The Secret Life of France
Page 23
‘When we came out of agricultural college back in the seventies,’ he told me, ‘we had a dream of the land that we were eager to fulfil. Before the rule of the supermarkets, we were able to live that dream. Not any more. We have no freedom now. Our lives are ruled by quotas, debts and targets.’
Bertrand and Marie’s answer has been to reduce their flock from one hundred and fifty white to eighty chamois goats, and cut out both the collectivists in the co-op and the capitalists in the supermarkets. Recently certified organic – which to all intents and purposes they already were – they are planning to make and sell their own cheese in the local markets. Bertrand’s son has also taken over his grandfather’s bees and now sells chestnut honey as well.
Over time Joe and I have come to understand why it is that Bertrand and Marie tend not to sell their land even when times are hard for them, which they often are. This land is, for them, as close as anything gets to sacred.
After several evening meals at our house Bertrand finally took me aside on his way to the door and implored me to stop inviting them for dinner.
‘We’re up at five,’ he pleaded. ‘Sunday lunch is better for us.’
* Guardian, film review by Peter Bradshaw, Friday 3 April 2009.
† Revenu de solidarité active (RSA) is a French form of social welfare introduced by the Sarkozy government in May 2007 to replace the RMI and given to about 1.8 million people. Today, an eligible couple with three children living at home will receive about 1,188 euros per month (not including housing benefit). In my department (Languedoc-Roussillon) 13.1 per cent of the population receives the RSA, versus 8 per cent nationally.
16
The Broken House
There are often unconscious forces driving our decisions, reasons that remain hidden to us. Abandoning the comfort of a lifestyle honed over decades for one that would put me utterly to the test was, I now realise, the result of such forces. In moving from the known to the unknown you can earn the hidden rewards that come from putting yourself in jeopardy and at the same time discover how much there is left to know.
In September 2009 I went to see my local GP about blood in my poo. Tests revealed something called squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the anal canal, a fairly rare, but – as my doctor friend Sandrine sweetly pointed out – not very chic form of cancer. So began a stream of jokes about my bottom that would sustain me through the darkest moments of treatment. In fact, I discovered a whole new lexicon of French expressions relating to the arse, my favourite being ‘avoir le cul borde de nouilles’, which means literally ‘to have an arse fringed with noodles’, or to be extremely lucky, which at the time I was not.
With my diagnosis, first of a large tumour in my bum with lymphatic spread, then of metastasis in the lungs, I would fall through into the parallel universe of the sick and their carers, and find myself on the front line of the French national health service. As I underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and then surgery and chemo in Montpellier’s anti-cancer centre, trying to wrap my mind around the details of the experience became an essential part of my struggle with the disease.
I am of course quite incapable of comparing the English and French healthcare systems, having only experienced the latter. What I can say is that I felt particularly lucky to live in a society in which no economic considerations seem to be applied to the matter of healing the sick. Cancer being the epidemic here that it is in the UK, I have witnessed many of my neighbours – old and young and, like me, without private health insurance – receive the same quality of treatment as I did. Details like free taxis to and from Montpellier (a three-hour round trip) and home visits from a physiotherapist reveal the generosity of the system. But how long can such munificence last, asks The Economist again and again? Something has to give, proclaim the pundits of supply-side economics. They’re probably right, I tell myself, but not yet, apparently. Not just yet.
Sandrine, my old anaesthetist friend, who works for the French Ministry of Health, is leading a reform of the Paris hospital service. She says that there is consensus right across the political spectrum that savings must be made. France spends about 10.5 per cent of her GDP on healthcare (versus about 9.8 per cent in the UK) and everyone agrees that there is an endemic problem of waste in the system that must be addressed. According to Sandrine, though, there is equally entrenched consensus that this crackdown must on no account affect patient care. None of Sandrine’s political masters, either under Sarkozy or more recently under Hollande, made any attempt to argue the cause of triage according to age or lifestyle, for example. Everyone must be equal, in this sphere as in all others.
Everything that I most enjoy and detest about France could be found in the microcosm of her health service. I learnt the particular humiliations that can come with being a patient in a very hierarchical society. There may be a patient charter here, passed back in 1995, but few of the hospital staff seem aware of it. In the week of my diagnosis I was hanging about in a hospital corridor waiting to be wheeled in for an examination when I decided to have a look at the file that was propped up at the end of my bed. It had my name on it, after all. As I was gazing at the largely indecipherable notes a nurse walked by and plucked it from my hand.
‘You’re not allowed to see that,’ she said tartly.
‘Could you give it back please?’ I called out as she marched off down the corridor. ‘It’s my right to see it!’ I shouted tearfully.
As she pushed through the swing doors, my specialist was coming the other way. He saw immediately what was going on and gently pulled my file free of her grasp.
‘She is actually entitled to look at it,’ he pointed out kindly.
‘Really?’ she said sniffily. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
When he returned it to me he apologised on behalf of his colleague.
‘The old ways are hard to change,’ he observed.
I saw it myself, time after time; patients cowed by the higher authority of the medical staff. On one occasion I was waiting to see the radiologist in the plush, underground bunker that was the radiotherapy department. A door opened and two women emerged, ushered by Professor M, chief consultant and head of the department. I guessed the women were mother and daughter. The professor stood and talked to them in low tones. The mother, a tall, black woman who might have been in her fifties, was weeping softly. The younger woman was comforting her but it was impossible to tell which one of them was sick. Suddenly the professor, who was no more than about five foot four, reached up and pressed his index finger to the weeping woman’s nose. The gesture was so shocking to me, so belittling that I had to stop myself from shouting out, ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ The woman didn’t seem to mind. She just looked down and opened her bag, took a tissue from it and blew her nose. Then this professor of international repute went back into his office.
I cannot imagine this kind of vainglory going unchecked in a British hospital yet nor can I imagine some of the mollycoddling that I experienced here in France. I remember towards the middle of chemo, when I was feeling anything but beautiful, the hospital beautician leaning over my bed and offering me a facial. Dazzled by her shining hair, her white smile and her perfect make-up, I lay back in a stupor of gratitude while she massaged my face with cream and talked to me softly about the quest for beauty as a signal and proof of recovery.
I think, too, of a conversation I had on my first day of chemo with a cancer nurse called Marie Christine who was well acquainted with psychoanalytic principles. Asking me whether or not I had any children she stopped me when I had finished rattling off their ages.
‘Have you told Joshua that it’s not his fault?’ she asked.
I had not.
‘I strongly recommend that you do,’ she said authoritatively. ‘He’s at the age when he believes himself to be at the centre of the universe. Everything is potentially his fault.’
Torn between fear and scepticism I rang home the next morning and spoke to Joshua.
‘Yes it is,’ he said firmly. ‘I didn’t put my hand over my mouth when I was coughing that time. Remember?’
When I explained that I didn’t have a cough, Joshua’s relief was palpable. Thank you, Marie Christine, for a particularly useful piece of Freudian orthodoxy.
After dreaming all through treatment of striding across the hills near our house, I found that among the aftereffects of the radiotherapy were lymphoedema (swelling in the legs) and acute fibrosis in the pelvis, which left me unable to walk properly for about a year. Three times a week a physiotherapist called Frederic drove the thirty minutes from the nearest town to treat me. I like walking, but I have never been partial to physical exercise. Joe watched with amusement as I struggled through my exercises in between my sessions with this ridiculously good-looking twenty-six-year-old international ultra-running champion. My motivation in working so hard was all at once revealed to me one afternoon by the reaction of an American girlfriend who happened to be staying. When I waved goodbye and closed the door on Frederic she put down her book and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me,’ she said.
*
In July 2010, six months after I had finished treatment, we got a call from Laurent asking us if he could come and spend the night with two of his girlfriends on their way down to Spain. I have never felt closer to being in a Nouvelle Vague film than that summer evening standing with Joe and watching those ravishing creatures in full make-up stepping out of Laurent’s Audi and picking their way in their Grecian sandals along the steep, narrow path that leads down to our house.
Laurent followed behind his charming companions, carrying a basket laden with delicacies from Paris. Their genuine delight and enthusiasm for a place and a life that could offer no personal appeal to them was a testimony of their refinement. When, the following morning, Laurent stood wrapped in a bath towel in our sitting room, in the middle of what Joshua then called ‘The Broken House’, with its crumbling walls and its makeshift furniture, and exclaimed, ‘J’adore votre maison!’ I felt a glow of pure joy.
The following afternoon after we had all waved them off I went inside to write an email to Jack and Ella recounting their father’s visit. Ella sent back a text message:
‘Laughing and crying at the same time! Thank you, Mum!’
‘Thank you for that description,’ Jack wrote the next day. ‘It really feels like the circle is closed and the suffering is ended.’
17
Ride a Fast Horse and Stay Ahead of the News
This, according to the American uncle who was responsible for nurturing my writing dreams, is the cowboy’s first rule of survival. He’d sometimes say it to me as a sign-off: ‘Remember, buddy: ride a fast horse and stay ahead of the news.’ I now suspect that he made the expression up because I can’t find it anywhere, but it still stands as a reminder of his extraordinary ability to live in the sticks – in his case a hippy outpost in Northern California – and still give the impression that he had his finger on the pulse.
I have, on occasion, felt uneasy about calling myself a journalist when I’m writing, most of the time, from the middle of nowhere. As one comment on my blog so rightly put it, ‘How would you know anyway?’
With regular power cuts and an average of one person for every fourteen square kilometres, my corner of the Lozère can feel very cut off. But then I remind myself of the fact that most journalists I know strongly dislike interviewing people and rarely leave their desks except to go out to lunch.
I mostly track news of France on the radio as I drive back and forth along the narrow, winding road that hosts the famous rally, Le Critérium des Cévennes, and leads down to our local village.
The stations that come through clearly here are France Bleu Gard Lozère, a very bland local radio station to which listeners phone in saying that they lost a shoe in a field, or that they found a bag of kittens by a stream; then there’s the uniformly and unapologetically leftist France Inter, and the shamelessly dull and pretentious France Culture. All three, with their endless talk shows and phone-in programmes, can offer a pretty good idea of the mood of the nation.
*
When Sarkozy came in promising rupture with the past, the West watched and waited for France to throw off at last her Keynesian corset and join the modern world. In July 2008 the President boasted at a UMP rally on Europe, ‘France has changed a lot more quickly and profoundly than we know. From now on when there’s a strike in France, no one will notice!’
By then Sarkozy’s track record was already impressive. His reforms to the civil service at home and his handling of the euro crisis during his term as President of the European Council, his intercession in the Russia–Georgia conflict and his decisive action against Libya had made a statesman of him – albeit one in stacked heels. By the following year even The Economist, which always has France in its sights, had to concede that the French had come out of the global financial crisis better than most. In an article entitled ‘France: the badboy of the free market bites back’,* the author, a devotee, as you would expect, of US and UK-style free-market capitalism, could not help but acknowledge that France’s bizarre economic model, with its record of shameless dirigisme, conservative banking and lavish public spending, had left her better equipped to deal with the crash of 2008 than her more obedient partners in the global economy. Sarkozy was riding high.
By May of the following year, however, a shift was discernible. A poll† claiming to take the temperature of the nation after two years of the hyperactive, tick-riddled Super-Sarko revealed that a large majority (75 per cent) admired the man for his ‘courage’ and ‘dynamism’, but condemned him (73 per cent) for his inability to ‘listen’ and ‘to solve the problems of the French people’.
A year and a half later, in October 2010, this mild condemnation had turned to mass aversion. For the sixth time since Joshua and Gabriel’s return to school – after their interminable, nine-week summer holiday – there was a general strike, a day of ‘interprofessional mobilisation’. Once again millions took to the streets, truck drivers blockaded the roads, railway workers occupied the tracks, workers barricaded the refineries and blocked the airports; in short, the kind of tsunami of protest that makes France the envy or outrage of the world.
‘What’s it about this time?’ my sister asked me irritably on the phone from London. My answer sent her into a spiral of indignation. ‘Retirement at sixty? Are they tripping!?’
Even for her, a left-wing, Guardian-reading feminist, the French were being spoilt and petulant.
What was clear, even through the euphoria of mass demonstration, was that this particular battle had already been lost. There was a sense that these marches were not so much about the retirement age but about the future of politics in this country, for politics was still being defined, for better or worse, through the interaction, or rather the collision between authority and rebellion.
Even my daughter, Ella, who was finishing a Masters in business and finance at Paris Dauphine, one of France’s few academic outlets for economic liberalism, felt caught up in the excitement.
‘It’s true that you can’t help admiring the British model, with its super-reasonable parliamentary democracy and all that,’ she said. ‘But I do love a strike, don’t you?’
The support for the strikes was massive and I pictured Ella along with all those French men and women sitting in their offices, behind their spreadsheets, watching the marching hoards on their iPhones and feeling, possibly in spite of themselves, the thrill that goes with disobedience. Chapters like Robespierre’s Reign of Terror notwithstanding, revolution is still the stuff that French dreams are made on.
* The Economist, 12 March 2009.
† Poll carried out by Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France.
18
Patriarchy in Peril
France seemed to be holding up reason
ably well to the constant pressure to mend her ways. After years of being urged to toe the line economically, she emerged from the global financial crisis clinging more steadfastly than ever to her status as lone wolf. Then, out of the blue, came a disastrous blow to her self-belief. On 14 May 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and France’s presidential hopeful, was arrested in New York on attempted rape charges. In the weeks following the news, cracks in the myth of France as the most civilised, epicurean nation in the world began to appear.
It was Sunday morning and I was driving to the market in our local village when I heard the news on France Culture. A woman of Guinean origin called Nafissatou Diallo working as a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in New York had accused Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her. I remember pulling over into a layby, turning up the volume and sitting there open-mouthed while the boys fought in the back. The news was shocking in itself – attempted rape, unlawful imprisonment – but my alarm went deeper. It felt like a moment of reckoning, a death knell to a certain idea of France. Suddenly DSK, the grand séducteur, the infamous lover of women, was revealed as nothing more than a dirty old man unable to control himself.
All of a sudden people started questioning some of the myths that are woven into this culture around sex – particularly of the extra-marital kind – as a private, elegant and decorous game. Perhaps all those hommes à femmes, those grands séducteurs and those chauds lapins were part of a big lie designed to serve as a rampart for the patriarchy. How tragic it was that the nemesis of both the man and the myth should be played out in America, the home of the witch-hunt and the cradle of political correctness. And how predictable that so much of the reaction to the story was centred upon a visceral clash between two world views.