Reflecting France

It's nice to see the French make the World Cup finals with its 1-0 win over Portugal today, even if this means the departure of Portugal's brilliant coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari. I like this much-maligned French team, with the cool and smooth Zinedine Zidane, the focused Thierry Henry--and Lillian Thurman.

Who? Well, FIFA's website did name the defender the man of today's match, for how he "superbly marshalled his defence."

But I'd say he's the man of France's team on a grander stage, for his statements a few days ago as quoted in We are Frenchmen says Thuram.

The Guardian: Lilian Thuram, France's most capped player, last night hit back at suggestions by Jean-Marie Le Pen that there were too many "players of colour" in the national side, denouncing the National Front leader as being ignorant of the make-up of his country's society.

The 34-year-old Juventus centre-half won his 118th cap against Spain on Tuesday and, hailing from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, is one of 16 non-whites in France's 23-man squad. He and his team-mates learned of Le Pen's comments immediately prior to the second-round match in Hanover, which Les Bleus won 3-1, with the 2007 French presidential candidate having reheated his criticisms of the 1998 side - which he denounced as "artificial" - by arguing it was not reflective of French society.

Lilian Thuram, France's most capped player, last night hit back at suggestions by Jean-Marie Le Pen that there were too many "players of colour" in the national side, denouncing the National Front leader as being ignorant of the make-up of his country's society.

The 34-year-old Juventus centre-half won his 118th cap against Spain on Tuesday and, hailing from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, is one of 16 non-whites in France's 23-man squad. He and his team-mates learned of Le Pen's comments immediately prior to the second-round match in Hanover, which Les Bleus won 3-1, with the 2007 French presidential candidate having reheated his criticisms of the 1998 side - which he denounced as "artificial" - by arguing it was not reflective of French society.

Le Pen, who was runner-up to Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential elections having beaten the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to the second round, had insisted that France "cannot recognise itself in the national side" and that "maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of colour and should have been a bit more careful".

"What can I say about Monsieur Le Pen?" said Thuram ruefully. "Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn't know anything about French history or society.

"That's pretty serious. He's the type of person who'd turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: 'Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What's going on?'

"When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn't matter if we're black or not, because we're French. I've just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he's got a problem with us, that's down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants."

France's more-successful version of Patrick Buchanan got 16.86% of the votes when he finished second in the 2002 presidential elections, so clearly his views aren't to be brushed aside.

His racist views I think have only become more mainstream in France in the past four years. And now, even as the soccer team tries its utmost to put the lie to them on the sporting pitch, comes A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light

Michael Kimmelman in the Times: The other day Stéphane Martin, president of the new Musée du Quai Branly, was in his wedge-shape office with the picture window overlooking the Seine. Dapper, charming, with the weary politeness of a busy executive who has better things to do, he fetched the latest salvo against his institution, a book by Bernard Dupaigne, and casually tossed it across the table.

The most ambitious museum to open in Paris in 20 years, dedicated to non-European cultures, Quai Branly provoked a ruckus from the instant President Jacques Chirac came up with the idea for it more than a decade ago. It was his monument to French multiculturalism and, perhaps, to himself.

Two beloved Paris institutions had to be dismantled, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme, France's sublime natural history museum. Anthropologists, not to mention more than a few people who loved going to those museums, were furious. The familiar aesthetics-versus-ethnology question came up: Will religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern, Western sense, be showcased like baubles, with no context?

Given the current political climate, Quai Branly's eventual opening, after years of delay, seemed almost as if it had been scientifically calculated to ignite the maximum debate.

I couldn't tell whether Mr. Martin was being helpful or if he actually enjoyed the fuss. What did he think of his museum? I asked. He thought it was a "neutral environment" with "no aesthetic or philosophical line." I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.

Wow, this is about as harsh a review as I've ever read in the Arts section of the Times. It gets worse; Kimmelman is very precise in his choice of words, and does a good job of linking what he found enshrined in marble with what anyone can see is happening in the streets.

Think of the museum as a kind of ghetto for the "other," a word Mr. Chirac has taken to using: an enormous, rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the jungle, downriver, where suddenly scary masks or totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to be foreign and exotic. The Crayola-colored facade and its garden set the stage for this passage from civilization.

Yes, the very same Chirac that's been prominently parading in the soccer stands in Germany this week--I guess when they're on the verge of winning the World Cup suddenly the 'other' becomes 'ours'.

In that sense, we really owe Le Pen a favor, for laying bare what must lie deep inside the hearts of Chirac and his ilk... how much sweeter would the French team's march be to them were it 'pure' Frenchmen on the pitch, whose ancestors were raised on foie gras and escargot, instead of crickets or whatever it is they eat down in Afrique; law-abiding whites instead of those rioting darkies.

It's really too bad; I've always thought of Chirac as a kind of pathetic figure, always doomed to be in the shadow of greater men, well-meaning but ultimately without the chops to really be an alpha male (even in France). There's no hope for the likes of Le Pen; but I wonder when Chirac will realize there is no 'other' in this modern world, that even if some of the people living in France aren't white and Catholic they are nevertheless just as French as Marie Antoinette, and maybe even more so given their real-life understanding of liberté, egalité, fraternité, and that their contributions to and shaping of French society and culture isn't limited to what they can do with a ball.

For me, just as France as a country tends to cling to an imaginary say in world affairs (but we have a seat on the Security Council!) Chirac is one of this dying generation of white males who grew up unopposed, who are used to making the rules, playing the game and keeping score, and who seem unable to grasp that groups like Muslim immigrants might find this objectionable.

Kimmelman goes on to point to the uneasy place museums as a whole have had in Western cultures, and their role in establishing and furthering 'us' and 'them':

Museums, whether they call themselves art museums or not — and Quai Branly at least rejected loaded words like primitive or art for its title — classify what they show to give objects particular meanings, to fix their relationships to viewers. If you're in the Metropolitan Museum, you know that an Italian altarpiece or an African mask is supposed to be visually striking, beautiful even. If the same objects are across Central Park at the American Museum of Natural History, they illustrate points about religion or ritual or handicraft or materials.

This doesn't mean that the artists or artisans who made altarpieces and masks weren't aiming for something aesthetically potent or pleasing, even if potency (and beauty) meant one thing to a Renaissance Italian, another to a Dogon craftsman, and it means yet another to an Aboriginal artist who comes to Paris to paint Quai Branly's gift shop.

Paintings and other objects, like people, have careers, lives. These objects have meanings to those who brought them into the world, other meanings to those who worked with or used them, yet others to historians who try to explain them, to curators who organize exhibitions around them. They exist in as many different forms as the number of people who happen to come across them. Objects are not static; they are the accumulation of all their meanings.

Claims of cultural patrimony and calls for the repatriation of antiquities (Italians wanting back ancient art dug up in Italy, Greeks wanting back Greek art) stem from nationalist politics and legal disputes, but they're fundamentally about who gets to assign meaning. A British anthropologist on the panel at Quai Branly mentioned a show of Polynesian art and religion in England. He said the question had arisen, should modern-day Polynesians have say over the show's content?

But which Polynesians? The political activists who might want their idols returned? The religious fundamentalist who might want them burned? They're both native voices. Which gets authority over what the artifacts mean?

John Mack, the British professor who moderated the panel, added that good museums "destabilize the idea of a singular meaning," whether it's "beauty" or "ritual." The implication was that they shouldn't do what Quai Branly has done, which is for the museum to make itself the meaning of everything in it.

I guess in an ironic way, it's apt that this kind of museum should open at this point in 21st century Paris. I wonder how later generations will see these years after 9/11 when our world went backwards, where a handful of Islamic terrorists provided Western society with the excuse to indulge in one last round of chest-pounding before, they fear, the Chinese, the Indians, the non-whites took over.

Maybe one day there'll open in Beijing a similarly benighted museum, devoted to a helter-skelter wow isn't that weird collecting of French (and German and British and Italian) artifacts.

Heck, the leading edge of the shift has already arrived--since sports, with their emphasis on performance and rules against bias, are always the field where societal changes first make themselves felt, maybe the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will provide opportunities for non-Western countries to shine.

Cause France's new museum and old politicians certainly can't.

The day after we spoke, I spotted Mr. Martin at the back of a photograph on the front page of The International Herald Tribune. In it Mr. Chirac and Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, both tall and snappy in blue serge suits, were greeting Chief Laukalbi from Vanuatu and his nephew, Jerry Napat, shirtless in straw skirts. Mr. Chirac, leaning down, looked as if he was pointing at the chief, or maybe he was shaking his finger. His posture was exactly the top-down one that the museum's galleries take.

Georges Pompidou had his center. François Mitterrand left behind I. M. Pei's pyramid, the Bastille Opera and the new National Library. So Mr. Chirac's grand projet is this $300 million megamuseum-cum-cultural-center, aspiring, as he put it during the museum's inauguration, to the notion that "there is no hierarchy among the arts just as there is no hierarchy among peoples."

No hierarchy, except that at the Pompidou you find Western artists like Picasso and Pollock; at Branly, it's Eskimos, Cameroonians and Moroccans. No hierarchy, but no commonality either. Separate but equal. What links Vietnamese textiles with contemporary Aboriginal paintings with pre-Columbian pottery with Sioux warrior tunics with Huron wampum? Only the legacy of colonialism and the historical quirks of French museum collecting, which Quai Branly's design blithely plays for entertainment.

AP photo of Thuram during the match between Portugal and France in the World Cup semifinals by Christophe Ena via FIFA.

AFP photo of Annan, Chirac, Laukalbi and Napat by François Mori via Yahoo! France.