This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, June 10, 2005

JUST BECAUSE IT’S
INSANELY WELL-WRITTEN



THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

SURRENDER FLUNKEY

Profile: Dominique de Villepin

The french voted against political elites -- but their new prime minister is the most elitist yet



Outside the Matignon palace, the Paris residence of French prime ministers, an exhausted Jean-Pierre Raffarin last week took his plump leave. Raffarin, doleful of eye, was modest as he walked to the idling limousine that would whisk him to obscurity. The vanquished PM, sacked by President Chirac after France's "non" vote last Sunday, quietly acknowledged a smattering of frail cheers from aides.

Watching all this, like some buzzard circling over a high valley, was a tall, aquiline figure radiating self-satisfaction. Blessed with a silvery, luxuriant mane and a lean, muscular physique, this adonis might have been mistaken for a film actor, a protocol flunkey, or possibly a male model in one of those health-affirming adverts for French mineral water.

He rewarded Raffarin with a series of slow, overdone claps. He nodded his noble head with the condescension of a connoisseur. Dominique de Villepin, newly appointed Prime Minister by his patron, le president, was vouchsafing his adieu to expendable Jean-Pierre. In his own superior way he was getting shot of his useless predecessor and seizing the Matignon for his own.

Even by the hothouse standards of French public life, Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin is an intriguing specimen, a fragrant orchid whose spell in bloom could prove brief but vivid. The Sun newspaper has certainly noticed him. It has identified him as a symbol of everything it dislikes about snooty European federalism, has nicknamed him "Vile Pin" and is attacking him daily.

De Villepin, a poet, is unlikely to be perturbed. He is a published student of Napoleon's decline and knows that no barb from a British tabloid could match Bonaparte's suffering in Elba and St Helena. Anyway, he has been a target for Anglo-Saxon abuse before. In February 2003, before the eyes of the whole world, he made a speech to the United Nations that criticised the American-led war on Iraq and patronisingly gave Dubya and Co some advice from "an old country".

This led to furious denunciations of the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" and saw "French fries" being changed to "freedom fries" in the US, but it made de Villepin a national hero in the France whose destiny he claims to feel so deeply in his blue-inked veins.

As he struts the corridors of French power, de Villepin is, they say, as likely to be turning over in his premier cru mind some nugget of literature or philosophy as he is to be concentrating on the ephemeral crisis of the hour. He fancies himself as a long-game man, a man for the history books rather than the news pages.

In an echo of the philosopher-footballer Eric Cantona, he has compared Europe to a seagull and America to a shark. "The seagull," he wrote, "is intoxicated by the sky. She turns, carried by the winds, with undulating wing, uttering from time to time her agonising peal of laughter. She watches, soars, comes closer, climbs, descends, turns suddenly. The straight line is rarely her course. She listens to the world."

He collects African and Asian art, the more obscure the better. His taste is testament to the fact that he was born in French Africa (Rabat, Morocco) and that he has spent much of his life abroad, from India to Venezuela to the philistine United States of America. A mere 18 years ago this long-limbed aesthete was a press attaché at the French embassy in Washington DC, where he was reduced to venting his high-flown political theories to baffled foreign journalists.

One British columnist, who lunched with press officer de Villepin in Georgetown in the mid-1980s, recalls a gangly talker, happy to while away the time chatting to a francophone waitress. He was a languid man who then seemed a possible candidate for promotion to the middle-ambassadorial ranks, but no more than that. That he has reached his current magnificence is due, perhaps, to the elitist genius of the French government system, and to the almost comical imperturbabilty of the man himself.

The most important thing to know about him is that he is an "enarque", a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the academy that has long produced France's blazered, mandarin class. De Villepin is often described as an "aristocrat" but this son of a colonial businessman and politician is not some scion of Bourbon bloodlines or château-owning privilege. He is a member of the intellectual aristocracy of the ENA, having won and kept his place there by passing a series of fiendishly competitive exams.

Membership of the enarque club gives him supreme self-confidence (as, no doubt, do his dashing looks and that Heseltine-esque hairdo). He regards government as an intellectual, managerial puzzle, rather than a representational process. De Villepin does not belong to any political party. He has no parliamentary constituency. Unlike modern British prime ministers, he has no regular "surgery" with voters to remind him of their vulgar concerns about unemployment and so forth.

Married, with three children, the 51-year-old hobby marathon runner was plucked from the foreign ministry in 1995 to become Chirac's chief of staff. Previously he had been senior aide to the foreign minister Alain Juppé. The newly-elected President Chirac had been impressed by de Villepin's fruity eloquence, his Gallic pride, and his belief that boldness and a relish for controversy were desirable in a political leader.

This backfired badly in 1997 when he urged President Chirac to call an early election. The socialists made gains and Chirac was becalmed. And yet the president remained loyal to his fellow romantic. "In the time it takes me to read a page, he devours four," he has said of de Villepin. "He understands things at a fantastic speed. It is very rare to meet a man like him - both a poet and a very good captain of a commando squadron." De Villepin was made foreign minister in 2002 and a year later made himself an international name with his performance at the United Nations.

He has never stood for election to public office and regards elected legislators as a pain in the fondament. They, and unsatisfactory juniors, are liable to find themselves called "morons" - or worse. De Villepin has become prime minister just as the electorate has indicated its firm displeasure with the political elite, yet there is possibly no greater exponent of elitist government than this vainglorious strutter. He stands in marked contrast to his longterm enemy Nicolas Sarkozy, an assured populist who may well prove to be his rival for the presidency.

His poetry, self-published, is pretty average doggerel. Chirac's wife has nicknamed the new Prime Minister "Nero", on account of that emperor's execrable verse. In his prose, too, de Villepin favours the florid turn of phrase. Pseuds' Corner, in Private Eye, may have a significant new contributor on its hands.

Recently, in an essay on France's need for national confidence (which, note, is not quite the same thing as Euro federalism), de Villepin wrote: "Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory' - as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation."

As he stood there last week, watching Raffarin plod off to obscurity, de Villepin's thoughts may well have strayed to his own, remarkable metamorphosis from Quai D'Orsay official to proud occupant of the Matignon. This "silver wolf with the burning eyes" may in many ways be a richly ludicrous figure, but he is unlikely to leave as little impression as his unfortunate predecessor.”