Donald Jenkins

France has historically been a cradle of cutting-edge technology and to this day remains a world leader in the field of mathematics. Yet in recent years it has gradually departed from that stance and has increasingly turned into a sort of cultural but irrelevant Disneyland, while America has gained, as a result of the revolution induced by the PC and the Internet, a dominant, indeed monopolistic position in the field of information technology. Why has the forced diet of mathematics not fuelled the emergence of a string of French Stanfords, MITs and Georgia Techs? Why do clever young French people have zero knowledge of, or interest in, information technology? And, most puzzlingly of all, why is new technology not seriously taught in France’s best engineering schools, whose graduates are mostly ignorant of even basic programming skills?

Observers today, whether they be politicians, ordinary citizens or even academics, appear to overlook the tragic deterioration that has taken place in France’s once widely-admired political institutions. In the thirty-year period following the institution of a directly-elected presidency in 1962 through until the Maastricht treaty ratification in 1992, the system put in place by de Gaulle was highly successful, regardless of the personality and political leaning of the ElysĂ©e Palace’s incumbent. This has now given way to a period of instability, governmental weakness and disillusionment. Yet the causal link with the destruction, though a constant stream of constitutional revisions often conducted for the most trifling motives, of General de Gaulle’s institutions has curiously gone not only unlamented, but unnoticed.

Formalism in art in no way implies conservatism. In fact, quite the reverse: only by freeing the beholder to like or dislike a work of art on its aesthetic merits alone can he escape the dictates of fashion or, indeed, the dictatorship of censorship or of official art. My innate eclecticism attracts me to abstract art just as much, if not more, as it does to strictly figurative work. Yet I resent attempts by anyone, whether so-called structuralists, art critics or, more likely, society bores, to imprison the works of Picasso, Matisse or Paul Klee in a model conjured up by them for reasons that often have nothing to do either with the artist’s motives or in the reasons for which people enjoy seeing them.

Structuralism, in particular, by implying that the mental processes and social preconceptions an individual brings to art are more important than its so-called “essential” qualities, is a reason that I have always found incomprehensible at best and, at worst, that I have resented. It strikes me, without wanting to provoke anyone, that this as just as sure a road to artistic serfdom as its distant cousin, centralized planning, is a path to economic serfdom.

I woke up on January 1 with my eyes blinking in the Parisian sunlight and the pain from the acute calcific tendinitis in my right shoulder permeating all the way down to my hand and up to the nape of my neck.
This inexplicable ailment had suddenly appeared in the early hours of New Year’s eve [...]

Burke, the soundest reference from an English perspective and, arguably, ceteris paribus, from most others also, would have had this to say about the Swiss practice of referenda:

… It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication [...]

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time [...]

The only thing that worries Western governments is the prospect of an Islamic bomb. These hyprocrites are oblivious of the fact that they deliberately toppled a friendly Iranian ruler who had repeatedly ruled out acquiring nuclear weapons because he foresaw the huge risk it would represent for the world’s most unstable region. And yet my fear is that, depite Twitter, YouTube and, especially, despite Le Monde, Mr Obama and his kind will have their way: just like previous protest movements by urban youth whose lives and prospects are being ruined by the oppressive theocracy ruling iran, Khameini, Amadinejad and their associated thugs will survive, secure in the knowledge that by manipulating the peasants whom they have rendered totally docile by reversing the Shah’s campaign against illiteracy and indoctrinating them, for thirty years, with nothing but Coranic propaganda will support them, that the population, like that of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, will be cowered into docility by the unspeakable brutality of the regime, that they will be able to continue to rig elections and, above all, that the West, still reeling from the damage it inflicted on itself in its inopportune attack on Iran’s historic enemy Irak, will do nothing. The media-greedy liberal lefties will move on to the next subject that Twitter makes fashionable, listen to what Mr Obama has to say on the subject, and the abominable sufferings of one of the world’s most civilised peoples will continue.

Ultimately, the cause of the fiasco surrounding the French-government’s ill-fated attempt to enact a three-strikes-and-you’re out law known as HADOPIis not a legal issue, despite the gravity of the infringement of civil liberties that it would have instituted, but the unwillingness, or perhaps the inability, of the French political elite to take a serious interest in cultural policy. And behind the economic reality that the model HADOPI seeks to prop up is dead, is the hard fact that youth, creativity, talent and fashion have moved on and that the French political establishment has been left behind and has clearly still not understood what is happening to it.

Je ne vous ai pas rendu heureux, et je vous laisse malheureux, et moi je meurs; cependant je ne puis me résoudre à souhaiter de ne vous avoir pas connu.

Isabelle de Charrière, Caliste ou suite des lettres écrites de Lausanne (1786)

From Rousseau’s Nouvelle HĂ©loĂŻse to Malraux’s ConquĂ©rants, French letters since the eighteenth century are strongly coloured by death and, more particularly, by death wishes. In the last couple of weeks, I have been looking with considerable interest at this subject that most will regard as unnecessarily stern in an age where happiness has been erected into a moral imperative.

What such people overlook, of course, is that happiness is sometimes impossible to achieve. Neither Rousseau, nor Goethe, nor Balzac, nor Wilde, nor Malraux can provide their heroes with the truly disinterested death that, in certain circumstances, can be the only palliative to their suffering.

Isabelle de Charrière’s sensibilitĂ© sevrĂ©e, to me, when applied by her to her heroine’s death wish, provides a more honest, more modest yet ultimately more modern approach than that of her more famous disciple. She cuts out the pathos and does not pretend to drape an artificial meaning over a gesture dictated by nothing more than reality.

Mr Obama’s position on capital punishment has shifted, from opposition in 1996 to support in limited circumstances. Yet he will, I believe, push for criminal justice reform. He can also indirectly influence death penalty decisions through his nominations to the Supreme Court, where Justices Stevens—a liberal on the death penalty despite being a Republican appointee—and Ginsburg may well need to be replaced. I can only hope that the debate on the issue will continue to result in “standards of decency”, which have already shifted sufficiently to provoke debate on the constitutionality of lethal injection and put an end to the practice of executing minors, evolving further in the direction of complete abolition.