France and the culture wars
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Christopher Caldwell
NOT until this month, when Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, did most of her fellow citizens discover that she was living in self-imposed political exile. In an interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles last summer, in between her reflections on Tolstoy and Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, the subject of being black in France came up. Ms NDiaye's Frenchness is much like Barack Obama's Americanness. Her African father left her a foreign-sounding name but returned home before he could have much influence over her upbringing. She grew up in a world that she describes as "100 per cent French". Her own acquaintance with Africa was acquired only as an adult.
Nor has racism been much of a problem for her personally, Ms NDiaye says, since as a novelist she does not apply for jobs. But she resents the frequency with which her brother, a historian, gets stopped by the police, and blames it on an "atmosphere of surveillance and vulgarity" that has arisen in France since Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007. "I find that France monstrous," she told Les Inrocks. "The fact that we decided to live in Berlin two years ago is not unrelated to that. We left just after the elections, in large part because of Sarkozy, although I realise it may sound snobby to say so."
It sounded worse than snobby to Eric Raoult, the mayor of the Paris suburb of Le Raincy and a member of the National Assembly for Mr Sarkozy's UMP party. Soon after Ms NDiaye won her prize, Mr Raoult wrote to Frédéric Mitterrand, the minister of culture, arguing that Ms NDiaye had now acquired, like it or not, a "duty of discretion".
She had become a kind of French cultural ambassador. She could think as she liked, Mr Raoult continued, but "a public figure who carries the literary flag of France has a responsibility to show a certain respect towards our institutions".
Mr Raoult is wrong about this, and it is easy to see his error. He is mistaking the personality and policies of Mr Sarkozy (which Ms NDiaye deplores and is within her rights to deplore) for the constitutional integrity of the French state (from which all French citizens' individual rights derive, and which can therefore take precedence over individual rights when the two come into conflict). Ms NDiaye has attacked the former, never the latter.
It was at this point, though, that the affair turned into an American-style "culture war".
Ms NDiaye has acquired a host of grandstanding "allies" ready to defend her from various vaguely identified threats to her free speech. For Ms NDiaye's defenders, it is not enough that Mr Raoult be wrong - he must be Hitler. Le Monde ran a punning headline suggesting that the UMP was choosing the voix (or votes) of the National Front over the voix (or voice) of a free novelist. Below it, a writer named Christian Salmon flew into a rhetorical rage about Mr Raoult's urging that Ms NDiaye behave more ambassadorially now that "we" have given her the Goncourt.
"One must understand what this 'we' conceals and what it excludes," Salmon wrote. "Marie NDiaye obviously is not part of it. 'We'? Who is this 'We'? 'We whites'? 'We, the right'? 'We, the west'?" But Ms NDiaye is obviously part of Mr Raoult's "we". If she were not, there would be no point in arguing with her. If she were not, she could hardly be an "ambassador".
Last year's Goncourt winner, Atiq Rahimi, was just as upset. He asked: "What is going on in France when a politician is allowed to question the choice of a literary jury?" But Mr Raoult has the same right to free speech as anybody else. He did not lose it by being elected to the National Assembly.
Ms NDiaye herself described Mr Raoult as being "at the edge of the extreme right". This is a serious charge. It is also nonsense. Mr Raoult has been the country's minister of integration. Le Raincy, the suburb of which he is mayor, is increasingly ethnically mixed. The area was rocked by anti-Semitic gang attacks starting in 2002, and Mr Raoult was among only a handful of French politicians at the time who confronted them in earnest, rather than explaining them away. His role in the episode was heroic.
He was criticised recently for sympathising with Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali after a correspondent from Le Monde was expelled from the country, but it is worth noting that he made these remarks on Berbère Télévision, a Paris-based network for North Africans, hardly a tribune for the fringe right.
The Goncourt jury member Françoise Chandernagor, while deploring Raoult's letter, rightly complained that a climate of moralistic denunciation was becoming common currency among all political tendencies in France. Consider the critic Anne Laffeter, who compared Raoult's outspokenness to remarks on homosexuality made by his fellow UMP deputy Christian Vanneste. She argued that both were members of the same "hard right" that had got over its "complexes" and grown increasingly assertive.
But wait: Mr Vanneste was prosecuted in 2006 for saying, on the floor of the National Assembly, that he found heterosexuality "superior to homosexuality on the moral level".
His freedom of speech has been infringed far more concretely than Ms NDiaye's - and for an opinion that until recently was a society-wide consensus and may secretly still be. One need not share Mr Vanneste's views, but he deserves the support of free-speech advocates, not their mockery. Those in France who care about freedom of speech probably have as much to fear from Ms NDiaye's allies as from her enemies.
FT Syndication Service
NOT until this month, when Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, did most of her fellow citizens discover that she was living in self-imposed political exile. In an interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles last summer, in between her reflections on Tolstoy and Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, the subject of being black in France came up. Ms NDiaye's Frenchness is much like Barack Obama's Americanness. Her African father left her a foreign-sounding name but returned home before he could have much influence over her upbringing. She grew up in a world that she describes as "100 per cent French". Her own acquaintance with Africa was acquired only as an adult.
Nor has racism been much of a problem for her personally, Ms NDiaye says, since as a novelist she does not apply for jobs. But she resents the frequency with which her brother, a historian, gets stopped by the police, and blames it on an "atmosphere of surveillance and vulgarity" that has arisen in France since Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007. "I find that France monstrous," she told Les Inrocks. "The fact that we decided to live in Berlin two years ago is not unrelated to that. We left just after the elections, in large part because of Sarkozy, although I realise it may sound snobby to say so."
It sounded worse than snobby to Eric Raoult, the mayor of the Paris suburb of Le Raincy and a member of the National Assembly for Mr Sarkozy's UMP party. Soon after Ms NDiaye won her prize, Mr Raoult wrote to Frédéric Mitterrand, the minister of culture, arguing that Ms NDiaye had now acquired, like it or not, a "duty of discretion".
She had become a kind of French cultural ambassador. She could think as she liked, Mr Raoult continued, but "a public figure who carries the literary flag of France has a responsibility to show a certain respect towards our institutions".
Mr Raoult is wrong about this, and it is easy to see his error. He is mistaking the personality and policies of Mr Sarkozy (which Ms NDiaye deplores and is within her rights to deplore) for the constitutional integrity of the French state (from which all French citizens' individual rights derive, and which can therefore take precedence over individual rights when the two come into conflict). Ms NDiaye has attacked the former, never the latter.
It was at this point, though, that the affair turned into an American-style "culture war".
Ms NDiaye has acquired a host of grandstanding "allies" ready to defend her from various vaguely identified threats to her free speech. For Ms NDiaye's defenders, it is not enough that Mr Raoult be wrong - he must be Hitler. Le Monde ran a punning headline suggesting that the UMP was choosing the voix (or votes) of the National Front over the voix (or voice) of a free novelist. Below it, a writer named Christian Salmon flew into a rhetorical rage about Mr Raoult's urging that Ms NDiaye behave more ambassadorially now that "we" have given her the Goncourt.
"One must understand what this 'we' conceals and what it excludes," Salmon wrote. "Marie NDiaye obviously is not part of it. 'We'? Who is this 'We'? 'We whites'? 'We, the right'? 'We, the west'?" But Ms NDiaye is obviously part of Mr Raoult's "we". If she were not, there would be no point in arguing with her. If she were not, she could hardly be an "ambassador".
Last year's Goncourt winner, Atiq Rahimi, was just as upset. He asked: "What is going on in France when a politician is allowed to question the choice of a literary jury?" But Mr Raoult has the same right to free speech as anybody else. He did not lose it by being elected to the National Assembly.
Ms NDiaye herself described Mr Raoult as being "at the edge of the extreme right". This is a serious charge. It is also nonsense. Mr Raoult has been the country's minister of integration. Le Raincy, the suburb of which he is mayor, is increasingly ethnically mixed. The area was rocked by anti-Semitic gang attacks starting in 2002, and Mr Raoult was among only a handful of French politicians at the time who confronted them in earnest, rather than explaining them away. His role in the episode was heroic.
He was criticised recently for sympathising with Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali after a correspondent from Le Monde was expelled from the country, but it is worth noting that he made these remarks on Berbère Télévision, a Paris-based network for North Africans, hardly a tribune for the fringe right.
The Goncourt jury member Françoise Chandernagor, while deploring Raoult's letter, rightly complained that a climate of moralistic denunciation was becoming common currency among all political tendencies in France. Consider the critic Anne Laffeter, who compared Raoult's outspokenness to remarks on homosexuality made by his fellow UMP deputy Christian Vanneste. She argued that both were members of the same "hard right" that had got over its "complexes" and grown increasingly assertive.
But wait: Mr Vanneste was prosecuted in 2006 for saying, on the floor of the National Assembly, that he found heterosexuality "superior to homosexuality on the moral level".
His freedom of speech has been infringed far more concretely than Ms NDiaye's - and for an opinion that until recently was a society-wide consensus and may secretly still be. One need not share Mr Vanneste's views, but he deserves the support of free-speech advocates, not their mockery. Those in France who care about freedom of speech probably have as much to fear from Ms NDiaye's allies as from her enemies.
FT Syndication Service