The New Old World (35 page)

Gaullism might seem a more straightforward case, its life-span in principle unlikely to extend much beyond that of the hero who embodied it. But its fate, too, leaves questions to which neither his mortality nor any general waning of the nation-state offers an answer. Abroad, after all, what has the French political class gained by abandoning the diplomatic and strategic independence the General bequeathed it, and returning to the Atlantic fold? At home, the constitution of the Fifth Republic was certainly an instrument designed for his suzerain person, that might well have been regarded as counter-productive once he passed, as Nora rightly implies it became. But far from reducing its presidentialism, the same class has colluded to render it yet more extreme—not a brake on, but an accelerator of, the assorted dysfunctions of the Republic. The fates of welfare or education, also figuring among these, tell another story, of once coherent systems lamed by expansion beyond the constituencies for which they were designed, eventually becoming mechanisms of exclusion, or mock-inclusion, for lack of the resources their ostensible democratization required, amid one of the most unequal distributions of income in Europe. The past thirty-five years have certainly seen profound socio-economic changes in France, and a cortège of maladies has accumulated with them. But even when we have taken their full measure, the unalterable fact remains the complete incapacity of the governing class to respond to them. Nora's reflections treat mainly of the cultural plane, but it is the political that poses the sharpest questions.

There, in yet another of the violent oscillations in the needle of public sentiment that have been a hallmark of the late Fifth Republic, Chirac's second presidency was as unanimously decried at exit as it had been acclaimed at entry. Once again, electoral docility had not stilled popular disaffection. In the spring of 2005, the entire political establishment received its most stinging rebuff in thirty years, when an attempt to force through the oligarchic charter for a European Constitution was overwhelmingly rejected in the referendum that Chirac, in another of his tactical miscalculations, had called to ratify it. The opposition that undid the charter, making reasoned use of the internet to expose official propaganda, came from below, ATTAC taking the lead. The fury and disbelief of the mainstream media and domesticated intelligentsia, after an unprecedented barrage in support of the Constitution, knew no bounds: only xenophobia could account for the result. What in fact the defenestration of the Constitution showed was how vulnerable the pretensions of the two major parties backing it—Gaullists who no longer had much to do with Gaullism, Socialists even less with socialism—had become to the novelty of democratic argument escaping media control. The debacle was such that Raffarin had to go. To replace him, Chirac picked a long-time intimate, the career diplomat De Villepin, as premier.

Five months later, two young immigrants—aged fifteen and seventeen, families from Mauretania and Tunisia—were electrocuted fleeing police harassment outside Paris. Riots erupted around cities across the country. The antithesis of everything evoked by the term ‘suburb' in English, the
banlieues
that exploded are typically high-rise slums concentrating populations of Maghrebin and African origin, bleak zones of racial dereliction and repression, where youth unemployment—not confined to immigrants—is double the national average. Targeting the most visible symbols of the consumer society from which they were excluded, night after night the insurgents torched cars in a pyre of social anger, amid violent clashes with the police. By the time the uprising had been brought under control, three weeks later, some nine thousand vehicles had gone up in flames, in the most spectacular repudiation of the ruling order since May 1968. Scarcely had the last charred saloon been cleared from the streets than the country's universities and lycées rose in a massive wave of protest at government measures to make it easier for employers to hire and fire youth on temporary basis,
the so-called
contrat première embauche
. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations, this time with trade-union support, cascaded into a movement of such magnitude, lasting for upwards of two months, that Chirac had to withdraw the plan, sealing the fate of De Villepin, whom he had hoped might succeed him.

Shocks like these had, in the past, all but invariably presaged a change of guard at the Elysée, allowing the Socialist Party to look forward to victory at the polls the following year, without—as had become traditional—having to offer more than token changes of policy. But this was to count without the fluidity that Chirac's decline had released within the ranks of the Right. There an alternative capable of a sharper demarcation from him than anything the PS could offer was waiting. Once another of Chirac's protegés, Sarkozy had betrayed him for Balladur in 1996, and only grudgingly been readmitted to office as minister of the interior in 2002. In this post, he rapidly built a reputation for toughness on crime and immigration, tightening rules on residence in France and promising to sandblast youthful rabble from the
banlieues
. Buoyed by popularity in the polls, by 2004 Sarkozy had taken control of the ruling party's machine as its new president, a powerful base from which to assert his independence of the Elysée, and dissociate himself from the discredit into which Chirac's reign was falling. The final fiasco of the CPE, from which he had been careful to take his distance, assured him the uncontested candidacy of the Centre-Right in 2007.

Against him, the PS ran Ségolène Royal, a hitherto second-rank figure, companion of the party's general secretary, picked by its membership as the least shop-worn candidate it could offer. Weightless and inexperienced, it soon became clear she enjoyed little confidence among her colleagues and was no match for Sarkozy. Footling attempts to show she was as tough on crime and as proud a patriot only underlined her lack of any independent programme; the choice of Bernard-Henri Lévy as confidante, her want of any judgement.
⁴⁹
After a vapid and disorganized campaign, she was routed at the polls, Sarkozy coasting to victory by two million votes. In this outcome, however—less disastrous for the PS, after all, than Jospin's debacle five years earlier—neither Royal's weaknesses as a candidate, nor the traditional
pallor of the Socialist alternative, were the critical factor. That lay in Sarkozy's reconfiguration of the electorates of the Right.

There, his record at the Ministry of the Interior, and unabashed appeals at the hustings to the country's need for greater security, in its streets and on its borders, cut the ground from under much of Le Pen's constituency. In the first round of the election, he took up to a million votes from the Front National, concentrated in its petty-bourgeois—as opposed to working-class—base: Le Pen's score among small shopkeepers, craftsmen and employers was more than halved, while Sarkozy's virtually doubled by comparison with Chirac in 2002. To this social stratum, he added a massive demographic sweep among pensioners, in the second round garnering nearly two-thirds of the vote of the elderly.
⁵⁰
Fear—of immigrants and the unruly young—was the principal cement of this bloc. But it was by no means the only emotion to which Sarkozy owed his victory. By 2007 the sensation of a creeping national decline, topic of many an earlier publication, had become far more widespread, as Chirac's regime was seen to disintegrate. As a notorious thorn in the side of the Elysée, Sarkozy was in much better position to capitalize on this than Royal, who had never taken any distance from her patron Mitterrand or from Jospin. He now did so with éclat. Promising a clean break with accumulated inertias, he assured voters that France could be revived by reforms based on the values of hard work, merit and honest competition—liberating labour markets, lowering taxes on inheritance, giving autonomy to universities, fostering national identity. With this prospectus, he captured a large majority of the age-group between twenty-five and thirty-four, attracted to him not by fears, but hopes of freer and more prosperous careers.

The combination of appeals to security and identity on one side, and to mobility and opportunity on the other, which gave him his convincing victory, made Sarkozy an object of acute detestation and alarm in the opposite camp. There, lurid depictions of him as the offspring of a wedding between Le Pen and Thatcher, if not actually a crypto-fascist, circulated freely. Such images were not without effect, rallying not only the youngest cohort of voters to Royal, but the constituencies of the far Left, many of whose electors plumped for her
ab initio
, and all of whose candidates clung to her skirts in the second. One phalanx of intellectuals
declared that ‘never had a candidate of the right so symbolized social regression', while another warned that Royal's defeat would mean nothing less than ‘grave dangers to fundamental liberties'.
⁵¹
Such overwrought lamentations, not unlike the hysterics of 2002 at the imaginary threat of Le Pen capturing the presidency, served only to disarm the opposition before the actual character of the regime with which it was confronted, once this was in place.

For Sarkozy's first move, far from speeding to the right, was to welcome as many lights of the Centre–Left into his administration as he could find, starting with the Socialist paladin of human rights, Bernard Kouchner, promptly appointed foreign minister; Jospin's deputy chief of staff Jean-Pierre Jouyet, given the portfolio on Europe; Royal's one-time chief economic adviser, Éric Besson, installed as secretary of state in the Matignon. This should scarcely have come as a surprise: during the campaign itself, Sarkozy had not hesitated to invoke Jaurès and Blum as inspirations for the country, not to speak of the young Communist resistance hero Guy Môquet, soon afterwards, as a model for its youth. Such ecumenical overtures were not confined to matters of ideology. Gender and race were no less liberally accommodated. Half of the new cabinet was composed of women, and three members of the full government were of Maghrebin or African origin, one a stalwart of SOS Racisme itself.

If the instrumental character of such appointments, designed both to demoralize the PS and to provide the administration with cover for the sharper end of its policies, was plain enough, their condition of possibility lay in the actual programme on which the government was embarked. For, as it soon proved, both hopes—in the euphoric visions of the business press—and fears—in the agitated imagination of the left—of the new presidency were exaggerated. Sarkozy did not retreat from his campaign commitments, but these were never as radical as his more ardent admirers supposed, or his own rhetoric implied. The most divisive of them, a handsome present to the rich of tax cuts and abolition of inheritance tax, was prudently slipped through before the immediate glow of his victory had faded. Thereafter, taking care to avoid any set-piece confrontations, the government's measures were generally introduced after at least an appearance, and often substance, of
negotiation. Unions, weak enough in France anyway, were cajoled with talks into acceptance of limitation of strikes in public services, abolition of special pensions on the railways in exchange for higher final wages, and voluntary circumvention of the thirty-five-hour week. Universities have been granted autonomy, allowing them to raise money from private sources and compete in attracting talent, but selection of students has not been introduced, and an increase in public funding of higher education has been promised. The retail sector has been liberalized, without greatly threatening small shopkeepers. Immigration laws have been stiffened, but as elsewhere in Europe, mostly to symbolic effect.

As a prescription for the reinvigoration of French society, the dose of neo-liberalism has so far been quite modest. Apart from anything else, the state itself has not been put on much of a diet. Having promised voters he would increase their purchasing power, Sarkozy was in no position to tighten fiscal discipline. Within a year of his coming to power, growth had slowed, the budget had sunk deeper into the red, and inflation had doubled. Failure to raise taxes or cut public spending was, in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon commentators otherwise well disposed towards him, bad enough. Worse was Sarkozy's lack of respect for the principles of a free market, where politically inconvenient. Not scrupling to denounce firms for outsourcing jobs, he has promoted national champions in industry, brokering state-led mergers in energy and armaments in defiance of admonitions from Brussels, and repeatedly attacked the European Central Bank for undermining growth by restricting the supply of money. Soon after his inauguration, indeed, he could be heard—to the dismay of
Le Monde
, which had hoped this odious expression was a thing of the past—criticizing
la pensée unique
itself.

To date, in short, Sarkozy's approach to the task of bringing France up to scratch, as understood by a modern liberalism, has—not in style, but substance—been closer to that of a Raffarin than a Thatcher, even though as a ruler he enjoys far more power than the first, or even the second. Reforms, though relatively consistent, have not been radical.
⁵²
What explains the apparent paradox? In part, the very personalization of power that his presidency has introduced. For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, the executive is concentrated entirely in one
omnipresent ruler—Sarkozy acting not just as the head of state, at a certain distance from day-to-day administration, as envisaged by the Constitution and respected by his predecessors, but as the visible manager of every detail of government. Jospin's ill-starred tampering with electoral tenures and calendars had made this collapse of any separation between presidential authority and partisan responsibility possible. But it required the full blast of Sarkozy's temperament to make it a daily reality. From the start, the hazards of such activism were clear: the Elysée would no longer be a shelter if anything went wrong.