Editoral-Why the French crashed

ITHOUT wishing to sound too much like Rex Harrison, let me say this: why can’t the English be more like the French?

There they hold bosses hostage until they accede to revolutionary demands, namely: 1) recognition that working on Friday afternoons or Monday mornings is an insult to everything the soixante-huitards fought for; and 2) the office must be airlifted next door to the boulangerie where they bake really good pain aux amandes.

These life-affirming, economy-destroying attitudes also explain why the French football team has crashed in South Africa. If there is anything more likely to fill English fans with joie de jolly old vivre than elegant Frenchmen immolating themselves on a bonfire they created, we don’t care to hear about it. Certainly not when the British government’s axe is on our throat and what remains of English masculinity depends on a football match between England and a team from a tiny country most couldn’t pick out on a map.

How much we envy the French and their grand gestes. How much England yearns to do what the French did in 1998, to win the World Cup with a mixed-race team that seemed to symbolise a post-colonial rainbow nation at ease with its manifold differences (nearly 180 degrees from the truth about modern France, but let’s not spoil the narrative). How much we’d like to have the cavalier attitude towards victory France had in 2006, when their greatest footballer sent his team crashing out of a World Cup final by nutting an opponent who’d insulted his sister.

There is more to the French disaster than a tradition of revolutionary resistance. There is what French philosopher Alain Badiou calls “the sacrificial temptations of nothingness”.

— The Guardian, London

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