French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  ZEMMOUR, ERIC

  French gad fly

  A columnist for Le Figaro magazine whose protracted attack on the state of the Republic, Suicide Français (French Suicide), was a bestseller in France in 2014 as the country crawled through its slough of despond. The son of an Algerian Jewish family that settled in France after the ceasefire, he is accused of Bonapartist, Jacobin, Gaullist, Pétainist and nationalist tendencies by his critics, who are numerous. His angry denunciations of the conceits of the French intellectual, political, corporate and political establishments have won him few friends. But he has little to contribute on the practical questions of how to deliver jobs, prosperity and happiness to the French people who actually exist, rather than those he imagines. The eagerness with which his critics wish to shut him up, keeping him off the TV and even trying to ban him from speaking, suggests, to his credit, that he is at least annoying them.

  ZEP

  Alphabet soup

  Zones d’éducation prioritaire were launched in 1981 as the education establishment recognised that it was failing to educate certain students. They were relaunched in 1990 when the measures of 1981 were found to be not working, and then relaunched again in 1998 when the failure of the 1990 reforms was finally acknowledged. The ZEPs still exist in the popular mind and ZEP continues to be used as a synonym for a zone of educational deprivation. In fact the ZEP has been supplanted by an alphabet soup of other acronyms (APV, RAR, CLAIR, ECLAIR, etc.) representing supposed reforms for which the results have also been invisible to modest. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, hundreds of classes of mainly Muslim students in the ZEPs refused to join their teachers in a Republican moment of silence, provoking yet another anguished debate about the failure of French education. Teachers get paid more for working in ZEPs. But they usually strike each time a new reform is attempted.

  ZIDANE, ZINÉDINE YAZID (‘ZIZOU’)

  Greatest ever French footballer

  Born in Marseille in 1972, Zizou is believed by many to have been the best European footballer in history, although he blotted his career by being sent off in the 110th minute of his second world cup final in 2006 for a coup de boule (head-butting) against Italy’s Marco Materazzi. France lost the game. In retirement he has occupied himself in numerous sporting and charitable activities. He could be a greater role model for young French people if he chose to live in France rather than Spain.

  ZOLA, ÉMILE

  Immortal French writer

  Oscar Wilde said of Zola, ‘if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull’. Totally unfair since his work is magnificent. Zola was a crusader against social injustice, a friend of Flaubert and may well have been killed for his role in the Dreyfus affaire. He memorialised his friend Cézanne in L’œuvre (The Work), as wrenching a piece of writing as anything ever written about art. His first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), was the beginning of the cycle called Les Rougon Macquart, the chronicle of a family during the Second Empire. Like Dickens, Zola (1840-1902) was often paid by the word, hence with little incentive to brevity. Zola exposed the worst excesses of France’s industrial revolution, the horror of the Franco-Prussian war (La débâcle, 1892) and the anti-semitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus, (J’accuse, 1898) for which he was convicted of criminal libel and stripped of the Legion of Honour. He fled to London where he was unhappy, and returned to Paris, where he was pardoned although not fully exonerated until after his death. Zola’s exposé of the excesses of 19th-century capitalism inoculated French people with an enduring suspicion of money and business. I suspect Zola today would be goring the underachieving French state with the same enthusiasm that he applied to the robber barons of his age. Zola was possibly murdered by enemies he made during the Dreyfus affair, but there’s no conclusive evidence. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning after his chimney was blocked. It was not satisfactorily explained whether this was an accident or by design, although I suspect the latter, since there were plenty of people who wished him ill.

  Afterword

  HOW TO SAVE A PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO BE SAVED?

  Is France capable of finding a formula for getting richer, not poorer? Is there any prospect of a viable project to re-launch France? Is any leader or circumstance likely to lead to such an outcome? As one reform after another tumbles, or is watered down, or put into the too-hard-to-do basket, it is easy to imagine that France is hopeless, the contradictions too deep, the tentacles of clientélisme too deeply embedded, infecting France like a tique (tick) with an incurable malaise. It is tempting to call for a restoration of the monarchy if not the empire, and admit that the revolution was a terrible mistake, although I doubt this would fly.

  The fundamental problem is the belief in exceptionalism that has produced the psychosis that France is safer isolated within its interior and European bubbles, rather than punching harder in the wider world. France clings to a code du travail (employment code) that destroys jobs and a monstrous, infantalising, unreformed état providence (welfare state), without ever saying how they intend to keep on paying for it. Wage overheads are four times higher than in Britain, and they can’t understand why the people have no jobs (let them toss burgers at McDonald’s?) The ruling Socialists offer a prospectus that is literally incredible - pretend reforms achieving nothing. The National Front offers less, a prospectus even more dirigiste (centrally managed) than the Socialists, with toxic added nationalism. The républicains (formerly the UMP), party of the right, has never felt strong enough to challenge the statist shibboleths and as it tacks to the leftish centrist consensus, seems unlikely ever to do this. Even though the French know they must change, they can only talk about it. These self-proclaimed revolutionaries are really just the most conservative people in Europe. They seem incapable of serious reform.

  The first article of the French constitution speaks of a Republic ‘indivisible, secular and social.’ This is holy scripture in the French mentality but there’s room for interpretation and the current interpretation is self-destructive. It’s hard to argue with a state claiming the right to be indivisible. Secularism (treated in the text: see laïcité) is a difficult idea, in practice. But the social element has been hijacked. There are elements to French society that are profoundly and delightfully social, but ‘social’ also implies socialism, where it gets more problematic, in a society where socialism too often is interpreted to mean conformity, dependency, hierarchy and dirigisme. France can be admired as a country that values a social dimension, but not so much for its unquestioning acceptance of an ultra-socialism in which resources are redistributed from both the rich and the poor to the bottomless pit of a state that knows few limits and in which self-reliance, enterprise and the private sector have been widely demonised and punished.

  Nevertheless, having delivered my pathology of France, I shall try to offer a prescription to save it, even though I am at but the humblest level of elected office in France, and unlikely to rise higher.

  1. Stop taxing jobs

  This is going to require going much, much further than the feeble reforms currently proposed. It means taking a chainsaw to the thicket of rules, anti-competitive practices, special privileges for the elite and restraints of trade and labour that crush enterprise. Payroll taxes are completely out of kilter with France’s competitors, even as they benefit the institutions that collect them at the expense of those who are nominally supposed to benefit. None of the reliefs so far proposed cut to the depth of the problem. Nobody seems to like capitalism in France but that’s because they mistake for capitalism what in France is too often corporatism and clientelism.

  The state in France will never be shrunk to the size of a pea but its 54 per cent share of the economy is wildly out of line compared to its main competitors. The French state with its crushing burdens on business, punishment of the enterprising and disincentives to investment and employment is, bluntly, toxic for investors. France must stop treating its citizens like children by promising that the state can do everything. It must allow bus
inesses to grow and hire (and also fire) and in this way might inspire the best and brightest of its younger generation to stay in France, rather than fleeing on the Eurostar to London, like latter-day Huguenots.

  2. Stop playing second fiddle to the Germans

  The visceral French objections to any idea of reforming the EU serve nobody but the French elite. Ordinary people are far less convinced that the EU project is delivering them benefits. For a time, when the EU’s priority was opening markets to competition, the European project did force some reforms onto the French economy, such as slightly more competitive energy and telecommunications markets. But the government has retained its command of the economy and the EU has morphed into a corporatist monster. The débâcle of the euro, cooked up by François Mitterrand and the corrupt German chancellor Helmut Kohl, has been a catastrophe for French competitiveness. It is too late to exit the euro, but not too late for the French to re-evaluate their relationship with the Germans.

  There is an obvious alternative and that is to embrace the idea of EU reform, to use a reformed EU to help France to reform itself, and to accept the United Kingdom as a partner, not an adversary. A more welcoming investment climate for clever, agile British companies in France could help, but not until the labour market is reformed. The same is true for other potential foreign investors terrified, like Titan Tyres, of the crazy employment conditions in France. The French must see that a British exit from the EU would be a disaster - not necessarily for Britain, but certainly for the French. It would leave the French even more exposed to a Germany that is already too dominant. There has never been a better time to renew the entente cordiale.

  3. Define a new Republic

  Early in his mandate, President François Hollande asked his ministers to present their ideas for the future, resulting in hundreds of feeble propositions, almost all of which have apparently now been forgotten. The inability of France to define and get behind some kind of grand national project of renewal is partly the consequence of cynicism, partly of doubt that it is necessary but largely because no convincing project is being offered. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy promised a break with the past and didn’t deliver. Hollande promised immediate change but the economy has become worse, even as he has become distracted by his idea of himself as a war president in the crusade for laïcité. On the stage of the EU, he mouthsplatitudes about solidarity with the Greeks and their need to reform while turning his back on the economic disaster of France itself. Tinkering reforms are not enough, France needs to be inspired and that is going to take big ideas and a leader with actual guts.

  There is much talk of a 6th Republic, but no coherent idea of what this could be. So in the absence of any ideas from French politicians, here is my own version. France must reconsider what it means by liberté, égalité, fraternité, which has become an alibi for a toxic social project that valorises sloth, envy, dependence and crushed ambition. Talent must be liberated, and equality must become equality of opportunity not of outcome. The state must retire from the micromanagement of every aspect of life and give space to the genius of the French people to create a future for themselves. A new republic must be future-pointing, outward-looking and dynamic, not reactionary, isolationist and protectionist. It must explicitly speak to young people who are so systematically excluded from participation in the economy. This doesn’t mean ultra-liberalism or abandoning the poor to starve. But it does mean that the French state must stop pandering to its clients, the unions and its civil servants.

  Is any of this possible? Perhaps not. France seems to me to be trapped in an economic death spiral in which those responsible do nothing effective because like the aristocrats, until they were deposed by the revolution, they do not suffer at all. French people have put up with this too long. They need to take responsibility. There must either be a révolution tranquille (quiet revolution) in the French mentality or the country risks being plunged into a much less benign upheaval.

  Vive la France!

  Acknowledgements

  This book was inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s caustic and funny Devil’s Dictionary, exquisitely crafted between 1881 and 1906; by Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Conventional Wisdom), a sardonic masterpiece, never finished but reconstructed from his notes, and published posthumously in 1913, and finally by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a magisterial study of Paris, also never completed, also posthumously published.

  Bierce, a great, slashing journalist, who died in Mexico in murky circumstances in 1914, was a scholar of the French and much else. He dedicated his book to those ‘enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang.’ He left numerous pertinent reflections on France, referenced here and there in this book, and left a splendid poem on France, identifying its hopeless contradictions:

  Unhappy State! with horrors still to strive:

  Thy Hugo dead, thy Boulanger alive;

  A Prince who’d govern where he dares not dwell,

  And who for power would his birthright sell

  Who, anxious o’er his enemies to reign,

  Grabs at the sceptre and conceals the chain;

  While pugnant factions mutually strive

  By cutting throats to keep the land alive.

  Perverse in passion, as in pride perverse

  To all a mistress, to thyself a curse;

  Sweetheart of Europe! every sun’s embrace

  Matures the charm and poison of thy grace.

  Yet time to thee nor peace nor wisdom brings:

  In blood of citizens and blood of kings

  The stones of thy stability are set,

  And the fair fabric trembles at a threat.

  Bierce’s and Flaubert’s works were presented ostensibly as dictionaries, or abécédaires, although neither are really dictionaries, but a series of reflections and meditations, revelations and insights, organised alphabetically. Benjamin also toyed with alphabetisation, but his work was encyclopaedic more than definitional and in volume almost overwhelming. I dedicate this book to the memories of all three of them.

  Many people helped with inspiration, criticism, suggestions, corrections and encouragement, not least the scores if not hundreds of French people who have shared their stories with me in my 15 years in France. I must thank in particular the warm and generous people of Caux, Hérault, my adopted home. Nestled between the Mediterranean and the Cévennes mountains, Caux has been inhabited for more than 1,000 years - probably much longer, as some of the most ancient traces of human civilisation in Europe have been discovered just a few kilometres from here. Its people have welcomed, fed and befriended me and even elected me to their municipal council.

  For practical help, Jean Martinez, a brilliant professor of biochemistry and Mayor of Caux, kindly reviewed various drafts. He has been tolerant of my efforts to inject an Anglo-Saxon gust of ideas into the functioning of our community, though he has no responsibility for my conclusions here. Marie-Jo Morelle, a French expatriate, translator and inspiring teacher of French and French culture at the University of Surrey, was a fountain of suggestions and welcome contestations. Jacques Kuhnlé, a retired professor in Lorraine, and Karen Robinson, who failed to teach me how to spell at The Sunday Times, wore out red pencils patiently correcting my errors and drawing my attention to alternative points of view.

  Other kind counsellors included Susan Douglas, my former colleague at The Sunday Times, Peter and Dominique Glynn-Smith, an Anglo-French couple with a unique insight into entente cordiale, Norman Berke, a wise American, his Irish wife Stephanie and her daughter Wumps, all of whom have seen a great deal of life in France, and Frank Russell, who keeps an eye on the French for me from a vantage point in the 21st arrondissement of Paris (Kensington). I thank my neighbours Benoît and Andrea Yveline, Jocelyne and Jean-Pierre Vanel, and Bertrand and Cristel Laugeri for feeding me and revealing many insights to French life. Yvette Angelats, Rupert and Helena Wright, Edward Mulle
r, Jane Reed, Christopher Ludow, Françoise Ellery, Alan Pearce, and Barry Strum contributed many valuable ideas. Special thanks to Marie-Trinité Lopez, whose village salon de thé has become a second home.

  Above all I must thank Daniel, my son, who told me to write this book; my wife, Terry, who tolerated my disappearance while I wrote it and my daughter Alysen, for tolerating me in general. Also Ringo, foundling Labrador, who helped me explore the glorious countryside surrounding Caux. Walking the flanks of the ancient volcanos among the endless vines, the orchids, the wild fennel and the abundant fig trees, has been inspirational and therapeutic. I am indebted to many others for corrections and advice. And then there are some who had better not be mentioned. All the errors and misunderstandings are my own.

  Jonathan Miller

  Caux, Hérault

  Author’s Note

  The book is organised alphabetically, in French. Within the text French words are in italics, followed by the author’s translation into English. The headings are followed by an explanation in English, sometimes literally translated but often not. Words in a different type cross-refer to related entries.