France

Why France?
The landscape is unmatched, the culture is humbling and the present, though unsettled, is intriguing, says Sebastian Faulks

I sometimes think the real France " the one that people love " exists only in the imagination. In reality, you can sometimes find glimpses of it, but even those are harder to come by these days.
I suppose we all have a similar idea of what that "real" country is. It’s something you find in the pages of Proust and Flaubert, in the paintings of Millet and Monet, in the smell of the Métro and in the landscape of the Auvergne. You can see it in the tight lips of the patronne of the hotel in the town square with its flowered wallpaper, failed plumbing and rattling china-lozenge door handles. It’s in the plane-flanked avenues of the routes nationales; it’s in the family inns of Burgundian villages; it’s in the old Michelin Red Guides with their crossed-out dog’s heads.

Modern technology came late to this sparsely populated country, and after 10 minutes down a D road you were back in a way of life that had disappeared from England decades before. As close as Normandy and as recently as 1975, you could effectively travel back to a pre-war, prelapsarian world, where Jacques Tati was your postman. You were through the looking-glass all right, in a world where even the village cafe cooked food better than you’d ever tasted at home; but something about it seemed mysteriously insubstantial. It had a dreamlike quality.

Critics of the country " and it has never lacked for them " will say that this sense of otherworldliness is caused simply by the fact that France has, over the centuries, failed to take sufficient interest in the lives and cultures of other countries. Believing itself to have the greatest thinkers, soldiers and scientists, as well as the most naturally blessed landscape in the world, France developed a sense of profoundly contented self-reliance that made it a world apart. "

Heureux comme Dieu en France", they said: as happy as God in France. Therein lay its glamour and its charm; therein, also, lay a danger.

If you look at France today, you see a troubled country. Most people feel crushed between the Anglo-Saxons on one hand, with their free-marketeering, awful films and foreign invasions; and, on the other, by the unstemmable tide of North African/Arab immigration that has started setting fire to the cities.

It is also fair to say that French literature and art is at such a low level that even a professional francophile such as Edmund White, long a resident of Paris, could claim in his recent book, The Flâneur, that France has only one artist and no writers of note. And the cuisine, once the brightest feather in the cockerel’s plumage, has, I think any objective traveller would admit, been eclipsed by the cooking of California, Italy and New York.


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