The Fall of France? (Again?)

So, unsurprisingly, Time Magazine’s cover story (international edition) on The Death of French Culture is making waves on the eastern side of the Atlantic (once upon a time, Time might have devoted space to French culture in its US edition: that it wouldn’t dream of doing so now tells us as much about the United States as it does about France).

Given that all countries enjoy introspection – what’s the subject of any attempt at writing the fabled Great American Novel, if not America herself? – it’s not shocking that Le Figaro should devote three pages to responding to Don Morrison’s silly, exaggerated article. Silly and exaggerrated and irritating, I mean.

It can be disconcerting to find oneself agreeing with Bernard-Henri Levy but his analysis of this foolishness seems, in its guts, right to me. In this instance the portrait tells us as much about the artist as it does his subject.