La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (34 page)

It was a record number of medals to bestow at one time. But in a personal letter to President Chirac, Levitte argued that Americans were woefully underrepresented in the roster of Legion of Honor recipients. His embassy had done its homework and discovered that Morocco, with one-tenth of America’s population, had just as many.

Chirac signed off on the idea, but when Levitte sent the budget—more than a million euros—to the Foreign Ministry for approval, the response was swift. “Forget it,” the ministry told him. Chirac would decorate one American veteran in France; the other ninety-nine would have to get their medals back home. “I wrote back and said, ‘You forget it,’” Levitte told me. “‘A hundred veterans are coming and I will be in charge of everything. I’ll finance it myself.’”

Levitte had lived in the United States for several years, first as ambassador at the United Nations, then in Washington. He had learned the can-do American spirit. So he brought together the heads of several major French corporations. “I said to them, ‘The loss of part of your market is catastrophic. This is a publicity campaign that won’t cost much but will do a lot for your image.’” They all agreed to cough up the money for his D-Day plan.

He persuaded Air France to kick in a jumbo jet to ferry the veterans and their families. He persuaded the SNCF rail system to donate a special train to Normandy and four-star hotels like Le Meurice and Le Bristol to provide free luxury accommodations, meals, and ground transportation in Paris.

There was a three-hundred-foot-long red carpet at the airport in Paris, so royal looking that the veterans had to be coaxed to walk on it, and a gala evening with American swing music. Levitte got so excited as he told me the story that his words came out backward. “Woogie boogies! It was cool!” he exclaimed.

The veterans were awarded the medals at the Invalides in Paris as a French military band played. During the anniversary celebrations on the beach at Arromanches in Normandy, World War II footage was shown on huge screens. One scene showed a banner strung after Liberation, which read, “Thank you for deliverance.” At Omaha Beach, thousands of French people formed a human chain that spelled out the words, “France will never forget. Thank you, America.”

Every American grave was adorned with roses. The American Sixth Fleet band played the signature jazz tune of the Duke Ellington orchestra, “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Fifty military planes flew overhead. The French frigate
Cassard
sounded a twenty-one-gun salute. In his speech, Chirac called D-Day “the day hope was born.” When the veterans, dignified in their slow gait, marched past the reviewing stand, the Queen of England stunned the audience with a dramatic break in protocol. She joined the other world leaders in standing to applaud them. All of us there on that day—even some of the toughest among the White House press corps—became a bit weepy. “This was a moment of history,” said Levitte. “Voilà. This was my thing. The veterans’ celebration. This was my thing.”

In his four decades as a diplomat, Levitte has become so adept at masking his feelings that he has earned the nickname “the Sphinx.” But his victory at D-Day was the high point of his diplomatic career. As he told the story, he sucked in his breath and snorted in an undiplomatic fashion. He was struggling to will back tears. “I’m still crying now,” he said.

Levitte understood the key to seduction in diplomacy as well as other areas of life: to find common ground and shared values and to build on them. Avoid confrontation and finger-pointing even if you are convinced you are right. Never let the other side lose face. Instead, get the other side to believe it is the winner. What Levitte did during the crisis over Iraq was to dig into French history and celebrate the best of the human spirit: generosity, courage, and sacrifice for the sake of freedom. What was needed was not elegant logic but the intellectual and emotional seduction that comes with good listening.

“It’s crucial to feel empathy, sympathy, and love toward the people you are going to live with,” said Levitte. “Within a negotiation, you have to establish a climate that will bring your interlocutor—who can sometimes be your adversary—to want to talk to you. My entire campaign in the United States was to say, ‘We love you. We understand you. We are with you.’”

The D-Day anniversary in 2004 did not quickly repair the relationship between France and the United States. But it was an important reminder that the two countries were and would continue to be friends and not, as some in America proclaimed, adversaries.

Despite his failings as a
séducteur
in the French mode, Nicolas Sarkozy was able to seduce America. He told Americans what they wanted to hear. While Chirac and Villepin seemed arrogant and made the United States lose face, Sarkozy came off as an ordinary guy and expressed his love. Levitte helped teach him how to do it.

A key to his I-love-America approach came in a radio interview in 2003. When Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born actor, won the governorship of California, some politicians and commentators said his victory reflected a dangerous American populism. Sarkozy, then the interior minister, gushed. “That someone who is a foreigner in his country, who has an unpronounceable name” can become the governor of the biggest state in the United States, “this is no small thing!” he exclaimed.

Sarkozy shared the official French view that America’s war against Iraq was a mistake and that France was right to stay out. Nevertheless, he suffered during the French presidential campaign for being too pro-American, proudly proclaiming admiration for the American celebration of the work ethic and upward mobility. He wore the nickname “Sarkozy
l’américain
” not as an insult but as a badge of honor.

By the time he came to Washington on his first official visit as president, in 2007, he was perceived as a staunch friend of the United States. One of the greatest moments of his presidency was his speech before a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress—a rare honor for a foreign head of state. As part of the press traveling with Sarkozy, I was monitoring the speech on the House side. My
New York Times
colleague, Carl Hulse, came over from the Senate side to help me out. We predicted that it would not be a big deal. Few lawmakers were expected to show up, and congressional staffers would be rounded up at the last minute to fill the empty seats. After all, that’s what had happened when I covered Jacques Chirac’s appearance before Congress in 1996. (France had conducted nuclear tests in the Pacific not long before that visit, and much of the Congress boycotted the speech in protest.)

But this time turned out to be different. A few minutes before Sarkozy’s speech, senators and congressmen poured in. Carl came rushing back to tell me what an extraordinary moment this was.

Congress was in the mood to embrace Sarkozy. He received loud cheers and a three-minute standing ovation as he stepped to the podium. Congress saw in him the imaginary good Frenchman who liked America, not the bad one who came with finger-pointing arrogance. Bertrand Vannier, Washington correspondent for Radio France, asked what was going on. “Bertrand, it doesn’t matter what he says. America wants to love him,” I said.

What none of us knew at the time was that Sarkozy’s speech had been rewritten at the last moment to appeal to the emotions of the Americans. Henri Guaino, Sarkozy’s top speechwriter, had drafted a text that criticized and lectured: the Americans had been wrong on the war in Iraq, Guantánamo must be closed, that sort of thing.

But Guaino missed the plane to Washington, and Levitte gained control of the text. He furiously rewrote it, injecting passages about friendship with the United States. He slashed the second half, which was full of criticism.

“We weren’t here to give lessons,” Levitte recalled.

Sarkozy delivered the sweet version. He spoke of his love of the American dream and of the cultural icons of the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to Ernest Hemingway. He expressed admiration for American values and for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He thanked the United States for saving France in two world wars, rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan, and fighting Communism during the cold war.

Even better, Sarkozy had been coached to put his hand on his heart. He did it with enthusiasm, twice in the first ten minutes. While Congress stood to applaud at the end of his speech, he again placed his hand on his heart, letting it rest there for a full five seconds as he smiled with satisfaction.

The strategy worked. Without sending a single soldier to Iraq, Sarkozy became, as President Bush called him later that day, “the kind of fellow I like to deal with.” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said of Sarkozy’s performance: “You just heard a Ronald Reagan speech from a president of France. It was an almost out-of-body experience for all of us.”

The three-star chef Guy Savoy, who had been invited as part of the French presidential party, told me afterward, “I was so proud I had to hold myself back from singing the ‘Marseillaise’!”

On a morning that grew gray and cold with the wind from the sea, Calais showed a little leg. After sixteen years of planning and an investment of about 28 million euros, this city in the northern corner of France unveiled a museum that pays tribute to the artistic specialty of its past: lace. The minister of culture was there, as were the mayor, local officials and residents, the architects of the modernist building, and dozens of journalists who arrived on a specially organized train from Paris.

Lace is the most seductive of body coverings. It evokes the idea of delicacy and femininity, showing without unveiling. In the early nineteenth century, the lace industry made Calais famous, and the new International City of Lace and Fashion of Calais includes exhibits of handmade and machine-made antique lace, lacemaking machines as big as trucks, and couture ball gowns with lace as light as butterfly wings. The permanent collection holds 10,000 pieces of lace and 3,200 costumes and related objects. To mark the opening, a red, white, and blue ribbon of lace was cut with a silver pair of scissors. Promoters explained that lace is part of France’s
patrimoine
, or heritage, and that it must be protected, preserved, and promoted; they touted a visit to the museum as “a spiritual, sensual, and sensory experience.” Chantal Thomass, France’s lingerie queen and the “godmother” of the museum, signed copies of her book on lingerie, her hands encased in tulle-trimmed fingerless black gloves. Eleven fashion designers showed lacy confections in a runway show.

But the celebration masked a sad reality: for nearly a century, France’s lace industry has been dying, slowly and painfully, a victim of cheap foreign labor, changing fashions, and outmoded business practices and technology. Most lacemaking has moved to Asia. In 1909, there were 35,000 lace workers in Calais; in 2009, about 2,000.

Tourists have come to the lace museum since that opening day in 2009, but they have not transformed Calais into a must-see destination. The city was largely destroyed in World War II, and it is a place not of picture postcards, but of high joblessness. It is also associated with a darker side: as a magnet for immigrants and asylum seekers from far-off places of desperation like Afghanistan and Iraq. They carry on their backs the dream of crossing the Channel into what they believe is an El Dorado called Britain. Since the closing in 2003 of a refugee center near Calais and the eviction in 2009 of several hundred squatters from a wooded camp called “the jungle,” the immigrants wander the city’s streets, waiting for a better future that may never come.

The museum is a modern manifestation of nostalgia, an exercise in preserving a grandeur that no longer exists. In a sense, the dedication of a space for the “memory” of the “legend” of lace is an acknowledgment of defeat.

France today is stuck between two options, both of which are flawed. One is to embrace the tenets of a globalized world that demands technological advancement, physical mobility, and psychological fluidity. But that would run counter to traditional culture. The other is to celebrate and promote the attractive, seductive tools that worked for France in the past. But they are rusting with age and running less smoothly, like the lacemaking behemoths that need oiling and repair.

For decades, an awareness of the decline of France has bored deep into the national consciousness. There is an admiration for history and a reveling in past glory, but these are coupled with a fear of the unknown and a determination to maintain the status quo. Side by side with what is called
déclinisme
are valiant and desperate attempts to retain the country’s reputation as a place of beauty and pleasure. Seduction is the best that France has to offer. When it works, it’s magic: it is hidden, mysterious, and oriented toward a glorious, crystallized, ideal image. But it can also entail inefficiency, fragility, ambiguity, and a process that at any time can end badly. When the game comes up against the cold, hard wall of reality, when it reveals itself, seduction fails.

It can degrade into the antithesis of seduction, what I call anti-seduction, a kind of antimatter of the emotional world, canceling out the intent to attract or influence by producing the opposite effect. Pornography is anti-seduction. Bling-bling ostentation is anti-seduction. Talking about money is anti-seduction. Ending lively banter by declaring the conversation over is anti-seduction. Saying no for no good reason is anti-seduction.

When seduction fails, France fails. “Seduction is irrational; it is deceptive,” said Bruno Racine of the Bibliothèque Nationale. “The seducer can instantly become despicable. When the terrible side of the seducer appears, his power of enchantment disappears. That is because seduction is the weapon of conquest. It cannot be the weapon of duration, because to endure you need other qualities as well.”

I am convinced that, deep down, many French people feel bitter resignation that France is no longer as important as it was, even a half-century ago. On many levels, they are terrified by change. They fear losing their identity. They fear inhabiting a midsize democracy with beautiful buildings, becoming Germany with better food or, just as bad, a bigger version of Belgium or Switzerland.

Marc Fumaroli, the historian and member of the Académie Française, lamented the fact that the French language is in permanent and irreversible decline. Conversation, so crucial to seduction, is becoming a lost art, he said.

So that means France is doomed? I asked.

Not at all, he replied.

“One must not exaggerate,” he went on. “These phenomena are terrible, of course, but ultimately, there remains the fact that everyone would like to come and live in France. We have at least ten centuries of civilization behind us. We have demolished, we have destroyed, but there remain enough traces. That is a source of happiness! There are entire regions that are inhabited by the English and Dutch who have settled here. If France is a museum, all the better! She must be a museum! It is by being a museum that she has a chance of survival, to be adored.”

But adoration from the outside is not enough. The French know that they must find a balance between modernization (to avoid economic decline) and preservation (to avoid cultural annihilation). Like other nations and people shaken by economic retrenchment and globalization, the French are often confused by the difficulty of determining where the real threats lie. Like Americans, they sometimes focus on the small picture, what they see as threats to their identity, fastening on immigration and fear of the outsider.

The identity issue is so crucial that the Sarkozy government launched a three-month nationwide debate in 2009 to determine what it means to be French. About 10 percent of France’s inhabitants are of Arab and African origin or descent, many of them Muslims, who offer a rich mix of history and cultures. But in announcing the initiative, Sarkozy proclaimed “the profound unity of our culture, and dare I say it, of our civilization.” The government asked the country’s one hundred prefectures to conduct town-hall meetings about the values of the Republic and sent them two hundred questions as a guide. The questionnaire was never made public, but it circulated quietly.

One question asked, “What are the elements of national identity?” Some of the choices were predictable: history, language, culture, agriculture, industry. Others less so. Where did France’s wines and its “culinary art” fit in? Was the “countryside” an element of national identity? “Churches and cathedrals” were listed as possibilities, but not synagogues and mosques.

The grand national debate was an abysmal failure. It quickly degenerated into an ugly controversy about immigration and the rights of Muslims, ethnic Arabs, and ethnic Africans living in France. The majority of the French were convinced that the debate had been a ploy by the governing conservative party to win votes from the far right in the 2010 regional elections.

Only modest measures came out of the campaign, such as requirements that schools fly the French flag, display the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man in classrooms, and give students the opportunity to sing the “Marseillaise” at least once a year. “Many French doubt their identity because they do not have as secure bearings as they once did,” said the sociologist Michel Wieviorka in the newspaper
Libération
. “The place of the country is no longer assured as before; its international influence is in decline. As a result, identity becomes the receptacle for all fears.” He faulted the debate as an exercise by those in power “to confuse all sorts of historical symbols and meanings.”

Even a seemingly benign promotion of France can backfire when the tools of seduction fail. In 2008 the government unveiled a new logo using Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. The initiative, called Rendez-vous en France, was designed to sell France as a tourist destination. Tourism and communications specialists identified three values that make France so appealing: liberty (independence, creativity), authenticity (history, culture), and sensuality (pleasure, hedonism, Epicureanism, romance, passion, femininity).

The logo was a simple red-and-blue line drawing of a young woman with a slight smile, her head turned and tilted upward as if looking toward the future, the word “France” curving across her chest. When Finance Minister Christine Lagarde unveiled the logo, she praised it for evoking romance. “Why not?” she asked, quoting the twentieth-century writer Paul Morand: “When it comes to love, if you are French you are already halfway there.”

A close look at the word “France” showed just how cleverly the logo had been drawn. The “F” formed Marianne’s right shoulder; the “N” her left arm. The problem was with the “R” and the “A,” which clearly outlined breasts. Market testing showed that the evocation of naked breasts might offend people in some countries. A French business website pointed out that the image of a naked woman might be “banal” in French advertising but unacceptable in North America, Asia, and the Middle East. In the end, the word “France” had to be rewritten and the naughty nakedness eliminated.

One place to look for evidence of the change and displacement that feed French fears is on the farm. Three out of four French farms have disappeared in the last half century; in 1960 about a third of the French earned their living by farming; today less than 5 percent do. The United States saw a similar move away from the farm, but it took place earlier and was met with less alarm. In France, the trend is unsettling, and it is deplored.

Much of the French countryside remains resplendent, with rich farmland and pretty villages. But there is a darker side. The writer Frédéric Martel, who grew up on a farm, offered to show it to me. And so one weekend we went to visit his parents in Châteaurenard, once an archetypical French farming town in Provence. The neat rows of apple trees and grapevines that once lined the road heading into town disappeared long ago. In their place was a landscape of prefabricated warehouses, auto parts dealers, a halal chicken-processing plant, and fields overrun with weeds and scrub. This was not the romantic Provence of the author Peter Mayle, where the villagers are quaint, the views picturesque, and the farmers happy.

Châteaurenard, like dozens of other farming towns that were the bedrock of rural France, has lost its soul. The farmers, like Clément Martel, Frédéric’s father, are selling off chunks of their land and abandoning their unprofitable fields. The Châteaurenard area has 150 working farms, down from more than 800 in the 1960s. Local officials and farmers predict that by 2020, only 50 farms will be left. “Our farms are becoming the monuments of the dead, our town is a bedroom community that services others,” said Bernard Reynès, the town’s mayor. “We are losing our confidence that life will somehow get better, losing our roots, our rural identity.”

Though it is near Avignon, a city that is one of France’s top tourist attractions, Châteaurenard has little star quality. Half of its working residents commute to jobs somewhere else. The medieval fortress is crumbling, the church unlit and often closed, the museum a one-room collection of old farm tools. At night, the streets of the town belong to young men, most of them of Moroccan origin, whose fathers came to France as farmhands decades ago. There is no new industry, and the young men are repelled by the idea of farm labor.

“My father came here with his children to find success,” said Mohamed Sghiouri, a high school student who hoped to become an electrician. “He was a farmhand for thirty years, and now he’s at home on disability with back problems. Since I was small, he told me to ‘work, work hard in school,’ so I could do better than he did and stay off the farm.”

The communities tend to keep separate. The ethnic Arabs congregate in one café; the Gallic French men in another. The first group gathers in the shade of trees around the central town square on hot afternoons; the second group retreats indoors. When the mayor walks the streets, he reaches out to shake the hands of the old-timers but leaves the ethnic Arabs alone. Every Bastille Day, the town celebrates the arts and crafts of daily life a century ago. A retired pharmacist grinds potions with a mortar and pestle. A baker makes loaves as big as casseroles in a communal oven. Residents dress in period costume to sing old French country songs. Children ride ponies. The ethnic Arabs stay home.