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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 26, 2003
Love letter to France
I should like to devote my column today to expressing my love for the French. Perhaps before we even get started I should explain that this will have nothing to do with Quebec or the "French fact" in Canada -- leave that to a former life. In reading the English-Canadian media lately I have noticed that we have forgotten about them anyway. We usually get along best when we forget about each other. And besides our French are no more French than we "Anglos" are. Canada from its foundations is a Norman country with two linguistic branches -- Norman English and Norman French. Our essential personality was not English nor French but Norman plus some Celts thrown in from Scotland Eire and Brittany just for the thrill. Northern boreal monarchic understated battleship grey and sublime -- that was Canada (though it is now grown ridiculous). One nation from William the Conqueror. And let the dead bury their dead as Christ says. No I am referring to France the European country and to the French the people who live there. I adore them and abominate them and always will. It is our habit in Canada whenever we begin to praise multiculturalism and to enumerate its many advantages to begin with the food. Thanks to multiculturalism we have all these ethnic restaurants. Few people are clever enough to think of another argument but to that one I'll concede. And likewise in saluting France we begin spontaneously with the food. From the beginning the French have been blessed with very good soil -- the best in all Europe -- and they have learned how to grow things. They make wine cheese and poussin c?ndrillon better than anyone (to say nothing of the truffle sauce). They do not export it however because they are mean. Go try and find a decent French wine at the LCBO for under 50 dollars! ... They only export the stuff they wouldn't drink themselves and you'll be better off with "Inniskiller". The French are sensual it has been often observed. They are worldly in ways that we northern types haven't even thought of. It is not just the food. It is in the way they walk and carry themselves; in the way they dress the men as well as the women; in the way they speak if they have any education. In the woman's preference for perfume to water. Even their cigarettes smell better -- more earthy yet more refined. As Brillat-Savarin so sagely observed (without pushing the point home too severely) the rest of the world must make do with five senses at most whereas the French have six and counting. They have distinguished a sense of "physical desire" that goes infinitely beyond our own crude combinations of sight hearing smell taste and touch. And upon this sixth sense they have constructed many more where we can never follow. They firebomb McDonald's franchises in France not the sort of thing we can approve morally. But on aesthetic grounds the case is more complex. Let me at least say this for French culinary terrorists that I have a sneaking regard for them. Anyone else would find a political argument for violent behaviour or at least a religious one. To do it in the spirit of artistic criticism is to prove the existence of that sixth sense. The French mind is likewise too subtle for us. Our minds fall back endlessly onto the jumbled bedsheets of empiricism theirs rise directly to the empyrean. There is logic and then there is French logic. Ours is dirty from contact with reality theirs is pure. I have often thought that the Cartesian strain in French thinking is the corollary of their sensual flights. The French alone have found a way to distinguish body from soul even on this Earth. We are peasants by comparison. And yet in the moments when the two touch -- the French body and the French mind -- there is a glorious incandescence. Only France could produce a Georges Bernanos or a Simone Weil to give them their due. Only France could have engendered the magnificent neo-Thomists of the 20th century. Or to be hypercritical only France could produce a Jean-Paul Sartre. Now people are going to write me from France saying I am thoroughly out of date that France today is a "modern" country that am?ricanisme has reached France too; that the old France is an idea fading into the fabric of Disneyworld. However this can never happen. I have seen these jeunes filles en fleurs who are now in jeans and the changes are merely outward. Every nation finds its own way to pretend to Americanize. Others will point to the "Islamization" of contemporary France. (Did you know for instance that the majority of babies born in French hospitals today are to Muslim parents?) But the France I love could be Christian or Muslim it wouldn't make any difference. It would still be instinctively Catholic and irreligious. I even doubt the statistic I have just cited or at least doubt its relevance. For how many generations have we been hearing that the French are no longer reproducing themselves? And yet they are still there -- more than 50 million of them as ever. The truth I suspect is that the French do not reproduce sexually as others do. For once you can distinguish body from soul it is a short step to separating sex from reproduction. I don't know how they do it I only have my suspicion: that there is a constant influx of people who may come from anywhere into France who are mysteriously transformed into French within the borders. It is not even naturalization but a kind of seduction and many many summers ago in Paris I found it was happening to me. I got out just in time! If you can even begin to understand Racine it is too late. That for the literary sort of person is the final test. No one can simultaneously understand Racine and understand anything else. He is too perfect. France itself is perfect untouchable sui generis. You must love it or hate it no middle ways. I love it to distraction. But as the French President one Jacques Chirac was reminding me in public statements just this last week my love is large enough to include an implacable hatred. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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