Once Upon A Time In France: As The Pandemic Turns, Comic Book Blues, and True Opera Crime
Plus a scary presidential poll.
The French have a surprising obsession with soap operas. We like to think of France as our sophisticated cultural cousin compared to the common tastes of Americans. But as it turns out, the French like to eat frozen foods, and they love watching poorly written, poorly acted dramas. Just like us.
Shows like Plus Belle La Vie (based in Marseille), Demain Nous Appartient (Sète), and Un Si Grand Soleil (Montpellier), are broadcast 5 nights a week around 8 p.m. They are all notably based in cities along the Mediterranean coast because the climate is better for filming year-round and plus beautiful people on the beach is always a winning combination.
While American soap operas have been on a long decline and headed toward extinction, French feuilletons are booming. According to Les Echos, they have combined average audiences of 3.5 million to 4 million. When French television video production came close to reaching its historic peak in 2018, those three series accounted for one-third of that volume.
This soap opera mania inspired La vie commence à 20h10, a novel by Thomas Raphaël. I can’t recall how, but somehow this book tumbled into my possession several years ago and it was one of the first novels I read in French ( a good match for my language level). The book tells the story of a young woman having a hard time finishing her dissertation at a Bordeaux university (thwarted by her mother who runs the place) and gets recruited to be the head writer for a soap opera. Rather than admitting this embarrassing bit of work to her husband and daughter, she begins a secret life in Paris working for a Devil-Wears-Prada-type boss and making gobs of money. Hilarity ensues. As the book cover announces, it is, “Recommended by the bloggers.”
Given this improbable soap-opera obsession, there is good news, of a sort because the French have had a brand new nightly soap opera to watch. Though one that is perhaps a tad less sexy. There’s no title, just a running theme: Will the government impose a 3rd national lockdown?
Last week, I noted that the government was expected to announce a 3rd national lockdown this past Wednesday. Didn’t happen. Instead, each day there seemed to be various “leaks” as the Macron government tested the waters as to the country’s mood and willingness to endure new restrictions. The drip-drip-drip of this information and the shifting list of what may or may not be closed began to create its own unwelcome dramatic tension as what was left of many people’s frayed nerves began to wear away. At one point, there was a talk of a “hybrid confinement” with a 6 p.m. curfew on weekdays and a full lockdown on weekends.
Finally, on Friday, Prime Minister Jean Castex made an official announcement that there would be some new restrictions on international travel, some large shopping centers would be closed, and the government would finally get totally serious about enforcing that 6 p.m. curfew. For now, the schools remain open.
But there is still concern that the Covid variants will lead to an explosion in cases. Plus, after finally getting the vaccine train rolling, the French government is now facing possible shortages. So Castex included a strong suggestion that if case rates get worse, that lockdown could still happen sooner rather than later.
“Our duty is to do everything possible to avoid a new confinement and the next few days will be decisive," he said. “We can still give ourselves a chance to avoid confinement.”
While Macron’s ministers and scientific council apparently favored a 3rd lockdown, the president no doubt has his eye on the fast-approaching 2022 spring election. Harris released a poll indicating that far-right candidate Marine Le Pen would lead the first round of voting with 26% to 27% against 23% to 24% for Macron.
The top 2 candidates advance to a second round, and the assumption is that France would again unite against Le Pen and re-elect Macron in such a scenario. However, some newspapers got ahold of the second part of the poll, which for reasons unknown Harris has not officially released, which found Macron only leading the second round 52% to 48% (compared to 66% to 34% in 2017).
Which, of course, is terrifying.
So the drama keeps coming. Tune in next week for another episode of, “As The Pandemic Turns.”
Comic Book Blues
This week marks the 5th anniversary of my first (and so far only) visit to the Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême, one of the world’s most important comic book gatherings. Angoulême is a small city located about an hour northeast of Bordeaux and has long served as HQ for this prestigious gathering.
Angoulême is the country’s capital of comic books, known here as bande dessinée. And Angoulême, which bills itself as the “city of the image,” has used that historic strength to turn itself into a major hub of digital arts, from video games to animation to motion capture.
The year I attended, there was a big controversy over the status of women in the industry because no female authors were nominated for major prizes. For the latest edition, there is a new fight brewing over the economic problems of the nation’s comic book authors and illustrators. Although almost one out of every 5 books sold in France is a graphic novel, many comic book creators are making less than minimum wage.
The main festival is being held in June, and the authors are threatening to boycott it unless something changes. I took a closer look at it in my story for Forbes.com.
Meanwhile, you can read about my visit to Angoulême here. The city will be in the spotlight again soon because it’s where Director Wes Anderson filmed his latest movie, The French Dispatch, which is scheduled to be released in May.
Opera Fight!
I spent a summer working in Florida as a newspaper intern. So when it comes to weird crime, it takes a lot to impress me. But this story from Le Figaro managed to clear the bar.
A stagehand at the Toulouse Opera is accused of sabotaging a performance of Tristan and Isolde in 2015 by tampering with the 200 kg boulder that was supposed to descend and then stop just before hitting Tristan.
It did not stop, and the actor playing Tristan was almost squashed. A judge has decided this was an attempt at revenge against another stagehand. The two stagehands had been feuding for some time. Apparently, the idea was to frame the 2nd stagehand for the "accident."
Dreaming Of France
My list of places to visit in France after the pandemic has been getting longer each week. But the Gouffre de Padirac in the Lot Department still remains near the top.
Plunging 103 meters underground, this chasm features a series of wild geological formations that are the result of a subterranean river gradually sculpting its limestone surroundings. Visitors can descend by an elevator and a series of steps and then wander the labyrinth by foot and by guided boat. The visit features the Salle du Grand Dôme, a 94-meter chamber big enough to fit the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Great Reads
Renowned New York Times reporter Roger Cohen stopped his column-writing gig last year and moved to Paris to be bureau chief. In this wonderful, if bleak, dispatch, he captures the somber mood of a city being ground down by the pandemic:
“We’ll always have Paris.” Turns out perhaps the most famous line in the movies was wrong.
Paris is gone for now, its lifeblood cut off by the closure of all restaurants, its nights silenced by a 6 p.m. curfew aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, its cafe bonhomie lost to domestic morosity. Blight has taken the City of Light.
Taboos fall. People eat sandwiches in the drizzle on city benches. They yield — oh, the horror! — to takeout in the form of “le click-and-collect.” They dine earlier, an abominable Americanization. They contemplate with resignation the chalk-on-blackboard offerings of long-shuttered restaurants still promising a veal blanquette or a boeuf bourguignon. These menus are fossils from the pre-pandemic world.
Indeed, when I was in Paris over the Christmas holidays, we resorted to eating take-out sandwiches during a rainy afternoon on a park bench. Not so festive.
Writing for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins explores “Consent,” a memoir by Vanessa Springora about becoming the mistress of Gabriel Matzneff when she was 14. Such scandals have been often overlooked by the French political and cultural establishment. Springora’s book has cast a harsh light on that culture and caused quite a stir:
Last year, Springora published “Le Consentement” (“Consent”), a memoir of what she has called her “triple predation—sexual, literary, and psychic.” She wrote it as a “message in a bottle,” she said recently, speaking on Zoom from her apartment in Paris, but it landed like a tidal wave, sweeping away the rationalizations and vanities in which sexual abusers in France had taken shelter for years. “Le Consentement” has sold some two hundred thousand copies and will be translated into twenty-three languages. According to the sociologist Pierre Verdrager, the book’s success marks “a major turning point” in the perception of pedophilia in France. “merci, vanessa springora,” read a sign that the feminist collective Les Colleuses pasted on a wall in Paris last year.
In other news, sales of Champagne fell 18 % in 2020. The Guardian has a tribute to “Spiral,” the long-running Canal+ series that is just ending its run as one of France’s most successful TV shows. And Chambon-sur-Lignon in Auvergne learned that an Austrian man who hid there from the Nazis during World War II has left the French village “a large part of this fortune.”
Toulouse, France
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