Monk

Ayn Randian logic is not entirely groundless. The new socialist French president is finding that a number of that country's wealthy citizens are looking to hot-foot the country with their wealth in tow.

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President François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone’s income above a million euros ($1.24 million) a year. “Should I be preparing to leave the country?” the executive asked Mr. Grandil.

The lawyer’s counsel: Wait and see. For now, at least.

“We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France,” said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. “Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing.”

-- Liz Alderman at The New York Times

France—and, along with it, Europe and possibly the global economy—are about to enter a new and uncertain era. The first exit polls in French media have put socialist François Hollande ahead of the center-right incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, with more than 52 percent of the vote.

-- Christopher Dickey at The Daily Beast

I don't suppose the Hollande government will be a re-play of the Mitterand days, but one is tempted to think that we may be seeing the ideological pendelum swinging back to the liberal side, not just in France, but for the West in general. We can only pray that Obama keeps the White House from Romney and the Republicans.

Maureen Dowd glows about the ferment of debate in France over male privilege in the aftermath of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn for raping the hotel maid:

“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.

As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”

After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.

Since I've never really enjoyed such male privilege, I probably should be celebratory too, but I cannot help feeling a sense of loss as well.

"I feel sory for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, there is nothing worse than getting accused of attempted rape. It means you failed."

-- Internet Anonymous

The quote must originate in France.

For the record, Strauss-Kahn was actually the head of the International Monetary Fund, and while he was in New York, he alledgedly took a run at a hotel maid. When she came to clean the room, he ran out naked and went for it.

In this sordid tale, there is a stirring note of democracy, to think that such an august international politician could get in legal trouble for raping a lowly maid, an African immigrant at that. The French are crying foul, as they have a more primeval understanding of sexual mores. Whatever else happens, Strauss-Kahn has resigned and his bid to run for the French presidency are thought to be dashed. Moreover, he has spent some days in jail. Will wonders never cease!

When in his later life Voltaire took the lead in seeking to overturn official, sanctioned injustice, his biographer Ian Davidson argues that Voltaire opened up a novel strategy of working to enlist public opinion on his side against the authorities (novel to the French, I suppose). However, Davidson interestingly notes that Voltaire had a decidedly qualified understanding of public opinion.

Of course, Voltaire did not understand ‘public opinion’ in anything like the sense we do today; on the contrary, he rejected the idea that the whole of society at large could have a valid opinion, as he made clear several years later, in the context of a quite different case: ‘When I say “the voice of the public”, I do not mean that of the population at large, which is almost always absurd, that is not a human voice, it is a cry of brutes; I mean the collective voice of all the decent people who think, and who, over time, reach an infallible judgment.’ Voltaire’s concept of public opinion was more limited, but still astonishing: he aimed to appeal to the political class as a whole, not just to individual members of it.

This may seem a bit harsh and crude to twenty-first-century sensibilities, but one thinks of the so-called Tea Party as well as the Birther Movement that even today rejects President Obama’s proffered birth certificate as final and dispositive proof that he is indeed an American, and one can appreciate Voltaire’s point.

“Our priests are not what the foolish people imagine; their wisdom is based solely on our credulity.”

-- Voltaire

After Frank’s “Dostoevsky”, I didn’t think I would be up for another big biography, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on Voltaire - too foreign and Frenchy, too involved and complex. I really only know his “Candide”, though I love it and once made a habit of reading it once a year. At this stage in my life, I am fairly free of any intellectual ambitions to learn big new things, preferring instead to enmesh myself more fully in subject matter that I have already made a home of.

In fact, a new biography on Charles Dickens was on the same shelf as Ian Davidson’s “Voltaire: A Life”, and I was inclined to take home the Englishman who gave me “Great Expectations” and “David Copperfield” as well as “Christmas Carol”, but browsing through the volumes, I saw that Davidson’s work was open and accessible enough to the general, liberal-artsy reader, and I decided to venture forth bravely. I’m not dead yet!

Clocking it at a little over four-hundred pages, Davidson’s biography is not an exhaustive treatment of Voltaire’s life and work, but neither is it a trite song fit only for lackluster high-school students. For those of us who are fairly innocent of eighteenth-century French figures and their most famous voice of the Enlightenment, we get to enjoy a rather intimate look at the man, such as his most contentious and complex relationship with his father, who wanted his son to follow him unto the heights of the legal profession instead of pursuing the uncertain course of the literary arts. We get to see Voltaire’s struggles at thirty, even after having made his big literary splash in theater and poetry:

By the end of September 1724 Voltaire was becoming so desperate about his financial situation that he was starting to think that he might have to get a job, as he wrote to Mme de Bernieres: ’My fortune has taken such a devilish turn in the Chambre des Comptes, that I shall perhaps be compelled to work to live, after having lived to work.’

I am only in the opening chapters, but I am confident that Davidson will maintain the enjoyable pace he has established. He has given us a wonderful opportunity to get better grounded in that revolutionary century and in the life of one of the West’s foremost wits.

( Extended excerpt )

“I write in French and dream in Italian.”

-- Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

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PARIS — The French bank Société Générale said Thursday that it had uncovered "an exceptional fraud" by a trader that would cost it €4.9 billion, or about $7.1 billion, and that it would seek new capital of about $8 billion.

-- David Jolly for The New York Times

This is to remind us that it is not only American financiers who can play funny money games. In the gilded age, that scent of easy money just makes the fancy boys go mad with greed, like the way that hawt spring break babes in a wet t-shirt contest makes them mad with lust. But as the economists say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

xXx

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Another spate of violent riots has been taking over the streets of France. As in the last bout of riots, this has all the markings of a rebellion of France's Muslim and African immigrants.

When I first skimmed this news, I thought this was about the economic reforms, in which President Sarkozy seeks to end the 35-hour work week. But that is a different case of French unrest.

The French arguably have an over-exuberent idea of democracy.

( article )

xXx

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I saw the mini-headline about massive strikes in France, but I just shook my head and went on, "That again!" Fortunately, Roger Cohen has a column that explains the situation. Although I usually find the French to be as annoying as anyone else, my heart rather goes out to their clinging to the 35-hour work week and their grudge against capitalism. But the world moves on and it is no worker's paradise.

( Cohen )