The Paris Tribune

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

Sometimes news events conspire to feed the shameless columnist ready fodder for showing off his uncanny ability to reconnoiter connections. But before the neo-libs roll their eyes and declare, “Another Wocky ((I still don’t know what this means)) American trying to artificially import another radical Yankee college campus construct to a country, France, where it doesn’t apply because we don’t have the same history etc.,” I’m not using my pundity prescience to point to Intersectionality but rather, serendipity.

Sometimes the actuality serendipity doesn’t go beyond enabling the erstwhile ranter-raver to show how clever he is in daring to see connections where his confreres can’t rise above the ruckus of the daily headlines. This was the case a few weeks ago, when several developments in France seemed to fall under the category of Things that go Boom:

1) The lache whose explosive belt either couldn’t or wouldn’t go off — et tant mieux — preventing him from killing even more innocents than the 130 he and his fellow terrorist nihilist brethren massacred on the cafe terraces, outside the stadiums, and in the music halls of Paris on November 13, 2015 getting up in the trial of he and 14 accused accomplices in the old Palais de Justice made famous by Simenon’s Maigret on the Ile de Cité in Paris, not too far from Notre Dame, and answering a question about his occupation by describing himself as a “combattant” for the so-called “Islamic State.” Non monsieur, vous n’etes pas un combattant, vous etes un lache; un combattant se livre dans un combat contre les autres soldats (du coupe, vous n’etes meme pas un soldat, vous etes qu’on petit voyou homicidal) egalement armé, tandis que vous, vous vous avais ‘battu’ contre les civilians sans arme et qui vous n’ont jamais fait aucun mal. (American readers, push the Google translation button on the right.)

2) The death of a grand actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, two of whose most memorable, fin de film performances involved combustions: His (petit mais au moins drole) voyou in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 “Breathless” exhaling his final cigarette smoke after he’s already been gunned down (in apparent self-defense) by policemen and accused Jean Seberg of being “dégueulasse,” prompting Seberg to utter one of the most memorable lines ever pronounced by an American ingénue in a French film: “C’est quoi ‘dégueulasse’?; and his frantic and ultimately futile attempts to snuff out the fuse of a dynamite bonnet he’s wrapped around his head — ” Mais qu’est-ce que je suis en train a faire?” — after killing the girlfriend who betrayed him, Anna Karina’s mome, in the climax of Godard’s 1965 “Pierrot le Fou.” In contrast with the murderous acts of the terrorists of November 13, in this case the only victim was himself. The triumph was Godard’s: In Belmondo, he found an interpreter who, with his Bogart-like ‘gueule’ (‘pan’ to you, bub), was a marker with whom the common man could identify, infusing these art films with a vital verisimilitude. Que Belmondo vas retrouve Karina — who died in 2019 — dans le soleil.

3) While it was, unfortunately more predictable than ‘deguelasse’ (I’ve given up on trying to spell this word right) the circling around the wagons by her fellow functionaries on France Culture, France’s middle-brow radio chain, provoked by the indictment of the previous health minister on a charge related to her handling of the early stages of the Covid pandemic was nonetheless disappointing. Patrick Cohen, the new host of the chain’s Sunday talking-heads show “Esprit Public,” ‘busculated’ the regular International segment so that his four panelists, rather than examining the merit of the charge itself, could attack the judiciary system (which they all did, no matter their supposed political proclivities), making a good case for the show’s being re-named “Esprit Public Service,” civil servant solidarity proving more important that serving the public.

… There are also, fortunately — for the ranter who wants to be seen as part of the solution — news cycles in which apparently disparate events can compliment each other when analyzed by a perspicacious pundit, in this case your (non-public) servant. This has been the case over the last week. First the events:

1. The doctors of S.O.S. Medicines held a 24-hour strike to demand an increase from the 10 Euro sur-charge they currently get for house calls. (Total cost: 35 Euros, in-house doctor visits here costing only 25 Euros, 40 if the treatment is more involved.)
2. President Emmanuel Macron proposed making restaurant tips received by credit card tax-free for both the wait-staff and the employer.
3. (Here I might get some of my details wrong, mais c’est pas grave.) After several months of neighbors complaining about a group of about 150 Crack addicts who had taken over a public park straddling the 18th (right below Montmartre) and 19th arrondissements of Paris, harassing them and their children, the Prefect of Paris, under the instructions of the Interior minister, finally took action… by moving between 50 and 100 of the Crack addicts to the border suburb of Pantin…. More specifically, a tunnel (or a park on the other side of a tunnel) at the Porte la Villette… on either side of which employees of the Prefect, or the City Hall promptly constructed walls… whose purpose, the Prefect reasonably argued, was to seal off the tunnel and protect the zone (presumably the crack addicts from being run over)… Which reasonable argument didn’t stop neighbors from both sides, i.e. the 19th arr. of Paris and Pantin, from labeling the barrier “the wall of shame,” One wag on a Facebook group I belong to, Collectif 19, pointing out the irony of France criticizing ex-president Trump’s border wall… The Socialist mayor of Pantin, meanwhile, complained that this would only add to the Crack problem in his city and nearby Aubervilliers.
4. President Macron announced that psychology consultations would now be re-imbursed by health insurance, or at least up to 40 Euros for the first consultation and 30 for subsequent meetings… which some psychologists pointed out would only pay for a 30-mintue consultations.

How to connect these four news events to the edification of all involved?

1. Make the doctors eligible for non-taxable credit-card tipping.
2. Send the head-shrinkers out to the Porte de la Villette to treat the Crack addicts.

5 centimes please.

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

First, I guess I should explain — before the libel suit rolls in — that the manner of speech employed in the headline, far from making serious aspersions on the moral character of the journalist in question, is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the old Saturday Night Live take-off on the old 60 Minutes (note to French audience: American news show) segment “Point – Counterpoint,” in which pundits putatively positioned on the Right and Left faced off over topical societal questions. In the SNL spoof, a cardboard caricature of conservative columnist James Kirkpatrick, often paired off against liberal Shana Alexander, finally expectorates, “Shana you ignorant slut.” The most brilliant gladiator in the real version was Nicholas von Hoffman, a columnist with Left leanings who my ninth grade buddy Max Yarowsky turned me on to. (Max graduated to become a women’s health care provider, which probably explains why I can’t find his contact information on the Internet, given the bounty put on the heads of abortion providers by some extremists in recent years.)

Here in France, there’s a neo-conservative pundit — a member of the Academy Francaise, no less (and he’s no Anatole France in my view) — who would pretend to offer a sort of Gallic version of Point – Counterpoint, “Replique,” a weekly soapbox on the middle-brow Radio France chain France Culture. “Soapbox” because while he often features real debate, Alain Finkielkraut conveniently waited until the previous New York Times Paris correspondent had left town to criticize his position on what he sees as the position of Muslims in France, concluding by praising the Times’s decision to (in his view) “repair the damage” by replacing him with Roger Cohen.

While I haven’t yet had the pleasure to be edified by Cohen’s position — excuse me, reporting, as Cohen claims to have moved back from having a rubric to the ‘news side’ — on Muslims in France, he made a snide comment Saturday morning on one aspect of the platform of one of the two finalists facing off this week-end in the Green Party primary run-off for April’s presidential election that makes it clear that he has absolutely no understanding of the French social model, nor of how the United States could stand to learn a lesson from it. Roger, as polemicists go, you’re not fit to carry Nick von Hoffman’s jock.

Supposedly opining on the place of the ecology in politics — one of the two topics of Caroline Broué’s weekly France Culture discussion with Paris-based foreign correspondents theoretically covering events in France — Cohen criticized, in that patented Times manner which manages to be both snide and cluelessly completely out of touch at the same time — Sandrine Rousseau’s proposal for a minimum revenue of subsistence, identified by Cohen as being around 850 Euros per month. “Getting paid to stay at home and do nothing, that’s not too shabby,” Cohen derisively joked. (I’m translating; sounds more haughty in Cohen’s French. And while we’re in a parenthesis: You try to subsist on 850 Euros per month, Roger. More on that further down.)

Let me tell you, Roger, what being a foreign correspondent — what being a reporter — means.

Being a foreign correspondent means interpreting and explaining the society you’re covering to the audience back home, in this case for an American audience. Obviously and inevitably, the foreign correspondent is looking at the covered (foreign) society’s mores through his or her own native perspective — which is, after all, that of your (to mix my pronouns) readers. But you still need to have the ability, the knack, or at the very least the inclination to get inside the motor of the covered country (and its citizens) and understand and explain what makes it tick, ideally in a manner that portrays the big picture by sketching a detail.

Let me give you, Roger, an example from my own experience, that of someone who has covered France for 21 years, prior to that covering New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for an international audience for my own magazines and other publications, including yours, and prior to that covering San Francisco for Reuters. (Which is not to vaunt my own experience, alacrity, reporting skills, or even ability to clearly understand, interpret, and explain a foreign phenomenon to my American readers, but rather to demonstrate that I at least attempt to understand the foreign subject from its own perspective, even if my own Native biases — particularly on the subjects of lay-ism and racism — are sometimes hard to surpass…, and in this one specific case captured the element which might most appeal to my readers.)

In France, freelance performance artists and technicians have their own unemployment status, the Intermittents Regime. To simplify (and my exact numbers might be off, as these are regularly adjusted), artists and technicians who clock about 500 hours over about 10 or 10.5 months in a given year are eligible for unemployment benefits the following year — no matter how many different employers they clock those hours with. I learned and wrote about this special regime in 2003, when threatened changes — as I recall, a slight increase in the number of hours required and a reduction to eight of the number of months one had to log them — provoked national demonstrations by the Intermittents, as well as performance and summer festival cancellations. (For the Covid period — which involved confinement and theater suspensions, and thus put most Intermittents out of work — the government has accorded “white years,” meaning that the requirement to log the hours in one year to qualify for benefits the next was waived.)

At the time, the core of our audience for the Dance Insider magazine was American and other “pick-up” dancers, so-called because they work for a variety of companies; in the States (unlike France, where besides the national ballet companies, at least 22 companies are awarded regional choreography centers), only a handful of Modern Dance companies can afford to pay their dancers full-time salaries. The rest of the companies — and thus the rest of the dancers — work for a variety of companies, which work, when they’re out of work, does not qualify them for unemployment benefits. In the States, at least the last time I profited from the regular unemployment benefits regime, you had to have worked at least one year for only one company, full-time, and have been fired, not quit, to qualify for six months of unemployment compensation which topped out in 1998, at $300 per week. (For the Covid period, even independent contractors received about $2,600, regardless of hours worked, if they fell below a certain poverty threshold). (And no, Roger, I didn’t use my unemployment benefits in 1998 to stay at home and do nothing; I used them to re-launch a free-lance career, including writing for your newspaper and ultimately to co-found the Dance Insider when I realized that newspapers like yours, for which I covered the arts as a freelancer, were not interested in stories that I and my dancer co-founders knew were stories.)

In other words, pick-up dancers in the U.S. need to have other day jobs to survive, and work their dance jobs on top of that. (The choreographers sometimes can’t even afford to pay them for rehearsal hours.) They cannot add together the hours they’ve logged for various companies — even if cumulatively these hours amount to full-time. This has real creative consequences for the choreographer-directors of smaller (most) companies, particularly if their language is unique, because it takes time to teach dancers that language, to develop a corps of performers who speak it. Most of the choreographers, like the dancers, eventually burn out and end up returning to or teaching at schools (which jobs they may be quite invested in).

In France, by contrast, performance artists and technicians who work at least 507 hours per year, even if it’s for multiple companies, can afford to just do that work… which not only lets them concentrate on their art (to the benefit of the arts-going public, at least when they can produce transcendent, relevant work) but in turn contributes to the creativity of the choreographers, sustains the theaters (which employ the technicians), and directors, thus contributing to the French cultural exception. (Something which even you, Roger, may have heard of.)

I have known a few Intermittents, and let me tell you, Roger, they are anything but slackers. My last roommate was an Intermittent, and she worked more than full-time, lived in a potential fire-trap, needed to have roommates to split the relatively low rent (still above 850 Euros) on her 37-square meter apartment (in a Paris suburb where you, Roger, have probably never set foot) and, the last time I saw her, still needed to take food hand-outs from a social service agency.

But to get back to the role of a foreign correspondent, and how my understanding of and reporting on the French Intermittents regime for my mostly American audience both did justice to the foreign population covered and edified my Native (U.S.) reader constituency, and what this example reveals about why Roger Cohen felt the need to, in contrast to me, denigrate a potential new evolution of the French social safety net completely in line with this tradition.

For the population (and country) covered, besides illuminating a concrete example in the cultural domaine which presented a better model of the way things might be to my American audience, I was trying to point to a broader and fundamental, society-wide and defining characteristic of a country through a detail. (There’s a term for this, and it may be super-annuation.) In France this is called the French social model — a model that, in the minds of some, has been at risk here for the past decade.

One proposition that has been put forth by presidential candidates on the solid Left since at least the last election, in 2017 is a “revenue of subsistence.” Contrary to Roger Cohen’s snide and intellectually lazy dismissive insinuations, this does not mean you get paid to stay at home and do nothing. Rather, it guarantees a modest revenue to help ensure you and your children won’t find yourselves homeless and hungry. In Paris these days — or rather outside of Paris — if you’re lucky and get there first, 850 Euros might get you a 27 square meter apartment with a minimal kitchen. In Paris, it’s more likely — and particularly if you’re a student who doesn’t yet know your way around — that you’ll end up paying 900 Euros for a 20-square meter apartment. If you can’t get above 650, expect to live in a closet. (While we’re on housing, here’s another example of how just because they have their own regimes, the Intermittents don’t have it easy: In my own quest to return to Paris, I belong to a Facebook group, Intermittents Solidarité Logement, in which members who will be of town largely for work gigs seek to rent their pads, or even just seek roommates, to supplement their income. In other words, they need every penny that they can get, even if it means letting strangers into their homes ((sometimes with drastic results; one Intermittent described, on another France Culture show, how he’s been unable to get his subletters out)). I somehow doubt that when Roger goes back to New York for journalism refresher courses he lets out his pad in the 6eme, 7eme, or 16eme.)

In reality, the revenue of subsistence would likely consolidate various other social welfare supplementary assistance programs which already exist. (And, in case I haven’t made it clear, Roger: 850 Euros will neither house you comme il faut let alone feed you in a French city, even more now as gas costs have risen 10 percent, electricity costs also, and food prices are reported to go up. But of course you, Roger, are probably paid more than that by the NY Times. So the recipients will not be “sitting at home doing nothing,” as you snidely proclaimed. You try to get by on 850 Euros per month, Roger!)

In rural southwest France a few years ago, working the vendange or wine harvest in the Lot, I met a young woman, formerly homeless, living in a small gypsy wagon or roulette (she had a horse for whenever she needed to move on) she had built herself, in which her father had helped her install solar power. She bathed herself in a barrel outside, and used an external “dry toilet” without walls. (I used her old camper and another barrel and dry toilet a bit down the path; you should try taking a crap in a dry toilet without walls at 7 on a blustery fall morning Roger, it might enlighten you. Come to think of it, it was the young lady’s toilet, which she abdicated for me, fine for herself with just going in the woods.) She benefited from one of the existing social safety net programs designed for young people, which brought her — for a limited time — about 450 – 550 Euros per month… And even then, was subject to control by state officials to verify that she had a project. Helene worked hard all day — I at times worked beside her — preparing hearty meals for the vendangers. And leant her old camper, for free, to the winemaker so that he could house me and my cat. Besides this young woman and me, there were about 30 ‘vendangers’ who had driven in, at their own expense, from Brittany to harvest the grapes, in exchange for meals, housing, and a few bottles of organic wine. (And most of them were not as lucky as me — I was one of the cooks — but lived together in a dortoir. The winemaker’s Breton assistant slept in his daughter’s tree-house.) We started at 6h30 a.m., knocked off at about 7 p.m. or later, and worked 7/7 for three weeks. Our ages were from 18 to 75.

But to return to Roger, and the real reason he (or at least establishment institutions like the Times; Cohen has likely been doing it so long, it’s probably unconscious by this point) like to denigrate laudable social models (now threatened by Americanization) like those in Europe and France, of which Sandrine Rousseau’s proposal for a modest ‘revenue of subsistence’ — not a boondoggle like those the bankers in the U.S. received in the 2008 congressional bail-out, but a safety net — is not an aberration, but a natural outgrowth:

They are a threat.

They are a threat to an American capitalist social model in which (for example) my Princeton classmate Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is able to pay for his space junkets by imposing a production standard on his workers which does not even leave them time to go to the bathroom and engaging in Union-busting tactics when they try to organize.

Roger Cohen’s snide, denigrating, subjective, biased observation — an observation in which he failed in the fundamental, minimal function of a foreign correspondent, which is to understand, interpret, and explain the country he is covering and thus broaden the world of his readers at home, perhaps even giving them cause for reflection in seeing how another country handles similar issues they face (and giving them ideas!, Heaven forfend) — was, unfortunately, part of a long tradition of American red-baiting. (Which I myself have been a target of in the past; delivering the students’ response to draconian budget cuts following the Proposition 13 property tax reductions in California, in 1979, to the San Francisco School Board on which I was the student delegate, I was rewarded with an assistant school superintendent saying our point-by-point analysis of the disastrous effects the cuts would have on school programs “sounded like a Socialist document.” Tant mieux!) Which, given the current presidential politics in France in which Green Party candidate Sandrine Rousseau, if she’s chosen in this week-end’s primaries, may be the most viable standard-bearer of classically European social model standards, has devolved under Cohen into Green-baiting. (For more on the original to which this is the carbon copy, Roger Cohen might want to read I.F. Stone’s “The Haunted ’50s,” a copy of which I scored at a Left Bank bookstore for 1 Euro.) (Cohen was equally dismissive of the American Green party as ‘semi-embryonic,’ neglecting to point out that unlike the French system, the American two-party system effectively locks the Green or any other parties out of the presidential debates and thus pushes them under the mainstream corporate media radar.)

Simply put, Cohen and his establishment pay-masters are threatened, as they have always been, by the European social model; they are scared that their readers might want to emulate it. In this — grace of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ingrid Thunberg, and others — they are already behind the times. Roger, of course you are not a slut. Mais vous-etes bien de-modé.

PS: Why should readers in the U.S. care what an American newspaper correspondent says on French radio? Given his dismissive — and in my view erroneous — voir derogatory comments on presidential candidate Sandrine Rousseau’s platform, it doesn’t bode well, notwithstanding Cohen’s statement that he has ‘gone over to the news side,’ for his Times readers getting a truly objective report — and thus learning about an idea applicable in the U.S. — on Rousseau’s ideas. All the news that’s fit to spit indeed (to cop a phrase from Bill Sokol).

Paul Ben-Itzak wrote for the New York Times from 1983 through 1998, and covered Princeton, Sacramento, and San Francisco for Reuters from 1982 through 1995 before co-founding the Dance Insider in 1998 in New York City. He has been covering France since 2000.

From the Arts Voyager Archives and the 2012 exhibition Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island. Images courtesy Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.

 

“The picture you’re seeing is of men on horseback whipping black bodies. The world is watching and that is the picture they are seeing.”
— Garlene Joseph, Haitian Bridge Alliance, September 20, 2021, Democracy Now, describing  the scene in Del Rio, Texas, where mounted U.S. Border control agents turned their reigns into whips to coral would be Haitian asylum seekers back to Mexico.

“Dans le nom de la France, je vous demande pardon.”
— French president Emmanuel Macron, requesting forgiveness from the survivors and descendants of 200,000 indigenous French citizens who fought on the side of France during the Algerian War of Independence, September 20, 2021, Paris.

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

Give me your tired and your weak … so I can whip their Black asses back to Haiti

FORT WORTH, Texas – It has always been like this. If you had to pick one geographical point in the United States that symbolizes the often diametrically opposed way our country has viewed immigrants of color and immigrants of European descent,  it just might be Texas. First there were the slaves, arriving in chains at Galveston Island beginning in 1845. (Texas would also be the last place where the slaves were informed they were free … after the Civil War ended.) Then there were the European whites who not only chose to immigrate, through 1924, but who were enticed to do so by the State of Texas, which launched a campaign to bring a million immigrants to the state through the port of Galveston Island. The railway companies even pitched in, offering free jump on, jump off privileges so that the immigrants could explore the Lone Star state at their leisure to find a place to settle, where low-cost housing and land were usually awaiting them. About the only white immigrants who eventually had trouble getting in – after 1913, when the rules got stricter – were people like me: Jews, who some immigration officials claimed were shifty.

Ironically, the more than 14,000 dark-skinned migrants who have flocked to the Texas border town of Del Rio, hovering and hungry under a bridge, some only to be beaten back by cowboy-border guards using their reigns as whips (and some to be aided by other Texans) over the past week trace their origins to Haiti, the first country founded by former slaves.  “Trace” because  some of the children, now among the hundreds being flown back there daily, have never seen the country, many of these migrants having started their long journey a decade or longer ago, settling first in Brazil, where their skin color wasn’t a problem and where they were welcomed, then migrating to Chili and finally Mexico, which also initially set up programs to integrate them. As noted by the Miami Herald’s Jacqueline Charles (to whose comments on Democracy Now’s Monday edition I owe this account of their trajectory), it was a word-of-mouth rumor that the Del Rio crossing was open that finally got them rushing to the U.S. border to request asylum…. In other words, it might be argued that these are not political but economic refugees. To my mind this distinction, sometimes employed in Europe to sort out theoretically more meritorious refugees from those who just need work, is a false dichotomy; if you’re starving because conditions (more and more driven by the climate emergency, often driven by Western interventions) have you out of work, your life – and your children’s future – isn’t any more secure than if you’re being politically persecuted. While this nuance might be reasonably debated in Europe, where immigration policies are geared towards political refugees and which generally does not have ‘land of immigrants’ in its DNA, it doesn’t really hold water in the U.S., whose (French-built) Statue of Liberty proclaims: “Give me your tired, your poor,  your weak….” And the Biden administration’s specific expulsion approach – to fly these refugees, even the children who have never seen the country, back to what is once again the Wild West of Haiti, as opposed to, say, Brazil or Chili, where some of them already have legal status – effectively puts many of them back into the category of political refugees. “If I go back to Haiti,” said one man at the border, explaining why he had made the decision to just send his wife and children over the border to request asylum, with the likelihood that they would be flown back to Haiti and not crossed over himself, “I’d be killed (in Haiti).”

What’s also troubling is the legal mechanism the Biden administration is exploiting to justify expelling these migrants without a hearing (although in recent days U.S. immigration officials have suggested they could make their requests from abroad): A Trump-era measure which uses the Covid epidemic as grounds.

From the Arts Voyager Archives and the 2012 exhibition Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island.

“Je vous demande pardon.”

… Meanwhile, back in France, while President Biden was regressing and freshening up a policy of the predecessor he’d decried,  French President Emmanuel Macron was following the just progression of steps taken by his three predecessors  in granting escalating stages of recognition of how France had abandoned the Harkis – 200,000 indigenous Algerians with French citizenship who fought on France’s side during the Algerian war of Independence which ended with the country’s independence in 1962 — and upping the ante.  200,000 of these soldiers and their families were simply abandoned when French forces pulled out in 1962. 80,000 made their own way or were assisted to come to France, where they were often welcomed with squalid living conditions where they remained for years. Speaking in the presence of 120 Harkis and their descendants at the Elysee Palace Monday, Macron declared: “France has a debt towards them… To the abandoned combatants, to their families who were subjected to prison, I request forgiveness.” The French leader’s bold step – bold because it moved beyond “regrets,” bold because he himself, while calling colonialization a ‘crime against humanity’ during his 2017 presidential campaign and recognizing the need for reconciliation, had previously stopped short of apologizing for France’s colonial history with Algeria, emphasizing the need to move on – was accompanied by the concrete promise of a law for reconciliation and reparations, applicable not just to the surviving Harkis but their descendants. The young president – the first born after Algerian independence — personally approached one woman who had spoken out during his presentation, and who spent 10 years in a camp, took her hand and declared, “Je vous demande pardon Madame.”

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

From my own corporatist point of view — which inordinately obsesses over what I see as the failings of the mainstream radio media (in my case in France, not because it’s any more problematic than in the U.S. but because this is where I live and thus this is the media I monitor) — the most formidable global victor in last night’s first-round results of the French Europe Ecology – Green party presidential primary was the planet itself, with voters’ consciousness of the primordial importance of the climate emergency transcending the almost total failure of Radio France’s journalists to cover the actual issues at stake and how the five candidates propose to address them. The nadir of this media chasm was a supposed debate on the popular chain France Inter in which a panel of political reporters from Radio France, France Television, and Le Monde devoted more time to soliciting the candidates’ opinions on the (to abbreviate) Muslim Veil (or head scarf, I’m never sure which one they’re talking about) and the long, post-Green New Deal disproven canard that ecology costs than on their actual programs, and where the fires and floods that raged across the planet this summer were conspicuous by their total absence.

The failure continued today on France Culture, French public radio’s middle-brow chain, whose morning program gave more air time to former president Nicolas Sarkozy than either of the candidates who finished first yesterday, European parliament deputy Yannick Jadot and former Green spokesperson Sandrine Rousseau — in other words, on a politician who, whether you like him or not, is almost completely irrelevant to the 2022 presidential race — and devoted most of the program to analyzing an extreme right-wing pundit who may or may not run for president. (The chain’s 8 a.m. newscaster even got Jadot’s name wrong, referring to him as “Yves.”)

If the race — and the issues involved — got more attention on the morning program of France Inter, which featured Jadot and Rousseau, each interviewed for ten minutes, it was partly because the hosts, Nicolas Demorand and Lea Salame, were more on point than usual (the Muslim head scarf or veil was nowhere to be found), and largely because the candidates neatly circumvented their interlocuteurs’ efforts to caricature their respective profiles and avoid talking about the issues at stake.

Thus Jadot — the party’s candidate in the last presidential election until he abdicated and threw his support behind the Socialist party candidate Benoit Hamon — refused the interviewers’ attempt to depict the run-off, which takes place next weekend, as a choice between Rousseau’s supposed radicalism and his centrism, by emphasizing the relative radicality of the combats the former Greenpeace official has helped lead so far (and which still need to be lead), including the banning of electric fishing. And Rousseau, when her turn came around, transformed the term (radical) from a noun into an adjective when the hosts tried to pin it on her, correctly pointing out that when the Earth is on fire and drowning, a radical approach is imperative and radical solutions are called for. And when Salame took her best shot at depicting Rousseau as a radical, challenging her on the candidate’s linking over-consumption and planned obsolescence to societal dispositions towards women and minorities under the rubric of “disposability” (the idea being, if I understood it correctly, that this notion is also behind rape and sexual harassment as well as racial inequality) Rousseau exploited the challenge as an opportunity to explain the concept, convincingly.

While it might be exaggerating to describe Rousseau as the Gallic answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — I don’t hear American media, even on the mainstream, using the reductive, corporatist term “feminist” to ghettoize AOC as some on the French radio media have done with Rousseau, thumbnailing her as an “eco-feminist” — I think she potentially taps into a similar popular, youth- and female-propelled movement, faces similar odds as those faced by AOC in her first run for congress, and appeals to a similar constituency, a constituency of young people eager to move beyond the political mastodons (be they on the right or extreme right, left or extreme left; most of the other candidates projected by these parties have been running for president for five to 20 years) and surpass mainstream mediacracy and which realizes how high the stakes are. (My own theory is that it was this constituency that was activated after the first debate, mostly by Rousseau, after which debate inscriptions for the online primary, open to anyone who paid 2 Euros and signed a values statement, jumped from 35,000 to 122,000, with 106,000 finally voting; by way of comparison, only 20,000 party members will select the moribund Socialist party’s candidate.) Both AOC and Rousseau have also anticipated media attempts to ghettoize them by taking an ‘intersectional’ approach which spurns sectarianism and relies on coalition-building. Both France Inter journalists tried to reduce next week’s vote on the final candidate to a confrontation between a prospect (Jadot) who wants to ‘govern,’ and a candidate who just wants to ‘influence,’ the implication being that Jadot (the man, practical) knows how to do this, whereas Rousseau (the woman, emotional) just wants to be heard. But the construct is archaic. The journalists had in mind a concept of governing defined as being able to form coalitions with other parties. For Rousseau — as for AOC and her (mostly female) generation of political leaders — the understanding of what governing means and entails is more … traditional: Being in touch with the people and able to represent them.

My own hope is that Rousseau will win (the primary), providing the Progressive Left (and the French presidential campaign) with someone who will actually base her campaign on concrete ideas, not just on proclaiming herself a socialist, feminist, and ecologist, the case of the most likely Socialist candidate, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and empty, unsupported and often unfounded and even demogogic lambasting of president Emmanuel Macron, as has been the case with both Hidalgo and “Insoumis” candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon who, having not submitted himself to a primary, has no ground to stand on when he accuses Macron of being imperious.

If I have one concern about Rousseau, it’s that she has promised to support Mélenchon if he’s the only candidate on the Left still standing after the first round of the presidential elections next April. If I had to choose between Mélenchon or Hidalgo and Macron I’d vote, with pride, for Macron, who has courage and the inclination to take bold risks to spare (and whose handling of the Covid pandemic has been exemplary), which is more than can be said of Jadot.

by Albert Camus
Translated by Paul Ben-Itzak

First published in the August 31, 1944 edition of Combat, the heretofore underground newspaper edited by Albert Camus — and unfortunately all the more relevant today, given the irresponsible manner in which the public radio “journalists” in France have covered the Covid crisis and now vaccination roll-out. . To read our translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s report on the Liberation of Paris from the same issue, click here. To read our review with extracts of the recently published correspondence of Albert Camus’s correspondence with Maria Casarès, click here. After returning to Paris with false identity papers furnished by the Resistance, Albert Camus was the underground newspaper Combat’s final editor under the Occupation, on one occasion (as documented by Olivier Todd in his 1996 biography for Gallimard) being saved from being busted with proofs of the newspaper in his pocket at a Gestapo checkpoint when he was able to deftly pass the proofs to Casarès, correctly guessing that she would not be searched. — PB-I

PARIS — Because between the insurrection and the war, a respite has today been granted us, I’d like to talk about a subject that I know well and which is dear to my heart: the Press. And because it’s a question of this new Press which has emerged from the battle of Paris, I’d like to speak with, at the same time, the fraternity and the clairvoyance one owes to comrades in combat.

When we were producing our newspapers in clandestinity, it was naturally without a lot of to-do or grandiloquent declarations of principles. But I know that for all our comrades at all our newspapers, it was also with a great secret hope: The hope that these men, who risked their lives in the name of a set of ideals which were sacred to them, would be able to give their country the Press that it deserved but no longer had. We know from experience that the pre-war Press had lost its morals and its principles. An avariciousness for money and an indifference to the big picture had combined to give France a Press which, with rare exceptions, had no mission beyond promoting the power of a select few and no effects beyond devouring the morality of the whole. It was therefore not difficult for this Press to become the Press it became between 1940 and 1944, that is to say the shame of the nation.

Our wish, all the more profound from remaining largely unspoken, was to free newspapers from pecuniary concerns and endow them with a tone and a truth which would elevate the public to the highest form of its higher self. We believed that a country is only as good as its Press. And if it’s true that newspapers are the voice of a nation, we were decided, for our part and as our humble contribution, to elevate this country by elevating its language. Wrongly or rightly, it was for this reason that many among us died in inconceivable conditions and that others suffered the isolation and the threats of prison.

In fact, we merely occupied offices, where we fabricated newspapers that we put out in the heat of the battle. It’s a great victory and, from this point of view, the journalists of the Resistance displayed a courage and a will that merits the respect of all. However — and forgive me for bringing this up in the midst of the reigning enthusiasm — this is very little considering all that remains to be done. We’ve conquered the means for conducting this profound revolution that we desire. But we still need to really carry it out. To put it bluntly: The Free Press, at least as far as one can judge after 10 days of putting out issues, leaves a lot to be desired.

What I propose to say in this article and in the following piece, I don’t want it to be misconstrued. I speak in the general name of fraternity forged in combat and am not targeting anyone in particular. The criticisms that it’s possible to make are addressed to the entire Press without any exceptions, and we understand each other. Are they premature? Should we allow our newspapers time to organize themselves before undertaking this examination of conscience? The reply is NO.

We’re well-situated to be able to appreciate the extenuating circumstances under which our newspapers have been produced. But this isn’t the question. The question is over a certain tone that might have been adopted from the get-go and that was not. On the contrary, it is precisely at the moment in which this Press is in the process of being created, of defining itself, that it is imperative that it examine itself. Only by doing so will it know what it wants to be and be able to become this.

What do we want? A Press clear and virile, a respectable language. For men who, for years, have written their articles in full awareness that they might have to pay for these articles in prison or death, it’s clear that words have their value and that they must be weighed. It is this responsibility of the journalist to the public which they want to restore.

Sins of laziness

And yet, in the rush, the anger, and the frenzy of our offensive, our newspapers have sinned by laziness. In these times the body has been working so hard that the brain has lost its vigilance. Here I’ll say in general what I propose to explain in detail later: Many of our newspapers have fallen back into the same tired formulas that we believed outmoded, with no fear of the rhetorical excesses or the pandering to the lowest common denominator in which the majority of our newspapers indulged before the war.

In the first case, we need to get it into our heads that we’re only marching in the same tracks, in a kind of reverse symmetry, of the Collaborationist presse. In the second case, we’re simply resuming, because it’s the easy thing to do, formulas and ideas which endanger the very morality of the Press and the country. If we really think that either of these is an option, we might as well quit now and resign ourselves to giving up on what we really have to do.

Because the means for expressing ourselves are now conquered, our responsibility vis-a-vis ourselves and the country is total. What’s essential — and it’s the goal of this article — is that we’re averted. The task of each of us is to really reflect upon what he wants to say, to shape step by step the spirit of his newspaper, to pay attention to what he writes and to never lose sight of this immense necessity we have to restore to a country its most profound voice. If we ensure that this voice remains that of energy rather than that of hate, that of objective pride rather than that of hollow rhetoric, that of humanity rather than that of mediocrity, then a lot will have been saved and we won’t have failed.

— Albert Camus

Version originale

PARIS — Puisque entre l’insurrection et la guerre, une pause nous est aujourd’hui donnée, je voudrais parler d’une chose que je connais bien et qui me tient à cœur, je veux dire la presse. Et puisqu’il s’agit de cette presse qui est sortie de la bataille de Paris, je voudrais en parler avec, en même temps, la fraternité et la clairvoyance que l’on doit à des camarades de combat.

Lorsque nous rédigions nos journaux dans la clandestinité, c’était naturellement sans histoires et sans déclarations de principe. Mais je sais que pour tous nos camarades de tous nos journaux, c’était avec un grand espoir secret. Nous avions l’espérance que ces hommes, qui avaient couru des dangers mortels au nom de quelques idées qui leur étaient chères, sauraient donner a leur pays la presse qu’il méritait et qu’il n’avait plus. Nous savions par l’expérience que la presse d’avant-guerre était perdue dans son principe et dans sa morale. L’appétit de l’argent et l’indifférence aux choses de la grandeur avaient opéré en même temps pour donner à la France une presse qui, à de rares exceptions près, n’avait d’autre but que de grandir la puissance de quelques-uns et d’autre effet que d’avaler la moralité de tous. Il n’a donc pas été difficile à cette presse de devenir ce qu’elle a été de 1940 à 1944, c’est-à-dire la honte de ce pays.

Notre désir, d’autant plus profond qu’il était souvent muet, était de libérer les journaux de l’argent et de leur donner un ton et une vérité qui mettent le public à la hauteur de ce qu’il y a de meilleur en lui. Nous pensions alors qu’un pays vaut souvent ce que vaut sa presse. Et s’il est vrai que les journaux sont la voix d’une nation, nous étions décidés, à notre place et pour notre faible part, à élever ce pays en élevant son langage. A tort ou à raison, c’ést pour cela que beaucoup d’entre nous sont morts dans d’inimaginables conditions et que d’autres souffrent la solitude et les menaces de la prison.

En fait, nous avons seulement occupé des locaux, où nous avons confectionné des journaux que nous avons sortis en pleine bataille. C’est une grande victoire et, de ce point de vue, les journalistes de la Résistance ont montré un courage et une volonté qui méritent le respect de tous. Mais, et je m’excuse de le dire au milieu de l’enthusiasme générale, cela est peu de chose puisque tout reste à faire. Nous avons conquis les moyens de faire cette révolution profonde que nous désirions. Encore faut-il que nous la fassions vraiment. Et pour tout dire d’un mot, la presse libérée, telle qu’elle se présente à Paris après une dizaine de numeros, n’est pas satisfaisante.

Ce que je me propose de dire dans cet article et dans ceux qui suivront, je voudrais qu’on le prenne bien. Je parle au nom d’une fraternité de combat et personne n’est ici visé en particulier. Les critiques qu’il est possible de faire s’adressent à toute la presse sans exception, et nous nous y comprenons. Dira-t-on que cela est prémature, qu’il faut laisser à nos journaux le temps de s’organiser avant de faire cet examen de conscience ? La réponse est « non » .

Nous sommes bien placés pour savoir dans quelles incroyables conditions nos journaux ont été fabriqués. Mais la question n’est pas là. Elle est dans un certain ton qu’il était possible d’adopter dés le début et qui ne l’a pas été. C’est au contraire au moment où cette presse est en train de se faire, où elle va prendre son visage définitif qu’il importe qu’elle s’examine. Elle saura mieux ce qu’elle veut être et elle le deviendra.

Que voulions-nous ? Une presse claire et virile, au langage respectable. Pour des hommes qui, pendant des années, écrivant un article, savaient que cet article pouvait se payer de la prison ou de la mort, il était évident que les mots avaient leur valeur et qu’ils devaient être réfléchis. C’est cette responsabilité du journaliste devant le public qu’ils voulaient restaurer.

Péché de paresse

Or, dans la hâte, la colère ou le délire de notre offensive, nos journaux ont péché par paresse. Le corps, dans ces journées, a tant travaillé que l’esprit a perdu de sa vigilance. Je dirai ici en général ce que je me propose ensuite de détailler : beaucoup de nos journaux ont repris des formules qu’on croyait périmées et n’ont pas craint les excès de la rhétorique ou les appels à cette sensibilité de midinette qui faisaient, avant la guerre ou après, le plus clair de nos journaux.

Dans le premier cas, il faut que nous nous persuadions bien que nous réalisons seulement le décalque, avec une symétrie inverse, de la presse d’occupation. Dans le deuxième cas, nous reprenons, par esprit de facilité, des formules et des idées qui menacent la moralité même de la presse et du pays. Rien de tout cela n’est possible, ou alors il faut démissionner et désespérer de ce que nous avons à faire.

Puisque les moyens de nous exprimer sont dés maintenant conquis, notre responsabilité vis-à-vis de nous-mêmes et du pays est entière. L’essentiel, et c’est l’objet de cet article, est que nous en soyons bien avertis. La tâche de chacun de nous est de bien penser ce qu’il se propose de dire, de modeler peu à peu l’esprit du journal qui est le sien, d’écrire attentivement et de ne jamais perdre de vue cette immense nécessité où nous sommes de redonner à un pays sa voix profonde. Si nous faisons que cette voix demeure celle de l’énergie plutôt que de la haine, de la fière objectivité et non de la rhétorique, de l’humanité plutôt que de la médiocrité, alors beaucoup de choses seront sauvées et nous n’aurons pas démérité.

— Albert Camus

Extract from “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie”
par Michel Ragon
Copyright 2008 Éditions Albin Michel
(Translation by Paul Ben-Itzak follows French text)

Commune de Paris (1871)

Bien que, parmi les dirigeants de la Commune, la majorité ait été jacobine et blanquiste, l’influence des jurassiens, des proudhoniens (Vallès, Courbet), de Bakounine (Varlin, Malon) a contribué à diffuser dans les actes de la Commune des théories spécifiquement anarchistes (la destruction de l’État, les communes fédérées, l’élection des officiers et des fonctionnaires, l’union libre). À la Commune de Paris se joignirent les Communes de Saint-Étienne, de Limoges, de Narbonne, de Marseille, de Toulouse. Vite écrasées par la répression, ces Communes libres n’esquissèrent qu’en un bref moment la théorie du dépérissement de l’État. Vite rétabli dans toute sa sévérité et animé d’un esprit de vengeance, l’État fit à Paris vingt mille victimes. Sept mille cinq cents Communards furent déportés en Nouvelle-Calédonie, quatre cent dix au bagne de Cayenne, trois cent vingt-deux en Algérie.

Longtemps occulté par la IIIe République, le souvenir de la Commune de Paris a été récupéré par les partis socialiste et communiste, qui ont prétendument affirmé être ses héritiers.

Or, en 1871, le Parti socialiste ne formait qu’un quart des membres dirigeants de la Commune, qui ne comprenait qu’un seul marxiste, Frankel.

Karl Marx avait délégué Élisabeth Dimitrieff comme représentante de l’Internationale auprès de la Commune.

Au lendemain de la Commune, le mouvement ouvrier français fut pratiquement annihilé. F. Pelloutier, dans son “Histoire des bourses du travail” (1921) écrivait: « La section française de l’Internationale dissoute, les révolutionnaires fusillés, envoyés au bagne ou condamnés à l’exil; les clubs dispersés, les réunions interdites; la terreur confinant au plus profond des logis les rares hommes échappés au massacre: telle était la situation du prolétariat au lendemain de la Commune. »

---

The Paris Commune (1871)
by Michel Ragon
Extract from “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie”
Copyright 2008 Editions Albin Michel
Translated by Paul Ben-Itzak

Translator’s Note: Appearing on the public radio chain France Culture last week-end, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, self-proclaimed leader of the left-leaning ‘The Unsubmissive’ party, put forth an exaggerated, historically inaccurate picture of the Communists’ role in the Paris Commune. Here’s the real story. — PB-I

Among the leaders of the Commune, the majority might well have been Jacobins or Blanquistes, the influence of the Jurassiens and Proudhoniens (Vallès, Courbet), of Bakounine (Varlin, Malon) helped pollinate in the acts of the Commune specifically anarchist theories (the destruction of the State, federated communes, direct election of officers and civil service workers, free union between men and women). The Paris Commune was soon joined by the Communes of Saint-Étienne, of Limoges, of Narbonne, of Marseille, of Toulouse. Soon crushed by the repression, these free Communes were able to illustrate, if only for a brief moment, the theory of the withering away of the State. Quickly re-established in all its severity and propelled by a spirit of revenge, the State exacted 20,000 lives in Paris. 7,500 Communards were deported to New Caledonia, 410 to the penal colony in Cayenne, 322 to that in Algeria.

Minimized for years by the Third Republique, the memory of the Paris Commune was eventually recuperated by the Socialist and Communist parties, who laid claim to being its legitimate inheritors.

And yet, in 1871 the Socialist party contributed but a quarter of the Commune’s leaders, which included but a sole Marxist, Frankel.

Karl Marx had designated Elisabeth Dimitrieff as the official delegate of the Internationale to the Commune.

In the wake of the Commune, the French labor movement was virtually annihilated. F. Pelloutier, in his 1921 “History of the Labor Market,” wrote: “The French section of the Internationale dissolved, the revolutionaries executed by firing squad, sent to the penal colonies or sentenced to exile; the clubs dispersed, the meetings banned; the terror confining to deepest basements the rare men to escape the massacre; such was the situation for the proletariat in the wake of the Commune.”

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

Trop, c’est trop.

Et fermer la porte de le poulailler après que le renard a déjà franchi le seuil, c’est trop tarde.