librarians without borders

French book casts Britons as un-erotic, pet-obsessed drinkers

By Colin Randall in Paris
(Filed: 11/04/2005)

The French are being offered a new guide to the English that portrays les rosbifs as a binge-drinking, pet-obsessed race which still leads the world in pop music and humour but dresses with dubious taste and treats sex as a subject of national embarrassment.

Agnès Catherine Poirier, a writer and broadcaster, bases her conclusions on the "strange, insular people" of Britain on the 10 years she has spent observing its inhabitants while living in London.

In her book, Les Nouveaux Anglais, published in France this week, she says many stereotypes that spring most readily to French minds when reflecting on their cross-Channel neighbours are already things of the past.

No one wears bowler hats any more, Poirier notes, yet Burberry, the classic styling once favoured by the aspiring classes, is now the motif of the football hooligan.

Old-fashioned pubs are fast disappearing from villages and towns. Even the full English breakfast, eaten by one Briton in two only half a century ago, is today the preserve of "tourists hoping to rediscover a culture that no longer exists" and exiles dreaming from foreign parts of the country they left behind.

Poirier, 32, devotes whole sections of her book to British obsessions - class prejudice, pets, queuing, the weather, the tabloids and bingo - but is at her most abrasive when dealing with attitudes to sex.

A chapter headed ''No Sex Please We're British'' begins with the words: "Let us be charitable and put ourselves in the place of our poor British friends."

How, she wonders, could there not be a problem with sex in a country where silicone-enhanced breasts and bottoms are paraded in the popular press "without an ounce of eroticism"; film censors forbid images of erect penises; the Kama Sutra has been legally sold only since 1963; and the Ann Summers chain sells a million sex toys a year?

Poirier adds, for good measure, evidence of raised Gallic eyebrows at the David Blunkett affair, which she summarises as "a bachelor minister telling the press of his passionate relationship with a married woman he hopes will get a divorce and marry him instead".

"How, in such conditions, can you avoid becoming totally nuts and a touch schizophrenic?" she asks. "On matters of sex, the British learn only how to laugh... it frightens them, thus the obsession.

''Sex, this subject of national embarrassment, is present everywhere, for example in the often provocative dress and attitude of women. But to talk of it is out of the question."

Moreover, she says, sex in Britain seems to have nothing to do with love but has been turned instead into an exercise, like yoga or jogging.

However, Poirier makes it clear that her views should not be seen as revenge for tabloid attacks on her country, or British expatriates' invasions of Brittany and the Dordogne.

She admits to a personal love affair with la perfide Albion that began with her first schoolgirl visit and has been nurtured by admiration of Londoners' courage during the Blitz and her love of Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, English tea and chocolate, "and the inimitable accent of Laurence Olivier".

Despite self-confessed struggles to understand what makes the British tick, her book - a series of 34 essays with the declared aim of "revisiting national clichés" is a mostly affectionate look at the "shortcomings and charms of a great nation".

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