The Atlantic and Its Enemies (43 page)

France had been there before, and such majorities made for what had been called the ‘unrepeatable Chamber’ (
Chambre introuvable
) - a reactionary majority so large as to threaten moderate and sensible voices within the government itself. But in this case, the boys and girls of 1968 had understood how to deal with a bureaucracy: a box-ticking culture which would run scared, and politicians in any event knew perfectly well that education brought cantankerous postbags and endless self-important lecturing, for no political gain. The government resolved on compromise and consultation; in other words, ran away. The politicians had been terrified, and simply gave in to demands for ‘autonomy’ and the rest; from that day to this, the universities in France have had to admit anyone with the right paper qualifications, themselves a very debased currency. French higher education survived with the ‘Grand Schools’; the state universities became, as Besançon said, ‘third world’ and vast damage was done to the cultural resonance of which French governments were enamoured. This coinage, worldwide, was now debased.

Not much noticed at the same time, there was another university crisis which portended far more than the circus of May 1968 in Paris. In all of the university disturbances, there was one that took a lead for perversity, and it was not to do with left-wing infantilism. The University of Louvain in Belgium had a very long and sometimes outstanding history. Its official history (
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
) is a noble book, and an epitaph. Humanism and its greatest figure, Erasmus, had flourished there. In the eighteenth century it had somewhat fossilized, students having to discuss (in Latin) such questions as ‘Did Adam and Eve pay each other compliments in the state of innocence?’ There was an inflation, and the window-cleaners had to be paid in gold; the clerical elite flourished while the juniors were starvelings. In 1794 came one of the great scenes of university reform, when, after their victory at Fleurus, revolutionary generals in their twenties occupied the place, stabled horses in its precincts, eventually, in 1797, abolished it, and exiled the Rector to French Guyana. It was restored in the nineteenth century and became a greatly respected Catholic university. In Belgium at that time French was the language for educated people, although Louvain itself stood in a Flemish hinterland. The university was an elite place of the old-fashioned sort, with a considerable intellectual and social life, ‘characters’ abounding; as such it attracted envy and resentment, but its products spoke for themselves, and Louvain was a leading European university with much international resonance. Its library was famous. With the student expansion, there were by 1960 more Flemish-speaking students than French, and some of them demanded Flemishization (‘Netherlandization’ as it was called, though almost no one thought of joining up with the Dutch, who had no objections to the use of French, a world language). In fact the halls of residence had already been ‘Netherlandized’ in part in the fifties, and some classes were already ‘parallel’. But nationalism of this sort was an itch only made worse by scratching. There was a further problem, that French-speaking (or French-leaning) parents at the university naturally wanted French-language schools in the town itself. There were demonstrations against these supposed ‘caste schools’ and it did not help that the university hospital doctors used French, sometimes unable to understand a distraught Flemish peasant mother with a sick child. In fact the doctors took a lead in what followed, and some of them made a property fortune out of the scouting of planning laws (the town acquired the usual hideous academic concrete). The real problem in Flemish eyes was that nearby Brussels, cosmopolitan and French-speaking, would spread like an oil slick (
tache d’huile
) and Frenchify a corridor to Louvain. In 1965 there were Flemish demonstrations to the effect of ‘All Walloons Out’ and Flemish students solemnly turned their backs on the procession of professors coming out of St Peter’s Church at the start of the academic year. The most that can be said for all of this is that at least no-one was killed, though there were some bruises. The Rector, Mgr Honoré Van Waeyenbergh, lost control, and though the bishops solemnly said in 1966 that the idea of two Catholic universities, one French and one Flemish, was absurd and expensive and impossible, they could not control the situation either. In January 1968 the French section was transferred to another concrete place at Woluwe, a suburb of Brussels, and has hardly been heard of again. Neither has the new Flemish university, which now, quite absurdly, uses English to express its international character. This time round, there would be no Fleurus, no horses stabled in ancient colleges, no deans sent to Guyana, but a great institution had died just the same.

But the fall of French at Louvain was only a small piece of a far larger picture: the wrong road taken in 1968. The European university also died, becoming, as the German equivalent of George Orwell, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, said, a ‘karst’. A brilliant French commentator, Marc Fumaroli, wrote an essay in 1992, ‘The Cultural State’, lamenting what had happened: France, he said, was turning into a huge version of Venice as she stood in the 1790s, before Napoleon had annexed her: wonderful architecture, many displays that impressed the tourists, but an air of deadness just the same. The State had built up an empire over Culture, studding Paris with
grands travaux
- a new opera house at the Bastille, a new and huge library, various ‘culture houses’, including a glass pyramid at the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, and ancient palace of the kings of France. There were enormous exhibitions and shows, and many references to ‘spaces of culture’ or ‘places of culture’. The greatest of these was the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1989. It was supposed to represent the Rights of Man, but the best thing that came out of it was another clever book, René Sédillot’s
Le Coût de la Révolution française.
Yes, France had had a revolution in the name of equality and liberty, but she had then lost her leading position in Europe, being overtaken by England and Germany. Still, in the 1950s, French civilization had attracted vast numbers of foreigners, and in the 1960s the Fifth Republic began to support it more lavishly than ever before as a national asset. The results were supposed to impress foreigners with the grandeur of France, and the monuments of Paris were scraped clear of centuries of grime, to look like filmsets. However, the effects of state patronage bore out what Charles Fourier had said a century before: ‘What the State encourages, withers; what the State protects, dies.’

A mania for public support of Culture spread over France, sometimes with preposterous results. In Provence you could read that ‘the Regional Council dynamizes the plastic arts’; there was ‘a microclimate of contagious euphoria’ with publicly funded art, and museums, spreading all over the place. The château de Chambord only very narrowly escaped acquiring what was described as an enormous breughelian pyramid, supposedly to celebrate the Renaissance. All of this was supposed to protect French culture, but its output compared quite badly with that of the 1950s, when, in small, private theatres, Ionesco and Beckett were performed. The new managers of French culture were very often anti-American, denouncing the establishment of McDonald’s on the boulevard Saint-Michel, but they themselves were really in the grip of another dictatorship altogether, that of East Berlin and Moscow: on the tower block outskirts of Paris there were ‘avenues Maurice-Thorez’ or ‘stades Rosa-Luxemburg’ that were as grimly Communist as anything you might have met in Romania. In fact, ‘State Culture divided Arts and Letters into functionaries and clients’. Typical of its output was a film,
Germinal
, which sought to revive a world of working-class passions, of the old French Left, with France’s best-known actor, Gérard Depardieu, in the heroic role. The film had no effect: it was, as Tocqueville had said of an earlier French revolution, that of 1848, ‘men warming their hands at the ashes of their grandfathers’ passions’. A more interesting film was Andrzej Wajda’s
Danton
, which showed a gloomy picture of a revolution eating its children. But Wajda, having lived through a genuine revolution, in Communist Poland, knew what he was talking about, whereas the French were only turning out wooden propaganda.

Most European countries had public support for the Arts. The Germans had inherited a tradition by which several, sometimes quite small, territories or towns had proudly maintained their local arts; the British, as ever, were better when it came to private gatherings and support - for instance, for the Hallé Orchestra - but they also had, in the BBC, a sort of Ministry of Culture, promoting music and literature through the radio. France, from the 1920s, tried to keep the language ahead, in a world role, subsidizing schools all over the globe; in the 1930s French film and theatre had been well ahead. However, much of this had to do with education, rather than public support for culture: it was simply a fact that the French were very well-educated indeed. In 1959, when the Fifth Republic was set up, Culture became a national totem; in fact, a sterile, old-Venice form of it was superimposed onto an educational system that, notoriously, declined, and a national television that was both censorious and comical. In Germany, state-led art sometimes reflected self-hatred. In France, matters were more complicated: the shapers of culture were motivated in part by the claims of national grandeur, but in large part also by contempt for what was bizarrely called the ‘French desert’.

It was said that the State had neglected its artists. This was in some measure quite true: it had not given great public commissions to, say, Cézanne. It had also allowed the sale of many modern paintings to foreigners. In the Third Republic, there had been a reaction against the cultural pretensions of earlier French governments, but there is no evidence at all that the civilization as a whole suffered - quite the contrary: the world beat its way to Paris. In the sixties cultural pretensions returned; but France interested the world less and less - though, to be fair, some of this was the world’s, and particularly the Anglo-Saxon world’s, fault, as knowledge of foreign languages ran down. In the fifties supposed decentralization of culture had been encouraged, at least in the theatrical world. What, in practice, this meant was that small versions of the Paris model went up everywhere, to the detriment of local character. This went together with a Communist notion that literature had been corrupted (‘bourgeois’) since the Revolution, that it needed to purify itself: such was Sartre’s attitude, in 1948, and, in 1953, Roland Barthes’s (
Le Degré zéro de la littérature
). They were contemptuous of cliché, dismissing even genuine, interesting and highly successful figures such as Édith Piaf or Charles Aznavour or Maurice Chevalier or Georges Simenon. The accent was on Brechtianism - ‘angry young men’ - as against the boulevard theatre: it was all modernism, and the hope was that the epicurean,
avant garde
dilettantism of the
art déco
world would be generalized. As Fumaroli says, this did indeed happen: within a generation, robustly bourgeois figures were going in for their version of bohemia, and popular culture more or less collapsed into out-of-date copies of Atlantic rock music. In the Third Republic, academe, not ‘culture’, had reigned: as a young education minister, Jean Zay, said in his memoirs, the greatest test was not to speak in the Senate, but before the professors gathered in the higher education council. In fact he did very well - commissioning the Palais de Chaillot, and getting Robert and Sonia Delaunay to decorate the technical pavilion of the exhibition of 1937. It was simply nonsense to write off the Third Republic as a cultural desert, but such was the tone. Later, Communist influences became very powerful, but an initial impulse came from Vichy. In 1940, with the great defeat, there were calls for a cultural purification of the country, and a General Secretariat for Youth was established, in which Catholicism and the army played their part. At Uriage a new school for administrators was set up, the beginnings of ‘technocracy’, and a Catholic thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, ‘the poor man’s Heidegger’, developed ‘personalism’. One of Vichy’s cultural ministers wrote, ‘Diriger l’art, c’est lui permettre de s’accomplir.’ A central part of this thesis was that the French universities had somehow let the national culture be frittered away in scholarly aridity, in egalitarianism. Mounier did have a reading list, but it was skimpy, and his accent lay elsewhere: he wanted to escape from the alleged academicism of literature and museums. These ideas were well-meant, in the sense that they were inspired by a feeling that ordinary people deserved a higher culture than, hitherto, they had had.

Such were the germs of the technocrats’ attitude to Culture, and after the war they were filtered through Communism, which won an enormous influence. Vichy even launched an idea of great public fetes. In this, it could rely on Rousseau, who disliked the Italian theatre and wanted demonstrations of unity; Wagner was a similar influence, and led straight to the megalomaniac producers Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig and Erwin Piscator manipulating the whole theatre, and using light, especially, to dominate a mass. The idea of theatre as awakening - here applied for left-wing purposes - was very old, and into the 1970s it was being used in western Europe, sometimes absurdly. Could television and film take its Brechtian place?

These notions came together, in 1959, with André Malraux - one-time hero of the Left, now de Gaulle’s minister of culture. Like so many intellectuals, he was out of touch with the liberal democracy which had in effect triumphed in 1945, and, like so many, he talked of some ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and Communism, which was a false way of putting the whole problem. France thus became in 1959 the first democratic country to acquire a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, and it went on to spread far and wide, in the very propitious environment of the French State, larger than elsewhere. Malraux’s budget had been small, and his
Maisons de la Culture
did not flourish, but, under Pompidou, elements of grandiosity took over. This especially concerned the Centre Beaubourg, but throughout the provinces and even in Paris small replicas pullulated. There was an entirely misleading idea that this was a continuation of Louis XIV’s practices, but, now, there were far more bureaucrats than artists, and it all had to do with a very modern phenomenon, ‘leisure’. The State’s monopoly extended, notoriously, to television, with a great noise as to protectionism against supposed cultural imperialism, cheapening,
etc.
and in the 1980s proceeded to grandiose nonsense - ‘the clangorous fiasco of the Bastille [opera], or the absurd project of creating a National Library, by its nature a private matter, in the very centre of a gigantic Leisure Complex’ or even some enormous French version of the Las Vegas Strip, a ‘Champs-Élysées of Culture’, including Versailles.