French Letters Read online

  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 potentially catastrophic safety 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. The country has a debt of 2,000 billion euros. 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 i
s 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

  Eng
land

  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.