The Secret Life of France (8 page)

That rainy afternoon of my wedding, I watched the earnest gesticulation, the heavy drawing on cigarettes, the trappings of intense debate, and felt bored and stupid. I couldn’t have guessed that in years to come I too would develop a taste for abstract conversation that would make my English friends squirm with embarrassment.

It has often been observed that the habit of embarrassment is quintessentially English. That night, when my brother-in-law began to play a rotation of Queen, Pink Floyd, Supertramp and his collection of rousing French hits from the seventies and eighties, the party divided into those who were embarrassed and those who were not. The French flooded onto the dance floor and began to jive expertly or else jump up and down and sing along at the tops of their voices, while the English huddled together in the hope that they might achieve invisibility.

That was the first time I heard the expression
yaourt
.

‘Yoghurt’ is the word used to describe the practice of singing along to tracks in English, usually with an unconvincing American accent, when you have absolutely no idea of the words. Yoghurt doesn’t have to
be
English, it only has to
sound
English. Singing along to ‘I Want to Break Free’ in Yoghurt would sound something like this: ‘I wo’ do’ bek fee.’ Sit on the Metro and you’ll hear plenty of
amateur French R’n’B singers doing ‘Papa gode a ban noo bang’ in perfect Yoghurt. There are even current French expressions derived from Yoghurt. My favourite is ‘
C
’
est la
waneugaine
’ – a bizarre distortion of the English,
once
again
– meaning it’s crazy or outlandish.

With a few notable exceptions, French pop music is by and large diabolical. Often described as the art form that calls least upon the intellect, music relies too much on intuition and the imagination to be really accessible to the French, who are coached from birth for rational thought. Ballads are fine, because they are firmly rooted in an easy melodic tradition and there are plenty of words: hence the particular genius of a composer like Serge Gainsbourg. There is no need, however, for any musical excellence in the rendition of these songs, so long as the singer
looks
good. That is why the French are quite happy to listen to some tone-deaf actress with a breathy voice, like Adjani or Deneuve or Bardot, sing Gainsbourg’s compositions. It also explains why Serge Gainsbourg’s ex-wife, Jane Birkin – a pretty, sixty-year-old
femme-enfant
with no voice – is an icon of the music business here and why her concerts are always sold out.

For a nation with such little aptitude for music, the French are wonderfully enthusiastic about it. In the early years of François Mitterrand’s presidency, just before he made his spectacular U-turn in economic policy, France was in the deepest doldrums. Those who had voted for him were bitterly disappointed that his bold decision to invite the communists into his cabinet, followed by his
audacious programme of nationalisations, appeared not to have worked; nor had raising the minimum wage, shortening the working week and lengthening the annual paid holiday improved the quality of their lives. (Mass unemployment, the collapse of the French stock market and a global recession certainly didn’t help.) Those who had not voted for Mitterrand were appalled that they were living in an almost Soviet-style economy in which the state had a 95 per cent share in banking and one in four people was working for the public sector. By June 1982, under pressure from his finance minister, Jacques Delors, Mitterrand made several currency devaluations and introduced a series of austerity measures, suddenly making himself the most unpopular president since the founding of the Fifth Republic. In the midst of this misery and hardship, Mitterrand’s popular, perma-tanned culture minister, Jack Lang, pulled an old idea out of the drawer and the
Fête de
la Musique
was born.

This, as I soon discovered, is an annual celebration of French musical mediocrity during which all manner of amateur musicians are invited to come out onto the streets of their city, town or village and ‘Make Music!’ (
Faites de
la Musique!
). In the tradition of popular festivals dear to the French Republic in its quest to provide meaning to a society that is at once rigorously secular and prone to idealism, Jack Lang chose the summer solstice, 21 June, for his music day. Every year since 1982, the French have celebrated the arrival of summer and on that night ‘Yoghurt’ fills the streets. The first time Laurent and I went together
to the
Fête de la Musique
would, I swore at the time, be the last. Lone, middle-aged electric guitarists, long thwarted in their ambitions, had come out of their basements to stand on street corners and play that Led Zeppelin riff over and over again, while rapturous teenagers banged their heads in appreciation. The culture ministry had not shown our eighteenth arrondissement the bounty she had shown other parts of the city, and there were no professional concerts that night, only the keen cacophony of amateur musicians, with their bongos, their accordions or their keyboards, playing cover versions on café terraces while everybody – young and old – danced together.

In spite of my vow never to go again, I would, with time, be infected by this French gift for innocent ebullience and take my children to the
Fête de la Musique
. Most years it would rain and we would wander through the warm, wet streets of Paris, slipping in our flip-flops as we danced with strangers to the terrible music. At the risk of sounding priggish, there is no need for money, or drugs, or alcohol, to have a good time at the
Fête de la
Musique
, nor is there anything to fear from letting your children wander the streets until dawn. French self-restraint, which is so often a bore, in circumstances like these becomes a blessing. The equivalent to the
Fête de la
Musique
could not exist in Britain. Not only would the music have to be of a higher standard – thereby destroying the rather makeshift, spontaneous flavour – but also the event would have to be accompanied by huge quantities
of drugs and alcohol and a considerable police presence. Good, clean fun is not feasible in today’s Britain.

One of the advantages of France’s rather undistinguished musical status (despite more recent aberrations like Air, Daft Punk, Justice or Kid Loco) is that the French have not been affected by the tyranny of Cool. The vast majority of French people are not ashamed of looking ridiculous while dancing to bad pop music, and I find this very charming. When my father-in-law pulled me onto the dance floor on the evening of my wedding and piloted me expertly through a jive, I wished that the ground would swallow me up. Having lived for so long in a country where people suffer so little from embarrassment, I can now appreciate how liberating is the experience of being completely uncool. Later, while the guests swayed in unison to ‘A Kind of Magic’, Laurent and I drove off on our honeymoon.

We spent a lazy and idyllic honeymoon in a house in Provence belonging to one of Laurent’s aunts. It was a pretty stone bungalow, overgrown with lavender and rosemary, on the edge of a sleepy, unspoilt village in Vaucluse called Puyméras. The village has since expanded and many of the surrounding vineyards have been swept away to make room for the new, uniformly pastel, mock-Provençal houses that now litter the hillsides. Anyone who has any experience of real estate in rural France will know all about the arbitrary and absolute power of the village mayor.

It was Mitterrand and his minister Gaston Deferre, back in the early days of his mandate, who, in an attempt to decentralise the French State, bolstered the power of little dictators to make or break village life in France. Despite a steady rural exodus since the mid-sixties which has resulted in the majority of the population now living in towns, the fabric of French society is still an intricate patchwork of small villages. Three-quarters of her thirty-six thousand communes are made up of villages of less than a thousand inhabitants, over whom
Monsieur
or
Madame le Maire
may reign supreme.

Since the early eighties most of these villages have been disfigured by anarchic building on their outskirts. Anarchic is perhaps the wrong word for these
lotissements
, as they’re called, for they tend to be uniform in their architectural conception, each region possessing its own template, its own parody of the vernacular. In Provence, all new constructions must be covered in a sickly salmon render to echo the sun-kissed limestone of old, and in the French Basque Country they must have mock wattle-and-daub façades with ox-blood shutters.

The steady selling-off of lots surrounding France’s villages has been a prized source of revenue for some of the many small-holding farmers,
paysans
, who have gradually lost their livelihoods over the past three decades. This practice has profited all those lucky enough to own land close to villages like Puyméras, as well as, in some cases, the mayors who delivered the building permits. It has also been a short-term gain that has threatened the future of thousands of communities, which have overbuilt on their most fertile land, polluted their water tables and created unsustainable communities no longer in a position to develop the kind of specialised or ecological agriculture that could save them.

In those days Puyméras was still pretty idyllic. There was a vibrant café owned by a man who went by the decorous name of ‘Zizi’ (French children’s word for penis), who offered barbecued
merguez
sausages and live music on Saturday nights. The band consisted of a young man who did Yoghurt versions of Michael Jackson hits, complete
with pelvic dance moves and accompanied by a woman on a synthesiser. Already I was finding it easier to dance along happily with the rest of the village to ‘A gonna be starvin’ sunshine’.

It was on the drive home to Paris that I first understood the significance of the
congé payé
, the French tradition of the one-month paid holiday. It was 15 August and the Catholic festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The roads were packed with families beginning or ending their holidays. In spite of the terrible traffic, the atmosphere was one of joy and camaraderie. Families were putting out aluminium chairs and tables and inviting each other to lunch in lay-bys or even right there, where they had halted, by the side of the
autoroute
. The
congé payé
is a privilege or, as the French call it, an
acquis social
which, broadly speaking, refers to any right which has been won through social or industrial action and which no one is prepared to give up without a fight. French politicians are notoriously wary of tampering with anything that can be described as an
acquis social
, for they know that it will unleash the terrifying, debilitating power of the mass demonstration.

The
congé payé
dates back to the Popular Front, the socialist coalition presided over by France’s first Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum. The
Front Populaire
was carried to power in 1936 on a wave of anti-fascism, and its short, two-year mandate is still perceived as the Glory Days of French socialism. As well as introducing the forty-hour
working week, Blum introduced the
congé payé
, which would make the month of August a virtually compulsory paid holiday for the entire adult working population of France. Even today, everyone is legally entitled to five weeks off a year and many decide, however inconvenient for business, to take most of it in one balmy chunk. Even committed capitalists put up the shutters in August as their suppliers are rarely available for business.

This mass exodus from working life creates a very particular atmosphere, especially in the vacated towns. The mood in Paris in August is entirely different from the rest of the year. Given over to the mercy of happy, badly dressed tourists, the city becomes gentler, freer, less imperious. Kids from the suburbs, somehow kept at bay by the Parisians for the rest of the year, feel permitted to spill over onto her elegant streets on August nights; the footbridges are alive with bad bongo players, amateur jugglers and other unabashedly uncool samples of French youth. Those Parisians who do stay behind in August revel in the
luxe calme et volupté
of the slacking city, and the place becomes more erotically charged than ever. I recently learnt of the existence of August brothels. Open Monday to Friday from 1 to 31 August, they cater specifically to husbands whose wives and children have left for the country or the seaside. These husbands stay and work in Paris in the week and then take the train to join their families on Friday nights. To even things out, the Friday-night trains are called
Les Trains des Cocus
(the cuckolds’ trains), packed as they are with men whose wives have
been having it away all week with their children’s tennis instructors.

In August Paris drops her guard and people gain direct access to each other. The city is a coded, trussed-up place most of the year, but in August people talk to each other in bus queues. The only other time one experiences camaraderie like this in Paris is during periods of mass demonstration. It is widely acknowledged as a harsh reality of political life in this country that it is the street that dictates reform. Or rather, it is the street that paralyses reform. Indeed, Laurent explained his own paradoxical politics to me in the following terms: ‘If you want anything to change in France, you have to vote socialist because only the socialists are able to push through reforms.’

This contrary position made no sense to me at the time, but it soon became clear that while Mitterrand was president, the street allowed his socialist government more room to manoeuvre than it would the Chirac government when it finally came to power in 1986. That winter was dominated by mass student demonstrations, which put an end to an educational reform that had been called for by politicians on both left and right for years. The Devaquet Project was an attempt to allow universities more independence from central government in determining fees and selection procedures. On Thursday 27 November two hundred thousand students took to the streets of Paris. Nine days later, as the demonstrations were still in full swing, twenty-two-year-old Malik Oussekine, an innocent
bystander on his way out of a jazz club, was chased by a group of motorcycle cops marshalling the demonstrators and beaten up in the lobby of an apartment building. He died in hospital from his injuries. In the wake of his death, the education minister resigned and Chirac withdrew the reform. He is convinced to this day that it was his capitulation that led to his defeat in the subsequent presidential elections of 1988. He has been said to have sworn never again to give in to pressure from the street. Indeed, his solution to this problem seems to have been to avoid any confrontation at all, his presidential style having been characterised by a stasis and inaction rarely seen in history.

During the nineties France’s right-wing governments withdrew every single significant reform after mass demonstrations. Prime Minister Edouard Balladur abandoned both his labour and his education reforms, as did Prime Minister Alain Juppé in his attempts to reform the pension and social security systems. In November and December 1995, a general strike was called to combat the
Plan Juppé
. It mobilised workers from the railway services, post office, telephone and electricity services, Social Security, hospital and education, the emergency services, local government, airports, transport workers and miners. Joined by the student population, the country ground to a halt.

The effectiveness of public demonstrations in this country came as a surprise to me. I had been a teenager under
Margaret Thatcher. My first demonstrations had been in support of the miners’ strike and against public spending cuts, and I had become resigned to the fatuousness of marching. Indeed, in Britain it seemed that demonstrations only did damage to a cause. In Paris, some group or other was marching every week, and the deputies in the Assembly were, for good or ill, taking their demands into consideration.

There was an atmosphere of collective jubilation during that winter of 1995. Parisians from all walks of life banded together. No matter what their feelings about the reforms themselves, they gave each other lifts in their cars and cheered on the chaos. Civil unrest on a scale like this seemed to bring out the milk of human kindness in these people, generally known for their sullenness. This spirit, this uniting against authority, is encapsulated in the French word
solidarité
, a word that has a magic ring to it. Mitterrand’s prime minister Michel Rocard used it to soften the blow when he renamed the new supertax from
Impôt sur la Grande Fortune
to
Impôt de Solidarité sur la
Fortune
(ISF). France’s equivalent of the civil partnership, voted in after much debate in 1999, was named the
Pacte
Civil de Solidarité
(Civil Pact of Solidarity). The word
solidarity
is important. It upholds the myth of France as a caring society and enables the individual to go on pursuing his or her interests with a clear conscience.

French people adhere to the idea of solidarity because they know that at one time or another they’re going to need it in order to defend their interests in a society made
up of a myriad of concessions and privileges that have been grappled from the clutches of that monolithic arbiter of all things, the State.

Once back in Paris, Laurent and I settled into married life. In September the city always returns to her natural posture of hostility and mistrust. I spent a good deal of my time crying in the face of daily expressions of scorn from strangers, and Laurent spent much of his trying to repair the damage. Today, my vulnerability in the face of dismissive shop girls, truculent civil servants and rude waiters seems a little pathetic to me. But at the time the rudeness of strangers devastated me. Pregnancy hormones, I’m sure, didn’t help, but when I look back at how I behaved in the face of these assaults, I realise that I was simply ill-equipped. All the social skills I had acquired growing up in Britain did me no good at all. My politeness, the constant pleases and thank yous, the self-deprecating posture – all of it only made me more of a target for people’s contempt.

‘You don’t have to be so
apologetic
,’ Laurent would whisper to me after I had ordered in a restaurant. ‘There’s no shame in the fact that he’s serving you.’

Of course he was right. The waiter interpreted my sycophancy as a mark of disrespect for his trade. Laurent explained that in France being a waiter was a noble profession. Waiters were not out-of-work actors or writers or people hoping for something better to come along.
Brasserie and restaurant waiters, in particular, have often fought for their positions, sometimes even paid for them, and many keep their jobs for life.

All this explained Laurent’s rather curt restaurant manner. He would state his order simply and clearly, without ceremony or apology, without a please or thank you, often without looking up so as not to engage personally. That way it became the waiter’s prerogative to initiate contact. He could be perfectly anonymous if he felt like it or he could make some witty remark to which Laurent would respond with an appreciative chuckle. This way, client and waiter were on an equal footing. There was no master–servant guilt.

France is a nation that is at once obsessed with the idea of nobility and the idea of equality. This paradox at the heart of her mythology explains the particular explosiveness of her society. The solution to this paradox, offered first by the monarchy and picked up by the Republic, seems to lie in the word ‘status’. Everyone in France has a
statut
, which is probably best translated by the military word
rank
. Waiters have a specific
statut
, just as the
boulanger
has his (or hers), as does the railway worker, the teacher, the painter, the plumber… Each profession forms part of a
corps
(another military word)
de métier
. The
corps de métier
is a clear echo of the medieval guild. Members of the medieval French guilds were bound to their lord and master for life. With each guild came a
statut
and with it a set of privileges; it was often these privileges that made the job bearable. This idea of a job
coming with its particular status and set of privileges endures today, even when economic realities have swept many of the privileges away. The fact that the French do not see much glory in productivity or even money goes a long way towards explaining their stubborn refusal to relinquish the few remaining privileges – early retirement, free train travel or long holidays – that are linked to their particular profession.

In France the idea of personal freedom is inextricably linked to the idea of Nobility. The Revolution’s slogan –
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
… or Death (a coda rarely remembered) – places freedom as the highest value. What is rarely admitted is that the Revolution’s particular idea of freedom is deeply indebted to the values of the
Ancien
Régime
. Indeed, it is as if the patrician values of the French monarchy were, by miraculous sleight of hand, incorporated into those of the Revolution. Bizarrely, for the French, even the post-revolutionary French, the idea of freedom is embodied in the life of the nobleman. To this day it is the obsolete aristocrat who remains the ideal model of a free man; free to rise above the drudgery of everyday, material concerns in order that he or she may delight in the life of the mind. Indeed, it is part of the function of the State to preserve and enable this very dream.