Sunshine Recorder

In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological—psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems withdrugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.

French child psychiatrists don’t use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA(Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L’Enfant et de L’Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children’s symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms.

To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child’s social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to “pathologize” much of what is normal childhood behavior. The DSMspecifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals.

The French holistic, psycho-social approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child’s problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children’s behavior.

And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France. These divergent philosophies could account for why French children are generally better-behaved than their American counterparts. Pamela Druckerman highlights the divergent parenting styles in her recent book, Bringing up Bébé. I believe her insights are relevant to a discussion of why French children are not diagnosed with ADHD in anything like the numbers we are seeing in the United States.

“Even my death will be contested. And yet what I desire most today is a quiet death, which would bring peace to those whom I love.”

Albert Camus’s prediction has been borne out—but not his hope. As France approaches next year’s centennial of the French Algerian writer’s birth, controversies have crackled over the meaning of his life and work. These battles, which have swept up intellectuals and politicians, have as much to do with France’s troubled past—in particular its ties with its former colony Algeria—as they do with our own troubling present.

Camus was remarkable witness to his times. Like George Orwell, he was right about the plagues of the era—totalitarianism and Communism. Also like Orwell, Camus’s lucid gaze, blunt honesty, and persistent humanity have made him as discomfiting and indispensable since his death in 1960 as he was during his short life.

Over the past couple of years, official efforts to commemorate Camus have faltered. In 2009, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal that the writer’s remains be moved to the Panthéon, the neo-Classical pile dedicated to France’s “great men,” was assailed by critics, outraged that the conservative president was trying to yoke his name to a writer who had spent his life on the political left. While Sarkozy believed that he needed Camus, concluded Camus’s biographer Olivier Todd, “Camus has no need for Sarkozy.”

More recently, ideological and political collisions have capsized plans for a grand centennial exhibition in Aix-en-Provence, home of the Camus archives. Two exhibit directors, Benjamin Stora, a historian of French Algeria, and Michel Onfray, a popular philosopher (and author of a controversial biography of Camus), were toppled by political foes. The result has been paralysis. Officials in Aix insist that an exhibit, though more modest given Paris’s refusal to subsidize the event, will nevertheless be held. The title of Stora’s torpedoed exhibit, “Albert Camus: The Stranger Who Resembles Us,” has never seemed truer.

Few writers were more conflicted over personal and national identity than Camus. He was a pied-noir, the moniker given to immigrants who came to French Algeria during the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of them came from elsewhere in Europe, becoming citizens of a nation, France, whose language they did not speak, whose history they did not know, and whose soil they did not set foot on.

Algeria was nevertheless considered part of France, even with several million Arabs and Berbers who were denied the rights of citizenship. By the 1950s, Camus resembled one of his mythic heroes, Prometheus, chained not to a rock but to the impasse of Algeria’s resistance to a foreign occupation—a French occupation. He labored for a solution that would satisfy the imperatives of justice for both Arabs and pieds-noirs, risking his life in pursuit of an impossible peace.

Camus’s efforts failed, and he fell silent—a public silence that began in 1956 and remained almost unbroken until his death, four years later. One of the two notable interruptions was the publication, in 1958, of Chroniques algériennes, the collection of Camus’s articles on Algeria. (In May, Harvard University Press will publish Arthur Goldhammer’s masterly translation.)

The second exception was Camus’s controversial reply, in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, to an Algerian student who was hectoring him for his public silence. Camus reminded the student that he had long denounced the political and economic repression of Arabs and Berbers, but that he also condemned the use of blind violence by Algerian nationalists: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” If that doesn’t sound quite right, it is because the familiar quotation—”I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice”—was the invention of the French newspaper Le Monde, which sympathized with the cause of Algerian nationalists and cordially despised Camus. Le Monde published a correction three days later.

When Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner leaped from a capsule some 24 miles above earth on October 14, 2012, millions watched on television and the internet as he broke the sound barrier in a free fall that lasted ten minutes. But in the anticipation of Baumgartner’s jump (and his safe parachute landing), there was little room to marvel at the massive balloon that took him to the stratosphere.

More than 200 years ago in France, the vision of a human ascending the sky beneath a giant balloon produced what one magazine at the time described as “a spectacle the like of which was never shewn since the world began.” Early manned flights in the late 18th century led to “balloonomania” throughout Europe, as more than 100,000 spectators would gather in fields and city rooftops to witness the pioneers of human flight. And much of the talk turned to the French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard.

Known for being nervous on the ground but fearless in the air, Blanchard is believed to be the first female professional balloonist. She became a favorite of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII, who bestowed upon her official aeronaut appointments. Her solo flights at festivals and celebrations were spectacular but also perilous, and in the summer of 1819, she become the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident.

She was born Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant in Trois-Canons in 1778, not long before the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne began experimenting with balloons made from sackcloth and taffeta and lifted by heated air from fires in a box below. As the Montgolfiers’ balloons became larger and larger, the brothers began to consider manned flight. Louis XVI took an interest and proposed sending two criminals into the sky to test the contraption, but the brothers chose instead to place a sheep, a duck and a rooster on board for the first balloon flight to hold living creatures. In a 1783 demonstration before the King and Marie Antoinette and a crowd at the royal palace in Versailles, the Montgolfier brothers saw their craft ascend 1,500 into the air. Less than ten minutes later, the three animals landed safely.

Just months later, when Etienne Montgolfier became the first human rise into the skies, on a tethered balloon, and not long after, Pilatre de Rozier and French marquis Francois Laurent le Vieux d’Arlandes made the first human free flight before Louis XVI, U.S. envoy Benjamin Franklin and more than 100,000 other spectators.

Balloonomania had begun, and the development of gas balloons, made possible by the discovery of hydrogen by British scientist Henry Cavendish in 1766, quickly supplanted hot-air balloons, since they could fly higher and further. More and more pioneers were drawn to new feats in ballooning, but not everyone was thrilled: Terrified peasants in the English countryside tore a descending balloon to pieces.

A child of this pioneering era, Sophie Armant married Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a middle-aged inventor who had made his first balloon flight in Paris when she was just five years old. (The date of their marriage is unclear.) In January 1785, Blanchard and John Jeffries, an American doctor, became the first men to fly over the English Channel in a hydrogen balloon, flying from England to France. (Pilatre de Rozier, trying to cross the channel from France to England later that year, became the first known aviation fatality after his balloon deflated at 1,500 feet.)

Jean-Pierre Blanchard began to tour Europe. At demonstrations where he charged for admission, he showed off his silk balloons, dropped parachute-equipped dogs and launched fireworks from above. “All the World gives their shilling to see it,” one newspaper reported, citing crowds affected with “balloon madness” and “aeriel phrenzy.” Spectators were drawn to launches with unique balloons shaped like Pegasus and Nymp, and they thrilled to see men risk their lives in flights where fires often sent balloons plummeting back to earth.

One spectacular Sunday in Paris last month, I decided to skip museums and shopping to partake of something even more captivating for an environment reporter: Vélib, arguably the most successful bike-sharing program in the world. In their short lives, Europe’s bike-sharing systems have delivered myriad benefits, notably reducing traffic and its carbon emissions. A number of American cities — including New York, where a bike-sharing program is to open next year — want to replicate that success.

So I bought a day pass online for about $2, entered my login information at one of the hundreds of docking stations that are scattered every few blocks around the city and selected one of Vélib’s nearly 20,000 stodgy gray bikes, with their basic gears, upright handlebars and practical baskets.

Then I did something extraordinary, something I’ve not done in a quarter-century of regular bike riding in the United States: I rode off without a helmet.

I rode all day at a modest clip, on both sides of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, past the Louvre and along the Champs-Élysées, feeling exhilarated, not fearful. And I had tons of bareheaded bicycling company amid the Parisian traffic. One common denominator of successful bike programs around the world — from Paris to Barcelona to Guangzhou — is that almost no one wears a helmet, and there is no pressure to do so.

In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. Un-helmeted cyclists are regarded as irresponsible, like people who smoke. Cities are aggressive in helmet promotion.

But many European health experts have taken a very different view: Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

The new Socialist government’s determination to abolish prostitution has the whole country in debate. But what do the sex workers think of the plan? 

In a parking bay on a deserted industrial estate in Lyon, Karen, in her late 40s, sat in the passenger seat of her second-hand Ford Transit van wearing only black underwear. It was 7.30pm on a Friday night. She lit a pink lantern on the dashboard. Soon, a steady flow of cars was circling the car park – Mercedes, jeeps, old bangers — their drivers slowing to peer at the women in corsets sitting alone in a dozen parked, white vans, arms folded, candlelight flickering across their faces. “Some men drive round for hours just staring,” she said. “Then they’ll stop, ask the price, and demand a discount. I’ll say, ‘What, for all that petrol you’ve wasted?’”

A silver car slowed. “20 euros for a blow job, 40 euros for ‘love’,” she smiled. “Too expensive,” said the man, accelerating. A 60-year-old agreed to sex for 40 euros. Karen climbed into the back of the van, which she had decorated with a bed, a heater, purple curtains and a chest of drawers. Three minutes later the man walked out into the night. Karen laid out a clean sheet of paper-towel on the bed, spruced her blond hair. “See, it’s all very quick,” she said. Most of the evening was spent sitting waiting. Then in 15 minutes, three clients paid for sex, including a Spanish man in his 20s in designer clothes. Each took less than five minutes. She had made her daily quota of cash needed to pay her bills.

A former secretary from the southern naval city of Toulon, three times married, with two daughters, Karen first started selling sex in the 1980s: a brief stint on the street near a Lyon station, working mainly in clients’ cars, “which is very uncomfortable”. She quit and got married, but in 1992, divorced and with a young child she suddenly needed to “put food on the table”. She returned to sex-work, first in a hostess bar, then meeting clients at her home via a newspaper small-ad. For seven years, she has worked on the street in her van, Monday to Saturday from 7pm to around 1am, paying tax as self-employed. “‘No pimp, no boss’ is my motto. I’d rather do this than an office job, getting shouted at by a boss for a pittance.” Her strict rules include condoms for everything and no kissing clients. “You have to hit rock bottom to do this,” she said. “It’s not an easy job, but it’s a job where you can make money quickly. People try to say we’re victims, say that we’re alienated, that there’s a sex attack in our childhood history, but I’ve never been raped by anyone. This is my free choice.” She never looks into a client’s eyes in the moment of a sexual exchange – “I look anywhere but” – and they rarely tell her their names. But in her top drawer beside the condom supplies is a petition signed by several of them: in neat writing, stating their profession: such as “public works” or “driver”. It’s a protest against the new French government’s war on prostitution.

Sex work was hardly a priority in the French election campaign, yet it has become one of the defining social issues of Francois Hollande’s new Socialist government. In June, the women’s minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, made the bold announcement that she wanted to “abolish prostitution” in France and Europe. “My objective, like that of the Socialist party, is to see prostitution disappear,” she said. The previous French parliament had already adopted a resolution aiming for a “society without prostitution”. But can a government rid society of paid sex? The debate is raging among French intellectuals. Sex workers have taken to the streets, accusing the government of moralistic paternalism, saying Socialists are using the issue to distance themselves from the pariah Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, once the Socialist hope for president, is under official investigation in France over complicity in a pimping operation after sex workers were allegedly procured for his orgies. He said he didn’t pay and didn’t know the women were sex workers. “I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman,” his lawyer told the press. The inquiry has been extended to examine alleged group rape over the question of whether one sex worker was forced. Strauss-Kahn denies any violence.

The “white van women” selling sex on Lyon’s industrial estate in Gerland embody the French state’s difficult attitudes to prostitution. As in the UK, prostitution itself – receiving money for sex, or paying for sex – is not a crime. But activities around it are. Laws prohibit pimping, human trafficking, buying sex from a minor and soliciting sex in public. Brothels were outlawed in 1946.

The government is planning a major consultation on the abolition of prostitution. One idea under consideration is to criminalise the client, meaning anyone who buys sex from a sex worker would face prison and a fine. There are only a handful of European countries where clients of sex workers face prison. In 1999, Sweden became the first, followed by Norway and Iceland. But it is far from certain that France will put it on the statute books. The French Socialists would like their abolitionist stance to be mirrored in Europe, namely in the country they see as closest in its attitude to prostitution: the UK. Other neighbours have radically different approaches: in Germany, prostitution is legal and municipally regulated; in Spain, vast borderland brothels in places such as La Jonquera in Catalonia are frequented by French clients.

There is fierce debate in France over whether all sex workers should be considered victims, or whether “independents”, without pimps and beginning to be unionised, should be viewed as separate. Pro-abolition feminists say the act of paying for sex is always an act of violence, forcing the sex worker to anaesthetise themselves and cut themselves off from their own body to endure it. “Slavery hasn’t been eradicated, but it has been abolished. The same choice for prostitution would be an advance for civilisation,” said the feminist Sylviane Agacinski. Another high-profile feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, co-wrote a counter-argument saying talk of abolishing prostitution was based on “two debatable assumptions: that charging for sex is an affront to women’s dignity and that all prostitutes are victims of their bastard clients”. She said a woman selling sex was “not necessarily a victim of male oppression”. And not all clients were “horrible predators or sexual obsessives who treat the woman as disposable objects”.

As a lover of letters, especially exquisite loveletters, I find myself enamored with Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair (public library) by Anna Holmes — a moving, rigorously researched collection of breakup letters from women across ten centuries, known and unknown, including favorites like Anaïs Ninand Sylvia Plath, and divided thematically — the tell-offs, the “just friends,” the marriage refusals, the unsent letters, and more. (Bonus points: The foreword is by none other than Francine Prose.)

One of the most stirring letters in the anthology comes from French writer, feminist, intellectual, and existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, author of the cult-classic treatise The Second Sex. In 1947, while visiting Chicago, she began an affair with Nelson Algren, best-known for The Man with the Golden Arm, and the two sustained a long-distance relationship across the Atlantic for a number years. But the strain of separation eventually took its toll on Algren and, in 1950, he became withdrawn from the relationship, wanting someone permanent in his life. (He eventually remarried his ex-wife, Amanda Kontowicz, in 1953.)

This letter, which de Beauvoir penned in September of 1950 en route back to Paris after visiting a withdrawn Algren in Chicago, is saturated with the palpable tension between the urgency of her longing and the ease which she tries to create for this man she still loves. To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

I am better at dry sadness than at cold anger, for I remained dry eyed until now, as dry as smoked fish, but my heart is a kind of dirty soft custard inside.

[…]

I am not sad. Rather stunned, very far away fro myself, not really believing you are now so far, so far, you so near. I want to tell you only two things before leaving, and then I’ll not speak about it any more, I promise. First, I hope so much, I want and need so much to see you again, some day. But,remember, please, I shall never more ask to see you — not from any pride since I have none with you, as you know, but our meeting will mean something only when you wish it. So, I’ll wait. When you’ll wish it, just tell. I shall not assume that you love me anew, not even that you have to sleep with me, and we have not to stay together such a long time — just as you feel, and when you feel. But know that i’ll always long for your asking me. No, I cannot think that I shall not see you again. I have lost your love and it was (it is) painful, but shall not lose you. Anyhow, you have me so much, Nelson, what you gave me meant so much, that you could never take it back. And then your tenderness and friendship were so precious to me that I can still feel warm and happy and harshly grateful when I look at you inside me. I do hope this tenderness and friendship will never, never desert me. As for me, it is baffling to say so and I feel ashamed, but it is the only true truth: I just love as much as I did when I landed into your disappointed arms, that means with my whole self and all my dirty heart; I cannot do less. But that will not bother you, honey, and don’t make writing letters of any kind a duty, just write when you feel like it, knowing every time it will make me very happy.

Well, all words seem silly. You seem so near, so near, let me come near to you, too. And let me, as in the past times, let me be in my own heart forever.

Your own Simone

Picture him as a legend, Joan of Arc in drag.

A great nation is conquered by its historic enemy and the General is forced to flee. From a foreign shore, he rouses his people to resistance. Four years later, he marches through the capital in triumph, determined to reunite a country torn apart by faction. But these are democratic times, and he requires more power than the Constitution allows. The people balk at his requests. After a long tug of war, he retreats to his country estate. The nation fails to heal, and its colonies begin to seethe with discontent; the people agitate for the General’s return, and he answers their call. He makes the nation great again—and, in an unexpected twist, he unravels the empire in the name of universal liberation. The nation becomes a shining example of how to conduct international affairs in a new world, as the General charts an independent course between two rival superpowers. But the people fail to acknowledge their debt to him. Only after they have pushed him out of power for the last time do they come to see him as their savior.

This is more or less how Charles de Gaulle wanted to be remembered, and against considerable odds he very nearly achieved his wish. De Gaulle, who died in 1970, was the most polarizing figure in France during his lifetime—half of the country hated him and more than a few tried to kill him—but his story has become a kind of collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in. The resurgence of his reputation might have surprised the Vichy collaborators who dismissed him as a rebel in 1940, or the generation that demanded the end of his rule in 1968, or the electorate that swept his longtime antagonist, the Socialist François Mitterrand, into power in 1981. It would not, however, have surprised the General. “Everyone has been, is, or will be a Gaullist,” he once declared, and so it seems to have come to pass. On the major questions of how France should orient itself toward the world, the cardinal points of the compass remain de Gaulle’s. In the French presidential election earlier this year, both main contenders claimed the Gaullian mantle: the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, by parading his shoddy version of “grandeur” on the international stage, and his Socialist challenger François Hollande, by fitting out his campaign with fulsome tributes to de Gaulle. Even Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, who did not survive the first round of voting, has conceded that while she’s “not a Gaullist,” she is “certainly Gaullian.”

The myth of de Gaulle is all the more remarkable considering the number of contradictions it has absorbed. The French Army commander who grew up in a Catholic household spent most of his career squaring off against the military and the church. The leader who desperately clung to the French empire in the 1940s vigorously dismantled it in the 1960s. The patriot who evinced skepticism toward supranational institutions is now sometimes hailed as a visionary of the European Union.

Consider, too, the array of admirers de Gaulle has attracted: men of the left like Régis Debray, who converted from Guevarism to Gaullism in a Bolivian jail; men of the right like Henry Kissinger, who has told Americans to become students of the French statesman; Osama bin Laden, who liked to quote from de Gaulle’s War Memoirs; Newt Gingrich, who compared his time in the political wilderness in the 2000s to de Gaulle’s retirement to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the 1950s; and Yasir Arafat, who at diplomatic summits made a point of sporting the Cross of Lorraine sent to him by de Gaulle. In his sharp new contribution to Gaullology, In the Shadow of the General, Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh tells of a French filmmaker in a remote corner of Bengal stumbling upon a group of Naxalite guerrillas, who greeted him by shouting a tribute to the French president’s famous anti-imperialist speech in Cambodia in 1966: “De Gaulle–Phnom Penh!” As de Gaulle told the novelist André Malraux, who served as his minister of cultural affairs, “In the end, you know, my only international rival is Tintin!… No one has ever noticed that, because of my size.”