It’s very old, and quite well known, but I suppose it’s conceivable that there’s some Virtual Stoa reader out there who’s never read Paul Jennings’s “Report on Resistantialism”. So, if you’re that person, here it is.
I wrote not so long ago that I quite liked the new Le Monde-sized Guardian, but preferred the French paper’s six columns to the Anglo rag’s five. And now Le Monde has had a makeover, reducing the column-count to five, and generally making the paper look more like tehgrauniad. Gah.
See above.
Friends of the Republican Calendar: note that we’re cycling through the end-of-year holidays prior to Year CCXIV beginning on (Gregorian) 22 September.
Around the same time that we acquired two small kittens, we also decided that would get a daily newspaper delivered, too, and after discussions, we settled on Le Monde. On the whole, it’s been a good read, surprising me from time to time with in-depth features on, for example, Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb, and with far more coverage of Martinique, French Canada and parts of North Africa than you tend to get in the UK papers. The great lack is that there hasn’t been much on the Ashes this Summer, which you would have thought any major journal of record would have wanted to cover at some length. But no, nothing — until today’s paper (or, rather, the paper with today’s date on it, that was published in Paris around lunchtime yesterday). Now, on the front page we can read about the “exploits d’Andrew Flintoff, star de la batte, qui a chassé le footballeur David Beckham de son piédestal” or Kevin Pietersen, with his “tatouage sur le biceps des trois lions de l’équipe d’Angleterre”, and learn important details about the game, such as the fact that a wicket is “une sorte de trépied”, which isn’t how I’ve ever really thought of it, but I suppose it makes sense. It’s all very fine, except for this detail: cricket, we are told, is a game “proche du base-ball”. Grr.
I should know the answer, but I don’t, and people I’ve asked don’t know the answer, either. What does the French Senate do, how is it (s)elected, and would it matter one way or the other if it didn’t exist?
(Fortunately, I’ve never had to teach introductory French politics, so I don’t feel too guilty at not knowing the answer to this one. I’ll probably google for it after posting this and the surrounding bits and pieces. But if anyone wants to leap in, please do.)
Concentrating on being in Paris also meant catching up with some dead socialists, with visits to the cemeteries at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse. (This site is great, by the way.)
Père-Lachaise has (among others) Louis Blanc, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Pierre Bourdieu, Édouard Daladier, Jules Guesde, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Imre Nagy memorial, Marceau Pivert, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, Maurice Thorez (died 11th July, and therefore a casualty of the Hiatus of the Stoa), Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright, and, no doubt, many more, as well as being home to the Mur des Fédérés and the site of many moving monuments memorialising the dead of the Nazi camps and various résistants.
(Question: there’s almost no Jewish iconography on the memorials to the Jewish dead. I assume that’s got something to do with French republicanism, but if anyone’s got any specific details on just why those monuments look the way they do, I’d be very interested to hear them.)
Montparnasse, which I hadn’t visited before, and which is also delightful, is home to what remains of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as (moving beyond the bounds of socialists proper) Tristan Tzara, Emile Durkheim, Alfred Dreyfus and - much more recently - Susan Sontag, whose grave is marked by flowers, but has no headstone set in place just yet. Perhaps one is on the way.
I’m writing from Paris, where I’ll be spending most of July.
By pure coincidence (yes, really), I travelled out here on the first day of the Tour de France, and I’ll be at the Gare du Nord to catch my train home while the riders are busy circling the Champs Elysées at its very end, and in between, I’ll be reading a lot of copies of L’Equipe.
There is an internet connection where I’m staying (as well as a magnificent panoramic view of the centre of the town from this 13th-floor apartment, which I’m told will provide splendid views of Bastille Day fireworks), but it’s a slow dial-up, and I suspect I’ll be doing and thinking about other things, so expect light-to-non-existent postings at the VS, and go and read other people’s pages instead.
You can read about it here (and scroll down).
We have a Tim-Collins-Watch over here, and months later the man loses his seat. It’s replaced by a Laurent-Fabius-Watch, and within days he’s expelled from the Socialists’ executive committee. The Curse of the Stoa hasn’t been this potent since the rugby world cup.
About half of this piece by David Lawday in the New Statesman discusses the Stoa’s éléphant du choix.
In an effort to kick-start the Laurent-Fabius-Watch, in which the Virtual Stoa will track its man all the way from referendum victory in 2005 to the Elysée in 2007 (or not, as the case may be), Dan sends me a summary of the latest developments in the French Press:
* Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a likely rival for the socialist nomination for President in 2007 is sticking the knife in with a suggestion in an
interview with Le Monde that Fabius should be removed from his position as no.2 in the Socialist party hierarchy.
* Meanwhile, Claude Bartolone, a Fabius sidekick, is counter-suggesting that he should be promoted to lead the PS’s preparations for 2007 — though stopping just short of calling for him to replace Fran�ois Hollande as the Party’s First Secretary — according to this piece in Libération, which has the splendid phrase in it, “A troika of elephants”.
More soon, probably.
Paul Anderson writes:
“Jeez! I’ve been looking for Brit blog comment on the French vote all day and there’s sweet FA from the Brit left blogs.”
Perhaps he missed posts shortly before the vote from Phil and Jamie, and posts after the result was clear came from Lenin, DML, Raj and SIAW. And if PA’s version of the left side of the World of Blogs extends to rightist maniacs like Pollard, then he’s got a bunch of idiotic posts up, too.So there’s a bit more than sweet FA. The two reasons there might be a bit less than there otherwise would have been are (i) that the result wasn’t a surprise, so anyone who had anything to say could have said it days ago and (ii) it was a Bank Holiday today, and bloggerage is always down on Bank Holidays, for reasons which might reflect badly on the work ethic of Brit Bloggers.
I’m just curious as to which blogs PA was visiting in order to draw his blanks? It’s pretty obvious that Harry’s has little interest in this kind of thing, when there’s Hitchens and Galloway to blather on about, and Matt T’s on holiday.
In any case, even if there wasn’t any comment (which there was), why is it any kind of failure if those of us who write on weblogs don’t choose to write about the same kinds of things that journalists get paid to write about? We’re interested in other things. Maybe those other things are more interesting. Maybe there really isn’t that much to say.
In his solemn broadcast last week, a few days before the referendum, President Chirac said that it was important that the vote not be a plebiscite on whether the electorate was satisfied with the right-wing French government, but should be a vote about the future of Europe, etc.
But what if he had gone on to add that the best way to ensure this outcome was for the President [*] to promise to resign in the event of a “Oui” vote? Then the Europhiles would have been pleased — they would have won their referendum and then got to blame either the Dutch or the British for derailing the constitution after one of the later votes; the French Right would have been pleased — it could have secured a Presidential majority for Sarkozy in the ensuing elections, got Chirac out of the way, and continued in power; and Chirac himself really ought to have been pleased — he could present himself as going out on a high, on a point of principle, bringing his exceptionally long political career to a more dignified conclusion than he deserves.
It would have been utterly unlike Chirac to do something like that, of course, though I’m not sure whether dislike of Sarkozy, fear of prosecution, or the simple pleasure of holding office would have been his chief reason for not doing it. But it would have made things more interesting.
[*] I assume that Chirac refers to himself in the third person, but perhaps he doesn’t.
Also to Dan in Paris, who has just sent me a copy of Fabius: Les brûlures d’une ambition by Jean-Gabriel Fredet. He writes on the accompanying postcard:
“I came across this in a 2nd hand bookshop and thought you would appreciate it! Now that that other iconic figure Tim Collins has had his political career abruptly terminated, you can turn your attention to following Fabius’ bid for the presidency in 2007! (But you may not have long… I am reliably informed that if there is a “Yes” vote in the referendum on 29 May his career will be over, having gambled everything on the “No” campaign.)”
The deep background to this, which Dan knows, is that I once sat next to M. Fabius at an event in Paris when I was an undergraduate, and very good company he was, too. (A glance at an old diary says 29 April 1994.) But I don’t know, Dan: would it be wise, so soon after Mr Collins crashes and burns, to translate my affections so quickly back to this old flame, Fabius? (Brûlures, indeed.) Does the world of blogs really need a Laurent-Fabius-Watch, anyway?
Y213 begins…
Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Yes, it’s the leap-year day in the arithmetical version of the French Revolutionary Calendar that this blogsite enjoys thanks to the expert engineering of Steve over at Very True Things.
Phersu has noted the occasion, too in a footnote to a post from earlier today:
(Via Portique virtuel, qui rappelle qu’aujourd’hui est dans une version simplifiée et homogénéisée au calendrier grégorien du calendrier de Fabre d’Eglantine le “Jour de la révolution” de l’An CCXII - le Jour de la Révolution est un jour qui n’existe que les années bissextiles, toutes les “Franciades” de quatre ans, le dernier “jour complémentaire” de l’année, demain nous serons le 1er Vendémiaire An 213 après la proclamation de la Ière République).
I couldn’t put it better myself.I’ve always maintained that the EU made the wrong choice when it embraced the French Revolutionary Metric System (”The Revolution has given the People the Metre!”) but rejected the French Revolutionary Calendar. Clearly the way forward is to combine old English weights and measures with the harmonious enjoyment of of the passage of time that the Republican Calendar makes possible.
But I suspect I’m still in a minority on this one.
As you’ll already have noticed, the annual cycle of French Republican holidays has begun, those days which don’t belong to the regular months of the Republican Year, but come between the end of Fructidor and the start of Vendémiaire, which kicks off the new year. Today, for example, is the Jour de la Vertu.
But it’s more exciting than usual this year. Steve, who once upon a time wrote the code for the excellent French Republican calendar which adorns this blog (and who now has his own blog) has emailed to remind me that this is a French Republican Leap Year, with the result that next Tuesday is the quadrennial (and, in the circumstances, entirely aptly named) Jour de la Révolution!
Be sure to indulge in suitable celebrations.
I’m delighted to see that I’m not the only blogger to have installed a French Revolutionary Calendar: the folks at Republikeinse have one, too (on the left-hand menubar, scroll down a bit), along with a Roman republican calendar, too. (More details on this kind of thing here.)
Careful readers will notice that their calendar and mine are a day out of sync with one another, which probably calls for explanation. The Virtual Stoa’s calendar is based on the mathematical version of the French Repbulican Calendar, which was approved but (alas) never implemented. Republikeinse probably have a script to generate dates according to the astronomical version of the calendar, which was the one actually in force in France in the 1790s, etc.
It’s good to clear that one up.
Probably.
A reader writes…
Talking of Arlette [ = Arlette Laguiller, aka “Arlette the starlet”, as we had been — Ed.] , you may (judging from your postings to the Virtual Stoa) be interested to hear that Arlette has now indicated that she is in favour of gay marriage (though is apparently not so keen on adoption by gay couples).Debate has recently resurfaced on this issue in France, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn (one of your, ahem, favourite French politician Laurent Fabius’ main rivals for the PS nomination for presidential candidate in 2007), last week attempted to make a bold policy move to jostle for position among his rival ‘elephants’ by pronouncing in favour of gay marriage. No�l Mam�re, who you may recall was the Green candidate for president in 2002, has also declared that he is going to carry out such a ceremony in the town of Begles (near Bordeaux), of which he is mayor, on - I think - June 6.
There is, therefore, a cartoon on the front of the current issue of Le Canard Enchain� (which I bought yesterday in the departure lounge of one of the terminals of Charles de Gaulle airport which has not yet collapsed) which has Arlette saying (instead of her standard opening line ‘Travailleuses, Travailleurs’), ‘Travailleurs, Travailleurs, Travailleuses, Travailleuses, mariez-vous’.
The reference to Fabius is a reference to the fact that many years ago, and for odd reasons, I once found myself sat next to him at some function or other. And “elephant” is still one of my favourite political jargon words.
Scott Martens provides essential commentary on yesterday’s vote in the French national assembly. More from the Normblog here; and readers with access to an academic library might want to dig out Cecile Laborde, “On Republican Toleration”, Constellations, vol.9, no.2, June 2002, pp.167-183, which does as good a job as anything I’ve read of explaining what’s going on in the politics of headscarves in language that we Anglophone liberal types can understand.
Scott also raises the question — also posed to me yesterday by my friend Naunihal (an occasional commenter at the Virtual Stoa), who is rightly concerned about the impact of the new law on French Sikhs — about whether either the Conseil d’État in Paris or the court in Strasbourg would strike down the new law. I don’t know anything about the former, and not much about the latter, but I’d be very surprised if it did: Articles 10 (freedom of thought and conscience), 11 (freedom of expression), 14 (right of education), 21 (non-discrimination) and 22 (cultural diversity) would be in play here, but given the way they’re phrased, and the characteristic get-out clauses which allow the court to defer to national politics, I strongly suspect that the impeccable drafting skills of French government lawyers will manage to produce a law which Strasbourg will have to swallow. It’s just a hunch, though I’d be interested if anyone has a knowledgeable opinion to replace this rather random guesswork.
Finally: a query suggested by something Naunihal said: is it the case that French “secular” schools are careful to observe Christian holidays? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
A correspondent writes to the Virtual Stoa:
Just a tiny point about the French republican calendar: your converter is a day out at the moment (presumably it’s using a different leap year rule). Here’s the real thing.
Thanks for this: you’re right that the Calendar installed at the top of this page is a little different from the one over at the site you link to, and right to guess that it has something to do with where the leap years come in.The page that you linked to presents the astrological version of the Calendar, which was the one that the French actually used for about a decade; the Calendar on this page is based on the 1795 amendment proposed by the Montagnard Gilbert Romme (and, I think, approved but never implemented), which aimed to regularise the pattern of leap years and — crucially — to forgo the need to calculate the precise date of the equinox each year.
On this mathematical model, every fourth year was to be a leap year, except every hundredth year, which was not to be a leap year, except for every four hundredth year, which was to be a leap year; and in addition to all of this (which is, so far, along the lines of the Gregorian Calendar), a three-day correction was called for every four thousand years, and each of these four thousand-year cycles was to be known as a “franciade millaire”. And that’s where the radical improvement over the Gregorian Calendar, over the very long haul, comes in.
The bit of script which generated this calendar was originally written by my friend Steve to turn Star Trek Stardates into and out of Gregorian dates, and he did the conversion job himself to turn the code into an altogether more progressive Revolutionary Calendar Generator. I’m forever in his debt.
… and let’s get it right this year: it’s Frimaire! (See the Calendar above).
Sharp-eyed francophone reader Phersu pointed out to me in a comment attached to the post below that this month was entered in my French Republican Calendar Database as “Frigidaire”, which is a mistake now that has been cycling round for several years, and is almost certainly entirely my stupid fault. (Steve: if you read this you might want to correct your own FRCD.)
Frigidaire is not a month in the World’s Finest Calendar, but a brand of refrigerator.
And since I’m going to be spending the weekend in front of the telly, rather than in front of the computer screen, I should point out now (see above) that tomorrow is one of the most famous dates in the French Republican calendar — the 18th of Brumaire…
