A new French revolution? No, just le même old gang
We might have been amused to see a front-page headline “The New French Revolution” over the news that the next President of France is likely to be an “outsider” never elected to anything before. But Emmanuel Macron also just happens to have been trained at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (an “énarque”, as the locals say), to have become a millionaire working for a multi-national bank and a minister in the last French government; and in love with the EU. In other words, this “revolutionary” is just another member of the same little gang which has run France for decades. Also familiar was the way Marine le Pen won 19,037 communes in rural France, easily beating those won by all the other candidates combined. This divide between town and country has equally been a feature of French politics for decades.
Thirty years ago I got a feel for this when my family were the only outsiders staying in a delightful little village on the edge of the Causses, those great limestone plateaus scored through with spectacular gorges in southern France.
On Bastille Day, 14 July, we were invited to join all the villagers at a celebration dinner in the floodlit square. By way of thanking them I rose to my feet and asked them to drink a toast to “La Revolution”. Stunned silence. No one responded. I quickly changed tack by asking them to drink “A Conservatisme”. They all rose happily as one, with broad smiles, to drain their glasses. Plus ca change.
Talking of European holidays, Jeremy Corbyn’s eccentric election pledge, that we should have four new bank holidays on national saint’s days – two in March, one in April and one on November 30 – reminded me of a suggestion some years ago in the European Parliament that, in the name of integration, any day which was a public holiday in one EU member state should become one in all. When it was discovered that this would include every single day in May, causing the EU to lose a twelfth of its GDP, the proposal was quietly forgotten.
I rose to my feet and asked the French townspeople to drink a toast to ‘La Revolution’. Stunned silence