France profonde

Nutty French drivers
August 19, 2003

Almost every hour of every day someone in France sets off on a car journey never to return. Every day another 377 people finish their journey in hospital, many having to live with the knowledge that they have killed someone-often someone they love.

The French attitude towards driving is based on a belief in libert?which translates here as "me first." Pr?ntion Routi?e, a charity, and the French government are trying to change the national indifference to others: this year's road safety campaign shows a man in yellow carrying traffic cones. The text reads: "This man is working for your safety. Respect his life." A radical idea: it'll take time.

If you have to stop on the hard shoulder of a French motorway this summer, time is something you don't have. On average, it's 17 minutes before someone ploughs into the back of you. I first heard this on the radio as I was travelling on a French motorway with my wife and small child. Not long afterwards, the traffic slowed to a crawl: a car had broken down, now the repair man lay dead on the road, killed as he winched it on to his truck. Still on the same motorway an hour later, I heard that flap, flap, flap of a flat tyre. A memorable moment: the sound of the key turning in the condemned man's cell.

"The French have never accepted speed limits," says the president of Pr?ntion Routi?e. "They see them as an unjust hindrance to their legitimate libert?quot; Freedom means not only driving as fast as you want on whichever side of the road you want, it also means stopping wherever you want. In our town there is usually at least one car parked three feet out from the kerb in front of the newsagent. My carpenter Dominique leans on the horn of his van, releasing a string of expletives. "Of course, he's got every right to stop there," he concedes, "just as I've got every right to do this." His shrieking horn has no effect on the person inside, who's flicking idly though the magazine rack. The carpenter flings open the door of his van. There's going to be a fight over whose libert?s greater. No, they shake hands. It turns out that he's a client. They chat about shutters while Dominique buys his cigarettes and scratches some lottery tickets he's bought with the change. The hooting is taken up by others behind us. "If they've got a problem," remarks the newsagent's wife, "let them eat pills."

What helps to give the French this sense of freedom is that for much of the year the roads are empty-you can overtake on a blind corner reasonably confident that you won't meet anything coming the other way (though even my wife, who drives faster than I do, was surprised the other day to see that the car overtaking her was itself being overtaken). Breaking the speed limit was considered least important of nine driving offences in a recent CSA/Pr?ntion Routi?e opinion poll, after failing to check the tyres. Driving after three glasses of red comes third, after smoking cannabis at the wheel and talking on a mobile phone. France has "une culture de consommation de vin," a director of Pr?ntion Routi?e explained to me. Even for him there was no question of stopping motorway cafeterias from selling wine. The wine lobby is powerful as well: my very responsible friend Pierre, a banker who also cultivates his family's vineyards, was outraged by the image in last year's drink/drive campaign: a man drinking from a wine glass. "What does this government think it's doing! Wine sales are catastrophic and now they're associating it with road deaths!" The picture was discreetly withdrawn. This year's picture shows a man with a glass of beer. Belgian beer.

Until recently there have been few incentives to obey the law: most people who were caught simply phoned up a friend of a friend or, if it was local, their mayor and for a small consideration got the offence blown away. Less than half actually paid a fine or lost points and only 8 per cent of drivers say they worry about, let alone respect the life of, the man in a k?.

But now Jacques Chirac has taken a strong line on driving. Traditionally, the incoming president amnesties all outstanding driving offences: during the months before an election people park even more selfishly than usual and drive at unbelievable speeds, knowing if they're caught, they'll be amnestied. Consequently each presidential election has cost an additional 300 road deaths. But before the last debacle, an opinion poll revealed that an astonishing 66 per cent were against the amnesty. Candidate Chirac went with the flow: if elected, he would amnesty only parking offences. He then made road safety one of the three pillars of his second term, including making it illegal to use influence to annul a fine and putting a brake on the time-honoured white licence, whereby professional road-users claim immunity because losing their licence would mean losing their job. So far, the new measures are working. Road deaths are down on last year. But this may have more to do with intense propaganda than a change of attitude: respect for another's life is an abstract ideal, whereas libert?like wine, flows in the veins.