France is thanking its lucky stars and stripes for transatlantic saviours once again. After four Americans, one Brit and a Frenchman defied those expecting a joke and rescued a Paris-bound train from the rampage of a deranged gunman, the crème de la crème of French society have been compelled to relinquish their amour propre and reflect on their habitual disdain for the United States. Are they en route to a rapprochement?
The love-hate relationship between France and America is as old as the United States itself. It started off amorously in 1778 when the French agreed to supply the Americans with help against Britain in the Revolutionary War. Come the next Franco-British scuffle in 1793, the Americans angered France by equivocating. The French have been unsure about their revolutionary cousins ever since.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France, was hammered by the left-wing French press in 2007 when he was seen jogging in a New York Police Department T-shirt. French media reported Mr Sarkozy’s exercise as “uncivilised”, “unFrench”, “undignified” and “right-wing”. Such commentators will be happier with François Hollande. He does not seem like the jogging type.
The haughtiness which is de rigueur in French circles is not restricted to the athletic endeavours of politicians. French food is haute cuisine. French fashion is haute couture. The French language is of such cultural value that it requires its own académie to preserve it.
Perhaps the Académie française, once it has written its next policy brief on whether accents should adorn capital letters, ought to weigh in on the debate raging in the French press over whether the American “heroes” (the inverted commas were inserted by the newspaper Libération) should be congratulated sans those commas.