0:00:02 > 0:00:06MUSIC: Theme from "Allo Allo"
0:00:11 > 0:00:13NEEDED SCRATCHES ON RECORD
0:00:22 > 0:00:24No checked table clothes.
0:00:24 > 0:00:26No dream homes.
0:00:28 > 0:00:29No situationists.
0:00:32 > 0:00:34No picturesque bastides.
0:00:35 > 0:00:39No art of living in Provence.
0:00:39 > 0:00:41No accordion music.
0:00:47 > 0:00:50MUSIC: "Runaround Sue" in French
0:00:58 > 0:01:01That's the sound of France attempting to do Doo Wop.
0:01:01 > 0:01:05In the subsequent 50 years, France has attempted
0:01:05 > 0:01:08every other kind of American pop music.
0:01:08 > 0:01:10Time and again it's been found wanting.
0:01:10 > 0:01:15One idiom it did not fail at was chanson.
0:01:21 > 0:01:24But chanson is evidently not American.
0:01:26 > 0:01:28It's not pop music.
0:01:29 > 0:01:33And, not quite the same thing, nor is it any longer popular.
0:01:33 > 0:01:34Only Sardou remains.
0:01:37 > 0:01:41Brassens, Brel, Barbara are all long gone.
0:01:41 > 0:01:43Their audience is dying.
0:01:43 > 0:01:46The France they sang about is disappearing.
0:01:46 > 0:01:48Their lyric tradition is in "despertude".
0:01:48 > 0:01:52There are few signs of it being exhumed.
0:01:52 > 0:01:53# I'm pan handlin'
0:01:53 > 0:01:55# Man handlin'
0:01:55 > 0:01:56# Post holin'
0:01:56 > 0:01:57# High rollin'
0:01:57 > 0:02:00# Dust bowlin' daddy... #
0:02:00 > 0:02:03Why should it be exhumed,
0:02:03 > 0:02:10when France has the entire product of the American music industrial complex to pay clumsy obeisance to,
0:02:10 > 0:02:13to flatter with gauche pastiche?
0:02:13 > 0:02:17# ..I don't wear no Stetson
0:02:17 > 0:02:20# But I'm willin' to bet, son
0:02:20 > 0:02:24# That I'm big a Texan as you are... #
0:02:24 > 0:02:27Strange as it may seem to a non-Anglophone nation
0:02:27 > 0:02:30such as France, America is exotic.
0:02:30 > 0:02:35It still possesses an irresistible allure.
0:02:35 > 0:02:37American English is ubiquitously mediated
0:02:37 > 0:02:41and ubiquitously misunderstood.
0:02:41 > 0:02:44# Last night I took a walk in the dark
0:02:44 > 0:02:46# To a place called Palisades Park
0:02:46 > 0:02:48# To have some fun
0:02:48 > 0:02:51# To see what I could see... #
0:02:51 > 0:02:53No matter how familiar it may be,
0:02:53 > 0:02:56it causes America to remain mysterious.
0:02:56 > 0:03:00It's as though appreciative devotion to a culture
0:03:00 > 0:03:04is at least partially dependent on it remaining unfathomable
0:03:04 > 0:03:09and unknowable because it's linguistically closed off.
0:03:10 > 0:03:15France is happily not in a position to suffer the gross delusion
0:03:15 > 0:03:22that the coincidence of a lexicon means that it's somehow joined to America.
0:03:22 > 0:03:25Without words which are a nation's soundtracks
0:03:25 > 0:03:28the ocular is paramount. You see.
0:03:36 > 0:03:38You see a different nation.
0:03:38 > 0:03:40You feel it in your gut.
0:03:40 > 0:03:42The less we're sidetracked by vocabulary,
0:03:42 > 0:03:45the more deeply immersed we are
0:03:45 > 0:03:48in the sign language of an alien culture.
0:03:48 > 0:03:53France's preoccupation with America has endured 200 years
0:03:53 > 0:03:57because it does not depend on language.
0:03:57 > 0:04:01America is understood visually, gesturally and idealistically.
0:04:01 > 0:04:05Linguistic oblivion creates simplicity.
0:04:05 > 0:04:07A polarised monochrome.
0:04:07 > 0:04:10The subtleties of vernacular discourse are AWOL.
0:04:10 > 0:04:12Allusions go unrecognised.
0:04:12 > 0:04:17As a result, it can still provoke awe.
0:04:17 > 0:04:21When France listens, the country it hears is merely noises,
0:04:21 > 0:04:24twangs, grunts, drawl.
0:04:24 > 0:04:28FRENCH RAP SONG PLAYS
0:04:42 > 0:04:46These sounds do not get in the way of misunderstanding,
0:04:46 > 0:04:50they do not impede France's imaginative creation
0:04:50 > 0:04:54of an America which is partial and oblique.
0:04:54 > 0:04:58They don't even begin to suggest the entire picture.
0:04:58 > 0:05:01America's products are spangled with stardust
0:05:01 > 0:05:04for the very reason that they are American.
0:05:04 > 0:05:05That's all it takes.
0:05:05 > 0:05:09So, if a song is written in French and sung in French,
0:05:09 > 0:05:12it is still "Made in USA".
0:05:19 > 0:05:24This captivation with the colossus of cultural imperialism
0:05:24 > 0:05:28extends from ye-ye's teenage earnestness
0:05:28 > 0:05:31to the gerontocratic frivolity of governance.
0:05:31 > 0:05:34From enlightened gangsters to saintly cops.
0:05:34 > 0:05:37Technology, places,
0:05:37 > 0:05:40place names, abstract thought, movies,
0:05:40 > 0:05:43can-do, management theories, jazz,
0:05:43 > 0:05:46certainty, outdoorsiness, talking animals,
0:05:46 > 0:05:49epic landscape, sharp practices, naivete,
0:05:49 > 0:05:51silos that are cathedrals of wheat,
0:05:51 > 0:05:55silos as mute and grandiose as Charles Sheeler's.
0:05:59 > 0:06:02France has, at one time another,
0:06:02 > 0:06:06fallen for the multitudes that America spawns
0:06:06 > 0:06:09and has usually despised itself for doing so,
0:06:09 > 0:06:14it's been ashamed of its vassalage to this coarsely omnipotent innocent.
0:06:14 > 0:06:20But, equally, time and again, it's managed to cast its guilt aside.
0:06:38 > 0:06:41Meriadeck was the most central of the city's several slums.
0:06:41 > 0:06:45Poor, scruffy, the blackest area
0:06:45 > 0:06:48in what had come to be known as the "black city",
0:06:48 > 0:06:54a century's industrial pollution had impasted the porous limestone.
0:06:55 > 0:07:00By night, there was a standard issue complement of hookers, seedy bars,
0:07:00 > 0:07:05sailors in drag, drugs, people whose eye it was unwise to catch,
0:07:05 > 0:07:08and insalubrious dogs.
0:07:08 > 0:07:12By day, there was a market specialising in stolen tat
0:07:12 > 0:07:13and counterfeit Americana.
0:07:13 > 0:07:18The appetite for approximations of Lee and Levi blue jeans
0:07:18 > 0:07:22was insatiable - blue is mandatory in French.
0:07:22 > 0:07:27The noxious quaintness of the place was rather appealing.
0:07:27 > 0:07:31Not, however, to Jacques Chaban-Delmas.
0:07:31 > 0:07:36Chaban was, for half a century, the Gaullist mayor of Bordeaux.
0:07:36 > 0:07:40He was George Pompidou's prime minister.
0:07:46 > 0:07:50Meriadeck's renovation would be one of his great projects,
0:07:50 > 0:07:57his princely vanity projects. "Manhattan sur Garonne".
0:07:57 > 0:08:01Renovation meant razing it to the ground.
0:08:01 > 0:08:05It goes without saying that the new Meriadeck was a political gesture.
0:08:05 > 0:08:10Politicians are forever pathetically preoccupied with their legacy.
0:08:10 > 0:08:14Here was a large lump of Chaban's legacy.
0:08:14 > 0:08:21It was also, like most urbanistic schemes of the '60s and '70s,
0:08:21 > 0:08:26socially dubious, not that anyone realised that at the time.
0:08:26 > 0:08:30It laid the foundations of an irreparable division.
0:08:30 > 0:08:33It involved massive class clearance,
0:08:33 > 0:08:37the expulsion of thousands of layabout blue collars,
0:08:37 > 0:08:39award-winning all-day drinkers,
0:08:39 > 0:08:43Stakhanovite pimps and dedicated apprentice dealers.
0:08:43 > 0:08:48They were decanted to housing projects in the 'burbs,
0:08:48 > 0:08:51places that would prove to be the enemies of assimilation,
0:08:51 > 0:08:54the ghettos of the future, the slums of the future.
0:08:54 > 0:08:56That future has arrived.
0:08:56 > 0:09:02And, with it, a flourishing separate development.
0:09:02 > 0:09:05Unlike many contemporary developments,
0:09:05 > 0:09:07Meriadeck was abundantly funded.
0:09:07 > 0:09:10Profligately and corruptly funded.
0:09:10 > 0:09:14Chaban, prime minister, could divert massive subventions
0:09:14 > 0:09:18to Chaban, Mayor of Bordeaux.
0:09:18 > 0:09:23The French for a backhander, for a big drink, is "peau de vin".
0:09:23 > 0:09:29This is a prime example of urbanism.
0:09:29 > 0:09:32It was conceived with the intention of avoiding the uniformity
0:09:32 > 0:09:35that had become commonplace.
0:09:35 > 0:09:39It was the work of numerous architects over a protracted period.
0:09:39 > 0:09:44The variety that a multiplicity of hands ought to have brought to it
0:09:44 > 0:09:49is seldom apparent due to its rigid axial planning.
0:09:49 > 0:09:53One building, however, deviates entirely from the rectilinear.
0:09:53 > 0:09:57The regional headquarters of a bank, la Caisse d'Epargne.
0:09:57 > 0:10:02A work whose extravagant asymmetry is psycho-political.
0:10:05 > 0:10:08Asymmetry is significant of republicanism
0:10:08 > 0:10:12and defiant, evidently, of symmetry, classical symmetry,
0:10:12 > 0:10:19which is the architectural mode of absolutism, autocratic classicism.
0:10:20 > 0:10:24Its architect, Edmond Lay, was a provincial oddball
0:10:24 > 0:10:29immune to metropolitan fashion, or at least isolated from it.
0:10:30 > 0:10:34His life was apparently consumed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
0:10:34 > 0:10:37whose buildings he had travelled to America to see.
0:10:37 > 0:10:44The corner window was indicative of an idea conceived early in my work
0:10:44 > 0:10:46that the box was a fascist symbol,
0:10:46 > 0:10:50and that the architecture of freedom and democracy
0:10:50 > 0:10:53needed something beside the box.
0:10:53 > 0:10:57So I started out to destroy the box as a building.
0:11:08 > 0:11:12It goes without saying that nearly all architects are plagiarists
0:11:12 > 0:11:14or thieves or copyists.
0:11:14 > 0:11:20But Lay's case was different. It was a pathology. Above and beyond.
0:11:20 > 0:11:23It went beyond mere impersonation.
0:11:23 > 0:11:27It was more like a case of artistic identity theft.
0:11:27 > 0:11:31It was as though he actually wanted to be Wright.
0:11:32 > 0:11:36He wanted to be him so much that he stole his soul
0:11:36 > 0:11:40and designed what is unquestionably Wright's finest posthumous work,
0:11:40 > 0:11:42a dead man's masterpiece.
0:11:42 > 0:11:45Lay was a ghost's ghost.
0:11:45 > 0:11:48He didn't make a forgery of a single work.
0:11:48 > 0:11:53He didn't copy what was extant. He went further, he was predictive.
0:11:53 > 0:11:56Just as Han van Meegeren forged the paintings
0:11:56 > 0:12:00that Vermeer might have made under the influence of Caravaggio,
0:12:00 > 0:12:02so did Lay devise a synthesis
0:12:02 > 0:12:06which Wright, had he not been otherwise detained,
0:12:06 > 0:12:10might have devised in response to this commission, on this site.
0:12:11 > 0:12:16Edmond Lay's brand of cultural thraldom was extreme.
0:12:19 > 0:12:22It was willed. Chance didn't come into it.
0:12:23 > 0:12:28France's debt to America comes in as many degrees as it does forms.
0:12:28 > 0:12:31Plagiarism. Homage. Influence.
0:12:31 > 0:12:35Dependence. Acolytism. Osmosis.
0:12:35 > 0:12:38Citation. Reference. Copyism.
0:12:38 > 0:12:41Imitation. Borrowing. Adulation.
0:12:41 > 0:12:44Daylight robbery. Sycophancy.
0:12:44 > 0:12:47Envy. Apostledom. Admiration.
0:12:56 > 0:13:01France denies some of these processes, some of these states.
0:13:01 > 0:13:06It fails to acknowledge others. It's sometimes oblivious.
0:13:06 > 0:13:09And, when caught with its fingers in the till and its mouth full,
0:13:09 > 0:13:11it is defiantly unashamed.
0:13:12 > 0:13:15America shares its way of life and its way of God.
0:13:15 > 0:13:21It bestrides the globe with confident confidence and moral morality.
0:13:21 > 0:13:24It dispenses its justified paranoia,
0:13:24 > 0:13:28its mistrust of just about everything that's not American.
0:13:28 > 0:13:33America evangelises with golden arches, soft drinks, soft rock,
0:13:33 > 0:13:36rock solid breasts and chipolata lips,
0:13:36 > 0:13:40musicals, academic patois, management jargon.
0:13:46 > 0:13:53It spreads goodwill with hydraulic, agricultural and forestry projects.
0:13:53 > 0:13:56Yes, it is guilty. But so what?
0:13:56 > 0:14:01It has fought the West's wars, seen off Nazism and communism,
0:14:01 > 0:14:05it's put man on the moon, it's produced incomparable writers and scientists
0:14:05 > 0:14:10it's created great art, and great cars. And so on.
0:14:19 > 0:14:24A l'ancienne, jadis, tradition, patrimoine,
0:14:24 > 0:14:29d'antan, histoire, naguere, folklorique.
0:14:29 > 0:14:33The past, the past, the past.
0:14:33 > 0:14:38France propagates a comforting image of sclerotic stasis,
0:14:38 > 0:14:41which is largely at odds with its actuality.
0:14:43 > 0:14:47It claims to be what it yearns to be, what it once was.
0:14:47 > 0:14:52A country apart, a fortress of Franco Frenchness,
0:14:52 > 0:14:57all succulent lunches and mellow stones, bastides and vineyards,
0:14:57 > 0:15:03inhabited by les gaillards franchouillards and les francais de souche,
0:15:03 > 0:15:08a fortress of ancient ancientness impervious to all that's around it.
0:15:09 > 0:15:13That's the organised social lie which it tells the world.
0:15:13 > 0:15:16The world, astonishingly, swallows it.
0:15:21 > 0:15:24For France is the most visited country in the world.
0:15:24 > 0:15:28High speed trains and motorways, and state-of-the-art trams
0:15:28 > 0:15:33merely enable the visitor to go from an immemorial cassoulet
0:15:33 > 0:15:38to the impossibly picturesque weir, made famous in Jean Claude Troufignon's painting
0:15:38 > 0:15:41to the fantastically roofed chateau
0:15:41 > 0:15:45where Madame La Turlutte wrote her memoirs of a courtesan.
0:15:45 > 0:15:48The bits in between are invisible to the visitor.
0:15:55 > 0:15:58Taking from America is a form of internationalism,
0:15:58 > 0:16:02a means of participation, a broadening of horizons,
0:16:02 > 0:16:06an inoculation against succumbing to the organised lie.
0:16:09 > 0:16:14France has just about come to terms with not being THE country,
0:16:14 > 0:16:18it reluctantly admits that it is merely A country.
0:16:21 > 0:16:24It gratefully accepts all that America has to offer
0:16:24 > 0:16:29as both producer and exemplar whilst, at the same time,
0:16:29 > 0:16:33enjoying the cosy delusion that America is imposing itself,
0:16:33 > 0:16:35that America is an occupying force.
0:16:39 > 0:16:46The entire populace believes it belongs to the resistance against the hated capitalist imperialist.
0:16:46 > 0:16:51The entire populace is actually composed of collaborators.
0:16:59 > 0:17:05Every time the characterful, pipe-smoking neo-peasant Jose Bove
0:17:05 > 0:17:09destroys a field of genetically modified corn product
0:17:09 > 0:17:13or dumps manure, the greenest manure that cattle can supply,
0:17:13 > 0:17:19outside a McDonald's, he is participating in the Americanisation of his country.
0:17:19 > 0:17:25His malodorous canutism is a concession of resentful defeat.
0:17:28 > 0:17:31The people are only too happy to sleep with the enemy.
0:17:31 > 0:17:35Rather, to ingest with the enemy.
0:17:40 > 0:17:43To create and patronise a sprawl,
0:17:43 > 0:17:49which aspires to the northern outskirts of Boston and the southern outskirts of Chicago.
0:17:52 > 0:17:59How many ex-urban furniture showrooms does a small town in the middle of France really need?
0:18:05 > 0:18:09How does the sin of car-dependency, which such development fosters,
0:18:09 > 0:18:13accord with the universally preached, seldom-practised,
0:18:13 > 0:18:19tiresomely trite and entirely unrealistic doctrine of sustainability?
0:18:23 > 0:18:26Menacing, anonymous, relentless,
0:18:26 > 0:18:30asphyxiating, incessant, dehumanising...
0:18:30 > 0:18:33These are the adjectives routinely attached to sprawl.
0:18:33 > 0:18:36They need hardly be attached.
0:18:36 > 0:18:41Sprawl is itself pejorative, due to the uncontested notion
0:18:41 > 0:18:43that it is necessarily undesirable.
0:18:45 > 0:18:50There is, tellingly, no single French word for "sprawl".
0:18:50 > 0:18:53There are constructions such as l'etalement urbain
0:18:53 > 0:18:56and les banlieues tentaculaires.
0:19:03 > 0:19:05But there is no consensus,
0:19:05 > 0:19:11no agreement about what to call the most frequently encountered form of modern urbanism
0:19:11 > 0:19:15or non-urbanism or anti-urbanism.
0:19:15 > 0:19:20This lack of agreement does not point to a failure to acknowledge sprawl's ubiquity,
0:19:20 > 0:19:22nor to a blindness.
0:19:26 > 0:19:30It is not vilified. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
0:19:30 > 0:19:34Nor is pride taken in it as pride is taken in conventionally elegant towns
0:19:34 > 0:19:36and orthodoxly pretty villages.
0:19:36 > 0:19:41Sprawl is accepted, it's there, it's an inescapable fact of France.
0:19:41 > 0:19:46No-one frets about it. It's a manifest of modernity.
0:19:46 > 0:19:47It's American after all.
0:19:51 > 0:19:53Sprawl is not homogeneous.
0:19:53 > 0:20:00There are many kinds of sprawl, which prompt anything from vague resignation to muted indifference.
0:20:01 > 0:20:07Sprawl provides jobs, shelter, services. It's been around for ages.
0:20:07 > 0:20:13There's good sprawl, there's bad sprawl, there's OK sprawl, there's iffy sprawl.
0:20:16 > 0:20:18Educational sprawl.
0:20:18 > 0:20:21Commercial sprawl.
0:20:21 > 0:20:23Business-training sprawl.
0:20:23 > 0:20:25Industrial sprawl.
0:20:25 > 0:20:28Research sprawl.
0:20:28 > 0:20:30Bureaucratic sprawl.
0:20:30 > 0:20:34Bureaucrats, an unsackable army of human mistletoe,
0:20:34 > 0:20:38require space in which to give thanks to the late Francois Mitterand
0:20:38 > 0:20:43for having created their non-job, space in which to sleep off lunch,
0:20:43 > 0:20:48not answer the telephone, shuffle papers, and fail to learn how to use a computer.
0:20:48 > 0:20:52France is a nation of half a million elected representatives
0:20:52 > 0:20:58and 7 million state employees. 7 million, that's 20% of the workforce.
0:20:58 > 0:21:00Though "work" is perhaps not the right word...
0:21:05 > 0:21:07Sporting sprawl.
0:21:12 > 0:21:14Retail sprawl.
0:21:14 > 0:21:17Entertainment sprawl.
0:21:17 > 0:21:19Hospitality sprawl.
0:21:21 > 0:21:24Arterial road sprawl.
0:21:24 > 0:21:28Which possesses the easy romanticism of road movies,
0:21:28 > 0:21:31the comfy alienation of blacktops to nowhere,
0:21:31 > 0:21:35the lure of a trucker's crotch,
0:21:35 > 0:21:38the threat of roadhouses, the inane joy of drive-ins,
0:21:38 > 0:21:45the quiet sordor of motels, and, above all, the place names.
0:21:47 > 0:21:52Abilene, Laredo, Wichita.
0:21:56 > 0:22:00Better never to see the places
0:22:00 > 0:22:03of powerful, moving country and western ballads,
0:22:03 > 0:22:07which the francophone does not realise are hymns to self-pity
0:22:07 > 0:22:10sung by pickup-driving psychopaths mourning lost love
0:22:10 > 0:22:12and swearing revenge.
0:22:16 > 0:22:17GUNSHOT
0:22:18 > 0:22:20Conference sprawl.
0:22:20 > 0:22:22Seaside sprawl.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43The painter Jacques Monory's America is second-hand America,
0:22:43 > 0:22:45a used America, a gaudy America...
0:22:47 > 0:22:49..the America of Americana.
0:22:51 > 0:22:53It's seductive for all that.
0:22:56 > 0:22:59But it would not exist, were it not for the vision of another artist,
0:22:59 > 0:23:02the film-maker Jean-Pierre Grumbach,
0:23:02 > 0:23:05who took an American surname.
0:23:07 > 0:23:13Jean-Pierre Melville died in Paris on August 2nd, 1973.
0:23:13 > 0:23:17The next day, the familiar mask - Stetson, aviator sunglasses,
0:23:17 > 0:23:21trenchcoat - was on the front pages of all the papers,
0:23:21 > 0:23:25and, for Melville, occupied an exalted a place in the Pantheon.
0:23:25 > 0:23:33And, besides, this is a country that is reverent, perhaps too reverent, towards artists,
0:23:33 > 0:23:36even towards artists who are in thrall to America,
0:23:36 > 0:23:41especially towards artists who are in thrall to America.
0:23:41 > 0:23:46And there was never a French artist so apparently in thrall to America as Melville.
0:23:46 > 0:23:52Apparently, for his art is entirely his own.
0:23:52 > 0:23:56He did not represent an extant world, he invented a world.
0:23:58 > 0:24:03The first, and best, scene of his last, and worst, movie was shot here.
0:24:03 > 0:24:05This cafe stood in for a bank.
0:24:22 > 0:24:26American film was no more than a springboard.
0:24:26 > 0:24:29ALARM BELL RINGS
0:24:31 > 0:24:34What he takes is decor and gestures.
0:24:34 > 0:24:38Cinching a trenchcoat's belt, holding a drink like this,
0:24:38 > 0:24:44and not like that. The etiquette of clubs, a way of touching a fedora's brim.
0:24:44 > 0:24:47He turns the cosmetic into the stuff of ritual.
0:24:47 > 0:24:52His films are moral, quasi mythic, tragic, cathartic.
0:24:52 > 0:24:58Save in their appearance, they owe more to Racine than to Robert Siodmak but,
0:24:58 > 0:25:01but appearance is everything.
0:25:04 > 0:25:06Though they are far from commonplace,
0:25:06 > 0:25:13Melville's films exemplify a commonplace French preoccupation with American surfaces.
0:25:13 > 0:25:16They belong to an unidentified time
0:25:16 > 0:25:21and an unidentified city, which stands for all cities.
0:25:41 > 0:25:45St Jean-de-Monts is on the western, Atlantic coastline
0:25:45 > 0:25:49that might be America's eastern Atlantic coastline.
0:25:50 > 0:25:53Town after town is conjoined.
0:25:53 > 0:25:56The bits between become indistinguishable from the towns,
0:25:56 > 0:25:59the former towns, the some-time villages.
0:26:00 > 0:26:02And, even where places are separated,
0:26:02 > 0:26:06they are indistinguishable, one from the next.
0:26:08 > 0:26:11St Jean-de-Monts, Les Sables d'Olonne, La Baule.
0:26:12 > 0:26:17Each of them comprises mile upon mile of the sort of development
0:26:17 > 0:26:23that is habitually calumnised and unfavourably compared to the unspoiled.
0:26:26 > 0:26:32Why is such development so readily, so unthinkingly, so unseeingly condemned?
0:26:34 > 0:26:37What's so attractive about all that is deemed unspoiled, untouched?
0:26:40 > 0:26:46It has something to do with a vague fey sentimental feely love of nature,
0:26:46 > 0:26:49even though nature is seldom actually natural.
0:26:50 > 0:26:53Love of nature is deflected misanthropy,
0:26:53 > 0:26:56an expression of guilt about being human,
0:26:56 > 0:27:00about the supposed ills that humans inflict on the Earth.
0:27:02 > 0:27:06Among France's more pronounced traits is a lack of reverence for nature
0:27:06 > 0:27:10unless, that is, it's nature than can be eaten.
0:27:10 > 0:27:13If it moves, shoot it.
0:27:13 > 0:27:16Vegetarianism is regarded as puritanical decadence,
0:27:16 > 0:27:18a fastidious pathology.
0:27:18 > 0:27:21This, after all, is the country that ate a zoo.
0:27:28 > 0:27:31Artifice is esteemed in a way that nature is not.
0:27:31 > 0:27:35Nature is merely raw material, to be reshaped.
0:27:35 > 0:27:38It gives man something to work with.
0:27:38 > 0:27:42Something to improve upon. That's what nature is for.
0:27:44 > 0:27:47Nature's role in cities is to be twisted, contorted,
0:27:47 > 0:27:49bent to man's will.
0:27:49 > 0:27:53Trees are pollarded, they are multiple amputees,
0:27:53 > 0:27:55victims of beautiful disfigurement.
0:27:59 > 0:28:01They're grafted.
0:28:01 > 0:28:05They are pleached like conjoined twins from a freak show.
0:28:05 > 0:28:08They are topiarised according to the laws of Euclid and kitsch,
0:28:08 > 0:28:11in defiance of their essence.
0:28:11 > 0:28:14Trees have no more rights than galley slaves.
0:28:14 > 0:28:18They're there to be shaped, to be treated like rock.
0:28:18 > 0:28:22Hewn, carved, ashlared, turned into something else.
0:28:34 > 0:28:38France retains the most beautiful city centres in Europe
0:28:38 > 0:28:43because they're the most regulated, most controlled, most zealously tended.
0:28:43 > 0:28:46So zealously tended that they sometimes give the impression
0:28:46 > 0:28:48that the life has been squeezed out of them
0:28:48 > 0:28:52in the name of historically questionable preservation.
0:29:00 > 0:29:03All cities are artifices.
0:29:03 > 0:29:07France renders that artifice overt, demonstrative.
0:29:07 > 0:29:12It relishes it. Its cities are planned. They are patterned.
0:29:12 > 0:29:14With rare exceptions, such as Marseille,
0:29:14 > 0:29:19they are not accretive, they are not accidental, not piecemeal.
0:29:19 > 0:29:21They are formal and mannered.
0:29:21 > 0:29:27Juxtapositions of style and collisions of scale are not commonplaces.
0:29:29 > 0:29:32Harmony and accord are.
0:29:32 > 0:29:36Where the contrapuntal does occur, it is by design,
0:29:36 > 0:29:38rather than by speculative chance.
0:29:42 > 0:29:46French cities are the products of aesthetic dirigisme
0:29:46 > 0:29:50rather than of the growth which is puzzlingly described as organic.
0:29:52 > 0:29:55They are laid out with virtuous uniformity
0:29:55 > 0:29:59and with little regard for the quaint niceties of the picturesque.
0:29:59 > 0:30:02They are, effectively, zoned.
0:30:02 > 0:30:05Architecturally as well as administratively.
0:30:05 > 0:30:08They are urbanistic expressions of reason.
0:30:08 > 0:30:11# Laisser tomber les filles # Laisser tomber les filles... #
0:30:11 > 0:30:14The expression of variety and diversity -
0:30:14 > 0:30:16make that vibrant diversity -
0:30:16 > 0:30:19for all diversity is apparently vibrant,
0:30:19 > 0:30:22is no more the aim of the built environment
0:30:22 > 0:30:24than it is of the republic as a whole.
0:30:26 > 0:30:30Collective reticence, unanimous restraint, consensual understatement.
0:30:30 > 0:30:34These are the outward properties of buildings,
0:30:34 > 0:30:37the properties they show to the street.
0:30:37 > 0:30:42The building line is rigorously adhered to. Nothing gives much away.
0:30:42 > 0:30:47Undemonstrative facade after undemonstrative facade.
0:30:47 > 0:30:50It's a sort of modesty. Or maybe arrogance.
0:30:50 > 0:30:54Or maybe both, for modesty is often arrogant.
0:30:54 > 0:30:58This blankness is, anyway, a manifest of the distinction
0:30:58 > 0:31:02between the private and the public.
0:31:09 > 0:31:14Public spaces, squares, streets, parks, are formal.
0:31:14 > 0:31:18Even their informality is formal.
0:31:18 > 0:31:23The bogus shouts about its bogusness, about its creator's art.
0:31:24 > 0:31:27Due to the attention lavished on them,
0:31:27 > 0:31:30cities too are borderline bogus,
0:31:30 > 0:31:34caricatural museums of their former selves.
0:31:34 > 0:31:39Their orderliness acknowledges tourism's economic grip on the country.
0:31:39 > 0:31:44More significantly, it maps the demography of the bourgeoisie.
0:31:44 > 0:31:49The bourgeoisie does not of course accept that it is bourgeois.
0:31:49 > 0:31:53It has never forgotten its cobble-lobbing soixante-huitard youth.
0:31:58 > 0:32:02The gap between pious utterance and self-interested action,
0:32:02 > 0:32:05between vaunted ideology and everyday mores,
0:32:05 > 0:32:08is chasmic and comical.
0:32:08 > 0:32:12But we shouldn't mock the delusional, save to point out
0:32:12 > 0:32:14that were they to vote as they speak,
0:32:14 > 0:32:20France would be governed by a coalition of green Maoists and Khmer Rouge provisionals.
0:32:20 > 0:32:24This caste of comrades in armchairs,
0:32:24 > 0:32:28proud that fellow freedom fighters Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh
0:32:28 > 0:32:32were educated in France, inhabits city centres.
0:32:33 > 0:32:38The entire complexion of France is determined by where this class lives.
0:32:38 > 0:32:40This is infinitely more relevant
0:32:40 > 0:32:44than its fraudulent ideological boasts and its bogus allegiances,
0:32:44 > 0:32:47which are not translated into action.
0:32:47 > 0:32:50Just as there is no single word for "sprawl",
0:32:50 > 0:32:54so there is no single word for "commute".
0:32:54 > 0:32:56Power and money do not commute.
0:32:56 > 0:33:00Power and money do not live in dormitory suburbs.
0:33:00 > 0:33:03Power and money do not live in commuter villages.
0:33:03 > 0:33:10To commute is to admit to social obloquy and financial failure.
0:33:12 > 0:33:18So the safety, comfort, salubrity and primped perfection of city centres
0:33:18 > 0:33:22is a matter of self-interest on the part of that tiny fragment
0:33:22 > 0:33:25of the population which controls the management of cities.
0:33:25 > 0:33:29And which often has no garden of its own,
0:33:29 > 0:33:33so uses public space, expertly tended public space,
0:33:33 > 0:33:34in lieu of a garden.
0:33:39 > 0:33:43Inner city is then obviously unknown
0:33:43 > 0:33:46as shorthand for a gamut of social problems.
0:33:46 > 0:33:50Dereliction, gang warfare, welfare polygamy,
0:33:50 > 0:33:53extortion, rocket launchers, street prayers,
0:33:53 > 0:33:56child neglect, delinquency, 40% unemployment,
0:33:56 > 0:34:00drug addiction, under-age prostitution, despair.
0:34:00 > 0:34:04These have all been eliminated. They no longer exist.
0:34:09 > 0:34:12Rather, they've been removed. To the 'burbs.
0:34:12 > 0:34:15Which is the same as not existing.
0:34:15 > 0:34:19The vast housing projects of 40 or 50 years ago,
0:34:19 > 0:34:21today euphemised as "sensitive",
0:34:21 > 0:34:25are beyond the periphery of bourgeois vision.
0:34:25 > 0:34:27Hence their non-existence.
0:34:34 > 0:34:38In the city centres, the obviously insensitive city centres,
0:34:38 > 0:34:41they are an abstract, theoretical problem
0:34:41 > 0:34:44ignored save during the rioting season,
0:34:44 > 0:34:46the 'burbs' version of the hunting season,
0:34:46 > 0:34:49which begins at the same time.
0:34:51 > 0:34:52EXPLOSION
0:34:52 > 0:34:54SMASHING GLASS
0:34:54 > 0:34:55CROWD SHOUTING
0:34:58 > 0:35:01The desperation of the 'burbs
0:35:01 > 0:35:04is due to the state having created ghettos.
0:35:04 > 0:35:09Ghettos which are hardly hidden, yet they're off the map.
0:35:09 > 0:35:14They're stigmatised and they're feared. Not without reason.
0:35:18 > 0:35:20The desperation of the 'burbs
0:35:20 > 0:35:23is due to the criminality of their inhabitants.
0:35:23 > 0:35:29The desperation of the 'burbs is due to a frail grasp of supply and demand.
0:35:29 > 0:35:33If everyone is a dealer, who is the customer?
0:35:33 > 0:35:37# Pourtant, disons, auparavant, devant ses enfants... #
0:35:37 > 0:35:41The desperation of the 'burbs is exaggerated by a France
0:35:41 > 0:35:46that, fearful and fascinated, wants it own Detroit, its own Watts,
0:35:46 > 0:35:49its own Los Angeles, its own South Bronx,
0:35:49 > 0:35:53along with its own gangsters, its own assassinations.
0:35:56 > 0:35:59The desperation of the 'burbs is not desperation.
0:35:59 > 0:36:03It's the expression of imported, impoverished cultures.
0:36:03 > 0:36:08Morally impoverished, pecuniarily impoverished,
0:36:08 > 0:36:12They suffer too multiple further impoverishments -
0:36:12 > 0:36:16dietary, marital, psychosexual, musical, sartorial,
0:36:16 > 0:36:20religious, legal, linguistic, superstitious.
0:36:22 > 0:36:26The desperation of the 'burbs is not due to their architecture.
0:36:26 > 0:36:29When such blocks are situated in city centres,
0:36:29 > 0:36:32the apartments command high prices.
0:36:32 > 0:36:34They are, as they say, sought after.
0:36:34 > 0:36:38The bourgeoisie lives in them without complaint.
0:36:38 > 0:36:42But maybe the bourgeoisie has less to complain about.
0:36:42 > 0:36:46They have after all elected to live in such blocks
0:36:46 > 0:36:51and such blocks are congenially situated and efficiently managed.
0:36:52 > 0:36:56It is planning, not architecture, that is culpable.
0:36:56 > 0:37:00Planning in this instance has meant extinguishing ambiguity,
0:37:00 > 0:37:04creating pens, pigeon-holeing the populace.
0:37:04 > 0:37:08The less you have, the more distant your place of banishment.
0:37:10 > 0:37:14It's improbable that the hyper-rational functionaries
0:37:14 > 0:37:18who devised the demographic disposition of the Gaullist Fifth Republic
0:37:18 > 0:37:21realised that they were turning the outskirts of cities
0:37:21 > 0:37:25into places of internal transportation, human scrap-heaps.
0:37:25 > 0:37:30But then they were also hyper- unimaginative and hyper-arrogant.
0:37:35 > 0:37:39Equality means that humans without the wherewithal to live
0:37:39 > 0:37:44in central locations enjoy the right to be treated as equal units.
0:37:44 > 0:37:48And throughout the second half of the last century,
0:37:48 > 0:37:51the number of units grew and grew.
0:37:51 > 0:37:54Refugees fleeing certain death in Algeria.
0:37:54 > 0:37:58Further refugees from Algeria's post-independence tyranny.
0:37:58 > 0:38:00Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
0:38:00 > 0:38:03France's doors were proudly open.
0:38:03 > 0:38:07Add in baby boomers and the rural diaspora -
0:38:07 > 0:38:11the result is a perpetual housing crisis.
0:38:17 > 0:38:21From its central urban redoubts, the bourgeoisie surveys
0:38:21 > 0:38:25what's around it with, broadly, indifference.
0:38:25 > 0:38:30Indifference cut with guilt and fear in the case of the worrying suburbs.
0:38:30 > 0:38:34Indifference cut with a smug, knowing, cinephiliac tolerance
0:38:34 > 0:38:38of ringroads' neon exhibitionism and check-shirted truckers
0:38:38 > 0:38:42who, if you squint when the sun's at precisely the right angle,
0:38:42 > 0:38:47might just be Michael Madsen in a straight-to-DVD road movie.
0:38:54 > 0:38:57But 'burbs and ringroads are disconnected.
0:38:57 > 0:39:00They may be in France but they're not "of it".
0:39:00 > 0:39:05The countryside is different, complicatedly different.
0:39:05 > 0:39:09The dissociation of town and country is total.
0:39:09 > 0:39:13There exists the widely-held perception of rural life
0:39:13 > 0:39:15as something other than idyllic.
0:39:15 > 0:39:19The countryside is reckoned to be a primordial quagmire,
0:39:19 > 0:39:23inhabited by ignoble savages - coarse, gun-toting,
0:39:23 > 0:39:28suspicious, illiterate - anonymous letter writers excepted -
0:39:28 > 0:39:33violent, possibly bestial, certainly incestuous.
0:39:33 > 0:39:36The brutes are, however, happy with their lot.
0:39:36 > 0:39:42Yet "la France profonde" exerts a hold.
0:39:42 > 0:39:47It has, after all, been around much longer than roadside hangars and tower blocks.
0:39:51 > 0:39:54Parisian politicians sedulously cultivate
0:39:54 > 0:39:57their bit of the back of beyond.
0:39:57 > 0:40:00Nicolas Sarkozy is atypical.
0:40:00 > 0:40:04He is less sentimental, less self-aggrandising,
0:40:04 > 0:40:07less self-mythologising than his predecessors.
0:40:07 > 0:40:10He does not falsely claim to have antecedents
0:40:10 > 0:40:15who were horny-handed smallholders or for that matter feudal seigneurs.
0:40:15 > 0:40:21Jacques Chirac's familial connection to Meymac in the Correze was tenuous.
0:40:23 > 0:40:27But he milked this hayseed link with merciless abandon.
0:40:30 > 0:40:33The startlingly sinister Francois Mitterand
0:40:33 > 0:40:37was forever reminding the world of his Charentais roots,
0:40:37 > 0:40:41whilst omitting to observe that roots are what vegetables have.
0:40:46 > 0:40:51Valery Giscard not only added "d'Estaing" to his surname
0:40:51 > 0:40:54in an attempt to pass as a feudal aristocrat,
0:40:54 > 0:40:59but also bought the immense chateau in deepest midmost Aveyron,
0:40:59 > 0:41:03a part of France so profound, it's almost gnomic.
0:41:03 > 0:41:06# Prendre un enfant dans ses bras. #
0:41:08 > 0:41:12France has more second homes than any other European country.
0:41:13 > 0:41:18They are invariably old, invariably over-restored.
0:41:18 > 0:41:22They are, supposedly, links to ancestral soil.
0:41:22 > 0:41:26What surrounds them is not a leisure amenity for townies.
0:41:26 > 0:41:29What surrounds them is a factory.
0:41:30 > 0:41:34The country is a workplace, as it always has been.
0:41:35 > 0:41:41There's no pretence that manual toil is uplifting.
0:41:41 > 0:41:43It's back-breaking.
0:41:45 > 0:41:48Landscape is routinely sacrificed to profit.
0:41:48 > 0:41:52Official manifestos boasting of ecological probity are laughable.
0:41:52 > 0:41:56The idea that hedgerows or a dry stone wall might be preserved
0:41:56 > 0:42:00because it's visually appealing is unthinkable.
0:42:00 > 0:42:03The prevailing attitude to herbicides, pesticides,
0:42:03 > 0:42:07and agri-chemicals is cavalier. Or realistic.
0:42:09 > 0:42:14An army of functionaries attempts to enforce greenish regulations.
0:42:14 > 0:42:17An adept cadre of smallholders, quarry operatives, loggers,
0:42:17 > 0:42:20cheese-makers, apiarists and so on
0:42:20 > 0:42:23does its best to make these regulations work to its advantage,
0:42:23 > 0:42:27whilst not actually evading them.
0:42:27 > 0:42:30Bend them, don't break them - that leads to trouble.
0:42:32 > 0:42:34For you never know who might be watching you.
0:42:34 > 0:42:38Who might grass you up in the latest episode of a familial feud
0:42:38 > 0:42:43that began a century ago, almost certainly for reasons connected to land.
0:42:43 > 0:42:48France abandoned primogeniture at the Revolution.
0:42:48 > 0:42:51Today when an owner dies, his holding is fragmented.
0:42:51 > 0:42:55So they diminish, generation by generation.
0:42:57 > 0:43:02The exploitation of the country is undertaken with no regard for prettification.
0:43:02 > 0:43:07That's not however to say that the country lacks an aesthetic sensibility.
0:43:09 > 0:43:10It creates its own art.
0:43:22 > 0:43:27Outsider art, the label is tellingly condescending,
0:43:27 > 0:43:30transcends cultures.
0:43:30 > 0:43:34It's untouched by insider art, by the standardised avant garde
0:43:34 > 0:43:37that is every establishment's official art.
0:43:37 > 0:43:39However, it too is global.
0:43:39 > 0:43:42The outside art of a Charentais farmer
0:43:42 > 0:43:46resembles that of a Gujarati ditch digger.
0:43:48 > 0:43:51It may be untutored, it may be kitsch,
0:43:51 > 0:43:54it may be unintentionally comical, it may be crude,
0:43:54 > 0:43:56it may be sentimental.
0:43:56 > 0:44:01But it evidently fulfils a basic, therapeutic need.
0:44:01 > 0:44:05The making is perhaps more important than what is made.
0:44:05 > 0:44:09It's a counter to daily drudgery and infinite boredom.
0:44:09 > 0:44:13So, in a roundabout, reactive way,
0:44:13 > 0:44:16it hints at the sapping horrors of bucolic life.
0:44:18 > 0:44:23There is a specifically rural sort of garden art brut.
0:44:23 > 0:44:29There is a specifically rural sort of installation art brut.
0:44:29 > 0:44:31The backwoods have their own press.
0:44:31 > 0:44:35There are tractor magazines and tractor books for tractor cultists
0:44:35 > 0:44:37to further their tractor knowledge.
0:44:37 > 0:44:41Insect control, coypu control, crop spraying,
0:44:41 > 0:44:44regional recipes, the more ancient the better,
0:44:44 > 0:44:48deer-hunting, boar-hunting, rabbit-hunting,
0:44:48 > 0:44:51patois, line-dancing, quads,
0:44:51 > 0:44:54trailers for roadkill and logs,
0:44:54 > 0:44:58white vans, the huntsman's preferred mode of transport,
0:44:58 > 0:45:03lingerie night at a beyond the backwards of beyond disco.
0:45:06 > 0:45:09The sticks also have their own ineffable form of building -
0:45:09 > 0:45:11le pavillon.
0:45:11 > 0:45:15That's to say the usually single storey, usually detached dwelling.
0:45:15 > 0:45:17Improbably designed by an architect.
0:45:17 > 0:45:20If designed by an architect,
0:45:20 > 0:45:23designed by a lazy, incompetent architect,
0:45:23 > 0:45:27of whom France apparently has an ample supply.
0:45:27 > 0:45:30Nicolas Sarkozy wants to put a halt to what he calls,
0:45:30 > 0:45:35"la derive pavillonaire qui gangrene nos paysages."
0:45:35 > 0:45:39"Derive" comes from the lexicon of psycho-geographers,
0:45:39 > 0:45:42that's to say geographers who haven't taken their medication.
0:45:42 > 0:45:45It might be translated as,
0:45:45 > 0:45:50"the creeping bungaloid blight which rots our landscape."
0:45:50 > 0:45:55By Sarkozy's standards, this is atypical understatement.
0:45:55 > 0:45:59However, although he's spoken, he hasn't acted.
0:46:04 > 0:46:07It is, anyway, too late. Many years too late.
0:46:07 > 0:46:12In 1973, the Gaullist minister of housing Olivier Guichard
0:46:12 > 0:46:15announced an end to large-scale housing developments.
0:46:15 > 0:46:19He was parroting the American fashion for denouncing,
0:46:19 > 0:46:21even demolishing, such developments,
0:46:21 > 0:46:26most notably the Pruitt Igoe project in St Louis, Missouri.
0:46:29 > 0:46:34Monumentality and towers were now the source of all social ills.
0:46:35 > 0:46:401981. The creepy malignant socialist Francois Mitterand
0:46:40 > 0:46:42was elected president.
0:46:45 > 0:46:48The country was radically decentralised,
0:46:48 > 0:46:53not least because Mitterand bore a grudge against regional prefects,
0:46:53 > 0:46:58unelected incarnations of centralisation who, long ago,
0:46:58 > 0:47:02had made life difficult for him as an inexperienced local politician.
0:47:05 > 0:47:09Devolution is then a dish best eaten cold.
0:47:11 > 0:47:16There are almost 40,000 communes, some of which are barely hamlets,
0:47:16 > 0:47:20many of which comprise only 50 or 100 people.
0:47:21 > 0:47:25France suffers from too much democracy.
0:47:25 > 0:47:28Each commune has a council. Each as a mayor,
0:47:28 > 0:47:32a sort of primitive tribal elder, a hayseed godfather,
0:47:32 > 0:47:35who wields considerable power
0:47:35 > 0:47:39and who is paid according to the number of inhabitants in the commune.
0:47:39 > 0:47:44It is in a mayor's pecuniary interest to increase that number.
0:47:44 > 0:47:48Any application to build is welcomed.
0:47:48 > 0:47:51Any application, that is, for a dismal pavillon.
0:47:51 > 0:47:56Any application for something of architectural merit will be rejected.
0:47:56 > 0:47:59This is because most mayors of small communes are
0:47:59 > 0:48:02narrow-horizoned, low-browed, ill-lettered, class warriors
0:48:02 > 0:48:06who feel out of their depth with educated architects and their art.
0:48:06 > 0:48:09Astonishingly, these persons are respected
0:48:09 > 0:48:12because of the office they hold.
0:48:13 > 0:48:17Levittown is a late-1940s development
0:48:17 > 0:48:21of some 18,000 cheap, mass-produced, partly prefabricated
0:48:21 > 0:48:25pale blue-collar houses on Long Island.
0:48:25 > 0:48:28It employed technologies William Levitt, the Henry Ford of the Hearth,
0:48:28 > 0:48:32had used in military buildings during the war.
0:48:32 > 0:48:35It was the most influential urbanistic archetype
0:48:35 > 0:48:38of the second half of the 20th century.
0:48:38 > 0:48:41Far more influential than the transcendent deep-thought schemes
0:48:41 > 0:48:46of visionary architects and utopian galaxy fondlers.
0:48:46 > 0:48:48It was copied all over America,
0:48:48 > 0:48:52and what America does today, the world does tomorrow.
0:48:53 > 0:48:58In 1965, Levitt embarked on a development at Mesnil St Denis,
0:48:58 > 0:49:01in the outer Parisian suburbs.
0:49:01 > 0:49:06France had seen nothing like it. It became a tourist attraction.
0:49:06 > 0:49:12What was fascinating then is the far side of banal now.
0:49:12 > 0:49:17Sub-Levitt homes are like an exotic species which got out of control.
0:49:17 > 0:49:20Rhododendrons, coypus, parakeets.
0:49:20 > 0:49:23There are no natural predators.
0:49:23 > 0:49:27Originally they were disposed in measured clusters,
0:49:27 > 0:49:32curving roads, carports, little drives, rudimentary landscaping.
0:49:32 > 0:49:37Houses built as though to prove that no taste and timidity
0:49:37 > 0:49:42will always come a bad second to bad taste and vulgarity.
0:49:46 > 0:49:51From these suburban beginnings when they were subject to some form of order,
0:49:51 > 0:49:53they have spread out of control,
0:49:53 > 0:49:56because there is no apparatus of control.
0:49:56 > 0:50:02In the tempest of February 2010, 29 people died,
0:50:02 > 0:50:05most of them drowned as they slept in pavillons
0:50:05 > 0:50:08constructed below sea level in Atlantic coast communes.
0:50:08 > 0:50:13Many these pavillons were the work of a house-builder
0:50:13 > 0:50:15who happened also to be a deputy mayor
0:50:15 > 0:50:17and on the council's urbanism panel.
0:50:22 > 0:50:27'Une fois de plus, j'appelle...
0:50:27 > 0:50:31'..tous les francais, quels qu'ils soint, pour qu'ils soient,
0:50:31 > 0:50:33'assurez venir a la France!
0:50:33 > 0:50:36'Vive la Republique! Viva la France!'
0:50:38 > 0:50:43Charles de Gaulle came to power by employing the methods of a protection racketeer.
0:50:43 > 0:50:49On May 13th 1958, a group of senior army officers staged a coup in Algiers.
0:50:49 > 0:50:5436 hours later, one of the leaders of that coup, Raoul Salan,
0:50:54 > 0:50:56threatened to stage the second coup in Paris
0:50:56 > 0:50:59unless de Gaulle, the strong man,
0:50:59 > 0:51:02the only man capable of saving the nation,
0:51:02 > 0:51:05the man of, yes, destiny, was recalled to power.
0:51:21 > 0:51:27Meanwhile another general, Jacques Massu, seized control of Corsica.
0:51:27 > 0:51:31The generals did the dirty work. De Gaulle kept his distance.
0:51:31 > 0:51:36On 1 June 1958, he was appointed prime minister.
0:51:39 > 0:51:43Parliament was dissolved. He ruled by decree.
0:51:43 > 0:51:47In December, he was elected First President of the Fifth Republic.
0:51:47 > 0:51:52The threat of armed coup had been averted by the actuality
0:51:52 > 0:51:54of a bloodless coup.
0:51:56 > 0:52:00On 4th June 1958, he had addressed a vast throng in Algiers
0:52:00 > 0:52:05and had uttered the now infamous words "Je vous ai compris".
0:52:05 > 0:52:08Je vous ai compris!
0:52:13 > 0:52:20The pieds noirs took this to mean, "I've understood you. I understand you".
0:52:20 > 0:52:25It didn't occur to them that he might have meant, "I've got the measure of you".
0:52:25 > 0:52:28It didn't occur to the generals who had supported him
0:52:28 > 0:52:33that he was not so furiously committed to the retention of Algeria as they were.
0:52:38 > 0:52:43He sidelined them, he promoted them into them powerless sinecures.
0:52:43 > 0:52:46They had been duped. Their man was not their man.
0:52:46 > 0:52:49Less than three years after being suppositoried into power,
0:52:49 > 0:52:53in order to secure the colonial future of Algeria,
0:52:53 > 0:52:56de Gaulle reneged on his dubious pact.
0:52:58 > 0:53:00Why?
0:53:00 > 0:53:03Why did he treat with the National Liberation Front terrorists
0:53:03 > 0:53:08who were militarily vanquished and who represented a minority?
0:53:08 > 0:53:11More indigenous Algerians had fought for the French
0:53:11 > 0:53:14and for the continuation of colonialism
0:53:14 > 0:53:18than had fought for the FLN and independence.
0:53:18 > 0:53:19Why?
0:53:19 > 0:53:21Fashion.
0:53:22 > 0:53:26Decolonisation was the occidental political fashion of the day.
0:53:26 > 0:53:29The apogee of liberal piety
0:53:29 > 0:53:33and self-congratulation posing as humanitarianism.
0:53:34 > 0:53:39Like any other fashion, decolonisation required an inevitability
0:53:39 > 0:53:42and became the consensual posture.
0:53:42 > 0:53:45To oppose it was beyond the pale.
0:53:45 > 0:53:48It's not till fashions have gone out of fashion
0:53:48 > 0:53:52that their preposterousness becomes apparent.
0:53:55 > 0:53:59De Gaulle calculated that should France cling on to Algeria,
0:53:59 > 0:54:03it would be censured in the court of international opinion,
0:54:03 > 0:54:06whose judge and jury was America.
0:54:06 > 0:54:10Successive American presidents had done their utmost to effect
0:54:10 > 0:54:13the dismantlement of Britain's empire.
0:54:13 > 0:54:17Now it was France that was being leant on.
0:54:17 > 0:54:19Three years before he was elected president,
0:54:19 > 0:54:24John F Kennedy began agitating for Algeria's independence,
0:54:24 > 0:54:27so drawing attention to his big heart, modern mindset
0:54:27 > 0:54:30and contempt for colonialism,
0:54:30 > 0:54:32of which America was of course innocent.
0:54:34 > 0:54:38The 16,000 military advisors and relief workers,
0:54:38 > 0:54:41whom Kennedy would deploy, in Vietnam didn't count.
0:54:43 > 0:54:48De Gaulle's prestige and France's glory - interchangeable illusions -
0:54:48 > 0:54:51were jeopardised by colonialism.
0:54:51 > 0:54:54On the one hand then, prestige and glory.
0:54:54 > 0:54:58On the other, the interests and lives of hundreds of thousands
0:54:58 > 0:55:02of little people, who simply didn't count.
0:55:02 > 0:55:03No contest, obviously.
0:55:07 > 0:55:11Decolonisation granted power to violent fellow travellers
0:55:11 > 0:55:13who had killed their internal political opponents,
0:55:13 > 0:55:16who would proceed to use the only methods
0:55:16 > 0:55:18they knew against their own people.
0:55:18 > 0:55:24Decolonisation is the precursor of tyranny. And thus of mass migration.
0:55:27 > 0:55:31If they could, the newly independent subjects escaped.
0:55:31 > 0:55:34to safety, to civilisation, to Europe,
0:55:34 > 0:55:36to the home of their former rulers
0:55:36 > 0:55:40whose occasional brutality was nothing in comparison with
0:55:40 > 0:55:44the savagery of their indigenous successors.
0:55:45 > 0:55:48De Gaulle predicted this exodus.
0:55:48 > 0:55:52He observed to his aide Alain Peyrefitte,
0:55:52 > 0:55:55"Mix oil and vinegar. Shake the jar.
0:55:55 > 0:55:58"After a moment, they're separate again.
0:55:58 > 0:56:01"The Arabs are Arab. The French are French.
0:56:01 > 0:56:04"Do you really believe France can absorb ten million Muslims,
0:56:04 > 0:56:07"who'll be 20 million tomorrow and 40 million the day after?
0:56:07 > 0:56:11"My village won't be Colombey les Deux Eglises
0:56:11 > 0:56:13"but Colombey les Deux Mosques."
0:56:13 > 0:56:17Far from preventing the immigration he feared,
0:56:17 > 0:56:20his actions encouraged it - and he knew it.
0:56:24 > 0:56:28In 1966, he expelled NATO's forces from French soil.
0:56:28 > 0:56:30Kennedy was dead.
0:56:30 > 0:56:34The Texan Caliban Lindon Johnson was in the White House.
0:56:34 > 0:56:37American prestige in freefall - Vietnam.
0:56:37 > 0:56:42Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to assert French sovereignty.
0:56:42 > 0:56:46In 1940, de Gaulle had proclaimed,
0:56:46 > 0:56:49"We have lost a battle, we have not lost the war."
0:56:49 > 0:56:53Antoine de St Exupery, a man with fewer illusions,
0:56:53 > 0:56:56said, "We HAVE lost the war. Our allies will win it."
0:56:58 > 0:57:01The Allies' winning it rankled so terribly with de Gaulle
0:57:01 > 0:57:06that in 1967, he warned French-owned state owned radio and television
0:57:06 > 0:57:09not to play a song called "Les Ricains" by Michel Sardou.
0:57:09 > 0:57:13The great statesman who bestrode the world stage -
0:57:13 > 0:57:15the saviour of the nation -
0:57:15 > 0:57:18was so touchy that he wanted to ban a pop song
0:57:18 > 0:57:21that told an uncomfortable truth about France and America.
0:57:21 > 0:57:25# Si les ricains n'etaient pas la
0:57:27 > 0:57:30# Vous seriez tous en Germanie
0:57:33 > 0:57:36# A parler de je ne sais quoi
0:57:38 > 0:57:42# A saluer je ne sais qui
0:57:44 > 0:57:47# Bien sur les annees ont passe
0:57:50 > 0:57:53# Les fusils ont change de mains
0:57:56 > 0:57:59# Est-ce une raison pour oublier
0:58:01 > 0:58:05# Qu'un jour on en a eu besoin...#
0:58:12 > 0:58:16Subtitling by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:58:16 > 0:58:20E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk