French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  CORSE, LA

  Violent Paradise

  The most beautiful part of France? No, the most beautiful place in the world, insists my Corsican friend. Corrupt, problematic but exquisite French island in the Mediterranean filled with offshore Frenchmen famous for murderous feuds, corruption and superb sausage. Although they are legally French, the Corsicans are really Italian. They are surrounded by water but they hardly fish; looking to their interior mountains for grazing, the surrounding sea tends to scare them. Like Albanians, Scots and other mountain men, Corsicans are celebrated for their multi-generational death feuds, settling old scores with their iconic Corsican vendetta knives. The reputation of Corsicans for random violence is satirised by René Goscinny and Albert Udezro in Astérix in Corsica (1973). Extreme violence remains endemic to Corsica. To take some 2014 reports more or less at random, a prominent lawyer was assassinated, a father was gunned down in front of his children and a woman was shot eight times in the back outside a shopping centre. In 1988, the prefect of Corse du-Sud, Claude Érignac, was shot dead by a Corsican nationalist.

  Corsica is linked to the mainland by the ferries of la Société nationale Corse Méditerranée (SNCM), whose militant workers are represented by a hardline branch of the CGT union. SNCM has long been an example of gross inefficiencies, restrictive working practices and accusations of outright criminality. SNCM sailors work 200 days a year, although often less as they are frequently on strike. Although it loses roughly 40 million euros a year on revenue of 230 million euros, it remains in operation through gross applications of subsidies funded by French taxpayers.

  Corsica is famously the birthplace of Napoléon Bonaparte, himself of Italian stock. Since the new style French plaques d’immatriculation (licence plates) were introduced, many people with absolutely no connection to the island adorn their cars with Corsican plates. The subtext of this is, ‘don’t fuck with me.’ (I have not bothered with this. My own car’s licence plates are adorned with the departmental code 975, which baffles most French people until I explain that it represents the tiny French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, the closest department of France to Canada, where I was born.)

  COTISATIONS

  Social charges to fund bureaucracy

  A couple recently moved to my village and bought the lease on the local café, to the delight of most of us. They’d scraped together their every last penny, started cleaning the place up after years of benign neglect, and worked every hour God gave them. Two weeks later, a demand dropped in their letterbox that they should immediately pay 10,000 euros in cotisations (social charges). They immediately protested. Their income was negligible, they had dedicated every penny of their savings to the project and there was much more to do. The response was hardly satisfactory. If it turned out that the demand was excessive, they could claim a refund - in a year.

  Cotisations are said to be the basis of the French social model, assuring medical care, social security and a comfortable retirement, but are an exorbitant tax on jobs and enterprise. They can add 80 per cent to the cost of employing someone (versus the average 13.8 per cent employer national insurance contribution and 3-5 per cent pension contribution levied in Britain), with the inevitable result that firms will do everything they can to avoid hiring anyone. My friend Bertrand, a talented and enterprising dentist (he is Swiss), had plans to open a new clinic in our village, employing 20 people. That’s not going to happen now. He did hire a bright young graduate dentist to help him, whom he pays 3,000 euros per month. Then he discovered that the cotisations add 2,800 euros to his costs. His business plan became unviable. The local printer told me he now works on his own because after briefly hiring an assistant, he was working more and earning less. ‘On my own, I work less and earn more,’ he said. Social charges make French labour amongst the most expensive in the euro zone, which is itself much more expensive than the US, Japan or the UK. The social security system spends 40 per cent of the money it collects on its own administration.

  CUISINE

  The Republic of junk food

  The restaurants of France represent the national paradox, on a plate. There are the exquisite (rare, costly), the good (you have to look), and then the majority, which range from ordinary to mediocre to just awful. The glory of French cooking was most memorably celebrated in the magisterial tome La Physiologie du goût (Physiology of Taste, 1825) by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, celebrating the explosion of bourgeois cuisine following the French revolution. It’s still in print. Ambrose Bierce celebrates him with the following story:

  ‘I was in my drawing room, enjoying my dinner,’ said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote. ‘What!’ interrupted Rochebriant, ‘eating dinner in a drawing room?’ ‘I must beg you to observe, monsieur,’ explained the great gastronome, ‘that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before.’

  Roland Barthes, the semiotician and phenomenologist, considered the phenomenological relationship of the Frenchman to his dinner in his famous essay Le Bifteck et les frites (Steak and chips, 1957). This amusing discourse goes beyond mere steak and chips to discuss, amongst other things, that great French variation on the dish, in which the beef is not cooked at all. Steak tartare, he says, is ‘an operation by which a spell is cast against the romantic association of sensibility with sickliness; in this preparation are to be found all the germinative states of matter; the bloody pulp of beef and egg, a regular harmony of soft and living substances, a signifying compendium of images of parturition.’ What might Barthes have made of a McDonald’s hamburger?

  You will never get a Frenchman to admit that the food is now better in England, except many of those who live there. France does not place in the top 10 of the top 50 restaurants in the world, scraping in at number 11 after establishments in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Peru, The United States, Japan, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Thailand. This ranking has predictably been denounced by French chefs. It is true that at the stratospheric end of the restaurant business where the bill can reach 500 euros a head, plus wine, there may be little difference between El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain and the Miramar in Menton, France. The problem is not that it is impossible to eat superbly in France. If you pay enough, you can eat a meal that you will remember for 20 years. The difficulty is everyday dining.

  There are still small family restaurants offering bourgeois cooking using local ingredients, serving lamb from the local shepherd, the fish landed that morning, seasonal fruit and vegetables from the potager (kitchen garden) out back. But these are increasingly hard to find and those who operate them are coshed by the stagnant economy, high labour costs, restrictive work-time flexibility and exorbitant cotisations. There are probably 200 restaurants within 20 km of my village, but I tend to patronise only a tiny handful of them. The brutal truth is that the average restaurant is getting worse, even as the standards in other countries are rising. You are more likely to be offered a plate of boiled-in-the-bag duck confit at a restaurant in France than anything actually prepared in the kitchen. More than likely, this confection is produced in the industrial kitchens of Brake France, an assembly-line processor of ready meals, owned by Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old outfit, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Brake is the largest (but not the only large) supplier of frozen and sous-vide (vacuum-packed) meals supplied to tens of thousands of French restaurants. The French don’t even know how to make pizza (outside of Nice, where they are really Italian), using the wrong flour, the wrong cheese (Emmental, for heaven’s sake), and tinned tomatoes.

  In 2012, Jacques Goldstein, a French filmmaker, produced an excoriating documentary on the decline of French kitchens, République de la malbouffe (Junk-food republic). The film, which can only be described as furious and heavy-handed, nevertheless exposed the degradation of French cooking, accusing then-president Nicolas Sarkozy of collaborating with industrial catering companies at the expense of traditional restaurateurs. But the decline is nothing new.
A. J. Leibling of the New Yorker, one of the world’s greatest gourmets, was decrying the decline in French cooking in 1959.

  Even the government timidly acknowledges that French cuisine is in crisis, recently introducing an official poster that can be displayed in restaurants guaranteeing that their dishes are fait maison (home made). However this scheme has rapidly proved to offer little meaningful advice to consumers. The best food in France is eaten at home. But French supermarkets are also often very mediocre and there is no equivalent in France to Waitrose. When I pointed out to an employee at the local Carrefour that there was a shattered jar of tomato sauce in one of the aisles, he shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘That’s not my job.’ When I tried to complain at the service desk, I was told the manager was in a meeting and did not meet with customers in any case. The best bet for buying decent groceries in France remains the street market, which remain glorious although even these have been infiltrated by industrially-produced fruit and vegetables imported from Spain.

  All this said, a terrific restaurant has just opened in our village, proudly declaring that everything is faite maison, avec amour (home made, with love). The chef is from Newcastle.

  CULTURE

  A secular religion

  The French tend to be pretty snooty about their culture and they have some things to be snooty about. French culture is one of the unique selling propositions of France. In film, music, literature and fine art, the French have punched above their weight. Chanson, the tradition of French song, is glorious. But French artists no longer dominate as they did in the Belle Époque. And much of what currently passes for French culture in France is mediocre. The nation’s favourite TV programme is CSI and a recent bestselling book was the translation of 50 Shades of Grey. France’s cultural establishment is enveloped in a cloak of protectionism, with subsidies flowing to politically connected producers producing films that sink without a trace, protected by quotas to restrict distribution of foreign films, music and television programmes. At a village fête in the south, you are as likely to see line dancers wearing cowboy hats as men playing the traditional tambourin (tambourine). French rock music has never made a huge impact and perhaps the liveliest contemporary music sector is rap, with its origins in the French ghettos where social conditions have given rise to some fierce energetic expression, not entirely approved of by the cultural establishment.

  D

  DAILYMOTION

  France’s fear of the Internet

  This video-sharing site was created in France at about the same time as YouTube and today counts 2.5 billion unique visitors per month, versus 4 billion a day for YouTube. Frédéric Filloux, a technically savvy French business journalist, has described how the government’s protectionist industrial policy simultaneously prohibited foreign investment in DailyMotion and ensured its market failure. After a tortuous history, DailyMotion ended up being owned by Orange, the telecoms giant, which behaved like it hated the business and tried to get rid of it. But its efforts to sell to Yahoo were vetoed by the government, which retains golden shares in Orange. The company has now been turned over to Vivendi in a ‘French solution’ although there is not much evidence that Vivendi will know what to do with it, either. DailyMotion is an object lesson of what happens when a promising start-up is turned into a political football.

  DEBORD, GUY

  Prophet of 21st century media culture

  Creator of situationalisme, which unlike its near-cognate, existentialisme, has proven a durable lens for viewing the world. A soixante-huitard (veteran of the Paris spring of 1968), a philosopher/ artist/ militant and an instigator of numerous amusing escapades with some of the wilder spirits of those times, he was among the first to notice the fabrication of narrative by interested economic parties. Authored counter-attacks using techniques of détournement, turning these narratives against those who had sought to control them. Author of Société du Spectacle (The Society of Spectacle 1967), director of numerous films. Born 1931. Shot himself aged 62, in 1994.

  DE GAULLE, CHARLES

  Great Frenchman, not universally loved

  The arrogant Frenchman from central casting. Mistrusted by Roosevelt, Churchill and, at times, millions of his compatriots, a representative of the high Catholic caste of France. Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (1890-1970) is today scored by opinion polls as the best-ever French president, in which role he served from 1959-69. After the French government capitulated to the Germans in 1940, he famously set up a government in exile in London and broadcast a speech of defiance on the French service of the BBC in which he declared, ‘We have lost a battle, we have not yet lost the war.’ He never liked the British. British historian Anthony Beevor teases de Gaulle for having written an entire history of the French army without ever mentioning Waterloo. Churchill supposedly said he looked like a female llama surprised in her bath.

  De Gaulle had a visceral hostility to the Nazis. He also had a daughter with trisomie 21 (Down’s Syndrome) and, as military attaché in Berlin before the war, had witnessed Hitler’s persecution of the intellectually handicapped. While many in the upper echelons of the French establishment were prepared to treat with the Nazis, it was his daughter who inspired his refusal to accept the inevitability of Nazi conquest. This is my personal theory anyway, de Gaulle never wrote about the subject.

  A physically imposing man, de Gaulle looked as if he had been created to represent France. 196cm, 6’5’’, and even more commanding in his habitual képi (military hat with a flat, circular top and visor), he was determined that France should be represented at the top table after Hitler’s defeat. He also first set France on the path of bilateralism with the then West Germans, a course that has been followed by every French president since. He never forgave the British or the Americans for their snubs during the war and directed France to become a nuclear power, another policy continued by every subsequent president. In 1966, he withdrew France from the NATO military command structure and ordered American armed forces out of France. The American Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, asked de Gaulle if that was to include the bodies of 60,000 American soldiers buried in France. De Gaulle, embarrassed, got up and left the room, without answering. De Gaulle withdrew from Algeria against strong armed opposition from hardcore integrationists who attempted to assassinate him.

  De Gaulle’s austere retirement office is still preserved in Paris. On a pilgrimage to the maison particulière (town house) owned by the de Gaulle foundation, I made friends with the curator who let me sit at his desk in his plain wooden chair. I imagined him walking in at any moment and demanding to know what on earth I was doing there.

  There are still plenty of French people who do not revere his memory. At a village fête in Limousin I was engaged by an aged veteran of the French war in Indochina who spoke bitterly of how the General had betrayed his comrades. And he remains unforgiven by many for his retreat from Algeria.

  DÉFENSE, LA

  Europe’s ‘largest’ office park

  Claims to be the largest office park in Europe. Soulless, modernist, a jungle of steel and concrete even worse than London’s Canary Wharf. La Grande Arche, a modernist reinterpretation of the Arc de Triomphe, is its symbol. Headquarters of many leading French paraétatique (semi-governmental) companies, La Défense has lurched from crisis to crisis throughout its existence. Many of its 1970s-80s era buildings are obsolete.

  DÉLOCALISATION

  The flight of employers

  Poland is the number one destination for French companies exporting their activities in search of lower labour costs, with 153,000 jobs created there. Among the French companies who have gone elsewhere in search of lower labour costs are: Airbus, Renault, PSA Citröen and Groupe Seb (Tefal, Rowenta, Calor, Moulinex, Krups). When I was in Poznan, Poland my hotel was filled with French executives hunting for Polish subcontractors. Many young French people delocalise themselves in search of work. See Londres.

  DENTISTES

  Nothing to smile about

&nb
sp; Ambrose Bierce defined a dentist as a ‘prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.’ In France, dentists are a protected profession and dental care can be pretty unimpressive. I go to London to get my teeth cleaned because dental hygienists are illegal in France, as they are considered concurrence déloyale (unfair competition) to actual dentists. It is evident to even a casual observer that many thousand dental hygienists could be usefully employed in France, earning a decent living, contributing to the economy, and clearing up the miasma of halitosis. According to Valérie Trierweiler, François Hollande’s former girlfriend, the President of the Republic refers to poor people as the sans dents (toothless ones). Hollande’s friends have denied he said this, but it seems hard to believe she invented it. And French teeth are pretty awful, so he had a point in any case. As with food, it always used to be the English who were mocked for their mouths.