A few days after my oral interview I went back to the Regiment Rouge, and this time I actually got on one of the stationary bicycles and rode it for twenty-four minutes. I was in full New York regalia (sweatpants, headband, Walkman) and did it in good New York form (Stones blasting in my headphones, crying out, “One minute!” when there was a minute left to go). By now there were other people at the gym, though the man on the bicycle next to me was going at a speed barely fast enough to sustain life, while the woman beside him, who was on a treadmill, was walking at the right speed for window-shopping on the boulevard Saint-Germain on an especially sunny day when your heart is filled with love and your pockets are filled with money; it was as though she had set the machine at “Saunter.”
I got down from my bike perspiring right through my T-shirt—the first person on the Left Bank, I thought proudly, to break a sweat at a gym. I walked back to the desk. “A towel, please,” I panted (in French, of course). The girl in the red tracksuit at the desk gave me a long, steady, opaque look. I thought that maybe I had got the word for towel wrong (I hadn’t, though), and after I asked again and got the same look in return, I thought it wise to try to describe its function. My description sounded like a definition from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary: that thing which is used in the process of removing water from the surfaces of your body in the moments after its immersion. “Ah,” she said. “Of course. A towel. We have none yet.” She looked off into the middle distance. “This,” she said at last, “is envisaged.” I looked at her dumbly, pleadingly, the reality dawning on me. Then I walked all the way home, moist as a chocolate mousse.
A couple of days later I went for what I thought would be my last visit to the Prefecture de Police to get my carte de sejour, a process that had involved a four-ministry workout stretching over three months. The functionary seemed ready to give it to me—she was actually holding it out across the desk—but then she suddenly took one last look at the dossier the prefecture had on me and noticed something that she had somehow missed before.
“Alors, monsieur,” she said, “you have not yet had a physical examination to make sure that you are in sufficiently good health to remain in France.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I belong to a gym,” I said at last, and I showed her my card from the regiment.
“Well,” she said, “this will be useful for your dossier.” I couldn’t argue with that.
The Chill
It was a very cold winter here, and it felt even colder. “It’s the dampness,” every shivering Parisian explained. But really it was something else. A visitor who has walked bareheaded and oblivious through twenty arctic Canadian winters found that, out for a walk in Paris with the temperature in the high thirties, he was pulling a woolen hat over his ears and huddling in doorways and stopping in cafés to drink hot wine and then quickly heading home.
What has made it seem so cold is the French gift for social dramatization: A cold day is a cold day, and everyone conspires to give it presence. Looking cold is also a way of making it plain that you are feeling miserable, a way to dramatize the “economic horror” that has overtaken Paris. In the chill a series of smaller social pageants have been played out, including a hostage taking, a craze for a strange book on economics, a growing conviction that the way out of the crisis is for everyone to stop working, a campaign against immigrants that led to mass civil disobedience by intellectuals, and visits by two foreigners bringing messages of deliverance.
The hostage taking at the Credit Foncier de France, a semi-public, or state-supported, mortgage lender, was the first and the most improbable of the economic dramas. The Credit Foncier was practically bankrupt, and the government decided to fob off parts of it on anybody who wanted bits of a failing bank. Its employees then decided that the best way to persuade the government to reconsider this plan was to go to the top and kidnap the president, a M. Jerome Meyssonier. Not only did M. Meyssonier stay on as a hostage, but he supposedly made it the only condition of his imprisonment that no photographer be allowed to take a picture of him sleeping on a cot in his office. The employees agreed, and even decided to keep the bank open for business while the boss was being held incommunicado. Then they too decided to sleep in the building, presumably as an act of solidarity with the boss they had just imprisoned.
Hostage taking of this kind has become more or less routine here, kidnapping the boss being to the French economic crisis what firing the employees was to the American one. Over the past few years a number of French bosses, including some at Moet et Chandon, have been held hostage. There’s actually a nice word for telling the patron to go to his room and stay there: He is merely being “sequestered,” which, as euphemisms go, seems a fair trade for the Anglo-Saxon downsizing.
The hostage takings, naturally, are almost entirely symbolic: If M. Meyssonier had really wanted to leave, he could have left. The melodrama of the “sequestration” was nonetheless mistaken by some foreign observers for the real thing. It’s easy to exaggerate the scale of the French crisis; the French do it themselves. The secondary, or symbolic, point of an action is often as clear as the primary, or practical, reality, and sometimes a lot clearer. At Christmastime in 1995 many journalists were enthralled by the masses of ordinary people who were out on the streets every day in the tens of thousands, symbolically showing their solidarity with striking Metro drivers. It was easy to miss the real point, which is that what everybody was doing on the streets was walking to work.
One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment-or chomage, as it’s called—has hovered around 12 percent for the last two years. Most of the other problems, the ones that create the sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government’s tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an “Anglo-Saxon” economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. No one is reassured by the stridently triumphal tones of American free-marketers. After a recent trip to New York one French journalist remarked that leafing through a copy of Forbes or Fortune is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.
These days one popular solution to the economic crisis is for everyone to stop working. The movement to lower the universal retirement age to fifty-five is the closest thing to a mass economic uprising that the country has seen; without the support of even the labor unions, to say nothing of the bemused parties of left or right, it is sweeping the country. It started last November, when striking truck drivers blockaded highways and ports to secure their right to retire at fifty-five. The government, faced with a choice between calling out the army and giving in, gave in. There was a general feeling that social justice had been done:
Truck drivers work long hours, away from their families, and letting them stop for good at fifty-five seemed fair.
Several weeks later people started to realize that after all, the truck drivers’ lot wasn’t that much harder than everybody else’s, and the idea of universal retirement at fifty-five really took flight. In January one of the public transportation unions decided to demand universal retirement at fifty-five, and despite the opposition of the respectable left, by mid-February a poll revealed that almost 70 percent of the population was in favor of stopping work at fifty-five.