The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  ‡ All three of these women would probably refer to themselves as psychoanalysts or philosophers rather than feminist thinkers. Indeed, they might even require a definition of that label before agreeing to it.

  4

  Truth versus Beauty

  Tragedy, Comedy and Historic French Losers

  It did not take me long to realise that the French inhabit a different moral universe to ours, a universe that clearly placed the pursuit of Pleasure and Beauty above notions of Truth and Duty. One episode and its aftermath offered a perfect illustration of the gap between our two world views.

  It was the final of the 2006 World Cup. The French football team had clawed its way from mediocrity to brilliance to find itself in a tantalisingly close final against the Italians. For Zinédine Zidane, undisputed hero of French football, it was the last game of a flawless career. With minutes to go before the final whistle Zidane turned on the Italian defender, Marco Materazzi, and delivered a powerful head-butt to the man’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Denounced by the linesman, Zidane received a red card and was sent off. Fans watched him walk, head bowed, past the World Cup trophy on its stand, and disappear into the changing rooms. In his absence, the French lost to the Italians in a penalty shoot-out.

  In Britain the next day the Sun’s headline was ‘Zidane’s a hero to Zzero’. For Alan Shearer ‘It was just a moment of madness’, and for the BBC football pundit, Alan Hansen, ‘He let himself down, he let his team down and he let his country down.’

  Back in France a very different debate was taking shape, the tone of which was set by the then president, Jacques Chirac, interviewed at the end of the match. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ the president lied, but Zinédine Zidane ‘possesses the greatest human qualities that can be imagined and which are an honour to France’.

  The French media began to speculate, as did the rest of the world, on the exact nature of Materazzi’s taunt. Professional lip-readers were hired to decipher whether or not the Italian had insulted Zidane’s sick mother or his wife, called him a terrorist or a dirty Arab. But while the British press referred unequivocally to Zidane’s ‘shameful’ act, the French press was much more careful in apportioning blame. However rash Zidane’s gesture had been, shameful was clearly not an appropriate adjective. The one thing that was not up for discussion was Zidane’s heroic nature. To respond rashly to injury is not shaming. Zizou had merely shown himself to be human, as President Chirac had wisely put it.

  What was broadly agreed was that with this stunning act of self-sabotage, the final touch had been added to Zizou’s hagiography. He was human. In other words, his crime was nothing more or less than hubris. Or as the daily newspaper Libération put it: ‘In destroying the dream that he himself had created, Zidane remained unfathomable to the end. For some, his gesture verged on the sublime.’

  For the French, Zidane had, in that poignant moment when he walked off the pitch and turned his back on glory, become a tragic hero. Asked in a television interview if he would have changed his career’s end if he could, Zidane answered: ‘No. It was decided upstairs that this was going to be my end.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve always tried to be honest, I’m just a human being with all the weaknesses.’

  An interesting parenthesis to the story of the Fall of Zidane is that he was, at the time of the insult, having an affair with a young singer. He and the young woman had been photographed together by one of the newly emerging tabloid magazines, People (pronounced ‘Pipol’), but the mainstream press had dutifully avoided the story – jardin secret oblige. Materazzi had apparently insulted Zidane’s wife and, by extension, his honour. For the general public, to whom Zidane’s liaison with the lovely young singer was widely known, there was no hypocrisy in the footballer’s sense of outrage. A wife is still sacred, even if you happen to be cheating on her. As for the matter of the Truth, the French – as I would soon learn – do not hold the virtue of truth in such high esteem as the British.

  The day after the World Cup final, President Chirac invited the French team to the Elysée Palace and addressed Zidane directly in the following words: ‘Dear Zinédine Zidane, what I have to say to you at this intense moment, perhaps the hardest moment of your career, is all the admiration and affection of a whole nation; its respect too … You are a virtuoso, a genius of world football. You are also a man of the heart, a man of commitment, engagement and conviction. And that is why France admires and loves you.’

  The key, then, is not winning, nor is it – as our Protestant mythology likes to claim – the joy of simply participating. France loves men like Zidane for their commitment, their virtuosity and their panache, not for their success. Traits like rigour, reserve and resilience – qualities which, significantly, are usually attributed to France’s Protestant minority – are begrudgingly admired but never championed. Only the great losers of history repeatedly capture the imaginations of French writers and filmmakers: figures like Joan of Arc, Napoleon and the martyr of the French resistance, Jean Moulin.

  France and her history are tuned to a tragic register. Every one of her regimes – monarchies and empires included – right up until the Fifth Republic, ended in bloodshed, rebellion or catastrophe. Tragedy is her element. Britain, with her tradition of political compromise and her attachment to the durability of custom, is more at ease with the comic.

  The French are not. They’re not, as we know, at all funny; they rarely understand irony and they’re never, ever self-deprecating. They are too involved, too committed for comedy, too busy feeling.

  Of comedy the philosopher Henri Bergson said in his essay on laughter, Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique: ‘Indifference is its natural element. There is no greater enemy to emotion than laughter.’

  The comic view requires a certain detachment from life and its vicissitudes, something of which the French are quite incapable. Even the French language – with its paucity of nouns and their multitudes of meaning – is more emotionally charged than English. I recently went to see a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, a play that Samuel Beckett wrote initially in English, and then translated into French. The director had been granted permission by the notoriously finicky Beckett estate to put on the two versions of this one-man show back to back. First we sat through the French version then the English, each one acted in strict accordance with Beckett’s precise and plentiful stage directions. In spite of there being little or no variation between the performances, the play, as it moved from French to English, shifted imperceptibly from a tragic to a blackly comic register.

  The comic view is also one that looks at reality between the eyes and dares to describe it. Comedy rolls around in the nitty-gritty of reality, while tragedy seeks escape through ideas. The French love of the tragic view of life goes hand in hand with their love of ideas.

  Comedy is the resource of the long-suffering. For the British, it is an antidote to the various hardships associated with living on a damp, windy island in the North Sea. Our humour has been honed and crafted over centuries. The easier people have it, it seems, the less their need for comedy. Today, France’s only decent stand-up comedians are her outcasts and fringe-dwellers – her Arabs and her North African Jews.

  The French, who have a horror of appearing stupid, tend to prefer wit to humour, and so the one has thrived to the detriment of the other. I was struck, when I first arrived in Paris, by how totally lacking in silliness dinner-party conversation was. I was stunned to find that people – even young people – thought that punning was funny; I would watch the gay rallying of jeux de mots in amazement. As the years went by, I entertained myself by becoming sillier, until it grew apparent that I had become l’Anglaise de service, a kind of clown, reliably irreverent and accommodatingly dippy.

  France, in the eighties, seemed to me a comic desert. When I discovered, from his domination of prime-time television, that for most French viewers English humour meant Benny Hill, I was even more horrified. Today Mr Bean has replaced Benny Hill in the h
earts of French comedy-lovers. On the one or two occasions that I made the mistake of trusting my French friends enough to bring out the latest example of English or American comedy, I have been met with stunned incomprehension. When my own children, thrilled by the prospect of a relaxed evening’s entertainment with their friends, brought back an Eddie Izzard DVD from London, they had to accept the chasm that existed between their humour and that of their peers.

  ‘But why does he dress like a woman? Drag isn’t funny any more …’ said one.

  ‘The gags are too long-winded …’ said another.

  Unable to explain that being in drag was not the point and that being long-winded was, my two children gave up and now confine themselves to clandestine comedy-viewing with their English cousins.

  Television, Hypocrisy and Ideas

  There is something contrary about the French; something that the English often perceive as perverse. But this awkwardness is the stuff of which French identity is made. It is born of the perpetual and irreconcilable confrontation between the idea and the reality.

  Recently I asked a French friend, a former English teacher and enthusiastic Anglophile, what it was that she liked about the English. Her answer goes a long way towards explaining what it is that I have found most difficult about living in France.

  ‘In England’, she said, ‘I learnt that it was possible to be more than one thing.’ When I pressed her for an explanation, she answered, ‘In English society a person can be complex, hold contradictory positions and ideas. In France, because of our idealism and our history, we are encouraged to take sides, and this can be very boring.’

  To my mother-in-law, Madeleine, and to a great many French people, the dominant characteristic of the English is their alleged hypocrisy. Indeed, the expression l’hypocrisie anglaise refers to what the French see as our perfidious habit of dissimulation. It does not occur to them that where they see duplicity may simply be doubt, nor that our unwillingness to take a stand might not be a posture but a genuine state of mind. In French, the words ‘equivocal’ or ‘ambivalent’ both carry the negative connotation of moral ambiguity before they convey the more neutral idea of multiplicity of meaning. Once again, as experts on the vicissitudes of reality over ideas, the British are aware that nothing is as simple as it seems.

  A good example of this confusion between pragmatism and duplicity can be found in French accounts of the personality of Oliver Cromwell, a man endlessly puzzling to the French. As leader of the English Revolution, Cromwell should have been an idealist. His life and actions proved him to have been quite the opposite and so for the French, he must have been a hypocrite.

  Drawn to the complexities of Cromwell’s character, Victor Hugo combed through countless seventeenth-century pamphlets and newspapers in the course of writing an interminable and rarely performed play about him. In the play, Cromwell is characterised as a parliamentarian who dreams of becoming a monarch. This Romantic conceit works perfectly well in French. The idea that the epitome of moral complexity is the figure of a man in whom two conflicting ideas are constantly vying for supremacy would have served perfectly the character of Napoleon, with his legendary histrionics. But Cromwell was an Englishman, and therefore not necessarily required to be consistent or even coherent. John Buchan beautifully described Cromwell’s paradoxical nature in his 1934 biography and at no point judged him for it: ‘A devotee of law, he was forced to be often lawless; a civilian to the core, he had to maintain himself by the sword; with a passion to construct, his task was chiefly to destroy; the most scrupulous of men, he had to ride roughshod over his own scruples and those of others; the tenderest, he had continually to harden his heart; the most English of our greater figures, he spent his life in opposition to the majority of Englishmen; a realist, he was condemned to build that which could not last.’

  For the French, complexity very quickly becomes hypocrisy. Bishop Bossuet, the scourge and converter of Protestants under Louis XIV, described Cromwell as ‘a man of an incredible depth of mind, a refined hypocrite as well as a skilled politician’.* Recent French scholarship on the man hardly differs in its interpretation: ‘As much as his political acumen, Cromwell owed his success to his profound hypocrisy.’†

  This confusion explains the strange mixture of admiration and contempt with which the French judge the English character. When they call Oliver Cromwell a hypocrite, they are not referring to any gap between what he might have practised and what he preached. Hypocrisy in French does not necessarily infer the pretence of virtue, which is a person’s private affair, but rather an excess of complexity, a lack of moral readability.

  The French need to know at all times whose side you are on, which – for an English person – can become very tedious.

  *

  The French love of ideas has had a devastating effect on the independence and quality of her media. Television was seen from the outset as a hugely powerful vehicle for ideas, and the habit of presidential meddling is a long-established tradition that has been hard to break. France’s two most influential newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, were basically created – or in the case of Le Figaro, re-created – after the Occupation by de Gaulle, and in his own image. From as early as 1944, in his configuration of France’s post-traumatic political landscape, the general was animated by a deep mistrust of communism. Forced – by the legitimacy conferred by their Resistance credentials – to compose a government with communist ministers, de Gaulle was careful to make sure that French radio and newspapers fell into the hands of his political allies. Driven by his dual mistrust of communism and the Americans, de Gaulle also created a new daily newspaper – Le Monde – and named his Resistance buddy, Hubert Beuve Méry, as its editor. It was Beuve Méry who said on the eve of the Allied landings: ‘The Americans constitute a real danger to France. They can stop a necessary revolution and their materialism does not have the tragic grandeur of the totalitarian regimes.’ Once again, at the heart of this quite widespread anti-American sentiment, lies the conviction that Anglo-Saxon culture is basely materialistic and lacking in grandeur. It is this very sentiment, this love of so-called ‘tragic grandeur’ that led legions of French intellectuals to support two of the worst totalitarian regimes in history – Mao’s and Stalin’s – long after everyone else had woken up to their horrors.

  Just like Le Monde, the modern-day Le Figaro was intentionally partisan. The paper reappeared in 1944, after a two-year hiatus under the Nazi Occupation. This right-leaning daily newspaper, in existence since 1826, became the official mouthpiece of the newly founded political party the MRP, which had its roots in the Christian branches of the Resistance. On 25 August 1944 its first edition opened with a eulogistic editorial by François Mauriac on de Gaulle. This politicisation of the press, born out of the trauma of collaboration and the dangerous instability of post-war France, has meant that there is no lasting tradition of independence in the media. It also goes some way towards explaining the paucity of investigative journalism. Since de Gaulle, Presidents Mitterrand, Chirac and even Sarkozy, when he was minister of the interior, are all known to have picked up their phones to have someone sacked from a TV station or newspaper.

  Alain Peyrefitte, formerly de Gaulle’s minister of information, gives a telling account in his brilliant and unflinching study of his own countrymen, Le Mal Français, of just how deeply involved the French government is in controlling the media. He describes being led into his new office in 1962 and his predecessor proudly showing him a row of buttons on his desk – given the times, it would probably have looked like something from Thunderbirds – and saying: ‘That one is to summon the porter, that one your secretary, that one gets you through to the head of RTF [National Radio and Television], that one to the news editor for radio and television, and those two to heads of programming for radio and for television …’

  It is hard to imagine, even as far back as 1962, a British government minister calling the editor of BBC radio or television news every evening at five o’
clock and giving him the order for the day. But this is what happened in France and continued, more or less openly, and despite Alain Peyrefitte’s efforts to the contrary, right up into the early years of Mitterrand’s presidency.

  Living in a society with no real tradition of independent media has one advantage: no one takes the media seriously and, as a result, its influence is extremely limited. Unlike the British, the French do not sit around and talk about what they have seen on TV, which is seen as a simplistic and implausible medium. It is rare that millions of French people will be held captive by a television programme; there is no equivalent to the numbers of viewers drawn by EastEnders, Big Brother or The Apprentice. France is not a society that sits huddled around its TV screens.

  Television is also, of course, a medium naturally given to the worship of reality. In line with our love of reality and our taste for the comic over the tragic, the British are excellent watchers and makers of television. The French, on the other hand, with their love of grand ideas and their contempt for reality, make execrable television. Hours of French airtime are devoted to the spectacle of people (anybody will do) sitting around discussing ideas. There is none of the British mistrust of ‘talking heads’. Talking heads are seen as a good thing in France, and the louder they talk the better.

  The extent to which the British nation recognises itself in its television is unimaginable to French people, for whom TV is and always has been an inferior medium. People in Britain are happy to devote hours of their leisure time to watching or discussing television, and the BBC is an object of national pride. The same is not true of TF1 or France Télévisions, or even the relatively new window on mainstream bourgeois culture, Canal+. The amazing diversity and inventiveness of British TV make it possible for the British public to identify massively with its output. In France no such consensus is possible. French television is not a mirror of the French soul and French people do not recognise themselves in their TV, radio, nor indeed in their newspapers. The result is that there is no media bandwagon here. People in France are not animated, in unison, by the same obsessions and anxieties as we are in Britain, where one week it’s cot-death syndrome, the next it’s paedophiles, the next it’s binge-drinking – the whole nation tilting like so many sunflowers to wherever our media shines its mighty beam. There is a paradoxical feeling associated with this concordance: on the one hand, it’s a comforting sensation of being part of a small, cosy island in which we all vibrate together – to the strike of Big Ben, to the theme tunes of Big Brother, Coronation Street, The Archers – and, on the other, an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling that makes many Britons long to escape.