French Letters Read online

  DÉPARTEMENTS

  lavish jobs for the boys and girls

  In my départment of Hérault in May 2015, the newly elected socialist-dominated departmental council at its very first meeting shamelessly increased its pay by 8 per cent to 5,512 euros per month for its president, 3,458 euros for its 15 (!) vice-presidents (if one vice-president is good, then 15 must be better) and 2,718 euros for its 34 ordinary members - virtually all of them already drawing salaries as mayors and deputy mayors of their various communes. Hérault is one of the poorest departments in France. Oddly, the Socialist party candidate who won the election in our own canton never made mention of this intention to self-enrich when he visited us to proclaim his commitment to fighting for our interests. Not that there seems a good reason for the departmental council even to exist since there is also a regional council, even more lavishly compensated. There are 96 departments in France excluding the overseas territories. French children are expected to be able to memorise the entire list, from 01 (Ain, Rhône-Alpes) to 95 (Val-d’Oise, Île-de-France). There is no Number 20 but 2A and 2B indicate Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse (southern and upper Corsica). Vast re-organisations of French regions are underway, which will inevitably involve hiring even more civil servants, and it is expected that these may eventually include reorganisations in the departments themselves, but for the time being, every department will also have a Préfet and a Préfecture, representing the central government. See gouvernance territoriale.

  DETTE PUBLIQUE

  97.5 per cent of gross national product

  By the summer of 2015, the French national debt exceeded two trillion euros, up 1.9 per cent in six months. The debt of the state was 1.6 trillion, that of the social security administration 232 billion, local government owed 188 billion and diverse public debts were 22 billion. French debt is accelerating despite President François Hollande’s promise to reduce it (it has increased by 220 billion euros since he took office). Hollande, meanwhile, lectures the Greeks that they must reduce their own debt while his left-wing friends splutter against government austerity (of which there is little evidence). Hollande has told Brussels that French debt will be reduced by 2017, but this depends on achieving growth of 1.5 per cent, which is hardly likely. If the current trend continues and Hollande cannot rekindle growth, debt will soon break the symbolically important barrier of 100 per cent of GDP, putting France outside its commitments to the EU and putting beyond doubt its status as a sick man of Europe.

  DIEUDONNÉ

  Comedian and dr Evil

  In a nation that professes to venerate Voltaire, liberty of expression sometimes means just the freedom to say the same thing as everyone else. This seems especially to be the case with Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (born 1966) who has become a symbol of defiance to the conventions of the state. The name means literally a ‘Gift of God’ but to many French establishment figures, he is a devil. Allied with Jean-Marie le Pen and a friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of Iran, both of them notorious Holocaust deniers. His shows, wildly popular among young immigrants in the ghettos, have been banned by the government. Whether he is anti-semitic or not is by now a purely academic question since he has become a hate figure for those who believe that he is, and a symbol of defiance for many in the ghettos, some of whom do not mind if he is. Ironically, he began his career as a performer in partnership with his boyhood friend Élie Semoun, a Jew. In 2012, Semoun said the Dieudonné with whom he once collaborated and the Dieudonné of today are completely different people.

  Repeatedly charged by prosecutors with incitement to racial hatred, Dieudonné has been physically attacked by Jewish militants. Yet all efforts to marginalise Dieudonné, ban his concerts, and attack him in the courts have done little to suppress his popularity and he is much admired by many young people who identify with his defiance of the French establishment. Many young French people simply do not understand why Charlie Hebdo is fêted for exercising its right to free speech, whereas Dieudonné is repeatedly condemned and prosecuted for doing the same thing.

  DIRIGISME

  France’s chain and ball

  Flaubert said the French like to be ruled by the sword and this is the traditional explanation of dirigisme in which l’État (the State) takes for itself the role of directing rather than merely regulating the economy and all other aspects of French social and cultural life. Dirigisme is most pernicious in the state’s management of the economy. Chronic unemployment and lack of investment, directly attributable to incompetent economic regulation, has not stopped the state remaining in control in every key decision, exasperating managers at large French companies who are not allowed to make decisions in the best interest of their firms, but are required to take into account the demands of the state. Yet there are many, like my friend Jacques, in Paris, who argue that the state has the exclusive democratic authority to make the ultimate economic decisions.

  DJIHADISME

  Islamic holy war

  With the largest Muslim population in Europe, Islamism is a gigantic challenge to the Republic, being ineptly addressed. The French seem bemused if not paralysed by the phenomenon. At least 1,200 French Islamists are estimated by King’s College, London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, to have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State. France’s ghettos, full of angry and unemployed young men, are a fertile recruiting ground. At least 17 men from the small southern French town of Lunel, population 27,500, were reported in 2015 to be fighting for the Islamic state; at least six have been killed. A jihadist interviewed by Paris-Match in March 2015 said there are so many French recruits in ISIS, ‘I couldn’t even count them all.’ Manuel Valls, the prime minister, has spoken of thousands of people in France who need to be actively surveilled. This Islamist fifth column has emerged under the government’s nose and it has had mixed results countering it.

  After the massacres at a Toulouse Jewish school, at Charlie Hebdo and at a Jewish supermarket in Paris, President François Hollande announced a two-pronged approach, transparently hopeless: more and more heavily armed police, and more money for schools for instruction in Republican values and laïcité (secularism). How giving pistols to our three municipal policemen is going to help is not easy to see. I further suspect that the young men in the ghettos might be more impressed with the prospect of employment than instruction on civic values. But these issues were not addressed by the President. Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, writing in the New York Times in January 2015, offered a succinct précis of the path to radicalisation: ‘The typical trajectory of most French Islamist terrorists follows four steps: alienation from the dominant culture, thanks partly to joblessness and discrimination in blighted neighbourhoods; a turn to petty crime, which leads to prison, and then more crime and more prison; religious awakening and radicalisation; and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country like Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen to train for jihad.’ Should these recruits return to France it is inevitable there will be more trouble.

  DOM-TOMS

  Overseas France

  La France d’outre-mer describes overseas France. There are French departments, territories and collectivités in North and South America, the Caribbean, and in the Indian and Pacific oceans. They are considered an integral part of France itself and the currency is the Euro. Some of them are little more than promontories, others are more substantial. Most of them constitute a bottomless pit into which the French pour subsidies for benefits that are debatable.

  Napoléon Bonaparte sold Louisiana and much of the midwest to the United States, after the French were kicked out of Quebec by General Wolfe. Hence the North American empire today is reduced to the tiny collectivité (administrative district) of St Pierre et Miquelon, off the coast of Nova Scotia (population 8,000), subsisting from a bit of fishing, a bit of tourism but mainly off subsidies from the mother lode. Closer to Montreal than Paris, St Pierre et Miquelon boasts a
detachment of gendarmes, a prefect, and must send its most seriously ill people to Canada for medical care.

  In South America, France still rules in jungly Guyane (Guyana), wedged between Brazil and Surinam, with its rapacious mosquitos, poisonous giant moths and the French space agency’s satellite-launching centre. Just off the coast is the Devil’s Island penal colony (le bagne) where Dreyfus was imprisoned and from which Henri Charrière (Papillon) famously escaped. There are amusing bars in Kourou, the administrative capital, populated by French Foreign Legionnaires who appear to be engaged in murky operations on the border with Surinam in the north and in the jungle to the south near the border with Brazil. Cayenne is where the eponymous peppers come from. On a visit to the space centre I once made the mistake of eating one of these, raw.

  Martinique and Guadeloupe, islands heavily dependent on tourism and with little depth to their economies, soak up more French taxpayer largesse in the Caribbean. Away from the resorts there is plenty of poverty and social instability. St Martin, the French half of an island shared with the Dutch, is more prosperous but the embarrassing jewel in the crown is the hyper exclusive island of St Barthélémy, where a bowl of soup at the beach restaurant of the Eden Rock hotel can cost 100 euros (admittedly with a fabulous view of topless Russian girls disporting themselves on the sand). Too expensive for mere millionaires, it is the preserve of plutocrats with yachts and private helicopters. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has an estate there and his yacht has two helipads, one for his own helicopter, the other presumably for the pizza delivery helicopter. St Barth is entirely exempt from French taxation under a treaty signed with the Swedish during the Napoleonic war, when the French took possession of the island. When French tax inspectors visited the island to discuss a change to the status, they were run off by outraged locals.

  In the Indian Ocean the French rule Réunion, with 850,000 people, southwest of Mauritius, another troubled dependency with 60 per cent youth unemployment and recurrent outbreaks of chikungunya, a paralysing disease. Mayotte, with a population of just over 200,000, is another headache. There were violent demonstrations there in 2011, which went largely unreported in France. The French Southern and Antarctic Lands, comprising a slice of Antarctica and several scattered islands, must not be overlooked either, despite a population of just 140 people and countless penguins. (The Southern and Antarctic Lands do have their own prefect, be assured).

  The Pacific boasts French Polynesia, with the unique status of an overseas country within the French Republic, and where there is continued political turmoil and calls for independence among elements of the population of 250,000. Next on the tour of non-hexagonal France is New Caledonia, with a population of around 250,000, and an economy that on paper looks much better with a GDP per capita comparable to New Zealand, although with huge income disparities. Next to last is Wallis and Futuna which comprises three kingdoms (there were four, but those owing their allegiance to the fourth tribe were eaten by the other three) but whose president is François Hollande. Clipperton Island (Île de Clipperton or Île de la Passion), is the final piece - an uninhabited nine-square-kilometre coral atoll located 1,280 kilometres south-west of Acapulco, Mexico, in the Pacific Ocean. France clings onto this because of the possibility that minerals may be found in its territorial waters. The sun never sets on the French empire.

  DSK

  Sexually incontinent Socialist politician

  Economist, lawyer, Socialist politician, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is apparently convinced he can resume his political career even after a series of sex scandals. He has tested to the limit French tolerance for private misbehaviour by public figures and described attending a dozen orgies in three years as ‘recreation.’ He referred to women in emails as ‘material.’ He engaged in what was described in court as ‘rough sex’ with prostitutes who subsequently wept on the witness stand describing brutal behaviour. He paid off a chambermaid in New York who accused him of forcing her to fellate him. And yet many French people seem ready to forgive him and many French journalists continue to insist this is none of anyone’s business. After the incident in New York, any hope he had of contesting the Socialist party primary for the presidency (which fell eventually to the uninspiring François Hollande) was destroyed. Many in France doubted that the events in America were entirely coincidental and asked who benefited. Well, Hollande, obviously. Would Hollande have been capable of masterminding such a conspiracy to bring down his rival? Many French people think so. Given Hollande’s general competence, I doubt it.

  Strauss-Kahn is an arrogant, deeply unpleasant man who has been entirely the author of his own downfall. After the debacle in New York, he seemed ready to rapidly resume his political career until he was accused of proxénétisme (pimping, basically) involving lurid libertine affairs at the drab Carlton Hotel in Lille and other venues, at which large contingents of prostitutes were supposedly imported for orgies involving politicians, businessmen and journalists. We have never been told the identities of the journalists involved. Strauss-Kahn denies knowing anything about the girls being prostitutes and even the prosecutor admitted he couldn’t prove it. Richard Nixon famously said, ‘I am not a crook.’ Strauss-Kahn essentially said, ‘I am not a pimp.’ He was acquitted but while I thought it impossible to imagine him returning to front line politics, he has emerged from his bunker and remains seemingly protected by journalistic omertà (silence).

  The case of Strauss-Kahn shames French journalists who have for years turned a blind eye to such conduct on the grounds that it is a matter of personal privacy of no interest to the public. Until we know the identity of the French journalists who were also involved in Strauss-Kahn’s orgies, it is unlikely that answers will be forthcoming.

  E

  ÉCOLE NATIONALE D’ADMINISTRATION

  Elite School CREATING mediocrity

  ‘Ireland has the IRA, Spain has ETA, Italy the Mafia, and France the ENA,’ former finance minister Alain Madelin once said of this elite institution, responsible for generations of sometimes corrupt politicians. Founded after the Second World War by Charles de Gaulle, supposedly to replace France’s collaborationist administrative class with a rigorously trained meritocracy schooled in Republican virtue, the École Nationale d’Administration is the ultimate finishing school for the French political elite. Most of its students are drawn from highly privileged backgrounds.

  With numerous top jobs in the French administration reserved for its graduates, termed Énarques, the ENA diploma is a meal ticket for life. Despite all the emphasis on academic rigour, the quality of the graduates is highly questionable. President François Hollande graduated at the top of his class. With graduates including former prime ministers Alain Juppé, Edouard Balladur, Michel Rocard and Laurent Fabius, Philippe Seguin, former speaker of the National Assembly, and former presidents Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing (VGE) and Jacques Chirac, ENA has provided almost all the politicians who have presided over the country’s economic decline in the past 40 years. There is supposed to be a shake-up with the appointment of a new director, Nathalie Loiseau, unusually not herself an Énarque but a graduate of the Sciences Po university in Paris and a student of Chinese. A high-flyer in the French foreign office, she was press officer at the embassy in Washington during the 2003 Iraq war. ENA recently announced that competence in English would in the future become a requirement of graduation from the school, which is surprising only because one might have thought this should have already been a requirement.

  ÉCOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIEURE

  Elite institution training teachers

  Normal/e is a faux ami (a false friend - a similar word with a different meaning in English and French). Normale in Frenchmeans a given standard, and supérieur means above ordinary, hence the École Normale is a school that claims elevated standards, i.e., higher than a bog-standard school. Established during the French revolution and reorganised by Napoléon, it stands alongside ENA and X as one of the elite schools of the French establishment. Tony Judt,
who spent a year there and was later awarded an honorary doctorate, described it as an ‘elite humanist academy… distilling the status and distinction of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, and Berkeley.’ An enormously long list of notorious and celebrated alumni includes Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Pasteur and Michel Foucault. The college was intended to train an elite corps of educators thoroughly indoctrinated in Republican values, tasked with the creation of a national education system itself designed to coin Republicans. It recruits 200 students annually, half in sciences, the rest in humanities, and students are considered to be trainee civil servants. Recently ranked between 18-33 in world university rankings, so maybe not today as impressive as it likes to believe or its history deserves. Students and graduates are called Normaliens.

  ÉCONOMIE

  Not a French strong point

  Marxism is the basis for much economic thinking in France. France’s star economist, Thomas Piketty, is characteristic of the breed. He is the scion of a well-to-do family of leftists. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations never seems to have made it onto French student reading lists. Economics is seen mainly as the challenge of redistributing existing wealth, rather than creating it. Not that the French economic model lacks admirers. Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, has declared: ‘News reports consistently portray the French economy as a dysfunctional mess, crippled by high taxes and government regulation. So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual numbers, which don’t match that story at all.’ What ‘actual numbers’ has he been looking at? France has been in a state of near-recession for 15 years. See productivité.