EPILOGUE

WHY MODERN FRANCE IS SUFFERING FROM ‘REGIS ENVY’

SO HOW ARE Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité faring in France today?

Well, the modern République française certainly offers a good deal of Liberté, though no more than monarchies like Britain, Belgium, Sweden or Tonga. French citizens enjoy democracy, relative freedom of speech, and more or less equal opportunity (in theory at least).

Even so, for a country that claims to be a secular state that liberated its people from the tyranny of the clergy in 1789, it came as something of a surprise during the French presidential campaign of 2017 to see mainstream politicians disputing the rights to gay marriage and adoption by gay couples – liberties that a post-revolutionary, non-religious republic should surely recognize without batting a political eyelid.

Similarly, there was the rumpus in the summer of 2016 about women on French beaches wearing swimsuits that covered up too much bare flesh. It took centuries for women to win the freedom to strip off on the beach if they wanted to, and now there was pressure in France to make naked arms and legs compulsory. Admittedly, the rule was confined to a few beaches in the politically sensitive south of France, but it was frankly bizarre – and not very libertarian.

In short, the battle for France’s fabled Liberté goes on.

As for Égalité, modern France may not have a House of Lords (its upper house is an elected senate), but the country is still full of aristocrats merrily marrying their cousins, moaning about the upkeep of their châteaux, and looking down on anyone whose surname doesn’t have a noble ‘de’ in front of it. Meanwhile, the moneyed bourgeoisie are every bit as snobbish as their pre-Revolution aristocratic predecessors towards people who don’t have an apartment in the ‘right’ part of Paris or can’t afford the best business school or fanciest wedding for their children. Inequality is everywhere.

As for Fraternité, France is one of the most politically divided countries in Europe. Its bosses and unions are constantly at war, and its extreme left- and extreme right-wing parties are exceptionally strong thanks to their ‘us and them’ politics. There is one party in parliament, La France Insoumise (‘France that has not given up’, subtext: since 1789), demanding a new Constitution and a new republic. Its members want a revolution. And in 2017 their leader was only 2 per cent away from making it into the final round of the presidential election. The conflict never ends.

All this is without even touching on the frightening rift in French society that partially caused, and has since been exacerbated by, the most recent series of terrorist attacks in France and the shocked realization that many of the attackers were home-grown.

In short, despite the Revolution, France has by no means shrugged off the social divisions of its monarchist past.

Far from it – today’s ruling class revels in pre-revolutionary luxury. The country’s lower house of parliament, the Assemblée nationale, is based in the palais Bourbon, the former home of Princess Louise-Françoise de Bourbon, a daughter of King Louis XIV. Given that the Bourbons were France’s former royal family, you’d think that someone would have suggested renaming the parliament building since 1789. After all, post-revolution Paris renamed many of its ‘royal’ streets. In Soviet Russia, they renamed cities; they renamed the whole country.

Similarly, the French President’s residence, the 365-room palais de l’Élysée, was once home to a mistress of King Louis XV, and was later the residence of Emperor Napoléon III. Hardly a chandelier, armchair or dinner plate has been changed since, and French Presidents live almost literally like kings, surrounded by eighteenth-century-looking liveried servants and enjoying 20,000 square metres of gardens in central Paris, where most people struggle to find a park bench to sit on.

The French Prime Minister (who, by the way, is not elected, but appointed by the President) also lives in a palace, the hôtel Matignon, which was formerly owned by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and King Louis XVIII. Its decor, like that in the Élysée, tends towards marble, gold and chintz, and apart from the new phones, computers and lightbulbs, it would feel very much like home to an eighteenth-century monarch. Matignon is smaller than the Élysée, but possesses the largest private park in Paris – 30,000 square metres.

By comparison with both of these palaces, 10 Downing Street is a garden shed.

As for the leaders themselves, France seems to have an innate preference for the regal type. Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, two of the most authoritarian and long-lasting of recent presidents, are still revered by many voters. On the other hand, presidents who tried to introduce the common touch, like Nicolas Sarkozy (who used to swear like a Parisian taxi driver at hecklers) and François Hollande (who declared that he wanted to be ‘le président normal’) were both considered vulgar and/or mediocre. What France really seems to yearn for is an aloof, emperor-like figure – another Louis XIV or Bonaparte (though without the absurd wigs and catastrophic wars).

Several financial scandals that arose during the 2017 presidential election campaign proved that modern French politicians possess all the bad habits that earned so many of their eighteenth-century predecessors a rendezvous with the guillotine.

Just like the old royal family, today’s MPs have been dishing out jobs to their relatives, some of whom have received small fortunes for doing virtually nothing. One 2017 presidential contender allegedly paid his wife more than half a million euros of public money over about nine years – more than double the average salary in France in all of that period – as a ‘parliamentary assistant’. (At the time of writing, there has still been no proof that she actually did any work to earn it.)

Despite a stream of scandalous revelations, this candidate did not withdraw from the election, and eventually polled 20 per cent. He was able to do so because, shockingly, when most of his payments were being made, it was perfectly legal for a French MP to hand out huge sums of taxpayers’ money to members of his or her family without declaring it. Now, at last, it has become compulsory to publish salaries paid to relatives, but pre-revolutionary cronyism has not been totally forbidden.

These modern French politicians enjoy plenty of other legal, regal privileges. During the 2017 campaign, it was revealed that a certain minister’s wife had three chauffeurs at her disposal. And that minister was a socialist, so who knows how many chauffeurs she would have had if her husband had not possessed a social conscience.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that while President Hollande was in office, he kept a personal hairdresser on a retainer of 9,895 euros a month – almost exactly the salary of a government minister. Who would have thought that a socialist with so little hair would have so much in common with Marie-Antoinette?

But then in modern, post-Revolution France, politicians of all persuasions have been following in the footsteps of their pre-Revolution forerunners.

The French will argue that these are just aberrations, that monarchies are inherently over-privileged regimes, and that almost no one wants to see the return of the French royal family. Politically this is true, but in that case, why is it that, whenever a British prince marries, or even gets a new fiancée, the whole of the French media comes charging across the Channel to cover the story?

If a British royal baby is due, French TV crews, some of them paid by the republican state, are happy to camp for days outside the hospital alongside their monarchistic British colleagues. And when ordinary French tourists travel to London, they are just as royally obsessed. If you’re queuing to visit Buckingham Palace or the Crown Jewels, you’re bound to hear French being spoken all along the line – and not only by Belgians, Swiss and Québécois Canadians.

This French fascination with British royalty seems to stem from two things: first, dissatisfaction with their own political elite for the above-cited reasons; and secondly, a feeling that their country’s identity is somehow incomplete. France possesses several of the most famous historic monuments on the planet, and yet there’s something lacking. Perhaps it all feels too recent. The Eiffel Tower is little more than a century old. The Louvre has only been a museum for about 200 years. Versailles dates back to the seventeenth century, but it is a shell – its former life is over. The same goes for the medieval castles and prehistoric cave paintings.

In short, France possesses no living, continuous entity that identifies it to the rest of the world as an ancient civilization that existed for a millennium before the Revolution. Britain, on the other hand, has the Queen, who (if you don’t look too closely) can trace her ancestry back to the eleventh century, or even beyond. And once she has departed the throne, there are already three generations in line to take up the royal reins. Whether one agrees with the principle of monarchy or not, this notion of historical continuity gives Britain a certain old-school cachet that France has lost.

Britain has its divisions, of course – Scotland keeps threatening independence, Northern Ireland will probably never solve its religious problems, Northern and Southern England are at constant cultural war, and Brexit has split the nation in two (at least). But the French don’t really see all this, and retain a romantic view of Angleterre (they often use the name to describe the whole of Britain) that is largely based on the continuity of the monarchy.

The French republic has nothing to replace its royals. The President never unites the country in the same sentimental way that, for example, the better British monarchs can. A new president is elected every five years, and occasionally he (there has still never been a Madame President) is carried into office by a wave of optimism, but within weeks this usually collapses and France sinks back into its distrust of the authorities, its profound conviction that nothing will ever get better, and its impatience to see a new leader – all throwbacks to its turbulent revolutionary past.

And yet, if the reformed constitutional monarchy of 1789 had been allowed to develop into a true democracy, then just over two centuries later, at little or no extra cost to the taxpayer, France could be attracting the world’s media and millions of extra tourists per year to royal jubilees, weddings and baby brandishings, and its politicians might be less prone to behave like monarchs.

Instead, the French complain about elitism dividing their society, spend a disproportionate amount of working days organizing 1789-style political marches, and regularly turn for their illicit royal thrills towards Britain.

Even if they would never admit it, deep down, the French are suffering from acute regis envy.