France's New Surrender
This time, it's cultural.
Proud, cocky France has given up yet again, and on two fronts at once: an all-Arabic version of the cable news network that is mostly government-funded, France 24, launched this week, and the ink is barely dry on an agreement France signed with Abu Dhabi to open a branch of the Louvre in that desert emirate.
These developments are not unrelated. Which one underscores more the deep malaise affecting the French nation is debatable, but clearly France is in no mood to put up a fight for things taken rather more seriously in centuries past, such as preserving a sense of national identity.
The very launch of France 24, a 24-hour news network meant to rival CNN and hailed by some in France, albeit prematurely, as punching its equivalent in French weight, is indicative of a nation adrift.
After all, CNN has been broadcasting for a quarter century now, and while that network ushered in the era of news around the clock, the French resisted hopping on the headline highway until they realized just how irrelevant France was beginning to look in the mirror of a globalized society in the 21st century. Clinging to the notion that the French language towers above all others didn't help either, but broadcasting France 24 in French as well as English and Arabic was supposed to help.
Maybe that's laudable. After all, as the propaganda that passes for news on Al Jazeera gains in popularity around the world, wouldn't it be better to know that Arabic audiences are getting their facts on, say, the Middle East peace process from a newsroom in Paris rather than Qatar?
On the other hand, will the millions of Muslims living in France tune in to the news in French and Arabic, or stick with what many of them already know best — Arabic news not from France? The former would only be bad — France's Muslim communities are already largely cut off from mainstream French society, as the nationwide riots in 2005 so jarringly demonstrated.
The addition of France 24 in Arabic risks making things worse. The Muslims who speak French might watch both stations, but the majority of France does not speak Arabic and thus will not watch the Arabic version of the newscast. The editorial line-up for the network is supposed to be the same regardless of language, but where linguistic fault lines begin, societal fractures often follow.
This is happening in a climate of ambient anti-Semitism and political correctness that permits attacks against Jews to be carried out with more frequency than any nation that collaborated with the Nazis and claims to have atoned for it. There was the brutal torture and murder last year of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian singled out because he was Jewish. He was reburied earlier this year in Israel. On March 31, another Jewish cemetery was desecrated, this time in the northern city of Lille. Neither event — the Halimi reburial or cemetery attack — was covered on France 24, in any language. How do I know that? I work there. The Web site, France24.com, receives so many anti-Semitic hate mails that the editors have considered eliminating user reactions to news items altogether.
In the meantime, thanks to an agreement signed last month between France's minister of culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and the authorities in Abu Dhabi, that emirate will now be able to borrow the name "Louvre" for their new branch of it in exchange for about a billion euro. It will also be able to borrow hundreds of works of art, which will find their way into a huge orb-shaped satellite of the Louvre Museum branch that is to be built soon on an artificial island in Abu Dhabi.
This would be much less interesting were the Louvre a private museum like the Guggenheim, which has plans for an Abu Dhabi satellite as well. But the Louvre is publicly funded, and arguably more emblematic of Paris and France than the Eiffel Tower. Mr. De Vabres, unsurprisingly, has hailed the deal as a bridging of cultures, but only a fool could believe him.
Economic indicators looking dicey? Who needs hard work and market reform? Just sell off the Louvre.
In a very real sense it's a fait accompli. And assuming that cultural bridges like other bridges go both ways, France can look forward to any number of cultural contributions from a country that doesn't hold elections for any public office, where migrant workers — the kind who'll be building the Louvre-by-the-bay — are confined to labor camps, and dissent of any kind is silenced effectively.
And of course, France can look forward to all those euro, some of which may even find their way into the subsidies that underwrite France 24 and its latest mission to reach out to the Arab world.
This might all sound bizarre, but this isn't the first time France has cozied up to folks most everyone else seems to have rightly assessed as enemies or those who might too readily sympathize with the enemy. In the past, such behavior has only left France weaker on the world stage, and perhaps less obviously, weaker from within.
Mr. Grant is based in Paris, where he is an assistant Internet editor at France 24. He has commented on French affairs for MSNBC and his blog, frenchminute.com, launches May 1.
