Racial prejudice in France, each time it manifests, is generally expressed under guise of secularism or laïcité. We’ve got nothing against Muslims – runs the argument, which can come from the left or the right – we just don’t believe that religion has a place in the identity of the French nation.

The public debate launched by Nicolas Sarkozy on November 2^nd last year on the subject of ‘L’Identite Nationale’ was a misguided manoeuvre designed, at least in part, to purloin votes from the far right. It backfired, of course, mainly because there is a structural paradox inherent in French culture that makes it impossible to have a measured debate on this issue. Frenchness, since the Revolution, is supposed to be rooted in the so-called universal values of The Enlightenment, which include such vaguaries as the individual before the state, reason before custom. The result is that for most French people Frenchness can only really be defined by its opposite: i.e. being French means not being English or worse, American, or even worse, Romany or Muslim.

With this in mind it is not hard to understand why a recent poll attempting to assess attitudes towards Muslims in France and Germany, found that a staggering 42% of French people believe that “the presence of a Muslim community in France represents a threat to the nation.”

Consequently, most people know that when Nicolas Sarkozy waves the flag of anti-Arab sentiment, he is trying to control his plummeting popularity. It often works – for a moment, as it did last December when he condoned the Swiss ban on minarets and at the close of the year when he confirmed his intention vigorously to enforce the law banning the burka.

President Sarkozy has invited Abderrahmane Dahmane – President of the not-very-representative association, the Council of Democratic Muslims of France – to be his ‘advisor’ on the unpopular practice of praying to Mecca in the streets. The shortage of mosques means that it is not unusual in certain areas of northern Paris on a Friday afternoon, to see a street lined with kneeling men, their discarded shoes, lying neatly in the gutter behind them. In raising this issue again, only weeks after Marine Le Pen publicly compared Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi Occupation, Sarkozy is once again pandering to the extreme right.

Recession tends to bring out this uglier side of French politics. For that is what anti-Muslim prejudice is in France – an ugly political consensus which frequently uses Marine Le Pen’s extremist outbursts as a cache-sexe for its own intractable bigotry.

Once again and for the sixth time since my two boys went back to school in September, there is a general strike, a day of “interprofessional mobilisation.” Today, however, both of my sons’ teachers have decided to work. It would not be seemly for me to ask them why, but I suspect the reason is not that they’re against the strike, but that they believe the day of action will have sufficient impact without their participation. With over a million people taking to the streets, truck drivers blockading the roads, railway workers occupying the tracks, workers barricading the refineries and blocking the airports, both teachers may well feel that they can keep our little village school open without undermining the formidable tsunami of protest that makes France both the envy and the laughing stock of the world.

I know that the prevailing view outside this country is that these strikes are absurd manifestations of French petulance and immaturity. Expecting to retire at 60? What planet do the French inhabit? And how wise is it to paralyse the nation, further threatening its struggling economy for the sake of a privilege that is doomed anyway?

The feeling here is that this is not just about the retirement age but about the future of politics in this country, a notion that may seem a little absurd to those of us who believe that the age of political engagement is dead and gone. It is part of the French paradox that politics are still defined, for better or worse, by the interaction, or rather the collision between authority and rebellion. However sensible our parliamentary democratic traditions and our well-reasoned mistrust of the mob, the French don’t want to give up their revolutionary prerogative. The spirit of revolt in this country may be besmirched by violent episodes like The Terror but it is still the stuff that French dreams are made of, and this, I think, explains the massive support for these strikes.

Even those French men and women sitting in their offices in Paris, behind their spreadsheets, watching the marching hoards on their i-phones are susceptible to the thrill that goes with disobedience. And although they may have voted for him three years ago, they’re starting to feel the threat posed by Sarkozy’s style of governance to the political modus operandi of this country. They’re used to the dubious pleasure of seeing the power of the street weighing in key decisions and they, like many who support the strikers, are doing so with their hearts rather than their heads.

This is where I live. As you can imagine, it’s a place that deposits little hooks in your heart. You go away and they snag.

Soon I’ll be back.

Landscapes exercise a strange power over you. As if each of us has an internal landscape, embedded in us during childhood and which lies in wait until the point of recognition. Ah, there it is, you think. Or rather, there I am.

Please forgive me for not posting over the next few weeks. I shall be in the bosom of that miraculous nebula that is the French healthcare service but hope to return to work soon.

I would like to thank everyone who visits this blog, for their readership and/or comments and their participation in a conversation about France and Britain that has so far been fascinating to me.

A tres bientot.

Lucy

I had a call the other night from Jon Henley of The Guardian, who had reviewed my book and wanted to talk about a piece he was writing about French women. It seems there has been a sudden onslaught of books on the subject, some of them written by Anglo-Saxon women driven by the question: what do they have that we don’t? And some of them by French women driven by the desire to tell us. Among the authors are Debra Ollivier, American author of ‘What French Women Know‘ and  Mireille Guiliano, the former executive turned lifestyle guru, who brought us ‘French Women Don’t get Fat‘.

Henley and I spoke for about an hour on the subject, covering the differences between catholic and protestant cultures when it comes to attitudes towards beauty and love, as well as the differing attitudes towards feminism and gender in Britain and France. Towards the end he asked me what I thought the key differences might be between French and British women – clearly an impossible question but one I still rashly attempted to answer.

I don’t think French women ever took on the patriarchy, not in its symbolic form anyway and that – for the continuing survival of the pleasure prnciple – they have accepted a certain level of symbolic domination by men. Back in the late sixties, as the feminist revolution swept through France, it was as if there was an unwritten agreement to leave the private roles that men and women played untouched by the new movement. French women would fight with the best of us for social and political equality but the feminist revolution, it was tacitly understood, would not enter the private sphere, or indeed the bedroom. As a result, French women, unlike British women, still feel completely unembarrassed about playing ‘traditional’ feminine roles: domestic goddess, temptress, petulant princess or (when necessary or possible) femme fatale. British women, on the other hand, feel they have to behave properly, that they have to earn men’s respect. French women feel that they play by different rules to men and therefore have little interest in earning their respect; what they’re after is their desire.

In two days time, six-power talks on Iran and its putative military nuclear programme are to be held in Germany, so I thought a little background to this show of international indignation might not go amiss…

In 1974, in the midst of the cold war, America gave France permission to provide Iran, whose northern border was unprotected from a possible Soviet missile attack, with enriched, weapons-grade uranium. Eurodif (European Gaseous Diffusion Uranium Enrichment Consortium), founded in 1973 by French industrialist, Georges Besse, still produces 25% of the world’s used enriched uranium. In 1975 Sweden, one of the five founding countries, withdrew from Eurodif and France agreed to offer Sweden’s 10% share to Iran. The Shah, Reza Pahlavi contributed an initial one billion dollars and then two years later a further 180 million dollars towards the cost of building the consortium’s uranium enrichment plant, in exchange for which his nation was granted the right to buy up to 10% of its precious output.

When the Iranian Revolution brought the Mullahs to power in February, 1979, two months before the Eurodif plant was due to begin production, France no longer felt inclined to honour the contract. Ayatollah Khomeini cancelled the Shah’s nuclear power programme due to lack of funds but reiterated his country’s claim to 10% of Eurodif’s enriched uranium output. When Mitterrand came to power in 1981, he continued to ignore Iran’s claim and so the regime in Teheran decided to use coercion. For ten years France was repeatedly targeted by Iranian-backed terrorism both on her soil and abroad. In an attempt to keep France’s conflict with Iran out of the news, most of the attacks, carried out by Hezbollah, were attributed to the western world’s bogeyman at the time, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Eight French hostages taken by Hezbollah in Beirut and a series of bomb attacks in Paris finally put an end to France’s reluctance to honour the Eurodif contract and on December 29, 1991 Mitterrand terminated this secret war and signed an agreement re-establishing Iran’s rights to her 10% of weapons-grade uranium. France also refunded Iran over 1.6 billion dollars.

Main sources: Yves Bonnet’s “Nucleaire Iranien: Une Hypocrisie Internationale” and Dominique Lorentz’s “Une Guerre.”

I like this photo of Chirac and Sarko taken in 1981.

Chirac is 49 and pleased as punch.

Sarko is 26 and struggling. With many things. His hair is but one of them.

I’m back in France after the longest time spent in England since I left twenty five years ago. My two and a half months in the motherland has left me dazed and confused and as far as this blog is concerned, mute for weeks on end. In writing about my understanding of France, I have come to realise how little I understand of my own culture.

Like many long-term ex-pats, I imagine, I am afflicted with nostalgia for a place that has ceased to exist. A place of the imagination, distilled from childhood memories of 1970s London and the intense, adolescence experience of hating Margaret Thatcher and what she had planned for the nation. Leaving in 1984, at that particular moment in history – when the class system was breaking down and social mobility dawning, when feminism was finally reaping its rewards, when Channel Four was leading the way to cultural democratisation and race riots paving the way for multi-culturalism – I carried off a snapshot of a society in transition and full of hope.

When I returned I saw all the unwanted concomitants of Thatcher’s revolution: class war, gender war, mass ignorance encouraged and condoned by a rampant and omnipotent media, a pusillanimous state that seems to roll back its own powers with one hand and the personal liberty of its citizens with another.

But then I noticed the dissent. Not of the petulant French variety, but the quiet and determined, free-thinking kind. You find it in pockets in Britain, like desert dew and when you find it you relish every drop.

I’d like to apologize in advance for posting a little less regularly over the next few months. I’m starting my next book, an aching, heart-wrenching, coming-of-age comedy set in a small village in the South of France in the 1970s. Talk about escapist.