The Debatable Land

To the barricades!

There's something splendid about this. Brent Whelan, an American in Paris, runs, as you do, into yet another demonstration. There was the...

sound truck and chants, flags and banderoles, a regular labor action. But I missed the front of the cortège where the leafleters and signs were, so I couldn't tell what it was about. So I asked a guy on the corner, who told me, "It's the archaeologists."  And that's just who it was: several hundred archaeologists marching down the street, shouting and chanting, demanding that the government withdraw plans to disperse the headquarters of its national archaeological service from Paris.

Only, I think, in Paris. And long may this remain the case. There's a serious point here too, however: everyone wants to sty in the capital. The scariest moment in any teacher or university lecturer's career, for instance, comes when they discover where the state has assigned them. At one end of the scale there's a plum posting in Paris itself, at the other a position in some grim or stupefyingly dull provincial town just beyond commuting range from the capital. Or there are, of course, the banlieues of which we do not speak.

Then again, France is, geographically, a sizeable place but because it has a proper railway system it's possible to get to the provinces quickly. Thus a friend of mine is nominally a lecturer at the university in Montpellier. However she lives in Paris and spends perhaps one and a half or two days a week in Montpellier during term-time. This is an agreeably civilised arrangement, made possible by the fact that her bosses also want to spend most of the week in Paris and by the glories of the TGV.

In other words, even if the poor old archaeologsts are moved out of Paris, life may not be too intolerable for them. Still, whose heart is not gladdened by the idea of archaeologists at the barricades?

[Hat-tip: Art Goldhammer]

Life in a Green Suit

Visiting friends or family with small children? Stuck for a present (toy drums and trumpets are not, I believe, generally considered thoughtful)? Well, my default gift is a collection of Jean de Brunhoff's wonderful Babar books. You cannot, in my view, and that of most tiny children, go wrong with Babar.

So, amidst all the sturm und drang on Wall St and the hurly-burly of the American presidential campaign, it was a relief to be able to turn to Adam Gopnik's lovely essay on Babar in this week's edition of the New Yorker.

It's a fine, perceptive piece, not just on Babar, but on French culture, colonialism, the bourgeoisie and the differences between British, American and French children's literature. 

He concludes: Far more than an allegory of colonialism, the “Babar” books are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life. “Truly it is not easy to bring up a family,” Babar sighs at one point, and it is true. The city lives on the edge of a desert, and animals wander in and out at will, and then wander out again to make cities of their own. The civilizing principle is energetic but essentially comical, solid-looking on the outside but fragile in its foundations, reducible to rubble by rhinoceroses. Even the elephants, for all their learning and sailor suits, can be turned into slaves through a bad twist of fate. The unruliness of natural life is countered by the beautiful symmetries of classical style and the absurd orderliness of domestic life—but we are kidding ourselves if we imagine that we are ever really safe. Death is a rifle shot and a poisoned mushroom away. The only security, the de Brunhoff books propose, lies in our commitment to those graceful winged elephants that, in Babar’s dream, at the end of “Babar the King,” chase away misfortune. Love and Happiness, who are at the heart of the American vision, are, in Babar’s dream, mere tiny camp followers. The larger winged elephants, which are at the forefront of this French vision of civilized life, are instead Intelligence, Patience, Learning, and Courage. “Let’s work hard and cheerfully and we’ll continue to be happy,” the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add.

Babies Everywhere...

More baby news: Rachida Dati, the 42 year old French Justice Minister, is, like Bristol Palin, pregnant. As Art Goldhammer says, however, they do things differently in France. Dati says she has no intention of revealing the father's identity and offers this marvellous comment: "I have a very complicated private life, and that's where I draw the line with the press. I won't have anything to say on that subject."

Meanwhile, the Times' Charles Bremner has a pop at French hypocrisy vis a vis privacy and the coverage of the Sarkozy administration:

The complete silence on the identify of Dati's partner looks more like old-fashioned deference to the governing class.

There was another, related, example of the deference phenomenon today. Most of the media were having fun with Sarkozy's Corsican blunder (last post), reporting the political row and deploring his devotion to his show-biz cronies. But the story was not deemed fit for readers of Le Figaro, a venerable national daily.  The newspaper, which is owned by Serge Dassault, a big Sarkozy supporter, can rarely bring itself to report anything embarrassing to the President. So it reduced the Corsica yarn to a few brief lines with no allusion to a row.

Chaps in glass houses ought not to chuck rocks! A newspaper proprietor influences coverage to protect his friends and business interests? That could never happen in Britain...

Sarko and Carla vs Barack and Michelle

Art Goldhammer looks at the Democratic convention in Denver and lets loose his imagination...

I got to thinking about what would have happened had a comparable scene been staged in France. Just try to imagine Carla Bruni rattling on about her first meeting with Sarkozy at a posh Parisian dinner party. And the family vetting? Would she have brought "Nick" home to meet her sister Valeria, an actress rather than a basketball coach like Michelle's brother, and would Valeria have offered an opinion on Nick's prowess as a persuasive public speaker? And how about the kids? Might Jean Sarkozy have motored on stage aboard his scooter, patted Carla on the rump, and asked an image of "daddy" on the television screen what city he was in? "Pontivy, fiston, Pontivy, et qu'est-ce que tu penses de belle-maman? Canon, hein?"

As he says, thank heavens America and France, being so similar, remain so different. Then again, perhaps this talk of how Michelle Obama "affirmed" her husband's promise while "humanising" him is sufficiently pretentious for any cliched left-bank coversation...

What's the matter with France?

Since yesterday was Bastille Day, this seems as sensible a moment as any to ask: whatever happened to France? How did a once-great nation fall so low? And, are there any grounds for hoping that France may recover from this shameful, pitiful, nadir?

I speak, of course, of cycling. No Frenchman has won the Tour de France since Bernard Hinault took his fifth yellow jersey way back in 1986. Worse still, apart from Laurent Fignon (winner in 84 and 85 himself), no Frenchman has since come even close to hauling on the Maillot Jaune in Paris. It gets worse: Fignon won the Giro d'Italia in 1989 and Laurent Jalabert took the Vuelta d'Espana in 1995  but those are the only two French triumphs in the grand tours since Hinault's final Tour win.

The collapse in French cycling has been extraordinary. At the first rest day in this year's Tour, Sandy Casar is the only Frenchman in the top 30 of the General Classification. Nor, alas, is there any obvious sign that a Frenchman will win at any point in the foreseeable future. Benoit Salmon was the last Frenchman to win the Tour's Young Rider's classification, way back in 1999. Benoit who? Precisely.

Even this litany of failure understates the French failure. True, Richard Virenque was King of the Mountains seven times in the Tour (though also, of course, a confirmed doper) and Jalabert also won it twice. But apart from Jalabert (in 1992 and 95) no Frenchman has won the points competition since Hinault also took it back in 1979.

Admittedly it's not just the French who are suffering: Lucien van Impe (1977) is the only Belgian not called Eddy Merckx to have won the Tour since the Second World War. But at least the Belgians can console themselves with the production of a number of sprinters and excellent one-day Classic riders.

So what accounts for this collapse? Part of it, I suspect, is rooted in the conservative culture of French cycling. The French were slow to react, let alone adopt, new methods and new attitudes to cycling. Some of it is also, of course, due to the increasingly international nature of professional cycling. Back in Hinault's day there weren't, Greg LeMond apart, many Americans in the peloton. These days it is chock-full of English speakers from the United States or Australia, to say nothing of the Grand Tour winners who have emerged from the former Soviet Union (Tonkov, Berzin, Vinokourov, Menchov). Add to that the resurgance in Spanish cycling and you have some form of explanation for the French failure. But even allowing for all of this, the French struggles seem tough to understand. What's gone wrong?

Thoughts on this years' Tour to follow later, but if any reader can help explain this collapse in French morale and ability, I'd be very grateful...

Vive La France!

This one's for my French friends and readers. Here's Yves Montand singing Les Feuilles Mortes. Wonderful stuff.

The new kings of Western Swing?

Via Cato, comes this report from The Times:

They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls.

They are drawn by a love of American culture - although definitely not American politics - and a passion for line dancing...

Now country and western has become so big in France that the country's bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control.

The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls.

The rules, which come into force next year, come after the rapid spread of country and western in France, where an estimated 100,000 people line dance several times a week. Jean Chauveau, the chairman of the country section of the French Dance Federation, said: “It's growing at a crazy rate. There are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.”...

In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs.

Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.

Two things: how marvellously French this is and, secondly, a reminder that culture and political policy are different things that, though they may overlap occasionally, remain distinct. Also, that France is a more interesting, complicated place than you might think...

The worst team in Europe?

Are Paris Saint-Germain the worst football team in Europe? This obviously depends upon how one measures or defines "worst". PSG, despite another appalling season, would (thankfully) still be expected to defeat, say, Shamrock Rovers. But in a pound-for-pound sense is there a more pathetic club in europe?

I's not just that they only narrowly avoided relegation this season, it's that they continue to squander resources. Even when they were owned by Canal Plus, PSG under-performed. Indeed, since the club was formed in 1970 they've only won the French championship twice (in 1986 and 1994), despite being one of the richest clubs in France and the only major club in Paris. Their 1996 UEFA Cup triumph offers just a partial compensation while also rather demonstrating the overall gap between PSG's theoretical potential and it's actual haplessness.

So, pound-for-pound are PSG the worst* club in europe? Ad if they're not, who is?

*NB: I mean in a footballing sense; times become tougher still for PSG when you factor their fans into the equation.

France and Collaboration

As an addition to this post on wartime France, Clive Davis directs one to this Max Hastings op-ed from a couple of years ago that makes similar points:

Hearing a recent conversation about collaboration, I made myself unpopular by suggesting that, if Britain had succumbed to Nazi rule, our own people would have behaved pretty much as the French did. Anthony Eden is seldom quoted with respect these days. Yet the former foreign secretary made an impressive contribution to Marcel Ophüls' great film on wartime France, Le Chagrin et la Pitié. He said, in impeccable French: "It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did." Here was wisdom.

It is extraordinarily difficult to resist tyranny ruthlessly enforced, especially in a densely populated country with little wilderness. In order to eat and provide for one's family, it is necessary to earn money. All commerce and industry must be conducted according to the will of the occupiers. A man who owns a business will find that he has no business, his employees no work, if he does not accept dictation. Members of a family that owns a house are liable to find it burnt about their ears if they commit, or are even deemed to have acquiesced in, acts of resistance. Some people may feel brave enough to accept such consequences for themselves, but would they inflict them on their children?

Quite so.

When Colour Is Worth 10,000 Words

Marty Peretz links to this Daily Mail account of an exhibition of photographs taken in wartime Paris which is, for obvious reasons, a matter of some debate in France. And yes, the photographs are shocking. Just not in the way in which either Peretz or the Mail seem to think they are. The Mail headline, subtle as ever, is "Oh what a lovely war! The dazzling photos of innocent Parisian fun that make the French so ashamed" while Marty titles his post, "What the Nazi Occupation of France was Really Like".

Here, for instance, is a photograph of three mademoiselles relaxing in the Luxembourg, circa 1942. How, the Mail wants us to ask, can these young Frogs be so blithe and innocent and carefree while their country is occupied y Nazi Germany and most of europe is ablaze? Isn't it just disgusting?

Well, maybe so but if you think that then you have a remarkably low disgust threshold. God knows a good deal of France's wartime history is dismal, depressing, often shameful stuff. But there's little to nothing about it that is especially French beyond the fact that it took place in France. By which I mean that we should be neither so complacent nor so arrogant as to suppose that Britain (or, for that matter, the United States) would have been vastly different in comparable circumstances. A bit better, we may cross out fingers and hope, but not much more than that. We can say there'd have been no British Drancy but it's a brave man who makes so bold a claim with any confidence based upon more than John Bull's bluster.

It's a simple thing really, but life under occupation must, one way or another or somehow, go on. Most people have little alternative but to make the best of a dismally bad lot. What else is to be done? Those of us who never experienced the humiliation and shame and ghastliness of occupied europe are not actually best-placed to sit in absolute judgement upon the collective failings or weaknesses of people whose lands were occupied by tyranny.

Sarko's NATO Problem

Here's The Economist reporting developments in France:

THE Gaullist backlash against Nicolas Sarkozy's new Atlanticism has begun in earnest, and its new poster boy is Dominique de Villepin...

Not only did he denounce the French president's decision, which was warmly greeted by George Bush at last week's NATO summit in Bucharest, to send an extra French battalion (some 700 troops) to Afghanistan. He went on to chastise Sarkozy for planning to reintegrate France into NATO's military command structure. "Not only is the return of France to NATO not in our country's interests, but I also think it's dangerous," he said: "We will lose space to manoeuvre, space to be independent" as well as "an ability to act alone". NATO, after all, he said "is an organisation under American domination".

I have no brief for Monsieur de Villepin but his analysis is, of course, entirely correct. It is hard to see what France gains from full NATO membership and easy to see what it could very easily lose. Even if one holds the view that reintegration into NATO's command structure is as much a symbolic move as anything else it is indisputable that NATO is, and will remain, an "organisation under American domination".

Which is, equally understandably, how the United States likes it. One quite often runs across liberals (in the debased, modern American sense of the term) who deplore what they term George W Bush's imperialism while pining for the good old days of returning to, and respecting, international organisations and the great brotherhood of man. Well, up to a point. It turns out that they generally mean organisations such as NATO that are themselves part of the American imperial project. Soft empire counts and so does indirect empire and NATO has obviously been an important element in maintaining and, these days, seeking to expand American hegemony.

Now it's true that some on the American right complain that europe doesn't spend enough on defence and, in some respects, this may be a legitimate complaint. but the United States has also done everything it can to prevent the emergence of any viable, independent european defence capability, insisting that all defence measures be channelled through NATO - an organisation that, of course, the United States controls. Hence the paranoia with which any moves to a greater European defence capability are met on the American right, hence too that the site of a British prime minister even talking about defence to europeans prompts cries of treachery and rabid complaints that Britain is jeopardising the so-called "Special Relationship".

That being so, it's rich to complain that european countries are failing to pay enough for defence when, in the larger scheme of matters, the United States has indeed been prepared to pay for the defence of western europe against the Soviet menace. Who would pay for a chocolate bar themselves if they could also wait 15 minutes and receive one for free?

NATO's imbalance has other unfortunate consequences. The fact that the United States spends so much more on efence than do european countries while remaining, if you like, the defender of last resort creates a sense in Washington that, damn it, the ungrateful europeans should be grateful and fall into line with American objectives. (This is not a situation confined to the Bush years; it was present throughout the drab and often squalid Clinton interventions in the Balkans).

And what could be more imperial than the demand that allied vassals fall into line with the mother power's wishes? Cue, the displeasure felt in Wahsington when europe actually did something and blocked the startlnig suggestion that the Ukraine and Georgia become members of the alliance.

NATO exists as a means of advancing American interests and that it is, at bottom, an American plaything. Hence, for instance, Rudy Giuliani's lunatic proposal to brin Israel into NATO. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's hard to see why a closer relationship with NATO should necessarily or automatically also be in the French national interests. I should also say that it would be quite possible to welcome all this and see it as a positive example of the power and benefits of Empire. What seems silly is pretending that a pipe is not in fact a pipe.

PS: I also have limited time for US complaints that NATO ain't pulling its weight in Afghanistan: NATO offered help in Afghanistan in 2001 but was told that there was no need to trouble itself or worry since the United States had everythng in hand and, in any case, all these europeans would just get in the way.

Location, location, location

Daniel Drezner praises Elaine Sciolino, who is leaving Paris after five years as the New York Times' correspondent, as a "fine reporter/observer". Not so fast, cautions Arthur Goldhammer:

Her swan song reminds us why she will not be missed. For our national newspaper's chief correspondent, France means above all sexy underwear, friendly butchers, nasty haberdashers, handkissing, and other quaintnesses. La grande Nation is a dotty old aunt best captured in droll anecdotes.

Now, to be sure, Madame Sciolino's farewell despatch is meant to be whimsical, even jolly. Alas, it's simply cliched, banal and, appallingly, stuffed with name-dropping. More to the point, it's also supposed to demonstrate how peculiarly funny and odd the French are. One has the sense that five years in France have neither led Sciolino to like or understand the French.

So I'm in Goldhammer's camp. That's fine. These are occupational hazards and I suspect that her editors in New York are at least partially responsible for Sciolino's glib and frothy take on France*. But, as anyone who has been a foreign correspondent knows (or should know), one of the jobs is, from time to time, to tell editors that they're wrong and that, no, the paper ought not to be peddling easy cliches. This can be difficult, but it needs to be done as, I rather suspect, Americans who read the foreign press's coverage of the US can readily understand. It's easy to write about a gun-toting, racist, obese America full of gay-hating religious crazies but indulging those stereotypes to excess scarcely advances either a reporters' understanding of America or that of his readers. There has to be an at least an attempt to ask why as well as what.

And, as in real estate, location matters. Sciolino lived (in an NYT-owned apartment?) in Paris's 7th arrondissement. Now if you wanted to choose a dreary and boring and unrepresentative part of the city to live in, well, the 7th would be on your shortlist of neighbourhoods. It would be like living in the dullest corner of the Upper East Side and thinking this gave you a window onto America.You could scarcely choose a worse place to live.

This is less of a problem for Washington correspondents since they're dealing with politics, but as a general rule it would be no bad thing if fewer foreign correspondents lived in New York and more of us moved to St Louis or Knoxville or Atlanta or Phoenix. My suspicion is that their journalism and their understanding of American life, society and culture would improve.

*Not everything has to be earnest, of course and there's plenty of room for quirky tales of eccentricity etc etc. The NYT's Sarah Lyall (whom I've praised before) is an excellent example of how one can simultaneously be light, affectionate and perceptive. Take, for instance, this very droll piece on why Slough is so ghastly.

Desperately Seeking a Tartan Sarko?

One of the most kenspeckled British political anecdotes of the last half century recounts the occasion when it was said of Herbert Morrison that he was "his own worst enemy", his great rival Ernie Bevin was quick to interject: "Not while I'm alive, he ain't!".

So when, courtesy of Art Goldhammer, I read that Pierre Lellouche, a conservative member of the UMP from Paris, had condemned the French right in these terms:

"La droite française, malgré la magie sarkozyenne à l'UMP, serait-elle redevenue, Sarkozy parti à l'Elysée, la plus bête et la plus lâche du monde", se demande le député de Paris.

my immediate thought was, no, that ain't possible. Not while the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party continues to draw whatever wheezy breath is left to it, it ain't.

Sego and Barack and the press

Since the British press have been having all sorts of fun over the "snub"*  Gordon Brown thanks to a canceled meeting with John McCain it's worth noting that press sillyness is not confined to the anglosphere by any means. Art Goldhammer has the details:

Le Figaro has a perfidious piece on Ségolène Royal's visit to the US. It leads with the insinuation that she was somehow snubbed by Barack Obama because she attended his rally without obtaining a picture of herself with the candidate. I said yesterday that I would not share my private impressions of Mme Royal, but in this case I will make an exception, because I had a conversation with her about the Obama rally. It came up because I asked her if she was following the American election campaign--it was Ash Wednesday, the day after super-Tuesday in our Christian political calendar--and she told me how interesting it had been to watch Barack in action and to see the crowd's reaction to his unique speaking style. To my mind, it was entirely to her credit that she went to the rally out of curiosity, without a VIP invitation, and that she had enough interest in the United States and American politics to rub shoulders with the ordinary people who had turned out in large numbers to hear Obama speak at Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty.

*A media favourite: refers to a newspaper concoction normally explained by clashing timetables, good manners (cf Obama "snubbing" Hillary at the State of the Union) or an old-fashioned cock-up . Occam's Razor must never be deployed.

The Symbolism of Sarko?

An entry for Pseud's Corner. Adam Gopnik on Sarko's romance with Carla Bruni:

It is possible to imagine that Sarkozy is not simply a man governed by his impulses and appetites but one trying to use a situation to make a strategic point. In the past, all French politicians were involved in an organized hypocrisy, where mistresses were known, and hidden with a wink. Just as Tony Blair used the cold body of Princess Diana to underline the need for a departure from the national habit of perpetual emotional postponement, Sarko conceivably is using the very warm body of Bruni to make the point that the French need to escape from their habit of perpetual cloaked privilege—of allowing an educated élite to have prerogatives and manners different from the great mass of the people. No more subsidized mistresses; instead, openly carnal vacations.

Or maybe, you know, he's just enjoying himself.

Also: it's piffle to suppose that the English - for here Gopnik means the English rather than the British - have a "habit of perpetual emotional postponement". It's just that they channel to their emotions into sensible areas. Spaniels, for instance. Or roses. Other people's children, sometimes. The English are in fact a very emotional people; it's a great mistake to believe otherwise.'