What nobody seems to be suggesting is une nouvelle république in which it is permitted to talk of liberated ambitions, one that is future-pointing and confident, not reactionary and protectionist. It was once believed that Sarkozy thought this, but it was evident during his presidency that these were just words: he proved to be more and he was going to disappoint those who saw him as a Margaret Thatcher.
RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE
The founding event of Republicanism
Zhou Enlai, the Chinese communist leader, asked what he thought of the French revolution, supposedly replied, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ In fact, he didn’t really say this, having misunderstood the question. But it’s a quote too good to waste. The French like to talk about their revolution as if it were a singular act of secular enlightenment, but from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 (an event subject to considerable Republican exaggeration thereafter) it was much more messy than that and a good case can be made that the revolution and its aftermath have been disasters, trapping the French in a mythology they are unable to puncture.
Joseph de Maistre, a Savoyard lawyer and philosopher (1753-1821), wrote of the revolution’s ‘satanic character’ in which priests were hunted, butchered, humiliated and robbed. ‘Those who escaped guillotines, stakes, knives, firing squads, drowning and deportation are now begging instead of helping the poor, as before. Altars are vandalised, prostitutes stand naked on the altars watched by terrified cherubs.’ Edmund Burke drew from the revolution the lesson that it had transferred power from aristocrats to an ‘enlightened’ elite who were more heartless, tyrannical and incompetent than the aristocrats they replaced. Violence was not only a symptom of the revolution but the fuel of it. A comparison with the terror of the Islamic State in Syria is unavoidable.
Perhaps one might not expect British historians to be sympathetic, but it is easy to be revolted by this supposedly glorious chapter in French history. Thomas Carlyle describes the ‘hideous’ cry emitted by Robespierre when the axe severed his head. Simon Schama, historian of the French and hardly a fan of the republic, author of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), contests the entire basis of the revolution and the argument that without it, we would not have the liberty, equality and democracy we know today. He says there is a fundamental difference between the American revolution and the revolution in France, both in the violence that propelled the revolutionary French project, and the failure of any French constitutional solution to endure. The late Tony Judt, the brilliant British historian of France, wrote that whoever controls the understanding of the French revolution controls France. Despite massive scholarship discrediting the Marxist historiography portraying the revolution as class struggle, this remains the prevailing doctrine in France, with disastrous consequences as republicanism has become statist authoritarianism.
When I came to France I used to joke that I was a republican in England and a monarchist in France, which produced gales of laughter at the village café, but it is hard to think of any events in monarchical Britain in modern times that come close to the horrors of the French Revolution, or to imagine that Britons today are any less free than their French cousins. Indeed, it is impossible to argue that citizens in any of Europe’s constitutional monarchies are less free than those in republican France. Are the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Belgians or the British less equal, free or fraternal than their French cousins? Can anyone argue with a straight face that they are not? The quasi-religious worship of revolutionary republicanism in modern France is among the most powerful of French perversions.
ROYAL, SÉGOLÈNE
Madame de Pompadour
The woman who would have been president. Failed presidential candidate, losing to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the 2007 presidential election. Graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration (of course). Despite her baby-daddy’s serial infidelity, she remains close to him and is seen in France as being effectively the vice-president and bolder French journalists suggest they are not just politically intimate. A member of Manuel Valls’s government as environment minister, she urged the French to stop eating Italian-made Nutella because it is made from palm oil, before executing a swift U-turn when the Italian government protested. Halted work on the Sivens dam in the Tarn, to avoid upsetting zadistes, the militant ecologists.
RMI
Welfare
The poorest you will be allowed to get, if you qualify, is still pretty poor. Another obsolete set of initials that still lives on, meaning revenu minimum d’insertion, in effect a minimum-income platform. It is now officially called the RSA (revenu de solidarité active) and offers a means-tested minimum-subsistence benefit of up to 600 euros per month. As in Britain, in addition to the RMI, claimants can get free housing and many other allowances, especially if they have children. My friend Céline, who works in the administration of this programme, says many of her clients have an effective income exceeding her own, without doing anything at all.
RUGBY
Popular passion
Another sport copied from the English, practically a religion in the south. The French word for a rugby player is rugbyman. A female player is accordingly a rugbywoman. The Top 14 has become the richest league in the world for players and even French towns with minor league teams now boast their complements of imported players drawn by the professionalism of the sport. The history of French rugby is murky, with well-founded allegations of massive amphetamine use before international games including the classic encounter with New Zealand in 1986. During the war, Marshall Pétain suppressed rugby league in France because of suspicions it was too close to the unions and dominated by communists. Rugby union was encouraged, however, and remains the dominant code.
Jonny Wilkinson CBE, the England international who played for Toulon from 2009-2014, is regarded by many French people as the greatest living Englishman, a true role model, epitome of sportsmanship, admired for his on-field performance (141 caps, 1,884 points) and his wonderful French. ‘I fall more and more in love with the French language as the days go by. It becomes more and more natural being able to move around the tenses from past to future into conditional without being able to consider it,’ he says. After retiring as an active player, Wilkinson remained in Toulon as an ambassador for the club, coaching, recruiting new players and inspiring the team.
RYANAIR
Hated Irish airline
Despised by French pilots and the air traffic controllers’ union. Hugely influential Irish low-cost operator with an immense fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft; 300 in service, many more on order and being delivered. Ryanair flies to every corner of France and despite misadventures with the French employment inspectors, plays an influential role in the tourist and broader social economy of the regions it serves. Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair, used to revel in his bad-boy image. The Mr Nasty culture is starting to change, but there are still those who would rather crash than fly on Ryanair. EasyJet, Ryanair’s British competitor, has meanwhile become the second-largest domestic airline in France even though its French-based crews have already gone on strike.
S
SAFER
Guardian of a false market for farmland
Often accused of corruption, the Société d’aménagement foncier et d’établissement rural is the arm of the state controlling sales of agricultural land. Safer exercises a right of pre-emption on sales of agricultural land to those who do not have official status as an existing farmer. The supposedly noble intention of Safer when it was established in 1960 was to protect the French rural way of life by ensuring that when farmland came on the market, it was available first of all to the existing farmers and their children in the same area. Safer’s right of pre-emption has created a false market - like so many in France - in rural land that has allowed peasants and their families to steadily increase their land holdings, but has made it a tribulation for outsiders to invest in agricultural holdings. Safer is justified as integral to the preservation of rural
culture but it is also structured to produce conditions ripe for suspicion. The words scandale and Safer produce links to numerous affaires when Googled.
SA GRACIEUSE MAJESTÉ
What the French call the Queen
Although the Queen is in English merely Her Majesty, the French lay it on even thicker by making her gracious and sometimes très gracieuse. The Queen is hugely popular in France where she is admired for her dignified longevity, stoicism and wardrobe (especially hats). It is also widely known and appreciated that she is francophone, speaking French with an accent that is terriblement British. The enduring fascination of the French with the Queen and British royal family, doped by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Paris, is yet another contradiction in a proud republic that drove their own royal family from the throne in 1792 and decapitated their last queen, Marie-Antoinette a year later, her executioner brandishing her severed head and crying, ‘Vive la République.’
SANTÉ
Insolvent health care system
The French claim to have the best health care in the world is pretty dubious, like so many claims of French exceptionalism.It costs just 23 euros to visit a general practitioner but first there has to be a general practitioner to visit. There are health care deserts in much of rural France, with a shortage of generalists and specialists. The ministry of health reported in 2014 that 2 million French people live in these deprived areas. Delivery of actual services on the ground can be pretty hit or miss. The ultimate outcome of healthcare is in any case measured in data that is hard to fake, that is to say life expectancy, where there’s not much in it between France and other first-world countries. This data shows France at 81.5 years, in 17th place globally, while the United States, which spends more than anyone, is at 79.8 years in 36th place. So life expectancy isn’t dramatically improved, it seems, even with statistically impressive health services. If you need medical intervention, the quality of health provision depends on when and where you are ill.
If you are lucky, the healthcare can be excellent. My carpenter severely injured himself skiing and was airlifted off the mountain in a helicopter, flown to a specialised unit, saved from what would under other circumstances have been death or permanent disablement, and eventually discharged after care that can only be described as proficient, paid for by his social charges. If you are poorly, the Sécu will pay for you to take a cure at one of France’s elaborate spas. But visit the general hospital in Béziers with its broken elevators, grim unpainted corridors and harassed and demoralised staff, and it is another story. Health services are not always very innovative in France, especially at the primary care level, where there are numerous obstacles inhibiting greater efficiency. The quality of French medical training is high but the sector screams for investment and innovation: with a deficit in the national insurance fund of 12 billion euros in 2014, it is hard to know where this will come from.
SARKOZY, NICOLAS
Failed president
Political pygmy, literally and figuratively. At 1.65m, even shorter than the non-statuesque François Hollande. Married to the chanteuse Carla Bruni, who towers above him, even in his elevator heels. President of the Republic 2007-2012. Entered office with a swagger and left it defeated having changed little. Keen to return. Known on francophone Twitter channels as #rolex - reference to his taste for bling. The story is odd. Sarkozy seemed to start out as a rare French politician with balls, a relative outsider as he did not attend École Nationale d’Administration, the only to lose them entirely once cocooned in the Arabian splendour of the Elysee presidential palace. As mayor of Neuilly, the tony Paris suburb, Sarkozy made his reputation as a gutsy politician, walking into a school where a gunman was holding children hostage, persuading the gunman to release the children and finally to surrender.
He failed to seriously reform the economy or the tax system, became distracted by law and order, taking a tough line and dividing public opinion. Perhaps too much was expected, although he must be responsible for this since he promised so much. It is true that Sarko was attacked from the first five minutes of his mandate by the media. When he chose to celebrate his victory with a dinner at Fouquet’s, a classy restaurant in Paris, he was pilloried for this supposedly vulgar display. Are you not allowed to go to dinner if you have just been elected president? Are nice restaurants immoral? Apparently so, in the eyes of the French media, even if they patronise the same establishments. A smarter operator might have looked to live a humble life, to speak softly and persuade but this was never going to appeal to Sarkozy.
Sarkozy as President should have been able to wipe the floor with Hollande during the televised debates at the last election, but instead he came across as smug and arrogant. Despite all of this, he almost won. His attempted political comeback since his defeat has once again seen Sarkozy talk about fundamental reform.
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL
Dead end
A bit of a shit, actually. A normalien (i.e. graduate of École Normale), grand patron of existentialism, structuralism, communism. When the surrealist poet André Breton, one of the exiles in America during the Second World War, returned to Paris, Sartre insulted him. Sartre feuded with Albert Camus, sucked up to Mao and Guevara, enjoyed a famously promiscuous left-bank lifestyle, and finally has been largely forgotten, along with his existentialisme. You can still buy overpriced coffee at the Deux Magots café favoured by Sartre and his wife Simone de Beauvoir but outside a corner of the academy that doesn’t matter, nobody talks much about existentialism these days, except to parody it. Breton’s surrealism and Camus’ humanism are meanwhile more compelling than ever.
SCIENCES PO
Oxbridge pretender
Seven campuses in France, the most elite being l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris (institute of political studies), classed as a grand établissement (major institution) by the ministry of education. Sciences Po does not prepare students for any particular career but offers a multi-disciplinary course including law, economics, history, political science, geography and sociology, somewhat similar to a British PPE (politics, philosophy and economics). At Sciences Po, a Marxist faculty graduates students who sign up as fast as they can for corporate jobs in London, where the alumni are a powerful group. Sciences Po graduates often share that particular arrogance characteristic of Oxbridge graduates, and waste little time telling everyone that they have ‘fait sciences po.’
SÉCU
Insolvent social security system
The basis of the French social model, a monstrous, un-reformable racket. The Sécu broadly refers to the four branches of French social security: medical care, pensions, health and safety at work and family benefits. Employees of the state receive pensions based on their final salaries at retirement; private-sector employees are pensioned at the average of their salary during 25 years of employment. There are also dozens of special regimes for such privileged groups as railway workers, miners, lawyers, parliamentarians, gas and electricity workers and Paris Metro workers. All aspects of the system are in deficit, estimated at 13 billion euros in 2014.
SERVICES
Black hole
France is a country where ‘the customer is always wrong,’ according to Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times. Where services are not banned altogether like dental hygiene and private hire cars, they do not exist because wage overheads make them impossible to provide. Although 10 per cent of the population is unemployed, it is too expensive to hire workers to perform services that are commonplace elsewhere. In Britain, there is pretty much nowhere you can’t get at least one supermarket to deliver to your door, and sometimes there are three or four. In France, this is a very limited service. If you go to a supermarket, expect a long wait at the undermanned checkouts. It is possible to order your groceries by Internet but you usually have to go to the store to pick them up. If your computer needs fixing, expect to wait. If you want your car washed, a machine will do it, or you can do it yourself, but don’t expect anyone to do it for you.
SEXE
Sex, or total confusion
French attitudes towards sexuality span the range from extreme prudishness to libertinage all of it confused by a thick fog of hypocrisy. Chantal Thomass, the celebrated female-underwear designer, once told a friend of mine that in France, ‘everybody does their own thing in their own corner’. ‘No-one is faithful in France,’ she states. ‘And age is no barrier to being sexy, even 65-year-old women insist on matching underwear.’ With testimonials like this, you could be mistaken for believing that the French are more promiscuous than other Europeans. I suppose it depends on your postcode. There is a size of woman’s handbag called a baise en ville (literally: fuck in town) supposedly capacious enough for the change of underwear necessary after an illicit affaire between the hours of 5pm-7pm (the famous cinq-à-sept). I am not convinced any of this is true or that any of the at best empirical evidence can be believed for a second. My guess is that sexuality is sometimes more open in France but that this behaviour is not greatly different to that elsewhere.
French Letters Page 23
