Reports of France’s death are greatly exaggerated

Here we go again. “France ain’t what it used to be.” “France is going/has gone to the dogs.” 

A recent opinion article in the Daily Telegraph revived and belaboured this hoary theme. 

The paper’s deputy comment editor, Annabel Denham, treated us to a rant about how “the France I love is dying” and what she sees as “the awful spectacle of La Belle France dissolving”.

The assumptions behind this theme are: 1) that there once was a great, loveable France that no longer exists; and 2) the features of this fictitious France should somehow be maintained by all patriotic Frenchmen and women for the benefit of visiting foreigners. 

Descriptions of La Belle France are almost always the fantasies of nostalgia. They are the mis-memories of holidays as a child or adolescent when the coffee smelt strangely wonderful and the croissants were fresh and squidgy. 

The exact form of the myth of a perfect, loveable France is invariably soft-focused and personal. Ms Denham, for example, laments the loss of “warm baguettes, contented cows [and] the exquisite parking”. 

I will take her word that the cows around her holiday home were contented but I have no idea what she means by the last phrase. I will go out today and look for an exquisite parking place.

I do not see France dying. I see it changing in many ways.

Not quite in frozen time

Things are certainly not quite the same as they were when we arrived a couple of decades ago but since then a generation has died, the internet has moved in and medicine has advanced. Nowhere can stay the same.

The “death of France” theory usually focuses on politics, economics, immigrants and crime – not necessarily in that order. 

Ms Denham sees the “the total unravelling of what was once a vaguely coherent, moderately high-trust society”. 

“Vaguely” is certainly the operative word. She goes on to castigate “ungovernable producer interests” and paralysing strikes. 

Has there ever been a time when France (or any other country, for that matter) was not the battleground of interests and trade unionists? It sounds a bit like a yearning for the restoration of the ancien régime.

“The public,” she says, “are painfully aware of this systematic decline, even if snooty elites look the other way.” 

I would say it is the elites that are busy peddling the decline narrative while people get on with their ordinary lives.

What I will give her is the fact that the cost of living is rising – that is true of most countries – and that France is maintaining a large debt – but that is mainly due to 21st Century people expecting a high standard of public services for which they believe they have paid. 

In other words, they want to maintain the kind of lifestyle for which Ms Denham is so nostalgic. 

“The French are in a permanent state of anxiety over immigration and the failures of integration,” says Ms Denham. This is a generalisation too far. It depends who you speak to, where they live, and how you phrase the question.

Olde France has not disappeared entirely. There is still a café at the crossroads in my local market town where people sit each morning over coffee and fresh croissants. They chat about the state of rugby rather than the state of the nation, just as they have done for as long as I can remember. 

I am sure the scene would not have been much different 50 or 100 years ago. You cannot hold back modernity, but it would be a mistake to believe that all is lost. 

France is a wonderful country still, a combination of the adorable and the annoying; a permanent battleground of ideas about how life should be. 

Save the obituaries. Park exquisitely outside your local boulangerie and take a whiff of what is cooking therein.