Seven reasons to be cheerful you’re not French
Pity the wretched French, rolling around in the dust like squabbling tigers. You see what happens when you have too much democracy? Chaos.
Two complex rounds of legislative elections and a loose alliance of Leftist parties have won the majority of seats. The hard-Right have been kept from power – the so-called cordon sanitaire in action – but no single party or alliance of parties has the clear majority required to govern.
Police and military are mobilised, the French could be setting fire to street bins as we speak. The country is in a fractured and scrappy state of nervous flux.
Here, on the other hand, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party storms to massive victory with just 33.7 per cent of the vote – and 3,173,263 fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 – and we all take it on the chin.
In his first week, Starmer trains it round the nation, planes it round the globe, with dignity and grace, as we pat ourselves on the back. While the Tories begin their detox we, as the cradle of democracy, relish the fact that we understand democracy.
You want it, but not too much of it. Definitive, but not proportionate. Farage gets a few seats, but quite enough thank you very much. The Lib Dems get a load, but not too many – the right number to match their nice and ineffectual simmer – and Labour’s majority is, as Andrew Neil puts it, “wide but not deep”. Enough to get them busy, not so much as to take the next election for granted.
Meanwhile, we are diverted by the footie and savour living in a country in which the sovereign sends a message to the England team, saying: “If I may encourage you to secure victory before the need for any last-minute wonder-goals or another penalties drama.”
Warm and understated, like our summer. A bit of sunshine but not too much to get us excited. All of which makes me think: thank God I’m not French. Along with these things, of course:
1. French politicians dabble with serious criminality
Among several French leaders, Jacques Chirac was found guilty of influence peddling, breach of trust and embezzlement and Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of attempting to bribe a judge and illegal campaign financing.
His wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (not a politician but politician-adjacent), has now been charged with related witness tampering.
Marine Le Pen is being investigated for suspected fraud in the financing of her recent presidential campaign. In this country, our leaders get the equivalent of parking fines for minor misdemeanours: fixed penalty notices, reduced to ￡50 for payment within 14 days, for breaking lockdown rules. Boris Johnson’s far worse crime being to drink wine out of a plastic cup.
2. The French don’t speak English
Can you imagine being born into a country where your language wasn’t the international mode of communication? It doesn’t bear thinking about. We can do commerce anywhere, be tourists everywhere, across the world everyone else bears the necessity to speak our language. Wherever we travel we can ask for and be delivered of: “Six pints of lager and a packet of crisps, please.” (Not even in France can you be assured of accurately receiving “six pintes de bière blonde et un paquet de chips”.) All of which confirms our hunch that we are British, they are all foreigners.
3. The French sound funny
And they shrug their shoulders and grunt in a weird way when they are taken aback by something, don’t comprehend something, don’t like something, think something is too expensive or claim they are innocent.
4. France’s champagne is losing its fizz
For centuries, the French have assumed superiority in the field of winemaking (and food – more on that shortly), in particular the crafting of champagne; the definitive brand of sparkling wine. But now look at les pauvre négociants. Extreme weather events are either freezing the grapes in winter, cooking them in the summer or soaking them at all times in between. Now battling with acidity and sugar issues, look what they’re doing: there’s an exodus heading our way, to our cooler climes and our chalk. Alas for the ignominy of the Frenchman who must come to England to make his perfect fizz.
5. And they’ve lost their gastronomic crown
You might have thought that the noble and haughty French, the inventors of gastronomy (although they’re not actually, because that was the Italians, or rather the Florentines via Catherine de’ Medici when she arrived in France with her chefs and their zabaglione after she married Henri, Duc d’Orleans, in 1533), would have kept their end up, would have resisted the horrors of fast food and food fads. But no. Look across France today and it’s a tragic sea of McDonalds and vegans.
6. French pop music – c’est dégueulasse
C’est aussi plus tragique. So it’s no wonder the French music industry is in decline. Their pop music has long been either terrible or suspect – or both – and then there’s French rap. Which is in French.
7. The French are bad-tempered
They can’t help it, it’s in their blood. It wasn’t so long ago that Robespierre oversaw a reign of terror and that desperate need to agitate means that most Frenchmen can’t walk past a public bin without wanting to set fire to it.
But: if you’re French, at least you’re in France
It’s the one, great plus those Frenchies have. They’re there. They can buy a proper croissant within seconds, they can ski in the Alps or go to a Mediterranean beach, they have ready access to white burgundy and Dijon mustard, they can eat garlicky, buttery snails as a matter of course.
They (well, more than we do) take their food with proper seriousness. Their cities and towns have not (yet), like the UK, become homogenous brand outlets. And those lucky French don’t have to battle miserable customs and passports queues to get in, which is completely our Brexit-y fault, and must make the French look at us Brits and think “Thank God I’m French!”.