Adam Gopnik - Paris to the Moon

The reader eventually comes to the realization that Forrester is not arguing against the free market, or even against globalization, but against the original sin of commerce—against buying and selling and hiring and firing and getting and spending. Her book is a pure expression of the old French romance of a radical alternative, with the ancient Catholic prejudices against usury, simony, and the rest translated into a curious kind of dinner party nihilism. Of course, the trouble with reviving the romance of the radical alternative is that the only radical alternative remaining is the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who isn’t romantic at all.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the left-wing daily Liberation, likes to say that Forrester’s book is a “symptom.” “The fears are irrational, psychological, but they are real,” he says. He himself is a kind of neo-Keynesian, and like many other sensible people here, he thinks that for all the hysteria, the economic crise is not really very deep and could be soothed by a little deficit spending. But the Keynesian medicine is forbidden by the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which is to lead to European economic union and which, for the sake of German confidence, prohibits new deficit spending.

In any case, there’s something emotionally unsatisfying about the Keynesian message. It is like going to the doctor in the certainty that you’re dying of tuberculosis, only to be told that your trouble is that your shoes are too tight. In America, and even more so in England, the triumphant free market has a rhetoric, and even a kind of poetry, of its own, visible in the Economist and the Spectator and the Telegraph: witty, trumpet-sharp, exuberant, hardhearted. In France there is a knack of small shopkeeping and a high rhetoric of the state, but there will never be a high rhetoric of shopkeeping.

By the end of February a new social movement was sweeping the papers and the streets. This one came from the left, in reaction to a new bill that attempted to appease Le Pen supporters by jumping up and down on illegal immigrants. The most obnoxious aspect of the Debre bill—named after the interior minister—was a requirement that people who had foreign guests in their homes inform the police when the foreigners left. This provision was so reminiscent of the Vichy laws, which made denouncing Jews a social obligation, that the entire French intellectual class launched a series of petitions against it. Famous artists and directors announced (theatrically, and as a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it principle, rather than as actual fact) that they were lodging illegal immigrants. The petitions flooded the newspapers and were signed by groups: directors, actors, philosophers, and even dentists. A massive demonstration was held, drawing as few as thirty thousand people (the government counting the marchers) or as many as a hundred thousand (the marchers counting themselves).

The provision was immediately withdrawn, but everyone agreed it was depressing that the government had been swayed by Le Pen’s absurd notion that France’s economic problems have to do with the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal. Many people, including numerous petition signers, also thought there was a depressing element of coercive self-congratulation about the marchers. The protest reached its climax when protesters, got up as deportees, arrived at the Gare de 1’Est to reenact the deportations of the forties. This struck even many sympathetic watchers as being in mauvais gout.

On a recent Saturday, at the first children’s concert of the season at the beautiful new Cite de la Musique, the union of part-time artists, which had been threatening to strike over their pension predicament, decided instead to educate the audience. Before a Rameau pastorale began, a representative of the union harangued the five-year-olds for fifteen minutes on the role of itinerant workers in the arts, and about the modalities of their contributions to the national pension fund, and how the government was imperiling their retirement. The five-year-olds listened respectfully and then gave him a big hand.

In the midst of the economic gloom Bill Gates came to France. Not since Wilbur Wright, back in 1908, has an American arrived in France quite so imbued with the mystique of American inventiveness, industry, and technological hocus-pocus. Bill Gates came here with a masterpiece, the Leonardo Codex, and it has gone on display in the Musee du Luxembourg, but his visit seems unlikely to produce a masterpiece, as Wilbur Wright’s did. Wright became the subject of one of the great portraits by the boy genius Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Mozart of photography, which summed up the early-twentieth-century French view of American technological wizardry; grave, dignified, pure. Bill Gates doesn’t have the bone structure, and anyway, the French cult of Gates is strangely indeterminate. He is described, variously, as the father of the Internet and the creator of popular computing—as anything except what he is, which is the head of a gigantic corporation. He is a symbol divorced from his invention, an aviator without an airplane.

Nonetheless he is presumed to know something. “What France needs is its own Bill Gates,” the governor of the Bank of France announced. Gates’s message to the French, which is essentially that buying Windows will lead to mass happiness, was symbolically linked with that of another celebrated recent visitor, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is the last of Europe’s “master thinkers,” and he gave a series of lectures at the College de France. His books and lectures have been the subject of reports in Le Monde and L’Express and on the television news. It seems that Habermas has replaced his old theory of the state, which was that there is no natural basis for it outside of a bunch of human conventions, with a new theory, which is that the natural basis for the state is the human habit of arguing about whether or not it has one. The argument is somewhat opaque, but it has produced a nice catchphrase, “social communication.” That, rather than the social contract, is to be the basis of the new society, and a hope now faintly glimmers that between Habermas and Gates—between the German philosopher who tells you that you need only connect and the American businessman who will sell you the software to let you do it—a new, comprehensive social theory is around the corner.

Some people just get fed up waiting. After five days in mostly happy captivity at Credit Foncier, Jerome Meyssonier decided that he’d had enough. “ Ca sufit,” the president announced to his employees, and that afternoon he went home. Curiously, he had become, in the interim, a kind of hero to the very people who were keeping him locked up. “Meyssonier is with us!” the employees of the Credit Foncier cried as their boss emerged into the light. (Later in the week they added to that slogan an even better one: “The semipublic will never surrender!”) On television Meyssonier was seen smiling weakly. He looked worn out and about ready to quit, but then perhaps this should not be a surprise. M. Meyssonier is fifty-five.

I have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-café Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, involved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three planets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem looks simpler, because all it involves is the interaction of a couple of places in Paris where you can eat omelets and drink coffee. It’s still pretty tricky, though, because what fills in for gravity is the force of fashion—arbitrary, or arbitrary-seeming, taste—which in Paris is powerful enough to turn planets from their orbits and make every apple fall upward.