Paul from Paris

The school year now sets the rhythm or backbeat to life in France. (I’ve posted on this point, twice.)

This is especially true this year, in my life.

We took up a challenge and relocated our family base from the historic center of Paris to a mountain town high in the Pyrenees.

Our move offered me a chance to step back and think about this blog. Since 2008, the world and blogging has changed; so have my own interests and preoccupations. After giving a close look at blogs that I read and canvassing some newcomers, I made some changes to this blog: a new theme, new kinds of posts.

As always, thanks to my readers for keeping in touch and carrying on lively discussions.

France witnessed two incidents of burka rage last week, both under-reported in French media.

The shoe-store altercation

A mother and her (adult) daughter spent a Saturday afternoon shopping in Trignac, a town in the Loire-Atlantique, in western France. In a shoe store, the pair see a woman wearing a burka (what the French commonly call any body-length garment that entirely covers the face and is worn by certain Muslim women). The mother tells her daughter that she’s eager for the French parliament to ban wearing a burka in public.

This much is undisputed. What happened next has led to criminal complaints for assault, now pending and under investigation.

The burka-wearer apparently engaged the mother-daughter pair in discussion, or argument. The mother may have likened the burka-wearer to Belphegor, a mythological figure who, in French cinema and television productions, haunts the Louvre museum, fully veiled. The mother may have told the burka-wearer to “go back to your country”.

The burka-wearing woman hit the mother, who tore off the burka’s veil. A scuffle ensued. Everyone wound up at the station house.

The burka-wearer subsequently held a press conference. Wearing a burka, and without giving her name, she explained that her first name is Elodie, that she was born in France and reared as a Catholic, and that following her conversion to Islam she decided to wear a burka as a sort of gift to her husband. If the law prohibited her from wearing a burka in public in France, Elodie would consider moving to Saudi Arabia.

The degenerating debate

A Tuesday-evening debate on the burka ban led to a scuffle, broken up by the police around 9:30 pm. Even talking about a burka ban can spark violence in France today.

The particulars need some unpacking.

The debate was called by Ni putes Ni soumises (“Neither whores nor submissives”), a women’s advocacy group launched (among others) by Fadela Amara, now junior minister for urban affairs. Notwithstanding her present participation in a conservative government, no one questions Amara’s left-wing views and positions. Ni putes ni soumises’s position on the burka ban is clear: full-fledged support.

The debate does seem to have had shadings of consciousness-raising or advocacy. It was held in Montreuil, a left-leaning town just outside Paris, at the Diderot Elementary School. High-profile politicians in attendance included Montreuil MP Jean-Pierre Brard and Emmanuel Valls, the mayor of Evry, labor MP, and the first labor party leader to openly declare his candidacy for his party’s nomination in the 2012 presidential race. Brard and Valls both support the burka ban and both are solidly on the left.

From press reports, the debate was interrupted by Abdelhakim Sefrioui and other supporters from the pro-Palestinian Sheikh Yassine collective. They oppose the burka ban and, from press reports, disapprove of debate on the burka ban; it’s reasonable to assume that they went to the Dierot Elementary School with minds less open than the organizers’. For Brard, “they’re in the field of intolerance”, and for Valls “making a law to prohibit the full veil is the best favor we could do for women”.
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The French titre-restaurant turns 40 this year.

Like hallway lights on a timer or doorknobs that aren’t round, French people seem to take titres-restaurant as a matter of course; but they puzzle outsiders.

The titre-restaurant sprang from paternalistic reflexes. French law required employers to provide for meal arrangements for their employees. In the case of factory workers, this usually meant a canteen. Many factories and offices had canteens, but others did not. The titre-restaurant was meant to fill this cap.

The principle is simple: an employer issues an employee a titre-restaurant (I’ll call it a lunch voucher), which the employee uses to buy lunch. Restaurants and cafés and vendors accept a lunch voucher, which they redeem from a voucher issuer.

The lunch voucher system offers incentives to employers in the form of tax breaks, and to employees through a discount system, where an employee pays about 50% of the voucher’s face value.

This being France, the actual scheme is complicated, as illustrated by this charming diagram (which I’d like to call “Vouchers make the world go round”) from the national lunch voucher commission (French acronym: CNTR, here pictured as the equal of the French state):

The fortieth anniversary of the lunch voucher is more solemn than celebratory. New rules came into effect on 1 March to regulate lunch voucher use. Most of the new rules are intended to discipline an overly lax or relaxed use of the vouchers. Among the changes:

• Lunch vouchers are to be used for lunch only, not for dinner or on the weekend.
• An employee may use a lunch voucher only in the area where he works. Employees who travel are supposed to have special lunch vouchers.
• An employee is supposed to use only one lunch voucher at a time. A past tolerance for using two vouchers may be on the decline.
• An employee may now use a lunch voucher to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Supermarkets and hypermarkets have reined in lunch voucher use. Henceforth, they will accept a lunch voucher only for salads (with lettuce or fruit), sandwiches, or prepared dishes (fresh, frozen, canned, or vacuum-packed); special bar codes will help police the system.

I confess to having used multiple vouchers for a weekend dinner (at which wine was served) far from home, during what was apparently an anything-goes high time for lunch vouchers. I’m not eligible for lunch vouchers today; given the glorious proliferation of rules around their use, I hardly miss this privilege.

Europe interests and inspires foreign observers.

Younger readers may find that statement improbable, but it’s true.

When I studied political science in Paris, years ago, a certain Mr. Zhang was among my classmates. A taciturn, middle-aged man, Mr. Zhang held memberships in the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations and the Chinese Association of Western European Studies. His lodgings were at the Chinese embassy. Mr. Zhang was a serious guy and an intent observer; he kept his views to himself.

I thought of Mr. Zhang this week because one of my Chinese students asked me a question. This young man, whose family name is also Zhang, is an outgoing and personable business student, visibly every bit at home in France as he is in China. He wanted to know why European leaders had chosen Herman Van Rompuy as the first president of the Council of the European Union.

I couldn’t answer my student; my reply had to do with reaching political consensus. But the question is apt.

The European Union has grown beyond what Europeans would have dared imagine a generation ago. When you consider what Europe is and does, the changes over the past twenty years have arguably been more monumental than those experienced in the United States or even in China.

Europeans, however, tend towards indifference. Too many lack knowledge –including awareness of the extent of their ignorance– and curiosity to ask questions and learn. In the midst of the world’s leading market, they lose sight of their sea of prosperity, more preoccupied with small variations directly perceptible by them.

I fault Europeans for this state of affairs. (After all, the Mr. Zhangs whom I’ve known have shown great curiosity about Europe and amassed impressive stores of knowledge.) My blame lies partly with European institutions that often seem to assume that everyone shares a passion for governance and institutional arrangements. I also fault national leaders, most of whom prefer to continue a strictly national conversation, rather than beginning one more European.

I remember when French elevators –ridiculously small, wood-sided, with iron grillwork doors– had interior ashtrays. I remember too that people made use of them.

Smoking in an elevator! Who could imagine such a thing today? In the years since I moved to Paris, I’ve seen smoking forbidden in elevators, hospitals, airplanes, trains, offices, restaurants, cafés, bar, and nightclubs. Surprisingly, I’ve seen the prohibitions observed overwhelmingly.

If you’re a smoker in France, where can you smoke? At home. Maybe in a car, except that recent models now come without lighters or ashtrays. I’ve seen a surprising number of cyclists and motorcyclists smoking. Tobacco enthusiasts can also smoke in the street, or in a park.

To me, this last option seems incongruous, even bizarre: why go into nature to smoke a cigarette? But it happens all the time. Parks are one of the few public spaces remaining where smokers are left undisturbed (although passersby will hasten to add that they are disturbed by the smoke).

This unobtrusive sign caught me eye. It sits on ground level in a grassy part of a well-known square in central Paris. Taking a formal tone, it informs smokers that ashtrays are available at the center of garden and requests that they use them; it adds an appeal that doing so will make the gardeners’ work easier.

Around the sign, two reactions. The first, in black marker, reads “Thank you” (in French), punctuated by a heart. The second is a collection of cigarette butts, strewn around the sign. I wonder: are they there accidentally, or purposefully?