VIVE la différence, eh! The difference between France and the UK, that is. And in these troubled times, Le Monde could think of no better way to illustrate the point than by reproducing a cartoon from The Independent.

In the foreground it shows a radio announcing severe budget cuts, and on the left is a worried Brit in his kitchen thinking: ‘Time for a cup of tea,’ and making one, while on the right is an angry Frenchman thinking, ‘Time for a Molotov cocktail,’ and pouring petrol into an old wine bottle.

Yes, they do like a nice little riot, the French, even if it’s often only a token revolt.
The first thing they did after all the ructions in 1968 was to vote the autocratic General de Gaulle back in to restore order. And even the storming of the Bastille remains a
potent symbol of republican citizenship, but only the churlish expat would point out that there were only seven prisoners still left inside by the time the revolutionaries swarmed all over the place.

Here in Dinan last year, farmers were just turning their tractors farm-wards after demonstrating about rock-bottom pork prices outside the sous-Préfecture, the government offices, when someone remembered they had brought some old tires to burn in the road.

So they turned back, consulted the gendarmes and the fire service first just to make sure it was OK by them, and a thick pall of black smoke was soon drifting across the Rance Valley in the late-afternoon sunlight.

Actually, on the radio this morning one national union leader even claimed that much of the violence in the pension reform demos was really caused by police agents provocateurs in a bid to discredit the whole movement and divert attention from its grievances.

Things were more peaceful in sleepy Dinan, where the population is around 10,000, depending on where you draw the town boundaries, but we’ve still had up to 5,000 people pounding the cobblestones for the last six Thursdays, trying to get Mr Sarkozy to accept that his reform, though essential and inevitable in principle, is unfair and ineffective as it stands.

Unfair, because he says we’re all going to have to make sacrifices, except high finance and those with privileged pension schemes like train drivers, postmen, air traffic controllers and notaries’ clerks (Lord knows why), who will still be able to retire at 50 or 55, for the next couple of years, anyway.

Oh, and the politicians themselves, of course, because every year spent in parliament counts double for their already very favourable pension rights. But he forgot to mention that.

The hardest hit will, as ever, be those who’ve worked the longest in the most tedious, worst-paid jobs, and women, because they earn less than men anyway, and particularly those with incomplete careers and insufficient contributions, which is just about every mum in the country.

Now, to add insult to injury, he has just announced a national debate on ‘systémique’ pension reform for 2013, ‘systémique’ being the latest buzz word here, by the way, fresh in from across the Channel.

Which is another way of admitting that the government’s refused us the national debate such a radical reform surely requires, preferring, as ever, to meet contestation with attrition, scorn, denial and condescension.

Yes, a bit like the States with your Line in the Sand and massed petitions. And what happened to that States’ debate on politicians’ pay?

Mind you, some commentators suspect that the president’s real, hidden agenda may simply be to send a message to the world money markets and to his own party that he’s the Big Boss and you don’t mess with him, particularly with the presidential elections coming up in 2012.

No wonder his popularity rating has plummeted below 30% and Mme Masstairmann and I and 3,000,000 other very angry French people have been going walkabout, losing a day’s pay each time, to give President Bling-Bling the traditional Gallic ‘bras d’honneur’ – the arm of honour.

JUST down the road from here, 10,000 people in Rennes town centre hit the streets for a quite different reason last Sunday morning when they were evacuated while bomb disposal experts neutralised a 500 lb bomb dropped from 10,000 feet by the RAF in 1944.
It’s thought that 10% of the explosives that rained down out of the wartime skies didn’t go off, and building excavations often create new panics.

Then there were the gendarmes in rural Normandy who hit the deck and then hit the roof after a local strolled up to the duty sergeant’s desk and plopped down a smaller bomb he had dug up in his back garden.

And the Breton pensioner who also got the fright of his life one Christmas Eve not so long ago when this log he had lobbed on the fire exploded, the wood having grown back over an embedded shell in the years since the war.

THE mayor in Gonne-ville-sur-Mer (population 600) in Calvados, Helier Clement’s spiritual homeland, has also been in the wars and attracting considerable flak for defending a portrait of Marshal Pétain that’s been hanging in the village hall for years along with all of France’s other presidents, past and present, controversial or not.

What I think of the man myself is neither here nor there, he argued. But this wedding guest spotted it and tipped off the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme. They took him to court in Caen, alleging that the picture was an ‘obvious disturbance of the peace’ because Pétain’s Vichy government had actively collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Occupation, abolishing the Republic and installing a racist dictatorship. The judge agreed and has just ordered Monsieur le Maire to remove the Marshal.

The son of peasant parents and a national hero after the Battle of Verdun in 1916, Pétain was brought to trial after the Liberation in 1944 and his death sentence for high treason was commuted to life imprisonment on the Ile d’Yeu on the Atlantic coast, where he died in 1951. A confidential army report written when he was still just a junior officer had said: ‘If this man rises above the rank of major, it will be a disaster for France.’

COFFEE drinkers in Paris have also been up in arms because the price of their petit noir is now rarely less than a euro, despite one or two exceptions like the no-alcohol Café de Petits Frères des Pauvres – the Little Brothers of the Poor – in the Rue de Batignolles, where it’s only 45 centimes, and a few back-street greasy-spoons that still only charge 80 centimes.

Now a kilo of imported green coffee costs two to three euros, depending on the quality of the beans. Then it’s roasted and sold on to the cafés for 11 to 26 euros a kilo, which, at seven grams a cup, makes 140 shots – each raking in a euro or more if you pay and sip up at the bar. But if you sit down inside or out on the pavement to drink it, you can double or triple that.

So Lord help the poor Brit visitor who, unaware of the three-tier price structure that operates in most cafés here, gets his espresso or whatever cheapish from the barman and then goes and sits outside in the pricey seats in the sun to drink it.

Which, come to think of it, is a bit like unwitting French visitors to The Rock who sit and sigh in a pub waiting to be served and then, sadder but wiser, stride confidently up to the counter in some tea-room and get told to sit down.
Yes, vive la différence,
indeed, eh!
Kenavo!