King Henri’s Head

Royal reconstruction is rather the fashion at the present.  First we had England’s Richard III, discovered illegally parked in Leicester, now we have France’s Henri IV, the other king who lost his head during the Revolution!  

Buried in the Basilica of Saint Denis, along with the other monarchs of France, his body was dug up by revolutionaries in 1793 and thrown into a mass grave, though some mystery admirer managed to make off with the head.  It finally turned up, after a two century gap, in the attic of a retired tax inspector, or so it is claimed. 

Henri, who was assassinated in May 1610 by a deranged religious fanatic, was one of France’s better kings.  The first in the Bourbon line, he converted from Calvinism to Catholicism, thus ending the Wars of Religion that had troubled France for a good bit of the sixteenth century.  Paris was worth a mass, he famously said, just as famously promising the French people the means to have a chicken in the pot every Sunday. 

The reconstruction, carried out by Philippe Froesch, a craniofacial expert linked to Barcelona University, certainly looks convincing, resembling the king’s portraits in life, though the addition of the hair,  the beard and the ruff has certainly helped!  Identification was apparently aided by a gash near the nose, as well as a beauty spot and a pierced ear along with other key features.  But, alas and alack, Good King Henri has been the cause of a new civil war between France’s squabbling royals.  Yes, they are still around.

The head comes, you see, at the head of a new book – Henri IV, The Mystery of the Headless King by Stéphane Gabet and Philippe Charlier.  “Oh, yes it is”, they say.  “Oh, no it isn’t”, the critics reply.  The brain was still in place, they say, though that would have been removed after death by the royal embalmers. 

The royals have weighed in, the Bourbons on the pro side and their Orleanist cousins on the anti.  Prince Louis Bourbon, a banker and Henri’s distant descendant, says that the head is genuine.  There is no question of it, he explained to journalists Le Figaro, “It is both highly moving and a great responsibility.”  Well, I suppose it would be, coming face to face with a face from the past.  In the other corner there is Henri d'Orléans, Count of Paris and Duke of France, described the book as a "pseudo inquiry". "This affair seems closer to a novel than scientific or historic truth," he told French journalists. "What are we supposed to see from this supposed facial reconstitution – that he had a Bourbon nose?"

Yes, I suppose he has the point, by a nose at least.  Support here has come from Oliver Pascal, president of the French Institute of Genetic Testing, who told Figaro that there is no conclusive proof that the head is Henri’s.  “The information would not stand up in a court of law”, he added. 

Meanwhile the head that may or may not have been that of the king sits in a bank vault, ironically enough, in the Bastille district of Paris.  The mystery of the head looks set to intrude into French testimonials for some time to come, rather like that of King Charles, which continually troubled poor Mister Dick. 

‘Do you recollect the date,’ said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, ‘when King Charles the First had his head cut off?’   I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine.

” ‘Well,’ returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. ‘So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?

Oh, well, long live the King’s Head! 

The Mighty Pens

Madonna and Marine le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, are not exactly on kissing terms.  During her Paris concert the singer performed against a background video which at one point showed the politician with a swastika superimposed on her face. 

At once Ms Le Pen’s lawyers got to work.  A lawsuit for public defamation and insult was filed.  A just let her try that again, the message went out.  Madonna appeared in Nice.  She did not try it again.  Marine was still in her video, aimed at promoting tolerance, so I understand, though this time the swastika was missing, a question mark in its place.  The inference here, of course, is she or isn’t she?  I can’t be sure if Madonna was intimidated by the lawsuit or by the people of Nice, much more pro-Marine than the cosmopolitan capital.  So it was nice in Nice! 

The conservative Le Figaro, for some bizarre reason, chose to describe the vanishing swastika as a sign of ‘appeasement.’  There is no reason to suppose that Le Pen is a Nazi and every reason why she should object to being associated with a Nazi symbol.  Defamation is defamation, something even Madonna recognises, though not, apparently, the editor of Le Figaro. 

Image is such a sensitive thing, particularly for Marine, busy updating and modernising the National Front, away from the days of Jean-Marie, her politically antediluvian father, an echo of Vichy in the modern age, or, better said, for those who know their French history, of the infamous Paris collaborationists. 

The daughter is not the father; she wants none of this past baggage.  The skinhead entourage has gone.  The nostalgia for Vichy and for French Algeria, the vanished paradise of the Pieds-Noirs, has gone.  The Front now looks to the front, which is to the future.  The right-wing causes are still there, the concern over the effects of mass immigration, the concern over culturally alien elements and the deracination of France is still there.  But the Holocaust is no longer a ‘detail of second world war history’, as Le Pen père once said; rather it represents the ‘summit of human barbarism.’

Less macho and less brutish in its political ways, the Front is now appealing to more women voters.  Nonna Meyer, a university professor, in a study of French voting patterns argues that the increase support for the National Front can be explained by a shift in the allegiance of women, working-class women in the main.  In the first round of this year’s presidential election approximately 30% of women working in non-manual professions voted for Marine, compared with only 13% for her father in 2007. 

So, it’s onwards and upwards, possibly through the invisible wall which has traditionally ensured that the far right, and the communist left, has never managed to escape from a ghetto percentage of the vote: fifteen percent here, fifteen percent there, always fifteen percent!  Now the heights of twenty do not seem impossibly out of reach. 

The new face of the Front is not the ugly skinheads of the past - it’s female; it’s twenty-two-year old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine’s niece and Jean-Marie’s granddaughter, who was elected to the National Assembly in June.  A law student, she is the youngest representative in France’s modern political history. 

There is a problem; there is a muttering in the background; there is Jean-Marine Le Pen, hanging around like the ancient mariner.  One is tempted to say with fathers like this who needs enemies!  In his political dotage, he was recently heard to mumble that his daughter’s moderation on certain issues was due to her petit-bourgeois upbringing. “Marine’s strategy”, he said, “is to give our adversaries as small a target as possible to attack. For instance, all those courageous and dynamic activists who get noticed because they have shaven heads have been pushed aside.”

So, it’s all a front Front, is it?  Yes, the blonde tresses in place of the shaved heads, in everyway more appealing, but is it just the same old same old?  Personally I think not, not matter what the old Banquo says at the feast.  He really is the past; the future might very well be something quite different.  There are views than can no longer be ignored in our brave new European world that would brush democracy, along with the Pens, under the carpet of history.  I personally believe that the Pen is mightier than the Bureaucrat.  

Lost Content

There are places I like to revisit.  There are books I like to revisit also, rich with the memory of past places.  I first read the wholly delightful Letters from my Windmill by Alphonse Daudet when I was on holiday with my parents in Provence, in Avignon, to be exact.  It was from there, the city of the popes, that we explored the surrounding countryside; from there we discovered the charm and magic of this special part of La France profonde – deep France.

I’ve also managed to recapture the time and the place in the novels of Marcel Pagnol, particularly the wonderful film adaptations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, but Daudet and his windmill, for the whimsy and for the beauty, for the love of a place and a people, is in a special class. 

It’s the lightness of touch I admire so, the beauty and crispness of his prose.  Not a word is wasted or out of place.  For me it’s verbal sunlight, soft lines and clear colours, like an impressionist painting; like something by Claude Monet, perhaps, celebrating nothing more than itself, its meaning immediate, its profundity a total lack of profundity. 

Daudet’s timeless little fables first appeared in the Paris press in the 1860s, an immediate sensation.  Although he was a major novelist of the day it is only through his Letters that he achieved a lasting reputation, particularly outside of France.  So far as I am aware it’s the only work of his ever published in English.  Most of the stories are set in Provence, though he also ranges further, to Corsica and further still, to French Algeria, itself a vanished world. 

Don’t look for the old Provence, Daudet’s Provence; it’s long gone, gone with the Mistral.  But it lives again in these sparkling pages.  Old Cornille, an anachronism even in his time, lives again, as does Monsieur Seguin and his audacious goat; as does the Vicar of Cucugan; as does Father Balaguere, dreaming of turkeys bursting with truffles; as does Father Guacher, singing away in the haze of his elixir – Hey!  ding-a-ding, Hey! ding-a-ding. 

Some of the stories are touching, sad in sweet melancholy.  Others are funny, a burlesque sort of comedy.  I found myself laughing out loud, once again, at Father Gaucher’s Elixir, and smiling broadly at The Three Low Masses.  Sad or funny, the various tales reflect Daudet’s own love for the music, the lore, the traditions and romance of his southern home, a way of life that I suspect he knew was slipping deeper into the mist of time.  Oh, to lie at night under a southern sky, looking up at the stars.

What! The stars get married, shepherd?

Oh, yes mistress.

And while I was trying to explain to her about these marriages, I felt something entirely beautiful resting lightly on my shoulder.  With the sweet crumpling of her ribbons and laces of the curls of her hair, she laid her sleeping head on my arm.  We stayed thus, without moving, until the stars paled, dimmed by the dawning day.  And I looked and looked at her as she slept, vaguely disturbed deep down within me, yet miraculously protected by the night’s clear holy light which has never given me any thoughts but beautiful ones.  Around us, the stars continued their silent march, as orderly as a great flock of sheep; and at times, it seemed to me that one of these stars, the brightest, having lost her way, had come to life on my shoulder in order to sleep…

I read this prose poetry and felt something beautiful resting lightly on my mind, a sweet sadness of memory.  That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain; the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.  

A Certain Understanding

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1845, Benjamin Disraeli, in a mood of anger against Sir Robert Peel, then Conservative Prime Minister, said that the right honourable gentleman had caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes.  What he meant was that, in repealing the Corns Laws, Peel had stolen the ideas of the main opposition party.

This reference came to mind in reading an account of Nicholas Sarkozy’s speech at Le Raincy on the suburbs of Paris last week.  He’s in a fairly desperate mood, poor man, fighting for his political existence after falling behind François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, in the first round of the French presidential election.  With the two men going forward to a second and deciding contest on May 6 things are not looking good for Sarko, running up to ten points behind his colourless rival in the opinion polls. 

All is fair in love, war and French politics.  Looking for a way of saving his hide Monsieur le Président is alert to any opportunity offered.  There she was; how could he possibly resist?  He caught Marine le Pen bathing and walked away with her clothes.  I can just picture him in drag, an ensemble topped with a blonde wig.  Talk about prêt-à-porter! 

Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front, won’t be standing in the final round, having come third in the first.  I say she won’t be standing but in a sense she will, in that she has become something of a king…sorry, make that queen maker.  She secured almost six and a half million votes in last Sunday’s first round, a record eighteen per cent of the poll.  With less than a million votes separating Sarkozy from Hollande on that occasion it’s a reservoir that he simply can’t ignore. 

So, there he was, talking in a mainly white neighbourhood, the quintessential Parisian denouncing the Parisian elite.  It wasn’t just Parisian urbanites he denounced, no; into the mix came drug dealers, Muslim preachers, Muslims who lock up their wives, police killers and foreigners, foreigners and more foreigners.  “I speak for the people who have had enough of lessons from those who live in the posh districts of Paris”, he shrilled, seemingly unaware that he would have to include himself here. 

The address was to the people of La Raincy, who live not too far from the grim estate of Clichy-sous-Bois, the immigrant and Muslim dominated area where the 2005 riots began, but he really had his eye on a much bigger audience.  Speaking directly to Le Pen’s masses he said “I respect you, hear you, in a certain way understand you.  Because I speak to six and a half million French people, I am supposed to be a fascist?”  His critics, he shouted, were hypocrites who understand nothing of the justified fear that foreigners were trying to rob France of its identity. 

I would say that what’s robbing France of its identity, what’s robbing every European nation of their separate identities, is the cosmopolitan ‘ideal’ of Europe, an ‘ideal’ that Sarkozy promoted in defiance of his own people, who voted against the Lisbon constitution.  However, here I’m simply going to put that fundamental truth to one side and concentrate on the main issue, which is Sarakozy’s opportunism and his hypocrisy. 

I wonder about the ‘certain way’ in which Sarko understands the National Front voters. Do they understand him; do they see through this naked demagoguery, do they see that he is hoping that they will enable him to extend his tenancy of the Élysée Palace for another five years?  Once safely behind those doors one thing can be guaranteed: that ‘certain understanding’ will evaporate as fast as rain on a Parisian summer’s day. 

Meanwhile poor naked Marine is playing her own game.  She is campaigning against that ‘certain understanding’, hoping that Sarkozy’s defeat will destroy his UMP party, allowing the National Front to make gains in the parliamentary elections scheduled for June.  She might reconsider her opposition, she says, she might call on her millions to vote for the President, but only if he agrees to support her parliamentary candidates against the Socialists.  It remains to be seen just how elastic that ‘certain understanding’ is.  

The Mouse in a Spin

Politics is a constant surprise to me, politicians an endless source of bemusement. I look at a silly little man like the preening Nicholas Sarkozy and wonder how this laughable Mouse, a kind of music hall turn, ever became president of France. It’s a sign of our age, I suppose, the relentless advance of mediocrity, evidenced by Obama in America and Sarkozy in France. The Daily Mail describes him as a ‘right wing conservative.’ Well, if that’s what passes for a ‘right wing conservative’ in France I would really hate to come across a ‘left wing socialist.’

The Mouse is looking pretty desperate these days, ever more fearful that the French public has finally seen him for what he is, a built-up personality in his built-up shoes. He and his shallow wife, all glamour and no substance, may have to hand back the keys of the Élysée Palace soon. With the first round of the presidential election scheduled for the end of April, it looks likely that the French people will send an eviction notice.

Poor little Mouse; he’s been in such a tizzy since David Cameron vetoed the European treaty amendments last December. There he is, throwing the occasional tantrum, the baby who did not get his way. He’s in the huff with Cameron, in the huff with England.

On Sunday, in defending a sharp hike in French value added tax (VAT - a sales tax), he appeared on national TV, even more fatuous than usual. It’s all part of an attempt to breathe a little vitality into the failing French economy. When told by a journalist that a similar hike in British VAT led to a rise in prices, he sneered (there is no mistaking the Sarko sneer) that “The United Kingdom has no industry anymore.”

Au contraire, monsieur, came the response, not from these islands but from his own national press. Le Monde, the leading evening newspaper, pointed out that Britain actually has more industry than France, with production standing at five per cent higher. The claim of the Élysée Mouse was ‘totally false', it went on to stress the point. It also inconveniently mentioned that the rate of industrial decline is stronger in France. Ah, le weekend, labour protection legislation, early retirement and short working weeks, not to mention the interminable lunch, must surely all factor in here.

When I think of Sarkozy I think of the character of Will Roper, the muddle-headed hot head from A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More. Roper, much given to changing his mind on questions of faith, is admonished by More “Now listen well. Two years ago you were a passionate churchman. Now you are a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning your face is to the front again.”

Last year Sarkozy claimed that a similar VAT rise in England had absolutely failed to stimulate the economy. This year he is all in favour, adopting the measure from Germany, where he says that it helped to boost that nation’s competitiveness. I rather suspect that his head will still be turning when he faces the electorate in April, a people with less money in their pockets and even less competitiveness.

Yes, price rises in a country with a declining industrial base and some three million unemployed, a country which recently lost its triple-A credit rating. “If we lose the triple-A, I’m dead”, he said some time previously. At least that’s one point he and I can agree on

Meanwhile Germany’s Angela Merkel has offered to support the embattled Mouse in campaign rallies. Angela on the hustings; the French being lectured to by the fat Reich’s Chancellor. Yes, things really are that bad.

The Midget and the Pig

I laughed out loud on the flight to Cairo, causing some stares from across the aisle. I simply couldn’t help myself. I was reading Rod Liddle’s column in the Spectator, the one headed Go on Sarko, tell us another, a few gems from a supposedly off-the-record conversation between Nicholas Sarkozy, France’s comic opera president, and Barack Obama, giving a personal lowdown on a other world leaders.

Now, of all people, of all presidents living in glass houses, Sarko is the very last who should be throwing stones. This is a man, after all, so sensitive about his diminutive stature that he wears built-up shoes, who insisted that a studio audience on a television appearance was made up of people even smaller than he is, a man who stands on tiptoe when photographed beside Obama and his wife!

Obama’s opener was to ask Sarko which world leaders he really hated. He could hardly start with the American president himself; that would be too stupid even for the mighty midget. But his choice was in some ways just as startling: it was Angela Merkel, his partner in the present Paris-Berlin Axis, his fellow fiddler, playing as Europe burns.

“That German hag”, he let rip, “You know, I half believe those internet rumours that she was created from the frozen sperm of Adolf Hitler. And have you seen her at dinner? Watch later on. She eats like a dinosaur, cramming stuff into that fat German gullet like they’ve just abolished rationing. Keep an eye on the filet mignon, Barack.”

So, the next time you see the artificial smiles and the back-patting (how revoltingly predictable they all are) just remember these words, this curtain drawn aside. I expect they all hate one another, all of our benighted world leaders, not just Sarkozy and Merkel, that appalling double act, so stepped in hypocrisy and obvious mutual loathing.

Liddle, in his usual corrosive style, sums up the Midget with prefect accuracy, writing that there is something wonderfully music-hall about Sarkozy and his big French gob, gurning and spitting out globules of spite. It would be truly comic if the situation was not so serious, if this risible little clown was not the president of France, a man who reminds me of Henry’s Cat, who knew quite a lot about nothing and not too much about that. A little man with a tall wife; that, I predict, is how he will go down in French history.

Think of the laughable degeneracy here. Karl Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, said that everything in history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. His example were good – Napoleon I and Napoleon III. I have one problem, though, with the strength of this statement. Sarkozy is clearly the farce, but who in French history is his tragic predecessor, who is the first act? Come to think of it, French politics has been quite farcical for some time past. There is the tragic figure of Charles de Gaulle, of course, but it’s impossible to draw any comparison, however remote, between him and the present occupant of the Élysée Palace.

Oh, well, I shall have to dig deep, perhaps all the way back to the Third Republic to find a possible comparison for Sarko and even that may not be deep enough. Meanwhile I intend to keep a close eye on Chancellor Merkel’s table manners.

See Paris and love

I love Easter, I love spring and I love Paris. When I combine the three nothing could be more perfect. I got back from a long weekend in the city earlier this evening, a lovely time in a perfect place, my favourite in all the world. Paris holds no more secrets for me; there is nothing fresh to be discovered; I have been so many times before, from early childhood onwards. Yet it never ever fails to charm.

My parents have a small flat close to the centre, allowing me to explore the city and its surroundings, to develop an intimacy with it over the years. I don’t go as frequently as I used to – it’s a year since I was there last - but I make the most of the time I have had. I love introducing Paris to new people, to friends coming to the city for the first time, or who may not know it as well as I do.

But Easter, the feast of Ostara, a time quickening and renewal, is more personal, a time for greater intimacy, a time for long walks, quite talks, leisurely lunches and magical dinners. It was a time for me and the person who is closest to me, just ourselves alone. We didn’t really do anything special, just relished the opportunity to be together and to reflect, to let the city exert its own romance in some of the more out of the way gardens, or bathe ourselves in the magical light of the most perfect gothic church in Europe, lovers hand in hand.

To Versailles also, not to see the palace – there is no more that it has to tell - but simply to sit once again in the shade of the trees and watch Apollo arise from the waters! The chestnut groves here are special to me, a place I came to in my teens, a place I have brought so many others since, to picnic in dreams. Here I always say my own silent prayer for Marie Antoinette, my favourite queen, who last saw these gardens in October 1789, before being marched off to the capital by the canaille vomited out from the city slums.

From the groves of Versailles on to Montmartre, sitting by the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, looking across the rooftops from the highest point in the city, all bathed in a sublime spring light. Sacré-Cœur isn’t an old church, dating no further back than the 1870s, when it was constructed in part as a memorial to those murdered by the leftist Communards of 1871. I find the interior uninspiring but I’ve loved the building itself ever since I saw it from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, that brilliant white edifice punctuated against an empty blue sky.

This morning we went Père Lachaise to lay some lilies on the grave of the Divine Oscar, forever reposed under Jacob Epstein’s ugly flying sphinx. I see the lipstick tributes are as bad as ever, despite admonitions against such desecration and regular clean ups. If you want to know, yes, I did resist the temptation! I first came here with mother, from whom I inherited my enthusiasm for Wilde, on 30 November, 2000, the hundredth anniversary of his death. I was only fourteen at the time, wholly beguiled by the experience, seeing all sorts of celebrants and outcasts coming to mourn, some attired in late Victorian dress!

In the afternoon, shortly before we left, there was one last thing we had to do – go and sit in the little park at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, possibly the most romantic spot in the most romantic city in the world. See Paris and live; see Paris and love.

Angst Ridden President

As I write French mirage jets are patrolling the skies over Libya. In Paris President Sarkozy is talking tough, standing on his high-heeled shoes;

In Libya, a civilian population which is passive which requires nothing further than the right to choose itself its destiny finds itself in danger of life. We have a duty to respond to its angst-ridden call.

The future of Libya belongs to the Libyans. We do not want to take a decision on their behalf. The fight that they are undergoing is their's. If we intervene on the side of Arab nations, it is not to impose on the Libyan people, but to apply to a universal conscience that cannot tolerate such crimes.

Yes, Sarkozy, the conscience of humanity, has heard that ‘angst ridden call,’ though less from the Libyan rebels and much more from the French people, increasingly perplexed by the bewildering turns in their foreign policy, by the sheer incompetence of their ‘angst-ridden’ president. He has an election next year, you see, and the Libyan situation is just so convenient, giving the Little Man the chance to pretend he is a Big Man, Napoleon IV, cutting a fine figure on the world stage. There he is, grandstanding in Paris while his bombs fall on the people of Libya.

I find it a little hard to accept homilies from a president of France about a “universal conscience,” one that seemingly “cannot tolerate such crimes.” Where was this ‘universal conscience’, I wonder, when French intervention contributed to the genocide in Rwanda? Is there any greater hypocrisy here, any greater mendacity in a ‘universal conscience’ that is silent at one moment and shouting at the next.

Forgive me if I express just a soupcon of cynicism over Super Mouse and his moveable conscience, one that allowed France to sell the selfsame weapons to the Mad Colonel that were used against those expressing that ‘angst-ridden’ call. I think it must have been another man, possibly a doppelganger, who received the Colonel in Paris in December 2007, telling the press that he was not perceived as a dictator in the Arab world. It was this fraudster, one not sensitive to ‘angst ridden’ calls or the ‘universal conscience,’ who proceeded to sell the Libyans fighter jets worth billions of Euros.

Let’s be frank: French intervention in Libya has nothing to do with humanity and everything to do with prestige, at least the prestige of the country’s beleaguered and ridiculous president, one who is happy to do deals with dictators when it suits and turn on them when it does not, all for the greater glory the Sarkozy.

As French jets now fly in the name of humanity the time might have come to ask Monsieur le Président some awkward questions about Laurent Gbagbo, about a prior commitment to the people of the Ivory Coast. Is there something wrong, I ask, is their ‘angst ridden call’ not quite as loud as that from Libya?

Turning Front

The French political right is possibly the most fractured in Europe, a condition of its history. To the right of the Gaullists, to the right of the right, are those who stand against the tradition of 1789. They are the people, if you like, of the Vichy tradition, those who were never fully reconciled to the loss of Algeria. It’s a tradition represented by the National Front, headed until recently by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Like him or not, Le Pen is one of the giants of post-war French politics, occasionally spoiling the feast of the more traditional parties, a little like the ghost of Banquo. In the presidential election of 2002 he beat the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, into second place, forcing the left and centre-right into an unholy alliance behind Jacques Chirac in the second round to ward off the monster. His catchphrase “If anybody doesn’t like France, they should leave” was even echoed by Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the 2007 election, a sign of how far the Front’s message has percolated into the mainstream.

I’m not keen on Le Pen, I must say; he’s too much of a bruiser, too lacking in subtlety, not quite the gentleman. Still, I agree with those sentiments; I would like to see them applied to my own country, I would like to hear leading politicians say that if you do not like Britain then leave, go, go in peace, but go. People who talk down this country, people who do not value its traditions of tolerance and freedom can get lost, the quicker the better. Please do not misunderstand me: so far as I am concerned this has nothing to do with race, or colour, or ethnicity, or religion. It has, rather, everything to do with attitude.

I’m digressing. Let’s get back to Le Pen and the French far right. Le Pen is dead; long live Le Pen. No, the old chap is not really dead; he’s just taken a back seat, giving way to Marine Le Pen, his daughter, who came top of a leadership poll last month. A lawyer by profession and a mother of three, she is far more personable, far more chic, as the French would say, in every way, carrying little of her father’s ideological baggage. She’s got class, unlike Nick Griffin, the glass-eyed fright who heads the British National Party. She appears on television without looking shifty and evasive, in the way that Griffin looks shifty and evasive.

Her biggest asset is that she carries nothing of the Vichy-Algiers tradition, looking to give the right a new direction, away from past neo-Nazi fixations which kept it penned (Le Pened?) in an electoral ghetto, going so far but no further. She has taken a stand on the tradition of French secularism, making it harder for more established politicians to attack her ‘extremism.’ Her main advantage, besides being the new attractive face of the right, is that people are fed-up with the political mainstream, fed up with both Gaullism in the Sarkozy form, and fed up with the Socialist alternative. Marine’s approval ratings have now reached an impressive 33%, higher than her father every achieved in his heyday.

The ruling UMP party is worried. The fear is that the 2012 presidential election could turn into 2002 in reverse, with Le Pen beating Sarkozy into a second round contest. It does not seem likely, but with Little Nic reshapping the debate on the future of France in terms defined by Marine she has already scored a kind of victory for the new respectable front.

L'etat, C'est Moi – a response to Adam

OK, Adam, with reference to your argument set out in The Autocratic Republic on your One Nation blog let’s strip things back to first principles. Monarchy simply means rule by a single person. While it is normally associated now with royalty there is no reason, no etymological or philosophical reason, why this should be so. According to your definition it implies “feudal hereditary selection.” But this is a contingent, not a necessary relationship. Go back to early history and you will find plenty of examples of elective monarchies: Rome was an elective monarchy before the advent of the Republic, with no hereditary selection, a tradition that was later revived in the Holy Roman Empire. And on the subject of Holy and Roman, the Vatican continues to be governed by an elected monarchy, again with no feudal or hereditary selection.

Look at the history of the Roman Empire: between the creation of the Principate by Augustus and its end under Diocletian it was governed for the most part by a single individual, though stable and hereditary succession was to be elusive in the extreme. After the death of Nero it was the exception, not the rule. During the most stable period of imperial history, from the ascent of Trajan to the death of Marcus Aurelius, reigning emperors simply chose the best man, meaning the strongest man, as a potential successor by cooption. It fell down when Commodus, the son, succeeded Aurelius, the father, simply by right of primogeniture, the feudal principle at its purest.

So, monarchy is not necessarily royalty. If you need a further example, one closer to home, then I give you the Protectorate. England was a republic in strict legal terms, but Oliver Cromwell was a monarch, a king in all but name; he was even referred to as “Your Majesty”. A dictator, an autocrat, he even managed to pass his ‘crown’ to his son in a non-elective, non-feudal hereditary succession. Closer to our time there is the example of the United States, which began as a revolution against monarchy...only to give monarchy an entrenched constitutional position. It is no accident that by the time of 'King' Andrew Jackson his opponents are referring to themselves as the Whigs. Bringing matters up to the present day look at North Korea. Is there any better example of a hereditary and absolute monarchy without any kind of feudal element?

Now let’s consider France. To begin with I have to say that you overestimate the importance of the Third Republic in general and Jules Ferry in particular, a figure of passing and transient significance. French history between 1792 and 1958, as I have already argued, is the history of a nation in search of a stable and lasting form of government. And what a bewildering picture it is –republic, empire, restoration, empire, restoration, bourgeois monarchy, republic, empire, republic, new state, republic, republic. Only the last stage, the Fifth Republic, reached a resolution because it finally answered the long question, the long struggle between parliamentary and monarchical governance in favour of monarchy.

Previous republics, even the long lasting Third, were driven by a system of parliamentary rule, weak to the point of self-destruction. Time and again the Third Republic sank into crisis, the most serious of which came with the riots of February 1934. I have said that it only survived because its enemies were weaker still, because they could not agree on an acceptable alternative. In the end the Republic committed suicide. Many people assume that Philippe Petain was a German puppet ruler. He was not. He was the embodiment of the state; he was a new Napoleon III. All power was accorded to him by the National Assembly, by the Republic itself.

De Gaulle was a politician of genius. He knew that the parliamentary republic was a failure; it always had been. Still, the outward trappings of monarchy were impossible, either in an imperial or a hereditary and kingly form. The solution was a Presidential Republic, a non-hereditary monarchy; the solution was the Fifth Republic, quite different from all of its predecessors. In many ways it resembles Weimar Germany under the presidency of Paul von Hindenburg than any previous French regime. Or, if you prefer to stick to the French example, De Gaulle was Napoleon I, Napoleon III and Marshal Petain all in one: he was the state. During his rule he was most often depicted by cartoonists as Louis XIV. Everything that you wrote about him in The Autocratic Republic confirms his stature, confirms his monarchy. The Fifth Republic, barring some unforeseen political disaster (never say never when it comes to France), is his abiding legacy. Against this background Ferry was a little man, an irrelevance. Modern France owes little or nothing to him; modern France scarcely remembers him.

Finding Anastasia

The female most associated with France is Marianne, the symbol of liberty, of freedom, of the republic and of revolution. But what I did not know, what I found out only recently, is that Marianne has a sister, altogether more censorious and far less interested in freedom. Her name is –can you guess? – Anastasia!

Anastasia, or rather Madame Anastasie, was brought to my attention here by Dominic, who came across a reference to her in the pages of Proust as a figure representing official censorship in France during the First World War. She appears specifically in Finding Time Again, the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, where the line appears “I do hope the most-high and all-powerful Anastasia doesn't blue-pencil us!"

Dominic started the ball rolling; I decided to kick it further. The whole thing is quite intriguing – it intrigues me – because I can only take the story so far. It looks as if the original figure of Anastasia, armed with a large pair of sheers or scissors, was created sometime in the 1870s by the caricaturist André Gill specifically to represent the official censor, who counted political caricature high among his targets. The thing is none of the sources make it clear if Anastasia, the tight-lipped old maid, was already in existence in some form or other before Gill gave her a definite shape.

The obvious question is why Anastasia, why was the censor given that name? The short answer is that it’s impossible to say with any precision. The suggestions that do exist, self-referential and unanchored in any original source, are not wholly convincing. More than that, they are contradictory and fairly obscure.

It could refer to a Saint Anastasia who was martyred during the third century persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Decius. Amongst other things she is alleged to have had her tongue cut out. An article in Time Magazine published in December 1939 repeats the tongue story, but says that this was because she resisted the advances of the Emperor Valerian, who, interestingly enough, had been chosen as censor by the Senate after Decius revived the office.

The other possibility, the one favoured by the French sources, seems even more obscure. Anastasia is said to be based on Pope Anastasius I who, in condemning the work of Origen, the Alexandrian scholar and theologian, began a tradition of Christian censorship. It seems more obscure to me because it’s difficult to believe that this kind of rarefied debate would have impacted at all on the popular imagination, unlike virgins and tongues!

Though the Press Law of 1881, guaranteeing free expression, sent the old girl into a partial hibernation, she and her sheers got back to work after the outbreak of the First World War. That is to say that official censorship was once again given her unprepossessing shape by Le Canard enchaîné,- The Chained Duck -, a satirical magazine established in 1915, which attempted to escape the fatal cuts by using word games and other diversions, probably beyond the old lady’s comprehension! Interestingly she seems never to have been unduly concerned by adverse depictions of herself, which survived intact.

L’Ouevre, which also appeared in 1915 as a daily newspaper, was another publication that came under the gaze of Anastasia. Whole swathes of material were disallowed, to which the editor responded by publishing a single white space to the right of the masthead with the word Chut! (Shush!)

The Second World War brought the sheers back, but the censorship was considered so onerous that protests were even raised in the Chamber of Deputies. According to a Time report of March 1940, Leon Blum, leader of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister at the time of the pre-war Popular Front, said that Anastasia’s conduct showed “absolute incompetence” and “ridiculous ignorance.” The French, he continued, were even more starved of hard news than the Germans.

So, this is it, this is the story of the French Anastasia. She is now back in hibernation; she has been for years, perhaps for good. But when it comes to legends, and archetypes, and Anastasias one should never say never. :-)

Vive le Président!

The president of France, now there is a man: there is Nicolas Sarkozy, an individual for whom I don't have a huge amount of respect. I've written about him in the past in scathingly sardonic terms, drawing attention to his vanity, his absurdity, his lies and his relentless self-promotion, the self-promotion of an insecure, little (little being the operative word) man. I'm normally sympathetic to right-wing politicians, apart from the laughably priapic Silvio Berlusconi and, up until now, Nicolas Sarkozy, the pocket pocket Napoleon. But things change, things always change.

He is a beleaguered man, President Sarkozy, under attack from the Eorocrats and under attack from the sans culottes in his own country. He's taken a stand against the Roma of Romania, professional and unpleasant beggars he's sent back east in hordes contrary to diktats on free movement within the European Community. Once again I put my head in the noose. If I were President of France I would have done the same. If I was Prime Minister of England I would do the same. Why? Is it because I'm a racist; is it because I'm opposed to the free movement of productive labour; is it because I dislike gypsies? No, no, and once again, no. I simply dislike the free movement of professional beggars; I dislike the streets of London being filled with Eastern European gangs of the indigent.

Now the President has taken a more important stand; he has taken a stand against the complacency of his own nation. In present economic circumstances he has asked it to make a few sacrifices for the sake of France; he has asked the 'workers' to consider the possibility that it might be necessary to raise the retirement age to 70, no, to 65, no, to 62, yes, and that's why the are now rising in their thousands in protest.

Yes, that's not a mistake - he wants to people to work until they are sixty-two. How dreadful; time for a new Bastille to tumble. The sans culottes are out in the streets, the people who enjoy bother for the sake of bother, the usual communist and anarchist suspects. At Nanterre just outside Paris thugs have attacked the police not because they believe in fairness, not because they give a fig about the retirement age (after all, what need to retire when you have never worked?); no, simply because they enjoy thuggery for the sake of thuggery, violence for the sale of violence.

I wish you well, Monsieur le Président, I wish you the courage to stand up and stand firm. But, alas, you are not Napoleon; you are not even De Gaulle: you are Sarkozy. I expect the capitulation soon. I would be delighted if you proved me wrong.

French Marquis; Soviet Hero

I don’t generally read obituaries. To be more exact, I don’t think I’ve ever read one right through. I did on Saturday, though, for two reasons: the obituary was about a pilot and I have a slight obsession with all matters relating to flying and aircraft at the present. But it wasn’t about just any pilot, no; it was about a French marquis who flew a Yak fighter alongside the Red Air Force during the Second World War. Reading these outline facts I was drawn like a moth to a flame!

Jacques, marquis de Saint Phalle, who died on 15 June aged ninety-two, belonged to a family that can trace its roots as far back as the sixth century. His ancestral home was the Burgundian Chateau de Mountgoublin. During the war he managed to escape from occupied France, coming to London, where he hoped to fly Spitfires with the RAF.

Instead he eventually found serving with the Normandie-Neman squadron of the Free French Air Force, which was sent, on the suggestion of Charles de Gaulle, to the Eastern Front in 1943 to aid the Soviet forces. The unit had the name Neman appended to its title by Stalin himself after the part it played the Battle of the Neman River in 1944.

Although Saint Phalle himself only ever had one confirmed kill in a hundred missions, shooting down a Focke-Wulf 190, the squadron destroyed 273 enemy aircraft in all between March 1943 and May 1945, flying Russian Yakovlev ‘Yak’ fighters, as effective in the east as the Spitfire was in the west. Such was the prowess of the unit, emphasised in Soviet propaganda, that Field Marshal William Keitel ordered the immediate execution of any captured French pilots.

Saint Phalle, clearly a remarkable man, had begun his pilot training before the war, obtaining his licence in the summer of 1939. Even so when he came to London he had not enough flying hours to qualify as a skilled pilot. He simply overcame this obstacle by lying to Jean Tulasne, the commander of the Normandie squadron. For his part in the war in the east he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the Medal for the Victory over Germany and the Order of the Patriotic War.

I have no idea what his politics were; so while I’m tempted to call him the ‘Red Marquis’ this may be a disservice to his memory. Instead, by one of the little ironies that history rather favours, a French aristocrat found himself fighting for the "workers' state". I wonder what Robespierre and Marat would have made of that!

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightning, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.

The Return of the Fairy

I was lunching with some friends in Montmartre last summer, a very pleasant occasion. I decided at the end of the meal, in an act of sheer devilment, to ask for a glass of absinthe. I might have well asked for hemlock! The thing is, you see, as I very well knew, absinthe, the drink of La Belle Epoch, has not been available in France in its pure form for close on a hundred years because it was believed to be almost as lethal as hemlock. That lengthy prohibition may about to be lifted.

I’ve written before about absinthe (The Green Fairy) and its associations with decadence and witchcraft. It was the favoured drink of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, supposedly inspiring Starry Night among other paintings, and writers like Oscar Wilde. But the fairy could just as readily turn into a demon, so it was believed, the nightmare that walks the pages of Zola’s L’Assommoir, one of the best of his Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels. In a mood of moral panic, no doubt intensified by the atmosphere of the war, the French government banished the Green Fairy in 1915.

Although restrictions were lifted somewhat in more recent times, it can still only be sold if called an ‘absinthe-based spirit’ and made to a slightly different recipe. But according to report I read in the press Franck Choisne, who owns the two-hundred year Combier distillery in the Loire Valley, a place where the secret of the original recipe is still preserved, is leading a campaign to bring it back. He has been joined Ted Breaux, an American connoisseur, who succeeded having the ban lifted in the United States.

As we now know that the original drink was no stronger than whisky and that the herbs it contained would have to be consumed by in gargantuan quantities before any harm was caused, it’s likely that the French parliament will vote to end the ban. It seems a pity, though, that the mythology is likely to die with it, or perhaps it’s just reassuring to know that genius is its own absinthe.

Vive Henri Quatre!

The March of Henry IV, or Vive Henri Quatre, was the anthem of France before the Revolution of 1789 and again after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814/1815. Named after the first of the Bourbon kings, for me it’s the most inspiring of all the royal anthems. I first came across it when I saw Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic film version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where it is sung by one of the captive French officers. It really is lovely.

Vive Henri quatre
Vive ce Roi vaillant
Ce diable à quatre
A le triple talent
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant

Au diable guerres
Rancunes et partis
Commes nos pères
Chantons en vrais amis

Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys
Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys

Chantons l'antienne
Qu'on chant'ra dans mille ans
Que Dieu maintienne
En paix ses descendants

Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents
Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Qu'à Reims on danse
Disant comme à Paris

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri

Sigmund Freud, a Fraud and a Fascist

I hate any kind of determinism, hate any suggestion that history, human institutions or individual people are shaped or motivated by some primary cause. I have no time, then, for Karl Marx and I have no time for Sigmund Freud; no time for the economic determinism of the one, or the sexual determinism of the other.

Marx still haunts us to a degree but I rather thought few people took Freud seriously these days. Not so; the French do. A major battle has broken out after Michael Onfray, a philosopher and author, weighed into the old fellow and his legacy, describing him as a liar, a misogynist, a hater of homosexuals and an anti-Semite! More than that, he says he was a fraud who failed to cure a single patient, even the famous Anna O, one of the core cases in the evolution of psychoanalysis.

Honestly, there are ways of doing these things with more decorum and less passion, but the French do like a good old-fashioned intellectual punch-up! Onfray’s onslaught comes in his latest book, Twilight of an Idol, the Freudian Fabrication. So far as he is concerned psychoanalysis is the last untouchable religion, revered by stars and footballers. “Who else, he asks, “would still have the time to pay in cash to lie on a couch twice a week before some guy who’s half asleep?”

Well, yes, he does have a point, even if he does sound just a little hysterical. But Monsieur Onfray does not stop there, oh no; Freud, you see was not just a fraud he was also a fascist! I can’t stop giggling as I write this; the whole thing is just so terribly droll. I can just picture the author out of control, unmanning himself in words.

Most people will know, I’m sure, that Freud was himself Jewish and had to flee from his native Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. The fascist accusation seemingly comes from the fact that he dedicated a book to Mussolini, though the report I read in The Daily Telegraph does not make it clear if the accusation of anti-Semitism is reducible to the same reference. If so, it really does need saying that fascism and anti-Semitism were never coterminous; and if Winston Churchill could at one time admire Mussolini then it would seem to be wrong to read too much into Freud’s dedication.

French analysts and admirers of Freud, rather than ignoring this provocation, and thus starving their enemy of free publicity, have mounted a vigorous counter-attack. In Le Monde Elisabeth Roudinesco describes the book as “a rag stuffed full of errors and shot through with rumours.” Is this, I wonder, a unique Gallic talent, stuffing rags and shooting them through with rumours? She goes on to say, in relation to the fascist accusation, that Onfray has rehabilitated the ‘pagan theses’ of the French extreme right. What are these ‘pagan theses’? I demand answers!

The odd thing is Onfray, a militant atheist and all round oddball, has written that there is no philosophy without self-psychoanalysis. Does, he, I wonder, lie on couch speaking to himself? Is the part of him that listens to the part of him that speaks half-asleep? Does he have a beard? If psychoanalysis is fraudulent is he not equally fraudulent, both for speaking to himself and listening to himself, even if half asleep? Overblown, overripe, self-deluding and silly, that much would seem to be obvious. What larks! :-))

Not Waving but Drowning

Nicholas Sarkozy really is sinking, the president of France, the president of bling. He seems to be as bad news for his own Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) as Barack Obama is for the Democrats. In the regional elections his name wasn't even mentioned in party literature, just in case voters took the 'ump (groan; sorry!) The man, quite simply, is an embarrassment, a major electoral liability.

The poor man has desperately been trying to distance himself from the predicted outcome, saying that this will have a purely local significance. At the same time he has complained that, to use his own words, "The French don't like me, they've never liked me." Oh, poor mouse, but where, one has to ask, does he think he is from? He obviously does not want to think of himself as French, no, just a case apart, a unique thing, a Sarkozian, from some distant planet, one assumes.

Alas, this is a man fighting a war on two fronts; on the one blaming the voters for his own dismal political performance, on the other blaming the virtual world for the "idiotic" rumours that Carla, his twitter-headed wife, was seeing someone else, was treating him in the same fashion as other French wives are, by tradition and literature, said to treat their husbands.

Is it true? Oh, who knows? There is no definite confirmation of the story which grew as an internet bush fire, but these things have a way of coming true. After all, Carla is a woman who produces such super bons mots as "I guess marriage should be for ever, but who knows what happens?" The super model's super mouth has been kept firmly shut since that particular piece of wisdom was produced earlier this month. I rather suspect this will remain the case. I find it difficult to imagine a person less fitted to be a first lady than Carla, whose head is as empty as her bra. Oh, but she looks so good beside Sarko, a mirror to his absurd personal vanity.

On the political front the problems really arise from Sarko's intellectual confusion, as much as his confusion over his nationality. He stood in 2007 on a right-wing ticket and if I were French I would have voted on the platform he presented, no matter my reservations over the man. Anything is better than a socialist, after all, even a Sarkozian. But France did not get a right-wing president; it got one who moves with the tides of political fashion, active for the sake of being active, with no direction, no principle no guiding set of doctrines. Even the people of Alsace, traditionally a bastion of the right, have had enough. I read a report of one retired bank manager, living in Strasbourg, saying that voters had had it "up to here" with the muddle-headed president, a man who appointed Bernard Koucher, a leading left-winger, to the key post of foreign Minister.

But there are other woes, even more fundamental for Alsace and France beyond, with unemployment now running at 10% and more and more jobs vanishing abroad. I suspect that a great many voters will be hoping that the Sarko, platform shoes and all, will vanish back at warp speed to the distant galaxy from which he emerged.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

France and the Jews

There had long been a tradition of latent anti-semitism in French society, evidenced by some of the responses to the Dreyfus Affair, though in the prosperous years of the 1920s this was but of marginal importance. The onset of the Depression, compounded by the influx of German Jews seeking refuge from Hitler, brought a fundamental change in attitudes.

Increasingly bad, the general political atmosphere became quite poisonous with the creation of the Popular Front government in 1936, headed by Leon Blum, a Jew. In March 1936 Charles Maurras of the right-wing Action Française, wrote "One thing that is dead is the spirit of semi-tolerance accorded to the Jewish State since the War...A formidable 'Down with the Jews' smoulders in every breast and will pour forth from every heart."

Maurras went on to call for the murder of Blum, though he was far from being the most violent anti-Semitic propagandist. That dubious honour surely belongs to the novelist Celine, conceivably the most eccentric genius France has ever produced. His diatribes against the Jews in Bagatelles pour un massacre and École des cadavers were so delirious that Andre Gide even suggested that they might be intended as a Swiftian satire. One critic went so far as to suggest that he may even have been paid by the Jews to discredit anti-Semitism!

People like Celine were never going to escape from the outer limits of political sanity, but anti-Semitism became an acceptable mode of discourse in the political mainstream, even cutting across the divide between left and right. It also became intertwined with new forms of pacifism, increasingly strong in post-war France, which argued that the Jews and the Communists were pushing the nation towards conflict with Nazi Germany.

During the Sudeten crisis in the summer of 1938 Ludovic Zoretti, a Socialist, wrote that France did not want to "kill millions of people, and destroy a civilization just to make life a bit easier for 100,000 Sudeten Jews", a sentiment echoed by Armand Chouffet, a Socialist deputy, who said "I've had enough of the Jewish dictatorship over the Party...I won't march for a Jewish war."

So, the mushroom grew in dank soil; a soil of economic crisis, fertilised by resentment of refugees, anger over alleged Jewish influence in politics and society, and a fear of of being lured into a new war.

Sinking Sarkozy

Things are not looking so hot for Nicolas Sarkozy, the Frog Prince, just at the present. There he is, poor midget, his marital problems compounded by growing political unpopularity. The UMP, his party, is expected to do badly in the regional elections, the first round of which was held today, as people turn to the rival Socialist Party.

Expecting a hammering, he has already attempting to distance himself to insisting that the vote is “purely regional”, nothing at all to do with national politics. Au contraire, Monsieur le President, you know very well this is test of you as well as your party, with your approval ratings now as low as 36%.

When it comes down to it Sarko is just a French Obama, if one can conceive of such a thing, a man who buoyed himself up with big windy promises, a man who was all things to all people. But now reality kicks in- unemployment is on the rise and people are increasingly concerned about how the country will recover from the economy.

Yes, there are clear frustrations with the UMP, but there is more; there is Sarko himself, not just his windy rhetoric but his abuse of power; his nepotism, his cronyism, his intellectual and political confusion, De Gaulle at one moment, Che Guevara at the next. He reminds me of Thomas Roper in A Man for All Seasons, liable to change from one position to another with considerable ease. You may remember what Sir Thomas More says of him:

Listen, Roper. Two years ago you were a passionate Churchman; now you're a passionate-Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head's finished turning, your face is to the front again.

The UMP is a conservative party, and I’m normally sympathetic to people with right wing views, but in France this is a product that does not do exactly what it says on the tin. Conservative voters simply do not know where they are with the muddle-headed president, particularly when it comes to Sarkonomics. Last November, as Henry Samuel reported in the Telegraph, he said that France must cease to be the world champion in state spending, the day after announcing a thirty-five billion “grand loan” for state investment. Where, I wonder, is the man who promised to raise working hours, cut taxes and increase flexibility? Where is the Gallic Thatcher?

No Gallic Thatcher, just a rather rerun of a sad old story. He is, it might very well be said, Napoleon IV, undermining the republic with his imperial and monarchist pretensions. The Fifth Republic always was monarchist in structure and tone, in contrast with most of its predecessors; but after De Gaulle the presidents mostly had the good sense to play this down. Not so the new Napoleon, who made himself look truly ridiculous in the Prince Jean affair, when he tried to helicopter his son into a prestigious position for which he was hugely under qualified. And then there is the bullying despot, who attempted to use the law to settle old political scores in the Clearstream trial.

In international affairs the confusion and venality is even worse, as Samuel points out, with Sarko embracing human rights at one moment and Colonel Gaddafi at the next; criticising the drift in Russian politics at one moment, declaring Vladimir Putin to be his friend at the next. With most other people I would say this simply showed a degree of state pragmatism but not with Sarko, not on the basis of the other signs of his shallowness and instability.

Oh, and then there is the vanity, his laughable sensitivity over his shortness, a dream to French cartoonists. He wears built up shoes; he stands on tiptoe or hidden stools beside Obama; he goes to meetings surrounded with hand-picked people even shorter than himself; he does not like to be seen standing on the same level as his tall wife. Why, oh why, did this silly little man marry such a tall woman? The answer is simple: that feeds another side of his vanity, to have a glamorous wife at his side. But she only serves to make him look all the uglier, all the smaller, all the more absurd, especially now that she has allegedly given him horns, to use an old-fashioned image that some, I feel sure, will recognise.

Ah, those the gods wish to destroy they first make president of France. :-)

Mendacious Mitterrand

Following on from my recent piece on Sarkozy’s visit to Rwanda I though I would add a separate article on Francois Mitterrand, the man who was president of France at the time of the genocide, the man who bears a singular responsibility for what happened, the man whose ignorance and turpitude made him conceivably the worst head of state the French have ever known, not excluding Marshal Petain, his hero and avatar.

What an odd thing, is it not, for a socialist to have an old reactionary like Petain as a hero. Ah, but you see, this is where we begin, with confusion, inconsistency and the worst forms of opportunism imaginable. In political terms the French are quite capable of switching from the camp of Caesar to the camp of Brutus, without any major qualms of conscience. But try to imagine being in the camp of Caesar and Brutus at one and the same time. Can you picture such a thing; can you understand such a thing? If you can you are already on the way to understanding the kind of man Mitterrand was.

I don’t really want to dig too deeply into old ground; there is plenty of material already on this man’s shady past and I suspect that there will be more to come in time. Let me just say that when it came to reconstructing the record Mitterrand had a tendency to be not just economical with the truth but parsimonious in the extreme, at least until the full story came out when Pierre Péan, an investigative journalist, published Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, a study of the man’s life and actions between 1934 and 1947. By one of those small ironies that fate enjoys it was published in 1994, the year Mitterrand acted as godfather to the Rwandan Holocaust.

Before this book appeared Mitterrand had either lied about his past or suffered from a highly convenient amnesia. In his youth he had supported the Popular Front, the socialist-communist alliance presided over by Leon Blum. In the war, after he escaped from a German POW camp, he became “a resister after no great agonising”, to use his own words. The truth is quite different. His associations were not with the Popular Front but with Action Française, the Croix de Feu, Le Camelots du Roi and the Cagoulards, monarchist, racist, anti-Semitic and terrorist organisations, some of whom specialised in political assassination, including the planned assassination of Leon Blum.

Mitterrand’s motto really should have been ‘don’t mention the war’, or at least don’t mention all of it. Once back in France he became a minor Vichy functionary. This was not just a job; he wasn’t just another bureaucrat, dedicated to serving authority, regardless of its political complexion. No; this was born of conviction, of support for what the Petainists called the ‘National Revolution.’ His sympathies are revealed in two articles he published in 1942, once criticising France for “150 years of mistakes”; criticising it, in other words, for the Revolution of 1789 and all that came thereafter. In the other article he approves the formation of the Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL), though lamenting its lack of “fanaticism”. He need not have worried about that, for the following year the SOL became the Milice, notorious for torturing and murdering members of the Resistance and collaborating in the Holocaust.

After Péan’s book appeared Mitterrand made all sorts of implausible excuses, more lies and dissimulation. But there was one particularly revealing admission in a television interview. In a response to a question about Vichy’s Jewish Statute he said that it was a piece of legislation against foreign Jews about which he had known nothing.

All I can say is that he must have been both blind and deaf not to know of this Statute. But that’s not the crucial point, no; the Statute was directed against all Jews, but even if it had not been this hardly makes it more defensible, as one author wrote. There he is, still the residual Vichyist, still holding the prejudices of that benighted age, still distinguishing between French and ‘foreign’ Jews. He could not condemn the past because he was the past.

Yes, he was the past and by his friends the French should have known him; friends like the notorious René Bousquet, the former secretary-general of the Vichy police, the man responsible for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris in 1942, in which some 13,000 Jews were sent to their deaths. In 1992 when a committee dedicated to remembering this outrage tried to get an official apology for the actions of Vichy against the Jews Mitterrand refused. The apology came in due course, but it was made by Jacques Chirac, his Gaullist successor, in yet another peculiar irony.

So, there we have it, there we have a taste of the career of France’s first socialist president. De Gaulle was right; Mitterrand was a ghost who came from the deepest depths of the collaboration. His career should have ended in 1945 but for the forgetfulness that descended on France, encouraged by de Gaulle himself. To have a man like Mitterrand as president says a lot about French socialism; says a lot about France.