16 March 2017
It’s The Bogeyman, Stupid!
Playing the blame-game in France.
By Richard Pooley
For a few hours last Wednesday night and Thursday morning the majority of the French were able to escape from their presidential election and enjoy one of their greatest pastimes: watching those haughty Parisians making fools of themselves. Football club Paris Saint-Germain, universally known in acronym-loving France as PSG, had won the first leg of their Champions League match with Barcelona 4-0. Surely not even mighty Messi and co. could overcome this in the second-leg on Wednesday night? But they did. In the final seven minutes of the match, the Catalonians scored three goals to win 6-5 on aggregate. Few, if any, of the PSG players are from Paris but this did not stop non-Parisians chortling at the humiliation of their country’s richest and, domestically, most successful club.
Back in the election itself the Republican Party continued in their efforts to turn what once looked like certain victory into probable defeat. At around mid-day last Friday someone used the French Republican Party’s Twitter account to tweet a cartoon of Emmanuel Macron. It depicted him as having a hooked nose and wearing a black top hat. He was also holding a red sickle, with which he was cutting a cigar. It was a crude reminder of the anti-Semitic, anti-Communist propaganda of the Nazis and their French sympathisers and collaborators before and during World War Two.
There was an immediate outcry from across the French political spectrum. The tweet was removed within a couple hours. However, it was not until just before nine o’clock the following night – over thirty hours later – that the Republican Party’s candidate, François Fillon, issued an apology. He said that the cartoon promoted “an ideology I have always fought against” and that he would find and punish the offenders. Some journalists and politicians, including members of his own party, have criticised him for being too restrained in his condemnation. He certainly has not shown the same level of anger as we have seen him employ towards those who accuse him of corruption. And I have yet to read of anyone criticising him for the time it took him to respond.
What has surprised me is how surprised French commentators are by the revelation that anti-Semitism is still so prevalent in their society. In an article in Shaw Sheet last month I quoted a comment Fillon had made about Macron: “Macron will have problems. He has too much money mania.” I went on to say: “I fear there is a whiff of anti-Semitism about that remark. Macron is not Jewish but he didn’t work for any old bank; he worked for Rothschild & Co.” Shortly afterwards a French friend told me that he did not understand why I thought that Fillon was anti-Semitic. We were watching a rugby match at the time and it became difficult for us to discuss the matter in much greater depth. Even so, I got the impression that my friend felt that what anti-Semitism there was in France was confined to members of the Front National and to Islamic extremists in the banlieues of Paris and Marseilles.
In another part of France this week other bogeymen were being blamed for France’s ills – the foreign media and, yes, those Parisian know-it-alls. The mayor of Albi, a city of 49,000 people north-east of Toulouse, inveighed against an article which had recently appeared in the New York Times. An American journalist, Adam Nossiter, had portrayed her city, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for its vast red-brick cathedral and Toulouse-Lautrec museum, as an impoverished, down-at-heel ghost town, devoid of life and hope. What right, the mayor thundered, did this foreigner have to traduce her beloved city? The mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, is a member of the Republican Party.
Naturally, I read the offending article – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/europe/france-albi-french-towns-fading.html
Perhaps the mayor’s English is not very good. If so, she should have taken the trouble to have had the article translated. The journalist knows and loves France well. He came to live in Paris with his family when he was four years old. He first visited Albi with his girlfriend in 1982 and “was captivated” by its beauty and vibrancy. He’s been back several times since. On his return in January this year he found but one bakery and no butcher in the city centre. Also gone from the centre are the last elementary school (closed in 2013), the last toy shop (closed last year) and the last independent grocery.
Whole streets that he could remember lined with shops full of customers are now empty of people; many of the shops are closed and boarded up. Cafes and bars, which once acted as the focal points for each community within the city, had disappeared. Moreover he did not walk around on his own. With him was a Parisian, Florian Jourdain, who since arriving in Albi four years ago has been writing a blog about the hollowing-out of the city. When the national press publicised extracts from his blog last year, Albi’s shopkeepers arranged a demonstration against him. He finds it necessary to walk around town in a hood in order not to be recognised.
A recent government report on France’s small cities and large towns has confirmed what Albi’s merchants and mayor don’t want to admit: “… the devitalisation of urban centres is worrying… the shops contribute and shape so much of city life.” People still need to buy stuff, of course, but now they go to the shopping centres and malls which lie on the edge of places like Albi. I live 30 minutes south of Brive-la-Gaillarde, a town the same size as Albi, and an hour and a quarter south of Limoges (population: 139,000). The former’s centre still bustles and has even attracted several new shops recently. This may be because it remains what it has always been, a processor of agricultural products and a logistical centre. Cynics suggest that it has been helped by the fact that two French presidents – François Hollande and Jacques Chirac – have had their political bases in the Corrèze, the department in which Brive is the largest town. When my wife and I first visited Limoges in 2012 we had exactly the same reaction as Mr Nossiter did in Albi. The place seemed to be dying from the head down. We have been back many times since and grown to like it. But away from the still-vibrant covered market and its attendant cafes and restaurants at the top of the city there is decline and decay.
Mr Nossiter’s requests to interview Madame Guiraud-Chaumeil were initially rejected. When, a week later, he spoke to her on the phone, Albi’s mayor had this to say about Monsieur Jourdain: “He is an extraterrestrial, who came here to get talked about.”
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