Paris To The Moon Read online

  Juppe has been prime minister for just under six months. He is a long-fingered, elegant man of fifty, with the kind of enviable, aerodynamic baldness that in America only tycoons seem able to carry off—the Barry Diller, Larry Tisch style of baldness. Juppe comes from a simple family down in the Landes country. He did well in school and was eventually admitted to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, in Paris, the tiny institution that produces nearly the entire French political elite. He came to the attention of an older fellow enarque, Jacques Chirac, and when Chirac was mayor of Paris, in the 1980s, Juppe became his "financial adjoint"—more or less the city comptroller. Then, when the conservative parties won the legislative elections two years ago, Chirac, though he had prudently decided not to seek the office of prime minister, arranged for Juppe to be named the minister of foreign affairs, in which position, Bosnia aside, he was thought to have done well. So when Chirac was elected president this May, it seemed inevitable that he would make Juppe his prime minister.

  Like all ambitious French politicians, Juppe chooses to present himself as a literary man. He has actually written a book of reflections titled La Tentation de Venise—"The Venetian Temptation." Juppe's Venetian temptation was to retire to a house there, where he could escape from political life, admire Giorgione's Tempesta, drink Bellinis in the twilight, and think long, deep thoughts. La Tentation was regarded as a fighting campaign manifesto, since it is as necessary for an ambitious French politician to write a book explaining why he never likes to think of politics as it is for an ambitious American politician to write a book explaining why he never thinks of anything else. Juppe, ahead of the pack, had written a book asserting not only that he would rather be doing something else but that he would like to be doing it in a completely different country. The romance of retirement is still extremely powerful in France, descending, as it does, from Montaigne, who remains the model here of pensive, high-minded reclusion, even though he spent an important chunk of his life as the boss of a tough town. In Juppe's case, the descent from Montaigne, who supplies the epigraph for La Tentation, is easy to show: Juppe is the mayor of Bordeaux, as Montaigne was. (French politicians often hold more than one office at once, just in case.) Among French politicians, in fact, ostentatious displays of detachment are something of a competitive sport. After being succeeded as president by Chirac, Francois Mitterrand gave an interview to Christine Ockrent, the editor of L'Express, simply to announce that he was now taking long walks in Paris and looking at the sky. It was understood as his way of keeping his hand in. Not long ago the former prime minister Edouard Balladur, who had been so busy looking detached from politics that he forgot to campaign for the presidency this time around, sneaked an item into L'Express announcing that he too was taking walks and looking at the sky. It was the start of his comeback.

  Then, at the beginning of June, the weekly comic paper Le Canard Enchaine revealed that Juppe, when he was the financial adjoint to Chirac, had taken the lease on an apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement that belonged to the domaine prive of the City of Paris. The domaine 'prive is a peculiarly Parisian establishment, although even after four months of scandal, no one knows exactly what it is, how the City of Paris came to possess it, or how you get into it. At first many Parisians confused the domaine •prive with the general stock of public housing that the City of Paris has built since the First World War; most of that housing is on the periphery, and a lot of it is in the less desirable neighborhoods of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Arrondissements. It turns out, however, that the City of Paris also owns a small, semisecret group of apartments and apartment buildings that are given out at the discretion of whoever happens to be running Paris. These domaine 'prive apartments came into the hands of the Parisian government in all kinds of interesting ways. Many of them are on the beautiful old streets of the Left Bank, near the river, because of various failed city plans that left Paris with a lot of property, which the city fathers eventually started renting to one another. Until 1977 the prefects of the Paris arrondissements controlled the domaine prive, but then the system was reformed, which, as often happens in France, managed to make the mechanics of it even murkier. Today no one seems to know exactly how many domaine prive apartments there are. One estimate puts the number at about thirteen hundred; another puts it at about fifteen hundred; still another says that there are more than four thousand.

  Juppe's apartment, on the lovely rue Jacob, was a lavish spread, complete with garden and terrace, that he had in effect rented to himself for a little less than three thousand dollars a month-well below the market price. When this arrangement was challenged, Juppe announced that he felt "serene" and that he couldn't see what the fuss was about, since anyone could have found out that he lived there by looking at the mailbox. There was something equally off-key about Chirac's later defense of his protege. During a televised press conference, he declared himself "profoundly shocked" by "the exploitation of a fact that no one should contest." Here, he explained, Juppe was actually paying about three thousand dollars a month in rent, while there were tens of thousands of people in France living in subsidized apartments who did infinitely less service for the nation than Juppe.

  As it happened, Martha and I arrived in Paris to look for a place just as the news of Juppe's arrangement broke, and we soon discovered what Juppe obviously knew to be the vital fact but was having a very hard time saying outright: All apartments in Paris that you would long to live in belong to the domaine prive. This is to say not that they all belong to the city government but that they can be obtained only through membership in one or another of the political or literary or fashionable keiretsus that dominate Paris. Though Paris is in many ways a grasping and commercial city, it is not ruled by the market in quite the way that most other Western cities are.

  Martha and I, eight-month-old in tow, learned this quickly as we wandered from apartment to apartment. We discovered that apartments came in three varieties: sad apartments that no one would want; interesting apartments that would require grands projets to make them work; and nice apartments that had a long private history or, to put it another way, a catch and so were in a domaine prive of their own. This one came with a sister in America, who might or might not eventually return. Another was available only if the divorce that had led to its emptying out was concluded. (With tears in his eyes, the previous resident made it a condition that we buy the espresso machine that he and his departed love had picked out in happier days.) That one belonged to a philosopher who had changed his sexual orientation, and it was available with the proviso that if he changed it back, he would need the apartment again. The inwardness of Paris rules out the illusion created by the renting of an apartment in New York, the illusion of renewal, of starting over. An apartment in New York is a blank slate. In Paris it is an already parsed sentence, a string of imperfect verbs, hidden conditional constructions, and long, intricately wrought clauses in the past tense.

  Juppe would probably have been able to survive the revelation of his living arrangements if only Le Canard Enchame hadn't published, a couple of Wednesdays later, the news that when Juppe was a city official, he had taken apartments in the domaine prive for his son and daughter as well and that these apartments too were right there on the rue Jacob. Then it turned out that both Juppes ex-wife and his half brother had apartments courtesy of the City of Paris. (The former Mme. Juppe was lodged across the river, on the Right Bank, presumably out of deference to the sensibilities of the new Mme. Juppe.) At this point l'affaire des logements became a little more serious. Le Canard published a document apparently showing that Juppe had approved a rent reduction on his son's apartment from seven thousand francs per month to six thousand (a difference of about two hundred dollars). This might have contravened an all-purpose law against ethical backsliding on the part of public officials, a law whose worst penalty, sweetly enough, was that the offender would be prohibited from ever again being elected to office.

  Things got so bad that Juppe had to submit
to a humiliation that the French had previously considered fit only for American politicians. He had to go on television and answer questions from reporters. (De Gaulle spoke directly to the French people or else in highly choreographed press conferences; Mitterrand would tolerate a few friendly journalists but would explain to them why the questions they were asking were not of a standard that could decently be put to the president of the republic.) Juppe, by contrast, had to give one of those jumpy, undignified, I-have-nothing-to-hide performances beloved of American handlers.

  Juppe did his best. He pointed out that members of the French press had been around for dinner at the now-famous apartment on the rue Jacob, and nobody had seemed upset about the apartment then. (This argument was regarded as fighting dirty. The next day Le Monde haughtily noted that it was not proper for guests to ask their host how much he paid in rent and who owned his apartment.) Juppe also announced that he had lowered the rent on his son's apartment only because he was afraid of contributing to a general inflation of rents in the city. It didn't help much. In July a local lawyer with Socialist party connections began filing letters of complaint against Juppe with the state district attorney in Paris, Bruno Cotte, who would therefore have to decide whether to go the Italian route and indict the prime minister of France (and, not incidentally, launch his own political career) or go the honored French route and let it all pass.

  By this time I had come into possession of what I thought was the lease on an apartment and so found the later stages of I'affaire des logements very diverting. There is nothing like being even an honorary, part-time insider to make insiderness look cute. Then, just as we were about to leave Paris to go home and collect our furniture, I got a call from the real estate agent. "I have bad news," she announced. "Your apartment is off the market. She made it sound as though the apartment had won a prize.

  Things worked out better for us than they did for the prime minister. We came back to Paris at the end of September and managed, through various routes, to find an apartment at 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs in the Seventh Arrondissement. The story with this one was that it belonged to a young man who had just been posted by his bank to Tokyo; the apartment was affordable because he and his wife had left it half renovated and half a wreck. On the other hand, they would want the apartment back when they returned from Japan, at some unspecified date, which makes us leap every time the doorbell rings.

  Bruno Cotte has at last offered his judgment on the Juppe case. He declared that he would not indict Juppe for what he had done with the domaine prive apartments, provided that the prime minister of France get out of his apartment and rent one someplace else. This may have been a first in the history of jurisprudence: an eviction notice issued by a magistrate against the prime minister of a major Western power. "This was more cruel than an indictment, which at least had the savor of persecution," a veteran Parisian journalist said to me of the Cotte verdict. "An indictment might have been insupportable, but an eviction is merely ridiculous."

  Naturally, American and British journalists have tried to analyze l'affaire des logements and, interpreting it in the light of Anglo-American politics, have concluded that Juppe has suffered because he was seen as a member of an unduly privileged elite. This is in fact almost the direct opposite of the truth. The Frenchmen who are currently the most enraged at the government—the functionaries who stopped all business in Paris several weeks ago—are not protesting against the accumulated perks of a privileged class. They are the privileged class, protesting on behalf of their accumulated perks. What made them mad about I'affaire des logements, and Juppe's conduct, was not that it revealed to them something they hadn't known but that it reminded them of something they knew all too well—namely, that the system of acquis sociaux—entitlements—runs so deep in France that to abolish it would be in some sense to abolish French life itself. Every Frenchman who is not outright destitute sits in the middle of a domaine prive—that is, within a domain of private benefits that he enjoys by virtue of his place in civil society The triumph of the Fifth Republic was to have expanded that domain so that it included nearly everybody But it may no longer be capable of any expansion at all. The people who are left outside now seem to be left outside for good. The North African immigrants, in particular, who fill the Paris banlieue that the police have largely abandoned are not just a minority; they are without any entree at all. They are called, simply, the excluded. Some of them set bombs off under your bed.

  Juppe's serenity is certainly gone for good. Already he is speaking plaintively of his fate. "But why have they done this to me? I am honest!" he told an interviewer recently. "Had I known, when I was foreign minister I could have moved to the quai d'Orsay, where I would have had at my disposal two hundred and eighty square meters and a chambermaid, and nobody would have reproached me at all." People agreed that he had a point, but they also noticed the way he was able to rattle off the square meters by heart.

  After brooding on this affair, the French elite has decided that the cure for the kinds of hidden deals that fill French public life is transparence, which has become (along with exclusion) the word of the moment here. By transparence people just mean that everybody should see everything that is going on. A lot of Parisians would now settle for having a Paris that is transparent the way an ant farm is transparent: with a cutaway front so that you can see the action even if you can't affect it. But what has always given Paris its peculiar grace and favor is that things that are hidden away elsewhere (like, say, adulteries) are all out in the open here, while things that are all out in the open elsewhere are hidden away here (like, say, the way you get an apartment). A Pans you can see right through hardly seems worth having.

  The Strike

  The "generalized" strike that the big French labor federations have called—making a fastidious distinction between what they're doing now and the "general" strike that they may yet get around to—has shut down Paris. The commuter and intercity trains haven't run for two weeks, not even the TGV, the famous fast train between Paris and the South. The Metro is closed down (the crickets who live beneath the rails are said to be perishing for lack of the heat they normally get from the friction of the trains running above, and their plight has become a minor cause celebre here). There are no buses, and the post office has stopped delivering the mail. Even le Paris touristique has been snapped shut. The Ritz has had a dropoff in occupancy of 25 percent (at the height of the terrorist bombing campaign, a few months ago, the rate was near normal, which suggests that the rich would rather risk being blown to bits than have a hard time finding a taxi). The Louvre, like a city under siege, has been struggling to stay open and can guarantee only a narrow access corridor, leading directly from the entrance to the Mona Lisa. The government has even commandeered the bateaux-mouches—those ugly, flat-bottomed open-air tourist boats that ply the tourist sights year-round—and has turned them into ferryboats to get commuters up and down the Seine.

  I think that I only really began to grasp just how serious the strike was when the chickens stopped rotating at the outdoor market in my neighborhood. Several poultry merchants there keep chickens and coquelets and rabbits and pheasants spitted and broiling on outdoor rotisseries all through the year, even in August and in the quiet days after Christmas. One afternoon a few days into the strike I walked over to the market to check on the progress of a turkey I had ordered from one of the rotisseurs, to be sent up from the country for a belated Thanksgiving, and I noticed that he had unspitted all his birds and turned off the grill. This seemed to me one of those signs that reporters abroad are supposed to treat as portents ("It has long been said in the bazaars that when the chickens stop turning, the government will fall"), and as I approached to ask what he was doing, he gestured grimly in the direction of the boulevard Saint-Germain.

  "Ca commence," he said grimly. It's beginning, though what, exactly, was beginning I wasn't sure.

  "The turkey, it's still on its way?" I asked, with the stupid inconsequence common to pe
ople caught up in revolutions. ("Rien," Louis XVI noted in his diary the day the Bastille was stormed.)

  He shook his head gravely, implying, I thought for a moment, that the strike might have spread to the fowl too. Then he gestured again toward the boulevard.

  For about ten solid blocks, on each side of the boulevard aint-Germain a row of tourist buses was parked; that, considering the severity with which the cops normally enforce the no-parking regulations, was in itself a near-insurrectionary sight.

  The buses bore on their windshields notices indicating where their journeys had begun—Lyons, Grenoble, Bordeaux—and, in their side windows, little stickers saying "FO," for Force Ouvriere, or Workers' Force. (Despite the militant name, it is the more moderate of the big French labor federations.) Inside, the bus drivers looked bored and sleepy after the long trip in from the provinces. But between the two rows of buses thousands of FO members, from all across France, were marching up the boulevard, three or four abreast. Then came a rear guard of students armed with batons and occasional bricks. The noise, oddly, was confined, cozily insulated by the parked coaches, a revolution taking place in a bus depot. Farther east on the boulevard, beyond the buses, the French riot police were lined up and waiting, in helmets and shields. There wasn't any violence then, and there hasn't been too much since, but around that time it began to seem that the French were trying on, if only for a moment, long-discarded revolutionary roles, albeit in a slightly unreal setting: strikers taking buses to the revolution, students relearning the lore of the heaved cobblestone.