It’s hard not to like France. France wants what we all want: to be rich and modern, but without working to death and without thinking that money is everything in life. Preserve traditions, small producers. Being a middle class country and escaping from massification.
However, the same cheese, made by one of these wonderful small producers, bought in that little neighborhood store that closes at lunchtime, costs triple the industrialized version, in the popular Président brand, sold in the supermarket that is open from 8 am to 10 pm.
And you, a worthy member of the Brazilian middle class, are you going to snub a President? Neither you nor a middle-class Frenchman can save two-thirds of the price.
But, thinks the Frenchman quite rightly, why shouldn’t I have access to the traditional cuisine of my country?
the question of identity
Today, too, it is impossible not to mention the discussion of “French identity”. It’s all too easy to think it’s just a “far-right” concern.
For a Brazilian, it can be difficult to imagine what it means to have seen their city completely changed by immigration. However, I invite the reader to a simple exercise.
Eric Zemmour may be the new beast on the right, but he likes to repeat an interesting story. He, who is 63 years old, spent part of his youth in the “18th arrondissement” of Paris. One fine day recently, as he was walking around, a young man with a foreign accent shouted at him: “Zemmour, go pick you up, you don’t belong here.”
I myself, who would love for there to be more immigrants in my Rio de Janeiro, admit that I would be duly upset if, while strolling through Copacabana de “ma jeunesse”, I heard from one of them: “your place is not here”.
I mention the episode because one good thing Zemmour brought, according to writer Alain Finkielkraut, was to have contributed to highlighting the issue of a country that received many immigrants, very quickly, and today goes through unusual situations.
For example, in the fiction series “Baron Noir”, the young deputy Cyril Balsan comes across a non-white community in a Paris suburb that asks for the presence of white students in schools. At stake is not only the idea that the government would supposedly offer better education with white students, but also the idea that the French Republic is the school. If France divides itself into communities, it will no longer be France.
The right grows in cultural life
France’s self-styled “nationalist” right may have lost yet another presidential election, but its issues are increasingly present.
Zemmour, a Jew and the son of Algerian immigrants, may even have repeated the story that the Vichy government — the one that collaborated with the Nazi occupation — was not that evil, but by definition it was impossible for him to have the same Vichyist rancidity. of the Le Pen family.
Not only. Part of the old left is today treated as the conservative right by the new identity left. The love still declared by Sartre does not spare Finkielkraut himself from this classification, a member of the French Academy and presenter of the already venerable radio program “Répliques”.
Sylviane Agacinski, a university professor of philosophy, who, by the way, is also the wife of Lionel Jospin, former president of the Socialist Party, was “cancelled” by the military against surrogacy and for saying that “infertility” is a notion that only makes sense when applied to heterosexual couples.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, already well known to Brazilians, criticized identity in “O Eu Soberano”, published two months ago by Zahar. She too is surprised by the change in French intellectual life, although she has a more cautious view than that of journalist Eugénie Bastié, from Figaro, whose “La Guerre des Idées” is unavoidable in the discussion of the contemporary French “culture war”.
The secret union of right and left
Something, however, unites the more and less radical right with the more and less radical left: a suspicion of very rapid changes, a suspicion of economic liberalism, embodied, at least for the right, in the European Union.
A recent program on the right-wing TV Libertés, reproduced on the Telegram channel of Cocarde Étudiante, spoke of the occupation of the Sorbonne by militant students, angry at the need to choose between Macron and Le Pen.
The presenter then quoted a call from the leftist Libération: “We’re fed up with re-electing the king of the bourgeois every five years.” As he read it, he couldn’t resist a comment, accompanied by a chuckle: “Which, in my opinion, is not entirely untrue.”
These more politicized Frenchmen may be tired of having to elect “the king of the bourgeois.” But that means they would like to elect a president who would allow them to not just eat the Président.
It’s a noble cause. And the French cultural scene, in full mutation, will continue looking for this figure.
