The decadence of France

from the dark valley:
Indeed, so impotent were all its governments that historians have described France between the wars as a "stale-mate society." Yet the impression of stasis is not altogether accurate. Nor is the complementary suggestion that France was hopelessly unstable because governments kept changing, as though the game of ministerial musical chairs was central to the life of the nation. The truth is that who-ever was in office, the Civil Service was in power. France had a long tradi-tion of directorial administration. Officials of all sorts had wide-ranging authority which they exercised with vigour and (often) with discretion. Take the energetic Prefect of Police in Paris, Jean Chiappe, for example. He established pedestrian crossings between rows of metal studs, banished several herds of goats from the inner city and prevented Paris's 25,000 prostitutes from soliciting too blatantly in the streets, though his plan to improve still further the "moral tone" of the capital by abolishing vespa-siennes, the stinking iron pavement pissoirs, met with insurmountable male opposition.35 There was much less opposition to the system of preventive detention (similar to the arbitrary arrest achieved by lettres de cachet under the Ancien Regime) which Chiappe employed chiefly to suppress the Communists. This was because most people, however much they cher-ished their revolutionary tradition, accepted the status quo. Before the Depression and the rise of Hitler they were unmoved by challenges from political extremists of Left and Right. Bourgeois and peasant gave their allegiance to the secular republic. In this land of 40 million individualists, the conservative consensus ruled. Less government was better government and if it did not work well . . . it worked after a fashion. In this it was like the plumbing in a country where most lavatories were "Turkish" holes in the ground. It was like the telephone service, where making a call from a post office could involve a wait of up to three hours. It was like the dirty, antiquated railways, where trains that attempted to run on time seemed liable to crash. It was like the safety matches which, after myriad splinter-ing strikes, failed to ignite or glowed without flame, only to explode into sulphurous life, hop from their sticks and burn a hole in the carpet. Gallic logic notwithstanding, Frenchmen prided themselves on their mastery of the art of muddling through—debrouillage. Nowhere was this art practised with more aplomb than in Emile Zola's bursting "belly of Paris," Les Halles. Situated in a tangle of mean streets just behind the Bourse, this monstrous food market was of far more interest to the average sensual man than the temple of stocks and bonds. In fact the 50-square-yard area closest to the Bourse which was devoted to the sale of mush-
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rooms gave rise to flights of lyricism that could never have been prompted by mere money. There, heaped in a massive array of boxes and baskets, were not just common or garden boules de neige but pungent little cedes from the south that incite to abandon and the wholesomeness of sin, large pine needle mushrooms from up near Lille, the special medium mushrooms from outside Rouen with the flesh tones of Jeanne d'Arc to be ravished by irreverent teeth and swallowed as a sub-stitute for magic.
But mushrooms were only drops in the ocean of produce which nightly flooded into Les Hales, threatening to overwhelm the ten huge pavilions built by Napoleon III—his "umbrellas of glass and iron." For miles around the city centre roads were clogged as wave upon wave of wagons struggled to deliver their tide of merchandise—chicory from Roussillon, tomatoes from Cavaillon, cabbages from Anjou, apples from Normandy, carrots from Nanterre. They brought in shoals of mackerel from the Channel ports, trout from the Vosges, eels from Brittany, squid from the Mediterranean, crayfish (Zola's "liquid fire") from the Atlantic. Gory tumbrils carried freshly butchered carcasses from the abattoirs of Vau-girard and La Villette, beef from Savoy and Charente, mutton from the Pyrenees and the Auvergne, poultry from Perigord and pork from Correze. Little had changed in the life of Les Halles since Zola's classic evocation 6o years before. Still the giant hangars magnified a deafening cacophony: the crack of whips and neighing of horses, the crash of iron hooves and wooden clogs on the pave, the curses of blue-bloused porters (some wear-ing the red stocking caps of liberty like their Jacobin forefathers), the jostle of crammed barrows and overflowing trolleys amid towers of crates and pyramids of boxes, the hoarse cries of sellers and the answering clamour of buyers, the tumult of tormented souls in a mercantile pandemonium. Still each dawn transfigured this infernal world, glancing through the shutters, chasing the shadows from the hollows in the roofs, illuminating the forest of pillars and bathing even the dimmest provender in a lambent glow. Still the senses were ravished by the sight and smell of mountains of tangerines, plateaux of raspberries, jungles of thyme, morasses of pâté, prairies of dahlias, seas of shrimps. Still, as Zola had noted, much of the produce rotted before it could be sold, so that the market was "a vast ossuary, a graveyard of corpses, a charnel-house of stench and putrefaction." Zola made it all so romantic that when their nightclubs closed elegant fljneurs flocked to this cornucopia of squalor, to drink onion soup and ogle the prostitutes.