II. THE CORE
FRANCE
I · 2004
France is, of all European countries, the most difficult for any foreigner to write about. Its intractability is a function, in the first instance, of the immense output on their society produced by the French themselves, on a scale undreamt of elsewhere. Seventy titles just on the electoral campaign of spring 2002. Two hundred books on Mitterrand. Three thousand on De Gaulle. Such numbers, of course, include a huge amount of dross. But they are not mere logomachy. High standards of statistical rigour, analytic intelligence, literary elegance continue to distinguish the best of French writing about France, in quantities no neighbouring land can rival.
Confronted with this mass of self-description, what can the alien gaze hope to add? The advantages of estrangement, would be the anthropological reply—Lévi-Strauss’s regard éloigné. But in England we lack the discipline of real distance. France is all too misleadingly familiar: the repetitively stylized Other of insular history and popular imagination; the culture whose words are still most commonly taught, movies screened, classics translated; the shortest trip for the tourist, the most fashionable spot for a secondary residence. London is now closer to Paris than Edinburgh by train; there are some fifteen million visits by Britons to France every year, more than from any other country. The vicinity is lulling. Its effect is a countrywide equivalent of the snare against which every schoolchild struggling with French is warned. France itself becomes a kind of faux ami.
Local connoisseurs are seldom of much help in correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many historiographic Major Thompsons. Less strenuous contributions—political science, cultural studies, the higher journalism—offer little antidote. Reportage itself often seems mortified: few dispatches are so regularly flat as those filed from Paris, as if it were somehow the death-bed of the correspondent’s imagination. A bright obscurity covers the country, screening its pitfalls for cross-Channel commentary. What follows is unlikely to escape a share of them.
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The current scene is as good a place to start as any, since it offers a pregnant example of the illusions of familiarity. Newspapers, journals and bookshops brim with debate over French decline. Gradually trickling to the surface in the past few years, le déclinisme burst into full flow with the publication last winter of La France qui tombe, a spirited denunciation of national default—‘the sinister continuity between the fourteen years of François Mitterrand and the twelve of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France’—by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the Centre-Right.1 Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a French version of a Thatcherite, a neo-liberal of more or less strict persuasion, and the whole controversy like a re-run of long-standing debates on decline in Britain. But the appearances are deceptive. The problem is not the same.
Britain’s diminution since the war has been a long-drawn-out process. But its starting-point is clear: the illusions bred by victory in 1945, under a leader of 1914 vintage, followed virtually without intermission by the realities of financial dependency on Washington, austerity at home, and imperial retreat abroad. By the time consumer prosperity arrived, a decade later, the country was already lagging behind the growth of continental economies, and within a few more years found itself locked out of a European Community whose construction it had rejected. In due course the welfare state itself—a landmark when first created—was overtaken elsewhere. There was no dramatic reckoning with the past, just a gradual slide within a framework of complete political stability.
Abroad de-colonization was conducted steadily, at little cost to the home country, but owed much to luck. India was too big to put up a fight for. War in Malaya, unlike Indochina, could be won because the communist movement was based on an ethnic minority. Rhodesia, unlike Algeria, was logistically out of range. The costs to the colonized were another matter, in the bloody skein of partitions left behind: Ireland, Palestine, Pakistan, Cyprus. But British society appeared unscathed. Yet, like the welfare state with which it was often coupled as a principal achievement of the postwar order, withdrawal from empire too eventually lost its lustre, when the abscess of Ulster reopened. The decisive development of the period lay elsewhere, in the abandonment after the Suez expedition of any pretension by the British state to autonomy from the US. Henceforward the adhesion of the nation to the global hegemon—internalized as a political imperative by both parties, more deeply by Labour even than Conservatives—cushioned loss of standing in the popular imagination, while exhibiting it to the world at large. Intellectual life was not so dissimilar, vitality after the war coming largely from external sources, emigrés from Central and Eastern Europe, with few local eminences. Here too there was subsidence without much tension.
A sense of decline became acute only within the British elites when fierce distributional struggles broke out in the seventies, with the onset of stagflation. The outcome was a sharp shift of gravity in the political system, and Thatcher’s mandate to redress the fall in the country’s fortunes. Neo-liberal medicine, continued under New Labour, revived the spirits of capital and redrew the social landscape—Britain pioneering programmes of privatization and deregulation internationally as it had once done welfare and nationalization. A modest economic recovery was staged, amid still decaying infrastructures and increasing social polarization. With the recent slow-down in Europe, claims of a national renaissance have become more common, without acquiring widespread conviction.
Overseas, Thatcher’s most famous success was regaining the puny Antarctic colony of the Falklands; Blair’s, brigading the country into the American invasion of Iraq. Pride or shame in such ventures scarcely impinge on the rest of the world. Internationally, the country’s cultural icon has become a football celebrity. Little alteration of political arrangements; moderate growth but still low productivity; pinched universities and crumbling railroads; the unmoved authority of Treasury, Bank and City; an underling diplomacy. The record lacks high relief. The British way of coming down in the world might itself be termed a mediocre affair.
France has been another story. Defeat and occupation left it, after Liberation, at a starting-point far below that of Britain. The Resistance had saved its honour, and Potsdam its face, but it was a survivor rather than a victor power. Economically, France was still a predominantly rural society, with a per capita income only about two-thirds of the British standard. Sociologically, the peasantry remained far its largest class: 45 per cent of the population. Politically, the Fourth Republic floundered into quicksands of governmental instability and colonial disaster. Within little more than a decade after Liberation, the army was in revolt in Algeria, and the country on the brink of civil war. The whole post-war experience appeared a spectacular failure.
In fact, the Fourth Republic had in some ways been a period of extraordinary vitality. It was in these years that the administrative structure of the French state was overhauled, and the technocratic elite that dominates the business and politics of the country today took shape. While cabinets revolved, civil servants assured a continuity of dirigiste policies that modernized the French economy at nearly twice the clip of growth rates in Britain. French architects—Monnet and Schuman—laid the foundations of European integration, and it was French politicians who clinched the Treaty of Rome: the birth of the European Community, just before the Fourth Republic expired, owed more to France than any other country. French literature, in the days of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, enjoyed an international readership probably without equal in the post-war world, well beyond its standing between the wars.
So when De Gaulle came to power, on the back
of military revolt in Algiers, the estate he inherited—apparently dilapidated—in fact offered solid bases for national recovery. He, of course, promised much more than that. France, he had famously announced, was inconceivable without grandeur. In his vocabulary the word had connotations that escape the vulgar claims of ‘Greatness’ attached to Britain; it was a more archaic and abstract ideal, which appeared even to many of his compatriots out of keeping with the age. Yet it is difficult to deny it to the man, and the reconstruction over which he presided. It is conventional to pair him with Churchill, as statues in the national pantheon. But, beyond romantic legend, there is a discrepancy between them. De Gaulle’s historical achievement was much larger. Colourful as it was, Churchill’s role in twentieth-century Britain proved by comparison quite limited: an inspirational leadership of his country, crucial for a year, in a war won by Soviet troops and American wealth, and a brief epilogue of nondescript office in time of peace. The image he left was huge, the mark modest. Little in post-war Britain, save lingering imperial illusions, is traceable to him.
In exile, De Gaulle’s war-time leadership was more purely symbolic, and his adjustment to peace, at which he threw in a hand stronger than Churchill’s, little more successful. But he was a generation younger, with an altogether more reflective and original cast of mind. When he returned to power a decade later, he had mastered the arts of politics, and proved a strange singleton of modern statecraft. In the West no other post-war leader comes near his record. The largest colonial conflict of the century—at its height, the French army in Algeria numbered 400,000, and probably as many Algerians died, in a war that uprooted nearly two million—was brought to a dexterous end, and resistance to the settlement by those who had put him in power crushed. A new Republic was founded, with institutions—above all, a strong presidential executive—designed to give the country firm political stability. High-technology modernization of the economy proceeded apace, with major infrastructural programmes and rapidly rising living standards in the towns, as growth accelerated. Large farming was shielded by the CAP, a French construction, while the countryside started to empty, and the capital regained its pristine splendour.
Most striking, of course, was the transformation of the French state’s position in the world. As the Cold War continued, De Gaulle made France the only truly independent power in Europe. Without breaking with the United States, he built a nuclear deterrent that owed nothing to America, and cocked it à tous azimuts. Withdrawing French forces from NATO command, boycotting US operations under UN guise in the Congo, stockpiling gold to weaken the dollar, he condemned the American war in Vietnam and Israeli arrogance in the Middle East, and vetoed British entry into the Common Market: actions unthinkable in today’s cowering world, as they were for Britain’s rulers at the time. No country of the period was so plainly removed from any notion of decline. Equipped with a vigorous economy, an exceptionally strong state, an intrepid foreign policy, France displayed a greater élan than at any time since the Belle Epoque.
The radiance of the country was also cultural. The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing. It could be argued that nothing quite like it had been seen for a century. Traditionally, literature had always occupied the summit on the slopes of prestige within French culture. Just below it lay philosophy, surrounded with its own nimbus, the two adjacent from the days of Rousseau and Voltaire to those of Proust and Bergson. On lower levels were scattered the sciences humaines, history the most prominent, geography and ethnology not far away, economics further down. Under the Fifth Republic, this time-honoured hierarchy underwent significant changes. Sartre refused a Nobel in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same kind of public authority, at home or abroad. The nouveau roman remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place at the altar of literature was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle’s reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Lévi-Strauss became the world’s most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist. The concentrated explosion of ideas is astonishing. In just two years—1966–7—there appeared side by side Du miel aux cendres, Les mots et les choses, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, Système de la mode, Écrits, Lire le Capital and De la grammatologie, not to speak—from another latitude—of La société du spectacle. Whatever the different bearings of these and other writings, it does not seem altogether surprising that a revolutionary fever gripped society itself the following year.
The reception of this effervescence abroad varied from country to country, but no major culture in the West, not to speak of Japan, was altogether exempt from it. This owed something, of course, to the traditional cachet of anything Parisian, with its overtones of mode as much as of mind. But it was also certainly an effect of the novelty of the elision of genres in so much of this thinking. For if literature lost its position at the apex of French culture, the effect was not so much a banishment as a displacement. Viewed comparatively, the striking feature of the human sciences and philosophy that counted in this period was the extent to which they came to be written increasingly as virtuoso exercises of style, drawing on the resources and licences of artistic rather than academic forms. Lacan’s Écrits, closer to Mallarmé than Freud in their syntax, or Derrida’s Glas, with its double-columned interlacing of Genet and Hegel, represent extreme forms of this strategy. But Foucault’s oracular gestures, mingling echoes of Artaud and Bossuet, Lévi-Strauss’s Wagnerian constructions, Barthes’s eclectic coquetries, belong to the same register.
To understand this development, one has to remember the formative role of rhetoric, seeping through the dissertation, in the upper levels of the French educational system in which all these thinkers—khâgneux and normaliens virtually to a man—were trained, as a potential hyphen between literature and philosophy. Even Bourdieu, whose work took as one of its leading targets just this rhetorical tradition, could not escape his own version of its cadences; far less such as Althusser, against whose obscurities he railed. The potential costs of a literary conception of intellectual disciplines are obvious enough: arguments freed from logic, propositions from evidence. Historians were least prone to such an import substitution of literature, but even Braudel was not immune to the loosening of controls in a too flamboyant eloquence. It is this trait of the French culture of the time that has so often polarized foreign reactions to it, in a see-saw between adulation and suspicion. Rhetoric is designed to cast a spell, and a cult easily arises among those who fall under it. But it can also repel, drawing charges of legerdemain and imposture. Balanced judgement here will never be easy. What is clear is that the hyperbolic fusion of imaginative and discursive forms of writing, with all its attendant vices, in so much of this body of work was also inseparable from everything that made it most original and radical.
The vitality of France’s culture under De Gaulle was not, of course, merely a matter of these eminences. Another sign of it was possession of what was then the world’s finest newspaper, Le Monde. Under the austere regime of Hubert Beuve-Méry, Paris enjoyed a daily whose international coverage, political independence and intellectual standards put it in a class by itself in the Western press of the period. The New York Times, the Times or Frankfurter Allgemeine were provincial rags by comparison. In the academi
c world, this was also the time when the Annales, still a relatively modest affair during the Fourth Republic, became the dominant force in French historiography, winning for it both a more central role within the public culture—something it had once enjoyed, but long lost—and a great arc of overseas influence. Braudel’s command of the sixième section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études allowed him to rejuvenate the social sciences, and lay the foundations of what would become the fortress of the autonomous Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, regrouping disciplines and talents in a manner worthy of the Consulate. Last but not least, of course, was the cinema. Here, as in much else, the origins of a spectacular burst of creativity lay in the sub-cultures of the Fourth Republic. One of its features, still undiminished through the sixties, had been the number and variety of its journals of ideas, which played a much more important part in intellectual life than anywhere else in the West. Sartre’s Temps modernes, Bataille’s Critique, Mounier’s Esprit were only the best known of these. It was in this milieu that Bazin’s Cahiers du cinéma had its place, as the crucible in which the passions and convictions of the future directors of the Nouvelle Vague were formed.
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