In most big arguments, Britain and France are fated to be on opposite sides

Paris

‘Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France.’ Thus de Gaulle, in one of the greatest first sentences of the 20th century, and he spoke for many humbler Frenchmen — or rather, as ‘humble Frenchmen’ is an oxymoron, let us say many other Frenchmen.

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This is a strange country, inscrutable to its own inhabitants, let alone to foreigners. Whereas we British usually manage to rub along, disguising our intellectual laziness as Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, the brittle, insecure, self-obsessed French elite takes itself desperately seriously. Every Frenchman who is recovering from a good dinner convinces himself that he is suffering from a ‘crise de foie’. In politics, the word crise is used equally promiscuously; so much so, that it often creates a crisis. In strained conversational exchanges, the French political and social haut-monde strives to maintain two irreconcilable positions: that this is the best society on earth, and that it is in a terrible state of chassis.