In his 1957 book Mythologies, the French philosopher Roland Barthes analysed how social myths are constructed and implanted in the shared public consciousness through the use of words and images that signify meanings without explicitly stating them.
The best example of the signification of imagery that Barthes used was a black boy dressed in the uniform of the French army, whom he described thus: “I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.”
I was reminded of Barthes’ essay yesterday as I walked along Rue d’Amsterdam approaching the Gare Saint-Lazare and saw eight soldiers strolling along in full camouflage gear carrying machine guns.
Most of the soldiers were black: the image of French assimilation fulfilled.
It’s alarming to an Englishman to see guns on the street. Doubly so for a Londoner whose memory of the days following the 7/7 bomb attacks is of armed security officers mistakenly shooting dead an innocent Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, because they had thought him suspicious.
The chances of an innocent person being killed in Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks seem high, though perhaps not as high as the chances of being run over by traffic; like Barthes who died after being hit by a laundry truck.
I have old copies of Paris Match whose covers show Moroccan soldiers fighting on the French side in WWII. In the current climate of Islamophobia washing across France perhaps we need some similar but new form of visual mythology that serves to demonstrate that Muslims are as much a part of the ideological notion of an assimilated French society as others who parade and defend the tri-colour.
This is difficult given that the French separation of religion and state means that, unlike in England where, for example, a male Sikh policeman would wear a turban and a Muslim female police officer would wear a veil over her hair, these religious symbols would be banned in France.
A blow to the power of semiotics and a rather pointless law, given that churches, cathedrals, mosques and synagogues are all over the French capital. Why prohibit the visual symbolisation of religion on a person when great monuments to religion are an integral part of the city’s architecture?
I walked on from Saint-Lazare past one of those symbols, the church of Madeleine built in the time of the great revolutionary Napoleon, to Place de Concorde, renamed as a symbol of peace following the French revolution that began the process of creating the first social democracy in the world. From there, the top half of the Eiffel Tower peeked over some distant trees and the Champs-Elysee swept majestically up towards the Arc de Triomphe.
Standing there amongst those grand designs I contemplated that the most powerful act of de-mythologising of semiotics and of iconoclasm in the 21st century was the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. I thought about the geo-political impact of a similar attack on the Eiffel Tower or London’s Houses of Parliament. I thought about the destruction of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra by ISIS in the Syrian desert and considered how appalling that any regime, militant or orthodox, could imagine that in 2015 a new state or society could be built on the destruction of a former civilisation. Destroying societies and their material things simply creates failed states, like Iraq since 2003 and Syria since 2011.
But, away from war or terror, what happens when a functioning society does not rebuild itself? Materially and socio-politically? Stagnation or, worse, regression.
Inside the Musee D’Orsay on the south bank of the Seine, Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (The Painter’s Studio) is being publicly restored; its wood having rotted and coats of paint (not added by Courbet himself) having obscured some original detail. The painting, an allegory about French modernising during the industrial age featuring people like Baudelaire who coined the word “modernity,” is being restored using public donations —a modern allegory in itself.
My love of the historic past is combined with my desire to modernise. Not in a wasteful or excessive way but complementing the old and symbolising progression and functionality as a rejection of stagnation and dysfunction. Like London has done over the past decade.
Paris’ great structures of the 19th century still stand magnificent and untarnished, but modern Paris—graffitied, erratically erected and cruelly denied the investment money that the 2012 Olympics brought to London—is certainly crumbling.