The Virtual Stoa

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Last Friday afternoon, as it happens, I tried to walk up to the top of Monte Nuvolone above Bellagio on Lake Como. I didn’t succeed, partly because I didn’t leave myself quite enough time, and partly because at one point I spectacularly missed the path, and it took quite a long time to find it again, much further up the slope. But while wandering through the fairly dark woods looking for the path again - in, significantly, my thirty-fifth year, I realised I was enjoying what can only be called an authentic Dante moment.

People tell me I should go off next in search of an authentic Petrarch moment in an attempt on Mont Ventoux, but those who know me better will know that if I ever do go up that mountain it won’t be by way of tribute to an Italian poet.

Was this year the first time the French have entered a song with Anglo lyrics in the Eurovision song contest?

(You can tell that I’m brooding over the issues that matter.)

A bunch of my friends went off to Helsinki last week. They said they were going to attend the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium of Political Research. But were they just too embarrassed to say that that they had tickets to Eurovision 2007? It’d be nice to think there were several analytical political theorists in the audience. Perhaps one of them was holding the much-filmed “Where Is Andorra?” placard?

Just as the separation of Montenegro and Serbia came suspiciously close to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Tony Blair’s resignation was clearly timed to try to increase the chances of the Eurovision electorate casting any votes at all for the UK entry, but in the end only Ireland (7) and Malta (douze points!) co-operated. (Perhaps we should hand out the George Cross to foreign countries more liberally than we do.) Still, I was glad Scooch got something. 2003’s Jemini deserved nothing, and Flying the Flag For You was far better than that. Ukraine was robbed, though.

Is all of Eurovision ever on Youtube? There seems to quite a lot of it, anyway, as searching for things like “Eurovision 1957” is generating quite a lot of clips. But I won’t plough through them just yet.

And if we are stuck in the era of Eastern domination and shameless regional bloc-voting, please can all the North African countries in Eurovision get over their hang-ups about Israel, at least to the extent of sending in their official entries, in the interests of living in a more multi-polar Eurovision large geographical area? And the Italians should return to the fray. Just because they’ve got their very own San Remo festival doesn’t mean the rest of us think it’s OK to opt out of Eurovision.

(I was surprised Sweden didn’t do better.)

Over here [thanks , NB]

It’s half-time during France vs Scotland in Paris, and there’s a distinct possibility that Ireland will end the day Six Nations Champions, if Scotland can hold on, and that the Irish cricketers may beat Pakistan in the World Cup: Pakistan are 73-6 off 22.3 overs. My goodness.

I’m trying not to get excited by the World Cup, because one-day cricket is a silly game (unless it’s 20-20 cricket, which pushes silliness to the limit, and becomes sensible, again, or something), but there’s been a satisfying amount of drama for a competition that’s still only a few days old.

UPDATE [5.15pm]: Bugger. Still, Pakistan are 112 for 8 (34.2 overs).

UPDATE [7.20pm]: Still, I always like it when Wales beats England.

Le Figaro (and a cracking photo here), Le Monde, Associated Press.

(Haven’t read any myself, though some of my friends say he’s pretty good.)

UPDATE [7.3.2007]: Steven Poole in the Guardian.

Over here.

Quite a good piece in the English Spiegel magazine.

As exceptionally long-term Stoa-readers will remember, I don’t really recognise Oxford as a part of the “South East”, but as far as elections to the European Parliament are concerned, we’re part of the “South East”, and although I do my best not to pay attention to who my MEPs are and what they’re up to, I couldn’t avoid noticing today that I’m now represented in the European Parliament by a rancid lunatic.

Ashley Mote — elected on the swivel-eyed loons ticket, but even UKIP doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore — has just signed up for the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty grouping, which looks — at first and second glance, which is all I’ve given it so far — to be a bunch of fascists, Holocaust deniers and assorted rancid scum.

So he’ll sit in the Parliament alongside Alessandra Mussolini, a chap from the Austrian Freedom Party, two Le Pens, some Bulgarian kiddy hack, another Italian fascist (who claims his views on the Holocaust have been ‘misunderstood’, diddums), and various Romanian nationalists and Flemish separatists.

The Bodleian’s got one of his books: I’ll have a look at it soon.

Yuck.

The Stoa’s Fabius correspondent writes, very possibly for the last time:

Chris’s One-Time Dining Companion Not to be French President in 2007 Shock

Ah, so it was not to be. The results from the Parti Socialiste’s primaries show the Stoa’s candidate Laurent Fabius came in third place with 18.7% of the vote, behind Ségolène Royal on 60.7% and Dominique Strauss-Kahn on 20.6%. This means the second round of voting in which Fabius had hoped to come through will not take place, and Fabius has rallied to support Royal for president in the grand combat against the Right and extreme Right.

Still, as you can see from this handy map on Le Monde’s website, at least Fabius managed to come in first place in two departments (Haute-Normandie, where his constituency is, and Haute-Corse), which is more than can be said for DSK.

Plus this may not be the end of Fabius’ presidential ambitions forever. As he has himself pointed out, by the time of the next election in 2012, he will only be the same age as Mitterrand was when first elected in 1981… (A cartoon in this week’s Le Canard Enchaîné satirically suggested that in the event of failing to be selected as PS candidate Fabius may instead grow a José Bové-style moustache in a bid to be adopted as the unified candidate of the anti-capitalist hard Left!)

Nevertheless, the outcome of last night’s vote means that the Laurent-Fabius-Watch will be taking an extended sabbatical, at least for the time being.

The complete Laurent-Fabius-Watch is here.

Long before he published his fine book about football in Eastern Europe, Behind the Curtain, Jonathan Wilson was writing for The Voice of the Turtle (currently in hibernation). Here’s his review of Puskas on Puskas: The Life and Times of a Footballing Legend, from 1999.

UPDATE [2.30pm]: I see that Jonathan also supplied something of an obit for tehgraun.

The Stoa’s PS correspondent writes…

Le Marathon Qui Se Transforme en Sprint

(That’s how the French TV news this morning put it). Well the campaign has enters its final days and your correspondent, on a brief visit to Paris, is filing this report from an internet café in the building in Belleville where Edith Piaf was born… There is little sign of Fabius-mania on the streets, just a few posters for a ‘grand meeting’ with rival candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn. But recent opinion polls suggest dramatic improvements in Fabius’ rating, up from 6 or 7 per cent to an astonishing 9 or 10 or even
11 per cent! That’s less than 50 points behind Ségolène Royal, suggesting the crowds of ecstatic fabiusiens seen shouting “Lau-rent Pres-i-dent” on the TV news last night - and Fabius’ own prediction that he will come second in Thursday’s first round and go on to win the second round - may not be as far from reality as cynical readers may suspect. Indeed, since none of the polls have been taken among Socialist Party members, the only people who can vote in this election, there is good reason to think they underestimate his support. While Royal and DSK have suggested policies to appeal to right-wing voters, Fabius has namechecked many Dead Socialists in calling for a return to the fundamentals of the “party of Jaurès”. Given the disproportionate number of schoolteachers among the party’s members, he has also taken advantage of a video circulating on the internet in which Royal suggests that teachers are not working hard enough as they have time to give private tuition. “It’s false, false, absolutely false!”.

Commuters picking up their copies of Métro at the RER station this morning were greeted by an exclusive interview with Fabius - illustrated by six photos taken in quck succession of him making a series of hand gestures - in which he declares his main message to activists is “Be free! Don’t ask who other people are voting for but what you want youself for your country and the Left”.

On that note, we await the results on Friday…

The Virtual Stoa’s Laurent Fabius Correspondent writes…

Yes, it’s two down and one to go of the televised debates between the Stoa’s man Laurent Fabius and rival éléphants Ségolène Royal and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as their battle for the Socialist nomination for French President approaches its November dénouement. More exciting still, your correspondent’s recent computer upgrade means he can now watch the debates in their entirety on www.laurent-fabius.net.

The first debate on 17 October (available for viewing here) saw Fabius — fresh from declaring to a public meeting six days earlier that “In a few months we will have a new President of the Republic. There is a one in two chance it will be a Socialist. And an important chance that it will be me.” — announce that “I am above all a militant“, as he declared combating injustice and inequality to be his top priority. In a rare break with the UK media’s concentration on Royal alone, one contributor to Radio 4’s The World Tonight cruelly commented that Fabius came across as a grand bourgeois trying to reinvent himself as an extreme leftist.

The second debate on 24 October (available for viewing here — there is an edited transcript in the print version of today’s Le Monde, but that leaves out the all-important visual clues) was especially noteworthy for the way Fabius carried out what Libération described as a “bazooka” attack on Royal’s proposal for randomly selected citizen’s juries as dangerous populism, that he argues will play into the hands of the extreme right and undermine the principle of universal suffrage.

Also watch how Fabius’ hand gestures become ever more vigorous as he attacks Royal for going against agreed party policies with various gimmicky recent announcements. Needing no lessons in popular dissatisfaction with the system — as he reminds us, Fabius represents a workers’ constituency — he denounces Royal’s suggestion that anyone who disagrees with her ideas is out of touch with reality and thinks all is well with France. Then he takes a well-aimed swipe at Blair-style private finance initatives, ridiculing Strauss-Kahn’s apparent recent suggestion that the chair of nuclear physics at the Sorbonne could be sponsored by EDF!

Moving on, Fabius makes his own proposals for extended after-school support, full student grants (pointing out that students who work during their studies are 40% more likely to fail) and the legalisation of gay marriage and adoption. A moving story of a Congolese accountant who has lived in France for 22 years and whose wife, the mother of a French citizen, is facing deportation, on the grounds that the father could look after his son alone, bolsters Fabius’ call, contra Royal, for a large-scale regularisation of sans-papiers. “France is France, for God’s sake!”

(Le Monde’s TV critic unkindly suggests however that Fabius was laying it on a bit here: “This is always the problem with Laurent Fabius. It’s when he wants to show himself to be close to people that he seems the least sincere”.)

Fabius’ website boasts that he alone was responsible for introducing two themes into the debate which would otherwise have been excluded: public services (many hand gestures again, as he blames cuts in public services for last years’ riots) and secularism (he was the only one of the three to support the ban on religious symbols in schools). Finally, his summing up announced that a Fabius presidency would bring about urgent social measures (not to mention the relaunch of “social Europe”) as well as a shift in powers from a monarchical presidency to parliament.

The final debate, focusing on Europe and foreign policy, takes place on 7 November.

Meanwhile, those of you who enjoy the retro feel of French presidential elections (Stopped being prime minister twenty years ago? No problem) may be pleased to hear that Arlette Laguiller will indeed be standing, whatever the outcome of the tortuous discussions about a unified candidate of the “left of the left”. Along with Jean-Marie Le Pen, that makes at least two 2007 candidates who first stood for president in 1974!

If there are any Calendar Bores out there, can he or she (but, more likely, he) tell me how often the French Republican New Year and the Jewish New Year coincide? It seems that from sunset this evening until midnight Paris time we have overlapping New Year festivities, which I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before.

(Will French Republican Jews celebrate with especial vigour this evening, or do they worry that that would compromise their French Republican identity? I like to think that they will.)

It is, of course, Décade I, Primidi de Vendémiaire de l’Année CCXV de la Révolution today, in the ongoing calendrical celebration of the people’s triumph over monarchical tyranny that is the French Republican Calendar.

… to my brother Michael’s new blog, Closely Watched DVDs, devoted to the world of Czech cinema.

Hurry over there now to learn the handy Czech phrase, “Tomorrow I’ll wake up and scald myself with tea”*, and do remember to go back every day in January, when he’ll be presenting his Jan Švankmajer blog-retrospective.

[* The only Czech phrase I can really remember from the time I tried to learn the language is the equally handy, "I think there's going to be a revolution in the West soon."]

Please note (above) that today is “Jour de la raison”, as we’re into the annual cycle of holidays that closes out the French Republican Calendrical year, so can we stop talking like pirates and start being rational.

(Don’t worry: it’s just for one day.)

Nothing on Tim Collins recently, but the Stoa’s indefatigable Laurent Fabius correspondent writes:

Yes, there are only three months left before we find out whether Chris’ one-time dining companion Laurent Fabius will do battle with Nicolas Sarkozy for Western Europe’s most powerful elected post! A feverish autumn of political in-fighting is expected to follow as Fabius attempts to face down rival contenders Ségolène Royal, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jack Lang and (possibly) Lionel Jospin and François Hollande for the Socialist Party’s candidature for President of the Republic. (Well, it’s already seen Jospin in tears at the party’s recent summer school in La Rochelle.) Nominations close on 3 October; the first round of voting is on 16 November and the second on 23 November; the winner will be officially ratified on 2 December. May the best éléphant win…

In the meantime, Laurent-Fabius-Watch wishes its man a happy 60th birthday. Will passing this milestone give him the necessary gravitas to be a présidentiable? (Let’s not forget that in 2002 the first, second and third placed candidates were aged 69, 73 and 64 respectively). Or will he fall victim to rampant ageism? Find out more in the L’Express interview which marked the occasion. What’s more, you can also hear - and see - Fabius talk about the impact May ‘68 had on his generation, in a special birthday interview for BBC World available online.

I like ‘présidentiable‘. It’s almost as good as papabille.

One of the Virtual Stoa’s French Affairs Correspondents writes:

“Following the long-awaited news on that other political Titan Tim Collins CBE, we present an update on Laurent Fabius, Chris’s old acquaintance who is, twenty years after he stopped being French prime minister, seeking to be the Socialist Party’s candidate for President of the Republic in 2007.”Readers may like to be reminded that, the Stoa’s man is still - despite media excitement around rival contender S�gol�ne Royal, and despite our period of silence on the subject since January - very much in the race.

“He even has his own website, complete with regular podcasts! And although I lack the appropriate technology to listen to such things, it would appear from the title that the following effort will be of particular interest to Stoa readers in the UK: Pour gagner en 2007, la gauche ne peut pas prendre pour mod�le Tony Blair.”

I’d rather taken my eye of the bald-headed �l�phant, so it’s good to have an update.

Good news! Also good news here, too.

The VS’s French Politics Correspondent writes:

“I had a look at the Stoa yesterday and noticed that the Dead Socialist Watch didn’t seem to have reported the tenth anniversary of the death of Fran�ois Mitterrand! (I was in Paris last week and a distinctly uncritical nostalgia is everywhere … you even can go on a Mitterrand-themed walk around Paris to observe the sumptuous tableaux put up for the anniversary outside, amongst other Mitterrand-related locations, the Panth�on, the Biblioth�que Nationale and the Institut du Monde Arabe…).

“May I suggest that the occasion be marked (and Laurent-Fabius-Watch updated) by publishing Fabius’ latest tribute to Mitterrand? (My translation from Lib�ration, 7-8 January 2006):”

“Fran�ois Mitterrand, who defined himself first of all as a free man, thought that the experience of one person never really works for others. But however he most certainly taught me a lot, on personal and political levels. The most obvious of his lessons is the power of will, the necessity of rallying the Left together and the decisive role of Europe: all that is so well known that it is becoming banal to speak of it. He also taught us several other things. I cite, in no particular order: the primacy of culture over economics, the pre-eminence of the historical and strategic vision of France over making media coups, the fact that nothing in politics is worth as much as having territorial roots, the attention to the right word and the useless epiphet, the faith in friendship, the necessity of thinking globally and acting locally. And, above all, the human dimension of all action. “Life is judo”, “When you want, you can”, “Politics is saying things to people”, “Don’t take every fly flying past for an idea”, “He who has betrayed will betray”, “We must move the lines”: these were some of his favourite phrases, carriers of a philosophical vision - at the same time volontarist and sceptical - and of a political and human practice. Without having looked for it, he taught us that we should beware of courtesans, of habits, of excessive powers and of too long terms of office. Ah! I was almost going to forget: he taught us that at least three essential qualities are needed for a good president: experience, competence and endurance. The man of state must know how to anticipate and to resist. It is not totally useless to remember this.”

Thanks for that, that’s very fine, and, yes, apologies for not posting on this Dead Socialist; I was away over the weekend.

My favourite expert on the politics of immigration and racism in modern France, Daniel Gordon, writes to the Virtual Stoa…

*** Neither having been in France during the riots, nor having yet studied their causes in any depth (as a historian, I know less about the banlieue of today than that of thirty to forty years ago), I was reluctant to join the ranks of the armchair pundits offering instant expertise on the riots to suit their pre-existing agendas.

You know the formula: this proves that the republican model of integration has failed and needs to be replaced forthwith with British / American multiculturalism — that the French social model has failed and needs a dose of neo-liberalism — that mass immigration is a mistake — that Muslims do / do not want to integrate — that ethnic relations would be greatly improved with the addition of some hyphens to how people describe their identities — that immigrants to Europe should be more aspirational, like the author’s Bolivian cleaning lady in the US — that France is on the brink of a civil war from which Le Pen will emerge victorious — that Nicolas Sarkozy has / has not blown it for the 2007 election — that the Right in power has spent too little / too much on the banlieue — that the Left in power was too laxiste — that Azouz Begag should not have allowed himself to become the government’s token Beur — that the revolution is just around the corner — that there is a Eurabian conspiracy — that Britain should not give up its rebate on the EU budget — delete according to taste; preferably support your view with as little evidence as possible; and try to move the argument as far as you can manage from the actual concerns of people living in the places affected.

I’m reminded of the youth from an estate near Lyons, who said after similar riots in 1981:

“For us, the riots were first of all the expression of bring fed up, nobody could guess in advance that it would go so far; the media have gone on about it for better or worse, but afterwards no longer can anyone say they didn’t know what we were living through. It was only afterwards that the lefties and the intellectuals descended on us to explain to the guys the real meaning, as they put it, of the riots. For us, it was just words, and anyway, we didn’t understand much of what they said. It wasn’t them who were in the shit, it isn’t their mates who were in the slammer. They quickly understood, and some of them were even beaten up, it was perhaps stupid, but people need to understand that we are fed up with everyone.”– Farid of Les Minguettes, quoted in Adil Jazouli, Les années banlieues, 1992, p. 24.

So it’s probably safer to adopt the old line about the French Revolution, that it’s too soon to tell. Since this general area is meant to be “my subject”, however, I thought it only fair to the various people who have asked me what my opinion is that it’s about time I had one.Let me first make the unoriginal, but necessary, point that there is always a tendency, given that the English-speaking media generally only take much interest in France when there’s a crisis, for the undeniably dramatic side of events like these to be overplayed. (Of course, the same happens in the other direction when France takes a glance northwards to get in a state about communautarisme in Britain). This obscures the lived reality that the banlieue is full of normal people trying to get on with unexceptional lives in sometimes difficult circumstances, regardless of their ethnic origin, and will still be once the TV crews have moved on.

And secondly, let me offer a few historical observations to try to put these events in some kind of perspective. This is especially necessary given the unfortunate tendency in much commentary to portray immigration as something new and external (despite the fact that North African labour migration to France dates back to before the First World War).

For example, the old canard that European immigrants to early twentieth century France were easy to integrate, whereas non-Europeans today are not, has recently been unquestioningly repeated in the Guardian, amongst other places. This is surprising given that this is a favourite theme of the xenophobic right in France (I once attended a local residents meeting in Nice on an entirely unrelated issue, where for some reason a member of the audience started to rant about North Africans not having the same “republican fibre” as Poles and Italians), and moreover that as long ago as the 1980s the research of historians like Gérard Noiriel showed this view to be highly questionable: there were anti-Italian pogroms in 1893 for example.

An additional problem is that the English-speaking media have too literally translated the French debate, referring to “immigrant neighbourhoods” and “immigrant youths” when they would not use such terms to describe areas of the UK with high concentrations of ethnic minorities descended from migrations of some decades ago, or the people that live in them.

To make another historical observation, the spectre hauting all this is of course the Algerian War. 7 November’s decision to declare a state of emergency under the law of 3 April 1955 - when the FLN insurgency was getting going in Algeria - was a quite extraordinary move, which one day, the de Villepin government may have cause to regret. Apart from the fact that the state of emergency directly fulfils a demand pressed over the preceding week by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine, the historian Benjamin Stora observes that it will “revive unhappy memories” amongst survivors of the period. After all, this was a measure that — leaving aside a farcical incident when it was used to ban The Bridge on The River Kwai — led to the setting up of internment camps in mainland France. Most notoriously, the last time that a curfew was applied in Paris, in October 1961, two hundred Algerians were beaten to death when the FLN organised a peaceful demonstration to break the curfew. Then, the curfew applied only to “Fran�ais Musulmans d�Alg�rie“; today it applies only to certain districts. And once again, calls have been made for demonstrations in breach the curfew…

(It�s also interesting that � at least according to Le Monde of 9 November - the driving force behind the measure was de Villepin, normally portrayed as the foppish soft cop, while Sarkozy, normally portrayed as the Action Man hard cop, had his doubts.)

And whenever there is an upheaval in France, watching out for the first person to exclaim, “It�s just like 1968 all over again” is a bit like waiting for someone to spot the first cuckoo of summer. Right on cue, it didn�t take long for commentators to make the comparison.

Since, just to pick a few examples from the last decade, this was also said about the strikes of November-December 1995, various protests of the unemployed in the late Nineties, the anti-Le Pen demonstrations between the two rounds of the 2002 presidential election, and the mobilisation for a No vote in the 2005 referendum on the EU constitution, we�d be right to be sceptical about such claims, unless and until the events in the banlieue spark off massive unrest in other parts of society.

It’s interesting that the ‘68 comparison was made with banlieue youth unrest as far back as the 1981 riots in the suburbs of Lyons � about the time, in fact, when the ‘68 period was definitively ending. ‘68 was a product of the postwar economic boom, of industrial society, of optimism, when Marxism was intellectually hegemonic and the far right marginal. It would be surprising if today�s much more fractured, pessimistic, individualised postindustrial society produced quite the same conjuncture of forces in revolt. France today, as ever, has plenty of social conflicts but they are rather isolated from one another - though admittedly the same was true of the situation immediately before May ‘68. I was struck that Eric Raoult, the first mayor to declare a curfew (on 7 November, pre-empting the government declaration), chose to accompany it with a declaration that it was not “a war of the rich against the poor and that Marx and Lenin have been dead a long time” � make of that what you will!

This is not to say there aren�t points in common with 1968:

1) Cars being destroyed (though it should be said that on a smaller scale cars are burnt the whole time: apparently there were 17,000 this year even before the current riots began). Since the ever-efficient Renseignements G�n�raux is good at recording the exact number of cars burnt each night across the whole of French territory, we can use this as a comparator. (Do they have teams of officials going round with clipboards to record this? � in fact they even manage to record that 28,000 dustbins were set on fire over the same period as the 17,000 cars, both displayed in a helpful pie-chart in Le Monde.) On the official figures, more cars were being destroyed per night at the height of the current unrest than on the Night of the Barricades, 10-11 May 1968 � which is remarkable, even allowing for the fact that the raw material, so to speak, is to hand in greater quantities now than then with higher levels of car ownership.

2) Sarko�s use of the word “racaille” to describe the rioters has parallels with the use of the word “p�gre” by government officials to describe criminal / lumpenproletariat elements taking part in the rioting in ‘68, a word which similarly led to an upsurge in violence.

3) Finally, Sarko�s announcement on 9 November that foreign nationals involved in rioting are to be deported is in a long tradition of expulsions at time of crisis. From the bitter strikes of 1947-48 to the delightfully named anti-communist crackdown “Operation Bol�ro-Paprika” of 1950, from May ‘68 to the immigrant hostels’ rent strikes of the late 70s, Interior Ministers have often tried to end a movement by ostentatiously deporting some foreign “troublemakers”, a denunciation from the Ligue des Droits de l�Homme for this acting as proof that they have fulfilled their job description. (By the way, how do you apply to be a “hardline Interior Minister”? Do you go to the same agency that has vacancies for “elephants” and “big beasts”?) ***