FRANCE: The Secret Life of Franceby Lucy Wadham, Faber & Faber, 278pp, £12.99. AT 19, Lucy Wadham, a student at Oxford, married a Frenchman and forsook England for France where she still lives, 20-odd years later. In that time she has by turns hated and loved France.
This book is the product of a long battle with the surges of alienation, antagonism and exasperation she’s prone to there; the outcome of an ongoing argument with herself about the clash of two cultures, separated only by a strip of water and yet so very different. They both come out of the argument rather well – France for its fundamentally admirable character and she for her intelligence.
In the early years, Wadham finds the Parisians in the bourgeois milieu she has married into conformist, earnest and obsessed with appearance – once she followed the glamorous national philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, along the Boulevard Saint-Germain and checked the inordinate number of times he checked his reflection in shop windows. They find her alarmingly liberal – she puts up a good defence for her woolly brand of liberalism – as well as over-friendly, frank and, perhaps worse, badly dressed. And she, coming from a culture where sex is discussed in the bleak terms of gender politics (for which there’s no equivalent phrase in French) is shocked by their libertinism. A dinner party turns casually, if tastefully, into a sex-swap party. A friend of her husband’s suggests over lunch that they have an affair – and her husband shrugs that, well, he’s only an acquaintance, after all, and wasn’t it a compliment actually?
Her political correctness enables her to spot, where the French can’t, an endemic anti-Semitism. And later, when the banlieues erupt into mutiny and riot, an anti-Arabism. The coldness and rudeness of shopkeepers and the implacability of bureaucrats dismay her. When her son is three, his nursery teacher tells her he has masochistic tendencies and should see an analyst. As he gets older his education is about nurturing his faculty for retention, not his originality – the French have little interest in originality – which doesn’t suit his mother at all.
In some ways she finds the French embarassingly pragmatic – her doctor is as concerned with the health of her libido as he is with the health of her liver – and in others unwilling or unable to deal with reality. They live by the idea, not by the facts; by the principle, not by the effect.
Lying behind all this, Wadham perceives the legacy of the old wars of religion. France, she has concluded, is still essentially Catholic while Britain – and she too – is still essentially Protestant, even Puritan. No wonder there’s a clash.
Since the revolution, she asserts, France has used the beliefs and values of a repressed Catholicism to reshape itself – a process consolidated by Napoleon when he instituted an educational system in the Jesuitical style. She identifies Catholic-influenced traits which France has continued to cultivate and which determine its unique way of life. Moral laxity of course. But also the cult of beauty. The tragic view of life rather than the comic. The need for a common cause, replacing the old collective worship. A distrust, even contempt, for money and the means used to acquire it. Guilt about owning property. A lack of regard for work per se but a huge regard for learning and achievement. Many of them reasons for French anti-Americanism and all Catholic-inspired. Only with the advent of Sarkozy, who’s happy to lay claim to his un-French background, does it look like these values could, as he promised, be starting to rupture.
Wadham only half-regrets the advent of Sarko – she clearly approves of his Anglo-Saxon-style common sense – though she categorises him idiosyncratically as a “sex dwarf”. And she herself has abandoned “Catholic” Paris for the Cévennes, which she describes as “a French aberration – a Huguenot stronghold”. Here, she says, she is embracing Frenchness. This is a little ambiguous, however, as she describes how the values of the Cevenols are different to those of their Catholic neighbours – they champion “integrity, punctuality, rigour and hard work over beauty, charm, art and leisure”.
Her book is no less contradictory, provocative and perhaps inflexible than she often presents herself. Equally it’s perceptive, engaging and illuminating – an essential read for Francophiles.
Anne Haverty is a writer. Her latest publication is a novel, The Free And Easy(Vintage)