La Rentrée

This is an article from a brilliant author. He conveys the mystery, the abiguity, the intrigue, the spirit, the personality, the je-ne-sais-quoi of life in France more poetically than any I have read....Enjoy!


Sunset behind Notre Dame from Quai d'Orleans on Ile St Louis, August 2005

Back-to-Everything Time
By Keith Spicer
Published on  Sept. 1, 2005 in Canada's national-capital daily, The Ottawa Citizen.
Posted with permission from the author.
                                                                                       
VENDÉE, FRENCH ATLANTIC COAST. A stone-walled garden under cloudless sky, sea air, six adults, four children, two dogs, and mountains of seafood on a long picnic table. The liquorice taste of pre-lunch pastis gives way to fruity, chilled Alsatian white wine. And, as summer wanes, to talk of la rentrée.

La rentrée means ‘returning’ to whatever concerns you – school, work, culture, sports, politics, the economy, romance. Every country has its New-Year-in-September, but in long-holidays France, it’s a time of almost unbearable anticipation. 

Education being a state religion in France, the original ‘return’ was la rentrée scolaire. Serious business: school scripts children’s lives for up to two decades with a rigour drilled into little heads from age three. Class ranking will later decide who gets into which elite high school and faculty. 

This fall, teachers and high-school students are aching to re-fight last spring’s battles against curriculum reform. After bringing down still another minister of education, the impressive François Fillon, kids and teachers can hardly wait to hit the pavement again while weather’s good and street-protest partying is comfy.

The cultural rentrée breaks down into literature (pre-eminent in book-crazy France), music of every kind, theatre, movies, TV, dance, painting, sculpture, and limitless fashion trends. Every clan and coterie has its rentrée and media insiders. Gossip abounds: the star news anchor, with a book to sell, reveals the non-secret that he fathered a fellow anchor’s child.

The chattiest, most incestuous rentrée is the rentrée littéraire. Targeting the bonanza-producing fall literary prizes -- the Goncourt, Renaudot, Médicis, Interallié and Fémina, publishers started hyping potential bestsellers in mid-summer. Driving the PR steamroller: the decade’s bad-boy novelist-poet Michel Houellebecq. Confronting the 632 other fall novels (few of which will sell), he promises all the gimmicks of cash-grubbing enfants terribles: filthy words, cynicism, kinky sex, woman-hating and racism. But his syntax is exemplary. Critics see a saviour for the flagging French novel.

The big film de la rentrée showcases heart-throb Daniel Auteuil, plus boredom, hills, and a blind real estate promoter with Braille skills handy for wife-swapping.

The big sports rentrée features the return to the national (Les Bleus) soccer team of Zinédine Zidane, captain of France’s 1998 World Cup-winning team. Take the top ten NHL players and multiply their fame by ten, and you come close to “Zizou”’s celebrity. The huge sports daily L’Équipe, headlined a full-page colour photo with: “The light returns.” Rumour claims President Jacques Chirac, eager to lift national morale, personally urged Zizou to return.

This year’s rentrée politique is classic. Both Left and Right are practising fratricide with abandon. After French voters rejected the new European constitution on May 29, the opposition Socialist Party split between old-line lefties and tepidly market-accepting moderates. Partisans spill rivers of socialist-red blood over six competing presidential candidates.

President Jacques Chirac’s UMP party is run with steely hand and mike-grabbing shamelessness by his former protégé, Nicolas Sarkozy. “Sarko,” with poll ratings pumped by his law-and-order stance as interior minister, is undercutting his boss at every turn. But to the silent delight of the Chiraquiens, Sarko’s wife Cécilia (whom he made a media icon as his peas-in-a-pod partner) has flown the coop with – mon Dieu! – Sarko’s aptly-titled Yankee “events organizer.” We shall learn the soap opera’s outcome in September. 

Why does this matter? Because the 2007 presidential election will soon turn into a horse-race between Sarko and Chirac’s current protégé, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Oft-mocked poet Villepin is turning out to be a surprisingly good politician. As Sarkozy’s likely rival in the 2007 presidential election, he has shed his aloof, grandiloquent habits for telegenic jogging, beers with the boys, and more listening than a sin-savouring country priest. Tall and handsome, he looks much more like a president than the hawk-nosed, hyperkinetic Sarkozy.

But Villepin’s Waterloo could be la rentrée économique. Just-announced tax cuts and his well-advised start on loosening labour laws to favour small business don’t seem enough to win his gamble of restoring public confidence by Sept. 15: barely 11 percent of citizens feel “more confident.” April-to-June growth fell to a shocking 0.1 percent. Unions –  more important symbolically than in membership – already promise what they do best: demonstrations (ah, la rentrée sociale!). Without growth, major labour reform, strict budget discipline and lower oil prices, Villepin cannot much reduce France’s almost 10-percent unemployment – his trumpeted priority.

Amid such gloom, we are left with what really matters: la rentrée romantique. (One string-hyping lingerie firm calls this the “pink” rentrée). Summer romances cooling, the fall is wide open for new, more consequential liaisons. Pastis and vin d’Alsace make all of this perfectly clear.