What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa L. Rossi

  His resignation spared de Gaulle one heartbreak: after the war, France lost most of her colonies, including Morocco, Tunisia, and Guinea. However, the French fought to regain their hold in Indochina (today’s Vietnam), taken by Japan during the war. Despite superior equipment and financing from the U.S. (which did not want to see Indochina under Communist rule), 58,000 Frenchmen died in the eight-year war (1946–1954). After the Viet Minh thrashed French fighters at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French granted independence and hurried home.

  The military was soon deployed again—this time to Algeria, Africa’s second largest country, a substantial provider of France’s food and a symbol of French colonial greatness. Her ego battered by pathetic battle performance in World War II and Indochina, France wouldn’t let go of this last vestige of her superiority without a fight. And a fight she got—one that dragged out for seven ugly years.

  ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

  Minutes after midnight on November 1, 1954, loud explosions shattered the calm of the Algerian night, as dozens of bombs ripped apart police stations, knocked out communication towers and electrical utilities, and blew up French stores and businesses. Fires soon blazed across the land, and a message crackled over the radio calling for independence from the French and “the restoration of the Algerian state… within the framework of the principles of Islam.” French interior minister François Mitterrand responded from Paris the next day: “The only possible negotiation is war.” And so began one of the most savage episodes in postwar history. Initiated by the militant group FLN—many members were Algerian officers in the French army—the calls for independence were not at first supported by most Algerians, even though many had lost their land, were living in poverty, and were working as slaves. But as French forces rounded up innocent civilians from villages, and as stories began to circulate about torture—the electrodes attached to testicles and eyes, the suffocations and the drownings—many Algerians did indeed want to eject the French. Most pied-noir farmers—French, Spanish, and Italians who worked on French farms—opposed independence. Whenever Algerians raided a pied-noir village or left another pied-noir colon hanging in the street with the trademark “Kabyle smile”—a slit throat—vigilantes launched another ratonnade (rat hunt) and massacred Algerians, sometimes a thousand a night. By 1955, some 500,000 French troops were erecting electric fences along borders with Tunisia and Morocco, slaughtering villagers believed to hide rebels, and pushing mountain farmers into concentration camps; by 1957, 2 million Algerians lived in squalid camps, where many starved to death. Algerian guerrillas were no better. They raided colonial villages, exploded bombs in restaurants, and blew up buses—averaging thirty attacks every day. FLN took their fight to France, to battle another Algerian independence group; in France, 5,000 died in bombings and machine-gun attacks during the vicious Café Wars.

  In 1958, the French armed forces in Algeria took over government buildings, threatening a full-fledged coup d’état unless the government brought General Charles de Gaulle in as leader of France. Believing the powerful general could resolve the Algerian conflict, they also thought he would back them in keeping Algeria a French colony.21 They were wrong.

  INTELLECTUAL EXERCISES

  Algeria’s right to independence was an issue heatedly debated by writer-philosophers Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, the era’s intellectual heavyweights and fixtures at Café de Flore. Camus, author of The Stranger, and 1957 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, grew up in Algeria. During the war, he tried to negotiate peace between the two factions, but had mixed feelings about cutting Algeria entirely free. Jean-Paul Sartre, author of the existentialist masterpiece Nausea (and who declined the Nobel Prize in 1964), and Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (the bible of feminism), supported Algerian independence, greatly swaying French left-wing public opinion. Algeria was only one issue in the writers’ furious arguments: Camus and Sartre dramatically ended their friendship (and nearly came to blows) over the Soviets’ post–World War II aggressions, which Sartre and de Beauvoir supported. Camus pointed out Stalin was slaughtering millions; Sartre and de Beauvoir dismissed it as necessary for Communism to take hold.

  Summoned by the president, de Gaulle was appointed prime minister in 1958. Elected president that November, he wrote a new constitution, creating a top-heavy power pyramid with a greatly bolstered presidency and weakened parliament, and called for a new republic—the Fifth. He strengthened France’s role in the European Economic Community (precursor to the EU), obtaining huge agricultural subsidies for France (currently $12 billion annually),22 and he nationalized French industry and utilities, creating powerful oil giant Elf (and authorizing a multimillion-dollar “black box” for bribes). He established an elite college to educate future politicians, which formed the backbone of the French political elite. Internationally, he forged a new identity for France, as a country that would not bow down to any other, be it the U.S., Britain, or Soviet Union—and he controversially made France a nuclear power, unleashing the “Force de Frappe” as a show of her independent strength. Previous slights from Churchill and Roosevelt weren’t forgotten: de Gaulle yanked France’s gold out of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and converted France’s dollar holdings to gold, effectively forcing the U.S. to later drop the gold standard for backing the dollar. He kicked NATO out of France, and twice vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community.

  But for many Frenchmen, de Gaulle is remembered most for what he did in Algeria: he gave it away.

  De Gaulle granted independence to Algeria in July 1962. France erupted in riots. In between dodging assassination attempts, he fought to keep France from breaking into civil war. For his bravery in setting Algeria free, Time hailed him as the 1958 Man of the Year.

  NUCLEAR MATTERS

  In February 1960, France announced she was a nuclear power—the world’s third—backing up the statement by testing a nuclear bomb in Algeria. The international community, particularly Japan and the U.S., was outraged. A nuclear test ban was in effect, and the United States had discouraged France from developing nuclear capabilities. France also heavily developed nuclear energy, and now has fifty-nine reactors—second only to the U.S.—which produce 78 percent of French electricity. In 1985, she opened the much-touted Superphénix, the world’s largest fast breeder reactor; plagued by leaks and technical problems, it’s now the world’s largest decommissioned breeder reactor. Unlike most Europeans, the French are huge fans of nuclear energy, and remain relatively unconcerned about any hazards posed by nuclear plants.

  After surviving numerous assassination attempts, de Gaulle was at least symbolically taken down by rowdy youth. Millions of students and workers protested overcrowded colleges and low minimum wages in the riots of 1968, which closed the country down for three days. De Gaulle looked like a wimp when he fled Paris, while Prime Minister Georges Pompidou stayed on and toughed it out. De Gaulle negotiated the end of the protest, but never fully regained his confidence or clout. The following year, when a referendum he initiated about senate and regional reforms failed, the man who had made France an international heavyweight dejectedly resigned—not knowing that in 2005, the French would vote de Gaulle the greatest French person in history.

  “De Gaulle was a magician. He made us believe we were great again.”

  —Sorbonne history professor André Kaspi23

  Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle; his only lasting contribution was the Pompidou Center—an impressive cultural hub boasting a modern art museum and library—encased in a postmodern architectural monstrosity. But the person who most shaped contemporary France was François Mitterrand, who became president in 1981.

  FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND (1916–1996)

  With his extramarital affairs, political changes of heart, and hidden health problems, Mitterrand led a double life, and there are two takes on his two-term presidency as well. On the one hand, Mitterrand—who’d switched from right wing to left in the 1970s—brough
t fresh hope to France. The first Socialist president since before the war, Mitterrand abolished the death penalty, nationalized ailing businesses, and revved up the economy with his Grands Projets (Great Projects), a $3 billion-plus program that put tens of thousands to work building a new library, opera house, and more, in the city’s most dramatic face-lift since the days of Baron Haussmann. Among the standouts: I. M. Pei’s pyramid blocking the front of the Louvre. On the downside, Mitterrand’s government was involved in shady deals in Africa, many involving national oil company Elf, accused of bribery and arms running. During his reign, France was slapped with two of its biggest scandals ever. In 1985, the Rainbow Warrior—flagship of Greenpeace—sank off the coast of New Zealand, after two bombs exploded. The French government admitted it was behind the bombing. That same year, thousands in France were exposed to HIV through tainted blood supplies; the French government had opted not to use an American test for the virus, waiting for a French lab to develop one. While his presidency started out as gang-busters, Mitterrand slipped in his final years, probably because he was dying of prostate cancer—another issue kept from the public. After fourteen years in the power spot—making him France’s longest-lasting twentieth-century leader—Mitterrand was succeeded by Jacques Chirac. He died six months after he stepped down from the presidency.

  France’s best-known icons these days aren’t intellectual heavyweights who sniff at Nobel Prizes, but graceful athletes who butt heads on the field and DJs who spin lounge music and peddle $40 CDs. The artiste lost in swirls of Gauloise smoke at the sidewalk café gazes out not just at the light dancing upon elegant Parisian domes, but at the cold, glassy angles of La Défense looming over the city, and that milky coffee in a bowl now competes with Starbucks’ paper-cup café au lait to go. And to keep France French and not overly distracted by Hollywood, these days the French ensure that their films and songs are heard across the country through “the cultural exception”: a high percentage of movies shown and music broadcast must be “made in France.”

  This isn’t France’s finest hour, and in a recent flurry of books intellectuals now lament that she is falling. But the economy is still soaring, tourists are still flapping in, and, internationally, France hasn’t been more prominent since the days of de Gaulle. The hand-wringing and whining is just part of a national process of transformation, pointing out the need to address problems long shoved to the suburbs. Like Napoleon himself, fetching France never appears content with what she is or possesses—she is forever pulled in a struggle between joie de vivre and ennui, self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. But that chronic discontent is what powers France, unleashing a flood of novel ideas through the centuries. How she plans to address burning issues remains to be seen, but don’t rule out the old standby wheeled out whenever the country undergoes major change. Perhaps it’s time to call a new French republic—the Sixth.

  Hot Spots

  Paris: With her Arc de Triomphe, la Tour Eiffel, and ubiquitous wicker-chaired, marble-tabled sidewalk cafés, the world’s most visited city still somehow lives up to the hype. Whether you’re winding up the twisting rues of Montmartre, past street artists capturing Sacré Coeur’s dome in watercolor, or washing down garlicky escargot with crisp sauvignon in a zinc-wrapped bistro; whether peeling hard-boiled eggs at a smoky bar where Serge Gainsbourg rasps from the jukebox, or gazing into a cloudy pastis in an ivy-shrouded garden; whether inching toward Mona Lisa at the Louvre, or tossing back vodka at new ice bar Kube, the city along the Seine marries history with style, and still intoxicates, despite her distant moodiness. Days filled with perfume sniffing, museum hopping, and boutique shopping slip into nights of boozy laughter with jazz musicians in basement discos, and easily roll into mornings over café au laits and golden croissants that never taste better than they do here. Still trendy—all the more with her new floating bars, designer hotels, and beachfront bars on the Seine—Paris frustrates too. Her artistic and intellectual past was so rich that one fears that, here or elsewhere, it may never be repeated—although sometimes, like a ghost, you can glimpse it.

  Paris: A showy marriage of old and new, as seen at the Louvre

  Eiffel Tower: Built to showcase modern engineering marvels, the Eiffel Tower was to be a temporary display in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Initially hated by the city’s artistic community—300 French VIPs signed a petition against it in 1887—it was scheduled to come down around 1914. It instead served as a World War I radio tower, intercepting enemy messages. The 984-foot-tall Eiffel Tower is now the symbol of Paris, and has been a target in assorted planned terrorist attacks. The tower caught fire in 2003, and nearly 400 have taken suicidal plunges from there. One attempt was foiled when a woman landed on top of a car; legend has it that she married the car’s owner.24

  Père Lachaise Cemetery: Almost everybody who was anybody in Paris lies here: Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, Molière, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Bizet, Georges Seurat, Oscar Wilde, and Chopin (minus his heart) are a few of the 100,000 dead whose lives are immortalized with elaborate vaults, sculptures, and tombs. The grave of Jim Morrison, whose fire flickered out in 1971 in Paris, is a huge draw. Multitudes of Doors fans heap love letters, albums, and booze bottles upon his tomb, trampling and trashing the plots of dead neighbors en route. After complaints from the neighbors’ kin, cemetery officials considered moving Jim elsewhere when his thirty-year lease ran out, but opted to let sleeping Doors lie.

  Corsica: The lovely island of lavender and wind-battered cliffs is Napoleon’s birthplace and France’s hottest spot of dissent. Separatists are only one-fifth of the islanders, but they’re furious about land development, taxes, and France’s mismanagement, and claim to have been behind three thousand bombings in the past three decades.

  Eurosatory: Every spring, Paris puts on the world’s biggest international exhibition of land armaments, showcasing the latest and greatest ways for humans to kill and mutilate each other. Well attended, of course.

  COGEMA La Hague: Perched atop the cliffs of Normandy, this ticking time bomb reprocesses nuclear waste, producing weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, and plenty of “enriched” effluent that radioactivates the English Channel. Since 2001, an antiaircraft missile system protects this national hazard. The French are now selling the U.S. this iffy technology.

  Scientists report that children who go to the beach near COGEMA even twice a month are three times more likely to develop leukemia.25

  Marseille: Some adore this predominantly Arab port city for open-air markets, sea urchins, bouillabaisse, and exotic flair; others find it seedy. The wealthy pull up in yachts, and smugglers pull in with drugs in this underworld haven.

  Grasse: Since the sixteenth century, this perfume capital outside Cannes has been pressing essential oils from jasmine, violets, roses, cedar, and spices. The scent of flowers from the farms—Chanel owns one—wafts in the air, making it hard to imagine this was once a stinking town of leather tanneries. When people took to scenting leather gloves during Louis XVI’s reign, the French perfume industry was born.

  Alsace-Lorraine: Snuggling up against Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Germany, this northeastern region is actually two: Alsace spreads along the River Rhine, and Lorraine tumbles down from mountains to meet her. Important for industry, resources, and trade links to the Rhine, the region is adored for natural beauty that is likened to a continuous garden. When the Germans ran off with her in 1871 (and again during World Wars I and II), it was a French national tragedy. The French got her back after a few more rounds of tug-of-war, but German speakers still dominate Alsace; French speakers are the majority in Lorraine.

  Provence: Overhyped by writer Peter Mayle and his Provence series, the southern region of olive groves and tiny towns does have charms: Roman ruins, open-air markets, vineyards, charming villages, and delightful restaurants are a few. Van Gogh went loopy here and cut off his ear; he really would have gone nuts if he could see how prices for houses have shot through the roof since Mayle began
cooing.

  Chunnel (aka le tunnel sous la Manche): A dream since 1802, the thirty-mile Chunnel connecting Folkestone, England, to Calais, France, finally opened in May 1994. The rail tunnel that shoots under the English Channel cost $21 billion and took three years to dig.

  Brittany (Breizh): Settled by Welsh and Irish missionaries, this region of medieval stone villages and renaissance châteaux rises from the boulder-strewn northwest coast and may be the only place you can find Frenchmen playing bagpipes. Legends are as thick as fog; sprites and gnomes frolic amid the heather, fairies live in caves, and mermaids beguile from the shores, they say.

  Bureaucrat school: It’s tough to get into l’École Nationale d’Administration, where students learn how to be bureaucrats, but those who get through are virtually guaranteed top positions in government.

  Hotshots

  Jacques Chirac: President, 1995–present, Union for a Popular Majority. So what if he’s allegedly corrupt, wears a hearing aid, and can’t seem to get through EU summits without knocking back a bottle of wine? The man who started out his presidency by controversially testing nuclear bombs in French Polynesia will go down in history for being right about Iraq.

  Nicolas Sarkozy: Minister of the Interior, head of Union for a Popular Majority, former finance minister, former friend of Chirac. Political mover Sarkozy, who loves the media and vice versa, steals the show. He’s gunning for the presidential chair, and to many French, the second-generation Hungarian Frenchman law-and-order enthusiast smells sweet in a system that stinks more by the day. Head of the party that Chirac created, the conservative who dated Chirac’s daughter is no longer chummy with the Chiracs; once Jacques’s protégé, Sarkozy didn’t back him in the 1995 elections. Chirac’s daughter, whom he dumped, belittles Sarkozy as being too short to lead France—apparently forgetting about Napoleon.