The other day, my 14-year-old daughter was on the train to Montpellier when she was approached by four beer-toting English lads. "Scuse me, can you move across the aisle? We want to play poker." She was put out, not by their unembarrassed use of their own tongue, or even their boozy bonhomie, but by the absence of any surprise at her replying in fluent English. Either they had forgotten they were in France, or some weird colonial throwback was operating.
This reminded me of something I was told by the owner of a local gîte: that the British are the least popular locataires. Britain and Germany seem to have swapped national characteristics; Brits are arrogant and rude, while Germans are modest and polite. I pointed out that in the Cévennes, where the SS and Gestapo strutted their stuff, Germans still walk on eggs; but this is because, she replied, that they not only have a sense of history, but are embarrassed by it.
"We definitely have a sense of history, but only when it suits us," I suggested, trying to improve our image through self-denigration. "And in some hazy way, we believe that the French owe us one." My hunch is that when the young, wealthy lot from London threw all the gîte's outdoor furniture into the pool on their final night and left it mournfully circling for the owner to fish out, they were sporting phantom tin helmets and khaki.
The permanent settlers show rather more colonialist tendencies: for instance, the idea that you can live somewhere without speaking the language, even minimally. If your purchasing power inspires awe (and shock, too—stories abound here of French buyers being gazumped at the last minute by les anglais), then I guess you don't need to worry about such trifling matters as understanding the natives.
Everything, but everything, is being streamlined to the ergonomic shape of a shark, and that shark is called monetary value. This is why I fear for France under Nicolas Sarkozy. I don't want it to go the same way as Britain. I don't want the "golden age" described by Julian Grand in his recent Prospect article.
I left Britain in 1990, and return for brief stints each year. Like time-lapse photography revealing the growth of a flower or a dead fox's dissolution, the ensuing image is starkly revealing. My son, who was brought up in France but is now at the University of Sussex, agrees with me that Britain is very casual. He appreciates that. There is none of that picket line of politesse that surrounds even the simplest exchange in France. Shopkeepers address him as if he's a mate; a call operator will end up chatting with him about life, or at least about football.
In Britain, there's a lot of chatting compared to France. Or maybe it's just louder. At times it feels akin to territorial assertiveness, like the barking of dogs. It's almost Texan, or Italian; but it lacks continental lightness and charm. Swearing in confined spaces, preferably spiced by the presence of someone elderly or very young, has become a national pastime. This is a real poser, after France. Here, the young, whatever they secretly think of their elders, have some residual awareness that generational claims of conscience are written into the social skin.
Is it all to do with a new, moneyed, post-Thatcher individualism? Or what Julian Le Grand calls Britain's "spring in the step"? In Britain, I feel, in the corner of the train or the pub, like some limping, bewildered, superannuated colonel returned at last from India.
In a land where even my teenage son's hard rock band greet us all with the bise, the following scene from four years back has not yet found its French equivalent. I was walking down a quiet lane in King's Lynn when a plump, pre-pubescent boy yelled "wanker" at a girl across the way. Or rather, "waaaaaaaaanker!" Between them was a frail old dear who, flinching only slightly, hobbled on. She must have been used to it. The scene has since taken on a cartoon quality in my mind—the old lady's white hair combed to one side in the blast, the plump boy swollen to toad-like proportions.
The boy caught my eye. It was a straightforward challenge, which I miserably ignored. Even in the notorious Nîmes banlieue where I spent a memorable afternoon last year (it has, officially, the most violent school in France), there is no equivalent of the what-are-you-looking-at? trope. Within hours of my arrival in Britain, I learn to keep eye contact—with a surprisingly broad age range—to a minimum. I usually return to France with at least one verbal bruise—even if it's only a caustic burst of laughter from the kids at the bus stop.
As its troubled history shows, France does violence, but in short, televisual bursts and usually in tandem with protest. In Britain, though, I sense violence as a low-level, background hum; the discomfort is increased, if anything, by the startling number of surveillance cameras. This may not be obvious from Julian Le Grand's chosen lookout point of the South Bank—surely the very last place from where to judge anything meaningful about the country's welfare—but let him try Beverley, near Hull, on a Friday night—one of the prettiest and wealthiest towns in the country.
There were bouncers in front of the pubs and restaurants. The hotel receptionist warned us not to venture out. We got about ten yards before we noticed the swarms. I was delighted to be goosed by a ladette, but my friends (tough guys all) had clocked yet another phalanx of merry bullet-heads and pulled me, complaining, back to the hotel receptionist's told-you-so look.
My son is more amused than shocked by all this. The chronic screaming out of violent obscenities is a national difference that is less annoying than his having (as a university student) to avoid the centre of Brighton on Friday and Saturday nights. He's much more impressed by the materialism, settled over the country like condensation, of a debt and spend culture. If you think borrowing from the future is progress and not barbarism, then France is way behind on this one. Our new president, inspired by Thatcher, Blair and America, wants it to catch up. That, I think, is a mistake. France will return to the speculative, selfish, petit-bourgeois years of the mid-19th century, brilliantly anatomised by Balzac ("Money, the only god we now believe in"), at a time when severe environmental strain is rubbishing the Anglo-American model of short-term liberal capitalism.
I voted for Ségolène (in lieu of les Verts) because she was rejecting this model, however half-heartedly. But a lot of the French like what they see over the channel: work, play and riches. And they're moving with their feet, along with the servicing Poles. I want to tell these hopefuls that the apparent gloop of wealth has not come without subtle, unmeasurable penalties. The measurable ones they must know already, but are apparently ignoring. It all looks just fine from the South Bank.
