Intellectuals, ski instructors and other militant riffraff
To read Le Monde, which I do every day, anyone would think that the French intelligentsia were about to stage a levee en masse against the government. Some 16,000 of them are said to have signed a petition accusing Monsieur Raffarin, the PM, and his culture boss, the aggressive JeanJacques Aillagon, of waging a financial war against their tribe. This petition is rather like the million-signature People's Charter presented to parliament in 1848: close scrutiny revealed such names as 'Arthur Wellington', 'Queen Victoria' and 'Johnny Russell'. Most of the signatories of the French protest struck me as pretty minor players in the game. And who is an intellectual anyway? In the Middle Ages, anyone who could translate a Latin sentence provided by a court was classified as a clerc and could plead benefit of clergy — that is, transfer of his case to a Church court. The term clerc was still in general use in the interwar period when Julien Benda published his notorious attack La trahison des clues. The term 'intellectual' came in during the 1890s at the time of the Dreyfus case, when the intelligentsia took on the Church and the army, and it is significant that those who drew up the present petition accuse Raffarin and Co, of being antidreyfusard. cultural memories in France being tenacious.
There are supposedly a dozen areas of dispute between les intellos and the Chirac gang. Film-makers claim that a new and severe system of censorship is being imposed. Publishers denounce the delay in introducing the French equivalent of our public lending right, and writers, in addition, deplore the invasion by big business of territory once occupied mainly by small family firms. Musicians say that the promise to build a huge new concert hall in Paris — part of the grands traveaux which have landed France with some of the ugliest and most inefficient buildings in Europe — has not been kept. Architects themselves are up in arms about a number of decrees and laws, into the trackless obscurities of which I decline to enter. The record industry blames the government for a sharp (11.5 per cent) drop in sales, and the application of clumsy EU rules to the droit d'auteur. The archaeologists protest that their profession is being privatised by stealth, having enjoyed powerful state support ever since Bonaparte led his mass invasion of scholars to Egypt in 1799. Teachers, as always, claim they are starving to death. A recent front-page
headline in Le Monde proclaimed La gmnde misere des universites francaises. The French dons deplored the fact that a recent world survey of universities found that only three French ones rank among the 50 'high-performance' institutions. Out of some 500 surveyed, the best university in France, Paris-VII, ranked only 65, followed by Paris-XI at number 72, and Strasbourg-1 at 102. The rest are said to be 'Third World' (a term invented, it is worth remembering, 50 years ago by Maurice Duverger at a French university). No new university jobs are being created, for the first time in 40 years.
Another Monde front-page headline sums it all up: Entre Raffarin et la Culture, le divorce est consomme. Actually, the strength of the argument against the government is weakened by the tendency to enlarge the term 'intellectual' to include a ragbag of trades and professions not normally associated with cerebral activity. Thus, defence lawyers and magistrates, more at home in a Maigret novel, are lumped in because they have recently taken to the streets of Paris to protest at a law, passed with terrorists in mind, which tips (they say) the balance of proof heavily against the accused. More dubious still is the inclusion of vast numbers of part-time actors, dancers and singers. Those people, known as intermittents or 'precarious ones', enjoyed until recently a generous state-pension scheme, now buried beneath a mountainous deficit. Last spring the government introduced a new and more miserly system and as a result intermittents and precarious ones went on strike for the summer, thus wrecking most of France's big provincial theatre and music festivals, and damaging the tourist trade — the government says this is the main reason why Spain has now pushed France aside as the European country with the most foreign holidaymakers. If actors count as intellectuals, then it seems to me anyone can claim the title. And they do. The latest group to join the revolt are the ski instructors. I had always thought of this alpine sub-tribe, especially the French ones, as making a lush living by seducing well-to-do AngloSaxon and sometimes German females at select resorts like Chamonix and Megeve, sometimes even marrying these ladies. But no! They are, apparently, starving to death also, unable to live at the resorts that employ them, buy books and CDs, attend philosophical conferences and other necessities of life.
All French protests are liable to end up in the streets and turn nasty, and this one seems to be heading that way. During a recent bitter exchange at the French cinema awards — the cineastes are always the most bellicose of France's so-called intellectuals de choc — hard words were exchanged. Jean-Jacques Alllagon shouted that his opponents were demagogues and that pour faii, ilfaut d'abord defaire. In fact there is a lot to be said for demolishing the enormous pyramid of official or state-financed culture which has grown up in France over the last half-century, ever since, in fact, General de Gaulle took power in 1958. He saw himself as a Louis XIV, not only endowing France with huge cultural monuments but also making intellectuals among the most rewarded and therefore faithful supporters of the Fifth Republic.
Over the past 50 years and more, the French state has spent more, per capita, in subsidising culture than any other country on earth. And it still does, whatever the intellectual rabble-rousers say. The universities may be in the depths of misery, as they claim, but they have just got an increase of funds, in real terms, of 3 per cent; not bad when the French economy registered no growth last year. I have been looking at the cultural budgets of the 22 regions of provincial France. Between 1993 and last year, the total spent at a local level almost doubled, and the regions have increasingly been undertaking huge projects which in most countries would be handled only by the state. In 2003, the Nord-Pas de Calais region spent nearly 50 million euros on culture. Of course, that is for four million people. But even Limousin, with fewer than 750,000, had a cultural budget of 7.5 million cures, as did the supposedly poor FrancheComt6. What are the results? Precious little. It is a long time since France has produced a great playwright or novelist, a poet of international stature, a master-painter or architect. The Etat Culture!, as it has been called, never gives birth to prodigies. There is no Moliere or Racine, no Corneille, not even a Le Notre. It is a fact that France has more than 3,000 literary prizes and no literature. My own theory is that intellectuals flourish best when they are poor, and produce art of high quality from unheated garrets and cafés rather than from comfortable appartemeras. The cerebral elites today are too well off and too obsessed with material things to keep their minds on the spiritual plane where civilisation takes root. If they grumble, the right reply is 'Hard cheese!' No one asked them to become intellectuals.
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