Winter in Paris

I arrived in Paris December 6^th and remained until the 18^th of the same month. The last time I visited was July 2018, and the most notable difference this time was the weather. Although most days were relatively mild by the standards of Canadian winters, some days were quite cold, with temperatures dipping well below zero. Another remarkable difference was the Christmas decorations; in December there are lovely Christmas trees worth seeing around the city (my favourite one is in front the splendid Notre Dame). Unlike in Toronto, Christmas decorations in Paris are almost completely scrubbed of religious significance. The secularization of the season in not unique to Paris or France, of course; even in Toronto, it has become a mostly commercial enterprise. But elements of the religious meanings are still visible in my home city. For example, a huge nativity scene is conspicuously displayed in front of Toronto’s city hall (something which would be illegal in France), the radio is full of religiously themed Christmas songs, and there are public religious-based events around the city, especially performances such as Handel’s Messiah. The absence of the latter in Paris was rather striking, since it is a timeless masterpiece one may enjoy regardless of its explicitly religious character.

Paris in December of 2018 was also more eventful than during previous visits. The “Gilet Jaunes”, or the yellow vest protesters, perhaps marked my sojourn the most. When Emmanuel Macron was elected, many believed that it was a historical turning point. He defeated the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen, and promised to transform the country into a dynamic, open, market-based society while ushering in reforms at the European level which would finally solve the continent’s seemingly interminable problems. This narrative seemed plausible particularly because in his first year of office, he implemented some radical changes, such as lowering capital gains taxes and liberalizing the labour market, which his predecessors repeatedly tried but failed to do. Below the surface of these successes was simmering resentment among many members of the precarious working class who have a hard time making ends meet. The spark that ignited this fire was a fuel tax intended to help the country move away from dependence on fossil fuels; evidently, Macron ignored or underplayed the tax’s regressive distributional consequences. The new tax would hurt the working classes more: unlike urban high income professionals in large cities with excellent public transit, they have few alternatives to using their cars, and the fuel tax would disproportionately bite their stagnating income. Weekly protests began in November, and accelerated each week; I arrived on Dec 6^th, and a major protest was announced for Dec 9^th; naturally, I wanted to attend. The epicentre was the area around the Arch of Triumph, and when I arrived, it looked a bit like a war zone. Shops were boarded up and closed; streets that would normally be teeming with tourists were empty; and less than twenty metres away from me, fully equipped security forces were launching tear gas at protesters who intermittently charged the barricades (it was very windy and so, lucky for me, the tear gas quickly dissipated). 

Yours truly, with the Yellow Vest protesters

Angry protesters looted stores which were symbols of wealth and overturned or burned expensive cars; these images dominated the international press’s coverage, giving the impression that protesters were mostly anarchists who, rather than being motivated by legitimate grievances, wanted an excuse to satisfy their lust for violence. But this did not fit my observations; most of the yellow vest protesters I saw were members of the working class, and women and men seemed to be equally represented. They were angry at their precarious situation, and their ire was directed to their president; they are convinced that he represents the interests of the rich and not the nation. For a country like France, where equality and social justice are ingrained in the national DNA, Macron’s regressive policies represent nothing less than a betrayal of French identity, an observation confirmed by the nationalist elements at the protests. I heard protesters sing the national anthem, and saw national flags everywhere. Not one European Union flag was visible, and my sense was that most of the protesters are either indifferent to Europe or they see it as a representation of the free market ideology they detest. At the most fundamental level, the protesters demand economic equality, and their willingness to protest violently against the elites continues a long held tradition that goes back to Louis the 14^th; in this sense, there is nothing new under the sun. Unlike, say, Canadians, who tend to be physically passive vis-à-vis their government, the French have a long history of using violence against their rulers. Macron’s government wisely saw the revolutionary potential in the movement, which, in an unlikely but still plausible scenario, could lead to his forced removal from office (and perhaps the removal of his head). He therefore cancelled the carbon tax and announced measures to help the lower working class make ends meet.

 

The riot squad is straight ahead

Another notable event in France during my latest stay was the terrorist attack on December 11th in Strasbourg. The country experienced national traumas in 2015 when jihadists mercilessly slaughtered 130 innocent youths at the Bataclan concert hall and when extremists murdered cartoonists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the weekly satire famous for its no-holds-barred willingness to sacrilegiously attack reigning orthodoxies, both religious and secular. Subsequently, the country was in a state of national emergency, and extraordinary measures were implemented to maximize security. This state of affairs was particularly noticeable during my first and second visits to the country (respectively August 2017 and April 2018). Armed forces, wearing full body vests and carrying machine guns, patrolled most public places where crowds gathered, as they suspiciously gazed at pedestrians, evidently looking for any sign that would trigger (quite literally) the use of lethal force. As the security situation improved, the sense of emergency eased, and by the time of my third visit to the country in July 2018, it seemed as if there were fewer soldiers patrolling the streets. The terrorist attack in Strasbourg threatened to pose a serious obstacle to this progress, particularly at the psychological level, something I sensed while present in the country. For example, I would frequently ride subways with passengers packed like sardines, and after the attack I could not help thinking about how easy a target those trains are. There were no security measures when entering the metro stations, and a terrorist could easily enter during rush hour and set off an explosive device, which, given the concentration of people, would cause maximum causalities, from both the explosion and the ensuing melee as people trampled each over each in the rush for safety. When thinking this in a loaded subway car in the days after the Strasbourg attack, I would look at other passengers and could not help thinking that some were thinking the same thing. At times, it was as if there was some sort of silent communication occurring; a particular momentary glance with a young office worker or an old widow would convey the same unspoken fears and anxieties.

On the other hand, many people have also become desensitized to terrorism, and hence are mostly unbothered by relatively small scale attacks like the one which occurred in Strasbourg. Because of its relative frequency, in France and elsewhere, for many terrorism is a kind of abstraction, something which periodically makes the headlines but which, like all other news stories, is quickly forgotten and replaced with another; modern life’s ephemeral entertainments and distractions quickly re-establish their psychological centrality. Of course, if another attack on the scale of Bataclan were to occur, this equilibrium would be shattered and a politically destabilizing national emergency could follow.

I’ll end this blog post with some reflections on Paris’s famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, which I visited for the second time on December 15^th. It is one of the city’s most popular locations, and for good reason. Many famous people are buried there, including Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison (there are always crowds around the resting places of those two icons, which have become de facto shrines). Another notable feature is the exquisite statues or sculptures which ornate many tombs and, in the process, help to create that sense of the eternal and mysterious which ignites the religious imagination. The tomb of Victor Noir combines both of these features. He was a young journalist who was assigned to fix the terms of a duel between Napoleon 3^rd (Bonaparte’s nephew) and a writer who penned a piece which offended the former’s honour. There are multiple and conflicting interpretations of what happened next, but the guide at Pere Lachaise said that Noir met a tragic end because, as he reached in his pocket to take out his pen, Napoleon thought that he was reaching for a gun, and shot him dead. Twenty years later, the artist Jules Dalou was creating a life-like sculpture which would rest atop his tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery. He wanted to reproduce his body in the state it was in moments after his death, when he was lying lifeless on the floor at the scene of the crime. Dalou believed that one of the body’s reactions after being shot in the head is blood rushing to the genitals. He therefore sculpted an erection onto Noir’s figure, which is visible as a penis-shaped protrusion below his pants. The sculpture of Noir has now become a kind of god of fertility; many women visit his tomb and touch his erected penis in the hope of increasing their chances of conceiving a child. (This is rather ironic in one of the world’s most secular cities).

Victor Noir's erect penis shows signs of frequent rubbing

The last time I visited Pere Lachaise was in the middle of summer (July 2018); this time I visited in mid-December on cold and dreary day. The temperature was just above freezing, and it was pouring rain. Although the weather was disagreeable, it was rather appropriate for the location and the visit. The cemetery, after all, is where the dead repose; below those expensive tombs lie the remains of previously living and breathing people who shared all the joys and pains of life. The most ornate and immaculate statues and tombs cannot disguise the fact that they are reduced to dust, mostly forgotten, and that me and every other visitor will meet the same fate. When seeing the weathered tomb of someone who was buried there in the 19^th and even early 20^th century, it struck me that everybody who walked the earth when this person lived is now gone, and that every person now walking the earth will die just as every previous generation before it. The sunshine will eventually set, the warmth will expire, and the cold and the rain were perhaps a gentle reminder of these inescapable dictates of nature.

Review of Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert provides readers with an acute and penetrating psychological analysis of Emma, a beautiful woman who marries Charles Bovary, mainly to escape the stifling confines of her father’s farm. Charles is a good man—honest, committed, loving—and a doctor to boot, making him, by conventional standards, a “good catch”, and yet Emma finds herself deeply unhappy with the ordinariness and monotony of middle class family life. Rather than making an effort to find contentment in her own circumstances, she seeks escape by having adulterous affairs, first with the handsome noble Randolph, then with the young clerk Leon. They ultimately do not satisfy her; even worse, her affairs sow destruction and, in the process, bring ruin to the innocent victims in her life, namely Charles and their daughter Bertha. The moral, it seems, is rather basic: succumbing to one’s desires, rather than accepting societal norms that restrain egotistical behaviour, ultimately produces pain and suffering. But there are other moral sub-plots that challenge this interpretation, such as the success of the selfish moneylender Lheureux and the flourishing of the venal pharmacist Homais. Reasonable people will disagree on the main moral purpose of the book, or whether there is any unifying moral theme at all, but few will disagree that Madam Bovary expresses these ideas with a poetic, lyrical, and beautiful prose.

Frustrated Expectations

The prospects for a happy marriage between Emma and Charles initially seem very good. Her mother dies young, but Emma is raised by her father, Pere Rouault, one of the upstanding characters of the book. He is a decent, hardworking man committed to the well-being of his farm, community, and daughter; he provides a good role model, one assumes, for how to find happiness within the confines of family and household. Charles enters their life one day because Pere Rouault has an accident and breaks his leg, and requires medical assistance. The good doctor visits frequently and helps to mend Rouault’s injury. At the time, Charles has frequent contact with the beautiful Emma, but he is in a somewhat loveless marriage with the wealthy but much older and neurotic Madam Dubuc. His wife’s unexpected death opens an opportunity for another relationship, and at this point Charles begins to pursue Emma.

One fascinating aspect of this part of the book is the courtship rituals in mid-19^th century rural France. In order to obtain Emma, Charles must convince her and her father. This endeavour was not that difficult, since Emma wanted to leave the stifling confines of the farm, and imagined that marriage would consist of endless happiness. Pere Rouault, naturally, wanted a good catch for his daughter, and Charles, the committed doctor who mended his leg, fit the profile. To proceed with the courtship, Charles approaches Pere Rouault rather than Emma to express his feelings; Emma’s father already knows, and must consult with her to ensure consent. This requirement of approval of both father and daughter would, one might think, act as a kind of prophylactic barrier that would prevent incompatible persons from marrying. In most cases, perhaps; but not, unfortunately, for Charles and Emma.

Emma discovers that marriage, household, and middle class small-town life are not what they are cracked up to be. Charles is committed to her, their daughter, and his medical practice, but he bores her to death (quite literally; see below). One reason for these frustrated expectations is that her father was not the main influence on her beliefs about marriage and family. During her formative years Emma spent several years at a convent, where she had the opportunity to read novels which exposed her to medieval ideals of chivalry. The ideal man was heroic, autonomous, independent, adventurous, courageous, and dominant while being submissive and sensitive to the whims of his lady. In the morning he would fearlessly trot to the battlefield and mercilessly slaughter his Saracen opponents, by the evening he was on his knees, gently caressing and kissing his wife’s hands. Her ideal man had multiple talents, could speak multiple languages, and would be a source of endless stimulation—mental, physical, and spiritual. This kind of love, thought Emma, would be “like a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss”; even more, it would last until death.

Charles (and perhaps no flesh and blood male) could never meet this standard, causing her domestic unhappiness. Her affair with Randolph was the first attempt to seek escape in the arms of another. He is a handsome landowner with a castle, and encounters the Bovary couple when he visits Charles for a minor medical procedure (Charles practiced medicine from home). He is immediately attracted to Emma. During this period, Emma is having health problems associated with her unhappiness, and the good-natured but naïve Charles encourages her to take up horseback riding with Randolph. Randolph seizes the opportunity during their excursions, and successfully seduces her. As often happens, Randolph spoke the sweet words of love but was mainly interested in the adventure, while Emma fell head over heels for him, although her emotions were probably an exaggerated reaction to finally escaping the monotony of family life and (briefly) finding sexual fulfillment. While Emma is enraptured by these feelings, she proposes that they escape together. Emma imagines that it is her opportunity to finally achieve eternal bliss. Bertha (her child), meanwhile, is almost an afterthought. When Randolph brings up the issue, she says, half-heartedly and reluctantly, that they could take Bertha with them. All of a sudden, the scheme seems less compelling to Randolph; it would mean forcibly taking Bertha away from her father and assuming responsibility for Emma and her daughter. Emma, so consumed by her feelings, is completely oblivious to the question of whether this might not be in little Bertha’s interest. Randolph can be somewhat more rational about the situation; he calls it off and terminates the affair.

Emma falls into despair and becomes unwell, and Charles, the good but naïve husband who is unsuspecting of the cause of her illness, tends to her needs through this difficult period. At least partially because of Charles’ care, she eventually recovers, and one would think that this experience would lead Emma to re-evaluate her beliefs. Had Emma been more reflective, she may have recognized that her pursuit of exalted feelings and extra-marital affairs was unhealthy, and that Charles, although not the knight in shining armour of her medieval fantasies, was a decent man and a good husband, and that she should commit herself to their marriage and their daughter Bertha. Flaubert, perhaps recognizing that many readers of Madam Bovary expected that development, insinuates the possibility: while she and Charles are at an opera about love’s inevitable frustrations, she recognizes “the pettiness of the passions”. But this brief ray of light is instantly overshadowed when she sees Leon, the young clerk to whom she was previously attracted but with whom the relationship was never consummated. They had not seen each other for three years, and during that time Leon had matured, became more confident, and was now, unlike in the past, willing to seduce Emma. He lives in Rouen, and Emma needs an excuse to visit the city frequently. She decides that piano lessons would do the trick, and convinces Charles, who, of course, suspects nothing.

Emma once again finds sexual fulfillment, but it is only temporary. When the rush of the affair’s debut wears off, she discovers that Leon, like Charles, is rather ordinary. Nonetheless, she continues the betrayal, which requires more and more lying, leading to a moral degradation which multiplies her woes. The affair and all its little lies costs money, and she goes further and further into debt, a spiral which is enabled by the unscrupulous financier Monsieur Lheureux. Her debts become unpayable, and the hapless Charles becomes mired in this needless and preventable bankruptcy—moral and financial. Creditors obtain court orders to seize their property, which would mean poverty for her, Charles, and most importantly, Bertha. Emma desperately tries to find a solution—asking her former lovers for loans to get her out of the mess, proposing to Leon that he steal the money, offering to sleep with Monsieur Lheureux, but to no avail. Unable to accept this impending destruction, she opts for suicide by swallowing poison.

Emma’s slow death is one of the more harrowing scenes of the book, partly because of how realistic it is. There are scenes familiar to anyone who has been at the deathbed of another and witnesses their final days and hours. Breathing becomes rapid and strained, while certain facial expressions express an inner turmoil, perhaps reflecting the body’s final resistance to the inevitable. As the end approaches ever nearer, a certain calm and tranquility can be observed in the person’s breathing or facial expression; subsequently, there is one last violent jolt of the body and moment of consciousness before the last breath. As Emma is going through these phases, Charles, distraught beyond words, is kneeling at the side of the bed, his head leaned against her and holding her hand, and before her step into oblivion she has a moment of genuine affection for him and caresses his hair. The man she betrayed and financially destroyed loves her unconditionally, and she, at last, reciprocates, but only briefly, and when it is too late.

Reaping What You Did Not Sow

The good doctor and committed husband experiences unspeakable grief, and one would hope that this loss, although traumatic, would be an opportunity to move on, rebuild his medical practice and financial stability, perhaps even meet someone new, while ensuring that Bertha is well-raised. This scenerio would likely have satisfied the reader’s pity for Charles and the wish for some sort of redemption after all his underserved travails. But his despair is multiplied when he discovers the correspondence between Emma and both of her lovers, where she details her love for them and her contempt for Charles. The spiral of depression takes a nosedive, he isolates himself, loses the capacity to recover, and joins Emma to an early grave. Their daughter, Bertha, will consequently grow up in a life of poverty and hardship. Emma’s wish to escape the mediocrity of middle-class married life, and the consequent adulterous affairs, sowed destruction on the people, Charles and Bertha, who least deserved it. Her enablers, meanwhile, escaped unscathed and even flourished: the unscrupulous money lender Lheureux continues his profitable activity; Randolph proceeds with the life of idleness and leisure typical of many nobles who inherit wealth; and Leon has a successful career as a notary, marries and settles down.

This climax, although not a happy ending, is emotionally powerful. I finished reading Madam Bovary the evening of the day before my book club discussion on the book (November 24^th, 2018), and when I went to bed, I could not stop thinking about the fates of the characters, particularly the Bovary family. Like other readers, I felt immense pity and sadness for Charles and Bertha. This is no coincidence; Flaubert, in his private correspondence with his lover Colet, said that that was precisely his intention when developing Charles’ character. His untimely demise, for no fault other than marrying the wrong person, offends one’s sense of justice, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that Emma’s enablers—Randolph, Leon, and Lheureux—proceed to live happy and prosperous lives. Flaubert evidently wanted to sketch a hyper-realist portrayal of a world where outcomes do not neatly fit our ethical presuppositions. Bad things happen to good people, the latter of which are victims of underserved calamities by virtue of arbitrary circumstances or unforeseen consequences. Bad or selfish people, on the other hand, often flourish because of random processes over which they or others have little control. Flaubert presents this profound, raw, unvarnished, and unsettling reality with a compelling tale and gorgeous style of writing which leaves an enduring impression and which justly renders Madame Bovary a must-read in the pantheon of classics.