The New France

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Now the country seems to be suffering an outbreak of that endemic French affliction called malaise. The symptoms: widespread public unease; a volatile mixture of boredom, anxiety and irritation, carrying the potential for triggering sudden acts of collective furor. Change is beginning to look overwhelming to many of the French, eroding the old certainties that once defined Frenchness for everyone. Traditional institutions are in decline, including the church, marriage, labor unions and even the leisurely lunch. In foreign affairs, defense, economic policy, even eating habits and consumer tastes, the French are becoming more like their neighbors -- and they're not sure they like it.

They are no longer strikingly different in the way they dispute power, practicing instead a pragmatism and consensus building that is unfamiliar, perhaps even unwanted. The disturbance involves what the French call the banalization of politics -- the end of ideology as the center of political life. Mitterrand's great achievement has been bringing the left into the political mainstream, giving it the respectability that was once a conservative preserve. But with the old partisan banners faded today, people sense a lack of choice in politics and are vaguely spoiling for a fight.

The President's May 15 selection of Edith Cresson as Prime Minister, to shake the nation out of its sullen mood, soured after little more than a month. With only a 38% public-approval rating, the bride of high office may be headed for divorce at a point when she has barely assembled her trousseau. French unemployment has reached 9.5%, and the record number of jobless looks as if it will go higher still. Meanwhile immigrant riots broke out in June, even as municipal policemen went on strike -- along with air-traffic controllers, railway workers and doctors.

Cresson's idea was to rally the nation behind a centralized industrial policy, marshaling economic forces in a war footing against competitors -- notably her designated No. 1 enemy, Japan. But her summons to arms has fallen flat at a time when the treasury is tight and Paris is striving to meet the conflicting imperative of a less subsidized, state-driven economy in advance of Europe's experiment with open market frontiers.

The undercurrent of these quarrels is a yearning for a new national myth, a sense of grandeur and destiny. As author Barzini points out, it was Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, the great Romantic writer, who said of his compatriots, "They must be led by dreams." De Gaulle, after founding the Fifth Republic in 1958 and establishing a presidential form of government verging on monarchy, set France apart from NATO, apart from "the Anglo-Saxons" -- conveniently lumping in superpower America with France's ancient enemy, England -- and even, in important ways, apart from Europe.

Though the general often talked up the idea of a like-minded, cooperative Europe, he viewed the infant Common Market circa 1960 largely as a device to control West Germany. From De Gaulle's day on, the E.C.'s chief purpose, as successive Elysee Palace incumbents saw it, was to bind French and Germans so tightly together economically that another war would become unthinkable. In exchange, Paris would champion West German interests in international councils where measures proposed by Bonn might sound Teutonically threatening.