Does France need a prankster to shake up its presidential race?

After the Charlie Hebdo attack, in January 2015, The Times’ Ben Macintyre explained a fundamental difference between the French and British approach to political satire.

In Britain, he said, it is “two parts entertainment to only one part genuine outrage”. By comparison the French tradition, dating back to the Revolution, is closer to “a fistfight” – “blunter, crueller and frequently braver”.

To put it another way, if French political satirists wear metaphorical battledress, the British equivalent is a jester’s hat.

Or, as we witnessed in Clacton this summer, sometimes just a bin. The Blighty way, it seems, is to relieve tension rather than actively interrogate.

This difference grew more apparent post-Brexit in the political chaos of the UK’s withdrawal and subsequent revolving door at Number 10.

Throw an international s**tshow into the mix – global pandemic, Trumpism, climate meltdown and full-scale wars – and satire has not just proliferated in the UK, but its performers have become akin to shamans, guiding a discombobulated British electorate through the political stress to the kind of altered state of consciousness where daffy stunts like a Liz Truss lettuce and intergalactic space warrior feel strangely mollifying.

Throwing pies

You might assume the French would be sniffy about this. Not one bit.

“It kills me to admit it but sometimes Brits are unplayable,” a French colleague said when Count Binface announced he was standing against Nigel Farage.

French media showed a similar wistful fascination for the novelty candidate, with many publications musing whether France, too, needed a clown to shake up its own politics.

The country’s flattering coverage of political pranksters continued with the death of Belgian custard pie-thrower par excellence Noël Godin in August.

For readers not familiar with this anarcho-pâtissier’s body of work, let me give you a précis.

He was known as L’Entarteur and made his name for ego-puncturing on an epic scale by targeting such notable ‘pompeux cornichons’ (his words) as Bill Gates and Ryanair's Michael O’Leary.

But it was his roll call of French victims, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, that particularly endeared him to the press here.

Some targets (see Jean-Luc Godard) were surprisingly good sports.

Others (philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was singled out no less than eight times) were subsequently haunted for life by footage of themselves, spangled by dollops of crème pâtissière, trying to throttle their attacker while yelling ‘Get up, or I’ll kick your head in’.

Holding out for a (political satirist) hero

But now the Entarteur has been in-tar-terred, and Binface has a lid on – at least until the next British by-election.

Don’t get too misty-eyed. Politics itself is so deranged right now that acting another type of fool for five minutes of comic relief won’t cut it for much longer.

With presidential elections around the corner and the world hurtling towards a collective lights-out, the stakes have never been higher.

France does not need to look to its neighbours for inspiration, but to go back to its own brand of hardball lampooning and find another way to smash through the nonsense.

We need something courageous and, love them as we might, it probably isn’t another clown.