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Let Them Eat Cake*
My first impression of Paris was the long line of taxis at Charles de Gaulle airport with no passengers for them to pick up. I waited about three or four minutes, just enough time to finish a cigarette and survey the landscape. I was the only one standing at the taxi station and the drivers were staring me down, ready to pounce on my next move. Before butting my cigarette, I reached in my pocket to review the sad notes of simple words that help get you through initial encounters in a foreign land - hello, please, thank you, how much, yes I may be an idiot but you should speak English everybody does - those type of introductory words and phrases. I make eye contact with the first in line. The North African Frenchman jerks the car forward four feet to the tip of my toes. We exchange pleasantries, he loads my luggage and I board the clean, black and white mini van. He mumbles something in French. Twenty words to ask me where I am going. Twenty more words to display his disdain when I massacre the street name of my destination and its eponymous hotel name. Sooner than I had hoped, I reverted to everybody's American English when encountering such situations - a loud, mouth distorting, and hand gesturing slow motion query - do you speak English? No. I sit back and huff. Italian? No. The meter was running. He looked back at me and yelled something in my direction for twenty or thirty seconds. If he was a parent and I was a child on a cross-country road trip, I would have understood his aggravation, but I was a flyer, a tourist from America via Italy. He must have encountered one of us before. With every word he spat, the meter kept on moving while the car wasn't. I tried in French again with no success and reverted to yell back in Italian. Cursing in Italian trumps French and even the Brooklyn accent of Italian Americans in movies like Donnie Brasco. Frustration was building between us, so I put up a finger to call a time out. I rummaged through my bag and ripped a piece of paper to write from memory the hotel, street and neighborhood number on a piece of paper. Paris is wonderfully spoked from the city center with numbers representing neighborhoods. My neighborhood, the Marais was number 4, conveniently located between numbers 3 and 5. But the man behind the wheel still looked puzzled at my written communication. His eyes squinted and his face was bewildered until he moved in his seat and pulled, to my wonderment, a road atlas from his back pocket. This book was pocket size, but thick enough to be the Larousse Gastronomique. After some thumbing and grunting and five Euros later, we were moving. The driver stuck his hand between the window guard and dropped the paper before I could grab it from him. Welcome to Paris. Any romance you were expecting we will discard like the paper wrapping from a Nutella smeared crepe you can buy at any of the many vendors on our meticulous, tree lined streets. Romance was exactly what I was after. A long time admirer, but first time visitor, what I knew of Paris was what I read in books like A Moveable Feast and saw in pictures by photographers Cartier-Bresson and Doiseneau. Cafe culture, loving embraces and cobble stoned streets in black and white. Little did I know those cobble stones were paved over after the Student-Worker riots of 1968 when cobblestones were lifted from the streets and launched in the direction of police officers and storefront windows. Coincidentally, my arrival in Paris was at the end of the second week of France's segregation and discrimination riots germinating in the African ghettos north of Paris. The City of Light was on the verge of incendiary lock-down because youths from these dilapidated suburbs were lighting cars on fire two-to-a-minute on some of the worst nights. Almost two weeks into the struggle, the government finally responded in an abhorable manner. The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, called for "cleansing" of the "scum" who threatened Paris' tranquility. And President Chirac's lack of response was laughable. He was peppered in the press with references to his rise to power when he claimed he would heal the social division, inequality and exclusion of France's younger generation. Ten years ago, Chirac stood on the platform of his ancestors, echoing the words of De Gaulle in the French colony of Algeria in 1958 who echoed the words of the French Revolution carved in many a building throughout the city - liberty, equality and brotherhood to all. De Gaulle was in Algeria in '58 to rally support amongst the pro-France colonists to quell the insurrection of Algerians who were fighting a guerrilla War of Independence. Algeria had been a French colony for over 130 years; many Euro-descendants and Jewish citizens had migrated and assimilated, as did many rooted Algerian Muslims. But when the Algerian National Liberation Front began massacring any Muslim who sided with the French, countless women and children and some men fled to Paris. In their wake, the French armies left as well. More than 100,000 Muslim supporters who fought side-by-side with the French were left dead in the streets. For their sacrifice and support, the colonists who escaped to Mother France were herded into concentration camp like quarters with the promise of factory jobs that the French themselves were unwilling to work - many of the jobs never even came to fruition. So, today in France there are Franco-Arab citizens who have been isolated and not assimilated despite the promises of French leaders. Therefore, teens, whose grandparents died on behalf of the French, are drawing their own conclusions - there is no force behind the political rhetoric and no faith in obtaining equality or brotherhood in France. The French appreciation, or lack thereof, of those who support them begs the question - can you have your cake and eat it too? The French would like to think so. There is no sympathy, apology or amelioration for their countless attempts at failed imperialism or past digressions. It is fine when brotherhood is in distant Africa, and the French profit by it, but having to share what is theirs in their own country, don't even think about it. The French would do anything to protect their sacred land and keep out friendly or unwanted visitors. During WWI they even turned to the Brits, who they had harbored resentment for thousands of years dating to the Norman conquests and the Hundred Years War, to help them secure the land they hold so dear. And it wasn't until the United States got involved when the Germans were 120 miles outside of Paris that the French retained control of their country, and the German threat of ruling Western Europe during WWI was erased. The French attitude of a purified France was also evident in WWII when Vichy France governed during the German occupation. The Vichy Regime set forth Anti-Semitism laws two years before the Germans even asked for them to be enforced. Post-World Wars, France was struggling again with control of one of their colonies, Vietnam. And although the United States supported the French financially in Vietnam for four years during the First Indochina War, the French ultimately lost the battle and the threat of Communism spread deeper into Indochina and dragged the United States into Vietnam to clean up the mess the French had left behind. It is now mid-1960s and Africans, Americans and the good people of England have helped France retain its glory, power and beauty during the first half of the 20th Century. So, what is the French response? With no battalions and bullets left in the barrels of their pistols, France becomes a vocal part of the United Nations Security Council trying to rally armed forces in Europe to balance the power of Russia and to cease the Western European dependence on the United States military. France even went as far as to withdraw from NATO for a number of years over complaints that its role in the organization was acting as a puppet to the demands of the United States. Back to the present day. It is funny that someone is resenting the French for the way they were treated in a time of need. It doesn't surprise the French, strike a chord of sympathy or cause them to feel apologetic for their blatant wrongdoing. Sarkozy's reaction was a perfect example, the French respond doggishly to anyone who infringes upon whatever it is that they are willing to defend so openly. But please, someone tell me what it is. It is evident the French are not upholding freedom, equality and brotherhood, so what is it - culture, class, crepes, homogeneity or dare I say, racism? So the next time you are in Paris and you sit across from these tortured souls huddled in cafes chain smoking Gauloises and writing hopeless novellas, look into their desperate eyes and try and ask them what is it that they resent of the world. Before any words are exchanged, I promise, they will pounce on you, because they have been thinking about how to say, "fuck off" even before Descartes declared, "I think, therefore I am." A Rose is a Rose
*Note: The famous phrase, "let them eat cake" has been famously misattributed to Marie Antoinette during the storming of the Bastille. However, it was actually Rousseau in his Confessions who tells a story of a Princess who when informed that the country folk had no bread to eat, she responded, "let them eat cake." - For further amusement, here is a short history of French Military success and failure:
Post 15 - November'05 Back to home...
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