A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries Jonathan Meades on France

No strings of onions.

No Dordogne.

No art of living in Provence.

No dream homes.

No Piaf.

No "ooh la la".

No Gallic shrugs.

No checked tablecloths.

What makes French architecture French?

Pyramids.

Domes.

Mammarial centrefold domes.

Domes shrivelled as an old sow's dugs.

Domes swollen as a fat glans.

Ovoid domes. Shallow domes.

What else?

Steeples.

Emphatic verticality. Sheer slopes. Turrets. Cones.

Spires. Wedges.

Crenellations like a junkie's dentition.

Hothouse asphyxiation. Exhilarating perversity -

this is the country which supplies the "S" in S&M.

A refusal to confuse beauty with prettiness.

Materials hewn against the grain.

Materials that don't weather.

Parasitical elements, like a rose self-grafted to an apple tree,

like a conjoined twin that grows out of its sibling's belly.

The aggregate of these more or less grotesque devices

is a freak show in the sky - it exploits the sky,

it's a nightmare reliant on heaven's brilliance.

This is where French architecture excels -

in the exaggeratedly ornamental roof line.

This is where French architecture is at its most distinctively,

most essentially, most perversely French.

The only person to have had a roof named after him was French,

the 17th century architect Francois Mansart.

"Le Toit a la Mansart."

The Mansart Roof.

Chambord.

There is no silhouette to match that of Chambord -

most fantastical of French roof lines,

thus of European roof lines.

This is the most immodest of hunting lodges.

Around it, the Sologne - heath and birch, gorse and broom,

ponds full of pike, woods full of boar, elk, deer

whose tines are as extravagant as its roof line.

Early on, during the long period when classicism,

in one form or another, was the pan-European fashion,

France developed its own unorthodox classicism,

a classicism with roofs that were hangovers from the Gothic past,

roofs that were entirely unrelated to the buildings they sat on.

Imagine a figure dressed in austere, quasi-monastic garb

and the dazzlingly farouche perruque of a Restoration comedy.

The fashion for this curious hybrid architecture did not last.

French buildings ceased to make play with the sky.

Invention and extravagance were reserved for interiors.

The late 17th, the 18th and the early 19th centuries

were the period of France's global pre-eminence.

Yet throughout this period,

its architecture was not quintessentially French.

France took its cue from the grand architecture of the rest of Europe.

But without the conviction that informs palaces

in Mecklenburg or Franconia, St Petersburg or Piedmont.

They did these things better there.

Versailles has problems.

Identity problems.

Pomp problems.

Size problems.

Size.

It isn't big enough, really.

It may be vast, but it's also paltry.

The architectural imagination seems puny

in comparison with the extent of the building.

The garden front isn't tall enough in relation to its length

or to the garden itself.

It's without articulation, without variety, without relief.

There's a crucial lack of energy.

Identity.

Versailles is inhibited. It's shackled by good taste.

Pomp.

It isn't pompous enough.

Absolutism demands to be represented by a lack of restraint,

not by timidity on an epic scale.

Almost 200 years of timidity came to an end in the middle years of the 19th century.

With the rebuilding of the medieval town of Carcassone,

French architecture became French once more,

with roof lines that were romantically medieval.

Carcassonne was a fantasy of the Middle Ages.

The 19th century's Middle Ages

were an improvement on the Middle Ages' Middle Ages.

Here were the Middle Ages with the benefit of hindsight.

Alfred de Musset, romantic poet, romantic alcoholic,

romantic early death,

described literary romanticism as "the abuse of adjectives".

This was a description which also applies to architectural romanticism

which is characterised by -

the abuse of ornament,

the piling up of decorative effects,

the accretion of extraneous gewgaws,

the incorporation of screaming additions,

the suturing of superfluous bling,

the impasting of ornamental whorls,

the exponential swell of increments.

They do tend to take over.

They bury the armature to which they're appended.

They mask the structure.

Digression becomes the very core.

Gustave Flaubert's prescription of "nothing outside the story" -

not, actually, a prescription he obeyed -

might come from a different world.

It has only rarely been applicable to French architecture.

Indeed, the new architecture,

the new old architecture, that Flaubert and de Musset witnessed

being made around them from about 1850,

manifested a bourgeois concept of romanticism,

a sumptuously bogus and self-conscious Frenchness,

a farrago of pseudo-chivalric devices

that recalled a distant, pre-revolutionary France.

Here was an architecture that evoked the field of the cloth of gold,

the courtly France of books of hours,

and le Chanson de Roland - a call to arms against Muslim invaders.

The France that built this convincing fiction

in the third quarter of the 19th century was untroubled by revolution

and anti-clericism, and sutured together by monarchical certainties

which resembled those of l'ancienne regime.

And it went on building this fiction,

even after the humiliation of the siege of Paris

in the Franco-Prussian war.

This was the Franco-French architecture that France exported

to wherever the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution

wished to show off their wealth.

It became the global nouveau riche style.

It was privately adopted by iron founders, paper millers,

cloth magnates, mine owners, bankers, oil bandits,

newspaper barons, brewers, guano tycoons

and Jay Gatsby, whose house was

"a factual imitation of some hotel de ville in Normandy".

It is to be found in the Ruhr, Bucharest,

Glasgow, Philadelphia, Cairo, Montevideo,

Buenos Aires and Istanbul.

It was enthusiastically espoused in England,

specifically at Waddesdon and Halton, by the Rothschilds

and consequently by lesser Jewish dynasties.

For such dynasties, it was a style that despite its flashy grandeur,

was bereft of presumption.

For it did not claim Anglo-Saxon heritage.

It announced a racial and cultural separateness.

In France, the public adoption of this style

was yet more politically charged.

The same architecture represented the then all-powerful church,

which was, until 1905, effectively an instrument of the state.

Paris's tentacles stretched to awkward provincial dioceses.

The architecture in question was, of course, the bewildering,

exhilarating, overpowering salmagundi of Byzantine revival,

with lavish splashes of baroque, a healthy soupcon of Renaissance,

and, needless to say, a catastrophic pile-up of colliding roofs.

The thin-lipped piety and dismal churchiness of the English Gothic revival is entirely absent.

This is not the architecture of cold showers

and muscular Christian torment.

It's opulent, soft, luxuriant,

sybaritic, indulgent.

It's a barely Christian architecture for concupiscent popes

with chancels full of nephews,

it's an architecture of the fallen, of the imperfect.

It reeks of scented hammams, loukoum, and seraglio.

Architecture is one of the glues that binds the state,

and it's capable of binding those parts of the state

that don't want to be bound, without their noticing.

France pretended to unity. It enforced unity.

The same bureaucracy affected Gascony as it did Flanders.

The same syllabus was taught in schools

all over the Hexagone and the dom-toms.

From about 1870 onwards,

the purpose of the French Empire in Indo-China, north and west Africa,

in North America, and so on, was in contrast to both its earlier empire

and to the British and Belgian empires.

The purpose henceforth was not the pursuit of trade,

not the plunder of mineral riches, not agricultural opportunism.

It was no longer founded in martial strategy.

It belonged, tardily, to the Enlightenment.

France's later imperial scheme was at once grandiose, naive,

idealistic, utopian, self-congratulatory.

It was to use empire in order to expand France

by creating replicas of France in far-distant places,

and by creating French citizens, replica French citizens.

French colonial cities were not, then,

as Evelyn Waugh's Brigadier Ritchie-Hook had it,

"all boulevards and brothels".

They were schools, institutes of instruction,

oblique pedagogic instruments.

They were founded in the notion of urbanistic determinism.

That is, in the belief that a particular disposition of streets,

street names, public places, public amenities, parks

and a particular gamut of stylistic tics could play their part

in moulding people, in nothing less than manufacturing citizens.

Colonial France had an exceptional, quasi-Jesuit faith

in the potency of environmental conditioning,

in the efficacy of nurture, in the force of example,

in the acquisition of traits through imitation,

in a sort of cultural osmosis.

Faith is, of course, a euphemism for gullibility.

It positions itself beyond proof.

Faith causes the existence of god and miracles,

and the predictive conjugation of magpies.

It was faith that caused colonial France to believe

that the peoples of countries it had annexed or invaded

could be rendered French,

and could have the privilege of being French thrust upon them.

Metropolitan France trains all its children to be French,

just as it trains its young adults to be doctors, electricians,

chefs, mycologists.

There is no country on earth with a greater fetish for qualifications.

France proselytised on behalf of Frenchness

as though Frenchness was a religion seeking converts.

The improvement of mankind could be achieved by making mankind French.

The colonies were factories supplementing the supply of French citizens.

Southeast Asian children, West African children, Maghrebian children were brainwashed.

Nicely brainwashed, with the finest scented brain soap,

which squeaky-cleaned their synapses and left them feeling French.

The British Empire was less presumptuous. It did not assume that a Gujarati dirt-farmer

could think of nothing better than becoming a civil servant in Bexleyheath.

But the British Empire was also less generous.

It rarely afforded such opportunities to its subjects,

whom it was happy to introduce to opium in order to open up a market.

It encouraged a sort of stasis.

It believed above all that its subjects should not aspire to Britishness.

How could they when their colour was not noon-day beetroot?

They should stick to their caste, their tribe, their quaint clothes,

their extravagant belief systems.

To do otherwise was getting above themselves.

Britain sought to preserve cultural, religious and racial purity.

France's ambitions for its citizens, who were not subjects, could not have been more different.

Citizenship was a surprisingly concrete goal,

that might be strived for and attained through the acquisition, in no particular order,

of language and culture, dress, mores, deportment.

And through learning by rote.

The route to Frenchness was paved with departmental numbers

that had to be inscribed in the memory.

12 - Aveyron.

13 - Bouches-du-Rhone. 14 - Calvados, a drink.

15 - Cantal, a cheese.

16 - Charente, a melon. 17 - Charente-Maritime. 18 - Cher.

-19 - Correze. 20 - Corsica. Cote d'Amor. Cote d'Or.

-Creuse...

SNORING

Departmental numbers are just the ticket when you're growing up

in a Saigon suburb or in a bidonville on the outskirts of Dakar.

A child many thousand miles south of metropolitan France, in a sub-Saharan school,

studies pluviometrie, the comparative rainfall of, say,

Grenoble, Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand, Rennes and Bordeaux...

a city which Alfred de Vigny,

poet, translator of Shakespeare, cognac distiller,

described as "as hot as Seville and as wet as Nantes".

MUSIC: "Nantes" by Barbara

# Il pleut sur Nantes

# Donne-moi la main... #

The child does not know what Nantes is - a kind of root vegetable?

The child has not heard a radio, does not know Barbara's song. The child has never seen rain.

The child does, however, know the words of the Marseillaise

and of such folkloric songs as Aux Marches du Palais.

The child knows the volume of water displaced by the transatlantic liner called La France.

The child knows the average annual sugar cane production of Martinique

and the names of dead generals and bearded statesmen.

Subjection, voluntary subjection,

to all this was a step towards becoming French.

What was being learnt was nothing less than a civil catechism,

the rules of the faith, the litany of belonging.

The French state has since 1905 been founded in laicite...

which is close to, but not quite the same as secularism,

which is how it is habitually mistranslated.

Religion plays no part in the offices of state.

A church wedding has no legal validity.

No god is invoked on July 14th or during the ceremony

to commemorate the dead on Armistice Day.

Laicite is not opposed to religious observance.

It is, rather, a means of treating all religions equally

without granting the favours that their wretched special pleading and whining demands.

There is no more reason to submit to a preposterous solicitation

because it is born of faith -

that is, of irreason -

than if it is born of astigmatism or greed or inebriation.

I entirely lack the credulous gene.

The idea that gods and prophets are more than low-level human inventions seems so frail and so preposterous

that they are not worth considering as parts of a belief system.

But as a psychopathology worthy of infinite investigation,

there is nothing quite like them.

France's approach has been that devotees of ancient programmes of superstition

should not enjoy more rights than bee keepers,

window dressers or monocyclists.

The French ideal is that religious practice, belief, observance

and so on is a private pursuit.

There is no demand on the individual to respect another individual's beliefs.

Tolerate them, certainly.

The Roman Catholic Church was the most prevalent and engrained

ancient programme of superstition when such determined men as Jules Ferry,

Emile Combes, and Aristide Briand began to militate for the separation

of the state and education from religious congregations.

The law of 1905 decreed that Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism

were all compatible with Frenchness.

The matter was determined not by the individual's conscience -

what a quaintly Protestant idea! -

but by the state itself in all its peculiar impartiality.

Belief systems and superstitions that were, on the face of it,

no more or less ludicrous than those which were sanctioned, were stigmatised and suppressed.

A succession of lavishly funded interior ministry agencies -

the current one bears the lollipop acronym MIVILUDES -

have determined the status of the different products in the marketplace of irreason.

Miviludes may be highly active but it's frivolous and toothless.

It addresses fringe charlatans, minor fraudsters, crazed apocalyptics

and ludicrous theologies such as the Tree of Flowing Jade and Hyper-Penitentism.

Miviludes pursues unbalanced cults such as Raelism,

founded after he met some extraterrestrials by a sometime Jacques Brel imitator

and sometime racing driver with a taste for sci-fi clothes - no collars, of course.

It prosecutes unpleasant sects such as Instinctotherapie,

whose leader is serving 15 years for the rape of children,

Garum, Khnoum, and Neo-Phare, whose leader believes he is Jesus.

He's planning a trip to Venus.

One of the statues built by the Aumist cult in the Alps

was dynamited by departmental authorities in 2001.

This, however, was nothing to do with outlawing a dodgy organisation.

It was, rather, because the ashram had neglected to apply for planning permission

and the neighbours complained.

The Cosmoplanetary Mandarom was 40 metres tall.

It was no more or less offensive than much other religious statuary.

Few denominations disavow kitsch.

All theologies are ludicrous. Some are more ludicrous than others.

Miviludes takes these millenarian fruitcakes seriously.

It justifies its existence by exaggerating

the threat of harmless nutters and by its uncanny ability

to discover a dangerously psychopathic cult in every backwoods village.

It has gone native to the point where it seems to entertain

the possibility that the world will,

as predicted by the cosmic-class apocalypse and haruspication operatives

of The Infinite Solar of Solar Solar, end on December 21st 2012.

This does not apply just to France.

Put it in your diary.

Miviludes' competence does not extend to monitoring

the elephant in the street...

demonstrative Islam. That falls to the Interior Ministry.

The practice of public prayers in, for instance,

the 18th arrondissement of Paris, is divisive.

The Ministry sees it as anti-republican provocation posing as piety.

The participants claim that it's a necessary response to the lack of mosques.

The interior Minister, Claude Gueant, has responded by arranging the rental of disused barracks

as a place for prayer and has banned any further street prayers in Paris.

The Western humanist tradition derives, just as the 1905 law does,

from the gradual self-secularisation that overtook Western Europe

in the schismatic centuries after Luther, after the Reformation.

Centuries when Europe cast off the Church's yoke...

individually and publicly.

Islam has not enjoyed a similar self-secularisation.

In Britain, what is recklessly celebrated as cultural diversity -

vibrant cultural diversity -

is actually a form of apartheid,

which starts early, at sectarian schools and faith schools.

People are defined by the religious or ethnic or linguistic group they are born into.

Identity is determined by community rather than by the individual.

Cultural diversity inhibits social mobility,

it stalls economic improvement, it fractures society.

It's a barrier to self-invention.

It sets the status quo in stone. You know your place.

You are conscious of your roots, your precious roots.

But roots are for vegetables.

The British seem unable to understand that a human's roots are actually a human's shackles.

They bear you back into the past.

There is no escape from your ancestors. Their mores are yours.

Their rites and superstitions are yours.

This kind of separate development that confines people to their communitarian pigeonhole

has been a fetish of Anglo-Saxon liberal policy for half a century...

even though it is patently illiberal.

Multiculturalism doesn't leave much room for aspiration.

The mutation that is allowed to the caterpillar is denied to British humans.

It militates against individual equality

by granting paramouncy to community rather than to the person.

In contrast, the French approach to immigrants is, in theory,

positive, optimistic, welcoming, even cosseting.

The individual, of no matter what ethnicity, can grow,

can improve intellectually, ethically, economically,

by subscribing to Frenchness.

It does sound suspiciously like a cult.

Throughout "les trente glorieuses", the 30 or so years after the war,

a vast programme of social housing was undertaken,

most of it on the peripheries of towns and cities.

These satellites would house the rural diaspora,

baby boomers and an ever-expanding and ever more fractured immigrant population.

Projects were characteristically massive in scale,

self-proclaimingly futuristic in form, self-consciously republican in aspiration.

Many of the buildings were so weird they might have belonged to a cult.

A benign cult in which every citizen is granted the same opportunity.

The French idea of citizenship

and of the citizen's quasi-sacred link to the state

derives from the Enlightenment, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

from the Jacobins' revolutionary utopianism which he fomented.

A tainted utopianism to say the least,

since the Jacobins were the instigators of state terror.

Equally they entertained a belief in the attainment of human perfection.

A preposterous belief, the bloody failure of whose countless

manifestations has, self-evidently, never discouraged

the next generation of tyrannical dreamers from embracing it.

And has never dissuaded the French republic from it.

Freedom, equality and brotherhood is much more than a slogan.

It is a secular faith.

Subscribed to and believed in, despite evidence of these

qualities being difficult to come by.

So difficult that one wonders if they actually exist.

Of course they exist! Faith demands no proof.

They are the nation's collective lie to itself.

They are a mental amulet. A good luck charm without physical form.

They are a testament to hope... for everyone.

Nearly everyone.

French citizenship is a social contract.

It is not conditional on ethnicity or religion.

Though on the one side, the Front National would like to make

Frenchness a matter of nature rather than nurture,

of being born to it rather than behaviourally conditioned.

It dreams of a France whose citizens are francais de souche,

that is, with a stump, or root, like as I say, vegetables.

This dream is increasingly shared by a large section of the population

bent on turning the clock back.

Marine Le Pen has succeeded her father

and toned down the party's rhetoric,

the hard right has softened. The result?

One in six citizens admits to intending to vote for her.

On the other side, there is a significant constituency

of second and third generation

Magrebian and west African immigrants who are resistant

to the assimilation which the French social contract demands or offers.

In other words, they reject the idea of Frenchness as determined

by the state and insouciantly mimic the British model -

cultural separation, ethnic identification,

communitarian stasis.

France was not made for this.

It lacks the constitutional apparatus

to deal with the minoritarian will towards auto-segregation.

The constitution is based in consensus.

The point is not one of mere incompatibility.

It is rather that there is no possibility of a meeting point.

No possibility of compromise.

The state is currently in a trap of its own making.

The principle of laicite considers religion to be a private matter.

French censuses do not include questions about religion or ethnicity.

If a government body such as the National Institute of Economic and Statistical Studies

is researching any social problems,

it cannot allow itself to recognise or consider race or creed.

Vital characteristics, but ones that the state

officially declines to acknowledge in its citizens.

The proposition is upheld that citizens, all equal, all free,

do not belong to an ethnic group or a religious congregation,

they're French, and that's all there is to it.

Immigrants' ethnicity, which they are stuck with,

is not a pressing problem in a country with a long tradition,

and current practice, of colour-blindness

towards those who are willing to assimilate to become French.

Hence the ascent to high political office

of Fadela Amara, Rama Yade and Rachida Dati.

Their ascent has nothing to do with tokenistic patronage,

the paradoxical proof of that is the subsequent descent

of Yade and Dati.

Assimilation demands the eschewal of practices that do not accord

with those of a nation forged in the Enlightenment.

Minoritarian practices which do not conform to the laws of the republic.

Polygamy, endogamy, forced marriages,

female genital mutilation and so on.

And practices which force the republic to create new laws,

most obviously the proscription of the niqab and the burqa which are

deemed by France to be demeaning to the wearer, sartorial manifestations

of a refusal to assimilate, and an affront to laicite.

The overwhelming problems derive, not from ethnicity,

but from religion, and specifically from the culture attached to Islam.

But it's not indissolubly attached.

It's a human's right to be able to abandon a religion,

to dump a culture, to shun obscurantism.

Assimilation also demands the acquisition of new characteristics.

The French mentality is both perplexed and insulted

by potential citizens who are reluctant to acquire them.

The French mentality can conceive of nothing better than being French.

Immigration has changed qualitatively as well as numerically.

What France has witnessed since decolonisation

is successive waves of immigrants

who do not share a total commitment to France and to Frenchness,

yet yearn for a qualified Frenchness where French is a suffix.

Senegalese French, Ivorian French, Algerian French.

There's a curious combination of circumstances at work here.

One of which is the unquestionable success of the post-colonial programme

called francophonie.

Founded as the Cultural and Technical Co-operation Agency,

which has a nicely Soviet ring to it.

That was in 1970, the early years of decolonisation.

Many of its critics and indeed some of its supporters, consider it

to be little more than a dilute continuation of colonial control

achieved by massive aid, cultural imperialism

and the propagation of the French language's primacy.

France presides over its former colonies

like a benevolently despotic godfather, or soft god.

Francophonie's stated aims include peace, democracy,

human rights, sustainable development, sexual equality,

(WEARILY) street theatre, multilateral cooperation,

understanding, digital culture, universal values,

arts hubs, solidarity, dance...

It's the nightmarish litany of a Miss World contestant.

And it provides only the thinnest veil for the self-evidently main business of Francophie,

the promotion of the French language and France's global standing.

It was devised as a means by which newly independent states could

go back to the teat of the good Mother Marianne without losing face.

And, of course, as a means by which the good mother

could enjoy the benefits of colonial power without the responsibility,

on the sly.

France's post-colonial empire has farcical aspects.

Because about a quarter of Canada's citizens speak French,

it's a national preoccupation,

watched over with proprietorial patronage.

France has never forgotten that De Gaulle,

seen here mincing towards glory, famously fuelled

the separatist aspirations of francophone Canadians.

"Vive le Quebec libre,

"vive le Canada francais."

It has forgotten the riposte of the Canadian prime minister,

Lester Pearson to the old fool, "The people of Canada ARE free.

"Canadians do not need to be liberated.

"Indeed, many thousands of Canadians gave their lives in two world wars

"in the liberation of France."

Canada, however, is a mere sideshow.

Alongside Francophonie, which is visible, more or less transparent,

legitimate, accountable and so on, there exists an occluded French apparatus, a covert network

whose quasi-imperial tentacles stretch throughout Africa.

This is the world of Francafrique.

Hello, sir. Welcome to Dictatours.

We are showing you, there is an understanding, from the other time of French colonies in Africa.

They are showing their gratitude to motherland,

by buying houses in some of the most expensive areas in Paris prestige.

Why shouldn't the dictators of these African nations buy property in Paris?

After all, their countries are still de facto French colonies,

semi-detached, partially dependent nations whose citizens

are also semi-detached and partially dependent...

Hence the ambiguity about national identity,

hence the opposing pulls of an imaginary Africa

that can't be left behind and a too real France.

Now, Monsieur, we are at Avenue Foch.

The President of Gabon has five properties here out of 39 total in France.

He's a very nice man. He loves expanding his waistline,

he loves elections that he wins.

He loves... He loves supercars...

CARS HOOT THEIR HORNS

..Jacques Chirac, Barack Obama.

He loves Nicolas Sarkozy, little Nicolas Sarkozy.

And bossa nova music, as I recall.

Francafrique has been a boon to conspiracy theorists.

It comprises a supposedly ubiquitous web, a shadowy web, of course,

of backhanders, back scratching, backstairs diplomacy, aid,

clientelism, gun-toting tyrants, bent elections,

arms contracts, infrastructure contracts, digital contracts,

torture, secret treaties, blind eyes.

Avenue Foch is very popular with dictators. Very popular.

There. There is property of Blaise Compaore.

He is president of Burkina Faso.

Blaise Compaore enjoys elections, he enjoys his people,

and the nation.

He enjoys guiding his people's resources, he enjoys using his

people's resources to administer his people.

And he enjoys meeting Barack Obama very much.

Several careers have been founded on berating successive

French governments' responsibility for child soldiers, genocides,

famines, dictators' palaces, dictators' menageries.

And of course, on exaggerating French complicity.

Exaggeration is the lifeblood of conspiracy theory,

it justifies the paranoiac's very existence.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that France had begun meddling

in the affairs of its 14 former African colonies

before the ink was dry on the treaties of independence.

Denis Sassou-Nguesso, President of Congo,

has a wonderful apartment here.

He loves his people and the African nations.

He loves making money out of oil, he loves art deco.

He loves spending the money he makes out of oil.

He loves big drinks...

You know, President Sassou-Nguesso has many, many academy competencies.

-And his family have?

-112 bank accounts in France alone.

Meddling in Africa on the sly demanded and still demands,

stealth, secrecy, and suitcases.

De Gaulle's chief fixer, who would serve a further four presidents,

was Jacques Foccart, a man who made octopuses look under-tentacled.

Every coup, every mercenary force, every armour-plated car,

every special advisor, every assassination,

every Croesus-size peculation,

every training programme, every disappearance

seems to have led back to this protean operator,

who counted as a personal friend, Mobutu Sese Seko,

the kleptocrat's kleptocrat.

Even though Zaire had formerly been a Belgian colony,

Mobutu was paid by France throughout the Cold War

to resist Soviet incursion.

And he was paid so well that his property portfolio was fatter

than that of any other dictator which is manifestly unfair.

His crimes, and those of numerous other tyrants,

some of them severely underhoused, were indulged.

For these were not any tyrants. These were France's tyrants.

The West's tyrants.

And their crimes, genocide, looting their country,

were, according to the dictates of realpolitik, puny.

They were the price to pay for loyalty.

Loyalty is granted to the highest bidder. France outbid Moscow.

Foccart operated in a crepuscular world of great brutality,

greater omerta and fluid certainties.

What he did and what he didn't do is unknowable.

Still, he never denied having ordered the murder by rat poison

of a Camerounais opposition leader.

Equally, there can be no doubt that at the very moment

when his ruthless counsel was most needed he was out of favour.

France is clearly a generous host to despots and deposed despots

and to despots-in-waiting.

When Ayatollah Khomeini was expelled from his Iraqi exile in 1978,

he applied for asylum in Kuwait.

Refused.

Khomeini was allowed to take refuge in France.

A decision which the president, Valery Giscard,

has announced that he has never regretted.

This pompous combover has learnt nothing.

To this day, he regards Khomeini as a great statesman.

He ignored the warnings of the counter-terrorist agency,

which proceeded to watch helplessly as a procession of known

terrorists and their immeasurably wealthy backers visited Khomeini

at his house at Neauphle-le-Chateau near the Grand Marnier distillery.

If only the twisted old tyrant had developed a taste for the stuff

the world might have been a better place today.

But he didn't.

Instead he called for Jihad and launched a theocratic revolution.

A revolution which began almost as soon as he landed back

on Iranian soil in a chartered Air France 747.

A plane which would become the Islamic hijacker's aircraft of choice.

The establishment of theocracy in Iran demonstrated that

bigoted backwardness could rule an entire country.

It incited other Islamic fundamentalists

to drastically and disastrously increase the scope

of their Jihadist ambitions.

Iran thus became the first in a toxic procession.

Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah.

Extremist regimes and freelance self-exploders,

misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, oxidentaphobes,

lapidation operatives.

Khomeini repaid France's hospitality

with a series of bomb attacks in Paris in the mid '80s.

The sidelined Foccart and the secret service

foresaw the holy havoc that Khomeini would wreak.

They believed that he should be assassinated.

Giscard however sought the Shah's opinion

and the Shah's opinion was that Khomeini should be allowed to live.

It gave squeamish Giscard a way to avoid sanctioning judicial murder.

Even though judicial murder was and remains a great French tradition.

Along with political assassination.

On 25th June 1894, Sadi Carnot, president of the republic,

was stabbed to death in Lyon by the Italian anarchist Sante Caserio.

On May 6th 1932,

Paul Doumer, president of the republic, was murdered

as he left this Rothschild mansion where he had opened a charity fair.

The idea that his assassin might be our old friend, the troubled loner,

was far too straightforward to merit consideration.

There must have been a plot.

Was the assassin, Paul Golgolov, a Soviet agent?

Was he a Nazi agent?

Had he been primed by White Russian fanatics?

Had he been a backstreet abortionist? A Chekist torturer?

Was he in the pay of Jews and masons,

bent on, yes, world domination?

What the proponents of these

and countless other conflicting rumours shared

was the assumption that the murderer of the president

must be a professional killer.

A contract killer. A specialist.

On July 31st 1914, three days after the assassination in Sarajevo

of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Jean Jaures, socialist,

was shot as he was dining here by Raoul Villain, nationalist.

On Christmas Eve 1976,

Prince Jean de Broglie, the treasurer of Giscard's party,

was shot in the street as he left a colleague's apartment

in Rue Dardanelle, Paris 17.

On February 1st, 1980, shortly after midnight, Joseph Fontanet,

former minister of education,

was shot dead from a car in front of his home.

The bullet entered by the shoulder and exited by the thorax.

On March 4th 1982, Rene Lucet,

a lawyer working against organised crime and corrupt socialists in Nice and Marseilles, committed suicide.

On May 1st 1993, the former prime minister, Pierre Beregovoy,

also committed suicide.

Lucet and Beregovoy succeeded in firing TWO shots into their brains.

On 29th October 1979, at a pond in the forests of Rambouillet,

Robert Boulin, a former minister,

drowned himself in several inches of water

having severely beaten himself up.

There is no doubt that many of these murders were carried out by contract killers.

The contract killer is a stock character of French cinema.

Alain Delon, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura.

But the contract killer is also a stock character of the French collective imagination.

Even when the evidence points the other way, in the case, for instance,

of Pavel Gorgulov's assassination of Paul Doumer,

which was several murders back, even in those circumstances

there is a will to believe that a professional was involved.

This derives from a fearful suspicion that plots are omnipresent,

that the country's many forms of police are unregulated

and above the law.

But it also derives from

a more general element of French thought and behaviour.

That is the idea that any profession, craft,

skill or trade has to be learnt.

Dentistry, marquetry, plumbing, agronomy, cartography,

they all have to be learnt.

And assassination is no exception.

The idea of an amateur assassin is inconceivable.

There is no country more preoccupied with paper qualifications.

No country more mystified by the self-taught

or contemptuous of the self-taught.

The human is a programmable machine who starts out knowing nothing.

Any profession, any craft, can be grasped, in theory,

by application and by learning,

which is not quite the same as understanding.

The craft of assassination is learnt through study and training

in the OAS, the CRS, the DCRI,

the BRGE, the DPSD, the SCSSI,

in any one of the countless national agencies, training, formation.

Formation - the word is telling.

No-one can do anything

unless they have been shown how to do it over and again.

All it takes is time and effort and pedagogic susceptibility.

The same process that can turn

a north African girl into a French woman,

can transform the doggedly plodding hay seed

into a smooth Parisian lawyer.

In accord with the wishful dictates of the Enlightenment,

French education has little to do with innate ability.

Rather, it crams the blank brain with information of a sort.

Conditioning and shaping are again what count.

The resolve to have a subject by rote.

Diversion from a syllabus is unthinkable.

Thinking for oneself is unthought of.

Further education is aimed at the production of specialists

with exceptionally narrow fields of expertise.

The toe doctor, the ankle doctor,

the calf doctor, the knee doctor.

France's specialists are everywhere. France depends on them.

The French in general can no more cook

than they can perform tracheotomies.

They don't need to cook.

They have a cast of professionals, specialists to do it for them.

Restaurant chefs, charcutiers, bakers, patissiers, traiteurs.

They don't need to think.

A crack squad of philosophers, economists,

free-range intellectuals and critics does their thinking for them

out loud on telly and radio, in papers and magazines,

at a level that mainstream British media would consider inaccessible.

And its high priests, famously wage a constant battle

of centralisation against lapses into regional dialects,

and worse, illegal immigrants from Anglophonia.

Incursions that debase the purity of the language.

In fact, most of these immigrant words assimilate.

Uprooted, they go native.

So native that they are unrecognisable to the Anglophone.

Un pressing - dry cleaning.

Un relooking - a makeover.

Un brushing - a blow dry.

Un self - the self-service store.

Un balltrap - a clay pigeon shoot.

Standing - luxurious.

Une residence de standing - a luxurious apartment block.

Faire un forcing - putting yourself out.

Fooding - a halfwit's idea of a witty name for a food guide.

They may be ugly and mangled,

but they're funny in the way that slapstick pratfalls are.

And they're uncontrollable.

What is so touching of this country and its institutions

is the very idea that language can be controlled.

That usage can be codified.

This is another touchingly pointless example of Canutism.

Another essay in unachievable utopianism.

Another Cartesian dream of taming Caliban.

Everyone knows that such attempts are doomed to failure,

but if you have faith in France they have to be made.

Trying to keep France French and failing to do so,

is the most characteristically French of endeavours.

GUN SHOT FIRES

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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