The canteen at work today had a French menu. The posters proclaimed: ‘French Independence Day, Thursday 15th July’. If I were French, I’d have been annoyed. As it was I was irritated by the canteen manager’s ignorance. Actually it’s something of an achievement to get both the name and the date of the festival wrong.
It provoked me to get to work on something I’ve wanted to do for a while, namely come up with a few things I like about France. Here goes.
Montaigne’s Essays. I first discovered these about fourteen years ago, by means of an article in the Times if I remember rightly. I went through a phase of reading them all over and over again: nowadays I dip in maybe only once a year, but his sheer style and strength and honesty and emotional range have always been, and are, an inspiration and a standard to measure myself by. Just opening my copy at random, here he is: “Natures that are bloodthirsty towards animals show a native propensity towards cruelty.” Montaigne’s dislike for cruelty was highly developed for his time (the late sixteenth century): “I live in an epoch when, owing to the licence of our civil wars, we abound in incredible examples of this vice… But this has by no means reconciled me to it. I could hardly persuade myself, before I had actual evidence, that there exist any souls so unnatural as to commit murder for the mere pleasure of doing so”.
Or how about (random again): “I hate any kind of tyranny, whether of wordsor deeds.” This in the course of an essay about conversation.
Or: “Is there not a touch of philosophy in the case of a certain gentleman once known to many? He married when well on in years, after spending his youth in riotous company; and he was a great talker and wag. Remembering how often the subject of cuckoldry had given him occasion to gossip and mock at others, he decided to protect himself… he chose a woman from a place where a man may have what he wants for money, and made a match of it with her. ‘Good morning, harlot.’ ‘Good morning, cuckold.’ And there was nothing that he discussed more freely and openly… than this arrangement of his, by which he stopped the secret prattling of mockers”.
I’ve never found time to read them in the original. He was a man without equal: he invented the essay form and really it’s hard to think of anyone who has ever used it better.
The opening section of the finale from the Organ Symphony by Saint-Saens, arguably the most thrilling music ever written for the organ. Shame he couldn’t keep it up for the rest of the movement.
The smell of the air and earth in the Jura hills just after a thunderstorm.
The good sense of the philosopher Alain, who noted that in some ages one could not expect progress: it was enough to not go backwards. He served four years in the trenches too, despite being the best part of fourty.
The courage of the French soldiers at the battle of Verdun in 1916, or Bir Hakeim, in 1942.
The fascination of reading a familiar passage in French and understanding it – it’s as though one can feel the gates of one’s comprehension opening just a bit wider. Another random example: “Et le mort sortit, les pieds et les mains lies de bandes, et le visage enveloppe d’un linge. Jesus leur dit: deliez-le, et laissez-le aller.”
Bernard Kouchner, whose organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres has done more good than can be counted.
Monet’s paintings: like this one or this one.
Zinedine Zidane. You only have to compare him to Beckham to see an explanation for the respective performances of the two national football teams in the last decade. Which of those two would you rather have on your side when the going got tough?
Renoir’s paintings: like this one.
Gothic cathedral architecture, arguably the greatest gift of France to the world during the late Middle Ages.
All of which is quite true, and the list could easily be much longer. But it resembles - rather too close for comfort – one of those lists drawn up by anti-American pundits who want to pretend that they’re not really anti-American. (Matthew Engel did one in the Guardian a year or two ago, for instance.) Usually such lists are highly selective and patronising, and more likely to offend than reconcile. So let’s try harder.
Among us baby-killers, Jacques Chirac plays an emotionally similar role to that played by Dubya for the anti-war pundits. He is the repository of all wickedness, the one who is blamed for everything, the one who is regarded with especial hostility because he is the leader of a country one normally thinks of as an ally. (Putin doesn’t get nearly so much stick, since no-one thinks of Russia as a western democracy or a real friend.) And it is true that the charge list against Chirac is long: proliferating nuclear technology (to Iraq, in the 1970s), rampant corruption, resuming nuclear tests in the Pacific (in 1995 – something that inspired some idealistic types to boycott French goods at the time), defending the Common Agricultural Policy, all before he started playing such a negative role re Iraq.
Defence moves a plea in mitigation. Selling nuclear technology to Iraq in the 1970s could be defended in several ways: that was before Saddam had taken full control; Iraq was no worse than the average Arab dictatorship at the time; it was a way of preventing Iraq from falling too far into the Soviet orbit.
Then there’s corruption. Serious, but it isn’t as serious as it would be here: Chirac is probably no dirtier than Mitterrand (not that that’s setting the bar very high).
In other ways Chirac isn’t doing anything more than continuing well-established French policies (e.g. scattering Mirages and Exocets like confetti around the world to any junta with spare cash), widely shared by the elite, the enarques, who staff the French government. He probably couldn’t change them if he tried.
And to hold Chirac responsible for all the many blots on the French body politic simply isn’t fair. Take the issue of anti-semitism. It wasn’t Chirac’s idea to recruit hundreds of thousands of poor North Africans as cheap labour, build gigantic sink estates to dump them in, and then fill their heads with vicious propaganda. Neither does Chirac have the power to stop the French media publishing tendentious articles about the Middle East.
This isn’t an easy case to make. But it’s good discipline. I for one would take the anti-war pundits more seriously if they showed some sense that Bush and Blair are basically reasonable men, with decent instincts, who are trying to cope with hideous problems. I can’t think of many who have done anything of the kind: Ian Buruma is about the only one. Jacques Chirac is not someone I would vote for (except to keep Le Pen out of the Elysee Palace), but it is too easy to exaggerate his faults.
Is it going too far to think that he’s a symptom of historical sufferings? I mean that the French body politic has been suffering a malaise for a long time, and when France found itself in the position of having to choose between a crook and a fascist (in the 2002 presidential elections) that may have been a symptom of a country which has made too long a sacrifice, and made a stone of its heart. I’m thinking about the terrible experience France went through between 1870 and 1962: shattering defeat, followed by murderous civil strife (i.e. the Commune), the establishment of a Republic that no-one respected, a victory in 1914-18 bought at extreme price (two million dead), another shattering defeat, then yet more defeats in Indochina and Algeria.
For any patriot (and the French are no less patriotic than anyone else) French history in that ninety-year period has few redeeming features. One doesn’t recover from such sufferings and disasters quickly, if at all. It may be that France suffered such repeated blows to her national confidence that mental escape was the only option – escape into the illusions of communism and racism and postmodernism.
This is pure speculation, not an argument based on evidence. I think it’s plausible, and if it’s true what France may need is a Thatcher figure – someone who does a lot of harm and a lot of good but who above all is recognisably a leader. France has seen such people before: Henry IV and De Gaulle are the most hopeful figures one might mention. Napoleon and General Boulanger were less auspicious examples of the same type. Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy will turn out to be the one. We shouldn’t expect too much. If he becomes President he won’t instantly smash the power of the unions who represent featherbedded public-sector employees and join in with a policy of vigorous democracy promotion in Africa and the Middle East: things don’t happen that way. He may even pocket a few bribes. But he may make some crucial re-orientations in policy.
We are talking about a country that was a great nation, maybe still is: certainly it can be in the future. Vive la France.