Samuel Fishwick
Salute the new Entente Cordiale
three and 18. Watching them — and their inscrutable, chic mothers — mill around the school gates before class will make even self-assured Brits feel lumpen and deficient. The lycée teaches predominantly in French, and is one of the most academically successful French schools outside mainland France, though it also offers the option to take British qualifications.
It has three primary-school satellites — in Ealing, Fulham and Clapham — and an associated lycée, the C ollè ge Français Bilingue de Londres. In late 2015, another lycée — the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill — opened in Wembley. In turn, if Oxford opens a campus in Paris, it would be the ancient university’s first and only satellite, with French legal status (and therefore access to EU funding). Sharing intellectual resources is as important as the sharing of financial ones.
Indeed, France’s tougher labour laws have traditionally put off London’s fastand-loose financial sector.
However, major banks have begun to flutter their eyelids at the French capital from a pre-Brexit-limbo Britain, with HSBC at the front of the queue. “We will move in about two years’ time when Brexit becomes effective,” chief executive Stuart Gulliver announced last month at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, revealing that the bank planned to relocate 1,000 staff responsible for generating around a fifth of its UK-based trading revenue to Paris.
Macron’s is a common theme, with Hidalgo recently hopping over the channel to woo banks, financial technology firms, trumpeting her city’s “digital economy”, its “best engineering schools” and the “biggest start-up campus in the world”, Station F. “I say to the French in London: if you want to come back, you should know that we are ready for you to come back,” Hidalgo said.
Since the referendum, officials in Paris are reported to have written to 4,000 UK-based companies and they report a “growing stream of inquiries” to an English-speaking hotline that offers advice on schooling, housing and a new expat tax regime.
But all is not lost. Jean-Frédéric de Leusse, head of UBS in France, said that French law does not offer major banks the complete flexibility they need in the fast-moving world of high finance and complex trading.
“As the saying goes, it takes three days to fire somebody in London, three months in Switzerland, and three years in Paris,” he said.
So how can London make its French expats feel at home? Anatomically speaking, the best way to the people’s hearts is via the stomach. While London has long flirted with Francophile sensibilities, French restaurants have sprung up like they’re going out of fashion in 2017 (they’re not). Bloomsbury’s Bon Vivant opens this month to satisfy our quotidien raclette, tartines and croissant needs, while in Dulwich La Bonne Bouffe serves snails, confit canard and steak frites.
For the connoisseurs, in January the Four Seasons opened Le Dame de Pic, the first UK restaurant by 47-year-old Anne-Sophie Pic, currently the only French female chef to hold three Michelin stars. The new culinary landmark has already made waves in the capital with its elaborate reworking of the classic French millefeuille, which this paper’s restaurant critic Fay Maschler has called an “admirably pure architectural construct”, as well as little-known wines from the Rhône Valley worth rolling home for.
When we’re not digesting French culture à table, we’re channelling it onto our screens. The lascivious court intrigues of Versailles return for a second season later this year, produced by French TV channel Canal Plus and filmed in France — but starring British actors including Alexander Vlahos and George Blagden, while the cult Netflix political hit Marseilles is also due back soon. Harry Styles, Tom Hardy, and Cillian Murphy star in Dunkirk this July, the highly anticipated war flick from Christopher Nolan. Shot on the French beaches, the film is a co-production between the UK, France and the US, proving we can all get along together just fine after all.
Macron himself says he’s learnt lessons from his British counterparts, firmly setting out his stall last night in the wake of David Cameron’s failure and the Leave campaign’s success. “In the current environment, if you are shy, you are dead,” he says.
And London’s French have not been backwards in coming forward. “He’s hot,” says a student in the queue. “But it is interesting to see that people are engaged — there was for many years a disinterest in politics in France and evidently it’s not the case any more.”
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