Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  * * *

  Not many people know about the Perche, even within France. Every time I tell people where we have a house, their first response is “Où?” Whereas they know the Normandy coastal region or the Loire Valley, they’ve never been to the area in between. Hence I was surprised to find an old New York Times piece on the area in which the writer calls it France’s Last Terroir. For the most part, the piece is spot on. She described the oddity of the Perche’s anonymity among the French and the Alice in Wonderland–type rabbit hole trails formed by the tall hedges, but there was one factual error.

  Yes, on paper the Perche is two hours from Paris, but unfortunately traffic is so bad on Friday night leaving and on Sunday night returning, anything two hours from Paris is inside Paris. Once you have a country house, you live in constant fear of traffic. You’ve either concocted ten different itineraries or you’ve created a convoluted recipe of subway to train to a car parked near the train station, which, in the end, gets you door to door in the same amount of time had you driven in traffic. Everyone is convinced they have the white whale itinerary to beat all others, one passed down from a friend of a friend who researched it over years across different occasions and different time periods, and which they will gladly text you and which you gladly curse while you’re cruising at twenty miles an hour through an abandoned mall parking lot near Versailles wondering where the fuck you are.

  I’ve experimented with different departure times, sometimes leaving Normandy at ten Sunday night and arriving in Paris at 1:00 a.m. to lug Bibi and Otto out of the car in their pajamas and up the stairs only to be greeted by a hernia. On other occasions, we’ll leave at five Monday morning to make sure the kids are at school by eight, only to have Anaïs and the kids abandon the car in traffic and take the subway the rest of the way in.

  Closing up the country house isn’t a picnic, either. Around 3:00 p.m., you start the evacuation process, turning off the electricity, emptying the fridge, boarding up the windows, cutting the water, bringing all the chairs from the garden indoors so they don’t rust, throwing the laundry together for Paris in a garbage bag so it’ll fit in the car, climbing into the car full of hot garbage that you’ll drop off at the dump on your way home to get stuck in traffic with everyone doing the same Sunday-night routine.

  And when you get to Paris, all the negative parts of city life become suddenly amplified at the périphérique (the Parisian beltway). The Tenth sometimes takes on the form of an upscale Calcutta. There’s trash everywhere, panhandlers, junkies, drug dealers, dog shit, and no green in sight to offset the misery. Sometimes when my Perche neighbors complain that the mayor still hasn’t dug that run-off trench he promised, I want to remind them that I saw a man shit in the street five meters from me, while looking at me straight in the eye.

  What I don’t know is if this sentiment is directly linked to having a country house or is simply the natural trajectory of the white French male, he who moves to the country, grows an abdomen, becomes more conservative, and eventually votes FN. Right now, I fear I’m rounding second.

  The other day I found myself once again trolling Mimi Thorisson’s site looking for clues and tips about how the house could become more like Winterfell; how I could dress up Bibi and Otto and Anaïs in wolf fur capes maybe and call myself the Warden of the Perche. Halfway down the blog scroll of ceramic bowls of cherries, cabernet harvests, and a fine collection of wall-hanging copper pots, I realized I’d become that French gentleman farmer I wanted to be, just not in the way I envisioned it.

  And as the days have bled into months that have hemorrhaged now into years, I’ve proven to myself time and time again, with my by-the-seat-of-my-pants home repairs, fraudulent insurance claims, bounced checks, or playing baseball with all our rotten apples, my goal has never been to become a wholesome Burberry ad like Mimi, nor to spend a charming picturesque year like Peter Mayle, but to create my own mediocre maison de famille, which I’ll probably never sell (because nobody will ever buy it), and which I now only look forward to dropping into the laps of my children, who themselves will gripe over it for the many decades to come.

  It is they who will bitch about who should fix the roof and who gets to use it for free, what circuitous route they should take back to Paris, who pays the heating bill, and what to do with all the Matt Damon DVDs Dad bought at some vide-greniers. While all this time, John (because we’re using the third person now) will be out back in the family plot underground, buried with the proceeds he won from Peter Mayle’s publishers, enjoying, year after year after year, his own eternal assimilation into French terroir.

  The French Resistant

  I’ve met French people of all shapes and sizes, and the common trait they all seem to share is that everyone, and I mean everyone, claims to have had a French resistant in the family during World War II. It’s often a grandfather or great-uncle who gets the credit, a hero who risked life and limb to do what was right or “juste,” as they often say. I, at times, have my doubts, considering France’s dubious history at the time: the quick capitulation, the collaborator Vichy government, not to mention the treatment of French Jews. But when someone’s across from you bragging about their family past, it’s tough to stop them midsentence to clarify: “Wait a minute, are we talking about the same war?” They’re my friends. I like them, and I’m inclined to take their word for it. Plus, the idea of resistance and revolution and standing up for one’s rights are something I always admire in the French, something I hoped would rub off on me, once I made France my home.

  Before moving here, I’d been a fairly apolitical person. I was a young adult during the Clinton years, an era I associate more with short shorts and Arsenio Hall than political engagement. Politics to me was the Lewinsky scandal, and current events were John Wayne Bobbitt, basically bad TV compared to today’s really good reality TV. Whereas now I know all of Trump’s hires and fires and can recite to you every Obama legacy he’s tried to torpedo since taking office, Bill Clinton was usually off my radar. I didn’t give a shit if he was in Japan or whether he was deadlocked with Congress over balancing the budget. What he did or didn’t do wouldn’t affect me one iota, I felt, so I tuned out.

  That’s why I was happy to move in 2002 to France—a country that, it seemed, still cared a bit about politics. It was a place where farmers burned tires on the highway to fight for agricultural subsidies or where ex-farmers, like José Bové, ransacked a McDonald’s and turned it into a political career. These people didn’t wait for the political process “to play out.” They took their future into their own hands, literally. Noël Godin, a self-proclaimed “humorist-anarchist,” went so far as to toss pies in the faces of politicians, lying in wait at a press conference or outside a cabinet meeting, then entarter an unsuspecting target à la Buster Keaton. Nobody threw a pie in Newt Gingrich’s face. And come to think of it, why the hell not?

  * * *

  My time in France got off to a politically charged start when, the day after our wedding, Anaïs and I woke up to a hideous hangover. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing candidate and leader of the National Front Party, had made it through the first round of the 2002 presidential primaries, scoring a runoff against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. For our friends, this was an out of nowhere, seismic event. Lionel Jospin, who’d been favored to win it all, had come in third and was now eliminated. Jospin had been such a shoo-in, many on the left and center hadn’t even bothered to vote (they were at our wedding instead), or they’d voted for a candidate who had no chance of winning as a way to send Jospin a message moving into the second round.

  Jospin was Al Gore’s French twin, a number two who was as effective as he was uncharismatic. The problem was that voters liked Jospin—they just didn’t love him. And since his stint as prime minister had been fairly drama free, voters expected the same on Election Day.

  Within hours of the result, most of France took to the streets in a call to arms to ward off
a potential Le Pen presidency. Anaïs was too pregnant to join that day, so we stayed at home and watched on TV, amazed at the crowds gathered at the Place de la République and on the Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower, marching like a modern day Les Misérables, all without (imagine this) the help of social media. Although they detested Chirac, those on the left swallowed their pride and gave him their vote, creating what was called a “barrage républicain” (a republican firewall). And it worked! Le Pen was trounced in the general election two weeks later, 82 percent to 18 percent.

  Little did I know, that feel-good moment of May 2002 not only glossed over the underlying problems that had led to this Le Pen insurgency, it also ushered in a pointless five-year second term that would challenge Boris Yeltsin’s for doddering nothingness. The economy stalled, morale plunged, and the political torpor I watched ensue would define French politics for the next fifteen years.

  * * *

  During those early months, though, I lived like an undergrad hopped up on Robespierre and Marx, intrigued at this France and its fired-up notion of citoyenneté. This was a country with a thirty-five-hour workweek, for crying out loud, a civilized luxury earned—I was sure—by the blood of strikers and radicals. There was also the law that banned shopping on Sundays, proving France still felt people who worked in department stores had lives, too. Neither of these laws could have flown in the States, but here they were gospel. I imagined the French employee as someone both proud and protected, and the workplace as a teeming cauldron of vigilance, where bosses dared not stretch the day one minute longer, lest they be strung up on the nearest light post. An American could learn from these French, I thought. There was a never-satisfied anger inside them I wanted a part of, and within days of moving into our new apartment, I found myself bellied up to the zinc bar of my local café hoping to somehow get a taste.

  Next to me stood a ragtag bunch: street sweepers, hipster dads, and a motley group of retirees, men and women, all watching the morning political roundup on the TV behind the bar. You can imagine my excitement when “ils sont tous des escrocs!” (they’re all crooks), then “rien ne change!” (nothing changes!), then “Que de la merde!” (all of it . . . shit!) rang out from one onlooker after another, building in a violent crescendo. I silently sipped my espresso half expecting this rage to pour out onto the street where we’d all turn over a car or torch a scooter. But no. At the commercial break, everyone downed their petit blanc and folded their newspapers and went out for a smoke, leaving me alone at the bar wondering if I should punch someone. I knew coming here that it was a French habit to criticize things and say everything was de la merde. But I assumed it was with verve and for a noble cause born from a “the world will hear my voice!” passion. Yet the more I visited this café and frequented offices and dinner parties and school outings, the more I sensed a feeling of disenchantment and disillusionment, something I would have attributed to my bong-smoking American dorm-mates in college, not the descendants of Rousseau. Many felt that the recent war in Iraq had done incredible damage. Not only did many feel lied to, there was a darker feeling that despite protests and the warnings and fears, the war had happened anyway; their voices and thoughts didn’t count.

  If you lingered long enough at my bar, these people would eventually get around to the good old days, specifically les trente glorieuses (the thirty glorious years), a boom period for the French middle class, one that stretched from the end of World War II until le choc pétrolier (the oil crisis of the seventies). I’d heard of these trente glorieuses before, but I’d always assumed it defined a group of leaders like “the dirty dozen,” not an actual period of time. For my barmates, though, les trente glorieuses was a high-water mark for France, and one that had unfortunately begotten les trente annnées de crise, three decades of economic recession and weak-kneed governance. Blame was thrown around, sure, but often it was placed at the feet of French politicians, whom my friends didn’t see as revered statesmen, but instead as needy egomaniacs. And the TV I watched in those early years confirmed this.

  One popular program, Le Grand Journal, would invite elected officials on, only to make fun of them to their face. The setup was always the same. A comedian would sit directly across from the guest, then launch into a not-so-nice takedown bio starting with something like “You’re elected mayor of Lyon as a left-leaning candidate in 1993. Two marriages and a bankrupt city later, you resurface on the national scene as a candidate of the right.” It was borderline S&M TV, and yet politicians kept coming back for more, probably because they saw how the audience pitied them. Jacques Chirac capitalized on this sympathy thanks to the Les Guignols de l’info (Puppets of the News), a satire series featuring marionette versions of real-life politicians. Nearing the end of Chirac’s first term, Les Guignols portrayed him as a dementia-ridden mess, shuffling around in his slippers, hands in his pockets, whimpering to his wife, Bernadette, “Nobody likes me, dear. Nobody wants to play with me anymore.” Chirac’s popularity received an unexpected bump from the episodes, leading some to say the marionette version of Jacques Chirac did more for Jacques Chirac in 2002 than Jacques Chirac himself.

  The more I watched, the more I realized what those in my café were pissed off about. The political talent pool was super shallow. Some officials resembled villains from Austin Powers movies more than real candidates. There was Jean-Marie Le Pen, of course, who was rumored to have tortured captives during the Algerian war and even once wore an eye patch. There was Bernard Tapie, a former cabinet minister and businessman who was found guilty of fixing a match for the Olympique de Marseilles soccer team. And Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the former socialist candidate and IMF head who was charged with sexual assault in New York, who shouldn’t be confused with Dominique Bodis, the mayor of Toulouse, who’d been accused (then later exonerated) of attending masked orgies. None of these guys had written their political obituaries, by the way, probably because of the unwritten pecking order that exists in French politics, a sort of “once you’re in, you’re in” lifer mentality that’s festered and that explains why nobody exits for the private sector. We may think “career politician” was an American invention, but the French made it an art form. For every John Edwards, Michael Dukakis, or Dan Quayle, men who’ve since disappeared into the dustbin of historical losers, there was a Laurent Fabius or Jean-François Copé or Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who despite loss after loss, cabinet appointment after cabinet resignation, were proof that French politicians never die, they just create a hellish political Groundhog Day instead.

  There were also the terms themselves. Up until 2002, a French presidential term was seven years. François Mitterrand served two of them. His presidency was longer than FDR’s. There was a point at which my sister-in-law had lived under only three French presidents, and she was already thirty! And during those quinquennats (they even sound very old), the feeling was that nothing consequential really would change. Each campaign would highlight the old issues of jobs going overseas or wages stagnating or the national debt rising, but once the candidate was elected, inertia would again take hold as it did in every other administration. And the result? Voter turnout dropped every year.

  But for an American, the real cause behind this apathy wasn’t the candidates themselves or their long terms in office, but the lack of political difference among voters. France is a proabortion, anti–death penalty, pro–gun control country that’s 100 percent for single-payer health-care coverage. Whereas in America those issues might be contentious, there’s national consensus in France. And as a result, political debates usually focus on whether the retirement age should be pushed to sixty-five rather than sixty-two or whether the education budget should be lowered or what role France should play in Europe. During debates, I’d watch dumbfounded, amazed at how eloquently each candidate explained his or her position, wondering when one would challenge the other to see if he had the guts to snuff Bin Laden. But it never came. Nor did the Swift Boat ads. Of course, the F
rench were disenchanted with the process. It was too boring.

  As for all the protests I assumed I’d be participating in each week, they were few and far between. And if we were marching, it was usually against something the United States had done, whether it was for its involvement in Iraq or against some American-financed GMO like glyphosate that the EU was flirting with allowing into the country. Although I never questioned my stance, it did feel weird to shit on my country from abroad. There was a living room cushiness to the whole thing that irked me. It was like playing political dress-up, John promenading down Boulevard Saint-Germain with his cardboard “Non à la guerre” poster, ducking into cafés on occasion to grab an espresso and pee, not having to worry if he’d be water cannoned or arrested.

  The only French person it seemed who hadn’t lost faith in the politics of change was my wife. Anaïs was a “socialiste militant,” meaning she was a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party, not just a regular run-of-the-mill Socialist voter. In Eastern Bloc countries in the seventies she might have been that person who locked you up, but in France, a militant was more organizer than subcommandanté. Anaïs attended party events, voted on its direction and platform, and generally kept abreast of the issues and how the party was addressing them. When we first arrived in France, I took her once-a-month “I’m off to my meeting” departures from the house as proof she was a recovering alcoholic, something she’d apparently been hiding from me before we got married. It wasn’t until later, when I found out “meeting” meant socialist rally, that I really started to worry.

  Most of our friends now know Anaïs is an actual militante. As many our age have drifted toward the center as all sell-outs do, Anaïs continues to swim upstream, refusing to concede that public services need to be cut or that the unions are full of opportunists. For many bourgeois French, voting socialist is something they feel they should do, but don’t love doing. And none of them head off to a monthly meeting on a February weeknight to cheer everyone on.