If you can accept that Intelligence is an agency and perhaps poorly supplied with this commodity, you will laugh at this witty series. The more educated you are, the better. Warning to those who believe everything the government told them since WWII : No spy-game serious french movie trend here, just the opposite (actually, it's a tradition to mock our secret services and our mafia)
All good things must come to an end. Colonisation, for instance, is on his last nerve in 1960 when young agent Merleaux enters the scene. Some colonies have gained their autonomy in 1947. Some others see our dear old resistant General hell-bent on keeping them, whereas the world is changing and the public opinion is shifting. We've seen a colonial war before in Indochina (turned into the Vietnam war) and the public opinion was divided. Defend our interests, yes, but these people had the right to defend themselves, especially after we had educated them in human rights and French revolution. And what did we care that they were interested in communism. So were we the french people. The good General would have liked it otherwise, but the communists saved us from Hitler. The bulk of Resistants (citizens, but for a large part communists) and the Red Army saved us. We would have been toast long before American soldiers set foot here if not for them. How do we remodel international relationships after that ? You'll find your answer in season two, which is not as good as the first.
THis is the context that makes it so funny. Our old imperialist mindset is clinging like crazy to old settings, old rules, old views, pratriarchism and above all bureaucracy. Nothing is as reassuring when all is collapsing around you than a good old procedure. The political jokes are hilarious and cruel at the same time. What happened was just born of ignorance of the world if not sheer stupidity sometimes, wrapped in arrogance, and we get to laugh at our elders for not seeing and knowing what was coming but we're not much better. But the fun they've made of the "Françafrica" or neo-colionalism is all too true (when the guy in charge of africa wants a poet elected, whereas the others want a dictator), the agreements with a nazi to find others, the boss who worked with nazis, the paranoid agent who doesn't speak german in the East. And of course, L'algérie, c'est la france !
L'algérie c'est la france ! (Repeated ad nauseum) (until you're sick)
Some say it's not funny. When the ones who said it were ready to torture people and created a paramilitary organisation to do it (here, an agent who wants to defend his properties in Algeria causes its birth !), it was not funny indeed. It is today. You will be hard-pressed to find a nostalgic aged less than 60 even among the Front National. And again, among the voices reclaiming or defending independance, many communists. It's only in this period that socialists really started to claim themselves well and far apart from communists, for a whole decade before the lines socialists/communists were clear... (Some Americans do their best to still not get it, and so you see, the joke is on us too) . For those who LIKE the joke, it's timeless, because of the good president, that good ol'folk (ol'junk ?) De Gaulle. He said "L'algérie c'est la france" et " Je vous ai compris"=I understood you", got his ass kicked on a referendum and quit afterwards !...oooh times, they were a-changing, yeah !
Let me introduce the word " franchouillard", which all the characters are, except maybe young agent Merleau. It is pejorative,but widely accepted by any french person if you speak of an elder. it's like "french at heart" in noble english words, but pejorative, not for the young in french. More "a good old frog at heart". That's the spirit. Whether the frogs feel a tad superior because they jump freely or make a lot of noise all the time, that's for you to guess at.. Since there is no age to think oneself superior in our knowledge of good wine, food and paternalism, we have a lot of "fran-shoe-yar" even now.
