Doubts Tearing France Apart: An orgy of breast-beating claims the French 'piss off the planet'

The Observer ^ | October 12, 2003 | Paul Webster

[quidnunc]

At the FNAC Etoile in Paris, more a multi-storey literary warehouse than a bookshop, the shelves are buckling under the weight of ammunition for a political and social war. With titles such as French Arrogance, Falling France and French Disarray, this is heavy-calibre weaponry that is being trained on France's political elite in a war that has broken out over the very soul of the country.

Launched against a background of top-level disillusionment with Europe, accelerating unemployment rates, spectacular company failures and a stagnant economy, the books — by some of France's leading social commentators — have added an incendiary factor to popular protests over reforms that could end the 35-hour week, cut social security benefits and introduce across-the-board austerity.

Having recently emerged battered from national education strikes and months of street demonstrations over reduced retirement benefits, Jacques Chirac's administration is looking on with dismay at media encouragement for right-wing intellectual claims that France is now the weak man of Europe, mired in hypocrisy nationally and internationally, indifferent to popular needs such as care of the aged, and shaken by the aftershocks of vain defiance of the US-led war in Iraq. In short, that France is going down the pan.

'Reading these books, France is in agony, powerless and irretrievably condemned to decline,' Dominique de Villepin, the suave but widely mistrusted Foreign Minister, complained over two pages in Le Monde last week, comparing today's prophets of doom to anti-republicans who collaborated with the Nazis.

Equally piqued by France's depiction is the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who sought out America's Time magazine to complain about state-educated French intellectuals 'scrutinising French society while perched on the summit of a pyramid' and obsessed with 'declinism'.

And it is a pretty bleak picture, even by the account of the most rational of the 'declinists', Alain Duhamel, whose lugubrious face haunts every TV channel and serious newspaper column and charges that the country has been struck down by an 'insidious evil'.

'French democracy, the political balance and even the nation's personality are at risk,' he writes in Le Désarroi français.

It is an argument bolstered by Nicolas Baverez, a historian and free-market evangelist and author of La France qui tombe, who in only 134 pages trots out a thousand historical and contemporary statistics to claim that France is paralysed by 'economic, political, social and intellectual immobility and is plunging towards decline'.

Both pale into insignificance alongside L'Arrogance française, where the journalist authors, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, state: 'With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights, we (the French) have pissed off the planet. Worse: we make them laugh.

-snip-

[quidnunc]

Quote:

Both pale into insignificance alongside L'Arrogance française, where the journalist authors, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, state: 'With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights, we (the French) have pissed off the planet. Worse: we make them laugh.

'It's a sickness to which French people are addicted — believing that France must offer the world Light, Law and Liberty; that their leaders are the carriers of a universal message.'

The French they are a funny race,
they fight with their feet
and they ***
with their face.

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[tet68]

a war that has broken out over the very soul of the country.


France has a soul?? Who knew?

[tet68]

Well, what ever their problems, it's certainly nothing that Bill Clinton couldn't solve by moving there PERMENENTLY!

[Timmy]

And it is De Villepin who is most exposed in this regard. 'Abroad,' he writes in his answer to declinists: 'France rests a pole of thought and culture, a major economic, military and political power.'

Methinks De Villepin is delusional.

[festus]

;France is in agony, powerless and irretrievably condemned
;to decline

They have been declining for a few hundred years now. Its about time they got around to noticing.......

[John Beresford Tipton]

" we (the French) have pissed off the planet."

I would like to quote a great Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Piggy, who asked the question that is on the minds of all the French:

"Pretensious?
Moi?"

[tet68]

And it is De Villepin who is most exposed in this regard. 'Abroad,' he writes in his answer to declinists: 'France rests a pole of thought and culture, a major economic, military and political power.'

This is what happens when your only friends are democrats.

[razorback-bert]

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who sought out America's Time magazine to complain about state-educated French intellectuals 'scrutinising French society while perched on the summit of a pyramid'

Gee, Jean-Pierre, who do you think put state-educated French intellectuals up there

[tet68]

Guess he doesn't get the point. ^

[jocon307]

"Well, what ever their problems, it's certainly nothing that Bill Clinton couldn't solve by moving there PERMENENTLY!"

LOL, you are too kind! Hey, at least he's an AMERICAN. Maybe he should go over there, and take all the other unhappy Americans with him. I think, at the very least, they'd jazz the place up a bit.

[jokar]

'It's a sickness to which French people are addicted - believing that France must offer the world Light, Law and Liberty; that their leaders are the carriers of a universal message.'

Arguments on the inevitability of French decline are based on three premises: chaotic history up to the end of decolonisation, the domestic mess caused by lost opportunies and mistaken choices since 1970; and, finally, the months following Chirac's re-election in May 2002 with 82 per cent of the vote which has been followed by some of the worst economic statistics since the war, and an admission by Raffarin that the country is in recession.

Since Agincourt, they say, French rulers have been repeatedly trapped by overconfidence. Napoleon in Moscow in 1812, his nephew at Sedan in 1870, and the Third Republic in 1940.

They point to a national tendency for self-immolation - the Terror, the Paris Commune, and Vichy - before going on to dissect the consequences of reckless decisions by all-powerful Presidents of the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle and Mitterrand among them, a tradition that they claim is pursued by Chirac.

In this they argue that, blinded by their unchallengeable status at home, French Presidents stumble into their own diplomatic and social ambushes constructed with the help of a state-educated elite from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, ENA.

But none admits his mistakes or apologises for appalling, almost comical, blunders typified by the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, by hapless frogmen in 1985.

And it is the suave De Villepin who is mocked with iconoclastic vigour for his vanity in L'Arrogance française, as a cypher for this state-moulded super-class and who is never forced to admit being wrong.

And it is De Villepin who is blamed in particular for persuading a malleable President to take such an uncompromising stand on Iraq although other advisers correctly warned of the long-term damage of taking no account of US hegemony and offending the emerging EU Eastern bloc.

It is not just the elites that come in for criticism; by implication it is the considerable number of ordinary Frenchmen who have put their faith in the rural campaigner, José Bové, a neo-Poujadist.

Much of this wave of populism, say the declinists, is fed by an insistence of both Left and Right on l'exception française, a modern form of chauvinism in which legal fences are built around French language and culture.

It is an 'exception' that is mocked in L'Arrogance française as a hallucinatory drug that spills over into all facets of life from haute cuisine to the heavily subsidised and introverted cinema industry.

It is all pretty apocalyptic stuff. But in one respect the declinists may be right: that their political masters seem somewhat blinkered to the way in which many, from the Murdoch press to the Bush White House, regard La Belle France.

And it is De Villepin who is most exposed in this regard. 'Abroad,' he writes in his answer to declinists: 'France rests a pole of thought and culture, a major economic, military and political power.'

[SwinneySwitch]

Don't mess with cowboys!;^)

[AlexW]

"France has a soul?? Who knew?"

Not likely...I know a French girl in the US, earning her PhD.
She just can not understand why the US could not be like
France, and was quite boastfull that 60 percent of French were Atheist...Go figure.

[steplock]

"orgy of breast-beating " ???

Dang!

I thought it said Orgy of BREAST FEEDING!

[Tennessean4Bush]

France tries to overcome its history of monumental failure and miscalculation by arrogance and denial. The left in France is running the economy down the tubes and they are too arogant to admit it. In 10 years, France will be less an economic force than CA, NY, TX, and Florida. India, Poland, and perhaps several other eastern bloc countries will surpass its GDP.

[Let's Roll]

The French have turned "oh, why does the world hate us so"? into a national past time?

So that's why our libs are always agonizing about us not being more "popular" in the world while the rest of us could not care less. Dim/libs can't even come up with their own angst. Do these people ever have an original thought?

[ctonious]

Doubts Tearing France Apart: An orgy of breast-beating claims the French 'piss off the planet'

Well, isn't that something. And what did it take? For once, a US President and the people that supported him collectively said. ""Listen up, France. We don't give a good g--damn WHAT you think. You're a buncha washed up socialists that have been consistently failing in every regard measurable - except the idiot fashion world where you can impress Arkansas yokels and Oprah-fied soccer sluts with snotty attitudes and pseudo-intellectualism. Now STFU."

[Bud Bundy]

What the french need to do is for everyone in the entire country (except for the evil rich) to go on strike, and demand that the gov't pass into law a one hour work week (with 30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks), and that the evil rich be taxed at a 100% rate, the proceeds to be distributed to each according to her need.

[kcar]

Pitiful story: so I checked with my dog again...