[This is Part II of a multipart series. For Part I, see here.]
So this time, when I got to France, I found that many of my old friends, people who had disagreed with me and disapproved of my morbid imagination for the future, more readily agreed with me. “Nous ne sommes pas en désaccord!” [we don’t disagree] – which is about the best one can hope for – insisted one with passion. The people I spoke to, even the most indifferent earlier, even the ostriches, seemed sobered. And the Jews reported more success trying to tell their non-Jewish neighbors about their fears. The French have even come up with a new term – les Gaulois – to designate culturally French (as in “nos ancêtres les Gaulois…” like Asterix)), as opposed to native-born French, which necessarily includes the growing population of un-assimilated, maybe anti-assimilationist children of Arab and African immigrants.
One might even say, some of the Gaulois were finding some clarity on who were the good guys. At the first café we went to, late Saturday night, the waiters, who began the evening making snide remarks about us behind our backs (including the way I wore by beret), upon realizing that were Americans who spoke French, grew quite warm. It turned out that at least two of them wanted to move to America.
“What about anti-Americanism?” I ask the waiter who was marrying an American girl and hoping to go to the States to start a restaurant.
“Oh, that was bad back at the time of the Iraq war, but no longer,” he said, with a reassuring confidence.
A wave of anti-Americanism that poisoned the Western alliance and has contributed so much to making Sadaam Hussein’s removal a nightmare in the winter of 2003, was in his eyes a passing squall. Not a problem.
It reminded me of the remark that an FBI guy said to some scholars about the Waco catastrophe: “We didn’t do anything wrong, and we won’t do it again.” Except that this Gaulois who wanted to jump ship to America wasn’t even saying “We won’t do it again.” There was not even the admission that the wave of pro-Chirac anti-Americanism was a stupidity that hurt France. Just a promise that, right now, we don’t feel any anti-Americanism.
There’s plenty of unconscious evidence that even Chirac regretted pissing the USA off, that your average Gaulois was beginning to realize that they were not in as good shape as America. No sign of an awareness that this spasm of anti-Americanism that they presented to me as a thing of the past, was actually embedded in certain profoundly self-destructive French traits, and that France needs to prepare to resist it on the next occasion of its appeal. Indeed an AOL poll of the French (i.e., those most attuned to the international community), finds 69% think that Chirac’s confrontation with the US was his single greatest accomplishment in his 10 years in power. (Interesting that it never occurred to those setting up the poll to include the same item among the options for Chirac’s failures.)
The next day, in an internet place crowded to the gills, I sit down on a cushion near a single man at a table for two. He eyes me suspiciously. “Vous permettez?” I say, eyeing the chair on the other side of the table.
“Puisque vous avez demandé, bien sûr,” [since you asked, of course], he tells me kindly. The French are interesting. If you are polite and show them respect, they can be very generous. If not, they can be extremely difficult.
We talk. He begins to carry on about “Baboush” [W] and how, if he could, he would wring his neck. This man was the opposite of the waiters we talked to the night before. Here was the anti-Americanism of March 2003, preserved, distilled, well over 80 proof. As I tried to suggest that maybe the French attitude, however right or wrong it might be, was self-destructive, he consistently cut me off, telling me how he was ex-military and knew the inside track, and passionately repeating his violent hatred of Baboush.
I moved away from him as quickly as possible, and later heard him on the phone to a friend talking about a woman: “Il faut lui flaquer une gifle, la salope. C’est une pute… je lui torderai le cou.” [You have to slap the bitch around… she’s a whore… I’ll wring her neck.]
I don’t remember this kind of verbal violence in public. Is it me? Or the new atmosphere of wireless Starbucks look-alikes? Or has Paris taken on a greater coarseness in public.
We go to Normandy. At the hotel, the woman confides to us: “My two sons are planning on leaving. While I pay for their education they’ll stay, but as soon as they’re done, they’re planning to leave and they want to go to America.”
“Why?”
Because the country’s going to hell. Because the bureaucracy favors the Arabs.
She tells the tale of her son-in-law getting refused family aid, but, since he’s dark-skinned, when he wears a keffiya, he gets it right away. Urban legend? Symbolic? Of what?
Because even though the riots didn’t strike their neighborhood [Bayeux centre ville], they weren’t far away. And because they believe that the riots were only a dress rehearsal.
We visit old friends from way back (the wife is a childhood friend). They are from the upper classes – educated, Catholic, intellectually lively, international in outlook, with smart kids who travel the globe studying and doing internships. In the past, the husband has taken the principled position of the ostrich in response to my warnings.
Not this time. This time he’s eager to talk, and quite open in his concerns. A description of what I have been trying to say for three years now.
“So what do you think the French will do?”
“Mais nous sommes tétanisés,” he says. [We’re paralyzed.]
What can you do when you pick your head up and see you’re between the tracks and the train is bearing down on you?
For Part III, see here.
Hmmmm. How quickly we forget, and how quickly the past ceases to have happened.
Just my jaundiced view, but: the French response to trouble seldom appears either principled or adaptive.
Remember the French plan for US troops that arrived during WWI (”LaFayette, we are here”), and how Black Jack Pershing had to insist that his units would retain their integrity rather than be broken up and integrated piecemeal into French units. French arrogance and military insanity collapsed before Pershing’s inflexible stance. Imagine the humiliation of being so horribly, stupidly wrong, and then having to back down; can the French ever forgive the USA?
Remember the abomination that was Vichy. It was unique (thank goodness); cowardly; and viciously and deliberately immoral.
Remember that before the Brits could fight Rommel in Africa, they had to fight their way through…the French.
Which post-WWII European nation barely put down a mutiny of its armed forces, an attempted coup that threatened to destroy the country’s democracy in order to retain an antiquated overseas empire?
I suggest that France is both very, very ashamed of itself and desperate to ignore its flaws. This is the source of the rudeness, arrogance and uncompromising petulance. The moral lesions are hidden behind a pathetically shabby grandeur.
Of course the ultimate question, the only one that matters, is whether the French have changed for the better. I have to wonder whether a nation that turns so bitterly against the USA (for all the wrong reasons) and then blithely declares the fuss just an insignificant peccadillo can ever be trusted. A certain consistency is required if one is to qualify as principled, non?
Two subjects require investigation, IMHO:
1. Files the USA recovered from Saddam’s intelligence service. A gold mine, or just meaningless bureaucratic paper? Is Chirac sweating blood, along with Putin? How much leverage do the files give the USA, if any?
2. Those TotalFinaElf contracts with Saddam’s government. How much money has France lost because Saddam is no longer in power? Or were earlier reports misleading?
Hmmmmm……
Comment by Lawrence Barnes — March 21, 2006 @ 10:01 pm
I hope this formats OK — it looks as if it may be a bit fractured when it’s posted.
Here’s a relevant quote from a respected journal:
Judging from his private statements, the single most important element
in Saddam’s strategic calculus was his faith that France and Russia
would prevent an invasion by the United States. According to Aziz,
Saddam’s confidence was firmly rooted in his belief in the nexus between
the economic interests of France and Russia and his own strategic goals:
“France and Russia each secured millions of dollars worth of trade and
service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their
political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraqi.
In addition, the French wanted sanctions lifted to safeguard their trade
and service contracts in Iraq. Moreover, they wanted to prove their
importance in the world as members of the Security Council — that they
could use their veto to show they still had power.”
This time I’ll give you the source up front, rather than lying in wait
for your challenge.
Comment by Lawrence Barnes — March 22, 2006 @ 12:52 am
thank you. fascinating article. i’ve added the ref. to my essay, Paris Notes, 2003
Comment by RL — March 22, 2006 @ 4:35 am
For those who might wonder how accurate my report on France might be, here is a response from the woman whose comments were extensively quoted at Atlas Shrugged.
” Je trouve cet article excellent, il analyse bien les problèmes et rend compte de la situation en détails.”
[I find this article excellent, it analyzes the problems well and offers an account of the details of the situation.]
r
Comment by RL — March 26, 2006 @ 3:29 pm
It is NOT TRUE that bureaucracy favors “the Arabs” (whatever this word means, the normande hotel manager probably does not know that a large part of the Muslim North African population in France are not Arabs but “Kabyles”).
The Kabyles are Berber, and speak a different language from the Arabs. They may be numerous, but estimates I’ve seen on the web suggest about half a million Kabyles in France, which would put them at 1/8 to 1/16 of the North African population.
However, I am sure there are people (fortunately not that many Frenchmen who believe it), like I am sure there are Americans who believe that Jews control America.
Interesting analogy. I’m not sure it works… but I did find it suspicious, and therefore asked whether it might not be an urban legend. On the other hand, what are the statistics of public assistance to North Africans in France?
What IS TRUE, on the other hand, is the fact that (for a lack of better word) Moslems of North African descent are often discrimnated for jobs and housing (renting appartments).
That is true, and now, given the behavior of the younger generation, it will only get worse.
I take the libery of remaining very firmly an ostrich.
I’m not sure why this follows from your remarks. Why be a firm ostrich? Does nothing concern you in France these days?
Comment by marina — March 26, 2006 @ 4:05 pm
well, an example of workplace with no discrimination is teaching in public middle/high schools. Every year there are competitive exams organized in every subject (CAPES and agregation) and if you succeed you get such a job with benefits and tenure. I once read the list of people admissible (that is, who had succeeded in the written part - which is anonymous by the way) - of the CAPES of history and geograpgy and I was struck by the number of Arabic sounding names. It s a very difficult exam requiring a lot of hard work. People who get these jobs are usually devoted and consciencious. This is also the younger generation you speak about.
That’s encouraging if it’s true, but the other part of the story that I’ve heard is the large number of “Gaulois” who don’t want to apply for this job because there’s no way to prevent being assigned to a school in one of the Territoires perdus, which has now become so difficult to teach in that most people don’t want to go there.
Comment by marina — March 26, 2006 @ 5:56 pm
On another point. There is a difference between the male and female immigrant population. This is something notable in many cases: the women adjust much better than the men. i think this is related to honor-shame culture. the men come from cultures where they are, however low overall, on a micro-level, at the top of the heap. When they come to a new country (doesn’t have to be France), the men feel completely dépaysés, out of place. they don’t speak the language, they don’t like being subordinate to strangers whose behaviour, intentional or not, constantly humiliates them. Women, who are used to be in conditions of humiliation in the cultures of origin, find the new culture a) not as problematic and b) sometimes a way out and up.
Lots of the “honor killings” going on now, are precisely about women who have escaped their position in the “honor culture” of origin.
When I refer to the behavior of the immigrant “youth”, I mean the boys — whose unemployment rates are astronomical (like Palestinian rates) — when Marina refers to their youth, she refers to the girls.
r
Comment by RL — March 26, 2006 @ 6:41 pm
NO, Marina refers to BOTH the boys and the girls. Most or many (I am not a socialogist) of these youth are born or at least raised in France anyway so the issue of depaysement does not really apply.
This is more cognitive egocentrism. You seem to think that somehow, by pure osmosis, the act of being born and raised in France has made these kids culturally French. The problem of honor and shame remains even into the next generation. That’s one of the problems in the schools — young men who resent being taught (and, given the French educational techniques, humiliated) by female teacher. All the worse if the teacher is Jewish. There may be young men who do make it within the system, but my guess is there’s a major difference in percentages between acculturated second generation North Africans.
Comment by marina — March 26, 2006 @ 7:46 pm
Marina writes: “The problem of honor and shame remains even into the next generation. That’s one of the problems in the schools — young men who resent being taught (and, given the French educational techniques, humiliated) by female teacher. All the worse if the teacher is Jewish.”
actually that’s not Marina, that’s me (RL), i comment on comments in italic.
I’m sure you’re trying to explain — not excuse — the behavior of these young men. But the responsibility — for change, or at least, recognizing and coming to grips with their insecurities and prejudices — rests squarely with these young men.
In other words, if I complained about insecurities brought to this country by my immigrant grandparents and resented female teachers, especially Jewish teachers, I’d be rightly called a sexist and an anti-Semite, and told to get over it.
and that’s just what the French are not saying to their Muslim population. That’s at the core of the problem, why the Jews are leaving and why the Muslims grow more aggressive by the day. They have failed to convey the crucial lessons about civil society.”
Comment by cosmo — March 28, 2006 @ 6:10 pm
[…] qu’elle ne va pas passer comme avant. Il a dit que un des ses amis lui a dit, “mais, [les français] nous sommes tétan […]
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