Paul from Paris

While walking through my Paris neighborhood, a political poster caught my eye. It featured a woman reading The Guardian, which is hardly an everyday occurrence in Paris (beyond the confines of the British Council’s offices).

It said “NO to video surveillance” and “for a Paris without surveillance cameras”. It was put out by the Collective for Freedom and Democracy, and it urged “resistance by signing the petition”.

I consider myself a friend of freedom and democracy, so I visited the Collective’s site.

The Collective opposes a plan –the Plan Vidéo Protection de Paris or PVPP– to boost significantly the number of video surveillance cameras on Paris streets.

Sources differ, but there are a few hundred such cameras today. Under the PVPP, which the Paris city council approved in November 2009, this number will increase by about a thousand additional cameras by 2011. (A map of planned camera locations in the 11th arrondissement is reproduced below.)

For the Collective, the PVPP wastes taxpayer funds and won’t protect people by curbing crime. Most of all, the Collective opposes the PVPP because it presents dangers to liberty.

Who is in the Collective? The opposition: green parties, far-left parties, trade unions, and a mix of community groups.

As much as the Collective mistrusts video cameras, it doesn’t seem too attached to privacy per se. The site exhorts site visitors to sign a petition. To do so, you have to provide personal information –name, e-mail address– which the site publishes.

A French press group won a favorable award against Google in connection with book digitization. (Full disclosure: I practiced law with the press group’s lead lawyer in the ’90s.) Google will likely appeal that judgment, and the appellate court may rule in its favor.

It would be a mistake to read too much into this award. Far from resisting digitization, the French state has long embraced it.

According to urban legend, president Mitterrand favored relocating the collections of the French National Library in towers –rather than underground, as most libraries do– because he was convinced that books soon would be digitized, making paper copies superfluous other than as collectible objects.

More recently, president Sarkozy has earmarked some €750 million to digitizing collections in the French National Library. Although it’s possible that this effort will become an alternative to Google, it’s also possible that French actors, public and private, will team up with Google in the future.

French young conservatives (jeunes populaires) produced and posted on their site a video that showcases their late-summer congress, with leading figures from the Sarkozy government in attendance.

I like the video. It answers the question: how can you be young and conservative without being complacent? It’s also sufficiently unpolished to be the work of real young people, not an advertising agency.

To begin with, the young don’t call themselves “conservative”; they’re “popular”, in keeping with Sarkozy’s big-tent vision of the conservative party as the leading party and the party of good government.

The young conservatives also look to the future, reprising a 1976 song by Canadian artist Luc Plamondon, “Tous ceux qui veulent changer le monde” (Everyone who wants to change the world). They’re young and fresh and hopeful; they want change.

Most of all, the young conservatives have a sense of humor. They’re a bit silly, and their friends in the Sarkozy government are comfortable being a little silly themselves. These young people get along with their elders, who actually seem to enjoy their company. The ambiance recalls, for me, a big family get-together or a church picnic (but not a company picnic: these people are confident and comfortable enough not to take themselves too seriously).

The video has sparked reactions.

Those on the left, for whom “young conservatives” are an oxymoron or heresy, have enjoyed a laugh and produced parody videos. By a casual count, there seem to be at least a hundred, possibly several hundred, parodies.

Some of those on the right are scandalized, put off by a lack of seriousness or an overabundance of fooling-around. The standard-bearer of the scandalized conservatives is former education minister Luc Ferry, who in an interview –apparently after seeing excerpts of the video for the first time– described the video as “dripping with drivel” and wondered aloud about the dangers it presented for the future of civilization.

A reader pointed out that Nadine Morano, the French junior minister for family affairs who recently misspoke (or was “mis-heard”) about French people of North African descent, has been chronically “misunderstood”.

A few years ago, Morano was interviewed on a morning news show. The discussion is best described as combative. As soon as she was introduced, Morano contested accounts that, during the presidential campaign, she had infiltrated herself and imposed herself as a speaker a rally for rival candidate Ségolène Royal. For Morano, “journalists will say anything”, even though, in this case, Morano had been filmed by journalists, whose package was later featured in a prime-time news program.

Morano’s interview was posted on the web, and viewers commented. One of the viewers was Dominique Broueilh, a mother of three from Dax (with a name remarkably rich in vowels). Broueilh’s comment was: “Hou, la menteuse“, or “liar”.

Was Broueilh questioning Morano’s truthfulness? Not really. Broueilh was actually commenting on Morano’s debating tactics, which Broueilh compared to a song by Dorothée, a French singer popular with children (and some dads) thirty years ago. In her hit, “Hou, la menteuse“, Dorothée plays a teenager teased by her little brother about a love interest, which interest Dorothée repeatedly but unconvincingly denies.

The humor was lost on Morano. The junior minister made a criminal complaint under an 1881 law on press freedom and its limits. The police tracked down Broueilh and wanted to question her. Broueilh talked to the press. The paper Sud-Ouest reported on the case, and others repeated the report. Morano backed down, again claiming to have been misunderstood and insisting that she obviously had not wanted to act against Broueilh.

Amidst all these misunderstandings, it will not come as a surprise that Morano has been misunderstood in other contexts. For example, after having spoken out against violent video games, Morano invited the press for a photo op at her home, where they witnessed her family playing the very video game against which she had spoken. In a subsequent video, Morano shows familiarity with the game, especially that it depicts women being raped and murdered.

Each generation differs from its predecessors, and parents have always worried about their progeny.

From my vantage point in Paris, I see that young Europeans are startlingly democratic. They’re egalitarian, and militant in their egalitarianism, skeptical of or hostile towards differences in station. They’re also more interested in forging horizontal bonds, connections among peers or cohorts, than in vertical or hierarchical relationships.

At the Lycée Jean Lurçat, a high school in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, students were unhappy with their English teacher, Claudine Lespagnol, age 58, with 8 years’ seniority at the school. The root of the problem seems to have been Ms. Lespagnol’s prohibition against using cell phones during class. (For clarity’s sake, the professorial objection was to cell phone use, not possession.) Students complained collectively to the principal and sought a change in teacher. Their request was denied.

Students then drafted and sent a group letter on behalf of the class. The letter read (my translation):

Re: Suggestions from the class

Madam,

Further to the collective letter of our grievances, we unfortunately were unable to get a favorable reply from the principal for a change of teacher. We want you to understand that, with your negative attitude towards the class, you’re wasting lots of time, making disrespectful remarks, trying desperately to have us listen to your class. It is true that many of us allow ourselves to be distracted in class by electronic accessories or our friends. But this kind of situation happens everywhere in everyday life. We think you take yourself too seriously when you yell at us when we are distracted; that causes a negative reaction among some of us. We therefore advise you to change your attitude, and to stop making remarks whenever one of us has a phone in his hands. It’s a waste of time. If you continue with the same attitude towards the class, the problem will go on and on, and each Monday you’ll suffer the consequences. We hope to spend an appropriate Monday with you after Autumn Break. If this is not the case, and if there’s no effort on your part to change, we’ll only have a few words to say: FUCK YOU.

Sincerely yours,

The Senior Class

The reaction? Nothing happened. A month went by, and teacher anger rose to a boiling point: the teachers walked out one Friday afternoon. Then the media took notice and publicized the affair. Only then did education officials take note. One came to the class to brand the letter “unacceptable” and “cowardly”, but also to say that “there’s no such thing as collective punishment”. The French education minister has announced an investigation to discover the author(s) of the letter.

I don’t want to read too much into a single incident, but three things strike me here:

1. The students turn the tables on their teacher, using the kind of language that a teacher might use to correct a student. I see this less as impertinence than as egalitarianism.
2. The teacher is supposed to compete (against cell phones and friends) for attention; a good teacher is one who can win students’ attention. I see this less as consumerism than as an acknowledgement of multitasking or a “noisy” world.
3. Authority prefers not to know that any of this is going on. Its sympathies ultimately lie more with the students than with the teacher. By contrast, the media reaction seems to have been uniformly negative towards the students (although no one seems to have asked Claudine Lespagnol for her story).