Food and the Fate of the French

DRAGUIGNAN, France — No one pulls off evocative eyerolls like the French, and André Bernard, my 82-year-old cheese guy, replied with his best when asked about legislative elections that just reduced the Gaullist Fifth Republic into a Gallic Game of Thrones.

“Political posturing,” André said with his usual half-smile, slicing a sample of ripe Reblochon in our Saturday market ritual dating back 40 years. “What still matters is what always has: a comfortable place to sleep, enough good food to eat, an occasional extravagance. And family.”

Younger eyes roll for different reasons. A fresh generation sees a traditional social safety net shred as prices soar. The rich inherit an Earth they despoil at an alarming rate. So why bother to show up at the polls? Overall, only 46 percent of eligible French voters cast ballots on Sunday.

Between the opposition’s activism and public apathy, the results were stunning. Le Parisien’s front-page banner caught the essence in big black letters: “Ungovernable.”

Emmanuel Macron’s reelection two months ago made him the de facto leader of a European Union faced with a cornered Russian bear rattling nukes on its doorstep. He champions NATO, ties with America, global action against climate collapse, dialogue with China and freer trade.

In 2017, he came out of nowhere to sweep the boards. Now, without a clear National Assembly majority, his party needs inconstant allies to hold off leftist and far-right blocs led by zealots who concur only on vitriol for what they call an arrogant patrician who betrays the nation.

Unlike America, today’s fractured France goes far beyond two parties at war. Turmoil in an old society that shaped much of the world over centuries is about the human condition, a term André Malraux popularized in his 1930s novel, “Man’s Fate.” It is not looking good.

A deadlocked France unable to take decisive action in a perilous world is serious cause for alarm. But, as André the cheese guy says, life is more than geopolitics and disputed economics. France, these days, is being shaken to its core. I’ll get back to this. First, the election.

Politics involve an alphabet soup of acronyms, parties shaped around personalities as much as ideas. Nuanced shades of realpolitik require a painter’s palette. In French colors, the left is red and now includes the Greens. The old-guard right is blue, now in spirit and as well as hue.

Macron’s party, Ensemble!, fell 44 votes short of the absolute majority needed to turn bills into law. He must beg votes from Les Républicains. The party leader said his 61 deputies would be a loyal opposition, backing only what they approve, not simply what Macron proposes.

One headline is Marine Le Pen’s rebranded National Rally, a more housebroken yet still hard-right racist, anti-immigrant “France first” version of her estranged father’s National Front. In 2017, it managed only eight of the National Assembly’s 577 seats. On Sunday, it won 89.

Le Pen was giddy among jubilant supporters on Sunday night. Her partisans reach deeper into rural France as views harden toward waves of refugees fleeing conflict and climate collapse, and police crack down hard on protesters and terrorist threats.

On the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a 70-year-old firebrand, merged the moribund Socialist Party that Francois Hollande left in ruins with Communist drib-drabs and other factions to take 131 seats in a coalition known as NUPES: La Nouvelle union populaire écologique et sociale. Disparate members can’t even agree on how to pronounce it. (The odds favor “NOOP”).

Both opposition leaders express support for Ukraine but have been soft on Vladimir Putin in the recent past. Each wants to uncouple France from NATO’s joint command and loosen its ties to the EU.

Mélenchon’s scathing, sarcastic oratory smacks a bit of Donald Trump: bombast tinged with bullshit. His Sunday night speech sounded as if he now ruled the nation. On Tuesday, he led his followers to the National Assembly gates like Russian peasants storming the Winter Palace. In fact, his own party in the coalition, France Unbowed, won 28 fewer seats than Le Pen’s.

But he is demonstrably sane and genuinely charismatic. Big lies have short lives in France, where a half-dozen real-news channels and national newspapers hold feet to the fire.

Courts pursue past presidents. Nicolas Sarkozy faced a possible 10 years in prison on charges of financial corruption and illegal campaign contributions. He was eventually convicted in 2021 and allowed to serve a one-year sentence at home with an electronic bracelet.

Campaigns are short, with strict spending limits. Voters drop paper ballots into transparent boxes on Sundays. Winners are declared soon after, and losers concede with feigned grace. France is unlikely to see a diehard incumbent sic a murderous mob on the Palais Bourbon.

But still. The French have a tumultuous past of taking politics to the streets. Ever since students knocked Charles de Gaulle off his perch with paving stones in 1968, recalcitrant unions, irate farmers and other have forced the Elysées Palace to back down on unpopular policies.

With all that, France stayed rooted in old traditions. Families gathered at Sunday lunch for memorable meals, prepared for hours if not days. Kids sat still as elders droned on about values. Much of that stuck as they grew up to add their own twists in an evolving world.

In the 1980s, I started regular trips to the Draguignan market in upcountry Provence. Along with André’s cheeses, there was Sisteron lamb raised on clover and fish that had just stopped flapping. Farmers knew each of their luscious peaches personally.

When I explained my chile con carne recipe to Robert, the butcher with the bedside banner, he selected a moist beef flank and cleaved it into perfectly sliced cubes. I followed the aroma to a Tunisian couscous master. The Yeller touted his strawberries at the top of his lungs.

By then I’d racked up a galaxy of Michelin-starred restaurants, hanging out with chefs and following their purveyors back to snail ranches, truffle troves and moldy Roquefort caves. That produced a book.

I titled the manuscript “Sunday Lunch: Food and the Fate of the French.” My publisher insisted on using one of the chapter headings, “A Goose In Toulouse.” That missed the point. The book dissected French society and how those family tables shaped it. Food was just the metaphor.

This, if you stretch it a bit, is why a political impasse matters so much today.

Americans who equate “socialist” to tyrants who twist the word’s meaning are either cynical manipulators or simply clueless. Social democracy defines capitalist systems in which wealth trickles down, not up, and impoverished citizens are not left to starve on the streets.

Life changed in America during the 1980s as Reaganomics widened the gap between rich and desperate. Dumbed-down schools taught practical skills rather than civics. After a rusted Iron Curtain collapsed, the country inward except when it bumbled into needless war.

François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, the same year as Ronald Reagan. No one who thronged the Bastille (now a place, not a prison) to wave roses — the Socialist Party symbol — will forget that night. Jacques Chirac, a rightwing elitist, replaced him in 1995. Not much changed.

France maintains a nuclear force de frappe and troops abroad but favors diplomacy over conflict. A “social contract” at home protects workers’ rights, providing universal health care. free higher education, vacation time and basic allowances for low-income families.

People have jobs but also lives. On long vacations, families take time to slow roast a gigot d’agneau and exchange intimacies over a tarte tatin. Crises erupt, labor disputes get ugly, some family circles seethe with strife. But at the core, France has stayed French.

This is fast becoming an irretrievable past. A wired world connects societies at the speed of light. A big, brash America imposes a common denominator, with cancel culture, TV marathons and the rest. Politics are no exception. Many cast votes with all the reflection of invertebrates stuck by a pin.

Macron is effective in foreign affairs. He handled Trump well: first with reason, then with acid barbs as he sought ways to bypass America’s historic dominance. He wages war on Putin but cautions to not humiliate him. Despots who lose face in defeat go to unthinkable extremes.

But he faced Sisyphean challenges at home trying to scale back social benefits and spur the economy. Gas prices rose in 2018. Almost overnight, a million Frenchmen put on yellow traffic safety vests and raised hell. The Gilets jaunes fizzled out two years later, but violent riots and police repression left deep scars.

Turmoil abroad brought Muslim refugees and migrants whose religious practices clashed with freewheeling French life. A lingering threat of terrorism and a deadly plague that still takes lives keep tension at the surface.

With all this and a legislature that thwarts a president, Le Parisien is likely right. The French may soon be ungovernable.

My own Maginot Line, down here in Draguignan, is fast-food hamburgers. The Big Mac attack on France is an old story, but today the two drive-through McDonalds compete with a huge hilltop Burger King, and the Florida-based company’s commercials are all over French TV.

In each, a guy mumbles, “Mmm, Ber-Ger King,” his mouth apparently stuffed with a Double Whopper Cheese. I can just imagine all those great aunts and grandmas hearing that after slaving over Sunday lunch where kids learn to mind their manners. Cardiac arrest.