Before I left, I insisted on tipping them a hundred euros each. Maybe it was too soon to give up after all — witness these two girls, and my father’s surprising late-life transformation. And maybe, if I kept seeing Rachida on a regular basis, we’d end up having feelings for each other. At least, there was no reason to absolutely rule it out.
~ ~ ~
This brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes’s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a ‘state of grace’. I thought often of what Tanneur had told me about the new president’s international ambitions, and although it went practically unnoticed, I was intrigued to see that Morocco had re-entered negotiations to join the EU. There was already a timetable in place for Turkey. The rebuilding of the Roman Empire was well under way, and in his domestic policies Ben Abbes had gone from strength to strength. His first achievement was a dramatic drop in crime: in the most troubled neighbourhoods it was down 90 per cent. He’d had another instant success with unemployment, which had plummeted. This was clearly due to women leaving the workforce en masse — due, in turn, to the highly symbolic first measure passed by the new government: a large new subsidy for families. At first there had been some squirming on the left, since the subsidy was reserved for women who gave up working. The new unemployment figures put an end to that. The subsidy hadn’t even added to the deficit, since it was completely offset by drastic cuts in education — until now, far and away the largest item in the national budget. Under the new system, mandatory education ended with junior school, around the age of twelve. For most children, the school certificate would be their last degree. From then on, vocational training was encouraged. Secondary and higher education had been completely privatised. All of these reforms were meant to ‘restore the centrality, the dignity, of the family as the building block of society’: so the new president and his prime minister declared in a strange joint speech during which Ben Abbes reached nearly mystical heights, while François Bayrou, his face wreathed in a beatific smile, more or less played the role of John Sausage, the Hanswurst of old German folk plays, who repeated — in an exaggerated, slightly grotesque way — everything the main character said. Muslim schools were doing fine, obviously. When it came to education, the Gulf States still had plenty to spend. More surprisingly, some Catholic and Jewish schools seemed to have made the best of a bad situation by appealing to various CEOs. In any case, they announced that they had covered their costs and would open as usual in the autumn.
At first the brutal implosion of the two-party system, which had ruled French politics since time immemorial, plunged the media into a stupor bordering on aphasia. You could see poor Christophe Barbier trailing from one news set to the next, his scarf at half-mast, seemingly unable to comment on a historic change that he hadn’t seen coming. The truth was nobody had. And yet, as the weeks went by, nodes of opposition began to form — first, on the anti-religious left. Protests were organised by the rather unlikely team of Jean-Luc Melenchon and Michel Onfray. The Left Front still existed, at least on paper, and it was clear that Ben Abbes would face a challenge in 2027, and not just from the National Front. On the other side, groups like the Union of Salafist Students rose up to denounce the persistence of immorality and demand sharia law. So, little by little, the stage was set for a political debate. This would be a new kind of debate, unlike anything in recent French history, more like what existed in the Middle East. But still it would be debate, of a sort. And the existence of political debate, however factitious, is necessary to the smooth functioning of the media — and, perhaps also, to keep people feeling that they live, at least technically, in a democracy.
Beneath these surface agitations, France was undergoing deep and rapid change. It turned out that some of Ben Abbes’s ideas had nothing to do with Islam: during a press conference he declared (to general bafflement) that he was profoundly influenced by distributism. He had actually said so before, several times, on the campaign trail, but since journalists have a natural tendency to ignore what they don’t understand, no one had paid attention and he’d let it drop. Now that he was a sitting president, the reporters were forced to do their homework. So, over the next few weeks, the public learned that distributism was an English economic theory espoused at the turn of the last century by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. It was meant as a ‘third way’, neither capitalism nor communism — a sort of state capitalism, if you like. Its central idea was to do away with the separation between capital and labour. For distributists, the basic economic unit was the family business; when in certain sectors consolidation became necessary, the government had to ensure that the workers remained the owners and managers of their own enterprise.
Distributism, Ben Abbes later explained, was perfectly compatible with the teachings of Islam. This was not self-evident, since Chesterton and Belloc were known during their lifetimes as outspoken Catholic polemicists. It soon became clear that although their doctrine was avowedly anti-capitalist, Brussels wouldn’t have much to worry about. The main practical measures adopted by the new government were, on the one hand, to end state subsidies for big business — which Brussels had always fought in the name of free trade — and, on the other, to adopt policies that favoured craftsmen and small business owners. These measures were an instant hit: for decades, every young professional in the country had dreamed of starting his own business, or at least of becoming his own boss. The measures also reflected changes in the national economy: despite the costly efforts to save heavy industry in France, factories continued to close, one after the other, so farmers and craftsmen managed to compete and even, as they say, to grow their market share.
These developments were turning France into a new kind of society, but it took a young sociologist, Daniel Da Silva, to articulate the change. His groundbreaking essay was ironically entitled ‘One Day, Son, All This Will Be Yours’. The subtitle was more straightforward: ‘Towards a Reason-Based Family’. In the introduction, Da Silva expressed his debt to an essay by the philosopher Pascal Bruckner, published a decade earlier, in which Bruckner had argued that marriage for love was a failure; he called for a return to marriage based on reason. Da Silva maintained that family ties, especially the tie between father and son, cannot be based on love, only on the transmission of practical knowledge and on inheritance. The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomisation of society, and that society could only be rebuilt if industry was based on a small-business model. In the past, arguments against romance may have enjoyed a succès de scandale, but before Da Silva the media never took them seriously, thanks to the universal consensus concerning individual liberty, the mystery of love, and so on. Da Silva was quick on his feet, an excellent debater, and basically indifferent to political or religious ideology. By sticking to his area of expertise — the evolution of family structures and their effects on the birth rate in Western societies — he kept from being swallowed up by his right-wing admirers, and instead became a leader in the debates that had begun to form (albeit very slowly, very gradually, without great animus, in a general atmosphere of tacit and lazy acceptance) around the domestic policies of Mohammed Ben Abbes.