Jesus, Salome and playing the dozens

 
Yesterday, it being Easter, we read the account of Jesus’s resurrection in Mark. Mark is not my favorite gospel, but I like the rawness. I like the side references to witnesses, as though Jesus was seen as a fait divers, a story in True Detective.  Mark’s is truly the tabloid gospel, and it has a tabloid ending, complete with various provincial, cultish promises by the risen Jesus. For instance, that you can take up snakes and they won’t bite you – which is not exactly the most useful quality one can imagine –  that you can heal the sick and cast out demons – which is again a nice thing, but not exactly cosmically important - and that anyone who doesn’t believe is condemned. On the whole, Mark’s story seems to just miss the occasion.
This time, I read the names of the women who come to the tomb and find the rock rolled away and realised how strange they are. “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.” In the King James version, which has the sound, the vibe for me, the sentence reads: “And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.”
When I was a boy in my Southern Baptist bible school, I dutifully learned that there was twelve disciples. They are painted by Leonardo, they are proverbially twelve in our phrase and fable, and I did not think about it. Of course, more aware of gender as I hope we all are, we know that the actual count is at least 15, as the above women should  also be counted as disciples. They seem to have ventured more, in following Jesus from Galilee, since wandering women were, in an Eastern Mediterranean society like Judea, viewed with an evil eye.
Salome, according to a study of 247 recorded names of Jewish women in Palestine in the century around Jesus’s life, was the name of 61 women, and Mary was the name of 58 – almost half of the women, then. But this Salome – not to be confused with the dancer so beloved of the decadents – is a floating signifier in the mythos. There is some tradition that she is Jesus’s stepsister, if you buy the story that Joseph was married and had kids before, as a widower, he met Jesus’s mother, Mary. Others call her Mary’s sister, which would make her Jesus’s aunt.
She is given some odd lines in the apocryphal writings. The oddest is in the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, "Two will repose on a couch: one will die, one will live. Salome said, "Who are you, O man? Like a stranger (?) you have gotten upon my couch and you have eaten from my table." Jesus said to her, "It is I who come from that which is integrated. I was given (some) of the things of my father." <. . .> "I am your female disciple." <. . .> "Therefore I say that such a person, once integrated, will become full of light; but such a person, once divided will become full of darkness.” This passage, admittedly, sounds like the first draft of some Leonard Cohen song. It probably has to do with the notion of the androgyn, the overcomer of the sexes – a right pertinent person in this age of persecuting the transsexual. Lets just say that the Gnostic Jesus would not have approved of the latter.
Clement cites some text which some scholars believe was originally in some version of Mark. This is another enigmatic dialogue. The banter between Salome and Jesus has a certain screwball comedy speed, as if they were doing the dozens:
“Salome asked the Lord: “How long shall people die?” He answered: “As long as you women bear children.” Salome said: “I did well then in not bearing.” The Lord answered and said: “Eat every herb, but that which is bitter do not eat.”
This, I suppose, makes a little more sense when projected against the dictum that there is no giving or taking of husbands and wives in the Kingdom of Heaven.  But it makes most sense if we suppose that by this part of the road movie, Jesus and Salome have a question and answer patter down. “As long as you women bear children” seems less magisterial than wisecracking, and Salome’s answer, mutatis mutandis, would def find a place in a Preston Sturges’s Lady Eve.
I’m playing the rimshot here. Hope all had a happy Easter.

Marat and the underground

 

Création difforme de la société, Fille sourde de cette mère aveugle. Lie de ce pressoir, Marat c’est le mal souffert devenu le mal vengeur… "
- Victor Hugo


Of all those revolutionary lives in the 1790s, Marat's has the most symbolic narrative arc -- a hider in the sewers, a brief triumph over his enemies, the moderate Girondists, a death in the bathtub, apotheosis in David's famous picture. Its symbolic perfection is exploited both by those who find Marat a saint and those who find him an ogre. To Taine, he was obviously insane with delusions of gradeur – le delire ambitieux. To his Marxist biographer, Earnest Belfort Bax, he was, as he entitled himself, the “people’s friend,” although untutored in the ways of class – a transitional figure, in short, which nineteenth century Marxists loved the way Darwinians loved fossils of mammoths and pygmy horses. I think he is a prototype of that essentially modern figure, the Underground Man. After all, he literally did hide underground – in Paris’ sewers, waiting out a hunt mounted for him by the police. While hiding from the police is nothing new, there is something very interesting about Marat’s legendary descent into the sewer. He himself exploited it for its mythic resonances – as though he foresaw the romantic aura that would attach to it in the nineteenth century. On November 2, 1792, Marat writes:

“Freres et amis, c’est d’un souterrain que je vous addresse mes reclamations. Le devoir de conserver, pour la defense de la patrie, des jours qui me sont enfin devenus a charge, peut seul me determiner a m’enterrer de nouveau tout vivant pour me soustraire au poignard des laches assassins qui me poursuivent sans relache.”

[Brothers and friends, I am sending you these protests from the underground [literally – from an underground tunnel]. The duty to preserve myself for the defense of my country, with the days that I have left, are the only reasons that have determined me to bury myself once gain, alive, in order to remove myself from the dagger of cowardly assassins who pursue me without letup.]

 This is unbelievably stirring, if you have the right historic sense for it. On a popular level, this is the release of a voice that will be exploited throughout the nineteenth century, in novel after novel. This is the Comte de Monte Cristo. This is the attitude of Les Miserables – or part of the mix of elements Hugo put into that novel. The more sinister undertone, in English novels, is borrowed by such covert master villains as Holmes’ great antagonist, Moriarity. And that voice will continue on in the twentieth century in film and comics, the dividing line between the hidden hero and hidden villain expressing the new moral uncertainties of politics in the age of capitalism – which is also, intrinsically, the age of contesting capitalism. In fact, Marat’s enemies didn’t believe a word of the underground story. “We know that Marat was in England, in consultation with Pitt, when it was believed he was hidden in the underground in Paris,” wrote Fantin des Oudards in 1801 – when the denigration of all Marat stood for had been going on for some time. To be in the underground could mean that you were anywhere – only the Shadow knows.

When Marat defended himself against the attacks of the Gironde in the convention, he stood up, shouted for silence, and told the assembled members: “one cannot hold an accused man under the knife like you do! Do you want to cut my throat? Cut my throat, then!

It was always knives and blades with Marat. In a famous passage in a pamphlet he composed, Are we done for, he wrote that France must lop the heads of five or six hundred traitors to be free. From this figure arose a legend, spread by Michelet, that Marat had demanded one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or finally two hundred thousand and seventy heads. In Dostoevsky’s Russia, the figure settled on, the proverbial figure, was one hundred thousand heads. Belinski, the liberal radical critic of the czarist regime, spoke of his thirst for a form of Marat’s justice in Russia – a retrospectively sinister phrase, much picked over in the Cold War. Marat himself, in his fight with the partisans of Manon Roland, lost the first round. His head was demanded by soldiers roaming the streets of Paris. A huge caricature of Marat, hanging from a noose, was hung up outside the café of the Palais Royale, and the man himself went into hiding – in, legend has it, some cave, some catacomb.

The ugly men of the Revolution! Mirabeau with his skin disease, Marat with his, Robespierre – in caricature, always depicted with a greenish skin. Michelet wrote of Marat as a non-human monster:  

“That yellow thing, green in his closes, his bulging grey eyes yellow… A kind of batracian, to which genre he surely belongs, and not to the human race. From what swamp did this shocking creature come to us?” Of course, one must know of Michelet’s feminism, his peculiar feminism, to see how the man slain in his bath by Charlotte Corday would call to everything in Michelet’s nature.

Nevertheless, this combination of monstrosity, irritation and the underground plants itself in the European culture of the late nineteenth century with a rare aesthetic force. A model of social rage.

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. Something is wrong with my liver.

In the mood for some Russians

 

I’ve been in the mood for the Russians – and so thought it was time to re-read Notes from the Underground. So I looked up Peaver and Volokhonsky’s translation, and by the second sentence I knew exactly what Janet Malcolm was talking about when she said these translations were not awful, just bland – and thus worse than awful.

The mouse-man says, in the (corrected)  Constance Garnett translation I read when I was a teen  – I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.

Peaver and Volokhonsky bobble the sentence, one of the great sentences, by turning it into: I am a wicked man.

The Russian word is zloi. Other translators have used “angry”. That is a rather broad emotional term to start off with, without the bite of “spite”. The French translation by Bernard Kreise,  is “méchant”, which is mean or spiteful. Resa Von Schirnhofer, a friend of Nietzsche’s, reported in a memoir that she talked to Nietzsche about Dostoevsky in 1887, and he told her he had compared the French translation, L’esprit souterrain, with the German translation, and found the French better. L’esprit souterrain is a strange book, for the Notes don’t begin until page 156. The book is “translated and adopted” by E. Halperine and Charles Morice, and by this they mean that they have translated The Lodger or the Landlady and amalgamated it with The Notes from the Underground. Nietzsche’s sense of the  Notes – or the journal of a man beneath the floor, as it has been translated as well – was distorted by this presentation. Even in the Halperine and Morice translation, though, the spiteful – méchant – presents itself as the narrator’s defining characteristic.

The Halperine and Morice translation was read not only by Nietzsche, but by Gide and Bataille. One of the duties of the translator, to my mind, is to understand how a work has inserted itself into our general culture – a duty signally failed by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

I was glad to see, looking about, that Gary Saul Morson went to town on the issue of spite and P and V’s cackhanded translation in the Pevearsion of Russian Literature. It is a nice scalping.

“What has wickedness got to do with it? The underground man is constantly turning on the reader, taunting him, putting words in his mouth, answering objections to things he hasn't yet spoken of. During that pause between the first two sentences represented by the ellipsis, it's as if he were thinking: "So, you think I want your pity, and allow you to condescend to me? Well, I'll show you I don't give a damn what you think! I'm a spiteful man, so there!" As the best Dostoevsky critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, put it, the underground man is taking a sidelong glance at his listener, cringing in anticipation either of sympathy or contempt, and exaggerating so as to leave him deniability should someone pin him down by believing him. His prose is all loophole. Garnett caught that tone well enough for generations to experience it. P&V don't seem to have heard it.”

Luckily, I think that the P&V train, which seemed to be crushing Russian lit in the 00s, that awful decade, has not had the monopoly power it once seemed to hold.

Spite is, to my mind, such a characteristic Dostoevsky word – and such a characteristic temperamental call in the culture of pre-World War one Europe – that when I read the first paragraph of the Peaver and Volkhonsky translation, I went elsewhere. Then I looked about at the commentary on translating Dostoevsky and found that the issues are usually about whether a translation is literal or not, whether there are mistakes in grammar or not, but not ever about the effect of previous translations – about the reception that has already encoded Dostoevsky’s work in Germany, France, England and America. To be méchant, or spiteful, was, above all, not to be happy.  

The Hermann Roehl translation, which was made for Insel in the early 1920s, uses the word schlecht – thus, a bad man. Roehl’s was just one of the translations in those years. E.K. Rahsin – a pseudonym for Elizabeth Kaerrick – also translated a number of Doestoevsky’s works. Kaerrick was closer in spirit to the  Dostoevskian age than Roehl, who was a philologist with a concentration on ancient Greek. Kaerrick, on the other hand, could have had a walk on role in the Demons. She and her sister met the great impresario of Russian literature in Germany, Moeller van der Bruck, in Paris in the 1900s. Van der Bruck married her sister and persuaded her to translate Doestoevsky’s works for Piper. Piper was also involved in translating Mereshkovsky, who gave Kaerrick a hand in her translations – which is like a laying on of hands of Russian literature itself. These people formed a nest of gentlefolks with very Doestoevskian vibrations, always working on the margins, finding jobs, finding cafes, finding love affairs. From early on, van der Bruck was a convinced adherent of the Sonderweg – that Germany was, like Russia, not part of the  West.  I have a small and messy theory that part of the anti-colonialist discourse comes out of this impure source – the casting off of the “West” by certain German conservatives, up through Heidegger.  If you want to understand Germany’s radical conservative strain, 1906 is an important date – that was when Rahsin’s translation of the Demons was first published. Moeller van der Bruck is best known outside Germany, I should say, for coining the phrase “the Third Reich”, which of course had a long and horrendous history. But that phrase came out of the last years of his life, when he had abandoned literature for radical nationalism.

Spite. Wicked. Mechant. Schlecht. Zloi. So much depends on these faceless middlewomen of culture. So much of my own intellectual life. I owe you, Constance Garnett.

Fear of the People: a geneology of Macron's ultra-liberalism

 

In Marie Helene Baylac’s aptly named “The Fear of the People, a history of the First Republic, 1848-1852, there is an account of one of those highly charged and very theatrical events that distinguish the 1848 revolution – which in spite of being the revolution of writers (Marx, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Sand, Hugo, and last but not least, Marie D’Agoult, whose history of that moment should be retranslated and introduced by some muckety muck for NYRB books – who will inevitably refer to D’Agoult as Franz Lizst’s lover and the mother of one Cosima, who married another famous composer, Richard Wagner) is not a revolution much loved by historians. A flop, they say. Such hopes, ending in Little Napoleon!

The scene takes place at the Hotel de Ville, which is around 10 blocks from where I am typing this. To set the scene, Louis Phillipe, the last king of France, had fled, and a new republic had been proclaimed , at least in Paris. One of the notable figures in the provisional government was Alphonse Lamartine, a romantic poet and, it turns out, an ultra-liberal. He was in the company when, on February 25^th, a worker with a rifle, at the head of a delegation of workers, barged into the room at the Hotel de Ville where the provisional government was meeting and addressed them, demanding “the organisation of labor, the right to guaranteed employment, and a minimum assistance assured for the worker and his family in case of sickness, and to save him from misery once he could not work.” Lamartine rose to the occasion: “You would have to cut off my hand before I would sign that!” Three days later, Lamartine addressed the assembly with even more stirring words about the horrors of undermining the free market in labor, again offering himself as a martyr for the cause: “You can set me to face the mouth of a cannon but you will never get me to sign those two words associated together: Organisation of Labor!”

The phrase is associated with Louis Blanc, who wrote a best-selling book of the same name. Blanc is a socialist of the kind still recognizable on the French left. Baylac quotes a speech he gave which defines, to an extent, the nebulous concept of organisation of labor: “… does liberty exist there were the conditions of labor are such that they are hammered out between the master who stipulates the wage to profit by it and the worker who stipulates in order not to die… one of the thousand tragic incidents that are engendered each day by the immense anarchy of universal competition?” In Blanc’s vision, the state would insert itself in the manifestly bad deal for the workers by creating national workshops and moderating competition. The demand for organized labor was, to an extent, a demand for unions – but this was still a vague organizational notion.

Lamartine is, I think, the true begetter of that strain of social moderation and ultra-liberalism that has found its latest puppet in Macron. One can imagine Macron throwing himself into some hysterical pose to face down the unruly masses – organisation of labor indeed! The combination of police-heavy tactics, a throwback to the French governments of the seventies, if not the Greek colonels of the 60s, and the confidence that the people, like children, will just settle down “after the dust has settled” – the Macronites have a quasi-obsession with the “dust settling”, which is about their entire experience with such things as garbage collection and manual labor – is reminiscent of Lamartine, although not as poetic – the poetry in Macron’s circle is produced by McKinsey consultants, and they earn more for their odes to privatization than Lamartine could ever have dreamed.

I have a feeling, where I sit, that the weight of fatigue has shifted – that the unions, the young, and the seventy percent that oppose the “reforms” are on the retreat. I hope I am wrong – and I know that this retreat is not an extinction of anger, but a sense that the government is sealed against the will of the people. I don’t see the French going gentle into the next period, giving away the national treasure of a social security system for Macron’s beaux yeux. But I also don’t see the Left taking advantage of this moment. Which leaves Le Pen.

And yet, Le Pen has her problem too - someday, somewhere, she  is actually going to have to speak about the French social security system, which her hardcore supporters have fought furiously against for fifty years. This is a dilemma she is helped over by a complacent French media, but these are questions that can't be delayed forever. 

Inactual observations, or how relevance nailed my ass

 

In one of his notebooks from the 1880s, Nietzsche, who was re-reading his essay on the Use and disadvantage of history for life (the second of his Untimely Meditations – although I like inactual for unzeitgemassige), jotted down one of those lightning bolts “How little reason there is in being as old, and as reasonable, as Goethe!” It is one of those lines that deserves to be haloed with a laughter, something like Johnny Rotten’s guffaw in God Save the Queen. “Is there room in science for laughter?” Nietzsche had asked in The Gay Science – and tacitly, he put himself forward as the answer to that question.

When one grows old – I am putting myself forward as that “one” – and one is as inclined to reason as a cow is to chew its fodder, it is good to remember how unreasonable it is to reason in the first place. It is good to remember that history serves, ultimately, life – and that the nexus between the two has never been satisfactorily resolved by either the mighty – Goethe – or the low – myself. Another note that Nietzsche jotted down as he was making up howlers about Goethe concerned the purpose of the Inactual observations. It was a bait to capture the attention of similar minded readers.

“At that time I was young enough to go fishing with such impatient hopes. Today – after a hundred years, if I am allowed to measure time according to my own scales! – I am always not your old enough to have lost every hope, and every  patience. How strangely it sounds in my ears when a gray old man presses his experience into these words.”

Nietzsche’s inactual observations are the presiding spirit over Georges Didi-Huberman’s giant book, Imaginer Recommencer, which takes in, in typical Didi-Huberman style, an encyclopedic ensemble of history, art and philosophy to make its point: tracing our modernity, or our culture of the modern, back to the Weimar culture of the 1920s, which was Nietzschian for both the left and the right.

The subtitle of Did-Huberman’s book is: ce qui nous souleve, 2. Soulevement is in the air, here in Paris, given the strikes and demonstrations. It is a song in the manif, although the echoes of that song are more melancholic than positive, more 1848 than 1789.   We are rising up, is the atmosphere among the bien-pissant – the pissed off and the disenfranchised. I am one of the pissants, here, and from my perspective, these demonstrations, this crisis, is about time. Human time, which was drained into Capital and recuperated, partially and painfully, by the social democratic initiatives of the twentieth century. Time, which divides into youth and old age, which casts a varied pall over different sectors and employments – for instance, over the garbageman, who is expected to devote more than forty years of his life to his smelly, untouchable job – which as we know, under the new regime of retirement, means no retirement, since death, the end of the garbageman’s time, is the more likely outcome to the new rules.

Which is fine for the rulers, who live in a different time, who reward themselves copiously with the finest pensions the state can offer. Who “work” all the time – at lunch, over a fifty euro meal, in conferences in Switzerland with big name capitalists, and of course at night, with their lovers-assistants, all on the highend dole.

My own dallying with the inactual began, I suppose, in high school, under a different set of parameters: the cry in the seventies was for relevance. Instead of learning fusty poems by Longfellow, we were plunged into, say, Walden 2 – or at least that was the book we read in Humanities class. Or into Atlas Shrugged – that was a book I was assigned and failed to read, the unrelieved one-dimensionality  of Ayn Rand’s imagination repulsing me. I was consciously mostly of how many letters, sentences and black black print each paperback  page bore – which I suppose is the non-reader’s feeling about books in general. They assault the senses, giving nothing to the eyes and making the body feel straitjacketed. Which is why you want to eat when reading a massive paperback tome. To give the tongue some leaway, at least, as the book closes the lid on you.  

So I chose non-relevance, and was quite happy with my choice until the advent of Internet. I dropped out of the inactual with a bang in the 00s, when suddenly social media and the digitalisation of everything enforced relevancy like a motherfucker. Plus, of course, the era of Bush, the Vulcanite Bush, the realization that we were going to be really, really stupid in the 21^st century. I was a little witness to the fact that greatness – measured in global effect – can be combined with idiocy to produce catastrophes that will be with us the rest of my life. Everything has been under the shadow of that period, 2001-2009 All the squandered opportunity, the death of the Holocene, the wasting of millions of lives, the neolib glee.

Lately, I’m in an odd place – both angry and suspended in the overwhelmingly relevant and longing for the inactual, for larger projects and maybe even hope.  

Hope. What a word.

Therapeutic nihilism and us

 

In these days of evil on the telly – and on the computer screen and in the climate shift, etc. etc. – my mind has been drifting towards the topic of therapeutic nihilism. In a sense, when peeps say we can imagine the end of the world more than we can imagine the end of capitalism, they are positing some natural power in capitalist arrangements that is powerfully reminiscent of the state of medical science in 1844, when the Viennese doctor, Josef Dietl, published his manifesto in the Zeitschrift der K.K. Gesellschaft der Aerzte zu Wien that proclaimed the proper scientific limits of medicine.

“Why don’t we demand of our Astronomers to turn the days into nights, of our physicians that they turn winter cold into summer heat, our chemists that they turn water into wine? Because it is impossible, that is, because it is not grounded in the principles of their sciences, and because astronomers, physicians and chemists are upright enough to confess that they couldn’t do it. But then, why do we demand that our doctors heal lung diseases, dropsy, arthritis, heart disease, etc.? Are these demands somehow grounded in the principles of his science? Absolutely not!”

The list of diseases is impressive, and impressively, we don’t have a “cure” for arthritis, for instance, even today. But the twentieth century not only saw the invention of airconditioning, turning summer heat into winter cold, but an amazing structure of therapies that could address the body’s ills in a manner undreamt of by Dietl.

In 1844, this world of cures – or therapies that could alleviate illnesses, such as insulin for diabetes – seemed extremely distant. It was an unimaginable world.  Dietl’s nihilism was a reasonable belief that the cure was an area not of science, but of chance. However, this did not mean doctoring was substantless: “The doctor must be valued not as an artist of cures, but as a scientific researcher [Naturfoerscher].

I often take this stance towards Marx. The communism he strove for depended, of course, on the thoroughness of the capitalism that he diagnosed. In a strong sense, it arose out of it, like … well, like the response of the body to a disease. The analogy is inexact, however. This body is the disease, and its cure is a new body, arising from the old one. Resurrection.

We all know how the resurrection belief has worked out – it has become a master trope in our metaphoric imagination, but it has less of a grip on our sense of the real future. Although, of course, literally billions  of people believe that it will, more or less literally, happen.

In the case of our political economy, it is easy to see that most economists are even more mired in a nonsensical world of cures than that of Dietl’s colleagues. To believe that you cure inflation with unemployment and then you heat things up until unemployment sparks off inflation is to have the most primitive sense of the general economy. It loses sight, in fact, that the economy is not a master but a servant – a servant of the social whole. Its only reason, its only footing in humanity, is to make the quality of human life better. It it doesn’t serve that purpose, kick it to the curb, start over. To rephrase slightly the slogan of the Wat Tyler rebels: “First we’ll hang all the economists.”

In fact, as it proved, therapeutic nihilism was not so nihilistic as all of that. Diagnosis eventually lead to water being turned into wine, or at least to an Austrian physician discovering blood types in 1901 and blood transfusion becoming a real thing after the discovery of anticoagulants, research that was hurried up because of (natch) war, as in World War One. Turning water into wine was nothing compared to transfusing blood properly and easily to a patient, but the creep of blood blood blood in the twentieth century mapped the creep of cure cure cure. Diagnosis, the left hand, found cure, the right hand.

A hopeful story. We are not mired in a world of therapeutic nihilism forever. We don’t have to accept that.

Saving the heritage: France's system of retraite

 

Lucie Mazauric was a museologist of the rarest sort – a Radical Socialist (along with her husband, Andre Chamson), a resistor, and a key member of the “circus” – mi-clochard, mi-aristo, as she puts it – who hid France’s museum treasures, its Da Vincis and Delacroixes, from the Nazis. In Ma Vie en Chateaux, she gives an account of this adventure: the finding of places of safety, the gathering of equipment to guard the treasures, especially fire-fighting equipment, the getting trucks together to convey it, on short notice, from one place to the other.

“But this happy specialisation, even as it filled us with pride, didn’t prevent our trucks from becoming ever more dirty at every new displacement, and our personnel ever more tired. We trailed after us a miserable baggage that gave us the air of travelling, not too prosperous, jugglers. In the end, the cases were worn out, the nails were lost, the gas was hard to find, the wrapping had lost their initial freshness. However, we buckled the buckle, the paintings were returned to their hanging places nail by nail, the sculptures pedestal by pedestal, and we had to marvel at it all.”

I have this feeling about that other French treasure: the social security system. A work of eighty years. While the Macronists are destroying it now, out in the street, with the air of down at heels jugglers, our protestors, our strikers are determined to save it. And we will have it back, every nail and pedestal of it, so to speak. I don’t believe France will lose its heritage because a lot of jumped up suit, clustered around their suited and rolexed Ubu Roi, have decreed it so.

Vive La France!