Posted on 03/17/2006 6:07:56 PM PST by blam
Chirac blamed for the failings of France
by Colin Randall in Paris
(Filed: 18/03/2006)
As the sun begins to set on the era of Jacques Chirac, students rampage in the Latin Quarter, the unions are restless and opinion polls reveal a nation that has lost all faith in its leaders. France, in other words, is much as Mr Chirac found it when he entered the Elysée in 1995.
And little more than a year before his expected departure from high office after four decades in politics, Mr Chirac has just been handed another reason to fear history's judgment.
Jacques Chirac: 'In mourning for himself'
In a fast-selling new book, a once-trusted confidant portrays him as a key cause of France's decline over the past 20 years.
Franz-Olivier Giesbert, a former editor-in-chief of the conservative daily Le Figaro, has drawn on copious notes kept from his extraordinary access to the president and France's political establishment to describe the Chirac legacy as "a personal tragedy that has become, in the end, a national tragedy".
Giesbert depicts Mr Chirac as a man obsessed by ancient art, his own supposed powers of healing and a failure to impose any of the bold ideas for reform he once held dear.
The book, The Tragedy of the President: Scenes from a political life 1986-2006, has been called "an affectionate hatchet job" by one critic, writing in the political weekly, Le Point, which the author now edits.
Mr Chirac is presented as a floundering leader who, little by little, has abandoned all ideas of significant change in French society after damaging strikes erupted at the start of his presidency.
Eleven years on, Mr Chirac has remained relatively silent as his embattled prime minister Dominique de Villepin has forced through a relatively modest youth employment law, giving bosses the right to sack workers without reason during a two-year "first job contract".
Up to one million students and workers are expected to take to the streets today in the biggest protest aimed at forcing the government to withdraw the measure.
Giesbert reserves his most scathing assessment of the president for a review of the events of last May when France voted emphatically to reject his appeal for a Yes in the referendum on a new European Union constitution.
"May 29, 2005 was the day of Chirac's political death," he writes. "And this time it was for good, without hope of resurrection. With the failure of his referendum, he still had two years to go and they were to be his cross to bear. His body would continue to move from habit, but his heart would no longer be in it."
Giesbert says that from one day to the next, Mr Chirac - then 72 -was turned into a ghost, the "undertaker of France's decline".
"He had aged 10 years in one go. Half asleep with a voice seeming to come from the grave, he wore a tie that was virtually black and he was in mourning for himself."
Giesbert says the young Chirac was a man of competence, a willingness to make decisions and real charisma. But "having led his life to the sound of trumpets, he has been transformed into the incarnation of French decline and the powerlessness of authority."
Among numerous anecdotes offering intimate insights into Mr Chirac's personality and style, Giesbert describes his passion for art and antiquities and the pride he takes when he is treated as an expert.
The president's office at the Elysée Palace, the author says, has come to resemble a curiosity shop full of the objects he has collected, from a 19th century Mumuye wooden statue from Niger to 3,000-year-old Mexican battleaxes.
The views of three French prime ministers, all staunch allies, quoted by the author speak volumes.
Alain Juppé said: "Chirac thinks of the world always in terms of civilisations. That explains his position in favour of Turkey's entry into the EU."
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, replaced as premier by Mr de Villepin after the referendum debacle, said: "Giscard d'Estaing thought in decades. For Chirac, it's centuries and, I often wonder, millennia."
And the currently beleaguered Mr de Villepin added: "He's not completely of our times but a man of the Orient or Asia who constantly finds himself above the world of today."
The president himself told Giesbert: "I am not a fanatic of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam or anything else. But I cannot bear the rejection of other cultures by the West. It makes the mustard rise in my nostrils when I hear arrogant, ignorant people, whether European or American, cover primitive art in their contempt.''
Giesbert also discloses that the president has to live with the knowledge that his wife, Bernadette, supports his former protege-turned-bitter-adversary Nicolas Sarkozy as presidential successor.
The author says that after a fall-out between the two men after Mr Chirac's famous slight aimed at Mr Sarkozy - "I decide, he executes'' - she went out of her way to assure the minister: "My husband will not stand [in 2007] and I will support you.''
Le petit merde.
Nonsense. France has been failing since long before Chirac.
Only in France could one make a political career on failure spanning more than 40 years.
With a little luck, Chirac will be the last of the French dinosaurs.
That doesn't mean that France is governable (my ex Brother in Law helped write the new employment law which is causing so much "pain" among elite college students).
It is good he is rejected and a broken old man. He is a post Napoleanic statesman who has injured France and Europe. A future good riddance.
His betrayal of the US and western civilization is the thing that I will remember him for. I was in Paris shortly after he won election to the Presidency in 1995. I was in a famous eatery called Le Fouquets on the Champs Elysees one night that happened to be the night of a soccer championship for France and the Paris St Germain club won the game and came into the place after while I was there still eating. Meanwhile outside a mini riot was beginning and the French police had deployed a small army outside the place. It was one of those eye opening moments when you realise you ain't in Kansas.
Yeah. It started with Louis XVIII at Sedan. And then, because of their false pride, they bled themselves white in WWI, followed by the appeasement of Petin and the Vichy government in WWII, their turning tail in SE Asia and the Middle East, and on, and on, and on.
They're a bunch of strutting megalomaniac peacocks who think they still have an Empire, and forget Napoleon was defeated and humilited -- twice. The Franc Terreur is long dead (300+ years), and was mostly a myth anyway; now they think retreat and appeasement are noble.
Really, it's the fault of the United States, Canada, Britain (too bad Henry V gave it up after slaughtering them at Agincourt...)and Australia, for rescuing them (twice) and protecting their sorry butts for the last 80 years ;-). We should have let Europe burn. Look what we have now...
So the president of France doesn't appreciate the tradition of his own culture. He prefers other cultures for their primitiveness.
Jacques Barzun, a Frenchman who became an American, saw the problem already back in 1959 when he wroteThe House of Intellect. As he writes in that book
At the juncture where we now stand, between ideology and Zen-Buddhism, between an emancipated art and the seductive automatism of cybernetics, the repair of tradition--by which I mean nothing other than continuity of thought--is a pressing concern. For it is daily more evident that the loss of tradition in that sense is impeding the great peoples of the West in the furtherance of their aims.Things have only gotten worse in the 50 years since then.
Barzun's last book, published in 2000 when he was 93, is From Dawn to Decadence. He wrote it so that people in the future who grow tired of the collapse of Western culture might find their way back home through that continuity of thought he advocated so long ago.
"It makes the mustard rise in my nostrils..." So let's hold him down and pour more mustard down his throat. And not 'Grey Poupon', the really hot stuff. Then Ginger Ale. Then let's see the mustard rise in his pointy Gallic nostrils. Talk about arrogant and ignorant!!!
socialism is to blame.
I call BS. Here is one counter example from our country of 40+ years of failure:
I stand corrected.
At least Fat Teddy never became president...
The failings of France can only be blamed on the French. After all, they're French.
It is simply difficult to imagine a change of government that will be capable of addressing the above. There are far too many oxen to be gored, too many trade unions with sweet contracts who refuse to budge, too many students who feel that jobs are an innate human right but actual working a bourgeois nuisance, and far too many established businesses who do not wish to open the economy up to competition in fear that someone will take it seriously. All of these not only vote but contribute to the defense of the failing status quo. It isn't an optimistic picture.
True, although a little simplistic. It's easy after the rape and plunder of the colonies they estabilised through bloody conquest, destroying those social structures, then hiding under the umbrella of North American largesse.
When you mention Sedan I presume that you are referring to the capture of the French monarch during the Franco-Prussian War. The monarch wasn't Louis, it was Napoleon III.
BTW, not the first time a French monarch was captured in battle. Jean II was captured by the English during the battle of Poitiers in 1356.
Thanks. I'll brush up on that period...
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