According to the French medical institute Inserm, there are over twenty thousand alcohol-related deaths per year in France. And this is not counting accidents while under the influence. For a similar population, the UK records only around six thousand deaths.
Even so, the French do generally go in for a more civilized style of drinking than most ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and they always have done. Apparently back in the eleventh century, William the Conqueror’s invading Normans were shocked by the Saxons’ habit of deliberately setting out to get paralytic. Things haven’t changed much since. You will never hear a Frenchman say, ‘OK, let’s go and get pissed’ (or its French equivalent) on a Friday night. They do get drunk, but it’s usually because of heavy consumption during a meal or at a party. Getting sozzled is a by-product of their evening rather than its raison d’être.
This is why there are so many drink-driving deaths – around 40 per cent of French road fatalities are caused by alcohol. At the end of an evening, after a bon dîner accompanied by plenty of bon vin, a respectable middle-class driver will have a quick coffee ‘to clear his head’ and then go and smash his car into an oncoming bus; the theory being that after a good bottle of Château Margaux you can’t possibly be as drunk as some vulgar English beer-drinker.
What’s more, a driver who isn’t yet completely sozzled can drop into virtually any service station and buy alcohol. The French don’t seem to have cottoned on to the possible correlation between selling booze at service stations and drink-driving.
The problem is made worse because French clubbers do not go in for electing one of their number as a teetotaller for the night when they drive to out-of-town discos. Every Friday and Saturday, after a long night of clubbing, carloads of young revellers end their short lives squashed against one of the plane trees that line French provincial roads.
With typical French logic, some regions are trying to tackle this drink-driving problem by (you guessed it) chopping down the plane trees.
Support the Save the Cheese Fund
Charles de Gaulle once said, ‘How can you govern a country that produces 258 sorts of cheese?’ The answer is pretty obvious – you simply dole out 258 sorts of cheese subsidies. And sausage subsidies, olive subsidies, wine subsidies, etc, etc.
It may seem slightly unfair to be paying 40 per cent of the European Union’s budget in subsidies to 2 per cent of the population – the farmers – but the French say that this is necessary to preserve their traditional foods. Which is partly true. Without subsidies, the local producers of cheese so rustic you can see the farmer’s fingerprints on the skin would be swamped by a tide of multinational, clingfilm-wrapped pseudo-Cheddar.
But it would be a mistake to think that these French food producers are all crusty peasants eking out a meagre living on a one-room, one-donkey farmstead. Apart from the fact that France has its own multinational food companies, some of the old paysans I’ve met are as deft with their finances as the best Wall Street trader.
I was once shown around a farm in central France belonging to an old couple who dressed as if they needed clothes subsidies. A barn-shaped nylon dress for her, medieval blue dungarees and a scarecrow shirt for him. They showed me their open chicken run populated by a few scrawny hens, and their three fields, all of them empty apart from four or five bright-orange cows (naturally orange, I should add – they were Limousines). An old Renault was parked in what used to be a chestnut-drying shed.19 You would have thought that they were heading for starvation within the next few months.
But no, not at all. The friend who’d taken me to the farm explained that the old couple, like all their friends and families on similar farms, were very comfortably off. They got European subsidies every year for planting new apple trees, a payment for burning most of the crop and so countering over-production, then a subsidy for ripping out the trees and reducing the national apple-growing capacity. They were also buying up fields all around the village and applying for more grants for leaving them fallow. Starvation was a very, very long way away. In Brussels, perhaps.
Given that any attempt by the French government to reduce subsidies causes blocked motorways and heaps of rotting food dumped outside (and sometimes inside) government offices, it will be difficult to take any of these advantages away from the farmers.
In any case, food is very important to French politicians. President Chirac has been accused of several cases of fraud. Not for simply filling his pockets, though. He was indicted because of his vast frais de bouche (‘mouth expenses’) when he was mayor of Paris. It was alleged that he spent 2.13 million euros of city funds on food between 1987 and 1995 – excluding official receptions. That is 4,500 euros a week on private meals for his wife and himself. The investigating magistrate threw the case out, so apparently this is a perfectly acceptable sum to spend on food.
Another accusation concerned using state funds to fly Madame Chirac to attend the making of the world’s biggest mushroom omelette in the city of Brive in 1998. Surely only a French politician would risk discrediting his administration for an omelette.
Food Laws and Rituals
Because the French spend so many hours of their lives at the lunch and dinner table, they are sticklers for food etiquette, and have been for a long time. It was Cardinal Richelieu who introduced the round-tipped knife to European tables in 1669 after he declared that it
