French Racquets

The French at Wimbledon

Were you to ask anyone at SW 19 when was the last time a Frenchman won the All-England Championships at Wimbledon, classiest tournament in tennis, you would get a blank stare.  Without a copy of Bud Collins’ classic History of Tennis at hand, I am confident in asserting it has not happened since before World War II, unless you count the ladies, which of course you must. Two classy young ladies, Amelie Mauresno and Marion Bartoli won here in the oughts and ‘teens of this century.

The waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo organized a virtual Wimbledon, with giant screen and strawberries and cream, and all the swells are dressed in fine flannels and summer dresses, just as they ought.  A shame the Tories were crushed by the Socialists in parliamentary elections a week ago, but England is England and as Winston Churchill said after losing an election — after winning the war! — “Trust the people.” (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: Elections in France Could Bring Extremists to Power)

Jimmy Connors stood up the Queen of England at Wimbledon one time, not nice, but the All-England Club would not offer a membership to Fred Perry, England’s greatest tennis player in his time, because he was not a public school boy, not nice either. But you can recall Churchill’s words and figure things will work out in their own good time. And this includes Frenchmen winning the Championships.

On Sunday (today) Ugo Humbert gave Spanish defending champion Carlos Alcaraz a run for his money in the round of 16, and there are two 20-year olds going into the second week,  Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi-Perricard, the latter with the biggest serve since America’s John Isner, 135 mph average. As I am neither there nor in Dumbo, it will merit a trip to a local sports bar when they play their matches tomorrow.

Not to get ethnic about it, but in view of the shock Tory loss last week, you cannot but notice that Fils and Mpetshi-Perricard happen to be products of France’s quite generous but now controversial immigration policies.  This, by the way, is not, or should not, be newsworthy. The last Frenchman to win on their own home court, at Roland Garros in 1983, was Yannick Noah (he now captains France’s Davis Cup team), and two of the previous cohort’s greats are Jo Tsonga and Gael Monfils (still here, lost in second round), who are regularly listed in the category of “best players to not have won a Slam.”

The truth is, this is secondary to something else: France’s player development system, which is known to spot talent early in the local clubs (or “federations”) and send them for graduate studies at the national federation. This is why they consistently produced deep benches in both singles and doubles.

France Is Unhappy

But if sports programs, which of necessity function on meritocratic principles, produce world class athletes, other institutions in France are by all accounts not doing all they should. Voters are unhappy, feel the leaders of the traditional governing parties pay no attention to their needs and anxieties, which include failing public schools, spikes in crime, a sense of the country being adrift and lacking confidence in its identity, its place in the world, its destiny.

Consequently, votes are cast for what President Emmanuel Macron has branded an “extremist”  party, whose aims and programs threaten the Republic. It might even be “fascist.” A snap election for the National Assembly on Sunday focused on how to “stop fascism.” And President Macron, in his wisdom, thought the best way to do this — and presumably keep his lease on the Elysee Palace for at least a while — was to join forces with another party, which only two weeks ago he had also branded as extremist and a threat to the Republic. As Irwin Shaw, who lived in France for some years, used to say, “Go figure.”

For if there are fascists in France, and indeed at the gates of power, it is not at all clear they are the ones identified as such by the media and the leftist coalitions that were hastily formed to stop them, namely the Rassemblement National (National Rally). This party for years has promoted a nationalist, France-first platform, including tighter controls on immigration, though by no means a rejection of immigrants who choose France, its laws and customs.  A case can be made that the economic and financial premises of the RN’s program are incoherent and unsustainable. But in itself, this is not fascist; moreover, the party has indicated it is anything but inflexible on budgetary questions, or on contentious issues such as control of the common European currency (the euro), the executive power of the EU itself, and participation in NATO.

On the other side, the left-wing La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party led by Jean-Luc Melenchon explicitly calls for a “refounding” of France and its regime, on the basis of the an alliance with the Islamists who have profited from French democracy to transmit to a growing Muslim population an attitude of outright hostility to France.  The resulting “Islamo-leftism” which is the driving force of the left-wing electoral coalition called the “New Popular Front,” rode the crest of hysteria regarding the National right “fascists” in the balloting on Sunday and, evidently, they may emerge with a plurality in the Assembly.  To form a majority, however, they will have to bully Macron’s centrists into letting them dominate a coalition government.  Macron having, in fact, made electoral pacts with the New Popular Front on the principle of “stopping fascism,” this is precisely what may happen. (READ MORE: Woodrow Wilson: A Madman, or Merely Misunderstood?)

Macron’s Mephistophelian pact legitimizes anti-Semitism, for the Melenchon-Islamist alliance makes no secret of its support for Hamas with its view that Israel is due for extermination. The irony here is that Marine Le Pen and her nationaux have been the staunchest supporters of Israel, whom they see as heirs of the Frankish armies that stopped a Muslim takeover of France at the Battle of Tours.

They say sports builds character; Macron, at one time a fairly avid tennis player, made an electoral pact which if anything shows a deficiency in judgement, perhaps in character as well. Whereas the National right has made it clear it would respect his executive prerogatives, the Melenchonistes are already calling for his resignation. But then, French politics have been treacherous for as long as anyone remembers, and in this game the match is not necessarily over when the last point is called.

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