By Donald Morrison & Antoine Compagnon, translated by Michel Bessières (Denoel, €13)
In late 2007, Donald Morrison lobbed a small grenade into the playground of the French intelligentsia by writing an article for Time magazine—for which he was European correspondent—entitled "The Death of French Culture." Morrison, for his trouble, was pilloried by the French press and sections of the American too. Yet he decided not to let things rest and opted in 2008 to write a longer, pamphlet-like piece, entitled "What is left of French culture?"
Translated into French and published by Denoel, the book offers yet another delicious glimpse into a relationship that never ceases to fascinate, that between the US and France. What is most compelling about it, though, is the accuracy of Morrison's argument combined with his deep affection for France. There is no rejoicing in his writing. Morrison's is a true lament and, toward its end, a scramble to unearth nuggets of hope. In his appraisal of France's growing incapacity to maintain its universal cultural pull, Morrison entreats us to think about the meaning of culture and universalism in the 21st century.
Morrison's original Time piece took as its starting point France's annual rentrée culturelle—its unveiling of the year's cultural calendar—and proceeded to list the goodies on offer for 2007: 727 novels, hundreds of albums, dozens of films, an abundance of major exhibitions, as well as countless theatre and lyrical productions. No one, concluded Morrison, takes culture more seriously than the French. Yet, he asked, does anyone outside France notice any more?
One could answer that so long as there is national enthusiasm for such cultural products, then French culture is doing just fine. Except that, as Morrison points out, we are not talking here about some medium-sized power content to keep its people entertained and engaged in the cottage industry of heritage preservation. This is France: a country still in thrall to its mission civilisatrice, with a national ministry of culture second to no other democracy's; a place whose image of itself is partly defined by the light it shines on the rest of humanity. In this respect, Morrison points out, France is no longer making good on its promises as a nation.
It's clear that the initial mauling he received took Morrison by surprise. What, he asks in the new book, could he have said to unleash such scorn? Critics focused on what they saw as his overly-American desire to measure impact; and, further, to measure what in the minds of many is utterly immeasurable. His defence is that, while one may not be able to measure such things directly, there are some good proxies around for both cultural impact and claims of universalism: the number of French artists on the market, the success of French theories abroad, the number of French intellectuals in foreign universities, of translations of French books, and so on.
Whatever one might think of such proxies, France would clearly have done much better by them in the past than it does today. In the past, French films did have mass-appeal; its intellectuals pretty much defined the genre (from Sartre to Foucault, from Bourdieu to Kristeva); its literature was copiously translated and widely admired. This capacity to encapsulate and translate for the whole of humanity embodied a particularly French commitment to universalism. It's a field which raises a host of questions on just how universal text, art, image and ideas can be. But the capacity to turn the irreducibly personal into something irreducibly shared and human is a necessary condition of anything that aspires to universality.
A number of things are at play here—two of which are near-clichés but shouldn't be underestimated. The first is the throes of a great nation struggling to adjust to medium-rank power status. France is not alone in having to face this transition, and in many ways it may not be facing it terribly badly, but it may be unique in the multi-faceted form of the relegation it needs to cope with—military, cultural, industrial, scientific and linguistic. Second, there is Morrison's relationship to France—which has an endearing whiff of "no longer the girl I fell in love with." It reminded me of an article published in 1991 by the American academic George Ross entitled "Where have all the Sartres gone?" Morrison's book, however accurate, is also part of an established American genre (although the lament for the decline of French culture is something of an industry in France too.)
In fact, Morrison's diagnosis rejoins an argument made by none other than the director of the Académie française, Marc Fumaroli, in his book L'État culturel—that French culture is in decline not in spite of the interventionism of the French state but rather because of it. In 2007, for instance, the French ministry of culture spent around €3bn, amounting to €208 a year for each citizen, in comparison to the equivalent of €120 in Britain and no more than a handful of dollars in the US. It is a situation that the French sociologist Dominique Schnapper described as a "cultural welfare state." It is, of course, always more acceptable to be critical of one's own family than to see them criticised by some upstart cousin, and Morrison's book touched a raw nerve with the French commentariat. More to the point, though, it seems that such an argument has forced many to admit to a deeper malaise to do with the very nature of the modern French state.
The situation, as Morrison acknowledges, is not so much about the size of France's subsidies as about its armies of civil servants, and their clientelistic relationship to a cultural elite that is sufficiently secure in its role and privileges that it can define what counts as culture with little reference to the world outside. What emerges is a disproportionate capacity to both isolate culture and asphyxiate it. French culture is cut off from the challenges and opportunities that come from openness, and from the dynamism that comes from vigorously fought encounters. It need not be so. The current, isolated success of the film The Class is a reminder of just how good French film is when it allows itself to place confrontation at its heart.
Recently, segments of the French state have paid lip-service to outsiders—turning to foreign think-tanks, for instance, or to professional management consultants. Yet the aim, beyond the attraction of looking bold and innovative, seems to have been simply to look for reassurance regarding France's uniqueness. This was brought home to me last year when I was asked by the French government to provide some advice on public service reform. Initially optimistic, I soon discovered that every analysis of France's dystopian technocracy I had read and dismissed as caricature was true—even understated.
The ministry I found myself in was a place of isolation, petty fears and wasted effort; a place where reform seemed about as likely as the Republic freezing over. Morrison's descriptions of a self-serving elite involved in a self-fulfilling game of conservation were only too accurate an image of, at least, this fraction of the French state.
And yet—the faults I saw were not so much conspiracies as an acute "political complex" which France will only shake off once it lets the world in. The French socialist party, for one, acknowledges that it is at a kind of cultural ground zero, while emerging institutions like the 27ème Région or the Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération promise to draw on the best of international experience. These are the spaces to watch for glimmers of re-awakening.
As for Morrison, at a time when the temptation in this country will be to slash cultural budgets, his book reminds us that a nation's political and economic capacities are intrinsically linked to its cultural potential—and to knowing how to nurture it.
A word to the wise.
