French society

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Macron one year on.

Macron wikipedia

It’s hard to guess from French media coverage a year and a bit into Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, that despite the chaos of mass demonstration, paralysing train strikes and a string of unpopular reforms, he’s considerably more popular at this stage in the game than were his three predecessors. With an approval rating of 44%* (Jacques Chirac was down to 37% after a year in office, Nicolas Sarkozy down to 36% and Francois Hollande to 25%) Macron has retained the support of almost 95% of those who voted for his En Marche movement and has won the approval 1 out of 2 republican (LR) voters and 1 out of 3 socialist (PS) voters.

Why then is the national mood being relayed on French news that of profound discontent? In its coverage of the recent anti-Macron demonstration, la Fête à Macron, organised by former rival in the presidential race, Jean-Luc Melanchon and his movement, La France Insoumise (Unbowed France), Le Monde ran the headline, “In Paris tens of thousands of demonstrators unite to ‘throw Macron a party’” – faire ta fete having come to mean ‘beat you up’.  According to both the Police and an independent collective of journalists, about 40,00 people attended the march, which, as one Le Monde reader put it, “makes it neither a success nor a failure, but just the normal low-water mark of a popular demonstration on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

The gap between the French media’s portrayal of the presidency and the lukewarm popular judgment reflected in the polls was most apparent in the lengthy televised interview that marked Macron’s first year in office. Investigative journalist Edwy Plenel and political talk-show host, Jean-Jacques Bourdin began by positing Macron’s presidency as divisive and unpopular: “Many French people doubt you and your choices,” Bourdin opened. “And they’re losing their patience. Are you not simply an illusionist risen from the heart of history?”

“You made a mistake [in choosing] the name of your movement,” Edwy Plenel later suggested. “You should have called it, En Force.” i.e By Force instead of En Marche, or forwards). “You’ve divided the country instead of unifying it.”

“Is that a question or an argument?” Macron replied. “It sounds like an argument.”

There’s no doubt that discontent is likely to attract more clicks than contentment, but this is not enough to explain the gap in perception. My own family is divided on the subject of Macron himself – my daughter supports him and my son doesn’t – but they both agreed on the ‘mauvaise foi’ (intellectual dishonesty) of Plenel and Bourdin’s line of questioning: “You’d think the country was in flames” (à feu et à sang), my daughter said after Plenel’s question on the strikes. Even the iconoclastic Charlie Hebdo – which in the aftermath of the often disconcertingly aggressive two and a half hour interview – considered Macron to have come out on top. Its cover portrayed Plenel and Bourdin’s caricatures covered in bruises and plasters with the caption, “Two journalists beaten up by a head of state right in the middle of Paris.

The generation gap may offer a clue to Plenel and Bourdin’s open hostility to the young upstart Macron to whom they pointedly referred throughout as Emmanuel Macron as opposed to the traditional ‘Monsieur le President.’ But I think the key to their antagonism lay in Macron’s final answer to Plenel’s question about how to solve gender inequality in France

Once Macron had pointed out that his movement En Marche was the first party in French history to send an equal number of male and female MPs to parliament, he went on to denounce what he perceives as a lasting hypocrisy in French political life, that when it comes to inequality, politicians on both left and right make do with words rather than actions. (The constitutional refusal to countenance positive discrimination or gather statistics on ethnic minorities doesn’t help with this inaction.) The righteous indignation being expressed by Plenel and Bourdin is, Macron suggested, no longer enough. It’s time to dismantle the carefully constructed privilege and hierarchy, that culture of “insiders” and “outsiders” inherited from pre-revolutionary France and which allows for the fact that until now certain civil servants were guaranteed a job for life while a young developer in charge of a company’s cyber-security would be guaranteed nothing, or else that a French-born Muslim male, because of his surname, will be four times less likely to get a job here than someone with a French (Catholic) sounding surname.

This embracing of action over discourse and reality over idea is where Macron stands out, not only from his three presidential predecessors but from Bourdin and Plenel themselves. By actually naming the causes of inequality Macron bursts the bubble of the French equality myth, which has so long survived on storytelling alone. The hostile response is because he’s trying to force them to leave the pleasure principle and its alluring fantasies and embrace the reality principle, wake them up to the fact that France is not an island of enlightenment floating in an ugly sea of commerce but a nation subject to the tides of global capital, to a plethora of special interests – be they corporations, banks, oligopolies or trade unions. Interests that have to be tamed, managed and/or reconciled with the desires of the population.

A version of this post appeared as a column in the May 2018 edition of Prospect Magazine

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Marine Le Pen and the Politics of Despair

Le Pen

Could it happen? Could France fall to the extreme right for the first time since Vichy? Until this moment I would have said no. Recently, however, I have lost my certainty. In January, a YouGov poll indicated that 38% of French people thought a victory for Marine Le Pen – leader of France’s far right party, Le Front National (FN) – was “probable”; this even though not a single poll is predicting that she will actually become president. Why this gap between what so many people, including myself, know to be likely and what we believe?

I fear Marine Le Pen could win. Not just because in a world of Brexit and Trump anything is possible, but because for the first time in its Fifth Republic, France’s main crash barrier against the lure of extremism – her electoral system – no longer feels entirely reliable.

Introduced by referendum under de Gaulle in 1962 and designed to keep extremists out of power, France has a two-round voting system in which candidates must receive an absolute majority, or else go to a run off between the two people who have received the most votes. The result is that French electors have tended to use the first round to vote with their hearts – expressing things like hope, desire, rage or downright blood-mindedness – and the second round to vote with their heads. Something about the way in which Marine Le Pen has managed to hijack the political conversation of this traditionally idealistic nation and infuse it with despair, makes me doubt the efficacy of that crash barrier for the first time.

Ever since I first moved to France in the mid 80s, I have watched the FN grow in support and legitimacy. I’ve seen its base increase and the gap closing with mainstream parties. In April 2016 there were 57,000 paid up members of the FN compared with 86,171 in the Socialist Party (PS), which, since 2012, had lost 40,000 members. I’ve seen the FN put down roots in town halls across the south and in the post-industrial north and east, pushing out the extreme left from those blue collar communities thwarted by globalisation and forgotten or ignored by mainstream politicians. I’ve watched its scores improve in successive local, legislative and presidential elections. And In 2002, when its founder, Jean Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential elections against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, I watched with relief as the “republican pact” kicked in and left and right wing politicians came together and provoked an uplifting show of cross-party solidarity to keep the extremist, anti-republican Le Pen out of power.

That was the first time I saw my own children, Ella and Jack, then 14 and 16, get out onto the streets. Armed with a banner saying FN, NON! they joined an 800,000 strong, anti-Le Pen march in Paris. I remember feeling pleased to be raising my offspring in an environment where this kind of political mobilisation was still possible. The fact that nearly 17% of the electorate could come out and vote in favour of a man like Jean Marie Le Pen simply reminded me that France likes to play with fire and in a world where political belief was rapidly disappearing, that felt like no bad thing. The safety barrier would hold.

Fifteen years later the atmosphere is very different and there is little passion to offset the depressive mood gripping the nation. The excitement that drove my teenage children onto the streets is hard to imagine today. Jack, now 31 and Ella, 29, are both approaching this election from a place of disenchantment. Jack, who in the 2012 runoff between Sarkozy and Hollande, put in a blank vote for want of what he saw as any decent option, will in the first round pick Benoit Hamon as the only candidate who seems to have concern for the environment (as well as a few new ideas) and in the second round for anyone but Le Pen. Ella, who voted socialist in 2012, will vote in the first round for Hollande’s former Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron – a 39 year-old ex-banker who has never been elected – and in the second round for anyone but Le Pen. Both Ella and her brother believe that a victory for Le Pen is possible. So does their cool-headed, pragmatic father Laurent, who has always had faith in the republican pact.

To reduce Le Pen’s chances of victory, Laurent, who voted socialist last time, had planned to vote for Francois Fillon of the centre right republican party (LR). That was before “Penelopegate” broke and it became clear that Fillon’s Welsh wife, Penelope (in France it’s pronounced penne-lop) had received 680,000 euros of public money for a parliamentary assistant job for which she appears not to have shown up, or at least not often. Laurent will now vote, without much enthusiasm, for Macron.

Like many of his peers in the Parisian elite, Laurent is all the more disgusted by Fillon for the fact that he had sold himself as the incorruptible honnete homme of this campaign. Next to Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been under investigation twice for nepotism and illegal political financing and Alain Juppé who was convicted for abuse of public funds as mayor of Bordeaux, Fillon seemed squeaky clean. Choosing the now ironic campaign slogan “Le Courage de la Vérité” (Courage for the Truth), Fillon promised to offer “a covenant of sincerity and honesty” to the French public. “Honour,” he said. “Must be the main virtue of the right. It’s one of the conditions of public confidence, one of the conditions too for re-establishing the authority of our institutions whose credibility we must restore.”

 When it became clear that Fillon wasn’t going to resign over the scandal, Laurent was outraged: “He’s a terrible person, who’s taken France hostage with his pride.” At a dinner Party in Paris last week, Laurent heard someone saying that he felt so angry about Fillon’s behaviour that he’d probably vote for Le Pen if Fillon were in the second round with her. Five years ago I would not have believed anyone in this circle of bourgeois liberals capable of thinking such a thing, let alone saying it out loud.

My own family’s distress and its tangled voting intentions are a measure of just how bleak and chaotic the political landscape is in France. All the traditional boundaries have fallen and the old binary logic traditionally used to understand French politics no longer functions. French history has been driven by the confrontation between opposing political families representing two sets of ideals: Jacobins and royalists, Bonapartists and monarchists, moderate and radical republicans, the Popular Front and the nationalist leagues, resistants and collaborators, left and right. Today, to the dismay of pollsters and political analysts, French voters swing from left to right and back again and the electoral map seems to have become a mosaic of complex allegiances based, not on ideas but on such obscure and subjective criteria as whether or not you’re afraid of the future, or whether or not you’re inclined to take risks.

There is no question that the depressed mood is in part an expression of the collective trauma after the Islamist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Still living under a state of emergency, this nation built on ideals is structurally ill equipped for adversity, for which a pragmatic mind-set is much more useful. The emergency regime – which should have ended in July last year but was prolonged after the truck attack in Nice that killed 83 people on the night of the Bastille day celebrations – creates moral discomfort in politicians on both left and right. Measures like the outlawing of public demonstrations and the legalising of nightime house searches evoke to many the darkest days of the Occupation. Indeed it was interesting to note how France’s MPs – torn by the desire to live up to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity – rarely missed an opportunity to criticise the coercion laws proposed by the Valls government, while voting massively in their favour.

There is, in post-Freudian thought, a word for the special lure of despair. It is Thanatos, the Greek personification of death. Some psychoanalysts argue that trauma will trigger one of two competing unconscious drives in us, Eros ‘the life drive’, which controls the libido and strives towards pleasure and survival and Thanatos, ‘the death drive’ which unleashes rage, risky behaviours or despair (acedia from the Greek akedia – ‘without’ + kēdos ‘care’ or hope) and strives towards destruction of self or others. I’m reminded of the fact that the slogan of the French revolution was initially, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou La Mort. The word Death was cut in 1794, after La Terreur (Robespierre’s reign of terror) in a bid, perhaps, to quit the realm of Thanatos for that of Eros.

LibertyEqualityorDeath

 France’s response to the Nazi invasion of June 1940 makes sense when you look at it through the lens of the death drive triggered by trauma. It took six weeks for the Wehrmacht to overrun the country, sending millions fleeing from their homes. France’s lack of faith in its own institutions was at its lowest ebb. Paul Reynaud, head of an unstable government, resigned and parliament self-destructed by calling in an angel of death in the form of the ‘Victor of Verdun’, Marshall Petain. Striking a pact with the occupiers, the 84 year-old Marshall launched his own ‘National Revolution’, a four-year anti-parliamentarian regime of terror, bigotry and state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

Marine Le Pen denies she is Petain’s ideological heir and has worked tirelessly to hide any such sympathies, both in her party’s ranks and its history and even rejects the extreme right label for the FN. Claiming to be ‘neither left nor right’ but ‘republican’ Le Pen began paving her way to the mainstream in 2011 when she ousted her father as party president. So skilled has she been over the past six years at moral shape shifting that she clearly believes she can convince people of anything, including the idea that she is, actually, the rightful heir of de Gaulle.

It happened discreetly, on a beautiful weekend last September at an FN rally in Frejus where it runs the Town Hall. Marine Le Pen, bronzed and highlighted after a summer holiday on Corsica, subtly appropriated France’s Gaullist heritage. In a speech dripping with Gaullist language she cried, “On our soil are enemies that plan to impose their values on us (…) French policy is being dictated from abroad, by Brussels, Washington, Berlin! (…) What makes us grow is our concern for France…Our concern for la France libre (Free France)!” Wild cheering.

La France Libre was the name for de Gaulle’s government in exile in London from where he organised and supported the Resistance against the Nazis. Note how Le Pen chose the definite article – La France Libre and not une France libre – thereby making the reference absolutely clear. If you were ever in doubt that this was a rally of the extreme-right, however, the spontaneous chant that followed the applause would set you straight: “On est chez nous, on est chez nous!” (This is our land).

Marine Le Pen is France’s Thanathos, her ‘angel of death’. Perhaps her oponents instinctively know this and it explains why the socialist nominee, Benoit Hamon chose the impassioned slogan, Faire Battre le Coeur de la France (Let’s make France’s heart beat) and why Macron chose the dynamic, vital En Marche! Which means ‘walking/marching’ as well as ‘functioning’. Despite Le Pen’s plausible, professional exterior and an image of respectability that has been brilliantly achieved over her 23 years in politics – even with the extremely unfavourable legacy of her unrepentantly xenophobic father, Jean Marie – there’s no doubt that a vote for Marine Le Pen will be a manifestation of the unconscious drive towards risky or destructive behaviours. As Benoit Hamon rightly predicts, “If she comes to power, it will be a guaranteed firestorm in the suburbs,” and her pledge to leave the euro would, it seems, be a form of economic suicide.

According to a recent report by the liberal thinktank, L’Insitut Montaigne, a return to the franc would lead to a likely 15 % drop in the value of France’s currency compared to the euro, followed by a rise in interest rates and a massive flow of capital out of the country. France’s GDP, the report finds, would reduce by 2.3 % in the first year and by between 4% and 13% long-term. The cost of leaving the monetary union is evaluated at 7000 euros per French worker and the number of jobs potentially destroyed in the first year could reach the tens of thousands and, in the long term, as many 500,000. While the majority lamented the disappearance of their currency in 2002, a poll in 2014 found that 56% were hostile to its return. Still Le Pen, and those tempted by her, like to flirt with danger.

Although Marine Le Pen clamours her republican values, most French people know that the FN remains a party of the extreme right, one that builds its central thesis around the idea of France as a nation in decline, that blames ‘foreign’ forces on this decline, forces that include immigrants, the EU, the multinationals or “the banking lobby” (which, although no longer voiced in public, still evokes to many French people, as Le Pen well knows, the so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ that obsessed her father). The solution Le Pen proposes to France’s decline is to “put French people first” and to link a person’s civic rights to their origin, thereby establishing norms of what it means to be French.

Whatver her true colours, Marine Le Pen has managed to set the political agenda, which now revolves around her favourite subjects: immigration, security and national identity. Despite France’s founding equality myth, there is an underlying xenophobia in its culture, which has morphed from the anti-semitism that dominated in the 20th century, to the Islamophobia, which found its roots in France’s colonisation of the Maghreb and dominates today. Le Pen has learnt to tap this underlying prejudice without even naming it.

All politicians are aware of this xenophobic seam or ‘negative energy’ as Emmanuel Macron, a man partial to New Age terminology, might put it. Back in 1986 Mitterrand cynically manipulated it to his advantage in time for the general elections by re-introducing proportional representation, the only electoral system that would enable the FN to win any seats in parliament. The result was that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party won thirty-five seats in the Assembly. By turning the FN into a legitimate political force for the first time, Mitterrand had split the newly elected right between those willing to form an alliance with an extreme right party and those who were appalled by the idea. Mitterrand at the same time delivered a fatal blow to his former allies on the extreme left, which has been losing voters to the FN ever since.

Years later Nicolas Sarkozy would tap the same dark vein by making eyes at FN voters during his presidential campaign of 2007. In 2009, he stoked the flames of national dischord a little more by calling for a “grand debate” on the question of national identity. “We are proud to have restored an unashamed conversation about national identity” and “what it means to be French.” Shortly after this, he announced, “the burqa is not welcome in France,” and in 2011 he banned wearing one in public places. In February 2011, strong in the knowledge that 42% of French people now believed Islam to represent a threat to their nation, Sarkozy launched another ‘grand debate’ on ‘Islam and secularity’. In 2012, after Marine Le Pen expressed her outrage that state school canteens should be serving halal meat, Sarkozy called for stricter rules on labelling and confirmed that serving halal meat in schools was in contradiction with French secular values. Sarkozy’s pusillanimity worked for him at first, but in the end backfired. People realised he was not ‘the real thing’ and votes began flowing back to Le Pen.

In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that behind the conventional parties lies “the slumbering majority,” or what Nixon would later call “the great silent majority,” which remains invisible as long as public attention focuses on the parties themselves. When faith in the party system breaks down, this entity, Arendt argues, emerges as “one great disorganised, unstructured mass of furious individuals.” Clearly France has reached this point and Marine Le Pen – who changed her campaign slogan from “La France Apaisée” (France at Peace) to “Au Nom du Peuple” (in the name of the people) – is talking straight over the heads of mainstream politicians to these furious masses.

Le Pen was already speaking to France’s silent majority in 2009 when she gunned for a former coal-mining town in the north east of France called Hénin-Beaumont. In an election that year to replace the incumbent Socialist mayor who had resigned after a corruption scandal, her party took first place in the first round with 39% of the vote. Her speeches started referring to “France’s forgotten ones” or “France’s invisible ones” and two years later this town in a region where unemployment hovers around 13%, fell to the FN.

Marine Le Pen also knows that out there lies a rich seam of untapped despair, legions of potential supporters ignored or despised by mainstream politicians: “neutral, politically indifferent people,” wrote Arendt. “Who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.” Indeed it is as though Le Pen knows instinctively what Hannah Arendt learnt in her observations of Stalinism and Nazism, that “masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class-based articulateness for determined, limited, and obtainable goals.” In a way Le Pen is telling the truth when she says she is neither left nor right. Her target voters are simply demoralised individuals who do not like the world as it is. And if they are not yet demoralised, she will do her best to make them so.

One of Le Pen’s most effective techniques for spreading despair has been to harness the doctrine of “tous pourris”, (they’re all rotten). Borrowed from Coluche, France’s most popular comedian, the idea that politicians are instrinsically immoral no longer makes the French laugh. Increasingly, it makes them vote Le Pen. Financial scandals among the political classes help the contagion of despair but this is another miracle of Marine Le Pen’s brand: she herself is still perceived as ‘clean,’ despite the fact that she is under investigation for tax evasion and fraud. In 2013 a fraud case was brought against ‘Jeanne’, the micro-party that was set up by her entourage in 2011 to fund her presidential campaign. Last month she was called in for questioning by the French tax authorities who believe the Le Pen family – namely Marine, her elder sister, Yann and their father, Jean Marie – owes the treasury at least 3 million euros. The police now wish to question Marine Le Pen on a case involving her chief of staff and a fictional employment contract with the European Parliament (EP).

Le Pen’s reaction to this fake employment scandal is to call the investigation “a political cabal” and refuse to show up for questioning by the French judiciary police. It indicates just how untouchable she feels and how effectively she has eroded, not only the moral credibility of all things European, but the reputation of the French judiciary that she’s getting away with it. The Socialist Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, told AFP that if she wishes to hold the highest office Marine Le Pen “cannot place herself above the laws of the Republic (…) No political leader can refuse, if they are a republican, to answer a judicial summons. Respect for the authority of the state and its institutions begins there.” But it seems she can, for as most people know, Marine Le Pen is only a republican when it suits her.

Why do I fear that the republican pact, that old crash barrier, may not hold this time? Because thanks to the success of Le Pen’s message, in this mood of collective disgust, voting instructions given by mainstream politicians who have lost their moral ascendancy are more likely to be ignored. Because the ‘republican pact’ is no longer universally perceived as a rampart against extremism but has become, for many, the undemocratic manouvreings of a political elite clinging to power. Because this same republican pact may simply reinforce Marine Le Pen’s status as an outsider, a victim of ‘the system.’ Because this faux union of opposing political families to keep her out of power also feuls her new narrative for France as divided into two groups: the privileged few who are in favour of globalisation and the ‘forgotten’ masses who are against it, a strategy that not only masks her party’s extreme-right heritage but feeds the despair on which she depends.

A version of this post appeared in Prospect Magazine‘s April 2017 issue.

 

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Farewell chivalrous knight of Islam

Malek Chebel

Photo by Benjamin Chelly

The wise and wonderful Algerian-born thinker, Malek Chebel – who argued valiantly for an enlightened Islam, himself a shining light in French intellectual life – has died.

We met the week after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and became friends. I shall miss him.
This is the interview of our first meeting:

An emotional shock often makes us look for some kind of echo, some proof in the world around us that everything has changed but the morning after last week’s terrorist attacks on their city, Parisians woke to pristine winter sunshine and a clear blue sky.

Crossing town to meet Malek Chebel, one of France’s most prominent Muslim intellectuals – a man who always meets fanaticism, wherever it hails from, with the same reassuringly sagacious smile – I thought of the tears in my daughter’s voice when she’d called me from work the day before. Her office is not far from Charlie Hebdo‘s and she said she could hear the sirens. “No one’s scared, though,” she told me. “People are crying at their desks.” That evening she left her own desk and went straight to the Place de la République, along with about 35,000 others, and called me from the vast square.

“It’s such a beautiful, poignant atmosphere. And it has nothing to do with patriotism or politics. It really gives you hope.” I didn’t ask her how many Muslims she thought might be out on that square, but that was what I was thinking as I spoke to her.

I met Malek Chebel in the “English Bar” of the Hotel Raphael in the 16th arrondissement – a quiet, oak-panelled room with crimson velvet upholstery and antique Persian rugs, designed to look like the French idea of an English gentleman’s club. Chebel was visibly delighted to be there. It was only 10 o’clock and he’d already given four interviews. “I’m usually called in at times like these to calm things down,” he said. “Out there it’s a Greek tragedy, everyone’s passions unleashed.”

Later that afternoon he’d been invited to a televised debate with the right-wing polemicist, Eric Zemmour, whose terrifyingly successful “misery essay”, Le Suicide Français (which has sold 400,000 in three months) argues that ever since de Gaulle, French identity has been irredeemably corroded by feminists, homosexuals and Arabs. That day in particular, I looked forward to seeing Chebel dismantle Zemmour’s “passions” with his usual skill and charm.

With his religious upbringing in Algeria, followed by his two French doctorates in social anthropology and psychology, Malek Chebel has passports into both worlds. He earned his reputation in Arab society by translating the Koran into French in an edition that won the approval of all the key Muslim clerics from the Maghreb to Indonesia. But he has also tackled the two subjects closest to French hearts: sex and psychoanalysis.

Chebel’s titles include The Arabic Kama Sutra, Arab Eroticism, and the just-published The Islamic Unconscious. Impressively, he has to date no fatwa on his head. “That’s because few Muslims have actually read the Koran. It’s a very, very difficult text. I gave 10 years of my life to studying it and that earned me people’s respect.”

Using his erudition to spread a message of liberation from what he calls the dangerous ideologies that have taken possession of his religion, Chebel regularly cites the learned and inclusive Islamic society that was established under the Abbasid caliphates of the Middle Ages as proof that Islam can be reformed.

I asked Chebel if he’d experienced much racism in his adopted land. He told me that when he’d first arrived in France from Algeria in the mid-1970s he’d gone to see the Alps with his girlfriend at the time. They had stopped in a remote village and an old woman, after circling him several times, had approached him and offered him some household bleach for his skin. “Something remains of that woman’s desire in many French people – the desire to wash us all whiter than white,” he said with a forgiving smile.

When I asked him whether he thought France was Islamophobic, his answer was coy and rueful: “I’m afraid there’s a subtle system of thought in place here, which lends itself to an Islamophobic atmosphere.” Chebel was talking about France’s obsession with la laïcité, which in English means “secularism” – as in the separation of church and state. This translation, however, doesn’t quite cover it. Today, the word in French carries with it a history of deep antagonism and mutual distrust between the worlds of political belief and religious faith. It’s a visceral hatred that was fuelled by the excesses of the Catholic church under the ancien régime, nurtured by the Revolution, reignited under the Third Empire and, even after the official separation of church and state in 1905, has flared up regularly ever since. “Unfortunately, la laïcité has become a dogma in this country which often masks a posture of intolerance.”

This intolerance is not only expressed towards Muslims. A Jewish friend of my daughter’s, who has recently begun practising her religion in defiance of the disapproval of her forcefully laïc parents, as well as nearly all her friends, told me that to be a practising anything in this country requires real strength of character.

That laïcité might be seen as a form of oppression would be deeply offensive to many French secularists who pride themselves on their egalitarian values. These are the people who supported the ban on French Muslim girls wearing their headscarves at school, and of course the law against wearing a burka in public. Their main argument in support of these measures (which many outside France perceive as an infringement of personal liberty) is somewhat paradoxical: young French Muslim women must be protected from patriarchal oppression (of which the headscarf is a symbol) by being told what they can or can’t wear in public.

In fact, as Chebel pointed out, France’s allergy to the Muslim headscarf may have more to do with France’s own patriarchal traditions, which make the idea of a woman choosing to cover up her charms distinctly unpalatable.

“Perhaps Islam’s function in the French collective unconscious is to mask its own regressive tendencies,” Chebel suggested. “The French patriarchy can hide behind Islam, which everyone thinks of as a patriarchal and misogynistic religion.” He said he was against headscarves in schools at first and supported the ban, but has since changed his mind. “When I realised that many Muslim girls wear the headscarf because it made them feel more comfortable, I could no longer oppose it.”

What’s not often discussed here is whether religious intolerance is just another form of racial discrimination. According to a study carried out by the French institute of national statistics in April 2014, a candidate with an Arabic-sounding name here is still considerably less likely to be called back for interview, even if he or she has better qualifications, than a rival with a European-sounding name.

When I mentioned the idea of positive action to counteract this kind of discrimination, Chebel expressed the view of the majority of French people: “Positive action signals an admission that, in a society of equal opportunity, the person you’re favouring is weaker. It’s a mark of disdain.”

Chebel’s argument echoes the prevailing egalitarianist orthodoxy – the same orthodoxy that supports France’s law against gathering data about ethnic minorities, even as a tool to combat discrimination. The argument is that the French are so attached to the ideal of equality before the law that they perceive any departure from that principle as a form of injustice.

Chebel’s caution towards his host culture is very occasionally replaced by a gentle mockery. When I brought up the horror that had spread across France when it was revealed that non-Muslim children had been given halal meat in their school cafeterias, he said, “The reason for the violence of that reaction was their unconscious belief that we were invading them from the inside. And we were using meat to do it, which of course is sacred here.”

As we settled into the conversation and Chebel realised, perhaps, that my prejudices might not be the ones against which he had armed himself so carefully, he began to lower his guard. He confessed that, wedded as he was to the idea of freedom of expression, he’d felt that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had indeed been offensive. “There are millions of Muslims in this country who felt deeply insulted. Of course death should never be the consequence, but we must have more understanding.

“In today’s multicultural society, France’s secularist doctrine creates an unbearable tension and behind this dogmatic form of laïcité there often lies a fundamental lack of acceptance of other cultures. The trouble is,” he added. “France no longer just wants integration, it wants assimilation and that’s just not acceptable. I think the British model, which practices tolerance towards all minorities, is wonderful. But we’re still a long way from that.”

When it was time for him to face Zemmour, we walked together to the nearest Metro station. On the Place de L’Etoile, a young man recognised him, came up to us and made a heartfelt speech about his horror at the terrorist attacks: “I’m a Muslim but I’m well-integrated,” he began, his hand on his heart. He went on to say how the shootings had made him feel physically sick, how that wasn’t Islam, how grateful he was to France for welcoming him in (from Morocco), for giving him a job (he was a waiter in a nearby café), and for helping him to educate his children.

After Chebel and I had said goodbye, I remembered the young man’s words: I’m a Muslim but I’m well-integrated. I tried to imagine a British Muslim making that kind of statement today. I realised that it was something you might have expected to hear back in the 1960s from someone who’d just moved to Britain from Pakistan.

It’s true, I thought as I descended the steps into the Metro – for all France’s beautiful ideas and high moments of popular fervour, there is, in practice, a long way to go before its practising Muslims will feel at home.

 

 

 

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Goodbye to all that.

Young Remainers

Nation of shopkeepers that we are, neither side of the referendum debate considered the immaterial losses that would be wrought on the next generation by Brexit.

My Dad, post-war Atlanticist and Empire nostalgic as he was, to my constant irritation, would talk about Europe as if it were a continent beyond the Channel to which he didn’t belong. “We’re part of Europe,” I’d tell him and he’d mumble, “Yes, yes.” But I always knew he was unconvinced. It wasn’t until last Friday that I understood how deeply entrenched this view of world geography still is in the UK. Waking that morning, I discovered that my father’s ethos, its nostalgia for the past, its discomfort with the present and its dread of the future, had won the day.

Even when, out of his five daughters, three were living in France and one in Spain, my Dad never accepted the idea that the UK might actually belong in Europe. He grew to admire from a bemused distance the miracle of his seven bilingual grandchildren, their mobility and their adaptability as they moved through European cities, studying and working as easily in French, English or Spanish, but he never embraced his country’s place in the EU, which irritated and bewildered him to the last.

I should have realised that the bitchy, lowbrow campaigns unfolding in the run-up to the EU referendum were already a sign that the conversation had been hijacked by those, on both sides of the argument, who did not really see Britannia as part of Europe, but clung to the delusion that she was superior to it. With hindsight, of course, we all now realise that both the Leave and Remain campaigns were too busy lying to each other – about immigration, the NHS, the cost to the economy of staying or going – to think of arguing for the value to future generations of belonging to, by which I mean being proud citizens of, not just a marketplace of 500 million customers but an extraordinarily rich continent.

My own children and their cousins understand the value of their pan-European heritage, so they’re bereft: “I’m so sad, Mum,” my daughter Ella texted on the day of the result. “I feel part of me has been rejected by this vote, so a part of me wants to cut myself off from my Englishness.” Her 24 year-old cousin, Bee – also raised in France by an English mother and French father – was “aghast.” She’d always seen xenophobia as a French malady, from which the UK, with its natural openness to globalization, had recovered. (It’s now clear, from the upsurge in racist attacks across the country that the referendum has also served to unleash Britain’s darkest forces.) This niece was in Brussels during the bombings and is, like my own children since the Paris attacks, more than ever bound to her European identity. Since Brexit she feels “no sense of kinship with a country that can abandon Europe.”

Stanley, my English, London-raised nephew, who grew up wanting the cultural fluidity that his cousins had, ended up reading French, Spanish and Arabic at Southhampton University. He has just graduated  speaking all three languages fluently and was considering his options. “I feel dismay, depression, anger, disappointment,” he told me. “This has made me want to leave England even more.”

Jamie, a 30 year-old English friend from Somerset, who’d just found a job working in an art foundation in Arles, said he feels “ashamed” by this vote. “I love the EU and have been extremely proud to be a part of it.” He blames Boris Johnson above all, recalling the author, Charles Bukowski’s words: ‘the world is full of intelligent people who are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.’

It’s one thing to deplore the selfishness of the affluent elderly, many of whom voted to leave the EU out of fear of modernity or nostalgia, or to regret the arrogance and moral vacuity of those sophistical, Spectator-reading  right-libertarians who voted Leave to be contrary, but it’s impossible not to the sympathise with the poor and disenfranchised who voted out of rage or despair and who, like their counterparts in France (many of whom vote for Marine Le Pen) not only don’t feel represented by their mainstream politicians but are utterly disgusted by them.

The English thrive on adversity and I’ve no doubt we’ll come through somehow, but it’s a tragedy to me in a world where so much of humanity’s cultural heritage is being wiped out by ISIS, that neither Cameron, nor Corbyn ever saw fit to give voice to the potential cultural, emotional and psychological costs to the next generation of Britons, and to the world as a whole, of the UK turning its back on its European neighbours. Or indeed to point out what the educated young already know: that in this digital age, this renewed fixation with national borders is a retrogressive fantasy.

 

 

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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.)