The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, April 5, 2024

Notebook:  J’ai d’autres chats à fouetter. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that expression from my dear late mother, from my brothers, from my aunts and uncles, though not, I should say, from my dear late pious maternal grandparents, who would not allow themselves so much as an innocuous “damn.” It was a favorite expression of the petit-bourgeois circles of Beirut society I grew up in, literally meaning having other cats to whip. It’s a terrible expression, a terrible image, though an idiomatic explainer translates it as something as innocent as “having other fish to fry.” The explainer is too absolving. Is there really a difference between the two expressions? Is it more excusable to fry fish than to whip cats? Peter Singer would argue not. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that having other fish to fry is as innocent as it sounds. The two expressions may yet be reflective of cultural heritage. Here I may tread on certain cultural stereotypes that verge on that mixture of ignorance and bigotry that once, in early 20th century parlors, passed for intelligent conversation, the way Herbert Spencer and Oliver Wendell Holmes thought Eugenics a splendid idea. I am tempted to say that having other fish to fry reflects the gentler sensibilities of Anglo societies, compared to Continental, and specifically French, societies. But then images of the middle passage spring to mind and throw that baby out with the bathwater. Still: the French, their wines make us forget, are among the most supremely violent people on the planet. Their history is only slightly less barbaric than Genghis Khan’s and Tamerlane’s, and a whole lot less tolerant. Both Mongols had an Enlightenment-like sensibility when it came to religious and other forms of tolerance, at least for the few remaining people in their paths whose throats they did not slit and whose gonads they did not impale: my Great Big Book of Horrible Things attributes 17 million deaths to Tamerlane, more accurately known as Timur, ranking him ninth on the hit parade of worst genocidal killers in planetary history, while Genghis is ranked second, with an attributed death toll of 40 million, and not a single Nestorian among them. The Second World War ranks first, at 66 million, with no single perpetrator given, but shouldn’t that dishonor go to Hitler and Stalin? French history from the time of the Franks, in what became France or in outremer, as Franks liked to call the Levantine lands their raping and rapine-lusting crusaders occupied for 200 years, to the 1960s, when France finally desisted from its bloodlust by abandoning Vietnam to American bloodlust and Algeria to Islamist bloodlust, French history, I was saying, is a dismal chronicle of horrors made worse by the romanticizing (because excusing) of the likes of Louis IX, ridiculously termed Saint Louis even in reputable histories, or the Sun King, for Louis XIV, who not only massacred millions but also revoked Henry IV’s tolerant Edict of Nantes, which had “allowed” Protestants to remain in France unmolested. (Henry IV–“Paris is worth a mass,” he famously said as he willingly converted–was a good king by most measures. I’d vote for him again.) Then we come to Napoleon, who accounts for 4 million deaths: one day’s Napoleonic battle took more lives than the entire Terror during the French Revolution. So no, I don;t think d’autres chats a fouetter is as innocent as having other fish to fry. I rather think its a left-over from a culture of brutality that, as Robert Darnton made clear in The Great Cat Massacre, excerpted in a Briefing last December, did not blink at torturing men, women and children any less than cats, all the while frying fish and gleefully enacting the anti-Babylonian vengefulness of the ninth verse of Psalm 137. For all this, let it not be said that I do not every day and every hour miss every inch of France though the sum total of my days there adds up to maybe three or four months, while I have about as much affection for England as I do for a CPAC convention, though I spent a year there and owe this, my third language, to its immersion by fire.

—P.T.

 

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Todd’s central argument is that there are fundamentally two Frances. There is a “central” France, including Paris and Marseille and the Mediterranean, where there is equality on the family level and a deep-rooted attachment to secular values of the French revolution and the republic. Then there is a France of the periphery, for example, the west or cities such as Lyon, which has stayed true to the old Catholic bedrock, where people may no longer be practising Catholics, but they’re still infused with all the social conservatism of that Catholicism, its hierarchies and inequality. He calls this “zombie Catholicism”. Infuriating his critics, Todd maintains that the post-attack rallies represented zombie Catholicism on the march. Despite the row, he stands by the idea. “France is always double,” he says. “That’s why you never know if it will collapse or get back on its feet.” Todd, who comes from a cosmopolitan family of writers and is distantly related to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, came to fame for predicting the fall of the Soviet Union in 1976 and more recently for suggesting the US is an empire in decline. He has long argued that family structures explain why people adhere to certain ideologies, and has pleaded for France to leave the euro. He claims in Who is Charlie? that France is no longer a place of liberty, equality, fraternity, but instead is a kind of pseudo republic favouring only the middle class while the working class and children of immigrants have been excluded. He feels France has much that is “marvellous”, including its welfare and social security safety net. “But it has stayed marvellous only for the top half of society.”

–From “Emmanuel Todd: the French thinker who won’t toe the Charlie Hebdo line,” The Guardian, Aug. 28, 2015. 

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