France, a Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown E-Book

Jonathan Miller

• Herausgeber: Gibson Square
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Meet the real French, and chuckle!The French are savvy, sophisticated, elegant — Right? Wrong! The French...* lecture the world about haute cuisine yet they eat more McDonald's hamburgers than anywhere else in the world* roll their eyes at foreign culture even as CSI is their most watched TV programme* pretend to be literary though Fifty Shades of Gray is France's best-selling book, everAlmost two decades ago Jonathan Miller moved to France. Soon he discovered the hilarious truth. The modern French live in a feverish state of fantasy. People are paid to pretend to work, pretend to strike, and generally think work causes depression and suicide. Dental hygienists are illegal, yet the French exchange a staggering 184 billion kisses every year. While preaching liberté, the State forbids everything, is run by one school's alumni, messes up over two thirds of the economy. It goes on....

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Jonathan Miller

France, a Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

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FRANCE: A NATION ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Some time ago I made an appointment to visit my lawyer. I was told to ignore the sign on the front door announcing that the office was on strike. It was a national day of action protesting proposed reforms to the legal profession. Instead I should knock discreetly at the side entrance and someone would let me in. The office was pretending to be on strike, while conducting business as usual. In France, not everything is always as it seems. In a country where people claim to be revolutionaries but are terrified of change, boast of their social model while condemning young people to mass unemployment, and claim to be the best cooks in the world, while a million people a day eat at McDonald’s, there is much that is paradoxical, even psychotic.

When I bought my modest maison in France almost two decades ago, equipped with rusty O-level French, I was seduced by the beauty of the country, discouraged by the difficulty of communicating effectively with French people, and entranced by the otherness of everything. Like many English people newly arrived in France, I imagined I had stumbled into a kind of paradise. Learning the language was both a challenge and a pleasure. The first 10 years are the hardest, but fluency (or an approximation of fluency, which is all I claim) is the very best tool for understanding the French, whose beautiful, romantic language is an insight into their soul. I have discovered the French to be warm, funny and generous. But I also learned how France really is and understood how their language has prevented them from seeing the world realistically, often isolating themselves within a francophone discourse that can be pretty remote from the harsh global reality and indeed is often delusional.

In 2014 I was elected to my local council - an experience that has given me introductions to many politicians and a new window into the endless contradictions of French life and the refusal to confront reality. It is fundamental to the French sickness that they believe that they are unique in seeing the world as it is, and everyone else is mistaken. As any psychiatrist can tell you, it is the patient who denies he is ill who is likely to be sicker than the one who accepts having some problems.

I have often heard people who do not really know the French say that ‘the French hate the English.’ This is complete nonsense. On the whole I think they rather like us. I have certainly never encountered any visceral anti-British sentiment in my years in France although they do like to tease us, if not as much as we sometimes tease them. The relationship is much more complicated than that. And our own relationship to the French is also nuanced. What’s clear is that we often struggle to understand one another.

The French are often adorable, but also frequently infuriating, often naïve, even infantile, hopelessly romantic, deeply neurotic and capable of holding numerous incompatible thoughts in their head at the same time. They admire principles, even when they may not work when applied in practice. The French talk often of their exceptionalism. And they are exceptional, but not always in a good way. The impossibilities of the French idea of themselves are startling. It is a country of great beauty, but where villages are dilapidated, millions of dwellings abandoned and suburban homeowners fortify themselves behind exterior walls that are made of untreated parpaing (breeze blocks), especially in the south. It is a state that claims to be laïc (prohibiting the state from recognising religion or even ethnicity) yet where millions in public funds are spent restoring cathedrals, even as Muslim girls are sent home from school for wearing headscarves and skirts that are deemed provocatively too long. In Britain girls are sent home for skirts that are too short.

To explore the endless paradoxes of France is to discover a nation that is dysfunctional and frequently self-destructive and where, it is said, the customer is always wrong. Arriving in France is like putting your watch back 50 years, to Britain in the 1970s. Whose carrots, as they say in one colourful idiom suggesting a situation that has become hopeless, are cooked (les carottes sont cuites). France is a country blessed with natural and human resources, with a cultural heritage admired everywhere. It is a society nominally committed to equality, liberty and fraternity, but it is failing to reliably deliver any of these things to many of its 65 million people.

This work will doubtless be decried by some as French-bashing and it is true that it is often critical. But I make no claim that the French are unique in the world in being prisoners of their own mythology. I do not say that France is better or worse than Britain or the United States, which I also know well. The French do not in any case need me to bash them since there are plenty of French writers and intellectuals who have made a career out of it. And there is always scope for the French to bash the endless foibles, hypocrisies and contradictions of America and Britain. Indeed, they seem to relish doing so. I merely take France on its own terms, and try to measure the gaps between the country’s unlimited potential and its often pitiful performance.

The selection of entries can justly be criticised as personal, haphazard, capricious and even irrational, in part a contradictionary, mostly un dictionnaire égoïste - an egocentric dictionary, influenced by my own experiences, the places I have visited, the people I have met, my immersion in and seduction by the French language and not least by my own location in the Languedoc, on the less fashionable side of the Rhone Valley, in one of the poorer parts of France. It is definitely not written from the perspective of Paris. I have tried to go from the particular to the general and the reverse, seeking to relate these stories to the bigger contemporary narrative of France. If I am negative and sometimes snarky, it is because from the beginning of this project I have been fuelled by rage at a political class that has ignored the real problems of the country, while feathering its own nests. I am afraid the snark is a bad habit acquired as a newspaper reporter.

The rose-tinted view of France offered by sentimental writers like Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence, 1989) and many others has not been helpful to understanding this country. France is an easy country to romanticise, but it is doing it no favours to overlook the present position. Yes it is often beautiful and full of charm, but not always. Can France be saved? Possibly. I conclude my tour with an Afterword, a modest manifesto. I reckon this to be good advice, but doubt it will gain much traction.

A woman in the village café, overhearing one of my morning rants about the conceits, paradoxes and misapprehensions of France, asked me bluntly: ‘If you don’t like it, why do you live here?’ The answer is that I love France, the French, their language, their music and art and literature, their extraordinary countryside, their ancient villages, their cheese and their wine - indeed, I have been in love with this country and its people since I first came here on a family holiday, aged 10. But the more I have come to know about France, and the greater my admiration for ordinary French people, the greater my contempt for its elites, who have betrayed the country and its future. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The late Tony Judt, a superb historian of France, wrote that reading the history of interwar France, ‘one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens.’ My argument is that France occupies once more what Judt identifies as the terrain of ‘collective and individual irresponsibility’. The Economist in 2012 said that France was a time-bomb at the heart of Europe. It has become even more dangerous since, to itself and others. The French need a slap, at least, if not a decent kicking, to break their hallucinatory cycle. This is a nation with the potential to be great, that is failing. It is heartbreaking to witness this.

Author’s Note

The book is organised alphabetically, in French. Within the text French words are in italics, followed by the author’s translation into English. The headings are followed by an explanation in English, sometimes literally translated but often not. Words ina different typecross-refer to related entries.

A

AFFAIRES

Business and funny business

An affaire is a business, an homme d’affaires is a businessman - but often, an affaire is a scandal. Scandals in France are often tangled, and are typically named after their central personalities or feature, hence the historic Affaire Dreyfus, the Affaire Bettencourt, the Sarkozy-Kadhafi Affaire, the long-running Bygmalion Affaire, and Macron’s Affaire Banalla with MacronLeaks, which combines gratuitous violence, patronage, the possibility of a sexual relationship, and many enquêtes (investigations). Each of these has its own Wikipedia page attempting to make sense of the typically tortuous plot and multitudinous cast, but neither these accounts nor the vaguely-sourced and often tendentious information relayed by the media are always convincing.

Affaires run the gamut from swindling rich widows, secret political financing, everyday bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, banking, football match-fixing and inevitably sex. Sometimes the actual scandal is imaginary, the invention of prosecutors and journalists pursuing political vendettas. Pedants distinguish between great political and financial affaires and purely criminal affaires ofbanditisme(gangsterism). Affaire can also be used to evoke a romantic affair, or liaison, not uncommon in France. If your employer is generous you will fly classe affaires (business class) on Air France but if really generous he will not make you fly on Air France at all.

L’AFRIQUE

The heart of French darkness

LaFrançafrique is French shorthand for France in Africa. Much of north and west Africa was under French rule in the 19th century and first half of the 20th, and although the colonial ties were dissolved (and in the case of Algeria, brutally so), the political, linguistic and emotional connections are perhaps as strong as ever. Also, the conflicts. On a trip to Mali, I visited the grand marché in the centre of Bamako where as I walked through the market, there were murmurs of toubabou, toubabou (white man, white man). On one side of the market, on the rue Mohammed, is the Grande Mosquée (Great Mosque) tallest building in the country; facing it, on the avenue de la République, is the French-built national assembly, with odd Moorish flourishes on a building that looks to have been modelled on a suburban French high school. The market itself is rooted in an Africa with roots more ancient than either Islam or democracy. Traders deal in everything from animist fetishes, the skins of leopards, the heads of monkeys and potent spells. And there are magnificent, explosively colourful woven and dyed textiles.

Mali was already too dangerous for me to visit Timbuktu, a lifetime ambition. At the last minute, my wary pilot discovered ‘technical problems’ with his King Air turboprop that would make the trip impossible. The road was insecure and westerners daring to travel it regarded as kidnap fodder. I left Mali optimistic, nevertheless, writing in the Washington Post that it still had a chance to become a west African success story. I thought the country might be capable of finding a social compact, under a government that while far from perfect, was at least vaguely democratic. In retrospect, I should have seen the coming catastrophe. Mali was crawling with spies. Mysterious Cubans and Americans were installed at corner tables in the best restaurants. The music was incredible, but the atmosphere on the streets was menacing. In 2013, Mali’s government fell, faced with an Islamist insurgency that seized Timbuktu and much of the north.

President François Hollande deployed French forces to Mali to combat the Islamist extremists in the Sahel, and established military bases throughout former French Africa, and beyond. His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, with British and American help, deposed Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 although with disastrous consequences. There are now Islamic State enclaves on the Mediterranean coast and a tidal wave of migrants is crossing the sea seeking asylum in Europe, and straining France’s relations with Italy, where most of them land. The French are entangled as far east as Djibouti in the Horn of Africa where they maintain a demi-brigade of their Foreign Legion and operate a secretive drone and special forces base in partnership with the United States Africa command. France looks warily at Africa, no longer for the possibilities of commercial exploitation that inspired the French African empire in the first place, but because it is a menacing continent across just a short stretch of sea from France itself.

Parisians sometimes express their disdain for the rustiques (rustics) of France by muttering l’Afrique commence au sud de la Loire (Africa begins south of the river Loire).

AGRICULTURE

semi-governmental

The French are some of the most urbanised people on earth yet still cling to a romantic notion of themselves as paysans (peasants, people of the soil). Rural employment is only 3 per cent of the workforce (versus 1 per cent in the United Kingdom, 2 per cent in the United States) yet there is a quasi-religious respect for terroir (the soil, the countryside) shared by even those who rarely go near it.

The rustic pretensions of France conceal an agricultural sector that is becoming highly industrialised. If you drive through the centre of France you will see enormous fields of wheat and sunflowers, onto which the French pump vast quantities of water, often wastefully in the heat of the day, whence it largely evaporates. This is a highly effective food machine that makes the French largely self-sufficient in terms of their basic food supply (though they say that in time of war, it is wise to go long on cooking oil and sugar). The French process vast quantities of foodstuffs, including dairy products, cereals and wine and the sector accounts for roughly 15 per cent of French exports.

The fetishisation of agriculture has major political consequences. Farmers are often angry, blockading roads and demanding subsidies to protect them from the marketplace. Blockades of motorways in the north of France and around Lyons by angry farmers in 2015 produced promises of new subsidies. President François Hollande promised to put pressure on supermarkets to raise prices and said schools, prisons and hospitals should buy only French meat. Utterly illegal under EU rules but it was a good headline. The farmers rejected the offer by closing the frontiers with Germany and Spain, ransacking trucks in search of agricultural goods coming into the country, which they regard as unfair competition. Farmers also frequently dump tons of manure in public spaces to protest their miserable lot. There are, naturally, no arrests. The police are too busy keeping Uber closed to keep the frontiers open.

All French presidents have attended the annual agriculture salon in Paris and are photographed admiring French-built combine harvesters and posing with fat cows, goats, and sheep. The French are the largest beneficiaries of the EU’s common agricultural policy but a lot of the subsidies go straight to the cereal barons with very little, in reality, trickling down to the milk producers and producers of beef or the remaining paysans, who continue to till their tiny plots, milking their cows, dutifully sowing their crops of winter wheat and sunflowers, and closing highways.

AÏGO BOULIDO

foul panacea

When I was sick, a kindly villager made this for me and I was cured. This potion of Provençal origin is made of garlic (lots), herbs of the garrigue, olive oil, egg white and the mint-like salvia plant (sorge). It is traditionally consumed on Christmas day after the excesses of la grande bouffe (the great feast) eaten on Christmas Eve. Also prepared as required throughout the year as a remedy for almost anything. French people make extravagant claims for traditional remedies but this one really works, if you can bear to let it pass your lips. If it isn’t dégueulasse (disgusting), it isn’t working.

Recipe: more garlic than you’d think humanly possible, thyme, sage, a cup and a half of salt water, pepper, a splash of olive oil, egg yolk (one or two), croutons from a baguette deep-fried in olive oil. If the garlic will not drive away demons then at least it will repel relatives who don’t care enough about you.

AIRBUS

(over-) Reaching for the sky

The French-based aircraft manufacturer faces turbulence. Its new military air-lifter, the A400M, is 10 years late, and 6.2 billion euros over budget. It is still not convincingly airworthy, one recently crashing, killing its crew, when faulty software shut down the fuel supply. The pride of the fleet, the giant A380 super-jumbo, has sold poorly and may never be profitable. Smaller Airbus jets have done much better, becoming the staple of regional and low-cost carriers and there are strong hopes for the new A350 inter-continental twin-jet. Being French, Airbus planes have dispensed with the traditional control yoke and replaced it with a side-mounted joystick like those used by video games. A tray table has been put where the column used to go, which makes it easier for the pilots to eat their meals.

Airbus has become a vast and complicated business, and would be proof that it is possible to run a world-class enterprise mostly out of France, except that there is energetic outsourcing of actual production to China and the United States. Airbus headquarters at Blagnac airport in prosperous Toulouse is the centre of an economic microclimate. Toulouse has an actual rush hour because so many people have real jobs, and you can buy A&W Root Beer in the expat shop that caters for all the Americans who work there, some of them alumni of Boeing.

AIR FRANCE

Employee-benefit scheme masquerading as an airline

Snooty personnel and a dubious safety record. ‘Avoid at all costs,’ says one of my French neighbours, whose monthly trips to China he schedules via Germany, after too many disrupted journeys on the national carrier. Aviation Week recently wondered whether Air France was destined to follow Pan Am into bankruptcy. Air France is being slaughtered by EasyJet on its domestic routes yet its pilots recently staged disruptive strikes to stop the airline from expanding its own low-cost subsidiary, Transavia. Management capitulated and France now has no chance of launching a major low-cost competitor.

Air France mimics in so many ways the activity of an airline, but it is really a paraétatique (semi-governmental) enterprise operating a lavish employee benefit programme, which also flies 245 aircraft. The crash in 2009 of an Airbus A330 into the Atlantic due to pilot error, killing all 228 aboard, was a disaster for the airline’s reputation. Another catastrophe was narrowly averted in spring 2015 when an Air France crew set a course to fly into an African volcano, and were about to do so, before being alerted by their instruments to pull up. It is not clear that the loss of an Air France Concorde in 2000, killing everyone on board and more people on the ground, was entirely the fault of Air France, as there was debris on the runway that damaged the aircraft. But before the crash, American safety regulators had warned Air France on four occasions of problems with its Concorde fleet.

Postings on the Professional Pilots Rumour Network, an online forum for airline pilots, reflect widespread contempt for the management of Air France and the professional competence of its pilots. According to Atlantico, Air France’s operating costs per seat per kilometre are three times higher than Ryanair and twice as high as EasyJet, while senior Air France pilots work far fewer hours than their counterparts at British Airways and are paid more (200,000 euros per year for senior officers). Air France also owns the Dutch carrier KLM, whose management is not in love with its French bosses.

ALGIERS

One-time jewel in the colonial crown

Annexing Algeria was seen as a civilising mission, although this was a view to which few actual Algerians ever subscribed. After bloodily settling the country in 1830, it was declared nothing other than a départment of France itself and the vast resources and expanse of the country were annexed and then ruthlessly exploited. With insouciant respect for the environment, the French even tested atomic weapons in the Algerian desert. Inevitably, there was a violent war for Algerian independence and eventually the French were kicked out and the country has been independent since 1962.

The film The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) is everybody’s first reference for this brutal war, whose echoes continue to resonate. Algeria remains a multi-faceted headache for the French. There are millions of people living in France who claim Algerian roots, many of them Muslim, others the descendants of the French immigrants who colonised the country and were forced to leave and others of Spanish, Italian and Jewish origin. The European Algerians forced from the country after independence are called pieds-noirs (‘black boots’) and have themselves suffered from discrimination in France. France, still dependent on Algeria for oil and gas, is a major security and has sensitive, almost indefensible borders with Libya, Tunisia, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and the Western Sahara, all of them infested with Islamic militants for whom France remains an eternal enemy.

ALLEMANDS

Les boches - feared, unloved

The French do not love the Germans, although they fear them, grudgingly respect them and have shackled their national interests to them for 60 years. Appeasing the Germans has been and remains at the very centre of post World War Two French policy. The institutions that form the kernel of today’s European Union were at the heart of this policy of rapprochement, starting with the Coal and Steel Community, which evolved into the European Economic Community and then the European Union and the common currency zone. This worked well for the French until Germany was reunified, after which the relationship between the two nations has become increasingly lopsided, not evidently to the advantage of the French.

The contemporary entanglement with Germany is rooted in the early medieval foundations of Charlemagne’s Carolingian empire and the outcome of the Guerre de Cent Ans (100 Years’ War, 1337 to 1453) of the Plantagenets against the Valois, after which France turned its back on its links with England, to look east. Today this strategy is never questioned, which is a pity as the relationship is obsolescent. The French have deluded themselves into believing that they can stand up to the Anglo-Saxon monolith, by aligning with the Germans. Even if this strategy had ever been plausible, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent relaunch of Germany as an economy vastly more powerful than France has put the French into a subservient relationship that is leading it nowhere other than into servitude.

ALTERMONDIALISTES

Other-worldly ecologists

The French version of a tree-hugger. Perhaps they cultivate a little organic cannabis behind the yourte (yurt). A movement opposed to ultra-libéralisme (Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism), capitalism generally, money, fracking, genetically modified foods, altermondialisme is closely related to Zadisme. The spiritual home of the altermondialistes is the plateau of Larzac in the south, where José Bové, the militant ecologist, once drove a tractor into the Millau branch of McDonald’s to protest junk food.

ALTRAD, MOHED

Bedouin millionaire

France’s most successful Arab immigrant. His story is inspiring. Doesn’t know his own birthday - either 1948 or 1951. Born in Syria, orphaned, attended school clandestinely, immigrated to France where he studied engineering at the University of Montpellier before working in information technology for Alcatel and Thomson. Bought a failing scaffolding company in southern France and built it into a global construction-support business with 17,000 employees. Author of three acclaimed novels and a management book. Owner of Montpellier Hérault rugby club. Given the Légion d’honneur by Jacques Chirac in 2005. He was named World Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2015.

What! How could this be? A Frenchman, named world entrepreneur of the year? It seems impossible. The French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur, according to former American president George W. Bush. The French political class was delighted, taking it as evidence that France was ‘open for business’. Altrad was quoted praising France for putting him on the road to success and said he hoped his story could inspire the country to believe in itself. None of this made sense to me so I phoned Altrad and found his views were much more nuanced. He is indeed grateful for having found asylum in France after his disturbed childhood, but is not exactly brimming with enthusiasm for the business climate in France. I asked him to explain the paradox of France, a country with such unlimited potential that always seems to underperform. ‘I’m not a politician, I consider myself first of all a writer and then a businessman, but there is a paradox and it can be very dark,’ he tells me. ‘The problem is cultural. The French have always had a problem with money. When you are rich and successful you are suspicious. In other countries to be successful is seen as a good thing.’

Yes, his Altrad Group employs 17,000 people, but only 3,000 in France. Wage overheads - social charges and taxes - are twice as high in France as they are in the UK and Germany. ‘Another problem is the French political class,’ he says. He is careful not to be partisan but believes that all French politicians have difficulty understanding where the wealth of a nation might originate. Politicians have no understanding that businesses cannot be taxed indefinitely, he said. ‘Unemployment and poverty has increased for 30 years in France... I want to be constructively critical. It is difficult to avoid hurting feelings. But the politicians don’t understand the huge consequences of constantly increasing taxes. The only place where you can make value is companies.’

As if to prove his point about the suspicion of wealth and wealthy people in France, in a profile in the newspaper Libération in 2013, an unnamed socialist deputy launched an astonishing attack on Altrad, claiming he ‘believed nothing’ of Altrad’s biography. The newspaper cited other unnamed critics accusing Altrad of using a ghostwriter to achieve his literary success, of being a member of the Assad clan that has ruled Syria for decades, and of money-laundering on his route to success. I repeat these accusations with great reluctance, because I can find no evidence to support any of them. What is illuminating is the naked hatred directed at those who achieve success in business in France. And it is worse for Altrad, who is an Arab. The newspaper may claim that it was merely repeating the claims of others but this won’t do. Libération, which receives 10 million euros of subsidies a year from the state, offered no proof whatsoever for its defamations but compounded this terrible journalism by awarding anonymity to the person who made them. And this is a newspaper whose snooty political reporters think that voters have no right to know about the adulteries of their presidents.

Altrad is a very good businessman and writer who has employed thousands of people and has been gracious to his adopted country. His story is exceptional and inspiring and France needs more like him. But he has some money, so the French left hates him and is utterly unscrupulous in its attacks.

AMERICAINS, LES

Barbarians and mythic superheroes

Not one or the other, but both at the same time. French people adore all manifestations of American popular culture including line dancing, McDonald’s and trick-or-treating. Alarmed, their governments have implemented measures to restrict imports of American cultural products: American rock music is so popular that radio stations have been ordered to play less of it. America is seen as France’s original ally and the special relationship between France and America is believed to be firmly anchored in the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, a gift of the people of France to the United States. Yet the French also resent and fear America.

The French are grateful to have been saved from the Germans twice in the 20th century by American armies, yet these memories also provoke a certain ambivalence. There is shame that such a rescue should have been necessary in the first place. After the second war, France did not exactly make life easy for the Americans, ordering their military out, withdrawing from the NATO military command structure, and cozying up to the Russians. The British became the best friends of the Americans. Today, America is seen as the cradle of ultra-liberalism, menacing the French way of life, but also as the only ally ultimately strong enough to be indispensable, when push comes to shove.

There is genuine affection, too. There is a 94-year-old man in my village who still talks about the day in 1944 that the Americans arrived and gave him chewing gum. American exiles in Paris - James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and many others - helped define the city’s cultural identity. American movies, music, video games and social networks suffuse France. French gangsters used to drive American cars and middle-aged Frenchmen still buy Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Yet Americans are also seen as dangerous economic predators and for decades the French have been terrified by the Défi Americain (American Challenge), which was defined in an influential 1967 book by the journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.

ANGÉLISME

Ignoring reality

A specific French psychosis involving the wilful refusal to confront reality, to substitute sentiment for moral, human or practical consequences, credulity and utopianism for what is otherwise self-evident, angélisme represents the triumph of naïvety over objectivity. When a gang of drug dealers in a nearby town was involved in torturing one of their mules who had failed to deliver a consignment of cocaine from Brazil, much of local opinion reverted to an angéliste analysis in which the brutal behaviour of the perpetrators was explained to be a consequence of their unhappy childhoods.

L’ANGLAIS

The English language

After my French friends grew weary of trying to teach me French, and found that my own approximate version of it had become minimally acceptable for rudimentary communication, they demanded that I start teaching them English. So I organised a series of classes in my chai (winery) and quickly learned that teaching is hard. There was no lack of enthusiasm from my pupils, only bafflement at my indifferent pedagogy. Eventually I decided that the best way to teach them English was to persuade them that they already knew it.

Georges Clémenceau, prime minister of France during the Great War, once described English as jamais que le français, mal prononcé (nothing other than badly-pronounced French). And this is not as ridiculous as it sounds. By various counts, there are 40,000 words in common between English and French. So my technique was to use English words that are cognate in French, to overcome the difficultés (you see how it works?) and show that it is possible (idem) to communicate in English, using mostly words they already knew in French. After I had persuadé (there I go again) my students, the problem became, as Clemenceau noted, the pronunciation. The English language presents problèmes (!) to French people. They find it hard to prononcer (!!) the ‘th’ letter combination. I taught them not to worry, that this (zat zis) makes them sound adorable (!!!) when they speak English. Think of Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther: ‘I am from the Nice telefern company. I have come to fix your fern.’

Part of the problem for French people who want to learn English is that it is often very poorly taught in French schools. (The reverse is also true.) Typically students learn English in groups of 30 for an average of 50 minutes, three times a week. After the recent round of bac exams, 12,000 students signed a petition to the minister of education protesting that the English exam was too hard. They’d been asked to interpret a passage from Atonement by Ian McEwan in which the word ‘cope’ appeared. There is no exact equivalent in French although se débrouiller and s’en sortir will do. Students complained the question was incomprehensible (!!!!). Indeed, many teachers seem determined to make it as difficult and boring as possible (see My tailor is rich but my English is poor).

French people who move to England usually master our language quite quickly, being immersed in it. I have lost count of the number of French families who have asked me to organise home stays in England, so their children can advance. Still, English remains a challenge. It doesn’t help that the French elite has often been hostile to English. In 2006, former President Jacques Chirac walked out of an EU meeting when the French head of a European business group spoke English. ‘I was profoundly shocked,’ said Chirac. It was considered headline news when prime minister Manuel Valls spoke a few words of English in London in 2015 (he also recited a few words of Chinese, in Shanghai). One of the most elite colleges in France, L’École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) is to make competence in English compulsory only from 2018. It is amazing that they have waited this long.

ANGLAIS EXPATRIÉS EN FRANCE, LES

the English in France

We English are admired, mistrusted and misunderstood, simultaneously. Loved or not, the English have again invaded France and are unavoidable. You can tell an English person in France by sight alone. We announce ourselves by the way we walk, the way we dress, and by our unquenchable thirst for the local plonk. Les Anglais ont toujours soif (the English are always thirsty) say the French. There are cricket clubs in the Drôme and the Dordogne, English newspapers produced in France for English people, and, inevitably, ‘we speak English’ signs in the windows of all estate agents. The latest French census picks up only a hundred thousand or so British people fully resident in France but the data is fishy (I have seen how these censuses are compiled). I am doubtful the official statistics are correctly capturing the scale of English and British immigration to France and especially the significant number of people with properties and interests in both countries. I’d guess there are between 250,000-400,000 Brits in France, full or part time.

British people have transformed much of rural France and a house that is freshly painted is likely to be occupied by British people (or possibly Germans, Dutch or Scandinavians, who are also in love with France). The French prefer to guard their affluence behind shabby exteriors, lest it attract the interest of the fisc (tax authorities). Some British people have made an effort to integrate, learn French, and make French friends, others have stayed in anglophone bubbles. There are many like my English neighbour who will not or cannot learn French. He has not been invited inside a French person’s home in 20 years (and neither has he invited anyone from the village into his).

ANGLETERRE

England

Perfidious appendage to Europe, adrift in the north Atlantic, England is the number one destination for French people fleeing economic stagnation at home. Yet we still have a reputation for being dangerously mercantile, for bad food and for imposing military humiliation on the obviously superior French. Les rosbifs (the roast-beef eaters) are tous riches (all rich), according to Flaubert. That’s a misunderstanding. French women say les Anglais ont débarqué (the English have landed) when their period has started, an unsubtle reference to the sanguinary arrival of English soldiers on French soil. That’s mistrust. Many French people think that all of the United Kingdom is England although rugby fans recognise that Scotland and Wales are separate nations. A surprising number of French people have never been to England, even those who live in the north of France. But this is changing. The low-cost flights that used to be entirely filled with English passengers are now equally patronised by French people returning ‘home’ to London after a weekend with their family in France, or French people experimenting with long weekends in London. Barbour jackets and British motorcars are the height of chic among upper-middle class French people who like to drop English words into the conversation in much the same way that English people play with French. Clémenceau described England as a colonie française qui a mal tourné (a French colony turned bad) but the French never really colonised England, it was the Normans, who were not French, but Vikings. See Londres.

ANGOISSE

Anxiety - a chronic French condition

The French are world-champion neurotics and seem rather proud of it. They have a lot about which to be miserable and anxious. Contemporary writers like Michel Houellebecq and Eric Zemmour reflect the existential angst that permeates the French mentality. The French find work itself to be oppressive. The media often occupies itself with exposés of employers (France Telecom is frequently cited) whose working practices supposedly contribute to depression and suicide. There are conflicting data sets floating around. Some seem to suggest that the French are no more depressed than the Americans or the Brits. Others that the French are truly sad. My own psycho-pathological diagnosis tends more to seeing French névrosité (neurosis) as psychotic and delusional rather than merely depressive. Obviously, the French have good reasons to be anxious and depressed, as a consequence of the grim position in which their country finds itself. The paradox is that many French people do not think that France is actually in such a position, so perhaps their delusions protect them from anxieties. (My qualification for offering this analysis is that my father was a psychiatrist.)

APARTHEID

france’s not quite france

My friend Nicola, a Brixton-born Englishwoman of Jamaican ethnic origin, and a naturalised French citizen who speaks perfect French, tells me she has never encountered overt racism in France, but I suspect it is because French people regard her as English, not black. It’s clear that black sub-Saharan Africans occupy a marginal place in society but those who are not Muslim less than those who are.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls in January 2015 described neighbourhoods like Mosson in Montpellier and Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris as places of ‘social, geographic and ethnic apartheid’ (‘Un apartheid territorial, social, ethnique’). He was attacked by former president Nicolas Sarkozy who said it was an error to have used this word. ‘I’m disturbed by the use of this expression and that the prime minister of the republic could use such a word,’ he said. But it is hard to dispute that Valls accurately characterised a problem that other politicians prefer to ignore. Apartheid means ‘the state of being apart’ in Afrikaans and it is 100 per cent accurate to use this term to characterise the situation in France. Though there is no law enforcing racial segregation - quite the contrary, it is strictly prohibited - denial of de facto discrimination is hardly credible. See Beurs, ghettos.

ARMES

A nation of gun-lovers

The French love weapons and celebrate the right to armed revolution in the refrain of the national anthem, Le Marseillaise (aux armes, citoyens). I know very few people who do not have a carabine (rifle) or a fusil (shotgun) tucked away. Officially, there are 33 guns per 100 people in France, compared to 6 in Britain and 88 in the United States. Unofficially, I expect there are considerably more. Technically, you do need a licence. Naturally, when I came to France, I wanted to join in. When I went to the doctor to ask him to sign the form allowing me to buy a gun, he asked me if I had ever had the desire to shoot anyone. ‘Souvent, j’ai une longue liste,’ (frequently, I have a long list) I replied, hoping he recognised that I was joking. ‘No problem, that’s normal,’ he said, grinning, signing the form and pounding it with his official rubber stamp. I hope he was joking, too. At my interview with the licensing officer at the gendarmerie, I was asked if I had ever been in prison. ‘Not yet,’ I said. That seemed to be an adequate answer. I confess to have become quite attached to my modest armoury. Should law and order break down entirely, I will not be unprepared. Shooting turns out to be highly therapeutic and quite demanding. But one is not allowed to shoot at targets with a human form. When I asked the president of my gun club if I could use imported American zombie targets he said, ‘absolutely not.’ ‘But they’re already dead,’ I said. He was unmoved.

Selling weapons to dictators has long been a pillar of the French economy. (The same charge can be levelled against the Americans and British.) Following recent huge pressure from the United States, they recently only reluctantly agreed not to sell Mistral helicopter-carrier warships to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, following his invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. They are now negotiating to sell the ships to the Chinese. Jokes about French tanks having more reverse gears than forward ones are not fair. The modern French arms supermarket includes missiles, ships, aircraft, armoured vehicles and battlefield command and control equipment.

The Paris Air Show every two years, which I used to attend when I was writing about aerospace, is perhaps the world’s most elaborate arms marketplace. The food in the hospitality chalets is also very good, even if some of the catering companies responsible are British. Former President François Hollande (François of Arabia) emerged as France’s arms salesman in chief, cozying up in particular to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. French arms deals have traditionally been accompanied by massive bribes classified as secret défense (defence secrets). French Exocet missiles sold to the Argentinian dictatorship caused havoc for the Royal Navy during the Falklands war.

ARROGANCE

The French are not polite

The Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C. in 2013 surveyed 7,600 people in eight European countries and discovered that the British and Germans judge the French to be the most arrogant people in Europe. The French themselves were divided between those admitting that they are the most arrogant and those maintaining they are the least. I find my neighbours and southerners generally not to be at all arrogant, although my winemaker neighbour Jean-Claude Mas launched a range of wine called The Arrogant Frog, which has become wildly successful, especially in the United States. Parisians may be the problem - they are often disliked even by the French. In 2015, the French government, disturbed by reports that tourists have been put off by the arrogance of many French people, launched a campaign to train-workers to be more polite. We shall see how this goes.

ARTE

Excellent but largely-unwatched Franco-German TV channel

Pronounced ‘are-tay.’ A Franco-German TV station conjured up by president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, at the height of the Franco-German romance. It was to be an element within a larger project to protect French and German language and culture, and thwart the domination of English. In addition to the TV station, German students were supposed to be taught French and vice-versa. Most students on both sides of the border were smart enough to realise it was more useful to take English. But Arte lives on. The German and French media experiment has sometimes almost immeasurably small ratings, which are unlikely to grow when all of television is moving away from the broadcasting model to the on-demand model. Arte is, nonetheless, excellent. It has many eclectic shows and even some American films. It was well in advance of the BBC in showing the Danish police procedural Forbrydelsen (The Killing). It broadcasts a gorgeous, full-strength HDTV signal, which makes its wonderful, Attenborough-free natural history documentaries highly viewable. Although its coverage of economics is predictably Marxist, Arte is much more convincingly a public service than the BBC, eschewing the derivative, populist drivel that is a mainstay of the Beeb, and is infinitely better than the pablum broadcast on the regular French channels. It is not clear why it is not available in the UK, or indeed outside France and Germany. The station could transform itself into a serious pan-European public broadcaster but seems to remain tied to promoting Franco-German amity to a tiny audience of die-hard fans.

ARTISAN

someone driving a van and mcdonald’s

Artisanal describes products or services that are really rather ordinary or worse: approximative building skills, disengaged cooking, all are too often described as artisanal. This word, of noble origin, hijacked by low commerce, is also infiltrating English, in equivalent misuse. In the United States, McDonald’s has recently introduced an artisanal hamburger. Everyone in France with a van, from plumbers to stonemasons, describes themselves as an artisan. Artisans frequently work on their own since they say it is too expensive and risky to hire anyone to help them.

ASTÉRIX

Emblematic Frenchman created by French people from elsewhere

Created by René Goscinny, a Franco-Polish Jew who spent his youth in Argentina, and Albert Uderzo, a Franco-Italian. Their comic book character of Astérix the Gaul is arguably the totemic image of the Frenchman in popular culture. The indomitable, mustachioed Astérix was projected into public consciousness first in the famous comic albums (bandes dessinées), then on film, later at the eponymous theme park outside Paris and in video games. Myths have power even if they are just myths and Asterix has profoundly influenced the French self-image while becoming a French cultural export and brand in its own right. Do not dismiss these brilliantly written and beautifully drawn books as merely for children. They are social satires and rewarding reading at any age. The English versions of Asterix by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge are the most brilliant popular translations of French into English ever achieved, defying Vladimir Nabokov’s insistence that translations be literal. They transmit the humour and style of the original without paying too much attention to the particular. Idéfix, Asterix’s dog, in English becomes Dogmatix - both are puns, the French from idée fixe (fixed idea) and the English a play on the word dogmatic. The best of all the books is Astérix chez les Bretons (Asterix in Britain), a great and funny romp in which the English drink eau chaude avec un nuage de lait (hot water with a cloud of milk, tea not yet having been discovered by the English). Un nuage du lait is a phrase instantly recognisable to all French people.

ATLANTICO