French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  Cheese is part of the culinary trinity of the French diet, alongside pain (bread) and vin (wine). With these simple rations, and the correct ritual (not barbarously cleaving the brie), a sort of Republican transubstantiation occurs at each meal time. When I worked briefly at the French embassy in Washington as a consultant to the science attaché, the highlight of the week was the arrival of the diplomatic bag (actually, a sealed air freight container), flown to Washington each week by the French air force, containing the unpasteurised cheese that is otherwise unavailable in the United States. The work of the embassy would grind to a halt as everyone trooped to the loading dock to collect their rations.

  French people say a meal without cheese is like a night without a woman. Even more colourfully, Flaubert said it was akin to a beautiful woman with a missing eye. It is not true that there are 246 varieties of cheese in France, as famously stated by General de Gaulle, who wondered how a country with such diversity could be governed. I suspect there are thousands. Nobody agrees exactly how many there are but some of the best never travel more than a few kilometres from the dairies, and are often sold by the producer personally at local markets. I recommend the chèvre from Mas Rolland, just up the road from my village.

  FRONDEURS

  Political rebels

  The inept administration of President François Hollande has provoked dissidence in the Socialist party, most notably led by Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, and the former industry minister Arnaud Montebourg (famous for insulting Maurice Taylor, the American boss of Titan Tyres who objected to saving an ailing factory in northern France because the communist trade union was refusing to work more than three hours a day). Mounteboug interrupted the party congress in June 2015 by declaring that the president was leading the country to disaster on a path of austerity. In truth, his analysis of the consequences of Hollande is resonant - more than 60,000 business failures and more than 600,000 more unemployed in three years. He also called for lowering taxes on the middle class, but did not explain how these prescriptions would downsize the gargantuan state, speculating instead that French debt, 97.5 per cent of GDP, could be reduced as a consequence of the growth that would be unleashed by abandoning austerity.

  FRONT NATIONAL, LE

  Socialist/nationalist party

  Not at all a party of the extreme right, as portrayed by the Guardian, Le Monde, the New York Times and practically all other media, but much more a party of the confirmist left, where all French political parties congregate, with added nationalism. The brand has been partly detoxified by Marine Le Pen, daughter of party founder Jean Marie Le Pen, who remains a thorn in her side with his unreconstructed views on, e.g. the Holocaust (‘a detail’ of history, he says). Marine cosies up to gays and Jews and never speaks directly of other races but instead emphasises the FN project of Frenchness, which is a code that can be interpreted rather broadly although it is frequently taken to mean anti-Arab. One poll says 14 per cent of Jews in France are likely to vote FN. Le Pen is certainly one of very few contemporary French politicians who knows how to hold a crowd when she gives a speech. It may be a hollow project but to many French people, some of them former communists, it sounds better than the blanc-manger (blancmange) on offer from the two other parties, so she is getting a lot of support.

  The pretence of the left-wing media that Marine Le Pen’s party is of the extreme right is presumably designed to confuse voters into imagining there is a centimetre of difference between the protectionist, isolationist and clientéliste policies of the National Front and those of, for example, the Front de gauche (Left Front) a coalition of the Communist party and a variety of other extreme leftist parties. There is no reason to imagine the FN is remotely close to having a clue how to manage the French economy. Indeed, the evidence is they will make matters worse, being even more unreconstructed interventionists than the socialists.

  The difference between the National Front and Communists is not economic policy. The differentiator is nationalism, with a whiff of Vichysme and a soupçon of the reactionary social movement Manif pour Tous. There should be an implausibility about the idea of the National Front ever forming a government. That it has borrowed 10 million euros from a Russian bank to finance its political campaigns verges on corruption. But it is not impossible that the party could advance further given the cluelessness of the mainstream parties and the disillusion of so many voters.

  FUITE DES CERVAUX

  Brain drain

  More than a million French people have left the country in the past 10 years, most of them to other countries in the European Union, and the rate is accelerating. They are often the most talented and ambitious. Twenty per cent of them have started their own businesses elsewhere. Among skilled engineers who have left, 40 per cent say they are not contemplating returning. One of my colleagues on the municipal council recently told me that her son was leaving London. ‘Is he coming back to France?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘he’s moving to New York’.

  G

  GARDE À VUE

  Police detention condemned as torture

  Police detention. Avoid if at all possible. France has been condemned by European courts for abusive police detentions but such detentions remain widely available to the police under French laws, despite some modest reforms. Under French law, a police officer can put you in custody for, in principle, 24 hours but longer under many exceptions, while possible crimes you may have committed are investigated, to stop you from interfering with evidence, merely to present you to a magistrate so he or she may question you, or for any of several other reasons. Suspects are routinely strip-searched and kept in primitive conditions. The committee for the prevention of torture of the Council of Europe has visited garde à vue cells in numerous police commissariats through France and found minuscule cells, filthy conditions and glacial temperatures.

  GARE DU NORD

  Decrepit Paris railway station

  Andy Street, managing director of John Lewis, was forced to apologise after calling this once great Paris railway terminus ‘the squalor pit of Europe’ but although the French were duly outraged, the Gare du Nord is pretty decrepit and menacing. Despite efforts to spruce it up the station has a reputation for muggings, pickpockets and filth, especially on the platforms connecting the station to the volatile northern suburbs. One must have a certain sympathy for Andy Street since the Gare du Nord bears no comparison with the expensively renovated and rather magnificent St Pancras station in London, where there is at least a convenient branch of John Lewis. The French seem to have been shamed by Mr Street since they have announced that they will spend more than a billion euros improving the station - by 2024. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, makes a speciality of professing outrage when foreigners say things about her city that are true.

  GAYET, JULIE

  Presidential squeeze

  An actress and Socialist party activist, aged 43 in 2015, who sued Closer magazine for revealing to the French public what the entire political and media class of Paris already knew: that she was having a sexual affair with President François Hollande who was living with someone else at the time. She was duly awarded 15,000 euros in damages against the magazine, which had published a picture of Hollande, looking characteristically gormless, arriving at her apartment on the back of a motor scooter driven by one of his bodyguards. A parade of French journalists appeared on France Inter and in the pages of Le Monde to denounce Closer for having disclosed the liaison, which they claimed was a private affair of which the public deserved no knowledge. Meanwhile, the line between private lust and public trust appeared already to have been violated as Gayet had been nominated by the minister of culture to a position with the Academy of France in Rome which, although unpaid, would have involved jolly expenses-paid trips to Italy. This nomination was subsequently withdrawn. Gayet in summer 2015 was reported to be spending four nights a week with Hollande, entering through the garden gate of the Elysée to avoid paparazzi. Ms Gayet is said to refer to herself as
Hollande’s fiancée but the Paris rumour mill says she has competition as the President is believed to have grown increasingly close once more to Ségolène Royal, the environment minister. She is mother of his four acknowledged children and was the presidential squeeze before she was displaced by Trierweiler, who was in turn displaced by Gayet. But of course this is none of anybody’s business, according to the Paris media elite.

  GAZ DE SCHISTE

  Fracking

  France has some of the biggest shale gas reserves in the world with 4 trillion cubic metres estimated to lie deep beneath the Paris basin, so maybe could power itself for decades and export plenty of gas, too. However there is an absolute ban on fracking and lower oil prices have taken the heat out of the argument in any case. Green movements in Europe have seized on the idea of shale gas as a uniquely dangerous form of energy and would certainly physically contest any attempt to frack in France. In the meantime, France will continue to import most of its gas, mainly from north Africa and Russia. It is all somewhat ironic because Total, the French petrol giant, was among the first to master the techniques of extracting gas from deep rocks. I tease my friends at the organic café in Pézenas by demanding genetically modified coffee roasted with gaz de schiste.

  GENDARMES

  armed collectors of fines

  Despite the glamorous image of the anti-terrorist intervention teams abseiling from helicopters, the gendarmerie is also more prosaically a fine-farming wing of the state, mounting checkpoints at which motorists are stopped and issued on-the-spot fines for the most minute infractions. Keeping farmers and angry trade unionists from closing motorways is not so much their thing. Catching actual criminals also often proves much more difficult. A friend in my village who is a recently retired gendarme (we meet at the local café when I walk Ringo) tells me that as a young officer, he was able to stop in the villages on his rural beat, chat with the notables and locals, and help people with their problems. At the end of his career, he said, much of this had been swept away by a target culture, in which officers were expected to write tickets. By tradition the 100,000 Gendarmes are part of the military and provide the splendidly uniformed Republican Guard and other ceremonial elements on state occasions, including a mounted detachment, but their policing responsibilities are supervised by the Ministry of the Interior.

  Gendarmes live in gated subdivisions called casernes (barracks) and carry 9mm pistols. Although they have lost some ground to the police nationale (national police) in the expanding cities, and many of the towns in their jurisdiction are establishing their own municipal police services, they still have ultimate authority in the smaller towns and the countryside, and they control most of the motorway speed cameras. Many gendarmes (there were honourable exceptions) were collaborators in the Second World War, rounding up Jews, resisters and other troublemakers and providing intelligence to the Gestapo, but they remained in the job after the invasion.

  The motorways and many national roads are now covered with cameras and number-plate recognition systems. These systems generate thousands of penalty notices daily. The new big police administration centre at Rennes where the penalty notices are generated mints a tidy sum for the government and has created exciting new employment opportunities for fortunate gendarmes who can do all of their law enforcing from a desk with a computer screen, without ever getting their boots wet.

  GHETTOS

  Also called banlieues, cités

  To the Mosson stadium in northwest Montpellier to watch my beloved Arsenal play the local team, Montpellier Hérault Sporting Club. The stadium is slummy (it has subsequently been condemned) and is located on the edge of a neighbourhood that could easily be mistaken for a city in north Africa. It is early evening and no women are visible on the streets. Young men loiter aimlessly on corners. Grim tenements festooned with satellite dishes loom over scuzzy-looking kebab shops. France might deny that it has no-go zones, but this wouldn’t be the place to walk down the street wearing a kippa. Before and after the game, scores of cops huddle next to the tram station, protecting each other, letting the arriving fans fend for themselves. Mosson is not special at all but similar to dozens of ghettos on the outskirts of every French city. Its inhabitants lead a life utterly separate from the rest of French people. There are essentially no jobs, other than crime. There is no reason for outsiders to come here, other than to watch a game of football, following which they will quickly depart. When you’ve seen one ghetto, you’ve seen them all, said Spiro Agnew, but in France they range from the merely dreary and impoverished to drug-ganglands.

  These estates had their origins, believe it or not, in good intentions, although these were wrapped in a theory of supposedly benevolent social engineering that has proved hopeless in practice. The ambition was to clear the old urban slums (lesbidonvilles) and put in their place a new type of housing, in the fresh air and open spaces of the suburbs, to be fit for workers.

  In 1954, l’Abbé Pierre, the famous social activist priest, was among those goading the government into the rapid construction of these massive suburban housing estates. The projects were even celebrated at the time. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris Corbusier, the celebrated Swiss modernist architect (and fascist), created the two most celebrated of these human warehouses, safely located on the outskirts of cities so their inhabitants might not perturb the bourgeoisie: La Cité radieuse in Marseille, and La Cité radieuse de Briey, in Lorraine. At first these concrete estates were occupied by poorer native French people decanted from the bulldozed slums, but as the estates matured, they became increasingly populated by immigrants from Algeria and other African countries. See Musulmans.

  GO-FAST

  Drugs smuggling technique

  A French neologism formed from two English words. It involves the high-speed transport of drugs, weapons or other contraband on France’s motorway network. Insane as this would seem as a viable criminal strategy, the go-fast is a real thing, according to the gendarmes, who have equipped themselves with speedy Subaru motorcars to give chase.

  The go-fast involves using two high-powered vehicles, one travelling ahead, keeping an eye out for the cops and roving customs controls, the other, with the actual contraband, laying back just a little. This technique, which has captured the imagination of French journalists and film and TV directors, itself would seem to illustrate that French criminals are as delusional as everyone else in France, since there are radars and cameras with automatic number plate recognition covering practically the entirety of the motorway network and nothing is so likely to attract official attention as two flashy motors full of home boys moving at 200 km/h. If I were in this business I would have my merchandise transported in camping vans driven annoyingly slowly by old people. Soon after I had this insight, reports appeared in the media suggesting that some criminals are doing exactly that. This latest technique has been dubbed by journalists, in another neologism imported from English roots, as the go-slow.

  GOOGLE

  Loathed by the French government

  Used daily by tens of millions of French people, condemned by government ministers as an example of American information imperialism. Google in France is increasingly compelled to censor its search results by the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (national commission on information technology and liberty). The French government indeed claims the right to censor Google worldwide, demanding it remove listings from its entire global search database if they are ‘inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive.’ Among those exploiting this ruling have been a British call girl jailed in France for running a ring of 600 prostitutes, suspected terrorists and a priest who stood naked at his window and shouted abuse at children. This censorship of reality, which originated with the European Union, has been enthusiastically gold-plated by the privacy-obsessed French, who have discovered that canny users can bypass google.fr and click directly to google.com in America, where they might come across non-conforming data.

  But this is hardly th
e only problem raised by Google. The larger issue is why is there no viable French competitor? For a country that once had pretensions to be a leader in information technology, state subsidies of technologies and market participants have produced mainly failure. Axelle Lemaire, a Socialist party deputy (representing London’s expatriate French, among others), and a minister of state, claimed the reason is because the American Google is too big and powerful. She believes Google should provide links to its competitors - which is like asking the Socialist party to add a line to their election manifestos advising voters that they also have the choice of voting for other parties. It’s typical of the French elite’s belief that citizens are infants who cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. It seems not to have occurred to her that the reason there are no French successes like Google is because it is impossible to launch such an enterprise, or indeed any enterprise, in France.