Médan — Blog — Ellen Hampton Books

Fifty Shades of French Politics June 2024

For those of you across the pond bemoaning the lack of choice in 2024, nota bene: for one seat in the upcoming assembly election, my local suburban Paris district (pop. 112,000) has 12 candidates, a list that includes 3 fascists, 2 Trotskyists, 2 Frexitists and 1 animalist.

The array of left to right offers a candidate in every shade of radical, with versions of solutions from ‘tax the rich’ to ‘stop the taxes’. As the political groups change their names every election, they are color-coded: red (hammer and sickle, ‘Urgent Revolution!’), blue (Reconquest, Re-Standing, Re-Assemble, all aim to close the borders to immigration), and green (defend the planet and respect the animals). There are three candidates who did not submit their program to the official list and have no online presence.

In the center, with intelligence and integrity, is a candidate who notes: People, we have to learn to compromise. Natalia Pouzyreff has served in the National Assembly since 2017, she understands that governing works only when different interests are brought together for the greater good.

But can France master the skill? The center is in the position of the Feuillants, the moderates of the 1790s (several of their leaders were veterans of the American Revolution, including the Marquis de Lafayette). Their consideration of new ideas did not go far enough for the radical Jacobins; their conservative affection for the existing order was not strong enough for the Girondins. They were trampled in the rush to embrace exciting new ideas, and cut off the heads of the old ones.

France is on its Fifth Republic, installed in 1958, a boomer republic, perhaps in need of renewal and restructuring. But what seems eternal in France is the fracturing of political opinion into nuances. In the first round we will vote for the candidate closest to our beliefs; in the second round we will vote against the candidate we most despise.

Reasonable compromise used to be a sign of maturity and respect. Could we see a revival of it on both sides of the Atlantic?

Post-election update: my little district voted 44% for Natalia Pouzyreff in the first round (among 12 candidates) and 54% in the second and final round (among 3 candidates). She was re-elected to the assembly in the overall precinct with 48% of the vote, a large majority. So here, at least, the center held. Now it has the hard work of coalition-building ahead of it.

Posts tagged Médan

Maeterlinck: Memory and the Blue Bird of Happiness

In 1910, the blue bird of happiness landed in the United States, in New York, to be specific, on Broadway. The Blue Bird was a philosophical play written by Maurice Maeterlinck, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year for it and other works. His Pelléas and Mélisande is better known today, as productions of the Debussy opera continue to enliven the stage. But at the start of the 20th century, The Blue Bird was all the rage, emerging in film and song, baptizing airplanes and race cars, and like most popular cultural symbols, being reduced to its simplest iteration: the blue bird of happiness.

Ellen HamptonJuly 2, 2019Maeterlinck, Médan, Bluebird