France Faces a Crisis of the Soul Amid Sweeping Social Changes

SAULIEU, France — While their cows dozed, farmers huddled around their TV sets for the May extravaganza: the last “Seinfeld,” in English, on a French satellite channel named Jimmy.

It was a powerful sign of the times for a nation gnawed by questions, in deepest Burgundy at the very heart and belly of France, as much as in fancy Parisian parlors.

In a globalizing, Anglicizing, homogenizing world, with Europe merging into a single economic and political conglomerate and American pop culture sweeping the earth, can the French still be French?

After two millenniums of conquering kingdoms, inspiring revolution and civilizing a benighted world, what awaits the nation of 60 million in the third?

And where do liberty, fraternity and equality fit in with urban violence, disaffected youth, joblessness, homelessness, collapsing authority, political scandal, police brutality, racism and xenophobia?

Billions will watch World Cup soccer in France this month, amid trappings of Gallic grandeur. But the cameras won’t get to Paulette Millot’s place, where a greater game is being played out in the smoky gloom.

Within the half-empty little bistro at Alligny, a rural village near the languishing old culinary paradise of Saulieu, the past seems to be losing in overtime to the future.

“La crise,” as the French call it, is specific and personal in gathering spots like Paulette’s, dotted all across rural areas where France’s roots are deepest.

Men in filthy wool caps grumble that the European Union might ban their raw milk cheese. Women in muddy boots fear their sons becoming hooked on Paris and leaving the farm. They still talk in long-gone “old francs,” with two extra zeros. They’re suspicious of this new European currency called the euro.

“Yes, life as we knew it is ending,” laments Millot, who once had to serve invading German troops and now is happy to see the odd German tourist stray off the auto route and into Alligny.

Her grandmother opened the bistro back when Alligny was a rich farming community, with shops and a comfortable hotel. In its heyday, it offered three meals a day instead of just drinks.

For three generations, the one-room pub bound together a community where vintners fretted over rain, grandmothers bragged about their boeuf Bourguignon and the priest lingered over cognac.

Now Millot is 77, bent and so nearly blind that she sneaks a finger into the glass so she pours the right amount. Regulars sit by the potbellied stove on chairs that antique dealers would kill to own.

“When I go, Alligny is finished,” she said, probably not exaggerating. The only shop in town is a bread dispensary, not even a real bakery, with a few shelves of groceries.

France Still Keeps the World Company

In the cities, many see “la crise” as a global issue. Victor Hugo, after all, once mused, “France, France, without you the world would be alone.”

Clearly, the world is not alone yet. French restaurants, fashion houses, factories, universities and galleries continue to thrive. France is, by far, the world’s most visited country.

But substantial change is afoot, and debate bordering on national psychosis rages over how France can keep up with modern times while maintaining its character.

Suddenly, a sharp dose of what the French have always scorned in America is upon them, shattering treasured myths about what makes them different.

Papers tell of serial killers, satanic sects--even shortened lunch breaks. Frenchmen, fairly or not, see the rise of urban violence and occasional gunplay as being as American as McDonald’s or “Seinfeld.”

Police shun the toughest suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, where graffiti runs to obscene English and conversation is often in Arabic, Vietnamese or any of several African tongues.

Unemployment is 12%. Aimless kids tear up schools and torch cars. Farmers dump cauliflower on railway tracks to protest falling subsidies.

Farmers’ children are moving to Paris, if not London, leaving vast pockets of rural desert. Supermarkets and shopping malls are hammering the small merchants. Bakers who used to pride themselves on their croissants and baguettes now buy them frozen from franchises.

The old politics is in turmoil. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, called Nazi and fascist by its foes, has split the right. The Communists are partners of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s Socialist Party.

To prepare for European monetary union, the state wants to shed its bulky share of the economy, revive debt-ridden state industries and cut back on various forms of welfare.

But these measures have triggered crippling strikes in recent years. The latest, by airline pilots, disrupted the country just as 32 national soccer teams were gathering in France for the World Cup, the last global sports event of the millennium.

Optimists Retain the Majority

Yet for all this disquiet, a broad sampling of opinion from one end of France to the other suggests that optimists hold the majority.

“Our foundations will remain,” declared Paule Blondelet, a lifelong friend of Millot’s, who worked for Francois Mitterrand when he was mayor of nearby Chateau-Chinon, long before he became president.

“The more that France modernizes, the more we hold onto our values,” she said. “We are going back to our basic resources, to our families and traditions, as a counterweight.”

As evidence, she cites holiday gatherings, when great-grandchildren hover at her elbow as she roasts a haunch of lamb. Or the loyalty of friends.

But like most other French optimists, she also admits to deep fears. Some worry about restive youth and the effect of 4 million immigrants on the social fabric. And Blondelet is frightened about where such worries will lead.

“I’m terrified of the National Front,” she said. “Voters are fooled, just like Hitler duped the Germans in the 1930s, with talk of national pride, security, old values, a car in every garage.”

The Front, a France-first party that blames society’s worst ills on North African immigrants and globalization, scares many people. Leader Le Pen’s polished veneer often fails to mask a bully beneath. He has been convicted of roughing up and insulting a female Socialist candidate and banned from political office for three years. He once belittled the Holocaust as a detail of history.

President Jacques Chirac calls the Front “racist and xenophobic,” but it scores near 15% in national voting and higher in many local elections. Four of 22 regions are run by center-right governors who got their jobs only because of National Front support.

In Vitrolles, a National Front-controlled city near Marseille, a special black-shirt-clad police force enforces the law aggressively. Liberal newspapers and books are purged from the municipal library.

Plenty of people oppose the National Front. The two center-right parties each expelled regional governors who accepted Front support. But for many, the Front is only a symptom of a bigger problem.

Sophie Body-Gendrot, a sociologist with a team of researchers taking France’s pulse, believes that her country’s troubles are far worse than most people think, endangering the very foundations of traditional society.

“It’s easy to single out suburban kids or National Front voters, but it’s much more widespread than that,” she says, citing data that she gathered for a report to Prime Minister Jospin.

She finds that urban violence is linked to rural revolt; that generic fear more than racism feeds the National Front; that squeezed by poverty, disgusted by politics as usual, people are simply turning off.

“Whole segments of society are rejecting authority, not paying rent, refusing the old norms of civility,” Body-Gendrot said. “It’s getting worse, and I don’t see solutions.”

“We need much more dialogue,” she concluded, “but the French don’t know how to engage in dialogue.”

Disturbing news of the present is mixed with the appearance of ghosts from the past.

In April, a court in Bordeaux sentenced Maurice Papon, 87, a former government minister, to 10 years in prison for sending 1,500 Jews to German death camps while serving as a regional police chief in the Vichy government of World War II.

Testimony opened old wounds, recounting collaboration, capitulation, cowardice. While some applauded the sentence, others wondered why Papon went unpunished for 50 years and pointed out that he may die before he goes to prison: Under French law, the sentence is stayed pending appeal.

During the trial, newspapers brought back a more recent ghost. They revealed that Papon had ordered Paris police to shoot Algerian antiwar demonstrators on sight when he was police chief in the 1960s. Dozens of bodies were dumped secretly into the Seine River.

Germany ranks high among French insecurities. In a little over a century, three invasions have blitzed across the Rhine. The last bitter occupation ended well within living memory.

And now many see the European Union being structured with a decidedly Teutonic tilt.

When EU members sought a president of the new European Central Bank, all but France agreed on a Dutchman who was strongly backed by Germany. Chirac held out for a Frenchman, forcing a compromise.

Reaction across Europe excoriated Chirac for acting selfishly and undermining the euro, the new currency. But many French people approved of their president resisting what they perceived as German hegemony.

If these various existentialist conflicts take many forms, the unifying metaphor is food. The centerpiece of France’s art de vivre has always been a meal made from the freshest ingredients, lovingly prepared, savored course by course.

Now people have less time to shop, cook and eat, to talk across the table about grand ideas; that is, to be French.

But again, in any random sampling, the optimists still prevail.

“The McDonald’s phenomenon is a matter of circumstance and it changes nothing,” pronounces Bernard Loiseau of the Cote d’Or restaurant in Saulieu, who is held in godlike reverence among serious eaters.

“OK, so people are often in a hurry and only have time to wolf down a sandwich,” he says. “But the idea of dressing up, going out, celebrating a birthday or a marriage--that is sacred.”

Open borders mean new challenges for France, Loiseau says, certainly no death knell.

“I’m all for enlarging Europe, but does that mean I’ll be speaking German?” he said, arms flapping for emphasis. “Never. We are French. French. That will not change.”

Just north on Highway 6, Jean-Claude Nuti brims with confidence for a fresh new France planted firmly in old ground.

Thanks to electronics, Nuti can run his market research company from his old Burgundy farm, e-mailing complex graphics to New York or brainstorming by cell phone atop his tractor.

His high-tech office is lined with antique leather-bound books, and dank stone stairs lead down to heartwarming racks of supine dusty bottles. His Paris apartment is filled with Asian artifacts.

Nuti’s wife, Helene, a filmmaker and publicist, studies all morning with a computer consultant, who then joins the family for a long, sumptuous lunch, where the topic is Moliere’s plays, not Microsoft.

“There is no contradiction between being part of the 21st century and being French,” he said. “Some things will never change.”

The Nutis’ 23-year-old son, Lorenzo, modems off a dozen letters a day to friends around the world. His sister, Liberte, is returning to London after working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her fluent Chinese is getting rusty, but she prefers the art world.

Every Christmas, and often in between, the family gathers around the stone kitchen fireplace with Helene’s mother and old friends.

“Sure, things’ll be a little different by the time I have my own kids, and they’re growing up,” Lorenzo put it, “but not really. We will still respect the sort of life we grew up with.”

At tables like the Nutis’, outsiders learn what makes Frenchness so indelible.

Financial scandals that sully top government officials and business leaders prompt bitter jokes and a shrug that says, so what else is new?

In some ways, future change in France could reinforce the past.

A decade ago, Le Pen appropriated the national flag and Joan of Arc as emblems of his France-first party. Now his left-wing opponents are doing something similar.

Near the Bastille recently, leftist marchers chanted slogans and waved the Tricolor in a display of patriotism that might have brought amused derision from the same crowd only a few years ago.

France’s problems, whether real or hypothetical, add up to “la crise,” whose solution the French can only guess at.

Jean-Guy Marenco, an independent builder and car fanatic in the Var, seems to typify a majority. He works hard for small successes, and his family lives comfortably enough. The euro doesn’t scare him.

“Most people don’t give a damn whether it’s left or right, just so long as it’s honest,” he says. “If we can just get some leaders who think of France ahead of themselves, we’ll be fine.”

His remark might have been made around Paulette Millot’s stove, or in any neighborhood of Paris.

With a chuckle, Marenco concluded: “That stuff about equality, fraternity, liberty. We laugh about it, but down deep, we believe in it. That’s who the French are, and we expect to stay like that.”