Tuesday, April 24, 2012
(1 )Avignon to Arles
(2) First round final vote totals

I set out at 8:00 a.m. for Arles, but take the wrong right turn and travel through one of the banlieues Achille warned me about, only realizing with certainty my mistake when i reach a dump. Turning around I return where I started, go one block further, turniing onto Boulevard St. Ruf, where I began my ride to Saint Remy yesterday.

Saint Remy is nineteen kilometers from Avignon, but Arles, closer to the Mediterranean, is thirty-four. I reach the outer limits of the town by 11:15 a.m., having stopped only once, at a Routiers, a truck stop, where the woman in charge makes me an espresso, then lets me help myself to croissants and pain chocolats while she returns to doing her sums. I make my way to the Tourist Office on Boulevard des Lices, the main street and lock my bike up. The town has many Roman monuments; it is also known for its bullfights, which take place during the feria Holy Week and in September.

I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.
I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.

The old tow of Arles looks unapologetically backward: the buildings, many dilapidated, look no different from what they did when Van Gogh lived there. The narrow streets wind up hill and down, to the Rhone's edge (modern Arles rises on the opposite bank). There Summer Gardens are cheek by jowl with the ruins: there is a sense of time standing still.

La Maison Jaune ("The Yellow House"), where Van Gogh lived, no longer exists: it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The Hotel Dieu, the charity hospital where Van Gogh was treated after he cut off his ear lobe has been preserved and is now a public space. It looks as it did when Van Gogh painted it: a cloister courtyard with yellow arches and a central garden of brightly colored flowers. Located in the middle of town, it cannot compare with the peacefulness of Saint Remy. Parts of the old town look more like Andalusia than they do the South of France. Arles, with its Spanish influences, evokes Goya, that painter of human cruelty and suffering, more than it does Provence, its location in Provençal notwithstanding.

***

The final numbers for the lection appear in today's papers: Hollande, 28.63%,; Sarkozy, 27.18%; Marine Le Pen, 17.89%; J.L. Melenchon, 11.10%; Francois Bayrou, 9.13%; Eva Joly, 2.31%; Dupon-Aignan, 1.79%;, Poutou, 1.15%, N Arthaud, 0.56%, and Cheminade, .025%.

Sarkozy's margin is much closer than originally thought. He is asking for three debates in the next two weeks, debates Hollande will not accede to unless something dramatic happens in the next few days to reveal him weaker than Sunday's results suggest. Nonetheless, because pollsters overestimated Melenchon's appeal, and underestimated Le Pen's, no winner can be predicted on May 2. While leaders of the Front National might urge Le Pen's voters not to switch to Sarkozy, in fact those voters may not be content to have made their protest in the first round, and abandoning theory vote for Sarkozy as the least bad of the two candidates.

Assessment by leading economists of what the future holds for the French are dispiriting: real estate prices down 15-30%; savings accounts barely keepi up with inflation, and the French are reluctant to invest in company shares, their fear of losing it all being greater than their appetite for risk.

Talking to people who work in restaurants and hotels, to young people working as interns (stagiares) it is obvious that people work less and have more time off, but the balance seems to have tipped: whereas before the benefits provided by the state, along with a moderately paid, job guaranteed for life, added up to a comfortable way of life for many tioday more and more people work part-time without benefits, and young people agree to work as volunteers for a company that pays them nothing and is unlikely to hire them when the internship ends. Obtaining internships is the only way to get a job, but with mkore interns than jobs, that majority that is working for nothing and will have no job is losing patience, hence the high numbers for Melenchon among those between 18 and 25.

Conversely, looking at the voting results in the South of France, where immigration is at its highest, Sarkozy caries the day in four out of five departments by 1-3 percentage points, taking Bouches-du Rhome, Vaucluse, Alpes de haute Provence, and Haute-Alpes. However, Marine Le Pen is a close second, and in Gard (a department which includes the old Roman town of Nimes), she bests him, the only department in all of France where she is victor.

Everyone is making analogies to Mitterand in 1981, including Hollande, but there has been no rising up of the Left, as was predicted. Instead, there has been a surge rightward --not a given, because in 2007 the Front National underperformed, receiving only 10% of the vote, instead of the projected 12-!3%. many of ts voters are small business owners, semi-skilled laborers from small towns, sick of seeing the France of their parents --those thirty years when things got a little better each year-- now just a memory.

France is a country that values labor, that enshrines highly skilled workers across the spectrum: fine art restorers, but also butchers and bakers and taxi drivers and santitation men. There is a deep-seated belief on the part of many French that whatever your metier, if you exercise it well, that you as an individual with a skilled trade, are owed a certain respect, a view which is not so often celebrated in the United States. That attitude is under attack by those who would like to make France more efficient to make it more competitive --and indeed, it may be the only way for France's citizens to continue to enjoy the quality of life a majority of them have had. It is nonetheless painful to watch the ordinary struggles of people torn between living as part of small communities, as France has traditionally done --and becoming part of a larger, more impersonal world, whose only advantage is that no one will fall further behind.

Charles Dietz, my physicist friend, stated clearly the view of many French confronted with the choice: rather than admit foreign influences strange to French ways, perhaps it is better to live a little less well, but to stick to one's principles and die with one's own (mourir avec ses siens).