French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  AYRAULT, JEAN-MARC

  Failed prime minister

  Failed, almost ridiculous prime minister, in office from May 2012 to March 2014 before being unceremoniously dumped by President François Hollande. A high-school German teacher and union activist, Ayrault rose through the ranks of the Socialist party to become mayor of Nantes and while holding onto that job, also a member of the National Assembly. With less charisma than the president himself, it can only be imagined that Hollande put Ayrault in place to make himself look more glamorous. It is not even clear that Ayrault can speak German. In Berlin on an official visit, he spoke only French and used an interpreter to talk to Chancellor Angela Merkel. After all economic conditions deteriorated under his government, Ayrault was replaced by the interior minister, Manuel Valls, who is a much tougher character but whose own sacrifice would seem inevitable as Hollande seeks to blame everyone else for the problems of the country.

  B

  BACCALAURÉAT

  Secondary-school diploma that counts for not much

  A feared school matriculation examination that prepares French students to take exams but not always much more. Françoise Sagan failed hers and went on to write the miserabilist bestseller Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness). Émile Zola also failed yet went on to become one of the greatest of all French writers. The bac is roundly criticised as a deeply compromised examination of doubtful utility in preparing French high school students for the opportunities and cruelties of modern economic life. The criticism is not new. More than 100 years ago, Flaubert advised, ‘thunder against it.’ Oddly, the bac is now admired outside France more than within it. Some British schools have begun experimenting with an internationalised version, as an alternative to A-levels. Harsh grading of mathematics and philosophy papers is blamed for provoking pointless neurosis among the most gifted students taking the most academic versions of the exam. But at the same time, the OECD says French students perform better at maths than students in South Korea, Britain, Germany or Finland.

  Although the image abroad of the bac is of a highly inflexible and unchanging system, characterised by rigour, the French have quietly abandoned the one-size-fits-all approach and almost everyone passes one version or another. There are now both traditional academic bacs and also applied bacs, one even allowing for a speciality in hotel management. For those aspiring to the grandes écoles there is a further gruelling course called prépa. Finally, after repeatedly skimming the cream in exam after exam, the French end up with an elite that is academically brilliant but otherwise often mediocre. French people who flee say that employers in France are obsessed with exam results whereas those in Anglo-Saxon countries are more interested in practical ability, personality, potential and commitment.

  French local newspapers publish special supplements every July with the names of all those who have passed the bac and the grades they have achieved. The son of one of my neighbours who received an exceptionally high score in maths got a telephone call from the Minister of Education, congratulating him.

  BANDES DESSINÉES

  Comic books, works of art

  Comic books, sometimes political, sometimes romantic, often pornographic and sometimes brilliantly political as in the work of Julien Berjeaut (Jul), the author and illustrator of Il faut tuer José Bové (José Bové Must Die), a satirical tour de force mocking the conceits of the environmentalist ultras. Astérix is among the best-known and best-selling series of bandes dessinées, alongside Tintin, which is of course Belgian.

  BANDITISME

  Organised crime

  The romantic image of French criminals - gangsters who knew to wear a good suit and hat - is the invention of the film industry and journalism. Bandits in France are actually pretty sordid. The celebrated Traction Avant gang (named after their preferred model of Citröen) after the Second World War was made up of former milice (right-wing militia), collaborators with the Nazis whom even the Nazis found uncontrollable. They changed sides at the end of the war to become résistants in time for the liberation, then evading any accountability for their wartime crimes, adapted to the changed environment and resumed their vicious criminality. Near my village there is a memorial to a gendarme gunned down by the gang in 1947 as he signalled them to stop for speeding. Jean-Luc Godard immortalised the notorious gangster Pierrot le Fou (real name Pierre Lautrel, ‘Peter the madman’), and also the actor who played him, Jean-Paul Belmondo, in an eponymous film (1965), although completely changing the story. Lautrel was found guilty of three murders and dozens of hold-ups and became one of the last Frenchmen to be guillotined, in 1956. The gangster genre has been a stylish mainstay of French film and television. Highlights include Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981), Mesrine (Jean-François Richet, 2008) and today’s long running series Engrenages.

  BANQUES

  Incendiary financial institutions

  French banks long ago gave up much financing of small business and much prefer playing in the global financial casinos. They sell consumer products such as car loans, insurance and mortgages, but only to those who are exceptionally well-qualified, meaning they must have permanent employment contracts and preferably be civil servants. French bank managers seem to have no discretion to finance business customers outside of narrow guidelines. An acquaintance with assets of millions of euros tells me his own application to borrow a few hundred thousand euros for a business project was met with a flat refusal as the limit would be no more than 50,000 euros. The manager had no discretion to consider the circumstances. Banks of course close at lunch time and often on Mondays.

  The French love to blame Wall Street and City of London banks for inflicting ultra-libéralisme (extreme capitalism) on the world, but for naked criminality it is hard to beat the performance of France’s own financial institutions. The most notorious episode in recent history was in May 1996 when the magnificent Paris headquarters of Crédit Lyonnais was destroyed by a fire that burned for 12 hours, usefully destroying virtually all of the bank’s archives and computer records. Crédit Lyonnais corruption was absolute: involved in money-laundering; served as a piggy bank for political allies of former President François Mitterrand; perpetrated a massive fraud involving the sale of Adidas to the colourful businessman Bernard Tapie. Tapie crops up elsewhere in this book for his involvement in football match fixing (see Foot, Christine Lagarde). Crédit Lyonnais also sponsored the Tour de France, appropriately since the cycle race was itself completely corrupt. Crédit Lyonnais has been reinvented as LCL and continues to operate as a retail bank in France.

  More recently, BNP Paribas was fined $9 billion by the US District Court in New York for laundering money on behalf of Sudan, Iran and Cuba. France’s third-largest bank, Société Générale, is notorious for having employed the trader Jérôme Kerviel who lost 5 billion euros in misjudged equity trades that apparently were unnoticed by any of his superiors. It is fair to say that nobody in the world outside Société Générale believes a word of the bank’s explanation for how this was allowed to happen but happily for my own modest deposit there, at least nobody has yet burned the bank to ground.

  BASTILLE, LA

  Birth of French republicanism, sort of

  According to French mythology, the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was the foundation event of the First Republic. This is not quite the complete picture. The Bastille was the citadel of monarchic power in Paris but its seizure did not mark the end of the monarchy. In any case, the only occupants liberated were a handful of old men, some of whom did not wish to leave. Informed of the event, Louis XVI asked the Duke of La Rochefoucauld: ‘C’est une révolte?’‘Non, sire, c’est une révolution.’ (‘Is it a revolt?’ ‘No sir, it’s a revolution.’) But the monarchy clung on for another three years until 1792 when citizens stormed the Tuileries, slaughtering 600 of the King’s Swiss guard, and the First Republic was proclaimed.

  BAYARD, PIERRE

  Subversive literary critic

  A genial, brilliant Parisian literary criti
c and psychoanalyst, and an indispensable guide to surviving in French intellectual circles. Oscar Wilde warned against reading books before reviewing them, but Bayard pushes further, saying you need not read them ever. His exegesis Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read), classifies all books as HB (heard-of book), SB (skimmed book), UB (unknown book) and FB (forgotten book). He goes on to note his opinions on some specific books. Ulysses he notes as an HB++ meaning a book he has heard of for which he holds an extremely positive opinion. Proust is doubly classified as an SB and an HB++. His point is that it is not necessary to have read a book to put it into a literary context but he raises some broader questions on the way, such as what does it mean to read? Bayard is also author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, a parodic structuralist investigation of Agatha Christie’s classic, in which he suggests that Hercule Poirot identified the wrong criminal, driving him to suicide. To bring Bayard up to date, it could be argued that the beauty of his method is that it also works with films, music, television programmes, the Internet. Once one has mastered the art of placing things in context, the details can be consulted on Google.

  BB

  Brigitte Bardot, sex symbol, batty old woman

  People with enormous numbers of animals and difficult relations with human beings are frequently deranged. An example is Brigitte Bardot, 80 in 2015, a sex symbol who established St Tropez as the most glamorous seaside resort in the world. (It is no longer glamorous at all but infested with Russian oligarchs). BB, pronounced bay-bay, is a devoted supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front founding leader. She’s nuts, but kind to donkeys, and we’ll always have Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman, Roger Vadim, 1956).

  BCBG

  Posh

  Bon chic, bon genre (very stylish, well-born). French equivalent of a Sloane Ranger (British) or yuppie (American). Pronounced bay-cee-bay-shay.

  BELGIQUE, LA

  Belgium, object of mockery

  Good food, confusing country, butt of French jokes. (‘Why do Belgian dogs have flat heads?’ ‘Because they run after parked cars.’) Belgium is not really understood by the French and the Belgians themselves are even more confusing. Some speak French but are not really French. Others speak Dutch but are not really Dutch. The French don’t really like the idea of Brussels as the capital of Europe, insisting the European Parliament divide its time, at high expense and inconvenience, between the Belgian capital and the second European Parliament site in Strasbourg, in Alsace. The French nevertheless respect Belgian gaufres (waffles), moules (mussels) and frites (French fries). Ill winds often blow from Belgium. Waterloo was where Napoléon was definitively defeated, and the Germans who helped defeat him returned to Belgium in 1914 and 1940 with disastrous consequences for France. Belgium uses the Napoleonic code and is supposedly laïc, (the state recognising no religion) but laïcité in Belgium is not quite the same flavour as in France, since Belgium remains a communitarian kingdom with no Republican nonsense about everyone being equal. Lots of people sometimes thought to be French are actually Belgian, like Hercule Poirot, Tintin, Jacques Brel, Georges Simenon, René Magritte, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eddie Merckx, Marguerite Yourcenar, Plastic Bertrand and Stromae.

  BELLE ÉPOQUE, LA

  Historical bookend

  Much to admire, especially as this was when my house was built with its 4.3 metre high ceilings and glorious salons (all for the price of a two-bedroom flat in East London). Retrospectively romanticised, The Belle Époque (beautiful era) between 1871 and the start of the Great War was the high-water mark of French culture, prosperity, industrial revolution and imperialism. Although unique in detail, it was concurrent with other similar golden eras in Britain and the United States, and was a product of an unusual period of peace between the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the Great War. Without doubt, Paris attracted many of the greatest musicians, painters, writers and capitalists, eager to invest in progress in all dimensions. The Paris Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in 1899, framed by the Eiffel Tower, seemed to put Paris at the centre of the world but this was to be the bookend to an era of disproportionate French cultural and artistic influence, which was followed by a century indisputably American. In any case, the heritage of the Belle Époque tells only part of the story. The art, music, architecture, cuisine and technology of the Belle Époque, seen through the prism of Paris, is in sharp contrast to the precariousness and exploitation of the poor described by Émile Zola, and the sheer primitiveness of the south, described by Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879): the epoch was not so belle for everyone. The Third Republic would not survive the wars that were to follow and while the heritage of the period is incomparable, nobody today thinks of Paris as the centre of the world, or even of Europe. Rather, Paris has become something of a museum of its vanished greatness.

  BENJAMIN, WALTER

  Witness of Parisian greatness

  In 2014, I drove two hours from my village to the Spanish border then took the winding coastal road to Portbou, where Walter Benjamin died in obscure circumstances on 26 September 1940. Benjamin, a German and a Jew, was fleeing from the Nazi invaders of France, but his papers were not in order and the Spanish border guards ordered him to return to France the next day. He was dead hours later, aged 48, perhaps a suicide. Benjamin left behind the unfinished manuscript of The Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), a never-finished but monumental history of the emergence of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. It was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which, wroteJ.M. Coetzee, ‘in Benjamin’s eyes first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry.’ Coetzee notes somewhat acidly that Benjamin did not appear to have read Wordsworth, who’d had a similar insight 50 years earlier. Benjamin’s manuscript was hidden in the Bibliothèque Nationale (French national library) by his friend Georges Bataille, and was discovered after the war. Published only in 1982, and in English translation 20 years later, and more than 1,000 pages long, the Arcades Project is a monumental collage, melding literary and architectural criticism, history, Marxist critical theory and encyclopaedic quotation that often overwhelms Benjamin’s own spare reflections. In their introduction to the English edition, the translators Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin describe the project as ‘the blueprint for an unimaginably massive and labyrinthine architecture - a dream city.’

  My pilgrimage was to visit the Israeli artist Dani Karavan’s breathtaking memorial to Benjamin, named Passages, a reference to both Benjamin’s unfinished masterwork and of his flight to exile. It is an installation seemingly as inscrutable as Benjamin himself. At the end of the first of Karavan’s three passages, on a sheet of glass offering a view of a whirlpool far below, Karavan has etched the words of Benjamin himself: ‘It is a more arduous task to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of famous persons. The construction of history is consecrated to those who have no name.’

  Benjamin was buried in an unmarked grave in the section of the municipal cemetery reserved for non-Catholics. Visitors are urged to honour the Jewish tradition by leaving a stone on the marker. I placed a piece of basalt from my village on his memorial stone and mourned.

  BERN, STÉPHANE

  presents the eurovision song contest

  The most brilliant French radio and television presenter, a monarchist, presenter of the Eurovision Song Contest, host of sadly terminated midday show on France Inter called Le Fou du roi (the court jester). Bern is funny, gay, and was decorated with the MBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in June 2014 during her visit to Paris. He explained to her that he had made a programme about Queen Victoria for French television. ‘She seemed truly interested. She had this astonishing ability to make you feel like you were the most important person she had met all day.’ Presented a jolly programme on France 2 about Louis XVI in 2015 suggesting he was not such a bad guy after all.

  BEURS

  ‘Arabs’ who are not really Arabs


  Unloved descendants of north African immigrants, les beurs are a generation born in France, but in spite of France’s claim to equality for all, often self-defined and defined by their fellow French citizens as not quite French. Officially, they do not exist. There is no official or administrative count of citizens of north African origin, but independent data suggests there are more than four million. Simple observation shows they are poorer, less educated, more often unemployed and increasingly radicalised and estranged from the republic of equality.