Even for a country teased by its critics for not being stout in a crisis (the American general Norman Schwarzkopf said that going to war without France “is like going deer hunting without your accordion”), isn’t France overreacting just a little to the wretched performance of its team in the World Cup?
A modest footballing crisis erupted into a volcano of national introspection and existential angst after one of France’s key players, Nicolas Anelka, was sent home after urging his coach to perform an act traditionally undertaken only by hermaphrodites. Anelka’s team-mates initially refused to train. France’s media melted into a fury. President Sarkozy is beating his chest and stamping his feet.
And to underline that this is a true French crisis — a crisis that the economist Jacques Attali considers a metaphor for France’s faltering competitiveness in a globalised world; a crisis that symbolises what the left-wing daily Libération calls “the cynicism of the era” — the furore has been given that official Gallic hallmark of gravity: a pronouncement by a starry intellectual. It is as if the country were driven by a Cartesian footballing maxim: I kick therefore I am.
The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut says that “these horrible, pouting, rich brats refuse to embody their nation”. To him the team “reflect the country with its clans, its ethnic divisions ... They hold a terrible mirror up to us.” The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 were fêted for their ethnic diversity. By contrast, today’s failing squad is sneered at for its recruits from ethnic ghettos.
It is not that England’s own World Cup is not teetering on the brink of tragedy. It is that France’s has already plunged into farce. Why? Because the country that gave us the can-can suddenly finds that, on the world’s grandest football field, it can’t-can’t.