'Frenchmen, one more effort, if you want to be Republicans!'

from: Cook, David. (5.14.2002). 'Frenchmen, one more effort, if you want to be Republicans!'The 2002 French Presidential Election. ctheory.net. retrieved on 31.05.07 from
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=339

" . . . Jospin may also have been his own undoing in contributing to the record absenteeism of the first vote. Not Baudrillard's 'silent majority' but rather more than likely the absentees who were absent with pay. Once the thirty-five hour workweek came into effect, coupled with the notoriously clever French system of 'bridging' holidays together, much of the nation is on vacation. Nothing wrong with escaping the noose of the factory system as the wish fulfillment of the thirty-five hour week has caused a boom in the vacation industry. This may also account for the popularity of Michel Houellebecg's Plateforme, which details the French fantasy of an inclusive Thai holiday with middle life sexual (dis)satisfaction, and made complete, I suppose, by a final terrorism attack. Here, nonetheless, is the republican spirit of Sade where the sexual fantasy runs the effort to become virtuous -- even if one really comes from Cherbourg. For Sade, the couplet of vacating/vacation was the algorithm of libertine life just as the circulation of the leisure parks and sun holidays dominates much of the 'real' life of the republic. . . . "

la Bastille