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Lamartine: Loneliness

Isolation

Often on the mountain, in the shadow of the old oak tree,
at sundown, I sit down sadly;
I let my gaze wander over the plain 
whose ever-changing scene unrolls at my feet.

Here roars the river with its foamy waves,
coiling and thrusting into the dim distance;
there, the motionless lake stretches its sleeping waters
where the evening star rises in the azure sky.

On the summit of these mountains, crowned with dark woods,
twilight still casts its last ray;
and the misty chariot of the queen of shadows
climbs, already whitening the rim of the horizon.

And now, ringing out from the Gothic steeple,
a religious sound fills the air;
the traveler stops, and the rustic bell
mingles holy music with the last noise of the day.

But my indifferent soul feels no charm or thrill
at these sweet scenes;
I contemplate the earth like a wandering shadow.
The sun of the living does not warm the dead.

From hill to hill, in vain, my glance turns,
from the south to the north wind, from the dawn to the sunset,
I turn through all the points of this vast expanse,
and I think, "No happiness awaits me anywhere."

What do they do for me, these palaces and cottages,
useless things, whose charm for me has fled?
Rivers, rocks, forests, solitudes once so dear,
a single being is missing, and everything is unpeopled!

Whether the sun's journey is beginning or ending,
I follow its path with an indifferent eye;
in a dark sky or a cloudless one, whether it sets or it rises,
what does the sun matter? I expect nothing from the days.

If I could follow the sun on its endless journey,
my eyes would see emptiness and desert everywhere;
I wish for nothing of all that it lights up;
I ask nothing of the immense universe.

But perhaps beyond the bounds of its sphere,
in places where the true sun lights up other skies,
if I could leave my carcass on the earth,
what I have so dreamed of would appear to my eyes!

There, I would be drunk from the springs I hope for;
there I would find hope and love again,
and that ideal goodness that every soul desires,
which has no name in its sojourn on earth!

Borne by the chariot of the dawn,
could I not fly as far as to you, vague object of desire?
Why should I stay in the land of exile?
There is nothing in common between the earth and me.

When the forest leaf falls in the meadow,
the evening wind rises and tears it away from the valleys;
and I, I am like that withered leaf:
carry me off like the leaf, stormy north winds!

 

            --Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)

L'Isolement

Souvent sur la montagne, à l'ombre du vieux chêne,
Au coucher du soleil, tristement je m'assieds ; 
Je promène au hasard mes regards sur la plaine,
Dont le tableau changeant se déroule à mes pieds.

Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes ;
Il serpente, et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur ;
Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes
Où l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur.

Au sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres,
Le crépuscule encor jette un dernier rayon ;
Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres
Monte, et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon.

Cependant, s'élançant de la flèche gothique,
Un son religieux se répand dans les airs :
Le voyageur s'arrête, et la cloche rustique
Aux derniers bruits du jour mêle de saints concerts.

Mais à ces doux tableaux mon âme indifférente
N'éprouve devant eux ni charme ni transports ;
Je contemple la terre ainsi qu'une ombre errante
Le soleil des vivants n'échauffe plus les morts.

De colline en colline en vain portant ma vue,
Du sud à l'aquilon, de l'aurore au couchant,
Je parcours tous les points de l'immense étendue,
Et je dis : " Nulle part le bonheur ne m'attend. "

Que me font ces vallons, ces palais, ces chaumières,
Vains objets dont pour moi le charme est envolé ?
Fleuves, rochers, forêts, solitudes si chères,
Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé !

Que le tour du soleil ou commence ou s'achève,
D'un oeil indifférent je le suis dans son cours ;
En un ciel sombre ou pur qu'il se couche ou se lève,
Qu'importe le soleil ? je n'attends rien des jours.

Quand je pourrais le suivre en sa vaste carrière,
Mes yeux verraient partout le vide et les déserts :
Je ne désire rien de tout ce qu'il éclaire;
Je ne demande rien à l'immense univers.

Mais peut-être au-delà des bornes de sa sphère,
Lieux où le vrai soleil éclaire d'autres cieux,
Si je pouvais laisser ma dépouille à la terre,
Ce que j'ai tant rêvé paraîtrait à mes yeux !

Là, je m'enivrerais à la source où j'aspire ;
Là, je retrouverais et l'espoir et l'amour,
Et ce bien idéal que toute âme désire,
Et qui n'a pas de nom au terrestre séjour !

Que ne puîs-je, porté sur le char de l'Aurore,
Vague objet de mes voeux, m'élancer jusqu'à toi !
Sur la terre d'exil pourquoi resté-je encore ?
Il n'est rien de commun entre la terre et moi.

Quand là feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie,
Le vent du soir s'élève et l'arrache aux vallons ;
Et moi, je suis semblable à la feuille flétrie :
Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons !

French teacher protests potential Harvardization of French universities

Why I don't dream of Harvard

In the limitless admiration that people give this diploma-machine, I see a disturbing lack of perspective. True, Harvard, the richest university in the world, and a private one, has collected a lot of laurels. But don't forget that laurels like to grow on dungheaps.

Observation 1. Our French universities are as poor as church mice, and teachers who spend time across the Atlantic come home perturbed by what they have seen: good research funding, well-equipped classrooms and laboratories, high-tech lecture halls and libraries, and salaries to make a French professor nearing retirement turn green with envy. The U.S. is a young country that invests in its young people and in knowledge! It is producing brains, the prerequisite for its technological advances, which themselves are one of the sources of its superpower. The American dream! Anyone would fall under its spell!

In Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre's article in Le Monde, 16 May 2012 ("The Secrets of Harvard, First Among Universities"), we learn that "44 Nobel prize-winners, 46 Pulitzer prize-winners, and eight presidents of the United States have come from Harvard." Damn! With information drawn from "La face cachée de Harvard" ["The Hidden Face of Harvard"], by sociologist Stéphanie Grousset-Charrière, the article illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of the kind of teaching dispensed by Harvard. We have talked about the advantages. The disadvantages are the logical counterpart. The teachers never stay home, even when they are ill; they have personal relationships with the students; they don't criticize the students when they evaluate them, but make positive remarks in order to be "constructive."

Seen from another planet, this way of teaching seems interesting and original, especially as it is true that consideration for the students is better than scorn and humiliation. But Harvard did not invent this motivating method, which flourished in Europe from the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. What is disquieting about this relationship between professors and students is not that it is influenced by constructive criticism, listening, and attention; but that it is the result of clientelism. Students pay a lot of money to go to Harvard, and expect their professors not only to be knowledgeable, competent and active, but also submissive, since the client is king.

This clientelism explains how it is possible that students are allowed to evaluate their teachers, and that someone who has not been "able to convince them" can be fired in unilateral fashion, like a valet in a French comedy! The payer bosses the payee, in the country of the doer who defeats the thinker! Seneca, who had a problem with Nero, whose tutor he was, complained in his book On Benefits [De beneficiis] that human relationships in Rome were based on indebtedness. He wanted to substitute for that commercial relationship to his client one of the gods toward humans, which he defined as one of kindness.

From this I infer that making children start out in life with debts is damaging, if not crippling! It is not so important that bad teachers are fired; but it is much worse that the relation between master and pupil is commercial, not intellectual. At Harvard, teaching is subject to economics, the intellectual is subject to the clientèle.

Remark 2. Debt means debtors. American students are looking for income more than knowledge, preferably income that will allow them to pay back their debts! It is already not easy to make children want to learn. Is it really necessary to make them go into debt in order to hyper-motivate their lack of appetite for scholarship [sic]? The liberals (in the economic sense) will say that those who go into debt find it a motivating factor. The psychoanalyst would say the same thing to his patient: pay so that you can know yourself better. Do you see the masochism in this approach?

It is true that Max Weber described this kind of logic well in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; John Harvard was a young Puritan pastor at the beginning of the 1600s. One can nevertheless wonder if knowledge needs to be purified by debt to expand and be fruitful.

Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, did not find his idea through economic masochism, but through a more joyful impulse. Marie Curie, Louis Néel, Albert Schweitzer, Bergson, Camus, Sartre, none of them went into debt to produce their work. At a time when we know that French teachers are paid worse than their colleagues in Germany or the U.K., should we announce that they do not deserve a pay raise unless they "Harvardize" their teaching methods, in order to re-price knowledge-- in other words, abandon free, disinterested teaching in favor of an enticing babying of the student, based on clientelism? The idea is already percolating in certain people's heads and in certain behavior.

But at a time when Quebec students are revolting against a major rise in university tuition, at a time when American student debt "has just crossed the threshold of one trillion dollars and is the main reason for American indebtedness," it is perhaps also a time not to "Harvardize" minds even more, and to invent other less costly, less castrating [sic! for this guy, professors are male, ça se voit] solutions. Let us start from the following thesis: knowledge is not physical; it is abundant, communicable, and not necessarily of a commercial nature. Let us remember that in Greek, the word "School" ("skholè") means neither client nor debt, but "leisure."

--Emmanuel Jaffelin, agrégé de philosophie, teacher at the Lycée Lakanal [in Versailles]. Author of  Petit éloge de la gentillesse (François Bourin Editions)

Pourquoi Harvard ne fait pas rêver?

Je vois dans l'admiration sans borne que vouent certains à cette machine à diplômes une absence de recul inquiétante. Certes, les lauriers ne manquent pas à cette université privée qui est aussi la plus riche au monde, mais il faut rappelerque le laurier aime à pousser sur le fumier.

Acte I : Nos universités françaises sont pauvres comme Job sur son tas de fumier et tout enseignant qui fait un séjour outre-Atlantique revient dépité de ce qu'il a vu : des moyens de recherche, des salles et des laboratoires équipés, des amphithéâtres et des bibliothèques high tech, des salaires à faire rêver un professeur de l'université française à deux doigts de la retraite. L'Amérique est un pays jeune qui investit dans ses jeunes et dans le savoir ! Elle produit de la matière grise qui est la condition de son avance technologique qui s'avère elle-même une des sources de son hyperpuissance. The american dream ! Comment ne pas être séduit !

Dans l'article d'Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre (Les secrets d'Harvard, la première des universités, Le Monde du 16 mai 2012), on apprend que "44 Prix Nobels, 46 Prix Pulitzer et 8 présidents des Etats-Unis sont sortis de ses rangs". Damned ! S'appuyant sur La face cachée de Harvard de la sociologue Stéphanie Grousset-Charrière, l'article met en évidence les avantages et les inconvénients de l'enseignement si caractéristique de cette université. Nous avons évoqué les avantages dont les inconvénients sont la logique contrepartie : l'enseignant ne s'absente jamais même lorsqu'il est malade ; il personnalise sa relation à l'étudiant et ne le sanctionne pas lorsqu'il l'évalue, mais positive ses travaux afin d'être"constructif".

Cette démarche, vue de Sirius, paraît intéressante et novatrice tant il est vrai que la considération de l'élève vaut mieux que le mépris ou l'humiliation. Mais Harvard n'a pas inventé cette pédagogie de la motivation qui a fleuri en Europe dans le sillage de l'Emile de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ce qu'il y a d'inquiétant dans cette relation du professeur et de l'étudiant, ce n'est pas qu'elle soit empreinte de construction, d'écoute et d'attention : c'est qu'elle résulte du clientélisme. En payant très cher son inscription à Harvard, l'étudiant n'attend pas seulement de son professeur qu'il soit savant, compétent et performant : il attend qu'il soit soumis, puisque le client est roi.

Ce clientélisme explique que les étudiants évaluent leurs enseignants et que celui qui n'a pas "su les convaincre" se voit congédié de manière unilatérale, comme un valet dans les pièces de Marivaux ! Le payeur sort le payé au pays du doer qui l'emporte sur le thinker ! Sénèque déjà, qui avait fort à faire avec Néron, dont il fut le précepteur, se plaignait, dans son ouvrage Des bienfaits, du fait que la relation humaine à Rome reposât sur la dette : il souhaitait substituer à cette relation du commerçant à son client celle des dieux aux hommes, par laquelle il définissait la bienfaisance.

J'en déduis que faire démarrer des enfants dans la vie par une dette constitue un méfait, pour ne pas dire un forfait ! Il n'est pas grave que de mauvais enseignants soient révoqués ; il l'est davantage que la relation entre maître et élève soit commerciale et non intellectuelle. A Harvard, le pédagogique est soumis à l'économique, l'intellectuel à la clientèle.

Acte II : Qui dit dette, dit débiteur. L'étudiant américain est ainsi moins en quête desavoir que de revenus, ne serait-ce que de ceux qui lui permettront de remboursersa dette ! Il n'est déjà pas facile de motiver un enfant à apprendre, alors faut-il l'endetter pour transformer son peu d'appétence scolaire en hypermotivation universitaire ? Les libéraux (au sens économique) diront que celui qui s'endette trouve dans celle-ci sa motivation. Le psychanalyste dit la même chose à son patient : paye pour te connaître toi-même. On voit quel masochisme est à l'œuvre dans une telle démarche !

Certes, si Max Weber a bien décrit cette logique dans L'éthique protestante et l'esprit du capitalisme - John Harvard était un jeune pasteur puritain du début du XVII^e siècle -, on peut néanmoins se demander si le savoir doit passer par la dette pour s'épanouir et fructifier.

L'inventeur de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, n'a pas trouvé son idée dans ce masochisme économique, mais dans une autre pulsion, plus joyeuse ! Ni Marie Curie ni Louis Neels, ni Albert Schweizer ni Bergson ni Camus ni Sartre ne se sont endettés pour enfanter leurs œuvres. Alors que nous savons aujourd'hui que les enseignants français sont moins bien payés que leurs homologues allemands ou anglais, faut-il, pour revaloriser le savoir, décréter qu'ils ne mériteront une augmentation de salaire qu'au prix d'une "havardisation" de leur pédagogie, c'est-à-dire d'un abandon de la relation pédagogique gratuite et désintéressée au profit d'une infantilisation séductrice de l'enseignant sur fond de clientélisme ? L'idée est déjà dans les têtes et dans certains comportements.

Mais à l'heure où les étudiants québécois se révoltent contre une augmentation élevée du droit d'inscription à l'université, à l'heure où la dette étudiante américaine"vient de franchir le seuil de 1 000 milliards de dollars et constitue la première cause d'endettement des Américains", il est peut-être temps de ne pas "havardiser" davantage les esprits et d'inventer des solutions moins coûteuses et moins castratrices ? Partons du postulat suivant : le savoir est immatériel, abondant, communicable et non nécessairement marchand. Rappelons-nous qu'en grec, école (Skholè") ne veut dire ni client ni dette, mais "loisir" !

--Emmanuel Jaffelin, agrégé de philosophie, enseignant au lycée Lakanal. Auteur d'un "Petit éloge de la gentillesse" (François Bourin Editions)

Commentary by Me, Sedulia:

Having been a student at both an Ivy League university and a French Grande École, I think I have as good a right as anyone to criticize the thinking in this article.

The main problem with the article is that much of its argument is based on something that is simply not true. It is not expensive to go to Harvard, except for rich people who can afford it. Most of the student body receives outright grants to go. This includes non-American students from all over the world.

Why do Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford have such good financial aid? Because their students loved their experience and contribute huge amounts of money so that future students can go there without burdensome debt. I know, because I am one of those who writes yearly checks to my Alma Mater. 

Was I rich, an "elite" student? No! My ancestors were coal miners, carpenters, and farmers. My family was poor. I was elite only in the sense that I thirsted for knowledge, like most Ivy League students to this day. And you will find that, very far from being "elite" in the sense of money, Harvard students come from every financial background, but mostly middle-class. To be fair, American public schools are so bad that the poorest students are ill-served, and few of them arrive at top schools without substantial academic help.

It is a vile aspersion to assert that Ivy League students are so avid for gain that the only reason they want to go to Harvard is to make money. What evidence does the writer have for this or any of his other assertions about Harvard students? It is an assumption on a level with the oh-so-clever remark I read once by a French writer talking about a slum in Brooklyn with such paper-thin walls that you could "hear the neighbor's bidet." Quel connaisseur! 

I was also surprised to learn, from this expert on Ivy League student debt who is unaware of Harvard's financial aid, that students in the Ivy League are "clients" who force their teachers to be "submissive" and that their relationship is a commercial one of customer to clerk. Hmm. I wonder if he has ever met a Harvard professor? "Submissive" is not the first adjective that springs to mind.

It was also surprising to learn from him that Harvard professors cannot stay home when they are sick. Really? I guess that's the flip side-- in France they stay home saying they're sick even when they're not.

The grudging acknowledgement that students might actually thrive in an atmosphere of encouragement such as that at Harvard is immediately followed by the statement that (of course!) this idea was invented in France. Socrates had nothing to do with it, then.

The praise for the French teaching system in the article is especially ludicrous. Imagine defending a system because it creates no personal relationship with the students! In France, teachers know they cannot be fired, and that their students' whole future lives depend on them (to a much greater extent than in the U.S., France is prey to credentialism). In my own and my children's experience, and that of French and foreign people I know here, teachers in France are, compared to American teachers, arrogant, out of touch, incompetent in and ignorant of the modern world, boring or careless lecturers, unremittingly nasty and unavailable to their students, and all too often literally absent. Because why not? You get what you pay for! 

The teachers in American universities are not hired and fired by their student ratings, which are much more affected by publication record and academic reputation. But the ratings do influence hiring and firing decisions. AS THEY SHOULD. In France, the government itself stepped in to ban a website that allowed students to rate their teachers. Freedom of speech, quoi. Even though teachers here cannot be fired except for the grossest misconduct, they were too afraid to hear their students' honest opinions.

I resent this article's boring and stupid idées-reçues assumption that Americans, unlike those noble self-sacrificing French people, have a commercial culture that cares only about money. Oh yeah? Who volunteers more? Who gives more to charity? Who is more hospitable to foreigners? Has this person ever even been to America? And by that I do not mean New York City and Disneyland. Does he know one single person who went to Harvard? From the article, the answer looks obvious.

It's enlightening to notice that throughout the article he calls the university students "children."

Never heard of Louis Néel, who I just read is a physicist born in 1904, but I would think that someone trying to defend the French educational system would not use as sole examples of its prodigies people who are all noticeably dead. 

On the reverse side, I agree with the writer about many things. Although Harvard does not leave its students deep in debt, many American colleges do-- and often, the worse the reputation of the college, the worse the debt. This is a national scandal.

It's wonderful that public schooling leaves the average French Bac candidate with a far higher fund of basic information about math, science, history, geography and general culture than most American college graduates. And it's wonderful that parents don't have to remortgage their house for their children's college education. (Not to mention the French health care system, which whatever its problems is head and shoulders better than the American 50-million-uninsured non-system. I love France.)

It is pretty amazing, really, that you can get any education at all for €300 a year or less, which is what French university tuition costs. I guess it's too much to ask for the teachers to be nice on top of it. Much less decent toilets. Since we're speaking of laurels growing on dungheaps.

Grande École, unisex toilets. 

Asbestos: Martine Aubry interrogated by gendarmes

Martine Aubry © SICHOV/SIPA

Martine Aubry has explained herself. In the asbestos affair, the mayor of Lille and first secretary of the Socialist Party testified on Thursday, 28  January to gendarmes of the Central Office for Combating Environmental and Public Health Problems (Oclaesp). "Martine Aubry is happy to see the work done by the justice system as it confronts the drama caused by asbestos. The victims and their families must understand what is happen. Our collective duty is enlighten the courts and continue to seek solutions so that such a tragedy never happens again," announced the press service of the Socialist leader.

Why Martine Aubry? Because she was director of labor relations at the Labor Ministry between 1984 and 1987, where among other tasks her role was to assure the safety of workers in companies. Now, that period was crucial in the asbestos affair. The inaction of government agencies cost them a condemnation by the administrative tribunal of Marseilles. In effect, the judges ruled, the four years that France took to put into action a European directive of 1983, aimed at reducing dust limits in factories and therefore the risk to employees, constituted a first wrong. After complaints lodged by several families of victims, the government commissioner who was charged with passing judgment before the adminstrative tribunal noted on May 16, 2000, "The state did not take the measures that would have protected public health from a danger that can lead to death." In fact the directive was not applied until 1987. He added, "During those four years, numerous persons were put in contact with asbestos fibers, whose danger the state knew," and then compared the asbestos scandal to the infected blood scandal: "In the affair of the unheated blood products, a delay of eleven months in reacting against a mortal risk was recognized as wrong. Asbestos also kills. In not reacting, the state itself gravely damaged public health."

British government ad against asbestos danger

One of her deputies was on the Permanent Committee on Asbestos

Another reason to hear the testimony of Martine Aubry is that one of her deputies at the time, Jean-Luc Pasquier, who directed the CT4 office for labor relations, was responsible for enforcing hygiene and safety in enterprises. He was on the Permanent Committee on Asbestos (CPA), a lobby set up from scratch by public relations people from the industry. The committee included scientists, representatives of certain unions, directors of public organizations and from five ministries (Labor, Health, Environment, Housing and Industry). The role of this lobby: advance the "controlled use of asbestos" and prevent France, then Europe, from banning this fiber, as many other European countries already had done. The state had chosen to play the game of the asbestos industry in delegating the management of this major public health problem to it.

If Martine Aubry has always refused to answer journalists' questions on the asbestos affair, Jean-Luc Pasquier, questioned in 2004 by this reporter, has explained why he was a member of the CPA. "I went by the order of my different superiors in the hierarchy, including Martine Aubry..... She was kept informed of all the controversial problems, and asbestos was one of them. If she had wanted for us to get out of the CPA, she had only to say so.

Asbestos Danger signs in France

"In 1996, we were facing nothing but a presumption"

The management of labor relations of that time is also accused of not having initiated any study to find out the risks of the "magic mineral." "In spite of the mortal character of this risk, there has been no statement in defense [of the government]... of any study ordered from the relevant government agencies or from scientific authorities with the aim of verifying the existence of the causal link between cancer and the inhalation of asbestos fibers." The parliamentarians of the Parliamentary Office for Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices who later investigated this affair agreed, reproaching the leadership of the Labor Ministry, but also the General Management of the Health Ministry, with not having played "the warning role that they should have." That is not all. The inaction of the Labor Ministry at the beginning of the 1990s also cost the government a condemnation. This time, Martine Aubry was Labor Minister, and here again, the delay in carrying out a new directive, "excessive time, lasting thirteen months," is judged wrong, according to the magistrates. "In effect, as in 1983, this text has highlighted the poor standard of the thresholds maintained in various states of the [European] Community, and as soon as France knew about this, it should have reacted."

Martine Aubry testified about these two periods later, on 28 September 2005, before the Common Information Mission of the Senate, a hearing at which the members of Parliament did not treat her gently. Martine Aubry declared that she discovered the Permanent Committee on Asbestos only in the report of professor Claude Got [ed.: in 1998], and that it had not played "an important role." As for the shortage of French regulatory texts, Martine Aubry, on the contrary, asserted, "The Labor Ministry promulgated many regulatory moves....When you say about these problems that we didn't pay attention and that everyone ignored them, I answer that that is not true." Why, then, was asbestos banned so late in France? "In 1996, we were facing nothing more than a presumption," Martine Aubry answered, adding, "On these subjects, it's necessary not to wait: as soon as there is any doubt, even minor, it's necessary to get hold of those who can answer.... and if there is a presumption that the risk is real, it is necessary to intervene." Now, for the members of the Mission, concerning the risks of asbestos, it was long past the time of presumptions. "The scientific knowledge does not date from today, but well and truly from yesterday, or the day before," they wrote.

Aubry at the root of the indemnisation fund for asbestos victims 

Six months earlier, on April 6, 2005, her deputy Jean-Luc Pasquier, also heard by the senators, asserted, in testimony judged "fragile" by the Mission, that his superiors in the hierarchy "perhaps did not even now that their management was represented in the work of the Permanent Committee on Asbestos." The members of the Mission noted, "In any case we will recall to mind the fact that the CPA's lobbying action sometime took the form of sending mail addressed to the ministers themselves. How, at that point, could they not have been informed?"

To give Martine Aubry credit, when she went back to business in 1997 as Minister for Employment and Solidarity, after the ban on asbestos by the government of Alain Juppé, she put into place the FIVA (Fonds d'indemnisation des victimes de l'amiante, "Fund for the indemnisation of asbestos victims), and establishes retirement at the age of fifty for workers who were exposed. "I cannot, nor do I want to, hide my indignation at seeing working people, already compelled to do tiresome work, being cut down by disease because of having breathed in asbestos dust at their workplace. As often happens, injustice falls on the most fragile," she declared in a speech on July 29, 1998. 

"She has always been present for the victims, when we went to plead against former employers in Lille. She even helped with some of the trials," says Maître Jean-Paul Teissonnièr, lawyer for numerous victims in this affair.

The first secretary of the Socialist Party reacted through a press release when her hearing was announced. She congratulated herself on having been heard, and assured [the public] that she would bring "all my cooperation" to the court.

       --François Malye in Le Point, 15 January 2010

Martine Aubry s'est expliquée. Dans le cadre de l'affaire de l'amiante, la maire de Lille et première secrétaire du Parti socialiste a été entendue jeudi 28 janvier par les gendarmes de l'Office central de lutte contre les atteintes à l'environnement et à la santé publique (Oclaesp) comme témoin. "Martine Aubry se félicite de ce travail engagé par la justice face au drame causé par l'amiante. Les victimes et leurs familles doivent comprendre ce qui s'est passé. Le devoir collectif est d'éclairer la justice et de continuer à chercher les solutions pour qu'une telle tragédie ne puisse se reproduire", a souligné le service de presse de la dirigeante socialiste. 

Pourquoi Martine Aubry ? Parce qu'elle était directrice des relations du travail au ministère du Travail entre 1984 et 1987, poste où, entre autres, son rôle était de faire respecter la sécurité des salariés dans les entreprises. Or cette période est capitale dans l'affaire de l'amiante : l'inaction des services de l'État lui a valu d'être condamnée par le tribunal administratif de Marseille (1). En effet, pour les magistrats, les quatre années mises par la France pour transposer une directive européenne de 1983 visant à abaisser les seuils d'empoussièrement dans les usines - et donc à limiter les risques pour les salariés - constituent une première faute. "L'État n'a pas pris les mesures susceptibles de protéger la santé publique d'un danger susceptible d'entraîner la mort", notait, le 16 mai 2000, à la suite de la plainte de plusieurs familles de victimes, le commissaire du gouvernement, chargé de dire le droit devant le tribunal administratif. La directive ne sera en effet appliquée qu'en 1987. "Durant ces quatre années, nombre de personnes sont entrées en relation avec des fibres d'amiante dont l'État connaissait la dangerosité", ajoutait-il, avant de comparer le scandale de l'amiante à celui du sang contaminé : "Dans l'affaire des produits sanguins non chauffés, un retard de onze mois pour réagir face à un risque vital a été reconnu fautif. L'amiante tue aussi. En s'abstenant de réagir, l'État a bel et bien porté une grave atteinte à la santé publique." 

L'un de ses adjoints siégeait au Comité permanent amiante 

Autre raison d'entendre Martine Aubry, l'un de ses adjoints de l'époque, Jean-Luc Pasquier, qui dirigeait le bureau CT4 à la direction des relations du travail, chargé de faire respecter l'hygiène et la sécurité dans les entreprises, siégeait au Comité permanent amiante (CPA), lobby monté de toutes pièces par les communicants des industriels. Celui-ci comprenait des scientifiques, des représentants de certains syndicats, des responsables d'organismes publics et ceux de cinq ministères (Travail, Santé, Environnement, Logement, Industrie.) Rôle de ce lobby : prôner "l'usage contrôlé de l'amiante" et empêcher la France, puis l'Europe, de bannir cette fibre, comme beaucoup d'autres pays européens l'avaient déjà fait. L'État avait choisi de faire le jeu des industriels de l'amiante en leur déléguant la gestion de ce problème majeur de santé publique. 

Si Martine Aubry a toujours refusé de répondre aux questions posées par les journalistes sur l'affaire de l'amiante, Jean-Luc Pasquier, interrogé en 2004 par l'auteur de ces lignes (2), a expliqué pourquoi il faisait partie du CPA : "J'y suis allé sur ordre de mes différents supérieurs hiérarchiques, y compris de Martine Aubry. [...] Elle était tenue au courant de tous les dossiers chauds et l'amiante en faisait partie. Si elle avait voulu qu'on sorte du CPA, elle n'avait qu'à le dire." 

"En 1996, nous n'étions que devant une présomption" 

Autre faute reprochée à la direction des relations du travail à cette époque, n'avoir diligenté aucune étude visant à connaître les risques du "magic mineral" : "Malgré le caractère vital de ce risque, il n'est fait état en défense [...] d'aucune étude qui aurait été commandée aux services compétents de l'État ou à des autorités scientifiques dans le but de vérifier l'existence du lien de causalité entre le cancer et l'inhalation de fibres d'amiante." Les parlementaires de l'Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques qui enquêteront sur cette affaire (3) ne diront pas autre chose en reprochant à la direction du travail - mais aussi à la Direction générale de la santé - de ne pas avoir joué "le rôle d'alerte qui était le leur". Ce n'est pas tout. L'inaction du ministère du Travail au début des années 1990 vaut également à l'État d'être condamné. Cette fois, Martine Aubry est ministre du Travail et, là encore, le délai pour transposer une nouvelle directive, "temps excessif qui a duré treize mois", est jugé fautif selon les magistrats : "En effet, comme en 1983, ce texte a mis en exergue les insuffisances des seuils retenus dans divers États de la Communauté et, dès le moment où la France en a eu connaissance, elle aurait dû réagir." 

Martine Aubry s'expliquera sur ces deux périodes devant la mission commune d'information du Sénat , le 28 septembre 2005, audition durant laquelle les parlementaires ne la ménageront pas (4). Martine Aubry déclare qu'elle n'a découvert le Comité permanent amiante que dans le rapport du professeur Claude Got [en 1998, NDLR], et qu'il n'avait pas joué "un rôle important". Quant à la carence des textes réglementaires français, Martine Aubry, bien au contraire, affirme : "Le ministère du Travail a multiplié les avancées réglementaires. [...] Quand on dit sur ces problèmes qu'on ne s'en est pas occupé et que tout le monde les a ignorés, je réponds que ce n'est pas vrai." Pourquoi, alors, une interdiction de l'amiante si tardive en France ? "En 1996, nous n'étions que devant une présomption", répond Martine Aubry, qui ajoute : "Sur ces sujets, il ne faut pas attendre : dès que l'on a un doute, même mineur, il faut saisir ceux qui peuvent répondre [...] et s'il y a présomption que le risque est réel, il faut intervenir." Or, pour les membres de la mission, concernant les risques de l'amiante, on était depuis bien longtemps au-delà des présomptions : "Les connaissances ne dataient pas d'aujourd'hui, mais bel et bien d'hier, voire d'avant-hier", écrivent-ils. 

Aubry à l'origine du Fonds d'indemnisation des victimes de l'amiante 

Six mois plus tôt, le 6 avril 2005, son adjoint Jean-Luc Pasquier, également entendu par les sénateurs, affirmait, lors d'une démonstration jugée "fragile" par la mission, que ses supérieurs hiérarchiques "ne savaient peut-être même pas que leur direction était représentée aux travaux du Comité permanent amiante". Les membres de la mission notent : "On rappellera toutefois que l'action de lobbying du CPA prenait parfois la forme d'envois de courriers adressés à des ministres eux-mêmes. Comment, dès lors, auraient-ils pu ne pas être au courant ?" 

À l'actif de Martine Aubry, quand elle revient aux affaires en 1997 comme ministre de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité, après l'interdiction de l'amiante par le gouvernement d'Alain Juppé, elle met en place le FIVA, Fonds d'indemnisation des victimes de l'amiante, et instaure la retraite à cinquante ans pour les travailleurs qui y ont été exposés. "Je ne peux, ni ne veux, masquer mon indignation de voir des salariés déjà astreints à un emploi pénible être fauchés par la maladie pour avoir inhalé sur leur lieu de travail de la poussière d'amiante. Comme souvent, l'injustice s'acharne sur les plus fragiles. Comme souvent, la maladie frappe les plus faibles", déclare-t-elle dans un discours, le 29 juillet 1998. "Elle a toujours été présente auprès des victimes, lorsque nous allions plaider contre d'anciens employeurs à Lille. Elle a même assisté à certains des procès", dit maître Jean-Paul Teissonnière, avocat de nombreuses victimes dans cette affaire. 

La première secrétaire du Parti socialiste avait réagi par voie de communiqué de presse à l'annonce de son audition. Elle se "félicite" d'être entendue et assure qu'elle apportera "tout son concours" à la justice. 

1. Tribunal administratif de Marseille, 30 mai 2000, n° 97-5988, M. et Mme Botella et autres contre ministère de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité ( http://www.rajf.org/spip.php?article405 ), décision validée par le Conseil d'État le 20 février 2004

2. "Amiante, 100 000 morts à venir", François Malye, Le Cherche Midi, 2004.

3. "L'amiante dans l'environnement de l'homme : ses conséquences et son avenir, rapport d'information n°41, 1997-1998, Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques"

4. "Le drame de l'amiante en France, Comprendre, mieux réparer, en tirer des leçons pour l'avenir", mission commune d'information sur le bilan et les conséquences de la contamination par l'amiante, 2005-2006

1. Tribunal administratif de Marseille, 30 mai 2000, n° 97-5988, M. et Mme Botella et autres contre ministère de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité ( http://www.rajf.org/spip.php?article405 ), décision validée par le Conseil d'État le 20 février 2004

2. "Amiante, 100 000 morts à venir", François Malye, Le Cherche Midi, 2004.

3. "L'amiante dans l'environnement de l'homme : ses conséquences et son avenir, rapport d'information n°41, 1997-1998, Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques"

4. "Le drame de l'amiante en France, Comprendre, mieux réparer, en tirer des leçons pour l'avenir", mission commune d'information sur le bilan et les conséquences de la contamination par l'amiante, 2005-2006

Homage to Polly Platt

My beloved, charming, funny friend Polly Platt has died suddenly, the day after Christmas, 2008. I'm so sad.

She missed her husband, Ande, so much since his death a few years ago. I believe she died the way she would have wanted to go, in lovely Vienna at Christmas, surrounded by her family, active till the last, and with a new, successful book out.

She will be greatly missed.

Polly's entertaining and profound books:

French or Foe?

If you read one book about France, this should be it.

A friend from the British Embassy was given French or Foe and told to read it before moving to Paris!

translated into French as: Ils sont fous ces français!

Savoir Flair

Love à la Française: What Happens When Hervé Meets Sally

Polly's website

Sarko

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Sarkozy appears drunk after a meeting with Putin at the G8 summit last week (those Russians!) and the French press mentions nothing, but the Belgians have a field day (and then have to apologize).

Better watch this quickly-- I bet YouTube takes it off!

The French H-bomb, thanks to the English

The President of the French Fifth Republic is indeed the only person in Europe who can freely activate a nuclear weapon. It is true that the British Prime Minister also possesses this power, in theory. But his vectors (submarines and missiles), his tests, and therefore his nuclear weapons are dependent on American technology. And if, on paper, he can decide to use them alone, in actuality it is much harder to do so without the agreement of Washington. However, in all their disdain for a Britain too tied to the Americans to be the complete master of its own nuclear weapons, the French forget what they owe to the British: the French H-bomb. Let us remember that the first version of the atomic bomb, bomb A, the bomb of Hiroshima and of Reggane [first French A-bomb, tested at Reggane, Algerian Sahara in 1960], was a fission bomb, while the H-bomb, which France exploded for the first time in August 1968, was a bomb called "hydrogen," or fusion.

This book does not lend itself to technical digressions, so we will just say that the H-bomb is incomparably more powerful that the A-bomb. It was developed by the Americans Edward Teller and Stanislaw M. Ulman [sic for Stanislaw Ulam], who perfected the Teller-Ulman [sic for Teller-Ulam] procedure. This used the X-rays emitted by the explosion of a small A-bomb to compress the elements tritium, lithium, deuterium, etc. in a thermoclear combustion and take it to fusion. The physicist Andrei Sakharov imagined a similar procedure for the Russian bomb, and the British had followed the same course. But at the end of the 1960s, French atomic scientists still did not know of any of this work and had to rediscover the procedure. It was long, it was expensive, and the head of state was stamping his feet in impatience.

Once France was in possession of the A-bomb, De Gaulle could not wait for the nation to go up one gear and acquire the famous H-bomb. The first American bomb of this type, Ivy Mike (10.4 megatons, or 600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb), had exploded on the atoll of Eniwetok in November 1952. Then, in August 1953, the Russians exploded their first H-bomb, perfected by Sakharov, who many years later became the main Russian figure opposing the Soviet order. In 1957, it was the turn of the British, who were remarkably rapid. All this was already vexing enough. But what put De Gaulle into a black fury was the idea of the explosion of a Chinese H-bomb, which in fact came to pass in 1967. France behind China? Unacceptable...and yet!

While De Gaulle pressed the teams of the CEA [Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, the French atomic energy agency], the nucléocrates were having trouble. Not only could they not manage to find a solution, but the Élysée Palace [equivalent of White House] found that they were reluctant and dragging their feet. This was not wrong! Feeling little affinity for this project, they considered that the A-bomb France already possessed was already quite powerful enough. They were in agreement with the military men, who were just as unenthusiastic about nuclear weapons, that it was scarcely useful to acquire a weapon that could kill an enemy a thousand times, when it is already possible to kill him a hundred times. Pierre Messmer, who was Army Minister at the time, was still so angry twenty years later with those who refused to toe the line that he denounced them at a Sorbonne conference in 1989: "One of the reasons that we were relatively slow in moving from the A-bomb to the H-bomb, that is from fission to fusion, was that the scientists who worked for the CEA systematically refused all studies and research of a military character." This was a little unjust, but what matter? The army chief must be satisfied at any price!

Charles de Gaulle found himself a scapegoat, Alain Peyrefitte, his Minister for Research and Atomic and Space Affairs from January 1966 to April 1967. Just after having named him, the General browbeat him until the minister, as he recounts in his book Le Mal français, avowed the dishonorable truth. The engineers were stumbling, they were stuck, they couldn't do it: the H-bomb seemed to be beyond their capability within the timeframe fixed by the head of state in 1968. Officially, Peyrefitte solved the problem by naming an exceptional man, Robert Dautray, to the head of the H-bomb research group. Legend has it that Dautray knew how to put the teams to work, and that they then miraculously found the way to the bomb. The truth, which hides a very big secret, is a little different!

In fact, it was the British who offered the H-bomb to the French. It was the engineer Pierre Billaud, ousted by Peyrefitte shortly after the Jupiter-sized temper tantrum of January 1966, who took off the rose-colored glasses, first partially in a short book [La véritable histoire de la bombe H française, 1994], then in December, 1966, in an article in the magazine La Recherche. He reveals in them that at the time when the French atomic scientists were thrashing around helplessly, one of the[ French] military attachés in London assigned to [French] ambassador Geoffroy de Courcel-- who was a close friend of De Gaulle's--  met several times at cocktail parties a scientist who was very well informed about the laborious French research. William Cook was one of the fathers of the British H-bomb, and had worked for years at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the equivalent of the DAM (Direction des applications militaires) of the CEA. His French conversation partner, General André Thoulouze, was not a technician and did not understand much of what his new English friend was telling him, except that he said he was ready to help the French, gratis pro deo [free for God]. Thoulouze gave an account of these conversations to Henri Coleau, the head of the BIRS (Bureau information et renseignement scientifique), the private information service of the CEA. The conversations with Cook continued, but Cook never provided the French with any document. He recounted and explained in simple terms, and André Thoulouze retranscribed everything afterwards. The information the scientist was delivering was crucial: the path to follow to succeed in exploding the H-bomb was that of the Teller-Ulman method, which the French were not aware of: the famous compression by X-rays.

A young French engineer, Michel Carayol, had indeed come up with that solution, but it was  repudiated by his peers, and he himself scarcely believed in it. On September 19, 1967, an emergency meeting was called at the CEA to discuss William Cook's revelation. This time, the road was clear...The French H-bomb exploded at Fangataufa, in the Pacific, less than a year later, on August 8, 1968, and remained one of the greatest prides of Charles de Gaulle.

Of course, this story gives a big slap in the face to the theory of an exclusive [French] "national path" in access to French nuclear weapons. Moreover, when Maurice Schumann, Alain Peyrefitte's successor in the ministerial oversight of the CEA, informed Charles de Gaulle of the British contribution, the latter "almost had a stroke."* Quite a few mysteries remain, however, concerning this episode. It would be especially important to know on whose political instructions William Cook, who died in 1987 years before his role came to light, was acting. For the French are still absolutely convinced, without having proof, that it was the British government of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson that sent him in contact. Let us recall that at the time, Charles de Gaulle had just decided to withdraw France from NATO, and that he was opposed to British entry to the Common Market. But if London hoped to make the general soften with the gift of the H-bomb, it was a bad calculation. Five months after the explosion of Fangataufa, he renewed his opposition! So ungrateful....

Oh, the British! If only they had wanted to discuss a common nuclear strategy with the French. If only they had accepted, for example, to "take the nuclear alert" with the French. In the 2000s, France had four SNLEs (sous-marins nucléaires lanceurs d'engins)[nuclear submarines] available, one always at sea. Another nuclear secret, from the Chirac era this time: from 1995 onwards, he had teams working on a rapprochement with the British in this domain. Which went far: on November 2, 1996, Jacques Chirac and John Major publicly declared in London, "We do not imagine a situation in which the vital interests of one of our two countries, France and the United Kingdom, could be threatened without the vital interests of the others being threatened too." After this declaration, the chiefs of staff met, scenarios were elaborated and war games carried out, until there was a roadblock: the integration of the British dissuasive force with the American system was such that British autonomy was very much affected...The French President, as for him, has no one to answer to... The bomb is all his!

            --From Histoire secrète de la Ve République, under the direction of Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel (Éditions La Découverte, 2006) 

* Marcel Duval, À la recherche d'un "secret d'État", in Défense nationale, August-September 2004.

 

 

"Today, schools are creating barbarians

Opinion

Today, Schools Are Creating Barbarians

by Jean-Paul Brighelli, teacher and author of La Fabrique des crétins ["The moron factory"], who is publishing a pamphlet on schools

The presidential campaign is underway. To take account of the ideas in debate, our section "Opinion" welcomes iconoclastic, even provocative remarks. We can each make up our own minds. Today: Jean-Paul Brighelli, who is publishing L'Ecole sous influence ["Schools under the influence"], a scathing attack on our school system.
.......................................................

From "morons" in your first book, the students, at least in ghetto areas, are now supposed to have become "barbarians." How?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. We have the school we deserve: that of a weaker and weaker democracy. We are currently paying the last consequences of the Jospin school law of 1989, which puts the pupil at the center of the system and incites him to "build his own knowledge," as the hackneyed educational refrain goes. But after not learning anything solid, many students have been walled up alive behind a terrifying screen of ignorance that leads to the worst excesses. Moron, that was nice. Today, the schools are manufacturing barbarians. The riots in the suburbs, which will happen again, show that I was right. By "respecting" the law of the ghettos and its underlying language, we have let an entire generation degenerate.

Does barbary begin with language?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. The barbarian, in the first sense of the word, is someone who does not speak the language of the city. Those from the projects make do with a rudimentary illiterate slang, reduced to a few hundred words sprinkled with English terms like "gun" or "cop." Bad rap, in a way. We are guilty of having let it happen by amputating by one-third, in twenty years, the number of hours devoted to learning French. With the result that there is a gangrene of the spirit, zero degrees of thought: the students don't even understand the words the teacher is reading.

The effects go even farther, you say....

Jean-Paul Brighelli. The Jospin law opened Pandora's box. It's not an accident that two months later, the first veil affair broke out in Creil (Oise). It was a way of testing the law, which legitimized the right-- without anything asked in return-- to express opinions, especially religious opinions. That is how debates that should have stayed in the private sphere erupted into schools. Today, school is no longer a sanctuary. We can feel the rise of violence, which is the only way barbarians communicate. Into a skull emptied by the absence of knowledge and of culture, you can slip any ready-made extremism. The future makes me uneasy.

"We have ended by tolerating the intolerant."

Then the principal of secularism is in danger?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. You must be joking, it doesn't exist any more! All you have to do is read the Obin report* published in 2004 by a team of inspecteurs généraux. An official, rigorous inquiry... and apparently kept out of sight by the Education department because it was too upsetting. It shows how public schools suffer every day from attempted infiltration by small religious minorities, and ends up by giving way over and over. In the name of the spirit of tolerance and cultural diversity, we end by tolerating the intolerant.

For example?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. Some principals act as if it is normal to have a prayer room for Muslim students in the Paris region; teachers give up teaching Voltaire, for example, or barely mention Darwin; students ask the gym teachers for separate locker rooms [WHOA! does this mean French boys and girls share locker rooms?!?]; the cafeterias prefer to use only Muslim-rule meat; the heads of schools receive veiled mothers [even though the veil is forbidden at schools]... It's certainly only a partial visiton, because these problems are concentrated in certain areas. But twenty years ago, there were no head-scarves in schools, and a lot fewer in the streets.

Since the law on religious signs, two years ago, however, the veil seems to have disappeared from schools. Do you disagree?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. What we chased out the door by banishing the veil has come back through the window in another form. Look at these boys who challenge girls at recess to force them to lower their eyes. Or that girl beaten up in a junior high school in Lyon for having dared to eat during Ramadan. They are the first victims of intolerance. For antisemitism, it's the same thing: we reassure ourselves by saying that the crimes are diminishing, but in the minds, it is becoming normal.

Do you not refuse, basically, for schools to be the mirror of a multicultural society?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. Society has never been multicultural, or only at the level of regional cultures. Schools have their share of responsibility. By putting all cultures on an equal plane, schools have neglected and even torpedoed our culture and our common language. They have encouraged kids to exalt their differences. Is it an accident that "Céfran" [verlan slang for français, French] has become an insult in the mouths of young Beurs [French of Arab origin] who almost all, however, have French nationality? We have let it happen because we are paralyzed by the post-colonial guilt that puts us in a situation of repentance.

You want to go back to "nos ancêtres les Gaulois"? ["Our ancestors the Gauls," traditional first words in French history class]

Jean-Paul Brighelli. No, no more than I'm nostalgic for the gray smock. It is not a question of creating an aberrant model, but of rediscovering a cement that will allow us to teach the same history, the same culture and to speak the same language from Lille to Bonifacio. School must no longer be the place of diversity, but that of a uniting speech. In order to do that, we must re-think the carte scolaire [which assigns pupils to schools for social-integration reasons], review programs from top to bottom while returning to basic learning, first of all French and math, even learn things "by heart" sometimes. The frame may look strict, but it is the only way to give students a solid base.

        --Interview by Charles de Saint-Sauveur in Le Parisien, 19 October 2006

* Brighelli also contributes to a collective work based on the Obin report (l'Ecole face à l'obscurantisme religieux, Schools and religious obscurantism)

Police accused of classifying delinquents by ethnic origin in report

In an official complaint lodged by SOS-Racisme on Tuesday in Paris, in which the association claims to have suffered from a crime, the police officers of the General Information Office [Renseignements généraux] are accused of having created a dossier classifying delinquents by their ethnic group, the association announced.

This procedure accuses a report of the General Information Office on January 6, 2005, which identified the ethnic origin "of 436 perpetrators in 24 quartiers sensibles" [touchy neighborhoods], a document published in several press outlets since February.

"Among [the perpetrators], 87% have French nationality, 67% are of North African origin and 17% of African origin. French citizens of non-immigrant origin represent 9% of perpetrators," the report concluded.

SOS-Racisme considers that to arrive at this conclusion, the policemen of the General Information Office must necessarily have created a dossier of delinquents with a racist base.

"No matter what, the statistics of delinquents according to ethnic origin could not have been revealed to the press unless a dossier was put in place in the heart of the General Information Office," writes Samuel Thomas, vice-president of the association, in the complaint, which was given to the press.

These facts constitute, according to the association, the infraction of "creation or conservation in digital memory without the express consent of the concerned party, of data of personal character, which directly or indirectly shows a person's racial or ethnic origins, political, philosophical or religious opinions, or union memberships."

The penal code provides a penalty of up to five years of prison and 300,000 euros in fines for this offense.

SOS-Racisme directly accuses Nicolas Sarkozy by including in its complaint a declaration of the minister to RTL last February, in which he deplored the legal impossibility of mentioning the ethnic origin of delinquents.

"The fact that in France it is not possible to understand the diversity of the population, because the ethnic origin of delinquents is forbidden, is one of the reasons for the wreck of our system of integration," declared the president of the UMP.

The report of the General Information Office was used by several extreme-right internet sites, SOS-Racisme emphasizes in its complaint.

The General Administration of the National Police [DGPN, or Direction générale de la police nationale] declared in a press release that "no specific file of that type was created by any police service."

"The numbers contained in the report...are the result of an evaluation based on data on the état civil*, which are obligatory in the hearing reports of 436 perpetrators who were arrested during acts of urban violence in all the quartiers sensibles [touchy neighborhoods] combined," it explained.

The DGPN explained that it was "the origin of surnames and first names that allowed this study, which uses solely numbers, not names, to be carried out."

*  état civil is an expression hard to explain to us Anglo-Saxons. It basically means your legal identity. You used to have to produce an official fiche d'état civil-- which involved a bureaucratic hassle-- for almost everything in France, from registering for school to getting a driver's license to renting an apartment. It was ridiculous going to the American consulate and getting a piece of paper that  constituted the U.S. equivalent of the fiche d'état civil; the consul would carefully explain that they were happy to give you the scrap of paper the French bureaucracy asked for, but that the U.S. version actually had no legal validity.  A few years ago the French bureaucracy accepted that a fiche d'état civil is pointless when everyone has an I.D. card or a passport, and you rarely need to deal with it any more.

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La police accusée d'avoir constitué un fichier raciste

    23/08/2006 - 07h31

PARIS (Reuters) - Les policiers des Renseignements généraux sont accusés d'avoir constitué un fichier de délinquants sur la base de leur origine ethnique dans une plainte avec constitution de partie civile déposée mardi à Paris par SOS-Racisme, annonce l'association.

Cette procédure incrimine un rapport des Renseignements généraux daté du 6 janvier 2005 répertoriant l'origine ethnique "de 436 meneurs recensés dans 24 quartiers sensibles", document publié dans plusieurs organes de presse depuis février.

"Parmi (les meneurs), 87% ont la nationalité française, 67% sont d'origine maghrébine et 17% d'origine africaine. Les Français d'origine non immigrée représentent 9% des meneurs", concluait ce rapport.

SOS-Racisme considère que pour arriver à cette conclusion, les policiers des RG ont nécessairement établi un fichier de délinquants sur une base raciste.

"En tout état de cause, les statistiques des délinquants selon leur origine ethnique n'ont pu être révélées à la presse qu'après qu'un fichier ait été mis en place au sein des Renseignements généraux", écrit Samuel Thomas, vice-président de l'association, dans la plainte transmise à la presse.

Ces faits constituent selon l'association l'infraction de "mise ou conservation en mémoire informatisée sans le consentement exprès de l'intéressé, des données à caractère personnel qui, directement ou indirectement, faisant apparaître les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses, ou les appartenances syndicales des personnes".

Le code pénal prévoit une peine maximale de cinq ans d'emprisonnement et de 300.000 euros d'amende pour ce délit.

SOS-Racisme met en cause directement Nicolas Sarkozy en joignant à sa plainte une déclaration du ministre à RTL en février dernier où il déplorait l'impossibilité légale de mentionner l'origine ethnique des délinquants.

"Le fait que l'on ne puisse pas, en France, connaître la diversité de la population parce que l'origine ethnique des délinquants est interdite participe à la panne de notre système d'intégration", déclarait le président de l'UMP.

Le rapport des Renseignements généraux a été exploité par plusieurs sites internets d'extrême droite, souligne SOS-Racisme dans sa plainte.

La Direction générale de la police nationale (DGPN) a déclaré dans un communiqué "qu'aucun fichier spécifique de ce type (n'avait) été créé par un service de police".

"Les chiffres contenus dans le rapport (...) sont le résultat d'une évaluation effectuée sur la base des renseignements d'état civil figurant obligatoirement dans les procès-verbaux d'audition de 436 meneurs interpellés au cours d'actes de violences urbaines dans l'ensemble des quartiers sensibles", explique-t-elle.

La DGPN explique que c'est "l'origine des noms et des prénoms qui a permis d'effectuer cette étude uniquement chiffrée et non nominative".

© Reuters Limited.

That sinister word social

The word social always makes a frisson go up my spine when I hear it on the radio. It's up to no good.

action social = strike

plan social = mass layoff

logement social = housing project (also known as HLM-- pronounced AhshellEM)

conflit social = labor dispute

partenaires sociaux= the bosses (always referred to as le patronat) versus the workers, the government and the media

mouvement social =  labor protest, strike

acquis sociaux [plural]= the things we have fought for, e.g. the 35-hour work week; retiring at 55; six-week vacations; the near-impossibility of getting fired for rudeness or incompetence

My French vs English wordlist (on-going)

I love the French and English languages. They are an endless source of pleasure.

[Disclaimer: all these definitions and opinions are my own and cannot be considered authoritative. I realize that you can eventually explain any notion in any language--but not equally easily.]

  

French words with no real English equivalent

les acquis sociaux [means "the things that we have fought for: the 35-hour week, etc." ]

attentat   The French have a word for any kind of terrorist attack

cadre [someone who is not an ordinary employee, part of the elite; but it's fuzzy]

chômer, chômeur [to be unemployed, an unemployed person: but in French, it's somehow active]

dépaysement [the sensation of being in another country]

déroulement [unfolding, how things happen] 

doux [means so many things at once: sweet, tender, soft, gentle]

douleur [means so many things at once: pain, sorrow, grief, sadness, ache, heartache]

encadrer [to be surrounded and taken care of]

la fête, fêter  [we need a word like this in English. "Party" or "feast" are not the same.]

incontournable [something you can’t escape from or get around; not quite the same as inevitable]

le patronat [the class of bosses, as if they're separate from normal people; I find this concept very French]

le regard  It's not exactly a glance, it's a look, the expression on your face as you look; mainly going toward the looker, while English look is mostly from the looker. 

retrouvailles [meeting again after a long time, the happiness]

That sinister word social 

sortable [adjective for someone you can take places without being embarrassed]  

spectacle [a show of any kind]  

surenchère [one-upmanship, upping the ante, increasing your bid]

 

English words with no true French equivalent

block  [as in "Go two blocks"-- the French word is pâté de maisons, but the French never use it. Instead they say "two streets." In fact I don't know how they talk about a city without ever mentioning blocks!]

float  [as in a parade]  In French you call it a char, but as far as I'm concerned, that has way too many other meanings and calls up the wrong image.

friend     [Of course, the French have friends too. But a French ami/amie always has to have a sex, whereas we find it's often so convenient not to have to say.]

gentleman   [in French, seems to be more of a fashion statement than a personal quality.]

kick  [you have to say: "donner un coup de pied" which I find a bit long for a quick kick]

kind  [the French have to say “gentille” or “généreux”; the nuance of this being a deep character trait is missing]

mind  [all senses, from "I don't mind" to "have in mind" to "a beautiful mind"]

miss [as in "missing someone"; you have to say "Tu me manques" which means "You are lacking to me."]

remember  [you have to say je me souviens or je me rappelle, "I recall to myself"-- seems very long for such a basic action]

ride  [as in an amusement park; you have to say "attraction" but that can mean a stationary one]

neighborly   Hahahahah

rude   ["mal poli" does not translate the American sense: aggressively, deliberately impolite.]

tailgating   [as in a car. This is curious because almost all French drivers tailgate. Maybe it's like our not noticing gravity until Isaac Newton pointed it out.]

thorough  [you have to say profond or à fond] 

wonder  [in French you have to say, "I ask myself" to translate "I wonder," but it's not the same thing]

wrong  [you have to say "faux" or "mauvais" as in "the bad direction" instead of "the wrong way"; a nuance of wrongness is missing]

French expressions I find strange

je n’y suis pour rien [literally "I am not there for nothing":  "it’s not my fault"]

passer un savon à quelqu’un  [literally "pass a soap to someone": scold someone]

tirer les vers du nez   [literally "pull the worms out of the nose": used as in English, "getting him to talk was like pulling teeth"; people actually say this]

French words I like/think sound funny

coup de barre

galipette

gueule

polisson

racaille, pagaille, canaille, gouaille, grisaille; chatouille, rouille, bouille

zozoter [the French have a word for lisp even though en principe they don't have a "th" sound!]

tentative d’attentat   [attempted terrorist attack; say it out loud!]

trois

Vive le roi!  [Try to say “roi ” and see if it sounds like a king!]


Common French expressions whose equivalent you don't hear much in English

en principe  ["in theory"; actually means "but in reality, probably not"]

mais puisque je vous le dis   ["but because I'm saying it to you"-- someone who often seems untrustworthy says this when you doubt what they are saying. ]

faut pas vous énerver!   ["(you) must not get annoyed!" Always said by annoying people when you object to their cutting in line/queue-barging]

Common English words and expressions whose equivalent you don't hear much in French

Sorry, but I didn't make the rules!

I don't buy that!

wasting time