''In January 2012 François Hollande,
socialist candidate for the presidency, announced on the campaign trail
that his ‘true’ enemy was finance capitalism. In the space of twenty
years it had taken control of ‘the economy, society, our very own
lives’. A few weeks later in London, where the British public had bailed
out the City with mixed feelings, Hollande backed off. It was not the
enemy; it was merely in need of a conversation with the real world.
François Mitterrand, too, was eloquent on the subject of money. At
Epinay in 1971, when he won the leadership of the Socialist Party, he
launched a heartfelt attack on ‘monopolies’ and entrenched wealth:
‘Money that corrupts, money that buys everything, money that rolls over
people, money that kills, ruinous money, and money that rots the very
conscience of human beings’. Behind this gust of anaphora lies the
belief that equality is worn away by accumulation and raw acquisition: a
view that Hollande may have shared for a moment, but one that’s harder
to take now than it was when Mitterrand left the Elysée in 1995..''
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