Another voice
Meditations in church
Auberon Waugh
At Gruissan, on the Mediterranean coast nine miles south of Narbonne, they have built a workers' paradise. It stands in the beautiful Aude countryside of rock, wild thyme and rosemary, umbrella pine and cypress trees where the three wine-growing areas of Corbieres, Minervois and Languedoc-Rousillon converge. Great cliffs of two-roomed apartment blocks rise above black pools of tarmac in the dusty, rock-strewn landscape and innumerable little notices point to cinemas, ten-pin bowling establishments, snacketerias, miniature golf courses and every other entertainment the heart or soul of industrial man could desire.
I made this disgusting discovery when revisiting the marine cemetery of NotreDame-des-Auzils, where, on a hillside above the sea, there are monuments to sailors who have been drowned and whose bodies have never been recovered. My last visit was fourteen years ago, when the government-sponsored holiday development of the coast between Montpellier and the Spanish frontier had scarcely started, and the area remained one of the loveliest and least spoiled areas I could remember.
The fashionable part of this coast — from Toulon to Menton — has, of course, been debauched for years, and with increasing brutality, but the first and most obvious lesson of Gruissan (and Agde, and countless other formerly beautiful spots) is that if there is one thing worse than unplanned or piecemeal development it is development which has been planned and co-ordinated. A second, and even more important distinction between what has happended to the C6te d'Azur over the past eighty years and what is happening to Languedoc-Roussillon now is that whereas the destruction of the Cote d'Azur was undertaken first by the rich and later by the well-to-do professional and middle classes, the new development caters ' very largely for the affluent proletariat; and it is infinitely the nastier.
Gruissan provides a vision of the future if ever capitalism and technology can harness themselves once more to social democracy and, for my own part, I find the vision too horrible to contemplate, especially in France. My feelings of dismay at the degradation of this complicated, intelligent most highly civilised of all European races were mixed with guilt that I might have contributed to it somehow by my decision to buy only French cars and save England from a similar fate. Western Europe is simply not big enough to accommodate an affluent proletariat with all its destructive appetites and patterns of consumption. The old argument — that the answer to these questions lay in education, whereby pros perous workers would be happy to listen to Bartok quartets and poetry readings by Mr Stephen Spender — no longer carries conviction.
I was musing thus in church last Sunday, staying with some French friends in the Loire for a few days on my family's way back to England. In the Loire, I should say, nothing has changed. Our friend, hospitable host — a man of impeccable respectability in his private life — continues to live in his forty-roomed chateau surrounded by elderly servants and red-faced, unshaved tenant farmers, all bound together by their Catholic faith in an apparently obsessive concern about each other's families. I say that I was in church, but this is not strictly true, as there is a convenient arrangement whereby one can open a door in a bedroom corridor of the chateau which adjoins the church, and step into a raised gallery or tribune above the altar from which the chatelain, his family and guests can hear Mass in their pyjamas, if they so wish.
On my first visit to the chateau, more than a decade ago, I was mildly shocked by this arrangement. Enjoyment of privilege, let alone belief in one's own cultural, intellectual or educational superiority, could only be sustained, it seemed to me if accom panied by an awareness that God had a different set of values, that the smelliest and stupidest of mankind might be more pleas ing in the sight of God. Moreover, such a belief was excellent for the morale of those less privileged on earth. I could quite understand the urge to distance oneself from the newly prosperous, washed and culotted working class at prayer — but if the chatelain could not bring himself to pray with his villagers this might explain certain regrettable episodes in French history...
My hostess disabused me. The tribune had been added in the last century. If it had any relation to the French Revolution, it must be seen as a consequence rather than as a cause of it. So it was after the traumatic experiences of that terrible episode that the family had decided to withdraw itself, watching from behind an iron grille up above as the Catholic Church slowly dis integrated from being a generally shared philosophy and explanation of the human predicament into a side-show in the great Holiday Camp of life, offering half an hour's Moral Uplift in competition with ten-pin bowling.
The church, surprisingly, was packed; but this was La Vieille France. The industrial proletariat, of course, no longer believes in God, if it ever did. Far more serious, from the English point of view, is the decline of religious belief or any pretence of religious belief, the avowal of disbelief, among the bourgeoisie. How can a person at the same time deny that the meek will inherit the earth hereafter and expect to be allowed a privileged existence on earth? The result, as we see, is a crippling sense of guilt, a hopeless fairmindedness whereby many Englishmen and women of my own class and inherited abilities claim to see the unions' point of view, accept the selfish interests of the proletariat as having greater moral validity than their own. And so, of course, in the secular morality of the times, they have. The tragedy is that we never suffered a revolution in England. Neither the bourgeoisie (in which I include the professional classes) nor the proletariat has any experience of where egalitarian rhetoric leads. In the absence of such an experience, egalitarianism has swung from being an extreme, dangerous and brutal revolutionary political doctrine to being a pious aspiration as commonplace and as unattainable as the universal love taught by the Christian Church (with intermissions) throughout its two thousand odd years of existence.
Never describe a problem without proposing a solution to it. Since the Church has gone mad and God is, temporarily at any rate, off the communal menu, reserved for private contemplation, the only solution must lie in finding an alternative secular ethic which the bourgeoisie can embrace without encompassing its own destruction. And the key to this, I think, may be found in Gruissan.
If only the educated, intelligent, morally sensitive middle classes can be brought to understand that the further enrichment of the proletariat will involve the destruction . of everything beautiful, everything worthwhile left on earth, then they might reach a position of seeing that this process must be resisted as an end in itself Since the process is dependent on technology and investment, is it mercifully quite vulnerable to sabotage on both counts. The important thing is to spread the awareness. At present children at public schools and elsewhere in the independent sector are sometimes sent 10 charabancs to factories, coalmines, comprehensive schools to broaden their outlook. They should be sent to Butlins instead, or to Blackpool, to teach them the full horror of the great boil of leisured proletarian affluence which is about to burst and engulf us all in its poison. But I am not sure how necessary it will be to educate the middle classes in this awareness. Proletarian greed — call it an unselfish passion for social justice — is something that confounds itself by its own force. All that is required is to do nothing to avert or mitigate its consequences. Again, there is a stgnificant number of people who are dedicated to destroying such prosperity as remains to us under capitalism. When they have succeeded in this worthy aim, and when British industry lies in ruins, the moment will have come to put them all in prison — not betore.
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