Quelle Horreur!
MOUTET, ANNE-ELISABETH
Quelle Horreur! Eurovision and other insults to French culture. BY ANNE-ELISABETH MOUTET Paris It is difficult to overstate the weird, galactic silliness of the 52-yearold Eurovision Song...
...We eventually hung up, he worried that his boss would unfairly think he’d got the library bad press, me vowing that if it took me all night, I would fi nd that book on the website of the French National Library...
...Feeling reckless, I clicked back, selected the entire text on my screen, and pasted it in a new Word document...
...I couldn’t...
...Even the French...
...Israel has been a competitor since 1973 and won three times, the last in 1998 with an entry sung by a transsexual calling herself Dana International...
...It turned out that we couldn’t fi nd “my” Balzac, however hard we tried...
...And so France is abuzz with the scandale S?bastien Tellier...
...No matter: Participation in the contest is highly coveted by any young nation between Iceland and Azerbaijan (a new contestant in 2008...
...Thus did the zealots of the Counter Reformation battle those Bible-obsessed militants raring to let just anyone read Scripture...
...But this year’s Eurovision had all of France up in arms: Our competing entry was sung—quelle horreur—in English...
...All the same, there may be better ways to warm the planet’s denizens by the glow of French culture than making French the compulsory language of all future entries in the Eurovision Contest...
...Tellier grudgingly added a couple of French lyrics to his song, but complained that it “didn’t sound the same...
...But surely, I thought, by now Gallica would have Les Illusions Perdues...
...Joyandet read France 3 the riot act, then contacted the Eurovision Contest’s executive producer, Svante Stockselius, to have the song altered...
...Culture minister Christine Albanel soon came under fire...
...Among them is Alain Joyandet, the junior minister for Francophonie, the Alliance of French-Speaking Countries, which France uses as its own little U.N...
...After half an hour getting lost on Gallica’s new site, I called the library’s press offi ce...
...of the chart-topping duo Daft Punk, the hirsute and bearded Tellier, who was educated in one of France’s most exclusive Catholic private schools, Saint Martin de Pontoise, sang in forgettable English a forgettable song called “Divine” (see it here, www.youtube...
...Pepper album, for instance, the (winning) British Eurovision entry was Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String...
...This was obviously a new and surprising notion to my guide...
...It’s not for nothing that France was, for a very long time, a Catholic country...
...I’m in front of a screen...
...BY ANNE-ELISABETH MOUTET Paris It is difficult to overstate the weird, galactic silliness of the 52-yearold Eurovision Song Contest, which wrapped up on May 24 in Belgrade...
...Dreamed up during a 1955 Monte Carlo junket by a bunch of Genevabased European Broadcasting Union bureaucrats, both as a technical experiment in live broadcasting and a means to cheer up postwar Europe, the Eurovision Contest took off in the sixties and seventies, fostering the music style best known as Europop, which bears only a distant resemblance to the actual national music of the participating countries...
...Further investigation failed to produce major French classics such as the plays of Moli?re, Racine, and Corneille (the 17th-century trio who collectively occupy in French letters a place roughly equivalent to Shakespeare’s) except for a couple of plays on a provincial teacher’s homepage and an archive in Quebec...
...The two French commentators— who included designer to the stars Jean-Paul Gaultier, the man who made a name for himself putting Madonna in a conical bra— mentioned none of this in their saccharine remarks, but veteran BBC commentator Terry Wogan (a kind of shaggy-haired Johnny Carson) made jokes and took potshots at everything, which apparently angered the Eurovision people enough that they complained to Wogan’s bosses...
...This year, possibly the best entry— Ireland’s Dustin the Turkey, an engaging animatronic glove-puppet DJ-ing an electronic number with a lot more charm than his human competitors— was thrown out in the semi-finals (which prompted calls for sacking at the state-run Irish TV authority in the Eire Daily Mail...
...Can’t we just fi nd one book together...
...A cult Eurovision entry is Germany’s 1979 disco “Dschinghis Khan,” which only placed fourth but is one of YouTube’s top-rated videos...
...I tried the opening sentence of one literary work that does exist on the Gallica website in electronic form, Moli?re’s sublime Tartuffe...
...But surely,” I countered, “you can guide me through the website...
...I suggested we open another window to Google, and type the fi rst sentence of the book, in quotation marks...
...You’re in front of a screen...
...This sensitivity, you understand, springs from the duty of every French citizen to foster the “rayonnement de la culture fran?aise,” an expression that has French culture radiating its beneficent influence like the sun...
...No dice...
...You’d be wrong...
...Chirac thundered, and promptly assigned a committee to counter this outrage...
...the former Warsaw Pact countries hanging together...
...Cultural politics being what it is in France, cabinet ministers’ heads may roll...
...Yet its very dorkiness has given Euro vision a new cool factor in recent years, hence the appearance of Jean-Paul Gaultier on the France 3 broadcast...
...Never mind that over half this year’s contestants (including the Dane, the Germans, the Latvians, the Pole, the Swede, the Ukrainian, and more) also chose to sing in the language of rock music, la langue du rock...
...Few Eurovision winners have managed to build any kind of career on their victory in the contest, the exception being the Swedish disco group ABBA in 1974...
...A polite young man named Jean-No?l Orengo explained to me that digitizing books cannot be done “just like that,” “on a massive scale,” “helter-skelter” (oh the horrors perpetrated by Project Gutenberg’s tens of thousands of cheerful volunteers who have entered over 40,000 titles into its free online collection...
...In 1967, the year of the Beatles’s Sgt...
...For months now the Serbian press, highbrow and tabloid, has been heralding the contest—held in Belgrade because the Serbian entry won last year—as their country’s fi nal proof of rehabilitation after the Kosovo crisis...
...France’s 1969 winner was Frida Boccara’s “Un Jour, Un Enfant” in the very year when Serge Gainsbourg produced “Je t’Aime, Moi Non Plus” and Georges Moustaki sang “Le M?t?que...
...As for our Eurovision Song Contest entry, it came in 19th out of 25 fi nalists, which, while better than the three losers tied for 25th place (the U.K., Poland, and Germany), is nothing to write the Acad?mie Fran?aise about...
...it must be done “correctly...
...I would take that one at least, I decided, and clicked on the “download” link...
...It brought back numerous earlier French tantrums, such as the reaction against the EuroDisney amusement park near Paris when it opened in 1992...
...That’ll give me the odd frisson next time I leave the country...
...Typing Illusions perdues in the Gallica jungle eventually produced the text of another Balzac novel, Ursule Mirou?t...
...On the face of it, he had all the makings of a Europop star (including killer hipbones), but his victory really had nothing to do with the judges’ assessment of his talent...
...But surely,” I repeated, having fruitlessly waded through lists of electronic works ranked by date of digitization, “the point of a website is that it can be used by everybody...
...Albanel, a former Chirac speechwriter and a novelist, has quite a few enemies in her own party, who covet her plum job...
...and a group of rednecks from northern France called Les Fatals Picards who overdid the hicks-from-the-sticks style with a song from an album called Pamplemousse M?canique (“Clockwork Grapefruit...
...This brought up a two-page questionnaire, demanding from me in addition to name and address a “customer number,” a Value Added Tax affi liation number, a bank account number, and the soul of my fi rst-born...
...Irony was tried last year, and failed...
...Stockselius refused...
...A commercial, American company, digitizing all books in existence...
...It has it all—stiff, uncoordinated dance number in gold lam?, luxuriant mullets, relentless mechanical beat...
...Every spring, Eurovision fever seizes European countries, culminating in a televised finale that demolishes any tastelessness standards set by, say, American Idol or Dancing with the Stars...
...One came to mind recently as I searched the web...
...Allons, Flipote, allons, que d’eux je me d?livre...
...and places like Ukraine, Moldova, and Estonia aligning themselves according to the pipeline that brings them oil and gas...
...I’m not an Internet specialist,” admitted M. Orengo, getting more fl ustered by the minute...
...Neither got anywhere...
...diplomatic pressure group (it was headed for a while by Boutros Boutros-Ghali...
...com/watch?v=Vz58Hw9hldw...
...Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a political journalist in Paris and a frequent contributor to the BBC...
...As it happens, the Biblioth?que Nationale, French equivalent of the Library of Congress, now housed in a tall glass building on the Seine, was tasked by former president Chirac not long ago to provide an answer to Google Books’s infernal gall...
...A group of intellectuals led by the great theater director Ariane Mnouchkine called EuroDisney a “cultural Chernobyl”—as if Notre Dame had been torn down and replaced by Sleeping Beauty’s castle, instead of the whole thing being built in the middle of beetroot fields 35 miles from the Louvre...
...You’d think more established nations, like, say, France and the United Kingdom (which, with Germany and Spain, are permanent members of Eurovision’s own version of the Security Council, guaranteed a place in the fi nals by virtue of their major European broadcasting networks) would take things with a little more distance...
...Monsieur Orengo said I should write to the communications director of the Biblioth?que Nationale if I wanted to fi nd out more...
...It soon became apparent that, while the most cursory of Google searches will produce three separate English translations (thank you Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia) as well as versions in Italian and Russian, none was to be found in the original language...
...Seriously...
...After a three-and-a-half-hour TV marathon in Belgrade (which, by contract, none of the rebroadcasters may cut), the cute half-clad Russian, Dima Bilan, singing in English, won...
...I now own the electronic text of a minor Balzac novel published 160 years ago, which I stole from the Biblioth?que Nationale de France...
...It began to look as if French culture wasn’t so terribly radiant after all...
...You’d think the non-Scandinavian Western Europeans would realize they have no ghost of a chance any longer, but they still ostensibly believe in playing fair...
...That installment with Paul McCartney’s tangoing one-legged estranged wife comes close...
...I made that last one up...
...In recent years, Eurovision has become ridiculously political—it’s bloc voting, with every Scandinavian nation voting for all the other Scandinavians...
...Celine Dion, who confusingly competed for Switzerland in 1988 with an inoffensive French title, did win, but had to wait half a decade before achieving lasting fame in an entirely different style...
...Ukraine voted oil-geographically, putting Russia fi rst, Azerbaijan second, and Georgia third...
...A prot?g...
...There was an Israeli entry in French, English, and Hebrew called “Push Da Button” which was addressed to President Ahmadinejad of Iran...
...He was picked to compete at Eurovision by entertainment honchos at (state-run) France 3 during a live broadcast, prompting an angry outburst on the fl oor of the National Assembly by Gaullist member of parliament Fran?ois Michel-Gonnot (“It’s the fi rst time in 52 years that such an outrage against French culture has been committed...
...Google doesn’t link to it...
...Before that, Gallica, the website of the Biblioth?que Nationale, mostly held facsimile copies of books, exactly reproducing the original pages, typeface, and so on, which were hugely unwieldy (10 to 80 megabytes) and unsearchable...
...Ah,” said M. Orengo, in the tone of someone revealing an important and necessary truth, “but all web search engines are Anglo-Saxon...
...I was looking for an electronic text of Balzac’s great novel Les Illusions Perdues (1843) to send to a Frencheducated American friend...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 37
