Gérard Depardieu, the French actor who moved to Belgium
recently to escape the confiscatory 75 per cent top marginal income tax rate imposed
on millionaires by newly elected French President François Hollande, is at least as “French” as
the Eiffel Tower. And his background points to a proletarian upbringing.
When another of France’s sons – in fact, the richest man in
the country, Bernard Arnault, the CEO and chief shareholder of the luxury
behemoth LVMH – kicked the socialist dust of France from his A. Testoni Moro
monk-strap shoes and moved to Belgium to escape the depredations visited upon
him by M. Hollande, the first socialist President of France since François Mitterrand left office, the
left wing Libération expressed its contempt for the rich in a headline on its
front page: “Get lost, you rich b------.”
The san culottes socialists in France squealed their
approval and secretly dreamed of guillotines.
Upon Depardieu’s leave-taking, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc
Ayrault, similarly dumped on M. Depardieu, calling him a “a pathetic loser.”
The “pathetic loser” responded last Sunday with an open
letter. “I was born in 1948,” M. Depardieu wrote, “I started working aged 14,
as a printer, as a warehouseman, then as an actor, and I’ve always paid my
taxes.” Depardieu noted that he had paid 145 million euros in tax, and to this
day employs 80 people. Last year the French actor paid taxes amounting to 85
per cent of his income. “I am neither worthy of pity nor admirable, but I shall
not be called 'pathetic’,” he concluded.
And, now an émigré, M. Depardieu returned his French
passport.
The government had been expecting the French people,
traditionally distrustful of riches and Marxists under the skin, to heap shame upon
M. Depardieu. They had seriously misjudged the temper of the people; according to
a poll taken by the popular Le Parisien, nearly 70 per cent of the French populous
supported M. Depardieu’s boisterous political incorrectness.
M. Depardieu has always been pleasingly irascible. Refused
permission to use the loo on an Air France plane, he urinated in a plastic
bottle; he’s punched a number of annoying paparazzi in various countries; and
his chat about some contemporary actors has been abrasive: “She has nothing,”
M. Depardieu said of Juliette Binoche. “I can’t even comprehend how she made 50
movies.”
The French admire excess: Hence the opulence of Versailles
and the French Revolution, itself excessive, inspired in part as a reaction to
the excesses on the monarchy.
Excess, thy name is Depardieu. But the man, large in body and heart, is no
hypocrite. His drunken brawls have not led to stints in tony rehabilitation centers;
he is not contrite by nature, and he would not be seen within miles of a health
food store, which is to French cuisine what rat poison is to rats.
As an actor, his personality is porous. M. Depardieu has had
no formal acting training, and yet he has an uncanny ability to breathe life
into such disparate characters as Christopher Columbus or Reynaldo in Keith
Branagh’s Hamlet, Cyrano de Bergerac on stage and screen, Rasputin and Jean
Valjean. He has worked under the direction of such giants as Bertolucci, Ang Lee,
Godard, Resnais, Handke,Truffaut, Wajda and Weir.
When the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda left his
county in 1982 for France, there to direct “Danton,” he chose M. Depardieu to
play the part of Danton, a revolutionist and friend of Robespierre who truly
was a man of the people, much beloved by them. During the Reign of Terror, which
Danton vigorously opposed by means of a newspaper he wrote, Robespierre made arrangement
for Danton’s execution. Robespierre, the apostle of Terror, could not permit
Danton to live, for he was continually calling upon the people to demand their
rights, given to them by the revolution itself. Wajda remained in France for
six years, and when communist finally collapsed under the weight of its own
internal contradictions, he returned in 1989 to a free Poland from which all
the Robespierre worshipers of state power and terror had fled.
In his confrontation with the ideologue socialists of France,
it is M. Depardieu who is playing the part of Danton; M. Hollande is his Robespierre.
“I am leaving,” M.
Depardieu said to his own Robespierres, “because you consider that success,
creation, talent, anything different, must be punished.” His new
house -- not inappropriately a remodeled customs house -- is in a small Belgian
village about 24 miles from France.
In time, the French will tire of their ideological frauds and
give them the bum’s rush; perhaps then M. Depardieu may return home to his
beloved France.
Comments
Good. It can't happen soon enough. The problem with socialism, Maggie Thatcher said, is that "sooner or later you run out of other people's money." This is how that happens.
Socialism was a serious concern when there were gulags into which one could commit kulaks, after first appropriating their wealth. On this side of the water, it has never been more than a political fad. Nothing is so temporary as a fad, G.K. Chesterton says.
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Wish I were as optimistic. There are certainly few American pols who will admit to being socialists, democratic, revoltionary, or other. Hear precious little explicit demand that the state control the means of production or eliminate private property. But, call it what you will, we have been moving inexorably towards a post-constitutional statist regime with heavy regulation and taxation, government increasing part of overall economy. These guys now are happy to take the golden eggs, let the goose proceed as best she can until she moves to Belgium. We get to keep title to property, but how it is used is increasingly a matter of government control. In this second Obama term I'm going to be taking solace in knowing that the melt-down of the ridiculous statist policies in, for example, the healthcare "reform" fiasco.
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Balancing the next state budget exclusively with spending cuts could be the final straw that breaks Connecticut's economic back, pushing it back into recession, the University of Connecticut's economic think-tank warned Wednesday.
The Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis also said that such a move could trigger as many as 25,000 annual job losses between the public and private sectors combined.
"The Connecticut economy is in trouble -- deep trouble," center economists wrote in a report titled, "Averting the Doldrums: Will Connecticut Avoid Recession?"
"If people see the state is not going to sustain key initiatives, then the private sector is going to respond," Prof. Fred Carstensen, the center's director, said. "People need to understand that there is a profound connection."
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's administration has made important strides to reverse more than two decades of almost nonexistent job growth, Carstensen said, citing investments in manufacturing, biosciences, financial services, and cutting-edge information technology.
http://www.ctmirror.org/story/18517/report-closing-state-deficits-spending-cuts-alone-could-spark-another-recession
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Since 1980, state spending has risen from $4,400 per household to $10,000 per household, an increase of 227%.[3]
Read more: http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Connecticut_state_budget#ixzz2FVbLekz6
It's not necessary for the "proletariat” – really, the omni-competent state – to seize property (money and goods) from the bourgeois to “own” the means of production (communism) when the state as easily may regulate businesses (fascism).
Mr. Carstensen is a beneficiary of state largess; he works for UConn. Why would be against crony capitalism?