The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  While my daughter Ella thrived on the extreme rigour of the system and always performed well in it, Jack was miserable from the start and did not. In Britain, I’m sure he would have been seen as a special-needs child and helped accordingly. Here in France he was placed in that ignominious category known as en echec, which means, quite simply, ‘failing’, and then – more shaming still – marked out for a bilan psychologique (psychological assessment). Laurent and I, unless we wanted Jack expelled, were forced to take him to Paris’s main psychiatric hospital, Sainte-Anne, for close and gruelling psychiatric scrutiny.

  As we walked with our eight-year-old through the lugubrious grounds, past the patients in their various postures of lunacy or distress, I inevitably wondered what we had done to our son to find ourselves in this situation. As it turned out, an analysis of Jack’s drawings revealed that I had not allowed him sufficiently to regress. I was not sure what this meant, but at the time I felt terrible. It is, of course, a constant of Freudian analysis to look for the mother’s role in the elaboration of complexes and repression. Long after autism was found to be an organic disorder, triggered by genetic factors, French mothers were still being blamed for their ‘failure to bond’ with their child. The myth of the ‘refrigerator mother’ who causes the autistic symptoms through her ‘unconscious wish that the child should not exist’ was propagated by theorists like Dr Bruno Bettelheim and echoed by the French psychoanalytic community for decades. Even today there are plenty of French analysts who refuse to accept the biological nature of autism and continue to compound the anguish of families with autistic children by apportioning blame. I know of one such family who ten years ago moved to London because behavioural therapy for autism simply did not exist in France. In this case the mother was sufficiently strong to resist the temptation to believe that her son’s condition was all her fault.

  Jack was a dreamer and for this he would be punished for years. He also loved abstraction and this would ultimately equip him very well for tertiary education in France, provided he could stay the course. In his last year of secondary school, Jack, along with the rest of his class, discovered philosophy and he became very good at it. But in all the previous years, the system judged and condemned him. At the age of seven, that symbolic age for Freudians when the ‘repressive phase’ begins, the age which the Jesuits used to call ‘the age of reason’, Jack was expected to be alert, receptive and able to absorb, without questioning, huge quantities of facts. On the one hand, the French school system insisted that he emerge from the dream of childhood, and on the other, the psychiatric establishment was telling me to let him go back there. At the time, I was lost, consumed with guilt and endlessly worried about my son.

  Branded with the stigma of the ‘failing child’, under frequent psychiatric supervision, Jack struggled on like this for years until in the end he got fed up and left school in his final year, taking his baccalaureate by correspondence at the age of eighteen and passing. His talent for philosophy got him into the Sorbonne and he has never looked back.

  Bizarrely, Jack now swears by the French school system and won’t hear a word against it, not because it didn’t make him miserable at the time, but because he believes it instilled in him a rigour and a desire for excellence that he would not have had otherwise. I’m not in a position to judge if he’s right or wrong, but I don’t think I’m prepared to go through the same experience with my younger children if, when it’s time for them to go to school, they too prove to be dreamers.

  *

  Jack survived, but I don’t know how many of his kind do. Neither the French education system nor the society beyond it champions the imagination. I believe that it is no coincidence that neither of my elder children have chosen to work in the Arts, which they, along with most of their peers, perceive as sacred and reserved for the lucky few, but not a viable means of making a living. Indeed, it is a wonder to me that novels even get written or art ever made in a culture that worships reason and knowledge to this degree. Experience, the raw material of the imagination, is not valued in this society. Ideas are, and, as a result, contemporary French literature is dominated by members of an academic elite. The novels that are published tend to be stylistically elegant, driven by a deep love of the language and, as far as narrative is concerned, pretty impoverished: story, like personal experience, is a dirty word.

  This is, I think, yet another of Catholicism’s cultural legacies: Auden’s Catholic We versus the Protestant I. It is also one that is under threat from Anglo-Saxon influences. In recent years there has been a backlash against the perceived elitism of French contemporary literature. Unsurprisingly, the iconoclasts have been mostly women and, unsurprisingly again, their subject matter has been mostly sex. Since the late nineties the confessional novel has made a comeback in the form of explicit memoirs by women about their sex lives. Novels like Inceste by Christine Angot, Jouir (Climax) by Catherine Cusset, Viande (Meat) by Claire Legendre or The Sex Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet have been dismissed in more traditional literary circles as ‘porno-chic’, but they achieved huge success with readers eager for real-life accounts and proper stories. They also offer a vibrant alternative to the polished, hermetic works that have dominated the literary prizes in this country for so long.

  Protestantism, in its relation to faith, emphasises personal experience. There is no intermediary between the Protestant and his God, and the absence of ritual in the context of worship suggests that the relationship with the deity should be internal and private rather than collective and social. The often beautiful Catholic rites that persist in countries like Italy and Spain – the cults of the Madonna and the local saint – were destroyed by the French Revolution, but there is an enduring nostalgia for institutional cults and collective worship which I am sure explain the utterly unfathomable French taste for son et lumière.

  This love of ritual may explain why reality TV has not taken hold in France. French versions of programmes like Big Brother tend to be obviously staged and revolve around archaic, fairy-tale scenarios like looking for a rich husband (Eric le Millionnaire) or trying to become a pop star (Star Academy). Britain has, of course, drifted in the opposite direction but somehow managed to end up in the same place: in our thirst for the personal account, we’ve made a cult out of reality; but as our culture becomes more and more voyeuristic, the viewed experience becomes increasingly doctored or processed, and what we call reality becomes the kind of false, self-dramatising posturing of a nation of adolescents endlessly acting out their narcissistic tendencies.

  *

  My first job in France was as an assistant to a professor of English at Saint-Denis University in the outskirts of Paris. Saint-Denis is a suburb. In French the word is banlieue, which means literally ‘place of banishment’, an apt description for many of these areas that are forsaken by the police, social and public services, or anyone who represents authority. The tower blocks of places like Saint-Denis, euphemistically dubbed les cités, in echo of antiquity, are inhabited mostly by immigrants, ‘invited’ from francophone Africa and the Maghreb during the sixties and seventies by Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing to build France’s magnificent infrastructure. It is the French-born children and grandchildren of these workers who, with their formidable rioting, periodically put the fear of God into France’s politicians and, indeed, those members of the Parisian bourgeoisie who have the imagination to realise that there is nothing separating them from the ire of these disaffected youths but Paris’s ring road.

  Saint-Denis University, or ‘Paris 8’ as it is known, was created at the end of 1968. It used to be known by the rather Maoist name of L’Université Populaire and was initially an ‘experimental faculty’, focusing mainly on soft sciences like philosophy and sociology, with a voluntarily anti-academic perspective. The illustrious names that made up the first teaching body include Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault (who set up the Philosophy department) and Hélène Cixous (who introduced Women’s Studies, sti
ll taught nowhere else in France). These people lent the place the extremely theoretical and politicised aura that persists today.

  Like most of France’s public universities, Paris 8 has no selection criteria. Anyone with the baccalaureate can enter, but few stay the course. The drop-out rate for philosophy at the Sorbonne in the first year, for instance, is huge; only about 30 per cent of those admitted go through to the second year. Students are left entirely to their own devices and receive no guidance from their professors, who tend to behave like rock stars, entirely inaccessible for advice. Magisterial lectures are held in vast, over-crowded auditoriums. As with the school system, only the self-motivators who are naturally rigorous and conscientious survive (or else the handful of monomaniacs like my son, motivated by their thirst for revenge on a system that has tried to crush them). The French university system is a matter of sink or swim. If you can stay afloat for three years – and those who do so invariably go on to do a Masters, since a simple bachelor’s degree carries little value on the French job market – then you will receive a first-rate, though entirely impractical, education that has hardly changed since the eighteenth century.

  My first day as an assistant teacher at Saint-Denis was with a group of third-year students of English, many of them clinging on by the skin of their teeth. They were all there because they wanted to be there and they worked hard. My job was to interview them about themselves one by one and note down the different categories of expression – narrative, experiential, descriptive, objective, discursive, theoretical – in an attempt to identify and reveal to them where their linguistic strategies lay. It was a pseudo-scientific approach to the learning of a language that now strikes me as typically French.

  In the process, however, I discovered something interesting – all of them were afraid of talking about their own experiences. They had been very effectively formatted to avoid two of the categories I was testing them for: the experiential and the descriptive. None of them were comfortable with demands like ‘describe where you live’. All of them slipped into generalities about the socio-economic profile of the inhabitants of their particular quartier or confined themselves to opinions about how pleasant or unpleasant the place was.

  Most of their sentences, I noticed, began with ‘I think’, as though they felt that what was required of them was a well-honed opinion. It was impossible to get them to describe anything. Description calls upon the imagination and the will to mould reality for the entertainment of the listener. As I would later discover with my own children, pupils in France are hardly ever asked to do this. Descartes’s fantasy – to extend mathematical enquiry to all fields of human knowledge – was clearly working here, even among the children of France’s immigrants.

  Smiley, Happy People

  Running parallel with the hegemony of Freudian psychoanalysis in France is the widespread use of the antidepressant. The French are the biggest consumers of psychotropic drugs in the world. Contrary to popular belief, they far outstrip the Americans. Recent research by scientists from Bordeaux found that almost a quarter of all French, more than 15 million people, admitted to having taken either anti-depressants or tranquillisers in the past year – five times as many as in Britain and a third more than in America.

  In Laurent’s bourgeois Parisian entourage, I would say that the proportion of people regularly using these drugs was considerably higher than that. There is no taboo surrounding the use of tranquillisers like Lexomil and Tranxène, which are offered over café tables by ladies who lunch when one of them is experiencing a coup de blues at her husband’s most recent affair. GPs tend to prescribe these drugs at the drop of a hat. Recently, two female journalists from the medical newspaper Le Quotidien du Médecin consulted sixty GPs across France, claiming to have stress and anxiety symptoms, and reported that every single practitioner prescribed them with tranquillisers.

  On the other hand, French people with severe psychiatric problems, including psychosis, do not always get drugs, especially if they are in therapy. Therapists in France are generally trained doctors who have then specialised in psychiatry. Theoretically, they can all prescribe drugs, but since most of them are Freudians they tend to decry the use of medication, which they believe interferes with the therapeutic process. So Laurent’s friends who were under psychoanalysis didn’t tell their shrinks what they were getting from their GPs. If you’re an averagely neurotic patient with time and money on your hands, a French GP will feel relaxed about supplying you with prescriptions for tranquillisers or anti-depressants for as long as you like. If you’re poor, however, or psychotic, or both, French GPs tend to play safe and refer you to a psychiatric hospital.

  The widespread use of these drugs does not alter the fact that France has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. According to OECD figures, approximately seventeen out of every hundred thousand French people take their own lives each year, compared to seven Britons. You might ask why – in a society where the quality of life seems to be superior, where fertility and life expectancy and literacy are higher, where the crime rate is lower and teenage pregnancies fewer – so many people want to kill themselves …

  Having raised my children in this society, I have a number of theories of my own – none of them particularly conclusive – but they all relate to the various myths and fantasies that seem to inhabit the French and condition their approach to suffering. All the values that form the bedrock of France’s collective unconscious – the Cult of Beauty, the Tragic (rather than the Comic) world view, the Cult of Reason – leave French people particularly ill-equipped for the harsher aspects of reality. Suffering, when it occurs, must be sublime. It cannot be of the petty, miserable, shabby variety. It has to be grandiose and romantic. The historic example of Napoleon’s slow and ignominious death on the island of Saint Helena is cited by the French as indicative of the ingenious cruelty of the British. Wedded to the nuts and bolts of reality as we are, we refused him the noble, transcendent death for which he was destined by slowly poisoning him.

  Suicide is a serious matter and throwing out idle theories based on little more than intuition is a dangerous business, but I can’t help feeling that a culture which champions the sublime, the grand and the noble, sets up impossible standards for its citizens. What is existentialism – a philosophy born out of the particular tension between the idea of being French and the reality – but the desire to opt out of these impossible standards and reinvent your existence with each passing moment? Surely suicide, in a culture such as this, is a form of sublimation, a means of regaining control over the quagmire that is reality. Gilles Deleuze, one of the great thinkers of twentieth-century France, threw himself out of a window. Richard Pinhas, one of Deleuze’s most eager disciples, who made an academic website devoted to his thought, described Deleuze’s suicide as ‘his final act of liberty’.

  All cultures have their own particular ways of fabricating meaning. British culture is a strange alchemy produced by the continual confrontation between custom and rebellion, between the old and the new. It is a cultural model that functions relatively well in the modern world. French culture, with its rigid founding myths, its obsession for nobility and status, is particularly ill-suited to the hurtling flux of globalisation.

  *

  The French tend not to use the word depression lightly. People don’t say, ‘I’m really depressed this week,’ because in France, having a hard time is not a badge of honour unless it happens to be suffering on a grand scale. Ask a French person how they are and they will never answer: bored, depressed, hung-over, broke, fat or spotty. They’ll put a brave face on their misery and say, ‘Ça va … Plutôt bien …’ And then they’ll change the subject, ideally to something abstract, like politics or cinema or art.

  As I soon discovered, a considerable number of Laurent’s friends were on anti-depressants. Some of them were clinically depressed and others were simply not interested in the particular lows that go with being alive. The normative principle in France – whic
h begins at maternelle and carries on relentlessly all through childhood – means that the pressure to keep up appearances is considerable. This pressure makes intimacy a rare commodity and explains why, after twenty years in a country that I have come to love, there are still no French people with whom I share the openness of my English friendships.

  When I first moved to Paris, I was struck by the gap I kept encountering between what was preached and what was practised. People were always banging on about solidarité and yet they didn’t know or care to know the other people in their building. For all her talk of fraternity and its modern equivalent, solidarity, France is a monumentally individualistic society. Her political system facilitates a certain detachment from her outcasts and high levels of taxation redeem the consciences of her citizens. And so the millions of unemployed and dispossessed on the fringes of all her big cities can be forgotten … At least until the next time they rise up in protest.

  When Laurent and I rented our first flat together, I went and knocked on doors to introduce myself to my neighbours on the other floors. I was greeted first by mistrust – I must be a Jehovah’s Witness – then, when they discovered that I was English, amusement and good will. Yes, I was English and therefore to be forgiven, admired even, for my eccentricity.

  For the sad truth is that, for all our French-bashing, we are in fact loved by the French. They love our eccentricity, they love our sense of humour; they love our moral courage, our excess, our restraint and our imagination.