Paris, 2013

is swinging rightward again.  In the recent municipal elections, disgruntled voters sent their Socialist president a message by electing rightist mayors in a surprising array of cities.  “La Punition,” roared the headline in Libération over a photograph of a distraught President François Hollande – punishment once again for a leader's failure to provide voters with the painless affluence they were promised.  So what else is new?   

Now comes the rigeur.  I wonder if we’ll be compelled to fork up another loan to the state, as we were a generation ago when François Mitterrand’s “rupture with capitalism” ruptured the country instead.  In 1983, with inflation in the teens and the franc reeling, I wrote a check for about 4,500 francs, then worth roughly $600.  We involuntary lenders were duly paid back with interest – 11 percent in those days – just before the 1986 parliamentary elections, but the politically timed reimbursements impressed no one and the pendulum swung back with a vengeance. 

It happens that I’m in the middle of Colonel Roosevelt, the final volume of Edmund Morris’s engrossing trilogy on the life of the 26th U.S. president.   Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke French well enough to employ it at diplomatic gatherings, must be snickering in the grave, relishing an impression of déjà-vu.  Assessing his opponents in the 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt had this to say about Woodrow Wilson:

“Wilson is a good man who has in no way shown that he possesses any special fitness for the Presidency. Until he was fifty years old, as college professor and college president he advocated with skill, intelligence and good breeding the outworn doctrines which were responsible for four fifths of the political troubles of the United States. . . . Then he ran as Governor of New Jersey, and during the last eighteen months discovered that he could get nowhere advocating the doctrines he had advocated, and instantly turned an absolute somersault so far as at least half these doctrines were concerned. He still clings to the other half, and he has shown not the slightest understanding of the really great problems of our present industrial situation.”

Sigh.

Paris, 2013

Marseille, 2012

Marseille, 2013