c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)
PARIS _ Across the Rue Napoleon from the Cafe Aux Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway and his cronies used to hang out, at the entrance of the old church of St. Germain des Pres, a woman was begging.
She was not an elderly woman in rags, nor a gypsy puffing on a cigarette, nor a haggard drug addict. She was young, no more than 25, fair, and her eyes, despite their sadness, were not unintelligent. Perhaps she was a graduate student from the nearby Sorbonne. She was well-groomed and attractively dressed, embarrassed to be begging but not very. It was probably not her first effort.
I gave her some francs; so did some of the other people entering the church. Others ignored her. No one besides me seemed surprised.
During the next 24 hours I pondered a possible scenario: Maybe she was an AIDS victim, disowned by her family. Haunted by the experience, I went back the next day. She wasn’t there.
That night I asked some Parisian friends what her story might be. Their explanation persuaded me the young woman was a symbol of all that ails France today, and why it is, as Jonathan Femby explains in his brilliant new book,”On the Brink.” The unemployment rate in France is around 12 percent. Among young people it approaches 25 percent. To supplement their meager 400 francs a month social insurance, many of them turn to begging. It is better than stealing and, if you’re a woman, better than prostitution.
Often, they band together in”communes,”a not-so-strange word given the history of Paris, in which they share apartments, clothes, television and support. They also constitute a barter economy: I’ll teach you how to speak English if you cook for me. Some of them even retreat to abandoned villages in the countryside and live off the land.
If you have a job in France, you live anywhere from pretty well to very well. If you don’t, others don’t notice you.
To the visitor who doesn’t know the story, France is a prosperous country.
A country that forces its young _ its future _ to engage in such techniques for survival is truly”on the brink.” According to Femby, France’s political, economic and civic culture is profoundly shopworn. One-quarter of its people work for the state. Almost everyone has some kind of subsidy, especially the farmers whose crops can’t begin to pay for the cost of farming. The only ones who don’t seem to have a subsidy are the young people.
The economy is not a command economy like that of Eastern European countries under communism. But the government exercises powerful controls and is wary of competition, internal or external, that threatens important French companies.
France does not have a left-wing political leader like Britain’s Tony Blair who believes that the winds of healthy competition need to air out the dead wood in the country. Instead, the country is administered by a caste of bureaucrats who are more interested in preserving the power of the state than reforming the structure of society.
Neither the left nor the right seems to have the power to institute the kind of reforms that will change the society and the economy. Far too many people and groups have vested interests in the way things are.
The unemployed young, at another time, would be an easy target for totalitarian ideologues. The present generation, perhaps influenced by the”postmodernist”philosophy to be found in their universities, and certainly influenced by the pathetic inability of the political process to deal with their problems, seems apolitical.
Instead of storming the barricades and chopping off the heads of their elders or blocking the streets in stone-throwing riots, the young are more likely to be beggars, as so many of their ancestors were in the Middle Ages.
DEA END GREELEY
