Jonathan Miller - France

http://www.gibsonsquare.com

Printed ISBN: 9781783340842

Ebook ISBN: 9781783340859

E-book production made by Booqla.com

Original title: 2016

Published by Gibson Square

Copyright by Gibson Square

I recently made an appointment to visit my lawyer. I was told to ignore the sign on the front door announcing that the office was on strike. It was a national day of action protesting proposed reforms to the legal profession. Instead I should knock discreetly at the side entrance and someone would let me in. The office was pretending to be on strike, while conducting business as usual. In France, not everything is always as it seems. In a country where people claim to be revolutionaries but are terrified of change, boast of their social model while condemning young people to mass unemployment, and claim to be the best cooks in the world, while a million people a day eat at McDonalds, there is much that is paradoxical, even psychotic.

When I bought my modest maison in France 15 years ago, equipped with rusty O-level French, I was seduced by the beauty of the country, discouraged by the difficulty of communicating effectively with French people, and entranced by the otherness of everything. Like many English people newly arrived in France, I imagined I had stumbled into a kind of paradise. Learning the language was both a challenge and a pleasure. The first 10 years are the hardest, but fluency (or an approximation of fluency, which is all I claim) is the very best tool for understanding the French, whose beautiful, romantic language is an insight into their soul. I have discovered the French to be warm, funny and generous. But I also learned how France really is and understood how their language has prevented them from seeing the world realistically, often isolating themselves within a francophone discourse that can be pretty remote from the harsh global reality and indeed is often delusional.

In 2014 I was elected to my local council - an experience that has given me introductions to many politicians and a new window into the endless contradictions of French life and the refusal to confront reality. It is fundamental to the French sickness that they believe that they are unique in seeing the world as it is, and everyone else is mistaken. As any psychiatrist can tell you, it is the patient who denies he is ill who is likely to be sicker than the one who accepts having some problems.

I have often heard people who do not really know the French say that the French hate the English. This is complete nonsense. On the whole I think they rather like us. I have certainly never encountered any visceral anti-British sentiment in my years in France although they do like to tease us, if not as much as we sometimes tease them. The relationship is much more complicated than that. And our own relationship to the French is also nuanced. Whats clear is that we often struggle to understand one another.

The French are often adorable, but also frequently infuriating, often nave, even infantile, hopelessly romantic, deeply neurotic and capable of holding numerous incompatible thoughts in their head at the same time. They admire principles, even when they may not work when applied in practice. The French talk often of their exceptionalism. And they are exceptional, but not always in a good way. The impossibilities of the French idea of themselves are startling. It is a country of great beauty, but where villages are dilapidated, millions of dwellings abandoned and suburban homeowners fortify themselves behind exterior walls that are made of untreated parpaing (breeze blocks), especially in the south. It is a state that claims to be lac (prohibiting the state from recognising religion or even ethnicity) yet where millions in public funds are spent restoring cathedrals, even as Muslim girls are sent home from school for wearing headscarves and skirts that are deemed provocatively too long. In Britain girls are sent home for skirts that are too short.

To explore the endless paradoxes of France is to discover a nation that is dysfunctional and frequently self-destructive and where, it is said, the customer is always wrong. Arriving in France is like putting your watch back 50 years, to Britain in the 1970s. Whose carrots, as they say in one colourful idiom suggesting a situation that has become hopeless, are cooked (les carottes sont cuites). France is a country blessed with natural and human resources, with a cultural heritage admired everywhere. It is a society nominally committed to equality, liberty and fraternity, but it is failing to reliably deliver any of these things to many of its 65 million people.

This work will doubtless be decried by some as French-bashing and it is true that it is often critical. But I make no claim that the French are unique in the world in being prisoners of their own mythology. I do not say that France is better or worse than the Britain or the United States, which I also know well. The French do not in any case need me to bash them since there are plenty of French writers and intellectuals who have made a career out of it. And there is always scope for the French to bash the endless foibles, hypocrisies and contradictions of America and Britain. Indeed, they seem to relish doing so. I merely take France on its own terms, and try to measure the gaps between the countrys unlimited potential and its often pitiful performance.

The selection of entries can justly be criticised as personal, haphazard, capricious and even irrational, in part a contradictionary, mostly un dictionnaire goste - an egocentric dictionary, influenced by my own experiences, the places I have visited, the people I have met, my immersion in and seduction by the French language and not least by my own location in the Languedoc, on the less fashionable side of the Rhone Valley, in one of the poorer parts of France. It is definitely not written from the perspective of Paris. I have tried to go from the particular to the general and the reverse, seeking to relate these stories to the bigger contemporary narrative of France. If I am negative and sometimes snarky, it is because from the beginning of this project I have been fuelled by rage at a political class that has ignored the real problems of the country, while feathering its own nests. I am afraid the snark is a bad habit acquired as a newspaper reporter.

The rose-tinted view of France offered by sentimental writers like Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence, 1989) and many others has not been helpful to understanding this country. France is an easy country to romanticise, but it is doing it no favours to overlook the present position. Yes it is often beautiful and full of charm, but not always. Can France be saved? Possibly. I conclude my tour with an Afterword, a modest manifesto. I reckon this to be good advice, but doubt it will gain much traction.

A woman in the village caf, overhearing one of my morning rants about the conceits, paradoxes and misapprehensions of France, asked me bluntly: If you dont like it, why do you live here? The answer is that I love France, the French, their language, their music and art and literature, their extraordinary countryside, their ancient villages, their cheese and their wine - indeed, I have been in love with this country and its people since I first came here on a family holiday, aged 10. But the more I have come to know about France, and the greater my admiration for ordinary French people, the greater my contempt for its elites, who have betrayed the country and its future. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The late Tony Judt, a superb historian of France, wrote that reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the