It’s
two o’clock on a hot Friday afternoon. All down the rue Polonceau there are men
and boys sitting in the shade, waiting for the call to prayer. The
loud-speakers placed at intervals along the pavement, are ready to broadcast
the words of the Imam from inside the mosque. The sun is beating down and big
thunderous clouds are massing heavily but the storm will hold off for a while
yet and the streets won’t turn into rivers until several hours after the
faithful have dispersed again.
The
mats and carpets are being spread about and within minutes they are full. Not a
square inch of carpet to be seen. Now there are hundreds of men sitting in neat
rows, waiting. Latecomers run to join them, grabbing a piece of cardboard from
the piles that are always kept handy, stacked up along the street. The traffic
on the boulevard Barbès rumbles past. A few tourists stand around wondering if
they dare risk a photo. At the bottom of the street the men are all facing into
the pharmacie which is going about its business as usual. With nothing more
than a few crowd control barriers and some carpets, they are creating a
self-contained space for worship right there on the street of the buzzing,
secular city.
I
reach the library. The entrance is blocked by a posse of ten year-old school
children and their two teachers. They’re on a library visit and are being told
in no uncertain terms about making no noise, not disturbing the peace. I
guarantee the two little gigglers, haven’t heard a word. They get the same
treatment from the librarian once they get through the door.
I’m
on my way to the first floor for novels but I see Joseph Stiglitz’s ‘The
Triumph of Greed’ on the ‘one-week-only’ loan stack so I pick that up as I go.
I’ve just waded my way through the interminable ‘Too Big to Fail’ by Andrew
Ross Sorkin and I think I need something about the financial mess we’re in
that’s a little less, ‘this happened, then that happened’ and a tad more
analytical. I’ve picked the right book for that but, my goodness, it makes
depressing reading…
The
children are being very quiet, less so some of the adults. Across the book
stack I can hear a couple of women debating the pros and cons of the decision
by l’Education nationale to put the third volume of de Gaulle’s memoirs on the
bac littéraire syllabus as a set text. It’s generated a good deal of talk since
I got back, on the radio as well as in the print media. There’s a suspicion
that the UMP, the party in power, is trying to clothe itself in the mantle of
the ‘great man’, it being the 70th anniversary year of de Gaulle’s
call to arms from London.
I
try to imagine a debate of this kind going on in Scotland or England – and I
can’t. For a start I’m doubtful how many UK students read whole books
for their exams these days. But the set book issue raises other questions,
deeper ones, than just whether there’s a political motivation behind the choice
of this book or whether a political memoir is ‘literature’ in the true sense of
the word, or not.
It
brings to the fore, in a rather encouraging way for the French, the role a
truly national system of education – i.e. used by well over 90% of its
population - plays as a force for social cohesion. Contrast that with the
divisive DIY model which is being introduced into England and you begin to
measure the enormity of what the coalition is doing to England’s already
weakened national education system. Ironically enough, quite a lot of those
French teachers who came out against the de Gaulle memoirs would probably like
a bit more DIY in their system and a freer hand to choose what texts to study.
That’s the nub of it, isn’t it? Finding the right balance between regulation
and autonomy. Same problem as Stiglitz is addressing in a different context
(and the stakes are just as high).
It’s
the start of la saison des cerises. My geraniums are flowering in their boxes
and the windows are open round the clock. It’s a far cry from the green
serenity of Burn House, from the red squirrels at the nuts, the great-tits
nipping in and out of their nesting boxes, but it has its own charm – and if I
listen hard enough I can definitely hear a blackbird sing.
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