French neo-colonialism and the pax franca

Someone with the same name as me has an article in the London Review of Books about France's historical (and waning) influence in Africa. It starts out by talking about France's dreams of a post-colonial empire in la Françafrique:

Gaulle envisaged the new arrangement as a ‘French system where everyone plays his part’. It was to be based on elite co-optation, within what the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon calls the ‘Franco-African state’. This was not a formula involving a series of relationships between the erstwhile colonial power on the one hand, and the newly independent states on the other, but a unitary Jacobin entity, with big brothers and smaller brothers governing and an unmistakeable centre of power, Paris.

Surprisingly (or not?), this kept the violence down:

The most impressive aspect of the French military shield was its breadth: it wasn’t simply a protection for lackeys and minor potentates. Between 1960 and 1990, 40,000 people are believed to have died as a result of internecine violence in French Africa, half of them in Chad; by comparison, roughly two million died in former British Africa, another two million in former Belgian Africa, 1.2 million in the former Portuguese colonies and another million in the residual category that includes Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea. A different indicator, which corrects for demographic imbalances, confirms the value of the pax franca: the number of ‘victims of repression or massacres’ is put at 35 per 10,000 inhabitants in ex-French Africa, 790 in postcolonial Anglophone Africa, 3000 in the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, and a staggering 4000 in the Portuguese colonies, which didn’t achieve independence until the mid-1970s.

To ruin the ending, French involvement and the relative peace end after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Funny foreign press about Obama's coronation

Not that I looked very hard, but here are two headlines on foreign newspapers' websites about the Obama victory.

Ségolène Royal : "J'ai inspiré Obama et ses équipes nous ont copiés from lemonde.fr; the headline on the (East Coast) evening of January 19.

Translation: "Ségolène Royal: I inspired Obama and his team copied us"

Ségolène Royal was the losing socialist candidate in the 2007 French presidential election, in case you forgot. Here's an excerpt from the first paragraph:

Il a envoyé une équipe à Paris étudier son site Désir d'avenir. "Chez nous ils ont enregistré les idées de 'gagnant-gagnant', de 'citoyen-expert'" Ensuite, M. Obama a adapté sa "démocratie participative" à la mode américaine, "fort différente de l'européenne". Aux Etats-Unis, tout n'est que "communautés" – ethniques, religieuses, culturelles, urbaines, même les quartiers d'habitations s'intitulent "communities". En Europe, on parlerait de collectivités, de mouvements, d'associations, de réseaux. Mais l'idée, dit-elle, lundi 19 janvier, à Washington, est la même : refonder la manière de faire de la politique, la relation entre les élites et le peuple.

My very liberal/bad translation: Barack Obama sent a team to Paris to study Ségolène Royal's campaign site Désir d'avenirs. "When he was here they picked up the ideas of "win-win" and "citizen expert" (???). Then, Obama adapted her "participative democracy" to suit American audiences, "very differently from the European model." In the United States, it's all about "communities" – ethnic, religious, cultural, urban – they even have neighborhoods with "community" in their names. In Europe, we would talk about collectives, movements, associations, and networks. But the idea, Ségolène says on the eve of inauguration in Washington, is the same: to remake politics, and to change the relations between the elites and the common people.

By the way, I think the "citoyen-expert" refers to a sort of Joe the Plumber ethic of deferring to the "peuple," which is a word that (I think?) connotes a sort of populism. This is a great example, though, of typical French bullshit.

Barack Obama a stat o oră în Bucureşti / Noul preşedinte al SUA, care s-a declarat marţi, după jurământ, prieten al tuturor naţiunilor, a stat în Bucureşti o oră, în 2005, când era doar senator de Illinois.

Translation: Barack Obama spent an hour in Bucharest / The new US president, who declared himself on Tuesday, according to his oath, to be a friend of all nations, spent an hour in Bucharest in 2005, when he was just a US senator from Illinois.

This was the most prominent headline at cotidianul.ro, a Romanian newspaper. I probably don't appreciate it enough, but the Romanian media has always struck me as really bad and unprofessional.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité et uniformité

I'm back, but I'm pretty fried, so all you're getting is a link to a Language Log post about Bastille Day and the languages of France and a quote from it:

From a linguistic point of view, however, the French Revolution was a disaster. The monarchy had been largely unconcerned with what languages its subjects spoke. At the time, the languages spoken by natives of France included six Romance languages: French, Occitan, Franco-Provencal, Walloon, Catalan, and Corsican (a dialect of Italian), the Germanic languages Flemish and German, the Celtic language Breton, and Basque. Some of these, especially French and Occitan, each had numerous divergent forms. Additional languages, such as Berber and Tahitian, now qualify as "French". A full list may be found in the Cerquiglini report Les Langues de la France.

One of the effects of the Revolution was to bring about a greatly increased centralization of the French government and a policy of establishing a standard form of French as the only language of the Republic. I emphasize that the policy adopted was not merely to ensure that all French citizens shared a common language, but to eliminate all competitors. This is readily seen in the title of the report by the Abbé Grégoire establishing the policy: Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser la langue française "Report on the necessity and means of annihlating the dialects and of making the French Language universal". Since the Revolution, all French governments have been hostile to minority languages.

Startling statistics

Here's your startling statistic of the day, from a NYT article about race in France (emphasis added):

He ticked off some obvious numbers: one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.

To this may be added Cran’s findings that the percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.