Adieu, La France

To enter France was once to enter a rich and strange, parallel universe. It was to say bonjour to yellow headlights, berets and garlic, to pungent, mis-shapen cigarettes, to large, round glasses of red wine, to the smell of warm baguettes and to throatily evocative pop songs on the radio with "r" sounds that extended over several bars.

These days the young French are wearing baseball caps, smoking Marlboros, drinking beer or alco-pops and listening to rap music, in English or French or Franglais.

Their mamans et papas drive cars with white headlights, listen nostalgically to the Beatles, shop in supermarkets as big as football stadiums and eat a sandwich for lunch. Maybe.

Is France disappearing? The question is provoked by the disturbing news that garlic sales are falling across the Channel. Not falling dramatically but quand-meme. If the French are no longer eating garlic - or smoking Gauloises - are they still French?

Of course the question could be turned against the British or almost any other nation. Fish and chips and warm beer and flat caps have given way to baseball caps, kebabs and lager.

Where are all the red telephone boxes of yesteryear? (Actually they seem mostly to be in France, where they are prized as great objets d'art and decorate gardens and seafront promenades.)

The point, however, is that France, above all nations, is not supposed to allow itself to disappear. Britain may be proud of being a nation open to all the winds and viruses of globalism, with a Chinese-owned fag-end of a car industry and British movies that are made in Hollywood.

Not France. France is supposed to be the country which says non. France is supposed to refuse all cultural imperialism, except its own. France is supposed to be the country of the "exception francaise": the refusal to be swamped by "mondialisation" (universalisation), Hollywood, la malbouffe (fast food), Japanese cars, Chinese bras or the English language.

France is supposed to be the country of Asterix, the small village which refuses to bow to the invader; the country of Jose Bove, the man who bulldozed a McDonald's to preserve his right to wear a droopy moustache and make stinky (but wonderful) cheeses.

All this huffing and puffing seems to have depressingly little effect. If you cast your eye over a range of cultural battlefields, France seems to have suffered nothing but Waterloos in recent years. There is not an Austerlitz in sight.

French exceptionalism in the matter of clothes appears to be dead. A couple of years ago, I rode in the lead car of the Tour de France cavalcade for more than 240km across Normandy and Brittany.

In the crowds lining the route, we saw a million baseball caps but not one beret.

Eating habits seem to have changed radically. The sandwich bar appears to rule in most large towns. In Paris, you now see young people scurrying back to their desks with a sandwich and a plastic container of soup.

The Gallic tradition of popular music - the Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel tradition - still exists but as a minority interest, like medieval plainsong.

The majority of young French people listen to Anglo-Saxon styles of music, from soft rock to rap.

All is not lost. French bread is fighting back against the supermarket imitations. You can still see peopled queuing for freshly baked bread (and what bread!) in almost all French villages and towns on a Sunday morning.

The French film industry - with over 500 movies a year - is, with Government help, the only full-range movie industry in Europe, producing everything from comedies to thrillers. Much of the output is tosh but at least it is French tosh, not standard Hollywood tosh.

France still has a car industry, with two thriving companies, one of which owns a Japanese car company. The French still have a style of their own which - in the Espace, the Scenic, the Twingo, and so on - have helped set the fashion for the world (even if they now have to have white headlights by EU law).

It is certainly not true that French cuisine is dead, either. In the restaurants available, in almost every town, in the middle-price range, France still out-eats every other country in the world.

All the same, for lovers of France and Frenchness - even those who believe that in some respects, France should be more open to the world - much has been lost to the march of worldism in the past 20 years.

- Independent