Paris to the Moon (10 page)

The national craze for early retirement may be an employees' twist on an employers' gimmick, but its roots are cultural. Retirement isn't scary here. In America one unmentioned aspect of the Social Security debate is the feeling people have that to stop working is, in a sense, to stop living. It is the vestibule of death. In France there is no equivalent anxiety—and there are no great Florida-style gulags for the elderly. One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and taking the air and walking their small, indifferent dogs along with everybody else. The humiliations visited on old people in America—dressed up like six-year-olds, in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers, imploding with rage—aren't common here. The romance of retirement is strong. The right-wing daily
Figaro,
for instance, though editorially opposed to the move for very early retirement, ran a series of pieces about the "young retired"— people still in their forties or fifties who have managed to stop working. The series described people who at last have time to "reflect"; it was written in exactly the same admiring spirit that an American daily might use for a series about old people who are as busy as all get-out.

For Parisians the pleasure of quitting isn't far to seek. Many of them come from the country—or, at least, feel attached to a particular village—so the idea of
returning
has a certain appeal. They are not being sent to Florida; they are just going home. People who remain here in town find that life becomes interesting when they stop working. Everyone who attends French public lectures knows that the most visible, and most audible, element in the crowd is the phalanx of the retired. Sometimes they present a bit of a problem, since they tend to be contentious, and when the subject comes within their purview—if it's the Third Republic, say, or the Second World War—they feel free to speak up and correct the lecturer.

Not long ago somebody referred to the debate on Social Security in America as being distorted by "black helicopter" thinking. In France there is something that might be called "white helicopter" thinking. The American populist belief is that there is a secret multinational agency ready to swoop down from the skies and make everybody work for the government; the French populist belief is that there is a secret government agency that may yet swoop down from the skies and give everybody a larger pension.

L'Horreur Economique,
the extreme manifesto of white helicopter thought, is the most successful book of the last several publishing seasons. A treatise by the novelist and essayist Viviane Forrester, it has sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in six months, and in November it won the Prix Medicis, which is a little like a French Pulitzer Prize. Forrester is a minor bellettrist whose earlier work included popular studies of Virginia Woolf and van Gogh. Not surprisingly, in
L'Horreur Economique
she has produced a work of political economy with all the economics, and most of the politics, left out. Unburdened by pie charts, statistics, or much else in the way of argument or evidence, the book is written in a tone of steady, murmuring apocalyptic dissent, with an occasional perky nod to a familiar neoliberal argument. The total effect is of a collaboration between Robert Reich and Rimbaud. Barely into the first chapter the author flatly announces that the logic of globalization will lead to an Auschwitz of the unemployed. "From exploitation to exclusion, from exclusion to elimination," she writes. "Is it such an unlikely scenario?"

The reader eventually comes to the realization that Forrester is not arguing against the free market, or even against globalization, but against the original sin of commerce—against buying and selling and hiring and firing and getting and spending. Her book is a pure expression of the old French romance of a radical alternative, with the ancient Catholic prejudices against usury, simony, and the rest translated into a curious kind of dinner party nihilism. Of course, the trouble with reviving the romance of the radical alternative is that the only radical alternative remaining is the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who isn't romantic at all.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the left-wing daily
Liberation,
likes to say that Forrester's book is a "symptom." "The fears are irrational, psychological, but they are real," he says. He himself is a kind of neo-Keynesian, and like many other sensible people here, he thinks that for all the hysteria, the economic
crise
is not really very deep and could be soothed by a little deficit spending. But the Keynesian medicine is forbidden by the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which is to lead to European economic union and which, for the sake of German confidence, prohibits new deficit spending.

In any case, there's something emotionally unsatisfying about the Keynesian message. It is like going to the doctor in the certainty that you're dying of tuberculosis, only to be told that your trouble is that your shoes are too tight. In America, and even more so in England, the triumphant free market has a rhetoric, and even a kind of poetry, of its own, visible in the
Economist
and the
Spectator and
the
Telegraph:
witty, trumpet-sharp, exuberant, hardhearted. In France there is a knack of small shopkeeping and a high rhetoric of the state, but there will never be a high rhetoric of shopkeeping.

By the end of February a new social movement was sweeping the papers and the streets. This one came from the left, in reaction to a new bill that attempted to appease Le Pen supporters by jumping up and down on illegal immigrants. The most obnoxious aspect of the Debre bill—named after the interior minister— was a requirement that people who had foreign guests in their homes inform the police when the foreigners left. This provision was so reminiscent of the Vichy laws, which made denouncing Jews a social obligation, that the entire French intellectual class launched a series of petitions against it. Famous artists and directors announced (theatrically, and as a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it principle, rather than as actual fact) that they were lodging illegal immigrants. The petitions flooded the newspapers and were signed by groups: directors, actors, philosophers, and even dentists. A massive demonstration was held, drawing as few as thirty thousand people (the government counting the marchers) or as many as a hundred thousand (the marchers counting themselves).

The provision was immediately withdrawn, but everyone agreed it was depressing that the government had been swayed by Le Pen's absurd notion that France's economic problems have to do with the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal. Many people, including numerous petition signers, also thought there was a depressing element of coercive self-congratulation about the marchers. The protest reached its climax when protesters, got up as deportees, arrived at the Gare de 1'Est to reenact the deportations of the forties. This struck even many sympathetic watchers as being in
mauvais gout.

On a recent Saturday, at the first children's concert of the season at the beautiful new Cite de la Musique, the union of part-time artists, which had been threatening to strike over
their
pension predicament, decided instead to educate the audience. Before a Rameau pastorale began, a representative of the union harangued the five-year-olds for fifteen minutes on the role of itinerant workers in the arts, and about the modalities of their contributions to the national pension fund, and how the government was imperiling their retirement. The five-year-olds listened respectfully and then gave him a big hand.

In the midst of the economic gloom Bill Gates came to France. Not since Wilbur Wright, back in 1908, has an American arrived in France quite so imbued with the mystique of American inventiveness, industry, and technological hocus-pocus. Bill Gates came here with a masterpiece, the
Leonardo Codex,
and it has gone on display in the Musee du Luxembourg, but his visit seems unlikely to produce a masterpiece, as Wilbur Wright's did. Wright became the subject of one of the great portraits by the boy genius Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Mozart of photography, which summed up the early-twentieth-century French view of American technological wizardry; grave, dignified, pure. Bill Gates doesn't have the bone structure, and anyway, the French cult of Gates is strangely indeterminate. He is described, variously, as the father of the Internet and the creator of popular computing—as anything except what he is, which is the head of a gigantic corporation. He is a symbol divorced from his invention, an aviator without an airplane.

Nonetheless he is presumed to know something. "What France needs is its own Bill Gates," the governor of the Bank of France announced. Gates's message to the French, which is essentially that buying Windows will lead to mass happiness, was symbolically linked with that of another celebrated recent visitor, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is the last of Europe's "master thinkers," and he gave a series of lectures at the College de France. His books and lectures have been the subject of reports in
Le Monde
and
L'Express
and on the television news. It seems that Habermas has replaced his old theory of the state, which was that there is no natural basis for it outside of a bunch of human conventions, with a new theory, which is that the natural basis for the state is the human habit of arguing about whether or not it has one. The argument is somewhat opaque, but it has produced a nice catchphrase, "social communication." That, rather than the social contract, is to be the basis of the new society, and a hope now faintly glimmers that between Habermas and Gates—between the German philosopher who tells you that you need only connect and the American businessman who will sell you the software to let you do it—a new, comprehensive social theory is around the corner.

Some people just get fed up waiting. After five days in mostly happy captivity at Credit Foncier, Jerome Meyssonier decided that he'd had enough.
"Ca sufit,"
the president announced to his employees, and that afternoon he went home. Curiously, he had become, in the interim, a kind of hero to the very people who were keeping him locked up. "Meyssonier is with us!" the employees of the Credit Foncier cried as their boss emerged into the light. (Later in the week they added to that slogan an even better one: "The semipublic will never surrender!") On television Meyssonier was seen smiling weakly. He looked worn out and about ready to quit, but then perhaps this should not be a surprise. M. Meyssonier is fifty-five.

A Tale of Two Cafes

I have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-Cafe Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, involved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three planets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem looks simpler, because all it involves is the interaction of a couple of places in Paris where you can eat omelets and drink coffee. It's still pretty tricky, though, because what fills in for gravity is the force of fashion—arbitrary, or arbitrary-seeming, taste—which in Paris is powerful enough to turn planets from their orbits and make every apple fall upward.

I began to brood not long ago, on a beautiful Saturday in October, when I arranged to meet my friend Nicole Wisniak at the Cafe de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, for lunch. Nicole is the editor, publisher, advertising account manager, and art director of the magazine
Egoiste
and is a woman of such original chic that in her presence I feel even more ingenuous and American than I usually do, as though pinned to the back of my jacket were a particularly embarrassing American license plate: "Pennsylvania: The Keystone State" or "Explore Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes."

When we got to the Flore and looked around, upstairs and down, we couldn't find an empty table—that kind of Saturday— so we went outside and thought about where to go. I looked, a little longingly, at Les Deux Magots, just down the street, on the place Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The two cafes are separated only by the tiny, narrow rue Saint-Benoit. I turned to Nicole. "Why don't we just go in there?" I said.

A smile, one of slight squeamishness mixed with incapacity, passed across Nicole's face. "I don't know," she said, at a loss for the usual epigrammatic summary of the situation. "We used to go there, I think . . . twenty years ago. . . ." Her voice trailed off, and again she got a funny smile on her face. She couldn't say why, but she knew that it was impossible.

A taboo as real as any that Malinowski studied among the Trobriand Islanders kept us out, though why it existed and how it kept its spell I had no idea. Still, one of the things you learn if you live as a curious observer (or as an observed curiosity) on the fringes of the fashionable world in Paris is that the Flore remains the most fashionable place in Paris, while the Deux Magots was long ago abandoned by people who think of themselves as belonging to the world, to
ce pays-ci—
this country here, as the inhabitants of Versailles called
their
little fashionable island. Somehow, at some point, in a past that was right around the corner but—to Nicole, at least—was irretrievable, something had happened to make the Cafe de Flore the most fashionable place in Paris and the Deux Magots the least.

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris—to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing.
"C'est normal."
And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally,
Foucault
announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).