Vive Henri Quatre!

The March of Henry IV, or Vive Henri Quatre, was the anthem of France before the Revolution of 1789 and again after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814/1815. Named after the first of the Bourbon kings, for me it’s the most inspiring of all the royal anthems. I first came across it when I saw Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic film version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where it is sung by one of the captive French officers. It really is lovely.

Vive Henri quatre
Vive ce Roi vaillant
Ce diable à quatre
A le triple talent
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant

Au diable guerres
Rancunes et partis
Commes nos pères
Chantons en vrais amis

Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys
Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys

Chantons l'antienne
Qu'on chant'ra dans mille ans
Que Dieu maintienne
En paix ses descendants

Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents
Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Qu'à Reims on danse
Disant comme à Paris

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri

Sigmund Freud, a Fraud and a Fascist

I hate any kind of determinism, hate any suggestion that history, human institutions or individual people are shaped or motivated by some primary cause. I have no time, then, for Karl Marx and I have no time for Sigmund Freud; no time for the economic determinism of the one, or the sexual determinism of the other.

Marx still haunts us to a degree but I rather thought few people took Freud seriously these days. Not so; the French do. A major battle has broken out after Michael Onfray, a philosopher and author, weighed into the old fellow and his legacy, describing him as a liar, a misogynist, a hater of homosexuals and an anti-Semite! More than that, he says he was a fraud who failed to cure a single patient, even the famous Anna O, one of the core cases in the evolution of psychoanalysis.

Honestly, there are ways of doing these things with more decorum and less passion, but the French do like a good old-fashioned intellectual punch-up! Onfray’s onslaught comes in his latest book, Twilight of an Idol, the Freudian Fabrication. So far as he is concerned psychoanalysis is the last untouchable religion, revered by stars and footballers. “Who else, he asks, “would still have the time to pay in cash to lie on a couch twice a week before some guy who’s half asleep?”

Well, yes, he does have a point, even if he does sound just a little hysterical. But Monsieur Onfray does not stop there, oh no; Freud, you see was not just a fraud he was also a fascist! I can’t stop giggling as I write this; the whole thing is just so terribly droll. I can just picture the author out of control, unmanning himself in words.

Most people will know, I’m sure, that Freud was himself Jewish and had to flee from his native Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. The fascist accusation seemingly comes from the fact that he dedicated a book to Mussolini, though the report I read in The Daily Telegraph does not make it clear if the accusation of anti-Semitism is reducible to the same reference. If so, it really does need saying that fascism and anti-Semitism were never coterminous; and if Winston Churchill could at one time admire Mussolini then it would seem to be wrong to read too much into Freud’s dedication.

French analysts and admirers of Freud, rather than ignoring this provocation, and thus starving their enemy of free publicity, have mounted a vigorous counter-attack. In Le Monde Elisabeth Roudinesco describes the book as “a rag stuffed full of errors and shot through with rumours.” Is this, I wonder, a unique Gallic talent, stuffing rags and shooting them through with rumours? She goes on to say, in relation to the fascist accusation, that Onfray has rehabilitated the ‘pagan theses’ of the French extreme right. What are these ‘pagan theses’? I demand answers!

The odd thing is Onfray, a militant atheist and all round oddball, has written that there is no philosophy without self-psychoanalysis. Does, he, I wonder, lie on couch speaking to himself? Is the part of him that listens to the part of him that speaks half-asleep? Does he have a beard? If psychoanalysis is fraudulent is he not equally fraudulent, both for speaking to himself and listening to himself, even if half asleep? Overblown, overripe, self-deluding and silly, that much would seem to be obvious. What larks! :-))

Not Waving but Drowning

Nicholas Sarkozy really is sinking, the president of France, the president of bling. He seems to be as bad news for his own Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) as Barack Obama is for the Democrats. In the regional elections his name wasn't even mentioned in party literature, just in case voters took the 'ump (groan; sorry!) The man, quite simply, is an embarrassment, a major electoral liability.

The poor man has desperately been trying to distance himself from the predicted outcome, saying that this will have a purely local significance. At the same time he has complained that, to use his own words, "The French don't like me, they've never liked me." Oh, poor mouse, but where, one has to ask, does he think he is from? He obviously does not want to think of himself as French, no, just a case apart, a unique thing, a Sarkozian, from some distant planet, one assumes.

Alas, this is a man fighting a war on two fronts; on the one blaming the voters for his own dismal political performance, on the other blaming the virtual world for the "idiotic" rumours that Carla, his twitter-headed wife, was seeing someone else, was treating him in the same fashion as other French wives are, by tradition and literature, said to treat their husbands.

Is it true? Oh, who knows? There is no definite confirmation of the story which grew as an internet bush fire, but these things have a way of coming true. After all, Carla is a woman who produces such super bons mots as "I guess marriage should be for ever, but who knows what happens?" The super model's super mouth has been kept firmly shut since that particular piece of wisdom was produced earlier this month. I rather suspect this will remain the case. I find it difficult to imagine a person less fitted to be a first lady than Carla, whose head is as empty as her bra. Oh, but she looks so good beside Sarko, a mirror to his absurd personal vanity.

On the political front the problems really arise from Sarko's intellectual confusion, as much as his confusion over his nationality. He stood in 2007 on a right-wing ticket and if I were French I would have voted on the platform he presented, no matter my reservations over the man. Anything is better than a socialist, after all, even a Sarkozian. But France did not get a right-wing president; it got one who moves with the tides of political fashion, active for the sake of being active, with no direction, no principle no guiding set of doctrines. Even the people of Alsace, traditionally a bastion of the right, have had enough. I read a report of one retired bank manager, living in Strasbourg, saying that voters had had it "up to here" with the muddle-headed president, a man who appointed Bernard Koucher, a leading left-winger, to the key post of foreign Minister.

But there are other woes, even more fundamental for Alsace and France beyond, with unemployment now running at 10% and more and more jobs vanishing abroad. I suspect that a great many voters will be hoping that the Sarko, platform shoes and all, will vanish back at warp speed to the distant galaxy from which he emerged.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

France and the Jews

There had long been a tradition of latent anti-semitism in French society, evidenced by some of the responses to the Dreyfus Affair, though in the prosperous years of the 1920s this was but of marginal importance. The onset of the Depression, compounded by the influx of German Jews seeking refuge from Hitler, brought a fundamental change in attitudes.

Increasingly bad, the general political atmosphere became quite poisonous with the creation of the Popular Front government in 1936, headed by Leon Blum, a Jew. In March 1936 Charles Maurras of the right-wing Action Française, wrote "One thing that is dead is the spirit of semi-tolerance accorded to the Jewish State since the War...A formidable 'Down with the Jews' smoulders in every breast and will pour forth from every heart."

Maurras went on to call for the murder of Blum, though he was far from being the most violent anti-Semitic propagandist. That dubious honour surely belongs to the novelist Celine, conceivably the most eccentric genius France has ever produced. His diatribes against the Jews in Bagatelles pour un massacre and École des cadavers were so delirious that Andre Gide even suggested that they might be intended as a Swiftian satire. One critic went so far as to suggest that he may even have been paid by the Jews to discredit anti-Semitism!

People like Celine were never going to escape from the outer limits of political sanity, but anti-Semitism became an acceptable mode of discourse in the political mainstream, even cutting across the divide between left and right. It also became intertwined with new forms of pacifism, increasingly strong in post-war France, which argued that the Jews and the Communists were pushing the nation towards conflict with Nazi Germany.

During the Sudeten crisis in the summer of 1938 Ludovic Zoretti, a Socialist, wrote that France did not want to "kill millions of people, and destroy a civilization just to make life a bit easier for 100,000 Sudeten Jews", a sentiment echoed by Armand Chouffet, a Socialist deputy, who said "I've had enough of the Jewish dictatorship over the Party...I won't march for a Jewish war."

So, the mushroom grew in dank soil; a soil of economic crisis, fertilised by resentment of refugees, anger over alleged Jewish influence in politics and society, and a fear of of being lured into a new war.

Sinking Sarkozy

Things are not looking so hot for Nicolas Sarkozy, the Frog Prince, just at the present. There he is, poor midget, his marital problems compounded by growing political unpopularity. The UMP, his party, is expected to do badly in the regional elections, the first round of which was held today, as people turn to the rival Socialist Party.

Expecting a hammering, he has already attempting to distance himself to insisting that the vote is “purely regional”, nothing at all to do with national politics. Au contraire, Monsieur le President, you know very well this is test of you as well as your party, with your approval ratings now as low as 36%.

When it comes down to it Sarko is just a French Obama, if one can conceive of such a thing, a man who buoyed himself up with big windy promises, a man who was all things to all people. But now reality kicks in- unemployment is on the rise and people are increasingly concerned about how the country will recover from the economy.

Yes, there are clear frustrations with the UMP, but there is more; there is Sarko himself, not just his windy rhetoric but his abuse of power; his nepotism, his cronyism, his intellectual and political confusion, De Gaulle at one moment, Che Guevara at the next. He reminds me of Thomas Roper in A Man for All Seasons, liable to change from one position to another with considerable ease. You may remember what Sir Thomas More says of him:

Listen, Roper. Two years ago you were a passionate Churchman; now you're a passionate-Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head's finished turning, your face is to the front again.

The UMP is a conservative party, and I’m normally sympathetic to people with right wing views, but in France this is a product that does not do exactly what it says on the tin. Conservative voters simply do not know where they are with the muddle-headed president, particularly when it comes to Sarkonomics. Last November, as Henry Samuel reported in the Telegraph, he said that France must cease to be the world champion in state spending, the day after announcing a thirty-five billion “grand loan” for state investment. Where, I wonder, is the man who promised to raise working hours, cut taxes and increase flexibility? Where is the Gallic Thatcher?

No Gallic Thatcher, just a rather rerun of a sad old story. He is, it might very well be said, Napoleon IV, undermining the republic with his imperial and monarchist pretensions. The Fifth Republic always was monarchist in structure and tone, in contrast with most of its predecessors; but after De Gaulle the presidents mostly had the good sense to play this down. Not so the new Napoleon, who made himself look truly ridiculous in the Prince Jean affair, when he tried to helicopter his son into a prestigious position for which he was hugely under qualified. And then there is the bullying despot, who attempted to use the law to settle old political scores in the Clearstream trial.

In international affairs the confusion and venality is even worse, as Samuel points out, with Sarko embracing human rights at one moment and Colonel Gaddafi at the next; criticising the drift in Russian politics at one moment, declaring Vladimir Putin to be his friend at the next. With most other people I would say this simply showed a degree of state pragmatism but not with Sarko, not on the basis of the other signs of his shallowness and instability.

Oh, and then there is the vanity, his laughable sensitivity over his shortness, a dream to French cartoonists. He wears built up shoes; he stands on tiptoe or hidden stools beside Obama; he goes to meetings surrounded with hand-picked people even shorter than himself; he does not like to be seen standing on the same level as his tall wife. Why, oh why, did this silly little man marry such a tall woman? The answer is simple: that feeds another side of his vanity, to have a glamorous wife at his side. But she only serves to make him look all the uglier, all the smaller, all the more absurd, especially now that she has allegedly given him horns, to use an old-fashioned image that some, I feel sure, will recognise.

Ah, those the gods wish to destroy they first make president of France. :-)

Mendacious Mitterrand

Following on from my recent piece on Sarkozy’s visit to Rwanda I though I would add a separate article on Francois Mitterrand, the man who was president of France at the time of the genocide, the man who bears a singular responsibility for what happened, the man whose ignorance and turpitude made him conceivably the worst head of state the French have ever known, not excluding Marshal Petain, his hero and avatar.

What an odd thing, is it not, for a socialist to have an old reactionary like Petain as a hero. Ah, but you see, this is where we begin, with confusion, inconsistency and the worst forms of opportunism imaginable. In political terms the French are quite capable of switching from the camp of Caesar to the camp of Brutus, without any major qualms of conscience. But try to imagine being in the camp of Caesar and Brutus at one and the same time. Can you picture such a thing; can you understand such a thing? If you can you are already on the way to understanding the kind of man Mitterrand was.

I don’t really want to dig too deeply into old ground; there is plenty of material already on this man’s shady past and I suspect that there will be more to come in time. Let me just say that when it came to reconstructing the record Mitterrand had a tendency to be not just economical with the truth but parsimonious in the extreme, at least until the full story came out when Pierre Péan, an investigative journalist, published Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, a study of the man’s life and actions between 1934 and 1947. By one of those small ironies that fate enjoys it was published in 1994, the year Mitterrand acted as godfather to the Rwandan Holocaust.

Before this book appeared Mitterrand had either lied about his past or suffered from a highly convenient amnesia. In his youth he had supported the Popular Front, the socialist-communist alliance presided over by Leon Blum. In the war, after he escaped from a German POW camp, he became “a resister after no great agonising”, to use his own words. The truth is quite different. His associations were not with the Popular Front but with Action Française, the Croix de Feu, Le Camelots du Roi and the Cagoulards, monarchist, racist, anti-Semitic and terrorist organisations, some of whom specialised in political assassination, including the planned assassination of Leon Blum.

Mitterrand’s motto really should have been ‘don’t mention the war’, or at least don’t mention all of it. Once back in France he became a minor Vichy functionary. This was not just a job; he wasn’t just another bureaucrat, dedicated to serving authority, regardless of its political complexion. No; this was born of conviction, of support for what the Petainists called the ‘National Revolution.’ His sympathies are revealed in two articles he published in 1942, once criticising France for “150 years of mistakes”; criticising it, in other words, for the Revolution of 1789 and all that came thereafter. In the other article he approves the formation of the Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL), though lamenting its lack of “fanaticism”. He need not have worried about that, for the following year the SOL became the Milice, notorious for torturing and murdering members of the Resistance and collaborating in the Holocaust.

After Péan’s book appeared Mitterrand made all sorts of implausible excuses, more lies and dissimulation. But there was one particularly revealing admission in a television interview. In a response to a question about Vichy’s Jewish Statute he said that it was a piece of legislation against foreign Jews about which he had known nothing.

All I can say is that he must have been both blind and deaf not to know of this Statute. But that’s not the crucial point, no; the Statute was directed against all Jews, but even if it had not been this hardly makes it more defensible, as one author wrote. There he is, still the residual Vichyist, still holding the prejudices of that benighted age, still distinguishing between French and ‘foreign’ Jews. He could not condemn the past because he was the past.

Yes, he was the past and by his friends the French should have known him; friends like the notorious René Bousquet, the former secretary-general of the Vichy police, the man responsible for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris in 1942, in which some 13,000 Jews were sent to their deaths. In 1992 when a committee dedicated to remembering this outrage tried to get an official apology for the actions of Vichy against the Jews Mitterrand refused. The apology came in due course, but it was made by Jacques Chirac, his Gaullist successor, in yet another peculiar irony.

So, there we have it, there we have a taste of the career of France’s first socialist president. De Gaulle was right; Mitterrand was a ghost who came from the deepest depths of the collaboration. His career should have ended in 1945 but for the forgetfulness that descended on France, encouraged by de Gaulle himself. To have a man like Mitterrand as president says a lot about French socialism; says a lot about France.

Sarkozy in Kigali; a report on the banality of banality

Rwanda was one of the places I visited in my gap before going up to university. While in Kigali, the capital city, I went to the centre dedicated to the commemoration of the 1994 genocide. The whole thing is so well done, placing what happened in the context of other racial massacres; explaining in great clarity the events of those terrible weeks in that terrible year.

I was moved, yes, but in a rather detached, coldly intellectual way; detached, that is, until I entered the final room, the room where details of a few of the children who died are given. Beneath large individual pictures are their names, the things they liked to do, their favourite foods, games and so on....and details of how they died. At once the whole thing took on a direct human meaning for me. I could feel my self-control going, willing all the time to get outside before anyone could speak to me. But somebody did. A member of staff asked if I was alright. That’s when I lost it; I broke into uncontrollable tears.

President Sarkozy of France was there the week before last, the first French head of state to visit Rwanda for a quarter of a century. There is no great surprise in this because there is still a deep anger in the country over the part France played in the genocide, in relative terms the most intense in human history, given that 800,000 people were killed over a few weeks in April. François Mitterrand, president of France at the time, a war-time collaborator, a man I feel worthy of particular contempt, bears a heavy and lasting personal responsibility for this tragedy.

It’s a sordid tale, a tale of a growing sense of inferiority in France in the face of the advance of the Anglo-Saxon powers, in the face of the advance of the English language. Yes, that’s quite right, the French were fearful of the declining importance of their power in the declining importance of their language. So, an attempt was made to build a French-speaking bloc, principally with the former colonies in Africa. Rwanda, a former possession of the Belgians, was taken into the orbit of Paris.

Knowing little and understanding less of the racial politics of Rwanda, Mitterrand provided the Hutu government with financial and military aid. It is alleged in Rwanda itself that the French took that extra step, training and arming the Hutu militias in the period just before the genocide. It’s further alleged that the French did nothing to challenge Hutu forces after the killing began. Beyond that, according to an official report, some French units took part in the killing, or were responsible for the rape of Tutsi women. They most certainly stood by, stood by though under a UN mandate, and watched as people were murdered, mostly hacked to death with machetes.

Yes, there is anger in Rwanda, so much anger that it is no longer a member of any French bloc; so much anger that English has now been adopted as the official language and the country has joined the British Commonwealth, although it has no historic ties with England or the Empire.

Sarko did not lose control as I did. No, he came clearly hoping for reconciliation through historical amnesia. After years of official denial of complicity in the genocide, the most he was prepared to admit was that there was a kind of blindness and a “seriously flawed assessment of the situation.” Not much, really, from a man who came to power in 2007 promising a ‘rupture’ with his country’s past role in Africa. But if he is unable even to face up to the atrocities France committed in Algeria he will most certainly never be able to face up to its complicity in genocide.

What a remarkable record the French have, collaborators with the Nazis during the Holocaust, collaborators, or passive witnesses, in the attempted extermination of the Tutsi ‘cockroaches.’ Yes, what a remarkable record; what a remarkable nation. There is no evil here; there is just the most crushing form of banality: there is Sarkozy in Kigali.

L'Etat c'est moi

If Super Obama is looking to take some comfort from his dreadful performance he might cast his eye on France, where the approval ratings of Sarko the Dwarf have dipped even further than his, now hovering at forty percent.

There was always something of the opportunist and crook to the character of this facile and absurdly vain little man, but, my, oh my, who would have thought that he had such poor political judgement. The Fifth Republic, the Gaullist state, was always a monarchy, but past presidents, all those who succeeded De Gaulle, at least had the subtlety and the intelligence not to play the game too grandly, to make it too obvious that the Sun King was shining once more.

But along came the Dwarf and we are back in business- L'Etat c'est moi. Having learned nothing from the Prince Jean debacle of last year, when he attempted to squeeze his son into a prestigious position for which he was hugely under qualified, he appointed his friend Henri Proglio to run EDF, the state-controlled energy group. Dear Henri took the job, a nice little earner at 1.6 million euros per annum, but saw no problem in keeping his old job with Veolia Environnement along with the salary.

After being tackled by the socialists, who unkindly reminded the Dwarf King of his calls for a “moralisation of capitalism”, he backed down as he did with Prince Jean. His combination of nepotism with modern forms of simony has even upset business leaders. Dear Henri, it now seems, will now remain as a non-executive chairman for only “a few months”, foregoing the salary during this period.

It’s the arrogance here that has upset most people, the Dwarf’s inability to see a problem in such obvious misuse of power coupled with his contempt for public opinion. An attempt is being made to recapture the mood of 2007, when he campaigned as a ‘man of the people.’ The rebranding began last week when he appeared on a primetime television show, spending over two hours answering questions from a cast of ‘ordinary people’ – a dairy farmer, a car worker, a housewife and a man with a string of onions, a stripy shirt, a beret and a pencil-moustache. Yea, I know, I made that up, the last one anyway. Still, I do wonder if the Sarko team trawled the nation to find people shorter than him, because we all know that he does not like being beside tall people.

It is a sad reflection of Latin politics in general that there is really no credible alternative to the likes of Sarko and Berlusconi, that sleazy old Italian Don Juan. In France there is of course Dominique de Villepin, the former prime minister, now cleared of any guilt in the long-running Clearstream trial. Better-looking, and certainly better educated than the Dwarf, he intends to revive his political career with the hope of becoming a credible right-wing alternative at the next presidential election. But mud sticks and how Sarko has tossed the muck! Meanwhile, the King is in his counting house counting out his money.

Ecce Homo

There are many thinkers and writers that I admire, people who in same fashion or other have made some worthwhile contribution to our common culture, to the culture of humanity. There are also many that I detest, and I make no apologies for using so strong a word, those whose thought and words have had what I consider to be a baleful influence on history.

My attitudes can be quite complex. I can admire the sheer intellectual industry of someone like Karl Marx, while rejecting the political philosophy that arises, dangerously comprehensive, dangerously Victorian in its all-consuming arrogance. But the one figure that I despise more than any other, who, so far as I am concerned, has no redeeming features as a writer or as a man, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

First, ecce homo: consider the man, consider the hypocrite. In the mid-1740s he began a relationship in Paris with one Thérèse Levasseur, the details of which ore outlined in Confessions, his autobiography. By this woman he was to have a son and as many as four other children whose names and sexes are not even recorded. One by one Thérèse was persuaded to give these children away to foundling hospitals, places where the mortality rate was even higher than the average for the day.

There is no certain evidence but on the balance of probability all of Rousseau’s children died in these places. He later made one attempt to discover the whereabouts of his son, some ten years after his birth, but no record of his existence could even be found. Edmund Burke was later to write of his conduct:

…his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings. Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.

Yes, this is the key not just to the man-who was later to lecture women on the best means of child rearing-but the forms of thought he produced, the substitution of arid formulas for genuine feeling and real life. Denis Diderot, another apostle of the Enlightenment, was later to describe Rousseau as “…false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and wicked.”

Oh, but how he loved in the abstract, how he eulogised the species in his Discourse on Equality and The Social Contract. In these we have people, men, to use his own expression, more as antique Romans than modern Europeans; men who are offered as expressions of ‘virtue’, as gestures of virtue, if you prefer, who may very well have escaped from the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. What is to be done?, Rousseau asks at the conclusion of The Social Contract. Cultivate virtue, the answer comes, a new contract where the individual will find freedom in submitting to the ‘general will.’ Yes, here is the shadow of Robespierre; here is the manifesto of the cold-blooded fanatic, here is the Republic of Virtue; here is the guillotine and the Terror, here is the abstraction coming like a vampire to suck life dry.

Edmund Burke was brilliant in his prescience. As early as 1790, when his Reflections on the Revolution in France was published, he could see the course of events, he could see contemporary moderation turning to destruction and dictatorship. The excesses of the Revolution were no accident. They were built in, rather, from the outset, rooted in Rousseau’s personal vanity, arrogance and general moral failings. They were rooted, I would add, in his failures as a human being coupled with a seductive intellectual power, enough to seduce the likes of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, Desmoulins and all the other ogres of 1789. Rousseau was their spiritual father, just as he stands as the spiritual father to all of the tyrannies that followed. Rather apt for a man who had not the courage to be a real father.

A Glittering Prize?

I continue to derive much simple impish amusement from the antics of the French president, such an endearingly silly little man, and French politicians in general. There has been so much recently to smile over: Frédéric Mitterrand, the self–professed sex tourist; the Prince Jean affair; the storm over The Princess of Cleves; the massive amounts of money wasted by the Midget when France held the revolving Euro presidency. Now Marie NDiaye, a novelist and winner of Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, has been told she should not criticise Monsieur le Président. More than that; she was told that it was her duty not to criticise him.

And how she criticised! In an interview with Les Inrockuptibles, a leading cultural magazine, she said that she moved to Berlin in 2007 largely because of Sarkozy’s victory in the presidential election, finding the vulgar note he brought to French government and politics not quite the thing. To give up Paris for Berlin, of all places, is a sure sign of just how vulgar things have become in the Sarkozy Reich!

But this admission brought Eric Raoult, an MP and leading supporter of Le Dirigeant, to table a question to Frédéric Mitterrand, Culture minister as well as a sex tourist, asking whether “the duty of a person who defends the literary colours of France should not be to show a greater respect towards its institutions.” I see; Sarko is now an institution! He also demanded that prize winners should observe un devoir de reserve, the quality of reservation expected of servants of the state. Perhaps the same devoir de reserve, I wonder, expected in times past of the winners of the Stalin Prize?

In a style unique to the French, the literary proletariat have rallied to the side of their beleaguered colleague. Patrick Rambaud, himself a Goncourt laureate, said that Raoult is confusing the prize with Miss France, wrapped in her tricolour sash, though I personally would have gone with the archetypal figure of Marianne, just to give that little extra dignity. :-)

And Monsieur Mitterrand, what does he think? He thinks that writers, even winners of the Prix Goncourt, should be allowed to say what they like. Well he would, wouldn’t he, considering his taste for sex tourism was revealed in his autobiography. Alas, no award for the President, now generally considered a shallow philistine by many French writers and artists. Not good in a country where past leaders have always taken pride in their literary credentials. Perhaps he should let it be known that while he hates The Princess of Cleves he really loves The Da Vinci Code. :-))

Sarko's Shower and Blair's Power

At the risk of appearing unfair the vamp is going to have another bite at Super Sarkozy, one of several. Yes, it might be just a tad excessive but I do assure you that I have no particular animus against the Midget, the European Union’s pocket Napoleon. But how can I resist drawing blood from his latest extravagance, his Euro shower, mentioned recently in The Daily Telegraph?

Do you know how much it costs to ensure the cleanliness of the President of France? No? Neither do I really, but what I do know is that while France held the rotating Euro presidency he had a shower installed for himself in the Grand Palace at a cost of £250,000 for the three-day summit held in Paris in July of last year. Yes, that’s right, only the said shower, complete with air-conditioning and radio ‘surround sound’, never witnessed the presidential torso: it was torn down unused days after completion. Sarko himself decided to perform his ablutions in the Élysée, ten minutes down the road. What a shower, yes, what a shower.

The general expenditure for this junket would have shamed Nero, but it’s rather the thing in the new Roman Empire. This three-day event alone cost the European taxpayer £16 million, including a dinner at a cost of £23,000 a head. What a feast that must have been! I expect the leftovers were scattered around the world like loaves and fishes, to places where people earn no more than a dollar a day, to places were people exist on the threshold of starvation.

The Midget may not be the brightest card in the European pack but he can spend as well as any. His six-month presidency of the EU cost a total of £160 million, among the most expensive in European history. Mark Wallace of the Tax Payer’s Alliance said: “It’s small wonder the EU is so wasteful if people who are meant to make it work for us are getting pampered in the lap of luxury.” Nigel Farange added: “The Napoleonic ambition of Brussels is underlined by the throwaway extravagance of its elite.”

Well, let’s just wait until that fright Tony Blair gets his hands on the goodies. What’s wrong with the Continentals? Why do they not hate this man, this warmonger and hypocrite, as much as I hate him? Can they not see him for what he is? Obviously not. Never mind; as David Milliband said, his cavalcade will stop the traffic; at huge expense, no doubt!

Finally, on the subject of El Presidente Blair, I rather enjoyed a letter from one Bob Wydell in the Telegraph;

Now that the Lisbon Treaty has been bulldozed through 26 countries and secured with bribery in another, Tony Blair is our only hope. He has ruined Britain, alienated the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland against each other and subordinated the once great Britain to the fraud-ridden European Union. Our only hope is that he can do the same in Brussels-ruin it.

Right on, Mr Wydell!

The Green Fairy

I first saw Absinthe on sale a year or so ago in a bar in Prague. I was quite surprised considering its ferocious reputation, something I had learned about in studying France and the literary demi-mode of La Belle Époque. This was a dangerous, maddening drink associated with the decadent and the degenerate. But it is also a drink which, in its original form, not in its recent reincarnation, has strong associations with witchcraft.

Absinthe is the Latin for the herb wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). The drink enjoyed by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Edgar Degas and Ernest Hemingway was distilled from its leaves, with other herbs added to make up the blend. Wormwood has ancient and powerful magical associations. The Latin root indicates clear associations with Artemis, who, amongst other things, was the goddess of the moon and witchcraft.

In magical terms wormwood is an ambivalent plant, a tool of malevolent witchcraft and a guard against its effects. In medieval times the ‘worm’ conjured up images of the serpent of the Bible, the Old Dragon, of Satan himself. By legend the herb is said to have sprung up as the serpent slithered out of Eden. So, its ominous reputation was long established.

Wormwood has been used in potent herbal brews for centuries, long before Absinthe itself was distilled. Witches used it in healing and love potions. It also, again by the light of legend, enables the drinker to communicate with the dead, and was also brewed with that specific intent. The danger here is that, unless carefully prepared and administered, one is just as likely to join the dead as communicate with them!

Although it was added to ale in England in the Middle Ages the modern drink only emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was invented by a French doctor by the name of Pierre Ordinaire. Bottled and sold for commercial purposes it eventually came into the hands of Henri-Louis Pernod, who purchased the formulae. Once in his hands Absinthe began its journey into a wider world…and to infamy. Because of its emerald-green colour, and its associations with witchcraft, it soon acquired a nickname- La Fée Verte, the Green Goddess or the Green Fairy.

The glass I had in Prague had a fairly modest alcohol content, but that consumed by the bohemians of Paris was an unbelievable 120 to 160 percent proof. Because of this it was almost never drunk undiluted rather blended with water. The bitter flavour also required the addition of sugar.

In echoes of the magical reputation of wormwood, at once bad and good, Absinthe itself acquired an ambivalent reputation. Artists and writers commended it as exciting and stimulating while the authorities, identifying it with a subversive counter-culture, began to perceive it as malevolent. It was actually banned in the United States in 1912, well in advance of full prohibition. France followed this lead in 1915.

It seems obvious now that the reaction against the Green Fairy was essentially part of a wider moral panic than because of its perceived harmful effects. It’s now widely available again, though at a weaker proof. Its even sold and distilled in France where the prohibition lasted longest. Did I enjoy it? Wait a moment; I shall have to ask Artemis and the green Fairy. :-))

King Louis, Prince Jean and The Princess of Cleves

I love keeping an eye on the political antics of our Latin cousins. I confess that Italy and Sleazy Silvio always manage to lighten a dull day but France and Super Sarkozy are not far behind. :-))

I mentioned in a recent blog (Sex Tourism and Nepotism) that the Midget put forward his twenty-three year old son Jean, a second year undergraduate, as a possible director of the prestigious La Défense development corporation. My, my; how this has blown up in his face! The obvious nepotism, the clear political corruption in advancing this hugely under-qualified frog sprog, has brought out the sans-culottes, armed with pikes, axes…and bananas! Outraged critics have rechristened the Midget as Louis XIV and his son as Prince Jean. But what they fear in the abuse of monarchical power is not that France is reverting to the Ancien Régime. No; it is, rather, turning into a banana republic. To emphasise the point demonstrators turned out in La Défense last week brandishing bananas.

We all know what happens to monarchs in France when they fail to take heed of the emotions of the mob. So, possibly anticipating a surge into the Élysée, Sarko has been pushed into a humiliating retreat. Prince Jean has been forced to withdraw his application to head the £100 million pounds-a-year corporation. Showing he has all of the razor wit of his father, the dear Prince said of the criticism that had arisen as a result of his candidature “A lot of it was excessive, a lot of it true.” There is hope for the future of France!

King Louis’ troubles do not end there. The political cloud that has descended on him over this laughable business is likely to benefit Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister, and the chief defendant in the so-called Clearstream trial. However, I’d like to focus on something else, another affair that may have escaped attention here: the King, you see, has fallen out with the Princess of Cleves. Now you are about to learn something of the true comic depths of French life.

It’s widely known that there are so many areas of French economic and intellectual endeavour that are immersed in a deep torpor. The malaise is particularly bad in higher education. Only one French institution, the École Normale Supérieure, makes it into the league of the world’s top universities, compared with fourteen for the United States and seven for the United Kingdom. Concerned by this decline the President decided earlier this summer that he would introduce some Anglo-Saxon style reforms into research funding.

French academics, always long on wind and short on results, don’t like this at all. In the emerging struggle The Princess of Cleves, an anonymous seventeenth century novel usually attributed to Madame de la Fayette, has become the symbol of resistance. You see, the Midget was unwise enough to express a view on this worthy but dull monolith of French culture, saying that reading it at school was ‘pure torture’ and that only a ‘sadist or an idiot’ could have inserted a question on the novel in the civil service exams.

Sales have soared! Public readings are now commonplace. Academics opposed to reform can be seen wearing badges saying “I have read the Princess of Cleves.” I saw one of these at the Sorbonne earlier this summer. Perhaps a revolution is maturing; perhaps a new Bastille is about to fall. I shall continue to look for the signs.

In the meantime lets all join together in a song of appreciation for King Louis and Prince Jean. Boom, boom, boom…

Sex Tourism and Nepotism-a French Farce

France is a foreign country: they do scandal better there. Well, they do. :-))Nicolas Sarkozy, the Mighty Midget, came to power promising to restore faith in the political process by creating a government above reproach. But this is France, a country were scandal and politics have always walked hand-in-hand; life just would not be the same without this partnership. Now we have the revelations of Frédéric Mitterrand, the culture minister, that he paid ‘boys’ for sex in brothels in Thailand as well as France.

Was this uncovered by some tabloid journalist? No, it’s an open admission by Mitterrand himself in a work he published four years ago under the title of La mauvaise vie (A Bad Life). Would you like a quote from his book? Well, have one anyway;

The profusion of very attractive and immediately available boys puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need restrain or hide.

This book, praised at the time for its ‘honesty’, acquired a fresh meaning in the light of Mitterrand’s statement on television last month that the arrest of Roman Polanski was “absolutely appalling.” Marine le Pen, daughter of the Front national leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, quoted the above section on television, saying it was proof that the minister was a pedophile and a sex tourist.

Mitterrand immediately assured a shocked nation that his sexual partners were not underage, at least distancing himself from the film-maker in that particular regard. He is not a paedophile but he is, by his own admission, a ‘sex tourist’, a practice he went on hypocritically to condemn. Even in our debased government I cannot imagine a minister surviving such an admission, but survive Mitterrand has, an insight, perhaps, to the Midget’s own hypocrisy in declaring that he would restore morality to French public life.

If a sex scandal wasn’t enough we have a touch of nepotism entering into the political picture. This week it was announced that Jean Sarkozy, the President’s twenty-three year old son, an undergraduate law student, has been put forward as a possible candidate to become chairman of the development corporation for La Défense, the plush business district to the west of Paris. If successful he will replace Patrick Devedjian, a sixty-five year old government minister. Nice work if you can get it and as he is the President’s son he surely will!

Do the French still read Moliere? If not perhaps Sarkozy Senior should be reminded of a simple truth: it is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all. :-))