The Secret Life of France (9 page)

The French idea of freedom could hardly be more different from the Anglo-Saxon notion. Set out most clearly in the philosophy of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, and even echoed, a century later, by the
conservative thinker Edmund Burke, the English notion of freedom which would be inherited by America’s founding fathers is inseparable from the idea of
property
. For both the liberal Locke and the conservative Burke, freedom can be defined by the pragmatic observation that one man’s freedom ends where another man’s begins, and that means with the boundaries of his property. In England, as in America, a man is free as long as his person and his property remain inviolable. His freedom is guaranteed by the law from any arbitrary intervention, be it from the State or an individual: ‘Man hath by nature a power to preserve his property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men.’ In America, the right to bear arms has forever been entangled with this fundamental right to the defence of one’s property.

The French Revolution, of course, made a mockery of this belief by confiscating the property of Church and aristocracy. Edmund Burke expressed his outrage at the goings-on in France and his protests reflected the deep conviction that the Englishman’s house was his castle: ‘You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.’

It is hard to imagine the British monarchy, for instance, ever having managed to convince the aristocracy to abandon their estates and move, complete with servants and livery, to the court. Surely the Versailles experiment
and the resulting submission to the will of
Le Roi Soleil
indicates that for the French the idea of Freedom is not linked to the idea of property but to that of nobility. Louis XIV cleverly manipulated this belief and thereby managed to establish an elaborate hierarchy around his person that fully occupied five thousand courtiers.

For the French, on the other hand, equating liberty with the freedom to dispose of one’s property is to debase the idea of liberty, which must carry the connotation of nobility or grandeur. To be free of material concerns is one of the principal attributes of true liberty, for the world of commerce induces a form of enslavement: enslavement to profit, to wages, to gain.

In English society, even in feudal times, the idea of freedom was linked to property. There was no such thing as life-time servitude unless, that is, it was voluntarily given. Legally, an English serf ’s obligation to his Lord ended the moment he returned the goods and property that had been given in exchange for his services. Theoretically, at least, this rudimentary contract was guaranteed by the King’s Justice.

In medieval France, on the other hand, the vassal vowed life-time devotion to his Lord, in exchange for which he received the status and privileges that were compatible with the nature of his service. The status conferred respectability and dignity and provided, within the confines of subordination to the honoured lord, a sense of belonging to a community of equals. This paradoxical notion of equality within a hierarchy persists in France
today. It can be seen in its purest form within the French Public Service, where employees are so imbued with a sense of nobility that they refuse all modification or reform of their status. As Alexis de Tocqueville said of the French: ‘They want equality in freedom but if they can’t have that, they’ll want it in slavery.’

This heritage goes a long way to explaining the attitudes of people employed in the service of the State. From post office workers to railway clerks to teachers, the French have traditionally been brought up to believe that there is no position more secure, more comfortable, nor more worthy than
Le Service Public
, and they will leap through countless hoops to get there. The endless tests and exams in order to become a civil servant, even at the most junior levels, contribute to the sense of having been ‘chosen’, and the smug, haughty, intransigent manner of the man or woman behind that sheet of glass is the result of a very particular combination of the pride of belonging to an illustrious caste and a certain resentment about the realities of belonging to that caste.

For as in most aspects of French life, there is a huge gap between the idea and the reality. The reality, of course, is the drudgery of stasis, of the repetitive task and the increasingly problematic confrontation with the outside world, which has its own expectations and demands. On the other side of that counter or window the world is shifting, people are starting to brandish phrases like ‘customer service’, and the great tide of Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalism, bringing with it concepts like job
flexibility and privatisation, is threatening to sweep away privilege and certainty. The only rampart against this tide is the State itself, and the State has failed.

In France, the civil servant’s mentality is not confined to the
Service Public
. It is everywhere. You can encounter it in organisations that are supposed to be committed to the idea of private enterprise. My local bookshop, which is part of a small chain affiliated with the illustrious publishers Gallimard, is one such place. Recently I bought a novel there for a friend, only to discover that she already had it. On my way to have lunch with my son, I took the book back and chose another novel by the same author, which was a little cheaper. Instead of giving me the change, the woman at the cash register offered me an
avoir
(credit note) for two euros fifty. I told her that I would rather have the money, to which she replied that they didn’t give out cash. The smugness of her delivery was so irritating that I asked to see the manager. She huffed, and marched to the back of the shop. I could tell from her gesticulations that she expected to be defended by her boss, which of course she was. The manager was a middle-aged man with exactly the same attitude: what I was asking was simply ‘not done’, he explained. When I dishonestly pointed out that I was a foreigner and would not be likely to ever use my
avoir
, he apologised in the most unapologetic way possible and repeated that it couldn’t be done. I asked him why, and he folded his arms and said, ‘Because we don’t do it, Madame.’

‘But what about customer service? Can’t you be a bit flexible?’

To which he replied, ‘The customer has to respect the rules like everybody else, Madame.’

This was his profound conviction: all equal in slavery. By this time a small queue had gathered behind me and people were watching me with marked hostility. I was making a scene. I was probably American. I had come to their country and tried to impose my free-market mentality on their egalitarian system.

By the time I got to the café where I was meeting my son, I was fuming with rage. This was something that hadn’t happened to me for a long time. I usually took this kind of behaviour in my stride, laughed it off, saw it as part of a wider context that brought with it an array of other, wonderful things: long lunches, paid holidays, a pleasant lack of competitiveness … Today I had relapsed.

My son, Jack, who was in his first year at the Sorbonne studying philosophy, laughed when I told him the story. He had just read Nietzsche and explained the attitude I had encountered in the following terms: ‘Nietzsche said there were two types of mentality in the world, defending two opposing kinds of civilisation: the slave mentality and the noble mentality. The slave mentality basically says “No” to life and the noble mentality says “Yes”.’

In Nietzsche’s merciless view of humanity, Jack explained, men were born with either a slave’s or a nobleman’s mentality, the former fuelled by resentment and envy and the latter by the conquering spirit and the will to
power. Nietzsche believed that the first champion of the slave mentality was Socrates and among the civilisations built upon it were Christianity and Marxism.

‘What you encountered in the bookshop,’ Jack explained, ‘that habit of saying, “No, it can’t be done,” is a pure example of what Nietzsche was talking about. Fear of change, devotion to a system, mistrust of the individual will; these are all manifestations of the slave mentality.’

The French paradox, then, lies in the attachment of its population to an apparently noble status that ultimately enslaves them.

It has often been pointed out that Protestant culture is a culture based on ‘confidence’, confidence in the individual as an autonomous, self-regulating entity. Theoretically, in this type of society, the State believes in the idea of limiting its own role. France, in turning her back on the Reformation, chose to maintain a hierarchical system in which the individual would continue to be both dominated and pampered by the State. The history of France is the history of her people’s paradoxical or at least dual relationship with authority. As René Rémond, one of France’s leading political scientists, put it: ‘The attitude of the French towards authority, throughout history, proceeds from a double and contradictory heritage: the cult of the State and the inclination to rebellion.’
*

This oscillation between contestation and worship
occurred throughout the
Ancien Regime
, both towards the monarchy and the Catholic hierarchy, anti-clericalism having always been much stronger in the French than in their Catholic neighbours. In a family with a powerful father figure, perceived to be at once tyrannical and indulgent, the children find a kind of reassurance in the perpetual interface with the authority figure; indeed, they are defined by it. So it is with the French and their State.

This legacy, however, is being undermined by an equally powerful current, which is gathering momentum and is generally referred to as ‘the Anglo-Saxon model’. Today, political discourse in France is entirely conditioned by where you stand on this influence, whether you are for it or against it, whether it is something to be embraced or resisted at all costs. This ideological divide does not follow party lines. It is also a divide that dares not speak its name.

When Nicolas Sarkozy came along with his defiant mantra on the value of work, he was striking at the very heart of the republican dream. His electoral message was revolutionary because it was quintessentially un-French. ‘I propose the following options to the new presidential majority: social policy … work, educational policy … work, economic policy … work, fiscal policy … work, commercial policy … work, immigration policy … work, monetary policy … work, budgetary policy … work. What I’m proposing is to make our politics the politics of work.’

Apart from during the ignominious Vichy period, work has never been a value in France. Nor, indeed, has
profit. The prevailing moral code, inherited from the
Ancien Regime
, sees work and gain as a means to an end; the end being an elevated life. The Catholic Church did not adopt the idea of salvation through work, and post-revolutionary France, in its clever appropriation of Catholic values, knew better than to integrate the work ethic into its new ideology.

During my first winter with Laurent the papers were filled with the chilling story of the murder of a four-year-old child called Gregory. The story – that came to be known as ‘Le Petit Gregory’ in an eerie echo of Perrault’s fairy tale ‘Le Petit Poucet’ – would grip the French imagination for years to come, and the mystery remains unsolved to this day. But it was not so much the story itself that fascinated me but, like Zidane’s head-butt decades later, the particular way in which it was told and interpreted.

For months the prime murder suspect was Gregory’s mother, Christine Villemin. Christine’s cold beauty seemed to incite extremes of feeling, and the country was divided between those who saw her as a victim and those for whom she was a monster. Nine months after little Gregory’s body was found, bound with rope, in the Vologne river that flows through the dark, industrial valleys of the Vosges mountains, an article appeared in
Libération
†
that seemed to be an attempt to unite this polarised view of Christine.

The article was written by Marguerite Duras, at the time France’s most eminent female writer and winner, that same year, of the Goncourt Prize for her world-famous novel
L’Amant
(
The Lover
). The long piece, marked with Duras’s special brand of laconic lyricism, entirely presumed the poor woman’s guilt (Villemin would later be acquitted), but went on to ‘forgive’ her for her supposed crime. Extolling the defendant’s will to overcome the narrow circumstances of her life, Duras paints a picture of a working-class Medea who chooses infanticide in a grandiose bid for freedom.

The article, which was published under the dazzling title ‘Sublime, Necessarily Sublime’, still strikes me today as emblematic of the particular blindness of the Parisian bourgeois intellectual. Embedded in Duras’s absurd eulogy are all of France’s founding myths and obsessions: the taste for the tragic, the obsession for nobility, grandeur, freedom and equality. For mad though it may sound, Duras suggests in her piece that the subject of her fantasy, Christine Villemin, by killing her own child, somehow rises above her social status: ‘I see only her,’ says Duras. ‘At the centre of the world, surpassed by only time and God.’

When I told my tutors at Oxford that I was pregnant, they kindly granted me a year off. I would have the baby in France and return for my final year. Some of them, I’m sure, thought that I wouldn’t come back, but they were all very supportive. In my college, which had only recently started admitting women, this was a first, and the dons seemed determined to be as positive as they could be.

In Paris that winter I was undergoing my gradual transformation. My resistance to the cult of appearances was being worn away, and I found that going out in my bedroom slippers was something I would no longer consider. Every month I went for a check-up at the maternity hospital where I was due to give birth in December. A girlfriend of mine, an anaesthetist called Sandrine, had recommended it to me for its glamorous head of obstetrics, Professor Minkowski, a renowned specialist in neonate and developmental biology.

In France, the best practitioners work in the public sector. The State pays them a standard wage and they are allowed to augment their income with private consultations outside the hospital. When I asked Sandrine why
they stayed with the public service, she simply answered: ‘
Pour la Gloire
[for the glory].’

There is more prestige in the Health Service than out of it. Practitioners are decently paid but, more importantly, they are respected and admired. Within the lavish public health system they can carry out their research, publish their findings and achieve that most prized of French dreams, not wealth or glamour, but that old-fashioned commodity, recognition.

As it turned out, I never clapped eyes on Professor Minkowski. Like most French National Health maternity hospitals, his was run by a team of midwives. He would only appear if there was trouble, dealing only with Caesareans and emergency procedures. His midwives carried out most of the deliveries.

In France, to become a midwife or
sage-femme
– literally, ‘wise woman’ – you have to complete the first year of medical school, after which you’re admitted to a special training course that takes a further four years. Like everything in the French education system, the course is extremely rigorous and theoretical. As well as learning the practical skill of delivering babies, the aspiring
sage-femme
has to study anatomy, physiology, pathology, microbiology, pharmacology, anaesthesiology, obstetrics, paediatrics, gynaecology, psychology and sociology, public health, law and, of course, sexology.

Hospitals have always been the core of the French healthcare system. This probably accounts for the extremely specialised, technical and curative nature of the
healthcare. A medical report carried out in 2000 showed that after diagnosis of lung cancer, patients in Britain were twice as likely to die from the disease as they were in France. Sandrine, who is currently involved in a massive programme of reform of the French Health Service and who has travelled frequently to the UK to compare systems, explained that the reason for this therapeutic gap is not the quality of British practitioners but rather the lack of resources and the resulting waiting lists. Lung cancer has to be treated quickly otherwise there is little chance of survival. In France there are no waiting lists for this type of disease, so the patient is treated immediately after diagnosis. As a result, the survival rates for people with lung cancer five years after diagnosis are only 7 per cent in the UK and 14 per cent in France.

Because everything revolves around the hospital, there is virtually no community care in France. Once you leave hospital with your baby, you’re pretty much on your own. There’s no health visitor unless your neighbour denounces you to the social services, and as for home births, they are very rare and strongly discouraged. You would have to fight the very interventionist system that kicks in as soon as you become pregnant and which has you under close medical surveillance from start to finish. This includes monthly check-ups, endless blood tests, three obligatory scans and hospitalisation if there’s even the hint of a premature birth. Once you’ve had your baby, you are kept in hospital for a minimum of three days, five to ten if you’ve had a Caesarean. As you get
your own room, good food and the option of night-time care of your newborn from a staff of truly devoted men and women – all for free – this was not something I ever resisted. Each time I had a baby in France I came home completely restored.

Just before I left the hospital, I had a visit from a gynaecologist who asked me if I needed a prescription for some contraception. That dealt with, she handed me what appeared to be a vibrator. I asked her if this was a kind of going-home present from the French Public Health Service, and she smiled and said ‘sort of’.

As it turned out, it was not a sex toy but a vaginal probe. I was to take it to my local
kiné
, short for
kinésithérapeute
or physiotherapist (of which there are huge numbers in France), and she, or he, would plug the other end into a machine that would send electrical impulses into the probe in order to tone and ‘re-educate’ my perineum. When I had got over the shock of being handed such a rude-looking object, I was overcome with admiration at a society willing to pay for millions of women to tone their fannies in the aftermath of birth. In retrospect, it not only makes sense for the healthy sex life of the nation, it makes sense economically too. The health costs incurred by mass female incontinence must be higher than a few million vaginal probes and some sessions with the
kiné
.

When you get home from hospital, the compulsory visits to the paediatrician begin. He or she will strong-arm you
into vaccinating your baby, endlessly weigh and measure him and plot his developmental progress on the various little graphs in the back of his precious medical ‘log-book’. This
carnet de santé
, as it is called, is part of an elaborate system of professional surveillance that continues all the way through childhood. It was, I suppose, the first sign of a phenomenon that would become increasingly obvious to me: France loves norms, and this love is part of her identity.

I soon realised that this was extended to breastfeeding as well. When my first child was born I was asked by my midwife if I intended to breastfeed. She smiled encouragingly at me, adding ‘bravo’, and scribbled something on her clipboard. When I went on to say that I hoped to keep it up for at least nine months, her face fell.

‘Nine months! That’s not necessary. They get all they need in the way of immunity in three.’

This, clearly, was a universally acknowledged fact and explained why of the mothers who did choose to breastfeed, the vast majority stopped after three months. In France only about 55 per cent of mothers breastfeed, and because most of them return to work within the first six months, they tend to wean their babies early. I think, however, that the objection to late weaning runs much deeper. The reactions I got from my Parisian entourage when I allowed my ten-month-old boy to suckle at my breast at a dinner party were too violent for them to be purely practical.

‘It’s unnatural!’ the inimitable Nathalie protested. ‘He’s got
teeth
!’

A few of the women present on that occasion were, I think, a little jealous that my work enabled me to go on breastfeeding when theirs had not. But, in most cases, they agreed with Nathalie that it was ‘unnatural’, expressing the deep-seated but unavowed conviction that breasts were first and foremost for sexual pleasure and the erotic delight of men.

Magali, who was seen by the other members of
la
bande
as the most maternal among us – since she had been the first to have children, was the best cook and had a nurturing personality – had chosen not to breastfeed any of her three children. She once explained to me that her breasts were her best feature and that she didn’t want to risk damaging them.

At the time her remark had struck me as selfish – immoral even. Surely that was what breasts were for? Of course there is always the risk of damage, with or without breastfeeding, but her husband should love them anyway and if he didn’t, well … he was an arsehole. In retrospect, however, I can appreciate her point of view. Her breasts did indeed stay lovely for many years and her children didn’t seem to suffer from having been bottle-fed. They appeared neither unhealthier nor more insecure than other children I knew who had been breastfed, since there are obviously plenty of ways to mess up your children after you’ve weaned them. Magali was clearly a devoted mother, and her choice was a happy, guilt-free one that has been beneficial to her sexual fulfilment and, by extension, to her whole family. The moral imperative that has
come to surround breastfeeding in Britain may simply be another manifestation of puritan guilt and, as such, one that needs to be watched.

France is extravagant when it comes to healthcare spending, which represents just under 10 per cent of her gross domestic product. In 2000 the World Health Organisation ranked her healthcare system first among the 191 member countries surveyed, stating that it provided ‘the best overall healthcare’. The health system in the US, which spends a higher portion of her GDP than any other country, ranked thirty-seventh. Britain, which spends 6 per cent of her GDP on the health service, ranked eighteenth.

The principle, ever since the French Public Health Insurance System was set up in 1945, has always been to provide unlimited access to care, patients being allowed to see as many physicians – including specialists for whom no referral is required – as often as they like. Compared to their British counterparts, French practitioners, even those working in the private sector, have always had a great deal of freedom over where they set up shop, how they function and what they prescribe, yet the bulk of their income is paid by public funds. As healthcare costs have continued to soar, this has become more and more of a concern. In recent years the French State has made a concerted effort to reduce costs – a delicate business since the lavish healthcare system is one of those ‘privileges for all’ that the French public is loath to relinquish.

On the surface, the system is both extravagant and chaotic. To qualify for health coverage you have to pay an insurance premium calculated as a percentage of your income. In addition to this, you pay fees for most things at the time of use, unless you earn below a certain income, in which case you are exempt. You then claim between 70 and 100 per cent of the fees back from your insurer. The result of this system is a very high standard of care available to everyone, without the waiting lists that characterise the NHS. Given that you can identify on your payslip how much you’re paying for your healthcare, you can then form an opinion about whether or not the cost is justified. The system is a kind of compromise between egalitarianism and liberalism. All citizens are said to be equal, but choice and competition are fiercely protected. The insurer makes no distinction between public and private hospitals (which provide about 35 per cent of beds), and patients have complete freedom of choice.

There are, however, drawbacks to this extremely lavish system. And they are not just the obvious, economic ones relating to the ever-growing deficit (to which most French people, incidentally, are impervious). As my own experience would teach me, the effects of this munificent, normative and interventionist system have deeper and more far-reaching consequences. My firstborn, Jack, who was delivered without incident by one of Professor Minkowski’s lovely midwives, would suffer from an early age as a result of this subtle but persistent normative pressure. From the moment we left the hospital, I would find
myself constantly battling against professionals from all walks of French life who wished to intervene to help my son become … well … more like everyone else. It started with the paediatrician, who put a dissatisfied dot on the growth chart in the back of his
carnet de santé
and urged me to consider growth-hormone treatment, since it was plain to see, at the age of eighteen months, Jack was
hors
norme
(outside the norm).

I refused the pituitary growth-hormone treatment that was available and being prescribed to children at the time, simply because I had been tiny for most of my childhood (my father had made me hang from door frames) and thought that Jack would probably have a late growth spurt as I had. As it turned out, the treatment being offered to us had a good chance of being contaminated with Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, and its administration to 1,500 children in France between February 1984 and February 1986 would become one of the biggest medical scandals of the decade; five people were arrested for not having taken the product out of circulation once it was known to be contaminated. The fifty deaths from this terrifying, debilitating disease which resulted from the French treatment programme represented more than half of all known cases worldwide and probably presaged many more.

The next battle on my son’s behalf would be with a nursery-school teacher who announced that at his age he should no longer be drawing
hommes-têtards
, ‘tadpole men’. By this she meant stick men without bodies but with arms and legs coming out of their heads. I listened in
amazement as she told me that this was a sign of arrested development. She recommended he see the school psychiatrist. We were on the street when we had this conversation and I remember laughing out loud at her proposal.

‘A psychiatrist!’ I said. ‘He’s only three!’

‘Madame,’ she said gently. ‘The sooner we deal with the problem, the better.’

When it became clear that I wasn’t going to agree, her manner hardened.

‘I think you should know that your son tends to place himself in the role of the victim,’ she explained.

At the time I was aghast, but this kind of psychobabble would prove quite common among teachers, who used it to strike guilt and fear into the hearts of all parents whose children didn’t fit the mould. Fighting this tendency towards the conformism inherent in French society took up a great deal of my energy as a mother.