HOW DID FRANCE GET TO THIS POINT, or THE END OF THE 1968 REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT.
When confronted with absolute horror, words fail one. Whether it be massacres in Africa, Ukraine, Iraq, or Gaza, the premeditated murder in Paris, of members of staff at Charlie Hebdo, this wednesday 7th January, gives vertigo and nausea.
BUT it did happen in France, on French soil, and one should ask not WHO and HOW, but WHY these two young men were filled with such blind murderous hatred. One ought to remember that, according to Republican law, they are first of all FRENCH, before being Arabs and Muslims. This privilege ought to endow them with a special status, to inspire them with a life ideal, to open them doors in French society. Nothing of the sort. French citizens, migrants from the former French colonial territories, are still considered, and treated, as second class citizens. They do not enjoy the same status as migrants from the European continent. As does, for example, Manuel Walls, the present Prime Minister of Spanish extraction, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President, issued from mixed origins : Jewish from Salonica from his mother side, and Tsigano-Hungarian on his father side. Both of them are in fact guilty, through their inflamatory speech, of incitment to social tension, xenophobic and racial hatred, as are other French politicians, in particular Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the neo-Facist Front National party, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, both belonging to the Sarkozy clan.
It is too easy to stigmatise the Front National, Le Pen’s extreme right-wing party, when in fact politicians, such as Sarkozy, court its members when short of votes, and denounce them as werewolves when using fear as a weapon. The Charlie Hebdo massacre does not so much result from Jihadist idelology, as from the internal, and external, violence, hatred and incoherences of French politics in particular, and of the European Community and the Western world in general.
Sacredness is inherent to all cultures in mankind’s yearning for the transcendental. It was so until very recently in Western culture, and in France in particular. In the name of catchy slogans, as empty as they are shallow, Il est interdit d’interdire, It’s forbidden to forbid, France no longer has any moral values since the social and sexual revolution of May 1968. French political leaders, whether from the right or the left, live in a tasteless, low-class hollywoodian vaudeville ; their credibility is undermined by sordid affairs. Dominique Strauss Kahn has been accused of procuring for sexual orgies, commonly refererred to, in a particularly French hypocritical and diplomatic euphemism, as parties fines, and implicated in a widely publised affair of sexual assault in New York. Nicolas Sarkozy is mixed up in several shady cases of illegal financing, embezzlement and various fraudulent dealings. His private life, which is also public from his former function as French President, is similarly tumultuous. After a first divorce, and a second marriage to a woman who supported him in his fight for the presidency, she left him once settled at the Élysée. He then married a former model, reconverted as a singer, whose rock’n roll past is as tumultuous as his. Her constant need of self-publicity, and her grasping mentality, are equal to his. François Hollande stands for the egocentricity, the mediocre and limited thinking and vision of the 1968 generation, in all its contradictions. He fathered children to Ségolène Royal, herself a candidate to the Presidency in 2007, but refused to marry her. He then embarked in a long-standing adulterous relationship with another woman, who pushed him to the Élysée, to drop her for a younger version in the lure of fresher pastures. Following which, the aggrieved Valérie Trierweiler poured her bile in a vindicative and denunciatory book, and reaped millions !
THE FRENCH POLITICAL ELITE HAS A DISASTROUS IMAGE ! In their fight for power they do not hesitate to insult each other in strong terms, and any one else crossing their path, for that matter. Nicolas Sarkozy has become a master in this detestable art. To any French citizen endowed with a sense of humanism, moral values, sensibility, let alone spirituality, this is unbearable. Mammon reigns supreme on the left as on the right, appearances are favoured to the detriment of substance. The socialist President François Hollande, champion of social and moral transgression, courts all the crowned heads in Europe, and elsewhere, although he has trouble in keeping up with their protocol and etiquette. Nicolas Sarkozy had done the same with the questionable Middle Eastern potentates, Gaddafi and Bashar el-Assad, to further his own personal interests, more than those of the country he was supposed to represent.
How can a young generation marginalized by its origins, discriminated against by its faith, identify with such incoherence and find its own way ? Even their more successful fellow citizens, such as the social climber Rachida Dati, give them an image of greed, constant search for publicity in a basic lack of moral and civic ideals. Blaspheme is offensive for ALL believer, WHATEVER THE FAITH. But it reflects more on the blasphemer than on the blasphemed. To claim in the name of freedom of speech that blasphème is a Republican principle is to reduce the Republique to its lowest, most detestable level, and to trample its true values. In a truly free, equal and brotherly society, according to Republican principles, THE OFFENCE MADE TO OTHERS MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT. It is an ELEMENTARY rule of mutual respect, tacit understanding, intellectual and emotional maturity. It is a matter of basic intelligence in a world which has become a global village. One ought not rule through fear, which creates hatred. It is through fraternal love, agape, caritas, that the world will change. Tolerance and respect of others is at the root of ALL humanist and religious thoughts, from the antique Western and Eastern philosophies – such as Buddhism so fashionable in French intellectual circles – to the great monotheist religions issued from Judaism ; Christianism and Islam. Why not follow the Dalai-Lama’s advice, Stay in your religion, in so doing one can and learn to appreciate other faiths and respect them.
The worn over leitmotiv, French laïcité or secularism, seems to give rise not to an open spirit of tolerane, but to an intolerant atheism, virulent and blasphematory, spreading violence through its very own violence. French society has lost the memory of its past, it is a sickness of the soul, and its noxious effects can be felt at all levels. France’s history is far richer and far more complex in its diversity, hence universal appeal, than the version fostered on and imposed by contemporary thinking, dating it back to the 1789 French Revolution, or even May 1968 ! Know thyself and thou shalt know the secrets of the gods, the Delphic and Socratic formula has been forgotten in a country robbed of its spiritual dimension and substance. Thus the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterand, nephew of the Socialist President, at the opening of a UNESCO biblical exhibition, can claim that he had discovered the Bible in Cecil B. DeMille’s films ! This same minister, in the company of a former Culture Minister, Jack Lang, left the performance of the French opera, Mireille, at the Opera Garnier, because they objected to the Christian mysticism of Frédéric Mistral’s poem which inspired it. One does wonder what sort of CULTURE they stand for ! Following citizens’ denunciations, as virulent as they were inopportune, administrative tribunals forbade the display of Christmas cribs in city halls and councils buildings. The wish to secularize totally the feast of Christmas, traditionally the celebration of Christ’s birth, belongs in its absurdity to the surrealistic realm of Gabriel Chevallier’s satirical novel Clochemerle. What CULTURE are we talking about, if in the history of French, and European arts at large, one can no longer mention and relay the Christian tradition, or for that matter the Classical one, from which they sprang ? A Cambridge don sensed it when he declared on the French radio France Inter, Where are your Mauriac, where are your Claudel ? Paul Claudel was a diplomat, as well as a writer. Common courtesy, good manners, high-mindedness, as much as respect and tolerance of other cultures and creeds, were second nature to him.
For centuries France was renowned for the art of diplomacy. What has happened to this social art of civilized living, this former French glory ? Sarkozy’s reign as Président at the Élysée Palace , and Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister at the Quai d’Orsay, have purposedly destroyed its last relics. In today’s France, only one man recommends himself of this great tradition, Dominique de Villepin. He is critized by his jealous peers, yet he is greatly respected, and widely admired, the world over in particular in the Near and Middle East, since his February 2004 speech at the United Nations agains the illegal Irak war. He would be the only French politician, at a national and international level, able to conduct a conciliatory mission in those delicate intercultural relations, negotiating in potentially explosive situations. The French political world ignores the prophetic tone of his media communications and written articles, dismisses all his highly pertinent and lucid analysis of the present catastrophic situation in France, in Europe, in the West, and in the world as a whole. When will France hear the voice of reason ? The whole country seems to sink in a dangerous quagmire of decadence, illustrated by two Sade exhibitions in Paris. The first one, at the Musée d’Orsay, is an overblown monstrosity, not only by the very nature of the subject matter, but for the self-indulgent curating, devoid of all intellectual rigour, discipline and metodology. A large number of works of art are exhibited, seemingly in a haphazard manner, with no visual or didactic logic. Furthermore many of the works have already been displayed in another exhibition in 2013, in the same museum, L’Ange du Bizarre. This repetition ad nauseam of all the horrors and perversions inherent to human nature, is a subtle form of propaganda of a single-thought philosophy, which must be denounced for its noxious and corrosive effect. It is revealed in the exhibition subtitle : Attaquer le soleil, To attack the sun. Some of us love the splendour of the sun, its light and its warmth. Some of us draw sustenance and nourishment from them, and stand for their virtues. Some of us know that man is a giant, whose feet are indeed in the mud, but whose glance is turned towards the stars. Some of us raise their eyes to Heaven, and refuse to flounder in the mud…
Thus to pay homage to the memory of the shooting’s victims, France and the French people turned away from blasphemy and trangression, and renewed with spirituality in their need for reassurance and transcendence. The bells of all French churches and cathedrals tolled on this Thursday January 8th, a national mourning day. The solemn notes of the Requiem of Mozart, of Fauré, of Verdi, of Gounod, rose to their high vaultings. During the Friday prayer in the mosques, the imams denounced and condemned murderous violence. Many people, out demonstrating in the streets, felt the reality of the English seventeenth century metaphysical poet, John Donne’s mystical verses :
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
MUST WE WAIT FOR DISASTER TO TURN TOWARDS GOD AND FIND THE LIGHT AGAIN ? WILL FRANCE, AND THE WHOLE WORLD, STOP IN TIME BEFORE ABYSS’S EDGE ?
MONIQUE RICCARDI-CUBITT
18th January 2015