France

In December 2020, in the aftermath of the presidential election, Jake Sullivan, President-elect Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged European officials to delay a European Union vote on a proposed economic agreement with China, called the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Sullivan, communicating with French and German officials, explained that the incoming Biden administration wanted to have 'early consultation' with the Europeans on China, and urged them to hold off until Biden took office to devise a common approach toward Beijing. Resisting the pressure from Biden, the European Commission announced that the agreement was concluded in principle, pending approval by the European Parliament.

One crisis can conceal another. While France has been distracted by COVID, a new menace is lurking. The specter haunting the republic is le Wokisme, the mutating ideology of race and identity that has found unexpectedly fertile ground here. French elites are unsettled. Those who assumed the French possessed herd immunity against such barbaric American ideas are having their complacency tested. Superficially a modern country, with iPhones, Amazon and electric cars, France is still often introspective and late to understand what’s happening in the wider — especially Anglophone — world, which is how wokeness has somewhat taken it by surprise. Woke had been happening in America for many years before the French noticed.

Americans might be unaware, but a great deal of right-leaning discourse in Europe holds the United States responsible for the outbreak or inflammation of their culture wars. In France, Emmanuel Macron has spoken disparagingly of 'certain social science theories imported entirely from the US' which are 'based on a different history, which is not ours’. His education minister was more explicit, castigating an 'intellectual matrix coming from American universities...which wants to essentialize communities and identities’. In the UK, meanwhile, in a column mischievously titled 'It’s All America’s Fault’, the English commentator Ed West blamed the US for the spread of 'social justice’ trends across Britain.

Professors of medicine do not usually look as if they have emerged from the pages of Asterix, or alternatively as if they were the drummer of a 1960s rock band just emerged from drug rehabilitation for the 17th time: but that is how Prof Didier Raoult, recently elevated to the rank of the most famous infectious disease doctor in the world, looks. If you type 'Didier' in your search engine, up comes Raoult, before even the soccer player, 'Drogba'. When infectious disease doctors are more famous than footballers, you know that an epidemic is serious.  Raoult says that he adopted his appearance to irritate his colleagues, which is another specialization of his, one at which he is undoubtedly very good.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.