Why It Matters : France

France's Socialists: The Mothball Party

Tracy McNicoll — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:26:54 GMT

If the first few minutes of Martine Aubry’s three-year term as leader of the French Socialist Party are any indication, it's going to be a tough time.

Last night in Paris, Aubry was granted victory by 102 ballots, or 0.07 percent of the more than 134,700 votes cast. In a vast room above the art deco amphitheater where the party’s national council okayed her slim win, Aubry, seated, spoke to the press. She made all the predictable noises. She reached out to her defeated opponent, saying the party had to get back to work. She even took a few jabs at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s policies. But she hardly electrified her audience. Here and there among the jaded reporters were empty pink chairs.

Then, moments after Aubry had gone, losing candidate Ségolène Royal made her appearance, and suddenly there was media mayhem. Television crews, surprised by her audacious arrival, scrambled for their positions, screamed instructions as they ran. A scrum of cameramen, competing to capture Royal’s entrance up close and ignoring warnings barked by colleagues, backed into a row of tripods that fell with a clatter.

Royal gave her statement standing up, a phalanx of allies behind her, as photographers teetered on the pink chairs. She had just begun to speak -- “We have led a beautiful battle to transform to Socialist Party. And that battle continues” -- when a photographer lost his footing, knocking over a drinking glass that hit the floor with a loud crash. “There's the proof!” laughed Royal, without missing a beat.

Yes, Aubry's going to have her work cut out for her. For the last 18 months, since Sarkozy beat Royal in the presidential eleciton, he has utterly dominated French politics. Having obliterated the far right last year, he's now moved in on the center left. At a time of financial crisis, he’s shifted his discourse toward what might easily have been Socialist Party policies. He declared the end of laissez-fairism in September and he’s going to launch a major economic stimulus package during Aubry’s first full week in power.

Meanwhile Aubry's got to start her party slogging toward the June 2009 European elections, when second-string parties like the Greens already look like they'll be chipping away at Socialist constituencies. And in the 2010 regional elections, the party has everything to lose, since it nearly swept the field in 2004. “Martine Aubry has almost no margin for error," says political analyst Dominique Reynié, who heads the Foundation for Political Innovation in Paris, adding "she’ll be endlessly reminded that she has a job that she maybe shouldn’t have."

Last night, Ségolène Royal released a video for her supporters in which she reluctantly acquiesced (albeit with a bit of schadenfreude) to the results. She noted she'd gotten half the vote, then said, “Half? What am I saying? Surely a little bit more, because we weren’t allowed a new vote. That’s how it is.” C’est comme ça. More importantly, though, she sounded like she was hitting the campaign trail. Again. “We’re going to continue, because 2012 is soon, 2012 is tomorrow,” she said, promising initiatives like cheaper party memberships in districts she won. “I’m going to commit myself all the way. Because I have some time on my hands, with the way things turned out,” she laughed.

Aubry, for her part, has to worry not only about her avowed rival, Royal, but about her own ostensible allies. The motley coalition of old-guard heavyweights that brought her the party leadership had more distaste for Royal than political affinities with her. Keeping Royal out of office also keeps their presidential hopes alive. Now that they’ve (barely) slayed that dragon, finding common cause could be tough.

Outside the party, the Socialists’ enduring divisions create opportunities for reshaping France’s political landscape.

Centrist leader François Bayrou finished third to Royal and Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential race, but a split Socialist Party may widen the avenue for him to march up the middle. Whether or not to ally with Bayrou for the 2012 race became a major fault-line during the Socialist leadership battle (Royal is for, Aubry against), and if exasperated center-leftist Socialists choose him directly, it may be Bayrou who's troubling Sarkozy’s bid for a second term, not the Socialists.

Olivier Besancenot - mailman by day, charismatic young far-left leader by night - has been putting persistent pressure on the Socialists’ left flank. Now the increasingly popular communist revolutionary is using his momentum to mount a new anti-capitalist party (for now called, catchily, the New Anti-Capitalist Party). There, too, disappointed left-of-the-left Socialists could go postal and return the Socialists to sender.

But the big winner is Sarkozy. He's been spared any convincing opposition to his presidency thus far, and the new Socialist order – a divided party with its own well-oiled, internal opposition -- poses little threat in the immediate future. “The Socialist Party was supposed to come out of a complicated period with this convention and this election, to find its place again in the national opposition. On the contrary, they’re headed deeper into difficulty,” says Reynié. “In the months and years to come, they could perpetuate this scene of a party more opposed to itself than to Nicolas Sarkozy.” And in any case, Sarkozy has already dealt a deathblow to the widely discredited 35-hour workweek – Aubry’s best-known oeuvre.

In the street outside the amphitheatre last night, a handful of Ségolène Royal supporters from the suburbs north of Paris braved bitter cold with protest slogans hand-printed out on copy-machine paper. The veteran group of card-carrying lefties clearly had encyclopaedic knowledge of more glorious battles. They ticked off ancient history to support Royal’s stances. One cited an alliance with the center in the 1930s. “But Mitterrand, too! In ’71," chimed in another, looking for all the world as if she'd been there. Yet even these greying comrades wanted the old guard out, and with Aubry in, they felt frustrated. “The headquarters," said one, "smells like mothballs.”

Ségolène Royal Wins… Especially If She Loses.

Tracy McNicoll — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:30:57 GMT

photo: AFP

The French Socialist Party's search for a leader, already a long, long drama, has recently turned into a farce. For 18 months, ever since right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president, the Socialists have been so busy turning on each other that "Sarko," as he's called, has been able to act as if there's no opposition at all. And a vote by party members that was supposed to put an end to the backbiting last week only opened up a whole new round of bloodletting. The doggedly determined Martine Aubry, mother of the country's problematic 35-hour work week, declared victory Saturday after 134,000 ballots were counted. But her margin was a razor-thin 42 votes. So former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is lobbying for a new round amid allegations of fraud, counter-charges of defamation and threatened court action. A party congress will pronounce on the results tonight, after two days of candidates’ representatives trading examples and counterexamples of accounting irregularities before a hastily assembled commission. And Royal might actually squeak ahead by a ballot or two. But, here's the thing: the biggest win for Ségolène Royal would be a loss.

Royal has never really been embraced by her party. At 55, she may have garnered the Socialist nomination for the 2007 presidential run, and borne four children to the outgoing Socialist Party leader, François Hollande. She may have been a second-string cabinet minister in Socialist governments through the 1990s and an advisor to France’s only Socialist president, François Mitterrand, through the 1980s. But none of that has been enough to make her an acceptable apparatchik in the eyes of her peers. Au contraire! She is derided – despised is not too strong a word – as an outsider. But she has learned to make that her greatest strength.

Considered at best a secondary figure in the party until 2006, Royal's bid for the presidential nomination seemed to come out of nowhere when she ran against two of the party's heavyweights. Former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn (now head of the International Monetary Fund) openly mocked Royal’s chances -- then lost to her by humiliating margins. She went on to lead a campaign mostly outside the party’s ambit. It was headquartered, literally, outside the walls of the party's main building, drawing its strength from a massive internet-based campaign for direct “participative” democracy, which endeared her to the little people and but only stoked the ire of party veterans. Even party leader Hollande, Royal's consort, kept his distance from her, while their son Thomas campaigned with maman. (It was later revealed the couple had split secretly, and acrimoniously.) So the moment Royal lost to Sarkozy, by a 47-53 margin on May 6, 2007, the knives came out. Socialist heavyweights blamed Royal en masse. But as recent weeks have shown, much of the base stuck with her.

Royal surprised everyone on November 6 when her motion for the new Socialist Party platform secured the most votes from the party faithful. It won 29 percent support, with Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë's proposal second and Martine Aubry third. Party custom has it that the sponsors of the losing motions look for compromises to gather behind the winning motion, but Royal couldn’t find that consensus. At the disastrous party convention that followed, the aspiring leaders whose motions she beat couldn’t get together enough to join forces, but were decided not to let her take the party in the leadership vote that followed.

Royal promised “a big popular party.” She promised to break open the Socialists' clunky political apparatus, involve the base in key decision-making, proposing a sort of “Socialist Facebook” and referenda on new ideas. One of those, her belief that the Socialist Party should keep open the option of allying with both leftists and centrists to beat Sarkozy in 2012, was particularly controversial. Faced with Sarkozy's proven ability to co-opt the right, the middle and even some stars of the moderate left, like French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, the party hacks seem determined to cling to margins.

Royal, meanwhile, has adopted a fairly funky new image. She’s dropped the chic, white-jacket-and-skirt look that became her trademark during the presidential campaign and now favors colouful Indian-style tunics over jeans. At a September political rally she mixed politics with musical acts. Critics disparaged the show as “too American” and her speech as “too religious,” “too mystical,” when she chanted “Fra-ter-ni-té” over and over to 4,000 supporters. “When I talk about fraternity, some snicker, but when Barack Obama based his campaign on fraternity everybody was blissful with admiration,” she responded on French radio last week. “Well, people will get used to it. They’ll get used to my political identity. They’ll get used to me remaining myself to better change the Socialist Party.”

The winner – for now – meanwhile -- sort of is Martine Aubry, 58, who's quite popular in lefty apparatchik circles. The daughter of former European Commissioner Jacques Delors, she has headed more prestigious government ministries than Royal and has drawn support from politically disparate Socialist Party heavyweights like Fabius and allies of Strauss-Kahn, known as “les éléphants." Aubry warned members that Royal would turn the Socialist Party into a “party of fans” rather than one of activists. And she has ruled out, four years in advance, allying with the center in 2012, saying she would only entertain alliances with staunch leftists like the Communist Party. After the preliminary rounds last week, Aubry was supposed to collect everybody else's votes and beat Royal handily. But she didn’t.

For now, it would seem, the disparate front of party traditionalists overtly opposed to Royal could manage no more than 50.02 percent of the vote. Indeed, while leaked numbers vary, Royal’s second-in-command this morning alleged that the margin had narrowed… to only four votes. Tonight, the party’s national council will rule on the results. The council is in its majority hostile to Royal, who only has 29 percent of the members (in line with the percentage of votes she picked up November 6, with her winning party line). She has called for a new vote, while her camp has threatened demonstrations and even legal action if its electoral complaints aren’t heard. All of that risks prolonging the party’s agony while sounding whiny to public opinion.

But if Royal loses tonight, and calls off her dogs, she may well wind up ahead in the long term.

“Ségolène Royal doesn’t come out of this fight weakened, far from it,” says Zaki Laïdi of the Centre for European Studies in Paris. He argues that the close scores show, first and foremost, the failure of the party heavyweights’ strategy of Royal “containment.” “Very honestly, I never believed as much in Ségolène Royal’s political chances as I do today, because she’s shown a capacity to fight and to overcome obstacles. It shows that they’re having more and more trouble containing her. Every time you think she’s dead, she charges back.”

“If there is one lesson here, I think it’s that the rise in strength and the control of Ségolène Royal now is paradoxically inexorable,” concludes Laïdi.

“In any case, she wins,’ concurs Gérard Grunberg, of Paris’s Institute of Political Studies. “First, the rest are divided: all those against her are divided. Next, they will be on the defensive all the time, because they defend the old ideas. And third, I think she is very, very intelligent at appearing as the victim. She’ll develop the argument ‘The Socialists wanted change. Change was prevented.’ So I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in the polls more than Martine Aubry.” And while Royal is free to make her case, Aubry, of course, would be stuck putting the pieces back together at party headquarters. Royal would be able to claim as much favor with the party faithful as Aubry, but operate as she has in the past, as the outsider from the inside. She will have one foot in the party with her representation on the national council and one foot out. The leader’s term is only three years, meaning the job will be up for grabs again in plenty of time for the 2012 presidential campaign.

So as the Socialist Party’s “parliament” gets set to meet tonight to parse an impossibly close ballot and take the next step, the political advice to Royal seems clear: Protest, lady, but not too much. Not enough to get stuck winning.

(Photo by AFP/Miguel Medina)

France: The President Who Ate His Government

Newsweek — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:09:36 GMT

By Clare Premo

French President Nicolas Sarkozy can hardly be faulted for lack of leadership. He seems to be everywhere all the time -- in France, in Europe, and literally around the globe. But according to the cover of this week's Le Nouvel Observateur written by Assistant Editor in Chief Hervé Algalarrondo, there's cause for concern that Sarkozy may become the president who ate his own government, upsetting the balance of power and usurping all authority.

In France, the executive branch is made up of the president, the prime minister, and the various ministers of different departments. While the constitution specifies that this group as a whole should direct the nation’ s policies, Algalarrondo says it's increasingly apparent that the president is augmenting his power while the rest merely look on. Le Nouvel Observateur suggests that the “true” government is not comprised of the ministers with official titles, but of the close advisors, best friends, party members and a panel of experts that Sarkozy turns to if and when he wants advice.

For instance, it seems as if Prime Minister François Fillon is all but dispensable these days. Not only has the president taken over most of his traditional roles, he’s even gone as far as to claim the prime minister’s customary weekend home for himself. That merely symbolizes the general break in the balance of powers. Sarkozy has given himself the ability to assign dossiers and to take charge of important decisions, in effect downgrading Fillon to just another minister among many. Sarkozy doesn’t seem to think this is a problem for Fillon: “Why is he unhappy? He’s the prime minister!” the president was quoted saying last year. Indeed, to Algalarrondo, it seems that Sarkozy expects Fillon to be grateful for the title, rather than bitter that his duties are being systematically reduced. For now, Fillon’s remaining domain is the leadership of Parliament. But with recent Constitutional changes that begin to tread on this right, who knows how long this fragile balance can last? (And with the complete implosion of the Socialist Party over the weekend, there is now no effective opposition to Sarkozy at any level of government.)

Fillon’s not the only one feeling unwanted. The ministers of the different departments are experiencing a decline in power as well. Apparently writing the script for the prime minister is not enough for Sarkozy; he wants to be the producer, director, star -- and cinematographer and publicist -- for the entire show. While in theory, the ministers might be in charge of the economy, internal security, or justice, in practice, they hold a post comparable to a vice-minister, the interchangeable members of a supporting cast.

Algalarrondo believes that Sarkozy’s actions are creating a cabinet à l'americaine. In other words, the personal advisors and friends with whom he chooses to surround himself are more important than the official government members themselves. These “Sarko boys” have the unprecedented authority to make statements to the press, indicating that they are not merely voices on the periphery, but actively accepted as major policy advisors. Sarkozy prefers that they be older, ensuring that they aren’t a threat to his power. Four men, Claude Guéant, François Pérol, Raymond Soubie, and Patrick Ouart, are so intertwined in Sarkozy’s governing style that they have earned the nickname “The Four Musketeers”.

Is this an unconstitutional seizure of power or a natural evolution of government? One thing’s for sure: French politics will never be the same again.

France: ‘We All Want to be American’

Newsweek — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:28:24 GMT

By Tracy McNicoll and Ginny Power

Paris- The reaction to Obama’s victory among the political classes and people on the street was one of explicit joy, hope, and a sort of open affection for American founding values that had gone into hiding through the Bush years. Some people did, however, wonder aloud whether Obama could live up to the exceptional hopes vested in him worldwide.

The historic news was announced at 5 a.m. local time. As folks scurried to work, dodging traffic and bending against the cold, wet wind, ordinary French people applauded America’s choice. That came as no surprise, perhaps, after polls have repeatedly shown massive support for Barack Obama among the French.

One woman gave a thumbs up as she rushed to work, “It’s great!,” she said, “But I can’t stop to talk!” Nathalie Bibrac, 24, also in a rush, spoke as she walked. “The first black president is a good thing. I didn’t really think it could happen,” she said. “There is often a gap between the projected votes and the reality. I think America wanted change.”

Jean Ricoux, General Manager of the Meridien Montparnasse Hotel, attended the U.S. Embassy’s ‘morning after’ breakfast. “The impact of a black man in America goes beyond U.S. borders,” Ricoux said. “But the color of [Obama’s] skin doesn’t even matter. It’s his substance, intelligence and composure. America voted for ‘the man’.”

Pascal Eudes, a 46-year-old construction site manager, had more typically Gallic reservations about Obama’s victory. “It might bring good things, but it’s happening at a very bad time and can go either way,” Eudes said. “There is a real crisis going on in America. I hope Obama can help the black community to feel part of the greater community and that he can get everyone back to work. But it can also provoke tensions and everyone has to go forward together.” Muamba Ntumba, a 50-year-old construction site boss who came to France 20 years ago from Zaire, was less pessimistic. “This is a great hope for change. I don’t think that blacks thought this could really happen. This is a show of hope for big changes.”

Mickael Theodore is a 33-year-old salesman, says he was pinching himself. “When I saw the news at 7:00 this morning, I could hardly believe it. I thought it was a joke, that I was watching ’24’ and that it was fiction,” said Theodore, elated. “Everything is possible in America. It’s magnificent. France needs to draw lessons from this. The Socialist party is made up of a bunch of dinosaurs fighting for a piece of …what? I’m really happy because when America coughs, France catches a cold. Things can only get better.”

Obama’s victory also let the French political class unleash their thinly veiled joy. Sarkozy wrote to Obama to congratulate him on his victory, telling Obama his election inspires “an enormous hope.” Bernard Kouchner told French radio, “We weren’t allowed to say until now the candidate we’d picked in our hearts and minds. Now, we can say it, and it isn’t discourteous to Mr. McCain, who had a very nice campaign.” In a communiqué Kouchner had said “American democracy has just lived a magnificent moment, one of these major rendez-vous that periodically show its vitality, its faith in the future, and its confidence in the values that founded it more than two centuries ago.”

Rama Yade, the Senegalese-born State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Human Rights—the only black member of the French government—declared, “I think this morning we all want to be American.” She compared Obama’s victory to the fall of the Berlin Wall times ten.” She also called the victory an “immense psychological revolution for France,’ picking up on a theme that has dominated in France throughout Obama’s campaign, in the country’s soul-searching on whether a French Barack Obama would be possible.

On the other side of the aisle, François Hollande, the leader of Socialist Party, declared, “The election of Barack Obama is a victory first and foremost of the American people. It had this audacity, this courage, this strength to choose, not simply the camp of progress… but a man whose orgins, positions, and skin color everyone knew. It’s a choice that has resonance even outside the United States of America.”

See the full round-up of the world's reaction to the election of Barack Obama.

French Newspapers In An Obama Swoon

Newsweek — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:24:56 GMT

By Tracy McNicoll and Ginny Power

After eight years of George W. Bush, the French press could be forgiven for going overboard the day after Barack Obama's victory in the polls.

The left-leaning daily Libération’s chief Laurent Joffrin published a fawning editorial: “At last, hope! Out of thanks, for an hour, for a day, let’s not be blasé, or prudent, or skeptical.” “After this already historic November 4, let us admit that we are, almost all, taken by a sentiment of happiness. For an hour or a day, let speak this enthusiasm that is spreading across the planet. For a few hours now, Americans have had hope; for a few hours now, the entire world has felt better. Happiness? A new idea in America.”

Joffrin says all one has to do is imagine for a moment that McCain and Palin had won, “a moral nightmare, a political horror film.” Instead, he writes, symbols bounce around in our imaginations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy, four figures of hope interrupted, four prophets of the real immolated, that live again, for a moment, by the grace of this election. These are the symbols of an America that loves the future. The symbols of the America we love.” Joffrin says there will be a time for evaluating the difficulty of the task, for dissipating illusions, to dissect Obama’s flaws—“he carries more hopes than he can satisfy”—but for now, the moment is to be savored. “For an hour, for a day, we must try to believe… that for the first time in a long time, the New World can be worthy of its name.”

French newspaper of record Le Monde wrote this morning: “After having twice elected George W. Bush, in a change of direction of incredible audacity, of dynamism, of faith in its own resources, America puts an ends to its conservative revolution made up of deregulation and wild law of the market, ended by the subprimes crisis and the collapse of the financial system. Thanks to his charisma and his lucidity, Obama as such imposes himself as the man of the moment, the man of America’s now, brutally rejecting to a somber yesterday the outgoing president and John McCain who aspired to succeed him…” Le Monde adds, “Brought to power with no veritable established doctrine, here he is charged with the American dream, open and smiling, preferring calm to drama, reason to excess. He is the man who is needed. It’s up to him to set this moment into the march of time.”

Le Figaro put out a rare morning edition with a near full-page photo of Obama inscribed with the single word “Historic.” The attached editorial is entitled simply “Hope.” “Barack Obama is now not only the elected [leader] of the American people, he is by proxy a sort of world president by acclamation, even before the ballot boxes’ verdict.” Le Figaro at once acknowledges the world’s hope and tempers that enthusiasm. After listing the difficult challenges facing the new president – the financial crisis, the terrorist threat, global warming – it notes that some Europeans “will quickly discover with dread that Barack Obama is a fierce defender of American economic interests, a determined supporter of the death penalty, and a resolved adversary to homosexual marriage.” It closes, “He will simply be the 44th president of the United States, carrier of enormous hope as he is charged with finally illuminating this 21st century so badly begun with September 11 and the collapse of the world economy.”

Liberty, Equality, Hypocrisy: Why There's No French Obama

Newsweek — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:20:13 GMT

By Clare Premo, Paris

The French adore Barack Obama, and they aren’t shy about it. A recent poll in the daily newspaper Le Monde showed 68 percent of the population would vote for Obama, whereas only 5 percent would vote for John McCain. In this week’s Le Nouvel Observateur, the magazine’s managing director, Claude Weill, suggests this enthusiasm stems from what the Democratic candidate represents to the French—a break from the American heritage of slavery, racism and discrimination.

Maybe it’s only natural for the country that penned "The Declaration of the Rights of Man" to condescend about Americans finally overcoming their original sins. The French, with their national motto of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” would like to believe that such a figure as Obama could have the same sort of meteoric rise and evoke the same kind of noble passions right here in France as the candidate they are watching from afar.

What are the chances, however, that the son of an African immigrant could graduate in the top tiers of the best French university and be elected president of the republic at age 47? Not great. In a speech in Philadelphia, Obama pointedly remarked that “in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” As Weill points out, the way Obama addresses the question of race is more straightforward and more honest than what you’ll hear among the French. When his ex-pastor’s statements caused an uproar, Obama spoke out. He stressed the importance of refusing to “simply wish [racism] away, to condemn it without understanding its roots.”

France is not nearly as straightforward about race. Even though the country has a huge problem, people pretend it doesn't exist until a scandal forces them to pay attention to the elephant in the room. A recent soccer match was a case in point. During the game between France and Tunisia, kids with French nationality who came from Tunisian backgrounds insulted and disrespected the French national anthem. That got the nation’s attention, but the result was just a new collection of platitudes and condemnations.

It’s convenient for the French to pretend that America’s reprehensible racial past is purely a product of the institution of slavery, and that their own country is somehow immune to the guilt and resentments that stemmed from it. But to believe that, as Weill points out, you have ignore France’s own history of colonialism (and slavery). You also have to overlook the racial crises in working-class suburbs of the big cities, the sporadic riots and the failure of local political systems. “It’s not by denying inherited divisions that we can overcome them," says Weill, "it’s by tackling them head on. It’s not by preaching about grand principles that we can achieve equal rights for all citizens; it’s by acting.” Although the United States has sometimes failed to ensure the rights of minorities, these disappointments are overshadowed by spectacular successes. Without the stunning progress of the past 50 years, Obama could not be in the position that he enjoys today. Whether he wins or loses, Obama’s campaign has shown how far America has come … and how far France still has to go.

'Holy Ignorance,' a French View

Newsweek — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:01:01 GMT

By Clare Premo, Paris

Is France an old-world Catholic country, a land of soaring cathedral spires and hallowed saints? Or is it an extremely secular state, grimly opposed to religious symbols in its schools, whether crucifixes, yarmulkes or veils? The truth, of course, is that it’s both. And in this week’s edition of Le Nouvel Observateur, scholar Olivier Roy, best known for his studies of militant Islam, uses France’s own experience to look at old time religion in the new world of the 21st century.

France, like the United States and much of the rest of the world, has seen an explosion of what’s often called revivalism and public religiosity. But according to Roy this is no “return to religion” in the traditional sense. He calls it a “mutation” that is quite particular to our times. Hybrid faiths are emerging as the result of global rootlessness or, as Roy calls it, deculturation. By separating religions from their traditional cultural environments, Roy says, globalization actually encourages fundamentalism as people practicing their faith come to see themselves as embattled minorities. In the French case, the constant influx of North African and Africans has created a substantial population that is no longer grounded in the inherited traditions of the land where they now live or the one that they came from.

Globalization also favors religions that can be “exported” easily, Roy tells Le Nouvel Observateur; in other words, faiths that are not specifically tied to a geographic location or a single culture. For this reason, we should not view today’s religious tensions arising from fundamentalism as a “clash of cultures”; the problem that these mutated faiths pose is precisely that they do not represent any traditional culture at all.

Roy cites the spreading popularity of Pentecostalism. This religion is the fastest growing in the world because it removes all essences of culture from worship, he says. The practice of speaking in tongues is emblematic, since those tongues are not connected to any place on this earth. The message is that the the Holy Spirit does not need to transform itself into a single type of culture and language, but goes beyond.

In this era of “spiritual nomadism,” Roy says, learning is devalued and ignorance exalted. Traditional cultures are seen by new believers as, at worst, pagan execrations, at best of of no value unless they are imbued with the spirit of religion. “What’s disappeared is the idea of culture as something with its own positive value, as a foundation shared by believers and unbelievers,” says Roy. At the same time there is a generalized indifference to theology in favor of “lived” faith. “Holy ignorance is not a return to some kind of archaic belief,” Roy concludes. “It is the expression of a modern design: the affirmation of the self, the enjoyment of the moment, of doing instead of thinking, of the immediate against the enduring.”

France to Nobel Committee: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Christopher Dickey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:56:40 GMT

By Clare Premo

Old controversies die hard. The October 6 presentation of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to two French researchers should have been the end of a 30-year debate over who should get credit for discovering the AIDS virus. A dispute between American researcher Robert Gallo and French researchers Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier entered a long truce in 1987 when President Jacques Chirac declared the two teams to be co-discoverers. The 2008 Nobel prize committee, however, awarded this year’s prize to Sinoussi and Montagnier, cutting Gallo out entirely. The French should be happy, non?

They’re not, according to an article in this week's Le Nouvel Observateur. The Nobel Committee decided to split the medicine prize between the French scientists and a German researcher, Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the Human Papilloma Virus. Why, the magazine asks, do each of the French winners—who discovered a disease affecting 1 percent of the world’s population—only receive 25 percent of the prize while zur Hausen gets 50 percent for research concerning a more minor virus?

That's only the tip of the iceberg of France's disillusionment with medicine. Last week Le Nouvel Observateur reported that the French are pessimistic about the future of their healthcare system (despite what they tell Michael Moore). An astounding 74 percent of French citizens think that their country’s healthcare system has been getting worse in recent years, largely due to social security problems and cutbacks in reimbursement and hospital personnel. That's a 9 percent jump from last year’s poll. Perhaps they have reason to be worried. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration has proposed shaking up the system by centralizing the hospital system, increasing the state's role in managing its citizens' healthcare. This move is criticized by local officials, private practice doctors, hospital practitioners, and Medef, France’s largest union.

Despite their unhappiness, the French public doesn’t seem ready to take action. In Le Nouvel Observateur’s recent poll , only 48 percent of respondents are prepared to pay for medications themselves for “small health problems” in order to preserve the national healthcare system. At the same time, fewer respondents say they’re taking measures to prevent illness, such as eating healthfully, exercising regularly. Not only do the French lack confidence in their supposedly world-class system, but they also are failing to take care of themselves. At least they have a Nobel prize. Or half of one.

French v. American Literature: Which is Worse?

Newsweek — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:43:31 GMT

By Amber Haq

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French Mauritian winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, is known for his quiet demeanour and solitary living. So it came as something of a surprise that the announcement today by the Nobel committee came trailing clouds of controversy. Last week Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee for literature, told the Associated Press that American literature is "too isolated, too insular," and American writers "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." American writers haven't been very generous towards the Nobel committee, either. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," New Yorker editor David Remnick told AP.

Le Clézio, however, doesn't seem to agree with Engdhal. In an impromptu press conference today at the headquarters of Gallimard, the most prestigious publishing house in 20th Century French literature, housed in a tiny enclave of left bank Paris, the author quoted numerous American contemporaries he esteems—chief among them Philip Roth. "American literature is atypical – unlike French literature it gives rise to all sorts of states, styles and authors who are distinct."

As camera flashes went off and hordes of foreign and French journalists jostled to get a seat at the conference, Clezio also defended his compatriots. The so-called 'death of French Culture,' a label conjured by a certain American newsweekly [note from editors: not Newsweek], seems to lack any foundation in Le Clézio's understanding of things. "Some people are speaking of the decline of French culture – I was not aware of it so I don't have any answer. I deny it. It's a very rich, very diversified culture so there is no risk of decline."

Le Clézio, 68, is the first French citizen to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since Gao Xinjian in 2000 and the first French Language writer to have won since Claude Simon in 1985. His prolific body of work includes over 30 novels, essays and short story collections. In the announcement earlier today the Swedish academy cited his breakthrough novel "Desert" published in 1980, describing its "magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."

The French Kiss and Tell

Christopher Dickey — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:03:37 GMT

For those who may have thought the French were always a little more, hmmmm, you know, open about sex, the latest Le Nouvel Observateur may come as something of a shock. The cover of France's leading weekly magazine of news and opinion--entitled "The New Sexuality of the French"--suggests the country is still coming to grips with the revolution in morals and manners that began 40 years ago in, you guessed it, that pivotal year of Boomer consciousness: 1968. The ensemble of stories includes everything from small talk about deep thinking--an interview with the aging nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut--to a survey of sex toys. Some, we're told, "are useful for relieving stress."

The core of the coverage, however, is built around a survey of 12,364 men and women aged 18 to 69 conducted by the French National Agency for AIDS Research. It's a follow-up on a similar study done in 1992, and the changes revealed are more evolutionary than revolutionary: The traditional idea of men as predators and women "waiting for the warrior at the entrance to the cave," as the Nouvel Obs writes blandly, "just won't fly anymore. Henceforth, women want to take part in the hunt." Backing that up are numbers that show men have about the same number of sexual partners over a lifetime today (12.9) as they did in 1970 (12.8), while the number of partners for women has increased from an average 1.9 in 1972 to 5.1 today.

With respect to gays, some prejudice endures and homosexual practice, at least as shared with those conducting the survey, seems to be pretty much the same as it's been for years: 4 percent of women say they have sexual relations with other women, compared with 2.6 percent in 1992; among men the numbers are unchanged at 4.1 percent. "The development of tolerance as a matter of principle, which is especially pronounced among the young, has not been enough to produce radical changes in private attitudes toward homosexuality," says the research agency's report.

And sexual practices? There's nothing in Le Nouvel Obs, in fact, about French kissing. But there are many other details about preferred approaches to sexual intercourse--or not, as the case may be. A checklist:

Masturbation: Practiced by 90 percent of men, from a very young age, and by 60 percent of women, who start later.

Oral sex: Massively entered into common practice in the years 1990-2000. From the age of 25 onward, two-thirds of women perform fellatio. As for cunnilingus, 85 percent of men and women have tried it.

Anal penetration: Still a minority. However, 35 percent of women and 45 percent of men have had the experience, which is more than in 1992.

Lovemaking without any penetration at all: One in five women and one in three men surveyed have had this experience at least once in their sexual encounters.

The first time: Outdoors, on the beach, in the woods or in the fields when we are talking about older people. Then, in the car. Today, at their parents' home or in a room loaned by friends.

Condoms: 90 percent of young people today use them the first time they have sex. One person out of two has been tested already for HIV. Less encouraging, on the other hand, those 26 percent of heterosexual men and 32 percent of women who have had two or more partners over the last year and are unprotected.

Internet: Henceforth an integral part of the amorous landscape. Ten percent of women and 13 percent of men questioned already are connected to dating sites. The girls as much as, or even more than, the boys.

Frequency: As in 1992, both women and men say they are having on average nine sexual encounters a month. And 90 percent of them are satisfied.

(Photo shows a bookseller displaying vintage sex magazines alongside the Seine. Credit: Christopher Dickey)

France to Sarkozy: "Get Lost, You Jerk"

Christopher Dickey — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:15:17 GMT

It's hard to believe that anyone could long for the good old days of Jacques Chirac, but when President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Agriculture Fair in Paris a few days ago, he managed to remind the French how comfortable they used to feel with his lanky, laid-back predecessor. When Chirac visited the annual fair, he did so as a bon vivant. Sarkozy, on the other hand, went through it in an overheated rush, using language fit for a scrum in the Metro. The video of the event captured by the tabloid daily Le Parisien has been watched by more than three million viewers:

(You can see it with relevant translation on The Shadowland Journal.) The climax comes when Sarkozy is shaking hands with the crowd and one man pulls back, "Ah, no, don't touch me." Sarko, his fixed smile unwavering says, "Get lost, then." To which the man responds, "You got me dirty." To which Sarko responds (this is a polite way of putting it), "Get lost, you jerk."

The French don't like their presidents to talk that way in public. (Chirac's language was plenty salty in private.) But the real problem is that they're discovering they just don't like Sarkozy. The cover story of this week's Le Nouvel Observateur explains why. In the lead article headlined "And if this were to end badly ...," François Bazin writes that other presidents have been unpopular, but for the most part late in their terms. When Chirac's ratings took a nose dive in 1996, early in his first mandate, his prime minister, Alain Juppé, took the fall.

But Sarkozy wants all attention fixed on him, and is managing to attract opprobrium to the office of the president itself. "What's happening today is literally unimaginable," writes Bazin.

"In the current political equation," he says, "there are plenty of other factors that enter into to the bottom line. The international crisis that's sinking growth. A campaign slogan ('Work more to earn more') that's remembered only too well and that's come back like a boomerang. All that creates turbulence, but doesn't justify the sense of an impending crash.The mistake of the president, what has really cost him, goes much further than management of change that's often contrarian and always marked by traces of narcissism that are a bit childish.

"The breaks with past conceptions of a modern presidency that Sarkozy has introduced are all symbolic in nature," writes Bazin. "His cardinal sin is to have called into question, sometimes just with little details or simple matters of behavior, that which legitimizes the authority of the head of state in a country like France." One day he manages to diminish the secular character of the French Republic (which is, to the French, almost sacred). The next he tries to tweak the nation's conscience by making 10-year-olds "adopt" victims their age killed in the Holocaust. On yet another day, he undermines the institutional rules that regulate the relationship a president has with his ministers, parliament, and the constitutional council. "There's no such thing as good governance without measure and distance," says Bazin. "And that presumes that the head of state is something other than a gang leader you can collar and talk to using the familiar 'tu.' And that also implies a certain simplicity needed in the 'republican monarch' ... who should not be transformed into a jet-setter fascinated by the glitz of power...."

"At the center of the rumbling political and media storm, the president has chosen to expose himself more than is reasonable," Bazin concludes " Every day he makes a statement that's offensive or provocative in some way, radicalizing and shamelessly playing up to a disoriented public opinion that just wants to feel secure. Dividing and victimizing. More than a method, it's the formula of every man for himself. Nicolas Sarkozy is out walking with a lightning rod in his hands. The risk for him—and above all for the office that he holds—is that the thunderbolts will not come from the presidency but land on it, which is not at all the same thing."

Nouvel Observateur: Holocaust Homework in France

Christopher Dickey — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:33:03 GMT

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a genius for turning conciliation into provocation and common sense into cause for resentment, outdid himself recently when he proposed that fifth-graders identify themselves with individual children killed in the Holocaust, in effect adopting the memory of the dead.

The most widely read French news and opinion weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, devoted several articles to the controversy in Thursday’s edition, including a petition for the proposal to be withdrawn: "We decline to discuss the nobility of the intentions, the good will and the level of spirituality that gave rise to such a project," says the appeal. "But we already see the effects of it and they are catastrophic. They divide communities -- even, and perhaps more so, the Jewish community."

For anyone interested in questions of anti-Semitism, secularism and Sarkozy, it’s worth taking a close look at what the magazine has to say. (The links are to the articles in French.)

The main story, headlined “The Mistake,” tells us that Sarkozy put forth his proposal without consulting any of his key ministers, much less preparing public opinion. (The latest polls show that 85 percent of the French oppose the idea.) The report lays out “the story of a personal initiative that turned against the cause it was supposed to serve.”

Sarkozy announced his plan at the annual dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), where he was seated next to Simone Veil, who is among other things a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a former cabinet minister and the honorary president of the Foundation for Remembrance of the Shoah. She held her tongue during his remarks, but not afterward. “It chilled my blood,” she said. “It’s inconceivable, unbearable, over-dramatized and above all unfair. We can’t inflict that on 10-year-olds; we can’t ask a child to identify with a dead child. This memory is too heavy to be borne.”

The Nouvel Obs goes on to analyze Sarkozy’s motives, some of which may be idealistic, and some brutally cynical. “For a long time the ex-minister of the interior has been thinking about the rising tide of racism and anti-Semitism, the growth of intolerance, the clashes among different segments of society in general and among young people in particular,” writes Carole Barjon in the lead article.

The interior minister is France's "top cop," and in that role Sarkozy fought effectively against harassment of French Jews. But he was not so successful with other minorities. In 2005 he faced (some would say incited) riots in public housing projects all over the country as the children of impoverished immigrants, many of them Muslims, vented their fiery rage. Sarkozy has become convinced that the evils of intolerance and anti-social violence have to be treated early, when schoolchildren are still willing and able to listen. By the time they are 14, in his opinion and that of sympathetic educators, it’s too late.

But such is the growing popular suspicion of President Sarkozy’s spin machine, which whirls faster than a Cuisinart, that even such worthy motives are called into question. “In these times of slipping polls, with his popularity at half mast, the president resorts as always to his hitherto famous techniques of diversion,” says the Nouvel Obs. His high-profile divorce followed by his recent marriage to aging super-model and sometime-songstress Carla Bruni raised questions about his personal judgment and discretion. An attempt to put Sarko's 21-year-old son forward for his old office as mayor of a posh Paris suburb poisoned the atmosphere more. (The young man is running, now, for a less important council seat.) “To make people forget the overexposure of his private life,” writes the Nouvel Obs, “he has to keep refocusing on ‘noble’ subjects.” In this case, remembrance of the Holocaust.

Thickening the blend of controversy, conspiracy and calculation – or miscalculation – is the way Sarkozy has played up the Christian identity of Europe and the religiosity of his regime, as Tracy McNicoll wrote recently in Newsweek International. This does not sit well with a population that has been taught reverence for secularism rather than the kind of contempt now shown for it in the United States. (See Lisa Miller's recent Newsweek column on that subject.)

Indeed, there is undisguised suspicion among the French that Sarkozy’s avowed admiration for things American has affected his judgment; that he only half grasps what he glimpses on the far side of the Atlantic. Thus he may have gotten the idea for indoctrinating elementary school children from a trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where the Nouvel Obs reports each visitor is given a badge with the name of a victim. The emotional impact on adults can be profound, but the effect on children could be traumatic.

The Nouvel Observateur’s editor in chief, Jean Daniel, minces no words in his column “The Gaffe and the Slap.” By denigrating the rigorous division between church and state, says Daniel, President Sarkozy “reopens the wounds that never healed” in a country that lived through centuries of savage religious intolerance. Secularism in France – “secular humanism” as it would be called in the United States – is based on a consensus about values, not on the dictates of the Almighty. “In any case,” says Daniel, “it’s not up to the president of the Republic to judge and to declare that we shall not find salvation outside the churches. In other words, we are not the United States.”

Dictating a guilt-based curriculum for fifth-graders, Daniel suggests, is not about reverence for the victims of the Shoah, or for any faith or culture. It is merely Sarkozy’s “latest gadget” to dramatize “his desire to make a break, to add something, to make himself stand out, to be ‘the first to’ [and] the ‘only one to dare.’”

The effect, as described by the Nouvel Observateur, is to trivialize the French presidency, the Republic and, not least, the Holocaust.

UPDATE: An AFP dispatch dated February 27 quotes Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor and former minister cited above, saying that the proposed program has been scrapped. The government will explore other avenues to "encourage children in classrooms to look at, not other children in particular, but rather a given situation in a given city," she said.

France: Putting the ‘Riots’ in Perspective

Tracy McNicoll — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:12:32 GMT

In France this week, we’ve seen a local story spread round the world in flaming images. On Sunday, two teenage boys in the impoverished Parisian suburb of Villiers-le-Bel were killed when the small motorbike they were riding collided with a police car. The incident sparked local riots among youth who blamed police for the teens’ deaths. (An official investigation into the collision is ongoing.)

Whatever the real cause of the accident, it evoked echoes of the national riots that spread across almost 300 similarly economically depressed towns and suburbs throughout the country-and fears that something similar could happen again. Back in October 2005, two teenage boys were electrocuted when they sought refuge from police in a power sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois, another downscale suburb of Paris with large minority populations. That incident resulted in 10,000 torched cars and 300 torched buildings over three long weeks. The tough-talking Interior Minister in charge of law and order then, Nicolas Sarkozy, is now president.

This time, though, it seems to be different-at least so far. The two nights of fairly localized, if particularly violent, rioting this Sunday and Monday were indeed disturbing for authorities. They are a reminder that much still needs to be done to reconcile people living on the literal and figurative periphery of French society. And the fact that guns were fired at police, some of whom suffered injuries from buckshot, is a worrisome new development. No shots were fired during the riots of 2005. As then, no one was killed this week, but the use of weapons ratchets up the tension through protracted clashes and the increased risk of a violent police overreaction.

Yet there’s also a risk that overstating the importance of these riots, especially by categorizing them as a test for President Sarkozy, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teenage boys in neglected suburbs may well be tempted to create spectacles for armies of cameras come to film their anger. A single burning car framed close-up, on television or in a web or print photo, is deceptively impressive. (The French still joke about how some global media treated the story of the riots in 2005. One international news channel’s map of France put major city names in the wrong places while graphically embellishing them with flames.)

Early this morning, global audiences may have read wire reports lamenting a “third night of rioting.” But that is misleading. Indeed, the same police union spokesman who early Tuesday fed headlines by deploring rioters’ “urban guerilla”-style use of firearms said today that “nothing too nasty” happened last night and that no new shots were fired. That 138 cars were burned across France last night is actually nothing extraordinary--that’s about the average for any night. Violence may flare-up again when the teens killed in Sunday’s collision are buried. Or even before that. Or after. But the media covering the riots have the same responsibility police peppered with buckshot do--to keep the violence in perspective.