French Letters Read online

  ANGOISSE

  Anxiety - a chronic French condition

  The French are world-champion neurotics and seem rather proud of it. They have a lot about which to be miserable and anxious. Contemporary writers like Michel Houellebecq and Eric Zemmour reflect the existential angst that permeates the French mentality. The French find work itself to be oppressive. The media often occupies itself with exposés of employers (France Telecom is frequently cited) whose working practices supposedly contribute to depression and suicide. There are conflicting data sets floating around. Some seem to suggest that the French are no more depressed than the Americans or the Brits. Others that the French are truly sad. My own psycho-pathological diagnosis tends more to seeing French névrosité (neurosis) as psychotic and delusional rather than merely depressive. Obviously, the French have good reasons to be anxious and depressed, as a consequence of the grim position in which their country finds itself. The paradox is that many French people do not think that France is actually in such a position, so perhaps their delusions protect them from anxieties. (My qualification for offering this analysis is that my father was a psychiatrist.)

  APARTHEID

  France’s not quite France

  My friend Nicola, a Brixton-born Englishwoman of Jamaican ethnic origin, and a naturalised French citizen who speaks perfect French, tells me she has never encountered overt racism in France, but I suspect it is because French people regard her as English, not black. It’s clear that black sub-Saharan Africans occupy a marginal place in society but those who are not Muslim less than those who are.

  Prime Minister Manuel Valls in January 2015 described neighbourhoods like Mosson in Montpellier and Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris as places of ‘social, geographic and ethnic apartheid’ (‘Un apartheid territorial, social, ethnique’). He was attacked by former president Nicolas Sarkozy who said it was an error to have used this word. ‘I’m disturbed by the use of this expression and that the prime minister of the republic could use such a word,’ he said. But it is hard to dispute that Valls accurately characterised a problem that other politicians prefer to ignore. Apartheid means ‘the state of being apart’ in Afrikaans and it is 100 per cent accurate to use this term to characterise the situation in France. Though there is no law enforcing racial segregation - quite the contrary, it is strictly prohibited - denial of de facto discrimination is hardly credible. See Beurs, ghettos.

  ARMES

  A nation of gun-lovers

  The French love weapons and celebrate the right to armed revolution in the refrain of the national anthem, Le Marseillaise (aux armes, citoyens). I know very few people who do not have a carabine (rifle) or a fusil (shotgun) tucked away. Officially, there are 33 guns per 100 people in France, compared to 6 in Britain and 88 in the United States. Unofficially, I expect there are considerably more. Technically, you do need a licence. Naturally, when I came to France, I wanted to join in. When I went to the doctor to ask him to sign the form allowing me to buy a gun, he asked me if I had ever had the desire to shoot anyone. ‘Souvent, j’ai une longue liste,’ (frequently, I have a long list) I replied, hoping he recognised that I was joking. ‘No problem, that’s normal,’ he said, grinning, signing the form and pounding it with his official rubber stamp. I hope he was joking, too. At my interview with the licensing officer at the gendarmerie, I was asked if I had ever been in prison. ‘Not yet,’ I said. That seemed to be an adequate answer. I confess to have become quite attached to my modest armoury. Should law and order break down entirely, I will not be unprepared. Shooting turns out to be highly therapeutic and quite demanding. But one is not allowed to shoot at targets with a human form. When I asked the president of my gun club if I could use imported American zombie targets he said, ‘absolutely not.’ ‘But they’re already dead,’ I said. He was unmoved.

  Selling weapons to dictators has long been a pillar of the French economy. (The same charge can be levelled against the Americans and British.) Following recent huge pressure from the United States, they recently only reluctantly agreed not to sell Mistral helicopter-carrier warships to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, following his invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. They are now negotiating to sell the ships to the Chinese. Jokes about French tanks having more reverse gears than forward ones are not fair. The modern French arms supermarket includes missiles, ships, aircraft, armoured vehicles and battlefield command and control equipment.

  The Paris Air Show every two years, which I used to attend when I was writing about aerospace, is perhaps the world’s most elaborate arms marketplace. The food in the hospitality chalets is also very good, even if some of the catering companies responsible are British. President François Hollande (François of Arabia) has emerged as France’s arms salesman in chief, cozying up in particular to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. French arms deals have traditionally been accompanied by massive bribes of which few details ever emerge since they are classified secret défense (defence secrets). French Exocet missiles sold to the Argentinian dictatorship caused havoc for the Royal Navy during the Falklands war.

  ARROGANCE

  The French are not polite

  The Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C. in 2013 surveyed 7,600 people in eight European countries and discovered that the British and Germans judge the French to be the most arrogant people in Europe. The French themselves were divided between those admitting that they are the most arrogant and those maintaining they are the least. I find my neighbours and southerners generally not to be at all arrogant, although my winemaker neighbour Jean-Claude Mas launched a range of wine called The Arrogant Frog, which has become wildly successful, especially in the United States. Parisians may be the problem - they are often disliked even by the French. In 2015, the French government, disturbed by reports that tourists have been put off by the arrogance of many French people, launched a campaign to train-workers to be more polite. We shall see how this goes.

  ARTE

  Excellent but largely-unwatched Franco-German TV channel

  Pronounced ‘are-tay.’ A Franco-German TV station conjured up by president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, at the height of the Franco-German romance. It was to be an element within a larger project to protect French and German language and culture, and thwart the domination of English. In addition to the TV station, German students were supposed to be taught French and vice-versa. Most students on both sides of the border were smart enough to realise it was more useful to take English. But Arte lives on. The German and French media experiment has sometimes almost immeasurably small ratings, which are unlikely to grow when all of television is moving away from the broadcasting model to the on-demand model. Arte is, nonetheless, excellent. It has many eclectic shows and even some American films. It was well in advance of the BBC in showing the Danish police procedural Forbrydelsen (The Killing). It broadcasts a gorgeous, full-strength HDTV signal, which makes its wonderful, Attenborough-free natural history documentaries highly viewable. Although its coverage of economics is predictably Marxist, Arte is much more convincingly a public service than the BBC, eschewing the derivative, populist drivel that is a mainstay of the Beeb, and is infinitely better than the pablum broadcast on the regular French channels. It is not clear why it is not available in the UK, or indeed outside France and Germany. The station could transform itself into a serious pan-European public broadcaster but seems to remain tied to promoting Franco-German amity to a tiny audience of die-hard fans.

  ARTISAN

  someone driving a van and mcdonald’s

  Artisanal describes products or services that are really rather ordinary or worse: approximative building skills, disengaged cooking, all are too often described as artisanal. This word, of noble origin, hijacked by low commerce, is also infiltrating English, in equivalent misuse. In the United States, McDonald’s has recently introduced an artisanal hamburger. Everyone in France with a van, from plumbers to stonemasons, describes themselves as an artisan. Artisans freque
ntly work on their own since they say it is too expensive and risky to hire anyone to help them.

  ASTÉRIX

  Emblematic Frenchman created by French people from elsewhere

  Created by René Goscinny, a Franco-Polish Jew who spent his youth in Argentina, and Albert Uderzo, a Franco-Italian. Their comic book character of Astérix the Gaul is arguably the totemic image of the Frenchman in popular culture. The indomitable, mustachioed Astérix was projected into public consciousness first in the famous comic albums (bandes dessinées), then on film, later at the eponymous theme park outside Paris and in video games. Myths have power even if they are just myths and Asterix has profoundly influenced the French self-image while becoming a French cultural export and brand in its own right. Do not dismiss these brilliantly written and beautifully drawn books as merely for children. They are social satires and rewarding reading at any age. The English versions of Asterix by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge are the most brilliant popular translations of French into English ever achieved, defying Vladimir Nabokov’s insistence that translations be literal. They transmit the humour and style of the original without paying too much attention to the particular. Idéfix, Asterix’s dog, in English becomes Dogmatix - both are puns, the French from idée fixe (fixed idea) and the English a play on the word dogmatic. The best of all the books is Astérix chez les Bretons (Asterix in Britain), a great and funny romp in which the English drink eau chaude avec un nuage de lait (hot water with a cloud of milk, tea not yet having been discovered by the English). Un nuage du lait is a phrase instantly recognisable to all French people.

  ATLANTICO

  The best French political website, mostly ignored by the French political class

  Indispensable, must-read antidote to much of the French media. Except with little apparent influence against the overwhelmingly leftist French media. The reform-minded digital daily argues for liberalised markets, flexible labour codes, other structural reforms, and reveals abuses in France. Lacks much humour.

  AUBRY, MARTINE

  Socialist politician, architect of economic decline

  A destroyer of French prosperity, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, is a hard-left socialist party apparatchik, whose rigid socialism epitomises the delusions of the French governing class. Notorious author of the 2000 law imposing a 35-hour week, which she promised would create 700,000 new jobs, which it didn’t. Unemployment has subsequently risen and Aubry remains a pillar of the socialist party left wing. The daughter of Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, she was minister of employment and solidarity from 1997-2000. Unsuccessful contender for French presidency. Political foe of François Hollande, Manuel Valls and Emmanuel Macron, whom she believes to lack ideological purity. See Trente-cinq heures.

  AUTOCARS

  France discovers the inter-city bus

  France is terrified of inter-city buses. They have been considered dangerous, unfair competition to the state railway, SNCF. There have been buses to Spain, Britain, Belgium and Italy, under EU open-market rules. But they were prohibited from allowing passengers to board in, e.g. Paris, and dropping them off in Toulouse, on the way to Spain. This is despite the fact that French companies like Transdev are world leaders in public transportation, albeit abroad. In a rare example of real reform, the market for inter-city buses will be liberalised and should be in full operation by 2016, allowing journeys between France’s major cities at half the price of the train, and perhaps creating 10,000 jobs. But for the moment, the details remain unclear and only journeys of more than 200km will be permitted, so even if a bus is travelling from Montpellier to e.g., Marseille, it may not be possible to drop off or pick up passengers in Nîmes. For shorter trips, a new regulatory authority is to be established to arbitrate disputes between the railway and the bus companies. As if France does not have enough regulators.

  AUTO ÉCOLES

  Daylight robbery

  Interminable and exorbitant is how victims describe the process of obtaining a driving licence in France, where the heavily regulated driving schools gouge their customers and subject them to endless hours of instruction at 45 euros per hour. French drivers are much better than they used to be since thousands of speed and red-light cameras have been deployed in recent years, yet roughly one-third more French people die on the roads proportionately than in Germany or the United Kingdom, so it is not clear that interminable instruction is producing better drivers. Candidates can wait five months for a driving test in Paris, three months elsewhere. Reforms have been promised but remain undelivered. A competitor to the driving school cartel has proposed offering courses of equal quality at 35 euros per hour but this has been fiercely opposed. It typically takes 18 months and fees of more than 1,000 euros to prepare for the exam.

  AUTO-ENTREPRENEUR

  legal status preventing success

  This new category of self-employment was supposed to encourage small businesses by exempting them from the worst of France’s Procrustean employment laws. But like so many so-called reforms, it has been eviscerated by the socialists. The reform was introduced by former president Nicolas Sarkozy to encourage sole-entrepreneurs to emerge from the clandestine economy (le noir) and engage with the tax and benefit system through a streamlined, economical process. This was just getting into operation when President Hollande took over and comprehensively gutted it, with the help of France-Inter, the state radio network, which launched a vicious campaign accusing auto-entrepreneurs of presenting unfair competition to established firms. The then-prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault cracked down, putting ceilings on the amount that could be earned (no more than the minimum wage), sharply raising cotisations (social charges) and imposing new layers of regulation. So a lot of people who were thinking of going the auto-entrepreneur route have changed their minds and still work on the noir.

  AUTOROUTES

  Motorways: race tracks, giant car parks

  French motorways are fabulous. They are surfaced like billiard tables. Most of the network is privatised and the tolls are heavy. Paris to Clermont-Ferrand, 424 km, costs 36.50 euros. The autoroutes shame the congested British motorways and crumbling American ones. But there are black spots. The Paris ring road (le boulevard périphérique) is in dire condition. And when the French all go on holiday at the same time, the autoroutes can become the world’s finest car parks. On some summer days there are 1000km of jams. As the motorways have become infested with speed cameras, the French have largely stopped using them as race tracks but the British continue to drive like lunatics the second they get off the shuttles from England, and the Germans are even worse.

  AVIATION

  Invented by the French

  To the chagrin of the French, it was the American Wright brothers working from their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, who achieved the world’s first sustained powered flights in 1903. But the French had been first into the air in 1782 in a balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers. Two years later, a Frenchman flew the first dirigible over the English Channel. By 1890, Clément Ader had demonstrated heavier-than-air flight but his aircraft wasn’t stable and flew for an insignificant distance. In 1909, Louis Blériot won a prize of £1,000 for flying the first heavier-than-air aircraft over the English Channel. Today the French make some of the world’s best fast combat jets, airliners, helicopters, business jets, light aircraft and rockets. The Ariane 5 heavy satellite launcher had by 2015 accumulated a record of 54 consecutive successful missions. The successor, the Ariane 6, is intended to be entirely reusable, challenging the American entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose own SpaceX rocket has so far led the way in this field. A rare French success story. See Airbus.

  AVOCATS

  Irrational Profession

  Lawyers are obsessed with their own privileges within a system that is secretive, politicised and often manifestly unjust. The big cases drag on for decades. The system is still reverberating from the miscarriage of justice in 2004 in Outreau near Boulogne where a zealous young magistrate pros
ecuted 18 people for child abuse. They subsequently spent years in jail - one died in custody - before the case collapsed. Eleven years later, the affair continues to drag on with inconclusive efforts to prosecute the magistrate responsible for the miscarriage of justice and repeated accusations that his superiors have evaded responsibility for the affair.

  The legal profession is riddled with restrictive practices and opacity. Lawyers refuse (claiming it would be unethical) to work as in-house counsel for companies, which hire English, Dutch, German and American lawyers instead. Many French lawyers are simply not that smart, evidently. The most numerous type of lawyer in France is the avocat. There are roughly 50,000 of them (although England has twice as many solicitors) who may offer legal advice, draft contracts and have a right of audience before all criminal, civil and administrative courts. To become an avocat is not considered especially difficult and below the level of the elite cabinets (firms) there are large numbers of them with little to do except launch various vexatious proceedings and organise their fellow professionals to obstruct reforms. For the consumers of legal services, the structure of the profession is confusing and imposes costs. The execution of legal judgements is reserved to a specialised type of lawyer called a huissier and property conveyancing is reserved to yet a third type of lawyer called a notaire. Efforts to introduce competition among these three branches, even to allow mixed cabinets (offices) in which all three might work together, in order to lower costs to consumers, have made only modest progress.