Francofile

France: The Neo-cons' Nightmare

There are a lot of people in the US who want us to believe that France is an economic backwater and generally a bad place to live.  Why is it so important to them that we believe this?  Paul Krugman, who wrote an editorial about the quality of life in France in the New York Times on Friday, July 29th, helps to answer the question.  He compares the standard of living in France and the US, finding that the determination depends very much on one's definition of "quality of life." He writes:

"The point is that to the extent that the French have less income than we do, it's mainly a matter of choice. And to see the consequences of that choice, let's ask how the situation of a typical middle-class family in France compares with that of its American counterpart. The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out. But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn't have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four. So which society has made the better choice?"

(The rest of the article can be accessed at:  http://www.nytimes.com  )

The answer to his question, according to many of a certain political persuasion in the US, is that there can be no comparing the two. The US blew past the French several decades ago and left them in the dust. But the reason conservatives don't want anyone to even contemplate such a comparison is abject fear.  As Krugman points out, many of the things that the neo-cons in the US say could never work are working very well in France. France is the extreme right's worst nightmare.  France's success makes it a target of those idealogues who do not want US voters to know that higher taxes and greater protections for workers and citizens can contribute to a society that is modern, humane, and still prosperous. In case anyone should notice that things are not really so bad in France, spokespersons for the right wing often throw in an extra dose of French-bashing, usually related to French cowardice, French rudeness, lack of personal hygiene, or all of the above--just for good measure.

Krugman's knock-out punch, however, relates to the family values to which the right pays lip service.  Policies and customs in France conspire to set boundaries between one's work life and one's personal life. Work is considered important, but not all-consuming.  Krugman exposes the hypocrisy of the "family values" crowd that does not tend to support policies that would actually allow family life to flourish, especially among the working poor. Krugman concludes: "American conservatives despise European welfare states like France. Yet many of them stress the importance of "family values." And whatever else you may say about French economic policies, they seem extremely supportive of the family as an institution."  But don't expect conservatives to point to France as a model in terms of support for family life.  If American voters were aware in greater numbers that there were workable alternatives to the conservatives' version of so-called "family values" (i.e. no gay mariage, no right to privacy concerning abortion, little support for family planning, etc. ) their ideology would be exposed as the fraud that it is. 

Those Romantic French

One of the most persistent clichés about the French is that they are exquisitely refined and passionate in the areas of courtship, love and romance.  Antoine, who at age 24 came to the US for a year to teach French to undergraduate college students, told me that several young women were coyly probing his romantic life.  He felt like a disappointment because he didn't live up to their fantasy image of the smolderingly passionate French lover.  Students study abroad in France, expecting to be swept into a dizzying love affair--and sometimes it does happen. 

Conversely, Hélene, an attractive French woman, married, fiftyish, and living in the US, confided that one thing she missed most about France was harmless flirtation in the workplace.  Even though she was not interested in an actual romantic liaison, being flirted with made her feel more feminine and more alive.  The French have fewer complexes about flirting than their US counterparts.

Regarding mariage and romance, it seems that the serial monogamy model has not caught on in France as it has in the US.  I have no statistics, but if French movies are an accurate reflection, extramarital affairs are more often the French antidote to the monotony of mariage.  When someone married has a mistress or a lover in France, it is often referred to openly in matter-of-fact tones.  Mariage seems to represent a legal bond that is not dissolved easily, even in the case of infidelity.  There are many ways of being a couple.  Françoise, a young English teacher in a Parisian suburb explained to me that she and the man she lives with are not married, but "pacsé," which is an alternative form of vow.  Many couples opt to live together, either as a trial mariage, or a long-term arrangement. 

Although the French language itself seems made for seduction, the French are often ambivalent about love. Most major authors have written about it and a few themes emerge.  With the 19th-century post-Romantic novelist Flaubert, love is portrayed, like in the old blues song, as a game you just can't win.  He writes of Felicité in Un Coeur simple: Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d'amour.  (Like everyone else, she had had her love affair.)  Her fiancé ended the love story abruptly and brutishly and it became a mere footnote in her life.  Flaubert's best-known heroine, Emma Bovary, is destroyed by her search for romance. 

In Voltaire's 18th-century portrayal of love, Candide searches the globe for his lovely Cunégonde, sacrificing and even killing in order to be reunited with his lost love.  When at last they are reunited, she has become horrid and shrewish.  They nonetheless cultivate their garden together.  Candide's happiness is ultimately found in lowered expectations about romantic love combined with Cunégonde's skills as a baker. 

Going back to the 17th century, François de la Rochefoucauld, a Parisian moralist and salon habitué, commented on a range of human experience, including love and passion.  His maxims also seem to portray love as a game you just can't win, but one that is worth playing nonetheless.  Here are a few examples:

• "Dans l'amitié comme dans l'amour on est souvent plus heureux par les choses qu'on ignore que par celles que l'on sait."

In friendship as in love, one is often happier because of what one is ignorant of rather than because of what one knows.

• "Dans les premières passions les femmes aiment l'amant, et dans les autres elles aiment l'amour."

In the first throes of passion women love the lover; afterwards, they love love.

• "En amour, celui qui est guéri le premier est toujours le mieux guéri."

In love, the first healed is the best healed.

• "Il en est du véritable amour comme de l'apparition des esprits; tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu."

        True love is like ghosts: everyone talks of it but few have seen one.

The French seem to have a tradition of giving the yellow light to romantic love.  It is part of the human experience, but one that should be approached with respect, and without illusions.

Decrypting French Culture

I just finished a book that added to my knowledge of an area I thought I didn't have much left to learn about.  Wrong!  Two Canadian journalists, one anglophone and one francophone, spent 2 1/2 years in France and produced an incisive and informative book called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong:  Why We Love France, But Not the French.*  Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau set out initially to determine why the French are resistant to globalization, but over time the question was reframed.  The book is a broader exploration of France and French thinking.  It focuses on present-day France, but includes a wealth of insights on how the past informs contemporary culture.   

Barlow and Nadeau make the case that we tend to judge the French according to our own models.  They explain Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of France in this way:

The typical traveler to Japan, China, or Africa is more open-minded than the typical traveler to France.  The fascinating rites of the Chinese, Japanese, or Zulus may cause travelers considerable discomfort and inconvenience, but travelers in these countries tend to accept these obstacles stoically, reasoning (rightly) that things are just done differently in foreign cultures. For some reason, when it comes to the French, North Americans drop this reflex.  ( . . . ) When North Americans, or more broadly, "Anglo-Saxons" are faced with France's peculiar way of doing things, they do not reason that they are dealing with an ancient people who have their own way of doing things.  Actually, they accuse the French of being inefficient, overly bureaucratic, unhygenic, and stuck in their ways.  And they take it personally.

We know that France has only existed as a country in the modern sense for a few hundred years.  Before the the rise of the monarchy, it was a patchwork of barbarian tribes.  However, as Barlow and Nadeau point out, the ancestors of the French go back to the Cro Magnon man of the Paleolithic age.  Although France is a melting pot and has gone through plenty of upheaval, the French people never arrived in the midst of a primitive culture, wiped the slate clean, and started over as we did in America.  This framework of a modern country influenced by a past stretching back twenty thousand years provides the backdrop for their ethnological analysis of the French relationship to food, the land, war, education, governance, economics, law, religion, language, Europe, and other topics.  The study can be read cover-to-cover, or by cherry-picking chapters.  These Montreal-based journalists are now working on their next book--The Story of French.

*I initially balked at reading this book because of the title, but learned from one of the co-authors that the second part of the title had been imposed by the publisher.  It does not accurately reflect the content of the book.  The authors clearly grew to love both France and its inhabitants while working on the project.

"Faux" News

My faithful readers know that one of the purposes of this blog is to keep tabs on France-bashing in its subtle and not-so-subtle forms. The last post was a mild critique of a probably well-meaning British journalist who I felt had glossed over some of the nuances of French culture in a story about the mood in France during this year’s Tour de France.

This post is in response to an entirely different beast--a mean-spirited ("bigoted" is also an applicable word) Fox News broadcast that came out as London was chosen over Paris for the 2012 Olympics. John Gibson, a commentator with oddly yellow hair and a swooping comb-over, criticized the committee for not picking Paris. His rationale?

"It would have been a three-week period where we wouldn't have had to worry about terrorism. First, the French think they are so good at dealing with the Arab world that they would have gone out and paid every terrorist off. And things would have been calm. Or another way to look at it is the French are already up to their eyeballs in terrorists. The French hide them in miserable slums, out of sight of the rich people in Paris. So it would have been a treat, actually, to watch the French dealing with the problem of their own homegrown Islamist terrorists living in France already." (Full transcript available on Miquelon.org site.)

Under the brittle surface of this hateful screed, there is emptiness. The man has nothing to say. The diatribe is devoid of facts, humor, focus, or insight. It consists of pure invective. It equates French Muslims with terrorists and French non-Muslims with terrorist appeasers. He justifies his France-bashing by implying that France is a terrorism-sponsoring state. His assertions are shoddily cobbled together. The tirade culminates in the callous statement "They'd blow up Paris, and who cares?"

For anyone who thought that virulent French-bashing in the mass media had subsided, be aware that it is still stepping lively at "Faux" News.

The Sky Is Falling–Or Is It?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British journalist, is following the progress of this summer’s Tour de France. On July 3 the Boston Globe published his article Liberté, Fraternité, Morosité. He writes: If you wander around France this summer, you find a country obsessed with its own woes, its future, and its very identity. Not long ago, France had a hang-up about America. Now, France has a hang-up about France. He goes on to correlate the lack of a great French cycling champion since Bernard Hinault to a general descent of the French people into a paralyzing "morosité." He continues: No recent event has made the morosité clearer than the referendum held on the last Sunday of May to approve or reject the wonderfully grandiloquent European Constitution. Rejected it was, with a non so loud, and on such a large turn-out, as to call into question the whole political culture and stability of the country. (my emphasis)  To Wheatcroft’s credit , he has actually spent time in France, unlike many commentators and pseudo-journalists who write of France's impending national decline. However, with the hyperbolic conclusion he draws, one has to wonder how well he really understands French culture. Would the French love to see the maillot jaune worn by a Frenchman? Of course. Are they depressed because the current star of the cycling universe is American? Not at all. Lance Armstrong may well be one of the greatest athletes of all time, and French people I speak with think he is an inspirational figure who is good for the sport. What is good for cycling is also good for France.  They note with some pride that Armstrong has chosen to do a good deal of his training in their country. Anglophones are sometimes stung by French criticism of their cultures. Jacques Chirac, the currently rather unpopular French president, recently said that today's British economic success is not based on a model that the French should envy. What Anglophones should realize is that the French do not reserve their criticism for Anglo-Saxon cultures. Far from being self-aggrandizing, the French tend to regularly turn their "esprit critique" against themselves. This must be what Wheatcroft interprets as their "morosité."  Remember how Voltaire ridiculed optimism in his novella Candide in the 18th century?  It has never been rehabilitated.  It is generally not in the French make-up to be particularly optimistic.  France's highly-educated population is constantly in the throes of a dilemma outlined by the essayist Montaigne. In the tradition of the Classical philosophers, he wrote about the need for balance between the active life and the contemplative life. Montaigne himself was engaged in public life in addition to being a writer, so he wrote from first-hand experience. Whereas American culture has been unapologetic about promoting the active life while treating intellectual endeavor with suspicion, France has always valued reflection and inquiry, sometimes at the expense of action. Each culture could learn something from the other. Now back to Wheatcroft’s thesis that France is spiraling uncontrollably into an abyss of demoralization.  Geoffrey, don't you worry.  France will continue to evolve and adapt, by measured steps, with or without a Tour de France champ.  The French people have faced much worse adversity than they are currently facing.  News stories about France that have a negative slant have become a staple for many US and British journalists and commentators of late. As an American of British ancestry who has spent a few years in France, I wonder why some feel that this makes for better reading than a piece that portrays France in its wonderful complexity and without the selective filter of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism.  Deep down, are we struggling with a fear that maybe we have conceded a wee bit too much of our dignity?  Might there be a gnawing doubt underlying all this that maybe the French really do live better than we do, and that they have been right all along?

Under the Spell of Quebec

Spending a few days in the friendly province of Quebec makes me want to go back for more.  Having lived in the upper Midwest of the US and in France, Quebec feels to me like a synthesis of these two familiar places.  Downtown Trois-Rivieres looked like the main street of any North American town in its architecture, but that's where the similarity ends.  Most store fronts were sidewalk cafes and restaurants.  Their terraces were filled with people of all ages.   Instead of watching TV in their houses or apartments, the whole local population seemed to be dining, strolling, or sipping on this warm evening.   A visit to an ordinary chain supermarket revealed appealing displays of local products.   Intense cheeses like Le Grand Chouffe and Duo du Paradis come from the Quebecois countryside.  Although I have often seen a delectable Quebecois monastery cheese called Oka in cheese shops in the US, many of the local cheeses did not seem to be widely distributed abroad.  The cheeses were marketed paired with regional beers like Trois-Pistoles and La Fin du Monde (The End of the World).  The local strawberries were tastier than any I have had since childhood.   The store was modern, yet maintained a pleasant, local feel.  A visit to Archambault, a store specializing in books and music of Quebec provided an opportunity to stock up on old standards of the "chanson quebecois" and to see what is new on the lively French-Canadian music scene. Music is a cherished part of the cultural heritage of Quebec.  For every Celine Dion, there are dozens of talented singer-songwriters and groups who are revered by the French-speaking community in Canada.  Some of the songs deal with the theme of preserving the French language in North America.  They remind one of the sacrifices that French-speakers have made over the decades due to their love of the French language.  It was explained to me that in Trois-Rivieres, the factories had once been run by anglophones while francophones provided the labor.  That system has finally given way to a culture of largely bilingual people in which French speakers are as economically empowered as English speakers.  The Quebecois are a resourceful and creative people who have adapted their French heritage to the North American environment to create a vibrant and welcoming culture all their own.