French Letters Read online

  Jonathan Miller

  France :-) a Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

  http://www.gibsonsquare.com

  Printed ISBN: 9781783340842

  Ebook ISBN: 9781783340859

  E-book production made by Booqla.com

  Original title: 2016

  Published by Gibson Square

  Copyright © by Gibson Square

  Foreword

  I recently made an appointment to visit my lawyer. I was told to ignore the sign on the front door announcing that the office was on strike. It was a national day of action protesting proposed reforms to the legal profession. Instead I should knock discreetly at the side entrance and someone would let me in. The office was pretending to be on strike, while conducting business as usual. In France, not everything is always as it seems. In a country where people claim to be revolutionaries but are terrified of change, boast of their social model while condemning young people to mass unemployment, and claim to be the best cooks in the world, while a million people a day eat at McDonald’s, there is much that is paradoxical, even psychotic.

  When I bought my modest maison in France 15 years ago, equipped with rusty O-level French, I was seduced by the beauty of the country, discouraged by the difficulty of communicating effectively with French people, and entranced by the otherness of everything. Like many English people newly arrived in France, I imagined I had stumbled into a kind of paradise. Learning the language was both a challenge and a pleasure. The first 10 years are the hardest, but fluency (or an approximation of fluency, which is all I claim) is the very best tool for understanding the French, whose beautiful, romantic language is an insight into their soul. I have discovered the French to be warm, funny and generous. But I also learned how France really is and understood how their language has prevented them from seeing the world realistically, often isolating themselves within a francophone discourse that can be pretty remote from the harsh global reality and indeed is often delusional.

  In 2014 I was elected to my local council - an experience that has given me introductions to many politicians and a new window into the endless contradictions of French life and the refusal to confront reality. It is fundamental to the French sickness that they believe that they are unique in seeing the world as it is, and everyone else is mistaken. As any psychiatrist can tell you, it is the patient who denies he is ill who is likely to be sicker than the one who accepts having some problems.

  I have often heard people who do not really know the French say that ‘the French hate the English.’ This is complete nonsense. On the whole I think they rather like us. I have certainly never encountered any visceral anti-British sentiment in my years in France although they do like to tease us, if not as much as we sometimes tease them. The relationship is much more complicated than that. And our own relationship to the French is also nuanced. What’s clear is that we often struggle to understand one another.

  The French are often adorable, but also frequently infuriating, often naïve, even infantile, hopelessly romantic, deeply neurotic and capable of holding numerous incompatible thoughts in their head at the same time. They admire principles, even when they may not work when applied in practice. The French talk often of their exceptionalism. And they are exceptional, but not always in a good way. The impossibilities of the French idea of themselves are startling. It is a country of great beauty, but where villages are dilapidated, millions of dwellings abandoned and suburban homeowners fortify themselves behind exterior walls that are made of untreated parpaing (breeze blocks), especially in the south. It is a state that claims to be laïc (prohibiting the state from recognising religion or even ethnicity) yet where millions in public funds are spent restoring cathedrals, even as Muslim girls are sent home from school for wearing headscarves and skirts that are deemed provocatively too long. In Britain girls are sent home for skirts that are too short.

  To explore the endless paradoxes of France is to discover a nation that is dysfunctional and frequently self-destructive and where, it is said, the customer is always wrong. Arriving in France is like putting your watch back 50 years, to Britain in the 1970s. Whose carrots, as they say in one colourful idiom suggesting a situation that has become hopeless, are cooked (les carottes sont cuites). France is a country blessed with natural and human resources, with a cultural heritage admired everywhere. It is a society nominally committed to equality, liberty and fraternity, but it is failing to reliably deliver any of these things to many of its 65 million people.

  This work will doubtless be decried by some as French-bashing and it is true that it is often critical. But I make no claim that the French are unique in the world in being prisoners of their own mythology. I do not say that France is better or worse than the Britain or the United States, which I also know well. The French do not in any case need me to bash them since there are plenty of French writers and intellectuals who have made a career out of it. And there is always scope for the French to bash the endless foibles, hypocrisies and contradictions of America and Britain. Indeed, they seem to relish doing so. I merely take France on its own terms, and try to measure the gaps between the country’s unlimited potential and its often pitiful performance.

  The selection of entries can justly be criticised as personal, haphazard, capricious and even irrational, in part a contradictionary, mostly un dictionnaire égoïste - an egocentric dictionary, influenced by my own experiences, the places I have visited, the people I have met, my immersion in and seduction by the French language and not least by my own location in the Languedoc, on the less fashionable side of the Rhone Valley, in one of the poorer parts of France. It is definitely not written from the perspective of Paris. I have tried to go from the particular to the general and the reverse, seeking to relate these stories to the bigger contemporary narrative of France. If I am negative and sometimes snarky, it is because from the beginning of this project I have been fuelled by rage at a political class that has ignored the real problems of the country, while feathering its own nests. I am afraid the snark is a bad habit acquired as a newspaper reporter.

  The rose-tinted view of France offered by sentimental writers like Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence, 1989) and many others has not been helpful to understanding this country. France is an easy country to romanticise, but it is doing it no favours to overlook the present position. Yes it is often beautiful and full of charm, but not always. Can France be saved? Possibly. I conclude my tour with an Afterword, a modest manifesto. I reckon this to be good advice, but doubt it will gain much traction.

  A woman in the village café, overhearing one of my morning rants about the conceits, paradoxes and misapprehensions of France, asked me bluntly: ‘If you don’t like it, why do you live here?’ The answer is that I love France, the French, their language, their music and art and literature, their extraordinary countryside, their ancient villages, their cheese and their wine - indeed, I have been in love with this country and its people since I first came here on a family holiday, aged 10. But the more I have come to know about France, and the greater my admiration for ordinary French people, the greater my contempt for its elites, who have betrayed the country and its future. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The late Tony Judt, a superb historian of France, wrote that reading the history of interwar France, ‘one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens.’ My argument is that France occupies once more what Judt identifies as the terrain of ‘collective and individual irresponsibility’. The Economist in 2012 said that France was a time-bomb at the heart of Europe. It has become even more dangerous since, to itself and others. The French need a slap, at least, if not a decent ki
cking, to break their hallucinatory cycle. This is a nation with the potential to be great, that is failing. It is heartbreaking to witness this.

  A

  AFFAIRES

  Business and funny business

  An affaire is a business, an homme d’affaires is a businessman - but often, an affaire is a scandal. Scandals in France are often tangled, and are typically named after their central personalities or feature, hence the historic Affaire Dreyfus, the current Affaire Bettencourt, the recent Sarkozy-Kadhafi Affaire, and the long-running Bygmalion Affaire. Each of these has its own Wikipedia page attempting to make sense of the typically tortuous plot and cast, but neither these accounts nor the vaguely-sourced and often tendentious information relayed by the media are always convincing.

  Current affaires run the gamut from swindling rich widows, secret political financing, everyday bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, banking, football match-fixing and inevitably sex (see Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Sometimes there may be less to these affairs than meets the eye and the actual scandal is imaginary, the invention of prosecutors and journalists pursuing political vendettas. Pedants distinguish between great political and financial affaires and purely criminal affaires of banditisme (gangsterism). It is sometimes hard to see a great difference. Affaire can also be used to evoke a romantic affair, or liaison, not uncommon in France. If your employer is generous you will fly classe affaires (business class) on Air France but if really generous he will not make you fly on Air France at all.

  L’AFRIQUE

  The heart of French darkness

  La Françafrique is French shorthand for France in Africa. Much of north and west Africa was under French rule in the 19th century and first half of the 20th, and although the colonial ties were dissolved (and in the case of Algeria, brutally so), the political, linguistic and emotional connections are perhaps as strong as ever. Also, the conflicts. On a trip to Mali, I visited the grand marché in the centre of Bamako where as I walked through the market, there were murmurs of toubabou, toubabou (white man, white man). On one side of the market, on the rue Mohammed, is the Grande Mosquée (Great Mosque) tallest building in the country; facing it, on the avenue de la République, is the French-built national assembly, with odd Moorish flourishes on a building that looks to have been modelled on a suburban French high school. The market itself is rooted in an Africa with roots more ancient than either Islam or democracy. Traders deal in everything from animist fetishes, the skins of leopards, the heads of monkeys and potent spells. And there are magnificent, explosively colourful woven and dyed textiles.

  Mali was already too dangerous for me to visit Timbuktu, a lifetime ambition. At the last minute, my wary pilot discovered ‘technical problems’ with his King Air turboprop that would make the trip impossible. The road was insecure and westerners daring to travel it regarded as kidnap fodder. I left Mali optimistic, nevertheless, writing in the Washington Post that it still had a chance to become a west African success story. I thought the country might be capable of finding a social compact, under a government that while far from perfect, was at least vaguely democratic. In retrospect, I should have seen the coming catastrophe. Mali was crawling with spies. Mysterious Cubans and Americans were installed at corner tables in the best restaurants. The music was incredible, but the atmosphere on the streets was menacing. In 2013, Mali’s government fell, faced with an Islamist insurgency that seized Timbuktu and much of the north.

  President François Hollande has deployed French forces to Mali to combat the Islamist extremists in the Sahel, and has established military bases throughout former French Africa, and beyond. His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, with British and American help, deposed Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 although with disastrous consequences. There are now Islamic State enclaves on the Mediterranean coast and a tidal wave of migrants is crossing the sea seeking asylum in Europe, and straining France’s relations with Italy, where most of them land. The French are entangled as far east as Djibouti in the Horn of Africa where they maintain a demi-brigade of their Foreign Legion and operate a secretive drone and special forces base in partnership with the United States Africa command. France looks warily at Africa, no longer for the possibilities of commercial exploitation that inspired the French African empire in the first place, but because it is a menacing continent across just a short stretch of sea from France itself.

  Parisians sometimes express their disdain for the rustiques (rustics) of France by muttering l’Afrique commence au sud de la Loire (Africa begins south of the river Loire).

  AGRICULTURE

  Semi-Governmental

  The French are some of the most urbanised people on earth yet still cling to a romantic notion of themselves as paysans (peasants, people of the soil). Rural employment is only 3 per cent of the workforce (versus 1 per cent in the U.K., 2 per cent in the U.S.A.) yet there is a quasi-religious respect for terroir (the soil, the countryside) shared by even those who rarely go near it.

  The rustic pretensions of France conceal an agricultural sector that is becoming highly industrialised. If you drive through the centre of France you will see enormous fields of wheat and sunflowers, onto which the French pump vast quantities of water, often wastefully in the heat of the day, whence it largely evaporates. This is a highly effective food machine that makes the French largely self-sufficient in terms of their basic food supply (though they say that in time of war, it is wise to go long on cooking oil and sugar). The French process vast quantities of foodstuffs, including dairy products, cereals and wine and the sector accounts for roughly 15 per cent of French exports.

  The fetishisation of agriculture has major political consequences. Farmers are often angry, blockading roads and demanding subsidies to protect them from the marketplace. Blockades of motorways in the north of France and around Lyons by angry farmers in 2015 produced promises of new subsidies. President François Hollande promised to put pressure on supermarkets to raise prices and said schools, prisons and hospitals should buy only French meat. Utterly illegal under EU rules but a good headline. The farmers rejected the offer by closing the frontiers with Germany and Spain, ransacking trucks in search of agricultural goods coming into the country, which they regard as unfair competition. Farmers also frequently dump tons of manure in public spaces to protest their miserable lot. There are, naturally, no arrests. The police are too busy keeping Uber closed to keep the frontiers open.

  All French presidents have attended the annual agriculture salon in Paris and are photographed admiring French-built combine harvesters and posing with fat cows, goats, and sheep. The French are the largest beneficiaries of the EU’s common agricultural policy but a lot of the subsidies go straight to the cereal barons with very little, in reality, trickling down to the milk producers and producers of beef or the remaining paysans, who continue to till their tiny plots, milking their cows, dutifully sowing their crops of winter wheat and sunflowers, and closing highways.

  AÏGO BOULIDO

  Foul panacea

  When I was sick, a kindly villager made this for me and I was cured. This potion of Provençal origin is made of garlic (lots), herbs of the garrigue, olive oil, egg white and the mint-like salvia plant (sorge). It is traditionally consumed on Christmas day after the excesses of la grande bouffe (the great feast) eaten on Christmas Eve. Also prepared as required throughout the year as a remedy for almost anything. French people make extravagant claims for traditional remedies but this one really works, if you can bear to let it pass your lips. If it isn’t dégueulasse (disgusting), it isn’t working.

  Recipe: more garlic than you’d think humanly possible, thyme, sage, a cup and a half of salt water, pepper, a splash of olive oil, egg yolk (one or two), croutons from a baguette deep-fried in olive oil. If the garlic will not drive away demons than at least it will repel relatives who don’t care enough about you.

  AIRBUS

  (Over-) Reaching for the sky

  The French-based aircraft manufacturer faces turbulence. Its
new military air-lifter, the A400M, is 10 years late, and 6.2 billion euros over budget. It is still not convincingly airworthy, one recently crashing, killing its crew, when faulty software shut down the fuel supply. The pride of the fleet, the giant A380 super-jumbo, has sold poorly and may never be profitable. Smaller Airbus jets have done much better, becoming the staple of regional and low-cost carriers and there are strong hopes for the new A350 inter-continental twin-jet. Being French, Airbus planes have dispensed with the traditional control yoke and replaced it with a side-mounted joystick like those used by video games. A tray table has been put where the column used to go, which makes it easier for the pilots to eat their meals.

  Airbus has become a vast and complicated business, and would be proof that it is possible to run a world-class enterprise mostly out of France, except that there is energetic outsourcing of actual production to China and the United States. Airbus headquarters at Blagnac airport in prosperous Toulouse is the centre of an economic microclimate. Toulouse has an actual rush hour because so many people have real jobs, and you can buy A&W Root Beer in the expat shop that caters for all the Americans who work there, some of them alumni of Boeing.

  AIR FRANCE

  Employee-benefit scheme masquerading as an airline

  Snooty personnel and a dubious safety record. ‘Avoid at all costs,’ says one of my French neighbours, whose monthly trips to China he schedules via Germany, after too many disrupted journeys on the national carrier. Aviation Week recently wondered whether Air France was destined to follow Pan Am into bankruptcy. Air France is being slaughtered by EasyJet on its domestic routes yet its pilots recently staged disruptive strikes to stop the airline from expanding its own low-cost subsidiary, Transavia. Management capitulated and France now has no chance of launching a major low-cost competitor. The disruptive strike was a further blow to what remains of customer loyalty.