Feature : Tomorrow’s goals and challenges

Hector Bianciotti, an Argentinian writer who acquired French nationality in 1981, left his country to settle in Paris in 1961. Drawn by French literature, he wrote his last autobiographical works in French, including Comme la trace d’un oiseau dans l’air (Like the Trace of a Bird in the Air). British writer Theodore Zeldin, Professor of History at Oxford and an expert on France, is the author in particular of l’Histoire des passions françaises (The History of French Passions). Both these writers, who have known France for decades, have agreed to talk to Label France in the language of Molière.

Label France: Do you think France still has a message for the future to convey to the world? Is she still a positive or an alternative model?

Hector Bianciotti: I discovered at the age of twelve or thirteen that there was a country called France that had greatly influenced the first Spanish-speaking poets whom I loved to read. At that time, France was the cultural centre of the Western world to all South Americans. I taught myself French from the age of fifteen because I had read in the newspapers about the death of the writer Paul Valéry [1871-1945], whom I knew through extracts of his work. In reality, I think I had always understood what France was, well before living there, through her literature. What’s more, when I arrived in France at the age of thirty, I was reading French fluently, without ever having written or spoken it. I was greatly attracted by France, her language and her culture.

I think that French culture will endure because France, as compared with other European countries, has a definite view of herself. She has always believed in herself and this is a real strength. This is the message she can pass on to the world, because a country’s future depends on the will of every citizen.

She also has this power to absorb Western cultures, which she assimilates in order to make her own culture an influential force. To foreigners, France and the French... they’re the whole world.

And there is this extraordinary city of Paris that summarizes Europe. It is a capital in the sense that there is a huge mixture of people, a lot of people passing through and foreign influences that the rest of the country is unaware of or does not accept. Few capitals in the Western world can comply with this definition.

To me, French culture resides essentially in its literature, which fascinates me. There are two trends in this literature. On the one hand, the official ideal: the sentence that is sparing of words and adjectives. This is the ideal, admirable prose, for example, of Voltaire [1694-1778], and it is regarded as good French. Novels, on the other hand, even the memoirs of Saint-Simon [1675-1755], have nothing to do with this official ideal of the economy of words and precision. The only great novelist to have come close to this style is perhaps Flaubert [1821-1880]. But when you read Chateaubriand [1768-1848], his prose sings, it is abundant. Balzac’s [1799-1850] is fairly ordinary, but brilliant in describing his characters. This is the wealth of French literature.

Theodore Zeldin: France is an idea

much more than a country. Indeed, France believes in Man’s perfectibility. This is why other countries may regard her as a model. Her strength lies in asking people to develop universal, rather than national, ideas. In the history of France and England, the difference between the two quests for freedom is that the English devised freedom for themselves, whereas Human Rights are universal. While many nations are still trying to set themselves apart from the others and are looking into their own history rather than into human needs in general, France provides an alternative model.

In addition, few countries value the pleasures of the intellect and conversation as much as France does. France is a country where everything is discussed, where you discover your own potential and are intellectually stimulated to deepen your thinking. France is a meeting place and a place for cultural exchanges where thinkers can be fed intellectually. And in a world where people are weary and looking for simple situations, France has something original to maintain.

While France is an avant-garde country, she is also a country of traditions. And I see in her present concerns about the law on the 35-hour week the end of an era rather than the beginning. The leisure society was devised to compensate for the fact that work, as developed by the industrial and technological revolutions, is for the most part exhausting, stupid and routine. The more people are educated, the more demanding they are about the type of work they are offered. Before the 35-hour week, workers tried to protect themselves against work. And now a new era is beginning, in which it is expected that work will provide a better awareness of life and wider experiences. In short, it must be educational. It is along these lines that France can provide ideas and pass on her experience through what I believe is her great ambition, Man’s perfectibility. Much is therefore expected of France and I am always impressed by the values she proclaims - the belief that in every individual there are qualities that must be developed through education thanks to equal opportunities, discussion incentives, friendship and everything that makes a man sociable.

Finally, the disaster that France has recently suffered in her forests is giving her the opportunity to invent a new rural life, which is not the old rural life in contrast to city life, but a life which would be the synthesis of all that we have developed to date, that is to say, a life without the nuisances developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. France’s future will depend on her ability to continue to think original thoughts.