(Warning : offensive material below. Delicate sensibilities may be harmed, etc., etc.)
Satyrs, male and female, have been with us a long time, as has satire, and for that matter, cavemen, who walk among us even now, many of them in shiny suits betokening their success in the modern world, so-called. To hone in on satire on France is to touch an extremely delicate nerve, in as much as satire, like the smelly goat folks who gave it to us, causes offense. No one has ever died from being ridiculed; but people die because they ridiculed religious sensibilities, or are, in the deformed minds of killers, somehow associated with it. The number in France from the last six years is a little under 400 dead. That is not a small number of lives in a small country that believes everything is open to debate. We all know the price now, and if we get close to forgetting, some deranged person will make sure to remind us, as one did in September, attacking the building where Charlie Hebdo used to be. You sometimes get tired of reminding readers that these are real people who lost their lives to religious fanaticism. Close friends of mine barely escaped alive. Let Virginie Despentes and the others who counsel sensitivity and caution stand guard during the next one.
The French are an offensive race. Their cows are not sacred. You may not care for the cheese they produce. Nonetheless, their genius is somehow pretty damn close to their ability to insult. Strange, you say, a culture which invented courtesie, the love-cult, politesse but la culture, c’est un truc compliqué. The country that produced more Catholics saints than any other leads the league in blasphemers, too. They’ve been at it a while.
Portrait of Henri III as an hermaphrodite, 16th Century.
In the 18th Century during the reign of Louis XV, the well-loved, the bore, who spent his spare time seducing every attractive female in his orbit, including all three Nesle sisters, the forest road from Paris to Versailles was where riders and drivers both uncovered the satirical publications verging on pornographic that made sport of the King and a generation later, the next Louis and his much-pilloried wife from Austria. The nineteenth century is the golden age : Daumier, Philipon, Léandre and countless others made their mark in the field of satire : feast your eyes. Today, Charlie Hebdo and le Canard Enchainé don’t let up. You could, without stretching so very much, even say that the guy arrested for breaking curfew was satirising the cops. How so ? In the permission form we all have to sign when going out, he gave his objective as, To flatten the face of a jerk.
Thus, no surprise, indeed, you might say, naturally, the French got het up over the current regime and protested on Saturday the 28th against the proposed new Global Security laws, an outrageous power grab by the Macron administration. Orwellian, are they ? Perfectly so, right down to their name. I’m not going to go through all that again, when Ben Franklin already did the job.
“A people prepared to sacrifice a little freedom for a little security is worthy of neither and will end up losing both.”
Rather I want to make an incomplete survey of French satire in our age of political correctness, as evidenced by the handmade originals (and only those) that I saw at the demo on Saturday. I’ll spare you the dramatics because for the French a manif is a serious matter but also a social occasion, a chance to connect, share, to dance in the street if the band pounding away is any good, to feel the numbers, to take heart. They’ve all done it hundreds of times before, and that, too, is in its way reassuring. But les pancartes, they interested me. They were raunchy, rowdy, wordless, classic and lighthearted. I leave you to judge their value.
The open eye was popular as was the word, Honte. The first, a reference to the new prohibitions, suggesting that we are awake and watching the police, and the second, Shame, for the violent behavior of the police a few days before when they emptied an encampment of homeless in Republique and a day later, physically attacked a young black man for not wearing a mask (for the distance between his cab and front door). Extremely effective both of them, a quiet, homemade rage against the machine, sometimes serious, often humorous. Laughter is a weapon. Politicians know this very well.
No comment necessary except to say that Macronie translates as the land Emmanuel Macron rules - in fantasy or reality.
Take five, Cid : the classic approach, a quote from Corneille’s le Cid with police substituted for old age : Outrage! Despair! Police my enemy! Have I lived so long for such infamy ?
Again the minimal approach: Smile for the camera, copper, you’re on film.
Say it all in a few words : Outlawing images equals authorising brutality.
The only participant to remind everyone that there are issues outside France worth making noise about. And the best gear, too.
Parisians didn’t lose time coming up with a word for it : Floutage is a new coin of the realm, the erasure of identity, our new inability to name the cops who brutalize us. (Translate ? The face erased.) The photo plastered on the wall bears the inscription, This photo will not exist.
“To each their shield.” Runner-up, skillfully, simply done. And the winner is….
Ah. Here we have satire, vulgarity, pan-cultural reference and French pride, painstakingly rendered. What more can one ask except why was it abandoned on a window ledge ? (“Big pricks with their faces erased, France is not a Japanese porno!!!”) You may disagree but both the humor and the hand seem to me a woman’s. (All photos by yours truly.)
A Harangue You Didn’t Ask For
Nothing upsets an American liberal’s amour-propre (more essential that whatever issue is at hand) like being told their opinions about France are banal or that their ideas are 50 years out of date. France functions to the « informed » liberal American imagination like a kind of Gallic valhalla where the wine flows and Socialism, against the odds and its inability to balance the books, prospers because the French represent a kind of stubborn vision of the way the world ought to be. A cameo of times gone by. I mention the financial ‘books’ only because I have listened to numerous American liberals, people who know nothing about money and have lived off their parents most of their lives, go on about how socialism can’t pay for itself. One must be delicate in situations like that.
Let’s have a close look at the current glamour boy, who married his high school teacher, took a cut-throat route to the pinnacle of power and now awaits the judgement of the populace as to whether he should have a second term (2022). Emmanuel Macron’s image in the United States, notably solidified since the COP20 accords, is of a handsome, well-spoken liberal who, despite calling Donald Trump his « personal friend, » is keeping up the good fight. My summation below is biased, brief, factual and furious and not, one hopes, simply a laundry list of complaints. There’s certainly a contrary argument to be made, but the inescapable fact is that Macron does not represent a « third way » of innovation and openness, as he put on in his pre-election Revolution. That may be impossible given the circumstances but he is inescapably a technocratic manager who believes (in his heart of hearts) that wealth is a measure of success and that austerity by any other name is the future. Maybe it has something to do with coming from a capital city surrounded by the impoverished north. Until November of last year, he was busy cutting resources for national healthcare and hospitals, only to be stopped in his tracks by repeated protests and finally, Covid 19.
Macron is not the handsome Obama redux he appears to be for so many American liberals, allowing them to snooze while believing all is essentially well while a few quills poke out of the pillow. He is, instead, the technocratic cousin of Boris and the Don, a member of the club, a man who rallied the excluded (youth, forever outside the France’s gerontological merry go round, where as long as you don’t get carried away, you never fall off) to campaign for him before ignoring them completely ; who began his presidency by selling off part of France’s nationalized industrial core (Alstom), has sided with other sales of the same sort, lessened the powers of communes, that is to say the French localities, by evolving ever larger circles of power, at a greater distance from the people; has attempted to « reform » social security by turning it into a kind of casino on a point-based system, where the retirée is given the present-moment market value of his initial pay-in (those monies having been used by the state based on their value at the time of insertion), provoking the Gilets Jaunes movement which was repressed violently in a manner unprecedented in contemporary Europe, shocking the Germans, among others; allowed a Elysée insider and fixer to appropriate the uniform of a police officer illegally, so he could beat citizens, acts caught on film, after which the President said via Facebook, that he was « shocked, » after which the truant, Benalla, clammed up and subsequently disappeared; ignoring the Gilet Jaunes for most of a year, launching a national debate whose most prominent feature were his hour-long harangues to the citizenry in various locals (sound familiar, anyone ?); then over a year after the Gilet Jaunes mobilizations began, the appointment of 100 French citizens to draw up an account of the « current state of things », the CCC (la Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat) charged to come up with a series of recommendations for environmental action, all of which were either ignored, watered down or gutted; threatened, until Covid intervened, to pass his Social Security « reforms » by Executive Mandate; has appointed a Minister of the Interior Gérald Darminin, a man who matches the profiles of most of the other Macron appointments in that he is an appointee of no particular political stature in the country, a mean nobody, and thus an able mouthpiece for his boss; Darminin has been accused of rape in two recent instances, denying the charges and pleading his case to the president by saying, « I have lived the normal life of a young man » (thanks very much for that, guy); benefiting from the presumption of innocence, which he should have, has held on to his Ministry, which he shouldn’t be able to do; again this Darminin is a nobody, easily replaced while he sorts his personal affairs out, thus remaining in office at the pleasure of his boss sends a very different message about how he regards the privileges of power than when Macron entered the Palais Elysées as a reforming liberal. Further, this Darminin is the wingman carrying forward the proposed new Loi de Securité Globale, a law with a name so perfectly Orwellian it proves, if nothing else, that hearing aids should be provided for members of this government; a law that provides heavy fines and imprisonment for, among other things, the photo or video recording of police exceeding their strict mandate of law enforcement while engaging in random, unprovoked acts of violence; a law denounced from many quarters, even here, brave reader, in the article This Camera…. ; a proposed law that did not benefit from giving people time to forget but even while it was being debated last week in the Assemblée Nationale, an encampment of homeless were violently dislodged from Place de la République in Paris, the Big Bravo Boy transgressions of the police filmed and publicized; more spectacularly perhaps because of the nature of the victim, undeniably racist and utterly unprovoked attacks on a young music producer, who seems to have perpertrated a newly criminal act, that of the being young and black and living in a well-to-do Paris neighborhood, his violent and utterly unprovoked beating coming to an immediate stop when a neighbor popped out of an upstairs window with a video camera, after which the youth, Michel Zecler, was arrested and spent hours in jail; the president once again took to Facebook and Twitter (as opposed to appearing in public) to announce that he was shocked. Shocked about what, precisely, sir ? One cannot escape the feeling that if this incident had not happened in Paris’ tony 17th arrondissement, if it had happened anywhere else in the country and the young man assaulted was not such an evident success who was even able to say good things about the cops (!), we would not have heard of its happening. The President added that, We must call a cat a cat, certainly an interesting elocution, meaning, I suppose, we must face the reality of the situation. But which reality ? I have stroked many a cat and you, sir, are no cat.
(The above blast surveys only Macron’s domestic agenda, leaving out foreign affairs such as the endless wars in Sub-Sahara Africa handed him by his predecessor Hollande, which he has expanded without success.)
The Macron Government shares with its frères in the (last days of the second Christ) Trump and Boris Johnson governments a recklessness bordering on malevolence, coupled with a dramatic sense of entitlement. Like the leaders of the other two regimes, one on his way out, the other sitting pretty until ’24, reality having failed to conform to expectations, Macron is increasingly the prisoner of the safe environs of social media, where nobody feels any pain. You know, the real kind.
So, please, American liberals, up your game. You are no more informed about the world than the conservatives you so despise. Turn off National Public radio, stop dancing to This American Life. Learn a language. Do something.
I won’t drag you through this again, I promise. At least until immediately before or after presidential elections here in 2022.
A last photo from the chaotic end of the demonstration on Saturday.
We want our rights, not the Right Wing!
Paris, November 30, 15h 28
histoire très breve du satire française
I apologize if this post is a bit free-floating and amorphous. It made me think of several different things:
1) I might be, to some extent, the sort of American this article castigates.
2) I am at times amazed at the slippery cynicism of the French. I heard that they devised the slogan, "Think Left, live right."
3) Actually, I think a succession of very specific events, in France's relations with other European states, made France less idealistic and more cynical: It's idealism made it support Polish independence from Russia in the early 1860's, and it's idealism made it support Italian independence from Austria. and this hurt France: When the Franco Prussian War broke out, in 1870, France was alone (It was alone because it had antagonized Russia and Austria) and was promptly defeated by Germany.
4) I am in awe of the progressive and radical strain in French history, but I recoil when I think of the catastrophe and shame that was Vichy.
5) Like many an American, I am enchanted at what appears to be the way the French are able to celebrate life -- and like many Amercans, and Englishmen too, I am envious of this.
6) I WISH TO G-D THAT I HAD LEARNED TO SPEAK FRENCH IN SCHOOL
There are so many things to address. I don't really know where to begin.
Fallacy One in this article is the assertion of something on the order of a unified French character, which cannot, by any objective standard, be said to exist, can it ?