The reason is that France is the only country in the world, apart from North Korea, where nuclear power is totally safe. The whole country is miraculously protected from any likelihood of radiation poisoning or fallout. When the cloud of luminous dust floated across Europe from Chernobyl in 1986, it famously stopped at the French border. Farms just across the line in Germany, Switzerland and Italy were polluted and sales of their produce embargoed, but in France crops were untouched.
It is the same for asbestos. It is only in the past decade or so that asbestos has officially become dangerous in France. Before that, it was perfectly safe, and the students of the asbestos-ridden university building at Jussieu in central Paris were in no danger whatsoever from the particles they kicked about and inhaled as they walked the corridors.
Could all this be because certain French companies are (or were, in the case of asbestos) amongst the world’s biggest manufacturers of these allegedly toxic materials? Mais non!
Astonishingly, the French don’t seem to mind this at all. For one thing, they have more important matters to think about than whether some factory they can’t see, hear or smell might be polluting the beach where they have decided to spend their holiday. For another, they are a technological people and believe that the Earth would be a better place if engineers ran the world and left everyone else to get on with the more refined things in life.
Je Ne Sais Quoi
Conspiracies of silence work very well in France because the country is indeed run by technocrats, most of whom went to school with each other. Many of the politicians, industrialists and financiers, and even some of the supposedly independent press barons, come from the elite grandes écoles. The country echoes to the sound of these people scratching each other’s backs. Three French presidents in a row – Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac – have been either openly accused of crimes or tainted by dubious friendships, but continued their careers. And Charles de Gaulle is quoted as saying that ‘a politician so rarely believes what he is saying that he is astonished when anyone believes him’. It’s not surprising that the French are completely cynical about their leaders.
This impenetrability helps them to be subtly efficient on the world stage.
They somehow manage to extricate French hostages from Iraq with their heads still attached to their shoulders. They deny that this is because they pay the hostage-takers, and no one believes them, but they don’t care.
They howl about globalization, which they refuse to call globalization, even though it would be a perfectly acceptable French word – instead they have coined the alternative mondialisation. They spit with fury if a foreign company tries to buy out a big French firm – in the case of Danone, the government actually blocked the deal – yet they lambast the USA about its protectionism. And meanwhile, the French export their nuclear power stations, car plants, trains and food technology, much of which is directly or indirectly subsidized by the government. Millions of Brits drink water supplied by French companies. And all over the world, even as far away as Sydney, you will see bus stops built by Decaux, the genius who conceived the idea of paying to build bus stops and then taking the revenue from on-site advertising. It’s a slow, silent invasion, kept semi-secret by the way the French continually complain that their economy is collapsing and the whole world is against them. A brilliant cover-up.
Don’t Mention the War
The Nazi occupation of France really traumatized the nation. Not so much because they suddenly had men in jackboots marching about the place, but because so many French people went over to the other side.
At the end of the war, lots of collaborators were executed, and women who’d consorted with the enemy had their heads shaved. But these were only the people who didn’t have enough influential friends to cover them. Some of the worst collaborators were never tried or even accused. Meanwhile, amongst the genuine heroes on the official lists of Résistants, there were people who had never lifted a finger against the Nazis.
The best example of these postwar double standards was a woman called Marthe Richard. She is famous in France as the crusader who closed down all the brothels in the country in 1946, ostensibly because they were health hazards and hotbeds of organized crime, and had often welcomed the Occupying Forces with open arms (and open other limbs, too). She was chosen to spearhead the clean-up campaign because she was a heroine of the Résistance, a national figurehead. However, it was later alleged that the supposedly saintly Madame Richard had herself been a Madame during the war, and had worked with pro-Nazi gangsters as well as organizing sex parties for the Gestapo. Moral confusion at its most French.
This trauma explains why there are no TV programmes like Crimewatch in France. The French say this would be a call for the public to denounce possible innocents. Which is what so many of them were doing from 1940 to 1944.
But it’s all hypocrisy. They do denounce people to the authorities, every day.
I lived for a while in a building where a man was caught stealing electricity. He had bypassed his meter, but had left the earth wire hanging loose near a water pipe. The trick was discovered when his next-door neighbour turned on the tap one day and flew across the kitchen with her hair on fire. The electricity men came, the fraudster was prosecuted, and the following year the neighbour was visited by tax inspectors who went through all her books and bank accounts. Someone had told the taxman that she was earning undeclared income working from home. It was not difficult to guess who.
Denouncing people can even be a negotiating tactic. A shower in a tiny studio apartment on the floor above me leaked into my living
