Vive la différence
The Anglo-Saxons, as we English-speakers are somewhat inaccurately known by the French, have long regarded their Gallic neighbours with a mix of amusement and horror. The intensity of that regard, however, has rarely faltered.
France is the country we love to hate, hate to love, and cannot get enough of. We vacation and migrate there in prodigious numbers (dimmed briefly by recession), turn French foibles into jokes and television series, and write books about why the French are so exasperatingly different.
Lots of books. Though the French begin at Calais, only a few miles away from England, they tend to be depicted in English prose as an especially exotic species of fauna with customs and folkways that require elaborate explanation. Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, Waugh, Wodehouse and countless other observers have given the French a going-over that the Italians and Belgians, for instance, rarely enjoy, despite being every bit as foreign.
Britain’s awed incomprehension of the French is embodied in Instructions for British Servicemen in France, a 1944 manual reprinted three years ago to wide amusement:
“If you should happen to imagine
that the first pretty French girl
who smiles at you
intends to dance the can-can
or take you to bed,”
goes one of the manual’s warnings,
“you will risk stirring up
a lot of trouble for yourself –
and for our relations with the French.”
Relations remain stirred; we Anglo-Saxons remain fascinated.
And fascinated you will be by the following reading list composed in perfect English, but so stirringly French. As one former English woman, now a dedicated Francophile, wrote:
“Like the long-suffering spouse
who realises, after all those years,
that in spite of everything,
there is no one in the world
she would rather be with,”
she confesses,
“I adore and despise this country
in equal measure.”
The Secret Life of France
Lucy Wadham
What French Women Know:
About Love, Sex and Other Affairs of the Heart
By Debra Ollivier
Détour de France:
An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education
By Michael Simkins
Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette
By John Dummer
Advertisement
I’ve always been intrigued by the quantity of books that “anglo-saxons” write about The French and their French experiences and have wondered how other countries compare.