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. Orwell concluded ‘that had the romantic rubbish which [Chesterton] habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer.’
Listening to the BBC these days and switching over to French public radio the contrast is striking. One is a constant depressive dirge on the UK’s woes; the other critically analytical of France’s problems, but upbeat in tone. Yet one might expect the reverse.
Take one raw statistic. In 2021, both World Bank and United Nations GDP (nominal) rankings have the UK at 5th and France 7th. International Monetary Fund estimates for 2022 show India overtaking the UK to claim the 5th spot for world GDP, but with France still 7th.
One may question the reliability of GDP as a comparator, but a host of other measures regularly show France worse off than the UK.
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