Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [46]
Ooh-la-la, I feel like I might be losing it; admire a rural landscape these days and you can find yourself being accused of neo-Pétainism. I like Prague too, you know, and even New York at a push (though the weather there is a little harsh).
Be that as it may, Denis Tillinac is right; he is absolutely right to live in this France (it’s true that la Corrèze is among the most beautiful areas of France) but he is wrong to believe that it will disappear and to feel nostalgic about it. Worldwide, tourism is now the largest economic sector and selling points like that don’t just disappear: they’re worth a lot of money. This is what young British people have come to look for when they retire after their careers in the City (and now that they’ve grossly inflated prices in the Dordogne, they’ve started buying up the Massif Central). This is what, with all their feverish, financial hearts, the Japanese and Russian nouveaux riches hoped to find; and we gave it to them. They have their raw-milk cheese, the Romanesque churches, they have their duck confit. We will give the same warm welcome to the nouveaux riches from China and India.
As an economic activity for France in the future, that will be more than enough. Does anyone really believe we are going to become world leaders in software development or microprocessors? That we are going to maintain a major export industry? Come on … We will still have some manufacturing, that’s true, mostly in the same sector (haute couture, perfumes, Joël Robuchon packaged dinners). Trains will be another exception; the French love trains.
Does this mean that I meekly accept the new international division of labor? Well, yes, nor do I see how I could do otherwise. The “emerging countries” want to earn money, much good it may do them; we have lots of things for them to spend it on. To put it more crudely, do I really want to turn France into a dead, mummified country, a sort of tourist brothel? To do to France what Bertrand Delanoë,* that wonderful trailblazer, is in the process of doing to Paris? Without a second thought, I say YES.
You wouldn’t think it, but I have, in a few sentences, just saved the French economy; which just goes to show that our letters are not a waste of time.
*The Sacred Hill by Maurice Barrès, translated by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Macaulay Company, 1929).
*A reference to Charles Péguy’s statement “Kant a les mains propres mais il n’a pas de mains” (Kant has clean hands but he has no hands).
*“Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” From Heretics by G. K. Chesterton.
†Maurice G. Dantec (born 1959) is a French-born science fiction writer and polemicist resident in Canada. In addition to his science fiction novels, he has written a number of polemical essays on radical Islamism. Dantec is an avowed Zionist and convert to his own Christian-Futurism, which informs his post-9/11 trilogy; the trilogy interconnects metaphysical research (Esotericism), technology, and the post-human.
*Philippe Muray (1945–2006) was a French essayist, critic, and novelist.
*“Chant du départ” (1794), music by Étienne Nicolas Méhul, words by Marie-Joseph Chénier.
*P1 through P5 were clinical reasons for which one might be exempted from compulsory military service; P2 related to depression or drug problems, P3 to anxiety or instability.
*Denis Tillinac (born 1947) is a French writer and editor of La Table Ronde, who writes “gentle, tender” novels, essays, and biographies that are quintessentially French.
*Bertrand