by Lucy Wadham
When Amara arrived in her new office, she protested about the impenetrable bureaucracy of her ministry. ‘You need a doctorate to understand what’s going on,’ she said. ‘We need to simplify, democratise all this.’
In June 2008, after a long wait, Amara unveiled President Sarkozy’s plan for the suburbs to the French public.
‘I’m a pain in the arse,’ she announced at the press conference. ‘I got what I wanted.’
The scheme carries the suitably idealistic title, ‘Hope Banlieue’. It represents a total investment of a billion and a half euros over three years and will focus on the two, uncontroversial, areas most in need of attention: employment and policing.
It will be a long haul for Amara and, tenacious as she has proven herself to be, she is fighting against a huge resistance to change. The French middle classes and the media that represents them do not want a multicultural society. They want the Republic to remain as it is, with its ideals and myths intact. They do not want to see Arab women in headscarves outside the gates of the Ecole de la République. They do not want positive discrimination, or affirmative action. They want francophone Africans to speak beautiful French, like MC Solaar, and play beautiful football, like Lilian Thuram.
Sarkozy could never have chosen Fadela Amara as a minister unless she had come out against the hidjab. Her feminist convictions guaranteed that she would. Indeed, when in 2008 the Conseil d’Etat (Supreme Court) refused French nationality to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that she wore a burka, Amara applauded the decision. For a woman, she said, ‘the burka is a prison, a straightjacket … There is no difference between the headscarf and the burka.’§
There are no statistics on France’s ethnic communities because ethnic or community-based data analysis is simply illegal. As a result, it is difficult to make real changes to the lives of the children and grandchildren of France’s immigrants because the equality fable makes it taboo even to study them.
The language of that 570-page white paper on the suburbs probably reveals more about France than the content itself. It is so amazingly rarefied and out of touch: ‘The situation of a large proportion of these populations, born of the most recent wave of immigration … apart from being frequently belittling, is the direct or indirect cause of serious social or racial tensions, heavy with danger for the future.’¶
Thirteen years after La Haine, whose clever dialogue and self-conscious aestheticism got the French middle classes to pay attention to the matter of la banlieue for the first time, France is still hurtling towards impact.
‘It’s the story of a society in freefall,’ the film concludes. ‘In order to reassure itself, it repeats endlessly, “so far so good, so far so good” …’
* The Pelchat amendment (article no. 9488), 1 February 1994.
† ‘Little brother has deserted the sports fields, / He can hardly walk and he wants seven-league boots, / Little brother wants to grow up too fast, / But he has forgotten that there’s no point running, little brother …’
‡ Libération, 10 July 1998.
§ Le Figaro, 16 July 2008.
¶ Report by the Cour des Comptes, 7 November 2004.
14
Douce France
For ten years, ten years too many, I was close to this milieu that refers to itself as ‘All Paris’ and which endlessly repeats the same things in the same tone without ever getting tired of its own ennui and convinced that it is exerting an influence upon society when it is no longer exerting any influence, even on fashion.
François Mitterrand, L’Abeille et l’Architecte
I would eventually discover that there was another side to France than the brittle, highfalutin, self-important world of the Parisian bourgeoisie. France’s rural identity, despite the entrenched centralism of Paris’s ruling elite, is alive and kicking. Indeed, one of the striking things about France’s dual nature (urban and rural) is the extent to which one exists in perfect isolation from and ignorance of the other. The affairs of State grind on while France’s peasant population – proud of this title and the knowledge and traditions that come with it – make their wine, tend their flocks or plough their fields with the same disregard for Parisian politicking that their fathers and forefathers showed before them.
I now live deep in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, one of the nation’s few Huguenot strongholds. This is the place where, in 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson went for a very long walk with a donkey. Before that it was the place where French Protestants had been persecuted almost consistently by the French Catholic monarchy for over 120 years. It is a place of hardship and mind-boggling resilience: the very opposite of Gide’s ‘softness, surrender [and] relaxation in grace and ease’. The great nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet said of this place: ‘The Cévennes offer rock, nothing but rock, razor-sharp shale. You feel the struggle of man, his stubborn and prodigious labour in the face of nature.’ This place is a French aberration: a Protestant stronghold in the heart of a Catholic country.
The Cevenols, the descendants of those men and women who chose the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, are inhabited by different values and traditions to their neighbours in the Catholic plains of the Languedoc. They champion integrity, punctuality, rigour and hard work over beauty, charm, art and leisure. They have a history of tolerance towards all minorities and distinguished themselves during the war by overwhelmingly choosing the Resistance and offering asylum to Jews on their flight to Spain.
It is a sweltering afternoon in June with not a breath of wind. It’s too hot for birdsong, only the drone of insects and the sound of my neighbours working outside my window, gathering the hay. Three generations out in the mid-day sun, raking the pasture: grandfather, mother and grandson. They can’t get the tractor up onto the steeply terraced land. Last week, the old man had spent a morning out there with a scythe, his hunched back moving slowly and methodically over the long grass, his arms making an even, sweeping motion. ‘There’s an old quince tree blocking the only access wide enough for the tractor. It’s on its last legs,’ he says with a smile. ‘Sometimes one finds oneself wishing it would die,’ he adds, taking off his beret and wiping the sweat from his brow. They wouldn’t cut down the tree, of course. For one thing, it provides fruit. So they go round it. And mow the whole meadow, about 2 acres, by hand.
Many of my neighbours have never been to Paris and have no desire to go there. Those who have often did so under duress, to pick up a medal for Resistance activity during the Occupation or to attend the annual Salon de l’Agriculture (Agriculture Forum), now a media fest in which reluctant Parisian politicians, posing with prize cows and saucisson, scramble for the farmer’s vote.
Little has changed since President Georges Pompidou remarked to Alain Peyrefitte in 1969 that ‘France remains an old agricultural nation and agriculture has lost its value in the modern world … the new society, the new social contract, change – that’s a language for Parisian intellectuals who can’t tell a cow from a bull’.
I do not read Libération any more. Or Le Monde. They’re impossible to get in my local village. Instead I’ll pick up the occasional copy of Midi Libre, the regional newspaper founded, of course, by one of the Resistance movements in 1944. In today’s copy is an article entitled ‘La lutte des classes n’a pas cessé d’exister’ (The class struggle still exists). It’s a quote from an interview with a local trade unionist called Jacques who joined the miners’ union in 1944. The subtext of the article is an entrenched and bitter hatred of capitalism and a powerful resistance to Sarkozy’s reforms.
‘With the present government,’ Jacques says, ‘which is hacking away at all our workers’ rights and with Europe trying to establish itself without the people, we are storing up our rage. But class-consciousness is coming back and the struggle has always existed. I’m optimistic. One day, the people will win.’
This enduring and entrenched anti-capitalism of the provinces, far more than the eyebrow-raising of the Parisian el
ite, is the force most likely to thwart President Sarkozy. No matter how fast and furious his programme of reform (contrary to what has been reported by the British press, the Sarkozy government managed to push through more than sixty reforms in its first year), the president is unlikely to be able to change this country in one mandate. He has been clever, though, particularly in his reform of what is known as le code du travail (labour code). The job market has, in France, been resolutely immune to all attempts at liberalisation. Unlike his predecessors, President Sarkozy has avoided taking the unions head-on. Instead, he cleverly rolled back the arbitrating power of the State by allowing management and its employees a greater freedom to negotiate with each other directly.
Traditionally, one of the oddities of French trade unions was that a movement derived its right to negotiate on behalf of a company’s employees, not from its representativity (number of members), but from its so-called legitimacy, adjudicated by the State, usually on the basis of a perceived historical legitimacy. One of the five criteria taken into consideration by the State in determining the ‘legitimacy’ of a union was the said union’s behaviour during the Second World War: ‘the patriotic attitude during the Occupation’. This made for a particularly rigid environment for labour relations, in which it was virtually impossible for any new movement to gain any traction. By encouraging direct negotiations, Sarkozy has subtly but radically changed the landscape. From now on only representative unions, i.e. those whose members make up at least 30 per cent of a company (and in the years to come that will increase to at least 50 per cent), are allowed to negotiate labour reforms. These negotiations, conducted under the new rules, will include a vote on the thirty-five-hour week. So Sarkozy will manage to dismantle this hugely divisive principle without even having to change the law. France’s largest union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) – which fought hard for the thirty-five-hour week – is of course furious. The mass demonstrations they organised in the spring of 2008 were a flop, however. People, it seemed, were tired of marching. And they wanted more money, not more leisure.
Things are changing, quietly, behind the scenes of government, while only a few irate militants howl their rage into the wilderness. There is the dismantling of the régimes spéciaux, a vestige of the old system of feudal privileges, by which the French monarchy and then the State granted ‘special’ retirement schemes to certain sectors deemed to be of particular service to the nation, as well as those occupations perceived by the State as particularly gruelling (pénible) – like driving a lorry, or a train, or working down a mine, or being a policeman or a soldier. Beneficiaries of this ‘special’ regimen also include sailors (since 1673), fishermen (since 1709), employees of the Bank of France (since 1806), actors with the Comédie Française (since 1812) and employees of the Paris Opera (since 1698), to whom Louis XIV kindly granted retirement and a pension from age forty for the dancers and fifty for the singers. For decades successive governments had tried to dismantle this absurd system of privileges, enjoyed by a mere 5 per cent of the population, but the determination of those concerned to hold on to their historic rights was so powerful and so impressive that it seemed to persuade the other 95 per cent of the justice of their cause. As Charles de Gaulle said, ‘Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or several privileges; it’s his way of showing his passion for equality.’
In the end it was Nicolas Sarkozy, with his rather Anglo-Saxon love of common sense and plain speaking, who managed to break the taboo and get public opinion behind the principle of equity in the pension system. His reforms won’t solve the huge pension deficit, but the abolition of the régimes spéciaux is of great symbolic significance, for they are the most enduring sign of France’s deeply hierarchical society.
Sarkozy even undermined the sacred cow of anti-Americanism and its concomitant Gaullist principle of French isolationism. By announcing, four decades after de Gaulle slammed the door, that France was returning to NATO’s integrated command, Sarkozy not only broke another taboo, but also put an end to nearly two decades of hypocrisy. All through the nineties, French foreign policy required that any arrangement which put French forces at the disposal of a NATO operation had to be agreed in secret.* Sarkozy has simply decided to put an end to the myth of France’s splendid isolation.
*
In December 2002 Laurent and I divorced. We had been married for fifteen years. When she found out that I was leaving her son, Madeleine came to have tea with me. She knew that I had met someone else and she was baffled by my decision to end the marriage, a move she saw as needlessly drastic.
‘You change husbands,’ she said. ‘And you’re only moving the furniture. Love comes and goes. In ten years’ time you will see. You will reach the same point.’
Laurent fundamentally agreed with her, the pursuit of ‘truth’ being, in his eyes, vastly overrated and very selfish.
‘Why can’t you just have an affair, for God’s sake? Why do you have to be such an Ayatollah of Truth?’
With Laurent, I had discovered France, had hated it, then loved it, hated it, then loved it again. What I didn’t realise at the time was that with each discovery of some new, infuriating facet of her nature, as well as each new reconciliation, my resistance to this country was being worn down a little more. The constant struggle against my environment not only fashioned me, it fashioned my children. As they grew up, they bore witness to my frustration at each collision between the Anglo-Saxon Protestant value system of my upbringing and the Catholic cultural heritage of theirs.
‘Stop knocking France,’ they would say. ‘England’s worse. It’s ugly and rainy and it smells of fried food and beer.’
Today the tables have turned. While I find myself, even without a French husband, becoming more and more deeply ensconced in French life, both my children are in the process of falling in love with my estranged motherland. I would never have guessed this development. Unlike my sister Irene’s children, Jack and Ella were brought up French. They were educated in French schools and although I always spoke English to them, they would, until recently, generally answer me in French. My sister, like many English people who move to France, has never really cut the cord. She raised her children as English and they, unlike my children, both speak without the trace of a French accent.
I should have guessed, however, that reading Jack and Ella Hilaire Belloc, Roald Dahl and Edward Lear instead of the Countess de Ségur or Jules Verne would probably set them on the path to abiding quirkiness. There is no nonsense or madness or indeed anything very dark about the stories that French parents tell their children. If the school psychiatrist had ever discovered the macabre and gruesome stories I would invent at my children’s behest every night, she would have had the whole family in therapy in a flash. Laurent, under the influence of his mad English wife, invented a very good story about a homicidal au pair girl with a chainsaw who chased her charges through the woods every night after their parents had gone to sleep.
In spite of my decision to raise my children as French, it makes me happy to hear them discussing their new-found passion for all things English. Ella, who has recently returned from two months’ work experience in London, is brimming with enthusiasm for the English sense of humour, as if she were the first to notice it.
‘People aren’t afraid to take the piss out of themselves in England. They don’t care what other people think. There’s none of that system we have in France where only one person in a group is allowed to be funny. You know – he or she’s the clown and everyone else is the audience. In England everyone feels free to have a go.’
This, of course, is music to my ears.
‘I love the fact that no one cares what they look like. And no one judges you. It’s so … liberating!’
I remind myself that this was the girl who at sixteen years old could not bear not to be looked at on the London Underground.
‘I love the fact that when you go to a party in London you meet people from all countries and all
backgrounds. In Paris, everyone stays in the gang they met at their lycée and they’re all from exactly the same milieu. I met some French people who were going to the LSE and I had to get away. They only hang out with each other. It was completely suffocating.’
Now Ella says she would like to live and work in England for a while.
As for Jack, he too has made peace with his English roots. This is the survivor of the French national education system who decided that he wanted to be a philosopher. He had a brief stint doing work experience in London and came back wanting to be a filmmaker instead. He has taken a part-time job with a chain of English pubs in Paris while he finishes his Masters in philosophy. He tells me that he is amazed by the dedication of the British waiting staff and moved by their camaraderie.
‘After a shift, we all sit down together and have a few beers, piss about. The French guys are sort of shut out. They don’t get the jokes. They don’t see the point of the work either. For them the job is just a means to an end and that affects everyone around them.’
So Jack discovers the Protestant work ethic and the notion of team spirit. This is the child who never ran a three-legged race or an egg-and-spoon race or saw his dad humiliate himself in a father’s race. Brought up in a nation immune to the idea that it is the taking part that matters, Jack is slowly but surely discovering that winning is actually one of life’s least interesting goals.
It is strange to me to watch my own children struggling, for the first time, with the very facets of their own culture that I found so infuriating when I first arrived twenty-three years ago. While they were growing up, I was blind to my own influence upon them. They seemed to me so wonderfully French that I would never have guessed that their Englishness would one day come and bite me on the bottom. Now that they’re getting ready to leave for England, I find myself buried so deeply in this culture that I doubt I can ever escape it. France has swallowed me up, but not my children.