A View from France by an Englishman, Part 4

by Glenn N. Holliman

This is our concluding chapter in Terence Field's evocative 'tour' of all things French.  He is a retired, successful businessman living on his four acres of paradise not too far from the Normandy beaches of 1944.  His lovely wife, Josephine, tends the garden flowers and vegetables, and he, the wine cellar, of course.  Terry is a superb chef, and as our readers know by now, 'thinks outside of the box'.  Delightfully so and he does not ask that one must agree with him.  Next to his culinary talents, he likes good conversation.  Take your time, ponder and smile at his humor and perhaps chuckled at his insights.  This chapter is about small shops, E. U. bureaucracy, diesel emissions cheating, a visit to the surgeon and French cooking.

France, the French and Why Things are as They are, Part 4 

by Terence Field 

To continue the theme of slowness to change,

at this point it is worth referring to the way France 'protects' its small retail businesses. It is well known as a place full of delightful one-man and family-based retail outlets. How this is maintained, and the effects it has on life here, is worth understanding a little. 

France operates a control on retail known as the ''back-margin law". It says, very roughly, that a supplier of goods can offer a first discount to the retailer- the 'back margin', and this is offered equally to all end user customers, large and small. Thus, for example, a retailer selling ten laptops a year will receive the same, initial 'back margin' as the retailer who sells one hundred thousand units a year.  Below, a French pastery shop.

If that margin (buying price reduction) is for arguments sake 10%, then the 90% of full manufacturers supply price is the lowest price that can be offered to the third party customer by any retailer.  At the end of the year, the supplier will reward the retailer who sells ten a year with no further discount (and thus profit) but he will offer the national chain a further (say) 40% in discount as recognition of the volume of sales (100,000 units) achieved.

Now here is the rub.

If the national reseller offers more of a discount to the end customer than the 'back-margin' 10% he received in common with the mom and pop store - in effect 'sharing' some of his second 40% suppliers discount - then the little reseller can go to the competition commission, and the national reseller will be fined on a per item basis for each computer he has sold at less than the manufacturers gross price less 10%.

What is the result of this so called 'protection' ???

Mass consumer goods are often vastly more expensive in France than in other countries. And the real specialist stores are in no way protected, since they do not buy the sort of goods that are sold in vast homogenous bundles, like white goods, computers etc.

Why does such a law exist only in France?  Simple, a loathing of big business, an economic illiteracy that is endemic, and thinking that harks back to the time before modern retail -let alone the internet - even existed. All the prejudices that France is really so remarkably good at expressing. The self-destructiveness is all too obvious.

These colourful little snippets of information may give a flavour of the country; they are not intended to be 'accurate'. or 'comprehensive', but from them some inferences may be drawn as to what France offers its citizens, how it operates in the European Union, and - here a little self-interest creeps in - what the future for Britain and France may be - both in or out of the European Union.

The debate in Britain about membership of the European Union has many strands. The conversation is chaotic, and I have to declare a preference here; I like representative democracy, and loathe referendum. I consider this to be a retrograde step. a return to a bun-fight of mediocrity, where 'the people' scream at each other and the ones with the loudest, most exciting, most intoxicating ideas prevail. We saw this in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, in France during the collapse of 1848 and more recently in 1968. 

I will be accused of being 'anti-democratic' no doubt, but for me the highest functioning mass democracy ameliorates the strident screaming of the hordes with the considered, hopefully wise reflection of their representatives, who one hopes will be of a greater intellectual and experiential quality than the mass of 'the people'.

In all this confusion, one theme stands out; that of democratic deficit in Europe. There is a quasi-democratic representational structure - the 'European Parliament', but in truth it has more in common with a school debating society than a real parliament. No, in Europe, the power of the executives, both in Brussels and devolved to the 'regions' by lines of unelected but highly 'political' bureaucrats is almost absolute.

Could this happen if the structure were built by Anglo Saxons? No, of course not. The European, is, in general, schooled in the experience of being a 'citizen' where he or she is very small indeed and the State is overwhelmingly large and powerful. The 'rights' they enjoy are politically granted, and can be modified radically if the political winds change. Power is untrammeled; is held by who so ever the mob likes. There are few balances, few constraints, to radical imposed change.

An example of this? The gross manipulation in France and in Europe generally of the type of automobile used. France ( and therefore Germany also) agreed some decades ago that diesel engines would be the way to go. Why? because the desire to reduce CO2 was considered the priority. The result? Massive nitrogen oxide and diesel particulate pollution that kills enormous numbers of people in the cities.

A democratic debate about the wisdom of this? Of course not, the technical ruling class in France, accustomed to absolute power, simply imposed it, and the Germans fell into line. The deal with the automobile companies? You fiddle the emissions results of your cars, and we, the state, will look the other way. It took the competitive actions of the USA to confront Volkswagen and the edifice of fraudulent dealing  between state and manufacturer crumbled. 

Are we seriously supposed to believe all other such manufacturers do not do precisely the same thing? Are we expected to believe that the engineers at VW are relatively incompetent and the engineers at Renault and Peugeot , Citroen, Alfa, Fiat etc have 'cracked' how to make diesel engines when VW are simply in the dark? That is what the European media would have their benighted populations believe. The engines that are fitted in VW are identical to those fitted in very many other manufacturers. The blocks are identical, the 'common rail' systems subject to supplier patent (often Alfa/Fiat).The distortion of sane emissions standards is thus a result of politically corrupted all-powerful executives in league with 'incentivised' manufacturers. Krupp financed and supplied Hitler. Not enough has changed for the better.

Freedom, free individuals, free and subtle laws, smaller state power, humble executives and subservient bureaucracy is the inverse of the history and daily reality of Europe, and of France in particular.

It is that, more than anything else, that consistently alienates the British. Mass migration from the unpleasant parts of the Mediterranean add to the mix, but the sense of a lack of freedom and accountability is profoundly felt in England. That it is not the same in Europe, in my view,  simply rams home the realty of a paucity of democratic expectations amongst the peoples of the continent.

But, what is the best thing about France?

There are many candidates. The food is superb, and this comes down to an ancient undisturbed semi-agrarian culture, where nearly everyone understands what an oven is for, how to prepare vegetables and gently cook them, and where to buy the best. 

I cannot, anywhere in England, buy the quality of foodstuffs I find all over France. Why? Simply that in any town or city the markets are largely composed of small, generally tired-looking and weary-from-their-exertions folk who sell what they dug up, cooked, prepared, killed, fished-for or otherwise directly interacted with in the almost immediate past.

I buy fish, sometimes still alive on the slab as no unusual thing. It is true that France has lost some of the philosophy of 'democracy of food', with the unwelcome appearance of 'fine dining', in my view a loathsome description of expensive cooking for those with a some - or a lot - more money.  

Below, Terry and his turbo, fresh from the sea, now surrounded by lemon and sufficed in a white wine.

Whilst France has always had fine 'haute cuisine', the country cooking for the generality of the people has been in no way inferior, and often it would be my choice. Would I prefer a filet steak (a bland, expensive, lazy little waste-of-time muscle hiding near the backbone) in a fancy setup,  or choose a rich flank of beef ( tight from breathing exertion) or ox kidneys in local red wine or cider slow cooked in an inexpensive restaurant? Always the conviviality and superb flavour of the simple offering.                          

Right, a picture of motherly type churning butter in 19th Century France, decorating a bistro door.

Can I find the same in America? No, in general not. That goes for England as well. Why? Because a pleasant motherly or grandmotherly type in France will have spent the morning preparing, searing, braising, thickening the gravy and finishing with herbs, a piece of meat that is more than often simply ground up for dog or cat meat in the mega-factories of Anglo-Saxonia.

What is an oven for? 'We do not know' comes the cry from the school-trained, health-and-safety obsessed, 'organ-meat' fearful urban peasantry who would not know taste and delight from the industrial garbage they are schooled to consume.

In the history of man on this planet, the most remarkable phenomenon is that rich productive clever societies have adulterated and made poisonous the delight that should be good food. Having passed a longish period in Florida, and in other parts of America, (a place of surpassing pleasantness that I could live through the winter in, in a heartbeat) I am at a loss as to how to find excellent ingredients.

The Carrot for Example!

I can buy attractive looking carrots in the supermarkets, of a length that it is impossible to achieve in Europe. (This must be because gravity is stronger in America, and thus the roots are pulled down further into the soil). I cut them up. I saute them in a little oil and water, lightly seasoned, then bake them, and look forward to a pleasant experience. What happens? I lose consciousness. That is the only explanation, since after I have eaten them I have no recollection of the taste of a carrot. It looked like carrot, it cut and cooked like carrot, but it tasted like fresh air.

Terry in his French kitchen sans carrots but with asparagus and vino.

In France, a carrot (often the one I dig from my potager, in common with millions of other fellow citizens) TASTES like a carrot; as do all the other vegetables.

What else is good about France?

The superb healthcare system, unlike the nightmare version in England, (since it is not built on an outdated Soviet-type model), and has  sufficient funding from both national taxation and top-up insurance, paid by those who can afford to meet the insurance premiums (and NO immoral 'pre-existing' condition nonsense) married to adequate supply, furnished by both the nation and private suppliers, all gently competing for custom through excellence delivers a marvel of quality and accessibility.

What is bad about the system? In common with England, dentistry is dreadful; rare is the hygienist. Miserable is the dentist. Violent is the experience, more often than not. Glowering is the dental assistant, who seems to take a perverse delight in mining the bottom of my pallet for red blood cells whenever she has her way with the saliva drain.

I am sure it is because she is getting back at me for the Thirty Years war, or the non-appearance of the rest of the Royal Airforce over the battle fields of France in 1940. Whatever it is, I know hell on earth awaits me the moment I settle back in the chair.

A similar experience awaits when surgery calls. Having visited my GP with a condition that required surgical intervention, I was rapidly referred to a surgeon; the next day (No this is NOT the NHS, is it!) I visited his lair, to be told that he could 'do it now, under local unaesthetic'. (He is an Arab; not conducive to calm thoughts at the present.)

'IT is quick, he said, but you may feel the anaesthetic going in!'  

I prepared myself on the surgery table; my life flashed before me and I regretted being sharp with my wife over breakfast. AGONY. I pour sweat and twitch. The needle penetrated deep and two hundred mils of God-knows-what  enters my quivering corpse.

Sweating profusely, I inquire if the pain would ease. 'Give it another minute' he said. The pain duly disappeared, and he appeared beside me with a scalpel blade. ' I will commence in fifty seconds' he said. A plaintiff voice, of the sort I have not made since I wore short trousers,  asked 'could you possibly wait a little longer for the anaesthetic to take full effect', perhaps a full minute??'

'It is ready, and I have a full surgery today' came the reply.

He cut away, and, miraculously, I felt nothing.

I recovered for a short moment, dressed fully, and he shook my still sweaty hand. He led me to the door, and as he opened it, he said ' Well done; you have a good pain threshold, most people would have cried out'. The door was open to the waiting room as he said it. The fear and terror on the faces of those waiting to enter was my consolation.

The result. No chance of being made dependent upon opiates as so many Americans are. On balance I would prefer to become a junkie. Pain here is good for you; like cold water baths.

How to sum up?

France - a delightful, insane, hard country, full of dreams for a socially fair way of doing things, politically broken, always fearful of the Hun, with bloody minded rejection of much of modern life, naturally rich in what matters in life, with a constant reference back to the value of lessons hard learned, and many delights that excite a jaded mind so used to homogenised living. Bloody irritating though.

Above, Josephine, Barb and Terry sample garden vegetables on the garden terrace in Normandy.

Happy days to you all, with your tasteless carrots. And fish fingers.  

Terry, an Englishman in France!

A View from France by an Englishman, Part 3

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our third part of Terry Field's deeply penetrating essay on French history and society continues with a reflection on French labor laws.

France, the French and Why Things are as They are, Part 3 

by Terence Field written from his country maison in Normandy (below)

Pragmatism is the order of the day in English thinking, and there is an aversion to intellectualizing in political life. Each country would claim its approach to be superior.

In French life, the success of post war American economic power has not produced the admiration that was, until quite recently, commonly held in Britain. True, the British left has reservations about the perceived brutal nature of free capitalism, US -style, but this mild antipathy pales when compared to France.     

Presidents Obama and Hollande, 2014

In France the lecture that Hollande delivered in his White House speech to President Obama on the occasion of his State visit to Washington reflected much of French social attitudes. He referred to the two countries revolutions, but castigated America for not having pursued 'equality'.

France has become obsessed with equality; to a degree that even its revolutionary spirit has not previously promoted. The 'social protections' enjoyed in France are extensive, the citizen have not greatly exposed (that is until recently) to the effects of unemployment, illness, poverty in old age as some are in the US. At the same time, the un-competitiveness of much of the economy that results from these controls (and the costs the employers thus must pay) has disastrous results in terms of business closure, unemployment and low economic growth rates.

French productivity is relatively high; they are well capitalised for work, and when they do work they are productive. The restrictions on the length of the working day materially reduce the level of prosperity the country could achieve, yet - in my experience - the French in France have a much lower level of desire for material prosperity than exists in either France outside France or the UK in general. 

They seem content with what they have; and what they have, in terms of a rounded quality of life is really a very great deal indeed.

The contrast between France and the Anglo Saxons seems to be like a young man keen to work hard and long in order to earn more to buy a fancy Corvette or Mustang, compared to an older guy, who has done it, been there, and is happy pottering about in an old pickup so long as he can go off fishing when he wants to.

Paris cafe 2014

What else goes into the mix of being French today? One element, Germany, always concerns French folk. They wish to be seen as at least the equals of the Germans, and for most of the post-war period, France dictated the political agenda, and for much of that time, its 'directed' economy seemed to be doing really quite well.

 All that has gone. The failure of the French model, with the adoption of the Euro, when compared to the performance of Germany, is all too obvious.

France has an over-valued currency, noncompetitive industry, poor trade figures and hardly grows at all. It is now a problem for Germany, not its partner, and that is clear for all to see.

How do the French react to this?

Some wish to see a new protectionist government and an exit from the Euro and from the EU. That is the policy of Le Pen, the Fronte Nationale, and attracts over four in ten of all French people. Others wish a continuation of the  present and a wish for better times. Yet others wish for full integration with Germany, on the 'if you can't beat them, become them' basis of thinking.

France fears global trade as a mortal threat. It wishes for protection, but does not know how to achieve it. If Britain leaves the EU in June of this year, it will in no small measure be as a result of the slavish following of French thinking by Germany, and the lamentable results such policies have produced.

To understand French fear of the competitiveness of the world, one needs to reflect on the level of 'protection' enjoyed by its citizens. 

A young man I know, a French fellow, returned last summer from San Francisco. I asked him how he had enjoyed the experience. What most surprised him about America?  Was it the girls? no. Was it the food? no. Was it the beaches? no.

What then?

The answer came back that he was amazed that people he met had more than one job quite often at the same time. In France, he had grown up in a country where it was illegal to have more than one occupation. Illegal!

Add to this the attitude to work protection and the race/religion problem France suffers from. A short story to illustrate will illuminate.

I was, some years ago, on a train going from Paris to a town called Massy Palaiseau I was the only person on the train and I wondered why. I asked the guard, and he told me that there was a 'manifestation' set for the afternoon in Massy. This meant a political demonstration. I asked what it was about. 'It is the law allowing employers to fire young workers after up until two years of employment; they don't like it' he said.    

I left the train at Massy and was amazed; across one side of the railway tracks was a large group of white, middle class youngsters with placards saying 'down with labour law' reform. These were the kids who were in a state of semi permanent post-grad training in businesses before they decided to settle down, (usually around twenty eight to thirty years old) after which they would enjoy total employment protection by law for life. They objected to the government giving employers some control over their willingness-or otherwise - actually to do a day's work.

On the other side of the tracks, a massive group of, in the main, French Arab young people, in general unemployed, and super-keen to get a job, and thus fully in support of the governments loosening of the labour employment laws; they expected it would help employers get the courage to make the decision to hire them.

In the middle were the CRS - the French riot police.

Both groups were entirely peaceful. There was no trouble. It was a peaceful demonstration.

Who do you think the riot police charged with drawn truncheons? Yes, you guessed it.

The Arab kids supporting the government reforms.

This is the country of Dreyfus, and things change very slowly here.

Soon, Part 4 of Terry's learned five-chapter analysis of France today....comments welcome.

A View of France from France by an Englishman, Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our second part of Terry Field's deeply penetrating essay on French history and society continues....

France, the French and Why Things are as They are, Part 2 

by Terence Field of Normandy

Another historical circumstance unique to France is its experience of religion, and what measures it has settled upon to accommodate the tensions that flow from belief. The replacement of the Roman Catholic church with lawyers in every town and city after the the French Revolution of 1789 was an expression of the rage felt by the French - or at least the intellectual forces whose writings had stirred the discontent - for a church that had allied itself with the forces of property, repression and injustice.  Strasbourg and church steeples.

In the new state, religion would be excluded from the life of the nation; it would be a private matter, and the church would have no power over the formulation of laws and the governance of the people. Embedded in the minds of the people would be, and still is, desire for the secular state. It would shine as a beacon of rationality, a light of equity and the deliverer of justice, untainted by the preconceptions of religion.

That secular life is a reality in modern France. How does it work for the French? I will return later to this.

The experience of Empire in France is quite different to that of the British. The French empire was not on the same scale as that of Britain, and the peoples it encompassed in large measure defined its character. The French empire was really centred on North Africa; a land quite close by, and composed, in the main, of Muslim peoples. Whilst France had some possessions in Asia, its political engagement was focussed on Africa, and of all its African territories.  Algeria was by far its most important, and demanding, responsibility.

France has incorporated some territories into its state as 'departments,' and as such they are considered common element in the French body politic. The application of the belief in equality is what France would claim as a principal driver in making this arrangement.

Given the close relationship between the French and Algerian social elites, the war for Algerian independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s simply ripped France apart. The trauma of the tearing away of Algeria from the French people cannot be explained adequately to a foreigner. In its way, it was as dreadful a loss as was India to so many British people who loved that country and its people as their own.

France lives with this; its effects I will return to later.

When considering the history of France, it is not possible to talk about France without looking at the two wars of the twentieth century.

The first war 'bled France white'. Millions of the bodies of its soldiers fertilised the fields of the border regions. The 1814 retreat from Moscow that resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million Frenchmen  did not have the traumatic effect the slaughters of Verdun and elsewhere had on the nation.

The villages of France found most of their young men never returned. Village after village lost half its population, as the men died, the women moved to cities to work in munitions factories never to return, and the land became partly abandoned for lack of horses to till, and for lack of people to sow and harvest. Old people eked out lives of lonely poverty and an echo of the joy of the Belle Epoque returned only slightly to the great cities.

After this, above all, France feared war; dreamed of its lost sons, hated the 'Bosch' and hoped, above all things, for better times. That those times did not come, that depression and stagnation became seemingly endemic caused a flirtation with communism and social democracy not in tune with the history of the conservative mindset of an essentially agrarian society.  The country was split down the middle; its politicians were entirely out of sympathy with the guardian of the State, the victors of the Great War, the bearers of the soul of the nation - the army.

The run up to the Second World War saw the army intellectually isolated from social developments in France, and it was similarly isolated from new thinking on matters military. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the French officer class were as antipathetic to social democracy as were National Socialists in Germany. Just as the French staff officers loathed their political masters, so they relied upon the technology and strategies that had proven successful in the past.

In contrast to Germany, whose newly developed general officer group looked hungrily to Britain and America for new military ideas and their application, France remained deeply rooted in the past. When war did come, the performance of the French army, by any reckoning an enormous force, was lamentable.

This was not simply a result of the fear of again being 'bled white', but had as much to do with both old military ideas, and crucially, no great antipathy to the Hitlerite armies. For many French, the real enemy was within. Extreme socialism was roundly blamed for the condition of the nation by the most senior commanders in the country.

It is not an overstatement of the case to say that the second war had the effect of paralyzing the French, since the country was culturally and politically split asunder, and many viewed Germany as a bastion against the horrors of communism yet to come. That events did not allow such divisions to became apparent to the world in no way reduces their potency.

The post war 'victor propaganda' has caused such extreme divisions to be removed from  public discussion, except where painful events, such as the behaviour of Claus Barbie, (who persecuted Jews) cause them to resurface. Certainly such matters are not discussed in the presence of the rest of the world. The shame, and the pain of it is a private matter.

The liberation of France needs also to be referred to. The presence of great foreign armies on the soil of France, even though they acted to remove the occupying power, was painful for all the French. The resistance in France was very largely composed of the communists. They dominated the post-war political space in a way not generally recognized outside the country. They held moral authority. They looked to the dominant military power in Europe, Russia, for inspiration, and their acquiescence in political life was required by all other political forces, including De Gaulle.    

Charles De Gaulle, the great general of the Free French in World War II and later President served immediately after World War II and again during the Algeria Conflict.

To assert that the social, cultural and political life of France from 1945 to the present is dominated by the ideas of the intellectual French left is not an over-statement. From Sartre, Camus, and so many others, the French formed the social attitudes we know today. The Socialists, who had so dominated events under Leon Blum before the war, returned in the political vacuum of 1945 and 1946.

The left created the agenda concerning employment law, labour protection and social protections. They did not have it all their own way, as the actions of the riot police used to destroy the socialist workers councils at Renault clearly demonstrated.

How can the polarization of France into communists and socialists on the one side, and nationalists and Gaullists on the other be explained? 

In part, it is unfinished business from 1789. France has never lanced the bad blood between the Grande Bourgeoisie and the inheritors of the sans culottes.

The history of radical social thinking that goes back to before Voltaire and Rousseau informs attitudes even today, and has encompassed the parts of soviet thinking that chimes with its own revolutionary inheritance.

There is a living and ongoing consideration of social values that does not exist in the same way in England and, we shall discuss that in the next post.

Next post, Terry continues to examine how history has taken France in directions very different from the United Kingdom.

A View of France from France by an Englishman, Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

In a recent post discussing the American election, an American living in England asked our Englishman living in Normandy, France, how France appeared to him and could he make generalizations on France as he did on England.  Here is part 1 of Terry's three part reply.  This first part discusses French history and how important English Common Law has been to the United Kingdom and the USA, and how such is sorely lacking in France.

France, the French, and why things are as they are, Part 1

by Terence Field

It is the easiest thing to put pen to paper and write volumes about 'peoples'. In making observations about a nation of people, little can be achieved without resort to generalisations on occasion.

Generalisations, questioned by one of the observers in this column, are intended merely to promote a conversation, and at the end of it all, I challenge any person to rely upon other than their general impressions of a place, a circumstance, people in groups or in general. That is all we have to coalesce the many small observations our short lives allow us.

I would submit that our subjective landscapes are the product of forces and experience unique to each of us. The mind creates its own reality, and outside there may be something really quite different. The mind, however is all that we have.

The wise confront their internal generalisations - their 'prejudices' as we may like to consider them, and spend their time continually re-assessing and revising.

Right, a corner in Paris

For good or ill, I would offer the following notes, on a people that I live amongst, and whose lives I have had the privilege to observe for some time now. Does France actually exist unchanged over time, to the extent that there is any really observable continuity? Indeed does any place so exist?

Not such a foolish question, given that one could equally well write 'is there any national group of people, who, over time retain characteristics that are recognisable from the mind-set of the people who occupied that place only a generation or two before'.

The peoples who make up France were, not so many centuries ago, not even the users of a common language. The French aristocracy used a language quite different from that used by the common people who served them; the Languedoc is a direct derivative of the 'Language of the Occ', and the Langedaille used yet another language. Latin unified all those who had cause to think, to own the great tracts of land, and to travel across the landscapes of the different regions we now call L'hexagon.

France has had a number of political manifestations in the last quarter of a millennium. It has moved from being the most populous single state in Europe, with a royal court that dominated the continent, and whose language - French - was the replacement for Latin in the lives of all educated persons in most countries, and certainly for all the royal courts of Europe, in which both power and control was concentrated until as recently as the twentieth century.

Change, and the sufferings of the French peoples

The five republics that have been constructed in France all have a single common thread, the attempt to cause political life to reflect the shifts in both power and fortune amongst the different groups of people that make up France since Napoleon. During the period from the dawn of the seventeenth century until the events of 1914 and after, apart from Britain, no great nation can have experienced both the intensity and breadth of upheavals in both national and personal life that France and its citizenry lived through.

This note is not intended to be a historical review, but it should be remembered that the France we all live with now is the product of the dislocations, and the extreme variation in national fortune that the French have know. To take but a few examples, the French revolution caused a trauma of  slaughter and reformation to entirely remove the power and authority of classes of people who had known stability for centuries dating back to the incursions of the muslim armies, and the wars with the English.

The settled view is that the French revolution is a piece of history, but its effects are still being played out; a Chinese politician, quite recently, being asked by his French opposite number of his opinion of the revolution, replied 'it is far too early to tell'.

How wise to put a context of long periods of time on the consequences of events. I live in a dreamscape of snippets of history from my own reading of the past. The past is all I - all we - have, and the reflective person takes his life time to grapple with what it all means.

The appearance of Germany, and the declaration of the Reich by Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles introduced a new element to France. Germans, unified and all aware of the horrors that they had suffered during the Thirty Years War, and more recently by the armies of Napoleonic France, were determined to employ national awareness and strength to stop any such thing happening to them again.

Right, a bistro in Paris

They had learned the lessons of national self determination that Napoleon had introduced; the replacement of the ancient loyalties with those of the nation state   entered the consciousness of all peoples in Europe. Within thirty years of the birth of Germany, all of Europe had constructed national beliefs, beloved of the newly powerful urban middle classes, and sitting very uncomfortably on top of all this were the ancient monarchies.

As these national stirrings grew, and the rough-hewn autocratic 'projection of power' that such beliefs gave birth to developed, France was strangely out of step. It had removed that ancient class of autocratic rulers, its emperor had departed, and it looked to something new. It looked to democratic representation, and looked in particular to Britain as an example of that compromise between the past and the present. Whilst France had been a prime mover when it came to the rights of man, and the  championing of the social values of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet it was unable to achieve the depth of democratic representation found north of the English Channel.

It has never been able to do so, despite all the genius it undoubtedly possesses.

Why is this?

One example is the time it takes to develop a body of law fully reflective of the liberties of the individual. It is one thing to express them in high flown rhetoric, the sort that flows from the chamber of a national parliament, quite another to deliver them in practice. In England, and in America, a continuum of case law, common law, the law of particular and unique personal experience judged to be worthy of universal application, has grown up over the many centuries. America has been wise to accept and develop (from the English root) this precedence law, and apply its gentle, and thus powerful principles to the work of its own Supreme Court. Codified law is of course needed, but precedence and constant interpretation make for real, full democratic freedoms.

The great European countries simply did not, and still do not, have this sophistication. The precedent based legal journey is eternal; it never ends. As we are reminded of now with the death of the great jurist, Justice Scalia.

That this sophistication has not been possible in Europe stems directly from its inheritance the use of Roman law. France has applied  Roman Law, modified by codified law handed down from legislatures, and refinement provided in the main by a political process that is, perforce, both more remote, and thus far less subtle, than the methods of legal development used in the Anglo Saxon world.

The political and social life of both France and Germany has precluded both societies form employing the time required to refine the development of laws as found in the Anglo-Saxon civilisation.

This matters greatly, and I will return to it later.

Next post, Terry continues his thoughtful essay on French civilization....