Nudist in the cafe — A letter from Paris

Pity not the new Gallic verismo, even if it is subordinated to nostalgia. Get out of culture; in politics too, radicalism is a distant word. You are, after all, in a France caught between the history-seeking Gaullism of Jacques Chirac and the dour socialism of Lionel Jospin. A duality which, in its individual parts, makes the past more beguiling. The truth is, Chirac’s fantasy of being a fin de siecle Jacques de Gaulle lies orphaned outside the wreckage of the General’s legacy. As a political alternative, Gaullism — a higher sense of patriotism and a deified concept of the state kept in balance by a leader with Bonapartist authority — had its last gasp in the June parliamentary election. France rejected Chirac’s idealism (“a new elan”), his economics (personified in the austere and arrogant Alain Juppe), his whole rhetoric. The Fifth Republic, which was built to suit the General, rebuffed Chirac mercilessly by electing a “second President”. Le Monde editorialised, “Gaullism’s defeat lies in its failure to drive back the extreme right.”

Can you blame the demise of Gaullism on Le Pen alone? Gaullism, the politics of which is sentimental as well as populist, has always stayed above minutiae. Who will talk deficit with a Gaullist? Will a Gaullist ever listen to a banker’s monologue? Chirac’s rhetoric clashed with his domestic exigencies; Mr Europe, though lesser than Kohl, repudiated Monsieur France. Looking back at that earthquake of an election, Pierre Haski, foreign editor of the left-wing Liberation, says, “the entire ruling elite has been discredited.” Such a pragmatic explanation makes sense only when you look at the alternative (momentary, perhaps) that has emerged out of the ruins of Gaullism: Socialist Lionel Jospin.

Paradoxically, both Chirac and Jospin are tired legatees. Jospin’s socialism is as lacklustre as Chirac’s Gaullism. Francois Mitterrand played to history. Jospin’s attention span doesn’t go beyond the next election. Mitterrand sought immortality. Milan Kundera captured that moment in Immortality — the newly elected president placing roses on the three chosen tombs in the Pantheon. “He (Mitterrand) was a surveyor, planting the three roses like three markers into the immense building-site of eternity, to stake out a triangle in the centre of which was to be erected the palace of his immortality.” Even as he took his last walk through the ruins of socialism, Mitterrand was a profile in grandeur, a man whose every gesture was a translation of his gigantic ego. His failure was magnificent; his melancholy was poetic. The new socialist prime minister, who aspires to be the next socialist president, keeps himself away from big ideas and all that history stuff. He is a non-flamboyant professor of home truths. He is a pale negation of Mitterrandism. As a sympathetic Haski says, “Jospin won’t take any historical responsibility”.

His domestic responsibility — lowering the unemployment rate — is wrapped in an ideology that has been rejected elsewhere in Europe. For, Europe is overwhelmingly Socialist today because the socialists have ceased to be Socialists with a capital `S’. The new socialism is society plus capitalism — call it compassionate capitalism. Jospin wants the bloated welfare state to be intact; Jospin wants economic growth; Jospin also wants to create thousands of new jobs. And his allies are old fashioned communists. When you meet Annick Lepetit, a spokeswoman with the passions of a JNU radical, at the socialist party headquarters, she talks away this contradiction with tremendous ease. “We cannot afford to be ultra-liberal. The social role of the state is very important to the French. Total privatisation, no! It won’t work.”

“Jospin is an honest man. Jospin makes only promises he can keep. And he has always been a European. He wants a social Europe. Not the Europe of globalisation with ghettos of unemployment”. If there is tension in the socialist-conservative cohabitation, it’s Chirac’s creation, she informs you. “He is the president of all French. He should not behave like an opposition leader”. For, the other day, the President has called the socialist policy, especially on privatisation, “obsolete and absurd”. So, what is the point talking Tony Blair with her? Does she echo the popular sentiment, the French exceptionalism? Even Chirac the moderniser cannot go beyond a point: “France,” he famously said, “intends to remain France.” Translation: the cultural pride of being different, the ability to defy the conventional wisdom of the globalising society.

Today, this exceptionalism is played out by men to whom the label VSOP can never be attached. They are tradition’s travesty, like that self-conscious nudist in the Cafe de Flore. “Men do not make history”, writes Fernand Braudel, “rather it is history above all that makes men and thereby absolves them from blame.” The nudist and his ruler can go on merrily, for there is little in them that invites history’s attention.

The writer’s visit to France was on a government invitation