I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade, the douceur de vivre is palpable.
If you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered
I’ve been here in Brittany five days, having got the ferry over from Portsmouth. And, quite frankly, the difference in life quality has been stark. If a visitor from Neptune descended to Earth and visited provincial UK and France, he would have no trouble deducing which country was gripped by terminal malaise, locked in grotty decline, and therefore about to elect a hard-right government out of despair. Likewise, our smart Neptunian would see the rich, satisfied country, as smug as a brick of Normandy cheese, and quickly understand that this country is the one re-electing the steady-as-she-goes centrist, so as to not disrupt the good life.
And our Neptunian would be completely wrong, wouldn’t he? Because it is sad, edgy, uglified, falling-apart-at-the-seams, haven’t-seen-a-dentist-in-30-years Britain which is voting en masse for the centrist dad Keir Starmer, whose biggest promise is to maybe stop 15-year-olds buying energy drinks, and it is the prosperous, swanky, got-three-doctors-each French who are reaching, in urgency, for the party of Marine Le Pen, who tells them ‘France is on the brink of ruin, vote for me, and yes, my dad was a Nazi apologist, c’est la vie’.
The more I think about it, the more mysterious this other French paradox becomes. Why? Because, compared to most nations on Earth, the French really do have it good, as my trip around Brittany has shown me.
The most striking thing is the skilled and marvellous way France maintains the public realm. From pavements to lighting, to high streets and motorways and serious infrastructure, France gleams. Frankly, given the choice, I’d rather live in a French roundabout than the average redbrick Barratt Home new-build, with its three-inch-wide windows. The former, the French roundabout, is likely to be prettier, and better designed, and it’s guaranteed to have superior stonework.
But it’s not just the streets, and nor is it an illusion created by the nicer weather. France has better healthcare than us, sometimes far better. The French live longer. They have much less obesity. They have lovely wine and their food is still pleasant, albeit not remotely what it was. In addition, their country is spacious when ours feels cramped, their landscapes are protected and ours are chewed up for railways that don’t get built, their rivers are full of delicious pike and perch, ours are full of sewage.
Why, then, are the French so consistently miserable, and pessimistic (and polls show that in some ways they are even more pessimistic than the doom-laden Brits), such that they fancy an electoral flutter on Le Pen?
Several answers come to mind. Perhaps they are annoyed at the rising amount of crime, and yes, it is true that a city like Marseille has become horribly dangerous in recent years. But then, they don’t suffer anything like the crime in Sweden, where bombed-out, rapey Malmö is basically Syria with open sandwiches. Perhaps they are annoyed at the large amount of immigration, but then they suffered nothing like the 2.3 million immigrants who poured into Britain from 2020 to 2023, when it turned out that when the stupid, disgusting Tories promised a ‘points-based migration system’, what they meant was ‘if you can vaguely point in the direction of Britain, we will let you in’.
What else might account for strange French morosité? One theory I find plausible is French declinism. For a long time – probably 300 years, maybe 600 years – France was top dog in the culture wars: the global elite spoke French, read French writers, admired French art, dressed in French fashions, drank the best French vino, and ate French haute cuisine. Now this great and proud cultural hegemony is reduced to a few kitchen trainees saying ‘oui, chef’ and a lot of tourists in Montmartre, spoiling Montmartre.
That kind of decline has got to hurt. We British know something about decline, we’ve gone from imperial superpower and global industrial overlord to being the most easterly of America’s Aleutian islands in about seven decades, but we are able to console ourselves that, boy, we left an imprint. The world still speaks the English language: it is the ghost of the British Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. And the world still and eagerly plays English sports, and adopts English standards (disguised as American), and in other subtle ways we continue to exert power beyond our natural standing. This is the consoling drink we can imbibe as we stare at the drizzle. France has no such anaesthetic, and even its croissants, these days, come frozen.
But here, in well-kempt, suavely affluent Trinité-sur-Mer, I wonder if there is a further reason for the French tendency to vote hard right. To find that reason, I can walk a few minutes and come to the birthplace of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Because, yes, the father of Marine Le Pen was born here, and the family HQ – a kind of French Kennedy compound – is still found here, a few kilometres from the great megalithic alignments of Carnac, the oldest continuously inhabited place in France.
Therefore, my final theory is this: the coming and sizable vote for Marine Le Pen is not a vote for racism or xenophobia, it is in part a vote to protect what France has left. If you grow up in Trinité-sur-Mer, like Jean-Marie Le Pen and co., you know that France is still a lucky country. Big, beautiful, sunny and bountiful. Life is jolie. And if you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered.
Seen in this light, a vote for the RN of Marine Le Pen is not a big, aggressive Gallic shrug to the world, a ‘je m’en fous’ to outsiders, it is a defensive and prayerful wish to keep what is left of lovely France, to prevent it being spoiled, to stop the ruination the French can see everywhere else (in Paris, but also London, Brussels, New York). It is a vote for a civilised and sweetly fizzy Kir Breton by the glittering marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, as the summer sun slants over the yachts and the boulangerie and the pretty blonde girls ferrying baguettes on bicycles. It is an understandable vote for an ideal, maybe even a faith. It is a Petition to the Lord for the Preservation of Frenchness.
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