1985 · France-Empire
Vive la France quand même !
(Long live France, all the same!)
Back from six years in Rome, I look at my country through the eyes of someone who has long seen it from afar. A spirited essay on the French character.
When you have lived abroad for years, you come home to France with a mixture of exasperation and tenderness. I was returning from Rome, where I had been TF1's permanent correspondent from 1977 to 1983. I had covered the Aldo Moro affair and the Red Brigades, the deaths of two popes, the election of John Paul II and most of his travels. And I was rediscovering the French.
This book grew out of that outsider's gaze. To feed it, I went to question the people whose job it is to observe us: the foreign correspondents posted in Paris, among them my Italian colleagues from RAI. Our quirks, our quarrels, our genius for complaining about a country the whole world envies: I wanted to say it all frankly, and still end on the cry of the title. The Bibliothèque nationale de France filed it under a subject heading I rather like: the French national character.
Published by France-Empire in 1985, the book is now out of print and can be found second-hand.
Worth knowing
- Written on my return from Rome.
- Draws on interviews with foreign correspondents posted in Paris.
- Catalogued by the BnF under "French national character".
- Out of print: available second-hand only.
