[War] France: Vive l'République

[Daniel Garcia]

"France:  Vive l'République"
President Zoé Ampère, French Republic
January 20, 2013


*Two Weeks Ago...*

Zoé leaned forward, stretching now that the thrust from the plane's  
liftoff had diminished.  The flight, from Lyon to Paris, would be a  
short one, fortunately.  Or unfortunately, as what was coming after  
would, by some estimations, be worse.  Zoé would soon be the  
President of France.

It wasn't so long ago that it would have been unimaginable.  But then  
again, not much had worked out as she had hoped or thought.  Her  
first choice for her studies had been philosophy, but her parents  
hadn't been too keen on that, and had forced her to study something  
more practical.  So she studied Computer Science, the rare woman in  
the field at the time.  It was there that she met her husband to be,  
Renaud Saint-Andre.  Of course, he had had to compete for the  
affections of the only woman in the program, or so he said, but they  
were a good fit.  They both had broad interests and were fairly good- 
natured people with seemingly perennial smiles on their faces.

They had married not long after they graduated.  Zoé took a job  
working for Interpol, helping build up their criminal databases.   
Renaud had leapt into the computer industry, which was about to enter  
the Dot-Com boom.  By late 1999, he had made his fortune and left the  
world of start-ups for the world of consulting.  This went well for a  
few months before the Dot-Com crash hit.  Many of their friends lost  
fortunes.  The early 2000's, with Zoé - who at this point was running  
Interpol's database infrastructure and was perhaps the most  
influential tech person at Interpol, by virtue of her having stayed  
at Interpol throughout the boom - holding down a steady job, and  
Renaud doing the occasional consulting work, were good times.

It was during one of Renaud's free periods in 2001 that he involved  
himself in politics for the first time.  By the middle of 2002 he was  
on the Lyon City Council.  He became mayor in late 2005, after the  
mayor had resigned following a minor stroke, partially caused due to  
the stress of the late Autumn riots which had not left Lyon  
untouched.  This was where the misfortune began.

In early 2006, after years of attempting to start a family, Renaud  
and Zoé had gone to a doctor to see if there were any issues.  There  
were:  Renaud was infertile.  She hadn't cried, not that day or that  
night, but she took the next day off, and was visibly saddened.  Over  
the next week, she had returned to her usual merry self, though  
Renaud still caught her moping from time to time.  Looking back, this  
had been a significant rift, though neither acknowledged it at the  
time.  Zoé had become more reflective and Renaud had thrown himself  
into his work.  That helped lead to the next disaster.

The riots of 2005, which had helped make Renaud mayor in some ways  
defined his term as mayor.  He was constantly seeking to end  
discrimination, improve relations between minorities, and integrate  
immigrants.  He also, increasingly as time passed, advocated relaxing  
economic restrictions and moving towards a more free market economy.   
This was partly due to his newfound experiences as mayor, and partly  
due to Zoé's partisanship.  Then, in mid-2007, there were another  
round of riots, and Renaud was characteristically out in front of  
efforts to calm the situation.  Unfortunately, one evening he was so  
far out in front that he found himself between police and rioters.   
While it's clear that the rioters attacked him, it's not clear  
whether it was the rioters' attacks or the police's blows, delivered  
inadvertently while trying to rescue him, was the fatal one.  Between  
that night and the funeral, even as the rest of France continued to  
reel unabatedly from this new round of rioting, the violence in Lyon  
subsided.  Whether this was out of respect for the deceased, or  
inspired by Zoé's own impassioned speech the next night - having  
spent the previous night crying, and more or less destroying a couch  
- castigating pretty much everyone and urging a calming in tensions,  
no one would say, though it was then and there that her own political  
career began.

Zoé quit her position at Interpol, unhappily for her superiors who  
were sad yet understanding in seeing her leave, and began stumping  
around France, calling for an end to the violence, calling for  
reconciliation.  She gained fame in August when, replying on  
television to critics who criticized her lenience for immigrants, said:

"I do not say we give France over to Africa.  I do not say we open  
our doors to immigrants of all classes.  What I do say is that those  
who are here legally, and these form a large, if not a majority of  
the non-ethnic French-people in France, deserve the equal protection  
of the laws, the equal respect of her citizens, and the equal  
standing before French society that our French philosophy demands be  
our highest principle.  And no amount of police force or firepower,  
no amount of oppression or suppression, no amount of neglect or  
dismissal will make the problems we now face go away.  The easy road  
of intolerance can never lead us to peace when the only road that  
will lead us there is the hard road of tolerance."

She even got to meet President Sarkozy in early November.  His  
initial response to the violence had been the brusque one that could  
have been expected from those who had followed his career.  But, by  
the time Zoé met him, he looked much older, and had already began  
searching for the means to bring about reconciliation.  This was  
clear from Zoé's perspective during the meeting, which was an  
unpublicized affair.  At the end of the meeting, Zoé urged Sarkozy to  
push for reconciliation, reminding him that "Only Nixon could go to  
China".  There had been rumors and rumblings that Sarkozy's new years  
message would have indeed announced a reconciliatory policy, and that  
there had been a series of discussions going on with those who were  
perceived as leaders of the rioters about such a policy.  If so, no  
one will ever know.  President Sarkozy was assassinated by a young  
man of Algerian descent in early December.  That's what had brought  
President Legrand into office.

By all accounts, Legrand's first act as President, though not one  
widely publicized, was to destroy any evidence of Sarkozy's  
reconciliatory policy.  Legrand was a hard-liner, and given the  
elevated status of the deceased Sarkozy, it wouldn't have done to  
show that he had gone soft towards the end.  For the minorities of  
France, the result was something of a dark age.  Zoé continued to  
campaign for reconciliation, though as time passed, she broadened her  
message to cover the whole range of topics facing France.  But before  
the police shootings of November 11, 2009, she was not a force to be  
reckoned with.

That evening, after the shootings, Zoé was shown on national  
television, denouncing the killing of dozens of people who were  
rioting over access to food.  She had unilaterally denounced  
President Legrand.  It was here that she had become a political star,  
and here that Legrand began to enter the political wilderness.   
Parliament was dissolved two days later and elections were held in  
December.  Zoé ran as an independent candidate and won a seat in the  
National Assembly.  A few months later she joined the UMP when it  
became clear that, in a party not big enough for both her and  
Legrand, it was Legrand who was being squeezed out.

In the intervening years, she had continued to gain in prominence.   
She pushed the UMP towards a more liberal economic agenda, and pushed  
for reconciliation.  The Socialists retrenched economically, and  
ended up with an incoherent message on reconciliation, or lack  
thereof.  It was all a blur, the political and economic situation so  
chaotic that nothing seemed to make sense.  And then she had been  
elected President.  That had brought things into focus very fast.

Shaking over her reverie, she realized that the plane was close to  
landing in Paris.  She would soon be inaugurated as President and the  
hard work would begin.  But, of course, first she would have to make  
her way through the assembled press, and say something.  But she was  
tired and hadn't thought of even the shortest remark before taking  
off, and she hadn't thought about it during the flight.

So, when the plane landed, and the stairway down to the tarmac was in  
place, leaving Zoé to look over the crowd of assembled journalists,  
she was at a loss, and was leaning towards not saying much of  
anything at all.  And, she almost succeeded in getting to the waiting  
car without saying anything, when out from the crowd of reporters,  
realizing that their likelihood of getting any kind of statement out  
of the President to be was diminishing quickly, shouted a voice,  
"Don't you have *anything* to say?"

She paused at this, and things were very still for a moment.   
Suddenly, Zoé did have something to say.  Nothing long or great, but  
something.  So she smiled broadly, and turned from the car door just  
beside her, and said what she had to say, with no fanfare:

"Vive l'République."


ACTIONS:

1)  An Introduction...