Los Angeles Time Interview : Edouard Balladur : Defending French Culture From Invading Americans By Scott Kraft

When Jacques Chirac led the Gaullist conservatives to an overwhelming victory in national elections last year, he had his eye on a bigger prize--the presidency. Unfortunately, the sitting president, Francois Mitterrand, planned to keep the job until his term expired in 1995.

So the conservatives devised a cunning, though politically risky strategy. They selected Edouard Balladur, one of Chirac’s oldest friends, a modest man without presidential aspirations or thundering charisma, to take the job of prime minister, the nation’s second-most-powerful job. That way, they figured, Chirac would be free to run for president while the mild-mannered Balladur, a seasoned politician, attempted to “cohabit” with Mitterrand and grapple with the domestic problems.

But, to the surprise of many and to the dismay of Chirac, Balladur has in just a year on the job become the odds-on favorite to replace Mitterrand, a Socialist, in the country’s highest office.

The 65-year-old prime minister’s popularity has baffled political analysts, journalists and even his own colleagues.

Analysts say Balladur’s popularity stems, in part, from his relative anonymity. Although a career government official, whose jobs included chief of staff to President Georges Pompidou in the 1970s, Balladur was not well-known to most voters. And many in France were looking for a fresh face.

Balladur is known for his formality and his courtesy, characteristics that have helped him stay out of range of the arrows frequently fired by his opponents.

As he sat for a rare interview at Matignon, the prime minister’s office on the Left Bank of Paris, he wore a tailored, Saville Row suit and kept the jacket buttoned. He is not a large man, standing just 5-foot-7, and he wears his thinning gray hair combed back.

Balladur usually arrives at his office around 7:30 a.m. and leaves at 8 p.m., heading back to his home across the Seine River in the up-scale 16th arrondisement . He and his wife, Marie-Josephe, married for 29 years, have four grown sons.

Born in Turkey to a well-to-do French banker, Balladur earned a degree from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the school of France’s bureaucratic elite. He understands English, but prefers to speak in French. “I have a complex with English,” he explained. “I don’t like to appear ridiculous.”

Though an unabashed protector of things French, the prime minister is fond of the United States and Americans. Under his guidance, the government is spending millions of dollars this year on D-Day landing ceremonies. And, at the government’s invitation, President Bill Clinton will become only the second foreigner in decades to address Parliament next month.

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Question: Many Americans, and many people in Southern California where the film industry is primarily based, are beginning to believe that France wants to close its cultural doors to competition. What’s your feeling?

Answer: Yes. Yesterday, Ted Turner was in this office and we talked about that. I think there is one thing that must be understood: We are strongly against a uniform world culture with one single world language.

We the French consider that we have a great culture and a great civilization language and that it’s perfectly legitimate that we should defend our culture. I forget what the exact percentages are, but American films have much more than 50% of the French market. And French films in the United States are just a few percentage points. So I think really the question is for me to put to you.

Q: Maybe you should put it to Ted Turner.

A: I said the same thing to Ted Turner, and he agreed with me that we need a diversity of culture worldwide.

Q: The question is, though, can you protect it by legislation, by law?

A: I think one can, yes. And it’s our firm intention to do so.

Now, this brings up a problem. It’s really a problem of principle. Should world progress only spring from the law of the markets? And that applies to everything. Economy, trade, culture. If that is the case, then nations are no longer of any use. We could just “leave it to nature,” so to speak.

As you know, the tendency of nature is that the strongest become stronger, and the weakest become weaker. The basis of civilizations is their struggle against nature. That is the basis of education, of religion, of democracy, of law.

So, it is a civilization endeavor that we are engaged in. It’s a bit of a paradox.

Q: That’s pretty philosophical.

A: (laughs) It’s an interesting idea, you might say. I don’t know if you can put that in your newspaper.

Q: What baffles many Americans is why France, such a powerful country and with such a rich culture, needs laws to protect its culture and its language. The French didn’t need to protect their culture in the 19th Century.

A: There are two different aspects. First is the language and, secondly, there is what you might call the cultural industry.

As for the language itself, this is not something new we are doing. Three and a half centuries ago, the Academie Francaise was set up (to protect the language). It’s not something my government has thought up that is new.

One has to have an open mind on this. Words like le weekend are part of the French language now. The only thing is, you shouldn’t overdo this. When the precise French word exists, there’s no point in not using it.

Q: And culture?

A: What is more interesting, really, is the cultural industry, the cultural economy, if you like. You’re perfectly right. In the 19th Century, this wasn’t necessary, nor at the beginning of the 20th Century. But cultural activity has become a very big consumer product. It’s true of books, films, shows. It needs a market to live.

And a country whose territory isn’t big enough needs to help those cultural activities, to give them what the market cannot provide. It’s a problem you don’t have in the United States, because the market is already there. You have almost 300 million consumers of cultural products.

But it is a problem in Europe, and especially in European countries that don’t use English as a national language.

The inadequacy of the market has caused a certain number of film industries to almost completely disappear in Europe. Luckily, the French film industry still exists, but I think it exists only thanks to this machinery that we have. And that’s why you have to correct market forces.

If we had a Francophone market with 300 million people, then we wouldn’t need to have this machinery. But your products and your cultural activities already pay for themselves in the U.S. market, and, therefore, they can be exported at a very low cost. We can’t do that.

So I think it’s a consequence of the fact that France is smaller than the United States, both in geographical terms and in population.

Q: Do you watch films or television?

A: Television, yes. I do look at films sometimes on television. I don’t go to the cinema often because people recognize me on the streets.

Q: What do you like?

A: I like sentimental films.

Q: Such as?

A: I like “Dr. Zhivago,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Love Story.” They are very pretty films. I don’t like horror movies.

Q: Action pictures?

A: Yes, I like a good war film. I like comedies. I don’t like sad pictures, even though “Love Story” is sad and “Dr. Zhivago” is sad, too, in the end. But they are very beautiful films.

I recently saw Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor.” It was an excellent film.

Q: Clint Eastwood was recently honored by the French culture minister for his work in films. That kind of thing is confusing to many Americans. The French seem to like Hollywood films, but the government seems to not want them to like those films.

A: That’s not at all it. First of all, Clint Eastwood wouldn’t have had his declaration if the government hadn’t agreed. But you need both. We like American films. I’m very fond of American films and American actors and actresses. There are some very fine actors. But it doesn’t mean that they should be the only ones on the screens. They have a monopoly.

We also were a very powerful country in the past, and our tendency at the time, probably, was also to consider that French language and French culture excluded all others. Now history has moved. Things have changed. And things will go on changing. One day you (Americans) may have to defend yourself against Chinese films.

Q: Speaking of that reduction in French power. Is it difficult for the French to accept a lesser role in world affairs?

A: I think the French people have gotten used to this for a number of years. But at the same time, I think at the heart of every Frenchman there is a feeling that his civilization has a worldwide value. It’s a heritage we get from the French Revolution.

At the heart of all French men and women is the feeling, perhaps, that they embody an international value, related to principles, to rules, to laws, to behavior.

If you look at our colonial past, it essentially consisted of seeing to it that the largest possible number of populations were able to join the French model of civilization.

There are two ways of looking at that phenomenon. You can say that it was generosity, if you like. But you can also say it was a sort of imperialism. You can say both and there probably is a bit of truth in both, anyway.

So, basically, France considers that she has a special mission in the service of peace and human rights. That doesn’t mean she always fulfills that mission in a proper way, but she tries to do it.

Q: So France feels a world responsibility, much in the way the United States does.

A: Yes, but in the United States, you have public-opinion reactions that are somewhat contradictory. Some people say, “Why aren’t you doing something in this or that country?” and others say, “Why did you try to deal with another country’s problems when you have problems of your own at home?” American public opinion oscillates between those two attitudes.

Q: A few months ago, President Clinton suggested that America should try to strengthen its economic ties with Asia rather than focus only on Europe. Does that worry you?

A: I do not share your analysis. If he shows a bigger overture to Asia, such an evolution seems to me to be natural. It’s the same for us. We are more interested in Asia than 10 years ago. It should not be interpreted as U.S. disinterest in Europe.

We often forget in Europe that a seashore of your country is turned toward the Pacific, and that your interest in Asia is ancient and constant. But it does not constitute an alternative to the privileged relations that have to go on between the two seashores of the Atlantic.

Q: How are relations between France and the United States at the moment?

A: I am satisfied by the state of Franco-American relations now, and optimistic about their future. France and the United States base their relations on identical, fundamental interests. We have always found solutions to our temporary problems without affecting the privileged character of our alliance, which has seen our countries side by side in major crises.

This was true in the time of Gen. (Charles) de Gaulle, during the Cuban missile crisis, and it was even more true during the Gulf War. The celebration of D-Day in Normandy next month will give us the opportunity to again celebrate an important page of our common history.*