All is not well in Macron’s France

The relationship entertained by French elites to their homeland is very different from their English counterparts. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’, wrote George Orwell in 1945. That derisory sentiment continues today among Britain’s urban elites.

French elites by contrast – though they can be highly critical of their country among themselves – do not shy from exalting its status abroad. French nationalism, born of the French Revolution, only came to be embraced by the right a century later. From then onwards, basic patriotism crosses political boundaries.

Elite francofilia has long been a facet of English snobbery. Orwell refers to the Catholic author GK Chesterton’s ‘romanticised’ vision of France ‘as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine.’ No harm in that – until  that romanticism was extended to an ‘enormous over-estimation of French military power’ after the First World War.