French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  Google, naïvely, thought it could buy off its opponents in France, giving millions to legacy French media to reinvent themselves for the digital world. These enterprises, showing no gratitude, are now suing Google before the European courts, claiming unfair competition. Google may or may not be guilty of uncompetitive practices, or perhaps it is guilty simply of being more effective than anyone else. But because everyone in France depends on Google every day, Google is an in-the-face reminder of how France has failed on the Internet. Therefore, Google is depended upon but hated at the same time. Perhaps it is hard to be sympathetic to such a giant enterprise, but Google’s real crime is that it is a success.

  GOUVERNANCE TERRITORIALE

  France’s most expensive pastry

  Local government (gouvernance territoriale) in France resembles the mille feuilles. This pastry otherwise known as a Napoléon is a creamy patisserie made up of a ‘thousand leaves’ of ultra-fine pastry with lots of cream and a sugary top. A perfect metaphor for the model on which France has constructed its system of local government. That is to say there are many layers, a squishy centre, and it is very fattening. The mairie, or hôtel de ville (town hall) is the first stop for many government services. The mairies are ruled by an elected mayor and a municipal council and are part of a larger canton, comprising numerous villages or a town or two, whose representatives go to the Conseil départemental to govern the département, which is itself subsidiary to the région (e.g. Languedoc-Roussillon), although these regions are currently being reorganised and some are being consolidated.

  Entwined amongst all this are 200 communautés d’agglomerations (metropolitan councils) and thousands of syndicats intercommunaux (inter-communal syndicates), established to provide services to local government customers (avoiding privatising them). These include syndicates for water and sewage services, trash collection, animal control, graffiti-removal and promotion of tourism. A local council meeting in France looks like a pretty good example of local democracy in action, although they are greatly constrained in what they can do by the overseeing eye of the state. If proximity is a virtue in local government, the French system delivers it, with around 40,000 elected mayors and councils. As for economy and efficiency, that is another question. Some of these organisms undoubtedly deliver good services but many are stuffed with relatives, friends and allies of local politicians.

  GRÈVES

  Strikes

  The French strike 10 times more often than the Germans. Often in an industrial dispute the strike is the first resort, not the last. Anyone can strike, even if they are not employed. Students strike. Even the pharmacist in the village went on strike for a day. I asked her to explain who she was striking against since she owns the business and is apparently prosperous. She was striking, she explained, to protest a scheme for reforming the retail pharmaceutical market, including the revolutionary possibility that consumers might be able to buy a packet of aspirin in the supermarket. Air Traffic Controllers, when they strike, tend to ground first flights of airlines which they consider unfair competition to Air France. Doubtless for most people the inconvenience of Dominique the chemist being on strike for the day was pretty minimal. Simply withholding labour is not enough for French strikers who do not hesitate to impose misery on their innocent fellow citizens. Tactics used by strikers include blocking motorways and railway lines, factory occupations and holding managers hostage. The police are generally passive observers of these events.

  GROSSESSE

  Pregnancy - French employers’ disaster

  A friend who runs a small business tells me he got four weeks’ work out of one of his secretaries in four years. Are women really benefiting from such a regime? An enceinte (pregnant) French woman will benefit from the most generous maternity regime in the world. She needs to have worked for an employer for only 60 hours (less than two weeks, since the maximum working week is 35 hours) to be entitled to receive two years’ paid maternity leave after accouchement (delivery). France is the most fertile country in the European Union, although seeing its lowest population growth in a decade in 2013, with the birth rate per woman falling to 1.99, from 2.03 in 2010. But who will hire a fertile woman?

  GUERRE DE CENT ANS

  Has it ever ended?

  One Hundred Years’ War, 1337-1453, which was not precisely 100 years but 116 and in some respects never has ended in terms of shifting dispositions on the ground. Land fought over on the Dordogne in the 14th century is now largely occupied by colonies of anglophones in their résidences secondaires (holiday homes).As for the actual war, the competing claims of the Plantagenets and Valois for the throne of France morphed into an almost impossibly complicated series of conflicts, taught rather differently in England and in France and has left confused memories all around. It can be argued that the war left Britain, cut off from its continental possessions, in search of another empire, and above all, looking west and globally, whereas the outcome cemented France as a caged continental power, uncomfortable for its neighbours. Although supposedly this conflict ended more than 700 years ago, there is an argument that manoeuvres remain ongoing.

  GUERRES DE RELIGION

  France’s invention of the Holocaust

  The French have been killing one another for religious reasons for a long time and, in the sweep of history, only recently ceased to do so, if they have. Recent killings of French Jews by French Muslims suggest the habit is not entirely extinguished. The various wars of religion were largely won by the Catholics who pushed Protestantism into a pretty marginal place in France. The consequences of this have been grave. A large number of the most motivated members of the French mercantile class, who were Protestant, relocated elsewhere, to the benefit of the economies of e.g. England, the Netherlands and the United States. The Catholic caste who were left behind, with their horror of commerce, consolidated France’s embedded suspicion of business, to its eternal cost.

  GUIGNOLS DE L’INFO, LES

  TV programme copied from spitting image

  Satiric puppet show modelled on Britain’s Spitting Image, on Canal+ since 1988. Les Guignols in 2015 broadcast a sketch of President François Hollande in bed with Julie Gayet and Ségolène Royal watching a replay of a press conference in which he had condemned Vladimir Putin. ‘Was I firm?’ he asked. ‘More or less,’ replied Gayet. ‘It was perfect,’ said Royal. Although there are still occasional moments of brilliance like this, the show is pretty tired. The patron (boss) of Canal+, Vincent Bolloré, would like to cancel it; he fired the writers instead.

  GUILLOTINE

  The national razor

  A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason, pace Ambrose Bierce. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, wishes to re-introduce this. Perfected by the French although early versions were used in England from 1280. As many as 40,000 French people were guillotined in France after the revolution under the direction of Maximilien Robespierre (‘pity is treason’), who met his own fate on the national razor in 1794. The guillotine was a popular mass entertainment. More than 50,000 spectators came from as far away as Montpellier to witness the guillotining of my village’s most notorious highwayman, Jean Pomarèdes, in 1843, on the site of what is now a car park.

  H

  HAÏTI

  product of French greed

  France’s terrible behaviour led to the establishment of the first black republic, in 1804, which in turn destabilised the institution of slavery throughout the western hemisphere. Amy Wilentz, professor of literary journalism at the University of California, Irvine, is author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo (2013), a love letter to Haïti and Haïtian créole and a scorching account of the shameful, corrupt, catastrophic international aid efforts following the Haïtian earthquake in 2010. She says France, with the brutal slavery it imposed before Haïti’s revolution, and the vicious financial strictures it imposed after it, almost destroyed Haïti, leaving it with a legacy of enduring poverty and political dysfunction. Wilentz explains: ‘The
y managed to bring over so many Africans that the ratio at the time of the revolution was something like 10:1, and the country was ripe for revolution. The French treated their slaves so badly that they were always having to bring in new ones from Mère Afrique (mother Africa) because so many died, and they needed so many more to work to death. These new recruits were the angriest, the least willing to bow to the yoke and the whip.’ These were the slaves rallied by Toussaint Louverture, whose revolution finally overthrew the French although he was himself betrayed by Napoléon Bonaparte who invited him to treat, broke his word and imprisoned him. Louverture died a miserable death in French captivity.

  The French left Haïti with crippling debt, intense class snobbery, a politics of pointlessness, Christianity, and also, though not with any benevolence, the extraordinary Haïtian créole language, a fabulous macédoine (mixture) of French and African tongues, in which French is simplified and the African languages reach an apogee of purity, wit, and clarity, notes Wilentz. An odd sidebar: the Haïtian revolution in 1946 followed a visit to the island by the French surrealist André Breton at a time when children were eating tadpoles from the sewers and labourers were working for one American cent per day. Breton condemned ‘the imperialisms that the war’s end had in no way averted,’ remarks reported approvingly by the reformist journal La Ruche. The subsequent suppression of the newspaper led to student unrest and then a general strike, which ultimately led to regime change.

  The progressive nature of the revolution was sadly short lived. Breton said later that the Haïtian spirit, ‘miraculously continues to draw its vigour from the French revolution’ and that ‘the striking outline of Haïtian history shows us man’s most moving efforts to break away from slavery and into freedom.’ This may itself have been a somewhat Franco-centric analysis, as Haïti’s subsequent history has not provided any enduring democracy or freedom for people who remain among the poorest in the world. The country was ruled from 1957 to 1986 first by François Duvalier (Papa Doc) and then by his son, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc). Papa Doc killed 30,000 of his opponents, sometimes watching as his Tonton Macoute secret police immersed them in baths of acid. Baby Doc amassed a fortune estimated at $800 million and after he was deposed, hid out in France. Haïti shares the motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité with France and is equally remote from delivering on this promise.

  Haïti’s art, drawn from Voodoo animism, remains influenced by a formality and composition drawn from French art of the 18th and 19th centuries. And then there is the food. In Haïtian cuisine, thyme, wild mushroom, garlic and onions are fundamental. And their home-grown, home-roasted coffee is outstanding and idiosyncratic. I would suggest, though Wilentz does not, that among the most enduring legacies of the French are the Haïtians themselves, some of the most handsome people anywhere - Africans, with a Gallic twist.

  HAUTE ÉCOLE DE COMMERCE

  Elite ‘business school for civil servants

  HEC is a business school that makes future administrators rub shoulders with the idea of business, with little impact. The usual elite selection and rigorous exams have produced no French equivalent to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (neither of whom even graduated from university). Its primary role seems to be to produce managers for the giant paraétatique (semi-governmental) enterprises that pass for private industry in France. It ranks 16th in the Financial Times list of the best global MBA factories.

  HEXAGONE

  The very approximate shape of France

  One of the certain ideas the French have about themselves is the geographically dubious notion that they inhabit a space called L’Hexagone (the Hexagon). This is supposedly the geometric form most closely resembling what would more accurately described as Contiguous France. I’ve never been entirely convinced. The Hexagone is also sometimes even less convincingly referred to as the métropole.

  HIDALGO, ANNE

  Glamorous, Spanish-born mayor of Paris

  Boasts that London is a suburb of Paris but nobody believes this and if she believes it herself, she is plainly psychotic. Threatened to sue Fox News for reporting that there are no-go areas in Paris. Her meteoric rise through the Socialist party is sometimes attributed to her extremely close working relationship with President François Hollande. She has angrily denied published reports that he fathered one of her children. Has a degree in trade unionism and spent years working on party business while being paid as an inspecteur du travail (an employment inspector and civil servant). She subsequently traded her inspectorship in for a mega-money job with Vivendi while remaining active in Paris socialist politics, rising to first deputy mayor before being elected mayor at the head of the Socialist party list in 2014. Tweets boastfully practically every day.

  HOLLANDE, FRANÇOIS

  ‘Monsieur Normal’ - President

  Catastrophic choice of French voters as President of the Republic in 2012. No charm or style but plenty of entitlement and ego. Claimed he would reduce unemployment and inequality yet unemployment has risen, and social disharmony has worsened. Hollande claims to be monsieur Normal, a product of the French meritocracy who rose from a humble background, but he is in fact the privileged son of a bourgeois family, born in Rouen in 1954. His father was an ear, nose and throat consultant, his mother a social worker. He graduated top of his class at the École nationale d’administration. Like an increasing number of top politicians in Britain, Hollande has never had a real job outside politics.

  His colourlessness and invisible political talent, wrapped in infinite self-regard (he dyes his hair), made him an unlikely choice to stand for president until the economically literate Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was eliminated by scandal. Since his erstwhile companion and fellow socialist politician Ségolène Royal had already lost her own presidential campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande became candidate by default. He ran against the not enormously popular incumbent Sarkozy and still nearly lost. Hollande began his mandate in coalition with the greens, which caused further catastrophic economic results and sent Hollande sinking in the polls. He has subsequently claimed to be a reformer but little reform has actually been delivered, and the president has concerned himself increasingly in foreign affairs, especially in Africa.

  Hollande enjoys a surprisingly diverse and entertaining love life for a flabby middle-aged political hack. He is famous for deferring making decisions and his indecision carries into his private life where he flits from one companion to another, never committing: presidential contender Ségolène Royal; a journalist on Paris Match, Valérie Trierweiler; a B-list actress, Julie Gayet; and there is a rumour about the now socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. According to France’s political journalists the private life of the president and other senior politicians is nobody’s business, a point of view fortified by the fact that often politicians are having their affairs with journalists. Many French people think differently. Hollande has left either four or five children in his wake, depending on who you believe.

  Perhaps the most perspicacious account of François Hollande’s absence of character is contained in the kiss-and-tell memoir of Trierweiler, who employs a literary style that is tabloid but that nevertheless has a ring of authenticity. In private, Hollande has led a double or even triple life and deception is second nature to him, not just in his complicated sex life. In his political life he also says whatever he thinks he can get away with, and when he is caught in an inconsistency, just lies again and denies it, according to Trierweiler. Hollande was elected declaring that he didn’t like the rich but in private is said to have contempt for the poor, whom he described as the sans dents, (without teeth), according to Trierweiler. It is hard to know when he last paid for his own ample lunches; his nickname on Twitter channel #radiolondres, a withering testament to his multiple chins, is #flanby. This is a sugary pudding for children sold in French supermarkets. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, apparently cannot stand him.

  When the diminutive Hollande visited London and inspected the guard of honour, Prime Ministe
r David Cameron had him escorted by a towering Guards officer, who reduced Hollande to the stature of a dwarf. He photographs poorly. In 2013, Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, withdrew a photograph of a gurning Hollande visiting a school in northern France, implausibly denying that the decision was to protect the president’s dignity. AFP receives officially no subsidies from the French government but the state is also AFP’s biggest customer, so make of its so-called independence what you will.

  Apparently, Hollande ranks his ministers by the number of laws they have pushed through and decrees they have published, no matter how meaningless or feeble. As if France needs more of either.

  HOUELLEBECQ, MICHEL

  Dyspeptic author

  Pronounced ‘well-beck.’ French novelist, notorious for Les Particules élémentaires (Atomised, 1988), a dystopian meditation on the pointlessness of human existence, feted by some, savaged by the New York Times as ‘deeply repugnant.’ Author of Soumission (Submission, 2014), another miserabilist tome positing an Islamic takeover of France. His own mother has condemned him as a liar, imposter and parasite. Houellebecq launched his promotional tour for Soumission by announcing that the Fifth Republic was ‘already dead’ and he might have developed this theme before cutting his tour short after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in 2015. He is hated by many of the French literati because he sells so many books. Houellebecq says: ‘They hate me more than I hate them.’ Contemptuous of the French establishment, hippies, new-agers and soixante-huitards (veterans of the Paris student revolts in 1968). Born in Réunion in 1956, ravaged by his lifestyle, he looks much older, . See BHL.