Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [9]
The state, then, matters in France as it does in few other countries. It has never been, unlike in Britain or the USA, the bogey of the tax-paying middle classes. For one thing, it keeps a large part of the middle class in work; more than half the families in France depend on income from the state. For another, its regulations and subsidies have sustained the attractive variousnesses of France, which still produces four hundred (or a thousand; the boast varies) different kinds of cheese, and where a town of one thousand seven hundred people can contain (this is a real but typical example, from Beaujolais) three bakeries, a butcher, two grocers, a pharmacy, a jeweller’s, two clothes shops, a flower shop, two hardware stores, a newsagent, two garages, several bars, two hotels and two restaurants, one of which is mentioned honourably in the Michelin guide. In Britain and North America, supermarkets and shopping malls would have closed most of them, while politicians spoke airily about the free market’s great virtue of consumer choice.
But—reenter le malaise français—unemployment runs at 12.5 percent (double the British figure) and the centralized political and bureaucratic elites of Paris have become deeply unpopular and sometimes corrupt. And the nation state is now retreating throughout the world as a custodian of economies and cultures, abandoning its old remits to the capricious pressures of the global market. France has many phrases for this phenomenon—le capitalisme sauvage, le capitalisme dur (hard), le capitalisme Anglo-Saxon—and most of them could be heard in the elections of June this year, when France ditched its right-wing government and replaced it with an alliance of Socialists and Communists. On the face of it, the Left had capitalized on France’s prevailing moods of sinistrose (dismalness) and morosité (gloom) by promising that the two great forces for change in French life could be resisted: that France needn’t bow to Chinese wage rates or cut its public spending so that it could qualify for membership of the European Monetary Union. The Left pledged that it would create seven hundred thousand jobs, half of them funded by the state, and cut the statutory working week from forty to thirty-five hours with no reduction in earnings. In Britain, where Mrs. Thatcher expunged socialism from the politics of her Labour successors, there was mockery and also half a cheer.
France was being exceptional once again, struggling to preserve its cherished ideas of Frenchness. To the rest of the world, which has accepted globalism as an inevitability, the way things are and will be, it seemed as though its fourth-largest economy had recoiled in the face of modernity; that Fortress France was pulling up the drawbridge.
Where does French writing stand in all this? The awkward truth here is that, outside France and small pockets of Francophilia, hardly anyone knows. Name six living French novelists. Name six contemporary French novels. The French, of course, blame this neglect on Anglo-Saxon ignorance and hostility, but the truth (our truth, at least) is that, in literature, France pulled up the drawbridge long ago. Saul Bellow, writing in Granta in 1984, remembered how Paris had been the capital of international culture before the Second World War and how, on his first visit in 1948, the city had still seemed “one of the permanent settings, a theatre if you like, where the greatest problems of existence might be represented.” Thirty years later that feeling had gone. “Marxism, Euro-communism, Existentialism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism could not restore the potency of French civilization,” Bellow wrote. “Sorry about that.”
Photo Credit 01.1
Today in France there are arguments about the purpose of writing and a movement to put the world back into the book; it hasn’t escaped the French that the failure of French writing to sell abroad may have, to put it strictly in terms