If you wish to know yourself better, there will always be people to tell you what you are. Now, it is also true that it is up to you to consider or dismiss what they say, but even if it is totally off, you know at least what people think. You may agree and work on it, disagree and dismiss it, or work with it. Now, being French is to be continuously told how to be more French, by French people, and how to be less French, by everybody else.
A no-win situation until I found, buried under half a century of amnesia, and dust, the little bundle of pictures, texts and posters that always meant to us: We Are French.
It is the little bubble of reality you carry with you whenever you live somewhere else. It can be small or big, but it will always follow you, in your tone, your words, some expressions and body language, unconscious associations: red means stop, green go. People will react to it. Now, you can try and minimize it, or wrap yourself in it like an invisible shield against the local reality. Whichever way you chose, at the very core of it is an irreducible, elemental, you.
That much I learnt by myself. Better to know what it means to me then.
My grandmother, my family always had some sort of ancestors’ shrine going on in our house. The icons were always prominently displayed on the dresser to avoid any doubt: De Gaulle, of course, and then Joffre, Leclerc,… There would be tales, parables, heroes and villains. My grandmother had carried in her paper around Katanga her War Bonds certificates, an ex-voto to France. France itself would always live in its own religious sphere. Like in most religions, that personal devotion was all that was needed – other French people were not.
Like driving through Paris, being French could only exist in memories, and that did not matter either. Ours was French for export.
Any nationality is part fact, part performance. 30 years of absence mean that both will be different for the local residents and the expatriates. Facts and performance will grow apart: a cultural identity globally ossified to in a Black and White photography of a coffee and a cloud of smoke, or a Jean Paul Gauthier extravaganza. The Paris Olympics opening ceremony, an Ozymandias for French culture, got that exactly right.
Nor was being French a lifestyle! Only 9% of French expats come back because of the lifestyle. So, that is not what it was about. To my grandmother, to us, being French was no less than a way to behave, to be. We had to live up to a French core that was antagonistic, visionary and elegant.
De Gaulle – Life cover magazine of 13 November 1944.
The original picture carried around Congo by my grandmother
I could actually close my eyes and the picture would pop up: a Gaul warrior leaning over the battlements at Alesia. Eternally defiant, eternally French: staring its enemies down, staring Fate down. Being French was to fight.
To fight to overcome division
Canada, Switzerland or Belgium have become recently in France a popular example of “successful” political systems. Why? Because they can “compromise”, subtext: French people are unable to do compromise. These systems however are just a solution to make profoundly antagonistic cultural groups co-exist – not to build, but to manage. At no point will there be One Canada, One Belgium or One Switzerland. The discussions are about how to share costs and benefits. Maybe France will indeed become the placid dream of a provincial patrician country tending to its fields, horse-trading favours and positions. Experience however is, that French people only tolerate to live together, when they believe that they are building something together, or should. No ideology, no party, no group has more legitimacy than the next in building this.
Being French is to fight for France, in France
The country was fuelled by these antagonisms. You were born knowing the real enemy: Foreigners could take a ticket, not the enemy next door. The communists that betrayed France for Stalin in 1939, sabotaged my grandfather gun in 1940 and tried to topple the Republic in 1968. And so, at 3, I was naturally on the barricades. There can be no doubt that there was somewhere in France the exact opposite mirrored opinion, to which I was the sworn enemy.
Being French is even being antagonistic as a hobby
In the UK, you would go to a social and try and ease up tensions with banter. Banter is a means to deflate egos, entertain the guests and make the occasion special for everyone. There is some competition in humour, but nothing where you feel you are being tested. A French social will start with a round of quotes and remarks to set the stage. This would be “reconnaissance by fire” to test the level of resilience of the audience, and then banter designed to close the discussion, not propel it on. Not to laugh with as much as to laugh at. “Whatever does not kill you…”.
That is the structural antagonism that explains why the French state was designed and worked the way it did, and the French persona created to reign it in. That is a fundamental paradox at the heart of a culture self-styled as universal: it relies on an internal combustion engine.
Stubborn, argumentative, pig-headed, defiant against all odds and often reason itself. That was French for me. Everything else is just accessories, colour and texture: dishes, wine, cheese, 4 hours long lunches, siesta, songs, …
“Stand up! Our dead for the homeland … France is coming!”
Being French was Versailles and the Eiffel Tower: visionary
Your mind is supposed to always look for new horizons, think beyond the mundane. Not about the traffic lights and bicycle lanes of today, but hydrogen engines, perpetual nuclear reactors, galactic travel. You had to be curious, about anything, forever a Renaissance Man, always watching, always enquiring, a perpetual motion of ideas. Aware of History yet racing toward the future.
Being French was to be Cartesian
The greatest compliment at school was to be “Cartesian”, to use pure mechanical logics. Exactly not the mix of irrationality and pedantic savantism that stuck somehow. A total split of rationality and irrationality as 2 separate domains. Theatre and literature doctrines that enforced it. Each its own sphere never to leak into each other. Versailles as a showroom for cultural dominance, and ultimately power. Luxury exports propped up as a showcase of France. The core was ideas, not lifestyle.
Hermès, Chanel, Versailles or Notre-Dame are France. Arianespace, Dassault, Framatome and Concorde were French.
France still disproportionately produces Mathematics Nobel Prizes and yet, like everyone else, these are the exception rather than the norm. France has tumbled down to the bottom ranks of global education. So did our industries: apart from weapons, any other technology France produces does not get a second look beyond its own borders. If that. The choice has been made in the 90s for the Potemkin France, the France of Saint Tropez, luxury and real estates: leather bags over mobile phones, Louis Vuitton over Alcatel. We have been attracting the rich and famous since centuries. There is no denying we are very good at it. But that is as well French for export.
We cannot stop hoping ourselves technologically relevant, it is at the core of being French.
This is why French politics stayed apparently so lofty for so long. That is what the picture in the living room was saying. It was De Gaulle in 1945, imperious, looking on to the horizon, preparing to drive yet again crazy the consummate parliamentary wheeler dealer, Churchill, with his inflexibility, posturing, ingratitude and apparently seemingly delusional designs.
To him, to us, he was France, we were French.
The ultimate requirement was to be elegant. From sun-up to sun-down, in any place, at any time, in any situation, being French was to be elegant. Intellectually, culturally, socially, physically. Prancing about was not being elegant. Bragging, showing off, talking about personal problems or money was not being elegant.
Being French was to have quixotic panache
Nothing really truly like fighting to the last man. The British could be happy with surviving at Rorke’ Drift. We always preferred a good old “with our backs to the wall, impossible odds, we fought to the last man”. Rocroy, Québec, Camerone, Bazeilles, Dien Bien Phu, … these are the names you will still read today in French accounts. Pétain stole that from us in 1940, but, to this day, being French means dreaming of the last Stand of the Old Guard at Waterloo.
Death and oblivion as the ultimate elegance.
A dinner, a party, had to be a practise run, an intellectual joust, where your ability to make your point, shine, dance around and deflect adversary comments and snide remarks without being hit makes or breaks your social ranking. As a child, you would get compliments for a dinner conversation well managed, as much as you would get scolded if you made a fool of yourself. The French did not invent fencing as a competition for no reason. To “shine in society” is the ultimate goal, your true social status, what no diplomas, job title or money can give: repartee is the French/English word. Elegance is another way to channel, funnel, the natural French aggression, it is a natural expectation, especially in competition. Winning without panache? Unconscionable! Just ask Didier Deschamps, the national soccer coach.
The opposite of elegance is ridicule: it does kill, it is compliance and the ultimate social sanction
My parents would demonstrate it to me every year, when they desperately tried to amuse the locals in Claviers, by arriving on holidays with a travelling circus of a car, bursting with luggage, panting cats and teetering bird cages. You apparently had to drive through the village at a snail’s pace to give everyone the opportunity to render judgement and decide that you were not “proud” and avoid retaliation. That exam passed, you were deemed not dangerous enough. Ridicule, your soul against 2 months of holidays as a near-death experience.
That is what panache means, the demand it puts on yourself. Elegant at any cost. Without that, how life be worth living?
Framed photo of De Gaul on the dresser left
We were, I am French out of memories, mine as much as my grandparents’. Not out of a shared experience, I know that.
The Great Man himself had been presiding over the kitchen since 1942, and so he would well after his death, across continents and years. His picture was still in Claviers’ kitchen when we started clearing out. It would have been replaced once when grease and steam had defeated the cardboard.
His picture would each year be framed with olive branches blessed for at the Saint Anne pilgrimage. Forever staring at the borders.
My grandmother always was nostalgic, whether she had to become Belgian, was living in Cameroon, Congo. She was nostalgic of a France that never truly was: the Lost Provinces of 1872, as she would dress her daughters in 1949 in Alsatian garb, Soissons during WWI, where her father lived, and would never visit again, Dijon, Moray-du-Jura, Pont-De-Vaux, … all places she lived in, and would never visit again. They were not France. She was French.
And so, she did, as much as my parents, school, friends, colleagues later, insisted on teaching me what being French was. As if, somehow, I did not quite fit in either. I probably was not. Although it sounded odd to me.
I was recently in such a discussion, as if being French had to be decided by committee. They made that clear. Fair enough. I do not even come from Rueil Malmaison, I just attended school there after all.
Allow to remain delusional however. I believe that the core values I was taught are the true fundamentals that will make being French still relevant tomorrow. A view of Life, not a lifestyle.
Only French for export, maybe, but French nevertheless.
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