Vive la France

by Adam Gopnik May 7, 2012

The Presidency of France’s Fifth Republic is a monarchical role, shaped to the elongated scale and the grand manners first of Charles de Gaulle and then of François Mitterrand. Although Jacques Chirac more recently gave the role a distinctly sleepy, roi fainéant flavor, it remains a throne more than a mere office. So the idea of a sort of citizen king, who giggles and wears glasses and is known to be on a diet, is a little unsettling. But it’s entirely likely that, after the second round of voting, on May 6th, the next President of France will be François Hollande, the inoffensive, myopic, weight-conscious Socialist candidate, a man so milky-mild that one has to project onto him a secret life to make him seem not just a fully credible politician but a fully credible human being. (And, indeed, Hollande’s love life is more intricate than one might expect: having fathered four children with his lover, the previous Socialist Presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, he left her, or was left by her, for another partner, meaning that his Presidency could include a role for an ex-mistress who is also a would-be queen.)

The strength of Hollande’s candidacy speaks mainly to the weakness of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, and the pervasive sense that his free-market reformist project has failed. After the twelve dead-man’s-float years of the Chirac Presidency, it was hard not to root at least a little for Sarkozy, and, in truth, his economic record, given the circumstances, is far from the worst on the Continent, or off it, for that matter. Yet he quickly came to seem arrogant instead of energetic, and he never quite shook a reputation, earned in the first days of his Presidency, for flashiness and bling. Even his marriage to Carla Bruni, and the child they had together, left the French unmoved. People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing.
Professional worriers worry about the prominence of the political extremes in France—and it’s hard not to worry when their parties take a third of the vote—but that vote wasn’t quite as large, or as big a deal, as it might seem. In the first round, Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Front, won eighteen per cent, an all-time high for the Party, but her father, Jean-Marie, won seventeen per cent ten years ago, during a time of much less economic uncertainty. The far left, in the person of the tetchy Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won eleven per cent, but it didn’t do nearly as well as the unrepentantly pro-Soviet Communist Party used to in the prosperous decades of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when it dominated the French left. It’s the persistence of the extremes, not their supposed gains, that is depressing: between Le Pen’s program, which suggested a dark politics that last seemed plausible in June, 1940, and Mélenchon’s, which recapitulated the brightest ideas of the autumn of 1917, it seemed that France had become less like the last Gaullist village holding out against the old Roman Empire, or the new American one, than like a theme park of awful ideas.

Far more significant than the rise of the “institutional extremes” is the absence of eloquent leadership at the center. The Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who not long ago seemed to incarnate the best of the rational middle, celebrated the electoral season by being detained for engaging in orgies with prostitutes. (He claims not to have been aware that that’s what the women were.) The former I.M.F. chief’s continuing fall brings to mind Michel Houellebecq’s gloomy, obsessive novel of more than a decade ago, “The Elementary Particles,” with its insistence that the neo-liberal model of material acquisitiveness would lead in the end only to nihilistic sexual compulsion. At the time, Houellebecq seemed pettish; he now seems poetically prescient.
What would an actual, honest-to-God Socialist President do in office? Probably not anything particularly socialist—nationalizing the means of production or the like—but, rather, something more along the lines of striking a protective stance. Hollande would defend French “solidarity”—the expensive social programs that make life pleasant and predictable for the vast majority of working people, though they seem to insure high unemployment even in the best of times. But a protective stance, as Muhammad Ali used to demonstrate, is in its way a fighting position. Defending solidarity means fighting austerity, and this seems likely to lead Hollande into conflict with the Germans and their tight-lipped (and walleted) bankers. The hope of American liberals that an Hollande victory would vindicate their position that austerity is bad policy—even though that may be the case—seems unlikely to take hold here. To the American right, anything that goes wrong in Europe does so because Europe is wrong, and not because of austerity, because austerity is right.
This anti-European bias is producing an indecent-seeming amount of schadenfreude—on the right but also on the left—about the prospect of the dissolution of the European Union. The potential Franco-German split, Germany’s own ambivalences, the Greek crisis, the fall of the Dutch government, the backslide of the British economy—the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe. In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.
That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history. Like all successes, it can seem exasperatingly commonplace. There is something uninspiring about the compromises and the dailiness of a happy marriage, and something compelling about one that is coming apart: it looks more like the due fate of all things. Yet the truth ought to remain central. A continent torn by the two most horrible wars in history achieved a remarkable half century of peace and prosperity, based on a marriage of liberalism properly so called (individual freedoms, including the entrepreneurial kind) and socialism rightly so ordered (as an equitable care for the common good). Any pleasure taken in the failure of Europe to expunge all its demons threatens to become one more way of not having to examine our own. A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist. France, and Europe, learned that lesson the hard way. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell