Political essay by 93-year-old tops Christmas bestseller list in France | World news | The Guardian

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Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93. The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society. Launched in October by Indigène, a small publisher working out of an attic in Montpellier, southern France, the book had a tiny first print-run, 6,000, and sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated and kept high by the law. Hessel's success has stunned France. After two months on the bestseller lists, the book has spent five weeks at number one, beating Michel Houellebecq's award-winning latest novel La Carte et le Territoire and a host of Christmas fiction. It has sold 600,000 copies and – publishers predict it will reach a million. Translations are underway for Italy and other European markets. The book's soaring sales reflect a general mood of French exasperation at the social inequalities of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency. But the phenomenon is mostly down to Hessel's charisma and his life story. Hessel was born in Berlin in 1917 and emigrated to France aged seven. His free-spirited mother, Helen Grund-Hessel, inspired the novel Jules et Jim, which became Francois Truffaut's film about a love-triangle of two male friends and a woman who loves them both. During the Nazi occupation of France, Hessel joined the French resistance, was caught, tortured and and deported to Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps where he escaped hanging. After the war, he helped to draft the universal declaration of human rights and later became a diplomat. Hessel's book argues that French people should re-embrace the values of the French resistance, which have been lost, which was driven by indignation, and French people need to get outraged again. "This is an appeal to citizens, young and old, to take responsibility for the things in our society that don't work," he said. "I wish every one of you to find your own reason for indignation. It's precious." Hessel's reasons for personal outrage include the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France's shocking treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, protecting the environment, the plight of Palestinians and the importance of protecting the French welfare system. He calls for peaceful and non-violent insurrection. Sylvie Crossman, a former Le Monde foreign correspondent who co-founded Hessel's publishers, said the book was like a new, "adapted" version of Charles de Gaulle's rallying resistance appeal from London on 18 June 1940. She said the book had been a success because it gave hope to people from a real fighter who was not just an armchair intellectual.

Most French houses have two sinks. I'd never actually even noticed this quirk until one day I was round at a friend's and saw them washing the plates in soapy water in one, then washing the soap off in clean water in the other. I was in shock for about a week afterwards that people would actually do that.

The point I'm trying to make is that people actually read this stuff. I swear on my cat's life. It's not like in England where you buy a Martin Amis or whatever to "read" on the tube and feel dead superior as you catch people looking. They read it and are interested and care.

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Hessel's reasons for personal outrage include the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France's shocking treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, protecting the environment, the plight of Palestinians and the importance of protecting the French welfare system. He calls for peaceful and non-violent insurrection.

1- We all agree. Even right-wing voters. They don't want to treat illegal immigrants badly. They are just willing to see it done by someone else on TV - for higher purposes...

2 - The real crux: Who will be paying for all that? It's easy enough to say we want bread and circus. The question remains 'who pays the bill?'...

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Most French houses have two sinks.

Not just the French, i think. But it's true - Not in the UK. Like driving on the left, you guys aren't happy unless you do things differently from everyone else...

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The point I'm trying to make is that people actually read this stuff. They read it and are interested and care.

Bof. They talked loudly about it. Not sure they really are that interested. There were plenty of articles talking about how disaffected the youth was when no one was voting. Then, when Le Pen went to the second round of Presidential Election and "the youth" spent two weeks chanting in the streets, the press touted the big wake-up call... which was just as quickly forgotten by this feckle youth, uncannily good at making the journalists look stupid.

The French system has not meaningfully changed since the post WWII build-up period. Not a ringing endorsement of our capacity to change.

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I know people who read this stuff and care about it. Seems like everyone but me at times. Back in my international security days I swear each and every person had a Big Shelf o' Genocide, often in their bedroom (way to create an atmosphere...). Everyone else reads these self-important, why-oh-why, state of the nation screeds.

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John Lichfield: Are we looking for a new message – or a new Messiah? - John Lichfield, Commentators - The Independent

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France has a new political and philosophical prophet. Step aside Jean-Paul Sartre. Step forward, Stéphane Hessel, 93. Mr Hessel's slim volume – very slim – called Indignez-vous! ("Protest!" or "Cry out!") is a publishing and social phenomenon across the Channel. More than 600,000 copies have been sold since October. The "book", 19 rambling pages of conversations with a sweet and honourable old man, has been chosen by the readers of Le Monde as the publishing event of 2010. "Publishing event" is right. The success of Mr Hessel's book is eloquent and telling. The book itself is not. Indignez-vous! urges young people to emulate the wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and by defending the social "values of modern democracy". The book, or pamphlet, is rather poorly written. It is repetitive, unoriginal, simplistic and frustratingly short. The message – "indifference is crippling; be angry; revolt, peacefully, for what you believe in" – is admirable enough. As a manifesto for renewed faith in social-democratic politics in a world where democracy and politics are losing control and respect (to market fundamentalism; to the power of China; to the blabbering global village of the internet) the pamphlet is lamentably inadequate. It contains no deep analysis; no memorable writing; no prescriptions for action, except vague exhortations to "indignation" and "peaceful insurrection". Here are a couple of brief extracts. "I would like everyone – every one of us – to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history... and this stream leads us towards more justice and more freedom but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the hen-house." "... The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the world into a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift away from the 'ever more', in the world of finance but also in science and technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and a sustainable balance prevailed..." Honourable enough sentiments but hardly original or penetrating. How can one explain the book's extraordinary success in France? Partly, it is a tribute to Mr Hessel, a German-born French resistance hero who survived torture and concentration camps to become a human rights advocate and diplomat after the war. Partly, it is a reflection on the well-meaning but unreflective, gut leftiness of a section of the French chattering classes. The book is being translated into English and several other languages. It is difficult to image it being such a triumph elsewhere. And yet, and yet. The success of Mr Hessel's book – if not the book itself – may tell us a great deal. There is, not only in France, but also in Britain, the rest of Europe, and even in the US, an incoherent and, as yet undirected, popular anger and anxiety. As the German philosopher, Anselm Jappe, says in a new book, Indebted Unto Death: The Decomposition Of Capitalism, the 2008 crash was not only a financial crisis but a "crisis of civilisation". The Western world has lost one religion (the post-Thatcher and Reagan blind worship of markets) but cannot yet bring itself to believe in another one. There is widespread anger that the same market institutions, which were bailed out by state funds in 2008-9, used that money, in effect, to speculate against state debt in 2009-10. There is incomprehension that the total value of money "invested" in world financial markets (€700,000bn, according to a recent French parliamentary report) should be equivalent to 12 times the value of the annual world GDP. To continue such vast, virtual speculation is, we know, insane. To try to curb it might, the markets tell us, send the globe into an even more catastrophic recession. The people who play in this speculative casino hand fortunes to one another. Meanwhile, public spending, we are told, must be cut to prevent those same people from speculating against the euro, or against sterling, or against the dollar. We know that the growth-led model for economic and political success threatens to destroy the planet. At the same time, we cannot seriously imagine any other model. Meanwhile, little by little, not invisibly but visibly, China, representing an entirely different set of political values to the West, is buying up Western debt and Western industries and, in effect, Western consciences and Western souls. We should, as Mr Hessel suggests, logically, be turning towards the "left" and a renewed belief in the importance of regulation, common action and state investment for the public good. There remains, however, a morbid terror of anything labelled "left" – driven by memories of the Soviet debacle and the alleged failures of the post-war welfare state. These fears are rigorously encouraged, and enforced, by a large part of the Western media – certainly the British and American media – which continues to believe in, or at least, peddle versions of the old market fundamentalism. Worse, there is a deepening contempt – also enforced by part of the media and the autarchic instincts of the internet – for all mainstream politics, politicians and even for democracy itself. Mr Hessel's book touches on all these themes with varying degrees of imprecision. What he fails to offer is any coherent new response, other than "indignation". The runaway success of his book suggests that there is a vast, potential followership (and not just in France) for a new political Messiah of the centre-left: someone who could articulate the anger and frustration of the middle classes (the new "masses") and offer a convincing, democratic way through the sinister muddle of the early 21st century. The alternative – a kind of fascism-lite – can already be glimpsed in the Tea Party in the US and the rise of middle-class, anti-immigrant populist parties in Europe (G&T parties?) The success of Mr Hessel's book is telling sign of the times. Regrettably, it is unlikely to change them.

The problem being, as has been noted, that opposing everything is easy and popular. Once you start suggesting actual policies, the energetic mass support drifts away.

Also, anyone who has ever said that Western liberal democracy is going through a "crisis" should be sent to live in Somalia for a year. That is all.

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It is goinf through a crisis; that doesn;t mean total collapse and disorder. It merely means that the esablished and conventional logic no longer seems applicable, appears to produce the very consequences it sought to avoid. This is a crisis of faith, of confidence; and it is, in many respects, part of the body of the iceberg lurching into view.

Hessel doesn't seem to have an answer here, and doesn't seem, on the above, to be claiming to present one, only to be calling for personal and widespread engagement in finding one. For the first time in decades, public confidence in the prevailing system ahs been profoundly shaken; that is not in itself going to produce solutions immediately, but it does produce a questioning uncertainty that had to not applied during, frex, sundry economic crises in the 80's.

The cold war is over and largely forgotten; the dikes that held back the waves no longer stand. Storm waters are washing about in places they haven't been for decades.

Originally Posted by contracycle

It is goinf through a crisis; that doesn;t mean total collapse and disorder. It merely means that the esablished and conventional logic no longer seems applicable, appears to produce the very consequences it sought to avoid.

In that case the crisis is permanent, and thus the expression becomes meaningless.

Let's be honest, no one ever got a social science research grant by proposing to look into why everything's actually going pretty well. Equally, We Should All be Jolly Grateful Really isn't a polemic that's going to sell many copies.

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Not really; the atmosphere is quite different now. The prevailing view that the status quo was inevitable and unchallengable has been shaken. These times are different; the Long Boom is over, and so is the certainty that went with it. The perception that Something Must Be Done is back, even if there is no clear of vision of what that should be.

The Long Boom ended ith the 70s oil shocks, and even before then France was hardly living in an age of intellectual certainty - far less so than now, in fact. BITD proper communism was still a viable proposition and people were getting all excited over deconstructivism and all the rest of it. Now all we've got is a vague, tranqued-up feeling shared by everyone from the far right to the far left that Something Must Be Done (TM).

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I donl;t accept the 70's as terminator by any means; and you mention precisely the points I already touched on, the fact that at the time all talk of alternatives was irrevoicably related to the Cold War. The 1970's oil shocks were an ezxternal event, not one brought about purely by internal causes, and the environment is such that specualtion can now be conducted with the shadow of the Soviet Union looming over it all.

(not that I would accept that "proper" communism was a "viable proiposition" in that set of circumstances).