730 cars burned and 592 arrests before President Sarkozy has been in office 24 hours. Under France’s new and more efficient system for dealing with delinquents, some have already been given prison sentences.

Last Friday, on the eve of the election, Nicolas Sarkozy created a pilgrimage. It’s something French presidents do: they choose a place that has some national significance (but not identifiable with the Catholic Church or the French monarchy) and make an annual pilgrimage there, to soak up some deep mystic force that is recognisably French and which will in turn give them greater inner strength. François Mitterrand chose an outcrop of rock near Macon which is supposed to have been inhabited for the past 7,000 years. Sarkozy chose Les Glières, a plateau up in the Haute-Savoie Alps where in 1944 the French resistance fought a desperate and unsuccessful battle against their own police militia and the German air force and army.

“Alone, he came out of the woods,” wrote Le Monde, showing that they were there first – together with several hundred colleagues. Lucky they were, so they could record Sarkozy’s thoughts: “I want to say to the young generation that if, in two days’ time, they are going to vote it is because of men like [these] who sacrificed their life.” He added he would come here every year to pay his respects to this spirit of resistance in France. It is noble. It is important to remember history.

Why? The obvious answer is that it tells us about the present. If so, Les Glières might be an odd choice: some two thousand French militiamen and police besieged 450 of their own compatriots, whom they termed terrorists. Many of the resisters were communists, so there was an obvious political element to the battle. Today those terrorists are called heroes. The French police failed to overwhelm their compatriots, so the Germans came in with some 4,000 men to flush out and kill all the terrorist/heroes.

There is absolutely no similarity with the 592 young people who were arrested on Sunday night, whom the French police (who bear absolutely no resemblance to the French police of 1944) call delinquents but who call themselves resistants. The context is entirely different: the young men on the Glières plateau in 1944 risked and found death in a country deprived of democracy and all freedom of speech, movement or thought. Those arrested yesterday were protesting against a man elected by a good majority of the entirely free French – their violence is anti-democratic.

The only link is the idea of resistance, a strong and noble tradition in France. José Bové, who will be returning to prison any day now to purge his sentence for destroying genetically modified crops, resists. He has a large following. He quotes the 19th century American Henry Thoreau who went to jail rather than pay a tax he judged unfounded and wrote the now famous essay “Civil Disobedience” whose first title was “Resistance to Civil Government”. As Sarkozy says, it is right to remember history.

Now Sarkozy has gone to Malta for a few days. He wants to rest, of course, but more importantly, as with his pilgrimage to Les Glières three days earlier, he wants to be seen by the world’s press “escaping”, he wants everyone to know that he has gone somewhere quiet so that he can learn, from within, “how to habiter la function presidentielle, to get used to the weight of responsibility which weighs on my shoulders and take the necessary distance to become a man of the nation.” Like a larva metamorphosing into a butterfly, he will emerge, radiant with the full understanding of his role. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just so ridiculously theatrical. So absurdly self-important. He made an enormous fuss about “disappearing”, knowing that the world’s press would immediately start a search and that search would create its own story. It is an indication of how he sees the French presidency – not as a job but the starring role in some glamour movie called French Politics. All the time saying Look at moi! Look at moi!

Thus yesterday, when the rest of France, led by its president Jacques Chirac, was publicly commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 – remembering history – the histrionic president-elect was pulling the spotlight on to himself. He failed to turn up for his first presidential duty, accompanying Chirac at the ceremony on the Champs Elysées. His absence was, as he knew it would be, much noticed. On Friday he had declared we must remember the heroes of 1944, the following Tuesday they are not important enough for him to move from his yacht off Malta. It is that continual inconsistency, which some call the meaninglessness of his words, we shall have to watch.

Meanwhile Ségolène Royal’s Socialist Party seems on the brink of melt-down. The older elephants want to re-take control, blaming Royal for the highest electoral score they have ever had – over 1 million more than Mitterrand achieved in 1981 when he became the first socialist president of France, and more than when he was re-elected in 1988. They blame her for doing what they could not, attracting the voters who will rule France tomorrow. The absurd in-fighting of the current Socialist Party is tragic. You cannot renew with the old. More importantly, France under Sarkozy needs an effective, united and strong democratic opposition – as the League for the Rights of Man and other organisations concerned with civil liberties said on Monday. Without it, resistance, civil disobedience, delinquency, heroism or terrorism, call it what you will, can only flourish.
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Political, Nicolas Sarkozy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.