The killing of a prime minister
"Je vous ai compris !" — Général De Gaulle, 4 June, 1958
Before we play, let’s review the rules. (If you know them already, skip to the end of this section).
The word “killing” in the title is not a metaphor. It refers to an actual and deliberate act of violence causing death.
By rules, we mean a set of clear or agreed-upon norms or principles governing behavior or procedures in a specific area of activity.
The specific area of activity in this case is the political regime of the French Fifth Republic, which was established on 4 October 1958 by Charles de Gaulle after a coup d’état by right-wing elements of the French military.
Under the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic, the prime minister of France is appointed by the French president.
Eight French presidents have appointed 25 French prime ministers since 1959, the year the office was created.
Eleven of those prime ministers are dead. All but the last three presidents are dead.
Fifteen prime ministers have held the office since the day I arrived in France in 1991.
Two of these are dead.
I did not kill any of them.
Actually, these seem to be more constraints than rules. Let’s narrow the focus.
A Republic is a polity in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
The French president is independently elected. He — so far no woman has ever held the office — oversees foreign affairs, defense, and “big picture” government policies.
The French prime minister implements those policies and the policies of the majority in the National Assembly. He or she — there have been two female French prime ministers, Edith Cresson (15 May 1991 – 2 April 1992) and Elisabeth Borne (16 May 2022 – incumbent) — is the titular head of the government oversees all domestic issues.
No French prime minister has ever been fired, although Michel Rocard, the prime minister for three years and five days under François Mitterrand, famously said, upon leaving office on 15 May 1991, “J'ai été viré”, which, roughly translated, means “I was fired”.
Only the National Assembly can actually fire a government. The complete body of government ministers under a prime minister’s leadership — the “ministry” — is subject to parliamentary confidence. The National Assembly has tried to fire governments 61 times since 1959. It was successful only once, in 1962, when a motion of censure dissolved the Pompidou government.
Editor: To learn more about what happened in French politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, have a look at the piece below, which is ostensibly about André Malraux, but, as usual, also hexagonally about five other things, including the founding of the Fifth Republic.
The president can ask the prime minister to resign. Until now, every prime minister has complied.
Georges Pompidou gave Charles de Gaulle a blank letter of resignation, “to be filled out whenever necessary”. Later, when Pompidou was president, he demanded that his appointed prime minister, Pierre Messmer, do the same.
Jacques Chirac, under Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, provided a letter that stated, “I do not have the means that I consider necessary today to effectively carry out my functions as prime minister, and in these conditions, I have decided to put an end to it.” Only the date was left blank.
It is traditional for the prime minister to offer his or her resignation after legislative elections.
The president can refuse to accept the resignation of the prime minister, as Emmanuel Macron did when Elisabeth Borne submitted hers on 21 June 2002.
The prime minister can resign despite the president’s refusal to accept his or her resignation.
Presidents can dissolve the National Assembly. Charles De Gaulle did this in 1962 and 1968, Mitterand in 1981 and 1988, and Chirac in 1997.
Presidents can pick anyone to be prime minister, but they traditionally choose an elected representative — a senator or a member of parliament — from whatever party holds the majority in the National Assembly. The person the president chooses must be deemed acceptable by the legislature.
There are exceptions to the above rule. Neither Georges Pompidou under Charles De Gaulle nor Raymond Barre under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing were members of the National Assembly when they were appointed. Dominique de Villepin, under Jacques Chirac, never held public office, nor did Jean Castex, Macron’s second pick, and before him, the disgraced François Fillon, the choice of the disgraced Nicolas Sarkozy. Borne, the current prime minister, only became an elected deputy in the Assembly in July 2022, two months after Macron appointed her prime minister.
When a president is from a different party than the majority of the members of parliament, a system of divided “cohabitation” is triggered, which forces the president to name a prime minister acceptable to the party that holds the majority.
There have been three cohabitation governments: 1986–1988 (François Mitterand/Jacques Chirac), 1993–1995 (François Mitterrand/Edouard Balladur), and 1997–2002 (Jacques Chirac/Lionel Jospin).
Three prime ministers — Pierre Mauroy and Michel Rocard on the left, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin on the right, were appointed during short periods between presidential and legislative elections when their parties were in the minority.
The prime minister is under no obligation to resign following the presidential election.
I arrived in France during the final year of the Mitterrand/Rocard mandate, on the day that Serge Gainsbourg died. The entire nation was in shock. We spent the evening with friends in absolute silence glued to the TV watching old interviews with a drunk, barely coherent Gainsbourg as he mumbled about his preference for young girls ("Je suis un esthète quelque part. Une fleur qui s'ouvre, c'est plus intéressant qu'une fleur qui perd ses pétales…")1, said rude things to Whitney Houston2, and lit money on fire3.
C.: “Who the hell is this creep?”
I apologize for the digression. Serge Gainsbourg’s 1984 song “Lemon Incest”, is ear-worming its way through my cortices, as is the Chopin melody to which it is set.
This is because his daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, with whom he recorded “Lemon Incest” when she was 12, has turned his former home in Paris into a museum.
C. is writing about the museum for Art Review. I’m writing about it for an upcoming Hexagon. In preparation we are re-examining our, France’s, and the world’s relationship to this “complicated” figure.
Mitterrand and Rocard are considered the most “fratricidal” pairing in French political history. They had long hated each other, dating back to the 1950s. Mainly for “ideological” reasons, though neither was really an ideologue.
Rocard had been an early proponent of decolonization. Mitterrand believed in empire and its gradual relinquishment. To him, the colonized were not yet adequately “prepared” for political autonomy.
Rocard embodied the "The Second Left", which he described as “decentralizing, regionalist, heir to the self-management tradition, which takes into account the participatory approaches of citizens, in opposition to a ‘First Left’, Jacobin, centralizing and statist.”
There were also personal reasons. Mitterrand thought Rocard was young and uppity. Rocard thought Mitterrand was old and archaic.
They both thought the other arrogant and sneaky (“surnois”).
On 15 May 1991, two months after we arrived in Paris, Mitterrand forced Rocard out (“You have kindly informed me of your intention to form a new government”) and replaced him with Édith Cresson, the first woman to hold the post and, chiefly because of that, the most unpopular prime minister in history.
On 2 April 1992, Pierre Bérégovoy took her place. A little over a year later he took his life.
The following year, after a right-wing coalition won the legislative elections, Mitterand was once again forced to cohabitate, this time with Edouard Balladur. Chirac did not want to cohabitate with Mitterrand a second time and pushed his longtime friend and tacit deputy Balladur forward in his place. Two years later, in 1995, the year C. and I were married in a five-metre-high, inflated, and transparent cathedral on a beach during the lowest tide of the year, Balladur, who was born in Turkey of Armenian parents, declared his candidacy for president, despite having promised Chirac that he would not run. His decision split the centre-right vote. Lionel Jospin won the first round. Jacques Chirac came in second. Balladur was third, just a few votes ahead of the far-right candidate Jean Marie Le Pen.
When Chirac beat Jospin in the second round, Balladur was replaced by Alain Juppé.
Since Juppé’s tenure as prime minister, during which the country was shut down by a general strike provoked by Juppé’s attempt at pension reform, which C. and I took advantage of to fly to Mexico for our honeymoon on the last Air France flight before Charles De Gaulle airport was shut down, ten individuals have held the office.
None are dead.
At the time of this writing, Elisabeth Borne, the second female prime minister, has been prime minister for one year, five months, and 27 days.
If there are no questions, we can begin.
i) Sorry. One more. My use of the word “play” at the outset of this post was incorrect. We are not about to participate in an activity for enjoyment and recreation. This has a serious purpose.
ii) Having now examined the issue more clearly, I think it can be safely said that the so-called rules listed here and above are in fact not rules nor constraints nor even observations.
iii) Nor are i and ii of this new set. Nor is this.
iv) They and this and all subsequent are something else entirely.
v) We shall continue nonetheless, and decide later — and together — on the proper nomenclature and the proper not-rules/not-constraints/not-observations, numbered or lettered accordingly, and eliminating those serving no purpose.
vi) To this end, I will start a final and definitive set now.
What follows appeared before, buried beneath a pile of IKEA furniture, in this post:
I pulled this out from under the pile of IKEA furniture on the advice of C.. “It’s my favourite piece of yours,” she said.
C. thought its first appearance, buried several thousand words beneath the furniture and under the byline of a guest writer named George Arthur Stephenson, was a mistake.
Stephenson was my maternal grandfather. He couldn’t have written “Moveable Objects (Part 1)”, which covered events in France between 1993 and 1999, as he died in 1981.
“Why did you do that?” C. asked.
I had no answer.
Just as I have no answer for why I am numbering these and calling them rules and then not calling them rules.
Nor for why I hauled “Moveable Objects (Part 1)” out from under a pile of IKEA furniture only to re-bury it under a pile of arcane French political conventions and history.
Nor why I don’t just write about cake. Everyone likes cake. Why not just give them cake?
Cake is not just an item of soft sweet food made of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and sometimes iced or decorated. Nor the many delicious gluten- and sugar-free versions of this.
Cake is a universal symbol of joy, good fortune, and celebration.
Cutting and sharing cake with others makes us happy.
Just looking at cake — just saying the word “cake” —releases a flood of serotonin and dopamine in our brains.
Not only that — eating a little cake now and then, especially chocolate cake, even for breakfast (because your metabolism is most active first thing in the morning), if combined with a nutritious diet and regular exercise, can help you lose weight, as cake satiates our cravings for sugar and makes us less likely to binge on desserts.
In France, cake is usually called gateau or génoise. People sometimes translate cake as brioche, which is where the whole Marie Antionette “Let them eat cake” confusion came from. Brioche is a bread enriched with butter and eggs. It is considered a luxury food. But it is hardly a cake.
Tell you what. Forget all this. I’m going to stop here, and let you get on with your day.
We’ll do this another time.
Maybe next week.
Alright?
Just scroll to the cake recipe at the bottom.
Or if you want, click on the “Moveable Objects (Part 1)” link above and read it now. It starts with a quote from Pope Leo XII: “The first law of history is to assert nothing false and to have no fear of telling the truth.”
Know though, too, however, that next time it will be different. Nothing ever stays the same.
Last thing. Have you heard of OuLiPo? It is short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as "Workshop of potential literature”.
Wikipedia describes it as “a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.”
The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy”. Queneau described Oulipians as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
This has nothing to do with OuLiPo. If it did, it would probably have more of a tree structure, like this:
Would you like to read about the killing of a prime minister?
If yes, go to 4.
If not, go to 2.
Would you rather read about cake?
If yes, go to 16.
If not, go to 3.
Would you rather just eat some cake?
If yes, go eat some cake.
If not, don’t.
And so on.
Or it would tell the story of Christopher Mooney, a writer who discovered an essay by George Arthur Stephenson, his maternal grandfather, called “Moveable Objects (Part 1)”, while on his honeymoon in Mexico. The essay described events occurring in France between the years 1993 and 1999.
Reading it, the principal character initially had a feeling of déjà vu, of either having personally experienced the events described in the essay, or of having followed them closely at the time in newspapers and on television.
Then he remembered that his honeymoon was in 1995, and that his grandfather had died in 1981, a decade or more before the events described in the essay.
After investigating, the Mooney character (played by Pat O’Brien in the film version) realized that these so-called actual events were either fictions that never happened or predictions of events that later did happen. Whichever was true, another truth was incontrovertible: George Arthur Stephenson was a genius.
Wishing to publish this discovery, he copied out the essay and published it on Substack, where 2,500 people clicked on it, and 8 people liked it, but not a single person actually read it.
Not even his wife.
Demoralized, he quit writing, except for cake recipes, which he posted online as often as six or seven times a day.
Later, when confined to the psychiatric hospital in Verrières and deprived of Internet access, he will write hundreds of cake recipes on the walls of his room, and on whatever scraps of paper he can find.
Many, many years after that, years well beyond the present ken of our uncertain future, he will die toothless, obese, and diabetic. Among the personal items he will leave behind is a black, linen-bound manuscript, painstakingly and ornately labelled “Moveable Parts (Part 1)”. On the first eight pages will be written a set of statements identical to the “rules” listed above; the other 392 pages will be blank, except at the top of each page, where will be penned “qu'ils mangent de la brioche” with the phrase “de la brioche” crossed out and replaced with “du gateau.” And at the bottom of each page will be written the first sentence from Jacques Chirac’s blank letter of resignation to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing:
«Je ne dispose pas des moyens que j'estime aujourd'hui, le ______________ , nécessaires pour assurer efficacement mes fonctions et dans ces conditions, j'ai décidé d'y mettre fin.»
In 1974, the year Georges Perec wrote the short story “Un Voyage d’hiver” that I modified for the above "conte à la mode Oulipienne" he ate “four chocolate cakes, one cheesecake, two orange cakes, one Italian cake, one Viennese cake, one Breton cake, one fromage blanc cake, one vatrushka.” You can read a full account of his intake that year in “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four,” translated by John Sturrock for Granta 52 (1995).
Next week then, expect to see this in your mailbox:
Now, how about that cake?
Lei Saito’s “Gâteau d’anniversaire insolite”
I am proud to report that my Hexagon piece on the Paris-based artist Lei Saito provoked two articles in the Le Monde by another Hexagon subject, Camille Lebron.
Lei Saito is from Japan. She often makes art out of food.
Camille Labro is a Parisian cookbook writer, Le Monde columnist, the goddaughter of Alice Waters, and the director of ecolecomestible.org.
Links to the Le Monde and Hexagon pieces are below Lei’s “unusual birthday cake recipe,” which was “inspired by her country's culinary practices. The dish resembles a large club sandwich, to be eaten cold.”
Ingredients for 8 people
8 large slices of sandwich bread (thin, without crust)
Salted butter
Fermented cabbage or purple sauerkraut
Cashew nut puree and/or black sesame puree
Fork-mashed hard-boiled egg with crème fraîche and mayonnaise or mascarpone
Creamy fromage frais
Seasonal fruit (watermelon, nectarine, grape, blackberry, fig, etc.)
Vegetables of the moment (yellow and green courgette, pickled pepper, cucumber, cherry tomato, radish, etc.)
Spices (smoked paprika powder, pink berries, etc.)
1 small handful of capers
Preparation
i) Butter each slice of sandwich bread.
ii) Spread alternately with egg salad, thin slices of cucumber, courgette, or other seasonal vegetables, the puree, then the sauerkraut, and repeat.
iii) Cover the whole sandwich with cream cheese (which can be coloured pink with a little beetroot juice).
iv) Decorate with small vegetables (cherry tomatoes, radishes), condiments (capers), spices (pink berries, paprika, etc.), and cut-up fruit...
iv) Serve and cut vertically, like a birthday cake.
My Hexagon piece on Lei Saito:
My Hexagon podcast with Camille Labro:
The Le Monde articles (in French, no paywall):
Thanks for
eatingreading.
On 1 October, 1985, Serge Gainsbourg discusses his role as a "Pygmalion à l'horizontale” on Antenne 2’s Aujourd'hui la vie. “I'm an aesthete in a way. A flower that opens is more interesting than a flower that loses its petals...” Video here