I could swear I saw French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy wince a couple of times as a small woman with a big voice launched into the French national anthem right after his acceptance speech. Amplified to fill the open air stadium where Sarkozy’s supporters had gathered in rapturous self-congratulation, the woman belted out the words that had been born out of the bloody French revolution of 1789: ‘Come, children of the motherland, the day of glory has arrived. The bloody banners of tyranny are raised against us! But do you hear, from deep in the countryside, these ferocious soldiers? They’re coming to your aid. To arms, citizens of France! Form up in your battalions! Let us march forward, until the impure blood of your oppressors irrigates the furrows of your fields!”
Strong stuff. Uncompromisingly revolutionary, anti-establishment stuff. It brought an end to royalty. The king’s and queen’s blood-soaked heads rolled at the foot of the slick, sinister guillotine, as did the heads of many members of the aristocracy, and in general, anyone who opposed the revolution — even revolutionaries who showed revisionist tendencies.
The French Revolution was brutal and bloody. But, once all the shouting had begun to die down, the revolutionaries, wading through the bloody streets of their destruction, had to find a way forward. It became a tussle between the people, the intellectuals and the bourgeoisie. In the end it was the bourgeoisie who triumphed. The people went back to their fields and their dog boxes and sweat shops with their tails pretty much between their legs.
But the anthem, la Marseillaise, remained. It has been a running theme in the background of French political life ever since. The French are proud of their stirring anthem, in spite of its bloodthirsty lyrics.
Losing candidate Ségolène Royal issued a pre-results warning that a vote for Sarkozy was a vote for violence and bloodshed, in the true spirit of the national anthem. The voters ignored her in significant numbers. But then the French have never liked anyone to tell them what to do or what to think.
Nevertheless, the loud and spunky voice of the lone lady singing (and it wasn’t The Fat Lady, either — Sarkozy days are just beginning) must have been running through the leader-to-be’s head in a new and resonating way. He had been elected as champion of the ‘right” and, as all the commentators were saying, you either loved him or you hated him for it.
Never mind that ‘left” and ‘right” have come closer together in recent decades, certainly in Western politics. The ‘right” hand cannot seriously function without the ‘left”. Sarkozy can trash some of the aspects of the welfare state, but he cannot totally eliminate all the social benefits that the citizens of France have been accustomed to since the revolution and all the relative advances humanity has achieved since then.
But Royal had certainly raised the spectre of blood running in the streets once more. The stirring, uncompromising words of the anthem simply reinforced the possibility of this spectre becoming reality.
Hence the almost imperceptible wince on the face of the leader-to-be — there had, after all, been weeks of running battles between disaffected youth, mostly children of immigrants from West Africa and the Maghreb, which had set the suburbs on fire just two years before. Sarkozy was minister of the interior at the time.
I was sitting in a murky café in Johannesburg’s trendy Melville suburb as the final results came rolling in. There were four French people sitting at the same table — two men, who seemed to be real Caucasian Frenchmen, and two women, who happened to be of immigrant descent, from North and West Africa respectively.
They were all crying into their beer — a mixture of rage and self-pity. One of the women showed me a message that had just come through on her cellphone from her brother in Paris. ‘On est mort —” (we’re dead —), it said. That’s how seriously Sarkozy’s victory is being taken by the left.
Remarkably, the issue of immigration (which usually means invasion by illegal darkies, even in post-apartheid South Africa) is expected to be one of the main planks of Sarkozy’s national policy. Even though France, like many other parts of metropolitan Europe, has long crossed the line into rainbow nation status, the dark spectre of African immigration is still brandished as a hobgoblin at each election. And it’s a guaranteed vote catcher.
The French lefties at the table grind their teeth in frustration. ‘What’s his game?” they ask. ‘How can they justify chasing us out of France? It’s a question of chickens coming home to roost. If they didn’t want us to come to France, they shouldn’t have come to Africa in the first place. Now that they’ve sucked us dry and gone back home, where else do they expect us to run to when the going gets tough? We’re just as French as they are now.”
There was not exactly blood in the streets on the night of the announcement of Sarkozy’s triumph. But the youth were already out in the streets, randomly setting fire to cars, burning and looting, and playing dodge-the-teargas with the cops.
The polarisation is complete. The Sarkozy era has arrived. The bloody banners might yet be seen on the streets of Paris.