Beneath these surface agitations, France was undergoing deep and rapid change. It turned out that some of Ben Abbes’s ideas had nothing to do with Islam: during a press conference he declared (to general bafflement) that he was profoundly influenced by distributism. He had actually said so before, several times, on the campaign trail, but since journalists have a natural tendency to ignore what they don’t understand, no one had paid attention and he’d let it drop. Now that he was a sitting president, the reporters were forced to do their homework. So, over the next few weeks, the public learned that distributism was an English economic theory espoused at the turn of the last century by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. It was meant as a ‘third way’, neither capitalism nor communism – a sort of state capitalism, if you like. Its central idea was to do away with the separation between capital and labour. For distributists, the basic economic unit was the family business; when in certain sectors consolidation became necessary, the government had to ensure that the workers remained the owners and managers of their own enterprise.
Distributism, Ben Abbes later explained, was perfectly compatible with the teachings of Islam. This was not self-evident, since Chesterton and Belloc were known during their lifetimes as outspoken Catholic polemicists. It soon became clear that although their doctrine was avowedly anti-capitalist, Brussels wouldn’t have much to worry about. The main practical measures adopted by the new government were, on the one hand, to end state subsidies for big business – which Brussels had always fought in the name of free trade – and, on the other, to adopt policies that favoured craftsmen and small business owners. These measures were an instant hit: for decades, every young professional in the country had dreamed of starting his own business, or at least of becoming his own boss. The measures also reflected changes in the national economy: despite the costly efforts to save heavy industry in France, factories continued to close, one after the other, so farmers and craftsmen managed to compete and even, as they say, to grow their market share.
These developments were turning France into a new kind of society, but it took a young sociologist, Daniel Da Silva, to articulate the change. His groundbreaking essay was ironically entitled ‘One Day, Son, All This Will Be Yours’. The subtitle was more straightforward: ‘Towards a Reason-Based Family’. In the introduction, Da Silva expressed his debt to an essay by the philosopher Pascal Bruckner, published a decade earlier, in which Bruckner had argued that marriage for love was a failure; he called for a return to marriage based on reason. Da Silva maintained that family ties, especially the tie between father and son, cannot be based on love, only on the transmission of practical knowledge and on inheritance. The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomisation of society, and that society could only be rebuilt if industry was based on a small-business model. In the past, arguments against romance may have enjoyed a
succès de scandale
, but before Da Silva the media never took them seriously, thanks to the universal consensus concerning individual liberty, the mystery of love, and so on. Da Silva was quick on his feet, an excellent debater, and basically indifferent to political or religious ideology. By sticking to his area of expertise – the evolution of family structures and their effects on the birth rate in Western societies – he kept from being swallowed up by his right-wing admirers, and instead became a leader in the debates that had begun to form (albeit very slowly, very gradually, without great animus, in a general atmosphere of tacit and lazy acceptance) around the domestic policies of Mohammed Ben Abbes.
My own family history was a perfect illustration of Da Silva’s arguments. As for love, it had never seemed more remote. The miracle of my first visit to Rachida and Luisa had failed to produce a sequel, and once more my cock had become an organ as efficient as it was unfeeling. I left their studio in a state of near despair, knowing that I would probably never see them again, and that my viable options were slipping ever more quickly through my fingers, leaving me, as Huysmans would have put it, ‘unmoved and dry’.
Not long after, a cold front several thousand kilometres long approached Western Europe. After stagnating for a few days over the British Isles, the polar air mass swept across France overnight, bringing unseasonably low temperatures.
My body, no longer a source of pleasure, retained its capacity for suffering, and within a few days I realised that, for maybe the tenth time in three years, I’d fallen victim to dyshidrosis. Tiny pustules spread across the soles of my feet and between my toes, merging to form one oozing, raw mass. At the dermatologist’s office I was told that the rash had been aggravated by an opportunistic fungal infection. It was treatable, but the treatment took a long time, and I shouldn’t expect to see any improvement for several weeks. In the meantime, I woke up every night in pain. I had to scratch for hours, until I bled, to get any relief. I couldn’t believe that my toes, those plump, absurd little pieces of flesh, could be ravaged by such piercing torments.
One night, after one of these orgies of scratching, I got up and walked, bleeding, to the bay window. It was three in the morning, but as always in Paris, the sky wasn’t completely dark. From my window I could see ten high-rises, a few hundred medium-sized buildings. A few thousand apartments in all, a few thousand
households
– which by now tended to mean two people or, more and more often, just one. Most of the cells were dark. I had no more reason to kill myself than most of these people did. On reflection, maybe even less. My life was marked by real intellectual achievements. In a certain milieu – granted, a very small one – I was known and even respected. Financially, I had nothing to complain about. Until I died I was guaranteed a generous income, twice the national average, without having to do any work. And yet I knew I was close to suicide, not out of despair or even any special sadness, simply from the degradation of ‘the set of functions that resist death’, in Bichat’s formulation. The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. I was incapable of living for myself, and who else did I have to live for? Humanity didn’t interest me – it disgusted me, actually. I didn’t think of human beings as my brothers, especially not when I looked at some particular subset of human beings, such as the French, or my former colleagues. And yet, in an unpleasant way, I couldn’t help seeing that these human beings were just like me, and it was this very resemblance that made me avoid them. I should have found a woman to marry. That was the classic, time-honoured solution. A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity. She gives life a certain perfume of exoticism. Huysmans would have posed the problem in almost exactly the same terms. Not much had changed since then, except in an incidental and negative way, through slow erosion and levelling – but no doubt even this levelling, these changes, had been greatly exaggerated. In the end Huysmans had taken another path, he had chosen the more radical exoticism of
religion
; but that path still left me just as perplexed as the other.
A few more months went by. My dyshidrosis eventually went away, but it was replaced almost immediately by an extremely violent outbreak of haemorrhoids. The weather grew colder and colder, my movements more and more predictable: one outing per week to the Géant Casino, for stocking up on food and for conversation, and a daily outing to the mailbox to collect the books I ordered on Amazon.
Even so, I got through the holidays without excessive despair. The year before, I had still received a few Happy New Year emails – from Alice, in particular, and a few university colleagues. This year, for the first time, nobody wrote.
The night of 19 January, I burst into unexpected, uncontrollable tears. In the morning, as dawn rose over Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, I decided to return to Ligugé Abbey, where Huysmans had taken his monastic vows.
The TGV to Poitiers was delayed indefinitely, the announcement said, and railway security guards fanned out over the platforms so that no one would be tempted to light a cigarette. The trip was beginning badly, in other words, and new inconveniences awaited me on the train. The luggage area was even smaller than it had been the last time I took the TGV. It was now practically non-existent. Suitcases and bags lay piled up in the corridors, so that moving from one carriage to another – previously the main attraction of travel by rail – was difficult and soon became impossible. The Servair buffet car, which took me twenty-five minutes to get to, held more disappointment: short as the menu was, most of the items were unavailable. The national rail service and Servair apologised for any inconvenience. I had to settle for a quinoa salad with balsamic dressing and an Italian sparkling water. At the station I’d bought a
Libération
, more or less in desperation. One of the articles ended up catching my eye around the time we reached Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. Apparently, this distributism of the new president’s wasn’t as harmless as everyone had thought. One pillar of Chesterton and Belloc’s philosophy was the principle of subsidiarity: that no entity (social, financial or political) could take charge of any function if it could be handled by a smaller entity. Pope Pius XI defined the principle in his encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno
: ‘Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and to commit to the community at large what private enterprise and endeavour can accomplish, so it is likewise unjust and a gravely harmful disturbance of right order to turn over to a greater society of higher rank functions and services which can be performed by lesser bodies on a lower plane.’ In this case, the function newly considered a ‘disturbance of right order’ was the welfare state. What could be more beautiful, Ben Abbes enthused in his latest speech, than to see welfare where it belonged, in the warm setting of the nuclear family. At the time, the ‘warm setting of the nuclear family’ was still mainly a
programme
, but in concrete terms, the new budget projected an 85 per cent reduction in welfare benefits over the next three years.
The really surprising thing was that he’d lost none of his hypnotic magic. Even now, his projects met with no serious opposition. The left had always been able to make cuts in social spending that the right never could, but this was even more true of the Muslim Party. In the international pages, I saw that the negotiations to bring Algeria and Tunisia into the EU were proceeding apace, and that by the end of the year both countries would, with Morocco, become European states. Preliminary talks had begun with Lebanon and Egypt.
Things started to look up when we got to Poitiers. There were plenty of taxis, and the driver didn’t blink when I asked him to take me to Ligugé Abbey. He was middle-aged and heavyset, with soft, thoughtful eyes. He drove his small Toyota very carefully. Every week, he told me, people came from all over the world to stay there, in the oldest Christian monastery in the West. Just last week he’d driven a famous American actor – he couldn’t think of his name, but he knew he’d seen him in the movies. (A brief enquiry established that the person he had in mind was probably, although not certainly, Brad Pitt.) He trusted that I would have a very pleasant stay: it was so peaceful, and the meals were delicious. As he said it, I realised that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don’t see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words,
nice
.
Off to the left of the entrance hall was the monastery shop, where you could buy monastic handicrafts – but the shop was closed right now, and there was no one at the reception desk to the right. A small sign instructed visitors to ring for assistance, but asked that they refrain during the daily offices, except in case of emergency. There was a timetable, but it didn’t say how long the offices lasted. After a fairly lengthy calculation involving mealtimes, I concluded that for everything to fit in one day, each office probably couldn’t take longer than half an hour. A shorter calculation revealed that right then we were somewhere between Sext and None, so I could ring.
A few minutes later, a tall monk appeared wearing a black habit. His face lit up when he saw me. He had a high forehead, dark brown curly hair with hardly any grey, and a dark brown beard. He couldn’t have been a day over fifty. ‘I’m Brother Joel,’ he said, and hefted my bag. ‘I’ll take you to your room.’ He stood up very straight and carried my bag easily, although it was heavy. Clearly, he was in excellent shape. ‘It’s good to have you back,’ he went on. ‘It’s been more than twenty years, hasn’t it?’ I must have looked confused. ‘Didn’t you stay with us twenty years ago?’ he asked. ‘You were writing about Huysmans?’ It was true, but I was amazed that he remembered me. I had no memory of him at all.
‘You’re what they call the guest master, aren’t you?’
‘No, no – but I used to be. That job tends to be given to the younger monks, or I should say, the ones who are new to monastic life. The guest master speaks to our guests, he’s still in contact with the world. It’s like a sort of airlock, or a halfway step, before the monk takes the plunge into his vocation of silence. I did it for a little more than a year.’
We were walking alongside a quite beautiful Renaissance building, surrounded by a park. A dazzling winter sun sparkled down on the tree-lined paths, which were strewn with dead leaves. A church stood in the distance, slightly taller than the cloister, late Gothic in style. ‘That’s our old church, the one Huysmans knew,’ said Brother Joel. ‘But our community was dispersed by the Combes laws at the turn of the century, and when we finally managed to reassemble, we couldn’t get the church back, only the cloister buildings. We had to build a new church inside the monastery itself.’ We stopped in front of a small one-storey building in the same Renaissance style. ‘Here’s our guest house,’ he was saying, when all at once a sturdy monk, maybe forty years old and wearing the same black habit, came hurrying down the path. A vigorous man, with a head so bald it practically gleamed in the sun, he projected extreme serenity and competence. He called to mind a finance minister – he even looked a bit liked Pierre Moscovici – or better yet a budget minister, someone, in any case, who inspired automatic and limitless trust. ‘And here is Brother Pierre, our new guest master. He’ll be handling all the logistics of your visit. I just came to welcome you back.’ He bowed, shook my hand and walked off towards the cloister.