The French have not given up on their extraordinary nation
It is easy to find flaws in France. High unemployment, civil unrest, institutional paralysis, selective memory, anti-Semitism, extremism, nativism, terrorism.
All have produced a crisis of identity, the kind of malaise that was supposed to bring the National Front to power this month.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Apocalypse. Unlike Americans, who gave up on the United States, the French have not given up on France. If they feel morally superior these days, they should.
France does a lot of things right. It enjoys an enviable quality of life. In politics, public works, social welfare, the arts, culture, and the esthetic, France is extraordinary among nations.
Consider the presidential election. After a few months of intense campaigning, the process produced two candidates, from a large field, in April. Two weeks later voters chose a winner with a two-thirds majority. Some threequarters voted, even if many disliked their choice.
When the polls closed at 8 p.m. on May 7, exit polls called the winner accurately and immediately. Marine Le Pen conceded at 8:11 p.m.; she spoke for three minutes and disappeared.
A week later, Emmanuel Macron took office. A decisive campaign, a political realignment, a short transition. No ambiguity or anxiety over the outcome. Bang, bang, bang.
When Macron’s campaign was hacked on the last weekend before the election, no one heard about the revelations. The media respected the blackout. Incroyable.
It is not just the political system that works in France. Health care is among the best in the world. Roads are excellent. High-speed rail laces the country; TGV stations are futuristic marvels and trains are smooth.
Libraries matter. The bibliothèque yields to the “médiathèque,” reflecting a country comfortable with technology. Often these are found in restored monasteries and other historical buildings.
Old industrial cities are fading, yes, but others are imaginative. Avignon, for example, uses minibuses powered by clean energy to navigate its narrow streets.
Culture is not a luxury; it is France itself. It is no slur to call Macron “très cultivé.” Museums offer discounts to teachers, students, the elderly and the unemployed. Arts festivals proliferate.
Food remains the country’s emblem. In Provence, there are markets in towns once or twice a week, as there have been for centuries. Stalls groan with cheese, fruit, vegetables, meat,
fish, poultry and charcuterie.
France spends more per capita on food than any other country. Food is poetry. Strawberries are indescribably red, lettuce impossibly green, roasted chicken singularly succulent. There is little appetite for junk food.
Everything seems to taste better, as food did a generation ago in North America.
It may annoy visitors to find shops in villages closed at midday. To the French, it’s civilized.
If they want to eat and make love in the afternoon, fine. Sex education is offered without embarrassment. Condoms are available on the street in public dispensers (“Easy fit”). There is the same insouciance regarding alcohol and adolescents, who are introduced to wine early.
Most strikingly, the French believe in beauty. It begins with the land itself — dramatic in variety, particularly in the south, by turns sharp, flat and creased, dry and lush. In spring, a sea of red poppies shimmer in the fields. In
summer, it is lavender.
There is beauty in a serpentine path through the piney woods, a windswept, cliff-top village at sundown, an open window framed by rose bushes, the hue of a glass of rosé, canopies of trees lining a country lane, the ancient aqueduct illuminated at night. It is life’s fabric here. Whatever our natural gifts in the new world, we just don’t see things the way the French do.
Oh, France struggles with its demons. It is no Utopia. Yet it remains a vibrant, diverse society that welcomed African Americans such as Josephine Baker in the 1920s, Medgar Evers in the 1940s and James Baldwin in the 1960s.
Whatever their angst, the French remain proud, independent and deeply patriotic in their spring of surprise. Now, more than ever, Vive la France!