French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  The effects of these subsidies are not limited to the production of timid journalism. They have produced a French media landscape that is largely moribund, with unsubsidised innovators forced to compete against subsidised rivals. The very small circulations of these supposedly serious papers are partly due to an antiquated and anti-competitive printing and distribution infrastructure that’s expensive, inflexible, inefficient and apparently irreformable. Wapping never happened in France, printing of newspapers remains controlled by unions. The argument for the subsidies is to preserve the diversity of the press but in fact it does the very opposite, privileging established players against newcomers and excluding digital publishers altogether.

  JUIFS, LES

  Jews, under attack from a new direction

  At a wine tasting, I was chatting with a local vigneron (wine grower) and mentioned that I’d recently tasted an excellent wine made by a recent arrival in the village. I hazarded that I thought he might be a Belgian. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I think he’s a Jew.’ I was taken aback that he would even think of making such a remark, although arguably I’d started it with a reference to him possibly being Belgian. While this was hardly an example of extreme anti-semitism, I found it curious nonetheless.

  Anti-semitism is deeply embedded in France yet the country continues to have the largest Jewish community in Europe. The Marais neighbourhood in Paris is where you can see young Jewish men dressed like Polish aristocrats of the mid 16th century. One gets the feeling they are posing mainly for the benefit of tourists from Great Neck, New York. You can even queue up at a restaurant called L’As du Fallafel. It’s very colourful, but one can’t overlook the presence of soldiers carrying machine guns.

  Jews have been disproportionately victims of violence in France for a very long time. The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guyana, remains notorious (see Zola). By 1937, the fascist, anti-semitic Parti Social Français had 700,000 members. The great French writer Céline was a virulent anti-semite and wartime collaborationist. During the war, the French government and police enthusiastically deported Jews to concentration camps. For more than 40 years the government denied the responsibility of French authorities for the murders. Only in 1995 did President Jacques Chirac acknowledge the crimes.

  But it is no longer the state that persecutes the Jews, but young Muslim Frenchmen who present the danger. Half of all racist attacks in France are directed against Jews, who constitute but 1 per cent of the country’s population. Soldiers now patrol every street where there is a Jewish institution. An Israeli journalist walked across Paris wearing a kippa in 2015 as a companion covertly filmed him. The videotape shows him being constantly harassed and threatened. Jewish graves are routinely desecrated (300 so far in 2015) and four Jewish schoolchildren were gunned down by an Islamist in 2012 in front of their school in Toulouse. Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an Islamist gunman attacked a kosher supermarket and slaughtered four Jews.

  The Jewish Agency claims 7,500 Jews left for Israel in 2014, 1.5 per cent of the estimated French Jewish population. But many others are determined to stay put. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the Grande Synagogue in Paris, the congregation sang the Marseillaise.

  JUPPÉ, ALAIN

  Pretender to the presidency

  Contesting the nomination of the Républicains (the right-of-centre political party, formerly the UMP) for the 2017 presidential election. Polls of voters in 2015 showed that among conservative voters he is in a strong position against the other leading candidate, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, although amongst inscribed party members, Sarkozy remains more popular. The candidate will eventually be selected in a primary and so it could be a toss-up. A graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, he is the mayor of Bordeaux and was prime minister under Jacques Chirac. Although personable and intelligent, there are more skeletons in his closet than in a ghost house. He was convicted in 2004 for abuse of public funds for using public employees for political purposes. He was nevertheless re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux in 2006. In 2008 he was named in a Rwandan government report on the alleged French complicity in genocide. Although he has talked of reducing the burden of social taxes on business, his political strategy seems to be centrist and to appeal to disaffected voters on the left. Like all French politicians, he is hardly a reformer.

  K

  KINÉSITHÉRAPIE

  Therapeutic massage

  Physical therapy of an intimacy that can shock sensitive Anglo-Saxons. My neighbour the novelist Helena Frith-Powell had a baby in France and was afterwards urged by her doctor to see a kinésithérapeute (practitioner of kinésithérapie), since after all it would be paid for by the state. Imagine her surprise when after he told her to remove her skirt and knickers, he inserted two fingers into her vagina and asked her to squeeze. In France this is called perineal re-education although it is possible in America or Britain that it might be termed sexual assault. ‘He seemed very disappointed when I asked him to stop,’ Helena reported afterwards. She swears this is true.

  L

  LAGARDE, CHRISTINE

  Most successful Frenchwoman

  Mistrusted French political figure suspected of having gone native in Washington. Sometimes talked about as a future presidential candidate although she told Arianna Huffington there is absolutely no chance of this. Since she is a politician, this might not be a definitive denial. It would be a pity if she was telling the truth since on economics, she is head and shoulders above every other politician in France. A fluent English speaker, a former Baker & McKenzie partner, a technocrat, she was parachuted in by President Nicolas Sarkozy to serve for four years as France’s finance minister from 2007-2011 before she segued to America as director of the IMF. Her taste for reform exceeded Sarkozy’s political courage. She was dragged into the Crédit Lyonnais affaire when she authorised 400 million euros compensation to the businessman Bernard Tapie, a convicted criminal and football club owner (see foot) who was defrauded by the rogue bank (see banques). At one point she was herself under criminal investigation and although this seemed politically motivated, it damaged her standing.

  She has apparently put this behind her, emerging as a major voice in global economic policymaking. To the right of the traditional French economic consensus, she described the 35-hour week as a symbol of the right to be lazy, ‘the ultimate expression of this historic tendency to consider work as a form of servitude.’ She took a tough line on Greece’s debt crisis, and seems almost more German than French in her disciplined approach to economics. She has also urged her nation to stop philosophising, stop dithering and simply roll up its sleeves. ‘Il faut cesser de penser et se retrousser les manches.’ Forbes magazine says she is the fifth most powerful woman in the world, and is the top-ranked Frenchwoman on the list.

  LAÏCITÉ

  Brittle backbone of the Republic

  This is a French constitutional term describing the separation of the state and religion. In fact, it is a word that carries heavy freight partly because, the Republic having declared this frontier between belief and the state, laïcité has itself become national dogma.

  President François Hollande, at his press conference in February 2015 following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, made it clear that any deviation from the principle of laïcité is itself heretical. He began his two-hour sermon, delivered from the pulpit of the gilded Salledes Fêtes at the Elysée Palace, by lecturing the respectfully assembled ministers, diplomats, journalists and guests on the right of the Republic to defend and even fight for laïcité, defining it as an unchallengeable state ideology. In effect, he was proclaiming himself a crusader for a secular intégrisme, a French term originally applied to reactionary Catholic defenders of sacred tradition against the forces of modernism. No one in the French media challenged this point of view.

  When school resumed in the autumn of 2015, every French student and their parent
s was required to sign a pledge of allegiance to laïcité, which if nothing else suggests that Hollande is the last existentialist. What exactly does laīcité mean? There are every day a thousand confusions. The state pays the cost of restoring France’s religious structures, claiming they are historic monuments and saving the Catholic church the cost of keeping its own roofs repaired. The French army operates its own Catholic seminary, training priests to provide spiritual support to its soldiers. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made city hall available to celebrate Ramadan, but offers no such support for Easter or Passover. Schools exclude Muslim girls for wearing headscarves and long skirts to school, while closing schools entirely for the Christian festivals of Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Whitsun. Veiled Muslim women have been banned from taking their children to amusement parks or chaperoning children on class trips. National Front mayors have threatened to offer Muslim children no choice but to eat pork for their school lunch, or go hungry, citing laïcité. Efforts to establish Muslim schools are fiercely resisted by the state, which subsidises private Catholic schools. Politicians compete with each other to make these restrictions ever more harsh, demanding measures to deny veiled women access to jobs, education and community facilities. This isn’t religious tolerance, it is racism.

  Laïcité is an idea born of enlightenment-era anti-clericalism, in a country that had suffered from centuries of religious strife. The entire population of Béziers, including Christians, was burned alive in 1209, just to be sure they had killed every last heretic. ‘Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens,’(kill them all, God will know his own), declared Arnaud Amaury, the Cistercian abbot and papal legate. In 1572 France achieved a new plateau of religious violence with the betrayal and massacre of St Bartholomew’s day, killing probably 20,000, but happily resulting in the installation of numerous Huguenots in London, immeasurably strengthening England’s trading position against the French. There was little wrong with establishing a separation of church and state, particularly in a country with a tradition of religious slaughter.

  Laïcité is sometimes compared to the American first constitutional amendment, which guarantees free speech, freedom of assembly, the right to petition the government and prohibits the state from ‘respecting an establishment of religion (or) impeding the free exercise of religion.’ But the French seem to have dropped off the last clause.

  If Hollande’s embrace of laïcité is cynical, other French people seem merely confused. I found myself in the foyer of the town hall after the Charlie Hebdo attacks arguing with the deputy mayor. I alleged that the Charlie Hebdo attacks had been politically hijacked and exploited by the socialist government. He replied: ‘But Jonathan, in this country we believe in laïcité.’ ‘So what is that?’ I replied, pointing to the crèche of the baby Jesus in a display cabinet. ‘But that’s been there for years,’ he replied, failing to see any contradiction. As much as it is taboo to question the idea, it was obligatory to agree with the I Am Charlie campaign, see Charlie Hebdo.

  LAIT UHT

  Disgusting milk-like liquid

  Ultra-Haute Température (ultra-high temperature) processing of milk produces a product with a shelf life (unopened) of 6-9 months and although it tastes burnt and frankly foul, is by far the most popular choice of French consumers, accounting for 95 per cent of milk consumption in France. Fresh milk is available in the chiller counters of most larger supermarkets. But it is typically far inferior in quality and freshness to milk sold in the UK, which is crazy because UK supermarket milk often itself comes from France. The French even make ice cream from UHT milk. For a nation that prides itself on the finest unpasturised cheeses on earth, why does France tolerate such horrid milk?

  LANGUE DE BOIS

  How politicians speak

  Wooden language is a stock in trade of politicians everywhere, not just France, but the suspicion is that when French politicians speak drivel, they actually believe their own rhetoric. Langue de bois is the French term for the ‘Newspeak’ described by George Orwell in 1984, a language used to eradicate undesirable concepts by cloaking them in approved terminology. In 2013 The Economist produced a compact guide to the wooden doublespeak employed by François Hollande and his team, and to those words banned by the government, as potentially upsetting. A few examples:

  Flexibilité (flexibility): word prompting grim visions of unregulated Anglo-Saxon free-for-all (see Libéral).

  Laissez-faire: iffy Anglo-Saxon phrase with no place in French.

  Redressement des comptes publics (putting right the public finances): budget cuts and tax increases, never combined with austérité or rigueur (banned words).

  Minable (pathetic): departure of French national who considers taxes too high (e.g. the actor Gérard Depardieu).

  Ultra-libéral (ultra-liberal): beyond the pale, e.g. The Economist.

  LÉGION D’HONNEUR

  Hypocritical system of gongs

  ‘You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led,’ declared Napoléon Bonaparte as first consul in the last phase of the French revolution in 1803. (Presumably he got the idea from the English.) Flaubert said: ‘Joke about it until you get it and always say you never asked for it.’ Advice not followed by the economist Thomas Piketty, author of 2014’s most fashionable tome on inequality. The French claim the British are obsessed with status but in supposedly egalitarian France the honours system is thriving and those honoured are much more blatant about it than the British. A miniature bauble called a rosette is worn on the lapel to ensure everyone knows who has been anointed. Who gets honours? Senior politicians of course anoint one another. Senior civil servants get honoured for showing up to work. Captains of nationalised industries, university presidents, diplomats and soldiers are always well represented. Sometimes, it seems that those who have achieved the least ascend to the highest ranks. The system is a lot like Britain’s. For a nation that claims to prize equality, the legion of honour comes in a bewildering number of varieties including special (lesser) honours for school teachers, a second-division order of ‘Merit,’ proving the point that some are less equal than others. There are even awards for Hollywood figures (Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood) although Bob Dylan was famously snubbed.

  LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ

  The undeliverable promise of the Republic

  Easily translated as liberty, equality, fraternity but the problem is that the meaning of these words is ever disputable and the incompatibility of the three taken together has never been in much doubt. The devise, the motto of France since the second Republic (with various interruptions), the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité continues today to decorate every town hall, every official document and every rubber stamp. So what does it really mean?

  Liberty is a word with which the French have a troubled relationship. In ancient French it included rights but these came with laws and taxes. Since 1836, Liberty has been represented in Paris by the Génie de la liberté at the Place de la Bastille, a gilded male angel clutching the torch of liberty in one hand, and the broken chains of oppression in the other.

  Liberty may strike a pose in Paris, but other than his halo he is strikingly naked in France. The cognate of liberté, libéralisme (liberalism, see ultra-libéralisme) is actually a dirty word to the establishment. (There is further confusion with the word libertinage, which refers to uninhibited sexual practices). Liberty to make a lot of money? Not so much. Liberty to seize opportunities and break the mould? Not in France. French liberty at its most expansive seems to go no further than the right to do those things that are not otherwise forbidden. Liberty comes down to an obligation to obey the law, the source of liberty being the law itself. French attachment to the idea of liberty is in any event tenuous. When France recently changed the law to allow its intelligence agencies virtually unfettered freedom to spy on private communications, 66 per cent of French people polled said they were happy to accept reduced individual liberty in the fight against terrorism. Ultimately, French liberty eq
uals obedience.

  Which leads onwards to the second part of the devise, which is equality. There’s an interesting quote in Sapiens (2014), a history of humanity by the Israeli social historian Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.’ The French themselves, still Catholics at heart and adept at simultaneously believing in two contradictory ideas, do not speak much of this contradiction, they merely repeat the trope.

  And then we come to the odd one out: Fraternité seems to have been added to the slogan perhaps because things sound better in threes. Fraternity is founded in the much more ancient traditions of fellowship. The French are actually good in practical terms at being quite fraternal and friendly, even if all the kissing might make them vulnerable to viruses. But when it comes to solidarity beyond everyday politesse, maybe not so much. The French don’t give a great deal to charity. They can be pretty squalid in how they treat public spaces. A YouGov poll found 85 per cent of Parisians doubt that anyone would come to their aid if they were attacked on the Metro. And the unions don’t show much fraternal respect for their fellow French citizens when they blockade motorways.