La crise en France: un regard (anglo-saxon) subtil et nuancé

La crise en France: un regard (anglo-saxon) subtil et nuancé

17 mars 2006 — Les réactions extérieures à la crise du CPE en France sont assez mesurées. Elles sont, d’une façon peut-être surprenantes, aussi mesurées qu’elles sont excessives en France. La crise est perçue en France sur le fond du débat sur le “déclin” français (le débat sur le nième “déclin” français, débat comme s’il état acquis que ce “déclin” existe) ; elle est perçue, hors de France, sur le fond d’une crise globale et multiforme qui frappe tout l’univers qui ne cesse de s’affirmer et de poser sa marque sur toutes les réflexions.

Ainsi est-on loin du torrent d’invectives et de sarcasmes qui, d’habitude, marque les commentaires de la presse anglo-saxonne lorsqu’une crise touche la France. La vision de la valeur réelle de la France est, aujourd’hui, bien différente hors de France qu’en France, surtout dans les élites françaises largement influencées par ceux qu’on nomme les “déclinologues” français. (“Déclinologues” français : un terme dont la fausseté révèle l’intention idéologique partisane, et auquel nous préférons sans la moindre hésitation, par honnêteté intellectuelle, celui de “déclinistes”. Le débat est bien loin d’être futile et mérite quelques observations. Voir notre Bloc Notes de ce jour.)

L’éditorial du Guardian d’aujourd’hui est inhabituellement grave et examine le conflit en cours en France pour ce qu’il est. L’introduction de ce texte court en donne l’orientation et rencontre une de nos très fortes convictions que la France est effectivement le “système d’alarme” le plus avancé des crises du monde. Cette première phrase est complètement juste, — complétée par une autre, dans le corps de l’édito, qui fixe justement l’enjeu : «  Because of its tendency to polarise and dramatise politics, France has always had the capacity to remind the rest of the world what the really important questions are. [...] Yet the underlying argument [of the French crisis] is a critical one for all countries which are finding it more difficult to combine a high degree of social protection with economic success, and which are increasingly tempted to discard more and more of the first in order to secure the second. »

D’autre part, nous pensons qu’un article publié le 12 mars par le correspondant de The Observer à Paris, Jason Burke, est tout à fait remarquable. Si l’article a comme sujet la situation et les ambitions de Nicolas Sarkozy (« Napoleon seeks his empire »), s’il examine la carrière de l’homme et les déboires de l’époux, il offre également in fine une analyse remarquable de la situation française. Il s’attache justement à ces rapports étroits entre la psychologie de la crise française et celle de la crise mondiale, à cette étrange fonction française de servir de signal d’alarme pour les grandes crises de notre temps. Il ne s’agit pas du texte d’un adorateur de la France, car rien ne dissimule ce qu’il pourrait y avoir de ridicule ou de dérisoire dans la chose décrite ici ou là ; mais ce qui aurait conduit aussitôt à l’usage exclusif du sarcasme chez un journaliste moyen du Monde ou de L’Express devient le moyen d’explorer un peu plus en profondeur un état des choses qui invite à la subtilité et à la mise à jour des nuances.

L’extrait suivant du texte de Burke éclaire, nous semble-t-il, ce que nous voulons dire :

« When I arrived in Paris six months ago, a friend told me about the bread served at breakfast in her local cafe. “Some days it's good,” she said. “Other days, if the baker's lost on the horses or rowed with his wife, then it isn't.” At the time I did not recognise that, very gently, she was giving me the key to understanding modern France and the modern French world-view. She was saying was what many French people feel. France is defiantly not part of the consumerist, capitalist, US-led economic and cultural wave that is engulfing the world. France is different. My friend spoke of two other elements which were new to me. She described herself as neither from left nor right but “a republican”, and spoke of the importance of a multi-polar world. The implication was that the leaders of the pole opposed to the “Anglo-Saxons” would be the French. “Anglo-Saxon” is another word you hear often in France. It means Anglophone, economically liberal, rampantly capitalist. It means the brutish British with their powerful economy and low taxes, their lower levels of unemployment but higher levels of poverty. It means the unsophisticated, insular, ignorant, crassly self-confident Americans who have somehow — and this is apparently an historic injustice of enormous proportions — managed to become the world's only superpower. It means a threat. It also means, of course, an overweening sense of précarité.

» One of the things that struck me most on arrival in France was this sense of external threat and internal crisis, despite the fact that the nation is still quite evidently one of the most successful states of the modern world. I started counting ‘crises’ — the crisis of wine, of textiles, of the press, of the railways (the latter immeasurably better than the UK's shambolic, expensive and filthy system) — and then gave up. As for threats, the biggest threat of all, that which apparently menaces all that France stands for, is globalisation, something that I had largely considered as a relatively benign process that brought countries closer together. Not for many in France. The destruction of distance, the melting of frontiers, was seen by many as a potential disaster. Even the project of the European Union was seen as a sinister Anglo-Saxon led ‘liberal’ plot to undermine the French social model and its cultural and economic traditions. The spread of the English language was an appalling loss to the world, not a means to greater international communication.

» All is thus insecure, threatened, precarious, whether jobs or a way of life. This explains, to a degree, the intensely powerful myths that surround French agriculture — even if France's future clearly lies not in producing steak and turnips but in capitalising on its incredible reserves of knowledge, thought and culture.

» The latter cannot fail to impress. If you want one difference with the UK, you will find it in the general level of popular conversation. In Bobigny, in the famous Paris banlieues — the celebrated department 93, scene of so much of the trouble last autumn — I spoke to a taxi driver who, after comparing rap lyrics to those of Corneille, the classic French playwright, explained to me the history of politically engaged French songwriting since the 1940s. In a poor provincial town in eastern France, the local mayor and backbench MP talked to me about different concepts of urban planning, making rapid references to major sociologists. He, incidentally, was a Sarkozy supporter. Everywhere the general level of public conversation is several notches higher than it is across the Channel and immeasurably superior to that found across the Atlantic.

» But the French love affair with words has its drawbacks. A Swiss journalist friend spoke of the 'logorrhoea' of the French, which is unfair, but does indicate the degree to which words are favoured over action. There is a strong sense that if the ideas are there, and expressed in the right words, then actions are superfluous. So, during the riots of last year, which pitted angry, unemployed, alienated, disenfranchised youth from ethnic minorities against not angry, employed, fully franchised white policemen, the refrain “the Republic is not racist” was everywhere. This was true: the principles of the French Republic are inspiring, the institutions are impartial, the laws are stunning in the simple elegance of their justice. But there is liberté, égalité, fraternité and there is réalité. As another French friend commented: “We are interested in pourquoi (why), the Anglo-Saxons are interested in comment (how).” »