The Secret Life of France (6 page)

Just like
Le Monde
, the modern-day
Le Figaro
was intentionally partisan. The paper reappeared in 1944, after a two-year hiatus under the Nazi Occupation. This right-leaning daily newspaper, in existence since 1826, became the official mouthpiece of the newly founded political party the MRP, which had its roots in the Christian branches of the Resistance. On 25 August 1944 its first edition opened with a eulogistic editorial by François Mauriac on de Gaulle. This politicisation of the press, born out of the trauma of collaboration and the dangerous instability of post-war France, has meant that there is no lasting tradition of independence in the media. It also goes some way towards explaining the paucity of investigative journalism. Since de Gaulle, Presidents Mitterrand, Chirac and even Sarkozy, when he was minister of the interior, are all known to have picked up their phones to have someone sacked from a TV station or newspaper.

Alain Peyrefitte, formerly de Gaulle’s minister of information, gives a telling account in his brilliant and unflinching study of his own countrymen,
Le Mal Français
, of just how deeply involved the French government is in controlling the media. He describes being led into his new office in 1962 and his predecessor proudly showing him a row of buttons on his desk – given the times, it would probably have looked like something from
Thunderbirds
– and saying: ‘That one is to summon the porter, that one your secretary, that one gets you through to the head of
RTF [National Radio and Television], that one to the news editor for radio and television, and those two to heads of programming for radio and for television …’

It is hard to imagine, even as far back as 1962, a British government minister calling the editor of BBC radio or television news every evening at five o’clock and giving him the order for the day. But this is what happened in France and continued, more or less openly, and despite Alain Peyrefitte’s efforts to the contrary, right up into the early years of Mitterrand’s presidency.

Living in a society with no real tradition of independent media has one advantage: no one takes the media seriously and, as a result, its influence is extremely limited. Unlike the British, the French do not sit around and talk about what they have seen on TV, which is seen as a simplistic and implausible medium. It is rare that millions of French people will be held captive by a television programme; there is no equivalent to the numbers of viewers drawn by
EastEnders, Big Brother
or
The Apprentice
. France is not a society that sits huddled around its TV screens.

Television is also, of course, a medium naturally given to the worship of reality. In line with our love of reality and our taste for the comic over the tragic, the British are excellent watchers and makers of television. The French, on the other hand, with their love of grand ideas and their contempt for reality, make execrable television. Hours of French airtime are devoted to the spectacle of people (anybody will do) sitting around discussing ideas. There is none of the British mistrust of ‘talking heads’. Talking
heads are seen as a good thing in France, and the louder they talk the better.

The extent to which the British nation recognises itself in its television is unimaginable to French people, for whom TV is and always has been an inferior medium. People in Britain are happy to devote hours of their leisure time to watching or discussing television, and the BBC is an object of national pride. The same is not true of TF1 or France Télévisions, or even the relatively new window on mainstream bourgeois culture, Canal+. The amazing diversity and inventiveness of British TV make it possible for the British public to identify massively with its output. In France no such consensus is possible. French television is not a mirror of the French soul and French people do not recognise themselves in their TV, radio, nor indeed in their newspapers. The result is that there is no media bandwagon here. People in France are not animated, in unison, by the same obsessions and anxieties as we are in Britain, where one week it’s cot-death syndrome, the next it’s paedophiles, the next it’s binge-drinking – the whole nation tilting like so many sunflowers to wherever our media shines its mighty beam. There is a paradoxical feeling associated with this concordance: on the one hand, it’s a comforting sensation of being part of a small, cosy island in which we all vibrate together – to the strike of Big Ben, to the theme tunes of
Big Brother, Coronation
Street, The Archers
– and, on the other, an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling that makes many Britons long to escape.

The absence of consensus in France explains, in part, French conformism. When I first arrived I was struck by the general partiality to navy blue or beige. Even young people standing outside their
lycées
seemed all to look the same. I was puzzled by the conservatism of my own children’s dress as they were growing up.

‘Why, when you don’t have to wear a uniform, don’t you dress a bit more crazily?’

They had no wish to dress crazily or stand out in any way. They wanted the same rucksack (Eastpack was the brand and still is) as everyone else; the same jeans, the same stationery. In the absence of rules, they made their own, expressing French society’s tendency to bow to a dominant cultural model rather than to form a willing consensus.

It is a strange paradox that my children, with all their apparent conformism, their desire to fit in and their willingness to look like everyone else, do not suffer any of the feelings of mental constraint or moral claustrophobia that I have described. They clearly
feel
free, even if they aren’t, and this sensation (or illusion) is key to the French identity. How free do the British feel, or indeed how free do we care to feel? Perhaps to the British, Freedom is as overrated as Truth is to the French.

Laurent and I were married in a small seventeenth-century church in Normandy. In the first of three cursory meetings the priest had asked me to promise to raise my children as Catholics. I don’t know if it was the man’s halitosis or my religious convictions that made me so uncharacteristically resolute, but I explained that I couldn’t make such a promise. Laurent, who as a perfect atheist was only going through the whole rigmarole to please his parents, didn’t intervene. He sat with his arms folded while the priest and I did our best to reach a compromise. In the end it was agreed that I would promise, when the time came, to offer our children the choice of taking their First Holy Communion.

The French Catholic Church has a long experience of deal-making. Forced to cohabit with what remained of the more unchristian values of Roman, then courtly society – the code of honour being paramount among those values – French Catholicism is no stranger to compromise. Although France today is no longer Catholic in any sense but culturally, that culture of compromise is still deeply entrenched. It was as if the Church knew that if it were to
survive, it would have to make religious practice as undemanding and as compatible with the requirements of secular life as possible.

There is no doubt that when France chose to turn her back on the Reformation and remain Catholic – despite the fact that her king, Henri IV de Navarre, and much of her aristocracy had converted to the new faith – she chose the path of least resistance. The Protestant relationship with the deity would always be the more difficult: no intermediary in the shape of a corruptible priest, only your conscience to guide you, the relentless scrutiny of the rest of the congregation and, above all, no confessional to wash you of your misdemeanours. There is no doubt that Catholicism, with all its rituals and suspended disbelief, knew how to reel in the masses. No matter how uncompromising the edicts from the Vatican, the French Catholic Church has always been, in practice, remarkably tolerant of sin. You only have to compare attitudes in Britain and France towards adultery, the most banal sin of all, to see the truth of this.
*

On the day of our wedding the little church seemed to be filled with Laurent’s ex-girlfriends. One of them was wearing a lovely tangerine chiffon dress and, as the dark triangle
revealed, no knickers. The girl in question was a very warm management consultant from Quebec with whom I would become friends.

Only my family and closest friends came. Most of my peers were too broke to afford the trip from England and my side of the church was so sparse that it soon filled up with Laurent’s guests. My two girlfriends whom I had accompanied to Victoria Station the summer before were both being pursued by one of Laurent’s many cousins, who had sneaked into their hotel bedroom the night before the wedding. So far, he had got nowhere, but he had not given up. Watching their reactions, I remembered the combination of shock and admiration that I had felt at Laurent’s own brand of persistence.

After the religious ceremony – which was entirely cosmetic; the real marital contract had been signed before the mayor at the village hall – the guests all traipsed through the fields back to the house for the
vin d’honneur
. This is an old custom, still prevalent in the countryside, which involves the whole village coming to toast the bride. For me, it meant kissing seventy Norman farmers four times each. In France, since the wars of religion, the Protestant minorities have greeted each other with the trinity kiss (three times) and the Catholics with either two or four, depending on the region. That part of Normandy being four, I was kissed that day at least 280 times.

After the
vin d’honneur
, I went and sat down with a group of Laurent’s friends from Paris. They were
les Juifs Tun
:
Sephardic Jews whose parents had fled to France from Tunisia after independence. It had not taken me long to notice that these people were different from Laurent’s other friends. They threw good parties with decent music, liked a laugh (though not, I had noticed, a drink) and did not care what other people thought of them. These traits made them better company than the manicured bourgeoisie with which Laurent mostly surrounded himself.

Over the past year, I had become close to one woman from this group, a lawyer called Nini who had taken me under her wing from the moment I had arrived, invited me out to lunch, lent me books and gossiped freely with me about everyone in
la bande
– the gang that Laurent had hung around with since his school days. Nini was not only good company; she had a mind like a steel trap and was one of those elaborately perceptive people who made you feel clever just listening to her. It was on the subject of
les Juifs Tun
that Laurent and I had had one of our most vehement rows.

A couple of months before the wedding, Laurent had taken me to a dinner party, during which I had been stunned by a conversation initiated by Nathalie, a pivotal member of Laurent’s
bande
. Nathalie’s strategy for overcoming the stigma of being ugly in a culture ruthlessly attached to appearances was to visit upon the world a bitterness that most people mistook for wit. Enquiring about the guest list for our wedding, she had discovered that Laurent, with my encouragement, had invited Nini, her two sisters and two of their cousins.

‘You’ll have to lay on a separate table for them,’ she said. ‘We won’t be able to hear ourselves think otherwise.’

The conversation that followed took on the tone of the habitual racist: a kind of we-all-know-how-we-feel-we-don’t-need-to-spell-it-out kind of tone, which amounted to a thinly veiled allusion to the vulgarity and loudness of the
Juif Tun
.

In the car on the way home I called his friends a bunch of anti-Semites.

‘They’re not anti-Semites. You don’t know what you’re talking about. They love Nini. They’ve known her since we were all teenagers.’

‘That doesn’t stop them from being anti-Semites.’

Although Laurent is not anti-Semitic, he has never understood my argument. His take on the subject was typically French. He refused to accept the idea that making generalisations about a traditionally persecuted minority is a dangerous habit. Nor did he accept that the Jews, by virtue of their history and their status as a minority, should ever be discussed as a category apart. He expected me to accept the notion that if there is no anti-Semitic
intention
behind a remark, then the remark is not anti-Semitic. My proposal that he and his friends were no less anti-Semitic for not being aware of it was absurd to him. It is typically French to believe that so long as you accept the
idea
that all men are equal then they will be, no matter how you treat them.

This state of denial about the reality of racism is very common in France. I have often wondered if it is the
result of the nightmare of collaboration, a trauma that is still poorly processed, even today. But then I realise that this same attitude is invariably held with regard to France’s Muslim minorities. With its obsession for the founding myth of equality, the French Republic simply cannot accept the concept of the minority group.

So much so that there was an outcry of disgust when the presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, came out in favour of affirmative action in order to tackle the problem of mass unemployment among French blacks and Muslims. Like any social evolution that goes against the republican model, positive discrimination is beginning to happen on the ground in spite of political resistance to the idea. When a study revealed that a job-seeker with an Arab name has five times less chance of being given an interview in France than someone with a European-sounding name, corporations like Peugeot began to apply the principles of affirmative action in their recruitment programmes, and with some success. Still, the idea of approving this policy nationwide remains taboo.

The French tend to cling firmly to the belief that their country is and always has been an egalitarian meritocracy and that she should not follow the example of Anglo-Saxon societies by talking down to her immigrants and belittling them with quota systems. They see what they refer to as the ‘communitarist’ model prevalent in Britain and America – where new immigrants settle into communities in which they feel free to preserve their customs and integrate at their own pace – as the ultimate hypocrisy.
The French consider this to be a means devised by the British and American governments of keeping their immigrant populations in poverty and at arm’s length. It is not seen as a pragmatic approach to the reality of cultural heterogeneity.

My first encounters with French anti-Semitism came as a shock to me. It was something that my own upbringing had not prepared me for. My generation saw the birth of Channel Four and the quiet revolution of political correctness bring with them the belief that certain opinions were morally unacceptable and needed to be stamped out.

The attitudes I was encountering were clearly a form of low-level cultural anti-Semitism, close to the kind that I had sometimes detected among my parents’ generation, and which made otherwise intelligent people like my mother-in-law capable of the most absurd generalisations: ‘The Jews are an immensely gifted people, of superior intelligence and they like to stick together.’

For a number of obscure, though historically entrenched reasons, these people also identify these ‘gifted’ Jews as belonging to a culture that champions money and profit. They are also viewed as being in bed with the Americans in their attachment to values that are deemed to be quintessentially un-French or, as the Vichy regime once put it,
anti-France
. I am convinced that this antipathy is built upon the solid bedrock of Catholic anti-Judaist theology, which right up until Vatican II held the Jews responsible for the death of Christ. What is certain is
that French anti-Semitism is inextricable from the deeply rooted distaste for capitalism that was inherited from Catholicism. Today it is often hidden behind or paired with the more acceptable hatred of America.

To me, Nini’s uncomplicated attitude towards money marked a welcome change from the feigned parsimony of the rest of Laurent’s
bande
. Nini’s gang was well off but, unlike their Goyim counterparts, did not bother to hide it. This lack of shame about their fortunes – many of which were built up over decades after having lost everything in Tunisia – was seen by people like Nathalie as vulgar. Behind this view lies the belief, inherited from Catholicism, that profit and gain are sinful. As Nini pointed out to me when we discussed the matter, the Jews are, in theological terms, closer to the Protestants when it comes to attitudes towards money. Calvinism, like Judaism, tends to see material success not as a source of guilt but as a sign of God’s favour. For the Catholic Church, profit has long been acquainted with sin. This fact alone explains why Marxism gained such a strong foothold in France, while in the Protestant cultures of Europe it has always remained on the fringes of political life.

France’s Catholic heritage has done lasting damage to the reputation of money. Napoleon’s scornful judgement of England as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ captures the widespread objection to our culture. Georges Pompidou, in a rare outburst of anger, told his friend and colleague Alain Peyrefitte that he was fed up with the French comparing
themselves unfavourably with the British. ‘We’re not like them,’ he said. ‘If we were we’d know about it! For nearly three centuries we’ve been idealising Anglo-Saxon society, starting with Montesquieu, who allowed himself to be manipulated by the Intelligence Service … This society that we worship is one of Money.’

When I first arrived in France, the nation’s long love affair with Marxism was beginning to die, but it was still a political force to be reckoned with. Most of Paris’s near suburbs, known as the
ceinture rouge
(red belt), were still run by communist mayors. In the general elections of 1981, the communist candidate, Georges Marchais, had won just over 15 per cent of the vote in the first round, calling on his electorate to support Mitterrand in the second round. Consequently, Mitterrand was honour-bound to invite the PCF (
Parti Communiste Français
) to form a government, and for the first time since 1947, France had (four) communist ministers.

By 1985 the PCF had become a bit of an embarrassment to Mitterrand. Its stubborn refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and its support for General Jaruzelski’s crackdown on the Polish Solidarity movement in 1983 had led to another wave of desertions from the party. As subsequent elections showed, many communists defected to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right National Front, which, bafflingly, continued to grow. In the European elections of 1984, the National Front won almost 11 per cent of the vote, while the PCF
saw its support, compared to the previous elections of 1979, cut in half.

In a particularly cynical piece of political manoeuvring, for which he has been widely criticised, Mitterrand decided to re-establish proportional representation in time for the 1986 general elections. This electoral system was the only one that would enable small parties like the National Front to win any seats in parliament. Thanks to proportional representation, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party won thirty-five seats. By turning the National Front into a legitimate political force for the first time, Mitterrand had split the newly elected right between those willing to form an alliance with the National Front and those who were appalled by the idea. In the same smooth motion, Mitterrand had also delivered a fatal blow to his former ally the PCF, which won the same number of seats as the National Front and whose electorate has declined steadily ever since.

The genetic racism of political extremists like Jean-Marie Le Pen seems, on the surface, a far cry from the anti-materialist and, by extension, anti-capitalist strain in French society. But it is precisely this current that votes for him again and again – often in shame – in election after election. It also explains the strange defection, throughout the eighties, of so many communist voters to the National Front.