The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

Their debut on the screen coincided with the arrival of De Gaulle in power. Les quatre cents coups and Les cousins opened in 1959, À bout de souffle in 1960. After the war Paris had notoriously ceased to be the capital of modern painting, a position it had held for a century. But within the visual arts as a whole, it might be said that France recouped with brio in moving pictures. Or if, with equal plausibility, we regard film as the art that has taken the place of the novel as the dominant narrative form of the age, Godard might be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the great French writers of the past, producing one tour de force after another—Le mépris, Bande à part, Une femme mariée, Pierrot le fou, Deux ou trois choses, La Chinoise, Week End punctuating the decade as had once the latest volumes by Balzac or Proust. No other country, even Italy, came near the blaze of the French cinema in these years.

  Today, all this has passed. The feeling is widespread that the Fifth Republic, as it approaches its half century, presents a fallen landscape. The economy, after crawling forward at 1.3 per cent a year through the nineties, is today sunk in yet another trough, with a widening deficit, rising public debt and very high levels of unemployment. Well over 9 per cent of the labour force, itself reduced by high rates of early retirement, is out of work. One-quarter of French youth is jobless; two-fifths among immigrant families. Secondary education, once the best in Europe, has been steadily deteriorating; large numbers now emerge from it scarcely literate. Although France still spends more on a pupil in its lycées (for the first time outclassed, except at the very highest level, by private schools) than on a student at its universities, France has one of the lowlier rates of reading in the OECD. Scientific research, measured by funding or by discovery, has plummeted: emigration, virtually unknown in the past, now drains the country’s laboratories.

  The political system, riddled with corruption, is held in increasing public contempt. Nearly a third of the electorate—a far larger number than voted for any single candidate—refused to cast a ballot in the first round of the presidential elections of 2002, in which the incumbent got less than a fifth of the vote; 40 per cent abstained in the legislative elections. The National Assembly is the weakest parliament in the Western world, with more than one resemblance to the echo chambers of the First Empire. The current ruler of the country would be in the dock for malversation had a Constitutional Court not hastened to grant him immunity from prosecution—a trampling of equality before the law that not even his Italian counterpart, in what is usually imagined to be a still more cynical political culture, has yet been able to secure. Foreign policy is a mottled parody of Gaullism: vocal opposition to the pretext for US war in the Middle East, followed by practical provision of air-space and prompt wishes for victory once the attack was under way, then eager amends for disloyalty with a joint coup to oust another unsatisfactory ruler in the Caribbean, and agrément for the puppet regime in Baghdad. At home the prestige of public works, as late as the nineties still a touchstone of national pride, lies in the mortuary dust and rubble of Roissy.

  Economic stress and political corrosion could still, it might be argued, leave intact what are the essential values of France, both in its own eyes and those of the world. No other nation, after all, has so conspicuously based its identity on culture, understood in the broadest sense. But here too, as much as—in some ways, perhaps even more than—in matters of industry or state, the scene at large is dismal: in the eyes of many, a veritable dégringolade. The days of Malraux are long gone. No better symbol of current conditions could be found than the fate of his hapless descendant as court philosopher, the salonnier Luc Ferry, minister of education under Chirac—derisively pelted with his latest opuscule by teachers when he tried to tour schools to persuade them of the latest round of downsizing reforms, and then summarily terminated as an embarrassment to his patron.

  More generally, a sense of cheapening and dumbing-down, the intertwining of intellectual with financial or political corruption, has become pervasive. Press and television, long given to the incestuous practices of renvoyer l’ascenseur—is there an equivalent so expressive in any other language?—have lost earlier restraints, not only in their dealing with ideas, but with business and power. The decline of Le Monde is emblematic. Today, the paper is a travesty of the daily created by Beuve-Méry: shrill, conformist and parochial—increasingly made in the image of its Web-site, which assails the viewer with more fatuous pop-ups and inane advertisements than an American tabloid. The disgust that many of its own readers, trapped by the absence of an alternative, feel for what it has become was revealed when a highly uneven polemic against the trio of managers who have debauched it—Alain Minc, Edwy Plenel and Jean-Marie Colombani—sold 200,000 copies in the face of legal threats against the authors, later withdrawn to avoid further discomfiture of the three in court.

  La face cachée du Monde, a doorstop of six hundred pages mixing much damaging documentation with not a few inconsistencies and irrelevancies, unfolds a tale of predatory economic manoeuvres, political sycophancies and vendettas, egregious cultural back-scratching, and—last but not least—avid self-enrichment, unappetizing by any standards. ‘Since Le Monde was founded’, Beuve-Méry remarked after he retired, ‘money has been waiting below, at the foot of the stairs, to gain entry to the office of the editor. It is there, patient as always, persuaded that in the end it will have the final word’.2 The media conglomerate erected by Colombani and his associates gives notice that it has taken up occupation. But, powerful a motive as greed at the top may be, the kind of journalism they represent is too pervasive to be explained simply by this. A deeper focus can be found in Serge Halimi’s exposure of the interlocking complicities—across the spectrum—of establishment commentary on public affairs, in Les nouveaux chiens de garde.3 What this sardonic study of mutual fawning and posturing among the talking heads and editorial sages of Parisian society shows is a system of connivance based at least as much on ideological as material investment in the market.

  The world of ideas is in little better shape. Death has picked off virtually all the great names: Barthes (1980); Lacan (1981); Aron (1983); Foucault (1984); Braudel (1985); Debord (1994); Deleuze (1995); Lyotard (1998); Bourdieu (2002); Derrida (2004). Only Lévi-Strauss, now a hundred years old, survives. No French intellectual has gained a comparable international reputation since. Lack of that, of course, is no necessary measure of worth. But while individual work of distinctive value continues to be produced, the general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, far the best known ‘thinker’ under sixty in the country. It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?

  If this is what lays claim to philosophy, literature is not far behind. Today’s leading novelist, Michel Houellebecq—the ‘Baudelaire of the supermarket’ in the eyes of admirers—occupies a position not unlike that of Martin Amis in English letters, as the writer by whom readers most like to be shocked, though beyond the commonplaces of sex and violence, their forms of épater are asymmetrical: flamboyance of style and bienséance of sentiments in Amis; provocation of ideas and banality of prose in Houellebecq. The French version, coming out of science fiction, is less conventional in intellectual outlook—capable of the occasional unsettling, if never very deep, apothegm—but, as might be expected of its origins, poorer in literary imagination. In principle, the steady drone of flat, slack sentences reproduces the demoralized world they depict, not the limits of the writer’s talent. But a glance at the doggerel of Houellebecq’s poetry suggests that the match between them is only too natural. That writing of this quality could command official acclaim says something about another, now more long-standing, weakness of French culture. Criticism has remarkably little place in it. The standa
rd idea of a book review—see La Quinzaine littéraire, Le Nouvel observateur, Le Monde des livres, Libération, virtually passim—is what would elsewhere be regarded as not much above a puff. The rule has its exceptions, of course, but these tend to simple inversion, the obloquy as another ritual. No equivalent of the TLS or the LRB, of L’Indice or the books section of The New Republic, even of the dull pages of Die Zeit, exists: truly sustained, discriminating engagement with a work of fiction, of ideas or of history has become rare.

  It was not always like this. The culture of the Fourth Republic and the early years of the Fifth, when political divisions were stronger and conflict within and between journals was livelier, involved much more genuine argument and criticism than can be found today. Cahiers du cinéma is a striking case in point. What is it now? Another commercial magazine in Colombani’s stable, that could be mistaken on the newsstands for Elle. If French cinema itself has not fallen as far, this is mainly due to the continuing flow of works from its original transformers: Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol are still as active as when they began. As for its contemporary output, the one film France has successfully exported in recent years, Amélie, is kitsch sickly enough to make even Hollywood squirm.

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  The current French scene cannot, of course, be reduced to its least appealing expressions. No mere inventory of failings could capture the uneven realities of a society in motion; other features and forces have yet to be considered. It is also true that all inter-temporal comparisons are subject to distortion and selective illustration. In the case of France, still haunted by the assured regency of the General, perhaps more so than elsewhere. But the present unease is not a chimera, and requires explanation. What lies behind the apparent subsidence of institutions, ideas, forms, standards? An obvious first hypothesis would be that the life of what was once the ‘French exception’—that is, all those ways in which this society and its culture escaped from the mediocre routines of the Atlantic ecumene surrounding it—has gradually been squeezed out of the country by two irresistible forces: the world-wide advance of neo-liberalism, and the rise of English as a universal language. Both have certainly struck at the foundations of traditional conceptions of France. Historically neither Right nor Left, however passionately divided in other ways, ever trusted the market as an organizing principle of social order: laissez-faire is a French expression that was always foreign to French reality. Even today, so deep is suspicion of it that here, uniquely, the contemporary term ‘neo-liberal’, with all its negative connotations, has little currency, as if it were redundant: ‘liberal’ alone remains enough, for a still considerable range of opinion, to indicate the odium. The Gleichschaltung of Western economic arrangements that began in the era of Thatcher and Reagan was thus bound to bear especially painfully on a national inheritance of economic intervention and social protection, common to the Fourth and Fifth Republics alike.

  Coinciding with the economic pressure of deregulated financial markets, and often experienced as simply its cultural dimension, came the victory of English as the unstoppable global medium of business, science and intellectual exchange. For the smaller countries of Northern Europe—Benelux and Scandinavia—this merely confirmed a widespread bilingualism anyway. The political and intellectual elites of the Federal Republic had always been so deeply in thrall to the United States, as the country’s saviour from a discreditable past, that the post-war pretensions of German were small. Italians have never imagined their language as of much moment to anyone but themselves. France was in a completely different situation. French had once been the common tongue of the Enlightenment, spoken by upper classes across the continent, sometimes even—Prussia, Russia—preferred to their own. It remained the standard idiom of diplomacy in the nineteenth century. It was still the principal medium of the European bureaucracy of the Community, down to the nineties of the last century. Long identified with the idea of French civilization—somewhat more than just a culture—it was a language with a sense of its own universality.

  The intellectual fireworks of the trente glorieuses, spraying aloft and exploding far beyond the borders of France, sustained this notion. But the conditions that produced them depended on the training of an immensely self-assured, spiritually—often also practically—monoglot elite, in the key Parisian lycées and École Normale that formed generation after generation of talents within an intense, hothouse world. The rise of the École Nationale d’Administration, founded only in 1945, to become the nursery of high-fliers in politics and business—Pompidou was the last normalien to rule the country—already tended to shift privileged education in a more technocratic direction. Then, after 1968, university and school reforms followed the pattern elsewhere: broadening access to education, without the resources necessary to maintain the standards of the narrower system.

  Democratization on the cheap inevitably undermined the morale and cohesion of a national institution that had been the pride of the Third Republic. The prestige of the instituteur plummeted; curricula were restlessly rejigged and degraded, the average lycéen now getting only a wretched smattering of French classics; private schools spread to take up the slack. This is a familiar story, which could be told of virtually every Western society. Over-determining it in France were the brutal blows to cultural self-esteem from the invasion of English, through the circuits of business, entertainment and journalism. In the past two decades, the proportion of French films screened every year has dropped from a half to a third: at present 60 per cent are American. Le Monde now distributes the New York Times—suitably selected—at weekends. One of the most important props of national identity is under acute stress. In these conditions, some degree of disintegration in intellectual performance was to be expected.

  But while economic and cultural pressures from the Anglosphere have imposed increasing constraints on a wide range of French traditions and institutions, political changes within French society have also been critical in bringing the country to its present low waters. Here an obvious coincidence strikes the eye. De Gaulle presided over the apogee of France’s post-war revival. His rule culminated in the explosion of May–June 1968. A year later he was gone. But by then the social energies released in that crisis, racing to the verge of upheaval, had been defeated. No comparable élan has ever reappeared. Ever since, on this reading, France has been sunk in the long post-partum depression of a still-born revolution—what should have been the turning-point of its modern history which, as in 1848, failed to turn.

  Seductive though such a conjecture may seem, the actual sequence of events was more complicated. Although the immediate revolutionary thrust of 1968 was broken, the energies behind it were not extinguished overnight. Politically speaking, for a time most of them flowed into more conventional channels of the Left. The early seventies saw a rapid growth in the membership of the Communist Party, the reunification of the Socialist Party, and in 1972 their agreement—seeming to bury Cold War divisions—on a Common Programme. Although Giscard narrowly won the presidency in 1974, polls indicated that the legislative elections scheduled for the autumn of 1978 would give a clear-cut victory to the Left, creating the first Socialist-Communist government since the war, on a platform repudiating capitalism and calling for sweeping nationalizations of banks and industries.

  It was this prospect, unleashing something close to panic on the Right, that precipitated the real break in the intellectual and political history of post-war France. Mobilization to stop the spectre of Marxism making its entry into the Hôtel Matignon was rapid, radical and comprehensive. The noisiest shots in the campaign were fired by former gauchiste intellectuals, launched by the media as the Nouveaux Philosophes between 1975 and 1977, warning of the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism and its theoretical ancestry. If a straight line could be drawn from Engels to Yezhov, would the French be mad enough to let Marchais and Mitterrand extend it into their own homes? Packaged under lurid titles—La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes, La barbarie à visage humain—and patronized
by the Elysée, the message enjoyed timely reinforcement from the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1974. Lacking much scholarly tradition of Sovietology, France had long lagged behind the US, UK or Germany in public awareness of the details of Stalin’s regime: what was common knowledge elsewhere during the Cold War could come as a revelation to le tout Paris during détente.

  For a brief period Solzhenitsyn could thus exercise, as a local admirer was to put it, the ‘moral magistracy’ traditionally accorded by the French to one of their own great writers4—a role that, of course, expired when his disobliging opinions of the West and other inconveniences came to light. But while it lasted, the effect was considerable, helping to put BHL and his fellow thinkers into orbit. In the midst of the mounting Communist scare, the PCF itself then offered a sigh of relief to its opponents by suddenly ditching its alliance with the PS, for fear of becoming a junior partner in it, so destroying any chance of the Left winning a majority in the National Assembly. By 1981, when Mitterrand finally won the presidency, the Common Programme was a thing of the past, and the party a spent force. The Left gained the epaulettes of office after it had lost the battle of ideas.

  For the uncertainties of the late seventies had galvanized into being an ‘anti-totalitarian’ front that would dominate intellectual life for the next two decades.5 The Russian sage and the Nouveaux Philosophes were only the advance criers of much stronger, more durable forces set in train in those years. In 1977, Raymond Aron—who had just joined L’Express, to be able to intervene more actively in politics—was preparing a new journal, Commentaire, to defend the Fifth Republic against what appeared to be the deadly threat of a Socialist-Communist regime, coming to power on a well-nigh revolutionary programme. By the time the first number of the journal appeared, on the eve of the elections of March 1978, there had occurred the ‘divine surprise’ of the rupture between the PCF and the PS. Nevertheless, as he explained in a formidable opening essay, ‘Incertitudes françaises’, there was good reason for continuing apprehension and vigilance. The factors that had made France so unstable and prone to violent upheavals in the nineteenth century—the lack of any generally accepted principle of legitimacy; peasant acceptance of any regime that left the gains of 1789 on the land intact; the powder-keg role of Paris—all these might have passed away in the prosperous, industrialized democracy of Pompidou and Giscard. But the depth and predictable length of the economic crisis since the early seventies, when world recession had set in, was underestimated by the French, while—even with the recent fortunate division of the Left—French socialism had not yet cast off all maximalist temptations. If the PS were still to pursue PCF voters and bring Communists into government, ‘France will live through years of perhaps revolutionary, perhaps despotic, turmoil’.6