These days the old mayor of Pau, who’d been beaten practically every time he ran for office over the last thirty years, was cultivating an image of integrity, with the connivance of various magazines. Which is to say, Bayrou was regularly photographed leaning on a shepherd’s crook, wearing a beret — like Justin Bridou on the sausage labels — in a landscape of meadows and fields, usually in Labourd. The image he kept trying to promote, from interview to interview, was that of the man who said no, on the model of de Gaulle.
‘It’s genius, picking Bayrou — sheer genius,’ Alain Tanneur said, the moment I showed up. He was literally quivering with enthusiasm. ‘I admit, it would never have occurred to me. This Ben Abbes really is something.’
Marie-Françoise greeted me with a big smile. She wasn’t just glad to see me, she was thriving. To see her bustling around the kitchen in an apron bearing the humorous phrase ‘Don’t Shout at the Cook — That’s the Boss’s Job!’ (or words to that effect), it was hard to believe that just days ago she’d been leading a doctoral seminar on the altogether unusual circumstances surrounding Balzac’s corrections to the proofs of Béatrix. She’d made us tartlets stuffed with ducks’ necks and shallots, and they were delicious. In his excitement, her husband uncorked a bottle of Cahors and one of Sauternes — then remembered his port, which I absolutely had to taste. On the face of it, I couldn’t see what was so ‘genius’ about bringing François Bayrou back into politics, but I was sure Tanneur would fill me in before long. Marie-Françoise gazed at him lovingly, clearly relieved that her husband was handling his dismissal so well, and adapting so easily to the role of armchair strategist — a role that would win him the admiration of the mayor, the doctor, the notary and all the other notables still to be found in provincial towns. For them he’d always retain the glamour of a career in the secret services. The Tanneurs’ retirement was off to a decidedly promising start.
‘What’s amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable,’ Tanneur enthused, ‘is that he’s an utter moron. He’s never had a political agenda beyond getting himself elected to the “highest office in the land”, whatever that might take, and he’s never had an idea of his own — he’s never even pretended, which is unusual. If you’re looking for a politician who can embody the humanist spirit, he’s perfect: he thinks he’s Henri the Fourth bringing peace through interfaith dialogue. Plus he plays well to the Catholic base, who find his stupidity reassuring. He’s exactly what Ben Abbes needs, since he wants above all to embody a new humanism, and to present Islam as the best possible form of this new, unifying humanism — and by the way, he happens to mean it when he proclaims his respect for the three religions of the Book.’
Marie-Françoise called us to the table. She’d made a salad of fava beans and dandelion with shaved Parmesan. It was so delicious that for a moment I tuned out of the conversation. The Catholics had all but disappeared in France, her husband was saying, but they still enjoyed a certain moral authority. In any case, from the beginning Ben Abbes had done all he could to court them. Over the last year he’d paid no fewer than three visits to the Vatican. He appealed to the Third World types simply by being who he was, but he also knew how to win over conservative voters. Unlike his sometime rival Tariq Ramadan, who’d been tainted by his old Trotskyite connections, Ben Abbes had kept his distance from the anti-capitalist left. He understood that the pro-growth right had won the ‘war of ideas’, that young people today had become entrepreneurs, and that no one saw any alternative to the free market. But his real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy, but about values, and that here, too, the right was about to win the ‘war of ideas’ without a fight. Whereas Ramadan presented sharia as forward-looking, even revolutionary, Ben Abbes restored its reassuring, traditional value — with a perfume of exoticism that made it all the more attractive. When he campaigned on family values, traditional morality and, by extension, patriarchy, an avenue opened up to him that neither the conservatives nor the National Front could take without being called reactionaries or even fascists by the last of the soixante-huitards, those progressive mummified corpses — extinct in the wider world — who managed to hang on in the citadels of the media, still cursing the evil of the times and the toxic atmosphere of the country. Only Ben Abbes was spared. The left, paralysed by his multicultural background, had never been able to fight him, or so much as mention his name.
Now Marie-Françoise served us a lamb shank confit with sautéed potatoes, and once again my attention began to wander. ‘Still, he is a Muslim,’ I murmured in my confusion.
‘Yes, and so?’ He was beaming. ‘He’s a moderate Muslim. That’s the point. He says so constantly, and it’s true. You can’t think of him as some kind of Taliban or terrorist. That would be completely mistaken. Ben Abbes has nothing but contempt for those people. You can hear it whenever he writes those editorials for Le Monde — underneath all the moral condemnation, there’s an edge of contempt. In the end, he thinks of terrorists as amateurs. The reality is that Ben Abbes is an extremely crafty politician, the craftiest, most cunning politician France has known since François Mitterand. And unlike Mitterand he has a truly historic vision.’
‘So you think the Catholics have nothing to worry about?’
‘Nothing to worry about? They have everything to gain! You know,’ he smiled apologetically, ‘I’ve spent ten years on the Ben Abbes file. I can honestly say that only a few people in France know him better than I do. I’ve spent almost my whole career tracking Islamist movements. The first case I worked on — I was still a cadet at Saint-Cyr — was the Paris attacks in 1986, which we eventually traced back to Hezbollah and, indirectly, to the Iranians. Then there were the Algerians, the Kosovars, the al-Qaeda offshoots, the lone wolves … It’s never stopped, in one form or another. So when the Muslim Brotherhood was created, we kept a close eye on them. It took us years to understand that, for all Ben Abbes’s ambitions — and he’s hugely ambitious — his plans had nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. There’s an idea you hear in far-right circles, that if the Muslims came to power, Christians would be reduced to second-class citizens, or dhimmis. Now, dhimmitude is part of the general principles of Islam, it’s true, but in practice the status of dhimmis is a very flexible thing. Islam exists all over the world. The way it’s practised in Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the Islam you find in Indonesia or Morocco. In France, I promise you, they won’t interfere with Christian worship — in fact, the government will increase spending for Catholic organisations and the upkeep of churches. And they’ll be able to afford it, since the Gulf States will be giving so much more to the mosques. For these Muslims, the real enemy — the thing they fear and hate — isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam — that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.
‘What about the Jews?’ The question slipped out — I hadn’t planned on asking. The image of Myriam on my bed that last morning, in her T-shirt, with her little round bottom, flashed through my mind. I poured myself another large glass of Cahors.