Public Enemies (14 page)

The ease with which a generation of working-class people (whose parents and grandparents were probably irreproachable patriots) was convinced that the
country of the workers
was the Soviet Union and there could be no other.

Finally, the lack of enthusiasm with which the French fought in 1940. When people condemn the
spirit of Munich
, I always feel a certain unease, because Munich after all was in 1938—twenty years after 1918. Twenty years isn’t much. And I think one has to beware of reading it as ideological. Because the first thought that occurred to most French people in 1940
was not, I think, “The struggle against Nazism has started,” but something more like “Here we go again with the Huns.”

If I don’t know quite what my parents did during the Second World War, I know even less about what my grandparents did during the previous war. There is, however, a number I remember because it struck me at the time. My grandmother was part of a family that in 1914 comprised fourteen brothers and sisters. By 1918, there were only three left. This is what they call “taking a heavy toll.”

For my part, I have little with which to reproach France; I didn’t even do my
service militaire
—I was exempted category P2 or P3,
^*
I don’t remember now. (Nowadays things are okay, we have a professional army; under such circumstances it’s easier to love one’s country, since the love is risk free.) But it’s like being in a relationship; you can’t quite remember what irritated you about your partner, you can even find some good things to say about them, but there’s nothing to be done, when it’s over, it’s over, and I won’t fight for France or for the Republic or for anything like it (always supposing I’m prepared to fight for anything).

In short, our different families have given us different visions of France, something confirmed rather amusingly by the way you write about taxes. When you say you “haven’t got the nerve” to be a tax exile it’s obvious that you think of it as morally reprehensible, whereas I can honestly say that I don’t.
I can assure you, dear Bernard-Henri, that I have absolutely no feelings of guilt. I have never felt any duty or responsibility toward France and choosing which country I live in has about as much emotional resonance for me as choosing which hotel I stay in. We are only passing through here on earth, I understand that perfectly now; we have no roots, we bear no fruit. In short, our mode of existence is different from that of trees. That said, I’m very fond of trees, in fact I’ve come to love them more and more; but I am not a tree. We are more like stones, cast into the void, as free as they are; or if you absolutely insist in seeing the glass half full, we are a little like comets.

I find what I’ve just written a little sad, suddenly; but it’s true, unfortunately, that in my life I feel as though I’m in a hotel; and I know that sooner or later I’ll have to
check out
. I can’t cope with this; I’m going to try to tackle some lighter subjects.

It’s possible that one day I will come back to France, and it would be for a very simple reason: I will have had enough of speaking and reading English every day. It annoys me that I feel so attached to my language, I feel it smacks of
literary posturing
, but it’s the truth. Besides, why should it be reserved for writers? The language we speak, that we use to express ourselves, is an important thing in a man’s life—at least as important as the food he eats.

And the French language is truly one of the successes of this country, harmonious, a little muted with limited tonalities. When traveling, I have sometimes felt the violent, irresistible urge to read even just a few lines in French; in this state of withdrawal I have sometimes gone so far as to buy
L’Express
.

(There are places in Asia where you can’t buy a newspaper
or a paperback book in French, but you can still find the international edition of
L’Express.
)

(I have to say it is an incredibly bloody boring magazine.)

(But it’s got great distribution.)

There is also what one might call
the France of Denis Tillinac
^*
—all local color and duck confit. I had barely experienced it until two or three years ago when, for a variety of reasons, I had to crisscross the country. And I have to admit, Denis Tillinac is right: it is a very beautiful country. The rural areas with their subtle patchwork of tilled fields, open meadows, and woodlands. The villages, here and there, stone houses, the architecture of the churches. Fifty kilometers farther along all this can change completely and you find a different arrangement, just as harmonious. It is incredibly beautiful what generations of anonymous peasants through the centuries have managed to create.

Ooh-la-la
, I feel like I might be
losing it
; admire a rural landscape these days and you can find yourself being accused of
neo-Pétainism
. I like Prague too, you know, and even New York at a push (though the weather there is a little harsh).

Be that as it may, Denis Tillinac is right; he is absolutely right to live in this France (it’s true that la Corrèze is among the most beautiful areas of France) but he is wrong to believe that it will disappear and to feel nostalgic about it. Worldwide, tourism is now the largest economic sector and selling points like that don’t just disappear: they’re worth a lot of money. This is what young British people have come to look for
when they retire after their careers in the
City
(and now that they’ve grossly inflated prices in the Dordogne, they’ve started buying up the Massif Central). This is what, with all their feverish, financial hearts, the Japanese and Russian
nouveaux riches
hoped to find; and we gave it to them. They have their raw-milk cheese, the Romanesque churches, they have their duck confit. We will give the same warm welcome to the
nouveaux riches
from China and India.

As an economic activity for France in the future, that will be more than enough. Does anyone really believe we are going to become world leaders in software development or microprocessors? That we are going to maintain a
major export industry
? Come on … We will still have some manufacturing, that’s true, mostly in the same sector (haute couture, perfumes, Joël Robuchon packaged dinners). Trains will be another exception; the French love trains.

Does this mean that I
meekly accept
the new international division of labor? Well, yes, nor do I see how I could do otherwise. The “emerging countries” want to earn money, much good it may do them; we have lots of things for them to spend it on. To put it more crudely, do I really want to turn France into a dead, mummified country, a sort of
tourist brothel
? To do to France what Bertrand Delanoë,
^*
that wonderful trailblazer, is in the process of doing to Paris? Without a second thought, I say YES.

You wouldn’t think it, but I have, in a few sentences, just saved the French economy; which just goes to show that our letters are not a waste of time.

I was happy to see you the other morning, Michel, although obviously disappointed by the power cut that prevented me from seeing your film.

But apart from the fact that it’s only been postponed and that we’ll see each other very soon, I must confess that I enjoyed our playacting in front of all those people waiting with us and who, I believe, we managed to fool into thinking that we hardly knew each other, that we were glaring at each other and had nothing to say.

I’ve always thought I’d have made a good secret agent.

Clearly, you wouldn’t have been bad in the role either.

And, as an aside, I think that a greater interest should be taken in writers who in their real life were real secret agents.

They’re always going on about writers who were diplomats, this unnatural alliance, this oxymoron. (Luckily, Claudel
^*
forgot that he was an ambassador when he wrote
Connaissance de l’est
[
Knowing the East
]! And I can still hear Arielle’s
^†
grandmother, the wife of Ambassador Garreau-Dombasle,
^*
who was also a good poet, celebrated as such by a handful of Surrealists and indeed also by Paul Claudel, sighing that the dinners, the letters from the castle, the
performance
had cost her her work …)

But the case of writers who were spies is so much more exciting! And there’s much more of a link with literary activity, the literary profession. Read any biography of Koestler, Orwell, or even le Carré. Take the case of Kojève,
^†
who we now know worked for the KGB. Look at Voltaire, the honorable correspondent of Louis XV at Frederick the Great’s court, Casanova and the Venetian doges, Beaumarchais trafficking arms for the American revolutionaries as Malraux did, a hundred and fifty years later, for the Spanish Republicans. Read the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, which were published by Bourgois twenty-three years ago, and also his writings on Picasso, Poussin, or the architecture of François Mansart. In each case, what mines to be tapped for a novel! Literary fodder in its pure state. You’ll find there the most radical and therefore the most pure form of the writer’s paradox according to
Contre Sainte-Beuve
:
^‡
I’m deceiving my world. I’m not who I appear to be. It’s marvelous to be taken for another and all the while, hiding behind this mask and this borrowed identity, to take on the features and steal the soul, the heart, the life of my contemporaries.

But let’s get back on track.

We’re not going to agree about the story of the German
officer assassinated in the metro: you’re pretending you don’t understand that killing a German officer in the middle of Paris in 1943 is not exactly a “random killing.” But let’s move on.

Nor will we agree on the question of the poor Chechnyans, who don’t seem to interest anyone and in your eyes too should just die without making a fuss. There certainly is, as you say, “something” about them in Tolstoy; that something is indeed in
Hadji Murad
, one of his last masterpieces, in which we see how this small martyred people is also (and the latter may explain the former) a great, proud people, insubordinate and incarnating a spirit of rebellion that the Putins of yesterday and today have always tried to bring to heel. I would so much like you to understand … But I know that you’ll say I’m pontificating if I insist too much, if I explain that once you get to the point where between 10 and 20 percent of a people have been killed off, its capital city wiped out, and half of its country transformed into an immense ground zero, this is no longer an internal affair but really a matter for everyone. So I’ll drop that too.

We won’t waste any more time on Barrès, even if there too the question is not as straightforward as you seem to think and is complicated, if I dare to say so, in the opposite way: there is a Barrès other than the one you mock. There’s the early Barrès, who is neither the
integral
nationalist of
La Colline inspirée
nor the Catholic drum-roller of
La Grande Pitié des églises de France
^*
and particularly not the proto-fascist of his notes on the period of the Dreyfus affair. There was that young Barrès, a romantic, a tortured soul who
espoused the “cult of the ego” and was a resolute enemy of laws, a Venetian by temperament, a lover of Toledo, admired by Malraux and Aragon, a man ultimately rootless enough to relate to what you say about your lack of attachment to the places you live in.

Strangely enough, what struck me in your letter was that story of the stones “cast into the vacuum” and to which our freedom is to be compared, as well as the idea you draw from it, according to which we are temporary guests in this world, condemned sooner or later to “leave the room.”

The image is interesting.

It was used as you know by an entire Greek school of thought founded by Democritus and Epicurus.

It’s the image used after them by Lucretius, who really conceived the world as a hail of stones thrown into the vacuum along parallel trajectories with from time to time a “clinamen,” a minuscule deviation, a swerve that causes them to meet and through meeting to form bodies.

As a parenthesis, this is an image that fascinated a whole series of writers before yourself, from Ovid to Montaigne, Bossuet to Rimbaud and Lautréamont, who saw
De rerum natura
as an extraordinary, brilliant, and in the proper sense of the word a visionary book (“
providens
” is what Lucretius called it; Rimbaud translated it as “
voyant,
” seeing).