The grumble from the camp of the so-called Anglo-Saxon model is that people have too easy a time over there in France. Social safety nets, protection of small businesses, quality food, pampered workers, productive yet lovely countryside, cheap dentists: you name it, it's got to stop. But those to whom these errors look rather attractive will be confused by Lydie Salvayre's radical idealism, because she thinks that no such social-democratic redoubt exists. For her, France is a neo-fascist midden, run by criminals and patrolled by enforcers wrapped in a cloak of prim respectability handed down from Vichy.

LRB 26 January 2006 | PDF Download