Infighting: Does France Suck?

Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic and Brian Beutler of the Washington City Paper on the country Americans love to hate.

January 30 – February 2, 2006

“No exit? No problem!”
Brian Beutler – February 2

Ok, let’s keep something important in mind. In a pluralistic, democratic country with a population 60,000,000, there will be a lot of problems. There will be an underclass and ethnic strife and there will be disingenuous politicians who have their eyes elsewhere resulting in a shrieking maelstrom of unhappy people. Sorry for the facile platitude. But it’s true.

And it’s true as well that the liberal idea is to bridge the chasms separating the rich and poor through wise social policies and collective good will. If we’re going to judge the effectiveness of those efforts, then we’re in the tricky and unkind position of looking at broad trends even though local failures might make us doubt our progress. It means appreciating the ocean, even though the coastline is all covered in mud. I think it’s that disconnect that’s blinding Eve to the idea that—on the most important fronts— France is doing remarkably well, despite simultaneous setbacks. She sees laïcité and decides that France has NO respect for civil liberties. She sees a racialized underclass and decides that France provides its citizens with NO protections from poverty. (This is, of course, without pointing out that, because of their welfare state, to be part of the French underclass means a very different struggle than the one Eve witnesses during her weekend jogs through southeast DC.) And she sees the bizarre and heinous sinking of the Rainbow Warrior 20 years ago and decides that France has NO respect for the environment. The problems Eve cites are real, but they’re universal, and that’s why I protected myself by establishing norms, so that we can judge effectiveness broadly and—callous though it feels—ignore for now the sad, but inevitable, exceptions.

I have absolutely no idea, then, what she means when she says “So maybe we should stop flogging statistics and look at outcomes.” What’s the difference? Why aren’t the “statistical” facts that France protects the environment and educates its citizens more effectively than almost all other countries in the world not an “outcome” of their governance? Eve herself asserted “the awesomeness of [French] people”, so we’re ultimately talking about policies and their ramifications, right?

But she absolutely nails it here: “Every country has a budget, and there is no nation on earth that has a powerful military, a spotless environmental record, universal healthcare, low unemployment, and a strong culture of innovation.” Dead on. And it’s precisely because of those frustrating limits that governments need to make the right choices. If there’s not enough money in the French budget to provide for universal health care, nationally financed schools, AND investment in technology, and the French are culturally antagonistic to tax cuts, de-unionization, etc. to nourish the economy, well, then, I still say France is right to put healthcare before the rest. It’s a matter of priorities and I agree with France on their most important ones, even though they do stupid shit a lot, or if their economy isn’t as healthy as Germany’s or Sweden’s.

And yet, as Eve implies with her summary quote and her New Criterion(!!!) link, there seems to be a lot of stubborn pessimism in France that’s tough for me to confront. But I wonder if their ennui—no, their existential dread—has anything at all to do with their current woes or if it’s an artifact of their prominent and decades-old intellectual currents, bounded by Camus and Sartre and followed by the battling thinkers Foucault and Derrida. Man, were those guys bitter, or what?!

They reached their apogee with Celine, who once said “Living, just by itself—what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that’s terribly exciting—or he’ll come along and nibble your brain.” Wow. He must’ve read that morning’s stock ticker and gotten all in a huff. Thank God he had that Bordeaux handy to wash down his delicious camembert, buoy his injured spirit, and catapult him through a (statistically) long and productive life.

 
“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite… if only it were true”
Eve Fairbanks – February 1

I’m super grateful for Brian’s efforts to establish standards—it’s something I should have done in my first post, and, for the most part, Brian does a fabulous job. He lays out clear criteria by which we can judge that a country doesn’t suck; he describes these standards robustly and compellingly; he uses tasty phrases like “enshrined by a democratic political system.” In fact, I’d be packing my duffel for Duluth if it weren’t for two pesky little problems: France flunks Brian’s own tests. And Brian’s argument isn’t about France at all; it’s a backhanded gripe over what he doesn’t like about the United States.

Brian establishes three standards for a non-sucky country, but these standards are suspiciously selective. Does a country’s economy really have nothing to do with its quality? What about scientific and technological innovation? Brian’s standards seem to be those for which any Western country would look good compared to the United States. (Are there any other democracies that Brian thinks are currently prosecuting an “opaque and unpopular” war?) But, as he said, we’re not talking about France vs. another country. (France faces serious crises in both science and the economy, but I won’t go into them, because I’ve been told it’s unfair to use benchmarks that France just-so-happens to miss.)

But Brian drew up the rule book, so maybe I should just suck it up and play by it. Let’s take his criteria one at a time. Does France have a secular society with a profound respect for civil liberties? Non: France’s rigid, dogmatic philosophy of secularism, called laïcité, has stifled civil liberties by barring students in religious minorities from wearing their yarmulkes or headscarves to school (and such open hostility towards religion has allowed foreign fundamentalists to exert dangerous influence over French society). Does France protect its people against political invisibility? Non, as I pointed out in my last post. An entire class of citizens—those of North African immigrant descent—is ghettoized, has no chance of going to a decent college or entering politics, and suffers a youth unemployment rate of 23%. Sure, working to live is no worse than living to work. But not being able to live because there is no work for you is much worse. And as to the environment, for God’s sake, this is the country that bombed Greenpeace!

Brian’s post makes me wonder if we’ve been going about this debate all wrong. Every country has a budget, and there is no nation on earth that has a powerful military, a spotless environmental record, universal health care, low unemployment, and a strong culture of innovation. It’s possible—though I’m not sure Brian did it—to assemble a set of criteria that makes France look fantastic, and another set that makes it look terrible. So maybe we should stop flogging statistics and look at outcomes. Can Frenchmen from varied economic, racial, and religious backgrounds be happy and proud to call themselves citizens? Non: We have read that France ’s underclass of jobless youths feels “humiliated and excluded,” while its old guard believes the country has become “irredeemably decadent, the sick man of Europe.” This is impressive, given that we often think of politics as a zero-sum game where what pleases the lower classes displeases the upper ones. France has failed both.

I think my Frenchman was misdrawn. Instead of anger, he should have portrayed an attitude of resignation. The widespread belief in France that nothing—not its politicians, not its intellectuals, not its rebellious youth—can save the country from dying of its economic and social diseases depresses me more than any statistic, because so often death comes when the patient gives up the will to live. (If you don’t believe me that this attitude is pervasive in France, see here.)

The French writer Marin de Viry describes modern France with an arresting and sad image: That of “a blind man feeling for an electric switch in a splendid but darkened library.” Sad because it recognizes how great France has been, and because it captures how internalized its problems have become—its cultural influence and liberal goals have gone dark, but its people also can’t see.

Maybe a country only really sucks when it has lost the ability to fix itself.

 
“So why is longer life, more vacation, and better health care bad, exactly?”
Brian Beutler – January 31

When I was told that our motion for debate was “France Sucks,” I was pretty relieved. At first, anyhow. Because it seemed to me that to argue affirmatively that France sucks is almost cartoonishly absurd—it’s something like the obverse of the Team America slogan “America: Fuck Yeah!”—and that I’d therefore won by default. I was even tempted to suggest that prizes be offered to the winner: an all-expenses paid trip to France for me if I win, and an all-expenses paid trip to Duluth, Minnesota for Eve if she wins.

But then I realized this might be harder than I’d first imagined, and not least because of Eve’s obvious surfeit of wit and charm.

What complicates matters is the lack of a solid reference point within the motion itself. Does France suck? Vis-à-vis quois? Does that ornery drunkard on the Champs Elysées who screams “bouffon!”at passing tourists suck? I can imagine a worse offense in an uglier language. (“Schiesse!” comes to mind. So does “Asshole!”)

We have a problem here. Eve has failed to provide me with a substantive argument, and instead has stopped short at, essentially, a list of France ’s problems.

I’d be much worse off if Eve had put me in the position of arguing against a mark—a mark that she had created and argued for—below which a country sucks, and if she had then demonstrated France’s failure to meet that mark. She comes close once: comparing France to Germany and America and—this sounds promising—all other growing countries around the globe. (“The number of hours its citizens who are employed work per year is around 1,450, compared to 1,700 in Germany and 1,950 in the United States. On the economy: France’s growth rate is in the bottom 25% of all countries.”) But she doesn’t follow with anything qualitative. Why is the 35-hour work week inferior to the 40-hour week? Why is vacation measured in months worse than vacation measured in weeks? Why is slow growth a desperate societal ill? Why does working to live make you suck while living to work makes you rule?

Since now I get to choose the normative criteria, I’ll develop them as objectively as possible—without making arbitrary comparisons on single issues between France and other countries, and without selecting statistics from the clouds because France just-so-happens to excel there. Eve, for instance, decides to compare France to Germany and the United States because people in those countries happen to work longer hours—a comparison that demonstrates precisely nothing. It’s as inconclusive as pointing out that life expectancy in France (79.44 years) is greater than in Germany (78.54 years) and greater still than in the U.S. (77.43 years).

So here’s a rough sketch—Brian’s criteria for a society that doesn’t suck:

For a country to totally not suck it must provide its citizens with security and mobility enshrined by a democratic political system. That means:

1). Possessing a competent military without engaging in warfare under opaque and unpopular terms. More broadly, it must be a secular society with a profound respect for civil liberties.

2). All of its citizens—or a VAST majority of them—need access to health care and education of a high enough quality that nobody is captive to the threat of illness or injury or to the possibility of becoming marginalized into political invisibility. That means extraordinarily high literacy rates— greater than a standard deviation above the global mean—and a health care system that doesn’t extort cancer patients until they’re hopelessly poor as well. Ever. (Note: universal health care REALLY helps here).

3). No extraordinary harm to the environment in the meantime. Let’s set a mark for this last part: for a nation not to suck, it must be on the right side of the median for per capita pollution by nation among developed countries.

If you agree with my measures, then France simply doesn’t suck.

Patriots note that a country—I mean our country—doesn’t suck simply because it doesn’t meet the standards for not sucking. There’s a spectrum here. And, yes, we did save their asses in World War II. Oh, and Eve, if you ever meet this French man of yours, tell him that he’ll be able to enjoy ALL of his country’s epicurean wonders if he just stops acting like a walking cliché.

 
"It ees not even possible to get a decent croissant in ziss town anymore!"
Eve Fairbanks – January 30

Somewhere in Paris this morning, an old Frenchman is waking up. Since this hypothetical Frenchman retired 20 years back, he has spent the better part of each day at an ancient Right Bank café, where he orders a café crème and half a baguette with butter and reads Le Figaro all the way through. Since he began this ritual, he has consumed a series of more and more depressing headlines. In 1985, he read that youth unemployment had topped 20 percent. In 1993, he read that the national Credit Lyonnais Bank, having lost France nearly $17 billion, was going bankrupt. In 1995, he read that striking French workers shut down the Chunnel trains, and in 2002, he read that ultra-rightist Presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen won 15% of the first round of voting. These days, he has been reading about riots in the suburbs and economic stagnation, but it is when his café crème arrives that his heart really sinks. An anemic layer of skim milk imported from Denmark floats on watery American coffee; a puffy, dry supermarket-bought Kaiser roll languishes on the edge of the saucer; and the whole miserable thing is served by a sulking Eastern European. “Quelle horreur!” our Frenchman thinks. “What has become of my country?”

Since widespread rioting in September exposed France’s dark side, many Americans have been asking themselves the same question. France has, historically, certainly been the butt of a joke or two, especially regarding its military and its male population’s penchant for tight, white denim trousers. But American liberals have often looked to France as a model of progressive society—or at least of good living. This is the culture that first insisted on a connection between liberty and equality, and on a connection between philosophic innovation and spending long afternoons drinking wine in sidewalk cafés. France gave the world the Enlightenment, innumerable artistic movements, pressed coffee, and kissing. France was the destination for many disheartened Democrats’ imagined emigration after Bush v. Gore. But recent events across the pond raise a sad and difficult question: Does France today, despite its former glory, kind of suck?

Let’s lay out the evidence. Over the past 30 years, France has embarked on a campaign to create job security, regulate pensions and the length of the work week, subsidize national industries, and aggressively promote a sense of national identity. How has this all turned out? On productivity: France’s unemployment rate hovers around 10%, a figure that actually masks the higher youth unemployment rate of 23%, and 70% of new job contracts are temporary. The number of hours its citizens who are employed work per year is around 1,450, compared to 1,675 in the U.K. and 1,800 in the United States. On the economy: France’s growth rate is in the bottom 25% of all countries, and economic listlessness and an inflexible budget have nudged its deficit over the EU’s debt limit. On society: Even though it is estimated that people of North African origin make up 10-15% of the French population, there are no minorities, other than those representing overseas departments, in French parliament. And see any number of stories on the recent riots, for example, here. Finally, on leadership: recent popular political figures have been Le Pen, who once claimed that the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane,” and José Bové, the risible anti-globalization activist who ate Roquefort cheese in front of a Seattle McDonald’s as a form of political action.

Now, none of these facts mean that France sucks irredeemably. Every country has had its share of economic downturns, societal ruptures, and disturbing politicians. But the French response to its malaise is taking shape like our hypothetical Frenchman’s response to the troubling Figaro headlines: To look navel-ward and lament a symbolic decline, a sort of clinical depression of the French cultural spirit (see here and here, in French). There may be a psychological element to France’s woes, but as we have recently seen, they are certainly not all in its mind. And, when actual reforms are attempted in France, too often the small subset of French citizens that would be adversely affected uses strikes to block any substantive change. But the abject failure of France’s ostensibly progressive project is tragic because of France’s powerful liberal history, and it would behoove us to try and understand how France got to this point of sucking. As Alexis de Tocqueville once said, France is “the best qualified to become, in the eyes of other peoples, an object of admiration, of hatred, of compassion, or alarm – never of indifference.”

Eve Fairbanks, Yale ‘05, is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. Brian Beutler graduated from UC Berkeley in 2004 and has interned at The Washington Monthly and the Brookings Institute. He writes for the Washington City Paper.

Illustration: Matt Bors