Mark Lilla: Tea Party à la française
[Mark Lilla is a historian of ideas at Columbia University.]
It’s strike season in France....
The strikes are largely empty rituals now—even if, as we’ve seen in recent days, they can descend into criminal street violence. The days when a small confrontation at the factories of Billancourt could bring out workers everywhere and paralyze the country are long over. The last time a national strike had a major effect was in 1995, when unions managed to block an earlier pension reform plan and prevent other benefit cutbacks proposed by then-Prime Minister Alain Juppé. But many of the changes proposed at the time have become reality in the intervening years and France has become, like most of its neighbors, a centrist nation. The Socialist Party remains divided à l’italienne among factions led by ambitious but ideologically nearly indistinguishable personalities—Ségolène Royal, François Hollande, Martine Aubry, and the slightly more centrist Dominique Strauss-Kahn—who would find it hard to govern together if they were brought back into power. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (NF) maintains its hold on a small, solid minority of the electorate on the right, politically untouchable but still able to affect the tenor of political debate. (President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent decision to close illegal gypsy camps and expel their residents is widely seen as a bone tossed to potential FN voters.) In short, nothing moves....
The French do not tolerate corruption as much as their Italian counterparts do, but they do generally assume that in the worlds of politics and high finance ambition makes everyone dirty. What they cannot abide is the thought that the ambitious might also become rich. What particularly galls them about Sarkozy today is not that he is a Rastignac, but that he has become, as the title of a new book has it, Le président des riches. This probably has less to do with his actual policies, which are in line with those of other E.U. countries since the financial crisis, than with symbols—the Rolex, the Ray-Bans, his curvaceous wife Carla Bruni, and all the other bling bling that Italians love but the French on the right and left distrust. As a French writer quoted in the New York Times remarked, “He has a lifestyle that doesn’t look like that of everyone…this is a reaction against the elite.” That Sarko is the child of immigrants and never attended a grande école means that, even as the single most powerful man in France, he will always be seen as an arriviste. This snobbery goes hand in hand with deep suspicion of markets and capitalism among the middle and lower classes, which shows no sign of dying out even in the age of the global economy. In a recent international poll asking people what they thought was behind recent increases in food prices, respondents in most countries gave a mix of reasons—bad weather, government policies, market turbulence. Roughly half of the French pointed to unnamed “speculators.”...
Read entire article at NYRB
It’s strike season in France....
The strikes are largely empty rituals now—even if, as we’ve seen in recent days, they can descend into criminal street violence. The days when a small confrontation at the factories of Billancourt could bring out workers everywhere and paralyze the country are long over. The last time a national strike had a major effect was in 1995, when unions managed to block an earlier pension reform plan and prevent other benefit cutbacks proposed by then-Prime Minister Alain Juppé. But many of the changes proposed at the time have become reality in the intervening years and France has become, like most of its neighbors, a centrist nation. The Socialist Party remains divided à l’italienne among factions led by ambitious but ideologically nearly indistinguishable personalities—Ségolène Royal, François Hollande, Martine Aubry, and the slightly more centrist Dominique Strauss-Kahn—who would find it hard to govern together if they were brought back into power. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (NF) maintains its hold on a small, solid minority of the electorate on the right, politically untouchable but still able to affect the tenor of political debate. (President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent decision to close illegal gypsy camps and expel their residents is widely seen as a bone tossed to potential FN voters.) In short, nothing moves....
The French do not tolerate corruption as much as their Italian counterparts do, but they do generally assume that in the worlds of politics and high finance ambition makes everyone dirty. What they cannot abide is the thought that the ambitious might also become rich. What particularly galls them about Sarkozy today is not that he is a Rastignac, but that he has become, as the title of a new book has it, Le président des riches. This probably has less to do with his actual policies, which are in line with those of other E.U. countries since the financial crisis, than with symbols—the Rolex, the Ray-Bans, his curvaceous wife Carla Bruni, and all the other bling bling that Italians love but the French on the right and left distrust. As a French writer quoted in the New York Times remarked, “He has a lifestyle that doesn’t look like that of everyone…this is a reaction against the elite.” That Sarko is the child of immigrants and never attended a grande école means that, even as the single most powerful man in France, he will always be seen as an arriviste. This snobbery goes hand in hand with deep suspicion of markets and capitalism among the middle and lower classes, which shows no sign of dying out even in the age of the global economy. In a recent international poll asking people what they thought was behind recent increases in food prices, respondents in most countries gave a mix of reasons—bad weather, government policies, market turbulence. Roughly half of the French pointed to unnamed “speculators.”...