Welcome

As the point of this newsletter is to look at my native country from outside, I start with a few reflections on foreignness.

I was born and raised in the région parisienne (an old designation with an elegiac ring that neither "Paris" nor "Paris area" captures.)

In my teens I developed an interest in things Anglo-Saxon.  I went on to live in the US and New Zealand before moving to London in my early 30s.  Britain has been my home since then.  I'm Out Of France for good.  My wife and my daughter are English; my work is here (I was a BBC journalist for three decades before going freelance).  The UK is where I belong.

That doesn't mean I feel British at all.  I am with them, not of them.  I remain irredeemably foreign and that's fine.  I've found Britain to be a great country to be a foreigner in.

So much for my relationship to my adoptive land.  But what about my passport country?  There was a time, in my peripatetic twenties, when France meant only that - a passport.  I thought I could easily shed my roots.  I was a citizen of the world.

But you don't realise the influence of your own culture until you truly get to know another.  A fish has no concept of water.  Having lived "abroad" for two thirds of my life, I've come to realise how thoroughly the place where I spent the first third has shaped me.

That does not mean that I belong there.  To repeat, the sense of belonging and the sense of identity are not always in line.  Identity, for me, means that whenever I set foot on French soil, I am on familiar ground.  I understand these people – better, I feel, than they understand themselves.  I am of them, not with them.

Some thinkers divide societies between cosmopolitan types who can be at home in Los Angeles, London or Bangkok and true natives who are attached to particular places and traditions.  In Britain, these categories may be referred to as anywheres and somewheres (the journalist who came up with this dichotomy sympathises with the latter). 

In France, commentators of a nationalist bent talk about élites hors-sol, a phrase that conjures up images of high-fliers looking down on earthbound masses, ready to settle wherever the jet stream takes them.  A geographer has written best-selling books on "la France d'en-haut", where the urbanites enjoy the benefits of globalisation, vs "peripheral France" where small-town folk struggle.

I accept that global job markets have economic downsides - inequality, segregation, weaker social bonds, etc. (although these must be set off against the benefits).  What I dispute is the notion of cultural impoverishment, the idea that expatriates join a faceless class of unmoored nomads.

Nationalists have no problem recognising the robustness of ethnic affiliation in other people – notably immigrants.  But the call of the tribe is supposed to be weak in their own countrymen, who can just leave it the airport gate.

But a person from Wrocław is no less Polish for working at the European Commission, a Valparaiso native hired by a New York bank no less Chilean.  I would argue that their national identity becomes more complete as a result of the experience of foreignness.

The similarity between another country and the past has been pointed out: "They do things differently there."  Both are often romanticised, or misunderstood.  Looking at history through the lens of the present is called "anachronism.  The geographical equivalent - "anatopism", I guess – is just as prevalent.  Exoticism makes us blind to universal traits and true idiosyncrasies.

To be sure, it is easier to travel in space than in time.  If you're really interested in a country, you can go there and talk to locals, or learn indirectly from experts who have.

But anatopism always lurks. Natives are not reliable sources of information: no-one knows what makes them special or interesting to others.  The French are particularly unreliable sources of information about France.  They seek to impress outsiders the same way they impress each other: through bombast.

Some people make allowances for this trait – hence the popularity of French Theory and Éric Cantona.  In general, though, Gallic windbags test the patience of the best-disposed foreigners.  After listening to a speech by Victor Hugo, Henry James wrote: "France occasionally produces individuals who express the national conceit with a transcendent fatuity which is not elsewhere to be matched... I don’t know how it affects people who dislike French things to their fantastic claims for their spiritual mission in the world, but it is extremely disagreeable for those who like them."

Foreign analysists of France are often excellent.  The British are among the best – from Edmund Burke to Sophie Pedder, en passant par Theodore Zeldin, Douglas Johnson, Robert Tombs, Julian Jackson, Stephen Clarke and Jonathan Fenby, among others.  But being a Francophile is not the same as being French.  The two, in fact, are mutually exclusive.

In writing about French politics and culture, I will seek to emulate the clarity and cogency of those observers.  Unlike their accounts, mine will have a strong first-person element.  I might refer to the French as "them", but "I" or "us" are not far behind.  This will hopefully enhance my credibility.  It will certainly allow me to be as critical as I like without being suspected of xenophobia.

My teenage interest in things Anglo-Saxon is undiminished.  I remain Out Of France for a reason.  In this newsletter I plan occasionally to give my two centimes about developments in the US or Britain when there is a relevant French angle.  In those instances I will speak not as an insider abroad, but as an outsider at home.