French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  Which is still better than any of the previously attempted rewrites.

  MARIANNE

  Goddess of liberty

  Ubiquitous allegorical icon, signifying democracy and opposition to monarchy, personifying the authority of the state. Often portrayed wearing the Phrygian bonnet, a conical cap associated with Phrygia in Anatolia. Marianne has played greater and lesser roles during the various republics. She has been represented by various models including Brigitte Bardot (BB) and Catherine Deneuve. The most celebrated image of Marianne is in the painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) by Eugéne Delacroix, celebrating the July revolution, portraying a bare-breasted Marianne leading revolutionaries into battle.

  MAYLE, PETER

  Author, A Year in Provence (1989)

  A man bought a house, hired some builders, ate some meals, drank a lot of wine and sold 6m books. Then he moved to Long Island, New York, before returning to France to write several further versions of the same book, selling millions more. You will learn virtually nothing about France from any of them although there is plenty about what Mayle ate and drank, and the often-annoying habits of French builders.

  MCDONALD’S

  France’s national dish

  French dietary staple, always known as McDo (pronounced Mac-dough). McDonald’s is the number one restaurant chain in France, with 1,285 sites, serving one million meals per day. Were Marie-Antoinette to live today, she might, having been advised that the people had no bread, have proposed, ‘Let them eat McDo.’ The restaurant chain proclaims itself to be Le Monde de Happy (a play on words, meaning a happy world and happy people). Its operations in France are said to be the most successful and innovative in its worldwide portfolio. They offer a croque McDo. To be condemned outright by all right-thinking French people even if everyone is forced to stop there every once in a while for a cleanish loo (see toilettes) and free wifi. That McDonald’s should conquer republican France with a hamburger called a Royal is one of numerous French culinary paradoxes.

  MÉDECINS

  Doctors

  You really wonder why anyone bothers to do this job. Doctors in France are theoretically independent of the state but must work within a minutely regulated framework. Doctors do not enjoy an income or standard of living remotely equivalent to their British counterparts, never mind the Americans. They often work out of quite grubby premises, lacking capital to invest in modern facilities. A généraliste (GP) can charge only 23 euros for a consultation and the rates for consultants are similarly regulated. Indeed, the official tariff includes a maximum rate that can be charged for attending a patient via Skype. ‘People knock on our front door when they have a cold,’ complains one doctor’s wife.

  MEDIAPART

  Leftist French digital news website

  Digital information service with a long list of scoops and inside stories on various affaires that has 100,000 paying subscribers. The editor is Edwy Plenel who left Le Monde after several tumultuous years. The project is inspired by the idea that the subscription model makes the journal accountable to subscribers only. Predictably left wing, but at least it is a fresh breeze in a French news landscape otherwise dominated by crippled, state-subsidised dinosaurs.

  MERKEL, ANGELA

  Frustrated partner of France

  President François Hollande likes to pretend that he stands alongside Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as one of the co-heads of the European project. This is hardly credible. Although Merkel receives him in Berlin and caters to Hollande’s vanity she has never ceased to lecture the French for their failure to structurally reform their economy and Berlin is said to regard Hollande as a political lightweight who does not keep his word. She is seen to grimace when he plants kisses on her cheeks during their frequent encounters. There’s no doubt who is the stronger figure. When Arnaud Montebourg, the divisive economy minister in the first Hollande government, compared Merkel to Bismarck, he was promptly fired.

  MINI-COOPER

  You can buy one, but…

  It is not permissible to name a child Mini-Cooper in France, a couple in the Roussillon have been informed by the prefecture. Other banned names include Nutella and Manhattan.

  MISÉRABILISME

  Despair

  The Germans call this Weltschmerz (world sorrow). In English, it’s a state of dwelling on the dark side. It translates exactly to miserabilism. In the fifteen years I have lived in France, I have yet to meet anyone other than politicians who expressed optimism for the economic future of the country. See Bovarysme.

  MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS

  President of the Republic, 1981-1995

  Unscrupulous political opportunist, shameless liar, narcissist, seducer, adulterer, constructor of pharaonic monuments to himself. Georges Pompidou, president of France from 1969 to 1974, said: ‘Never let Mitterrand impress you. No matter what he tells you, never believe a word he says.’ Polls say that French people consider him the second-best president ever, after De Gaulle. All available evidence suggests he was the worst, imposing employment rules that have progressively destroyed the economy. Infinitely crafty, slippery and economically ignorant, he lived like a Borgia. Beginning his political career as a Catholic rightist, he had a murky war, was a fonctionnaire (civil servant) in the administration of Pétain, and joined the resistance in time for the allied victory.

  After the war he reinvented himself as a socialist party politician whose instincts were statist, protectionist and clientéliste. By 1973 he was allied with the French Communist party and after winning the presidency eight years later installed four communists in his government. It was Mitterrand who proposed the 35-hour week, nationalised swathes of the economy, vastly expanded the welfare state, lowered the pension age, increased the embedding of unions within the social institutions, imposed the wealth tax and enlarged the government. His monuments include the hideous Bibliothèque Nationale de France (national library) in Paris. Only when his funeral was attended by his wife, his mistress and his illegitimate daughter after his death from prostate cancer did the compliant French media disclose that he had a second family.

  MONARCHISME

  Royalism

  In absence of a monarch of their own, the Queen of England is widely admired by French people nostalgic for the ancien régime. Monarchists mount candidates for the European elections, run web sites proposing various solutions to the existential Republican crisis, but are basically irrelevant. In addition to those who are wistful for a Bourbon restoration there are also Bonapartists, but if anything even less visible, although I did meet one once at a barbecue. Given Republican control of all media, it is hard to see the emergence of a credible claimant to the French throne or imperium although it would always be open to the French to import a royal household. My own suggestion, that William and Kate be leased to the French as required, at least for the near future, finds surprising support amongst my constituents, especially as the French consider Kate trés jolie (cute).

  MONDE, LE

  Newspaper with little news

  Prestigious, precious and pompous French newspaper, as self-regarding and viscerally leftist as the Guardian, but less imaginative and not as humorous. The printed edition will never deign to stoop to publishing anything so coarse as news. Indeed, it simply cannot. Due to the archaic rules of the print unions, Le Monde’s content is more or less a day old before it gets to any newsstands outside Paris. To be a shareholder in Le Monde is an exercise in frustration. The staff get to vote on who should be editor, which is not a recipe for effective leadership. In summer 2015 the newspaper was looking for its sixth editor in five years. The most recent candidate, Jérôme Fenoglio, was rejected by the staff partly for proposing to accelerate the newspaper’s move towards digital distribution. With a circulation that has dropped below 300,000, the paper has never sold well outside the Paris media-political bubble and survives on 16m euros a year of government subsidies, equivalent to almost 10 per cent of the cover price, per copy so
ld. This figure does not include tax breaks.

  MOUVEMENT SOCIAL

  Euphemism for strikes

  Polite name for strikes. Social movement is a name given to work stoppages to make them sound progressive and justified rather than merely greedy and annoying. There are few strikes ever reported on French radio and television outlets - instead there are social movements. France Inter will solemnly announce that train services, for example, will be suspended ‘because of a social movement.’

  MUR DES CONS

  Wall of shame

  The Mur des cons affair exposed the corruption of politicised French prosecutors, revealing their hit list of targets. In 2013 the website Atlantico published a video taken surreptitiously at the headquarters of the magistrates’ union in Paris revealing a mural labeled Mur des cons depicting figures on the right. They included former President Nicolas Sarkozy, Manuel Valls, then the minister of the interior who later became President François Hollande’s second prime minister, the criminologist Alain Bauer, the businessman Alain Minc and the banker/writer/left-wing apostate Jacques Attali. The suggestion that this constituted a target list for magistrates was implausibly denied and the journalist who exposed this scandal was censured by his union for breach of professional ethics, having photographed the wall without permission (!) from the union of magistrates. The head of the union, the austere leftist Françoise Martre, was eventually declared by the Paris prosecutors (members of her own union) to have committed no criminal act. The mural has nonetheless been painted over.

  MUSULMANS, LES

  Muslims

  A marginalised religious minority, suffering educational and employment deprivation and discrimination. It is extremely difficult to determine the precise economic status of Muslims in France because the state does not recognise them as a separate ethnic group so it collects no statistics revealing their education achievements, average income, rate of employment, housing status, household wealth or health. Indeed when the mayor of Béziers was accused of trying to collect such data in his city, he was investigated by the police. Of course on all of these metrics, empirical observation and independent data demonstrate that Muslims do not fare well. Casual racism directed at Muslims is common.

  Even when Muslims know better than anyone else what they are talking about, nobody listens to them, as I learned when I tried to buy an infant seat from a local car dealer, only to encounter mass confusion among the sales staff. The only guy who seemed to know anything was a junior employee named Mohammed, who pointed out that the proposed solution could never work but was ignored. Muslims are subject to naked employment discrimination in France. Unemployment among Muslims across France is at least 40 per cent, higher among youth, while 60 per cent of prison inmates are thought to be Muslim.

  ‘MY TAILOR IS RICH BUT MY ENGLISH IS POOR’

  English phrase known to all French people

  Once upon a time every French student was taught this bizarre phrase. Its first recorded appearance is in the standard textbook L’Anglais sans peine (English Without Pain), by Alphonse Chérel, published in 1929. Although not taught in French schools for decades, the expression has ironically become firmly embedded in the French language. It was used in Astérix chez les Bretons, and even made a cameo in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) when the devil-possessed girl Regan announces from her bed that her tailor is rich, a reference that will have entirely escaped 99.9 per cent of the film’s audience. It is still sometimes used by French pilots to test their radios, as an anglophone might say ‘testing, 1,2,3’. It is of course almost impossible to use this phrase in any conversation - but not totally. At my first municipal council meeting, complimented on the cut of my suit, I was able to reply, and truthfully given the price of the suit, ‘my tailor is rich’, producing gales of laughter. British children were taught to recite an equally challenging phrase for everyday conversation, ‘où est la plume de ma tante?’ It is not unknown for Britons in France seeking to purchase a writing instrument to ask shop assistants for a ‘plume’ rather than a stylo (generic name for a biro or pen). I know this because I actually saw it happen at a French motorway service area when a British tourist gormlessly asked for one. The shop assistant was baffled since it has been some time since the French plucked a goose to write a letter.

  N

  NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE

  Ambivalent NATIONAL figure

  The French are massively ambivalent about Napoléon (1769-1821). The number of roads named rue Napoléon Bonaparte in France is zero. Though, to be fair, he has two avenues. And there is an unassuming Bonaparte street in Paris, though the forename is absent. By contrast, André Breton, the surrealist poet, has more streets named after him. The communards proposed memorialising Bonaparte on a Monument to the Accursed but this came to nothing. Walter Benjamin notes that the stations of the Paris Metro named after his victories made them ‘gods of the underworld.’ The Arc de Triomphe was conceived by Napoléon, and most of his body is interred in the most magnificent tomb in Paris at Les Invalides, although a urologist in New Jersey claims to have his penis.

  Bonaparte presents French people with a problem. The most gigantic figure in all of French history, he was not really French but a Corsican of Italian extraction. His legacy is fundamental to France and he put in place much of the foundation of the modern French state. He defended the revolution but proclaimed himself Emperor. He was the most successful French general of all time, but his career ended in humiliation. He is irreconcilable as both a war lord and social reformer, a tyrant and a law-giver. His famous legal code (see code civil) was progressive and reactionary at the same time, supposedly forbidding privileges based on birth, establishing freedom of religion, and imposing a meritocracy on government jobs, while bequeathing enormous power to the state and institutionalising discrimination against women. He brutally restored slavery in the Caribbean and massacred those trying to free themselves from its yoke. Andrew Roberts in his 2015 biography, sympathetic to Bonaparte, is hardly sympathetic to the leader of the Haïti rebellion, Toussaint Louverture, noting that he was pretty brutal himself and also a slave-owner. This hardly excuses Bonaparte’s remark: ‘What could the death of one wretched Negro mean to me?’

  NAPOLÉON II

  Forgotten scion of Bonaparte

  François Charles Joseph Napoléon, 1811-1832, son of Bonaparte, was arguably Emperor for a fortnight, but he died at 21.

  NAPOLÉON III

  The last emperor (1808-1873)

  To visit the remains of Napoléon III, you must go to Farnborough, in Hampshire. The Imperial Crypt is a short walk away from the train station at St Michael’s Abbey, where it is tended by Benedictine monks. A jolly, hospitable Abbot, Cuthbert Brogan, showed me around, ushering me into the chilly crypt that the Emperor shares with his wife Eugénie de Montijo and their son, Napoléon Eugene, the Prince Imperial. After the disastrous conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoléon III and his entourage were held in captivity in Germany for several months before he was released by Bismarck and made his way to England, where he was joined by Eugénie. They settled first at Chislehurst in Kent, where the Emperor died in 1873. He was buried at St Mary’s Catholic church. When their son, Napoléon Eugene, who would have been Napoléon IV, died in 1879, Eugénie moved the bodies to the abbey she built in their memory. She installed herself in a nearby mansion, now a Catholic girls’ school, and plotted against her enemies.

  The Crypt is not especially grand. Napoléon is entombed in a sarcophagus donated by Queen Victoria, very similar to those of the British royal family at the Frogmore mausoleum at Windsor, with some added Catholic iconography. Neither is it a major tourist attraction, being open only once a week and attracting a mere handful of visitors. Queen Victoria, in her diaries, expressed great admiration for the Emperor. ‘If we compare him with poor King Louis-Philippe, I should say that the latter was possessed of vast knowledge upon all and every subject, of immense experience in public affairs, and of great activity of mind; where
as the Emperor possesses greater judgment and much greater firmness of purpose, but no experience of public affairs, nor mental application; he is endowed, as was the late King, with much fertility of imagination. Another great difference is that the poor King was thoroughly French in character, possessing all the liveliness and talkativeness of that people, whereas the Emperor is as unlike a Frenchman as possible, being much more German than French in character.’

  From time to time, French politicians have demanded that the Emperor’s remains be returned to France but Father Brogan dismisses these suggestions with contempt. He recalls that when Queen Victoria was criticised by the French press in 1871 for entertaining Napoléon and his wife Eugénie to dinner, she described the French in her diary as ‘incomprehensible and impertinent,’ a sentiment with which he is plainly in accord. ‘The French seem to think we are some kind of insurrectionist Bonapartist cult,’ he told me. ‘Frankly, I am more concerned with chickens, bees and bookbinding. We have to earn a living. The best we can do for the Emperor is to pray for his soul every day, which is the only thing that will do him any good.’