LA BELLE FRANCE
(….suffering disfigurement to its beauty)

Right  up front, I’ll admit that I’m a Francophile, partly because of some family roots, but mainly because, from my earliest formative to teenage years, I was fully immersed in a solidly middle-class French – milieu – (to the point where being American….was a vague notion solely due to my natural parentage….and little else). And the influences of that early period in life still linger to this day in my makeup (especially according to those who insist I write English as it is spoken in French).

So it is difficult for me to comprehend this latest tragedy in Toulouse, a region of France better known for laid-back tolerance and a reputation for the pursuit of great food, wine, women, and song (not necessarily in that order) than anything else. The direct regional heir to the rich legacy of ancient Aquitaine, the cradle one might say of French culture, that is, of courtly love, troubadours, and dashing martial spirit (personally experienced back in my days of association with some of the French Army’s elite units… once some of Patton’s favorite allied members of his Third Army in WWII). In short, the epitome of everything “French.”

But none of that has any relevance to the France of today, a France which has suffered a number of disfigurements to its beauty as ….La Belle France….in recent history. Among these, in the aftermath of WWII, were the disastrous reverses (such as Dien Bien Phu) with its former colonial holdings in Indochina; then, the long and extremely bitter conflicts with its North African holdings, the bitterest and most psychologically damaging of which was that with Algeria ( ironically not a colony, but a fully integrated “department” of homeland France) some residues of that still lingering today, and, the reason why France has one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe. An immigrant population deriving from those colonial conflicts, and more recently, as refugees from the post-colonial instabilities and repressions within those newly independent ex-colonies.

The sad thing, however, is that the youths born of those early immigrants and later refugees, who have grown up in an entirely French –milieu-  seem less integrated than their parents or grandparents into that –milieu-, having become largely alienated from it, and thus readily more susceptible to the blandishments of the likes of al Qaeda and other extreme jihadist influences, and, irony of ironies, as a son of Algerian immigrants, also of  those of France’s chauvinist extreme right, with its virulent anti-immigrant and “foreigners….go home!” perspectives.

In this instance all of these factors seem to have turned such a youth into a mindless killing machine, only to end up being put down like a mad-dog by a police anti-terrorist SWAT team.

Looking back at France’s post WWII track, one can’t help but wonder why it seems to have all gone wrong. There was great elation back in the Fifties, when both France and Germany finally buried the hatchet of their old rivalries, exhibiting true mutual statesmanship by setting the foundations for what ultimately became the EU. And despite some rocky moments in the Sixties, France’s traditional reputation for high style and cultural dynamism created its own version of America’s “Camelot”, with the glories of “Bebe” , “Dalida”, Sartre, Piaf, Moreau, Chanel, Lanvain, Coureges, Patou, Deneuve, Citroen DS, Renault’s Deux Cheveaus, the Concorde, and a host of others. England may have “swung”, but France “rocked.” back then.

All of that despite the stultifying aspects of its hard core adherence to statist-socialist concepts of governance, which somehow, retained its hold over everything else, keeping the inherent dynamism of its economic capacities in check; and thus, creating a disaffected matrix of extended poverty, welfare dependence, and lack of opportunity for economic and social assimilation and mobility in an immigrant element that needed it the most. And it is from these that youths such as the Toulouse killer have been drawn.

While the advent of the Sarkozy administration briefly gave rise to the hope that there would be changes for the better, and despite some best and creative efforts to do so, it has not been able to overcome long entrenched public and private sector practices that have prevented such progress to occur. Compounding those difficulties, recent Euro zone economic and fiscal problems have simply added to these problems.

Yet, perhaps, it will be a measure of its continued collective belief in its essence as –La Belle France – that it will neither allow nor suffer further disfigurements of this kind….to its beauty.

CENTURION