Whence France?

A fun read for your weekend, and no, it is not posted with any kind of Schadenfreude:

Liberté! Egalité! Fatigué!

Could France be losing its panache, its je ne sais quoi? The furor surrounding President Hollande’s love life, in which everyone has behaved with a tragic lack of chic, is just the latest evidence that the world’s most envied culture has got the yips.

By A. A. GillIllustration by Barry Blitt

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Englishman and a Frenchman are discussing the definition of the expression “savoir faire.” “Well,” says the Englishman, “as I see it, savoir faire is when you come home from work early, walk in on your best friend humping your wife, and have the presence of mind to say, ‘Sorry—do carry on.’ ”

“Mais non,” replies the Frenchman. “That is a very Anglo-Saxon attitude. That is not savoir faire—that is your politeness. Savoir faire is husband comes home from work early, walks in on best friend on top of wife, and says, ‘Sorry—do carry on.’ The savoir faire part is being able to carry on.”

Maintenant, France looks like it’s losing its savoir faire—its adroitness, that innate je ne sais quoiunderstanding to do just the right thing in just the right manner. France has never looked quite so laughably en détresse as it does at the moment—so utterly out of step, so wrong-footed. Let’s begin with the marvelously dropped gâteau of President François Hollande’s love life, and what it represents for civilization’s chosen people.

Of all the West’s First World, classically based cultures, France’s is the most other—the most apart. The French are not to be mistaken for their neighbors, and they work hard at it. There is the French way and there is the wrong way. They see themselves as elegantly chosen: by Providence, gastronomy, culture, geography, and seduction. And for a long time we have agreed with them, often through gritted teeth.

The French are the paragons of panache and soigné chic. For the last decade, we have been slapped around by books called things like French Children Don’t Smear, French Women Don’t Fart, and The Frenchwoman’s Guide to Eating in Your Bra and Panties. And we bought them, and we’ve given them to our fat in-laws, because France comes with such a great résumé. So many letters of recommendation—from Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both Porter and Gershwin, Henry James, Julia Child.

Hollande’s perfectly predictable affair was so revealing of the French state of affairs, and affairs of state, not because it happened—that a Frenchman has a mistress is hardly news; this was Frenchman with mistress caught with further mistress—but because of the utter lack of savoir faire involved. That was the smirking surprise. Everyone involved behaved with a tragic absence of chic.

First, he was caught on a moped. Really, how pencil-dick is that? And it was a three-wheeled moped—a motorized tricycle. And he was sitting pillion, in the passenger seat. Not exactly Alain Delon, is it? Do you think he held on tight round his security driver’s waist? And then the helmet—the business suit with the terrible shoes and the giant helmet. Like Michael Dukakis trick-or-treating as Daft Punk. It’s worth pointing out that France has banned women from wearing the veil—because, they say, it’s demeaning to women. But, apparently, wearing a giant motorbike helmet to visit your girlfriend isn’t demeaning for either you or the girlfriend.

And then there is Valérie Trierweiler. The out-cheated mistress who had plainly failed to read any of the “Why Frenchwomen Are Just Cooler and More Chic” books. She had an epic fit of hysterics when the news broke, reportedly doing $4 million worth of damage to the presidential office, and then had to be admitted to a hospital for a broken heart.

Here we should pause and ask an important question: What happened to France? To that savoir faire? And to French culture? To the country that we all loved enough to make allowances to put up with the casual hauteur and the studied rudeness? Because, after all, this was la belleFrance, and they could teach us a thing or two. They had something worth sharing.

But when was that? When was the last time you enjoyed, say, a contemporary French film? How many must-see French actors are there? Their most famous actor has now taken out Russian citizenship (and moved to Belgium). Name a living French painter worth the wall space. Name a great French musician. A novelist, apart from Michel Houellebecq—and the French hate him. Their vaunted cuisine has become a moribund tourist performance. Unable to change, terrified of innovation, France has become the Bourbons, who famously forgot nothing and learned nothing.

The language that committees of old academics protect, like maids fussing over a cabinet of bone china, has been ransacked, seduced, and impregnated with bastard usages by movies, pop music, the Internet, and the global need to speak English. And now even some French universities have begun teaching science and computing classes in English, because no one wants to come to France to study them in French.

The pre-eminence of French culture has evaporated, before our very eyes, within a generation. The fear that innovation might damage or detract from their weighty heritage has left it like an angry child, with its eyes closed and its hands over its ears, la-la-la-ing “Je ne regrette rien.” French civilization went from the brilliant clamor of the streets to the musty hush of the museum. Instead of creating, they have dusting.

Culture doesn’t arise out of nothing. It is the symptom, the consequence, of all national life. The French political system—and the fatly satisfied ruling class—has stifled and penalized every sort of innovation. Employing anyone is an agony, unemploying them a trauma. The state taxes and flings out streamers of red tape, and a political orthodoxy has driven the wealth and opportunity creators abroad. Where I live, in Chelsea, in London, now sounds like an arrondissement of Paris. According to the BBC, London is the sixth-biggest French city in the world.

The bureaucratic French are fearful of entrepreneurialism. They dare not take chances—they dare not risk their precious culture; their lunches; their months-long summer breaks; their endless public holidays that slop over into the weekend; their right to relax, to shrug their shoulders, to not work to the same strictures as everyone else.

How did it come to this? Well, there is a difference between the French vision ofliberté (as in their revolutionary égalité and fraternité) and our freedom. It’s the liberty to be, and the freedom to do. Freedom you are born with—it comes from the bottom up—but you are given your liberty. It is handed from the top down. So the French system, with its huge state—its committees, academies, and conventions of wise men—is prescriptive for your own good, to protect all the things it deems most important. While we tend to think you should leave freedom alone. Indeed, if you don’t leave it alone, it’s not really freedom. It creates two apparently similar but fundamentally very different systems. In France, they look to their lives and culture to be protected. For the rest of us, we want to be allowed to get on and remake our lives and our culture.

France has lost its nerve. Lost its belief that what comes next will be as good as or better than what came before. The French have reached a meridian where they think they have more to lose than they have to gain. France is a short, unpopular man wearing a business suit and a giant helmet riding a tricycle in the dark.