ISN'T TEN GENERATIONS OF IMBECILITY ENOUGH?:

France: A nation in crisis?: The banlieues are in revolt ... unemployment is high ... the universities are failing ... real incomes have been falling for years ... and the young are leaving in their droves. So is the 'French Model' doomed? And will any of the Presidential candidates dare address the problem? (John Lichfield 13 April 2007, Independent)

Should France therefore not be more "market-oriented" in its economic policy, as M. Sarkozy has suggested: more like Tony Blair's Britain?

"Non, non, non," say Yves and his friends. They are attracted to London jobs but appalled at the suggestion that France should be more like Britain. There is "too much poverty" in Britain, they say. The hospitals are "falling apart". "Workers have no rights." The trains are falling off the tracks.

French gloom about Britain is outdone only by obsessive British gloom about France. After 10 years of living and writing about France - 10 years of great pleasure and interest - I sometimes catch myself wanting to suppress the negative and stress the positive. I know that the gloom will be enthusiastically covered elsewhere. I will therefore allow an Australian friend, who has been living in Paris for nearly two decades, to "speak up for France".

John Baxter, a much-praised film biographer and writer living in Paris, says: "I was brought up in Australia, where everything was homogenised, where everything worked efficiently but everything was, in a sense, fake, based on an idealised view of what Britain might once have been and probably never was. That's why I love France."

"I love the fact that here is a country which has so many different kinds of cheese that no one can agree how many there are and so many different types of wine that nobody can remember all their names. The French don't want to lose all that and neither do I."

Sure, the country's in the crapper, but it's got lots of cheeses?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2007 11:47 AM