The Frenchest things in the world… Part Deux

There is no country on earth like France

‘When, after their victory at Salamis, the generals of the various Greek states voted the prizes for distinguished individual merit, each assigned the first place of excellence to himself, but they all concurred in giving their second votes to Themistocles,’ wrote the great 19th-century historian Edward Creasy. ‘This was looked on as a decisive proof that Themistocles ought to be ranked first of all. If we were to endeavour, by a similar test, to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.’

France is central to the story of Europe, and indeed of Britain. It is almost impossible to understand England’s history without appreciating the relationship with its closest continental neighbour. It is a love-hate affair originating in a grand inferiority complex, a long rivalry that continues tomorrow when England meet France in the World Cup quarter-finals.

In a piece last year I cited some of the most endearing/maddening things about the French, all of which contributed to a sense of amused frustration on our part:

Only in France would football fans protest that a local restaurant had lost a Michelin Star, as happened in Lyon two years ago. Only in France would an expedition to the Himalayas — of huge national importance — fail because it was weighed down by eight tonnes of supplies, including 36 bottles of champagne and “countless” tins of foie gras. And only in France would you get actual wine terrorists, the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, who have bombed shops, wineries and other things responsible for importing foreign produce.  This is a country which only reluctantly in the 1950s stopped giving school children a nutritious drink for their health, by which the French meant not milk but cider.

This is a country where mistresses are so much part of life that they can legally inherit, and where murder doesn’t really count if it’s done for love. One of France’s most famous socialites, Henriette Caillaux, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro just before the First World War and received just four months in jail because it was a crime passionnel. So that’s all right then.

But there are so many other things to love about our strange neighbours…

The Anglo-French relationship is a difficult one, reflected in the troubled history of royal marriages. Charles I’s Catholic wife Henrietta Maria was a drag on his popularity among excitable Protestant radicals, and turned out to be the last French consort; in the 14th century Edward II’s wife Isabella overthrew him and, perhaps, conspired to have him killed, after a rocky marriage that began badly when he brought his lover to the coronation and acted inappropriately affectionate towards him. But then, as Edith Cresson pointed out, this is to be expected when you marry an Englishman.

In 1514 Louis XII married an English bride, Henry VIII’s sister Mary; she was 18, he was 53, and had syphilis, so she must have been delighted about the whole thing; however, within weeks she had ‘danced him to death’, the sex apparently proving too exciting for his nervous system. Francesco Vettori, Florence’s ambassador to Rome, wrote that King Louis had a lady ‘so young, so beautiful and so swift that she had ridden him right out of the world’. 

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Perhaps not a terrible way for a Frenchman to go, and not the last French head of state to die in a similar manner. President Félix Faure expired in 1899 while with his mistress, after which his funeral featured this very understated carriage.

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Numerous French presidents have had affairs, although Francois Mitterrand actually had a secret second family while in the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand’s last meal was also ultra-French: ‘He'd eaten oysters and foie gras and capon — all in copious quantities — the succulent, tender, sweet tastes flooding his parched mouth. And then there was the meal’s ultimate course: a small, yellow-throated songbird that was illegal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird—ortolan—supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole—wings, feet, liver, heart. Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn't witness the barbaric act.’


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The French are world outliers in their attitudes to adultery, the only country where a majority of people think it’s fine. Germany is number two in this index of permissiveness while the Americans, of course, are the most disapproving western nation. 

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The French are also very relaxed about pupils having a relationship with a teacher. The Americans, in their weird Calvinist manner, imprison female teachers who seduce teenage boys for decades, while in France they get to live in the Élysée Palace. At the other end of the life cycle, in France you can marry someone after they’re dead. Sadly, such are the inroads of American-style ‘wokery’ that incest has been made a crime. 

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France’s riot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, are famed the world over for their softly-softly approach to civil disturbance. Indeed, perhaps the most iconically French images of recent years featured police having running fights with firemen; look at them, just people living for the moment, not a phone in sight.

When climate protesters in England block roads, or throw soup at paintings, the police treat them with the sort of deference one might expect of the British class system. God forbid that Indigo or Milo might actually be punished for stopping everyone from getting to work. In France, when eco-protesters glued themselves to the road, the police ripped them off.

Bizarrely, until 2011 the riot police were permitted to drink on duty. ‘A glass of wine, beer or cider – but not spirits – was always permitted with lunch, including while on duty. Even packed lunches provided out of riot vans while they were patrolling demonstrations came with a can of beer or glass of wine.’ That all changed, sadly, although it makes more sense when you see them as essentially a military force; after all, First World War soldiers were given a ration of two glasses of wine a day.

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Wine is obviously hugely central to French culture. In 1965 French adults consumed 160 litres per head a year, which perhaps explains their traditionally very high levels of cirrhosis. Despite this, they don’t have the sort of extreme oblivion-seeking alcoholism found in the British Isles. Anglo-Saxon binge drinking is considered uncouth, and the true man of panache and élan instead spends all day mildly sozzled until eventually turning into a grotesque Gérard Depardieu figure. (Although Depardieu’s 14 bottles of wine a day might be on the high side, even for French standards.)

When the French sought to reduce alcohol consumption in the 1950s, the government’s slogan was ‘No more than a litre of wine a day’, which must have seemed excessively nanny-statish at a time when primary school children were given cider for lunch. Wine consumption has quite drastically fallen in the decades since, by as much as two-thirds by some estimates. 

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In his memoirs BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas wrote about a battle between the French and Germans in 1944, recounting how at one point the French army ground to a halt: ‘I looked at the map, and realised we were at the beginning of the Burgundy vineyard country. They were studying it because it would be tragic if they fought through the great vineyards of Burgundy – France would never forgive them and they paused.

‘Then, a young sous-lieuteant arrived and said, “Courage, my generals – I’ve found the weak spots of the German defences: everyone is in a vineyard of inferior quality.” The general made up his mind, “j’attaque!”’

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French winemakers are famously belligerent, and not shy of engaging in direct action; on one occasion they hijacked Spanish tankers and threw 90,000 bottles down the drain. And wine-tasting is so important that when the vaccine came along French wine-tasters requested that they be at the head of the queue, ahead of the old and vulnerable. Quite reasonably, as they depend on their smell and taste.

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The French are the most pessimistic people in the world, although the British briefly overtook them in the post-Brexit period. They are also the continent’s biggest hypochondriacs and suffer from illnesses no one else has heard of, including things like ‘heavy legs’.

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The Channel Tunnel was finally completed in 1994, six years after work began and almost 200 years after the idea was first mooted. During the historic dig British tunnellers were prohibited from smoking or drinking on the job, and were even searched for matches before going in. French workers, in contrast, were freely permitted to smoke, and when the British first broke through to French lines they were ‘confronted at the undersea border with France by a cairn of empty champagne bottles’, as this Telegraph obituary of the French head engineer recalls. Despite this, the British had seven fatalities, and the French just two, and the French team also had very low numbers of injuries for the standards of the industry. A lesson there, surely.

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The French do military pomp like no one else, including funerals, most recently that of Charles-Étienne César Gudin  a French general who died in 1812. His remains were finally discovered in Smolensk last year, and so they held a full-on First Empire-style funeral where they all dressed like they were in Napoleon’s army.

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In a brilliantly French moment ‘second-home owners on the Ile d’Oléron, off the west coast, brought a case against a cockerel, Maurice, for crowing too early.’ The locals sided with the chicken, obviously, and a judge ruled in its favour. Afterwards the National Assembly backed a bill from a southern deputy to protect France’s ‘sensory heritage’, defined as ‘the crowing of the cockerel, the noise of cicadas, the odour of manure’.

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Obviously, the art of the chef is hugely important to French pride. As well as Lyon fans protesting that lost Michelin star, there was the incident of a French chef who sued Michelin after they accused him of using English cheese in a soufflé.

But then this is nothing on François Vatel, the great French maître d’hôtel during the reign of Louis XIV, who killed himself when a banquet was ruined by a late delivery of fish, stabbing himself with a sword.

French chefs protect French ways, and Gérard Idoux, a chef at the acclaimed Recamier restaurant in Paris’s 7th arrondissement, led a group of celebrities writing an open letter denouncing Dry January as an affront to French culture. He said: ‘These days, we are not allowed to drink, to smoke or even to have a mistress. It’s just prohibition, prohibition, prohibition.’

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Sadly, English is now the global tongue, but there was once a golden age when French was the language of civilisation. Indeed until 1858, even British passports were entirely in French. Such was its obvious dominance that Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain from 1898 in 1920, didn’t speak a word of English. As Christopher Clark wrote in The Sleepwalkers: ‘He firmly believed — like many members of the French elite — that French was the only language capable of articulating rational thought and he objected to the foundation of French schools in Britain on the eccentric grounds that French people raised in Britain tended to end up mentally retarded.’ In contrast, Germany’s ambassador to Britain at the time, Prince Lichnowsky, was a fluent English-speaking Anglophile who was married to an Englishwoman. Despite this, Cambon obviously did a reasonable job as we ended up siding with the French.

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That war was no mere blip. Despite the history of conflict, including two different century-long wars in the late medieval and early modern period, France has been Britain’s closest military ally for two hundred years. Since 18 June 1815, the two countries have fought together in 21 different wars, an unusually strong bond between two neighbours and friends. You might even call it a special relationship.