The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  * These differences, of course, do not apply if we are talking about Catholic minorities within Protestant societies. Besieged from the outside, minorities operate under their own laws, making English Catholics an entirely different species from their brethren in southern Europe.

  † Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘Lettre à l’Institut après son éléction le 25 décembre 1797’, published by Le Moniteur.

  6

  Sublime, Necessarily Sublime

  Mayors, Mass Demonstration and Mayhem

  We spent a lazy and idyllic honeymoon in a house in Provence belonging to one of Laurent’s aunts. It was a pretty stone bungalow, overgrown with lavender and rosemary, on the edge of a sleepy, unspoilt village in Vaucluse called Puyméras. The village has since expanded and many of the surrounding vineyards have been swept away to make room for the new, uniformly pastel, mock-Provençal houses that now litter the hillsides. Anyone who has any experience of real estate in rural France will know all about the arbitrary and absolute power of the village mayor.

  It was Mitterrand and his minister Gaston Deferre, back in the early days of his mandate, who, in an attempt to decentralise the French State, bolstered the power of little dictators to make or break village life in France. Despite a steady rural exodus since the mid-sixties which has resulted in the majority of the population now living in towns, the fabric of French society is still an intricate patchwork of small villages. Three-quarters of her thirty-six thousand communes are made up of villages of less than a thousand inhabitants, over whom Monsieur or Madame le Maire may reign supreme.

  Since the early eighties most of these villages have been disfigured by anarchic building on their outskirts. Anarchic is perhaps the wrong word for these lotissements, as they’re called, for they tend to be uniform in their architectural conception, each region possessing its own template, its own parody of the vernacular. In Provence, all new constructions must be covered in a sickly salmon render to echo the sun-kissed limestone of old, and in the French Basque Country they must have mock wattle-and-daub façades with ox-blood shutters.

  The steady selling-off of lots surrounding France’s villages has been a prized source of revenue for some of the many small-holding farmers, paysans, who have gradually lost their livelihoods over the past three decades. This practice has profited all those lucky enough to own land close to villages like Puyméras, as well as, in some cases, the mayors who delivered the building permits. It has also been a short-term gain that has threatened the future of thousands of communities, which have overbuilt on their most fertile land, polluted their water tables and created unsustainable communities no longer in a position to develop the kind of specialised or ecological agriculture that could save them.

  In those days Puyméras was still pretty idyllic. There was a vibrant café owned by a man who went by the decorous name of ‘Zizi’ (French children’s word for penis), who offered barbecued merguez sausages and live music on Saturday nights. The band consisted of a young man who did Yoghurt versions of Michael Jackson hits, complete with pelvic dance moves and accompanied by a woman on a synthesiser. Already I was finding it easier to dance along happily with the rest of the village to ‘A gonna be starvin’ sunshine’.

  *

  It was on the drive home to Paris that I first understood the significance of the congé payé, the French tradition of the one-month paid holiday. It was 15 August and the Catholic festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The roads were packed with families beginning or ending their holidays. In spite of the terrible traffic, the atmosphere was one of joy and camaraderie. Families were putting out aluminium chairs and tables and inviting each other to lunch in lay-bys or even right there, where they had halted, by the side of the autoroute. The congé payé is a privilege or, as the French call it, an acquis social which, broadly speaking, refers to any right which has been won through social or industrial action and which no one is prepared to give up without a fight. French politicians are notoriously wary of tampering with anything that can be described as an acquis social, for they know that it will unleash the terrifying, debilitating power of the mass demonstration.

  The congé payé dates back to the Popular Front, the socialist coalition presided over by France’s first Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum. The Front Populaire was carried to power in 1936 on a wave of anti-fascism, and its short, two-year mandate is still perceived as the Glory Days of French socialism. As well as introducing the forty-hour working week, Blum introduced the congé payé, which would make the month of August a virtually compulsory paid holiday for the entire adult working population of France. Even today, everyone is legally entitled to five weeks off a year and many decide, however inconvenient for business, to take most of it in one balmy chunk. Even committed capitalists put up the shutters in August as their suppliers are rarely available for business.

  This mass exodus from working life creates a very particular atmosphere, especially in the vacated towns. The mood in Paris in August is entirely different from the rest of the year. Given over to the mercy of happy, badly dressed tourists, the city becomes gentler, freer, less imperious. Kids from the suburbs, somehow kept at bay by the Parisians for the rest of the year, feel permitted to spill over onto her elegant streets on August nights; the footbridges are alive with bad bongo players, amateur jugglers and other unabashedly uncool samples of French youth. Those Parisians who do stay behind in August revel in the luxe calme et volupté of the slacking city, and the place becomes more erotically charged than ever. I recently learnt of the existence of August brothels. Open Monday to Friday from 1 to 31 August, they cater specifically to husbands whose wives and children have left for the country or the seaside. These husbands stay and work in Paris in the week and then take the train to join their families on Friday nights. To even things out, the Friday-night trains are called Les Trains des Cocus (the cuckolds’ trains), packed as they are with men whose wives have been having it away all week with their children’s tennis instructors.

  In August Paris drops her guard and people gain direct access to each other. The city is a coded, trussed-up place most of the year, but in August people talk to each other in bus queues. The only other time one experiences camaraderie like this in Paris is during periods of mass demonstration. It is widely acknowledged as a harsh reality of political life in this country that it is the street that dictates reform. Or rather, it is the street that paralyses reform. Indeed, Laurent explained his own paradoxical politics to me in the following terms: ‘If you want anything to change in France, you have to vote socialist because only the socialists are able to push through reforms.’

  This contrary position made no sense to me at the time, but it soon became clear that while Mitterrand was president, the street allowed his socialist government more room to manoeuvre than it would the Chirac government when it finally came to power in 1986. That winter was dominated by mass student demonstrations, which put an end to an educational reform that had been called for by politicians on both left and right for years. The Devaquet Project was an attempt to allow universities more independence from central government in determining fees and selection procedures. On Thursday 27 November two hundred thousand students took to the streets of Paris. Nine days later, as the demonstrations were still in full swing, twenty-two-year-old Malik Oussekine, an innocent bystander on his way out of a jazz club, was chased by a group of motorcycle cops marshalling the demonstrators and beaten up in the lobby of an apartment building. He died in hospital from his injuries. In the wake of his death, the education minister resigned and Chirac withdrew the reform. He is convinced to this day that it was his capitulation that led to his defeat in the subsequent presidential elections of 1988. He has been said to have sworn never again to give in to pressure from the street. Indeed, his solution to this problem seems to have been to avoid any confrontation at all, his presidential style having been characterised by a stasis and inaction rarely seen in history.

  During the nineties France’s r
ight-wing governments withdrew every single significant reform after mass demonstrations. Prime Minister Edouard Balladur abandoned both his labour and his education reforms, as did Prime Minister Alain Juppé in his attempts to reform the pension and social security systems. In November and December 1995, a general strike was called to combat the Plan Juppé. It mobilised workers from the railway services, post office, telephone and electricity services, Social Security, hospital and education, the emergency services, local government, airports, transport workers and miners. Joined by the student population, the country ground to a halt.

  *

  The effectiveness of public demonstrations in this country came as a surprise to me. I had been a teenager under Margaret Thatcher. My first demonstrations had been in support of the miners’ strike and against public spending cuts, and I had become resigned to the fatuousness of marching. Indeed, in Britain it seemed that demonstrations only did damage to a cause. In Paris, some group or other was marching every week, and the deputies in the Assembly were, for good or ill, taking their demands into consideration.

  There was an atmosphere of collective jubilation during that winter of 1995. Parisians from all walks of life banded together. No matter what their feelings about the reforms themselves, they gave each other lifts in their cars and cheered on the chaos. Civil unrest on a scale like this seemed to bring out the milk of human kindness in these people, generally known for their sullenness. This spirit, this uniting against authority, is encapsulated in the French word solidarité, a word that has a magic ring to it. Mitterrand’s prime minister Michel Rocard used it to soften the blow when he renamed the new supertax from Impôt sur la Grande Fortune to Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune (ISF). France’s equivalent of the civil partnership, voted in after much debate in 1999, was named the Pacte Civil de Solidarité (Civil Pact of Solidarity). The word solidarity is important. It upholds the myth of France as a caring society and enables the individual to go on pursuing his or her interests with a clear conscience.

  French people adhere to the idea of solidarity because they know that at one time or another they’re going to need it in order to defend their interests in a society made up of a myriad of concessions and privileges that have been grappled from the clutches of that monolithic arbiter of all things, the State.

  Nobility, Freedom and Status

  Once back in Paris, Laurent and I settled into married life. In September the city always returns to her natural posture of hostility and mistrust. I spent a good deal of my time crying in the face of daily expressions of scorn from strangers, and Laurent spent much of his trying to repair the damage. Today, my vulnerability in the face of dismissive shop girls, truculent civil servants and rude waiters seems a little pathetic to me. But at the time the rudeness of strangers devastated me. Pregnancy hormones, I’m sure, didn’t help, but when I look back at how I behaved in the face of these assaults, I realise that I was simply ill-equipped. All the social skills I had acquired growing up in Britain did me no good at all. My politeness, the constant pleases and thank yous, the self-deprecating posture – all of it only made me more of a target for people’s contempt.

  ‘You don’t have to be so apologetic,’ Laurent would whisper to me after I had ordered in a restaurant. ‘There’s no shame in the fact that he’s serving you.’

  Of course he was right. The waiter interpreted my sycophancy as a mark of disrespect for his trade. Laurent explained that in France being a waiter was a noble profession. Waiters were not out-of-work actors or writers or people hoping for something better to come along. Brasserie and restaurant waiters, in particular, have often fought for their positions, sometimes even paid for them, and many keep their jobs for life.

  All this explained Laurent’s rather curt restaurant manner. He would state his order simply and clearly, without ceremony or apology, without a please or thank you, often without looking up so as not to engage personally. That way it became the waiter’s prerogative to initiate contact. He could be perfectly anonymous if he felt like it or he could make some witty remark to which Laurent would respond with an appreciative chuckle. This way, client and waiter were on an equal footing. There was no master–servant guilt.

  France is a nation that is at once obsessed with the idea of nobility and the idea of equality. This paradox at the heart of her mythology explains the particular explosiveness of her society. The solution to this paradox, offered first by the monarchy and picked up by the Republic, seems to lie in the word ‘status’. Everyone in France has a statut, which is probably best translated by the military word rank. Waiters have a specific statut, just as the boulanger has his (or hers), as does the railway worker, the teacher, the painter, the plumber… Each profession forms part of a corps (another military word) de métier. The corps de métier is a clear echo of the medieval guild. Members of the medieval French guilds were bound to their lord and master for life. With each guild came a statut and with it a set of privileges; it was often these privileges that made the job bearable. This idea of a job coming with its particular status and set of privileges endures today, even when economic realities have swept many of the privileges away. The fact that the French do not see much glory in productivity or even money goes a long way towards explaining their stubborn refusal to relinquish the few remaining privileges – early retirement, free train travel or long holidays – that are linked to their particular profession.

  In France the idea of personal freedom is inextricably linked to the idea of Nobility. The Revolution’s slogan – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité … or Death (a coda rarely remembered) – places freedom as the highest value. What is rarely admitted is that the Revolution’s particular idea of freedom is deeply indebted to the values of the Ancien Régime. Indeed, it is as if the patrician values of the French monarchy were, by miraculous sleight of hand, incorporated into those of the Revolution. Bizarrely, for the French, even the post-revolutionary French, the idea of freedom is embodied in the life of the nobleman. To this day it is the obsolete aristocrat who remains the ideal model of a free man; free to rise above the drudgery of everyday, material concerns in order that he or she may delight in the life of the mind. Indeed, it is part of the function of the State to preserve and enable this very dream.

  The French idea of freedom could hardly be more different from the Anglo-Saxon notion. Set out most clearly in the philosophy of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, and even echoed, a century later, by the conservative thinker Edmund Burke, the English notion of freedom which would be inherited by America’s founding fathers is inseparable from the idea of property. For both the liberal Locke and the conservative Burke, freedom can be defined by the pragmatic observation that one man’s freedom ends where another man’s begins, and that means with the boundaries of his property. In England, as in America, a man is free as long as his person and his property remain inviolable. His freedom is guaranteed by the law from any arbitrary intervention, be it from the State or an individual: ‘Man hath by nature a power to preserve his property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men.’ In America, the right to bear arms has forever been entangled with this fundamental right to the defence of one’s property.

  The French Revolution, of course, made a mockery of this belief by confiscating the property of Church and aristocracy. Edmund Burke expressed his outrage at the goings-on in France and his protests reflected the deep conviction that the Englishman’s house was his castle: ‘You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.’

  It is hard to imagine the British monarchy, for instance, ever having managed to convince the aristocracy to abandon their estates and move, complete with servants and livery, to the court. Surely the Versailles experiment and the resulting submission to the will of Le Roi Soleil
indicates that for the French the idea of Freedom is not linked to the idea of property but to that of nobility. Louis XIV cleverly manipulated this belief and thereby managed to establish an elaborate hierarchy around his person that fully occupied five thousand courtiers.

  For the French, on the other hand, equating liberty with the freedom to dispose of one’s property is to debase the idea of liberty, which must carry the connotation of nobility or grandeur. To be free of material concerns is one of the principal attributes of true liberty, for the world of commerce induces a form of enslavement: enslavement to profit, to wages, to gain.

  In English society, even in feudal times, the idea of freedom was linked to property. There was no such thing as life-time servitude unless, that is, it was voluntarily given. Legally, an English serf ’s obligation to his Lord ended the moment he returned the goods and property that had been given in exchange for his services. Theoretically, at least, this rudimentary contract was guaranteed by the King’s Justice.

  In medieval France, on the other hand, the vassal vowed life-time devotion to his Lord, in exchange for which he received the status and privileges that were compatible with the nature of his service. The status conferred respectability and dignity and provided, within the confines of subordination to the honoured lord, a sense of belonging to a community of equals. This paradoxical notion of equality within a hierarchy persists in France today. It can be seen in its purest form within the French Public Service, where employees are so imbued with a sense of nobility that they refuse all modification or reform of their status. As Alexis de Tocqueville said of the French: ‘They want equality in freedom but if they can’t have that, they’ll want it in slavery.’