It’s actually part two, which I’m sure would astonish many a Brit:

The Royal Standard of the King of France (and by default, the national flag), used between 1638 and 1790.
Wikimedia Commons.

“When, after their victory at Salamis, the generals of the various Greek states voted the prizes for distinguished individual merit, each assigned the first place of excellence to himself, but they all concurred in giving their second votes to Themistocles,” wrote the great 19th-century historian Edward Creasy. “This was looked on as a decisive proof that Themistocles ought to be ranked first of all. If we were to endeavour, by a similar test, to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.”

France is central to the story of Europe, and indeed of Britain. It is almost impossible to understand England’s history without appreciating the relationship with its closest continental neighbour. It is a love-hate affair originating in a grand inferiority complex, a long rivalry that continues tomorrow [Saturday] when England meet France in the World Cup quarter-finals.

In a piece last year I cited some of the most endearing/maddening things about the French, all of which contributed to a sense of amused frustration on our part:

Only in France would football fans protest that a local restaurant had lost a Michelin Star, as happened in Lyon two years ago. Only in France would an expedition to the Himalayas — of huge national importance — fail because it was weighed down by eight tonnes of supplies, including 36 bottles of champagne and “countless” tins of foie gras. And only in France would you get actual wine terrorists, the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, who have bombed shops, wineries and other things responsible for importing foreign produce. This is a country which only reluctantly in the 1950s stopped giving school children a nutritious drink for their health, by which the French meant not milk but cider.

This is a country where mistresses are so much part of life that they can legally inherit, and where murder doesn’t really count if it’s done for love. One of France’s most famous socialites, Henriette Caillaux, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro just before the First World War and received just four months in jail because it was a crime passionnel. So that’s all right then.

But there are so many other things to love about our strange neighbours …

The Anglo-French relationship is a difficult one, reflected in the troubled history of royal marriages. Charles I’s Catholic wife Henrietta Maria was a drag on his popularity among excitable Protestant radicals, and turned out to be the last French consort; in the 14th century Edward II’s wife Isabella overthrew him and, perhaps, conspired to have him killed, after a rocky marriage that began badly when he brought his lover to the coronation and acted inappropriately affectionate towards him. But then, as Edith Cresson pointed out, this is to be expected when you marry an Englishman.

In 1514 Louis XII married an English bride, Henry VIII’s sister Mary; she was 18, he was 53, and had syphilis, so she must have been delighted about the whole thing; however, within weeks she had “danced him to death”, the sex apparently proving too exciting for his nervous system. Francesco Vettori, Florence’s ambassador to Rome, wrote that King Louis had a lady “so young, so beautiful and so swift that she had ridden him right out of the world”. 

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Perhaps not a terrible way for a Frenchman to go, and not the last French head of state to die in a similar manner. President Félix Faure expired in 1899 while with his mistress, after which his funeral featured this very understated carriage.

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Numerous French presidents have had affairs, although Francois Mitterrand actually had a secret second family while in the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand’s last meal was also ultra-French: “He’d eaten oysters and foie gras and capon — all in copious quantities — the succulent, tender, sweet tastes flooding his parched mouth. And then there was the meal’s ultimate course: a small, yellow-throated songbird that was illegal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird — ortolan — supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole — wings, feet, liver, heart. Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.”

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The French are world outliers in their attitudes to adultery, the only country where a majority of people think it’s fine. Germany is number two in this index of permissiveness while the Americans, of course, are the most disapproving western nation.