Defence of the Republic
France looks as if it is poised to go into one of those peculiarly franco-français spins which leaves other nationals gasping for words. This particular spin is caused by the event I wrote about in the previous piece – the President’s insisting, without consultation, that every 10 year old be saddled with the memory of a French child who died in the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of that decree per se, it was the final straw for many Republicans, and sparked an appeal trumpeted throughout the land for “Republican vigilance”. This call-to-arms was signed by many senior French politicians (Ségolène Royal, François Bayrou, Dominique de Villepin). Their basic premise is that under President Sarkozy, republican values are in danger. That debate, for me, is where the downward spiral starts.
I have written in Prospect that the republican values (equality and laïcité particularly) are the bed-rock and defining principle of present-day France. But they do not export – or even translate – well. Anglophones, for example, tend to read laïcité as secularism – which it isn’t, it is something far stronger and in many French people touches a nerve far deeper. Hence the passion behind this petition for the defence of the republic, which looks like becoming another major row in France.
But many people outside France believe that these “values” are the product of a by-gone age, and are now hampering France as much as its Code du Travail or its unaffordable social security system. Arthur Goldhammer, an American blogger on French politics, feels that: “vaguely [Sarkozy] senses that the old republican rhetoric is out of whack with the realities of contemporary France, and he is right.” Or it may be that, as ange scalpel suggests in a comment on the previous piece, Sarkozy is consciously trying to unpick key republican values: something he could never have alluded to during the election campaign but which, he may feel, have no place in today’s world. Something many non-French would agree with. Sarkozy is clearly influenced by “foreigners” to a far greater degree than his predecessors: as well as the rag-bag of American influences, Rue 89 yesterday gave a fascinating insight into the close links with Canadian billionaire Paul Desmarais, and not just financial: in 1995 when Sarkozy was rejected and reviled by mainstream French politicians, traversing what he likes to call the desert, “a man invited me into his family in Quebec. We spent hours walking through the woods and he told me: “You’ve got to stick in there, you will get there, we must build a strategy for you.” On Sunday Sarkozy rewarded Desmarais with France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, saying: “If I am president today it is partly thanks to the advice of Paul Desmarais.”
It may be that people like Desmarais and others have suggested to Sarkozy that the notion of “the Republic one and indivisible” is, as Goldhammer says: “a pious wish, not reality”. The real question is whether a country prefers to live mouthing pious wishes or staring reality in the face. The second choice is not necessarily superior: many French people appear to prefer the former, even knowing, deep down, those pious wishes are hot air, for they also know that if they are forced to adopt the latter and stare reality in the face, France will lose a large part of its Frenchness.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I find this comment misleading. The values of the French Republic may be an illusion or a myth, a relic of a bygone age, but the fact is that Mr Sarkozy behaves as if He Alone could impose to his country any sort of decision about religion or the constitution without consulting the citizens. this is a form of Republican authoritarianism , of the sort practiced by Robespierre. If , as you seem to suggest, Our Sovereign were really a liberal, he would not care about the State giving indications about how to preserve memory or about how to practice the “devoir de mémoire”. He would just let religious groups do freely what they want. I a m curious about what he will do about scientology. Blaise Pascal said that tyranny is “the desire to legislate out of his sphere”. Pr Sarkozy is just tyrannistic in trying to legislate over what he is not allowed to legislate about. A REpublican reflex among his compatriots is not necessarily the proof of their adherence to old fashioned values of an Indivisible Republic ( which may have existed only at the time of Valmy! , but only to a simple fear that the basic liberties of democracy are violated. France is a democracy, but we have to be watchful.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Plus there may, of course, be concerns about a smuggling-in of the conservative “bright idea” across the Western world of sub-contracting public and social services to voluntary (for which read religious) organisations: this would have a particular resonance in the French situation, but resistance to the idea (in the Anglosphere no less than in France) is hardly “old-fashioned”.
There are of course rigidities in the interpretation of the idea of community cohesion in France, of a kind we got over 20 years or more ago in the UK (but are still revisiting): you don’t make people equal merely by saying they are and by refusing to look at how life is actually experienced by inconveniently real people. That’s perhaps less to do with “republican values” than énarque arrogance and a preference for the theoretical over the empirical: but whether Sarkozy’s genuinely committed to consistent action to reinterpret values in that or any other context, or, as his critics say, just capriciously showboating, Berlusconi-style, is yet to be seen.
Why no link, by the way? It’s here: http://www.marianne2.fr/L-Appel-republicain-de-Marianne_a83903.html.