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Everyone loves France: food, wine, art, landscape, fashion; intelligent hedonism, ancient culture. I grant you, you get all this cheaper, classier and with more friendly service in Italy, but one can’t have too much of a good thing. The Entente Cordiale (or “Friendly Understanding” as we say in English) is a great way to enjoy all this and fight fewer wars. But psychologists find that marriages work best between spouses who think alike. And one of the loveliest things about France is that it is so very foreign.
When I was in the City there were big bucks in playing British and French tax laws against one another. Send cash across the Channel, suitably packaged, and it gets a deduction on leaving Dover but incurs no tax at Calais. Pass the Moët. But things weren’t set up like this to amuse bankers. Napoleon’s cannons gave the Continent a legal code in the early nineteenth century: thanks to Nelson we kept the Common Law. Now in France, if there is no law permitting you to do something, you may not do it. In the Anglosphere, it’s allowed so long as the law is silent. This is why EU rules about plum sizes drive us bonkers. Our culture says “have as few rules as possible and obey them all”. The Continent has had too many laws for long enough that they learnt to ignore the stupid ones.
The French are better at Grands Projets. The Champs-Elysées makes a straight line from the Louvre to the Bois de Boulogne; when the Prince Regent wanted to link Carlton House with his favourite park he had to settle for Regent Street. Eurostar runs through Kent like a steam roller on Temazepam for the same reason: because we do ask permission of the frogs before we drain the pond. In 1984 (smell the symbolism) France Telecom gave everyone a screen on their telephone with scads of tabulated information about rainfall in Chad and trains to Montpelier. Much more elegant than the internet, n’est pas? But elegance isn’t everything.
English itself, the original information superhighway, conquered the world partly because we don’t care how you speak it: entrepreneur is an English word. France has a law to enforce the use of French. England has the Oxford English Dictionary – growing by four thousand words a year.
France and the Continent are different from Britain and the Anglosphere. Seductively different; exotic. But before you turn a friendly understanding into an ever closer union, listen to the psychologist. When opposites attract, it all ends in tears.