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By Root 1434 0

Paris and the France that is the provinces (“la France profonde”) have been at odds for most of the nation’s history, the regional parlements against the Bourbon monarchy, the landed aristocracy and their supported church against the Jacobins. When in World War II the French national center collapsed and Paris and the north were occupied by the army of the Third Reich, it was the periphery under the collaborationist Vichy regime that took on the tasks of conservator for France, redefining its spirit along the way With agriculture the only honest culture the French could afford to recognize under Nazi occupation, Parisians who in the 1920s and 1930s had despised village life, in the 1940s suddenly discovered long-lost relatives in the provinces, country cousins with whom a newly unearthed cultural identity could be affirmed.

Even today, Parisians seek second homes in peripheral villages where they can escape not just French modernity, but McWorld’s tawdry intrusions into Paris or the grinning visage of Mickey mocking them from EuroDisney just a few miles to the east. The irony is that the fast trains and superhighways by which these weekend traditionalists render the periphery accessible to Paris are destroying the rural landscape they wish to honor, just as their ex-urban occupation of quiet farm villages infects these hamlets with a corrosive cosmopolitanism even as it gives the cosmopolitans the illusion of a respite from McWorld. Here Jihad and McWorld intersect: McWorld’s spent consumers, who cannot do for more than a long weekend without the twin fixes of twentieth-century consumerism and twenty-first-century technology, periodically excuse themselves from the city and its suburbs to inhabit Jihad’s contrived ethnic identities “dans la compagne” or “auf das Land.”

To provide the illusion of a cultural identity, McWorld goes slumming in Jihad while its rootless denizens play at being “locals” in a manner that is almost entirely spurious, vicarious, unearned. In Europe, where they coexist cheek by jowl with centralized national power, such local identities as have been preserved are predominantly linguistic and the trade-off with McWorld still under negotiation. If, as Ignatieff has it, “the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism,” then the key to ethnic nationalism is language.2 In Western Europe’s gentle Jihad, language is how the parts detach themselves from the whole. It is not only Americans who worry about a primary or mother language. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, provincials have rediscovered language (dialect) and made it the talisman of their reawakened cultural subnationalism, leaving modern French patriots to wonder what will be left of France if it is carved back up into its Norman and Breton and Basque parts.

The irony is that French itself is under siege and the National Cultural Ministry in Paris has actually prevailed upon the legislature to outlaw popular foreign terms, in particular, the multiplying Americanisms of McWorld. Talk show, chewing gum, software, prime time, and cheeseburgers inter alia will now be denoted by the terms causerie, gomme à mâcher, logiciels, heures de grande écoute, and … well, quelque chose (something or other) “à la fromage” (the equivalent will have to be invented) or such commodities will be mute (not an acceptable mode for a commodity). Ads using fashionable anglicisms will have to be translated, and scientific terms from the new global technology will have to find French neologisms if French scientists want to write or speak about them.3 In this mini-Jihad of the French government against McWorld’s bold Esperanto (recently softened by compromise) can be seen at the national level the parochial spirit of provincial efforts to hold a regional line against French. Two lines in the sand: one drawn by France to keep out McWorld; the other drawn by France’s provinces to keep the French at bay.

The Basque region is the best known separatist entity (it exists on both sides of the Spanish/French border, where until very recently campaigns of terror have been conducted).