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Playing with Fire

18% to the National Front… Sarkozy’s evil strategy of making eyes at the extreme right all the way through his campaign seems to have backfired. In vain did people in his party warn him to stop banging on about immigration and halal meat every five minutes and try to talk about policy. This morning you can be sure that the president was ruing his decision to ignore them and follow the advice of his eminence grise, the dark lord, Patrick Buisson. This is a man who was suckled on Charles Maurras‘ proto-fascism, is admired as a strategist by Jean Marie Le Pen and who earnt his stripes as a columnist with the extreme right weekly newspaper, Minute. “I owe my election to him,” Sarkozy once declared. Buisson’s tactic in 2007 was to siphon votes from the National Front and Philippe de Villier’s  Movement Pour la France. This strategy worked once. Why, Sarko must have asked himself, shouldn’t it work again?

The big difference is that this time the electorate knew him. After five years, they felt they knew him intimately. And they detested him. It was a grave mistake of Sarkozy’s not to try to dissimulate his petulant, dictatorial personality a little behind his track record – his reforms to the civil service, his handling of the euro crisis during his term as European President, of the Russia Georgia conflict and his decisive action against Libya. But his deep narcissism and childishness would have made it impossible for him to do this.

So there we have it, 18% for Marine Le Pen. There will be a kind of perverse delight at this result, at least in the little corner of rural France where I live. Round here Hollande is seen as a traitor to the left. In my nearest village it was his electoral portrait, not Sarkozy’s that was daubed with a devil’s moustache. (For my neighbours Sarko is below contempt.) Yesterday’s terrifying result will reassure people that anti-fascism is not an irrelevant, obsolete struggle. It will prove to those most fearful of the advance of consumerist vacuity that ideology is not dead.

wikipedia

To Change or Not to Change…

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Notes from a Rebel Island

Many of us fall in love with Corsica but it rarely lasts. The French call her l’Ile de Beauté, which helps mask their unease about a place of perpetual insurgency, unrest and superstition. I was smitten on sight, for its beauty, of course but also for its atmosphere – the foreignness, the impenetrability – and for what I would have to call its “edge.” But what do we mean by this? ‘An intense, sharp, or striking quality?’ A grittiness? A lack of compromise? Whatever it was, I knew that the island would remain forever mysterious to me and that – like Dorothy Carrington who spent half of her long life writing about the granite island’s archeology, its history and its people -I would always be an outsider. This knowledge of your perpetual exclusion does not stop you from trying to understand. On the contrary.

I remember the first article I wrote about Corsica, in February, 1996. I was supposed to tell the readers of The Sunday Telegraph how the independence movement, the FLNC was leading Prime Minister Alain Juppe on a merry dance. The organisation had recently held a nocturnal press conference in the maquis around the village of Tralonca in the rugged north of the island. Several hundred militants, wearing cagoules and armed to the teeth had brandished rocket launchers and machine guns for the cameras while dictating their terms to Paris. A source at the ministry of interior had told me that local police had been made aware of the meeting beforehand and had even shown up to take down registration numbers.

As I stepped off the evening flight to Ajaccio and greeted my contact from the PJ (judiciary police), I had so many questions in my head that I had no idea where to begin. As it turned out, the policeman (let’s call him Cesari) tended to meet my questions with as enigmatic an answer as possible, or else with another question.

It was unseasonably warm so Cesari drove us to an excellent fish restaurant on the bay of Ajaccio, or Aj-axe as he pronounced it. (Like the characters in The Sopranos, the Corsicans foreshorten their suffixes). Cesari asked me if I had ever tasted sea urchins, which I hadn’t. He said they were particularly fleshy at this time of year and ordered a bottle of white wine to go with them. As I prepared my first question about the Tralonca fiasco, an old man dressed in a white suit with a black, mostly unbuttoned shirt came over to our table and clapped Cesari on the shoulder.

“It’s Cesari isn’t it? The Cesaris from… (He mentioned some village).”

“No. We’re from…(The policeman mentioned another village).”

In Corsica, as I would learn, the individual is nobody. You are only somebody if you are so-and-so’s son or daughter. Disappointed, the man in the suit turned his attention to me. Cesari duly introduced me as a member of the British press and the old man graced me with a baisemain.

“Ah yes,” he said, pointing at the policeman. “I remember. You raided my house not long ago.”

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“Yep,” Cesari replied calmly. “That was me. Just doing my job.”

“Of course, of course but for some sorry business about possession when we both know that every old woman on the island has a Beretta hidden in her dresser.” He opened his hands. “I mean, come on. It was a pop gun!”

Cesari laughed and began folding and unfolding his napkin. The two men exchanged pleasantries but the old man had made his point and he returned to his table.

I asked who he was.

“He’s a local politician,” Cesari said with a smile. Apparently the ‘pop gun’ was a 9mm SIG-Sauer.

Later, Cesari dropped me off at my hotel. I went up to my room and began writing notes for my first novel, Lost. It would be a thriller, set on Corsica. The man in the white suit would become Coco Santini, the villain and Cesari lieutenant to my jaded anti-hero, Antoine Stuart.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. A need to get away from DSK perhaps, and from l’actualité in general, and the desire to share that lurching motion that goes on between the real and the unreal, between fact and fiction.

Pour la traduction francaise de cet article paru dans Le Financial Times de Londres, voir Le Courrier International du 19.07.2012

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The DSK case and the Sisterhood

Although I have always called myself a feminist, I was, in the days following Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, unable to join the sisterhood in condemning a man — albeit of dubious moral record — for the crime of attempted rape before he had actually been found guilty.

Having written a piece (that was never published) attempting to explain the French outrage at the “perp walk” and public shaming of someone theoretically innocent until proven guilty, I ducked the flak and watched the case unfold in silent bafflement that my own views could be so at variance with those of my fellow female journalists in Britain and America.

Have I gone native, I wondered? Have I been corrupted by French libertinism?

I would not describe myself as a libertine.* I believe in the wisdom of monogamy for optimal happiness and I think that transparency in a relationship is a desirable goal. I do not, however, underestimate the difficulty of marriage and I refuse to judge others for a failure to live up to the above standards.

I also accept the notion that it is possible to be happy in what used to be called “an open marriage,” and although that would not be my choice, I refuse to judge others if it is theirs.

Knowing, as I did, Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a sexual predator and philanderer, I was not drawn to the man, even before he went to America and I doubt that I would have voted for him, but I still felt queasy at the sight of those shaming placards outside the courtroom on the day of his release, or of the abusive cry of: “DSK, you’re a sick bastard and your wife is even sicker.”

Clearly I have little stomach for the witch-hunt because I was also shocked by a column in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that attacked even Strauss-Kahn’s long-suffering wife, Anne Sinclair, for her decision to stand by her husband. Allison Pearson’s tirade was entitled “When forgiveness goes a step too far.”

“Forgiveness is good,” writes Pearson. “Even so, the nauseating sight of French heiress and journalist Anne Sinclair standing by her man, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, sets a new low. The former IMF chief may have been acquitted of attempted rape against a hotel maid, but is there anyone who can look at that swaggering silverback primate without a shudder? Ugh … Shame on his indulgent wife.”

Why is it that this woman feels she has the right to condemn this couple in this way? What is it about our culture that makes us so quick to judge, and so quick to blame? Are we all so blameless ourselves that we can be so censorious when our public figures slip from the path of moral rectitude?

I believe that the answer lies in our Protestant heritage. The Catholic practice of confession allowed for sin as an inevitable part of being human. In abolishing the privacy of the confessional and in making the congregation the only moral arbiter outside that of our own conscience, we paved the way for a society in which the media has replaced the congregation in an endless pursuit of moral voyeurism.

No one in France underestimates the horror of the crime of rape. Agnes Poirier — a French journalist based in London whose thankless task it has become to explain her contrary nation to the rest of the world — points out that “It is the shift (from ardor) towards coercion that makes the sex act a public matter. If it is between two consenting adults, it remains a private act.”

She bravely goes on to suggest that cheating on your wife does not automatically make you incapable of doing your job, adding, “but I know that this argument is impossible for most Americans and British to understand.”

Why impossible? Surely we can all agree that sex is a complicated business, that one man or woman’s ecstasy is another’s nightmare and that judging others carries the very real risk of being judged ourselves.

Surely this case proves how dangerous these trials by media are? We all thought we had the perfect victim in Nafissatou Diallo. She was poor, black and female. Strauss-Kahn was rich, white and male. It was a no-brainer. And yet here we are with a woman sufficiently dishonest for the case to have been dismissed by a district attorney whose interest it was to see a prosecution.

As French writer and commentator, Elisabeth Levy points out in ‘Causeur‘, we do not know what happened between those two people in that hotel room. And D.A. Cyrus Vance was brave enough to admit that, even at the risk of ruining his chances of re-election.

Levy goes on to condemn the fuzzy logic that Strauss-Kahn must have raped Diallo because he publicly confessed to cheating on his wife. “In other words,” writes Levy, “all adulterous men are rapists. I imagine, dear male readers that some of you may be starting to feel a little uneasy …”

Levy is what I would call an old guard feminist who, like me, laments the battles that now being fought in the name of equality.

For the Strauss-Kahn case has uncovered the divide, not between men and women so much as between old and new feminists. Old feminists, from Genevieve Clark to Erica Jong, believed that the goal was political and sexual freedom for women, not the political and sexual subordination of men.

I cannot accept the idea that womanhood automatically implies victimhood, nor do I think that it is a desirable state of affairs when women see men as the enemy.

The man-hating tirades of my female colleagues are nothing but puritanism in disguise and I suspect that our feminist forebears would be dismayed by the climate of inquisition that seems to dominate relations between men and women today.

* Significantly, there are 2 definitions of the word Libertine. In English we tend to forget the second in favour of the first.

1 a person, esp. a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, esp. in sexual matters.

2 a person who rejects accepted opinions in matters of religion; a freethinker.

A version of this post appeared on http://www.cnn.com

Pour un article en francais sur l’affaire DSK voir Le Courrier International du 01.09.2011

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DSK



Why do so many French women – and not just powerful women in politics and the media  – see DSK as the victim?

Listening to the French equivalent of BBC Radio 4 this morning (France Inter) brought it home to me: France is one of the last great patriarchies. I could hardly believe my ears. There, in the recording studio, a female journalist called Pascale Clark sat tittering at male comedian, Sami Ameziane, who was impersonating DSK in his hotel room in New York trying to talk some sense into his penis: “Listen I don’t like the look of this chick, she’s going to get you into trouble, put away the merguez, buddy…” But it’s the other voice that wins: “Come on Dom. Have you forgotten who you are, Dominique-nique-nique-nique*. Whip out the tools, mate…”  The three minute sketch was a festival of macho inanity the subtext of which was, either the maid was asking for it and changed her mind half way through, or it was a set-up. In both scenarios DSK is the ‘vigorous’ male (as Christine Boutin described him), a Samson figure, being brought low by a woman.

When Segolene Royal ran for the presidency, I was stunned by the misogynistic comments, from both men and women, that polluted her campaign. When she failed to get elected I wondered if it was what the French call a strategie d’echec, her own unconscious urge to fail, because she was not ready to question her own conditioning. Today, the widespread view of DSK as a victim confirms my misgivings. Willfully unreconstructed, France is a society in which women collude in a continued phallocracy.

If Brits and Americans want to understand this mindset all they have to do is watch Joan Holloway, the curvacious redhead in Madmen, a TV series set in an advertising agency in 1960s America. Joanie is clever, sexy, witty and submissive. She’s admired, valued, often worshipped and always dominated. This is the unspoken pact most French women are still willing to accept.

*nique : screw


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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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Banning the Burqa

French Government Campaign

This month, a bill making the wearing of the burqa* illegal in public will become law in France. Predictably, as an Englishwoman I have mixed feelings about this law. On the one hand I agree with Sarkozy’s former minister, Fadela Amara, who like the majority of her fellow French Muslims, objects to the burqa as a symbol of religious extremism and patriarchal oppression. On the other, I believe that laws targeting religious practices ought only to be considered if they represent a threat to individual or public safety. My first instinct in moments such as these is to ask my French-born children what they think. My 23 year-old daughter sees me coming. “My opinion,” she begins. “Is quite radical. And quite French. When I see a woman walking down the street in a full veil I immediately picture the husband who is making her wear it.” My daughter approves of the ban because behind the burqa she sees a life of ostracism and male domination. My son is also for the ban and his argument runs like this: the form of Islam that suggests that a woman’s face must be covered in order to preserve her decency is inferring that women are intrinsically indecent, an idea that is not only appalling but contrary to the values of French society. I can understand both these positions. The trouble is, I’m deeply suspicious of the motives behind this law and this colours my view, not only of its justice but of its efficacy.

Unlike the law of 2004, which banned the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in French state schools, the wording of this new law against the burqa is deceptively simple. “No one may, in a public place, wear a garment designed to conceal the face.” No mention this time of religion, or values, or of that sacred cow, la laicite. The government campaign surrounding the ban is purposefully ambiguous and designed to suggest that this is not so much about Islam or French identity as it is about some undefined form of practicality. The campaign slogan, “La République se vit à visage découvert” can only be loosely translated into English as, “We live the Republic with our faces uncovered/without a mask.” It is not surprising in this context that a list of exemptions to the law are being drawn up and will include motorcycle couriers, carnival revellers and people with bird flu. (One cannot help wondering about cases like Lady Gaga.)

Unfortunately, however, recent events suggest that this is a law about Islam and a further example of the rather ugly finger pointing that has been going on since the beginning of Sarkozy’s presidency. In the months since the President first announced, during his somewhat overblown performance at Versailles in June 2009, that “the burqa is not welcome in France”, he and his party have adopted a discernible strategy of political harassment of the Muslim community, all of it designed to win votes from the extreme right. After launching, in November last year, a public debate on the rather nebulous question of French national identity, Sarkozy cut to the chase in February this year and announced a new, even meatier debate on the place of Islam in France. Strong in the knowledge that 42% of French people now believe Islam to represent a threat to the nation and knowing that the burqa is worn by only a tiny fraction of France’s Muslims (about 2000 women), Sarkozy clearly believed he could use this law to whip up yet another wave of anti-Muslim sentiment without getting burned. It now appears he was wrong. In seeking to occupy and thereby legitimising the ideological ground of the extreme right he now finds himself neck and neck with Marine Le Pen in voting predictions for the next Presidential elections. Alarmingly, a recent poll foresees the head of the National Front knocking him out in the first round. Sarkozy’s strategy, then, to gather a consensus around the febrile issue of French identity, has worked but in the process he has shot himself in the foot.

The place of Islam in France will doubtless lie at the heart of the next elections but fermenting mistrust towards her Muslims is unlikely to result in their jubilant desire to throw off the veil and live the republic to the full.

*understood in France as the full veil (niqāb) covering the face.

NB A version of this post appears in this month’s Prospect Magazine (Online)

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Bad Politics

Racial prejudice in France, each time it manifests, is generally expressed under guise of secularism or laïcité. We’ve got nothing against Muslims – runs the argument, which can come from the left or the right – we just don’t believe that religion has a place in the identity of the French nation.

The public debate launched by Nicolas Sarkozy on November 2nd last year on the subject of ‘L’Identite Nationale’ was a misguided manoeuvre designed, at least in part, to purloin votes from the far right. It backfired, of course, mainly because there is a structural paradox inherent in French culture that makes it impossible to have a measured debate on this issue. Frenchness, since the Revolution, is supposed to be rooted in the so-called universal values of The Enlightenment, which include such vaguaries as the individual before the state, reason before custom. The result is that for most French people Frenchness can only really be defined by its opposite: i.e. being French means not being English or worse, American, or even worse, Romany or Muslim.

With this in mind it is not hard to understand why a recent poll attempting to assess attitudes towards Muslims in France and Germany, found that a staggering 42% of French people believe that “the presence of a Muslim community in France represents a threat to the nation.”

Consequently, most people know that when Nicolas Sarkozy waves the flag of anti-Arab sentiment, he is trying to control his plummeting popularity. It often works – for a moment, as it did last December when he condoned the Swiss ban on minarets and at the close of the year when he confirmed his intention vigorously to enforce the law banning the burka.

President Sarkozy has invited Abderrahmane Dahmane – President of the not-very-representative association, the Council of Democratic Muslims of France – to be his ‘advisor’ on the unpopular practice of praying to Mecca in the streets. The shortage of mosques means that it is not unusual in certain areas of northern Paris on a Friday afternoon, to see a street lined with kneeling men, their discarded shoes, lying neatly in the gutter behind them. In raising this issue again, only weeks after Marine Le Pen publicly compared Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi Occupation, Sarkozy is once again pandering to the extreme right.

Recession tends to bring out this uglier side of French politics. For that is what anti-Muslim prejudice is in France – an ugly political consensus which frequently uses Marine Le Pen’s extremist outbursts as a cache-sexe for its own intractable bigotry.