The wider puzzle remains: what explains the strange contrast between a unique literary cosmopolitanism and so much intellectual parochialism in France? It is tempting to wonder whether the answer lies simply in the relative self-confidence of each sector—the continuing native vitality of French history and theory inducing indifference to foreign output, and the declining prestige of French letters prompting compensation in the role of a universal dragoman. There may be something in this, but it cannot be the whole story. For the function of Paris as world capital of modern literature—the summit of an international order of symbolic consecration—long precedes the fall in the reputation of French authors themselves, dating back at least to the time of Strindberg and Joyce, as Casanova demonstrates.
Moreover, there is a parallel art that contradicts such an explanation completely. French hospitality to the furthest corners of the earth has been incomparable in the cinema too. On any day, about five times as many foreign films, past or present, are screened in Paris as in any other city on earth. Much of what is now termed ‘world cinema’—Iranian, Taiwanese, Senegalese—owes its visibility to French consecration and funding. Had directors like Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien or Sembène depended on reception in the Anglo-American world, few outside their native lands would ever have glimpsed them. Yet this openness to the alien camera has been there all along. The brio of the New Wave was born from enthusiasms for Hollywood musicals and gangster movies, Italian neo-realism and German expressionism, that gave it much of the vocabulary to reinvent French cinema. A national energy and an international sensibility were inseparable from the start.
Such contrasts are a reminder that no society of any size ever moves simply in step with itself, in a uniform direction. There are always cross-currents and enclaves, deviances or doublings-back from what appears to be the main path. In culture as in politics, contradiction and irrelation are the rule. They do not disable general judgements, but they complicate them. It is not meaningless to speak of a French decline since the mid-seventies. But the current sense of the term, that of Nicolas Baverez and others, which has given rise to le déclinisme, is to be avoided. It is too narrowly focussed on economic and social performance, understood as a test of competition. Post-war history has shown how easily relative positions in these can shift. Verdicts based on them are usually superficial.
Decline in the sense that matters has been something else. For some twenty years after the end of the trente glorieuses, the mood of the French elites was not unlike a democratic version of the outlook of the early forties: a widespread feeling that the country had been infected with subversive doctrines it needed to purge, that healthier strands in the nation’s past needed to be reclaimed, and—above all—that the forms of a necessary modernity were to be found in the Great Power of the hour, and that it was urgent either to adapt or adopt them for domestic reconstruction. The American model, more benign than the German, lasted longer. But eventually, even some of those addicted to it began to have doubts. At the end of this road, might there not wait a sheer banalization of France? From the mid-nineties onwards, a reaction started to set in.
It is still far from clear how deep that goes, or what its outcome will be. The drive to clamp a standard neo-liberal straitjacket onto economy and society has slowed, but not slackened—Maastricht alone ensuring that. What could not be achieved frontally may arrive more gradually, by erosion of social protections rather than assault on them; perhaps the more typical route in any case. A creeping normalization, of the kind the current low-profile government led by Raffarin is pursuing, risks less than a galloping one of the sort admirers look to from Nicolas Sarkozy, the latest d’Artagnan of the right, and in French conditions may prove more effective. It will not be the Socialist Party, in office for sixteen out of the past twenty-four years, that halts it. Its cultural monuments, the shoddy eye-sores of Mitterrand’s grands travaux and vulgarity of Jack Lang’s star-shows, rightly detested by conservative opinion, were the epitome of everything signified by the progress of banalization.
Outside the country, attitudes of passionate francophilia that were still quite common between the wars, have virtually disappeared. Like most of its neighbours, or perhaps more so, France arouses mixed feelings today. Admiration and irritation are often expressed in equal measure. But were the country to become just another denizen of the cage of Atlantic conformities, a great hole would be left in the world. The vanishing of all that it has represented culturally and politically, in its pyrotechnic difference, would be a loss of a magnitude still difficult to grasp. How close such a prospect is, remains hard to fathom. Smith’s dry rejoinder to Sinclair comes to mind: there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The hidden stratifications and intricacies of the country, the periodic turbulence beneath the pacified surface of a consumer society, sporadic impulses—gathering or residual?—to careen fearlessly to the left of the left, past impatience with democratic boredom, are so many reasons to think the game is not quite over yet. After pointing out all the reasons why France was no longer subject to the revolutionary fault-lines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and had at last achieved a political order that enjoyed stability and legitimacy, Raymond Aron nevertheless ended his great editorial of 1978 with a warning. ‘Ce peuple, apparemment tranquille, est encore dangereux’. Let us hope so.
II · 2009
‘I agree’, wrote Pierre Nora in response to the survey above, ‘with the general diagnostic of languor and creative anaemia in France of recent years, except that I live what he calls the French dégringolade in a more painful than mocking way, and conceal the word ‘‘disaster’’ which comes to mind under the more presentable term ‘‘metamorphosis’’ ’.45 However, he went on, to sketch a decay was one thing, to explain it another. There, disagreement must be complete. For two reasons: in point of method, to focus on just a political and cultural parabola was too narrow, not say idealist; and as to framework, developments in the hexagon could not be understood without reference to more general transformations in Europe, and the world at large. A ‘brutal and mysterious levelling of cultural production’ was undeniable in his home country.46 But in substance, matters were no better elsewhere. They were only more visible in France, for a series of reasons historically specific to it.
Four of these, in Nora’s view, stood out. First was the unusually close political connexion between a centralizing state and the linguistic, educational and cultural institutions of the country, which had long made of the humanities a touchstone in the formation of politicians, writers, intellectuals and scientists alike, whose gradual abandonment had dealt a fatal blow to all four sectors of activity. Second came the collapse, at the end of the totalitarian era, of the myths of revolution and nation, nourished by Communism and Gaullism. Third was the reversal of the very mechanisms of modernization that had given post-war France its élan, into so many brakes on further development: as witnesses, the crisis of its welfare state, the frictions in its constitution, the troubles of its cultural institutions—universities, publishers, theatre, cinema. Finally, there was the mutation in the very form of the nation-state, affecting virtually all countries, and unsettling their sense of themselves, which France could not but register with especial sharpness, as the oldest nation-state on the continent, whose traditional forms of identity—centralist, statist, imperial, military, peasant, Christian, secular, universalist—had lasted longest and were struck simultaneously.47
Much of this can be conceded. The peculiar intimacy of the links between state and culture, and the centrality of classical forms of rhetorical training to them, form part of the case developed above. The general disturbances of national identity, and France as an illustration of them, are discussed elsewhere,48 emphasis falling on this occasion simply on the pressures of the macro-economic regime change in the Atlantic world since the eighties, and the rise of English as a planetary lingua franca in the same period. That said, Nora’s broader complaint is perfectly justified: no analysis essent
ially restricted to political and cultural developments could hope to be fully satisfactory—in any detail, the social is missing. But if we are to explain why the scene today is so different from that of the late fifties or sixties, most of the answer must lie at this level. There, Nora’s proposition is readily acceptable, if we invert its terms. Attention should probably go, first of all, to the ways in which Gaullist modernization destroyed the social bases of the very exceptionality to which it gave such remarkable (if contradictory) expression. It was only because the much deeper changes it entrained—disappearance of the peasantry, reconfiguration of the working class, multiplication of urban middle strata, rise of new kinds of capital—were working themselves out, that the ideological successes of a new French liberalism became possible in the late seventies.
Such a presumption is, of course, only algebraic. The actual inter-relations between transformations of social structure and changes in cultural or political life remain to be teased out, and could well prove more complicated and unpredictable than initially supposed. The fates of Communism and Gaullism, invoked by Nora, are a case in point. Across the decade from the May Revolt to the break-up of the Union of the Left, the descent of the PCF into a kind of senile dementia was certainly one of the conditions of the ease of the neo-liberal turn under Mitterrand, ending in the party’s virtual extinction. But the distinctive character of French Communism remains something of an unresolved mystery to this day. What explains its peculiarly numbskull insensibility? Historically, unlike its English counterpart after the mid-nineteenth century, the French working class was never radically alienated from the world of ideas and culture; nor, from the time of the Third Republic, was education typically viewed with distrust as an emblem of privilege. Why then did the party that came to represent it after the war prove so ideologically crass? The corset of Stalinism is no answer, as a glance at the contrast in cultural outlook with the PCI makes plain. It is sometimes forgotten that the opportunities of French were far greater than those of Italian Communism, since it was not politically isolated in the seventies, nor excluded from office in the eighties. Yet it listened to no voice in society outside its own wooden head. On the Left, the upshot was all too predictable: a deaf communism generating a blind anti-communism, the one as vacant as the other. The underlying social logic of this impasse has yet to be unravelled.
Gaullism might seem a more straightforward case, its life-span in principle unlikely to extend much beyond that of the hero who embodied it. But its fate, too, leaves questions to which neither his mortality nor any general waning of the nation-state offers an answer. Abroad, after all, what has the French political class gained by abandoning the diplomatic and strategic independence the General bequeathed it, and returning to the Atlantic fold? At home, the constitution of the Fifth Republic was certainly an instrument designed for his suzerain person, that might well have been regarded as counter-productive once he passed, as Nora rightly implies it became. But far from reducing its presidentialism, the same class has colluded to render it yet more extreme—not a brake on, but an accelerator of, the assorted dysfunctions of the Republic. The fates of welfare or education, also figuring among these, tell another story, of once coherent systems lamed by expansion beyond the constituencies for which they were designed, eventually becoming mechanisms of exclusion, or mock-inclusion, for lack of the resources their ostensible democratization required, amid one of the most unequal distributions of income in Europe. The past thirty-five years have certainly seen profound socio-economic changes in France, and a cortège of maladies has accumulated with them. But even when we have taken their full measure, the unalterable fact remains the complete incapacity of the governing class to respond to them. Nora’s reflections treat mainly of the cultural plane, but it is the political that poses the sharpest questions.
1
There, in yet another of the violent oscillations in the needle of public sentiment that have been a hallmark of the late Fifth Republic, Chirac’s second presidency was as unanimously decried at exit as it had been acclaimed at entry. Once again, electoral docility had not stilled popular disaffection. In the spring of 2005, the entire political establishment received its most stinging rebuff in thirty years, when an attempt to force through the oligarchic charter for a European Constitution was overwhelmingly rejected in the referendum that Chirac, in another of his tactical miscalculations, had called to ratify it. The opposition that undid the charter, making reasoned use of the internet to expose official propaganda, came from below, ATTAC taking the lead. The fury and disbelief of the mainstream media and domesticated intelligentsia, after an unprecedented barrage in support of the Constitution, knew no bounds: only xenophobia could account for the result. What in fact the defenestration of the Constitution showed was how vulnerable the pretensions of the two major parties backing it—Gaullists who no longer had much to do with Gaullism, Socialists even less with socialism—had become to the novelty of democratic argument escaping media control. The debacle was such that Raffarin had to go. To replace him, Chirac picked a long-time intimate, the career diplomat De Villepin, as premier.
Five months later, two young immigrants—aged fifteen and seventeen, families from Mauretania and Tunisia—were electrocuted fleeing police harassment outside Paris. Riots erupted around cities across the country. The antithesis of everything evoked by the term ‘suburb’ in English, the banlieues that exploded are typically high-rise slums concentrating populations of Maghrebin and African origin, bleak zones of racial dereliction and repression, where youth unemployment—not confined to immigrants—is double the national average. Targeting the most visible symbols of the consumer society from which they were excluded, night after night the insurgents torched cars in a pyre of social anger, amid violent clashes with the police. By the time the uprising had been brought under control, three weeks later, some nine thousand vehicles had gone up in flames, in the most spectacular repudiation of the ruling order since May 1968. Scarcely had the last charred saloon been cleared from the streets than the country’s universities and lycées rose in a massive wave of protest at government measures to make it easier for employers to hire and fire youth on temporary basis, the so-called contrat première embauche. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations, this time with trade-union support, cascaded into a movement of such magnitude, lasting for upwards of two months, that Chirac had to withdraw the plan, sealing the fate of De Villepin, whom he had hoped might succeed him.
Shocks like these had, in the past, all but invariably presaged a change of guard at the Elysée, allowing the Socialist Party to look forward to victory at the polls the following year, without—as had become traditional—having to offer more than token changes of policy. But this was to count without the fluidity that Chirac’s decline had released within the ranks of the Right. There an alternative capable of a sharper demarcation from him than anything the PS could offer was waiting. Once another of Chirac’s protegés, Sarkozy had betrayed him for Balladur in 1996, and only grudgingly been readmitted to office as minister of the interior in 2002. In this post, he rapidly built a reputation for toughness on crime and immigration, tightening rules on residence in France and promising to sandblast youthful rabble from the banlieues. Buoyed by popularity in the polls, by 2004 Sarkozy had taken control of the ruling party’s machine as its new president, a powerful base from which to assert his independence of the Elysée, and dissociate himself from the discredit into which Chirac’s reign was falling. The final fiasco of the CPE, from which he had been careful to take his distance, assured him the uncontested candidacy of the Centre-Right in 2007.
Against him, the PS ran Ségolène Royal, a hitherto second-rank figure, companion of the party’s general secretary, picked by its membership as the least shop-worn candidate it could offer. Weightless and inexperienced, it soon became clear she enjoyed little confidence among her colleagues and was no match for Sarkozy. Footling attempts to show she was as tough on crime and as proud a patriot only underlined her
lack of any independent programme; the choice of Bernard-Henri Lévy as confidante, her want of any judgement.49 After a vapid and disorganized campaign, she was routed at the polls, Sarkozy coasting to victory by two million votes. In this outcome, however—less disastrous for the PS, after all, than Jospin’s debacle five years earlier—neither Royal’s weaknesses as a candidate, nor the traditional pallor of the Socialist alternative, were the critical factor. That lay in Sarkozy’s reconfiguration of the electorates of the Right.
There, his record at the Ministry of the Interior, and unabashed appeals at the hustings to the country’s need for greater security, in its streets and on its borders, cut the ground from under much of Le Pen’s constituency. In the first round of the election, he took up to a million votes from the Front National, concentrated in its petty-bourgeois—as opposed to working-class—base: Le Pen’s score among small shopkeepers, craftsmen and employers was more than halved, while Sarkozy’s virtually doubled by comparison with Chirac in 2002. To this social stratum, he added a massive demographic sweep among pensioners, in the second round garnering nearly two-thirds of the vote of the elderly.50 Fear—of immigrants and the unruly young—was the principal cement of this bloc. But it was by no means the only emotion to which Sarkozy owed his victory. By 2007 the sensation of a creeping national decline, topic of many an earlier publication, had become far more widespread, as Chirac’s regime was seen to disintegrate. As a notorious thorn in the side of the Elysée, Sarkozy was in much better position to capitalize on this than Royal, who had never taken any distance from her patron Mitterrand or from Jospin. He now did so with éclat. Promising a clean break with accumulated inertias, he assured voters that France could be revived by reforms based on the values of hard work, merit and honest competition—liberating labour markets, lowering taxes on inheritance, giving autonomy to universities, fostering national identity. With this prospectus, he captured a large majority of the age-group between twenty-five and thirty-four, attracted to him not by fears, but hopes of freer and more prosperous careers.
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