It’s a timely sentiment. Exactly 100 years ago, we Brits embraced everlasting friendship with our closest neighbor and oldest enemy. No more squabbling over colonies, threats of war, cartoons portraying an elderly Queen Victoria baring her bum to the French. Instead it would be Entente Cordiale.
And it’s worked. Our pols may squabble but France we adore. Every summer, like 13 million of our countrymen, my family heads for the nation’s favorite holiday destination–France. We marvel at the high-speed trains, the empty roads, the lavish health care. Through the year we yearn for “steak frites” and inexpensive wine. Britain’s middle-aged bourgeois dream no more of roses-round-the-door cottages in Devon; the fantasy is of a tumbledown Provencal farmhouse with olive grove.
Still, somewhere in the gut, old prejudices live on. At the height of last year’s spat over Iraq, the mass-circulation Sun ran an anti-French joke campaign. (“What’s the difference between Frenchmen and toast? You can make soldiers out of toast.”) In the words of the novelist Julian Barnes: “If you were God and you were trying to invent a nation that would most get up the British nostril, it would probably be the French.”
My own problem starts with envy. It’s the irritation of the law-abiding older brother at the insouciant sibling who somehow walks away with all the prizes. Our politicians don’t take bribes. Inefficient industries have been left to die. We’ve slashed away at red tape. We work harder than our EU partners, but at least we’re globally competitive.
By contrast, the French break all the rules. The president stands accused of big-time corruption, commerce is still tangled in regulation and the government racks up debt and shirks awkward economic decisions. Yet the supermarkets are heaped with high-quality goodies, the roads are bump-free and the phone system works. If that’s economic decline, give us more.
Over a brioche, my grievances grow. How come they can eat better than we do without bursting waistbands or dropping dead in their 60s? How did they escape our hang-ups? Lodged deep in the psyche of the British male is the myth that all Frenchwomen are models of chic and all Frenchmen keep mistresses, without shame. Is it a vacation-fed illusion or do the French really live better?
This image is further confused by unrequited love. Think of the EU. First they conspired to keep us out. Then they teamed up with the old enemy, Germany. A recent poll found that 25 percent of the French consider the Germans to be their closest friends, with the British trailing at just 7 percent. English voices are common in any Norman market town, especially in the summer; it’s a long time since I heard French spoken in my native Dorset.
Worst of all is when they’re right. How I resented the polished lectures on multilateralism from the former French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin (also a published poet, a horribly French accomplishment) before the Iraq war. How much more I resented him for being proved correct. Forget cordiality. As the great French epigramist de la Rochefoucauld observed in the 17th century, love is closer to hate than friendship. Right again, dammit. This croissant will choke me.
