In early June, the mayor of B?es, a suburb of Bordeaux, conducted the wedding of two men. In France, a mayor is the only person who has the right to marry people, but this mayor had been warned by the prime minister and the public prosecutor that marrying two people of the same sex is illegal. He defied them, unleashing an impassioned debate which dominated the front pages at a time when the transfer of power in Iraq or even the adoption of a European constitution might have been considered more important. The debate is another expression of the current confusion in France about republican values. What do equality and the rights of man mean if a sizeable minority, in this case homosexuals, are excluded from legal and social measures available to the majority? Republican values are being undermined in other areas, most vociferously in the protest against the ban on Islamic headscarves in state-run establishments. If their raison d'?e is threatened, the core of French identity is called into question.
The nation state is felt to be losing its power: no longer does it control its bank, budget or, soon, foreign policy - they have all been handed to Brussels. But Brussels has betrayed the French. They feel that the European Union was built on the French model in order to serve French interests, so watching French ministers having their knuckles rapped for breaking the stability pact was not only deeply humiliating; it was somehow proof that Europe is being hijacked by free-market, Atlanticist bandits.
But not everything can be laid at Europe's door. At a deeper level, the malaise is part of a crisis of national identity, which Le Figaro has been tapping into with a stimulating series of some 30 full-page essays: "What is it to be French today?" Writers, industrialists, teachers, politicians, philosophers - from left and right - all gnawing at De Gaulle's notorious "certaine id?de la France." As one put it: "How has such a brilliant country, eldest daughter of the church and the revolution, become such a mediocre power, so out of breath, so in debt, so locked into prejudice? To be French is to grieve for what we are no longer, but still find so desirable."
The writers search among the wreckage for clues to their identity: "our language is the cement," agree many of them, which for 500 years has been used as a tool to unify the disparate peoples of the hexagon. The irony is that, having deliberately destroyed regional languages to achieve this, French in turn is being destroyed in the name of global unity. Britain is the only country in the western world to teach French as a second language. Only pride and bitterness remain: "Our idiomatic phrases, our grammar, our syntax are better adapted than any other language for the fluent ordering of ideas," pronounced one. English is a "lingua franca, stripped of every form of civilisation," wrote another.
Many writers date France's successes from the Enlightenment - that period 250 years ago when the works of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau launched French values upon the world. Only R? Brague dares say those values were not French at all, but Italian, Dutch and Scottish. He sees France's high point in the 13th century and for him the only great French thinkers were Abelard, Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal. The uncontested building blocks in the construction of today's French citizen include the revolution, cradle of republican principles, and Napoleon with his empire and, more enduringly, his civil code, still the basis of much of French administration. But it's so long ago.
The 20th century was deeply traumatic for the French: the defeat of 1940, Vichy, the humiliating way in which empire was lost. Some writers see De Gaulle, whose lanky shade looms over Le Figaro's series, as a saviour; for others he is no better than P?in, shrouding truth in myth.
Any search for contemporary identity has to tackle immigration and its concomitant, integration. Fear that "a certain idea of France" will be lost through racial dilution is widespread and exaggerated - "by 2050 the true French will make up only the oldest half of the population, the rest being composed of people from the inexhaustible reservoir of the third world," wrote one contributor. But it is true that the current influx is different from previous ones: today's immigrants are the first to appreciate France not for its civil code or republican principles but purely as a geographical location. They live here, but thanks to the internet and satellite television, their minds and culture remain in their country of origin. Certainly this is true of the expatriate British I know, who resolutely watch BBC Prime and swap 'Allo 'Allo jokes by email. Or, as a young woman of north African ancestry told a television reporter: "Stop telling me I've got to integrate - I'm French."
Integration, after all, is what the homosexual couple in B?es were trying to achieve by marrying. For their pains they were summoned by the public prosecutor to the tribunal of grande instance - and the mayor who married them has been suspended from his duties for a month.
