France: Dangerous Illusions . . . By Salman Rushdie Friday, April 26, 2002
Here we are once again in the world of Voltaire's Candide. We can easily see our dark 21st century world reflected in that merry tale of an 18th century deluged in blood, where catastrophes, rapes, hangings, earthquakes and syphilis lay in wait for the characters around every corner. In Voltaire's fictional universe, as in our all-too-real one, there was much trouble between Europeans and "Mussulmans." Hope existed only to be dashed, love to be accursed; the innocent Candide could only win the fair Cunegund after she had been transformed into an ugly hag.
Doctor Pangloss, the Leibnizian man of ideas, teacher of the sweet science of "metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology" and prototype of all our contemporary "reality instructors" (the term is Saul Bellow's), somehow clung to his belief that "everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds."
Candide, however, opted at the end of his violent road for the path of quietism: concluding, in the famous phrase, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." So Voltaire's great fable ends with the suggestion that in appalling times we would be well advised to keep our minds off high ideas and our noses out of great affairs, and simply cultivate our gardens.
Voltaire was not the sort to recommend apathy as a general cure for life's ills, however; and yet, such is our penchant for sloppy reading and sloppier thinking, the conclusion of his most celebrated work of fiction has come to mean exactly that, has come to be read as an endorsement of apathy, passivity, withdrawal.
It is just such a case of misguided apathy that, in our own appalling present, has permitted the "LePenization" of the French political process and led France into one of the greatest democratic blunders of that country's modern history. France, busily cultivating its garden, has belatedly discovered that there's a poisonous snake in the grass.
Every so often, an electorate will shrug its shoulders and decide there isn't much difference between the main contenders for office. The day after the election, reality bites, but by then it's too late. When it last happened in Britain, the consequence was Margaret Thatcher's long, damaging reign. Voter apathy was also a crucial factor, perhaps the crucial factor, in the Bush- Gore presidential election; as a result, the fiasco in Florida turned into the decisive event it should never have become. Now the malaise has struck France, and although Lionel Jospin has rightly accepted the blame for an Al Gore-ishly lackluster campaign, he is not the only one at fault. It's an old adage in politics that the electorate is never wrong, but in this case, by golly, it was. Maybe it's the French electorate that should resign instead of Jospin, and make room for new voters more interested in shouldering their responsibilities.
It's a terrible truth about our awful times that the people who seem to care least about freedom and democracy are the ones who have the readiest access to these treasures. In the years following the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against me, the loss of my right to vote (when one lives at an "unknown address" one can't register as a voter) was one of the privations I felt most keenly. Yet whenever I mentioned the fact, nobody seemed to feel I had lost anything particularly important. Since then, voter disillusion and cynicism have continued to increase. The disenfranchised citizens of the world's many tyrannies have every right to feel disgusted that those who possess these privileges value them so little and squander them so readily.
The French electorate doesn't even have Candide's excuse of post- cataclysmic exhaustion. The world's present high level of mayhem isn't taking place on French soil. No one-eyed mullah has proposed the Talibanization of the Gallic way of life, no messianic Osama has bought the apparatus of the French state to use it in the service of terrorism. No suicide bombers ride the Paris Metro. France is not Gujarat, where the hideous state government presided over mass slaughter while the Indian prime minister turned a blind eye; nor has it been traumatized by anything like the Palestinian horror of Jenin. France is still France, even if it has recently seemed to be performing the difficult and unenlightened trick of displaying anti-Semitic and anti-Arab tendencies simultaneously.
The French way of life is still among the world's most desirable and, yes, most civilized. But this comfortable continuity has bred some dangerous illusions, notably on the left. The decision of the left to field multiple candidates and thus split the anti-Chirac vote created the gap through which Jean-Marie Le Pen has gleefully charged. Such a decision can be made only by people who are so sure of the survival of the status quo that they can take stupid risks with the future. What is there to say about the folly of the European left? How and where will it mess up next? Five minutes ago it was opposing the military action that deposed the Taliban and almost certainly prevented a number of terrorist attacks on the West. Having got Afghanistan wrong, the left has now got France wrong as well.
This time, thank goodness, the French electorate has a chance, in the second round of voting, to clear up the mess of the first round. The price will be many more years of Jacques Chirac. But the price must be paid. The garden cannot be handed over to the serpent.
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