It’s not easy being French. Steeped as they are in the myth of La Belle France’s effortless superiority, they have to cope with the fact that one of their near-neighbours conquered them and the other liberated them. And they’ve never quite got over either experience.
The fact that the world speaks English, for example, gnaws at the French soul like a plague of rats. On Saturday, every other nation in the Eurovision Song Contest will return its votes in English, to Azerbaijani hosts who will also be speaking our mother tongue. The French, however, would rather die than submit to such indignity and so will insist both on speaking French and being addressed in it, too. That will not of course alter the fact that English is the global language of politics, business, science, aviation and popular culture. But it will, just for a moment ease the pain.
Then there are the Germans. When a soaking wet President Francois Hollande touched down in Germany last week, Frau Merkel guided him along the red carpet like a fussy nanny scolding a recalcitrant schoolboy. She wears the trousers in that relationship for the very simple reason that her country has all the money. France may puff itself up all it pleases, but Germany is calling the shots. As the Euro implodes another great French surrender is surely in the offing.
That’s not all. The Australians make better wine than all but a tiny fraction of French vineyards. Spain, Denmark and even England have the finest chefs in Europe, if those ‘best restaurant’ polls are to be believed. London beat Paris to get this year’s Olympics.
More... The seductive IMF boss and a smitten BBC business guru: Lagarde's Gallic charms leave Peston flustered QUENTIN LETTS: The PM went for the shot, calling Balls 'that muttering idiot opposite'There is still, however, one respect in which the French can hold their heads up high. For as Christine Lagarde, boss of the IMF proved when reducing the BBC’s Robert Peston to a quivering jelly of middle-aged lust yesterday, Frenchwomen are the most elegant, sophisticated, impressive and downright sexy female powerbrokers on earth.
‘She’s a very seductive politician,’ drooled Peston, before losing his place in his news report, reaching for a glass of water and virtually having to take a brisk, cold shower before he could continue.
Quivering wreck: BBC business editor Robert Peston described Mme Lagarde as 'very seductive'Speaking as Peston’s almost exact contemporary, I can quite see what moved him so. The silver-haired, 56 year-old Madame Lagarde is 5’11” tall, a slender ex-synchronized swimmer who keeps herself trim with yoga, swimming and scuba diving. That she is a fully-grown woman who actually knows what she’s talking about differentiates Lagarde from the airhead Berlusconi bimbos who used to parachuted by their grateful old lech of a Prime Minister into Italian cabinet posts.
That’s not to say that that these feisty French aren’t capable of sexual intrigue. They are French, after all. President Sarkozy’s former justice minister Rachida Dati was a fiery North African-born brunette who ran a lengthy feud against Sarko’s supermodel First Lady Carla Bruni. Dati was said to have lost her job because Sarko blamed her for spreading rumours about his alleged extra-marital affairs.
More from David Thomas... On the 20th anniversary of the first mobile phone text message... How texting made history but ruined our language- and plenty of marriages! 02/12/12 Why can't we all just stop texting and have an actual face-to-face conversation for once? 18/07/12 Why I’m going into battle with Google to find out if it stole my family’s secrets 13/06/12 Why I hate the snobbery and elitism of the 'anti-elitist' BBC 07/06/12 A memo to the sweaty, Lycra-clad bike brigade: The rules of the road apply to you, too 15/05/12 The anti-fat campaign is just fat-headed 10/05/12 Dwain Chambers is no dope: Why reformed drug cheats have the right to be Olympians 30/04/12 With apologies to St George - patron saint of a country that seems to be dying of shame 23/04/12 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEMeanwhile President Hollande himself is the rather limp meat in the spicy sandwich between his ex-partner (and predecessor as Socialist leader) Ségolène Royale and his current girlfriend, a highly combative ex-journalist and TV host Valérie Trierweiler. Both women are, of course, slim, immaculately dressed and generally drop-dead glamorous.
Frenchwomen have the knack of maintaining their sex-appeal without in any way diminishing their seriousness and authority. The only female Tory to have come close to this – and even then, only to men of quite specific tastes – was Margaret Thatcher. Meanwhile the ladies of the Left tend, like Margaret Beckett, or Baroness Ashton to be defiantly plain. Or, like Ed Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper, disguise themselves as a 13 year-old boy.
No, if it’s political thinking man’s crumpet that you want – or should that be ‘le croissant de l’homme pensant’? – then give me a Frenchwoman every time.
