Five years of living here in south-west France have led me to the thought that if that old Scots toast 'Here's tae us, wha's like us' were ever to be transcribed to the Fifth Republic, the next line would not be 'Gey few, and they're a' deid'. It would be 'Wha cares?'
Time and again during the battle over Emmanuel Macron's pensions reform I was brought up hard against the realisation that you will never convince the French to do something by pointing out that everyone else does it. Why so much aggro, I would ask, about raising the state pension age from 62 to 64? Everyone else has done the same, indeed many countries are way ahead of you. Britain is already at 66 and soon to go to 67. The Germans are talking actively about a pension age of 70.
And back, with invariable promptitude, would come the reply: 'So? But this is France'. It was not said with hostility nor in a tone that suggested in any way that offence had been taken. Rather, it was imparted in a spirit of gentle tolerance for a foreigner who clearly didn't know the very obvious answer to his question. One suddenly remembered which language it was that gave birth to the word 'insouciance'. Also, which people execute the most eloquent shrugs in the world.
The British, a more docile and complaisant (some might say, apathetic and gullible) people than they like to think themselves, raised very little protest over pension age hikes. The main rumpus I recall, and I intend no criticism here, was when the female age was equalised with the male, leaping at a stroke from 60 to 65: though, on reflection, my own view of that resentment may have been magnified in our household by Madame finding herself on the wrong side of the change by just a few months. The fact that so many of her friends beat the cut-off by similar margins did nothing to encourage her acceptance nor dilute her voluble sense of grievance. The grudge is borne still.
Not so in France. A more generous, less onerous balance between work and leisure is France's way of doing things and it will only be changed when the people of France decide they want to change it. Which, as President Macron has been reminded by protesters clattering saucepans (casserolades) in every town he has visited on his tour of reconciliation with electors, isn't yet. Nowhere close.
The simple truth is that French people are very, very pleased to be French. Stated like that, it could easily sound like a cue for the pumped-up exceptionalism of MAGA or Brexit. But, despite the best efforts of some politicians to toxify it, it comes across to me as a rather more introspective and positive impulse. The French do not greatly mistrust nor despise other nations. They just pity them, not unkindly, for having been born deprived of the colossal advantage of being French.
To call Macron an anti-democratic snooty Parisian elitist is fine for the banners. The real reason so many of his countrymen don't like him is that they suspect him of being un-French. He is too prone to cite in support of his policies the sort of international comparators that French voters instinctively disdain, too drawn to Anglo-American economic doctrines. If, as he says, the present pension rules cannot be afforded then his job, in the view of voters, is to find the money to afford it.
And if, as he tells them, France is increasingly out of step with the rest of Europe, then that is merely to demonstrate his lack of empathy with how demotic France thinks. He can aspire to lead Europe all he wants but it is not going to determine how he leads France. France is, by and large, enthusiastically pro-EU, with one caveat. It is perfectly prepared to be more communautaire… provided this doesn't mean being less French.
One of the most conspicuous consequences is an almost obsessive consumer patriotism that can look awfully like protectionism to the outside world, and can be the despair of Brussels. It is what ensures that almost every vehicle of any size that you see on French roads is a Renault or a Peugeot. It is why so many key French industries and services remain majority state-owned: so that they can be run in accordance with French custom and practice. This does not always make them more efficient, in the North Atlantic sense of cheaper; but the French would say that it makes them more efficient in the sense of doing what they do the way French people want it done. It makes France much happier to invest expensively in making services better, in contrast to British Treasury parsimony.
Privatisation in an open economy, the Thatcherite nirvana, found little appeal in France. There is no principled objection here to a monopoly, state or otherwise, provided it is rigorously regulated. A cynic might say this is why Électricité de France runs Scotland's nuclear power stations and ScottishPower does not run France's: also why ScottishPower is owned by Spaniards.
Consumer patriotism has an upside: for example, an ecologically sound preference for local foodstuffs over imported exotica. But it has downsides too, such as the preponderance of French electrical goods in the stores, even when they are of poorer quality and higher price than, say, their Japanese counterparts. This is a trade-off with which French consumers seem happy. It is why nearly a third of the British GVA comes from foreign-owned firms, against just 17% in France.
The France to which voters cling so tenaciously is, of course, a fantasy: a neverland of philosopher paysans content to conjure perfect produce from the local terroir, and share it around France for others to enjoy in their ample leisure time. It is not hard to mock, and perhaps deserves the scorn it gets (not least from the younger French). Brits, forever prone to understand life through the prism of the Second World War, may have a point too when they say that it helps obliterate a less than proud heritage from the early 1940s. Where wartime memories leave Britain steeped in remorse for lost prestige, France indulges in a compensatory, celebratory conceit about its own aesthetic. Neither reaction, it must be said, encourages forward thinking.
But let's be honest here: many, even most, nations cleave to a fantasy vision of themselves. The French version may be irritatingly smug, but it bears neither menace nor malice to others, and it is firmly rooted in a noble revolutionary ideal – liberté, égalité, fraternité – to which most people still instinctively aspire, if not always successfully.
A fortnight just spent in the UK has reinforced my own preference for that rubric as a totem, rather than a toff anointed by a deity. I watched the nation-state of my birth, or at least its southernmost quartile, industriously apply itself to the role of offshore theme park. Even in Scotland, there was no avoiding the witless hyperbole ('Your coronation station, broadcasting to the coronation nation!'). Not for the first time, France's quaint satisfaction in its own uniqueness seemed by comparison reasonable and healthy, its republican constitution mature and rational. It was good to come home.
Keith Aitken is a journalist, writer and broadcaster
