Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture Read Online Free PDF Page B

Godard (another implacable Helvetian), Baron Haussmann (“the Alsatian Attila”), the Boulevard Saint-Michel—indeed, the whole of the Latin Quarter—Georges Pompidou (a “visionary vandal” worse than Haussmann), pedestrian precincts, and the scrubbed petrification of buildings restored for people to look at rather than live in.
    Just as he was a historian of individuality, Cobb was a believer in the individualistic city, one marked by variousness and the human scale: different people leading different lives in different yet neighbouring streets. In his lifetime he saw the heart of Brussels wrecked, and parts of Paris go, especially the Marais and the Six-ième. He watched the French capital become increasingly a single-class city, in a process of social cleansing promoted by money, municipal vanity, and museumification.
    This may seem exaggerated. Paris has probably suffered less than many other Western European cities; while the lover of rural France has watched even starker transformations than the lover of urban France. * But each later generation draws a new base line, and finds it hard to imagine what has already been lost. The defining France Cobb first encountered in 1935 would have been closer to Edith Wharton's France of thirty years earlier than to De Gaulle's and Pompidou's of thirty years later. The Fifth Republic was at least as effective (being more sly, and acting with more general consent) as Louis XIV or the Revolution in the continuing drive to centralize, standardize, and domesticate the nation. This smug postwar expansionism provoked one of Cobb's most splenetic denunciations, of the:
ten years of Gaullist paternalism and political anaesthesia and exclusive concern for the material comforts of an unquestioning and vulgar pursuit of the new car, the TV, holidays in more and more exotic surroundings, early marriage, a family of manageable size, and the youthful climb up the technocratic ladder, as people, on the road to material success and managerial position, moved further and further out of the city, to live in pseudo-rural “neighbourhood” estates: riding, swimming-pool, tennis, park, children's playground, patio, whisky, invitations to young married colleagues in the same income group, a limited infidelity (in the same income group), talk of the next car and the next holiday, rapid trips abroad for the firm (discreet infidelity, limited to the Common Market zone), masculinity and violence expressed in terms of horsepower and speed of driving.
    It all got worse (it always does); indeed, it reached a poignant climax in 1989, when Cobb was so disgusted by the Bicentennial celebrations that the Revolution's great historian resolved never to write about France again. This was a sad, love-lost, and possibly naïve decision. Renan said that “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,” and a nation rarely gets its history as wrong as when congratulating itself on a famous yet intensely contradictory event. Cobb might have known this. But it is a measure of the largeness and precision of his love for the country that it could in the end so disappoint him.
* That story of the mildly peaky peasant killed by alcohol deprivation and modern medicine is widely told; it has become an enduring and necessary Rural Myth.

(2)
Spending Their Deaths
on Holiday

    Three beers, one ashtray, three singers: (l. to r.) Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens
    Don't talk to me about Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, that lost Beach Boy, or any of the lesser pop-rock deaths. I get no necrothrill from a drug overdose, a stoned slump into the void glorified as “life at the edge,” an episode of melodramatic self-indulgence inflated into the greatest loss to the musical world since the early death of Schubert. No: the three deaths I prefer to hymn are sourly ordinary, dragging hospital terminations of the kind more likely to await the rest of us: heart disease, cancer, cancer.