France

Marc Lambron in der NY-Times International am 31.10.2014:

It’s amusing to note that as soon as France receives good news, the rest of the world reacts like a pessimistic doctor. The recent awarding of two Nobel Prizes to Frenchmen — Patrick Modiano for literature and Jean Tirole for economics — triggered another round of French bashing. Is the country on its deathbed? Is its decline irreversible? The details of France’s crisis are well known, and they are serious problems. Our social and economic model worked beautifully between 1945 and 1975, years of reconstruction and prosperity.

The French welfare state was one of the most generous in the world. Waves of immigrants, in particular those from North Africa, were integrated into a prosperous economy. For the rest of the world, French grandeur was personified by General de Gaulle. France asserted itself as a nuclear power, invented the supersonic plane Concorde and submitted a balanced budget every year. It was the France of my childhood. In the last 30 years or so, the situation has deteriorated. France started to live beyond its means. Public expenditures for social programs rose drastically, and resorting to loans to pay for it all has put the country deep in debt. The pact the Republic had with its citizens doesn’t work well anymore, in particular in suburbs where a population of immigrants feels rejected and is ripe to be recruited by Islamic fundamentalists.

The French are jealous of Germany. Many French people hoped that François Hollande would undertake the reforms the country needs. He was a man with a strong economic background, a socialist in his 50s who could have embodied progressive modernism. But President Hollande hasn’t freed himself from his party dogmas — one of the last political movements in the world cultivating nostalgia for the Marxist worldview. With more taxes, more public grants, the protective state has become a devouring state that confiscates and squanders the country’s resources. The French left continues to promote a fetal relationship with the real world: a citizen’s life is like that of an embryo sheltered in a nourishing mother, the state, being fed a diet of subsidies through the umbilical cord. We’re still awaiting the moment when the child will be born to the world. And yet, living in France remains desirable. The country has one of the highest birthrates in Europe.

It is the foremost tourist destination in the world, a reflection of the appeal of a certain refinement à la française. In the past few weeks, French culture has had triumphs beyond Mr. Modiano’s Nobel Prize; the magnificent Picasso Museum has just reopened in Paris, a reminder of a time not so long ago when artists from all over the world, from Foujita to Hemingway, Neruda to Chagall, wanted to live in France. The French emperor of luxury goods, Bernard Arnault, has inaugurated his Louis Vuitton Foundation, an impressive center for contemporary culture designed by Frank Gehry. One aspect of the French crisis is the excessively somber way France, through its media, tends to see itself. This complacently bereaved vision of France is in large part a journalistic construction that appeared during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency. Since most French journalists are left-wingers, they have shifted from bashing the former president to adopting a pessimistic tone in principle, understanding that the Apocalypse sells. As a result, President Hollande is hunted with cartridges manufactured to shoot his conservative predecessor.

This compulsion has set in motion a mimetic echo in the international press. But what newspapers write about France does not jibe with the experiences or attitudes of most people who call France home. My fellow citizens are far more resourceful, courageous and elegant than what’s written about them. And most foreign visitors don’t leave France with memories of a journey in a ghost nation. So the theme of the day is not merely the French crisis, it is the dramatized construction by the media of a gruesome soap opera intended to sell more copies. The journalistic caste is not afraid of stigmatizing politicians it loathes and envies, wielding power over public opinion. “Emphasize the negative,” it sings. In the end, it all depends on perspective. If you consider life in terms of assets to be earned, France is certainly not the best country to make a fortune. But if you consider life in terms of taste, there still is a French exception that remains enigmatic, if not irritating, to the rest of the world.