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| The 1998 World Cup winning French football team was an emblem of French diversity. The National Front said it wasn't "French" enough. |
Most of all one question is being asked: who are we?
France, like many European countries, is really a collection of states, separated by language and culture, that have come together as a political union, through wars and alliances. And as a the country at the crossroads of Europe, France has always had people coming and going from all corners of the continent, helping to create a rich cultural soup. Within the "Hexagon", the south and the north, the Catalans and the Alsatians, the Bretons and the Basques – to name a few – have always maintained contrasting identities.
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| Nicolas Sarkozy: son of a Hunagrian immigrant with a dash of Greek olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt |
That's the ethnic mix. Then there's the religious diversity. There are more Muslims and more Jews in France than anywhere else in Europe. France is by tradition Catholic, of course, with Protestant sauce, but the real religion of France is secularism, a deeply-held belief in rationalism, scepticism, philosophical questioning with roots in the Enlightenment and branches that spread into every sector of society. It was one of the first (and only) countries in Europe to officially sunder church from state back in 1905, a step that we in Britain have yet to take.
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| Charles Aznavour: son of Armenian immigrants |
If France were a person, naturally one might think of her as a sort of Catherine Deneuve – cool, chic, ironic – so it's right that this chart has both Sun and Venus in stylish Libra.
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| Serge Gainsbourg: son of Russian immigrants |
The Sun at 0° Libra – equality and fairness. Libra is a cardinal sign which means leadership, initiative and action, but in the realm of the seventh sign that means considered action, political action, diplomatic action. Since this is a critical degree at one of the cross-quarter points of the Zodiac, this gives the chart tremendous power.
That Sun is also right on the MC, France shines very brightly in the world. It's actually not a huge country (pop. c. 64 million) but its reach and influence have been, and still are, global.
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| Still the best book on the psychology of colonialism. |
The millions of souls who became the colonised were not only exploited economically but they had their own senses of identity assaulted.
This pushing of boundaries is Sagittarius rising at work. Sagittarius' ruler is Jupiter, the planet of expansion and in the natal chart it conjuncts Neptune, who dissolves boundaries. Sagittarius signifies things foreign. Sagittarius Moon is an inveterate traveller, a lover of the exotic, an adventurer, a philosopher. Also Sagittarius is about ideas, higher learning – and French philosophy from Descartes to Barthes has influenced human thought enormously.
(You could visualise France's Sun-MC as Catherine Deneuve and the Moon-Asc as Jean-Paul Sartre – the two faces France shows to the world.)
Liberté
You can see how the mob (Pluto in Aquaruis, the common people) changed (Uranus) the leader (Leo) in this natal chart. It's a startlingly exact opposition between the planets of revolution (Uranus) and transformation (Pluto), and France is prone to upheaval whenever those planets form a hard aspect.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, French colonies exploded – in particular Vietnam and Algeria – in fierce rejection of their colonial masters. This was when both Uranus and Pluto were ripping through France's 9th house of colonies and ideals. When Uranus hit France's North Node there at the top of the chart, we saw the upheavals of 1968, when for a while it looked as if there might be another revolution.
Right now, the two heavy-hitting planets are at loggerheads. Uranus is in Aries squaring Pluto in Capricorn. And France is still living with the consequences of colonialism, de-colonisation and its aftermath. One of the unsavoury sub-texts of this current election is racism, in particular towards the huge populations of maghrebis, now second or third generation French. Clearly, a some of them, for example the killer who murdered seven people in the name of Islam this week, do not feel part of the secular project that is France.
This is from 2006 and very prescient.
Uranus has knocked the country off-balance. When that planet crosses the IC – the motherland, home, the soil, le terroir – you can expect some upset. What is more, Uranus has been opposing France's Libra Sun – putting the country's identity in question, shaking the French sense of self.
On its own, that would be a major transit. But this Uranus transit comes with added energy from the lord of the underworld himself, Pluto.
Pluto has been ploughing through the first house for more than a decade now, carving out a new face for France. It's been a painful process at times, but it has produced a more diverse France, with a President bearing a foreign name, vibrant youth culture, a rainbow football team – and a vocal far right.
What's more Saturn the reaper transited the French Sun just when the EU started to wobble. During the past two years Saturn's been going through the house of leadership and the French have really questioned the people in charge, and even the system that got them there. As with the rest of our democracies, it's become evident that a tiny cabal of suits runs the country.
A series of scandals – sexual and financial – has dogged the power elite, allowing the charismatic right-winger Marine Le Pen some easy targets. Thirty years (a Saturn cycle) of more or less corrupt governance has come under scrutiny. Pluto has been tearing down the French facade of cool style to reveal behaviour by politicians that's not ironic or clever, just rather venal and sordid.
Uranus is currently smack on the IC, which reflects the deep shock to the national psyche of the killings in Toulouse this week. This year the Uranus-Pluto square will be causing maximum stress and upset.
When Pluto enters the French house of national income and squares Venus (money) in 2013/14 there may well be more financial shocks. Meanwhile, Uranus will oppose that Libra Venus hmmm... bumpy. Perhaps the French love affair with consumerism will be challenged.
What of French national identity? This is in the process right now of being reshaped. France is due for change. The country has a tendency to go through periods of calcification that then need to be exploded. This is the Saturn-Jupiter opposition in the fixed signs of Taurus and Scorpio at work. As a frequent visitor to France, it's felt to me that the country lost it's joie de vivre some time in the 1990s. The problem with getting rid of God is that it leaves you with little left but shopping and sex - and both lead inevitably to tristesse, a very French state of mind (but that is for another post).
To a frequent visitor, France feels like it's coming to the end of one of its decadent patches - perhaps, as happened during the last Uranus transit through Aries in the 1920s, the country is about to recreate an avant garde and again become a mecca for innovators, thinkers, artists and dreamers.
I'll leave you with Dalida: half Italian, half Egyptian, all French.
