August 17, 2002
What Is French Culture?
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| Showings. |
In the monthly Capital, the authors review the new Chirac-Raffarin government's plan to cut taxes by 30 billion euros over the next five years. They start with an analysis of the effectiveness of tax cuts. I defy you to find a single "financial" periodical published in the US that would not say "lower taxes are good for the economy". This one says "well, it's doubtful." Are the french just depressed pessimists, or are they really that liberal? They show Bush's 1.37 trillion dollar tax cut, and they have a little cartoon of him looking sad as the economic growth rate has plummeted. Apparently the Swedish and the Kiwis implemented big tax cuts in the 90s to good success.
But the most telling thing is the relative tax rates. Forgive me while I get Ross Perot on you and present a table:
| Country | Sweden | France | Germany | UK | OECD Avg. | USA| Avg Tax Rate | 57.3% | 47.2% | 43.1% | 39.3% | 36.2% | 30.9% | |
Indeed, taxes are high here in France. However, chances are that you in the US know someone with no health insurance; whereas everyone here is covered and the World Health Organization ranks their quality of care as better than America's and most key indicators are better (despite what you hear from US politicians, and despite the fact that the US spends a greater portion of its larger GDP to cover a smaller proportion of its population). Chances also are that you know someone who didn't go to a fancy university because it cost a lot more than the local state school; all education, including the most elite institutions, are free in France. Clearly they don't suck, because lots of their graduates were good enough to take up slots at Stanford's aerospace engineering PhD program. America's elite institutions are better on the whole, but practically nobody (as a percentage) actually goes to them.
Today's Le Monde editorial is about culture, and the tradition among French presidents in the last 30 years of building grand monuments. L'Express also ran a critical piece lately. Georges Pompidou's cultural center is a winner, by all accounts. Mitterand had a lot of winners: the arch at La Defense, the pyramid at the Louvre, and the Tres Grande Bibliotheque that I study at.
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| The Mitt. |
Consider, in a little detail, the case of Les Halles. Right in the center of the 1st arrondissment, it used to be a beautiful old covered marketplace. When that shifted to the periphery of the city, they built something widely considered to be awful. A subterranean mall with a very ugly, compartmentalized and therefore unsafe park.
One of the surprising occupants is the Forum Des Images. It's basically a government-supported movie library. You can walk in and get a day pass for $5, and watch any of their 6500 films or sit in whatever they are showing that day in their cinema. They show all kinds of avant-garde and classic stuff. And they put on a series of outdoor films ("Cinema Au Clair De Lune") during the summer, about 3 per week for the whole summer. And they are only 1 of 3-4 other public film "festivals" running through the season. There's also Cinema En Plein Air, and a few smaller ones. The city of Paris, on top of all that, has decided for 2002 to subsidize all tickets for people under age 26 at the arthouse cinemas: only $3. And for three days at the end of August, every single cinema in the whole city will charge only $3 for everyone. All brought to you by the government.
But back to Les Halles. So it's this big mall, right? Well, at night, it's pretty much closed. But you can still go in and out of it (partly to get to the movie theaters downstairs, or to get to the Metro station that's built into it). Kids show up there practically every night with boom boxes and hip hop tapes. They play the music and practice their B-boy moves (breakdancing and related stuff involving spinning on your head, sliding across the smooth mall-floor, etc). I think it must be known throughout Paris as the place to come -- there are dozens of kids their on most nights.
You could not do this at, say, the Manhattan Mall. There, an untrained privately-employed security guard/lout would just chase you out. Is it the fact that Les Halles is owned and operated by the government, and that its public-use spirit is part of its conception, that it can be co-opted by B-boys for breakdancing? Maybe. But the B-boys in the basement of Les Halles are as much the product of French culture as are the spontaneous quartets on the bridges of the Seine or the street-performers drawing huge crowds on the nighttime promenade at Paris Plage. There is a communal life in Paris, sponsored by the Mayor et al.
Posted by amol at August 17, 2002 11:59 AM