The Atlantic and Its Enemies (44 page)

Much of this came about with the ministry of Jack Lang, in 1981. On one level, it was popular, his team grinning away in the Kennedy-Servan-Schreiber manner. Culture, said Lang to
Playboy
, was to be fun. As the eighties drew to a close, Culture even gave the socialists a new lease of life, their original inspiration having failed: there was indeed fun, even though the other ministries - the economy, foreign affairs - became grim-faced as the problems began to accumulate. To begin with, the Malraux project had been very serious indeed, as befitted a country that had gone through so much, up to the Algerian war. Then 1968, an explosion of imbecile hedonism, had occurred. Theatre had begun this process and Lang himself had run a festival at Nancy that was supposed to be innovative, thought-provoking,
etc.
in the Brechtian manner. At least it had some sparkle, whereas the cultural commissars were taking over elsewhere (Louis Althusser’s
Notes on a Materialist Theatre
, or Sartre’s thoughts as to ‘a proletarian theatre’). In 1969, the Nancy Festival started a sort of annual commemoration of ‘the revolution of 1968’, the general idea being a French Wood-stock or Berkeley. Patrice Chéreau added the war of the sexes to the Brechtian war of the classes; or there was an American, in 1971, who staged a seven-hour dumb show, brilliantly illuminated, which Aragon said was the best thing he had ever seen. Lang was sacked from the Théâtre de Chaillot, in 1974, having destroyed the
art déco
frescos that had once seen Gérard Philipe’s triumphs, but took his revenge, claiming that France was still a cultural desert. In 1981 the ministry announced there would be ‘recognition of the cultural habits of the young, rock, jazz, photo, scientific and technical culture. Local radio . . . Introduction of the cultural dimension of the politics of social and professional inclusion for the young’ (
sic
). Six
groupes de réflexion
were set up, and no doubt various useless institutes in the education ministry where Alain Besançon’s one-time Communist friends found their places, burrowing away in the State like some sort of termite, pre-programmed and leaving nothing to record their passage but little heaps of pulverized dirt. Tocqueville had written a famous passage: Au dessus (de cette foule innombrable) s’élève un pouvoir immense et tutélaire, qui se charge lui seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort. Il est absolu, détaillé, régulier, prevoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait à la puissance paternelle, si, comme elle, il avait pour objet de préparer les hommes à l’âge viril; mais il ne cherche au contraire qu’à les fixer irrévocablement dans l’enfance.

Lang in 1981 even announced that ‘culture is the abolition of the death penalty! Culture is the reduction in the hours of the working week! Culture is respect for countries of the third world! Each member of the government has an obvious artistic responsibility.’ Wooden language followed:

the ministry entrusted with culture has, as its mission, to permit each and every French citizen to cultivate their capacity for invention and creation, to express their talents freely, and to obtain the artistic training of their choice . . . to contribute to the spread of French art and culture in the free dialogue between the cultures of the world.

France now adopted the stereotypes of Greenwich Village, giving up her own clothing and popular music, but a good part of the inspiration was really Soviet, in that Lenin had maintained a commissariat for culture, under Lunacharsky, together with various Bolshevik women - Krupskaya, Trotskaya, Dzierzynska, Kameneva,
etc.
It had Lito - Direction of the Book, which purged libraries, Muzo for music, Izo, Teo, Foto-Kino and Chelikbez, the special commission for the elimination of illiteracy. Lunacharsky had said, ‘taking power would be pointless unless we could not make people happy’. Narkompros collected its avant-garde, and there remained, for Malraux’s generation, an illusion - ‘an ultramodern Parnassus, working together with an ultramodern state to ultra-modernize a people that was innocent, but stupefied by religion and the old order’. But the library purging was soon followed by poets and artists. Fascism, with
dopolavoro
and
Kraft durch Freude
, followed.

Against this European happiness-by-State came the American style, happiness by democratic entertainment, an immense force. Even by 1946 there was an initial test - one condition for an American loan was that American films should be freely distributed, as against the existing quota, by which French films had to be shown four weeks out of sixteen. American films then invaded - in 1947, 388 were shown, whereas French ones fell from 119 to 78 that year. In 1948 the US films were taxed, and the money was passed on to French film-makers. But the fact was that Holywood was very good. State protectionism in France turned the cinema over to coteries, anxious to do down the
idées reçues
; François Truffaut alone, or nearly, holding out for the older values in the national tradition. Fumaroli remarks that it has been a good thing that French wine-makers never had a state subsidy or were forced by coteries to make an avant-garde wine. But the way was now open for a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, with the inevitable coteries frightened by popular success and denouncing ‘Americanism’ while being dazzled by its techniques, though this ultramodern America was in reality at variance with America’s own traditions. French Communists took up the cause, and the Central Committee collected some big names - Picasso, Aragon, Léger, Irène Joliot-Curie, quite in the style of Comintern media mobilization in the thirties. Russian films,
etc.
were shown in fellow-travelling organizations such as
Les Maisons de la Pensée Française
, and Fumaroli wonders how far these ideas percolated, as the state ‘structures’ spread, and of course culture offered at least relief from the endless wooden language and the tiresome agitprop. In time, many left the Party but stayed, at state expense through
Maisons de la Culture
, etc., with ‘gauchisme’, and 1968 showed how Brechtism replaced Marxism of the old sort. Kremlin-Beaubourg, Kremlin-Bastille then got going. Jack Lang, for instance, said of Cuba in 1981 at a Unesco conference in Mexico that it was ‘courageous’, that ‘culture is above all the right of each people freely to choose its political order’, as against the supposed domination of culture by a multinational financial system. There was much denunciation of the American film festivals at Deauville, but the denunciation itself was really that of Greenwich Village, sexual liberation, drugs,
etc.
Lang subsidized French rock groups that imitated obsolete American ones and made a great fuss of rap. That ministry was even encouraging a confrontation for alleged creativity between the museums and a noise called ‘tag’. The only answer would have been to defend French culture via the schools, but instead Lang tried to fight Americanization by adopting what the American liberals made of it - alternative life-styles, marketing, social and racial problems - and bringing Disneyland to France. There were gruesome events such as a
Fête de la Musique
, endless music of all sorts launched simultaneously, everywhere, in the manner of a campaign against smoking or for seat belts. There was in June 1995 a business on the place de la Concorde for SOS Racisme, a nowadays discredited organization, with reggae and pop groups subsidized by the ministry, looked on with favour by Jacques Attali, and Jack Lang, with 300,000 people there for the weekend, including tourists, with huge screens and amplified music, the ministerial faces projected. It was supposed to be an enormous campaign against racism, complete with campaign buttons (
touche pas à mon pote
), in connection with the celebrations of 1789.

There were of course in the Ministry of Culture (as it was after 1976) the older institutions, the museums and archives, with enormous international authority, with well-chosen exhibitions, in the usual dusty and slow-moving scholarly atmosphere. Now, the ministry introduced dynamism, etc., and its exhibitions were glossy and shallow as against the older style of long-lunch apparent laziness (in the great days of the BBC Third Programme, three-gin lunches were standard). Fumaroli says ‘the ready-made smiles of the modern, dynamic technocrat disguise a mourning’. Hence the saga of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Even with Malraux (who instituted the
Maisons de la Culture
) there had been ideas of juxtaposing the modern and the medieval, and the idea won after 1988, as the socialists ran out of any other ideology. This led to imitation of the Grand Louvre scheme, and I. M. Pei’s absurdly misplaced
Maison de la Culture
.
Lieux culturels
followed, with all the audiovisual paraphernalia. Strange it was that these artifacts were not really shown on television at all, where they would indeed have had access to millions if that was the intention. The State did not let go of television, and a modest cultural channel, la 7, can only be seen very expensively, on cable, and by fewer people than watched the original Eiffel Tower transmitter in 1935. Besides the electoral considerations, the ministry’s own assumption, that there is a huge public for culture, would automatically be disproved as there would indeed only be a small number of viewers for such a channel, and in any case they were quite likely just to ignore television. There is the example of the Centre Beaubourg, getting in a year as many people as watch a successful TV show in a single night. But the museum itself attracts no more people than when its pictures were tucked away in the Palais de Tokyo. Visitors spend time in the side-shows but do not pay to enter as they were supposed to do. There was conscious imitation of the Eiffel Tower (1889), renowned worldwide, and Beaubourg, the Louvre pyramid, Opéra-Bastille, the Géode de la Villette, l’Arche de la Défense, and then the tower-books of the Tolbiac library were repetitions on the theme. The crowds that visit do indeed silence criticism but the real visitors remain quite stable in number. The things have been a touristic success, and nothing else. Books got the treatment as well, and libraries acquired multimedia trappings, until the Direction du Livre had the idea of the Très Grande Bibliothèque (Paris libraries generally being understocked). The Beaubourg’s own library took in as many visitors as the museum upstairs, people sitting on the floor and notices warning of pickpockets. The Très Grande Bibliothèque was supposed to keep the old French books and as well to be an ‘information library’, but the two purposes (however much talk there was of the technical difficulty of keeping books in the old BN and the need to computerize the catalogue) were different. The old library was meant for an elite - or a minority, if that is the right word - and yet it was supposed to coexist with a crowd of sightseers (
badauds
). Fumaroli remarks that no-one expects non-sportsmen to come onto football pitches, or non-dancers to take the floor in discos. ‘The superposition of two libraries, by nature incompatible, on the same architectural site, itself in any event conceived to attract the robot-tourist’ caused a debate that had been simmering all along, since 1959. The public who had always gone to the museums and the Comédie-Française were oppressed by this supposed cultural democratization. The Lang ministry was the apogee of modish bureaucratic creationism, all geometry and Le Corbusier, with a vast budget. But what was there to show for it all? This ‘Culture’ was used as a grandiloquent, triumphalist alibi for the ruining of the old university and the humiliation of its scholar-teachers, as ‘social sciences’ take over from the old humanities, which truly had the apparatus of scholarly disciplines to offer. Television became the real queen of the battlefield, a mighty engine of egalitarianism, which simplifies and coarsens to the point of caricature the worst features of what Montesquieu called the general spirit of a people. Curiously enough, the men (much more often: it took time for the women to catch up) of 1968 frequently went on to prosper in the media, as they did in Germany as well. That year had much to answer for.

16

Atlantic Crisis 1974-1979

Of this period, the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in April 1975 was the great symbol - the greatest military and economic power on earth defeated by a small and very determined Communist state. It was a symbol of greater resonance than even earlier such instances, such as the evacuation of Canton in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan, with his broken army (and the museum treasures of ancient China). In Saigon, there was a general panic, for all the world to see on television, as the helicopters whirred off the roof of the American embassy, crowds of people clutching desperately at the struts. Of course, the supposed peace agreement of 27 January 1973 had been fraudulent, a face-saver for the Americans, and there was a considerable Northern presence in the South. Heavy weaponry was moved along the jungle roads, and 100,000 men came in from the North, with tanks and SAMs. The total force available stood at a million men, regulars and
guerrilleros
, most of whom did front-line service, whereas Thieu’s American-trained 750,000 men suffered for the enormous ‘tail’ on which the Americans insisted: in effect six men in the rear for every one at the front. Thieu tried to extend his own control in the Mekong Delta, but that only overextended his forces - by now, at least partially, far better than before, and offering one of the might-have-beens of the affair. Then came the oil crisis, depriving the South Vietnamese air force of fuel, which the Americans would only dole out from watering cans; and inflation became much worse. By autumn 1974 the Northern leaders had decided upon a two-year ‘general uprising’ and early in 1975 seized territory adjoining Cambodia, capturing huge amounts of supplies, at that only eighty miles from Saigon. Nixon had promised to ‘respond with decisive military force’, but he was now politically dead, and Thieu was abandoned, to the cheers of Congress.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, no longer the romantic Guevara pathway, was now double-tracked and paved, with intersections that required traffic managers, and ended close to Saigon. In fact the South could be cut in half, and the North had another advantage, that small attacks in the centre would drive hordes of refugees in panic towards the sea and Saigon, blocking all the roads and preventing the Southern army from moving effectively. That is what happened - a chief city bombarded and isolated, with refugees crowding the roads and even the ports, paralysing the ships. South Vietnamese soldiers themselves panicked, rushing to save their families. A truly ruthless regime would just have machine-gunned the refugees and driven them in a different direction, but Thieu was not made of such stuff, and instead just ordered complete retreat out of the Central Highlands. Masses of troops picked their way through masses of refugees, moving in buses, lorries, private cars, bicycles, all overloaded with people, from babies to aged ancestors, those who fell being crushed by the vehicle behind, while the North Vietnamese threw shells into the crowds. Forty thousand people are said to have died on this exodus, and over $1bn of materiel fell into North Vietnamese hands.