Signs, impressions, shadows: reflecting on French culture

Contemporary Review, May, 2004 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

Chez Bertrand was a restaurant like no other. Hidden in a narrow alley of the old quarter of Nice, one discovered it by chance or word-of-mouth. Bertrand hired no publicists. In fact he hired no-one. Somehow he managed to take orders, answer the telephone, cook and serve his delicious meals to a full restaurant every evening. Disaster perpetually threatened, but never seemed to prevail. Bertrand always remained in control of the madness he had created. His life was a performance of a peculiarly French kind, a stylized absurdity and measured spontaneity with natural charm, as if to make a serious point. When Bertrand finally retired there disappeared a singular and irreplaceable cultural experience.

Fame would have ruined Bertrand by making him self-conscious. Remembering him is akin to looking at a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson where something is taken unawares, and in that spontaneous moment so memorably composed by the artist's eye it takes on a symbolic quality. There is a quiet family picnic by the Seine in the nineteen-thirties, for example. Seen through Cartier-Bresson's lens, its banality acquires a lasting poignancy. Given the period of its setting, and with hindsight, the implications of the image are almost visible.

There are films of the period like Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte or Julien Duvivier's La Belle Equipe, or a novel by Jules Romains, Les Copains, celebrating ordinary life. These are celebrations to a purpose, for the theme is always of ordinary people finding common cause in good-humoured revolt against social constraints. The political tone typifies the contemporary mood of crisis, but is the more powerful for being understated. We are allowed the essential facility of responding according to our own conscience. Time allows us now the perspective to sift the illusions from the ideals. What remain are works of continuing interest and undiminished vitality.

France has a credible claim to the discovery of photography. It has its share in the development of film technically and as a cultural form. It is surely significant that France alone has produced an international film star who never worked in Hollywood. Brigitte Bardot is in several ways strikingly representative of national attitudes and experience, a presence which transcends the charms of the celluloid image. Her independence of career contrasts powerfully, sometimes disturbingly, with the growth of transnational modernity. This has proved problematic, not only for one ageing screen goddess. Politically she has been by turns an extreme radical, working with the experimental New Wave directors, and an outspoken supporter of reactionary populism. A serious national dilemma is thereby reflected. The problem since the Liberation sixty years ago has been to provide a credible national identity responding to contemporary challenges without being defined by them.

France has proved more resistant than most of Europe to the invasive commercial anti-culture which remakes the world in its own bland image. The task has been to provide an alternative which can be both authentically French while being accessible to the world elsewhere which thinks and behaves in very different ways. Any consideration of French culture in recent decades must take into account this situation. Life is not a Cartier-Bresson photograph. Life moves in many directions relentlessly.

The events of May, 1968 prove inescapable as a reference point of recent history. The sudden and ferocious nature of the revolt by the finest young minds of France indicates something other than carnival. What remains almost inexplicable is the shameful failure of the governing party to offer discussion, as if there were nothing to be learned from the questioning cris de coeur of young idealists. The origins of the rising, however, are complex and easily given to misreadings. A series of spontaneous demonstrations rather than a dynamic revolution, it none the less occasioned a moral panic which exposed the fragility of the institutional idea of France.

The rebels of 1968 were arguing for an informal culture of social experiment to take the leading role in society. On reflection, it may be that the rebels, grown older and wiser, have made a useful contribution in broadening and redefining areas of concern. Charismatic thinkers, such as Bernard-Henri Levy, to whom the French media are intelligently alert, have given political culture in France a conscience it might otherwise lack at the present time.

Since Zola's famous J'accuse! (1898) a marked and surely positive tendency has been the respect and influence accorded to the intellectual. The writer has become the questioning advocate of truth, with a duty and a right to call those in public affairs to account. The controversy surrounding Captain Dreyfus revealed the worst and best in public life. Echoes continue to resound, as in the anti-semitic murmurs against Monsieur Levy, and the vindictive undercurrents which have emerged once more as a political force.