Just a Few Debts France Owes to America Jonathan Meades on France

MUSIC: Theme from "Allo Allo"

NEEDED SCRATCHES ON RECORD

No checked table clothes.

No dream homes.

No situationists.

No picturesque bastides.

No art of living in Provence.

No accordion music.

MUSIC: "Runaround Sue" in French

That's the sound of France attempting to do Doo Wop.

In the subsequent 50 years, France has attempted

every other kind of American pop music.

Time and again it's been found wanting.

One idiom it did not fail at was chanson.

But chanson is evidently not American.

It's not pop music.

And, not quite the same thing, nor is it any longer popular.

Only Sardou remains.

Brassens, Brel, Barbara are all long gone.

Their audience is dying.

The France they sang about is disappearing.

Their lyric tradition is in "despertude".

There are few signs of it being exhumed.

# I'm pan handlin'

# Man handlin'

# Post holin'

# High rollin'

# Dust bowlin' daddy... #

Why should it be exhumed,

when France has the entire product of the American music industrial complex to pay clumsy obeisance to,

to flatter with gauche pastiche?

# ..I don't wear no Stetson

# But I'm willin' to bet, son

# That I'm big a Texan as you are... #

Strange as it may seem to a non-Anglophone nation

such as France, America is exotic.

It still possesses an irresistible allure.

American English is ubiquitously mediated

and ubiquitously misunderstood.

# Last night I took a walk in the dark

# To a place called Palisades Park

# To have some fun

# To see what I could see... #

No matter how familiar it may be,

it causes America to remain mysterious.

It's as though appreciative devotion to a culture

is at least partially dependent on it remaining unfathomable

and unknowable because it's linguistically closed off.

France is happily not in a position to suffer the gross delusion

that the coincidence of a lexicon means that it's somehow joined to America.

Without words which are a nation's soundtracks

the ocular is paramount. You see.

You see a different nation.

You feel it in your gut.

The less we're sidetracked by vocabulary,

the more deeply immersed we are

in the sign language of an alien culture.

France's preoccupation with America has endured 200 years

because it does not depend on language.

America is understood visually, gesturally and idealistically.

Linguistic oblivion creates simplicity.

A polarised monochrome.

The subtleties of vernacular discourse are AWOL.

Allusions go unrecognised.

As a result, it can still provoke awe.

When France listens, the country it hears is merely noises,

twangs, grunts, drawl.

FRENCH RAP SONG PLAYS

These sounds do not get in the way of misunderstanding,

they do not impede France's imaginative creation

of an America which is partial and oblique.

They don't even begin to suggest the entire picture.

America's products are spangled with stardust

for the very reason that they are American.

That's all it takes.

So, if a song is written in French and sung in French,

it is still "Made in USA".

This captivation with the colossus of cultural imperialism

extends from ye-ye's teenage earnestness

to the gerontocratic frivolity of governance.

From enlightened gangsters to saintly cops.

Technology, places,

place names, abstract thought, movies,

can-do, management theories, jazz,

certainty, outdoorsiness, talking animals,

epic landscape, sharp practices, naivete,

silos that are cathedrals of wheat,

silos as mute and grandiose as Charles Sheeler's.

France has, at one time another,

fallen for the multitudes that America spawns

and has usually despised itself for doing so,

it's been ashamed of its vassalage to this coarsely omnipotent innocent.

But, equally, time and again, it's managed to cast its guilt aside.

Meriadeck was the most central of the city's several slums.

Poor, scruffy, the blackest area

in what had come to be known as the "black city",

a century's industrial pollution had impasted the porous limestone.

By night, there was a standard issue complement of hookers, seedy bars,

sailors in drag, drugs, people whose eye it was unwise to catch,

and insalubrious dogs.

By day, there was a market specialising in stolen tat

and counterfeit Americana.

The appetite for approximations of Lee and Levi blue jeans

was insatiable - blue is mandatory in French.

The noxious quaintness of the place was rather appealing.

Not, however, to Jacques Chaban-Delmas.

Chaban was, for half a century, the Gaullist mayor of Bordeaux.

He was George Pompidou's prime minister.

Meriadeck's renovation would be one of his great projects,

his princely vanity projects. "Manhattan sur Garonne".

Renovation meant razing it to the ground.

It goes without saying that the new Meriadeck was a political gesture.

Politicians are forever pathetically preoccupied with their legacy.

Here was a large lump of Chaban's legacy.

It was also, like most urbanistic schemes of the '60s and '70s,

socially dubious, not that anyone realised that at the time.

It laid the foundations of an irreparable division.

It involved massive class clearance,

the expulsion of thousands of layabout blue collars,

award-winning all-day drinkers,

Stakhanovite pimps and dedicated apprentice dealers.

They were decanted to housing projects in the 'burbs,

places that would prove to be the enemies of assimilation,

the ghettos of the future, the slums of the future.

That future has arrived.

And, with it, a flourishing separate development.

Unlike many contemporary developments,

Meriadeck was abundantly funded.

Profligately and corruptly funded.

Chaban, prime minister, could divert massive subventions

to Chaban, Mayor of Bordeaux.

The French for a backhander, for a big drink, is "peau de vin".

This is a prime example of urbanism.

It was conceived with the intention of avoiding the uniformity

that had become commonplace.

It was the work of numerous architects over a protracted period.

The variety that a multiplicity of hands ought to have brought to it

is seldom apparent due to its rigid axial planning.

One building, however, deviates entirely from the rectilinear.

The regional headquarters of a bank, la Caisse d'Epargne.

A work whose extravagant asymmetry is psycho-political.

Asymmetry is significant of republicanism

and defiant, evidently, of symmetry, classical symmetry,

which is the architectural mode of absolutism, autocratic classicism.

Its architect, Edmond Lay, was a provincial oddball

immune to metropolitan fashion, or at least isolated from it.

His life was apparently consumed by Frank Lloyd Wright,

whose buildings he had travelled to America to see.

The corner window was indicative of an idea conceived early in my work

that the box was a fascist symbol,

and that the architecture of freedom and democracy

needed something beside the box.

So I started out to destroy the box as a building.

It goes without saying that nearly all architects are plagiarists

or thieves or copyists.

But Lay's case was different. It was a pathology. Above and beyond.

It went beyond mere impersonation.

It was more like a case of artistic identity theft.

It was as though he actually wanted to be Wright.

He wanted to be him so much that he stole his soul

and designed what is unquestionably Wright's finest posthumous work,

a dead man's masterpiece.

Lay was a ghost's ghost.

He didn't make a forgery of a single work.

He didn't copy what was extant. He went further, he was predictive.

Just as Han van Meegeren forged the paintings

that Vermeer might have made under the influence of Caravaggio,

so did Lay devise a synthesis

which Wright, had he not been otherwise detained,

might have devised in response to this commission, on this site.

Edmond Lay's brand of cultural thraldom was extreme.

It was willed. Chance didn't come into it.

France's debt to America comes in as many degrees as it does forms.

Plagiarism. Homage. Influence.

Dependence. Acolytism. Osmosis.

Citation. Reference. Copyism.

Imitation. Borrowing. Adulation.

Daylight robbery. Sycophancy.

Envy. Apostledom. Admiration.

France denies some of these processes, some of these states.

It fails to acknowledge others. It's sometimes oblivious.

And, when caught with its fingers in the till and its mouth full,

it is defiantly unashamed.

America shares its way of life and its way of God.

It bestrides the globe with confident confidence and moral morality.

It dispenses its justified paranoia,

its mistrust of just about everything that's not American.

America evangelises with golden arches, soft drinks, soft rock,

rock solid breasts and chipolata lips,

musicals, academic patois, management jargon.

It spreads goodwill with hydraulic, agricultural and forestry projects.

Yes, it is guilty. But so what?

It has fought the West's wars, seen off Nazism and communism,

it's put man on the moon, it's produced incomparable writers and scientists

it's created great art, and great cars. And so on.

A l'ancienne, jadis, tradition, patrimoine,

d'antan, histoire, naguere, folklorique.

The past, the past, the past.

France propagates a comforting image of sclerotic stasis,

which is largely at odds with its actuality.

It claims to be what it yearns to be, what it once was.

A country apart, a fortress of Franco Frenchness,

all succulent lunches and mellow stones, bastides and vineyards,

inhabited by les gaillards franchouillards and les francais de souche,

a fortress of ancient ancientness impervious to all that's around it.

That's the organised social lie which it tells the world.

The world, astonishingly, swallows it.

For France is the most visited country in the world.

High speed trains and motorways, and state-of-the-art trams

merely enable the visitor to go from an immemorial cassoulet

to the impossibly picturesque weir, made famous in Jean Claude Troufignon's painting

to the fantastically roofed chateau

where Madame La Turlutte wrote her memoirs of a courtesan.

The bits in between are invisible to the visitor.

Taking from America is a form of internationalism,

a means of participation, a broadening of horizons,

an inoculation against succumbing to the organised lie.

France has just about come to terms with not being THE country,

it reluctantly admits that it is merely A country.

It gratefully accepts all that America has to offer

as both producer and exemplar whilst, at the same time,

enjoying the cosy delusion that America is imposing itself,

that America is an occupying force.

The entire populace believes it belongs to the resistance against the hated capitalist imperialist.

The entire populace is actually composed of collaborators.

Every time the characterful, pipe-smoking neo-peasant Jose Bove

destroys a field of genetically modified corn product

or dumps manure, the greenest manure that cattle can supply,

outside a McDonald's, he is participating in the Americanisation of his country.

His malodorous canutism is a concession of resentful defeat.

The people are only too happy to sleep with the enemy.

Rather, to ingest with the enemy.

To create and patronise a sprawl,

which aspires to the northern outskirts of Boston and the southern outskirts of Chicago.

How many ex-urban furniture showrooms does a small town in the middle of France really need?

How does the sin of car-dependency, which such development fosters,

accord with the universally preached, seldom-practised,

tiresomely trite and entirely unrealistic doctrine of sustainability?

Menacing, anonymous, relentless,

asphyxiating, incessant, dehumanising...

These are the adjectives routinely attached to sprawl.

They need hardly be attached.

Sprawl is itself pejorative, due to the uncontested notion

that it is necessarily undesirable.

There is, tellingly, no single French word for "sprawl".

There are constructions such as l'etalement urbain

and les banlieues tentaculaires.

But there is no consensus,

no agreement about what to call the most frequently encountered form of modern urbanism

or non-urbanism or anti-urbanism.

This lack of agreement does not point to a failure to acknowledge sprawl's ubiquity,

nor to a blindness.

It is not vilified. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

Nor is pride taken in it as pride is taken in conventionally elegant towns

and orthodoxly pretty villages.

Sprawl is accepted, it's there, it's an inescapable fact of France.

No-one frets about it. It's a manifest of modernity.

It's American after all.

Sprawl is not homogeneous.

There are many kinds of sprawl, which prompt anything from vague resignation to muted indifference.

Sprawl provides jobs, shelter, services. It's been around for ages.

There's good sprawl, there's bad sprawl, there's OK sprawl, there's iffy sprawl.

Educational sprawl.

Commercial sprawl.

Business-training sprawl.

Industrial sprawl.

Research sprawl.

Bureaucratic sprawl.

Bureaucrats, an unsackable army of human mistletoe,

require space in which to give thanks to the late Francois Mitterand

for having created their non-job, space in which to sleep off lunch,

not answer the telephone, shuffle papers, and fail to learn how to use a computer.

France is a nation of half a million elected representatives

and 7 million state employees. 7 million, that's 20% of the workforce.

Though "work" is perhaps not the right word...

Sporting sprawl.

Retail sprawl.

Entertainment sprawl.

Hospitality sprawl.

Arterial road sprawl.

Which possesses the easy romanticism of road movies,

the comfy alienation of blacktops to nowhere,

the lure of a trucker's crotch,

the threat of roadhouses, the inane joy of drive-ins,

the quiet sordor of motels, and, above all, the place names.

Abilene, Laredo, Wichita.

Better never to see the places

of powerful, moving country and western ballads,

which the francophone does not realise are hymns to self-pity

sung by pickup-driving psychopaths mourning lost love

and swearing revenge.

GUNSHOT

Conference sprawl.

Seaside sprawl.

The painter Jacques Monory's America is second-hand America,

a used America, a gaudy America...

..the America of Americana.

It's seductive for all that.

But it would not exist, were it not for the vision of another artist,

the film-maker Jean-Pierre Grumbach,

who took an American surname.

Jean-Pierre Melville died in Paris on August 2nd, 1973.

The next day, the familiar mask - Stetson, aviator sunglasses,

trenchcoat - was on the front pages of all the papers,

and, for Melville, occupied an exalted a place in the Pantheon.

And, besides, this is a country that is reverent, perhaps too reverent, towards artists,

even towards artists who are in thrall to America,

especially towards artists who are in thrall to America.

And there was never a French artist so apparently in thrall to America as Melville.

Apparently, for his art is entirely his own.

He did not represent an extant world, he invented a world.

The first, and best, scene of his last, and worst, movie was shot here.

This cafe stood in for a bank.

American film was no more than a springboard.

ALARM BELL RINGS

What he takes is decor and gestures.

Cinching a trenchcoat's belt, holding a drink like this,

and not like that. The etiquette of clubs, a way of touching a fedora's brim.

He turns the cosmetic into the stuff of ritual.

His films are moral, quasi mythic, tragic, cathartic.

Save in their appearance, they owe more to Racine than to Robert Siodmak but,

but appearance is everything.

Though they are far from commonplace,

Melville's films exemplify a commonplace French preoccupation with American surfaces.

They belong to an unidentified time

and an unidentified city, which stands for all cities.

St Jean-de-Monts is on the western, Atlantic coastline

that might be America's eastern Atlantic coastline.

Town after town is conjoined.

The bits between become indistinguishable from the towns,

the former towns, the some-time villages.

And, even where places are separated,

they are indistinguishable, one from the next.

St Jean-de-Monts, Les Sables d'Olonne, La Baule.

Each of them comprises mile upon mile of the sort of development

that is habitually calumnised and unfavourably compared to the unspoiled.

Why is such development so readily, so unthinkingly, so unseeingly condemned?

What's so attractive about all that is deemed unspoiled, untouched?

It has something to do with a vague fey sentimental feely love of nature,

even though nature is seldom actually natural.

Love of nature is deflected misanthropy,

an expression of guilt about being human,

about the supposed ills that humans inflict on the Earth.

Among France's more pronounced traits is a lack of reverence for nature

unless, that is, it's nature than can be eaten.

If it moves, shoot it.

Vegetarianism is regarded as puritanical decadence,

a fastidious pathology.

This, after all, is the country that ate a zoo.

Artifice is esteemed in a way that nature is not.

Nature is merely raw material, to be reshaped.

It gives man something to work with.

Something to improve upon. That's what nature is for.

Nature's role in cities is to be twisted, contorted,

bent to man's will.

Trees are pollarded, they are multiple amputees,

victims of beautiful disfigurement.

They're grafted.

They are pleached like conjoined twins from a freak show.

They are topiarised according to the laws of Euclid and kitsch,

in defiance of their essence.

Trees have no more rights than galley slaves.

They're there to be shaped, to be treated like rock.

Hewn, carved, ashlared, turned into something else.

France retains the most beautiful city centres in Europe

because they're the most regulated, most controlled, most zealously tended.

So zealously tended that they sometimes give the impression

that the life has been squeezed out of them

in the name of historically questionable preservation.

All cities are artifices.

France renders that artifice overt, demonstrative.

It relishes it. Its cities are planned. They are patterned.

With rare exceptions, such as Marseille,

they are not accretive, they are not accidental, not piecemeal.

They are formal and mannered.

Juxtapositions of style and collisions of scale are not commonplaces.

Harmony and accord are.

Where the contrapuntal does occur, it is by design,

rather than by speculative chance.

French cities are the products of aesthetic dirigisme

rather than of the growth which is puzzlingly described as organic.

They are laid out with virtuous uniformity

and with little regard for the quaint niceties of the picturesque.

They are, effectively, zoned.

Architecturally as well as administratively.

They are urbanistic expressions of reason.

# Laisser tomber les filles # Laisser tomber les filles... #

The expression of variety and diversity -

make that vibrant diversity -

for all diversity is apparently vibrant,

is no more the aim of the built environment

than it is of the republic as a whole.

Collective reticence, unanimous restraint, consensual understatement.

These are the outward properties of buildings,

the properties they show to the street.

The building line is rigorously adhered to. Nothing gives much away.

Undemonstrative facade after undemonstrative facade.

It's a sort of modesty. Or maybe arrogance.

Or maybe both, for modesty is often arrogant.

This blankness is, anyway, a manifest of the distinction

between the private and the public.

Public spaces, squares, streets, parks, are formal.

Even their informality is formal.

The bogus shouts about its bogusness, about its creator's art.

Due to the attention lavished on them,

cities too are borderline bogus,

caricatural museums of their former selves.

Their orderliness acknowledges tourism's economic grip on the country.

More significantly, it maps the demography of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie does not of course accept that it is bourgeois.

It has never forgotten its cobble-lobbing soixante-huitard youth.

The gap between pious utterance and self-interested action,

between vaunted ideology and everyday mores,

is chasmic and comical.

But we shouldn't mock the delusional, save to point out

that were they to vote as they speak,

France would be governed by a coalition of green Maoists and Khmer Rouge provisionals.

This caste of comrades in armchairs,

proud that fellow freedom fighters Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh

were educated in France, inhabits city centres.

The entire complexion of France is determined by where this class lives.

This is infinitely more relevant

than its fraudulent ideological boasts and its bogus allegiances,

which are not translated into action.

Just as there is no single word for "sprawl",

so there is no single word for "commute".

Power and money do not commute.

Power and money do not live in dormitory suburbs.

Power and money do not live in commuter villages.

To commute is to admit to social obloquy and financial failure.

So the safety, comfort, salubrity and primped perfection of city centres

is a matter of self-interest on the part of that tiny fragment

of the population which controls the management of cities.

And which often has no garden of its own,

so uses public space, expertly tended public space,

in lieu of a garden.

Inner city is then obviously unknown

as shorthand for a gamut of social problems.

Dereliction, gang warfare, welfare polygamy,

extortion, rocket launchers, street prayers,

child neglect, delinquency, 40% unemployment,

drug addiction, under-age prostitution, despair.

These have all been eliminated. They no longer exist.

Rather, they've been removed. To the 'burbs.

Which is the same as not existing.

The vast housing projects of 40 or 50 years ago,

today euphemised as "sensitive",

are beyond the periphery of bourgeois vision.

Hence their non-existence.

In the city centres, the obviously insensitive city centres,

they are an abstract, theoretical problem

ignored save during the rioting season,

the 'burbs' version of the hunting season,

which begins at the same time.

EXPLOSION

SMASHING GLASS

CROWD SHOUTING

The desperation of the 'burbs

is due to the state having created ghettos.

Ghettos which are hardly hidden, yet they're off the map.

They're stigmatised and they're feared. Not without reason.

The desperation of the 'burbs

is due to the criminality of their inhabitants.

The desperation of the 'burbs is due to a frail grasp of supply and demand.

If everyone is a dealer, who is the customer?

# Pourtant, disons, auparavant, devant ses enfants... #

The desperation of the 'burbs is exaggerated by a France

that, fearful and fascinated, wants it own Detroit, its own Watts,

its own Los Angeles, its own South Bronx,

along with its own gangsters, its own assassinations.

The desperation of the 'burbs is not desperation.

It's the expression of imported, impoverished cultures.

Morally impoverished, pecuniarily impoverished,

They suffer too multiple further impoverishments -

dietary, marital, psychosexual, musical, sartorial,

religious, legal, linguistic, superstitious.

The desperation of the 'burbs is not due to their architecture.

When such blocks are situated in city centres,

the apartments command high prices.

They are, as they say, sought after.

The bourgeoisie lives in them without complaint.

But maybe the bourgeoisie has less to complain about.

They have after all elected to live in such blocks

and such blocks are congenially situated and efficiently managed.

It is planning, not architecture, that is culpable.

Planning in this instance has meant extinguishing ambiguity,

creating pens, pigeon-holeing the populace.

The less you have, the more distant your place of banishment.

It's improbable that the hyper-rational functionaries

who devised the demographic disposition of the Gaullist Fifth Republic

realised that they were turning the outskirts of cities

into places of internal transportation, human scrap-heaps.

But then they were also hyper- unimaginative and hyper-arrogant.

Equality means that humans without the wherewithal to live

in central locations enjoy the right to be treated as equal units.

And throughout the second half of the last century,

the number of units grew and grew.

Refugees fleeing certain death in Algeria.

Further refugees from Algeria's post-independence tyranny.

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

France's doors were proudly open.

Add in baby boomers and the rural diaspora -

the result is a perpetual housing crisis.

From its central urban redoubts, the bourgeoisie surveys

what's around it with, broadly, indifference.

Indifference cut with guilt and fear in the case of the worrying suburbs.

Indifference cut with a smug, knowing, cinephiliac tolerance

of ringroads' neon exhibitionism and check-shirted truckers

who, if you squint when the sun's at precisely the right angle,

might just be Michael Madsen in a straight-to-DVD road movie.

But 'burbs and ringroads are disconnected.

They may be in France but they're not "of it".

The countryside is different, complicatedly different.

The dissociation of town and country is total.

There exists the widely-held perception of rural life

as something other than idyllic.

The countryside is reckoned to be a primordial quagmire,

inhabited by ignoble savages - coarse, gun-toting,

suspicious, illiterate - anonymous letter writers excepted -

violent, possibly bestial, certainly incestuous.

The brutes are, however, happy with their lot.

Yet "la France profonde" exerts a hold.

It has, after all, been around much longer than roadside hangars and tower blocks.

Parisian politicians sedulously cultivate

their bit of the back of beyond.

Nicolas Sarkozy is atypical.

He is less sentimental, less self-aggrandising,

less self-mythologising than his predecessors.

He does not falsely claim to have antecedents

who were horny-handed smallholders or for that matter feudal seigneurs.

Jacques Chirac's familial connection to Meymac in the Correze was tenuous.

But he milked this hayseed link with merciless abandon.

The startlingly sinister Francois Mitterand

was forever reminding the world of his Charentais roots,

whilst omitting to observe that roots are what vegetables have.

Valery Giscard not only added "d'Estaing" to his surname

in an attempt to pass as a feudal aristocrat,

but also bought the immense chateau in deepest midmost Aveyron,

a part of France so profound, it's almost gnomic.

# Prendre un enfant dans ses bras. #

France has more second homes than any other European country.

They are invariably old, invariably over-restored.

They are, supposedly, links to ancestral soil.

What surrounds them is not a leisure amenity for townies.

What surrounds them is a factory.

The country is a workplace, as it always has been.

There's no pretence that manual toil is uplifting.

It's back-breaking.

Landscape is routinely sacrificed to profit.

Official manifestos boasting of ecological probity are laughable.

The idea that hedgerows or a dry stone wall might be preserved

because it's visually appealing is unthinkable.

The prevailing attitude to herbicides, pesticides,

and agri-chemicals is cavalier. Or realistic.

An army of functionaries attempts to enforce greenish regulations.

An adept cadre of smallholders, quarry operatives, loggers,

cheese-makers, apiarists and so on

does its best to make these regulations work to its advantage,

whilst not actually evading them.

Bend them, don't break them - that leads to trouble.

For you never know who might be watching you.

Who might grass you up in the latest episode of a familial feud

that began a century ago, almost certainly for reasons connected to land.

France abandoned primogeniture at the Revolution.

Today when an owner dies, his holding is fragmented.

So they diminish, generation by generation.

The exploitation of the country is undertaken with no regard for prettification.

That's not however to say that the country lacks an aesthetic sensibility.

It creates its own art.

Outsider art, the label is tellingly condescending,

transcends cultures.

It's untouched by insider art, by the standardised avant garde

that is every establishment's official art.

However, it too is global.

The outside art of a Charentais farmer

resembles that of a Gujarati ditch digger.

It may be untutored, it may be kitsch,

it may be unintentionally comical, it may be crude,

it may be sentimental.

But it evidently fulfils a basic, therapeutic need.

The making is perhaps more important than what is made.

It's a counter to daily drudgery and infinite boredom.

So, in a roundabout, reactive way,

it hints at the sapping horrors of bucolic life.

There is a specifically rural sort of garden art brut.

There is a specifically rural sort of installation art brut.

The backwoods have their own press.

There are tractor magazines and tractor books for tractor cultists

to further their tractor knowledge.

Insect control, coypu control, crop spraying,

regional recipes, the more ancient the better,

deer-hunting, boar-hunting, rabbit-hunting,

patois, line-dancing, quads,

trailers for roadkill and logs,

white vans, the huntsman's preferred mode of transport,

lingerie night at a beyond the backwards of beyond disco.

The sticks also have their own ineffable form of building -

le pavillon.

That's to say the usually single storey, usually detached dwelling.

Improbably designed by an architect.

If designed by an architect,

designed by a lazy, incompetent architect,

of whom France apparently has an ample supply.

Nicolas Sarkozy wants to put a halt to what he calls,

"la derive pavillonaire qui gangrene nos paysages."

"Derive" comes from the lexicon of psycho-geographers,

that's to say geographers who haven't taken their medication.

It might be translated as,

"the creeping bungaloid blight which rots our landscape."

By Sarkozy's standards, this is atypical understatement.

However, although he's spoken, he hasn't acted.

It is, anyway, too late. Many years too late.

In 1973, the Gaullist minister of housing Olivier Guichard

announced an end to large-scale housing developments.

He was parroting the American fashion for denouncing,

even demolishing, such developments,

most notably the Pruitt Igoe project in St Louis, Missouri.

Monumentality and towers were now the source of all social ills.

1981. The creepy malignant socialist Francois Mitterand

was elected president.

The country was radically decentralised,

not least because Mitterand bore a grudge against regional prefects,

unelected incarnations of centralisation who, long ago,

had made life difficult for him as an inexperienced local politician.

Devolution is then a dish best eaten cold.

There are almost 40,000 communes, some of which are barely hamlets,

many of which comprise only 50 or 100 people.

France suffers from too much democracy.

Each commune has a council. Each as a mayor,

a sort of primitive tribal elder, a hayseed godfather,

who wields considerable power

and who is paid according to the number of inhabitants in the commune.

It is in a mayor's pecuniary interest to increase that number.

Any application to build is welcomed.

Any application, that is, for a dismal pavillon.

Any application for something of architectural merit will be rejected.

This is because most mayors of small communes are

narrow-horizoned, low-browed, ill-lettered, class warriors

who feel out of their depth with educated architects and their art.

Astonishingly, these persons are respected

because of the office they hold.

Levittown is a late-1940s development

of some 18,000 cheap, mass-produced, partly prefabricated

pale blue-collar houses on Long Island.

It employed technologies William Levitt, the Henry Ford of the Hearth,

had used in military buildings during the war.

It was the most influential urbanistic archetype

of the second half of the 20th century.

Far more influential than the transcendent deep-thought schemes

of visionary architects and utopian galaxy fondlers.

It was copied all over America,

and what America does today, the world does tomorrow.

In 1965, Levitt embarked on a development at Mesnil St Denis,

in the outer Parisian suburbs.

France had seen nothing like it. It became a tourist attraction.

What was fascinating then is the far side of banal now.

Sub-Levitt homes are like an exotic species which got out of control.

Rhododendrons, coypus, parakeets.

There are no natural predators.

Originally they were disposed in measured clusters,

curving roads, carports, little drives, rudimentary landscaping.

Houses built as though to prove that no taste and timidity

will always come a bad second to bad taste and vulgarity.

From these suburban beginnings when they were subject to some form of order,

they have spread out of control,

because there is no apparatus of control.

In the tempest of February 2010, 29 people died,

most of them drowned as they slept in pavillons

constructed below sea level in Atlantic coast communes.

Many these pavillons were the work of a house-builder

who happened also to be a deputy mayor

and on the council's urbanism panel.

'Une fois de plus, j'appelle...

'..tous les francais, quels qu'ils soint, pour qu'ils soient,

'assurez venir a la France!

'Vive la Republique! Viva la France!'

Charles de Gaulle came to power by employing the methods of a protection racketeer.

On May 13th 1958, a group of senior army officers staged a coup in Algiers.

36 hours later, one of the leaders of that coup, Raoul Salan,

threatened to stage the second coup in Paris

unless de Gaulle, the strong man,

the only man capable of saving the nation,

the man of, yes, destiny, was recalled to power.

Meanwhile another general, Jacques Massu, seized control of Corsica.

The generals did the dirty work. De Gaulle kept his distance.

On 1 June 1958, he was appointed prime minister.

Parliament was dissolved. He ruled by decree.

In December, he was elected First President of the Fifth Republic.

The threat of armed coup had been averted by the actuality

of a bloodless coup.

On 4th June 1958, he had addressed a vast throng in Algiers

and had uttered the now infamous words "Je vous ai compris".

Je vous ai compris!

The pieds noirs took this to mean, "I've understood you. I understand you".

It didn't occur to them that he might have meant, "I've got the measure of you".

It didn't occur to the generals who had supported him

that he was not so furiously committed to the retention of Algeria as they were.

He sidelined them, he promoted them into them powerless sinecures.

They had been duped. Their man was not their man.

Less than three years after being suppositoried into power,

in order to secure the colonial future of Algeria,

de Gaulle reneged on his dubious pact.

Why?

Why did he treat with the National Liberation Front terrorists

who were militarily vanquished and who represented a minority?

More indigenous Algerians had fought for the French

and for the continuation of colonialism

than had fought for the FLN and independence.

Why?

Fashion.

Decolonisation was the occidental political fashion of the day.

The apogee of liberal piety

and self-congratulation posing as humanitarianism.

Like any other fashion, decolonisation required an inevitability

and became the consensual posture.

To oppose it was beyond the pale.

It's not till fashions have gone out of fashion

that their preposterousness becomes apparent.

De Gaulle calculated that should France cling on to Algeria,

it would be censured in the court of international opinion,

whose judge and jury was America.

Successive American presidents had done their utmost to effect

the dismantlement of Britain's empire.

Now it was France that was being leant on.

Three years before he was elected president,

John F Kennedy began agitating for Algeria's independence,

so drawing attention to his big heart, modern mindset

and contempt for colonialism,

of which America was of course innocent.

The 16,000 military advisors and relief workers,

whom Kennedy would deploy, in Vietnam didn't count.

De Gaulle's prestige and France's glory - interchangeable illusions -

were jeopardised by colonialism.

On the one hand then, prestige and glory.

On the other, the interests and lives of hundreds of thousands

of little people, who simply didn't count.

No contest, obviously.

Decolonisation granted power to violent fellow travellers

who had killed their internal political opponents,

who would proceed to use the only methods

they knew against their own people.

Decolonisation is the precursor of tyranny. And thus of mass migration.

If they could, the newly independent subjects escaped.

to safety, to civilisation, to Europe,

to the home of their former rulers

whose occasional brutality was nothing in comparison with

the savagery of their indigenous successors.

De Gaulle predicted this exodus.

He observed to his aide Alain Peyrefitte,

"Mix oil and vinegar. Shake the jar.

"After a moment, they're separate again.

"The Arabs are Arab. The French are French.

"Do you really believe France can absorb ten million Muslims,

"who'll be 20 million tomorrow and 40 million the day after?

"My village won't be Colombey les Deux Eglises

"but Colombey les Deux Mosques."

Far from preventing the immigration he feared,

his actions encouraged it - and he knew it.

In 1966, he expelled NATO's forces from French soil.

Kennedy was dead.

The Texan Caliban Lindon Johnson was in the White House.

American prestige in freefall - Vietnam.

Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to assert French sovereignty.

In 1940, de Gaulle had proclaimed,

"We have lost a battle, we have not lost the war."

Antoine de St Exupery, a man with fewer illusions,

said, "We HAVE lost the war. Our allies will win it."

The Allies' winning it rankled so terribly with de Gaulle

that in 1967, he warned French-owned state owned radio and television

not to play a song called "Les Ricains" by Michel Sardou.

The great statesman who bestrode the world stage -

the saviour of the nation -

was so touchy that he wanted to ban a pop song

that told an uncomfortable truth about France and America.

# Si les ricains n'etaient pas la

# Vous seriez tous en Germanie

# A parler de je ne sais quoi

# A saluer je ne sais qui

# Bien sur les annees ont passe

# Les fusils ont change de mains

# Est-ce une raison pour oublier

# Qu'un jour on en a eu besoin...#

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