The Secret Life of France Read Free

surprised to discover in his company how infected I was by various kinds of guilt: sexual, moral and political. It is hard to find examples of this since they go back a long way and I have been reformatted over the years to fit better into the French way of life. But I can tell that I have changed because when I go back to England I have a subtle but persistent feeling of discomfort, a kind of constant moral pressure to think and say the right thing.
    This subtle feeling is, I realise, simply the result of habit. I know that my English and American friends feel a certain discomfort at the moral chaos that reigns in France. They dislike the discourteous driving, the queue-jumping, the fare-dodging, while I have come to find the level of civic obedience required in Anglo-Saxon society faintly oppressive. In London, I don’t reverse down a one-way street because I know that some well-meaning old lady will rap on the window and tell me that I am going in the wrong direction. This would never happen in Paris, where everyone is constantly breaking the law. Only if the law-breaker inconveniences you personally do you ever bother to launch into invective. If the offender is an old person – ideally old enough to have been an adult during the Nazi Occupation – a classic and powerful taunt is to call them a collaborator. I remember the first time I heard this insult: an old man in a beret who was racing along the cycle lane in Paris alarmed a young manwho was standing on the pavement, about to cross.
    ‘Collabo!’ the young man shouted, for all to hear. The old man nearly fell off his bike at the sound of that ugly diminutive but regained enough poise to raise his middle finger, leaving us onlookers to speculate on whether or not this had been the gesture of a collaborator or a résistant .
    I never think of jumping the queue in London, while in Paris I do it all the time. Why? Because everyone is doing it. France is filled with disobedient children all busily trying to jump the queue. There is no guilt about this except, of course, for that special brand of shame you feel when you get caught.
    I have read my Graham Greene and had always thought of guilt as the special ecstasy of Catholics. Since living in a nation of lapsed Catholics, I’ve come to realise that this is a gross over-simplification. The Catholic Church has certainly learnt over the centuries to use the idea of sin to great effect, but in comparing Britain, or indeed America, to France – all similarly developed, post-Freudian societies, one culturally Protestant and one culturally Catholic – it has been my observation that the dead hand of guilt falls far more heavily on us Protestants.
    If guilt is the inner struggle between the I want and the I should , or as Freud would have it, the effect of the struggle between the Ego and the Superego, then Catholicism is the domineering but indulgent Mother and Protestantism, the aloof and exacting Father . The legacy of Catholicism in France is, amongst other things, her powerful and interventionist state; what Anglo-Saxons refer toas ‘the nanny state’ and the French more affectionately call l’Etat-providence (the munificent state). Under such a system, citizens are children, perpetually clamouring I want, I want ; alternately scolded and mollycoddled by the powers that be. In both British and American society, on the other hand, where the citizen is supposed to behave like a self-regulating adult, guilt becomes a natural and highly effective enforcer.
    *
    I remember my delight as I began to understand the particular relationship the French have with the law. I had accumulated a few parking tickets and had started hiding them in my sock drawer, a habit of avoidance that would take me at least twenty years to break. Laurent caught sight of them one evening when we were dressing for dinner. ‘I’m going to pay them,’ I said.
    ‘What year are we?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘1986,’ he mused. ‘It’s worth