Free Thinking - French thought and politics.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Dodd wrestles with an especially knotty question – does France have to stop being French to survive? Its a question which owes its urgency to recent events from the massacres of last year to the rise of the Right and an apparent erosion of the secular values that underpin the Fifth Republic. What price the France of Camus and New Wave Cinema in the face of globalisation? To answer these questions Philip is joined by the political commentator Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, the historian Liz Buettner, the Muslim scholar, Ziauddin Sardar and Andy Martin, an expert in 20th century French literature which did so much to fix the features of modern France in our minds.
Producer: Zahid Warley.
Europe After Empire by Elizabeth Buettner is published in April Islam Beyond the Mad Max Jihadis by Ziauddin Sardar is published in February
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, something's happened to France, and I don't only mean the massacres of last year. |
| 0:38.0 | Former President Sarkozy, who wants to run again for the post in 2017, |
| 0:43.2 | said that his Christmas wish was that the French would remain French. |
| 0:48.0 | It's an odd wish, whatever else might they be. |
| 0:50.8 | But it seems to speak to a feeling that French identity is fragile, it's under threat. |
| 0:56.0 | Now the last 30 years or so haven't been easy with unemployment, not less than 8%, |
| 1:02.0 | globalisation seen as an enemy, the secular values of the French Republic under strain |
| 1:07.0 | with the return of religion to the public stage and a French culture, |
| 1:12.0 | not enjoying the global attention that was lavished on it in the 50s and 60s, |
| 1:16.5 | with Camus Sartre, New Wave Cinema and a magnetic Paris that attracted cultural figures |
| 1:22.8 | from James Baldwin and Eugene Yonesco to Miles Davis. |
| 1:27.1 | Music James Baldwin and Eugene Yonesco to Miles Davis. |
| 1:39.4 | That was of course, or that is of course, |
| 1:42.3 | Miles Davis recorded in Paris in 57. |
| 1:47.2 | And this evening's free thinking is devoted to France and French identity, |
| 1:52.5 | trying to help Nicholas Sarkozy and others understand what it means to be French now. |
| 1:58.0 | If inevitably we're going to explore recent events, but we'll also be looking at the post-war period at what happened in France after empire and its reverberations in the present. |
| 2:03.3 | To do this, I'm joined from Amsterdam by Liz Butner, author of the forthcoming Europe after empire, |
| 2:09.5 | the Muslim scholar Zia Dinsada, whose Islam Beyond the violent jihadis is published next month, |
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