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Friday, February 21, 2003
posted by gbarto at 9:58 AM:
Nice column by David Ignatius about A Nation's Mystery, i.e. just what is it with the French?What mystifies and offends so many Americans is the way Chirac has worked to undercut U.S. policy at such a sensitive time, especially after elaborate American efforts last fall to accommodate French views. This is not what allies do, and it's hard to imagine any quick fix for this breach...The TurkeyBlog is of much the same mind. I've lived in France for brief intervals a few times now and have always enjoyed it. The anti-Americanism I've personally encountered in French is far less than that I've run into on the typical college campus in the US. But there is something about the French that drives one mad and I find it reflected both in my main object of study, Victor Hugo, and in people I have known.
France's insistence on doing its own thing is infuriating. But it is also part of why France remains a special place. Many of the same Americans who are now denouncing Chirac's perfidy would doubtless love to visit France this summer -- to eat in its peerless restaurants, visit its magnificent museums, savor a culture that refuses to be homogenized...
I wish I could separate the France I love from the France that drives me crazy, but I can't. The country's best and worst features are bound up in its Frenchness -- in a national obstinacy that is at once its deliverance and its ruin.
When France fell to Napoleon III's control in 1851, Hugo was worried about how the world would get by without the light of Paris to guide it, was certain that only France could bring the mix of civilization and humanity necessary to set a course for global... democracy? republicanism? socialism? capitalism? Didn't matter. What mattered is that it be French. In the early '90s I lived with a family in which the mother worked for the Securité Sociale, France's main agency for the welfare state. She knew the agencies flaws, its problems, the fact it was out of money. And yet she defended it absolutely: if the French couldn't make it work somehow, how could any society achieve justice? seemed to be her root thought. Is it arrogant as hell? You bet. But naively sincere. That's what we're up against, a country so generous in its initial impulse that it is, alas, blind to its faults, its problems, and the other solutions the world offers. So, does one flatter? ostracize? berate? I've been studying this culture since the mid '80s, and I fear the only real answer I can offer - still - is to shake one's head and hope they'll be more reasonable tomorrow.
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