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Gallic guile is what we now need for this chaotic world
A French attitude is the perfect antidote to the American century
Hywel Williams
Thursday January 24, 2002
The Guardian
Fear is central to France - Europe's hypochondriac state. No other
people enjoys its illnesses quite so much or spend so much money on
what might fix the disease. The national passion for debate is best
heard at the pharmacie as Moliere's malade imaginaire once again
takes to the stage. Which pilule will do the trick? Did this onguent
work for you? Eyes squint and brows furrow. A visit to the Parisian
chemist is a reminder that the theatre of the absurd is a French
invention.
But that febrile individualism which ministers to diseased minds and
bodies alike is often a national style as well. La Grande Peur is one
of the key events of French history - a time in the summer of 1789
when the countr
y was gripped by collective fear and came close to dissolution. The later Austrian
menace at the borders in 1792 was identifiable enough. But domestically, the talent
for neurotic and cruel imagining had already worked ov
ertime as armed gangs roamed the French countryside gleefully slaughtering the
innocents.
French fear is a cyclical affair - a recurring feature of the country which regularly
anticipates that it's about to be condemned to la vie en marge . The idea that a
national style in politics and culture has to be defin
ed and maintained goes deep because it's a mechanism of defence against the dark. And
the intolerance which emerges betrays the reality of the fear.
English Francophilia is easily and naively impressed by the strenuous cultural
politics, by the Acad�mie and the superficial uniformity of the education system. But
that rhetoric is at odds with the reality which is one o
f a chronic and persistent variety, which is why the brutal Jacobin tradition
enforcing order at the centre is a feature of both French left and French right. The
national mission statement is only needed because the Fren
ch have to be told to be fraternal. It is not a natural condition of the country where
even bureaucracy is a form of anarchy.
A presidential election year is good timing for a dip into nervosit�. The Royal
Academy's new exhibition centres on Paris as the city whose diffused light irradiated
the world of the visual arts. Its dates suggest that wh
at started in 1900 ended in 1968. And the associated lectures on the period's
intellectual life recall the reality of a glory which seems pass�.
Something very big and bad happened to the idea of the French intellectual post-1968.
Those new philosophers of the 1970s - Andr� Gluckmann and Bernard-Henri Levy - who
seemed to give an old tradition a new kick are agein
g badly now. And - judged by the old-left consensus of the Sartre-Camus generation -
they were themselves a deviation. For the object of their fashionable flirtation was
Anglo-American liberal economics.
The idea of the intellectual engag� had been a great French tradition - one of
suffering and witness in which principle castigated power. Its high point was the
Dreyfus affair. But behind it there lay Voltaire and Diderot
- the protests which came from the salon and study against the throne and altar.
Defences of Stalinism by Sartre diminished the tradition's credibility. And the 70s
debates on structuralism saw massed ranks of intellectu
als disappearing into an empyrean of the inane. Fashion-fixated, the French
intellectual has become an object of fun.
Both the French and the English share a talent for nostalgia: for the soft-tinted lens
which recreates la vie en rose. Brassai's photographs of the 30s fix the city in the
popular mind, with gauloises protruding aggressiv
ely from the lower lip. The Hungarian immigrant certainly romanticised what he
recorded on the Paris streets. But he was also recording a certain kind of
working-class Paris which was already in decline. Haussmann's boule
vards of the 1860s had straightened the old streets which had been a natural home for
protest and intrigue. The architecture had made Paris radical - and the 1848
revolution possible. What followed was the geometry of ord
er: the straight line of fire which killed the demonstrator.
Paris today is a centre of scrubbed and clean architecture - but a place devoid of
real street life. To walk there by day is to promenade in a beautiful museum. And to
walk at night is to be surrounded by ghosts in a terr
ible silence. Only in literary pages do the resilient types of Les Mis�rables live.
The vitality of the petits gens, of the artisans and the workers, has long since
drained away.
The French started to worry that there weren't enough of them - of any class or kind -
in the second half of the 19th century. From being Europe's most populous country in
the 18th century, the statistics plummeted, and h
ave never recovered. Which is why rural France, the idyll of Peter Mayle, survives to
enchant the visiting English. But the dream is really a death. Central Paris - the
seat of urbanity as well as of of radical politics -
tells a similar story. In 1901 there were almost 3m Parisians living in the centre
and a million in the outlying banlieue . By the second world war the two populations
were about equal. And since then the trend has been
a constant drain away from the centre.
"Paris doit �pouser sa si�cle" [Paris should marry its age], Pompidou used to say in
his pompous way. But that marriage has meant the abuse of one partner, the city
herself, by the age of technocracy and its associated ar
chitecture. The most obvious abuse was the destruction of Les Halles and the end of
the Marais as a place of social mixture. Paris's most important tradition now is one
of sanitised, unthreatening order. It has become Sca
ndinavian. And the radicalism of the old streets and faubourgs rings only a hollow
memory as the Burberries with their pampered dogs trip down the trottoir to pick up a
Paris Match. Paris is now France's most conservative
city - one only recently released from tutelage to a decadent Gaullism by the
election of a socialist mayor.
It's a neat revenge that the Gaullist class, which killed the city's independent life,
now finds itself threatened by a wider and stronger force, one even more careless in
the abuse of its hegemonic power. France's new na
tional role is a cross-party consensus. For it has decided that it will be the only
country ready to stand up to that other product of the late 18th century's democratic
revolution. The new grande peur, more rational than
the old, centres on America's current dominance.
French aggression, French fear and French belief in a unique mission to civilise have
come together to create a potent force. For all their proclaimed rationality, this is
a people who reserve their highest compliment for
the person who is d�brouillard - one who shows a combination of
resourcefulness and style in a tricky situation: one in which there's
no fixed plan for survival. Paris may be dead but the endless
American century needs France.
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Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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