As I said, I’m no historian, but it seems to me that over the two-hundred-odd years since the Revolution, the French seem somehow to have combined these two extreme reactions to being disconnected from their old values. They seem to have embraced the new values (or had them pounded into their brains by the French education system), and then decided that their perfect new way of doing things was under threat, adding the touch of paranoia that they are famous for.
And most of it is the fault of us Anglos. As soon as the French started cutting royalists’ heads off, they added a new level of antagonism to their relations with the traditional enemy across the Channel. At first, it was easy for the revolutionaries to sneer at the Brits. Those ridiculous royalist English fops with their mad German monarchs – how could they possibly be right about anything? After all, they had just lost their biggest colony, America, to rebels aided by the French. Huh! But things soon started going wrong. Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo and sent to die on a colony that Britain hadn’t lost, Saint Helena. And then, just a couple of decades after the French Revolution, how dare these Anglais have their own revolution – the industrial one – and start inventing machines that made French technology look outdated? And they even had the effrontery to call one of their first new railway stations Waterloo! It was more than enough to make a nation paranoid, non?
Things that the French are
right about
• An adulterous politician is probably no more corrupt than a monogamous one.
• Just because a man compliments a woman, it doesn’t mean that he is planning to rape her.
• Getting out of Vietnam in 1954 was a pretty good idea.
• Invading Iraq was not such a good idea.
• If a country’s schoolkids are taught mathematics to a good level, its technology industries will never lack qualified engineers.
• Children do not die if they stop eating French fries for a week.
• Spa holidays should be available as state-subsidized medical treatment.
• If you have a regular office job, there is no point working on Friday afternoons.
• Putting foreign words on menus does not make the food taste better.
• If you invest money in railways, they are more efficient.
• All you need in salad dressing is olive oil, vinegar, mustard and salt. Anything else is window dressing, not salad dressing.
• If the French ignore a European law, no one will be able to force them to obey it.
Things that the French are
wrong about
(though it is not wise to tell them so)
• The more you boast about sex, the better you are at it.
• Everyone just adores passive smoking.
• Pétanque is a sport.
• Motorway bridges are so beautiful that they must be celebrated on picture postcards.
• The Earth does not revolve around the Sun – it revolves around Paris.
• Benny Hill represents the cutting edge of British comedy.
• The words to a song are so important that you don’t need a tune.
• Supertramp are (or were ever) hip.
• If you push in front of someone in a queue, they will respect you more.
• All films should be about the director’s love life. (This is why they love Woody Allen so much.)
• It is fun to eat calf’s brain and pig’s anus.
• Vegetarians cannot have sex.
• Many customers do not actually want to be served.
• Nuclear power is totally unpolluting.
• Johnny Hallyday is world-famous (he’s an aging rocker, by the way).
• Serge Gainsbourg was sexy. (He was a chain-smoking, drunk, toad-faced physical wreck. Their best-ever songwriter, though.)
• The louder you laugh at your own joke, the funnier it is.
• France invented French fries. (The whole of the rest of the world accepts that it was either the Belgians or the British.)
• A word does not exist unless it’s in the dictionary.
• When there is fog on the motorway, it is safest to drive as fast as you can and get out of the low-visibility zone as quickly as possible.
• Red traffic lights do not always know best about the need to stop.
• Designated flood zones do not flood and are therefore safe to build on.
• You can cure anything by inserting the relevant medicine up your back passage.
• All Americans care enough about France to know where it is on a map of the world.
• All British people are polite.
1 Just look at the little accent under the c in français and you’ll see why. Even the French have trouble spelling French words.
2 The Parisian driver has other reasons to ignore red lights. See the Eighth Commandment.
3 On the subject of getting things right, I deliberately phrased that sentence to avoid choosing whether the Mont Saint-Michel is in Brittany or Normandy. Whichever you choose, someone in France will write and tell you you’re wrong. So I’m just saying that the village of La Masse is in Brittany, which it undoubtedly is – see the Michelin map number 309 for confirmation. It’s a French map, so it must be right.
4 For the upside of this bacteria-sharing method, see the Third Commandment on food.
5 Some American readers might prefer to call this a Freedom train.
6 Po is short for politiques. Yes, a
