Nicolas Sarkozy, the murderer of the Princess of Cleves
Nicolas Sarkozy, the murderer of the Princess of Cleves | Hélène Cixous | Comment is free | The Guardian
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'La rupture!" A clean break! That was Nicolas Sarkozy's word. Break, he would shout, miming it with his whole contortionist's dislocated body. Break! Presto! And break with whom? Of course, with the past. With the fathers! Chirac and Giscard! We were going to do paternalism differently! We would let the right wing be right wing, without "hang-ups". And without delay.
To set an example he, the smooth talker, would "first of all shed his hang-ups about the French language". Let's get rid of this weight, of these manners. Style? Grammar? All in the past! The French language? Those centuries of literature, these treasures of humanity? What's the use? Do you need a fine turn of phrase to be president of the republic? To sway the people? A good kick up the arse, quick and cheap. But language and its inexhaustible resources, its quaintnesses – it empowers speech, carries thought. Like I said, the French people, they don't need to think no more, says the smooth talker. I'm making your lives simpler, look: "Work more to earn more." Ain't that beautiful? As good as Racine, La Fontaine or Hugo. Henceforth (now that's a word we'll chuck out), we'll have less words, more dosh. People of France, don't bother; I am the Law, take it from me.
All of a sudden France is owned by a man possessed, an outlaw; it's like Chicago's come to Neuilly. One no longer has talks or discussions, one lightens the conversation with gunshots, punches and kicks. The sovereign lashes out. He is now separated from the French language, in a thunderous divorce. You've got to see what he does to language. He mauls it, he beats it, he pummels it, he dismembers it. Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent's face. He imposes his idiolect on the world. Only he "speaks" this idiom; only stand-up comedians imitate it. Language gets a hammering from him. Upon its ruins he proclaims the disgrace of culture and the reign of ignorance.
To inaugurate his empire of brutal regression and to strike a clear example into people's minds, the ruler decided to put an end to The Princess of Cleves. "The other day, for fun – we take whatever fun we can get – I was looking at the exam syllabus for administrative managers. Some sadist or idiot – you choose – had put on the syllabus to ask candidates about The Princess of Cleves," he recounted to a meeting in Lyon. "I don't know if it often happened to you to ask the woman at the ticket office what she thought of The Princess of Cleves ... Just imagine!"
Feeling pity for top civil servants, he releases them from the duty to read the novel in another massacred speech: "Volunteer work should be an experience recognised in competitive exams for the civil service, for after all, it's as valuable as knowing The Princess of Cleves by heart ... Well ... I got nothing against but still, still … because I had a really hard time on her." This brand of calculated barbarity should remain in the annals of French history. Just imagine an English potentate breaking the good news to the people: a ban on bloody tedious Robinson Crusoe, cluttering the mind. And Shakespeare, what a drag! Old stuff. We've got the telly now.
But the French sovereign's singular mark is his choice of scapegoat. With blind, vengeful fury, he's rounding on the most discreet, distinguished figure of French language and literature. The Princess of Cleves is the first novel in literature. Worse, it's written by a woman (Madame de La Fayette). Worse, it immortalises a woman. And now all these complex characters, politically and intellectually refined, fall in the 21st century under the blows of a bad boy driven by an absurd urge that is beyond him. He doesn't know what he's doing.
When it comes to suffering in the workplace, the anxiety of unemployment, the stranglehold on teachers, widespread injustice in the health sector … for all this, Sarkozy has no ear.
Why then this fury against French language and literature? This resentment? This frenzy? Because here is a world on which he cannot pull the old trick of the law of the strongest. He doesn't know how to seduce thought, how to reduce it, dominate it, make it crawl. He feels an impotent rage. Now he's ready to give it a pummelling. Careful! Perhaps he suspects that he is himself a character in the big political novel of The Human Comedy. But he is no main character, no De Gaulle or Mitterrand: he will never deliver a speech à la Jean Jaurès, never abolish any death penalty. He just taps Angela Merkel on the shoulder, and each year he parades before his interlocutors, the nine true modest French citizens personally selected for his televised circus number so that they can't cut him short. He asks them their own questions and gives all the answers.
He has cut out the nation's tongue, and put it in his pocket.
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Totally on Sarko's side here. Fuck that shit.
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