Notes on a Panic -- 90s Edition, Part 4
Notes on a Panic -- 90s Edition, Part 4
The Great Santini
For this installment of the grand tour of the mid-90s crop of “dictionaries” of “Political Correctness”, I’ll be looking at a book by André Santini: De tabou à boutade: Le véritable dictionnaire du politiquement correct (literally: From Taboo to Joke: The True Dictionary of Political Correctness) was published in 1996. The main title may be a late addition, as the book is referred to as Le véritable dictionnaire etc. throughout. I wonder whether that’s because the other French dictionary of political correctness (Philippe de Villiers’ Dictionnaire du politiquement correct à la française) came out earlier?
André Santini is still alive and active in politics. Corsican by origin, but born in Paris in 1940, he has served since 1980 as the mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which is, I believe, within the Métropole du Grand Paris, but is pretty suburban in character. On my inner map, it’s close to Roland-Garros, where the French Open takes place, but my followers can correct me on that. It was also apparently first a a communist, then socialist stronghold. He’s also on record as saying that “when I was a child, I saw myself following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, and look where I am now: mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux.” Which I’m guessing is a reference to a large immigrant community? In 1999, 17.5% of the district’s population was of “foreign” birth (i.e. born outside of metropolitan France). That’s not nothing, but also not huge — in Clichy-sous-Bois the same number in 1999 was at 36.3%. Unemployment in Issy appears to be quite low by French standards.
So I’d say: speaker position is metropolitan. He’s not one of those European mayors who run the kinds of towns the rest of the country is scared of, and then write books to tell you why immigrants (i.e. their constituents!) are scary. More to the point: This guy isn’t exactly an outsider, even though he seems to see himself — not shockingly for an anti-“PC” crusader — as exactly that. To quote the jacket copy of Maire celibataire, he is a “child of war, from a modest family, without network but not without will.” He “built himself through effort and adversity, without ever forgetting where he came from.” The jacket cover also notes his “independence of mind” and his “freedom of tone”, but also the “high price” that both come at. It’s a performance of independence and apostasy, however, that seems to emanate by and large ex cathedra.
I can’t tell how frequent a guest he is on “Ensemble c’est mieux”, “Le rendez-vous”, “L’heure des pros”, but he’s been on all of these shows and cuts a pretty good figure on political chat shows. Readers of this newsletter seemed to know a whole lot more about Santini than I did — he appears to be fairly present in media, he’s won a French political humor award numerous times (and unlike some of the other recipient seems to have meant to be funny with his winning statements), and clearly considers himself something of a wit — the jacket cover of his most recent book highlights his reputation for “les bons mots et le franc-parler”. De tabou à boutade clearly thinks of itself as playful and irreverent in tone, and as a non-native speaker I’m not going to opine on that.
One thing that I do want to point to is the title: the pun contained in the title (tabou => boutade) is an example of verlan, a common form of French wordplay, almost a language of its own. To create a verlan word, you reverse the syllables of a word without adjusting the pronunciation. Think of it as a French version of Pig Latin. Verlan is also, at least today, associated particularly with non-white youth cultures, especially hip hop (see Chantal Tetreault’s 2015 Transcultural Teens for some of the uses of verlan in youth culture). Maybe this wasn’t true in 1996, but at least to today’s ear Santini’s title seems to purloin the linguistic play of younger people who look very different from André Santini. In any case, it seems that Santini’s book straddles orthodoxy and heterodoxy in a way we’ve seen in many of these types of books: his manner is transgressive, but he’s defending orthodoxy. He claims to be straddling divides, but is not-so-covertly relying on them.
So Santini appears to be both a creature of the establishment, but also someone who has made gestures of apostasy and not-fitting-in part of his establishment appeal. One way to trace Santini’s political trajectory is via his national political appointments: he started out as a member of the Social Democratic Party, but he seems to have been in office almost entirely as a functionary of various conservative parties. He served in Jacques Chirac’s second cabinet, and in François Fillon’s second cabinet, he was a supporter of Nicolas Sarkozy, and of Alain Juppé for the 2016 présidentielle. To me that looks pretty typical of the kinds of people who first disseminated “political correctness” discourse in Europe in the 90s. He is a man (and I don’t mean “man” generically) of the right, but not of the far right. Writing a book on “PC” is inherentily populism, and I suppose being mayor is among the more “populist” elected positions one can hold. Santini also emphasizes the kind of postideological pragmatism that mayors especially seem to go in for. But Santini’s positionings in the broader ecosystem of French conservatism seems decidedly mainstream.
I don’t know whether there has been much drift of politicians from les Republicains to the Ressemblement, but, to use two examples from neighboring countries, he’s neither Alexander Gauland nor Nigel Farage. Gauland was one of a group of right-wing insiders of the Christian Democratic CDU in Germany who helped found the Alternative for Germany, serving as its chairman and eventual “top candidate” in the 2017 national election. And Farage of course started as a Tory, leaving the party after the UK signed on to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Both of them were big “PC”-bashers, and their fixation on correctness and “speech codes” was not exactly an engine, but rather an index of their gradual radicalization. I’d be interested to find out where Santini sees himself today, and how he looks back at this book. I reached out to him — he’s still in office, and therefore quite findable —, but haven’t heard back. To be fair, he does appear to be embroiled in a #MeToo scandal of his own, which might limit his willingness to talk to feminist scholars.
Santini has done comparatively ample research — Le véritable dictionnaire has footnotes (!), quite a few even. But in a way Santini’s documentation exposes the peculiarities of the kind of incuriosity that a dictionary like this always also traffics in. Because there is inevitably something slapdash about the way a book like this reads other texts. It trawls other people’s books and articles for a neat ridiculous quotation, anecdote, and especially term and holds it up to ridicule in a six-to-ten line “entry”. This is true for Santini’s book as well: A bunch of these entries are in fact just anecdotes under a heading that more or less fits the amusing story. I’ve gone through like six of these types of books by now, and this is the first one that has an entry for “Peter and the Wolf” (op. 67 for all the Prokofiev-heads out there). Here’s why:
“Pierre et le Loup Une violoncelliste a préféré quitter l’Orchestre symphonique Eurêka en Californie plutôt que jouer cette oeuvre de Prokofiev, qui calomnie injustement une espèce en voie de disparition. Et quid de Carmen, cette cigarière éprise d’un tueur de taureaux?”
“Peter and the Wolf A cellist preferred to leave the Eureka Symphony Orchestra in California rather than play this work by Prokofiev, which unfairly slanders an endangered species. And what about Carmen, this cigar maker in love with a bull killer?”
A cellist quitting over a slandered wolf? Unlike some other “entries” in this book, this anecdote basically has the kind of structure we might find in a joke book. The anecdote is in fact a true story, one that made it into various newspapers in 1994. Santini imports it into his book 1-to-1 and doesn’t seem to have done even the most rudimentary research — as evidenced by the fact that he for some reason chooses to render the town name of Eureka in French! What’s next, Les Anges, Californie? Requin, Californie? Since he doesn’t seem to notice that the Eureka Symphony is named after the small city of Eureka in Northern California, he also doesn’t seem to notice that playing in the Eureka Symphony isn’t a job. The cellist in question (Anne Conrad-Antoville) seems to have been a local activist and scientist who walked out on a hobby because she was offended by Prokofiev’s piece.
Overall, though, the footnotes are indeed really helpful. Santini is fairly improvisational about what he cites — the cello-incident above didn’t merit sourcing, nor do the vast majority of anecdotes presented in this book. But the footnotes give a good sense of the media diet a French writer/politician contemplating a book about “PC” in the mid-90s was on. When he sought to describe the problem of “PC”, what publications did he reach for? What sources came to his mind?
One thing the citations give away: this book was written and published extremely quickly. The best pub date I could find for De tabou à boutade is April 30, 1996. The youngest reference in the book is from March of that year.
In what follows I will divide the book’s footnotes into four buckets. There are 107 footnotes in the book, and about 80 of them fall pretty clearly into one of four buckets. And I think that in itself gives us a pretty good sense of what Santini’s course of reading (and of not-reading, and of not-having-to-read) must have been when pulling together De tabou à boutade.
Bucket 1: French newspapers or weeklies [37 out of 107]. A few things are noticeable here: first off, the citations are preferably from centrist or even left-leaning dailies and weeklies. Le Monde leads the pack (15 footnotes), center-right Le Figaro, which today does a lot of wokism-stories and “cancel culture” stories, is second (8 citations). But the list also includes La Libération (far more left-leaning), and the centrist L’Événement du jeudi. Most of the pieces cited are pieces about political correctness — meaning that if you were an avid reader of Le Monde, Santini’s book contained more than 10 percent material you were already familiar with. There are two reasons I’m harping on this: (1) Santini’s stories largely reflect a common consensus back at an audience that is already extensively exposed to that consensus. This isn’t a discursive transfer from one political or national public to another. It is, at best, a mirroring. (2) Santini doesn’t seem to cite any right-wing, let alone far right French dailies or weeklies. And given my research, I think this actually reflects the dynamics of the “PC”-debate in France more generally: it may have started on the right, but was very quickly taken up by center and left-of-center publications, to the point that a conservative like Santini could just cite them and walk away whistling.
Bucket 2: US publications [21 out of 107]. The vast majority of these are references to US magazines or newspapers. I’d class about 9 of these are centrist publications — the vast majority of these concern anecdotes cribbed from Harper’s or John Leo’s weekly anti-“PC” column in US New & World Report. But there are also references that I’d class more as obviously right-wing or neocon PC-hunters: Santini draws on an essay Peter Thiel and David O. Sacks published in National Review to promote The Diversity Myth, he cites Dinesh D’Souza. Where it gets pretty genuinely right-wing, though, are the books he cites — while the most cited book is the French edition of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Disuniting of America (1991), Regnery Press may be the most cited publisher in this book. Santini approvingly cites Ralph Reeed’s Politically Incorrect (1994) as an authority. Longtime followers of this series will be delighted to see Santini cites the most successful English-language “PC”-dictionary, The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf
Bucket 3: Learnings [8 out of 107]. This was the ironic moniker I used to give during my book research to high-minded references that seemed intended to launder the sheer grubbiness and pettiness of the anecdotes, by scattering in some Kierkegaard, or the Federalist, or Mother Theresa. Santini specifically drops in the Bible, Henry David Thoreau, Jean Paul Sartre, Winston Churchill, Pierre Corneille, and the French novelist François Mauriac. These kinds of patron saints, who are usually more invoked than really engaged with, are pretty common in books like this one. They seem to serve two different functions: (1) they give the — frankly often pretty boneheaded — cavils about renaming manhole covers their stakes and supposed intellectual heft; and (2) they signal more or less inexplicitly who, in the midst of something like a spewing hydrant of derision and belittling, is worth taking seriously, is worth engaging with, is worth — and this is key — exempting from the corrosive of critique. Just like one of those famous yes/no-memes, most of modern culture comes in for the left-picture treatment; and then a select group of old white dudes comes in for the right-picture treatment.
I should say that Santini’s book is more learned than the others I’ve looked at in this series. In fact, I’m not sure it’s a dictionary at all, the text it mostly resembles (and indeed, I think, seeks to resemble) are books of moral philosophy from the Age of Absolutism — think the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld (1613—1680). Take a look at an entry like “Ideologue”: “any person defending a position other than your own.” It’s quite different from the other entries, but it is a pretty nice maxim. It’s quick, it does some surprising things with language. It’s not exactly up there with a true La Rochefoucauld banger (“We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.”), but it’s clearly aspiring to something like this: be surprising, offer witty reversals and turns of thought, test and keep in check our false pieties.
Bucket 4: Actual left-wing discourses [16 out of 107]. These are basically texts that Santini uses exemplify the excesses of “PC” discourse en français. Which makes it kind of remarkable that (a) there are 14 of these in the entire book, and (b) that about half of them are American. I should be clear: For the purposes of my count, I didn’t include references if followed by “(cited in The Atlantic)” or whatever. No, these are books that appear on their own, cited directly. So the books (I think?) we’re invited to imagine M. Santini perusing with a knowing chuckle and a half-amused, half-concerned shake of the head.
So what does this archive of disaproval look like? How did Santini assemble it? These are hard for me to place, but they seem kind of an unusual course of reading for a mayor of a French town circa 1995. Afrocentrist thinker Cheikh Anta Diop? Sure, he’s always good for people wanting to relativize white racism. A few communiqués from anti-AIDS activists ACT-UP? Anti-racism sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff? Sure, makes sense. But WashU St. Louis feminist studies professor Joyce Trebilcot’s Dyke Ideas? Martine Rothblatt’s Apartheid of Sex: a Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (1995)? I’d be really interested in finding out how those ended up in a book that otherwise cites mostly a bunch of newspapers Santini seems to have subscribed to and some basic culture war texts you could pick up at a local bookstore. I’ll have more to say about how reactionaries read feminism, critical race theory, etc. in a different installment. But there’s some excellent scholarship (including this great article by Moira Weigel from 2023) about the peculiar modes of non-reading, sort-of reading, symptomatic reading engaged in by those who read “theory” only to be outraged, amused, horrified by it.
The reason I’m not dwelling on this: I still don’t quite believe that Santini necessarily read all of these. But his footnotes raise another question that I think is more pertinent to understanding these types of “dictionaries”: how did he even come across these books? How, in other words, do “PC” dictionary writers pick the authors they choose to get mad about? Where do they find these people? You might think it’s unfair to assume a writer didn’t research, but some of these books are kind of hard to imagine him tracking down in the mid-90s. Trebilcot’s Dyke Ideas came out with SUNY Press in 1994; it’s not listed as being available at the French National Library today. (Also, Santini gets Rothblatt’s book’s subtitle wrong, so make of that what you will.) Trebilcot shows up in the co-authored book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal (of Sokal-hoax fame) and his French co-author Jean Bricmont, which first appeared in France as Impostures intellectuelles in 1997. So … too late to be Santini’s source. There’s also AEI’s favorite anti-feminist fellow Christina Hoff Sommers, whose Who Stole Feminism? from 1994 cites Trebilcot, but not Rothblatt. The most likely conduit for Rothblatt is actually Harper’s: the magazine seems to have excerpted part of Rothblatt’s Apartheid of Sex in its “Readings”-section.
I’m going to keep trying to track this down, but I hope it’s clear why I think this is interesting: where does this canon of disapproval come from? How does a consensus emerge what a particular kind of academic research or theory “says” or “is”, especially if it’s pretty large or pretty hard to assimilate? How do people get the confidence to have opinions about it? There’s a lot of scholarly attention paid to “negative fandom” these days — i.e. the kind of fixation that is fannish but unifies and gives meaning by inspiring hatred, derision, etc. (think all of us reading David Brooks). It’s clear that books have these negative fandoms, and it’s clear that the 90s were a good time for them. Think of Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1991), which is mostly a list of book titles — essentially going “get a load of this asshole”, and then moving on to the next, supposedly self-evidently absurd academic book. There’s a long tradition of this, of course; and there’s a great, short analysis of this phenomenon in Eve Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”, which starts — hilariously enough — by theorizing its own inclusion into Kimball’s book.
Anyway, to give an example of the citational politics of this book, here is the entry on “homophobia”:
“Fear, disgust or intolerance displayed towards homosexuals. Examples of typical homophobic behavior: jumping when a gay person touches your arm; be convinced that the open homosexual or lesbian in your office has designs on you; maintain physical distance from them; look at two people of the same sex who are holding hands.”
You might read that and think “yes, thinking that every gay person wants to rape you does seem to be example of homophobia”. And you might read this and wonder why any of it is supposed to be satirical. I think it’s interesting to imagine the kind of person that does find it ridicule to identify something so normal as “jumping when a gay person touches your arm”. In Cancel Culture Transfer I talked a lot about the hermeneutic circularity of examples like these: the only way to find this funny is to be not-so-secretly repulsed by gay people, which … idk, might be homophobic? In any case, it’s the bringing-to-language of these impulses at all that seems to incense M. Santini. This isn’t just normal it should go without saying. Its going with saying (or whatever the expression would be), i.e. the fact that recoiling at a queer person’s touch is something we have to talk about one way or the other, is already an injustice. You won’t be shocked to learn that being a bit weird about homosexuality and above all discomfort with gender variance runs like a red thread through De tabou à boutade.
And finally: notice the footnote? Guess what Santini is citing! “D’apres” (so he’s rephrasing somewhat) from a brochure distributed by George Mason University, and cited in an article entitled “PC: almost dead, still funny” by John Leo in US News and World Report, December 1994. This rather neatly sums up how concepts, anecdotes, arguments go from a book like De tabou à boutade. Step 1: a group at a university puts out a brochure, leaflet, communiqué. Step 2: some conservative group draws attention to it, for instance in the campus conservative newspaper. Step 3: a professional PC-anecdote gatherer grabs the story — today this would be a Substack or the Wall Street Journal; back then it was David Horowitz or someone like John Leo, or a book about POISONED IVY or BAD ED. Step 4: a European writer collects a bunch of these and mashes them together pretty much exactly as found in the article/book.
I’ve been calling this series my “90s Edition” and De tabou à boutade finally lives up to the billing. Because oh boy, is it mid-90s as hell. I’ll give you three guesses as to who is, according to Santini’s book, “the fetish[ized] actor of the politically correct”.
Going.
Going.
Going.
It’s Kevin Costner! Who has his own entry? Robin Williams comes in for a drubbing in the “Education”-section — Santini hates The Dead Poets’ Society almost as much as I do, and pretty much for diametrically opposed reasons. What’s the reason poor Kevin Costner is the early 90s pope of woke? Dances with Wolves has the temerity to suggest that white people did butcher a ton of bison (also people) on the Great Plains. And he had the temerity of having Morgan Freeman show up in a Robin Hood movie (“he introduced a Black into Sherwood Forest,” as Santini puts it). Oh, and his Maid Marian is not a total damsel in distress.
I don’t know why I’m harping on Kevin Costner — maybe because it was the first laugh-out-loud moment for me in reading this book. But it does seem to me indicative of the “old-man-yells-at-cloud” element of it all. And the kind of confusion that seems to me at the center of this book.
Santini is (or rather models for his audience) upset at the films that are in theaters, the music that’s on the radio. It’s a gesture that manages to mix together some straightforwardly political points (Santini does not care for feminism, it turns out, and people with disabilities have it too easy; he has opinions about immigration and European integration, and don’t get him started on cross-dressing or gay parents in children’s books) and some points that are basically just reactive cavils (movies these days! food these days! kids these days!). That’s the kind of creepy thing about this book: it toggles between a free-floating acerbic wit and very pointed policy preferences; between a basic grumpy-old-man shtick and something far sharper and far more targeted. As in many of these books, the slapdash presentation and indiscriminate choice of targets, seem designed to hide that dynamic. To make sure you swallow one thing with the other.