Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! , the translated title of Dario Fo’s 1974 play, is one of the great works of Italian postwar literature. Exploring the struggles between moderates and hardliners in the country’s Communist Party, Fo drags his audience into the heady, violent atmosphere of the Years of Lead. In Italy, of course, that world is dead and buried, yet Fo’s story could just as well apply to the modern French Left. It, too, is riven by factionalism — even if, unlike Italy in the Seventies, France’s radicals now seem to be winning. More than his story, though, it’s Fo’s title that feels most relevant to contemporary France. For it’s quite possible that the country will, at some point, stop paying its debts. If debtors can’t pay, they won’t.
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