Vive la France

I’ve been a Francophile for as long as I remember, putting me at odds with the majority of my fellow Englanders. Where my compatriots see a nation of simians prone to laying down weapons with an unhealthy enthusiasm, and afflicted with an innate weakness for cheese and shit wine, I have tended to see a nation of philosophers and poets, artists and beautiful people. The country of Monet, Rimbaud and Zola. And Plastic Bertrand.

I think I can trace this love of the French to my early years, sitting in Hulme Library reading Tintin*, immersing myself in a world of espionage, adventure, fluffy dogs, exotic countries and drunken sailors.  My early impressions of France was that it was a country of excitement, where round heads and tiny quiffs were the uniform of the super-cool, where the streets were narrow and everyone seemed to carry a gun.  It was my kind of place.

My experiences were drawn a little more into reality with my first French lesson at St Thomas Aquinas High School**, when we were introduced to the French family who inhabited the pages of Tricolre, the text book of choice in 1980s French classes.  This was a (stereo)typical French family, with a mere, a pere, a young son and a teenage daughter called Marie-France. It is to Marie-France I apportion the inspiration for my real attraction to France, because Marie-France would have been about two years older than me, and was stylish, studious and pretty fit. As line-drawings go, anyway. Not a Francine Smith or Lois Griffin, but enough for a pubescent adolescent to get distracted by. If French girls were like that, I wanted in.

So, to my initial belief that France was a country riddled with spies and pirates , the carefree, stylish young-girl-about-town was added***.  And so, until my twenties, this informed my vision.  France: a country of two-dimensional adventure and penciled objects of desire.

I’ve recently returned from a trip to France, and every time I go, my original simplistic love is diluted with real France, as it occurs in the actual country. It’d be going a bit far to call it a disappointment, because I still love it. But it would be fair to say that I’ve met few philosophers, artists or pirates.

Most annoyingly for me, however, is that France has long had a reputation for being tres chic, the home of style, the fortress of couture.  When I first met real live French people, twenty-odd years ago, I was struck by the lack of correlation between this idea, and that ever-pesky annoyance, reality.  Then, in my very early twenties, all the Frenchies I knew looked like they were dressing like their parents, or had been dressed by their parents.

Nothing has changed.  The cheese is great, the wine is risky, the clothes are shite.  At some point in the fifties, French fashion was probably lightyears away from the staid, drabness of the rest of Europe.  In fact, for people over fifty, the clothes would still be classed as very stylish. But the fashion for the under forties is, with a few exceptions, best described as Meeting-the In-Laws-Friendly. Not so much cutting edge as Alderley Edge.

So, while I am always sad to leave, and for a fortnight afterwards dine on French produce purchased to draw out the holiday buzz, and read some Baudelaire and Tintin with wistful pangs of regret for the life Marie-France and I never made together,  the pain of leaving is easily lessened by purchasing some actual fashion on my return to Blighty.

So tomorrow I’m getting a tiger-stripe onesie.  I bet Tintin never had one of them.

*I know he’s Belgian, but at the age of seven I assumed he was French. I don’t think I really became aware of Belgium’s  existence until the 1982 World Cup.  An awakening that has not improved my life in any measurable amount.

** Which no longer exists.  Twenty-seven teachers won a lottery syndicate a few years after I left. The school hit a rapid decline following twenty-seven resignations shortly after.

***Like a younger Genevieve from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, if vous preferez.