The French presidential elections are now less than a year away, and official campaigning will begin in earnest this autumn. A slightly tongue-in-cheek Antoine Perraud, proving that a journalist is never at rest even while travelling the Paris Metro, sees a message behind the station ads that points to the tone of the political debate ahead.
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The admen just now are making a meal of the theme of a return to nature, to one's sources, to the reassuring values of terroir. There is a mood about that they are capturing and caressing, squeezing and exploiting.
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This need for protection, nested in the land, and profitably manipulated by ad campaigns in the Paris metro, shines a light on what is building up in the collective unconscious, and which the forthcoming presidential campaign will set to work upon. The promise of happiness versus a fingered state of horror. An intriguing and telescoping run of images, metro station after metro station, reveals the line ahead.
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At one end of the platform is a face as babyish as that of new French finance minister François Baroin. The teenager has traits of childhood, but one can guess the psyche of the adult-in-waiting within him. He is serene, he is well, he is French. Of Gallic stock, without any doubt, as testified by the béret on his head.
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At the other end is an anxious, tormented teenager, fighting for survival. The décor surrounding him is difficult to identify, much like the displaced monuments that illustrate euro banknotes. The scene is an apocalyptical no-man's land. Gone is the simple-as-pie paradise on Earth, supplanted by 3D pandemonium.
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Danger is present, stabbing its flag in the ground. Meanwhile, a frightened France seeks out a shepherd, a renewal with its origins, a return to the cherished, bucolic roots of terroir, the land and the soil. Just like in the children's song (click the video below), "Ah, Mesdames, there's some fine cheese" (Ah! Mesdames, voilà du bon fromage), which chants in rhyme and such implacable truth, the virtues of a bon fromage, which comes directly from the village of those who made it.
The time has come to choose your side
Take a closer look at the blue-green colouring of the poster below, oozing across the rapacious backdrop from an unknown ‘somewhere'. This is where rules a disturbing foreigner, who has no true homeland but the international omnipotence in which he wallows. He advances and threatens, with the nasty face of a hardened rapist. His snout, with no claim to a terroir as we know it, says it all.
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In contrast, the very natural nasal features of the French ewe featured below fill us with ataractic bliss. This cuddly creature and feature of the French countryside re-introduces serenity. Its familiar gentleness, and its freshness, come to rescue those worthy French from a brutish world. Here we have a happy form of deglobalization. A beautiful, unhurried and bleating Mater dolorosa offers its pure wool to us for protection, a countryside-green refuge from the sick-green world of the alien. The tutelary ewe is our guardian angel.
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The time has come to choose one's side. On the one hand, the urban world of rogues and rotters, bounty and booty.
On the other, a bucolic world snuggling under the village church tower, resurrected.
The French advertising guru Jacques Séguéla used and even abused the spirit of the latter in the successful promotional campaign, themed as La force tranquille, for François Mitterrand during the 1981 presidential elections. Today, within the shadows of the executive office, Patrick Buisson, the French president's ultra-right spin doctor, is now preparing ‘the new President' for re-election. This is a sort of Barrés-like creature, descending from an unknown inspirational mount, capable of reassuring the profound reaches of the nation. We have already had Nicolas ‘sword of justice' Sarkozy, here comes Nicolas ‘coat-of mail' Sarkozy, brandishing himself as a protective shield. The current favourite Socialist Party candidates hoping to run against Sarkozy, François ‘the beret' Hollande and Martine ‘the ewe' Aubry, have a lot on their plate and more yet to be served.
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English version: Graham Tearse