A favorite pastime of the French, particularly of the Parisian stock, is to lament the loss of their nation, language, or culture. This happens at neighborhood markets, on Mediterranean beaches, and frequently, on panels on evening news programs, where a graying member of the Académie Française (I am thinking here of the author and cultural critic Jean Clair) will bemoan the decline, or hybridization, or paralysis of the French patrimony in today’s post-modern, post-national, post-truth (what have you) world.
Something, it would seem—something vital and invaluable—has been indelibly lost, and France is quietly (characteristically) up in arms.
Of course, this quintessentially French compulsion to lament what has been lost is by no means a new phenomenon. By the mid-nineteenth century, the poet Charles Baudelaire was already mourning the “old neighborhoods turned to allegory” by urbanization, a favorite subject of Baudelaire’s contemporaries.
Among the artists, authors, and intellectuals who bemoaned the loss of old Paris was the itinerant photographer Eugène Atget, who in 1897 began meticulously documenting an urban landscape he feared was rapidly disappearing amidst the ruins of modernity. Alongside the stately monuments and ghostly palaces of the Ancien Régime, Atget also photographed the everyday details of Parisian life: fading advertisements on flapping café awnings, iron balustrades in eerie silhouette, canvas mannequins strapped in lace corsets in shop windows, or the gaping demon’s mouth that once opened onto the Montmartre cabaret known as “L’Enfer,” or “Hell.”
One of Atget’s favorite haunts was the peripheral neighborhood of Montmartre, bordered to the south by the Boulevards de Rochechouart and Clichy. Until 1860, the neighborhood had functioned as an independent commune just north of the Parisian city limits, and following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent collapse of the Second Empire, Montmartre became the provisional seat of the Paris Commune, the radical socialist insurrection that laid siege to and briefly governed Paris in the spring of 1871.
Despite the profound changes brought about by urbanization, in which entire neighborhoods had been razed to make way for train tracks, wide boulevards, covered markets, manicured parks, underground sewers, and deep canals, Montmartre had escaped relatively unscathed. At the turn of the twentieth-century, Montmartre was one of the rare Parisian neighborhoods to retain the look and feel of a provincial village, with unpaved streets, modest cottages, and bucolic gardens hemmed in by wooden fences and overgrown hedges.
In his Montmartre series, Atget frequently opts for a wide composition, mimicking the perspective of the pedestrian as he rambles down rustic streets bathed in a bright, uniform light that flattens the photographs’ contours. But Atget’s placid images of Montmartre belie the socioeconomic precariousness of the neighborhood, threatened by urban expansion to the south and an influx of migrant laborers in the industrial suburbs to the north.
Atget’s intent was as much to document a disappearing landscape as it was to apprehend the forms of community life this particular public space made possible. Atget frequently photographed street vendors—knife sharpeners and basket sellers and florists and rag-and-bone men—as they went about their work, paying particular attention to their postures, their practiced gestures, and their public relationships with clients.
While the cottage industries embodied by these street vendors would soon die out with the advent of automation and industrialization in France, Atget’s photographs remain an enduring testament to the socioeconomic structure of public space at the turn of the twentieth century. Half a century before the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas‘s groundbreaking study of public space in Europe, Atget’s photographs collectively capture the spirit of the street as a site of socialization, conversation, and exchange, constantly blurring the boundaries between the public and the private.
But soon the Parisian picturesque that Atget had worked so passionately to preserve would be lost, paved over in the name of progress. Lost, too, would be the Left Bank haunts of Charles Baudelaire, and later, the Existentialist crowd, now commoditized for tourists who sip overpriced espressos on the terrace of Café Flore. Even the once seedy neighborhood of Montmartre, with its streetwalkers and peep shows and record stores, has been overrun by foreign tourists snapping photos in front the Moulin Rouge, the famous cabaret that was bastardized and romanticized and battered into kitsch by Baz Luhrmann’s musical romantic comedy by the same name.
But what do we mean when we say that a nation, its language, or its culture have been lost? While the city beloved by Atget and Baudelaire would be lost to urbanization, the popular mythology of old Paris—the romantic ideal of an authentic, eternal city—is perhaps just as pernicious as the ravages of time. This is the paradox of every lost city: an obsession with preservation too often can lead to the erasure of historical contours, as what was once alive and dynamic and contradictory is flattened and repackaged for mass consumption as myth.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou expresses this paradox in Images du Temps Présent (Images of Present Time), a series of monthly lectures delivered in 2001 and 2002. Reflecting on the question of the past and its representation in the present, Badiou writes: “A question of the present, it is that the present never presents itself as present. The present is not the presentation of the present. The present is in the obscurity of presence, in any case when it is a living present, enigmatic.”
“[U]ne question du présent, c’est que le présent ne se présente pas comme présent. Le présent n’est pas la présentation du présent. Le présent est dans l’obscur de la présence, en tout cas quand il est un présent vif, énigmatique, un présent de la question.” —Alain Badiou
Despite Badiou’s bulky verbiage (is it any wonder that continental philosophy is often decried as alienating and inaccessible?), his underlying thesis remains prescient and poignant. In short, Badiou’s point is that the remembrance of things past is always a reflection of the present. And our understanding of the present, Badiou reminds us, is always incomplete, obscured by global currents of change that inevitably surpass our capacity for comprehension.
In my research for this post, I came across a February 2017 article in The New York Times that encapsulates the present perception of France’s decline on the global stage. (As a side note, I want to reassure my dissertation committee—should they ever stumble across this blog and discover that I am, in fact, capable of producing coherent writing on a weekly basis—that I am still plugging away at my chapter revisions, as promised.) Today, the anxiety that once surrounded the urbanization of Paris has been largely displaced to the provincial hamlets of France’s sprawling countryside, perhaps less primed to absorb the shocks of modernization than their urban contemporaries.
In an article apocalyptically entitled “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness,’” the American journalist Adam Nossiter, accompanied by the photographer Dmitry Kostyukov, examines the dismal state of Albi, a small town in the department of Tarn in southern France, which the author originally visited in 1982. In that stylistic prose so characteristic of American new journalism yet foreign to the French, Nossiter laments the deserted streets, shuttered storefronts, and crumbling infrastructure of the “jewel-like city” that first captured his imagination thirty-five years ago.
Nossiter laments: “Turn a corner in Albi, and you’ll pass the last school inside the historic center, abandoned a few years ago. Down another street is the last toy store, now closed, and around a corner is the last independent grocery store, also shuttered. Walk down the empty, narrow streets on some nights and the silence is so complete that you can hear your footsteps on the stones.”
The journalist’s stated intent is to better understand the “cultural insecurity” (a term coined by the French sociologist Laurent Bouvet) driving the alarming success of the far-right Front National during the 2017 French presidential campaign. For Nossiter, the decline of Albi illustrates a profoundly French paradox: “the deep pride felt by the French in what they regard as an unparalleled way of life [is] always accompanied by anxiety that it is facing extinction.”
In America, Nossiter’s article seemed to confirm what we Americans have always quietly suspected: the pedantic, pretentious pride with which the French have obstinately defended the superiority of their own culture is ill-suited, if not downright antithetical, to the realities of global capitalism. But Nossiter’s doleful depiction of Albi unsurprisingly outraged the French.
The local press decried Nossiter’s alarmist prose and questioned the validity of the journalist’s main source, Florian Jourdain, an Albi implant whose meticulous documentation of the decline of local businesses had already antagonized the residents of his adopted town. Nossiter was accused of slandering Albi’s reputation, and the town’s center-right mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, even invited the journalist to return during the summer months, suggesting that the gloomy winter weather had perhaps overshadowed the medieval city’s enduring meridional charm.
While criticisms of Nossiter’s hyperbolic language may be warranted (to illustrate, here is a particularly obnoxious example: “[I]t was a frigid intersection combined with a soulless pedestrian plaza. Cars whizzed past.”), it is nevertheless telling that even the most outraged of French respondents did not directly contest the data supporting the journalist’s claims. At most, Albi locals pointed fingers at other French towns that had fared worse under globalization and the global recession. In Albi as in Paris, it is true that France’s formerly thriving local industries—the family-owned cafés and artisanal bakers and toy stores that were once at the heart of community life—have been threatened economically, sometimes to the point of extinction, by the competition of international corporations and big box stores.
The anxiety surrounding the decline of local industries in France is not merely economic. For the French anthropologist Marc Augé, the recent proliferation of “non-lieux,” or non-places—the shopping centers and high-speed highways and international hotel chains that are increasingly encroaching on the outskirts of French cities—is symptomatic of an impoverishment of community life, and concomitantly, French cultural identity. If cultural identity is constructed through meaningful relations with others within a public space with a shared history, as Augé argues, then the blissful anonymity offered by megastores and other non-lieux fundamentally threatens the collective imaginary that holds a nation, its language, and its culture together. To put it simply, Augé argues that when our daily social interactions—from buying bread to pumping gas—are carried out anonymously or in transit, our communities (whether local or national) suffer as a result. This is the kind of socioeconomic decline that the French so presciently and clamorously fear today.
The common thread linking Atget to Albi is that France, perhaps more than any other post-war European nation, has managed to not only maintain but also actively promote a uniquely centralized, commoditized myth of French cultural and linguistic particularity. Who else, if not the French (except perhaps the Italians), would launch a rigorous (and successful!) campaign to have their own gastronomic tradition recognized on the UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage” list?
But what does it mean when my elderly neighbor gives a judgmental squeeze-and-sniff test to a tomato imported from Spain for sale at the local market, grumbling all the while about the quality of fresh produce these days? Should I take her complaint to be a veiled critique of free trade treaties under European Union economic policy? Did she grow up on an organic farm in southwestern France that was sliced in half by the construction of the high-speed train linking Toulouse to Perpignan to Barcelona? Or does her upstairs neighborhood just happen to be a pot-smoking Catalonian who hosts late-night EDM dance parties in an apartment complex with an interior courtyard prone to echoes?
Who else, if not French intellectuals and politicians, could twist a municipal ban on the “burkini,” the conservative beachwear favored by Muslim women, into a vigorous and very serious public debate on secularism and female sexuality? Was it blatant Islamophobia that fueled such municipal decisions? Or were the mayors of these municipalities simply striving to uphold the time-honored tradition of French laïcité, the aggressive secularism that emerged out of the French Revolution? Or was the “burkini” ban just another sexist imposition of the Western ideal of femininity on foreign female bodies?
And who else, if not a member of the Académie Française (again, I am thinking here of Jean Clair), could unequivocally state that the proliferation of ungrammatical speech and linguistic irregularities in the French language is responsible for precipitating the world into madness?
“Parler en ignorant la grammaire, cette autre forme du logos divin, c’est précipiter le monde dans la folie.” —Jean Clair
Is this ardent defense of the purity of the French language simply the natural outgrowth of the author’s own socioeconomic marginalization as a peasant child educated in Paris, who saw the mastery of the French language as a means to cultural assimilation? Or is Jean Clair just another alarmist observer of the evolution of the French language as it adapts to new semantic codes, both urban and imported?
It is impossible to ignore the various “–isms” (anti-Semitism, classism, protectionism, racism, sexism) and “–phobias” (Arabophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia) driving contemporary discourse about France’s decline on the global stage. However, the precarious myth of French particularity has also produced innovative forms of public discourse and debate.
In France today, marginalized communities have responded to fears of French decline by demonstrating how the pernicious myth of French particularity has worked historically to efface minority contributions to the construction of the French nation, language, and culture. In other words, when contemporary commentators lament the loss of “Frenchness” in France, they are really referring to the displacement or transformation of a certain image or myth of the past whose coherence is contingent on the erasure of marginal histories, from colonization to collaborationism.
The legacy of loss in France is also inevitably a story of recuperation. When we pause to problematize the myth of French particularity, what precisely is it that we find in its margins? This possibility of recuperation, of course, depends on how willing and aware the French are of who they are as a people, and what was lost and found in the founding of their nation, language, and culture. Stay tuned for “Found City,” scheduled for next week.
Solitary City 