So much for French manners: Edinburgers have them beat

Jeremiads about the decline of modern manners are as old as manners themselves: generally, the convention is that the older generation feels free to criticise the young for their uncouth diction, barbarous hairstyles, the disgusting way they gnaw their mammoth bones and so on. But last week a 21-year-old student, Robin Vettier, reversed the trend by publishing a series of tweets bemoaning the appalling manners he had witnessed from customers while working at a Carrefour supermarket in Fontainebleau.

Vettier, who studies translation at the Sorbonne, took part-time supermarket jobs to finance his studies, both in Edinburgh, where he spent a year on the EU’S Erasmus programme, and in Fontainebleau, a popular weekend retreat for middle-class Parisians.

Those of us who struggled with French at school sometimes acquired the impression that the French were sticklers for manners – all those convoluted rules about tutoyer-ing; all that ritualised handshaking and kissing. But Vettier’s Twitter thread, which has been retweeted almost 26,000 times, suggests that the housewives of Morningside could teach the bourgeoisie of Fontainebleau a thing or two when it comes to supermarket etiquette.

Not once did he encounter rudeness when he was working in the UK, he wrote. But “in France, people have lost the notion of respect”. Working at Carrefour, he endured regular insults (“illiterate moron”), had a rucksack hurled at his head, and dealt with a furious father who used his toddler’s pushchair as a battering-ram: “His baby remained stoical.”

In his book, Sorry! The English and Their Manners, Henry Hitchings points out that manners originally came to Britain as a slightly suspect Continental import, so there is a certain charm in finding our supermarket mores praised as the flower of courtesy by a Frenchman.

The degrading of our personal filters, both online and in real life, is a ubiquitous side-effect of social media, which deals almost exclusively in the primary colours of raw emotional response. But at least in Edinburgh, cool cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment, a brief encounter between strangers at the till can still be what the Earl of Shaftesbury described as an “amicable collision”.

It has taken centuries, but humans are gradually coming round to the idea that animals do not exist exclusively for our benefit. Humans, that is, with some notable exceptions, such as big game hunters and the fashion industry, where shooting animals, by one means or another, is still regarded as perfectly acceptable.

Take the latest campaign for the Swiss watch brand Tag Heuer, in which the model Cara Delevingne posed with a 10-year-old male lion, “controlled” by a “lion whisperer” who had raised it from birth. The model, said the photographer, David Yarrow, “didn’t flinch one bit”. How the lion felt, we do not know.

Much has been made, by all the (human) parties involved in the shoot, of their virtuous intentions in publicising the plight of African wildlife. Yet a 2008 study in the academic journal Science revealed that people were less likely to believe that an animal was endangered if it appeared in a photograph with a model.

In an industry only belatedly coming to terms with the idea that fat people are fully human, the notion that wild animals are not fashion accessories evidently remains a troublesome concept to master.

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