Sardanapale

“The trial, which took place over the following weeks, was like a circus, although there was some difficulty getting the elephants into the courtroom. At last, the jury found Cloquet guilty, and he was sentenced to the guillotine. An appeal for clemency was turned down on a technicality when it was learned Cloquet’s lawyer had filed it while wearing a cardboard mustache.”

Woody Allen

The short story “The Condemned” by Woody Allen - a satire of French literature of the absurd - had always made me laugh.

I found the idea that judges could take silly accoutrements into account in their decisions deliciously surreal.

But then I read the story of a Moroccan woman whose husband and three sons are all French - but who fatefully filed her application for French nationality while wearing a burqa.

Guess what happened?

French judges turned her down, deeming “radical practice of religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of sexual equality”.

The absurd is no longer a literary fashion in France, but it appears to have become a legal one. You can read more about the case here.

Yesterday David Davis, the shadow home secretary, took a step that is almost unheard of in British political history.

He resigned as a member of parliament – and as the second most senior conservative leader after David Cameron – and promised to run again for his seat on a platform of defending “British liberties”.

Davis took pissed off his party – which is a year or two away from being elected – to take a moral stand, a day after the House of Commons passed a law extending detentions for terror suspects.

Many find his move baffling or quixotic. But his stirring resignation speech is worth quoting:

“Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because with centuries or forebears we defended the freedoms of the British people. Well we did up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, the document that guarantees that most fundamental of British freedoms - Habeas Corpus, the right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge…

Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta…

But in truth, 42 days is just one - perhaps the most salient example - of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state….

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off Scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped.

And for that reason, I feel that today it’s incumbent on me to take a stand.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden….

I will argue this by-election, against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government. “

The movie channel recently played a film called The Last Mitterrand.

It is adapted from a book by a French journalist, Georges-Marc Bénamou, who was picked by François Mitterrand as his diarist during his last three years in power.

It shows the terminally ill president going about his business and giving his thoughts of life, politics and the universe for the younger man to preserve for posterity.

The book, which came out a year after Mitterrand’s death in 1996, was controversial mostly because of a passage that had the president gorge on ortolans during on New Year’s eve.

His family cried foul: the great man, they said, would never have allowed himself to break European Union legislation on protected species.

Which account should I believe: Mitterrand as a viveur ready to flout the rules to the end, or as a puritanical stickler for the law?

Tough call. I’ll have to think about that one.

But that brief dinner scene is not the most shocking (in fact I did not understand its significance until I went online to read up about the book).

Mitterrand (magnificently played by Michel Bouquet, who bears a striking physical resemblance) is presented as an acid-tongued control-freak who thrives on putting down the flunkeys which whom he surrounds himself.

He is also paranoid, and constantly talks about plots by enemies who have pursued him for decades.

And now for nasty part: Mitterrand combined in a particularly French way a love of luxury with empty revolutionary rhetoric.

Bénamou quotes from a speech to a UN “summit on social development” in March 1995:

“Will we allow the world to become a global market, ruled only by the law of the strongest, aimed only at securing maximum profit in minimum time, a world where speculators ruin in a few hours the labor of millions of men and women? Will we abandon future generations to these blind forces?”

Right. So what do we do? Abolish profits and get rid of those blood-sucking speculators?

But wait! I thought that had been tried before, and never with shining success.

Mitterrand’s life spanned the 20th Century, but the main lessons from that century were apparently lost on him.

And also on Bénamou, who appears to admire this presidential twaddle. His main complaint is that Mitterrand did nothing to support the implementation of his ideals.

In this, it must be said, Bénamou is unfair.

He neglects to mention, for instance, that three days after giving that speech, Mitterrand was embracing Fidel Castro - contributing to keeping 10 million Cubans sheltered from the “blind forces” of capitalism in his concentration camp country.

Bénamou also takes Mitterrand to task over his connections with France’s collaborationist Vichy regime.

This is where I actually felt sorry for the old man.

He was being harassed by a callow youth who has never been in a war, and was more interested in judging than listening to him.

Mitterrand’s murky past is worth delving into, but by scholars not prosecutors (the best book on the subject, Une Jeunesse française by Pierre Péan, a masterpiece of historical detective work, was remarkably judgment-free)

Bénamou’s pose is not just morally vacuous, it is also professionally stupid.

If he had been less sniffy about Mitterrand’s past, he might have got something out of him. In the end - despite access many researchers would have killed for - Bénamou contributes nothing to our knowledge of that past.

Mitterrand’s ultimate tragedy is that he picked the wrong confessor.

Having just re-read Frédéric Bastiat’s tract Government, I find it as illuminating and relevant as it was in 1848.

The French state is constantly expected to act.

As Bastiat put it, “100.000 mouths from the press and public forums” urge it to at once:

“Organize labor and workmen;
Root out selfishness;
Repress the insolence and tyranny of capital;
Make experiments on manure and eggs;
Cover the country with railways;
Irrigate the plains;
Plant the hills;
Set up model farms;
Set up social workshops;
Colonize Algeria;
Nurture children;
Instruct youths;
Assist the aged;
Send the inhabitants of towns into the country;
Equalize the profits of all trades;
Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow;
Emancipate Italy, Poland and Hungary;
Breed and perfect the saddle-horse;
Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and ballerinas;
Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy;
Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people.”

Inevitably, 160 years on, some these calls need updating.

Experiments in agriculture technology can only be carried out with the precautionary principle firmly in mind. Horses are no longer central to transportation policy.

Recolonizing Algeria is out of the question: the state is now supposed to rebuild Afghanistan.

Italy and Poland are free: the places to emancipate now are Darfur and Tibet.

But the main thrust of Bastiat’s list of demands is strikingly current.

The French state is still supposed to protect workers from the rough winds of trade and all hazards of life, to provide more jobs, teachers, cheap loans, as well as support for farmers, artists, and pretty much everyone else.

I would only ass one item to bring the list completely up to date: at the minute the government is meant to shelter people from the worldwide rise in oil prices.

I don’t mean to knock Nicolas Sarkozy’s latest proposals on this matter (he wants to use surplus income from the gasoline sales tax to reduce the fuel bill of the low-income households - not a too idiotic an idea if you insist on doing something.)

I’m only noting that Sarkozy answered urgent demands arising from the depth of French society.

As always, especially when confronted by special interested using violence, like the fishermen currently blocking French ports and fuel depots, the “hyperpresident” is only too happy to spring into action.

It would never occur to him to say: “You’re asking too much. Go away.”

Instead he encourages France’s fateful tendency to believe - as Bastiat put it - that the state

“has bread for all mouths, work for all hands, capital for all enterprises, credit for all projects, oil for all wounds, balm for all sufferings, advice for all perplexities, solutions for all doubts, truths for all intellects, diversions from all troubles, milk for infancy, and wine for old age - which can provide for all our wants, anticipate all our wishes, satisfy all our curiosity, correct all our errors, repair all our faults, and exempt us henceforth from the necessity for foresight, prudence, judgment, sagacity, experience, order, economy, temperance, and activity. “

The French cannot see that these contradictory demands are rooted in childish conception of government, as an ominpotent entity that stands above society and showers goodies from on high.

The left’s response to Sarkozy’s fuel proposal wonderfully illustrates this delusional view of the state.

Socialist leader François Hollande says the fuel tax surplus should be given back to all drivers, and restated his plans to hand out “gasoline vouchers” to a thankful populace.

The idea is no longer to rob Peter to pay Paul. It is to rob Peter and Paul to pay Peter and Paul. As Bastiat put it in a celebrated formula:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

No one realizes that the average citizen loses out from this transfer: it has a cost and entrench the powers of the state.

The French state is not Big Brother, but Big Mother - a caring presence that stands above you, ready to be milked.

Its wards seek to extract as much as they can from it, while giving as little as possible.

We constantly talk of “brotherhood” and “solidarity”. But few nations try harder to live off the public purse, without realizing that in so doing it is only cheating itself.

Click here for a translation of Bastiat’s Government.

Here are my last two cut-and-paste jobs on British articles about 1968. Both are from the current issue of Prospect Magazine.

The first is a cogent analysis by Jacques Rupnik of the deep differences between the tragedy that was the Prague Spring and the Parisian farce:

From Paris to Prague and from Warsaw to Berlin, not to mention Berkeley or Mexico, there was a generational moment of “incoherent fraternity” (Paul Berman): similar fashions, listening to the same music, the shared distrust of political establishments…

But in reality the language and the political aspirations differed substantially.

The “alienation” in a consumer society and the traps of “formal democracy” denounced by French radicals were by no means scorned in societies then emerging from 20 years of real socialism.

The French 68ers wanted to reclaim the purity of the socialist idea from the communist grip, while the Czechs, who had learned the hard way about such things, were trying to dilute it with all the intellectual trends of the time, from psychoanalysis to the Christian-Marxist dialogue.

For French 68ers the word “Europe” was then associated with the “common market,” and references to “European civilisation” smacked of colonialism in the aftermath of the Algerian war.

Their international horizon was “third worldish,” with the opposition to the war in Vietnam, support for Mao and for Cuban-style “revolution in the revolution” (the title of an essay by Régis Debray…)

In Prague, the identification with European culture was part of an emancipation from the post-war Sovietised eastern orientation of official cultural life.

As Milan Kundera put it ten years later: “The Parisian May was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague spring was an explosion of post-revolutionary skepsis… The Parisian May was radical. The Prague spring was a popular revolt of the moderates.”

And what of the respective legacies? In Paris, it was “if you can’t beat them, join them.” The 68ers have gradually conquered the institutions they had challenged and reached the peak of their power in French society.

From feminism to environmentalism and multiculturalism, they have imposed their agenda. In the words of Cohn-Bendit: “We have won culturally and socially while, fortunately, losing politically.”

The fate of their Czech counterparts was very different. They were purged and expelled from all walks of public life for two decades.

So when the “velvet revolution” of 1989 surprised them (and the rest of their countrymen), they were pushing 50 and had lost 20 of their most creative years.

1989 was anti-68 in the sense that it did not try to pick up where the ‘68 reform movement stopped: it sought western market democracy rather than the utopia of “socialism with a human face.”

The second piece is by PJ O’Rourke:

Mind-altering drugs were the best part of the 1960s. Nowadays these drugs have a bad reputation simply because lots of people died from them and many more had their lives ruined. But let’s look on the bright side. I give an example from personal experience.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine and I both suffered that common malady of late middle age: debilitating depression. My friend is six years older than I - just old enough to have missed the era of being one’s own pharmacist.

When depression struck my friend, he thought, “I’m a worthless human. What have I done with my life? I make myself and all the people around me miserable. Why go on?”

I thought, “Bad acid!”

I immediately knew-from extensive practice of introducing wrong chemicals into my brain-that wrong chemicals were in my brain. I went to a doctor. We fiddled around with drugs, just like I always used to, except legally. We found something that worked. I have the right chemicals in my brain. And I feel great.

My square friend, on the other hand, he… Well, to tell the truth he did exactly the same thing I did. He’s got the right chemicals in his brain too, and he feels great. But there’s a key difference between sandals-and-pot era me and white-bucks-and-beer era him.

He keeps asking his doctor when he can get off his meds. I keep asking if I can get more.

Le Monde hails Sarkozy’s “liberal (i.e. pro-market) clarification”.

According to the paper, the French president will be much more forceful and coherent in reforming the economy his second year in office than he was in his first.

Le Monde praises the centerpiece of his new program, the “law on economic modernisation”, saying it marks a “resolute acceptance of supply side policy.”

Would that it was true. I too support the bill, which aims to encourage an entrepreneurial society by cutting red tape, strengthening competition, and generally putting consumers first.

But I doubt that the move will deliver the “rupture” that Sarkozy once promised – for two main reasons.

The first is that he may already have blown his chances. During his first six months in office, Sarkozy wasted a strong popular mandate for change and huge majority.

He implemented some reforms but balked at radical measures such as scrapping the 35-hour week, and shied away from confrontation with vested interest.

I can’t see how he can re-invent himself as an effective modernizer after running out of political capital.

But the more fundamental reason to be skeptical is that Sarkozy is not a conviction politician in the mould of Reagan or Thatcher.

He is only a lukewarm reformer. The Economist hit the nail on the head when it wrote recently:

“For at the heart of Sarkonomics is a contradiction: Mr Sarkozy promises both to create an entrepreneurial, risk-taking society and to protect workers, factories and jobs.

When he was running for president, his campaign stop of preference was the factory floor, where he would surround himself with industrious-looking men in hard hats and promise never to let France lose its factories, because, “Once the factories go, everything goes.”

He may call himself a liberal but he also believes in national champions, and in a strong industrial policy to defend them.”

The French journalist Pierre Briançon is not impressed by 10 month of Sarkozy presidency:

“Truth be told, nothing much has happened in France since Mr. Sarkozy was elected on a promise of “rupture.”

Reports have been commissioned and ignored, ministers have been infantilized and silenced, while the president has faked action on all fronts, talking here and insulting opponents there with expletives no U.S.-based newspaper could print.

But true reforms have been rare and few.

The Sarkozy administration has made a few commendable inroads on topics that were long considered taboo. But their limited scale gives an idea of what passes for reform in France these days.

Train conductors have been asked to retire at the same young age (60) as anyone else, and not ten years earlier.

State-owned universities have been granted some degree of autonomy that might allow them, down the road, to — heaven forbid — compete with each other.

Neither the job-killing 35-hour week nor the populist, so-called wealth tax have been abolished, though their most absurd consequences have been curtailed by creating major loopholes.”

What else? Well, that’s it.”

His whole article, in the Wall Street Journal, is here.

Both French and US voters are obsessed with the stagnation of living standards.

In France, this feeling is largely behind the unpopularity of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the conservative losses in the current local elections.

In America, the “middle-class squeeze” is a major theme for both Democratic front-runners.

Hillary Clinton has spoken of “seven years of stagnant wages, declining incomes and increasing inequality.”

Barack Obama claims to be on the side of “the struggling masses”, as opposed to “the idle holders of idle capital”.

But is it true that, as millions believe on both sides of the Atlantic, the circumstances of ordinary folk have not improved in decades, and that the benefits of growth have accrued to a wealthy minority?

I have problems reconciling this idea with my own experience.

In 1960s France, only well-to-do families had a television and a washing machine; today the humblest households have several TVs, a DVD player, and a dishwasher.

When I was growing up single mothers didn’t fly to the Canary islands for their vacations.

When I tell my daughter that people used to darn socks and shirts that had holes in them, she thinks I was raised in the third world.

And there’s no need to go back to the 1960s and 1970s to be struck by remarkable changes in lifestyle and consumption trends.

In the early 1980s, most households had only one phone – and it was a landline that was very costly to use by today’s standards. Few people had a computer.

A mere 15 years ago, no one had heard of the internet.

What about the basic things in life: a roof over your head and food?

Rents have risen no faster than income. Despite rising supermarkets prices over the past year, it’s still much cheaper to feed your family today than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago.

So why do are so many people – including economist – telling us that living standards have stagnated?

Without claiming to exhaust the question, I will mention a few points made by Thomas Sowell in his latest look Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Most economists focus on households, which have been declining in size since the 1970s.

Hence the relatively low increase in household income conceals a significant rise in income per head (+51 in the US over 30 years, according to Sowell).

Moreover, the focus on households income distorts the statistics on inequality. Rich households have more members than poor ones.

In the US the top 20% of the household distribution has almost twice as many people as the bottom 20% - which now typically includes single-parent families and senior citizens, rather than large families of underfed children.

The gap between the rich the poor has indeed widened on an individual bases, but not by as much as you would think by looking at household figures.

And when people talk about rising inequality, they often forget that the poor do not form a stable group.

Those who are at the bottom of the social heap today are the same who were there 20 years ago.

Their ranks are constantly renewed, mostly by immigrants (for whom a minimum wage is a boon), just as the ranks of the rich are replenished by the middle classes are the poor.

So the fact that inequality has risen does not necessarily mean that “the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer”.

There are signs that social mobility is decreasing. But this worrying trend is at work both in statist France and more business-friendly US and UK: you can’t blame markets for it.

In short, the obsession with “stagnating living standards” rests mostly on statistical illusions, and Clinton and Obama should know better than outdo each other in populist rhetoric.

For enlightenment on these issues, I recommend Sowell’s magnificent interview on Econtalk, my favorite podcast, and this article by Brad Schiller in the Wall Street Journal.

Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, has found a fascinating research subject: a comparison between American, French, and German textbooks.

A few highlights from the piece he recently published in Foreign Policy:

“In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination.

Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation…

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities.

The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues.

Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.”

Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.”

This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972. ..

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills.

For example, a one-year high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity.

Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and Regulation.”

The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization.

Only one third of the course is about companies and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions, government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth.

The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected.”

The French militant farmer José Bové has gone on hunger strike in support of a ban on genetically modified organisms.

As French opinion largely shares his views and a timorous government seems unwilling to stand up to the green lobby, I believe some facts outlined in Dick Taverne’s recent Prospect magazine article, “The real GM food scandal“, bear repeating:

“The fact is that there is not a shred of any evidence of risk to human health from GM crops.

Every academy of science, representing the views of the world’s leading experts - the Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, French and American academies as well as the Royal Society, which has published four separate reports on the issue - has confirmed this.

Independent inquiries have found that the risk from GM crops is no greater than that from conventionally grown crops that do not have to undergo such testing.

In 2001, the research directorate of the EU commission released a summary of 81 scientific studies financed by the EU itself—not by private industry—conducted over a 15-year period, to determine whether GM products were unsafe or insufficiently tested: none found evidence of harm to humans or to the environment…

Some opponents of GM crops, who seem to have realised that the argument based on lack of safety has no basis, now focus their opposition on environmental concerns, arguing that GM crops destroy biodiversity.

It would be wrong to claim that the planting of GM crops could never have adverse environmental effects.

But their impact depends on circumstances, on the particular crop and environment in which it is grown. Such effects occur with all sorts of agriculture.

Worldwide experience of GM crops to date provides strong evidence that they actually benefit the environment. They reduce reliance on agrochemical sprays, save energy, use less fossil fuels in their production and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. And by improving yields, they make better use of scarce agricultural land.

These findings were reported by Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot of PG Economics in a careful study of the global effects of GM crops in their first ten years of commercial use, from 1996 to 2005.

They concluded that the “environmental impact” of pesticide and herbicide use in GM-growing countries had been reduced by 15 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

Energy-intensive cultivation is being replaced by no-till or low-till agriculture. More than a third of the soya bean crop grown in the US is now grown in unploughed fields.

Apart from using less energy, avoiding the plough has many environmental advantages. It improves soil quality, causes less disturbance to life within it and diminishes the emission of methane and other greenhouse gases.

The study concluded that “the carbon savings from reduced fuel use and soil carbon sequestration in 2005 were equal to removing 4m cars from the road (equal to 17 per cent of all registered cars in the UK).”

One other effect of GM crops may be the most significant of all.

In the next half century, the world will have to more than double its food production to feed the over 800m people who now go hungry, the extra 3bn expected by 2050 and the hundreds of millions of people who will, as living standards rise, acquire a more western lifestyle and eat a great deal more meat…

The broader driving force behind the excessive regulation of GM crops, however, is the cult of “back to nature,” which has also inspired the propaganda against agricultural biotechnology as a whole.

This cult has many manifestations. One is the popularity of organic farming, which is based on the manifestly false principle that artificial chemicals are bad and natural chemicals good. Another is the rising fashion for alternative, non-evidence based medicine.

The dogmatic opponents of GM crops in Europe believe that interference with the genetic make-up of plants is essentially a moral issue.

It is to be condemned as part of mankind’s sinful attempt to control nature, which contributes to global warming, to epidemics of cancer and all the blights of modern life.

In the light of this undercurrent of anti-science sentiment, what are the chances that the obstacles to the spread of GM crops will be overcome? There are grounds for hope…

There can be little doubt that GM crops will be accepted worldwide in time, even in Europe.

But in delaying cultivation, the anti-GM lobbies have exacted a heavy price. Their opposition has undermined agrobusiness in Europe and has driven abroad much research into plant biotechnology—an area in which Britain formerly excelled.

Over-regulation may well cause the costs of the technology to remain higher than they need be.

Above all, delay has caused the needless loss of millions of lives in the developing world.

These lobbies and their friends in the organic movement have much to answer for.”