What’s Wrong With France? par Laurent Cohen-Tanugi

Abstract

Reviews 243 immune to gentrification intra muros, to a bastion of an alternative lifestyle, at once accommodating toward Parisian bourgeois looking for an evening of fun and keeping alive a spirit of rebellion against authority. Before crass commercialism won out, the Montmartre avant-garde aspired to a new authority based on“Equality, Imagination, and Pleasure,”i.e.,“anarchist ideals of local autonomy,self-determination,and equality” (x), a new ethos based on artists’ “affective experience,” not “tradition or scientific expertise” (xi). The famous Chat Noir cabaret had a sign at the entrance showing a black cat with the exhortation: “Passerby. Halt! Be modern” (29), a bold invitation to revolt. In his insightful analysis of Poe, Baudelaire, and Manet, the author shows how the enigmatic black cat became“the quasi-mystical signifier of unrepresentable forms of life, experience and truth beyond the boundaries of the human subject” (29). The Chat Noir published L’Anti-Concierge and was home to avant-garde groups with fanciful names, such as the Hydropathes and the Incohérents, as well as a motley crew of wannabe artists who cultivated a carnivalesque humor (23), aka“fumisme”(literally, blowing smoke), expressing itself through a spotty fare of satire, farce, and buffoonery accompanied by a generous measure of joyous revelry. The Montmartre avant-garde anticipated surrealism and situationism but produced little of lasting value. Moreover, the image of Montmartre as the bastion of a radical avant-garde was soon sanitized and supplanted by the commercial cachet of dance halls, such as the Moulin Rouge. The Chat Noir commodified and aestheticized the revolutionary spirit of the Commune, laying the groundwork for the area’s transformation into a hub of the emerging culture industries. Political anarchism, which came into vogue around the same time and used dynamite the way artists used satire, proved short-lived and infertile. This well-written and impeccably researched study combines “archival work, textual analysis and original theoretical work”(x) to underscore the normalizing power of the state, which sought to rein in citizens’ affective life and transform would-be rebels into passive onlookers and consumers of cultural goods. St. Norbert College (WI) Tom Conner Cohen-Tanugi, Laurent. What’s Wrong With France? Paris: Grasset, 2015. ISBN 9782 -246-85488-3. Pp. 128. 10 a. With the specter of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks still painfully afresh worldwide , Cohen-Tanugi’s perspective on the current political climate and social mentality in France is both insightful and revealing. Written as a response to the question embedded in its title and posed to him by friends from all over the world, CohenTanugi concentrates on the reasons behind globalization’s disruption of what historically had been France’s identity. In his introduction and in the eight chapters— “It’s the politics, stupid!,” “Le roi est nu,” “La République des Mandarins,” “Où sont passés les intellectuels?,” “Travailler moins pour gagner moins?,” “Le grand écart,” “Entre globalisation et provincialisation,” “Retrouver la France”—he reflects on the status of France’s government, the caliber of its civil service, the value of its elitist meritocratic system, its standing on the worldwide ladder of intellectual leadership, the condition of its “social model,” and the status of its political clout in Europe and the world. While absorbing Cohen-Tanugi’s perspective, it is helpful to keep in mind his professional background. He is a Paris-based international lawyer and a member of the Paris and New York bars. His practice focuses on such strategic areas as international mergers and acquisitions, arbitration, and corporate governance. He is a registered arbitrator with the French National Committee of the ICC’s Court of Arbitration and was the first French lawyer appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to have served as an independent compliance monitor. Thus, when he writes that “[l]e chômage de masse qui plombe la croissance française en un cercle vicieux et pénalise toute une génération ne se résoudra pas par des incantations politiques” (81), we are able to appreciate his conclusive deduction; he asserts that unemployment would be resolved “par un changement de mentalités et un démantèlement des...