Category Archives: French society

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DSKNY

When I first heard the news of Dominique Strauss Kahn’s arrest in New York I clapped my hand over my mouth in horror. The news was shocking in itself – attempted rape…unlawful imprisonment – but my alarm went deeper than the accusation itself. It felt like a kind of reckoning, a death knell to a certain idea of France. Suddenly, DSK, the Grand Seducteur, the infamous lover of women was revealed as nothing more than a dirty old man unable to control himself. In the process, the very French mythology surrounding sex – particularly of the extra-marital kind – as a private, elegant and decorous game, was exposed as a big lie serving, primarily, as a rampart for the patriarchy. How fitting it was that the nemesis (both of the man and the myth) should be played out in America, the home of the witch-hunt and the cradle of political correctness. And how predictable that so much of the reaction to this story has centred, on both sides of the Atlantic, upon a visceral clash between two world-views.

On the morning after DSK’s arrest, words like “Incredible”, “unbelievable” “Inconceivable” peppered the French headlines. America was universally outraged by the details of the case while in France Twitter was awash with conspiracy theories exonerating the politician. DSK’s socialist colleagues all leapt to his defence. Former prime minister, Laurent Fabius (“in shock”) spared a thought, not for the supposed victim, but for Strauss Kahn’s wife and family. Even his political opponents alluded to a possible set-up by Sarkozy’s entourage to undermine his candidacy for the presidential elections. Former minister for housing, Christine Boutin, in the manner of a true courtesan and guardian of the patriarchy said, “To me the whole business seems highly implausible! We know that he’s rather vigorous, if you know what I mean, but that he should get himself caught like that, seems unbelievable so I hope he’s just fallen into a trap.” The general state of shock in France, then, is not so much that the alleged crime should have taken place but that DSK allowed himself to get caught.

My friend, the journalist and writer, Michele Fitoussi, feels that what’s happening to DSK is being lived out as a national trauma. “We had all heard about him, some made jokes and some knew what he was capable of. For years during our Parisian dinners we’d sit around slyly alluding to DSK’s dubious behaviour with women. We made jokes about the fact that a sexily dressed woman shouldn’t be left alone with him. There were rumours that it went further than the occasional visit to Les Chandelles (Paris’ most elegant swinger’s club). There’s a climate of maximum tolerance towards our male politicians that we’re just waking up from. It feels like a real collective trauma.”

But will this trauma cause a change in behaviour? Not necessarily. French reaction – male and female, public and private – to what is widely seen as the ritual and unnecessary shaming of DSK, betrays the entrenchment of patriarchal values, still being disguised as Epicureanism or savoir vivre. Listen to Bernard Henri Levy’s priceless response on French national radio: “Do you think for one second that we would be friends if I thought that DSK was a compulsive rapist (love the use of the word compulsive here), a Neanderthal man, a guy who behaves towards the women he meets, like a sexual predator? All this is utterly grotesque.”

Significantly, BHL ends the interview by stating that not everyone is the same: “Everybody is not everybody! The President of the IMF, the man who was about to be a candidate for the presidency of the French Republic, handcuffed! It’s obvious that he’s not some commoner (quidam). This American justice is an outrageous hypocrisy (Tartufferie), something I already knew but which today is blindingly obvious to me.”

BHL, with his humanitarian posturing and his patrician lecturing, is the living embodiment of the endless struggle that lies at the heart of French culture, between the myth of Republican equality and the hierarchical values of the Ancien Regime.

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Reconstructed Female seeks Unreconstructed male

Two female friends wrote to me recently, deploring the mutual bafflement that was coming between themselves and their boyfriends. One of them was French with an Englishman and the other, English with a Frenchman.

“It’s good to notice that even a British women has come across the problem of repressed English boys!” wrote La Francaise. For I had guessed at what she was going through, having experienced it myself: she was fed up with not feeling sufficiently desired and was appalled by the fact that he seemed to prefer a night out drinking with his friends than a night in bed with her.

The Englishwoman, of course, was suffering from the opposite. What would she not give for a night out with the girls? Her problem was not her man’s sexual repression, but his persistent tendency to sexualise everything. Beyond the first flush, his refusal to let her develop beyond the sex slave and their relationship beyond a parody of 9½ Weeks, was suffocating her. She felt, she said, like a character in a film he was directing: “It was as if he had the script in his head and I kept wandering from it and disappointing him.” In his keenness to fan the flames by acting out his idea of the love affair, he was actually snuffing out her desire for him.

For this is a reconstructed woman, he’s dealing with, who will resist submission and infantalisation, both by-products of what he sees as vital components of the sexy woman. She is used to contractual relations between men and women and the hard, brittle, intellectual tussle that they bring. And so she will call it a day, choosing the need for autonomy over the ‘ecstasy of submission’ (as Finkielkraut calls it).

My French friend, on the other hand, knows that she is not sacrificing her intrinsic autonomy by submitting to the rules of the Game of Love. As long as she is with Englishmen she will continue to miss the playful, erotically charged, wilfully mindless games-playing of L’amour a la francaise. Keep contractual relations out of the bedroom, says she, for therein lies the secret of erotic longevity. Play the game and preserve the mystere that Catholic societies have ever sworn by to keep the faith.

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The Equality Myth

Here’s  the thing. France is the land of human rights. Not to mention Equality. It is therefore illegal here to gather data on the basis of a person’s race or ethnicity. How, then, without statistics to enable analysis, does she address the very real problem of discrimination in her society? This very sensible question has only recently been taken seriously here. Why? Because Sarkozy, in thrall to the Anglo-Saxon social model, has set up a new commission, headed by a businessman of Algerian origin called Yazid Sabeg, in order to measure and promote ‘diversity’. The English-speaking world is busy applauding on the sidelines while most French intellectuals on both left and right band together in fierce opposition. What are these guardians of the republican model afraid of?

Three things:

1) The Past: the last time the citizens of this nation were invited to provide information on the basis of their racial origins was under Vichy’s ruthlessly efficient anti-Semitic regime.

2) The Present: if France gives in to this initiative and starts openly gathering data on her ethnic minorities, she will have to face the reality of how truly elitist and non-egalitarian her society actually is. (There is basically no black middle class in this country.)

3) The Future: If France allows herself to debunk the myth of equality by acknowledging the day to day reality of her immigrant populations she will have to do something about it, maybe even start considering such terrifying proposals as affirmative action. Should this happen, it will only be a matter of time before her highly elitist National Education system and with it, all the vestiges of her aristocratic traditions that have survived so well since her revolution, crumble and die.

I’m not too worried, though. Sarkozy’s measures so far are only posturing. France has plenty of data about her immigrant communities. To get around the law she simply asks, Where were you born, where were your parents born, and your grandparents? She already has all the stats on her first, second and third immigrant generations. She simply doesn’t want to wash her dirty laundry in public. Is that too much to ask?

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The Address of Shame

Former headquarters of the French arm of the Gestapo

Former headquarters of the French arm of the Gestapo. Known as 'La Carlingue' (cabin) the address also served as a brothel.

93 rue Lauriston, 75016, Paris, is an address known to most of France (at least those vaguely aware of her history) as the headquarters of the French Gestapo from 1941 – 1944. It is not, it would seem (however expensive the real estate in this particular part of Paris) an address that is desirable to its potential tenant, former Foreign Minister to Chirac, Monsieur Herve de Charette. The MP recently asked Claude Goasguen, the good mayor of the sixteenth arrondissement (by far the Nazi’s favourite quartier), to ask his council members if they could possibly change the address…From No. 93 to No. 91a, rue Lauriston!

“The past associated with the address was embarrassing to me,” the former minister has since explained, by way of justification. “Particularly since I’m responsible for a Franco-Arab* organisation. My request was well-intentioned: to get rid of the address of shame. I didn’t know I was going to trigger all this controversy.”

Obligingly, Mayor Goasguen (a fellow member of Sarkozy’s UMP party) put it to the vote. Significantly, 8 out of his 12 councillors abstained but no one dared to vote against his motion, which was quite simply absurd. Not revisionist, as some have claimed, not fascist, but plain mad.

The mayor, who has rather clumsily described his position on the subject as “neither for nor against”, has since dropped the matter. (The matter, though, has not dropped him.)

It all reminds me of the suggestion, made a few years ago, by the MP Gérard Charasse, that a law be passed to prohibit any assimilation of the Vichy regime with the town of Vichy (one of the key towns in his constituency). Article 4 of his law (which thankfully has never seen the light of day) states that “Shall be considered an imputation causing prejudice to the honour and reputation (of Vichy)…any designation tending to assimilate the name of the town or its inhabitants with treasonous behaviour, capitulation, or offense to republican values.”

When will this country ever recover enough from the trauma of the Occupation to stop wanting to forget it?

*President of the Franco-Arab Chamber of Commerce.

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France: the badboy of the free market bites back

I love The Economist. It’s so smug and so uniform in its outlook, as though all the articles were written by that same, reassuringly ‘authoritative’ hand. This morning, though, on reading the piece about France’s infuriating proclivity towards statism, Back in the Driving Seat: The Return of Dirigisme,  I detected a touch of self-doubt.

A devotee, as you would expect, of Anglo-Saxon, free market capitalism, the author of the piece could not help but acknowledge that France’s bizarre economic model, with its record of shameless statism, conservative banking and lavish public spending, has left her far better equipped to deal with the financial crisis than her more observant partners in the global economy.

The French economy is used to high unemployment, which is currently pushing 8.3%. America, whose unemployment rate in February was 8.1%, is not. The social consequences of joblessness in France (where the poor have access to decent schools, health care and welfare) and in the United States, are not the same at all.

France is constantly being rapped on the knuckles for her high public spending. Two years ago, this accounted for 52% of her GDP, compared with 45% in Britain. I have long been puzzled by the argument that it is permissible to encourage massive personal borrowing (the average owed today by every adult in Britain, including mortgages, is £30,450) and be so censorious of state borrowing. Now, of course the French budget deficit (running this year at 5.5% of her GDP) is well below that of Britain (7.2%) and America (12%).

Now, all you Anglo Saxon capitalists out there, could we please see a little more humility?

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The French Strike Again (Bless them).

I strike therefore I am.

The French love nothing more than to strike. Even if they don’t actually approve of the cause of the strike, watching their country grind to a halt puts them in touch with their visceral, ancestral selves and makes them feel alive. And who can blame them? Strikes in France are fun. People become uncharacteristically friendly during periods of social unrest. They give each other lifts, talk to each other in bus queues. Against all reason, men and women from every social milieu feel impelled to rally behind the deep, instinctual cry of the protesting toddler in the face of authority: “Non, non, non, non, non!” This explains why, at a time of severe economic crisis for their nation, 69% of French people support today’s general strike (Le Figaro).

President of Sud Rail, France's second railway union, confirmed on French radio that "basically we're practicing class warfare."

The President of 'Sud Rail', France's second railway union, confirmed on French radio that "basically, we're practicing class warfare."

Fighting Talk

“The law is the law,” the French Minister for Education, Xavier Darcos, announced bravely last October. “It (a law to ensure a minimum service for the public sector during a strike) has been voted and validated by the Supreme Court. It must be enforced,” he thundered.

Today, in spite of Xavier Darcos’ promise to provide a minimum service in primary schools, my son’s school is closed. (He is next door shooting his enemies with a very noisy phaser.) Today’s Le Parisien provides a long, long list (which includes Paris itself) of all the towns and cities that will not be respecting Darcos’ law.

Xavier Darcos is what the French call a faux dur (a fake toughie, or someone who pretends to be tough). The French political landscape is littered with the bodies of ‘faux durs’ who promised to push through unpopular reforms and caved in under pressure from the street.

Example of A Faux Dur

While Jacques Chirac was building his political persona, he sought, like most French right-wing politicians of his generation, to emulate de Gaulle’s authoritarian style and grandeur. He did not fool anyone for long, for it soon became clear that Chirac was a bon vivant* pretending to be a dur.

The Real Thing

That, perhaps, is why Margaret Thatcher was such a source of fascination to so many of them. François Mitterrand said of her, “She has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula,” and although he had difficulty disguising his contempt for her evident lack of culture, he could not help admiring her vision and determination. For politicians like him, Thatcher was the real thing, which may have explained Chirac’s exasperation when he murmured to an aide, during one of her state visits, “What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a platter?”

* Not, as many English people believe, a bon viveur.

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The Libidinous Dwarf

Last week I sent The Secret Life of France off to Yves Bonnet, the former French spymaster who features heavily in the book. I have been nervous of his reaction. Today he sent me a text saying:

I love your analysis of our President. Be assured that the phrase ‘libidinous dwarf’ is now being whispered in the corridors of power.

President Sarkozy likes to sue people for libel. He has taken legal action six times since he has been in office. Is it libelous to call someone a sex dwarf?

I imagine arguing with the judge:

Monsieur le juge, I meant it as a compliment!

(Which is actually true. Sex dwarves are highly sought after in my family of five – tallish – girls.)