When I first moved to France ten years ago, a neighbour asked me if I saw many differences between the French and the English. I didn't. We all seemed to want the same things out of life and set about getting them in broadly the same way. More recently, though, a carpenter I am working with asked me the same question, and now I find it less clear.
The French are fascinated by why so many English come to live here. Newly arrived and wanting to please, I replied: the weather, the food, the people, the culture. But I got bored trotting out these semi-truths, so one evening, with people I knew well, I replied: "Because it's less expensive." As an answer, it is no less true, but a curtain came down, wet and clammy. No amount of back-tracking could extricate me. The damage was done. I had learnt the threshold of acceptable criticism.
The English accept criticism from everyone-the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the French-in fact, anyone who's not English; it's part of our culture. Our roads are terrible, our railways a disaster, the NHS has collapsed, as have education, farming and football. I know all this because my neighbours, who have never been near the place, tell me. Even our drivers are useless: they kill only half as many as the French.
I pour my carpenter a glass of red, thinking about his question. We get on well; he may not be the best carpenter in the world but he's good company, an excellent cook and, well, not too expensive. We're eating his boar's head p??His wife has made a daube; I supply the plonk. He chokes on it. "Is this your new world filth?" No, I say, Beaujolais. I won't tell you what he said next: a Lyon magazine was recently fined E254,143 for publishing a critical opinion of Beaujolais. A court decided that there are things about France the French press may not criticise-wine being one of them. Beaujolais has problems: nobody wants to buy the stuff any more. To find out why, a local magazine interviewed a professional wine taster, the president of the European Grand Jury. Although complimentary about Beaujolais crus (Morgon and so on), he said Beaujolais primeur was "a sort of lightly fermented and alcoholised fruit juice."
But, like my reason for coming to France, the fact that a statement is accurate does not mean you can say it. Beaujolais producers had recently overproduced and were lobbying for E7m state compensation, blaming competition from "Latin America." When asked whether the producers were justified in demanding compensation, Fran?s Mauss (the expert) replied: "No. This is nonsense. They were only interested in making money, knowing full well they were marketing a vin de merde." Two "denigrating" statements: E254,143. The judge was clear: "Mauss and the journalist who interviewed him went beyond the acceptable limits of their social functions as, respectively, critic and supplier of information."
You notice self-censorship-call it politeness if you prefer-in all French newspapers. Whereas we are used to seeing Tony Blair described as a control freak, a French newspaper editor would consider it mal ?v?o call Chirac a weathervane. The traditional explanation for this is that politicians of both left and right, most captains of industry, banking and the press all attended the same state-run graduate school-the ?ole nationale d'administration. It may help to explain why the press has made so little fuss about the trial of the governor of the Banque de France, an ENA graduate. Imagine the British press reaction if Eddie George were on trial for complicity in falsifying accounts. More colourful, but no better covered, was the trial of another top government man, Bernard Bonnet, the prefet in Corsica, a post as delicate as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Bonnet didn't like a couple of popular restaurants which had materialised on the beach without planning permission, so he ordered his gendarmes to burn them down in the dead of night. His defence of this eccentric move was that he was told to burn them by the man who appointed him, Prime Minister Jospin. There's a great story in there, but no journalist will touch it. Journalists receive tax relief, which amounts to the state paying a third of their salary, but according to a report for the Acad?e des Sciences Morales et Politiques, they don't see any link between that and the "lack of critical voices." Indeed, the French consider it normal for the press to be financially assisted and therefore controlled by the state. "Our culture is frankly opposed to political freedom for the press," says the report. Perhaps that explains why they are among the least read of any in the democratic world.
An example, if extreme, of state control is told by a friend, who arrived in France 48 hours after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The BBC was showing hourly in which direction the nuclear cloud was moving. As my friend checked into a hotel, she asked where the cloud was. The owner looked at her blankly: the French government had decided that its citizens should not be informed about the disaster, for fear of panic.
