Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (3 page)

Despite our membership in the European Union, despite the Channel Tunnel's visual abolition of water and cliff, some of my compatriots still exhibit a Bouvardian alarm at having the French as neighbours, let alone closer ones. Francophobia remains our first form of Europhobia, though not of xenophobia (ethnic minorities have edged out the French in that regard). The French are genuinely puzzled by the bile of our tabloid press, shocked that a country known for phlegm and decorous manners can also deal in such jeering contempt. It's not really you, I try to explain; it's just that you are more than yourselves, you have become the symbol of all that is foreign; everything, not just Frenchness, begins at Calais. Whereas you may look across your different frontiers and be offered a choice of four great civilizations, we in our offshore islands are surrounded by you on one side and fish on the other three. No wonder we feel about you more strongly, more obsessingly— whether as Francophile or Francophobe—than you feel about us.

Each time I give this explanation, I am less convinced by my words. Yes, they're sort of true; but it's also the case that the French are so … well, French, and therefore designed by God to seem as provokingly dissimilar from the British as possible. Catholic, Cartesian, Mediterranean; Machiavellian in politics, Jesuitical in argument, Casanovan in sex; relaxed about pleasure, and treating the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels. What assemblage could be better targeted to enrage the puritanical lager-lunkhead blessed and prodded by our tabloid press, or even some posher patriots? When Salman Rushdie received his
fatwa,
British Airways refused to let him fly with them. Air France, asked their position, replied: “We respect the French custom regarding the rights of man, which means that we transport passengers without discrimination. If Mr. Rushdie wished to travel with Air France, he would not be refused.” It was an enraging piece of one-upmanship, morally superior, flourishing
les droits de l'homme
in our faces (as if the French had invented them!), and above all,
right.
In public life, the French are just as hypocritical as we are; the difference would seem to be that their hypocrisy pays lip-service to idealism, whereas ours pays lip-service to pragmatism.

Such differences ought to survive in the name of biodiversity. We are losing human languages almost as fast as we are losing animal species; we are also losing something much less quantifiable, human difference. “Oh, but surely, Monsieur Barnes, you are still quite entirely British, and I am no less
Franche, hein?”
Yes—that's to say, no. I may and do seem very British to a French interlocutor, and s/he thoroughly French to me. But I am less British than my father, and he less than my grandfather. So what, Monsieur Barnes? Your grandfather, you tell me, went abroad only once in his life, to France for the First World War; your father was engaged in the second. Surely a bit of globalization and European homogenization is a small price to pay for the fact that you managed to dodge the third? Isn't the last half-century of European peace something to celebrate? And here you are, complaining that French shopkeepers no longer take four-hour lunch-breaks, and what's that High Street store doing just down the road from the Beaubourg?

Yes—that's to say, no. The European Union seems nowadays to be less about friendly difference than about centralization of power and commercial harmonization: in other words, creating an ever-bigger pool of docile consumers for transnational corporations. When the British were enthusiastically helping the Americans to bomb Serbia, one of the slimiest arguments around was: “This proves the European project has an ethical as well as an economic dimension.” (Well, don't forget all those rebuilding contracts after the war …) In its imperial days, Britain was a great standardizer and centralizer; now it likes to present itself as a bulwark against over-zealous federalism. To the European eye, this is no more than self-interested idling. So what's your position, Monsieur Barnes? Europhile but Bureausceptic, internationalist but culturally protectionist, liberal-left, green. Not many votes there,
mon ami.
My brother is a philosophical anarchist with an ambition “not to live anywhere.” My mother described herself as true blue. My father was taciturn with liberal tendencies. Some political biodiversity there, at least.

In 1997 I went to France with my parents for the last time. For once I was taking them, rather than the other way round. My mother had died a few months previously, my father in 1992, and I was transporting their ashes towards a final scattering on the Côte Atlantique. We took the Eurostar, familiar to me, but a first time for them. I had the necessary “out-of-England” certificate for my mother, but had failed to get one for my father, so watched the x-ray machine at Waterloo Station with a certain apprehension. In a holdall, beneath a couple of shirts, my father was in the traditional oak casket, my mother in a heavy-duty plastic screw-top jar. I was doing the first leg to Paris; my niece would transport them to the Indre, then my brother and his wife would take them on westwards.

In my Paris hotel room I switched my parents to a plastic shoulder-bag from a London clothes shop (it had at least a French name:
Les Deux Zèbres).
I tested for weight: heavy still, but the bag seemed solid. My niece lived up in the 18e. When I got to her apartment block, the entryphone had broken down; I was let in, but unable to receive directions to the apartment. Inside was a gloomy, half-lit hallway. My parents were pulling at my shoulder. I groped for names on the first couple of doors: both were blank. There was a prevailing smell of boiled cabbage from the crepuscular stairwell. I realized that I would have to trudge round every floor scouring every door for my niece's name. At this moment the lanyard on my shoulder-bag ripped through the plastic, and I dropped my parents. They hit the concrete floor so noisily that I was sure one if not both of their containers must have split open. I imagined myself hand-scooping the ashes back in. I imagined some neighbour's poked face, and my scrabbling explanation,
“Er, voici ma mère, et, er, ici, c'est mon père.”

It was, as I failed to realize at the time, a small Flaubertian moment. In 1846 the novelist helped bury his younger sister Caroline. The gravediggers at the Cimetière Monumental in Rouen had made the hole too narrow. After shaking and pulling at the coffin, after attacking it with spades and crowbars, they resorted to stamping on it “just above Caroline's head” to force it down. Flaubert described all this in a letter to his friend Maxime Du Camp: “I was as tearless as a tombstone, but seething with anger. I wanted to tell you this, thinking that it would give you pleasure. You are sufficiently intelligent, and love me enough, to understand that word ‘pleasure,’ which would make a bourgeois laugh.”

JULIAN BARNES

August 2001

(1)
An Englishman Abroad

A typical Ultimate Peasant

In the spring of 1998 I was on a walking holiday in the Vercors, south of Grenoble. On a perfect May morning, two of us were traversing a high upland plateau just belo w the snowline. Turf impeccable enough to re-lay fairways at Augusta was crossed by thin, pure streams; here, in boastful profusion—Nature showing what it can do when left alone—were a billion gentians, edelweiss, dwarf narcissi, buttercups, and orchids; once or twice, against the melting snow, we glimpsed what was probably a small fox, depending on how big marmots grow. A padlocked shack denoted a provisional human presence in what was otherwise a swathe of changeless France. In the late afternoon we descended into a small village, some forty buildings jammed between two hills. As the grass track gave way to semi-asphalt, we encountered another item from changeless France: a peasant pasturing his goats on the public hedge-side. He was ancient, rubicund, and toothless, accompanied by a psychotically hostile dog of mixed ancestry, and as he told us the long story of his rheumatism he would, as punctuation, give the nearest goat a dust-raising thwack with his stick.

The village was as you might expect: a church, a desiccated water fountain, a former school still bearing a faded rf on its forehead, a boulangerie open one hour a day, an auberge, two walkers' hostels. Some of the houses had been freshly made over, with parchment stone and custard mortar; others were
in restauro.
Over dinner we asked Madame how many
indigènes
still lived in the village. Just the one, she replied: the peasant whom we had met. He may look eighty, she said, but was only about sixty—“And yet he lives a very
bio,
a very
écolo,
life.” We agreed that you could have too much
bio
and
écolo
in your life. Was drink the cause of his seeming dilapidation? No, not this one: it was his cousin, the village's penultimate peasant, who used to drink. Or at least he did until the day he went down the mountain to vote, and someone in a café told him he didn't look too well. They took him to the hospital for observation, he couldn't drink for eight days, and promptly died.

The surviving Ultimate Peasant followed a rigidly structured life: he rose at five, and went up the mountain to collect dead wood for a fire ritually lit at five in the evening, every day, regardless of season or weather. He lived with and off his goats; he had a certain amount of money, but didn't spend anything. He had never married. “I suppose he could get a Russian,” said Madame. There is still a bachelors' fête not too far away, where women traditionally came for husbands. Years ago they would be Portuguese or Spanish; nowadays they are Polish or Russian. But this solution is improbable. In the meantime, everyone in the village does errands for the Ultimate One (“It took him fifteen years to say Thank You”). He doesn't drive and—according to the incomers— couldn't live through the winter without their help. At some point he, the last
indigène,
will die, and then this village, which seemed on first acquaintance so authentic, will become completely false— or, if you prefer, will finish reinventing itself for the modern world. It will be sustained by tourism rather than agriculture; be reliant on cars and out-of-town shopping; and be virtually uninhabited in winter. A seasonal village, repeating from time to time a few of the communal acts which its originators and their successors performed out of necessity and belief and habit.

La France profonde
has disappeared within our century; or at least is now graspable only in tainted form. Edith Wharton saw this about to happen as she roared through France with Henry James at her side. “The trivial motorist,” as she described herself, was to prove the forerunner of other destructive agents: war, peace, communications technology, mass tourism, the industrialization of agriculture, the unfettered free market, Americanization, Eurification, greed, short-termism, complacent ahistoricism.

The old nation-states of Europe are gradually being homogenized into herdable groups of international consumers separated only by language. Is this a fair—or, at least, the only—price to pay for the avoidance of those recidivist spasms of continent-wide warfare which marked our previous history? Perhaps. Would the Ultimate Peasant prefer to start his life now, with an easier workload, social benefits, subventions from Brussels, satellite porn, and an off-road vehicle? Perhaps. But both the lowering of ambition among the European leadership and the lowering of distinctiveness among the European populations have to be noted. We give character to our own particular region of dullness by certain totemic cults and, where necessary, by the invention of tradition. The French are as good at this as anybody; and the Francophile's dismay at such permitted dilution of the Gallic essence is the greater because the French have always made the largest claims, both for themselves and for Europe.

The historian Richard Cobb first went to France in 1935, to a Paris which still (just) contained Edith Wharton, though what fascinated him was popular life rather than literary pilgrimage: the street vendors and flame-swallowers, the strolling musicians and prostitutes, the manacled strong men enjoying
“droit de pavé
on the immensely wide pavement”; the world of obscure bars and tiny, four-table restaurants; the exuberance, volubility, and cheerful anarchy of the daily scene; and behind it all, that enviable ease with pleasure which so attracts the repressed English. He delighted in the pungent Métro and the convivial
plate-forme d'autobus
(a Cobb leitmotif, along with leprous Utrillo walls and the
faux manoir nor-mand),
while asserting, and proving, that a city could only be truly known if explored on foot.