The two French nations

There are, writes Dalrymple, two Frances, living in enmity:

• the ‘good’ France, residing in city centres or good suburbs, that respects authority and obeys the rules.
• the ‘bad’ France — the lower class, the uneducated, the immigrant, the poor, the unskilled, the ones who cannot work from home, the recalcitrant — living in the banlieues who, at the best of times, detest the constraints and rules that emanate from the élite, and try not to obey them on principle.

Paris under the shadow of Chinese flu

The doctor-writer reports that the Wuhan virus has emptied the City of Light. Anyone with a country place has left. The bright lights have gone. Père-Lachaise, where he likes to stroll, is shut. La Peste, the Camus allegory, has turned literal. A taxi driver tells Dalrymple that he thanks God

that the tabacs are kept open. To live through an epidemic and have to give up smoking would have been too much.

Dalrymple says that

a few days’ confinement to barracks is one thing, a prolonged period quite another. So far, it has all felt a bit like one long bank holiday or, at worst, a Sunday in Wales in the old days.

You must carry

a laissez-passer that can be demanded and inspected at any time.

Dalrymple’s wife, also a doctor, has been ‘controlled’ three times; he has been ‘controlled’ once. This is

every policeman’s dream. Fighting crime is difficult, demanding papiers is easy but nevertheless a fulfilment of duty.

The police were polite, in Dalrymple’s case.

I had forgotten to tick the box stating my reason for being outside, and strictly speaking, could have been fined. But since no truly bad man wears a tweed jacket such as mine, the policeman let me off.

He explains that Parisians of the type who can work at home

are prohibited from jogging from ten in the morning to seven at night. The authorities feel that there are still too many of them and it is difficult to keep a jogger at the regulation distance of two metres when he is hurtling towards you in his fluorescent Lycra outfit. I won’t miss them: joggers always seem to me to have an expression of reproach of the sedentary on their faces.

As he walks through the streets in which there are scores of shuttered shops and other enterprises,

I wonder how many of them will open again. Will only large companies survive, leading to the yet greater corporatisation of our politico-economic dispensation?

Theodore Dalrymple: no truly bad man wears a tweed jacket such as his

Dr et Mme Dr Dalrymple

The French ask only to be free, like the butterflies

Harold Skimpole

It is understandable, writes Dalrymple,

that those who benefit from the Byzantine system of pension arrangements in France should be anxious for them to continue. Workers on the railways, for example, mostly retire in their early 50s, and a train driver who retires as soon as the rules allow him will quite possibly be in receipt of a pension for twice as long as he worked. His pension theoretically is paid from the contributions of current workers, but since the number of current workers is half the number of former workers in receipt of a pension, the contributions have to be topped up by the government from tax. The 42 privileged pension schemes of early and generous retirement for specially-designated workers — a small minority of the population— are subsidised by the rest of the population, who have to work much longer in order to receive less generous pensions.

Why then, he asks, is there an apparently quite high degree of public support for the present wave of strikes? The answer is that

many French people do not see that what they are sympathising with is the maintenance of a system of privileges. Nor do they see that it is they who are paying for those privileges.

They support the strikers because they are

unaware of the underlying realities of the situation, also because of a general dissatisfaction with life, when anything that discomfits those in authority is welcomed, even if it is even more inconvenient for themselves.

An American ninny in Paris

A breathless New York Times booby on a visit to the French capital writes that the barbaric Centre national de la danse building (Jacques Kalisz, 1972), at which she

stared open-mouthed

for a long, long time,

radiates childlike exuberance.

Dalrymple remarks:

Anyone who can see childlike exuberance in such a building is capable of seeing the milk of human kindness in a Nuremberg Rally.

 

Repulsive, disfigured Paris

The approaches to the city are visually hideous, writes Dalrymple.

Practically everywhere beyond the confines of the centre, the eye is greeted by a modernist mess of gargantuan proportions, and every occasional building that is not a total eyesore was built before 1945.

He notes that there has been

an utter collapse of æsthetic ability, judgment, and appreciation in France.

M. Clean

Freelance riot control: Alexandre Benalla, right, in action on May Day. He stands accused of assault and impersonating a police officer, apparently for the heck of it

An agent of presidential security, writes Dalrymple,

is not supposed to comport himself like the bouncer of a provincial nightclub.

Dalrymple asks whether this is the moment

to bring Emmanuel Macron back down to earth, with the president increasingly criticised for his monarchical manner and basking in the reflected glory of the French victory in the World Cup.

The affair, Dalrymple says,

has not yet run its course, and though it will fizzle out, it is another nail in the coffin of Macron’s popularity. Impunity in high places can only promote disorder below.

He adds:

Any politician who lives by cleanliness dies by dirt.

Did Goolagong’s victory help the Aborigines?

Dalrymple writes that the victory of les Bleus in the World Cup

no more solves the social problems of France than did the victory of ­Evonne Goolagong at Wimbledon solve the problem of Australia’s Aborigines.

The outburst of hysterical optimism in France

is destined not to last very long — as it did not the previous time, in 1998, and as the riots in the Champs-Élysées and elsewhere indicate.

Of course, he says,

the desire for a magical or symbolic solution to intractable problems springs eternal.

Les Bleus champions du monde: des photos pour l’éternité

Dalrymple lights upon this heading in the French magazine the Point. He is reminded of

Kim Il-sung, president of North Korea for eternity.

There is, he writes,

something in the modern régime of bread and circuses that encourages such stupidity, in which a minor accomplishment counts as major and serious problems go by default.

Celebratory rioting, looting and arson

His heart swelled with patriotic relief when rioting broke out in various cities in France during the celebrations of the country’s victory.

Here, at last, was evidence that the English are not uniquely stupid and that other nations are catching up.

Some of the rioters who left the Champs-Élysées in a terrible mess

came prepared, bringing balaclavas. They smashed windows, looted stores, and attacked what in France are known as the forces of order. Nearly 300 people were arrested (more than 100 in Paris), and more than 800 cars were burned out. The fact that the forces of order felt it necessary to employ water-cannon and tear-gas suggests the problem was not on a minor scale.

But the ­reporting in the French press of these happy events, and in the Western liberal media,

was muted, to say the least. Why the reticence? Riots generally make excellent copy, none better in fact.

Celebratory looting and rioting

National rejoicing in France

British culture: a form of ruminant grazing

The terrible deterioration in the character of the English

The decline of religious belief, writes Dalrymple,

which provided a basis for personal responsibility, occurred at the same time as a decline in Britain’s world power. Intellectuals, impotently enraged by this, mocked at every value and belief, without providing alternatives. Unlike France, which remained the standard-bearer of a language and a culture, Britain was turned into a province, a deep humiliation for a country which had been metropolitan for two centuries.

Young Britishers

have been deliberately deprived of any knowledge of British achievement: they know nothing of Shakespeare and Dickens, Newton and Darwin, Brunel and Lister. They know of nothing of which they can feel proud.

In the absence of a system of values, says Dalrymple, adolescent revolt

has become a permanent state of mind.

The lack of belief in anything

is compensated for by shrillness, as if noise could fill the void.

The trouble with Britain is not the government. It’s the people

The malaise, Dalrymple points out, is not confined to an underclass.

Every week I meet members of the middle classes who consider themselves victims of some injustice or other in order to lend significance to their lives. They are only victims in the sense that Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess.

The attempt to find transcendent meaning in social justice

destroys or perverts aesthetic appreciation: for how, it is asked, can beauty and injustice subsist in the same world? The aggressive ugliness (not mere lack of taste) of the mode of dress of many of my younger patients, especially those with intellectual pretensions, is intended to provoke the very rejection that will then be used to justify the resentment that gives meaning to otherwise meaningless life.

Essentially personal dissatisfactions (of the kind attendant upon life) are projected on to society as a whole. This

has its advantages: it absolves one of the often painful necessity of self-examination. But it breeds the angry passivity that is now almost a national characteristic.

The sullenness of many of Dalrymple’s young patients

is not mere adolescent rebellion, it is a permanent condition: they will not grow to courtesy. They do not have the dignity or self-respect of previous generations which have known suffering that is not self-inflicted.