Paris: The Collected Traveler (eBook)

France: The OutsiderIan Jack This editorial was the introductory essay in an issue of the fine, thought-provoking literary magazine Granta. Though it appeared in the autumn 1997 issue, the references made to society and politics remain very much similar today. (Though the unemployment rate in France, for one thing, has fallen.) The essay as it appears here is an edited version of the original. __ IAN JACK was the editor of Granta from 1995 to 2008. He edited London's Independent on Sunday from 1991 to 1995, and currently he writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Jack has also served as a foreign correspondent in South Asia and is the author of The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (Jonathan Cape, 2009). __ The first man to fly solo across the Atlantic and the hero of his age, Charles Lindbergh, saw France from the air on May 21, 1927. He had been flying for more than thirty hours and seen nothing but ocean since he left New York, and now the green fields and woods of Normandy were below him. Journey's end! Time for a bite! He took a sandwich from its wrapper and stretched to throw the wrapper from the cockpit. Then he looked down and decided that just wouldn't do. 'My first act,' Lindbergh said to himself, 'will not be to sully such a beautiful garden.' His American waste paper remained in the aircraft--scrunched, one assumes, in a ball at his feet. The French writer Jean-Marie Domenach, who died this summer, tells this story in his last book: Regarder la France: essai sur le malaise franais. It is for Domenach yet another small stone in a large mountain of anecdotal evidence gathered to demonstrate the singularity of France as a state, a people, a culture and (in this case) a landscape. But, as Domenach's subtitle indicates, all isn't well with this singularity. The fields that Lindbergh flew over are larger now, the roads straighter and wider, the peasants (should Lindbergh have spotted any, bending their backs in this beautiful garden) dramatically fewer. All of these changes have happened to most other western countries as agriculture has adopted new machines and new techniques to plough out hedges and plough in chemical fertilizers, to relegate agricultural labourers to models in museums of folklore. But in none of these other countries (even England, where the countryside supplies a large part of the national idea) would rural transformation be seen as such a blow to the nation's identity. There would be nostalgia, of course, and ecological concern. In France, things go much further. Implied in Domenach's story is the notion that, had Lindbergh been flying over some other, less top-quality country (Portugal, say, or Belgium), he might have nonchalantly tossed the paper into the windstream and had a good spit at the same time. But, as General and President Charles de Gaulle was fond of saying, France is . . . France. Even Lindbergh, high up in his frail aeroplane, and with a hundred other things to worry about, could see the specialness of the place and respect it. Nobody doubts that France is special, certainly not the French. It is the largest, though not the most populous country, in Europe, and was once the most powerful. Its linguistic unity and its natural boundaries--France can be seen as a hexagonal fortress with sea on three sides and mountains on two--have given it a clearer identity, a less contested nationalism, than most countries which share a continent. Its history is alive with symbols, events, heroes and slogans which have not been shuttered in to the cobwebbed past--which form part of France's grand and still unfolding story, as the...