France After Sarkozy: What Can Hollande Do?

Nicholas Sarkozy came to power five years ago heralded as France's New Man who would yoke France to global capitalism by separating it from its social model.  He jogged and he paddled New Hampshire canoes without his shirt.   I thought then that it would turn out badly, and it has.  The new Socialist president François Hollande faces a mess when he steps out of his democratically little car.

Sarkozy was a classic wedge politician, campaigning against France's supposedly grasping unruly immigrants and its allegedly violent racial minorities in 2007 as he had while minister of the interior under Chirac. Sarkozy brought one of America's most repulsive and ineffective ideas into French politics, which is that solidarity damages the economy and retards society's wealth creators, who should rule by natural right.  The practical effects in France have been a minor-key echo of their destructive impact in the U.S.. Sarkozy presided over the piecemeal degradation of two of the cornerstones of French society, its strict, high-quality public schools and its affordable, high-quality health care system. 

Woes of the French Government

Here's the best English-language potboiler version of the scandal plaguing the Sarkozy presidency in France.  An equally important story are the ongoing existence of actual independent journalism - in this case, the web-based paper Mediapart - amidst the profession's clientalist servility to the powerful ones who grant it access (witness the anger of the Washington press core at the revelations of Gen. McCrystal's contempt for the civilian government that came from a relative outsider working for the Rolling Stone).

The other big story is of course the extent to which the Sarkozy government works mainly for the rich and connected.  Huge majorities are already upset enough by the absence of real economic accomplishments among contemporary governments -- Sarkozy's approval ratings have been below 50% for a year or two. They are even more infuriated by the prospect of the minister of finance, whose wife handles financial matters for Mme. Bettancourt, working to help the richest woman in France with a fortune of $17-20 billion reduce her tax burden. 

Governments look increasingly like court servants of the each country's elite, in a throwback to the medieval period. The passivity of the middle-classes in effect supports the forces that jeapordize these classes's survival.

Unneeded Leader #109

At the Vatican last month, Nicolas Sarkozy talked about "France's Christian roots" and invoked the "Church's contribution to clarifying our choices and building our future." This prompted the major French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur to interview the head of the French freemasons, who denounced le Jogger's efforts to "reintroduce religious morality to the heart of society" and to ignore France's other "roots" in ancient Greece, Renaissance humanism, and the Enlightenment. It was nice to read an establishment defense of secularity and non-religious visions of the advancement of humanity. It's too bad it's hard to read similar things in the US mainstream press.

Le Jogger is doing what leaders everywhere are doing: reinforcing a society of deference. This is what post-democracy looks like.

Le J has built a miniature deference society in the French press, much of which is controlled by his close associates. They praised his enormous candor and transparency for putting his new girlfriend Carla Bruni on display on his holiday in Egypt, forgetting, as le J had planned, their denunciations of his lack of transparency on issues of business and governance, such as the "arms for hostages" deal that freed the Bulgarian nurses in Libya.

The US press overdoes it on le J's merits as well. Adam Gopnik made him into the paragon of human courage in his New Yorker profile late last summer (issue of August 27), and wrongly claimed all France admired the bravely of vacationing in New Hampshire and "talking calmly over a hot dog" to Bush. In fact, most of France thought he was desperate, proven when his pals at Paris-Match airbrushed his love-handles out of the canoe shots.

When he stopped revering Sarkozy for a second, Gopnik made a good point about the overall decline in the status of the US.

The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but American is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

And he concludes that the Reign du Jogger "may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era."

As if. The philosopher Marcel Gauchet offered a different version of post-America in an interview in Marianne (issue of 24-30 November). Even as the world faces a form of globalization driven by economics rather than imperial politics (as in 1900), the US has relaunched an imperialism that isn't so different from the kind the world saw then. We can overstate the problem a little bit this way, Gauchet continued: Germany was a leading nation that lost the first round of globalization, and became the problem country of the 20th century. And the United States, which dreams of an empire in a world that is no longer made for them, could become the problem country of the 21st.

What does Gauchet mean, the "dream of empire"? This dream has a means and an end.

The end is to have a share of world wealth much larger than the US share of the world population - this is a goal codified by George Keenan in the 1940s and has stayed close to the heart of US policy since.

The means are many. But the one playing out in the US, Pakistan, and elsewhere is to discredit the multipolar social majority - Pakistan's federal judges, Benazir Bhutto's middle-class technocrats, US "liberals" and college-educated types, the non-aligned US working class, the pro-social left, the many small political parties in France. This preempts any possible alliance between the educated and uneducated, or the "middle" and working classes, or the employed and unemployed, or the regular economy and the "planet of slums."

With a majoritarian alliance made impossible, minority rule settles in, whether constitutional and supported with fraud around the edges - Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004 - or by massive fraud and/or military coups, as in Kenya and Pakistan. Governance becomes a matter of cowboys vs. Indians - you are with us or with the terrorists - and this justifies not only the use of force but the grossly unjust appropriation of general resources.

Minority rule and growing inequality are major forty-year trends in the West and not just elsewhere - as any issue of Paris-Match will tell you!

The Leader of the French World

I grew up in Los Angeles, which has great mountains and beaches but a pretty damn crappy city-scape. To see great trees and amazing buildings and have the feeling of luxurious calm they can give, my friend's dads would occasionally take us to some mogul party in Bel-Air. There you'd see Luxembourg- Gardens style glories of eternal summer, the peaceful abundance of a Fragonard painting , maintained by invisible faires hailing from Oaxaca and Guanajuato.

Manmade L.A. beauty was mostly private. There were a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright houses open to the public, about a half-hour of driving from each other and the La Brea Tar Pits, and the County Art Museum as we then called it. Mostly for aesthetic pleasure we went to Griffith Park Observatory or to the beach. UCLA's Powell library was a nice Moorish-Spanish fantasy, but they didn't like kids.

More generally, the parks were pathetic. The streets were one-story shop fronts built with ten-year write-offs in mind. The later upgrades, driven by Hollywood migrations west towards the ocean to beat the smog, meant that shopping strips got taller and the Gaps looked like a 1980s bank, as did fancy restaurants like Chaya Venice. Picture today's Santa Monica Promenade, morphed from the 3rd st concrete strip. I do like the airplane hanger Broadway Deli but stuff like that doesn't add up to a visible city.

Paris is the contrast. The beauty is public. There's the cafe in the courtyard of the Louvre, rue Mouffetard, the square around the Mairie du 14e, Butee aux Cailles, my own ordinary rue Pascal (pictured above), le Jardin des Plantes, all the cutsy little shopping streets in the 6e that American jam because it's human scale Disney "Main Street" of people face to face next to amazing clothes and perfect courtyards only its real. There are hundreds of places that look great and are there for everybody. I almost feel dumb saying it, it's so simple. Beauty for free. Public beauty. And it's really great.

The leader of the French world, aka Le Jogger, aka President Rupture - he likes private beauty. The weekly magazine Marianne has a story this week elaborating Sarko's obvious love of the rich and famous. The article is on the "Fricocrates" now surrounding and controlling a president who can't help but worship them ("fric" = dough as in money). For some reason, Marianne is about the only major national publication that seems upset by Le J's plutocracy dressed up as vigorous renewal. The magazine isn't radical, but it is independent. This reminds me that the major magazine voice on this subject in the States has been Lewis Lapham, the longtime and recently retired editor of Harpers who hated socialism but not quite as much as he hated fat-cat pseudo-democracy. Independence. Hmm, could be important.

The Marianne article is by Laurent Mauduit, who names lots of the huge money surrounding Sarkozy. Most of them don't mean much outside of France (or inside for that matter) - you've seen Bouygues, as in Martin Bouygues, on one of the Tour de France teams if you watch cycling, and he's a huge mogul in communications among other things. Most of Le J's big names are top 20 in the wealth-o-meter - several billions of euros, which is a lot of dollars as the dollar heads towards the value of the yen.

Some tidbits:

• a Sarkozy insider, Henri Guaino, happily compares Sarkozy's vision to that of the Second Empire, the dictatorship of Napoleon III which Guaino describes as an era of modernization and economic renewal.
  
• Le J is, we must repeat, a drooling dog around big money. Saluting his wealthy friend Stephane Richard in a state building, the Ministry of the Interior Place Beauvau, he said, 'you are rich, you have a beautiful house. . .You have made a fortune. Perhaps at some later point this too will happen to me."
• One critic correctly says, these guys Sarkozy loves, they aren't really the entrepreneurs but the very rich. He actually prefers the inheritors of wealth to the empire-builders.

This last is the crucial point. The wealthy explain their money as the natural reward of value that they have personally created. But le J's wealthy didn't actually create much value.

One could generalize the point to the financial sector in general, which once could say is grossly overpaid for sometimes providing liquidity but mostly taking a huge cut of raising the price of everything. The Second Empire that Guaino praises was also a period of unhinged speculation in real estate and finance that arguably drained money from France's industrial development, which never came close to that of England or Germany. One of the victims of the power of investors over corporations today has been research and development, which companies have cut to the bone to help keep their stock price high.

We're supposed to be innovation economies. But does the Right's leading lights like Le J really support innovation? That's different from inflating asset values and collecting gigantic broker fees.

I can't prove it (yet), but innovation has everything to do with how you feel in a beautiful place that is entirely public.