Thinking about France

Something the French I've met, are too aware to do. If you have had a lover from France, to pluck an example from thin air, and you've lapsed into a bodily compliment, you were met with a whisper, but that isn't me. One goes, figuratively or not, to France for this very kind of rejoinder; where does it come from? 

On the following day, most of the world as we know it, will ask itself this question about the existence of France. The answers that explain the great states of the world are on the tip of our tongue; and in regard to France, we know the wonderful people who've done everything they can to explain it to us, ever since all of Gaul was divided into three parts.


I, for my part, do not care to hear of tomorrow's celebration, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That mantra belongs to one work of art which needs no justification from us, one masterpiece of passion we do not interrogate with history. 

I, Laurent, know I have no French blood but that Paris figures in the conception, gestation, death, education, and delectation of my forbears, as the ground zero it is to almost everyone I know with a mind and heart. That Paris is not France, I, Laurent, do not need to be told; but that it has other consequential crossroads, we have already published, in a motorcyclist's choice between Meursault and Puligny. Moreover, we know, then, that the claim of the name of France has more than once been hostile to other provinces, other faiths, others living next door; it exists only in that void sustained by the very arrangement of its parts, Barthes suggested.


There exists an idea of France and an elastic place and an elastic mode, that are called by that name. What accounts for the constancy of the one, with so little surety of the others? I will agree, that it is too multifaceted for an answer, but that if you turn the thing just so, you may see what you lack for there. And the first of these is what you learned on your pillow, in an embrace that changed your heart.














Roland Barthes
Michelet
1954
Richard Howard, translation
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987©