The New Old World (27 page)

In exile, De Gaulle's war-time leadership was more purely symbolic, and his adjustment to peace, at which he threw in a hand stronger than Churchill's, little more successful. But he was a generation younger, with an altogether more reflective and original cast of mind. When he returned to power a decade later, he had mastered the arts of politics, and proved a strange singleton of modern statecraft. In the West no other post-war leader comes near his record. The largest colonial conflict of the century—at its height, the French army in Algeria numbered 400,000, and probably as many Algerians died, in a war that uprooted nearly two million—was brought to a dexterous end, and resistance to the settlement by those who had put him in power crushed. A new Republic was founded, with institutions—above all, a strong presidential executive—designed to give the country firm political stability. High-technology modernization of the economy proceeded apace, with major infrastructural programmes and rapidly rising living standards in the towns, as growth accelerated. Large farming was shielded by the CAP, a French construction, while the countryside started to empty, and the capital regained its pristine splendour.

Most striking, of course, was the transformation of the French state's position in the world. As the Cold War continued, De Gaulle made France the only truly independent power in Europe. Without breaking with the United States, he built a nuclear deterrent that owed nothing to America, and cocked it
à tous azimuts.
Withdrawing French forces from NATO command, boycotting US operations under UN guise in the Congo, stockpiling gold to weaken the dollar, he condemned the American war in Vietnam and Israeli arrogance in the Middle East, and vetoed British entry into the Common Market: actions unthinkable in today's
cowering world, as they were for Britain's rulers at the time. No country of the period was so plainly removed from any notion of decline. Equipped with a vigorous economy, an exceptionally strong state, an intrepid foreign policy, France displayed a greater élan than at any time since the Belle Epoque.

The radiance of the country was also cultural. The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing. It could be argued that nothing quite like it had been seen for a century. Traditionally, literature had always occupied the summit on the slopes of prestige within French culture. Just below it lay philosophy, surrounded with its own nimbus, the two adjacent from the days of Rousseau and Voltaire to those of Proust and Bergson. On lower levels were scattered the
sciences humaines,
history the most prominent, geography and ethnology not far away, economics further down. Under the Fifth Republic, this time-honoured hierarchy underwent significant changes. Sartre refused a Nobel in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same kind of public authority, at home or abroad. The
nouveau roman
remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place at the altar of literature was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle's reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Lévi-Strauss became the world's most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist. The concentrated explosion of ideas is astonishing. In just two years—1966–7—there appeared side by side
Du miel aux cendres, Les mots et les choses, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, Système de la mode, Écrits, Lire le Capital
and
De la grammatologie,
not to speak—from another latitude—of
La société du spectacle.
Whatever the different bearings of these and other writings, it does not seem altogether surprising that a revolutionary fever gripped society itself the following year.

The reception of this effervescence abroad varied from country to country, but no major culture in the West, not to speak of Japan, was altogether exempt from it. This owed something, of course, to the traditional
cachet
of anything Parisian, with its overtones of mode as much as of mind. But it was also certainly an effect of the novelty of the elision of genres in so much of this thinking. For if literature lost its position at the apex of French culture, the effect was not so much a banishment as a displacement. Viewed comparatively, the striking feature of the human sciences and philosophy that counted in this period was the extent to which they came to be written increasingly as virtuoso exercises of style, drawing on the resources and licences of artistic rather than academic forms. Lacan's
Écrits,
closer to Mallarmé than Freud in their syntax, or Derrida's
Glas,
with its double-columned interlacing of Genet and Hegel, represent extreme forms of this strategy. But Foucault's oracular gestures, mingling echoes of Artaud and Bossuet, Lévi-Strauss's Wagnerian constructions, Barthes's eclectic coquetries, belong to the same register.

To understand this development, one has to remember the formative role of rhetoric, seeping through the dissertation, in the upper levels of the French educational system in which all these thinkers—
khâgneux
and
normaliens
virtually to a man—were trained, as a potential hyphen between literature and philosophy. Even Bourdieu, whose work took as one of its leading targets just this rhetorical tradition, could not escape his own version of its cadences; far less such as Althusser, against whose obscurities he railed. The potential costs of a literary conception of intellectual disciplines are obvious enough: arguments freed from logic, propositions from evidence. Historians were least prone to such an import substitution of literature, but even Braudel was not immune to the loosening of controls in a too flamboyant eloquence. It is this trait of the French culture of the time that has so often polarized foreign reactions to it, in a see-saw between adulation and suspicion. Rhetoric is designed to cast a spell, and a cult easily arises among those who fall under it. But it can also repel, drawing charges of legerdemain and imposture. Balanced judgement here will never be easy. What is clear is that the hyperbolic fusion of imaginative and discursive forms of writing, with all its attendant vices, in so much of this body of work was also inseparable from everything that made it most original and radical.

The vitality of France's culture under De Gaulle was not, of course, merely a matter of these eminences. Another sign of it
was possession of what was then the world's finest newspaper,
Le Monde.
Under the austere regime of Hubert Beuve-Méry, Paris enjoyed a daily whose international coverage, political independence and intellectual standards put it in a class by itself in the Western press of the period. The
New York Times,
the
Times
or
Frankfurter Allgemeine
were provincial rags by comparison. In the academic world, this was also the time when the
Annales,
still a relatively modest affair during the Fourth Republic, became the dominant force in French historiography, winning for it both a more central role within the public culture—something it had once enjoyed, but long lost—and a great arc of overseas influence. Braudel's command of the
sixième section
of the École Pratique des Hautes Études allowed him to rejuvenate the social sciences, and lay the foundations of what would become the fortress of the autonomous Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, regrouping disciplines and talents in a manner worthy of the Consulate. Last but not least, of course, was the cinema. Here, as in much else, the origins of a spectacular burst of creativity lay in the sub-cultures of the Fourth Republic. One of its features, still undiminished through the sixties, had been the number and variety of its journals of ideas, which played a much more important part in intellectual life than anywhere else in the West. Sartre's
Temps modernes,
Bataille's
Critique,
Mounier's
Esprit
were only the best known of these. It was in this milieu that Bazin's
Cahiers du cinéma
had its place, as the crucible in which the passions and convictions of the future directors of the Nouvelle Vague were formed.

Their debut on the screen coincided with the arrival of De Gaulle in power.
Les quatre cents coups
and
Les cousins
opened in 1959,
À bout de souffle
in 1960. After the war Paris had notoriously ceased to be the capital of modern painting, a position it had held for a century. But within the visual arts as a whole, it might be said that France recouped with brio in moving pictures. Or if, with equal plausibility, we regard film as the art that has taken the place of the novel as the dominant narrative form of the age, Godard might be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the great French writers of the past, producing one tour de force after another—
Le mépris, Bande à part, Une femme mariée, Pierrot le fou, Deux ou trois choses, La Chinoise, Week End
punctuating the decade as had once the latest volumes by Balzac or Proust. No other country, even Italy, came near the blaze of the French cinema in these years.

Today, all this has passed. The feeling is widespread that the Fifth Republic, as it approaches its half century, presents a fallen landscape. The economy, after crawling forward at 1.3 per cent a year through the nineties, is today sunk in yet another trough, with a widening deficit, rising public debt and very high levels of unemployment. Well over 9 per cent of the labour force, itself reduced by high rates of early retirement, is out of work. One-quarter of French youth is jobless; two-fifths among immigrant families. Secondary education, once the best in Europe, has been steadily deteriorating; large numbers now emerge from it scarcely literate. Although France still spends more on a pupil in its lycées (for the first time outclassed, except at the very highest level, by private schools) than on a student at its universities, France has one of the lowlier rates of reading in the OECD. Scientific research, measured by funding or by discovery, has plummeted: emigration, virtually unknown in the past, now drains the country's laboratories.

The political system, riddled with corruption, is held in increasing public contempt. Nearly a third of the electorate—a far larger number than voted for any single candidate—refused to cast a ballot in the first round of the presidential elections of 2002, in which the incumbent got less than a fifth of the vote; 40 per cent abstained in the legislative elections. The National Assembly is the weakest parliament in the Western world, with more than one resemblance to the echo chambers of the First Empire. The current ruler of the country would be in the dock for malversation had a Constitutional Court not hastened to grant him immunity from prosecution—a trampling of equality before the law that not even his Italian counterpart, in what is usually imagined to be a still more cynical political culture, has yet been able to secure. Foreign policy is a mottled parody of Gaullism: vocal opposition to the pretext for US war in the Middle East, followed by practical provision of air-space and prompt wishes for victory once the attack was under way, then eager amends for disloyalty with a joint coup to oust another unsatisfactory ruler in the Caribbean, and
agrément
for the puppet regime in Baghdad. At home the prestige of public works, as late as the nineties still a touchstone of national pride, lies in the mortuary dust and rubble of Roissy.

Economic stress and political corrosion could still, it might be argued, leave intact what are the essential values of France, both in its own eyes and those of the world. No other nation, after all, has so conspicuously based its identity on culture,
understood in the broadest sense. But here too, as much as—in some ways, perhaps even more than—in matters of industry or state, the scene at large is dismal: in the eyes of many, a veritable
dégringolade.
The days of Malraux are long gone. No better symbol of current conditions could be found than the fate of his hapless descendant as court philosopher, the
salonnier
Luc Ferry, minister of education under Chirac—derisively pelted with his latest opuscule by teachers when he tried to tour schools to persuade them of the latest round of downsizing reforms, and then summarily terminated as an embarrassment to his patron.

More generally, a sense of cheapening and dumbing-down, the intertwining of intellectual with financial or political corruption, has become pervasive. Press and television, long given to the incestuous practices of
renvoyer l'ascenseur—
is there an equivalent so expressive in any other language?—have lost earlier restraints, not only in their dealing with ideas, but with business and power. The decline of
Le Monde
is emblematic. Today, the paper is a travesty of the daily created by Beuve-Méry: shrill, conformist and parochial—increasingly made in the image of its Web-site, which assails the viewer with more fatuous pop-ups and inane advertisements than an American tabloid. The disgust that many of its own readers, trapped by the absence of an alternative, feel for what it has become was revealed when a highly uneven polemic against the trio of managers who have debauched it—Alain Minc, Edwy Plenel and Jean-Marie Colombani—sold 200,000 copies in the face of legal threats against the authors, later withdrawn to avoid further discomfiture of the three in court.