Hunger Games: Fifth Republic

France has gone psycho. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is the guide you need. Part I.

Comrade Mélenchon-al-Quds, left; Caudillo Goneril Le Pen, right. It’s all fun and games until one of these meshuggahs controls the French state.

What a week! The entire French political class has exploded in so furious an orgy of plotting, sniping, leaking, betraying, reputation-smearing, throat-slitting, purging, backstabbing, frontstabbing and sidestabbing that I truly wonder if any of them will be left alive at the end of this. (And who will run France if they’re not?) Like everyone here, I’ve been enthralled. Who knew the French had it in them? When they put their minds to it, they make Donald Trump look like Solomon.

But listening to American newscasters when they try to explain this is so dreary. Either they don’t truly understand the story or they’ve concluded that it’s too complicated and explaining it all is too daunting. Their accounts are so abbreviated, dull, and sanitized that you are, quite frankly, being deprived. It is unfair. You’re missing out on what is right now the greatest show on earth. I have therefore resolved to explain this whole thing to you properly, from start to finish. Because you deserve it. But even my explanation requires an explanation.

Start with this short version:

That’s a good summary, if you already know what’s going on. Most of the people in the video are household names in France. But if you don’t live in France or follow French politics as a vocation, you won’t recognize them or know what they represent. Most of my readers, I’d guess, would recognize Macron and Marine Le Pen, but wouldn’t be able to pick the others out of a lineup. Unless you know the back story—who these people really are—none of this quite makes sense. You need a guide to the characters. So I wrote one.

As I was writing it, though, I realized that you needed something else. You also need a guide to the basics of French constitutional and election law. So I wrote that, too.

Then I decided no one would ever fully enter the spirit of this fandango without seeing and hearing it. But the main characters are all speaking French. If you don’t understand French, it just sounds like they’re making excited, squeaky noises. So I set myself to dubbing all of the week’s highlights and bons mots into English, using AI. I’d never tried that before and wasn’t sure if it would work. But it did—so well that it’s just spooky. We’ve now hit the sweet spot with AI, I think, where everything it does is so clever that it makes you rub your eyes in wonder, but we haven’t yet been turned into its pets. Here’s a preview. The French version, first:

English version:

I swear to you, I gave it no instructions on this one except, “Translate from French and dub into English.” It was the AI that decided, all on its lonesome, to create that voice and that accent. It decided to make the lyrics rhyme—I didn’t tell it to do that. It even decided to sing. (Sing! Where did it learn to do that?) No, it’s not as musical as the original, but apart from that, you’re missing nothing.

I did lots more videos like that, partly because I was having so much fun, but mostly because they bring the drama alive in a way nothing else could (except learning French). But I realized you still wouldn’t recognize the people in the videos, so I’d have to illustrate the guide to the cast of characters. (So many of them are entering and exiting alliances, betraying one another, related to, divorced from, or sleeping with one other that frankly you really need diagrams.) So I did that, too.

Then I figured you could use a handy reference guide to French political parties, too, because they keep changing their names. (This is lest people remember who they are.) So I wrote that, too. Then I decided you needed an essay explaining the hidden drama—the parts no one talks about. So I wrote that, too.

I wanted to fit all of this in a single newsletter. I didn’t want you to forget anything from one part to the next or be obliged to search your Inbox for the guides when we launch into Season 1. But by this point, I was panicking. I’d been beavering away all week, and I was sitting on at least 20,000 words of prizewinning gold (or it would be, once I’d edited it). But I hadn’t yet sent out a word. I began worrying you’d all cancel your subscriptions. That would be so unfair, because I’d been working so hard, and I was on the verge of sending you the best newsletter you’d ever received—but how were you to know? For all you can tell, I’ve been spending my week on the banks of the Seine with Jacques the Guitar Guy, where we’ve been singing ditties about Macron and drinking ourselves into a gallic stupor.

I worked myself into paroxysms of anxiety about this. I couldn’t even bring myself to check my email for fear you’d sent me letters of complaint or that I’d discover you’d all cancelled your subscriptions. Yet I couldn’t finish the thing, either, because every new day brought another thunderbolt, another politician switching sides and renouncing his principles so fast that the whole story kept changing, and not in minor ways—those wily eels kept making me rewrite from the top. I began to feel like Sisyphus.

---

So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and send you this thing in three parts.

• Part I: How France works.

• Part II: The dramatis personae.

• Part III: Season premiere—the first week.

I really meant all of this to be read at once. I don’t like breaking it up. I fear you won’t remember the details from one installment to the next. But I’m sure that if I don’t send this today, you’ll all cancel your subscriptions. So below is Part I. (This part is actually the least exciting, but you need it to follow the plot.)

TLDR: Please don’t cancel your subscriptions. I have not been slacking. I’ve been working like such a demon that yesterday I forgot to eat, and when I finally realized how late it was, everything was closed. So for dinner, I had beans. Which I ate straight from the can without heating them up. I am just not the kind of woman who deserves to be abandoned by her subscribers.

I know our publication schedule is erratic. I know that’s unsettling. I regret that. But look, you can learn what’s happening in France on a regular schedule from CNN or the New York Times. If you want to luxuriate in the news from France, though, you must wait for the Cosmopolitan Globalist to ripen on the vine.

---

PART I

FRANCE: A FAQ

Q. How does France work?