There is so much Frogbashing to be found out there, especially in the English-speaking press, that even someone with a healthily critical eye on France - someone like me, you were perhaps thinking - feels no shame in occasionally redressing the balance.
Most of the venom tends to stream from a certain kind of pundit. They range from witty oafs to oafs who are not witty and share, as well as being oafs, the unchanging appearances of people who were already in their mid or late 30s when born.
These characters, or many of them, still come to France on holiday, because in their hearts they realise what a great country it is.
What they don't realise is that they should actually be stopped at Calais and exchanged for those poor souls who tramp the streets of the town, after journeys through hell and high water fuelled by the desire to live in Britain. Except, of course, that Calais has not yet done nothing sufficiently bad to deserve such a fate.
I cannot explain precisely why these thoughts came to mind as I watched live coverage of the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris.
The stirring spectacle of all those military formations marching down the Champs Elysées from l'Arc de Triomphe to Place de la Concorde not only took me back to the exasperatingly special part of Paris where I lived until the turn of the year.
It rekindled other memories, inspired and good as well as bitter and bad, of my time in the capital.
But those are essentially personal thoughts, or they are for now.
Two other things struck me. One, once again, what a marvellous national anthem La Marseillaise is, however politically incorrect the bloodthirsty lyrics may have become. At today's commemorations, as I am sure is traditional, the young choristers of Les Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois sang it with gusto.
Yes, I do realise that when you are saddled with something as atrocious as God Save The Queen, you are bound to look at anyone else's anthem through rose-tinted specs, or hear it thought velvet, sound-enhancing earphones. But it's a thunderingly good song even so; the French footballers who don't sing along when it's played before internationals really should learn the words.
And the other thing to strike me? Just how well the French stage such ceremonies.
But just as I was thinking the second of those thoughts, Mme Salut! piped up with one of her own.
"You know," said Joelle, who is known to be French. "I think we do that kind of thing almost as well as you."
* And this touching message arrived from a leftie teacher friend with a keen interest in France:
Happy Bastille Day:
I amused my class of 4 and 5 year olds yesterday by telling them about sans culottes, let them eat cake, storming the Bastille & building a bridge out of a prison, & cutting off the heads of the king the queen. One rather large lad, more than likely to enjoy time at Her Majesty's Pleasure in the future, was gobsmacked.
"But wottabout the police?" he kept asking, wondering how on earth they got away with it. Perhaps I should explain to him about collective action, he can become an eco-warrior instead.....
a bas les aristos
Recent Comments