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Exit Jack Lang: A Grand Master of Pop Culture
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11537 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
7,261 Words |
| Author
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Curtis Cate
Historian and biographer Curtis Cate was greatly aided in the
preparation of this article by Liane Villemont and Jacques
Deschamps of l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel. |
Is France, the France eternelle of Moliere, Rodin, Debussy, and Renoir, about to enter a new Dark Age? Are the semidiurnal philistines of the "right" going to slap the lid back onto the bubbling cauldron of popular creativity just when it was coming to a juicy boil? Or, to put the question more simply, are the dramatic, sculptural, pictorial, cinematographic, choreographic, operatic, musical, and other arts in France about to slither back into the morass of immobility from which they were recently pulled, now that we have witnessed the end of the almost five-year reign of Jack Lang - "the most enterprising Minister of Culture" France has so far known?
These questions would seem farcical had not the specter of a crepuscular eclipse, the somber menace of a Spenglerian Untergang into the nether depths of subculture, recently been brandished by scores - what am I saying? - by hundreds, indeed, by more than a thousand petitioners (a veritable Who's Who of international celebrities), all pathetically pleading for the continuation of a "formidable cultural élan" that has apparently electrified not only France, but also a significant segment of the intelligentsia of the Western world.
For the origins of this extraordinary phenomenon, for the spark that first ignited this explosive outcry, one must probably go back to last October when the newspaper Le Parisien Libere got the Louis Harris research institute to undertake a most unusual public-opinion poll. Instead of being invited to express their positive or negative feelings about this or that politician, the 1,000 carefully selected opinants were asked to name the person he or she would most like to see in different ministerial posts.
The results were snarling, incidentally revealing how increasingly arbitrary are those shopworn labels - "left-wing" and "right-wing" - in defining French political programs and positions. For what emerged from the poll was an implausible heterogeneous, almost carnivalesque "dream cabinet" composed of persons of the most varied political stripes.
The prize plum - the post of prime minister - was won by the maverick socialist Michel Rocard, with 28 percent of the vote, which put him comfortably ahead of former premier Raymond Barre (22 perfect) and the considerably younger Laurent Fabius (21 percent).
Raymond Barre - once called by former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing "the best economist in France" - was their choice for the Ministry of Economy and
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