The New Old World (34 page)

More generally, if one looks at the social sciences, political thought or even in some respects philosophy in France, the impression left is that for long periods there has been a notable degree of closure, and ignorance of intellectual developments outside the country. Examples of the resulting lag could be multiplied: a very belated and incomplete encounter with Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy or neo-contractualism; with the Frankfurt School or the legacy of Gramsci; with German stylistics or American New Criticism; British historical sociology or Italian political science. A country that has translated scarcely anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and could not even find a publisher for Eric Hobsbawm's
Age of Extremes,
might well be termed a rearguard in the international exchange of ideas.

Yet if we turn to arts and letters, the picture is reversed. French literature itself may have declined in standing. But French reception of world literature is in a league of its own. In this area, French culture has shown itself exceptionally open to the outside world, with a record of interest in foreign output no other metropolitan society can match. A glance at any of the better small bookshops in Paris is enough to register the difference. Translations of fiction or poetry from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American and East European cultures abound, to a degree unimaginable in London or New York, Rome or Berlin. The difference has structural consequences. The great majority of writers in a language outside the Atlantic core who have gained an international reputation have done so by introductory passage through the medium of French, not English : from Borges, Mishima and Gombrowicz, to Carpentier, Mahfouz, Krleža or Cortazar, up to Gao Xinjiang, the recent Chinese Nobelist.

The system of relations that has produced this pattern of Parisian consecration is the object of Pascale Casanova's path-breaking
La république mondiale des lettres,
the other outstanding example of an imaginative synthesis with strong critical intent in recent years. Here the national bounds of Bourdieu's work have been decisively broken, in a project that uses his concepts of symbolic capital and the cultural field to construct a model of the global inequalities of power between different national literatures, and to illuminate the gamut of strategies that writers in languages at the periphery of the system of legitimation have used to try to win a place at the centre. Nothing like this has been attempted before. The geographical range of Casanova's materials, from Madagascar to Romania, Brazil to Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria; the clarity and trenchancy of the map of unequal relations she offers; and, not least, the generosity with which the ruses and dilemmas of the disadvantaged are explored, make her book kindred to the French élan behind the World Social Forum. It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of such criticisms or objections,
The World Republic of Letters—
empire more than republic, as Casanova shows—is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's
Orientalism,
with which it stands comparison.

The wider puzzle remains: what explains the strange contrast between a unique literary cosmopolitanism and so much intellectual parochialism in France? It is tempting to wonder whether the answer lies simply in the relative self-confidence of each sector—the continuing native vitality of French history and theory inducing indifference to foreign output, and the declining prestige of French letters prompting compensation in the role of a universal dragoman. There may be something in this, but it cannot be the whole story. For the function of Paris as world capital of modern literature—the summit of an international order of symbolic consecration—long precedes the fall in the reputation of French authors themselves, dating back at least to the time of Strindberg and Joyce, as Casanova demonstrates.

Moreover, there is a parallel art that contradicts such an explanation completely. French hospitality to the furthest corners of the earth has been incomparable in the cinema too. On any day, about five times as many foreign films, past or present, are screened in Paris as in any other city on earth. Much of what is now termed ‘world cinema'—Iranian, Taiwanese, Senegalese—owes
its visibility to French consecration and funding. Had directors like Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien or Sembène depended on reception in the Anglo-American world, few outside their native lands would ever have glimpsed them. Yet this openness to the alien camera has been there all along. The brio of the New Wave was born from enthusiasms for Hollywood musicals and gangster movies, Italian neo-realism and German expressionism, that gave it much of the vocabulary to reinvent French cinema. A national energy and an international sensibility were inseparable from the start.

Such contrasts are a reminder that no society of any size ever moves simply in step with itself, in a uniform direction. There are always cross-currents and enclaves, deviances or doublings-back from what appears to be the main path. In culture as in politics, contradiction and irrelation are the rule. They do not disable general judgements, but they complicate them. It is not meaningless to speak of a French decline since the mid-seventies. But the current sense of the term, that of Nicolas Baverez and others, which has given rise to
le déclinisme
, is to be avoided. It is too narrowly focussed on economic and social performance, understood as a test of competition. Post-war history has shown how easily relative positions in these can shift. Verdicts based on them are usually superficial.

Decline in the sense that matters has been something else. For some twenty years after the end of the
trente glorieuses,
the mood of the French elites was not unlike a democratic version of the outlook of the early forties: a widespread feeling that the country had been infected with subversive doctrines it needed to purge, that healthier strands in the nation's past needed to be reclaimed, and—above all—that the forms of a necessary modernity were to be found in the Great Power of the hour, and that it was urgent either to adapt or adopt them for domestic reconstruction. The American model, more benign than the German, lasted longer. But eventually, even some of those addicted to it began to have doubts. At the end of this road, might there not wait a sheer banalization of France? From the mid-nineties onwards, a reaction started to set in.

It is still far from clear how deep that goes, or what its outcome will be. The drive to clamp a standard neo-liberal straitjacket onto economy and society has slowed, but not slackened—Maastricht
alone ensuring that. What could not be achieved frontally may arrive more gradually, by erosion of social protections rather than assault on them; perhaps the more typical route in any case. A creeping normalization, of the kind the current low-profile government led by Raffarin is pursuing, risks less than a galloping one of the sort admirers look to from Nicolas Sarkozy, the latest d'Artagnan of the right, and in French conditions may prove more effective. It will not be the Socialist Party, in office for sixteen out of the past twenty-four years, that halts it. Its cultural monuments, the shoddy eye-sores of Mitterrand's
grands travaux
and vulgarity of Jack Lang's star-shows, rightly detested by conservative opinion, were the epitome of everything signified by the progress of banalization.

Outside the country, attitudes of passionate francophilia that were still quite common between the wars, have virtually disappeared. Like most of its neighbours, or perhaps more so, France arouses mixed feelings today. Admiration and irritation are often expressed in equal measure. But were the country to become just another denizen of the cage of Atlantic conformities, a great hole would be left in the world. The vanishing of all that it has represented culturally and politically, in its pyrotechnic difference, would be a loss of a magnitude still difficult to grasp. How close such a prospect is, remains hard to fathom. Smith's dry rejoinder to Sinclair comes to mind: there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The hidden stratifications and intricacies of the country, the periodic turbulence beneath the pacified surface of a consumer society, sporadic impulses—gathering or residual?—to careen fearlessly to the left of the left, past impatience with democratic boredom, are so many reasons to think the game is not quite over yet. After pointing out all the reasons why France was no longer subject to the revolutionary fault-lines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and had at last achieved a political order that enjoyed stability and legitimacy, Raymond Aron nevertheless ended his great editorial of 1978 with a warning. ‘Ce peuple, apparemment tranquille, est encore dangereux'. Let us hope so.

 

‘I agree', wrote Pierre Nora in response to the survey above, ‘with the general diagnostic of languor and creative anaemia in France of recent years, except that I live what he calls the French
dégringolade
in a more painful than mocking way, and conceal the word ‘‘disaster'' which comes to mind under the more presentable term ‘‘metamorphosis'' '.
⁴⁵
However, he went on, to sketch a decay was one thing, to explain it another. There, disagreement must be complete. For two reasons: in point of method, to focus on just a political and cultural parabola was too narrow, not say idealist; and as to framework, developments in the hexagon could not be understood without reference to more general transformations in Europe, and the world at large. A ‘brutal and mysterious levelling of cultural production' was undeniable in his home country.
⁴⁶
But in substance, matters were no better elsewhere. They were only more visible in France, for a series of reasons historically specific to it.

Four of these, in Nora's view, stood out. First was the unusually close political connexion between a centralizing state and the linguistic, educational and cultural institutions of the country, which had long made of the humanities a touchstone in the formation of politicians, writers, intellectuals and scientists alike, whose gradual abandonment had dealt a fatal blow to all four sectors of activity. Second came the collapse, at the end of the totalitarian era, of the myths of revolution and nation, nourished by Communism and Gaullism. Third was the reversal of the very mechanisms of modernization that had given post-war France its élan, into so many brakes on further development: as witnesses, the crisis of its welfare state, the frictions in its constitution, the troubles of its cultural institutions—universities, publishers, theatre, cinema. Finally, there was the mutation in the very form of the nation-state, affecting virtually all countries, and unsettling their sense of themselves, which France could not but register with
especial sharpness, as the oldest nation-state on the continent, whose traditional forms of identity—centralist, statist, imperial, military, peasant, Christian, secular, universalist—had lasted longest and were struck simultaneously.
⁴⁷

Much of this can be conceded. The peculiar intimacy of the links between state and culture, and the centrality of classical forms of rhetorical training to them, form part of the case developed above. The general disturbances of national identity, and France as an illustration of them, are discussed elsewhere,
⁴⁸
emphasis falling on this occasion simply on the pressures of the macro-economic regime change in the Atlantic world since the eighties, and the rise of English as a planetary lingua franca in the same period. That said, Nora's broader complaint is perfectly justified: no analysis essentially restricted to political and cultural developments could hope to be fully satisfactory—in any detail, the social is missing. But if we are to explain why the scene today is so different from that of the late fifties or sixties, most of the answer must lie at this level. There, Nora's proposition is readily acceptable, if we invert its terms. Attention should probably go, first of all, to the ways in which Gaullist modernization destroyed the social bases of the very exceptionality to which it gave such remarkable (if contradictory) expression. It was only because the much deeper changes it entrained—disappearance of the peasantry, reconfiguration of the working class, multiplication of urban middle strata, rise of new kinds of capital—were working themselves out, that the ideological successes of a new French liberalism became possible in the late seventies.

Such a presumption is, of course, only algebraic. The actual inter-relations between transformations of social structure and changes in cultural or political life remain to be teased out, and could well prove more complicated and unpredictable than initially supposed. The fates of Communism and Gaullism, invoked by Nora, are a case in point. Across the decade from the May Revolt to the break-up of the Union of the Left, the descent of the PCF into a kind of senile dementia was certainly one of the conditions of the ease of the neo-liberal turn under Mitterrand, ending in the party's virtual extinction. But the distinctive character of French Communism remains something of an unresolved mystery
to this day. What explains its peculiarly numbskull insensibility? Historically, unlike its English counterpart after the mid-nineteenth century, the French working class was never radically alienated from the world of ideas and culture; nor, from the time of the Third Republic, was education typically viewed with distrust as an emblem of privilege. Why then did the party that came to represent it after the war prove so ideologically crass? The corset of Stalinism is no answer, as a glance at the contrast in cultural outlook with the PCI makes plain. It is sometimes forgotten that the opportunities of French were far greater than those of Italian Communism, since it was not politically isolated in the seventies, nor excluded from office in the eighties. Yet it listened to no voice in society outside its own wooden head. On the Left, the upshot was all too predictable: a deaf communism generating a blind anti-communism, the one as vacant as the other. The underlying social logic of this impasse has yet to be unravelled.