I have to admit to a wrong call about France that I made earlier, when the riots by Muslim unemployed youth made headlines. I thought that such riots prefaced a squeeze on the French government, as the youths in question tend to be the silent victims of the bureaucratization of the French economy that has benefitted more established and politically-plugged-in middle-class groups, and that the resultant turmoil would bring an end to the Fifth Republic. With regard to this forecast, I was flat-out wrong.
The turmoil, though, seems to have caught the attention of the new and present French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. He has recently said, in conjuction with some of his inner circle, that France suffers from a kind of malaise, caused by too much attention paid to matters of the intellect. Or, to be briefer about it as the New York Times has, "New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much."
In America, any leader who says that would either be visited with a lot of hostility or, in more complacent times, be laughed off as some kind of dunce. Thus, it would be difficult for President Sarkozy to import such a call to America, even though it is profoundly Americanistic at its core: "'too many thinkers, not enough doers' is the cause of the nation's economic stagnation."
Every nation has certain activities that act as a sink for the unemployed or unemployable, offering them a means of life that enables them to feel useful by being useful, if in an out-of-market way. In North America, politicking often serves this function. Paying attention to the "Defense of the Realm," often by reading Jane's defense periodicals, is one of Britain's chief sinks. I need hardly say that the intellectual life is one of the most noticable ones in France. There are, of course, others in any nation and culture in each nation, some localized.
In certain times, it is decided upon high that there are too many people pursuing such a way of life - that standing outside the madding, if economically productive, crowd is becoming too popular. Evidently, Sarkozy and associates have decided that France has reached that point, and have responded with the typical response from the centre of power: officially-sanctioned iconoclasm.
- Daniel M. Ryan
