Escape from barbarity

Spectator, The, Jan 3, 2004 by Dalrymple, Theodore

The English, so another Frenchman once observed, take their pleasures sadly. If only that were so: those were the good old days. It used to be the case that you realised the futility of life when you watched the English enjoying themselves, but now it is far worse and more depressing than that; they take their pleasures noisily, offensively, brutally, antisocially. They can't enjoy themselves without screaming, baring their teeth, hitting each other over the head with broken bottles, eructating and vomiting. You see none of this in France, at least on a mass scale, which is what counts in determining the quality of life. Furthermore, I doubt that many French patients address their doctor by the equivalent of 'mate', as young British patients now do. The mere usage of Madame and Monsieur makes France a more polite country than Britain, despite its (in my experience undeserved) reputation for rudeness.

Of course, everything is going to the dogs in France as well as in Britain - at my age, you can expect nothing else; such expectations are genetically hard-wired into the aging human brain - but more slowly and gracefully. The charm of France will see me out, but their education system is falling to bits, their educationists are making the same wicked mistakes as our own, young Frenchmen can't write or spell their own language properly, and crime is rising, so that the statistics, always doubtful, suggest that their crime rate is 80 per cent of ours - that is to say abominably high. Administrative incompetence, indifference and cruelty are not confined to this side of the Channel: for example, not long ago I read a book by a prison doctor in France which, if a true reflection of what goes on in Paris's largest prison, La Sante, puts all prison abuses in Britain in the shade.

And yet there is more to a civilisation than the sum of its problems - at least, if it has any charms. Try as I might, however, I can see little charm to life in Britain, even if its vaunted economic recovery were not, as it clearly is, a house of cards. The British strike me as frivolous without gaiety and earnest without seriousness, which is why Mr Blair is so apt a leader for them. They have all but lost their saving grace (and a very great saving grace it was), their ironical humour. Of course, there is a deal of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith said, and even in its sense of humour, and I am talking in generalities. The British sense of humour is still superior to the French. But I think that only a few years ago the British would have guffawed the half-absurd, half-sinister caesaropapism of the British government to scorn. Give Britain a few more years, and no one will laugh: people will scream when they're happy and shake their fists when they're angry, which they will be most of the time.

I am not starry-eyed about France, and I know that it has many skeletons in its cupboard (the latest to emerge is the treatment of the Harkis, the Algerians who sided with the French during the war of independence and moved to France when it was over). But the fact is the French are a great nation, and they have contributed disproportionately to every field of higher human endeavour, from mathematics to literature, from art to physics and medicine. Much more than the British, they retain a respect for the civilisation they have wrought, and if at times their pride is irritating and absurd, and Paris is not the centre of the world because nowhere is the centre of the world, it is better than the loss of spirit one sees in Britain, whose self-doubt is an ideological pretext for mental laziness and excruciating bad taste.