The Secret Life of France (7 page)

Shortly after I arrived in France, this avuncular, glasseyed veteran from the Franco-Algerian War appeared on
national television and called the Holocaust ‘a detail’ of the Second World War. I was stunned by the fact that he was still being given airtime.

‘You can’t muzzle him,’ Laurent said.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because in some places he wins 30 per cent of the vote.’

Beyond the unifying principle of anti-capitalism, the Le Pen voter is someone who does not feel represented by the governing elite.
Lepenistes
feel themselves to be outside the confines of bourgeois consensus politics – broadly reflected in the dirgeful editorials of
Le Monde
and
Le
Figaro
. They believe that voting Le Pen is a means of manifesting their frustration in the face of a political class that bears no resemblance to them. These voters are a rag-tag bunch that certainly includes racists and anti-Semites, but also the ideological heirs to those who fought against the Revolution, people who simply do not identify with the republican dream and who believe that a vote for Le Pen is their only means of dissent. The political genius of Nicolas Sarkozy was to convince these very people that he, and not Le Pen, was the true iconoclast. For the first time since the war, this hitherto silent minority felt they could vote against the system without giving their vote to a fascist.

As I would later discover, when my own offspring turned three and went to nursery school, the republican dream, with all its prejudices and its desires, is implanted early into the hearts and minds of France’s children. Expressed
in the very language of the teacher and
Monsieur le
Directeur
when they welcomed me, as a parent, into
la
communauté scolaire
and embedded in the things they chose to teach my children was a morality inherited from the values of the Revolution. This morality – conveyed through words like
solidarité, collectivité
and
laïcité
– was generally reasonable, but rarely inspiring. It excluded all those who were attached to values like cultural diversity, spirituality or, in my case, originality and freethinking.

My sister Irene, who also raised her children in France, saw the moral formatting that my children were being exposed to and vowed to make sure it didn’t happen to hers. She eschewed a free education and put them into a Steiner school outside Paris. It is a measure of the general climate of mistrust towards any ethos that might conflict with republican values that France’s few Steiner schools were at one point put on a list of cult organisations to be watched by the
Renseignements Généraux
.

My bucolic, shotgun wedding (I was five months pregnant) would be marked with a certain Madame Bovary-like melancholia, helped on by the leaden Normandy skies and my hormonal disarray. The kindness of Laurent’s family seemed only to exacerbate my tearfulness. As everybody sat down to lunch, the asphalt clouds opened and the rain beat down on the marquee. The guests sat through the long, muggy afternoon, waiting for the party to begin. My brother-in-law had kindly offered to be the
DJ, and I had been to enough French parties to dread the results. My pregnancy meant that I was more than usually emotional, and as I stood at the edge of the tent and watched my new husband moving among the guests, I felt a wave of alienation. I looked at the small huddle of friends from England. The men – or, more accurately, boys – were all wearing dark suits and sunglasses, like extras from
The Blues Brothers
; they were all clutching their drinks and, I guessed, feeling baffled and a little depressed by the sobriety of the occasion. As I looked at my dashing, juvenile father-in-law flirting with one of my closest friends; at my handsome, long-suffering mother-in-law floating about in her silk sari; at Aurélie, the should-have-been-me sex goddess – also dressed in white – and at my new husband, presiding over a table of earnest smokers, deep in what I knew would be ‘intellectual conversation’, I was seized by an overwhelming desire to run away, back to my unsophisticated student life, back home to England.

Instead, I went and sat down beside Laurent and hovered on the edge of the conversation, a position I was finding increasingly uncomfortable but from which it would take me about five years to disengage. Living in France and not speaking French properly is a torturous business that cannot be compared to the experience of living in England with approximate English or in Spain with bad Spanish. The French are, as it has often been noted, ruthlessly unforgiving of foreigners. The reason for this is that they love their language beyond all reason. (‘My
country’, as Albert Camus put it, ‘is the French language.’) They relish it, turn it in their mouths and savour it like wine in a way that smacks of the obscene to most Brits, for whom language is principally a means to an end. French is not an efficient language. There are too few nouns for it to be properly useful. It is a language given to digression and subordinate clauses – the language of diplomacy, the language of non-commitment. It would take many years for me to be able to enjoy it for this very reason: in French you can be as long-winded and pretentious as you like. No one will blame you for it. In fact, the sight of a foreigner who appears to be enjoying their language is a pleasurable experience for French people – like watching a person really savour something you’ve cooked for them.

There is, on the other hand, no tolerance for the learning process. The French do not like to hear their language spoken badly. They would rather butcher yours than hear theirs being eviscerated: hence their very rude tendency to reply in bad English after you’ve been struggling in French. I believe that the reason for this intolerance is that language is central to their culture in a way that it is not in Britain. The French are addicted to ideas, and their language, with all its wonderful imprecision, is a perfect vehicle for abstraction.

The British are, by contrast, rooted in the concrete. Their talent for comic detachment enables them to communicate in ways that are not necessarily linked to the expression of ideas. Indeed they mistrust ideas, which are
seen as the domain of the pretentious. A sense of the absurd or a sense of irony will be enough to make someone entertaining in Britain, whereas both these faculties are frequently lost on the French.

This love of ideas explains the status of the intellectual in French culture. In Britain we have journalists, social commentators, academics, but we don’t have
les intellectuels
– those foppish, self-regarding creatures who clog the French media and regularly hit the best-seller lists with titles like
The Meaning of Beauty
or
The Misery of
Prosperity
, which many people buy, everyone discusses, but rather fewer actually read. A figure like Bernard-Henri Levy has only recently become an object of derision in France. For years he was her most glamorous and sought-after intellectual. With his handsome face, mane of dark hair and trademark white shirt unbuttoned to reveal an eternally juvenile chest, he has been wheeled out for decades to comment on every social ripple from fashion to war. Having achieved international notoriety by his posturing on the geopolitical stage – first in Sarajevo, then in Afghanistan – he became every Paris correspondent’s favourite interview (apart from Le Pen and, more recently, Carla Bruni). Since becoming the object of Anglo-Saxon derision, however, even his French public now see how ridiculous he is. I, personally, have always been intrigued by his shameless narcissism. I once followed him for about twenty minutes down the Boulevard Saint-Germain and was astounded by the frequency with which he checked his reflection in the shop windows.

In Britain, communication can exist beyond and in spite of language in a way that it cannot in France. The miraculously bonding effect of alcohol, for example, operates in British culture beyond language, so that it is enough to have a few pints and watch some sport together in order to determine whether someone’s company is good or bad. In France, this judgement can only be made according to a person’s capacity to express and exchange ideas. There is also – and this is true of every milieu – a deep love of loud debate. To say of a conversation that it is
Café du Commerce
refers to the widespread practice of sitting around and talking loudly, though not necessarily informedly, about one’s ideas. This love of ideas has dominated the history of France, conditioned her particular brand of colonialism and led her to Glory or Ignominy, depending on your perspective. Napoleon said, ‘There is no occupation more honourable, or more useful to nations, than to contribute to the extension of human ideas. The real power of the French Republic must henceforth lie in the assurance that no new idea exists that is not hers.’
†

Napoleon also said that the essence of France is the French language well written. Because of their logocentric culture, the French like their politicians to be eloquent. One of the main objections formulated by her opponents against the candidate Ségolène Royal was that she spoke badly. For an entire week in the run-up to the last presidential
elections, the media was dominated by her use of the word
bravitude
for ‘bravery’ (a neologism of her own invention). Following in the footsteps of her mentor, François Mitterrand, Royal was standing on the Great Wall of China with an escort from the Chinese Communist Party when she made the linguistic
faux pas
. The word she should have used was
bravoure
. Her opponents seized on the slip as the ultimate proof of her unsuitability as president, whose French, it was pointed out, had to be ‘pure and irreproachable’.

For Royal’s supporters, the gaps in her education were a sign of ‘authenticity’. Indeed, her sudden rise to stardom before the presidential race was in part the result of a growing backlash against the kind of eloquence that was being seen increasingly as a trademark of the ruling classes, trained in the art of rhetoric by the same prestigious schools, ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and Polytechnique. Her opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, rarely missed the opportunity of pointing out that, unlike her, he had attended neither of these schools but had trained as a lawyer. He also claimed to have a mistrust of ideas, unprecedented in a French politician. In the introduction to his extremely popular autobiography,
Témoignage
, Sarkozy wrote, ‘In my opinion words, ideas, communication, only mean something if they permit, but more importantly, facilitate action.’ These words sound like common sense in English. In French, they are highly polemical.

With the exception of de Gaulle, whose extensive oeuvre related entirely to defence and military matters, a
widely proclaimed love of literature and art has always been a necessary part of the presidential profile in France. Georges Pompidou – the man behind Rogers and Piano’s iconoclastic Pompidou Centre and one of the key initiators of France’s lavish and robust cultural policy – edited an anthology of French poetry that is still in print. His successor, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing (in spite of the fact that he has only published one, rather mediocre novel called
Le Passage
), has the reputation of a man of letters and was elected to France’s most illustrious literary body,
L’Académie Française
. Even Chirac, with his badly cut suits and his dubious reputation for preferring beer to wine, writes rhyming poetry and is adept in the art of Alexandrine verse, a talent that he has used to seduce more than one mistress. Mitterrand, probably the most intellectual of all the presidents of the Fifth Republic, published nine books during his lifetime, two of which were collaborations – one with the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and the other with the novelist Marguerite Duras.

It appears that the more overtly literary France’s politicians are the more promiscuous they seem to be. François Mitterrand, throughout his open marriage to Danielle, has been described as a bumble bee, constructing his parallel love lives like a complex honeycomb. Beyond the tranquil haven of his ‘secret life’ with Anne Pingeot and Mazarine and the duties of his marriage to Danielle, the Elysée Palace became a hub of erotic activity. It has been said of him that he tried, and invariably succeeded, in seducing any attractive woman who passed through his
office. An employee from those heady days explained how one summer the president hired a helicopter to meet one of his new conquests. Another civil servant recounts how, on a state visit to Switzerland, the president decided, after breakfast and in the middle of his official programme, to look up one of his old flames: ‘We waited on the doorstep … At the appointed time we knocked on the door and the official schedule continued.’

Sex and power are seen in France as intertwined; or, as Henry Kissinger put it, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ But while the American public will ultimately punish their politicians for libidinousness, the French will always admire and applaud them. Chirac is known as ‘Monsieur ten minutes, shower included,’ and viewed affectionately – even by those who would never vote for him – as a
bon
vivant
, a man with a Rabelaisian appetite for life.

In this frivolous nation, the career of any politician (male or female) who does not appear to be interested in the art of seduction will suffer as a result. The dark years of the Nazi Occupation no doubt made the prudish figure of General de Gaulle an exception to this rule. But men of moral rectitude, like Edouard Balladur or Lionel Jospin, even Michel Rocard (who suffered a lapse in rigour late in life by having an affair and then, like the Protestant that he is, leaving his wife), are broadly perceived as unsexy. Indeed, all three of these politicians were thwarted by voters when within sight of the presidency. When I asked Laurent about this puzzling state of affairs, he taught me a new expression.

‘Politicians have to be
chauds lapins
,’ he said. ‘The more they seem to enjoy sex, the more it adds to their charisma.’

Hot Rabbits
?