Talk to the Snail Read online

  On the other hand, French books with picture covers can be very good. They’re great at historical novels and biographies, for example. Let no one accuse me of being totally negative.

  ‘Sold’, the sign says. What this British family don't know is that

  they've just agreed to pay two hundred thousand euros for a parasol.

  THE

  7TH

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Ne Sauras Pas

  THOU SHALT NOT KNOW

  THOU SHALT NOT KNOW

  IN FRANCE, THINGS ARE DONE ON A ‘DON’T NEED TO KNOW’ basis. Unless forced to do otherwise, no one will tell you anything.

  There have been cases of people left sitting for hours on a motionless train in the middle of France, staring out at the fields of sweetcorn and wondering why they weren’t using the rest of the railway line. Had the locomotive broken down? Was there a bomb or a cow on the line? Had the driver stopped off at a friend’s house to watch the Tour de France? Nobody would say.

  I once arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport to find that there were no immigration officials on duty. Two planeloads of jetlagged travellers crowded into the arrivals area, jostling for position in front of the unmanned booths, wishing they’d gone for a pee before getting off the plane, and waited for forty-five minutes. There were no announcements, and no one to complain to. In the end a woman found out that there was a bomb scare at the airport by phoning a friend who worked in a café in the departure lounge. The officials finally turned up, everyone pushed forward with their passports, and no more was said about the wait.

  The worst case I ever experienced was coming home to my apartment one afternoon to find a masked, body-armoured, machine-gun-toting policeman on my landing. At least I hoped he was a policeman.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, rather bravely, I thought.

  ‘You don’t need to know,’ he said.

  I didn’t feel like arguing.

  Sometimes, the French complain about this ambient secrecy, but there are lots of things they actually prefer to keep quiet. They hate being spied upon – mainly because they have so many guilty secrets.

  There are very few CCTV cameras in France, and the French are very smug about this. They know that they would only get caught driving badly, walking furtively into a hotel with their lover, letting their dog poo on the pavement, dumping their leaky car battery on a street corner, or doing a whole variety of other antisocial things. So what if a few muggings and car thefts go unsolved?

  The funniest example of strategic secrecy is a French itemized phone bill, which never gives the complete numbers called. It gives the first six digits, but not the rest, so that jealous spouses cannot call numbers they don’t recognize and get through to a lover.

  This is why secrecy is tolerated. You keep your secret, I’ll keep mine. Au revoir.

  Danger? What Danger?

  On the north-west tip of Normandy, just fifteen miles from the Channel Islands, is a typical French secret. It’s a place whose existence is not denied at all – the area’s official website provides a link to ‘un autre site’ about the region, which has a very informative page on the subject.

  But when you click on the link, you think, holy merde, why does no one talk about this?

  This place is Cap de la Hague, a nuclear reprocessing plant much like the one at Sellafield in the north-west of England, which is so notorious that its name keeps getting changed to try and throw the public off the scent (people with long memories may recall that in the past it’s also been called Seascale and Windscale). But Cap de la Hague has always been Cap de la Hague. And unlike Sellafield, which regularly has the whole of Britain and Ireland up in arms about pollution, Cap de la Hague is ignored. Even though there is also a massive conventional nuclear power station right next to it.

  This silence is all the more surprising (or, cynics would say, less surprising) because the site is right in the middle of a summer tourist area. Practically every coastal town within a hundred miles is a seaside resort where people happily swim, paddle and fish for shrimps. The bay to the west is a big oyster-producing region, and Le Mont Saint Michel is just seventy miles downwind.

  The reason is that France is the only country in the world, apart from North Korea, where nuclear power is totally safe. The whole country is miraculously protected from any likelihood of radiation poisoning or fallout. When the cloud of luminous dust floated across Europe from Chernobyl in 1986, it famously stopped at the French border. Farms just across the line in Germany, Switzerland and Italy were polluted and sales of their produce embargoed, but in France crops were untouched.

  It is the same for asbestos. It is only in the past decade or so that asbestos has officially become dangerous in France. Before that, it was perfectly safe, and the students of the asbestos-ridden university building at Jussieu in central Paris were in no danger whatsoever from the particles they kicked about and inhaled as they walked the corridors.

  Could all this be because certain French companies are (or were, in the case of asbestos) amongst the world’s biggest manufacturers of these allegedly toxic materials? Mais non!

  Astonishingly, the French don’t seem to mind this at all. For one thing, they have more important matters to think about than whether some factory they can’t see, hear or smell might be polluting the beach where they have decided to spend their holiday. For another, they are a technological people and believe that the Earth would be a better place if engineers ran the world and left everyone else to get on with the more refined things in life.

  Je Ne Sais Quoi

  Conspiracies of silence work very well in France because the country is indeed run by technocrats, most of whom went to school with each other. Many of the politicians, industrialists and financiers, and even some of the supposedly independent press barons, come from the elite grandes écoles. The country echoes to the sound of these people scratching each other’s backs. Three French presidents in a row – Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac – have been either openly accused of crimes or tainted by dubious friendships, but continued their careers. And Charles de Gaulle is quoted as saying that ‘a politician so rarely believes what he is saying that he is astonished when anyone believes him’. It’s not surprising that the French are completely cynical about their leaders.

  This impenetrability helps them to be subtly efficient on the world stage.

  They somehow manage to extricate French hostages from Iraq with their heads still attached to their shoulders. They deny that this is because they pay the hostage-takers, and no one believes them, but they don’t care.

  They howl about globalization, which they refuse to call globalization, even though it would be a perfectly acceptable French word – instead they have coined the alternative mondialisation. They spit with fury if a foreign company tries to buy out a big French firm – in the case of Danone, the government actually blocked the deal – yet they lambast the USA about its protectionism. And meanwhile, the French export their nuclear power stations, car plants, trains and food technology, much of which is directly or indirectly subsidized by the government. Millions of Brits drink water supplied by French companies. And all over the world, even as far away as Sydney, you will see bus stops built by Decaux, the genius who conceived the idea of paying to build bus stops and then taking the revenue from on-site advertising. It’s a slow, silent invasion, kept semi-secret by the way the French continually complain that their economy is collapsing and the whole world is against them. A brilliant cover-up.

  Don’t Mention the War

  The Nazi occupation of France really traumatized the nation. Not so much because they suddenly had men in jackboots marching about the place, but because so many French people went over to the other side.

  At the end of the war, lots of collaborators were executed, and women who’d consorted with the enemy had their heads shaved. But these were only the people who didn’t have enough influential friends to cover them. Some of the worst collaborators were ne
ver tried or even accused. Meanwhile, amongst the genuine heroes on the official lists of Résistants, there were people who had never lifted a finger against the Nazis.

  The best example of these postwar double standards was a woman called Marthe Richard. She is famous in France as the crusader who closed down all the brothels in the country in 1946, ostensibly because they were health hazards and hotbeds of organized crime, and had often welcomed the Occupying Forces with open arms (and open other limbs, too). She was chosen to spearhead the clean-up campaign because she was a heroine of the Résistance, a national figurehead. However, it was later alleged that the supposedly saintly Madame Richard had herself been a Madame during the war, and had worked with pro-Nazi gangsters as well as organizing sex parties for the Gestapo. Moral confusion at its most French.

  This trauma explains why there are no TV programmes like Crimewatch in France. The French say this would be a call for the public to denounce possible innocents. Which is what so many of them were doing from 1940 to 1944.

  But it’s all hypocrisy. They do denounce people to the authorities, every day.

  I lived for a while in a building where a man was caught stealing electricity. He had bypassed his meter, but had left the earth wire hanging loose near a water pipe. The trick was discovered when his next-door neighbour turned on the tap one day and flew across the kitchen with her hair on fire. The electricity men came, the fraudster was prosecuted, and the following year the neighbour was visited by tax inspectors who went through all her books and bank accounts. Someone had told the taxman that she was earning undeclared income working from home. It was not difficult to guess who.

  Denouncing people can even be a negotiating tactic. A shower in a tiny studio apartment on the floor above me leaked into my living room because the landlord had installed it on bare floorboards. The tenant had no insurance because the landlord was not declaring the rent and so refused to issue a lease, which is necessary for a tenant to get home insurance. My insurance man told me to blackmail the landlord into paying for the damage and fixing the shower immediately by threatening to shop him to the taxman. Charmant, I thought. The threat worked like a dream, though.

  Lawyers against the Law

  French court lawyers all look like abstract sculptors who have been practising on their own hair. They are often interviewed on TV about a case as their client enters or emerges from the courtroom, and they all look like the last person you would want to defend you in a court of law. Unshaven, vaguely psychopathic, totally untrustworthy.

  But in fact they are often very astute operators, because they are experts at manipulating French secrecy.

  In the British legal system, solicitors are officers of the court and as such are duty-bound to produce any relevant documents in their possession, even if they are harmful to their client. But French lawyers have no such obligation. So what if their client filmed himself hacking his business partner to death? No one else knows about the home slasher movie, so they can plead not guilty. At the same time, these lawyers are more than happy to review all the evidence into a forest of TV and radio mics and then claim that their client cannot possibly get a fair trial because the media keep reporting the case. The moral is, what better person to defend you than someone capable of such beautiful hypocrisy?

  The Law in Inaction

  The French police are divided into a variety of semi-independent bodies – the police nationale, who are run by the Ministry of the Interior, the gendarmerie nationale, who are part of the Ministry of Defence, the CRS (the gladiator-style riot police), the police judiciaire, the GIR (rapid intervention force), and others. But in French minds, they are more meaningfully divided into the ones who look silly and the ones who don’t.

  The ones who look silly include certain gendarmes who have to wear the old kepi, and the gangs of hickish beat cops who wander the streets of Paris looking as if they’ve failed the audition to become New York policemen because of their sloppy uniform. Even the CRS look quite silly before they put on their body armour, because of their shiny blue catsuits that zip up from the crotch.

  These silly-looking units have a bad public image. The common perception is that the CRS do nothing but bludgeon students and union activists, and that the gendarmes and uniformed beat cops bumble about, allowing major crimes to disappear unsolved into a quagmire of paperwork.

  But in fact, the less-than-serious cops are there to deflect attention from the more discreet ones. There are often brief stories in the newspapers about huge networks of fraud, internet crime or prostitution being cleared up. No fuss, lots of arrests, the suspects deported or sent to rot in jail. Individual crime may not concern the French police very much (if you get burgled, that’s your headache), but give them a whole network to dismantle and their intelligence services spring silently into action. If the network involves influential people, it may not be dismantled quite so quickly, but that’s a different problem.

  The uniformed cops get their dramatic crime-busting operations, too, but they tend to net slightly smaller fish. Every weekend, there are crowds of French police on the Italian border, confiscating fake Dior T-shirts, cheap plastic imitations of Louis Vuitton bags and other counterfeit luxury items. These aren’t being smuggled in by dealers, just by locals who nip over to Italy to get a chic brand-name jacket for a hundredth of the genuine price. The gendarmes stop cars that have been seen parked at Ventimiglia market by spies who are on the payroll of the big brands involved. The spies phone in the car registration numbers to the gendarmes, and the shoppers are stopped and dispossessed as soon as they cross back into France. On top of this, whole coachloads of naïve daytrippers are searched and relieved of their contraband.

  They are absurdly easy pickings. And while this is going on, you could smuggle through a carload of white slaves, rocket-propelled grenade launchers or heroin – as long you are not a big enough fish to interest the secret services, of course. And as long as you’re not wearing a fake Cartier watch.

  Argent? What Argent?

  One subject that the French feel uncomfortable talking about in polite society is money. Or rather, their money.

  If you’ve got it, you shut up about it. Only the poor and the vulgar discuss how much they paid for something or how much they earn. And only the nouveaux riches wear huge watches and drive silly red sports cars.

  This, though, is less out of polite discretion than fear.

  France has a wealth tax that applies to everything you own, from your house and car to your post-office savings account. And it kicks in at a very low threshold. If you own a family-sized apartment in the centre of Paris, you really ought to be paying the impôt sur la fortune (ISF). I was once at a dinner party at the home of a Paris family who’d just had a lift installed in their building near the Seine. They were on the fifth floor, so the value of their apartment had gone up by at least 20 per cent, almost certainly taking it over the ISF threshold. An English woman at the party asked how much the place was worth now. The hostess blanched and went into etiquette shock. She felt that she ought to be polite and answer her guest, but at the same time it was an unspeakably blunt question for a dinner party, rather like asking how many lovers the hostess currently had on the go. I intervened, told the hostess that it was a very British question, and led the conversation away to safer dinner-party territory – how many lovers other people had on the go. Given that lots of comfortably-off city-dwellers own an apartment plus a country house and a couple of decent cars, they have to keep their heads down. Walking around in a Louis Vuitton leather overcoat and buying Dior sunglasses for the poodle would be worse than vulgar – it would be financial suicide.

  This explains why the French are so good at inverted snobbery. Just as French artists will claim (untruthfully) that they don’t care if no one buys their paintings, the rich are very skilled at looking poor. Or trying to, anyway.

  I have spent a couple of summers on the île de Ré, just off the west coast of France, which is the country’s capital o
f inverted snobbery. Everyone who’s anyone in Paris has a house there, but none of them want to talk about it – the island is so trendy that house prices have become absurd. And you pay ISF on the potential value of your belongings, not the cash you get if you sell. Consequently, the rich Parisians try to blend in with the locals (and simultaneously disassociate themselves from the holidaymakers who rent places for the summer or – horrors – stay at campsites on the island). Look closely at that weatherbeaten fisherman walking along the quai at the swanky port of Saint Martin en Ré and you’ll see that his faded shirt has a Ralph Lauren label, his shapeless shorts are by Lacoste and those deck shoes are in fact battered Gucci loafers. He might have arrived at the quai in an ancient Citroën 2CV or – even more chic – on a rusting pushbike, but this is only because his discreetly powerful Renault is in the tumbledown garage beside his island house. And if Johnny Depp were to ask him where the nearest chocolate shop was, he would snootily tell him to enquire at the nearest office de tourisme.

  It’s not that the rich Frenchman wants to be invertedly snobbish, you understand. He has to do it to protect his wealth. Richesse oblige.

  Skeletons in the Cupboard

  Housebuying is another subject shrouded in secrecy.

  France makes the process less nerve-racking than it is in some other countries, with its system of signing a promesse de vente or compromis de vente – an agreement to buy, with a seven-day cooling-off period for the buyer. Once this is signed, the seller cannot accept any better offers. It is a great protection against gazumping, but even so, buyers can fall victim to a web of secrecy.

  Of course, when buying a home, the French hire solicitors to make sure that there are no plans to run a motorway through the kitchen. They also demand to see proof that the building is not infested with termites or riddled with amiante (asbestos). But almost no one commissions a structural survey to make sure that the place is not simply going to fall down of its own accord. I mentioned the possibility of surveying the building when I bought my first small apartment in Paris, and the estate agent looked at me as if I’d just asked for proof that the world wasn’t flat. In any case, if I’d found someone to do a survey, and discovered that all the supporting walls in the building had been removed and the place was being held up by the telephone cables, it would have done me no good. The agent would simply have replied, OK, so do you want to buy it or not? If not, no problem, because the next set of potential buyers won’t commission a survey.