Return to the Ancient Regime

Terry and his wife Fina have left their winter home in Florida, USA and have returned to their four acres and a restored farm house in Normandy, France.  Both are English who have taken up residency abroad for the past decade or so.  Terry, a retired business executive and very well-read, once more takes to his keyboard and dashes out his views on the USA, France, the French election and in general the peculiarities of human cultures.  Yes, with a splash of humor.  Yes, he spells in British English. - Glenn N. Holliman

A return to France
and not a confirmation of the superiority of its culture over that of the United States
by Terry Field

Well, here I am. The last six months in America have flown by, and – after the required jet lag, and the unpleasant experience of rapid eye movement at 8 am French time on waking, I am slowly adjusting to the deep cultural shock of being immersed in a continuing 18th century France masquerading as a half-way modern state.

The first thing that hits one in the nose is the stench of diesel fumes. Suddenly, the outline of my lungs becomes a conscious experience. The eyes water a little, and one has this sense of passing one’s life within a combustion chamber. Asthma re-establishes itself. I have recovered my Ventolin, and have used it, together of course (Doc, are you reading this?) the obligatory Beclomethosone ‘preventer.’ Note – French vehicles are predominately fueled by diesel. 

The Ancient Regime re-establishes itself once more. 

In my local town, I decide to go shopping; the fridge is empty and we have little to eat that is fresh (save quantities of purple sprouting broccoli in the potager that has survived the winter). I drive in to the local fuel station to ‘tank up’.

I offer my French euro debit card. It is refused by the bank. Curious - there are adequate funds in the account. I offer as security my watch, refused by the clerk, who demands I return with payment or ‘the gendarmes will be called’!

I drive to my bank; the plump, dozing clerk rises to full consciousness and tells me my card had been ‘blocked’ for security reasons since it had been inactive for three months or more. Is this usual? I ask, since there are funds in the account. ‘It is normal, monsieur’ he whines.

The card is unblocked, and I retrieve cash to buy fish, meats and vegetables in the market place. As I proceed past the home-made jams, my telephone wheezes. (it is the selected ‘tone of the French ‘phone company – I have tried to change it, without success, maybe they set it that way because they think that, as an asthmatic, I will appreciate the sound).

It is my dear wife, in a state of agitation. The fuel company clerk has called her, demanded immediate cash payment from her, or the gendarmes will be called within the hour – not within the day that I had been originally threatened with. She is, quite reasonably, ‘in a state’; that transfers seamlessly, and with amplification, to me. I reassure her, recount the ‘story’ and tell her I will go and pay on the way home, which was my original intention, in cash.

Approaching the fuel station, I suddenly feel, just a little, homicidal. I see the offending clerk and it occurs to me, that, in order to call my wife, she has in some way called my bank, said a non-payment was experienced, and that they have given out our personal telephone details, thus breaking confidentiality, with no reference to legal protections. Had this happened in the US or the UK, they would be open to litigation; not so in France, a land where rights are spoken of reverently but trampled regularly.

My desire to inflict personal damage is enhanced when I actually engage with the creature. She looks like so many women do in this part of the world – after a certain age they visit a hairdresser who makes them look just like the chickens that dot the farmhouse gardens across Normandy. Arrogant, rude, so quintessentially French after the pleasant politeness and relatively extreme consideration for the person I have bathed in during my time in America.

This contrast of obnoxious after pleasantness is really too much. I do something I have not done in well over twenty years of close engagement with L’hexagone (France). I swear at the chicken-faced hag in my very best Anglo-Saxon. ‘Speak in French’ the half-woman-half-chicken says. So I do. I furnish her with a full, unvarnished translation – peppered with a few additional, and I pride myself, highly-creative froggie phrases that not even the robust English are generally aware of.

I then demand a receipt as she wobbles in well-deserved shock.

It is thrown at me.

I drive off. 

End.

As I travel along the road, looking for a place to park, I am struck by the French behaviour in their cars, as compared to the Americans. In America, when a pedestrian steps off the walkway and the cars stop immediately and uncomplainingly. A driver drives slowly looking for a turning, or a place to stop – Americans uncomplainingly accommodate this. Not here; they weave past the people, attempting to intimidate them; horns are sounded. They gesticulate if anyone wishes to go slowly, even momentarily. Fingers are raised in a gynaecological suggestion, faces snarl.

The French are being themselves. Just angry. Always angry on their roads. And most other places these days – including in their politics. I am reminded of the observation of a well-traveled American Friend – ‘You compete over trivia and ignore the big stuff; we do the reverse’.

That does seem to sum it up.

I arrive home, and fall on the wine; turning on the television. I am treated to a series of fifteen-minute interviews with the many ‘candidates’ for the upcoming presidential elections. Well, this really is the political equivalent of children dancing round the maypole. A sort of composite lunacy.

The first ‘candidate’ is a communist lady – thin (obligatory for such a presentation), very badly dressed, cropped hair, convict-like, mouthing the sort of humourless economically illiterate platitudes we recall from the odd films of Lenin rabble-rousing in Moscow. She, of course, rages against the ‘imperialists’ and the ‘American imperialists’. She sounds, I fear, a little like UKIP but with garlic overtones.

She is followed by a grey ex-executive who wishes to save the people from the rigours of the EU; he wants reform, and he will get it by refusing to do anything Brussels asks for. That’s it – that is his presidential program.

Then comes a blondish, oldish, smilingish, driven person by the name of Le Pen. She rattles on about migration, turning France into a sort of camp if the others win, and then she says she will protect everyone!

After her a man called Macron who made money with a global investment bank, and wishes to free up taxes for entrepreneurs and make people work. I am reminded of Colbert in the time of Louis Quatorze, who, when asked by Le Roi Soleil how the kingdom prospered, said that everywhere he went, men were at work. That it what the technocrat Macron wishes for, but he is no Colbert, and there is no Roi to impose rogour here.

This is Everyman’s Republic, a kind of Home Depot political state. Subject to periodic ‘remodeling’ when it looks a little too frayed at the edges. De Gaulle was the last ‘fixer-upper’. I fear the Froggies do not wish to comply with his dragooning them into effort – they do 30 hours a week in Paris; 25% of the young are unemployed, and there is no riot or visible objection to speak of. I think they would prefer something more spicy than Macron.

So we move on to ‘candidate’ Mr Melenchon. This chap is a long-in-the-tooth campaigning hard-left socialist, in the mold of The Beast of Bolsover in the British Parliament (a faux-firebrand who spits his rage across the despatch box at whichever poor minister is the cause of his ire). Melanchon wishes to expropriate 100 % of all incomes over 360,000 euros. He wants a ‘peoples’ presidency’, a new constitution, a removal of the EU liberal economic controls, and – yes you guessed it - a protection from the outside world.

Protection from the outside world seems a theme that runs and runs through most of these strange people’s minds and arguments. It really is true that politics is fame for ugly people. And my goodness these people are, in general, extremely ugly, and not just on the surface. The personalities are a condemnation of the social condition of modern France. What a dismal bunch. But one of them will soon be ‘Le Grand Fromage’ and another round of dysfunctional codswallop will be underway.

I go back to my garden, musing.

Thank God. Prime Minister May announces a general Election in Britain for June (and thus lying again, never mind, she is only Prime Minister, why bother with the truth) to free her from the constraints of both the rabid UKIP-right wing of her party on the one hand, and the left leaning House of Lords on the other. Another old country, dreaming with bitter memories of much better times a very long time ago. Both places are prisoners of a perception of a glorious past, which they wish to repeat, or at least recreate in miniature. Poisonous dreams.

The Germans are more sensible. Which is why Germany can do well what the other two do so very badly. And then there is the United States. Now there is a place that really can determine its own future. 

I’m off down to the barn; into the wine cellar. A safe retreat from the intolerable.

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