Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy

Over a meal, either in late 2008 or early 2009, Michel Houellebecq (MH here, sometimes) and Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL here and everywhere, nearly always) decided to begin an exchange of 28 letters which would run from January to July 2008. These were published in France the following year under the title Ennemis Publics. A translation into English, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, became available in the US a year ago, and, under the title Public Enemies, has just been published in the UK. 

BHL is well-known as a philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker and MH is a well-known writer who won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for La carte et le territoire, published in the UK as The Map and the Territory in 2011. Houellebecq likes to go on the offensive from the start – The Map and the Territory opens with an ad hominem attack on Jeff Koons and Damien Hurst. So in Public Enemies, it’s not surprising that he opened up on BHL and then turned on himself:

We have, as they say, nothing in common - except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.
A specialist in farcical media stunts, you dishonor even the white shirts you always wear. An intimate of the powerful who, since childhood, has wallowed in obscene wealth, you are the epitome of what certain slightly tawdry magazines like Marianne still call "champagne socialism" and what German journalists more astutely refer to as the Toskana-Fraktion. A philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts, you are, in addition, the creator behind the most preposterous film in the history of cinema.
Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist: to lump me in with the rather unsavory family of "right-wing anarchists" would be to give me too much credit; basically, I'm just a redneck. An unremarkable author with no style, I achieved literary notoriety some years ago as the result of an uncharacteristic error in judgment by critics who had lost the plot. Happily, my heavy-handed provocations have since fallen from favor.
Together, we perfectly exemplify the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect as was recently pointed out, sternly but fairly, by Time magazine.
We have contributed nothing to the electro-pop revival in France. We're not even mentioned in the credits of Ratatouille.
These then are the terms of the debate. (pages 3,4)

MH and BHL

a passage which starts to reveal the challenge which the translators (Miriam Frendo for BHL and Frank Wynne for MH) faced. In the original, “champagne socialism” appeared as «caviar gauche» – in France champagne doesn’t carry the class associations it has elsewhere. Toskana-Fraktion was left untranslated from the German, but is a play on Rote Armee Fraktion, usually translated into English as Red Army Faction - the UK’s Toskana-Fraktion would probably include several leftist luminaries with a fondness for Tuscany. The references to “the most preposterous film in the history of cinema” and Time magazine’s stern-but-fair article might have benefited from referencing (here linked), but the translators probably felt they had enough to do, footnoting the large cast of French literary personalities the two authors discuss, eg:

“A l’agité du bocal": essay by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, considered to be inflammatory and anti-Semitic, which was published in 1948 in response to Sartre's article "Le Portrait d'un antisémite" (1945).

It may be that your reaction to that is «bien sûr», or “of course”. If so, you are probably a graduate in French and are well equipped to appreciate the majority of the discourse between these two intellos. Otherwise, if you are just curious about France, the preoccupations revealed in the letters still offer insights into that complex country, spread among the literary introspection. It is also quite amusing to watch two alpha males with such high opinions of themselves making the transition from locking horns to bonding, of a sort.

BHL was born in 1948 and Houellebecq in 1956 (probably), and it doesn’t take long for them to begin exchanging notes on what their fathers did, or didn’t do, during the war, that is to say the Occupation. Neither man shows much interest in post-war Europe or the EU, but both struggle with the experience of France between 1940 and 1945. For example, BHL:

There are the good stars, the astra, which, on the other hand, make you raise your head, look to the sky, especially the sky of ideas: there's the star of the sailors of the Ile de Sein and the humble fishermen of Brest and Saint-Malo immediately joining the Free French; the idée fixe that, despite the shooting and the slaughter, made the inspired soldiers of Monte Cassino rise to the assault, the light guiding the first French pilots in the Battle of Britain through the night as they resisted the fascination - again, starstruck - of what de Gaulle called “the frightening void of general renunciation."

BHL is not one to let facts impede his poetic flow. Readers should make their own minds up about the contribution of the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy and at Monte Casino with the Moroccan Gourniers in particular. But the RAF Roll of Honour for the Battle of Britain recognises 574 pilots from countries other than the United Kingdom, as flying at least one authorised operational sortie with an eligible unit during the period from 10 July to 31 October 1940, alongside 2,353 British pilots. The largest contribution came from 145 Poles – there were only 13 pilots from France. (Similarly, when talking about writers with an espionage background (page 119) BHL cites Le Carré, but also Orwell when presumably he meant Grahame Greene.)

MH takes a grimmer view of the World Wars:

… In going beyond the acceptable in that appalling, unjustified [First World] war, France lost all right to the love and the respect of its citizens; it brought discredit on itself. And such discredit is. I repeat, permanent.
This, it seems to me, explains a lot of things.
The nihilist rage of Surrealism and Dadaism, the surge of fury André Breton sometimes felt at the sight of a uniform or a flag.
The ease with which a generation of working-class people (whose parents and grandparents were probably irreproachable patriots) was convinced that the country of the workers was the Soviet Union and there could be no other.
Finally, the lack of enthusiasm with which the French fought in 1940. When people condemn the spirit of Munich, I always feel a certain unease, because Munich after all was in 1938 – twenty years after 1918. Twenty years isn't much. And I think one has to beware of reading it as ideological. Because the first thought that occurred to most French people in 1940 was not, I think, "The struggle against Nazism has started," but something more like "Here we go again with the Huns."
If I don’t know quite what my parents did during the Second World War, I know even less about what my grandparents did during the previous war. There is, however, a number I remember because it struck me at the time. My grandmother was part of a family that in 1914 comprised fourteen brothers and sisters. By 1918, there were only three left. This is what they call "taking a heavy toll." (pages 113, 114)

MH takes a mordant view of life in modern France as well:

There is also what one might call the France of Denis Tillinac - all local color and duck confit. I had barely experienced it until two or three years ago when, for a variety of reasons, I had to crisscross the country. And I have to admit, Denis Tillinac is right: it is a very beautiful country. The rural areas with their subtle patchwork of tilled fields, open meadows, and woodlands. The villages, here and there, stone houses, the architecture of the churches. Fifty kilometers farther along all this can change completely and you find a different arrangement, just as harmonious. It is incredibly beautiful what generations of anonyrnous peasants through the centuries have managed to create. Ooh-la-la, I feel like I might be losing it; admire a rural landscape these days and you can find yourself being accused of neo-Pétainism. (page 116)

The last is an intriguing comment. The French elite seem to like spending their holidays by the sea (Île de Ré and so forth), areas which were mostly occupied and therefore not part of Vichy France. As the map shows, this 'Free Zone', for reasons of Nazi strategic defence, was essentially inland and rural.

Writing before the current EU economic crisis, Houellebecq takes a jaundiced view of France’s prospects as well:

… Denis Tillinac is right; he is absolutely right to live in this France … but he is wrong to believe that it will disappear and to feel nostalgic about it. Worldwide, tourism is now the largest economic sector and selling points like that don’t just disappear: they're worth a lot of money. This is what young British people have come to look for when they retire after their careers in the City (and now that they’ve grossly inflated prices in the Dordogne, they've started buying up the Massif Central). This is what, with all their feverish, financial hearts, the Japanese and Russian nouveau riches hoped to find, and we gave it to them. They have their raw-milk cheese, the Romanesque churches, they have their duck confit. We will give the same warm welcome to the nouveau riches from China and India.
As an economic activity for France in the future, that will be more than enough. Does anyone really believe we are going to become world leaders in software development or microprocessors? That we are going to maintain a major export industry? Come on . . . We will still have some manufacturing, that's true, mostly in the same sector (haute couture, perfumes, Joël Robuchon packaged dinners). Trains will be another exception; the French love trains.
Does this mean that I meekly accept the new international division of labor? Well, yes, nor do I see how I could do otherwise. The "emerging countries" want to earn money, much good it may do them; we have lots of things for them to spend it on. To put it more crudely, do I really want to turn France into a dead, mummified country, a sort of tourist brothel? … Without a second thought I say YES.
You wouldn't think it, but I have, in a few sentences, just saved the French economy; which just goes to show that our letters are not a waste of time. (pages 116, 117)

MH has his own way of handling BHL who, on 4 April, sends a long letter including an essay on Epicurianism and the nature of chaos – one expects he always got 20/20 for his philo – ending (page 132): "Now it’s up to you to play." Houellebecq begins his reply on 10 April:

… I moved my boxes of books into a house which is not habitable just yet and won’t be for several months, maybe until the end of the year. Here I am, therefore, utterly powerless to respond to your letter in like terms. …

By May BHL and MH seemed to be finding more in common than either expected – as MH points out on 20 May:

… I realised a fact, a small but significant fact: we already have the same enemies. (page 212)
When all this has calmed down, long after we are dead, some future historian will be able to draw some great lesson from the fact that we both, and at much the same time, have comfortably fulfilled the role of public enemies. I don’t feel able to expand on the idea, it's just an intuition, one that still seems strange to me: but I believe that the person who manages to work out why the two of us, so different from each other, became the chief whipping boys of our era in France will, in doing so, understand many things about the history of France during this period. (page 214)

which might make the US title, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, a little misleading. The two writers’ concluding letters in July are appropriately elegiac. Houellebecq quotes Schopenhauer

:“We remember our lives a little better than a novel we once read.” To which I would add that we remember our lives less well than a novel we once wrote. (page 300)

BHL has the last word:

Contrary to the famous theory, I don’t believe that it's at the last moment, the last breath, that you rediscover the total memory, fully available to itself, that life has dispersed. I believe it's here and now, at every moment of life, as long as it is really lived. On each page of each book, as long as it is intensely desired. And my premonition, if I had one, would be rather that it's time to start worrying when in reply to the question "What is living?', too many of those books, moments in life, or the faces that accompanied them stop answering the roll call. There's a feeling in return for a feeling, a wager for a wager.
Let's wait and see. (page 303)

At which point it's possibly worth re-reading the article in Time.

European exchange rates – now and 70 years ago

The BBC website has recently posted a helpful guide, What really caused the eurozone crisis? Although not attributed to a particular author, reading it one starts to hear the unmistakable tones of Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business editor, though surely Stephanie Flanders, the Economics editor was involved. One of the most interesting graphics in the guide shows the trends in the trade balances of the major eurozone economies since the currency union was established in 1999. Germany’s is now nearly 6% of GDP in surplus. After investing huge sums in the modernisation of the former East Germany in the 1990s, Germany seems to have ensured it could put that investment to work. The initial Deutchsmark/euro rate was set at a level low enough to favour the pricing of German exports to the rest of Europe and the world.

Seventy years ago, exchange rates were set in Europe to favour Germany, but in the opposite direction. In 1979 Len Deighton published one of his non-fiction military histories, Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk. In the concluding section he provided this description of the economic consequences for the French of their defeat in 1940:

German soldiers were provided with occupation marks. The French and Belgian francs and the Dutch florin were pegged artificially low - the French currency about 20 per cent below its true value - and issue banks were forbidden to devalue.
This not only had the effect of draining everything - from champagne to real estate - into German hands at bargain prices, but it prevented German goods leaving Germany, except at bonanza prices. It was a subtle form of plunder …
In addition, each defeated country was made to pay for the maintenance of the German occupation forces. In the summer of 1940 France began paying 400 million francs per day as a 'contribution to her defence against Britain'. …

(p361 Triad/Granada edition 1981)

From 1940 to 1944 the economies of both Vichy France under Pétain and occupied France were ruthlessly exploited so that resources of all kinds could be directed to the Nazi war effort. Insufficient rationed goods of all kinds were available to meet the French domestic demand with inevitable results. For example, the government-set price of butter in 1942 was 43 francs a kilo. On the marché amical (relatives and friends) it sold for 69 francs, and on the black market for 107 francs.

Eventually about 2/3 of the population could not afford to buy the minimum ration diet (1400 calories a day) due to a combination of declining wages and steadily increasing prices. People who had assets like small antiques, porcelain, pictures and so on sold them for what they could get, ultimately to finish up in the occupiers’ hands and be taken back to Germany. Presumably what wasn’t blown to smithereens during the Allied bombing offensive, or sold to the occupying forces in Germany after 1945 is still there. There always seems to me to be a paucity of antiques, antique dealers and so forth in France by comparison with the UK, which avoided Nazi occupation (apart from the Channel Islands). The inadequate nutrition of children, adolescents and women of child-bearing age during the Second World War might explain why, at 6 feet (1.8m), I seem so much taller than most Frenchmen over 50, markedly less so with the under 30s.

The wartime statistics above are taken from The Civilian Experience in German Occupied France, 1940-1944, Meredith Smith , Connecticut College, January 2010; see pages 17 and 24 for the supporting references.

Two Paris Exhibitions

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, and it was in Provence that many of his most celebrated works were produced. However, encouraged by his school friend, Émile Zola, he first travelled to Paris in 1861 and would return there many times to paint in the city or in the surrounding countryside (Pontoise, below). About 80 works from in or around the capital provide the theme for Cézanne et Paris, currently at the Musée du Luxembourg.

Cézanne now seems to be classed as a Post-Impressionist rather than as an Impressionist (“un peintre déjà sorti de l’impressionisme”, said Renoir), and many of the works in the exhibition (portrait of Mme Cézanne, left) hint at later developments by other artists, particularly Cubism . He is often called the father of modern art ("notre père à tous" said Picasso or Matisse, or both of them). Nonetheless, Cézanne had exhibited at the 1863 Salon des Refusés and at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 when his works were among the most disliked.

The son of a banker, Cézanne had no financial need to sell his work and it was only after the solo exhibition put on by the dealer Ambroise Vollard (right) in November 1895 that his reputation became established. Cézanne died in Aix-en-Provence in 1906. By this time some wealthy young Americans had come to live in Paris, and their art collection is the subject of the second exhibition, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… L’aventure des Stein, in the Petit Palais, across the Seine from the Musée du Luxembourg.

The Stein family were of German-Jewish origins and had become wealthy through the San Francisco tramway business co-owned by Daniel Stein. Daniel died in 1891 at the age of 59, three years after his wife who had died at 46. This left their four children, aged between 17 and 26, to pursue lives that, but for their intellectual inclinations, might have been labelled trustafarian in Britain a century later. Leo Stein (1872-1947) was the first to develop a serious interest in art. In 1900 he was studying 15th century Italian art in Florence under the influence of Bernard Berenson. However, while there he met Roger Fry (who was to introduce Post-Impressionism to Britain in 1910) and saw a Cézanne for the first time. At the end of 1902 he moved to Paris. In 1903 he purchased a Cézanne and was joined by his younger sister Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). By 1904 Leo and Gertrude had bought more works by Cézanne, as well as by Gauguin and Renoir. That year they were joined by the oldest Stein brother and would-be paterfamilias, Michael (1865-1938), and his wife Sarah (1870-1953). In the years that followed all four Steins were to make substantial purchases of works by these and other artists.  Hung in their two Paris apartments (Michael and Sarah's, left; Gertrude and Leo's, right) the paintings were to be admired during Saturday soirées held for Paris’s artistic avante garde.

Picasso became a close friend of Gertrude and painted her famous portrait  in 1905-6 (below), (photographed together by Man Ray in 1922). Gertrude had by then started her literary career and became a supporter of Picasso during his development of Cubism. She famously remarked of Picasso:

He alone among painters did not set himself the problem of expressing truths which all the world can see, but the truth which only he can see.

The exhibition brings together some of the exceptional works which passed through the Steins’ hands, and are now dispersed in museums and private collections around the world. Michael and Sarah collected many works by Matisse only to lose some of the best during the First World War while on loan to a gallery in Berlin. In the late 1920s Le Corbusier designed them a Modernist villa near Paris but they were to leave after a few years when the rise of fascism prompted their return to the US. By 1914 Leo had taken himself and his preferred pictures, mostly Renoirs, to Italy. This left his sister and her companion, Alice B Toklas, to be the core of the American literary and artistic community in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, (recently portrayed in Woody Allen’s comedy, Midnight in Paris). 

After the First World War, Gertrude could no longer afford to buy Picasso’s work and, although she continued to act as patron to emerging artistic talent, her later acquisitions turned out to be much less significant. The expensive exhibition catalogue (63 euros for the English edition) makes little mention of her experiences in France during the Occupation of the Second World War (she and Alice had been highly regarded for their American Red Cross work during the First). However, as Barbara Will has shown in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma, Gertrude's judgement in becoming an apologist for Pétain’s Vichy France, particularly by translating his speeches for US consumption, was questionable, even if it ensured the preservation of her art collection. 

Both exhibitions contain works of the highest quality and are rewarding to visit. Cézanne et Paris is the more straightforward as a retrospective on one artist, whereas L’aventure des Stein has to weave together the works of four major artists (63 Matisses, 43 Picassos etc) and many others and the histories of their collectors, a complex task skilfully done.  Cézanne et Paris continues to 26 February 2012. Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… L’aventure des Stein has been extended to 22 January (check!) and then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1 February to 3 June 2012). It started at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May to September 2011).