An American in Paris

I did sit passively while my clothes were ripped off on national television, however. I was doing a French evening talk show — one of those five-intellectuals-around-a-table affairs. It was hosted by a young woman known around France for her beautiful eyes and her cleavage, both of which are indeed formidable. And as happened continually during my trip, I was the only one present in a suit and tie (I don’t know how Yves St. Laurent stays in business). The writer on my right — one of the nation’s foremost interpreters of Bob Dylan and the Beatles — decided I was too well dressed. While I was talking, he went under the table and took off one of my shoes and put it on the table. Then he got up and took off my tie and started unbuttoning my shirt. The intellectual further to my right, a musician who quotes Plato and sells bubblegum rock by telling everybody that it’s punk, got out of his chair and came up behind me to help with the disrobing.

I could have fought back, but I confess that I didn’t quite know what to do. Most of my recent television punditry has been on American political shows, and never once on the set of PBS or CNN have I been sexually harassed. But French television has different rules; it’s like going from the NewsHour to a Marx Brothers movie. So while they were tugging at my chemise, I just kept babbling like an idiot. I should have known beforehand that something odd was liable to happen, since the music writer had opened his fly and showed me his cool underwear in the make-up room. But on the set I just didn’t react. If I’d let him take it all off, I could’ve been the next Jerry Lewisstyle French demigod. Instead, I’m just another American in Paris, unprepared for the rigors of French discourse.

In May, I published a book called Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The book is distinctively American; it describes stories and personalities that are known only here — or so I thought. But there was a surprising foreign response. Like Baywatch stud David Hasselhoff, the book became more famous abroad than at home. In Britain, there were a few stories that credited me with the term Bobo (which stands for bourgeois bohemian), including a nice cover story in the New Statesman, “Tony Blair is a Bobo.” But you may not be surprised to learn that many other British journalists wrote long essays on the concept without burdening their readers with the knowledge that it had been previously described by anyone other than themselves. A friend told me about an online encyclopedia of neologisms that contained an entry beginning: “Bobo: a word invented by journalists in London to describe . . . “

The most surprising responses came from people in Korea (where the book will appear soon), Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere, who insisted that Boboism is rife in their countries. I can’t even imagine a Restoration Hardware store in Korea.

But the most enthusiastic responses have come from France and Germany. Every large French weekly has run a spread on the book, and it’s been the subject of culture programs on most of the major radio and TV networks. On November 17, for example, Le Monde ran an essay insisting that the word Bobo was actually coined by a Frenchman, the historian Pierre Hassner, to mean Bolshevik-Bonapartistes.

Indeed, my book tour has already been profoundly educational in one key respect. Before, I thought that the French had a weakness for facile ideas with too-clever-by-half monikers. But on this trip, I realized that the French are intellectually rigorous, and pay attention only to ideas that are cosmically profound, yet meticulously documented. I think I came to this realization while I was being interviewed by a beautiful journalist from a weekly magazine who asked me about 30 minutes worth of questions about how Bobos masturbate.

We were having lunch at Bubbles, a champagne restaurant designed like an early 1960s airport lounge — The Jetsons come to the rive droite. When she began this line of inquiry, I was going to confess that in all my researches I had not really collected data on this area. But fortunately she went ahead and answered her own question. “They only give pleasure to themselves, right? Even when they are having sex with others, they only care about their own pleasure, right?” She seemed to know what she was talking about, so I could only assent. Then when the conversation turned to how modern feminism has made masturbation a liberating power exercise, she began to grow more and more passionate. In other words, I was sitting in a chi-chi restaurant drinking excellent champagne, nibbling grilled salmon, and listening to a beautiful young woman in a low-cut peasant blouse talk about masturbation. I believe this is why Ernest Hemingway came to Paris in the first place.

In America, money and status were the themes of many interviews on my book tour, but in France, sex and philosophy dominated. Indeed, it was stunning how quickly my interlocutors could jump from the pubic to the metaphysical and back again. France is just incredibly sex-drenched. The network Canal Plus did an hour long discussion of the book (without me, fortunately), which was preceded by a promo for an upcoming show about two men who do dances by stretching their foreskins into an incredible variety of shapes. One French monthly I visited was sending out a promotional poster bragging about a 16 percent increase in circulation; for visual interest, the poster showed a man with his face buried in a woman’s private parts (this was not a pornographic magazine, by the way). On my second day I was being interviewed by a charming, vivacious woman from the French Cosmopolitan, and I mentioned that the new elite is based on education, not bloodlines, and that therefore this group has a tendency to turn everything into a form of school. Toys become educational toys. Vacations become edifying alumni tours, and so on. She perked up, noting that in France women now take courses to perfect their technique in the particular sex act that is of the Lewinskyan persuasion. We were having this conversation in English, and while you might think that a reporter from Cosmopolitan would have a relatively rich vocabulary to describe this act, even in her second language, this woman knew only one phrase, and it was just about the crudest one in the whole repertoire, a term you never hear in mixed company. She used it over and over again, with an air of easy refinement. I just sat there while she went on and on, people all around us in my publisher’s office, waiting for the gendarmes to sweep in and arrest us for violating public decency.

America is supposed to be a raucous country, but everything about the book tour was more anarchic in France. The publisher wanted a better photo of me than the passport-style shot that’s on the book. So they hired a photographer who had apparently been inspired by that pulsating photographer in the 1960s movie Blowup. Instead of sticking me in a nice spot and shooting a few frames, he had me sprinting with him through the packed streets of Paris while he looked for the right momentary combination of light, color, setting, and background crowd. He would dash across a boulevard, turn with his lens, and tell me to stride across the traffic: “Go! . . . Turn! . . . Lift your head to the light! . . . Stop!” Meanwhile, his assistant would scramble along beside me holding a huge reflecting foil to illuminate my face without creating reflections off my glasses. He quoted some Susan Sontag theory about how photography is like hunting and explained that amidst the chaos of the chase there comes a spontaneous moment in which the real subject reveals himself. Meanwhile, hundreds of Parisians were stopping to check if I was someone famous before turning away.

Another magazine decided I didn’t look hip enough to grace its pages, so they brought along a bag of designer clothes, all cut to fit a scrawny French male model. I stood there in the heat of the kitchen of a fashionable French restaurant, unable to breathe in a black on black outfit half my size, while a photographer waved his digital camera around my face. A Parisian TV show had me walk through a few boutiques describing the Bobo style while a spike-haired camerawoman waved her camera at my feet, the back of my head, my hands, anything but my face, in her best cinema-verite-on-ecstasy manner.

One night my publishers and I went to dinner at the home of Jean-Francois Bizot, who wrote a preface for the French edition of the book. I had been told that Bizot, a familiar figure in France, had been the editor of a leading 1960s countercultural magazine, Actuel, and is known as the godfather of the underground. He’s also extremely rich, the black sheep of the family that owns Rhone-Poulenc. He himself owns a fat avant-garde magazine named Nova, two alternative radio stations (which introduced rap and world music to France), and a television production company.

But nothing quite prepared me for his house. It’s in the media-dense suburb of Joinville. You walk through a large gate and see an immense 19th-century palace of classical design. But when you enter the hall, you don’t know what to think. The tiles under foot are in such disrepair they shift when you step on them. Scattered about are gothic and even romanesque statues of the Virgin and the saints. On every conceivable surface there are hundreds of 30-year-old alternative magazines, from Berkeley, Greenwich Village, and Paris. There are cover stories everywhere advertising interviews with Abbie Hoffman, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Rubin, and the Black Panthers. There are illustrations by the omnipresent countercultural cartoonist, R. Crumb. There are posters for the Newport Jazz Festival. There are leaflets about Vietnam and books about North Korea. There are little ironic toy figurines here and there, yellowing polemical books, a knife that looks like it was once used to slice a baguette a few decades ago, a gun that was buried in the garden just prior to the German invasion in 1870, and all manner of extremely dated furniture from the late sixties. It’s as if somebody’s held an all-night revolutionary meeting in 1972, and nobody had ever bothered to clean up.

In fact, Bizot bought this house and turned it into a crash pad for counterculturalists. He’d invite hippies to stay there, and some of them just never left. There are now 20 people living in the mansion, some of them grizzled radicals along with their new wives and kids. Bizot is 55, and some of his housemates are senior figures in the French media (I met the top news editor at a French TV network and a leading journalist at Nova), but they’ve kept the faith. And Bizot himself is, as he would say, a trip. Amidst all the deadly earnest crap about revolution, we forget that there actually was a refreshing fun element to the counterculture, and Bizot embodies that. He doesn’t say he’s a radical or a revolutionary; he says he’s a “freak,” even while lamenting that the word has lost its once-rich connotations. He delights in everything, he laughs at everything. He’s got one of those full-body laughs that has his torso shaking and his face clenched up in Falstaffian joy.

Early in our conversation, amidst the obligatory 30 minutes spent lampooning the American election, I mentioned that I had voted for George W. Bush: This struck Bizot and his housemates as amazing, bizarre, and utterly original. “C’est fou! C’est fou!” That’s crazy! It’s crazy! It was like watching a bunch of lifelong hunters suddenly come face to face with a unicorn. They were too enchanted to shoot. My Bush vote became the theme of our evening. About a third of the way through, after the third or fourth bottle of Beaujolais, Bizot got out his video camera and propped it on the dinner table directly in front of me so he could record my every gesture and utterance for all posterity. It sat there staring at me all night (I learned later the tape made it to his website as streaming video). We talked about some of the now largely forgotten heroes of the counterculture: Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman (Bizot had a great photo of the longtime Commentary contributor cooking vegetables over an open fire at a youth gathering of some kind), and Guy Debord, founder of situationalism. One of the more senior members of our group kept trying to explicate some theory of Trotsky’s, but Bizot always interrupted him with jokes, and the guy finally moved over to the other side of the table where he could ratiocinate. Every few minutes we’d come back to Bush, to my amazing vote, and in particular to Bizot’s theory that some of President Bush’s old CIA buddies had botched their effort to fix the election.

I left the house in the wee hours, as blissfully confused about Guy Debord as I had been when I’d arrived, but a little better informed about the sixties. “I’ll tell you what 1968 was all about in France,” Bizot said past midnight. “It took me a while to realize this. We were tired of being last. Even in Denmark they were ahead of us. We weren’t allowed to take girls to our rooms in the university.” A writer from Lebanon once told me that his country blew up when young fundamentalist men started seeing women in bikinis on the beaches. Both theories are oddly compelling.

Bizot admitted that he’s something of a relic of a bygone era. But there is also a clever and even, if you’ll pardon the expression, postmodern aspect to the way he’s constructed his life and his image. For example, the furniture. It looks like it’s been sitting there since the days of the student strikes. In fact, Bizot bought much of it recently over eBay and had it shipped from the States.

The next day, while I was sitting with a young woman from the French version of Amazon.com, I learned that there are now brigades of anti-Bizots. There is a movement in French journalism made up of young people who hate the 1960s. They have a magazine called Technikart, which is full of attacks on self-absorbed sixty-eighters who can’t get over their supposedly glorious youths and who denigrate all the subsequent generations for their supposed apathy. In this magazine there are interviews with psychologists who dissect the pathetic inability of the sixties radicals to accept adulthood. There are open letters to the baby boomers telling them how pathetic they are. In the current issue there’s a piece savaging Bizot as a hide-bound reactionary. Technikart is operated largely by scions of France’s most prominent families, and one day a couple of them came to talk to me (also carrying a videocam for their web page). With a smidgen of prompting, they went off on the sort of savage attack on the 1960s that would set Hilton Kramer’s heart aglow. But then I asked them who their political hero was, and the young man said simply, “Marcos.” I looked blankly at him, trying to figure out if he meant Imelda.

“Comandante Marcos,” he continued. “The revolutionary. . . . The ones that wore the masks.”

And then it dawned on me that he was talking about the leader of the rebels in Chiapas, Mexico, the one who staged the fledgling armed revolt a few years ago. They were attacking the New Left from the left.

“Mitterrand’s wife went and met with him. She is on the left hand,” he said proudly.

I sat there amazed. In other words, in order to rebel against radical chic baby boomers who romanticized Che Guevara, the new French youth movement is embracing radical chic Danielle Mitterrand, who romanticized Comandante Marcos! This is the daring new movement.

But amazement was pretty much standard fare in Paris. The French are supposed to take ideas so much more seriously than we do, but what I saw was spectacle. It’s like a country that has managed to keep itself dynamic by means of constant titillation — and of course a deep appreciation of the finest literary masterworks that come from overseas.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.