Love and politics a powerful combination in France

The French are passionate about love and politics, and politics play a significant role in their relationships, political sociologist Anne Muxel observes in Politics in Private; Love and Conviction in the French Political Consciousness.

“Political conviction has an important role to play in any relationship based on feeling,” says Muxel, a senior researcher with the CNRS scientific foundation. After all, fidelity and betrayal, passions and break-ups are common to both love and politics.

Muxel’s book is comprised of main sections on ways of agreeing and ways of disagreeing about politics. Seduction is one way of agreeing. “I did interviews with people who told me they fell in love because someone talked politics to them,” she says. “When Eros and politics meet, it’s a very powerful combination.”

In the English-speaking world, it's poor etiquette to discuss politics at table. Not so in France. Over the past century, the Dreyfus affair, the Popular Front, the return of Gen Charles de Gaulle, the Algerian war and May 1968 "aroused confrontation that was often virulent and without concession", Muxel writes.

Divisive topics

Some French people reportedly suspended family gatherings for the duration of the 2005 European constitutional treaty campaign, because they argued so much.

The most divisive topics at present are Israel-Palestine and the National Front FN).

Muxel based her book on interviews with dozens of French people. A left-leaning architect told her how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had destroyed his marriage to a pro-Israeli Jewish woman.

A young woman biologist recounted arguments between her extreme right-wing father and his left-wing children.

A particularly vehement row ended with the wife/mother stabbing her husband in the hand. The family now enforces a ban on political discussion to enable them to continue meeting.

France’s socialist president, François Hollande, and Ségolène Royal, his former partner for 30 years, were both raised by strict, religious, right-wing fathers. But Hollande and Royal are exceptional. Only 10 per cent of French people break completely with their parents’ politics.

That birds of a feather flock together is the lesson of Muxel’s book. “About two-thirds of the French continue the ideological choices of their parents,” she says. Three-quarters choose a spouse or partner who shares their political orientation, though with such a panoply of left and right-wing parties, they don’t necessarily vote the same.

The most surprising thing to Muxel was the degree to which votes are kept secret. For all the impassioned dinner discussions, more than a third of French people are not certain how their spouse or partner votes. “Between parents and children, barely one in two know. Among friends, only about 40 per cent tell each other how they vote.

“This reserve is precisely because politics is imbued with so much passion,” Muxel continues. “The secret vote is a means of avoiding disputes that could impinge on interpersonal relations.”

Muxel was surprised by the way Americans post political placards on their front lawns and flaunt bumper-stickers on their cars. “In France, if you put a Sarkozy bumper sticker on your car, it would be demolished,” Muxel says.

“In the US, one publicises one’s private choices, whereas in France, one privatises one’s public choices.”

Simple insult

In France, "to say of someone, 'Il/elle est de gauche' or 'il/elle est de droite' usually translates an insult rather than a statement of fact," the book's Irish translator, Chantal Barry, notes in a preface.

People on the left feel a particular necessity to share the convictions of those around them, Muxel says. “The left has always been motivated by a collective project which engages the ‘we’,” she says. “The right is more individualistic and individualised, more embodied in strong personalities.”

Witness the present power struggle between Nicolas Sarkozy and his rivals on the right.

Opinion polls show the French public to be deeply distrustful of politics, while maintaining an intense interest in the subject. Six out of 10 French people say they are ready to go into the streets to defend their ideas. “These three ingredients – distrust, keen interest and a proclivity to protest – reflect the French attitude towards politics today,” Muxel says.

Whether it be the Communist Party in its heyday or the FN today, one might reasonably ask if politics replaced religion in France. When she was making her documentary on Family Disputes and Politics, Muxel met an entire household who had converted to the FN. "A woman converted her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. They all vote FN now," she says. "It happens. People engage in proselytism."