Singin’ the bourgeois blues

by David Benjamin 

“Lawd, in the bourgeois town, ooh the bourgeois town,/ I got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news aroun’./ Me and Marthy we was standin’ upstairs,/ Heard a white man say, ‘Don’t want no niggers up there … ”

— Huddy Ledbetter

 

MADISON, Wis.—It’s instructive to regard politics, especially nowadays but—really—forever, as a struggle between the uncomfortable and the miserable. The power to resolve this clash resides almost entirely among the uncomfortable. But they just can’t get comfortable. 

The great bluesman, Huddy Ledbetter, known to his friends, family and fellow inmates as “Lead Belly,” encapsulated this dilemma in two erudite words, the “bourgeois blues.”

“Bourgeois,” of course, is a French word—appropriately, because the French have a bad case of this chronic malaise. Indeed, my last encounter with the bourgeois blues was conversation with a French family whom Hotlips and I have known and loved for years. For three generations, these kind and sophisticated Parisians have chafed, volubly, against the presence in their neighborhoods and their nation’s body politic, of Arabs, particularly Muslims, who just can’t seem to comport themselves like Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.

Over thirty years, these complaints haven’t evolved, nor have the plaintiffs’ material circumstances altered very much, except that now, perhaps, they are a little more prosperous and secure—more resolutely bourgeois.

And yet, they seethe with discomfort. 

It’s a touchy topic and I try to avoid it. I’ve never minimized the genuine threat posed by small cells of radical Islamists hidden among the high-rise ghettos that encircle Paris. Incidents like the Bataclan massacre in Paris and the truck attack in Cannes, which together killed more than 200 innocent people, have cast a lingering pall over the nation and infected everyone with a sense of dread, anxious that a fresh atrocity might occur any moment.

When I mention to our friends that in America—with private arsenals of more than 400 million guns, more than 200 mass shootings just in 2023, and a vast web of violent hate groups—we feel a similar anxiety, I’m told that I have no clue. 

For thirty years, I’ve been counseled that France is unique. No other nation suffers comparable indignities inflicted by an intransigent enclave of immigrant ingrates. France, you see, has given these guests every opportunity to fit in, to switch from Mohammed to Jesus, to shed their barbaric caftans and hijabs for bikinis and Louis Vuitton, to forsake their strange cuisine (except for couscous which, inexplicably, the French seem to love) and to adopt a form of misogyny more Gallic than Ottoman. But they just won’t cooperate.

It isn’t as though, according to my interlocutors, France hasn’t given its aliens an even break. After the government lost a bloody war in Algeria—and another to Ho Chi Minh—and steadily loosed its grip on a colonial empire that subjugated Tunisia, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea and other chunks of Africa (not to mention the French West Indies and restive slave state of  Haiti), it granted citizenship and free passage to France to all its former colonial subjects. 

But have these liberated millions uttered even a grudging merci to their benefactors?

Not a peep. 

Intrinsic to the belief, among “native” French, that immigrant Muslims have looked La Belle France’s gift horse in the mouth, is a doctrine called laicité. Translated literally—and so perceived by the “real” French—laicité simply means “secularism.” Interpreted literally, the Muslims’ persistence in clinging to their faith and expressing it openly in their appearance—what they wear, how they shave, etc.—violates and repudiates a sacred French ideal born in the anti-clerical enlightenment of 1789.

Since I learned about laicité, I’ve been puzzled, because it seems to have little to do with religious practices. That 200-year-old definition has long been obsolete. Nowadays, for all evident purposes, laicité is a sort of immigration booby trap. It perpetuates the pretense that France is a color-blind secular utopia in which equality is so deeply rooted that no French citizen perceives any other citizen as different, regardless of race, religion, origin or social class.

France does not count the population of its minorities, because France has no minorities. Everyone is the same. The only citizens at fault for perceiving differences, or for promoting differentness, are the obstinately different. If you think you’re different, you’re not French. But you are French, so you can’t be different. Catch-22!

There is an American euphemism that captures the meaning of laicité in contemporary French usage: “separate but equal.”

After an uncomfortable discussion last month with our lifelong friends, on the clash of Islam versus laicité, I’ve resolved to retire the issue, for two reasons. Most important is our friendship. Second is the implacable grievance I see in our French friends. They have a case of the bourgeois blues so blood-borne that no form of persuasion can ever penetrate. 

Of course, despite their assurances that France’s discomfiture is unique, I’m skeptical. As the French bourgeoisie lean more and more toward the xenophobia of Marine Le Pen, I see the obvious U.S. parallel in the Trump cult. The former guy’s most faithful devotees are not so much the neo-fascists who wield garden torches and chant “Blood and Soil.” His truest believers are the relatively prosperous white suburbanites and retirees who have lived more or less comfortable lives but now feel namelessly insecure. They sense changes in society that give them the willies. 

Significantly, nothing in their own lives has changed much. Same house, same neighbors, same neighborhood protected from intruders by gates, cameras, rent-a-cops, red lines on maps and unwritten covenants. Same circle of family and friends, although steadily depleted by deceased parents and siblings, and by colleagues and classmates who’ve succumbed to weak tickers, diabetes, bad livers, cigarettes, booze, obesity and cancer. Still cozy in their routine with Netflix and pickleball, the bourgeoisie shouldn’t feel uncomfortable at all.

But out there? The jungle.

The dilemma that I’ve posed in these discussions is the question for which there is no moral answer: What do we do with them?

Historically, efforts to answer that question have given us humanity’s greatest inhumanities. The Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee. Jim Crow and Emmett Till. Apartheid. The Nuremberg Race Laws. The Final Solution. The Killing Fields. 

Absent such unseemly solutions, the blues among the dyspeptic bourgeoisie comes down to what my grandma Annie called bellyaching. There is so much in life that you cannot forestall. Change is now. But, in the face of upheaval, as the world you knew inexorably becomes something different, unwelcome and hard to understand, leaving you powerless to turn back the clock, forcing you to adapt, you can, at least, find a sympathetic ear… into which you can kvetch.

If times are right, you can even a join a movement of revanchists, atavists and Lost Causers. If you are powerful enough, you can for a while delay the inevitable, frustrate efforts to mitigate the consequences of change and punish—worse than you, if possible—the upstarts who started you singin’ the bourgeois blues. 

You know exactly who. The others. The miserable. The only ones who have the blues worse than you.