Summer in Paris and London
BELL, DANIEL
THINKING ALOUD Summer in Paris and London By Daniel Bell Paris: I like to look at cities from a distance. From a distance, one can trace their contours, their densities, their ecology, even...
...Whatever differences there exist on the presumed margin, the agreement is general that Labor is far out in front...
...It is the style of the technocrats...
...What would be the impact of a Labor victory...
...Thus, because of a low return on investment, the price of the houses tends to be small...
...There are now supermarkets and automobile crushes...
...Harold Be Thy Name: From all present readings, if a general election were held tomorrow in England, there would be a smashing Labor party victory...
...De Gaulle is France...
...Claude Bourdet, one of the editors of L'Observateur, a lively Left-wing weekly roughly akin to the Nation, recently resigned because the editorial board supported the views of his co-editor, Giles Martinet, in favor of nuclear weapons for France...
...What, then, is left for Brown...
...Hold your bets...
...Whereupon one of his chief supporters was heard to mutter: "What a relief to have a leader of the Labor party who knows how to tell lies...
...Engel's law" (a proposition first enunciated 100 years ago by a German statistician...
...a new express subway will extend the metro to the suburbs...
...Given the constraints of the export market, there is little that Labor can truly do beyond what intelligent Tory policy has now begun...
...La Nef, a Left-wing monthly, recently undertook a reappraisal of these actions which has "shaken" French intellectual circles...
...Much of this antedates de Gaulle, of course...
...The second command post, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is marked for James Callaghan, who had been the third contender for the leadership...
...Perceptions are influenced by personal moods...
...The immediate question is how does one handle a Paris which will contain 10 million persons without the urban sprawl which has so defaced the United States...
...Diagonally across the city, near the Butte Chaumont, the great working-class preserve that Haussmann created to give the proletariat a bois of its own, a circular television tower, by its looks built for some 20th century muezzin, dominates the quarter...
...Employment in the traditional industries has dropped sharply (mining by 22 per cent, self-employed small craftsmen by 25 per cent), while the newer industries (chemicals, engineering and electrical engineering) show a rapid rise, as do services (trade, banking and insurance) in keeping with the trend to a tertiary sector...
...What gave the skyline its design was its harmonious proportion, a roughly even height adjusting subtly to slight swells of land and broken only by the spires of churches and the domes of public monuments—a heavenly city on a human scale...
...All the men in the case sound like schoolboy roués...
...It is even the style of de Gaulle...
...One cynical story making the rounds points up the attitude of his own lieutenants...
...There are some dogmatist pressures for further nationalization of industry, but the extent of this would be small...
...De Gaulle, to his surprise, took 40 minutes, until he realized that the first words de Gaulle had used were: "France has told the other powers...
...The background to it is this: In constructing a future cabinet, one problem Wilson has is finding a place for George Brown, the deputy leader who contested the leadership with him and lost...
...But the curious and sad thing is how small French intellectual circles have now shrunken...
...By the spring, the echoes of the Profumo scandal will have died down—already the boredom is evident—and perhaps a new Tory leader, cither Maudling or Edward Heath, will be in office...
...Once fashionable or convenient districts, much like New York's Upper West Side in the 70s and 80s, come into demand...
...Germain-enLaye...
...The post of Foreign Secretary has been promised to Patrick Gordon Walker, a former history don, whose stolid competence is beyond dispute...
...There is no point in rebutting the New Society's assessment in detail...
...All of which has led to the popular pastime of constructing Labor cabinets and speculating on the personality and role of Harold Wilson...
...Now the skyline of Paris is becoming jagged...
...A powerful agency like the Commissariat du Plan is run by engineers and civil servants, with scarcely a nod to the academic economists...
...Turnabout: Turn over a tart and what do you find...
...The image of Vicky Barrett, the flagellatorprostitute in the Ward case, as a "Venus in furs" is ludicrous...
...The fact is that de Gaulle has pulverized the opposition intellectually as well as politically...
...Much as some displaced New Yorkers encountering the climate of California work furiously to relax, so the Londoners—at least in the West End, the Parisians manqué—work sniggeringly at s:n...
...large tower blocks break the skyline at irregular intervals, spoiling what had been a distinguished architectural pattern...
...But in truth, one has to disagree...
...a colorful pile of refuse...
...Once a foothold is gained, rooms are let to West Indians whose presence then forces out other tenants until whole buildings and finally whole neighborhoods are "tipped...
...the fact is simply that none of it is so...
...And the reciprocal relation is pleasing to both the Monarch and technocrats...
...A French academic I know, who used to be proud of the fact that he speaks English so well, now insists on speaking only in French to visitors...
...And yet—who knows...
...Some of Wilson's advisers have been talking of putting him at the head of a new Ministry of Production, or Planning, which would be assigned some of the Treasury's powers and give him the role of economic czar...
...Important as the issues raised in La Nefs symposium are, there are few echoes and few real debates (although one can always count on Sartre's Temps Modernes to dissent...
...the encrustations of historic grime are being scraped off the public buildings...
...This is the style of the nouveau roman...
...Everyone agrees on his ability...
...New York is best seen from the promenade in Brooklyn Heights or from the bluffs of Weehawken...
...An entry in The Goncourt Journals for April 6, 1867...
...the doubts are about his character...
...Reginald Maudling, been going down rapidly, and today is about 2 per cent of the labor force...
...In Passy, in the southwest, a large building to be used by a radio station has broken the traditional zoning restriction against tall structures...
...In any event, the issue was raised not long ago at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labor MPs, where Wilson was taxed by one member with encouraging such talk and with aggravating a feud between Brown and Callaghan to his own advantage...
...And the declarations of conscience, leading to Jean-Paul Sartre's famous Manifesto of 121 which counseled civil disobedience in France, had all the passions and urgencies of the Dreyfusard manifestos 60 years ago...
...When the threads in the Ward case led back to Rachman, there was even the suspicion that he had contrived his "death," put a derelict in his place and disappeared with his ill-gotten gains...
...Now under Pierre Massé, its third head, the Commissariat has begun to do 25-year projections, concentrating principally on problems of urbanism...
...The government of France today is politically a monarchy and economically a technocracy...
...Other polls bring the majority down to 10...
...Daniel Bell, a regular contributor to this department, is author of Work and its Discontents and The End of Ideology...
...Enter the Peter Rachmans...
...the Paris skyline, from the rooftops of the large apartment houses in Auteuil that front the Bois de Boulogne or, further west, from the butte in St...
...Mournfully, Hirsch remarked that the day before he had to explain to a Cabinet minister that unless certain investments and commitments were gotten under way immediately, economic expansion would be severely curtailed and reversed, perhaps by an energy shortage in five years...
...The change, however, is not to Callaghan's liking, and a number of Labor economists are dubious about the advisability of such bureaucratic centralization...
...But if a choice were to be made, it is clear that Labor would opt for a social revolution in education...
...The major problem is educational opportunity...
...The tiers monde was felt to have the revolutionary mission that the proletariat in the bourgeois countries had lost...
...But how recurrent these complaints are...
...In an affluent society, or one in which a new middle class (in this case the technicians) wants accommodations commensurate with its new status, one of the greatest pressures is for adequate housing...
...the vistas across the Tuileries gardens are taking on a metallic glint from all the automobiles parked along the roads...
...I am conscious of a peculiar sensation: my eyes are breathing...
...There is even a rollicking political scandal in the traditional French manner...
...Not only has she revealed the sex tastes of a shoddy smart set, but she has also thrown light on the workings of M15 (the British security service) and its inadequate contact with the Prime Minister, the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet, the workings of the Tory party, the dragnet role of the police, and, most recently, the operations of a major housing racket...
...Car sales have risen fivefold in 12 years, and total consumption has now achieved an annual average growth rate of nearly 6 per cent...
...The Left Intelligentsia: It is the Left intelligentsia that is France's most disoriented group...
...Hirsch added: "You can imagine what my problems were...
...and since 1954 farm employment has been reduced by a fourth, today accounting for 20 per cent of total employment as against 27 per cent less than a decade ago...
...Population growth, beginning with an unprecedented baby boom in 1946, is one factor in France's present economic state...
...For many persons, Paris is associated with its marvelous light, those pink-mauve tints that bathe the city in the late afternoon of a sunny day, the product, one is told, of low clouds filtering out the sun, or of the reflection of the sun's rays from the limestone facades of the 19th century buildings...
...Six years ago, a friend visited Etienne Hirsch, Monnet's successor as head of the Commissariat du Plan...
...a picturesque town full of exotic charm and showing no sign of municipal activity...
...At present, there are places for only about 15 per cent of any age group among the young for higher academic or technical education...
...Guy Mollet was clocked in five minutes...
...Mais": The French intellectuals, or at least that small sample with whom I have spoken, have a new word: mais...
...London is changing...
...Christian Engel) that as incomes rise the proportion of money spent for food and clothing declines is in clear operation in France: Salaries now go for washing machines, refrigerators and automobiles...
...Not only has Gaullist nationalism divided its soul (the French intellectual, Left and Right, has been anti-bourgeois, but not anti-France), but the events in Algeria have left it perplexed...
...Before the Ward case, Peter Rachman was completely unknown...
...Once the statutory tenants are out, the West Indians are cleaned out as well, the buildings are renovated into luxury fiats, the prices of the properties rocket, and handsome profits are made...
...An essay in the issue by Michel Crouzet, a former member of the Communist party and an organizer of the intellectual groups supporting the FLN, is particularly moving for its revelation of his rationalization at the time for terrorism...
...And as for pleasure and multiplicity of entertainment, except for one or two gambling clubs fitted out like Egyptian bordellos and some seedy non-stop striptease joints (beginning at 1 pm I one can find the same tedious bohemianism in Provincetown, Mass.—except that in London it all shuts down at 11:30 pm...
...This nationalism comes on top of the startling transformation of France in the last 12 years from a semi-rural country to a high-consumption economy...
...The Common Market has added a competitive prod...
...Unemployment, a problem all last year, has, under the spending budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer...
...The struggle for Algerian independence had given a new élan to an intelligentsia confronted by the complexities of a new non-ideological society...
...Dozens of jokes abound about the General, but his actions and imperious style have fed a resurgent middle-class nationalism which has carried over into all sections of the population, including the intelligentsia...
...The major changes, if any, would not be economic but social...
...I feel that I have escaped from the Americanized modern world and hidebound Paris...
...The Tories still have a year in office, and, barring a "snap" election in the autumn, it is not likely that balloting will take place before next spring...
...Now the post-independence struggle for power in Algeria—with Ben Bella jailing or hounding his old cellmates, a conflict recapitulating the familiar grubby struggles for power in other Middle Eastern states, unredeemed even (except on the surface) by any significant ideological divisions—has left the intelligentsia troubled about its rhetoric and its previously unconditional support to the FLN...
...The Gallup poll shows Labor with an astonishing 20 per cent lead...
...The editorialist points out that Paris seems "full of people scurrying about on business," while London "is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure...
...And the Gare Montparnasse, the large railway station which bestrides the borders of the Luxembourg and Observatoire arrondissements, will now be torn down for some new skyscrapers...
...There is the same permissiveness over personal habits, the same multiplicity of entertainment, the same floating student population...
...I am against France building a nuclear deterrent, but, can an independent power place itself completely under the protection of another country...
...A former managing editor of The New Leader and labor editor of Fortune magazine, he is now Professor of Sociology at Columbia University...
...But the sense of governmental stability is clearly an important force in generating a mood of confidence and orientation to the future...
...Politics in Britain is still a horse race, and the odds at post may yet come down sharply...
...the tumbling old 17th century "hotels" in the Marais, the oldest section of Paris, are being refurbished under the grand design of M. Malraux to become part of the lustrous history lessons for tourists —in short, Paris is losing its "charm...
...Winston Churchill in 15 minutes...
...There is even a Hilton Hotel looming far over the broad reaches of Hyde Park...
...Political commitment in the style of Sartre and Camus is dead...
...Etc., etc...
...And in their sex scandals, one might add, amateur Frenchmen...
...So much so that when he died in a London hospital, apparently of a heart attack, there were only two persons to claim his body and he was buried in a potters field with scarcely a grave marking...
...They buy up the houses cheaply with mortgage money from the insurance companies, install prostitutes in renovated basement flats (prostitution is legal in London, street soliciting is not), threaten the tenants, break the drains, refuse service and through similar coercive devices begin to force out the householders...
...The Tory government has sought to expand the universities, but the handicaps of the working-class children are still quite large...
...And there is the remarkable system of French "indicative" planning initiated a dozen years ago by Jean Monnet (who today is gibed at by de Gaulle for his Europeanism...
...In some travel reading, I find the following: Civita-Vecchia, ten in the morning "At last we have found twisting streets, narrow alleys, and filthy markets, alive and swarming with people...
...The refrain goes something like this: "I am against personal power, but, compared to England —look at Profumo, look at Macmillan's weakness at Nassau on the Skybolt issue—de Gaulle governs well...
...As a guest currently in the country, one must mind one's manners in stating a disagreement...
...But as one stout nurse remarked, after identifying Rachman from a picture as the man who had been brought into the morgue: "There's no body-snatching allowed in this place...
...For me the beauty of Paris has always been the cityscape itself...
...Only the lolly...
...Whether a Labor government would have the economic resources to overhaul British education without seriously curtailing the present level of affluence is an open question...
...In trying to trace back the activities of Peter Rachman, the man who had kept both Christine and her girl friend Mandy Rice-Davies, a Labor MP further demonstrated the shady relationships between some large insurance companies and the demi-underworld...
...Within eight years, the spread of machinery resulted in nearly 1.3 million farmers leaving their land...
...Algeria, for the Left, had all the moral simplicities of the Resistance...
...All this leads to the familiar complaints among the traditionalists about the Americanization of Paris: The landmarks are going...
...stained gimcrack buildings...
...And yet, a Labor victory is not certain...
...But the houses are let to "statutory tenants" who under the rent control laws cannot be dispossessed and whose rents cannot be raised...
...One French sociologist did a content analysis of speeches to see how long a statesman spoke before saying "I...
...As a friend remarked after shopping in the stores and watching British television at length: "What they've become is amateur Americans...
...Going up in the same district is an enormous office block—a symbol of the welfare state—which will handle all of France's social security...
...London: The New Society, an earnest English sociological weekly, solemnly asks in one of its July numbers whether London and Paris are not "reversing their traditional role as sedate commercial center and bohemian cosmopolis respectively...
...Here was a minister who was fighting to survive the next five weeks—and I wanted his support for a problem of five years hence...
...The modernization of industry and the impetus to productivity from the Marshall Plan is another...
...From a distance, one can trace their contours, their densities, their ecology, even their natural history —the rhythmic movement from the old concentrations through the transient belts to the newer residential sectors...
...Wilson, with great heart and piety, denied any such efforts...
...No body...
...The stages of the change provide vivid confirmation of the Colin Clark cum W. W. Rostow theory of the development of industrial society...
...The hilarious aspect of the Ward case, as Anthony Sampson pointed out in the Observer, is that Christine Keeler has become the "unofficial royal commissioner extraordinary into the state of Britain...
Vol. 46 • August 1963 • No. 17
