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De Retour

I’m back in France after the longest time spent in England since I left twenty five years ago. My two and a half months in the motherland has left me dazed and confused and as far as this blog is concerned, mute for weeks on end. In writing about my understanding of France, I have come to realise how little I understand of my own culture.

Like many long-term ex-pats, I imagine, I am afflicted with nostalgia for a place that has ceased to exist. A place of the imagination, distilled from childhood memories of 1970s London and the intense, adolescence experience of hating Margaret Thatcher and what she had planned for the nation. Leaving in 1984, at that particular moment in history – when the class system was breaking down and social mobility dawning, when feminism was finally reaping its rewards, when Channel Four was leading the way to cultural democratisation and race riots paving the way for multi-culturalism – I carried off a snapshot of a society in transition and full of hope.

When I returned I saw all the unwanted concomitants of Thatcher’s revolution: class war, gender war, mass ignorance encouraged and condoned by a rampant and omnipotent media, a pusillanimous state that seems to roll back its own powers with one hand and the personal liberty of its citizens with another.

But then I noticed the dissent. Not of the petulant French variety, but the quiet and determined, free-thinking kind. You find it in pockets in Britain, like desert dew and when you find it you relish every drop.

I’d like to apologize in advance for posting a little less regularly over the next few months. I’m starting my next book, an aching, heart-wrenching, coming-of-age comedy set in a small village in the South of France in the 1970s. Talk about escapist.

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Lacunae

I have been asked how I could have written a book about France without writing about food. I think the answer is simply that I felt it had been done so often before – and in some cases very well – that I didn’t think there was much point. What I did hope to do with this book was to nail some of the things that people don’t know about France, rather than tell them once again what they already know.

I would like to respond to one aspect of the food issue, though. And that is the argument that France’s food culture is dying. This may be true in pockets. Even though France’s highly protectionist laws have prevented the death-by-franchise of her town centres, she has still recognised the need for supermarkets. Even so, I think it’s a little early for us to mourn the passing of French cuisine.

The fashionable thesis, of course, is that France is being invaded by American culture and fast food. Ever since Donald Morrison’s 2007 article in Time, proclaiming that French culture (including her cuisine) was dead, the schadenfreude at the idea of the demise of French art de vivre has been irresistible to Anglo-Saxon journalists. Again, I think that they’re gloating too soon.

In my experience, remarkably little has changed over the past 20 years when it comes to food in France. In Britain, on the other hand, there has been a food revolution, manifested principally through a back-lash against its uncontrolled industrialisation. It is we who have changed. There has been a gastronomic rennaissance in Britain and America over the past 10 years and like all revolutions it is the bourgeoisie that has both driven it and benefited from it. In Britain at least, it’s as if the middle classes have finally woken up to the fact that you can get pleasure out of food. The French have always known this and they still do.

What has changed, though, is a certain drop in standards when it come to the overall quality of restaurants in France. This is a reflection of the much larger problem of commercialisation, which is, I suspect, part of the inevitable capitulation to the lure of the Anglo-Saxon economic model. There is also a kind of gastronomic apartheid between restaurants patronised by locals and those patronised by foreigners. The big problem is that tourists are generally not discerning like locals are and therefore won’t send a dish back to the kitchen if it’s not up to scratch, so standards fall where they can.

Since chefs in Britain conquered television, their power and status has increased in proportion with their earnings. British Gastronomy is now a booming industry and consuming the right food or being seen in the right restaurant is now yet another source of status and glamour. In France, this is still not the case. For the French, food is still one of the more effortless pleasures of daily life. Parisians will still find a restaurant in their quartier that they like, with a head-waiter they like and an ambiance they like and they will stick with it – often for decades (witness that old lady sitting at her table in the corner, feeding morsels to her lapdog or that old bloke dripping soup down his chin). In my local village where I now live in the Cevennes, farmers and artisans eat in the café every day and know what they’re going to get: local meat (no need to trumpet its organic origins; they drive past it running about in the fields on their way to work every day); vegetables that taste of something; local cheese and some clafoutis or tarte – all prepared by somebody who learnt to cook from his mum and who does not feel the need for frills or possessive pronouns on his menu.

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This is not a swimming pool

The other day I took my four year-old son for a swimming lesson in the public baths close to where I’m staying in Suffolk. Florine, a fourteen year-old French girl who is over for a week from the village where I live in France, came with me. This was my son’s third lesson and he was clearly past the first flush with his teacher and reluctant to get into the water. While the coach cajoled him down the steps, Florine and I took our seats in the viewing gallery.

“Don’t you want to swim this time?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“It’s rubbish, this pool (C’est nulle). In fact,” she added, gazing sadly at the rows of swimmers moving sedately and tidily up and down the pool. “It’s not even a pool.”

“What do you mean?”

She threw out her hand.

“Look at it. It’s not a pool. It’s a church! You’re not allowed to do anything here. Pools aren’t like that in France. In France, it’s chaos. (C’est le bordel). People jumping in and shrieking and chasing each other about…Just having fun.”

I had a flashback to the 1970s. Remember? Before Health and Safety. Before the US contagion of litigation.

“And look!” she went on. “There’s a sign saying ‘No diving’.”

“That’s just in the shallow end.”

She puffed out air.

“Why do they have to tell us not to dive in the shallow end? They think we’re stupid or something?”

I smiled and turned to the baby pool to see my son swimming towards his teacher.

I stood up and clapped furiously. His little face peered up at me from beneath the surface of the water as he paddled furiously to keep that tiny island around his nose and mouth from becoming submerged with the rest of him.

“Quick!” I said to Florine. “Where’s the camera?” She handed me my bag and I rushed down to the poolside, switching to film mode. I was picturing my son’s pride at seeing his father’s delight at seeing this moment; a whole chain reaction of joy would be triggered by this film.

As I crouched down a whistle blew.

“I’m sorry love,” the coach said, wading towards me. “No photography allowed. It’s the Children Act.”

“What?”

The penny dropped: The Internet. Child pornography. The modern world.

Appalled, I stood up, blew my son a kiss and returned to my seat to find Florine laughing and shaking her head.

“I told you. It’s not a pool. It’s a church,” she said.

Afterwards, the coach took me aside and explained. I could film him, she said, but under certain conditions. We’d set them up. Next time.

“He can get his badge, though. Today,” she said encouragingly. “He can pick up his five metre badge from reception.”

I looked down at my son.

“Did you hear that? You won a badge!”

His face lit up.

“What’s a badge?”

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “We’ll go and get it now and you can show Dad when you get home.”

I had spoken too soon. At the reception I met with the inimitable, close-mouthed, compensatory smile of UK officialdom, the one that’s always, always accompanied by an “I’m sorry Madam but…”

THEY HAD RUN OUT OF 5 METRE BADGES. I looked down at my son who was looking up at me expectantly. Then I turned back to the woman behind the desk. But how could they run out of five metre badges? Did they not comprehend the emotional stakes they were dealing with here? Instead I asked,

“When do you think you’ll receive them?”

“Should be some time over the next few weeks.”

Florine was laughing. I wanted to cry.

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Learning curve

I’ve been in England for two weeks, promoting this book about France and two encounters with British broadsheets have given me an interesting lesson in the workings of the media in this country.

The first newspaper contacted my publishers offering to run an ‘extract’ from the book. Great excitement all round: it was every writer’s and every publisher’s dream. I was not particularly surprised when I learned that they were interested in a chapter called ‘The discrete charm of the bourgeoisie’ which features an account of a Parisian dinner party I once attended with my husband, which – for a small handful of the guests – moved seamlessly from good food, and good conversation, to good sex. My point in the chapter, was to note my astonishment – and my admiration – at the relatively guiltless nature of the incident for the people involved. I have no interest in judgment, really. It bores me but I was interested in what the incident revealed about my own conditioning and about the differences inherent in our two cultures. Clearly, this was an exceptional occurrence but there was something in the way it played out that spoke of an entirely different attitude towards pleasure.

When I opened the paper that Sunday morning I discovered that they had not actually run ‘an extract’ but had instead ‘extracted’, as they put it, from the book, all the bits that they found most juicy and then jammed them all together. This, of course meant all the various references or anecdotes relating to my own experience of the French attitude towards sex. When I read it, one of the things I felt was pity for those prospective readers who would rush to amazon thinking that they were buying a book about sex only to find that they were being asked to read about things like, politics, religion and history.

The second incident flowed inevitably from the first. Another national newspaper had read the ‘extracted bits’ and someone called to ask me for an interview. Once again, as I would discover, it wasn’t really an ‘interview’. It was a conversation with a journalist over the telephone about the sexy bits, which she would then write up ‘in the style of the paper’, as she phrased it, and then put into the first person. (!) I was immediately wary of such a procedure: words written ‘in the style of the paper’ but passed off as my own? It sounded dangerous. And of course it was. However vigilant you are, ultimately they’re not your words and the photos and captions flag a message that leaves you staring at yourself in bewilderment and asking, who on earth is that?

I take great comfort from the fact that these experiences confirm the thesis in my book about the nature of the British press and its roots in protestant morality.

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Le Culte de L’Argent

A friend of mine – who happens to be a philosophy professor (bear with me) –  recently explained to me a philosophical distinction, first made by Aristotle between two visions of money and its role in society.  The one he (Aristotle) called oikonomia (economics) and the other he called khrematisike (chrematistics). The first, basically, is perceived as good and the second as bad. The first – economics – refers to the useful and beneficial function of money as related to the ‘natural’ process of producing and exchanging goods, while the second – crematistics – refers to the ‘unnatural’ art of money begetting money and includes mechanisms like speculation and debt.

According to this same friend, the glamorous French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, describes Aristotle’s theory in the following terms: “For Aristotle, it is a matter of an ideal and desirable limit, a limit between the limited and the unlimited, between the true and finite good (the economic) and the illusory and indefinite good (the chrematistic).”

Reading this, another French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, springs to mind. He went to America in the nineteenth century and described what he saw in the following terms: ‘The Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.’(1)

Does the Anglo-Saxon consumerist model encourage us to chase after the next new thing of this world, urging us to borrow in order to do so – the next handbag, the next mortgage payment etc. – and so induce a culture of endless postponement of ‘true’ pleasure?

In a fit of exasperation at seeing his nation repeatedly compared to Britain, Georges Pompidou once said to his Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, “We’re not like them! If we were we’d know about it! For nearly three centuries we’ve been idealising Anglo-Saxon society, starting with Montesquieu, who allowed himself to be manipulated by the Intelligence Service…This society that we worship is one of Money!”

(1) De la démocratie en Amérique

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Non-dits

Anti-Semitism in France is a strange and elusive beast. It seems to shift and mutate, changing shape with each new generation. Today, you might find it lying just below the surface of José Bové’s otherwise legitimate struggle against cultural hegemony, beneath the worthy concern for France’s disenfranchised Arabs, or lurking behind the Parisian intellectual’s critique of American foreign policy. You might also discern it behind the widespread  and vociferous contempt for the current president.

Nicolas Sarkozy talks without difficulty about his father’s Hungarian origins, frequently referring to himself as the son of an immigrant. He never, on the other hand, invokes his mother’s Jewish roots, describing himself as Catholic “in culture, tradition and belief”(1), as if to do so in a society whose anti-Semitism is ever-present and unresolved were just too much for him. This avowed affiliation, however, is not universally respected. The politician, Georges Frêche – who was expelled from the socialist party in 2007 after a series of racist remarks (including a cracker about the number of blacks in the French squad) – chose to make a speech shortly after Sarkozy’s victory hailing the French nation for electing a Jew as president. During the campaign, Le Pen also frequently referred to Sarkozy’s soi-disant judaism in an attempt to stem the flow of National Front voters to his rival.

Back in October, 2005, during one of his legendary visits to a rioting suburb, Sarkozy was, as usual, bombarded with abuse from angry youths, many of whom were of North African origin. The French TV crew covering the incident decided not to report the exact wording of their insults. Claiming poor sound quality, the editor chose to subtitle the real chant, ‘Sarkozy, Filthy Jew!’ as ‘Sarkozy, Fascist!’

That a producer/reporter would run the risk of making an edit so politically loaded and so clearly tendentious is as baffling as the strange denial that surrounds Sarkozy’s Jewish heritage. The media clearly plays a continuing role in upholding the myth of France as a liberal, enlightened and tolerant nation. I’ve often met with incomprehension or resentment when I have dared to compare France’s immigrant suburbs to America’s black and Hispanic ghettos, or indeed Britain’s inner cities. Still obsessed with the idea of equality through rapid and miraculous integration, France will not own up to the seriousness of the problems she is facing.

(1) La République, les Religions, l’Espérance, Nicolas Sarkozy (ed. Cerf)

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Cold Shower

In response to a chapter of the book that was published this month in Prospect Magazine, Arthur Goldhammer cautions me:

“Ms. Wadham needs to take a cold shower. True, Yasmina Reza did overhear Sarko telling another pol that “nous [referring to the French political class as a whole] sommes des bêtes sexuelles.” But the president wears elevator shoes. Surely that has to be a turn-off, even supposing that voters were waiting to be ravished…”

Tex_Exile comments: “Reading this piece, one learns more about Ms Wadham than about Sarko or the French electorate. One cannot but wonder if her attitude towards the president is not tainted by her frustration that he did not pursue what his eyes had tacitly promised her.”

Touché!

I shouldn’t be, I know, but I am little amazed by the puritanical responses to my remarks about Sarko as a sex dwarf. I’m also amused and faintly gratified that this was the only part of the chapter to have drawn any comment: it only confirms my belief that in Anglo-Saxon societies, Eros walks in shackles.

I will go and take that cold shower now and hope that my wantonness abates.

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Shameless

When I began this blogging caper I told myself that I would eschew all shameless airing of my personal laundry in public and stick to the honest business of self-promotion.

But I can’t help it.

The giddying sense of a vast, anonymous audience hanging on my every word is too much for me…I have to share this:

I’m on a brief and longed-for holiday by the jeweled Adriatic – Montenegro, in fact; a destination I have fantasized about for years (NO, there are no sex dwarves here) and it is pouring with rain. The sky is black and the emerald rivers are spewing their litter-laden mud into the sea. I’m told this freakish and unprecedented precipitation will go on till the end of the week.

So what do I do? I go to a ‘cyber cafe’ with its upbeat Balkan mariachi and its towering waitresses (dressed in thigh boots and string vests), I log onto this blog and I pour my heart out.

Only a year ago I was deploring the unseemliness of blogging culture. How bizarre, I thought back then, to want to splatter your inner life all over the Internet, and how vainglorious to think that anyone would be interested.

Now look at me.

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Five Foot, Six Inches

I’ve been asked to clarify the notion of the sex dwarf.

As I said when I first began to write about the current French president, the term is not meant to be disparaging. It may seem a little disingenuous to say that it is meant as a compliment, but it’s true. I see Nicolas Sarkozy as one of a long and illustrious line of men who choose to make up in libido* what they lack in stature.

I’m not going to share here my reasons for believing that Nicolas Sarkozy is a sex dwarf. I will simply say two things: he is short (5ft6 is short, especially if your wife is 5ft9) and – as has been both widely observed and repeatedly suppressed – he is sexually predatory.

From Ancient Egypt to Aubrey Beardsley, sex dwarves have peopled mythology and haunted the human imagination. Dynamos of erotic energy, powering both the ego and the id, they are life’s doers (and shaggers). My reason for dwelling on this aspect of his person? I do not think that politics alone are sufficient to explain his baffling conquest, first of the French people and then of Carla Bruni. I suspect that the French nation was seduced, as was Carla, by the sheer force of the man’s will to power and, while I cannot speak for the latter, the former seems to have woken up the morning after the election either shaken or appalled by the dark forces that drove them to choose this nietzschean superman over his distinctly chaste adversary, the rather goody goody daddy’s girl – Segolene Royal. (I also think we can agree that whatever one may feel about the man’s policies, life in France would have been considerably less interesting if they had not.)

*li.bi.do |ləˈbēdō|noun ( pl. -dos): the energy of the sexual drive as a component of the life instinct (Psychoanalysis)

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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 Work Life Divide

A bizarre poll, claiming to take the temperature of the nation after two years of Super-Sarko, reveals that a large majority (75%) admire the man for his ‘courage’ and ‘dynamism’ and at the same time, condemn the president (73%) for his inability to ‘listen’ and ‘to solve the problems of the French people.’

TF1 posted the results on its site. I think the readers’ comments reveal more than anything the nature of the divide that defines this nation.

At 23h35 on 6/5/09 Axel in London wrote:

“Those who affirm that ‘all of France is in the street to protest against (Sarkozy’s) policies’ have a weird view of things: even if the March demonstrations were supposed to have been an ‘enormous’ success, they only gathered 3 million French people. It’s true that the opinions of the 61 million others, who were at work or at home, don’t count for anything. Only the views of those who complain count…”

At 11h55 on 7/05/2009 Luc in Paris wrote:

“The reactions of Axel in London don’t interest anyone! He should get out of London and take a look at the extreme poverty of the country he’s living in.”

At 13h41 on 7/05/2009 Axel in London wrote:

“…That is very definitely one of the main reasons why I stopped voting left and started voting right: today in France, we are graced with a magnificent leftist intellectual dictatorship: ‘you think of France as we do or you don’t exist.’ Thank God I left France, a country being eaten away from the inside…”

At 16h40 on 7/05/2009 Xavier in Houston, Texas wrote:

“Bravo Axel in London (…)! The French don’t ever stop complaining, not working much and earning a lot!!!! Wake up, Sarkozy is doing a good job. If people stopped striking every month and finally got down to work, you wouldn’t be in this mess !!!!! Every time I come home for a few days, I see it. It’s a complete mess!!!!

The last word…

At 19h30 on 7/05/2009, Max in Boulogne wrote:

@ all expats or foreigners : of course you criticize France and yet you come to a French site…Hilarious! @ Xavier : I’d rather live in France under Sarkozy than in a country where only material and financial success is valued!

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730 Days on…

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Sarko, the sex dwarf’s presidency. I didn’t write anything on the day because I really couldn’t work out what to say about him. Nothing at least that I haven’t said already: which is that two years ago, when faced with a choice between the passive, matriarchal figure of Ségolène Royal and her ‘gentle revolution’ and the strutting and libidinous Sarkozy and his promise of ‘rupture’, this ancient patriarchy, in thrall to the libido, inevitably chose the latter.

Today I still don’t know what to make of Sarko’s record so far. Of course the majority of France (65%) thinks his presidency has been rubbish. (It is useful to note that exactly the same majority condemned Chirac after the same period in office.) My suspicion is that Sarko knows that he’s actually doing ok. Despite the trumpeting tone of the unions, last week’s grand Mayday rally saw half as many people on the streets as there had been for the general strike of March 19th.

In fact, I fear that the French democratic model, which dictates reform (or lack of it) from the streets, is in serious jeopardy. The eight unions may well have plastered over their differences in order to get their supporters marching together on Mayday in a big show of unity, but they are, in reality, at each other’s throats. Why? Because Sarkozy, through a very clever political sleight of hand, and without new legislation, managed to change the rules by simply rolling back the arbitrating power of the State and inviting management and employees to negotiate with each other directly. This was a disaster for France’s main trade union movements who have dominated labour relations and politics since the war, not because of their “representativity” (number of members) but because of their so-called political “legitimacy”.

By encouraging direct negotiations, Sarkozy subtly but radically changed the landscape. Henceforth, only “representative” unions, i.e. those whose members make up at least 30 per cent of a company (and in the years to come that will increase to at least 50 per cent) are allowed to negotiate labour reforms – a move towards democratisation against which nobody could decently object.

This move not only brought to the fore an array of far more radical unions (like Sud) that had hitherto not had a look-in, thereby fragmenting the base, but it has severely reduced the political clout of union dinosaurs like the CGT and the CFDT.

As Charles Bremner pointed out yesterday (as ever, quicker off the mark than me) there is no one remotely credible to stand against Sarkozy. From memory, these elements – a nation in moral and economic crisis, in search of a new identity and leadership that is at least perceived to be strong, with an opposition in disarray – generally lead to a second term.

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cross culture

Today I asked my daughter to tell me what it felt like to have an English mother when she was growing up. To my amazement she came back with the drawbacks.

“Well, there were the clothes and the I-don’t-care-about-appearances approach to dressing.”

I had flashback of her aged four:

“Non, Maman. C’est pas joli, ca.” (You can’t go out like that. You look bloody terrible.)

“And there were huge gaps in my popular (French) culture. I was the only one in my class who hadn’t heard of ‘La Grande Vadrouille’ and ‘La Boum.’ And I hadn’t even heard of Jacques Brel.”

Both cult films, La Grande Vadrouille is an exhausting, slap-stick comedy set during the Nazi Occupation, with Louis de Funès and and André Bourvil (widely believed to be the funniest men in French history) and La Boum is a coming of age film with Sophie Marceau slow dancing endlessly to bad French pop music. And as for Jacques Brel, over my dead body were we going to listen to that sniveling, misogynist…Belgian.

Then she added:

“But when everyone eventually discovered The Clash and Bob Marley, I knew all their songs off by heart.”

“So it was ok then?”

“Yeah. It was ok.”