David Waller
Discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
One afternoon in the spring of 1876, a 56 year old English widow toiled up the stairs of Number 240, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to the apartment of the greatest living French author. She pressed on the doorbell and was told by the maid that the novelist was not at home.
Gertrude Tennant refused to leave her name but was encouraged to come back the following day. On her return, she was ushered into the living room where a man was sitting with his back to the door. Before he could turn round, Gertrude approached, put her hand on his shoulder and said: “Gustave”. Gustave Flaubert started up in astonishment and seized her hand. “Madame Tennant…Gertrude, Gertrude!” he cried, before sinking into stupefaction at this apparition from half a lifetime ago. “Oh mais vous me faïtes du bien, mais du bien!” he eventually exclaimed. “How it does me good to see you, how it does me good.”
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Lucy Wadham
France’s hapless former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, once told a Le Figaro journalist that what France really wanted was to be raped by a strong leader. “La France veut qu’on la prenne,” said the suave diplomat: France wants to be taken by force. While Villepin’s record for taking his nation’s temperature is pretty poor, it seems that on the matter of France’s deepest desires, he was probably right.
In some ways, Nicolas Sarkozy’s strategy—or posture—was to “take France by force.” His presidential campaign was peppered with pugnacious, coercive vocabulary. He claimed to be answering what he called the nation’s long-suppressed “need for order, authority and firmness.” Distinguishing himself from the motherly, reassuring messages of his opponent, Ségolène Royal, he invited citizens to vote for la rupture.
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Lucy Wadham
May in France is a heady month, in which the nation embraces its dual heritage of rebellion and leisure. At least three and sometimes four of the country’s 15 public holidays fall in May and this year, the workforce can look forward to a month peppered with long weekends and industrial action. Emboldened by the success of four general strikes since January, France’s leading trade unions intend to make May day “the new crowning moment of mobilisation.”
On 1st May, the nation’s deep ambivalence towards the idea of work seems to crystallise. Legally inaugurated in 1941 as la fête du travail by none other than Marshal Pétain (the only French leader apart from Sarkozy to champion le travail as a value), France’s Labour day has tended to be a celebration not of work, but of the struggle to liberate mankind from work. People like to remember 1st May 1936, when Leon Blum’s Popular Front, days away from power, organised a pageant of activism and solidarity that heralded the very real joys of the 40-hour week and the paid holiday. Or else 1st May 1968, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit was summoned to appear before the disciplinary board of the Sorbonne and the spark was lit for les événements. They recall 1st May 2002, which saw 400,000 Parisians marching against Le Pen’s presence in the second round of the presidential elections.
Indeed, most Parisians go misty-eyed at that memory. Haunted by the spectre of Vichy, my children’s generation made banners saying “Abstention = Collaboration,” “Better to be screwed by Chirac than raped by Le Pen” or “We are all immigrants.” The French do mass demonstration very well. They embrace that atmosphere of collective euphoria, of dissolution in the throng with a gusto it is hard to imagine in our restrained and leery Protestant culture. The manif is the closest this lapsed Catholic society gets to the rapture of Mass, and on May day all sides of the political spectrum submit with joy.
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Catherine Fieschi
Que reste-t-il de la culture française?
By Donald Morrison & Antoine Compagnon, translated by Michel Bessières (Denoel, €13)
In late 2007, Donald Morrison lobbed a small grenade into the playground of the French intelligentsia by writing an article for Time magazine—for which he was European correspondent—entitled “The Death of French Culture.” Morrison, for his trouble, was pilloried by the French press and sections of the American too. Yet he decided not to let things rest and opted in 2008 to write a longer, pamphlet-like piece, entitled “What is left of French culture?”
Translated into French and published by Denoel, the book offers yet another delicious glimpse into a relationship that never ceases to fascinate, that between the US and France. What is most compelling about it, though, is the accuracy of Morrison’s argument combined with his deep affection for France. There is no rejoicing in his writing. Morrison’s is a true lament and, toward its end, a scramble to unearth nuggets of hope. In his appraisal of France’s growing incapacity to maintain its universal cultural pull, Morrison entreats us to think about the meaning of culture and universalism in the 21st century.
Morrison’s original Time piece took as its starting point France’s annual rentrée culturelle—its unveiling of the year’s cultural calendar—and proceeded to list the goodies on offer for 2007: 727 novels, hundreds of albums, dozens of films, an abundance of major exhibitions, as well as countless theatre and lyrical productions. No one, concluded Morrison, takes culture more seriously than the French. Yet, he asked, does anyone outside France notice any more?
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prospect
Sarko’s post-presidential woes
During France’s six-months presidency of the EU, Nicolas Sarkozy won widespread praise for his high-octane leadership. Just a few weeks after handing over the reins of power, though, some eurocrats are wondering aloud whether he is now destroying one of the EU’s most important achievements: the single market. With economic growth in France stalling and unemployment rising, Sarkozy is under pressure to show voters he is acting to stave off a depression. Whereas last year he could always convene an EU summit, Sarko is now restricted to domestic initiatives like his controversial €6bn plan to bail out the French car industry. Even before its details had been made public, though, the French president sparked a fierce dispute over protectionism by criticising the manufacturers who relocated abroad only to re-export their cars to France. “If we give the car industry money to restructure,” Sarkozy told French television viewers, “it is not to find out a new factory is being moved to the Czech Republic or elsewhere.”
Sarko’s comments shattered the veneer of EU unity in reaction to the economic crisis—and provoked a furious response from Mirek Topolánek, prime minister of the Czech Republic, which now holds the EU presidency. One senior Polish politician warned that Sarko had reopened the divisions between “old” and “new” Europe that his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, created. But the reaction of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, underlined the real risks of the Sarkozy stance. If French car-makers decided to quit Slovakia, Fico said, he’d send Gaz de France home. The row illustrates the growing fragility of the single market in the face of recession. Consumers may take its advantages for granted, but the downturn is prompting a significant rethink of European economic integration. The financial sector was the first to experience this when the Benelux banking group Fortis got into trouble last year. Spurning a cross-border rescue with the Belgians, the Dutch government decided to nationalise its Netherlands operations, so that Fortis has effectively been dismembered. If this is the reaction of governments in Holland and Belgium, two founder members of the EU and arch-supporters of European integration, the single market could be in for quite a battering.
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Manneken Pis
Why Lisbon when we’ve got Sarko?
It would be cynical to suggest that the conflict in Georgia has been a bit of a godsend to Nicolas Sarkozy. But the French president has had a good war so far. Hyperactive as ever, and now holding the presidency of the EU, Sarko brokered the peace deal that stopped the fighting in August. True, the Russians failed to adhere to the terms of the ceasefire, but at least they stopped their offensive. Sarko then had a second diplomatic success when he went to Moscow and extracted another promise of Russian withdrawal.
The Russian invasion produced a rare show of unity among EU heads of government, who were convened in emergency session by Sarko on 1st September. At a four-hour meeting in Brussels, the French president somehow managed to forge a common line in a meeting that included the Russophobe Polish president Lech Kaczynski and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian premier, who likes entertaining his friend Vladimir Putin at his Sardinian villa. Sarko even got the EU leaders to sign up to an agreed line in time for the evening news bulletins.
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Tim King
The travelling family circus
In the summer, culture comes to rural France. Amateur choirs who have practised through the dark winter burst forth with their requiems and masses in ancient abbeys. There are concerts in the music rooms of private chateaux, perfect for the brilliance of Mozart arias, the brooding melancholy of Chopin or, more eclectically, Perrault’s fairy tales, with lute accompaniment. The room will be packed—urbane financiers from Paris, relaxing with their families, next to the local dentist or even a sheep farmer fresh from milking, massive hands on massive thighs. Above us, on the decorated ceiling, faded alchemical symbols remind us of man’s eternal quest to transform our base materials into something perfect.
If that’s too arcane, there is the travelling family circus. This Tuesday, for one night only, Le Cirque de Provence: Marc and Lydia Cornero, their children Laura and Christophe, and Christophe’s wife and tiny child. That’s it. One of perhaps 150 family circuses touring southern France, the Corneros have been coming to my village for 26 years, and Madame’s grandfather came long before that.
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Ernst Hillebrand
The centre-left parties of western Europe are in retreat. They have lost power in a number of countries in the past few years, even in places where they have governed with some success. The centre left looks set to lose out in Italy and has lost direction in Britain. Four of the five Nordic countries—social democratic societies par excellence—now have conservative heads of government. The German SPD is in power as a junior coalition partner but threatened by a new party to its left; in France the Socialists are in a mess. Is this merely the normal swing of the pendulum, or is it the result of something deeper and more worrying for the centre left?
It is hazardous to try to draw general conclusions from experience in such a wide variety of countries. Yet one thing at least seems clear. This development marks the end of a political-ideological cycle: the centrist technocratic project known as the “third way” in Britain and the Neue Mitte in Germany. It was developed most explicitly in Britain—based partly on ideas borrowed from Clinton’s Democrats—but has had influence throughout Europe.
This project enabled the centre-left parties to establish themselves as the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the 1990s. Voter expectations and global political and economic conditions had changed since the mid-1980s, and the centre-left parties proved able to adapt to them. The project’s various manifestations had this in common: a combination of moderate neoliberal economic and fiscal policies along with an insistence on the continuing role of the state, including the welfare state, and a liberal-progressive standpoint on cultural issues—proof of an enduringly “progressive” ethos. Labour market reforms and the reorganisation of welfare benefits were coupled with an acceptance of EU-driven deregulation and competition policies (and in some countries privatisation). The centre-left parties presented themselves to the new middle classes as effective managers of capitalism. At the same time, education was allotted huge tasks—indeed, it seemed almost to take the place of redistributive fiscal policy as the main instrument of social reform. The idea was that investment in education would, over time, help solve issues of social justice, unemployment and competitiveness.
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Tim King
Michel Onfray is that profoundly French thing: a public and popular philosopher. In France there seems a deep need for such a figure: a rebel contesting ideas we take for granted, whose only credentials are his knowledge and the semi-magical epithet “philosopher,” revered by some, reviled by others, half shaman, half fool. Considered a noble and necessary calling, it stretches back to Voltaire and Rousseau, by way more recently of Sartre and Camus. But the rebel must remain acceptable—otherwise no one listens to him, a delicate balance: L’homme révolté but not revolting
Many readers of Prospect will know Onfray through his recent book Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In France, where the issue of organised monotheism arouses terrible passions, the Manifesto became a bestseller. But there is far more to Onfray than a godless world. The two keywords in his galaxy are libertaire and hédoniste. Libertaire: the refusal to accept any constraint on personal freedom, the anarchist. Hédoniste means not fast cars and faster women, Onfray told an interviewer, “but the hedonism of being, the existential pleasure of sculpting one’s self, one’s life, independent of having. It involves civility, delicacy, politeness, attentiveness and caring for others.”
Both words are political statements—in France to appeal to a wider public the philosopher has to be political. “It’s hard for me to imagine a philosopher disconnected from the world, indifferent to the cares of his country, unmoved by poverty, unemployment: I am a committed citizen.” But Onfray’s vision of what constitutes a just society bursts the rigid lines of political parties: “Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.” Onfray is anti-free market, but not necessarily anti-capitalist. The root of society’s ills, he believes, is our obsession with performance and success, our mistaken conviction that possessions brings happiness.
In this year’s presidential campaign he initially allied himself with José Bové, whose quixotic tilting at industrial agriculture touches a chord with many French, but on the eve of the election dropped him to endorse the previously rubbished Ligue communiste révolutionnaire. This predictable unpredictability, the mark of the true ultra-libertaire, makes Onfray a popular rebel—skilled at that particularly French art of shocking while remaining deeply conventional. In 2002, after 20 years teaching philosophy, he heretically proclaimed that the Education nationale was stultifying young minds. Ostentatiously he set up a People’s University at Caen in Normandy to offer philosophy to all, particularly those from backgrounds like his own (Onfray’s father was an agricultural labourer), where philosophy is unknown. Whether it achieves that aim or not, Onfray’s course at the UPC is popular—600 people turn up every week for his lectures, which are later broadcast on national radio and distributed on CD. But his teaching is far from revolutionary—hence its popularity. He teaches exactly as he was taught, that is, focusing on history and not on rethinking how to think, or indeed what to teach. The difference with his “Counter-history of philosophy” course is that he teaches philosophers passed over by the set books, like Pierre Charon, Jean Meslier and Robert Owen. But it is history nevertheless.
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Lucy Wadham
When I moved to France, I told myself that I would stick it out for five years, then come home. That was 20 years ago, and I’m still here. Even today there are few things about the culture I enjoy. I dislike French television, French pop music, French humour (such as it is). French theatre is irrelevant and overblown, and contemporary French literature seems dull and elitist. But there is one aspect of life in France I have come to value: the sanctity of a person’s private life. The poetic term for this inviolable sense of privacy—which applies to husbands, wives and public figures alike—is “le jardin secret,” the secret garden.
It seems, however, that the Anglo-Saxon fascination for the lives of other people is finally taking hold of the French imagination. Our Protestant taste for transparency; our snooping tabloids; our intrusive, fly-on-the-wall documentaries; our fixation with the sex lives of our politicians, celebrities and even next-door neighbours—all appear to be spreading to France, where it is often said of someone who is routinely unfaithful simply that they are a “chaud lapin,” a hot rabbit.
It is a measure of the influence of Anglo-Saxon morality that the French presidential couple have chosen to divorce. In the past, the “d” word was simply not an option. In the French Catholic spirit of compromise, all presidents since the war—with the exception of the dour de Gaulle—were known to be unfaithful, and their wives either suffered in silence, or, as in the case of Danielle Mitterrand, cultivated their own jardin secret. But French public opinion on the extramarital shenanigans of Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy has undergone a subtle shift. The Protestant ideal is beginning to encroach on both the public and private spheres.
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