Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  Shortly after his speech at Bourges, José Bové, the Master of Hungary, was pursued by irritated burghers and chopped to pieces.

  A FAMILIAR TASTE FOR VANDALISM AND VIOLENCE

  We see in the present Bové’s movement, and the personalities of those who surround him, much that is familiar. (Bové, an avid student of European peasant revolts, is well aware of this.) First, there is the remarkable fact that the hero of the peasants has chosen to make his case through vandalism, rather than through legal organs of political persuasion. He justifies this by arguing that the dangers posed by GMOs and by homogenized, modern farming techniques are so vast that he has no moral choice. But again, the dangers of GMOs are abstract and unproved. This does not mean they are not real, but it does suggest that they may not be the true source of the emotive power Bové has managed to harness.

  Consider this: We have known for more than fifty years that tobacco will kill some 25 percent of its users. No one in Europe takes to the streets about this, or ransacks the offices of the corporations that promote this lethal product. Bové, populist champion of the public health, is rarely seen without his pipe, which he is forever stoking and tamping and puffing. His followers find this very charming. If Bové were concerned above all about disease and health, putting that pipe away would be the more rational place to start. There are no protesters rioting about France’s rate of vehicular homicide, one of the highest in the First World. We see no protesters in Europe demanding greater public (or private) funding to combat AIDS, even though AIDS is the biggest threat to global health in the history of the human race, particularly in the developing world. Clearly, this isn’t just about rational fear and real risk.

  And why, precisely, does Bové believe that he has no means of political expression beyond the destruction of private property? “When,” he asks, “was there a public debate on genetically modified organisms? When were farmers and consumers asked what they think about this? Never.” 16 But this is patently untrue: The public debate on genetically modified organisms has been endless; a quick search on Google will prove this. In 1999, for example, scientists extensively debated the dangers of GMOs in Nature and The Lancet. Throughout Europe, GMOs have been discussed in newspapers, in scientific journals, in women’s magazines, in government commissions convened specifically to investigate the issue. They have been discussed on television; they have been debated on the floor of most European parliaments. And throughout Europe, people have been given a chance to vote for candidates who champion their views about GMOs, in regular elections that are generally agreed by observers to be relatively free and fair. The fact that voters have not elected candidates who embrace Bové’s philosophy would suggest that they don’t agree with him.

  Bové hasn’t much use for the franchise. “I myself wonder whether one should vote at all,” he says. As for the suggestion that he himself might run for office, and use the power of persuasion to pursue his agenda democratically and legally, he replies, “Never.” 17

  In the courtroom in Montpellier, Bové concluded, “Yes, the action was illegal, but I lay claim to it because it was legitimate.” 18 He did not, however, specify the source of this legitimacy, and it is certainly not clear what it might be, if it is not the popular will. French voters may be wrong about GMOs—even catastrophically wrong—but surely it is an error to suggest that the remedy for this is the rule of the mob. We know what lies at the end of that tunnel.

  “It was the Americans who led the way in all this,” Bové says. “They were the ones who threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor because they were fed up with taxation without representation. That was an American example.”19 The comment contains its own rebuttal. The Boston Tea Party was a response to taxation without representation. France has enjoyed universal manhood suffrage since 1944. Bové, like every man and woman in France, has the right to vote. His is most certainly not the American example.

  But it is quite a good French example, as we are seeing.

  THE FOURTH LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  José of Flora, or Joachim, as he is more commonly known, was born in Calabria in 1145 to a middle-class family, as Bovés are usually born. Joachim was the most significant apocalyptic thinker of the Middle Ages—a more intellectual Bové than most. He began his career unremarkably as an official in the Sicilian court of Palermo. After a spiritual conversion, he set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; when he returned, he lived as a hermit for a number of years before joining the Cistercian Order. (It is striking that so many of the Bovés were hermits before they were activists; the current Bové, at the age of twenty-one, hid from the police in an isolated farm high in the Aspe Valley, part of the Basque region, for nearly a year. There he made yogurt.)

  Joachim’s linear theory of history was the most complete known to Europe until the advent of Marxism, and was in many ways Marxism’s precursor. His inspiration was to find in the Scriptures concealed clues to the pattern of history itself, which was to unfold in three progressive stages, the Age of the Law, the Age of the Gospel, and the Age of the Spirit. The final age would be a utopia of enlightened consciousness and freedom. This inadvertently subversive doctrine—he was not consciously heterodox—has been the clear inspiration for Continental theories of trinitarian historical evolution ever since; it has reappeared, for example, among the German Idealist philosophers, and in the theory of historic progress espoused by the French proto-fascist Auguste Comte.

  From the Scriptural clues, Joachim determined, the future could be predicted, and that future was the Apocalypse, near at hand (it was due in 1260, he thought). By the late twelfth century, he had become known throughout Europe for these views, which acquired by the end of his life a decidedly anticlerical luster. Joachim prophesied the replacement of the Roman Church by a universal monastery to which all men would belong. This egalitarian, anti-elite vision of the future proved particularly inspiring to a new generation of revolutionary millenarians. Widely circulated throughout late medieval Europe, his texts furnished a vocabulary by which to indict the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy of the medieval Church. Joachim himself never attacked the papacy directly, but others, particularly radical Franciscans, drew from his writings the conclusion that the pope was none other than the Beast.

  Was Joachim truly a Bové? At first glance it might seem not—no rabble behind him, no sheep to speak of—but his sense of history is Bové through and through. The recent Bové, too, sees inevitable, sequential phases of history characterized by particular institutional structures, all leading to a final, universal expansion of consciousness. “History shows,” says the new Bové, “that each phase of political development has a corresponding institutional form: France’s response to the Industrial Revolution was the nation-state; the WTO is the expression of this phase of the liberalization of world trade.”20 His manifesto, cowritten with his confrere in activism, fellow farmer François Dufour, is titled The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food. One section is titled “A New Consciousness.” That new consciousness, the authors believe, is now dawning. If José of Fiore saw the portent of the new era in the emergence of Saladin, the current Bové sees one in the events in Seattle: “Seattle was a historic event, marking the emergence of a new awareness on a world scale.” As Joachim predicted, this new consciousness heralds a clearer apprehension of the Antichrist. “In Nice, Prague, Genoa, there has been a real sense of a different sort of consciousness,” says José of Millau. “With the movement against a monolithic world-economic system, people can once again see the enemy more clearly.”21

  As Joachim insisted, the new consciousness will not be restricted to the elites. “We are witnessing the rise of a new awareness on a world scale,” echoes Dufour, and “confronting issues hitherto only dealt with by experts.”22 If Joachim’s followers were heartened by his message, so are the contemporary Bové’s: “The struggle is giving them renewed confidence in the possibility of changing things,” says Dufour. “They were waiting for a sign.” 23 A sign from
what? It is as if this vocabulary were programmed into the genome.

  “Each new rally,” Dufour adds, “holds out hope, is proof that the worldwide challenge is being maintained. . . . It’s an odd sort of militancy, with no specific political project.”24

  Of course there is no political project. That is because this is a spiritual project.

  RITUAL, RELATIONSHIP, FAMILY, LOVE, TRADITION

  The foreword to The World Is Not for Sale is written by the prominent antiglobalization activist and author of No Logo Naomi Klein. “José Bové and François Dufour,” she writes, “have come to stand for a way of life in which our relationship to food and nature is grounded in respect. For them, food is more than bodily fuel; it is ritual, relationship, family, love, tradition, and so much else.”25

  It is?

  Ritual, relationship, family, love, tradition. A potent aphrodisiac for people longing, if obviously unconsciously, for the revival of ancient social and kinship bonds, for a religious tradition they have lost. In the same book, interviewer Gilles Luneau lowers the level of discourse, theologically speaking, to the frankly neopagan: “Wheat, maize and rice are more than just crops. They are the outcome of a fusion of sun, water, and soil. In eating, humans inscribe themselves in the cycles of the universe, and this is far more profound and basic than making money.” Bové agrees that his activism represents a quest for some kind of sustenance beyond the material: “We eat,” he laments, “but don’t nourish ourselves, even on the farm.” He mourns “the vacuity of much of modern life,” and the way even “our deaths, like our food, have become standardized.” His program, he admits, goes “beyond the defense of working conditions, incomes or jobs to challenge the social and ecological purpose of work and human activity.” The spiritual yearning in these comments is palpable.

  Bové does not really deny that the free market and the globalization he deplores have brought unprecedented prosperity to Europe. The downtrodden of Europe are not physically oppressed, he says. They are mentally oppressed. “These days, in our post-industrial society, social awareness against alienation is more likely to come from thinking things through than from experience of more traditional overt exploitation.” 26 The emphasis is mine.

  I know what he’s talking about. I, too, sometimes find myself uneasily thinking things through, late at night, when everyone else is sleeping. I wonder what it all means. I suppose you could call it alienation. If I cannot really bring myself to believe that the cure for this is the purification of the food chain, it is perhaps because I am not a natural mystic.

  THE FIFTH LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  Sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, Bové was born again in what is now southern Germany. Hans Böheim, the Piper of Niklashausen, was—again—a shepherd. Before his visitation by the Virgin Mary, in 1476, he had also been a popular entertainer, hence his name.

  The Virgin conveyed to him a message: God was greatly displeased, but would suffer Himself to give the people one last chance. The Piper was to abandon his pipes and burn his drum, then bring the pure Word of God to the people. All men were to journey on a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Niklashausen. A dreadful punishment awaited those who failed to heed the summons.

  The formerly half-witted and inarticulate peasant found himself suddenly possessed of unnatural eloquence. Adoring crowds streamed from great distances to hear him preach. He claimed miraculous powers for himself, teaching that his intercession had prevented God from killing all the corn and vines. Inevitably, he turned against the clergy, pronouncing them worse, in their corruption and avarice, than Jews. He enjoined his followers to withhold from them all taxes and tithes. This message was, as usual, well received.

  The Piper’s innovation was his vision of the coming Kingdom, which would not be a heavenly Jerusalem but a return to an imaginary past, a primal and egalitarian State of Nature. Wood, water, pasturage, fishing, and hunting would be enjoyed equally by all in this earthly paradise, as they had been, he imagined, in ancient times, before they were usurped by the nobility. Rulers of every stripe would be overthrown. All would live as equals and brothers.

  Vast hordes of the urban poor and peasantry abandoned their workshops and their flocks to follow him. Camps sprang up around his village, with tents. The bishop and town council, greatly alarmed, plotted to have the Piper arrested, seizing him in the early hours and whisking him off to prison on horseback, no doubt outraging the peasants by disrupting a farmer before the morning milking. The next day, thousands of his followers marched to the castle where he was imprisoned. They drove off the bishop’s emissary with stones, then tried to storm the town, shouting the Piper’s name. As in Seattle, their protests provoked a violent response from the authorities, who brought out the cavalry and responded with cannon shots. Some forty demonstrators were killed. The rest fled in a panic.

  The Piper was tried and found guilty of heresy and sorcery. He was burned at the stake. The current Bové, recalling with nostalgia the “shining crowds” in Millau, has remarked that “our journey from the farm to the court on the tractor trailer was like a trip to the scaffold.”27

  Bovés in the past, I imagine, also found themselves likening their journeys to trips to the scaffold, probably because they were taking trips to the scaffold. By the standards of his predecessors, the current Bové must surely count his sentence lenient.

  THE GREAT EUROPEAN AFFLICTION

  Malbouffe. This concept is important. Bové coined this neologism. As Gilles Luneau correctly observes, there is no word in English that captures its full meaning. It is generally translated as “junk food,” but that dismissive, vaguely ironic Americanism does not capture the full horror of bad bouffe, with its intimation of contamination, pollution, poison. The word mal in French should in this case should be translated as “evil,” as in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. “The sound of it provokes a feeling of nausea,” writes Luneau. The word, adds Bové, has “become universally accepted to express a confused unease, a mixture of guilt and accusation.”28

  I know that feeling, too, although again, I am not convinced it has anything to do with impure food.

  There it is, in example after example: To his followers, Bové stands for meaning in a meaningless world. “In its rush to make life as fast, efficient and wealthy as possible, many overlooked humanity’s hunger for dignity and a way of life that fills oneself with something other than meaninglessness,” writes one of Bové’s admirers on an Internet webzine aimed at students.29 From another admirer on the Internet:

  Jose’s battle is not merely a battle of farmers. Jose’s battle is one of people and the earth. Tracy Chapman once wrote a song with the line, “All you have is your soul.” Now we have the makings of a political alignment. The 50,000 people who came to the trial in Millau, following on Seattle, represent a global search for meaning, a global need to live in our hearts and bodies, grounded in the soil and sun, using our intelligence to re-create modern society as respectful of us and our sustenance. 30

  Just look at this vocabulary! Souls, global searches for meaning, the re-creation of the earth itself! Clearly in using these metaphors of food and hunger, of sustenance and nurturance, Bové has tapped a deep mine in the collective unconscious, a profound longing for something that combats meaninglessness—the great European affliction. But what, precisely, does Bové propose as the remedy? I have no doubt that anyone who believes an abundance of local sheep farms will cure his sense of aching emptiness will think again after inspecting a herd of sheep at close range over a period of several months.

  Curiously, these very same people, according to survey after survey, are apt to declare themselves deeply concerned that George W. Bush prays a lot.

  THE SIXTH LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  The next Bové’s name has, like the first, been lost in the mists of time. The antique madman has come to be known as the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine. This Bové, I’m afraid, is distinctly unpleasant. He lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century in the Alsa
ce (we think), and wrote in German. His Book of a Hundred Chapters was the most complete expression of the millenarian eschatology of the Middle Ages.

  As usual, it all began with a personal visitation from God, who as usual was vexed with man’s sinfulness, but had as usual decided to give him one last chance. God charged the Revolutionary with the task of organizing an association of pious laymen; soon, God assured him, a savior would come to establish a messianic kingdom, where bread, barley, wine, and oil would be distributed at low prices. First, however, the Revolutionary’s association, the Brethren of the Yellow Cross, must stamp out sin, which in practical terms meant slaughtering sinners, a prospect that aroused the Revolutionary greatly: “Go on hitting them!” he urged. “From the Pope to the little students! Kill them all!”31

  The Revolutionary was clear upon this point: the Brethren were the poor; the sinners were the rich, and the Millennium was to put an end to capitalism. Church property would be seized and distributed among the poor. Income derived from property or trade would be confiscated. Private property would be abolished. All goods would be held in common. The emperor (whom he hints would be himself) would urge his subjects to inform on sinful neighbors; sinners would be enjoined to come forth and criticize themselves at special tribunals, to be established in each parish. The judges would punish them with “cruel severity.” Jews, of course, would be annihilated.