Managing things better
Richard West
Paris As usual it was on the boat from Dover to Calais that I once again remembered Sterne's immortal judgment that they manage things better in France — this time in connection with football hooliganism. The centre of the Mercia Bar (equipped with a plastic Sealink public relations plaque on the importance of Mercia in early England) was occupied by the supporters of a Pyrenean rugby team that had just won a match and were bringing back the triumphal effigy of a golden cock. They were already drunk, or at least noisily jubilant, when they got on the boat at noon, honking motor horns, crowing like the cock they had won and indulging in badinage against the defeated rosbift. As soon as we left Dover, venturing out into the mist among unmanned Greek tramp steamers and rogue Liberian tankers, the French rugby men started to dance in a crocodile round and round the boat, each man clutching the man in front by the crotch, as they do in the scrum. Between sorties they drank deep of duty-free whisky.
Towards the end of the journey, the rugby supporters settled down in the Mercia Bar to bawl their traditional songs which tended to be on the dirty side — tu as baise ma mere — and involved much incidental business like sitting down and suddenly standing up again, or jabbing the little finger up in the air. Although some of the songs were chauvinistic — 'we like lovers, we like the King of France but we heap obscen ity on the English' — these French rugby supporters were popular with the mainly English passengers on the boat, indeed English matrons who had been kissed by the Frenchmen shamelessly asked to be kissed again. There was never a hint of the violence and resulting fear that one gets in the presence of the supporters of Leeds or Manchester United or, these days, almost any English soccer club.
My colleague Auberon Waugh might say
that the difference lay in social class, that the English soccer supporters are urban working class while the French rugby supporters are most of them from the peasantry or the petite bourgeoisie of the south-west. They were also much older than English soccer hooligans. Indeed one man, wearing a tee-shirt of the Great Western Railway Rugby Football Club looked surprisingly like the Spectator's distinguished, veteran Paris correspondent Sam White. I remembered what I was told last year by a London cab driver, that of all the football supporters who came into town, by far the best behaved were the French rugby fans because, so he said: 'You get some wild youngsters but they always have their
fathers with them, to keep them in order'. This observation, so much more telling than all the recent, expensive sociological surveys of football hooliganism, also suggests that 'they manage things better in France'.
One hopes that Sealink, for all its faults, will not be replaced by a channel tunnel dug, on our side, by Rio Tinto Zinc (legal adviser Lord Goodman, largest individual shareholder, the Queen) and on the French side by the Rothschilds. The late, infamous President Pompidou, a former Rothschild executive, not only promoted the channel tunnel but knocked down much of Paris on both sides of the Seine to provide motorways that would enable drivers to get from London to Nice at great speed.
In spite of Pompidou and the Rothschilds, Paris has suffered far less than London from the assaults of demolishers, be they greedy capitalists or loony Socialist planners. There are, of course, hideous high-rise blocks, as well as the Seine developments, but it seems that French politicians are more cautious than ours about knocking down buildings of beauty. Some credit for this must go to the communists who here, as in Italy, are more sensible than the English left. Also, in France the conservationists or ecologists as they call themselves, have enough electoral support to frighten and therefore influence the main political groups of left and right.
They manage things better in France, but even here there are signs of wrong
headedness, as one learns from the report of a conference in Nice held for parents of 'over-endowed' children. Why, the anxious parents asked, are some children more intelligent than others? Surely this cannot mean that France, with its 'successorientated' state education system, hankers after the English educational system in which bright children, unless they are sent to expensive private schools, receive virtually no education until they get time off from work to watch TV programmes for adult illiterates. The French would not wear it.
There was a song 'Paris tu n'as pas change', and in most ways Paris has changed less over the thirty years I have known it, than London has. One is not so aware in Paris, as in London, of people of another race. Even up in the northern working-class suburbs, one could not, in Mrs Thatcher's words, feel oneself 'swamped'. Of course, there is a large North African community and an ever-increasing number of black West Africans, not now just students but sub-proletarians such as road-sweepers and sewage workers.
If race relations are better in France than in England, it may be because the French lack our hypocrisy: they admit that the immigrants were brought in to do jobs that their own workers disdained. The French do not want to assimilate or 'connect' in the current jargon, with those whom they still regard as strangers.
A few years ago I was sent by a very TorY newspaper to report on a strike by North Africans at a smelter in Lyons. It turned out that although the strikers had some support from middle-class socialists and Trotskyists, the communist party declined to offer support or even union membership on the grounds that these North Africans were illiterate. Compare this French frankness with the hypocrisy of the English trade union leaders at last year's Grunwick dispute. At both places, immigrants were working for pay and conditions. unacceptable to the local white working class. The English socialists tried to get Grunwick closed down on the pretext of unionising its workers, the French coinmunists stated, implicitly, that they did not care what wages were paid to people of another race. This was illiberal and unadmirable but it was honest and for this reason I think that France will suffer less than England from racial hostility.
France seems to have behaved well to political refugees from its former colonies in Indo-China. The Vietnamese are prominent restaurateurs, although I .suspect that the French do not regard their cuisine as highly as that of the emigre Chinese. In the Vietnamese restaurant where I went last night I was surrounded by Americans boring their wives and girl-friends with their experiences at the battle of Hue or the pacification of the Delta. Paris used to be famous for its mad, white Russian taxidrivers, but for recklessness they have now been surpassed by the emigre Cambodians.
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