As midlife crises go, relearning French is probably not a particularly adventurous option, but four days into an intensive language course in the middle of nowhere in rural France teaches you some things about yourself. For example, I had no idea that I am – and probably have always been – a kinaesthetic learner, someone who absorbs information more easily if I am shown the meaning physically rather than reading it.
For a reasonably bookish person this has been a revelation. I didn’t realise that relearning a language can be tricky because that “foreign language muscle” in my typically Irish and monolinguistic brain is so underused.
And I had no idea that the sound of a frog’s mating call can keep you awake at night. Channelling their inner Robert Plant, these lads smash the sound barrier looking for a whole lotta love. Love-struck frogs may sound like a cliche but, believe me, the racket is supersonic.
On a more serious note, when it comes to understanding our European cousins we should acknowledge two factors. One is the durability of the Franco-German alliance. The second is the strength of an emerging alliance of farmers and the new right-wingers against the environmental movement. In what is a classic 21st-century marriage the country and the city are moving in lock step. Earthy farmers and the assorted urban anti-establishment movements are, as we’ve seen in the Netherlands, forging a political force against what they see as the cosmopolitan, metropolitan Green movement.
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Last night, after a game of boules, I sat with a local provincial farmer with that wonderful old Breton name, Gatien. In between discussions about the great 1970s football team St Etienne, the beauty of Antoine Dupont in full flight and why I should join him on a wild boar hunt this weekend, he articulated a farmer’s concern about the environmental movement imposing controls on his work and, more importantly as he saw it, his way of life.
It is easy to pick apart these arguments, but that’s not the point – politics is all about feelings. Gatien and his neighbours feel they are being identified as destroyers of the environment. They say their herds are being culled, their access to water constrained and their sense of tradition being undermined by what they see as remote rulers making ridiculously invasive rules.
And who do they see as their protector? The EU that actually doles out millions of euro to subsidise their farm incomes? No – they regard their protector as Marine Le Pen, the anti-EU right-wing presidential candidate who talks warmly about their traditional values, culture and way of life.
Far from the farm, on national TV, Emmanuel Macron, speaking what sounds like pretty fluent German, is in Dresden reaffirming the centrality of the Franco-German alliance to the EU. Over the past 150 years the relationship between France and Germany has dominated the continent. From 1870 to 1945 that relationship was characterised by competition, animosity and three devastating continental wars.
The story is well rehearsed but it is critical for us other Europeans to appreciate just how much things changed with the EEC and then the EU. From the turmoil of the second World War both France and West Germany embarked on a remarkable period of detente, with some French scholars and politicians (such as the godfather of the EU, Robert Schuman) going so far as to suggest a federation between both countries to prevent another war.
The expression “European integration” was invented to really mean friendship between France and Germany. It was decided to travel a slower road than Schuman’s federation idea. However, the EU has been based on a Bonn, now Berlin, axis with Paris.
Ultimately, the most cohesive expression of European solidarity, the euro, was a trade-off between France and Germany over German unification. The French essentially traded East Germany for the euro, saying to Germany in effect, “you can have your country if we get your currency”. Within a few years the Deutsche mark, the symbol of West Germany, was no more.
Macron understands the centrality of the relationship to the EU. He appreciates that Germany today is not the giant it used to be. It has been laid low by recent developments, including the fact that cheap gas from Russia, the fuel for the German industrial engine, has stopped flowing and that the insatiable Chinese demand for German products has ebbed due to the slowing of China and its increasing trade wars with the West.
On top of this, Germany’s outsourcing of its defence to the US will no longer be tolerated in Washington, which means Germany has to stump up for its own army for the first time since the 1930s. With Russian gaining ground in Ukraine this becomes an existential issue for Germany. This week, watching French TV, the coverage gave me a sense that, for the French at least, this was the first time in half a century that a French president met a German chancellor as an equal in political and economic terms.
Back on the farm the meeting of the leaders didn’t cut much muster. After a pastis the chat turned to immigration, and the farmers, who have been helped for years by Moroccan seasonal workers, felt that there were too many foreigners coming into France. The discussion centred less on economics and more on culture. These men were not National Front supporters traditionally and were far more likely to have voted for Jacques Chirac than Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie. But they noted that the Green movement was pushing them right towards Le Pen’s embrace.
And this is one of the biggest potential threats to the European centre – a rural and urban alliance against environmental regulations that inflame the farmers and are seen cynically by the right-wing as a wedge issue to unify around. Both groups can point the finger at a certain ill-defined “they” up there in Dublin or Paris or Brussels who are out to destroy your way of life. “They” don’t want this or that; “they” want you to behave this way or that way; “they” want to take away your freedom, your liberty, your heritage.
I heard a lot about “iIs” or “they” the other night. When I asked the farmers who “they” were, it was lawmakers, bureaucrats, politicians, big business, the EU, left-wingers, environmentalists and some removed liberal elite who don’t understand what the countryside is all about.
Looking ahead to the EU elections, here the lines are drawn between the internationalist message of Macron and the domestic yearnings of Gatien. Both are legitimate, yet both are now regarded as mutually exclusive. In the recent past it was entirely possible to unify the metropolitan with the pastoral; not any more. Populists have the environmental movement in their sights and in this battle they’ve enlisted some of the farming community, and they believe that with the farmers populism is unstoppable. As they say, culture trumps economics every day. The battle for the heart and soul of France has started; for decades the cosmopolitans, with their message of European unity and big-power politics, have always carried the day, maybe not this time.
Bienvenue à politics, 21st century style.