Taking Stock

August 3, 2013

     With August, the reality of Fall comes closer.  As of Tuesday, I will have been living in Caunes-Minervois for two months.   I came here because of the generosity of friends who recognized that I needed to make a defining break after an excruciating loss.  I never had a plan, other than to improve my French, and to know France and its people better.  For all my efforts, I have received so much, and more, in return.

     Being here I do not know whether I am a witness to France's unstoppable decline or its plucky resilience.  France is a country where talk matters, where books by French writers matter --even if the ideas in them fly in the face of what is happening outside of France, even if they deliberately ignore the world outside France.  Wanting to categorize, to classify, to analyze, to engage in dialectic, to expatiate --that is the essential quality of a Frenchman.  It is the result of his upbringing: surrounded by the names that made France a great power, he is taught that to think large thoughts is to count: Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, philosophes; great administrators, like Colbert, Louis XIV's Finance Minister; and Vauban, the builder of the country's defensive fortifications; Riquet, the engineer who built the Canal du Midi;  Eiffel, a great builder of bridges, and not just the tower that bears his name.  These are not dusty names, they are very much alive and models held up as worthy of imitation.

     The negative side of this is that French thought, whether in science, finance, mathematics, the arts, or politics is less influenced by thinking elsewhere than any country to which it might be compared.  Some here believe that that insularity may be the country's Achilles' heel.  That mentality's roots in France's history perpetuate a way of looking at the world where little is supposed to change that is not driven by public consensus led by brilliant French thinkers.

     In the long run, it may not be the best strategy for remaining competitive in a global economy where economies of scale matter.  But it is what makes the French fascinating: their stubbornness, their refusal to yield to standards not established first in France, their insistence that France has the subject covered.

     I am a romantic, so I consider the French celebration of artisanal production a principled position, even as I wonder whether the realities of the global market will permit small producers to survive without subsidies.  Passion imbues the French small producers: they love what they do.  When I patronize them I am taking a position to support their enterprises, even as I wonder whether they will exist in twenty years.  But I admire them, and want them to succeed, because the scale at which they work is a human one.

     Nowhere else can a foreigner be put so at ease, be made to feel nothing important happened until his arrival, while simultaneously remaining only a guest.  That quality of the French -warmth and distance-- is a legacy of the ancien regime, when receiving royalty in one's home operated on one level as a display of extravagant hospitality, but on another, as a means to personal advancement.  If there is gain to be had from making visitors happy, the French will find the way to do so.  They have been doing it well since the days of the Sun King.

     Henry James wrote of Paris,  "[T]he great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood."

        In Caunes-Minervois, I have been able to arrange my life exactly as I have pleased, and I have been accepted and understood, as James might have said.  I end my blog here, with many thanks to those of you who have followed by peregrinations.  As Americans, we often take France for a country living on faded glory with nothing to teach us.  I hope the blog has succeeded in suggesting that the French point of view is nuanced, rooted in its long history and its well-developed habits of thought, not merely the product of arrogance, as is often written in our newspapers.

        So many Americans have fallen in love with France because to understand the French and to know France is to be enriched.  I count myself one more of that number.  I arrived unfamiliar with driving regularly in my own country, let alone a foreign one.  I became a better and a more confident driver on French roads.  Is there no irony in the fact that as a result, a New Yorker became more American?