Can France Be Saved?

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Subject: Can France Be Saved?

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Thank You

A link to

"Can France Be Saved?"

has been emailed to your friends.

Most E-mailed articles:

French elections can be as entertaining as Russian roulette. Twelve years ago, in early 1995, it was taken for granted that Edouard Balladur, a conservative prime minister, would succeed the outgoing socialist president François Mitterrand without further ado. The Left was then a spent force. So, evidently, was Jacques Chirac, another conservative Gaullist and a former prime minister (and unsuccessful contender for the presidency). But then a satiric TV show, Les Guignols de l’Info (The News Puppets), started featuring Chirac as a French-style Forrest Gump who would answer questions on any topic, political or economic, with the phrase “Eat apples.” In April 1995, Jacques “Apple” Chirac won out over both Balladur and the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.

Two years later, Chirac called a new parliamentary election, not in order to solve a crisis between the executive and the legislature but simply to suit his political convenience. This, though allowed under the constitution, had never been done before, and the public did not like it. His parliamentary majority was ousted and replaced by the socialists. Jospin now became prime minister and remained in place for five years.

The next presidential election, in 2002, was even more sensational. Bidding for a second seven-year term, Chirac was challenged again by Jospin, who this time looked sure to win. But then France’s two-ballot system came into play. In the first round, a plethora of left-wing candidates pulled so many votes away from Jospin that he was reduced to the third position, behind Chirac and the far-Right agitator Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was ejected from the race. On the second ballot, some 80 percent of the voters backed Chirac over Le Pen. Chirac was foolish enough to believe they had elected him.

And now we have the elections of 2007. First the presidential election, with its first ballot on April 22 followed by a runoff between the two top vote-getters on May 6; then the National Assembly elections in June. Two years ago, everyone would have sworn that the presidential winner would be the maverick conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s minister of the interior. Then Sarkozy’s fortunes declined sharply, while those of another star—and another maverick—were rising: Ségolène Royal, the socialist governor of Poitou-Charentes in western France. Early this year, Sarkozy made a strong comeback, and Royal fell from grace. At that point a third candidate, François Bayrou, a nice, decent, articulate, over-ambitious centrist, unexpectedly entered the picture, effectively challenging both Royal and Sarkozy. Complicating matters still further was the perennial candidacy of Le Pen.

By the time this issue of COMMENTARY reaches subscribers, the first ballot will be over, and the two candidates with the highest number of votes will have begun battling it out for the May 6 runoff. But what does it all mean? Common wisdom—in America at least—is that the French are and will always remain an utterly fickle people, as individuals and as a nation. This may be true—up to a point. My own belief is that the vagaries of the French vote tell us a great deal about the profound uncertainties the country is now facing.

_____________

Books about “national decline” and the “growing national crisis” have been best-sellers in France for at least the past four years. The first and still the most trenchant was La France qui tombe (“Falling France,” 2003), by Nicolas Baverez, a lawyer and a graduate of the immensely prestigious Ecole nationale d’administration (National School of Public Administration, or ENA). The same year saw the publication of Le Grand Gaspillage (“The Great Waste”) by the distinguished Sorbonne historian Jacques Marseille, followed by the same author’s La Guerre des Deux France (“The War of the Two Frances,” 2004) and more recently Les Bons Chiffres pour ne pas voter nul en 2007 (“The Right Figures for a Sensible Vote in 2007”).

Both Baverez and Marseille can be described as moderately conservative free-marketeers; both write columns for Le Point, the right-of-center weekly of news and opinion. Two other declinists come from a very different background. Michel Godet, a professor of industrial economy, was originally close to the Christian Left but over time developed a robust critique of French industrial and social policy. His 2003 book Le Choc de 2006 (“The Shock of 2006”) pointed to the exorbitant price the country was paying for its extensive welfare state, a thesis elaborated this year in Le Courage du bon sens (“The Courage of Common Sense”). Claude Allègre, a geologist of repute, served as a minister in Jospin’s government, where he tried and failed to reform the French educational system. Subsequently he became one of the country’s best columnists, first at L’Express, the left-of-center weekly, and then at Le Point.

A fifth should be mentioned: Louis Chauvel, a young sociologist at the Institut de sciences politiques de Paris (Paris Institute for Political Science, or “SciencesPo,” as everybody calls it), who has produced a short, dry assessment of the collapse of the French middle class, Les Classes Moyennes à la dérive (“The Middle Class Adrift”). Like Godet and Allègre, Chauvel was seen initially as a man of the Left, and is still supposed to be close to that orientation—which makes his indictment all the more notable.

_____________

To understand where these various authors are coming from, it helps to bear in mind the bedrock fact that France is one of the founding nations of Europe—that is to say, one of its oldest nation-states. Since the Great Revolution of 1789, since Napoleon, it has been a modern, secular society. In the 19th and 20th centuries it grew into a world leader in science, technology, finance, culture, art, and literature. It conquered and then emancipated a large colonial empire. And it took a decisive role in the formation of what is set to become a 21st-century superpower, the European Union.

Very few countries can lay claim to such a glorious destiny, or to a more stable national identity. To be endowed with a special destiny and identity is, in itself, a political blessing. But what if that glory is challenged, and the national identity eroding? What if the actual stuff France is made of—its shared culture, its assurance of a common heritage—is disintegrating?

It has happened before. The early decades of the 20th century were a time when France, suddenly mired in a demographic and economic slowdown, seemed to hover between national pride and national despair. This culminated in the full-fledged disaster of 1940, when France was crushed by Germany and subjected to nation-wide occupation. Fortunately, Germany was crushed in turn by the Anglo-Saxon powers and Soviet Russia, and France was allowed to recover. And so it did, with a vengeance. From the 1950’s through the 1970’s, there was much talk in the world of a Japanese miracle, a German miracle, even an Italian miracle. France was a fourth and no less impressive miracle. National independence and national influence were restored, demographics improved, the economy boomed once more. France felt like France again.

Despite warning signs, like the simultaneous rise of Le Pen’s National Front on the far Right and of various Trotskyite and other radical groups on the far Left, this newfound optimism lasted for two more decades. Since the mid-1990’s, however, it has become untenable. Drawing from the works of our four or five whistleblowers and others, we can reliably paint the following portrait of France today.

Demographic Upheaval