Letter From Paris: Chirac's Fin de Régne
Harris, Joseph A.
"Letter From Paris" JOSEPH A. HARRIS S Chirac's Fin de Regne NE OF THE PIQUANT POLITICAL PLEASURES of France is the contrast it offers between its democratic pretensions and the...
...French politicians proclaim vehemently and often, "This is a republic...
...Joseph A. Harriss is a Paris-based American journalist whose latest book is About France...
...The only relatively fresh face on a French political scene domiThe long, feckless, fruitless Chirac era is effectively over...
...He wants to keep France's gridlocked, high-unemployment welfare state, believing it can be saved with still more government handouts like the new subsidy of $916 a month to parents who have a third child...
...The media dutifully fretted about the lack of government transparency...
...And God help the rest of us...
...Nor, for that mat-ter, are they awed by titles like baron, comte, marquis, and duc...
...Those who bothered to read the fine print eventually learned that Chirac, in the political doldrums since his humiliating defeat in the May referendum on a JOSEPH A. HARRIS S European Union constitution, had actually suffered a hematoma in the back of his brain...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...How well that would mesh with France's all-state, all-the-time habits remains to be seen...
...France is a democracy...
...They do protest too much, methinks...
...L E T T E R F R O M P A R I S JOSEPH A. HARRIS S Chirac's Fin de Regne NE OF THE PIQUANT POLITICAL PLEASURES of France is the contrast it offers between its democratic pretensions and the feudal reality of its republican monarchy...
...Physicians say the odds favor a recurrence within a year...
...She echoes his Gaullist chauvinism, proclaiming that France is, naturellement, "unlike any other country...
...But since Alliot-Marie has never bothered marrying the man she lives with, it would be the first time that France was ruled by a commoner's concubine...
...Slight, but for some unexplained reason requiring a full week of hospital care...
...For the next 18 months, the monarch's favorite and his declared opponent will joust in public...
...nated by has-beens and retreads, Sarkozy (the un-French name comes from his Hungarian descent) boldly advocates more free-market policies and calls for "a rupture with the past...
...In two memorable appearances at the United Nations, France's favorite grandstand, Villepin (1) lectured the world on the futility of America's effort to create freedom and democracy in Iraq, and (2) grandly promoted "solidarity contributions" in the form of an international tax on airline tickets to fund Third World development...
...The joker in Chirac's fin de regne is Michele Alliot-Marie...
...Thus if Princes Villepin and Sarkozy wear each other out over the next 18 months, a French princess could end up as female republican monarch...
...When he was struck with a bad headache and vision problems in September, he was whisked to a military hospital in the dark of night, secretly and sans the usual spectacular motorcycle escort...
...Chirac's favorite, the ever-so-aristocratic Dominique-Marie-Francois-Rene Galouzeau de Villepin, is a lifetime functionary, certified member of the elite, and amateur poet who has never held elective office...
...Presidential elections were already scheduled for 2007, but this has suddenly tipped France into full, frantic fin de regne mode...
...As a confidential report by the country's corps of prefects, who are paid to keep their collective ear to the ground, has said, "The French no longer believe in anything...
...When Germany's reformist Angela Merkel visited Paris last summer she made a perfunctory courtesy call on Chirac, but held a long press conference with Sarkozy, who also admires Tony Blair...
...While serving as Chirac's chief of staff for seven years, his most notable contribution to governance was convincing Frere Jacques to dissolve the National Assembly in 1997 and call snap elections—a catastrophic miscalculation resulting in the loss to the Socialists of the Assembly and prime minister's office...
...She has kept intact the flame of a great nation, fervent defender of her status...
...Perennially tanned, glamorously coiffed—half of the men in Paris would kill to get the name of his stylist—and known for his high-flown rhetoric, Villepin, 51, ardently admires Napoleon and refers to France with a lyricism that would do Charles de Gaulle proud: "France still burns with a desire for history," he has written...
...Only the next day did word begin to trickle out in the form of laconic communiques mentioning the 72-year-old president's hospitalization for a "little vascular incident" and "slight vision problem...
...WITH THE MONARCH politically impotent and irrelevant—Chirac's poll figures have fall-en to a record low 26 percent—two crown princes are jockeying for the Chateau, as the Elysee Palace is feudally known...
...To everybody but spinmeisters, that means a stroke...
...There ensued three years of blocked "cohabitation" with a nominally conservative president facing a socialist premier...
...But flagrant presidential lying is an old story in France...
...The long, feckless, fruitless Chirac era, first as prime minister and then as president, is effectively over...
...Villepin's challenger, Nicolas Sarkozy, who openly derides Chirac as le grand connard (roughly, the big jerk), is an energetic, pugnacious, 50-year-old lawyer, former finance minister, present interior minister, and, perversely, head of Chirac's own party...
...With quiet but steely ambition, Alliot-Marie headed Chirac's ruling party before he named her the first woman defense minister, to the initial displeasure of what's left of the French military...
...Not even Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin or the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy—much less the French plebeians—were in-formed that France's head of state, finger still on the nuclear button, was perhaps gravely incapacitated...
...But, accustomed as they are to being treated with contempt, most French rolled over and went back to sleep...
...Citizens truly comfortable with democratic government hardly need such reminders...
...If you liked the oil-for-food pro-gram in Iraq, you'll love this new, worldwide, slush fund doubtless run by French civil servants...
...With most French ridiculing him, it will be mourned only by the likes of Gerhard Schroder...
...Sarkozy's admiration for American efficiency has earned him the accolade "the fake American" by the New Yorker, which attests to his conservative credentials...
...Francois Mitterrand, diagnosed with prostate cancer 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 soon after his election in 1981, ordered his doctor to issue false health bulletins every six months for years...
...Georges Pompidou officially called his illness just a recurrent case of flu until he suddenly died of cancer in office in 1974...
...The French are, of course, inured to mistresses and other extracurricular ladies wielding perfumed political power from the boudoir...
...This time, Le Monde was sufficiently upset by monarchical spin that it even briefly forsook America-baiting to favorably cite Ronald Reagan's openness about his health problems...
...France's chattering class focused on the apres Chirac likes to give itself frissons by envisioning a new Paris-Berlin-London axis of free-market leaders for Europe...
...At stake is whether France will continue to cherish its costly, enervating, cradle-to-grave "social model" or find the courage to tiptoe into the 21st-century world of the risk-taking free market and globalization...
...Having made five stabs at becoming democratic since 1789, with as many constitutions and republics—and there is serious talk now of a new, sixth constitution—the French still have not quite got the hang of government of the people, by the people, and for the people...
...The latest example of France's persistent feudal-ism is Jacques Chirac's mysterious malady...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
