A little over a year after participating in this documentary, Julien Dray returned his Socialist Party card. So a strong nostalgia imbues La Disparition?, shot in 2020 by Jean-Pierre Pozzi with the designer Mathieu Sapin, released in 2022 at the cinema.
Nostalgia for the power of a party that was still popular. In an hour and a half, this return to the great hours of the Socialist Party (PS) and its collapse first seduces with its archive images. Mitterrand, Jospin, Royal, Holland… The “black baron” Dray and Mathieu Sapin stroll through a deserted and confined Paris (in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic), the Bastille, an empty Solférino, where the former is redoing the geography of congresses good times. Then come interviews, in particular with the journalist Laure Adler, former adviser to François Mitterrand.
During Ségolène Royal’s campaign – the most beautiful experienced by Julien Dray after those of Mitterrand, he says – a meeting photo shows the candidate in the foreground and, in the second, a young Olivier Faure takes the light. Apart from this image, there is no question of the current first secretary of the party, a symptom of the break assumed by Julien Dray between the PS of yesteryear and its new leadership. “The PS that I knew has disappeared, we have turned the page,” he sweeps. It is also nostalgia for the successes of a handful of political communicators, campaign narrative artists.
Missed appointment
Gérard Colé, one of the architects of the victory of May 10, 1981, provided the cartoonist with some vivid memories, in particular the development of the campaign against Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, “the man who wants against the man who pleases “. Some imitations of Mitterrand and the feeling, already, that victory came “too late”, after the 1970s when everything was still possible, and that the left has, basically, never been able to apply its program or explain its failures of government.
Second missed meeting with François Hollande. The “soft left” that Martine Aubry castigated in her October 2011 primary campaign. “It was starting to take hold, they had found the line to face Holland”, notes Julien Dray. An agonizing little music punctuated by ticking then punctuates this “disappearance” of the PS that the documentary deplores.
As a death certificate, there is this “Night standing”, in 2016, where François Ruffin launches, at the podium: “Among young people, we will never vote PS again. What resonates with the current evolution of the deputy, who has become more lenient with regard to social democracy. “It has become a swear word to be on the left, in Parisian elite circles (…), it’s complicated, we’ll look at you with a little commiseration”, notes the communicator Philippe Moreau Chevrolet on a background of he images of 1981 showing, it is true, a jubilation which retrospectively seems quite naive.
From this promenade populated by ghosts and former councillors, retired to the countryside or away from business, one emerges a little dazzled, as if after spending too much time in the dark.