Anti-advertising protests in France are an inspiring holiday season corrective.

"Consumer Madness":
Photo credit, The Guardian.

Nowhere else except France could there be a "Pee in Peace" parliamentary motion to "ban video ads above urinals and toilets."

But there should be such a movement here. After a half-century or more of reducing human beings to little more than consumer drones, we're reaping what we've sown in the form of pervasive societal cluelessness.

'Advertising breaks your spirit': the French cities trying to ban public adverts, by Angelique Chrisafis (The Guardian)

Activists in Lille recently demonstrated against advertising, while Grenoble has replaced hundreds of adverts with trees and noticeboards. Could cities remove ads altogether?

On a pavement in the northern French city of Lille, an advertising panel rotated pictures of bargain Aldi prawns and blended scotch whisky, competing for the average three-second attention span of pedestrians. Suddenly a 31-year-old hospital nurse darted across the street, unrolled a mass of white paper and began to cover the ads.

“I’ve been treating sick people in emergency rooms for 11 years, but this is about treating a sick society,” he said, as he reached up with other protesters to tape the paper in place. “When you walk down the street, how can you feel happy if you’re constantly being reminded of what you don’t have? Advertising breaks your spirit, confuses you about what you really need and distracts you from real problems, like the climate emergency.”

Passersby began to gather, some baffled, some nodding. Police officers arrived to move the demonstrators on, but they were already on the move, hurrying down into the metro to cover their key target: digital video screens advertising trainers.

For decades France has had one of the most well-organised anti-advertising movements in the world, ranging from guerrilla protests with spray-cans to high-profile court cases. But now the boom in what is artfully called “digital-out-of-home advertising” – eye-catching video screens dotted across urban areas, from train platforms to shopping centres – has sparked a new spate of French protests, civil disobedience and petitions ...

Trump, Brexit and Yellow Vests: “To Understand American Political Anger, Look to ‘Peripheral France’ ”

"You segregate yourself but continue to talk about an open society. That’s the paradox."

Speaking for myself, I find the analysis compelling.

To Understand American Political Anger, Look to ‘Peripheral France’, by Ian Klaus (CityLab)

French geographer Christophe Guilluy has a controversial diagnosis of working-class resentment in the age of Trump, Brexit, and the Yellow Vests.

Ever since the twin 2016 ballot-booth surprises of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, academics, journalists, and policymakers have been looking intently at geographic divides—in particular, the gap between urban and rural communities. The arrival of the Gilets Jaunes—the Yellow Vests—on the streets and squares of French cities in 2018 prompted a similar searching. Led initially by disgruntled motorists protesting government fuel taxes, the Yellow Vests tapped a familiar vein of populist anger against an increasingly out-of-touch urban elite. To understand what the movement wanted, many turned to the work of French geographer Christophe Guilluy.

Before the Yellow Vests emerged, Guilluy laid out a searing indictment of trans-Atlantic capitalism and its urban forms in his books La France Périphérique and Twilight of the Elites, the latter of which has recently been published in English. Focusing on smaller French cities and rural areas, the 54-year-old writer takes aim at liberal articles of faith around openness, cosmopolitanism, protest, and multiculturalism. Provocative in print, congenial in conversation, Guilluy spoke with CityLab on why “urban” is a useless concept, the problem with the “cool bourgeoisie,” and why Notre Dame belongs to more than just Parisians. Our conversation was translated by Dylan Yaeger and has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let's skip to the conclusion.

Ultimately, I think that what is interesting is to see that the global economic model has produced the same effects in all the Western democracies. We cannot continue to act as if the Yellow Vests or Trump’s electorate or the Brexiteers don’t exist. These people exist. They exist in regions very removed from the globalized city, and we need to come up with an economic model for them. We don’t have a choice. They will be here for around 100 years. So, whatever else, we need to think differently about space.

A brief but solid video overview of France's "yellow vest rebellion."

Courtesy of Deutsche Welle's documentary series (in English).

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France's yellow vest rebellion - a movement against Macron

Who are the "yellow vests” that have plunged France into crisis? Hundreds of thousands have been demonstrating to demand lower taxes and higher pensions.

What began as a spontaneous protest against high gasoline prices swiftly evolved into a mass movement that has caused a major crisis in France. The "yellow vests” have become synonymous with the widespread anger at the reform policies of President Emmanuel Macron - and constitute his greatest challenge since he took office. The protesters accuse Macron of being a representative of the rich while ignoring the plight of ordinary citizens. The wave of demonstrations was triggered by Jacline Mouraud and her video tirade on social media. Her subsequent fame has enabled her to continue criticizing politicians on TV talk shows. The "yellow vest” demonstrations have been organized almost exclusively online and without the involvement of opposition parties or unions.

The protesters have a range of demands, from lower taxes to high pensions and a greater say in the running of the country. They feel neglected by the Paris elite, who they see as showing no interest in their economic duress and fears of social decline.

Yellow vest protests: "Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular."

We needn't worry here. BOW would refuse the parade permit.

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

The yellow vest protests are more nuanced than American pundits want to admit

“What’s wrong with elitism?” asked Washington Post columnist Max Boot this week on Twitter. Boot posed this in a discussion about the merits of centrism, raised in the context of the “yellow vest” protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron in France.

American media seems to be confused by the protests. Few seem to understand what protesters want, or even who they are. Some outlets describe protesters as Trump-like nationalists aligned with Marine Le Pen, others as antifa-style leftists aligned with Jean-Luc Melenchon.

The marchers actually cut across all political lines, and if anything, both Le Pen and Melenchon are trying to attach themselves to something independent of them. Unifying factors seem to be hatred of Macron and a desire to express this in profane fashion (the New Yorker noted that many of the protest slogans are colorful variations on the theme of people being literally screwed by Macron).

snip

Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled.

What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you?

This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite?

The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West.

Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.

See: NAFTA, the creation of the WTO and GATT, deregulation of the banking sector, multiple unnecessary wars, tax holidays and other corporate subsidies like bans on drug re-importation, mass construction of prisons during an era of sharply declining crime (coupled with broad non-enforcement of white-collar offenses), and so on.

Allow me to recommend supplemental reading.

The Marxist Pop-Culture Theorist Who Influenced a Generation, by Rob Arcand (The Nation)

Through his blog, k-punk, Mark Fisher pioneered a different kind of cultural criticism.

... Across three books, numerous magazine pieces, and hundreds of short essays, Fisher established a vast and totalizing worldview defined by his thoughts on capitalism, media, and the afterlife. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to describe a specific belief increasingly common with politicians in both the UK and North America, that no matter how bad things were under capitalism, the roughly 300-year-old political and economic system had become the only viable option—with it all but impossible to imagine any realistic alternative to the current global marketplace.

Building on the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, Fisher regarded the expression that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” as more than mere Marxist fatalism; his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, approached film, literature, and music as a lens into the phenomenon for which it was named—a manifesto for some lasting alternative to global capitalism, inspired by the art he loved. But before their inclusion in Capitalist Realism, almost all of the writing here existed in earlier forms as essays and posts on Fisher’s blog, k-punk.

30 years ago today: We say goodbye to Ireland with hurling and Guinness on a Sunday afternoon in Rosslare.

Previously: 30 years ago today: It was about Cork, the Irish experience and U2 -- and the craic was lovely.

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Day 116 ... Sunday, August 9
Cork  → Rosslare. Bus mayhem, boat departure for France

Our Irish idyll was winding down, but bus mayhem?

I have no idea what I meant by this reference 30 years ago. Maybe thousands of Bulmers cider drinkers had spent sleepless nights in Cork after the U2 show, wandering the streets and waiting for the market pubs to open, before suddenly realizing on Sunday morning that they needed to get home.

Did we take the bus all the way to Rosslare, or hop another bus elsewhere, or stumble upon a rail head?

Your guess is as good as mine. I know for a fact we made it to Rosslare in one piece, because we sat for a long time in the little ramshackle pub that used to guard the harbor there, sipping pints of Guinness and watching the hurling championship semi-final between Galway and Tipperary on the telly.

We had enjoyed watching Gaelic football a few days earlier, back in Kenmare.

Background

The most widely played sport in Ireland is Gaelic Football, which along with Hurling is organised by the Gaelic Athletics Association (GAA) and is the national sport of Ireland.

The Game of Gaelic Football

Gaelic Football is like a cross between soccer and rugby and is closely associated with Australian Rules Football.

While Gaelic football seemed vaguely familiar, hurling struck us as otherworldly.  It's worth a brief digression.

The Game of Hurling

Hurling follows the same scoring system and similar rules as the other major Gaelic Athletics Association sport, Gaelic Football, but the two games are played differently. Both games are played by 15 men a side and the object of each game is to score more points and goals than the opposing team. Each game has the distinctive H shaped goal posts; a goal is scored when the ball is put into the net, while a point is scored by hitting the ball over the bar but within the H posts.

Similar in shape to a hockey stick, the game of Hurling is played with sticks or hurleys, which are traditionally made from Ash wood and used to move the ball, known as a sliotar, which is a hard leather ball of 65mm in diameter.

When the sloitar is on the ground, it must be played by striking or lifting it off the ground with the hurley into the air where it may be struck again or placed into the hand for either four seconds or four steps, whichever comes first. However if the sloitar is caught, the catching player may not throw it or carry it using the hurley’s base for the shorter of four paces or four seconds, but is allowed to strike it with a stick or hand, or by kicking.

Arguably the oldest field team sport in Europe, Hurley was brought to the shores of Ireland by the ancient Celts some 2,000 years ago and the sport is chronicled throughout Irish folklore. It is also regarded as the fastest moving field team sport in the world. It's a tough game, very much a contact sport, where no quarter is given or asked for. You'll see sliothars and hurleys flying around at head height and though some players wear helmets, it isn't obligatory and the majority don't even where them!

In essence, this hurling match was our day. Men without padding or helmets dashed up and down a huge expanse, dribbling a little ball in a big ladle-like stick, periodically batting the ball through the uprights, and all the while swinging those sticks like baseball bats.

It was a sport made for stout.

The boat for France sailed around 5:00 p.m. Irish time, scheduled to arrive in Le Havre at 3:00 p.m. on Monday. From Le Havre, we'd find a train to Paris St. Lazare, ride the Metro to Paris Nord, and with luck, book a couchette for the overnight trip to Copenhagen.

Barrie flew into Copenhagen, and he'd fly out from there. My plane home left from Brussels, but with a Eurailpass, anything was possible. I'd changed my plans when I accompanied Barrie to Ireland, and I changed them again on my birthday evening in Kenmare, when we concocted a plan to surprise Kim Wiesener, our Danish tour guide in the USSR and Poland, with my presence in Copenhagen in Barrie's company.

For the second time, I found it strange and a bit disconcerting to be approaching the end of a lengthy period abroad. But a last epochal adventure lay ahead. We boarded the ship in Rosslare, and got on with it.

By the way, Galway won the 1987 hurling championship a few weeks later, in September.

Next: Copenhagen, and the calm before the Clash of the Titans.

"France is set to say au revoir to the couchette."

This is a depressing article.

My early European travels were immeasurably enhanced by understanding and utilizing the principle of overnight travel on sleeper trains. Couchettes, or train cabins converted into six horizontal sleeping spaces, were a wonderful and affordable way to meet people from all walks of life.

It's sad. Very sad.

France waves goodbye to sleeper trains, by Isabel Choat (The Guardian)

SNCF blames the demise of night trains on high costs as it announces plans to end services from Paris

France is set to say au revoir to the couchette, as the country’s department of transport prepares to withdraw overnight train routes from Paris.

The French government, which owns the national rail operator SNCF, has said sleeper trains are too expensive to run; it has withdrawn financial support and invited bids to run the services. But unless a proposal is received by July 1 all but three of the dozen or so overnight services will be axed. The only remaining Intercités de Nuit will be from Paris to Briancon, Rodez and Latour de Carol, routes deemed socially necessary, according to rail website The Man in Seat Sixty-one.

The news is a further nail in the coffin for sleeper trains across Europe, and a major blow for any travellers trying to reduce their carbon emissions. Overnight services between France and Germany hit the buffers in December 2014 when Deutsche Bahn, the German rail provider, closed its night service between Paris and Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.

A year earlier night time connections between Paris and Madrid and Barcelona, run jointly by SNCF and the Spanish rail provider Renfe, were withdrawn when the high speed TGV service between the French capital and Barcelona was introduced.

"There is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and ... it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other."

This isn't food for thought. It's a five-course meal.

Two Views on Speech, by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)

... The absolutist American view, let’s stipulate at once, still has much to be said for it. It says that once the state gets into the business of distinguishing acceptable dissent from unacceptable dissent then what we have is no longer dissent. Instead, we have state-sponsored and defined dissent, like that of the tiny “dissident” parties that were allowed to persist, once upon a time, in Eastern Europe, pendant to the chief Communist one. As John Stuart Mill said, in what is still the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written, the free contest of ideas, even bad ones, is necessary to discover the truth of things. Or, to borrow a turn of phrase from the N.R.A.: it takes a good man with a pencil to stop a bad man with a pen.

But the view that governs the opposite position, in Canada and Europe alike, is not irrational or truly hostile to liberty. The laws and rules vary, but all have a simple distinction at their core, which is that criticizing an ideology, including a religious ideology, however vociferously, is different from inducing hatred of a people or persons. In plain English, hate-speech laws are based on the simple truth that there is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and that it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other.

"Nudist, beach-like freedom is not what it used to be."

(there is no illustration, so I can dodge charges of sexism or what not)

I arrived by train in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1987.

After securing a room at the hostel, my first stop was a small shop, where salami, bread and a few bottles of beer were purchased. It was noon, and a walk of a couple hundred yards to the lake on a brilliant, warm late spring day. Lots of office workers were headed the same direction.

By coincidence, I was a few paces behind an attractive brunette, perhaps my age (27 at the time), or a bit younger. When we got to the public area by the water, she pulled a blanket from her bag, threw it on the ground, and slipped out of her work clothes, all in one speedy practiced motion. She wore a bikini bottom and nothing else.

It was all so nonchalant and meaningless. She had a half hour to sunbathe, and got right down to it. No big deal at all. Only an American hick like me, raised in the hinterland amid humorless cornfed religious personages, could possibly see any significance in an act of simple nothingness.

But I decided to sit elsewhere and drink my beer, lest I dwell for too long on the shortcomings of my homeland, because once you get started, where to stop?

The real reason French women have stopped sunbathing topless at The Guardian's "Fashion Blog"

... "Globalisation and Americanisation of women's portrayal and sexiness in France has pushed away gentle (and generally harmless) French eroticism towards porno, frontal, hyper-sexualised consciousness," she says. "Nudist, beach-like freedom is not what it used to be ... breasts no longer feel innocent or temporarily asexual."

"The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway."

I love social elites ... as long as they're properly cooked.

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway ... Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air?, by Razmig Keucheyan (Guardian)

As history has shown, France is capable of the best and the worst, and often in short periods of time.

On the day following Marine Le Pen's Front National victory in the European elections, however, France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, the committee for a citizen's audit on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France's finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

WWI readings: From what was torn asunder to what was not rebuilt.

I've started reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark. Less than 100 pages into this examination of the pre-war European scene, the magisterial tone is gripping and intense. There's something to be said for burrowing into a study of century-old stupidity as a salve for the daily pain of coping with the contemporary variety, surrounding you on all sides, sucking the air from rooms.

But enough about my life in New Albany.

So far I've learned about Serbian porcine husbandry, Austro-Hungarian economic development initiatives in Bosnia-Herzegovina and what international loans really meant in terms of the recipient. All these are factors in the run-up to the Archduke's assassination in 1914.

Clark's preface alone is worth the price of admission, suggesting that far from being remote and isolated phenomenons, the antecedents of World War I have again become timely and relevant for us, 100 years later. How similar in temperament are the Black Hand and Al Qaida? After all, the spark that lit a conflagration in 1914 came as the result of a state-sponsored terrorist act. The most consistently disproved theory in history is that it can't happen again.

A Tour of the Eerie Villages France Never Rebuilt After WWI, by Mark Byrnes (The Atlantic Cities)

The Battle of Verdun, an 11-month struggle in northeast France between German and French forces during World War I, left hundreds of thousands on both sides dead (recent casualty estimates range between 700,000 and just under 1 million). When the fighting finally ceased in late summer 1917, the Germans had retreated, leaving small villages along the battlefields completely destroyed. As a tribute, many were never rebuilt ...

"Starving piranhas, no bonjour, no pleasantries, it was direct and crude."

Crude starving piranhas? Is it French cybersex, or the comments section at Chipped Kitchen Table Formica?

At any rate, the Minitel is obsolete.

Long live the Minitel.

France says farewell to the Minitel – the little box that connected a country, by Angelique Chrisafis (Guardian)

• Precursor to internet now redundant after 30 years
• Chunky terminals popular for cybersex and accounts

It is known as the "Little French Box", a 1980s design classic now seen as the ultimate in beige plastic kitsch. But once it was an audacious precursor to the world wide web, introduced the first cybersex into people's living rooms and had a user-friendly design that may have inspired Steve Jobs's first Macintosh computer.

Yet, on Saturday, the plug will finally be pulled on the Minitel machine, France's one-time pride and joy, 30 years after its launch ...

... The longer users stayed online messaging, the more the service providers made.

The musician Gerome Nox recently told the newspaper Libération how he had worked on one of the services posing as a hostess called Julie to attract men and keep them online as long as possible. He compared the men replying to his messages to "starving piranhas, no bonjour, no pleasantries, it was direct and crude". He said he decided to stop as "my Julie had become more and more disagreeable and hateful".

He unmasked himself, typing: "I'm not called Julie. I'm a man, just here to rack up your phone bill. You've been screwed, which was just what you wanted all along." He was fired.

They spit, we swallow ...

Just the same, this is an excellent movie.

Comments by Tribune columnist out of line -- no, troggies, not mine.

I almost missed this one. Thanks to D for pointing me in the right direction.

McDONALD: Comment by French official out of line, by Tim McDonald (Tribune local columnist).

Instead of my usual device of running a representative portion in this space, permit me to briefly summarize the columnist's position:

A French official makes an ill-advised comment about America's handling of relief to Haiti, is quickly disavowed by his own government, thus providing the columnist with a pretext to devote 900 words to repeating just about every "let's bash the Frogs" cliche ever uttered.

That's basically it. How he refrains from the "mint condition, unused rifle only dropped twice" joke is inexplicable to me. Perhaps the equally xenophobic Healthblogger already used that line in an anti-Obama rant.

Was the comment by the French official out of line? Probably, seeing as France's president rushed to clarify it. Is it then logical to repeat the very same error in in attacking the comment? Certainly not. However, not unlike masturbation, it apparently comes naturally to Americans, even the educated ones, to boost our ever-shaky patriotic self-esteems by periodically lashing the French ethos.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch PBS's "American Masters" bio on Julia Child for a second time, but not before I celebrate nativist buffoonery in the guise of learned commentary with a bottle or two of imported Burgundy.

Monitoring the French election campaign? I am.

Seldom does NAC publish verbatim reprints from the mainstream media, but today is an exception. The following piece appeared last Sunday in the New York Times on the occasion of the opening French election round. While it may have taken a back seat to New Albany's forthcoming primary contests, the French presidential selection process has been quite interesting this time around.

Have you ever noticed that vast conspiracies and sordid scandals invariably break on the front page, but later retractions appear on page 15? America’s typically uninformed lemming venom, expressed in the language of an adolescent temper tantrum, was unleashed on the French nation and its president, Jacques Chirac, when the Iraq war began more than four years ago and we were unable to contrive lock-step marching in all international quarters.

The situation looks very different now, doesn’t it? And yet I see little acknowledgement on the part of our chest-bumping buffoon class that the nasty “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” actually called the shot quite accurately – and before it became fashionable to do so.

As the NYT article following makes no effort to deny, France has its own roster of economic, social and cultural problems. So does every nation in the world, and this fact doesn’t justify facile stereotypes on the part of people who take little interest in what happens outside the comfort zone of their own tightly confined boxes.

While it's never been my primary choice of locales, I’ve been to France many times, and I’ve never experienced the snobbery and bias that Americans so love to fear. Perhaps that’s because I’ve taken an interest in the surroundings, given a general impression of being willing to learn, and been able to say “please,” “thank you” and something along the lines of “nice place you’ve got here.”

One more thing: I’ve been following the French election campaign at the French Élection 2007 blog, which purports to provide coverage from an “American perspective” – in this case, balanced and comprehensive. The second round approaches. Stay tuned – but hey, I wouldn’t want to take you away from “American Idol,” or anything like that.

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France Looks Ahead, and It Doesn’t Look Good, by Tony Judt (New York Times; published on April 22, 2007).

It is easy to underestimate Jacques Chirac.

Today the French will begin to vote for a new president, and soon Mr. Chirac, the 74-year-old incumbent, will pass from the scene unmourned. Over a political career spanning nearly five decades, during which he was mayor of Paris, prime minister (twice) and president for 12 years, Mr. Chirac appears to have achieved little.

As mayor from 1977 to 1995, he oversaw a steady rise in political corruption and municipal graft (albeit both at insignificant levels by American big-city standards). As president, he abandoned his promises to resolve shortcomings in France’s employment laws and social services in the face of street protests. And he has done little to redress the grievances of France’s minorities or the anxieties of young people. On both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Chirac’s political obituary is being written in distinctly unflattering terms.

But is the French situation really so dire? From every quarter one hears calls for “reform” to bring France more in line with Anglo-American practices and policies. The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed.

In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.

Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls.

Meanwhile, recall what Jacques Chirac has done. In 1995 he became the first president to acknowledge openly France’s role in the Holocaust: “The occupier was assisted by the French, by the French state,” he said. “France accomplished the irreparable.” This was a phrase that would have stuck in the craw of his much-lauded predecessor, François Mitterrand, and, it must be said, of Charles de Gaulle himself.

However low his political fortunes, Mr. Chirac forbade his supporters to ally or compromise with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front — again in contrast with Mr. Mitterrand, who cynically manipulated French election laws in 1986 to benefit Mr. Le Pen (and thus weaken the moderate right).

Conscious of Europe’s links to the Muslim world — and the cost of rebuffing and humiliating Islam’s only secular democracy — Mr. Chirac has steadfastly supported Turkish admission to the European Union, an unpopular stance among his conservative constituents. In 2004 he created the first French administrative agency with explicit powers to identify and fight discrimination.

On the global stage, he has been perhaps the most outspoken major world leader on global warming, warning that “humanity is dancing on a volcano.” And, of course, he initiated and led international opposition to President Bush’s war in Iraq.

Let’s not forget the hysterical Francophobia of 2003: not just the imbecilities of “freedom fries” but xenophobic outbursts from Congress, the Bush administration and the mainstream American press, where prominent commentators called for France to be thrown off the Security Council and offered to let French “weasels” hold our coats while Americans once again did their fighting for them.

It wasn’t only Americans who objected. When in 2003 Mr. Chirac told the Eastern Europeans who backed Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on Iraq that they had “missed an opportunity to shut up,” his blunt talk upset a lot of people and did little for France’s popularity.

But in all of this, he has been proved right. By standing up to Mr. Bush and instructing his representatives at the United Nations to block a rush to an unprovoked war, the French president saved both the honor of the United Nations and the credibility of the international community.

It is not obvious that any of his likely successors would have done as well. Mr. Chirac is old enough to appreciate Europe’s debt to America — on the 60th anniversary of D-Day he said, sincerely, that “France will never forget what it owes America, its steadfast friend and ally” — but Gaullist enough to oppose Washington’s folies de grandeur. His heir presumptive, Nicolas Sarkozy, is neither.

Mr. Sarkozy’s admiration and knowledge of the United States appear confined to its economic growth rate. He opposes Turkish membership in the European Union in the most intolerant terms: “If you let 100 million Turkish Muslims come in, what will come of it?” And his Gaullism is tainted by a weakness for rightist catchwords — “nation” and “identity,” not to mention “scum” when referring to rioting minority youths — with which he hopes to outflank Mr. Le Pen.

Ségolène Royal, the socialists’ candidate, has a Joan of Arc complex (in her declaration of candidacy last October she spoke of hearing “calls” and accepting “this mission of conquest for France”), and she practices what could be called a “soft” demagogy. On crucial issues — the European Union Constitution, Turkish admission to Europe — she has avoided commitment, promising instead to “listen to the people.”

Many of Ms. Royal’s socialist supporters manage to be both anti-American and anti-European: a Royal presidency would thus probably weaken the European Union without in any way strengthening France’s trans-Atlantic leverage — a leftist mirror of the agenda of neoconservative strategists in Washington.

Neither Mr. Sarkozy nor Ms. Royal (nor the centrist François Bayrou, the only other candidate with a serious chance of advancing to the runoff after today’s initial voting) shares Mr. Chirac’s historical appreciation of what is at stake in the construction of Europe: why it matters and why those who would divide or dilute it are playing with fire.

On this score, Mr. Chirac has reason to worry. Some new European Union member states want it both ways: to have an American-style low-tax economy that is underwritten by subsidies from Western European taxpayers. Poles and Czechs are happy to accept such handouts from Brussels, in the form of “solidarity funds,” yet at the same time welcome American missile defense systems without even consulting their fellow Europeans. Romania’s entry into the union this year hasn’t kept its president, Traian Basescu, from continuing to seek a “strategic Washington-London-Bucharest axis.”

In the hands of a new generation of politicians out for local advantage and indifferent to the past, Europe could unravel very quickly. Those who now celebrate Mr. Chirac’s departure should recall Rhett Butler’s admonition to Scarlett O’Hara when she sneered at the straggling remnants of the Confederate Army: “Don’t be in such a hurry to see them go, my dear; with them goes the last semblance of law and order.”

With the departure of Jacques Chirac, we are saying goodbye to the last semblance of statesmanship from a generation that remembered where an unraveled Europe could lead. I fear we shall miss him.