La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (35 page)

The malaise that hovers over the town extends to the vast wholesale produce market on its outskirts. There, six mornings a week during the harvest season, hundreds of farmers and distributors gather at six o’clock to buy and sell in a frenzied, one-hour ritual. They lament that the wholesale price of their lettuce is the same as the retail price in the supermarket off the highway and that boats docked in Marseille are filled with cheap pears from Chile.

And tomatoes. Tomatoes are the real losers here. First, there was the invasion of the Spanish tomato, followed by the Moroccan variety. But the decisive blow to the homegrown Provençale tomato was dealt several years ago when the Chinese industrial tomato giant Xinjiang Chalkis bought the local canning factory and began shipping tons of tomato paste all the way from China to can locally and sell as “made in France.” Local tomatoes became worthless.

The decline of French agriculture is mirrored in a very different venue where seduction might be expected to hold sway: the world of international culture. “Grandeur” originally was a French word. But Paris, as the physical embodiment of French greatness, is no longer the cultural capital of the world.

In
Mainstream
, a groundbreaking book about the globalization of culture, Frédéric Martel identified the United States, along with India, China, Brazil, and South Korea, as the world’s cultural powerhouses. France, he told audiences in the lively debates that followed the book’s publication in 2010, had been left behind. Martel said that much of the French elite rejects the notion that to survive in the world, the French must learn and speak English. He documented a trend that began decades ago and continues today, the resistance to using English words in French society: the Socialist Party leader who is criticized for using the word “care” for one of her initiatives; the deputy minister who hopes to ban the use of “buzz,” “chat,” and “newsletters”; the former prime minister who proposes limits on English expressions in certain international organizations; the language commission that wants to substitute the words
ordiphone
for “Smartphone” and
encre en poudre
for “toner.” Martel criticized President Sarkozy for not speaking English and for branding as snobs French diplomats who are “happy to speak English” instead of French.

Neither the French language nor French culture has the appeal it once did in the United States. Some of the best private schools in America have substituted Chinese for advanced French courses. Far fewer French books are translated into English, even as French best-seller lists feature translations of American authors like Philip Roth and Paul Auster. Some 47 percent of the citizens of the European Union speak English; 25 percent of the EU’s official documents are printed in French, compared to 50 percent three decades ago. American movies and television shows are much more prevalent than they were in the 1980s. Ask a Frenchman who among his compatriots has the same cachet in the United States as George Clooney or Brad Pitt do in France, and he will tell you that such a person does not exist.

What my former colleague John Vinocur wrote in the
New York Times
in 1983 about the cultural retreat of France could be reprinted today: “It was a weak year for French films…. There is no hot new French play, no hot young painter…. France has fallen…among book-exporting countries…. The art market has moved to the United States.” French films, he added, are “unexportable—chatty, obscure, non-visual, untranslatable.”

For Stanley Hoffmann, the political scientist at Harvard University, there is nothing new in the concern over the French unwillingness to adapt. He said that when he first came to the United States from France in 1955, “there were all kinds of books on decline claiming that France was working against itself and would never outgrow its artisan and peasant mentality. This is a small country, very incestuous and also remarkably noncomparative. The French really don’t look at what is going on elsewhere. Everyone knows there are blockages in French society. Some of them have been removed and others not. I wrote about them forty years ago!…We are rediscovering the same clichés.”

Another source of anti-seduction in French life today can be found in the
banlieues
, or suburbs, on the edges of France’s cities. Pockets of poverty, unemployment, and crime, they seize the headlines every so often, when daily life turns violent. The first time I went to a
banlieue
of Paris, however, was not to cover orgies of car burnings and rock throwing by roving gangs of young and restless men. It was to watch my younger daughter, Gabriela, who was then twelve, play soccer.

Gabriela had opposed our move to Paris. In Washington, she had been on an elite traveling soccer team, so I tried to appease her by promising that she would play soccer in France. Really good soccer. France, I told her, had won the World Cup in 1998. A French woman had just been named the most valuable player in the American professional women’s soccer league. Soccer is to France what football is to America.

What I discovered, however, is that real French girls—at least real French middle-class Parisian girls—don’t play soccer. Strapping on shin guards and kicking a ball up and down a dirty field is a boy thing. It is played by what sociologists call “the lower classes.” So Gabby joined one of Paris’s only
football féminin
teams. Most of the other teams were in the tough suburbs, so every weekend Andy and I stood on the sidelines with the other parents, most of them fathers with blue-collar jobs who had once played the game themselves and happened to have daughters. There were few soccer moms. Gabby discovered that soccer-playing girls smoke and talk back to the coach; she also learned how to curse.

Over the years, through Gabby’s soccer, I got to know parents who were carving out a life for themselves and their families in the suburbs. But many of the
banlieues
are vast concrete wastelands built in the 1950s and 1960s as cheap housing for immigrants, mostly from France’s former colonies. In these housing projects, unemployment among young men under age twenty-five is as high as 50 percent.

Discrimination against the residents of the suburbs is so deep-rooted that even well-intentioned people don’t seem to know when they are guilty of it. I witnessed it on the day that Andy was sworn in to the French bar. The representative of the bar of Paris felt compelled to make personal observations as he granted the certificates. He congratulated a young woman with an Arab-sounding name from one of the suburbs for her accomplishments and told her that the suburbs needed good lawyers like her. To my American ears, it smacked of go-back-where-you-came-from. Would it have occurred to him that she might want to work for an international law firm or a big corporation or even the French state?

Life in the suburbs may be grim, but the residents still pursue everyday pleasures in ways that seem particularly French. Indeed, the food market at Saint-Denis, a vast glass-and-metal-covered expanse that dates from the nineteenth century, is a gastronomical pleasure palace. This suburb, just north of Paris, is also the site of the most French of French symbols, the Saint-Denis Basilica, perhaps the most overlooked religious gem in the Paris area, given its size and importance. According to legend, after Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was decapitated near Montmartre during a persecution of Christians in the third century, he picked up his head, washed it off, and carried it about five miles to the north before he collapsed. A shrine was built, replaced by the basilica, which became the burial place for France’s kings, from Clovis and Dagobert I to Louis XVIII (with royals like Catherine de Médicis, Henri IV, Marie Antoinette, and Louis XVI along the way).

The site has also served as a marketplace since the Middle Ages, when merchants from all over Europe came to trade. At first glance, the market appears to be run by and for North African Arabs and sub-Saharan black Africans. That’s because to get to the food emporium, you have to pass through a long stretch of outdoor stalls with the feel of a raucous souk, where vendors hawk the paraphernalia of daily life: cheap fabrics, piles of clothing, costume jewelry, cooking pots, running shoes, even mousetraps and zippers.

On closer inspection, the food market is multiracial and multiethnic, an enclosed microcosm of layers of French history. The third-generation crêpe maker from Brittany makes crêpes and galettes to order. Parisianborn French men with tattoos offer pigs’ heads and feet. The ethnic Portuguese and Italians, whose families immigrated to France decades ago, sell cheeses, oils, charcuterie, olives, and wine from back home. The Franco-Arab merchants who hold French identity cards in their pockets and Arabness in their voices lure passersby with deep-discounted trays of chopped chicken gizzards and homemade halal sausages. The greengrocers beckon with African root vegetables as big as melons.

Here the merchants and their clientele—no matter what their color, religion, age, ethnicity, or country of origin—seduce each other. They share a common purpose: buying and selling food products, of course, but also anticipation of the shared pleasure that comes with cooking and eating
en famille
. The process of acquiring the necessary raw materials needs time, conversation, and salesmanship. “Come and buy my tomatoes, madame, they are ripe from the vine,” or “Let me mix a special curry for chicken, madame, and, oh, don’t forget preserved lemons,” or “Wait till next Tuesday and by then I’ll have those special olives you like.” If the customer is a young woman, the pitch is likely to start with something like, “Hey, you are
magnifique
!”

To change the mentality of the ethnic Arab and African population in the suburbs would require a redefinition of what France is—not the country of “republicanism” that ignores religious, ethnic, racial, and gender differences but one that embraces them. Diversity and ambition would be rewarded. The thousands of words of
verlan
, the ever-changing slang of the suburbs, would be put into dictionaries and used in schools. The popular culture of the streets would be celebrated—with scholarships, exchange programs, and support for the films, books, music, and art that struggle to get funded and noticed.

But that approach would require flexibility, which is not a French tradition. The Americans’ strength “is that they put everyone on the same footing,” the humorist Yassine Belattar told
Le Monde
. “They are not in the mind-set of ‘labels’ as we French are, but in the mind-set of action: ‘Who’s moving?’ ‘Who’s proposing?’ ‘Who’s innovating?’ and not, ‘What is your degree?’ ‘Where did you do your studies?’ ‘Who is your father?’”

Fear, together with the national habit of romanticism, also serves to hold back change. In the fall of 2010, millions of French people took to the streets to protest a modest reform of the state pension system: raising the minimum retirement age from sixty to sixty-two. Students, some as young as thirteen, joined with teachers, town-hall staff, train drivers, postal and utility workers, and other public-sector employees to stage strikes and celebrate worker solidarity. Even
casseurs
, or “smashers,” young troublemakers who episodically confront police and loot a little, came out.

Jérôme Sainte-Marie, the chief political analyst at the CSA polling organization, argued that President Sarkozy had made a crucial error of presentation: he had cut off discussion with the unions and other opponents of the measure. “Social dialogue was interrupted,” he told the
New York Times
, disapprovingly. The moment was not prolonged but abruptly terminated. Others made the point that Sarkozy the anti-seducer had brought the protests on himself.

In the end, the strikes neither shut down the country nor stopped most of the French from getting to work. But large swaths of the country were deprived of gasoline and diesel fuel; air and rail traffic was disrupted. The social action cost France billions of dollars. Still, Sarkozy did not blink, and the reform was implemented.

Sometimes I feel that the everything-is-possible American approach may never find a home in France. After so many years of living there, I thought I had accepted the quirky cultural differences between France and the United States that had frustrated me when I first arrived. When the French act in a way that seems to make no sense and wastes time, money, and energy (three visits by various technicians to get a hot water heater repaired, for example), more often than not I can let it go. Process is a natural part of French life, I say to myself.

I tell myself that France is also a place where promises of pleasure are deliverable. A melon bought at an outdoor market might be sublime. Women might flirt on the street. Men might be gallant. It is even possible, with playfulness, deference, a clever use of language, and staying power, to strip the French of their arrogance and get them to loosen up. That gives me the courage to fight bureaucracies.

Then came the drama of the kitchen. I decided that unless France changes its attitude toward the kitchen, it will never again be a great power.

French apartments are sometimes rented with empty kitchens. Except for a water source and perhaps a sink, there are no appliances, cupboards, or counters. Every new tenant has to install a kitchen—and pay for it.

Andy and I got lucky when we moved into our first apartment in Paris. The tenants who preceded us had left after less than two years, and we were allowed to buy their kitchen—with its top-of-the-line custom-made cabinets and appliances—at a bargain price. We were not talking
Architectural Digest
, but this wasn’t IKEA, either. When we were about to move to a new apartment years later, the landlord ordered us to leave the kitchen empty, except for the kitchen sink. I made a case for at least keeping the cabinets, which still looked perfectly new. I harbored no illusion that anyone would buy them. But I just didn’t think it was right to destroy perfectly good cabinets so that a new tenant could spend a vast amount of time, money, and emotional energy installing another set that might not be as good as this one. And I didn’t feel like paying a hefty fee to have the cabinets pulled apart and hauled away.