Monday, April 16, 2012
Pierre and Nathalie Kudlak

It has been very rainy for the past three days, unseasonably cold, too, although it has not stopped Elise and Jean from leading life at their usual furious pace. Saturday night we saw a film by Maurice Pialat, a fictionalized life of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, with Jacques Dutronc --known more for his singing than acting-- playing the lead role. Sunday night we see "No Country For Old Men". Tonight I will visit their informal English conversation group.

Friends of long-standing, Pierre and Nathalie Kudlak, call to say that they will be in Besancon around lunch time, and could they stop by? Elise does not hesitate to tell them to come by, and phones Jean to tell him that lunch will be at noon, an hour earlier than usual. She and I go out to do some errands, and she returns ahead of me to start lunch.

Pierre and Nathalie are friends of long-standing. Pierre and his brother Bernard started the Cirque Plume, a travelling circus based in Franche-Comte, with seven others, in 1984. The circus has been in continuous operation since, with Pierre acting as manager and sometime juggler and clown. The circus was part of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York during the summer of 2001.

Nathalie is a soprano whose solo material is largely Yiddish songs --her family were Polish-Jewish refugees. As part of the chorus of the Besancon Conservatoire, she sang the Pergolesi Stabat Mater at Le Corbusier's chapel in Ronchamp a few days before.

Pierre has the impression that I was brought up in Spain, and when he finds out that I am actually American, he tells me how amazing he finds it that a country with so many Nobel prizes in science can have such dumb political candidates. Asked about his own political views, he comes down firmly on the side of the workers, criticizing financiers who enrich themselves by selling financial instruments, rather than manufacturing.

I rejoin by saying that in France it is a taboo to be rich, and he says that the French do not hold their wealth against those whose artistic talent or whose ability to render their companies productive results in their being paid much more than average. At which point I ask for whom he will vote, and he says "Eva Joly --the ecology party candidate. His reason? None of the candidates except Joly have discussed the effect of a Fukushima-style nuclear disaster on France, which depends on tourism and is (according to Pierre), the most visited country in the world.

I ask Elise for whom she will vote, and she says either Melanchon or Joly. I ask Elise and she says her political views have evolved: she came from a family which was Communist when they arrived in France, but felt deceived by the Party's claims and moved to the Socialists, then the right. Notwithstanding, she has remained a Socialist voter, although she may vote for Joly because Hollande has not once mentioned nuclear power and she too, is concerned about France's reliance on la force de frappe.. She finds Sarkozy detestable, not just because of his abrasiveness, or his fondness for money, but because he leaves a trail of promises broken.

I ask her about Marine Le Pen and she says,

"Being the child of refugees, I could not possibly support her politics."

We continue to talk about the conditions in our respective countries, with me trying to explain that states have power over many activities that they do not in France. I also point out that there are aspects of French politics we find odd, such as the pre-determination of the constitutionality of laws before they take effect, and the ability of a Cabinet Minister to simultaneously hold the position of Depute, the French equivalent of a Congressman, something called le comble des mandats.

On economic questions, we are at opposite poles: he speaks of capitalist exploitation and I of the challenge of China. He parries my thrust by observing

"For two hundred years the West exploited the Asians, the Africans and others. Now it is their turn to exploit their resources to bring themselves up to something close to our level. Why should we be exasperated that they appropriate to themselves what is theirs?"

That is a nice intellectual explanation of what is going on, I say, but it will be small comfort to the man who earned a decent living as a factory worker in France or the United States during the post-war boom in our countries, but whose son cannot find decent, permanent work now. He returns to the point that capitalism has to be reformed. The devil is in the details, I reply. Neither of us convinces the other.