What is it about female hair ?

A French parliamentary commission has recommend a state ban of the Islamic burqua or full veil. It's a debate that will continue to rumble through the governments of western europe.

At a  pragmatic level even the better-informed Islamophobes see that state bans will produce the  opposite to the intended effect and strengthen funda-mentalism in minority communities.

Western liberals on the other hand are in danger of disappearing up their own relativist backsides in refusing  to address disturbing issues that they would never accept in their own culture.

Here's a thought though;  each of the images  here tells a story - and  these stories are not equally valid, they are equally fucked up. I could speculate at length on the cultural, historical and socio-economic origins of the customs portrayed, and the world-views they imply.

I think it is sufficient to simply say that they each reveal some profoundly twisted shit: About property relations, about the status of women, about suppressed sexuality ... and most of all about the unique and extraordinary power of religion to get people to connive in their own subordination.

Relics on holiday

Back from holiday in France - the tan is already fading and the prospect of returning to work looms. Now that the days of motorcycle touring - historical blitzkriegs on two wheels - have gone, our family holidays are a compromise. I trade sitting on a beach in the afternoons with a spot of cultural tourism in the mornings. For a staunch ex-Catholic this means that I visit a surprising number of churches - even the dullest market town can usually be relied on to have a a historic church. Here's a fairly typical example:

On one particularly hot day we were in Saint Maximin - the gothic basilica there is built on a much earlier Gallo-Roman church and surprisingly for somewhere that is a place of pilgrimage the church is simple and uncluttered inside. On a hot day with its tall cool walls, the high vaulted ceiling, the light diffracted through the windows, and the waft of incense you can understand how, from the point of view of a sweaty, stinky and simple medieval peasant, a sense of spirituality was easily conjured up.

But before you get carried away with this - go and have a look at the crypt which contains the principal reason for the basilica's existence - the relics of Mary Magdalene. There's a big cult of Mary Magdalene in Provence, apparently she brought Christianity to the area having been cast adrift in a boat from Palestine along with her brother Lazarus. According to the legend the boat had neither sails nor rudder so it was from any point of view a stroke of luck that she made it there.

It was also quite a stroke of luck that when Charles of Anjou in the 13th Century decided to build a church and a Dominican monastery at Saint Maximin, he should unearth a much earlier chapel containing a sarcophagus with the remains of Mary Magdalen. By a previous legend these relics had been somewhere up north in Burgundy, but conveniently there was an inscription explaining that they had been hidden there from the Saracens. The Saracens had of course raided Southern France and tended to take a dim view of the veneration of old bones thinking it all a bit primitive and barbaric, not to say idolatrous. Anyway, presumably Charles couldn't believe his luck so he built a huge basilica which attracted pilgrims for centuries (and maybe these days Da Vinci code conspiracy nuts). In the process he and the Dominicans* undoubtedly did very well out of the whole thing.

A typical medieval tale really - a bit harder to compute is that apparently to this day every July the grotesque relic is taken out the crypt and paraded around. Maybe those Saracens had a point.

*(As a side note; the old Jewish quarter of the town remains, not far from the basilica, along with a plaque explaining that the Jews lived here until the 15th century under the protection of the Dominicans - given the role of the Dominicans as the storm-troopers of the Holy Inquisition you can guess that this was probably a mafiosi style of 'protection').

Carla fever

What’s with the national obsession with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy ? Sure she’s easier on the eye than the queen or Camilla, but then let’s face it that’s setting the bar pretty low.

The press seem to be whipping themselves in to a frenzy that she’s the next Lady Di / Jackie Onasis / Queen Of Hearts. But apart from being photogenic, what else is there to say about her ? Well she certainly didn’t let her professed left-wing sympathies get in the way of becoming the missus of a French tory leader (apparently she supported Sarkozy’s socialist rival Segone Royal, and she's been linked with former socialist premier Laurent Fabius).

Coming from one of Italy’s wealthiest families, and having been a top earning supermodel you couldn’t really call her a gold-digger, but from her impressive list of famous ex’s she is some sort of power-digger: Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Kevin Costner and Donald Trump. For all her left-bank chic there's not too many struggling artists or impoverished intellectuals there. One story going around relates to her having seen Sarkozy on TV and saying "I want to have a man who has nuclear power." Nice. Rather more WAG than Simone de Beauvoir.

But the most telling image of the visit is not of Carla in one of her Dior suits – it’s this shot of her feet alongside Sarkozy's. Never trust a short bloke who wears high heels to compensate. Even Napoleon didn’t do that.

Guy Moquet

An unlikely and roundabout route to this story…

With defeat at the hands of Argentina in the rugby and Scotland in the football, national pride in France is at something of a low ebb. A rather bizarre technique to boast the teams before their games was to read them the letter of Guy Moquet . And even more bizarrely , the letter is such a favourite of Nicolas Sarkorzy, that one of his first presidential decrees was that it should be compulsory reading for every French schoolchild: A sentimental note written by a 17 year old boy to his family on the eve of his execution by the Nazis.

Guy Moquet was an active member of the Communist Youth Movement and the son of a Communist Party deputy in Paris. With the Nazi occupation of Paris he was arrested and imprisoned at the age of 16 by the Vichy authorities, along with other known activists.

When the German commandant in Bordeux was assassinated by the Resistance the Nazis ordered the Petain government to take reprisals. Vichy authorities handed over 50 Communist prisoners to the Germans “in order to avoid letting 50 good French people get shot.” And so it came about that Guy Moquet was killed by a firing squad in October 1941, refusing a blindfold and crying out ‘Vive La France’.

The legacy of the Vichy government shames and divides France, but also has lessons for all of us nowadays.

Practically every French town still has its memorial to the ‘deported and the shot’. It is a reminder that the collaborationst government did much of the Nazi’s dirty work for them; a quarter of all French Jews, and a much higher proportion of foreign-born Jewish refugees in France, were either deported to German death camps or perished in camps in France, guarded by French Gendarmes. Along of course with many other ‘undesirables’ and political opponents, such as Guy Moquet and his comrades.

There were French Nazis in the Vichy government, but the majority, like Marshal Petain, were simply ultra-conservatives who saw co-operation with the Nazis as the lesser of two evils in comparison to the pre-war Popular Front government and the threat of socialism. Their position was perhaps best summed up in their replacement of the French Republic’s slogan of ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’ with ‘ Work, Family and Nation’.

And the lessons for us now?

Repression and reaction don’t have to come in the form of goose-stepping storm-troopers. The Vichy regime was the tyranny of small-town France and the petty-bureaucrat . De-facto fascism came in to power not by a coup d’etat but by a series of administrative measures.

And so the threat in Europe today doesn’t come from the boneheads of Combat 18 but from the populist nationalism to be found on the fringes of mainstream parties – the whole Daily Mail / Little England mentality is the home-grown descendant Vichy-ism. And asylum seekers are the Jews of the 21st century.

It is no accident that Le Pen’s Front National has distanced itself from its street-fighting wing and has sought rehabilitation for the ’mis-understood’ Vichy regime.

Sarkozy wins - merde !

There hasn't been much international solidarity shown by the socialist parties of Europe since 1914. Even so it was still galling to hear that New Labour were rooting for a Sarkozy victory in the French election. I shouldn't be surprised. After all, a platform of neo-liberal economic reform and a pro-US foreign policy are all very close to the Blair/Brown project.

But politics aside, I am particularly saddened by the presidential result because I am a bit of a Francophile:

Not that France is any sort of workers' paradise, just talk to the North African communities in the Paris suburbs, but I have always thought that France managed to retain something that the UK lost post-Thacherism.

The French resisted many of the worst features of modern Britain. Such as an American work ethic that takes the balance out of life/work balance. And a misplaced idea of consumerism that emphasises 'choice' at the expense of quality - 57 varieties of sandwich at Subway that all actually taste the same. A mantra of private=good and public=bad that denationalizes everything in sight.

And so the UK is rapidly becoming a pale imitation of the American mid-west; dowdy shopping malls full of chain retailers selling identical products. Whilst the French kept the 35hour week, trade unions that are more or less allowed to operate within the law, and small towns with farmer's markets and artisan shops.

And perhaps connected to this, a population unlike the UK that has not yet been disillusioned by and disenfranchised from politics, seen in an 85% turnout in the elections.

All this could be about to change. The 'socialist' Royale ironically ran a campaign that would not have been out of tune with New Labour. And Sarkozy represents a new 'un-French' departure with a declared aim of making France more Anglo-Saxon.