We French love to mourn our former presidents. Thousands queued to pay their last respects to Jacques Chirac as he lay in state at the weekend. Monday was a day of national mourning: the tricolour flew at half mast everywhere and a minute’s silence was observed even in schools. It is hard, though, to know which love is greater – the love of mourning the passing of former heads of state, or the love of loathing them with the fervour we held when they were in power. I remember all through the 1970s my mother calling Chirac “facho Chirac” because of his greasy, thinning pulled-back hair, his wannabe Charles de Gaulle style of speaking and his war-like conquest of the right and of Paris city hall.
The French have an unusual relationship with power, specifically with our elected presidency. It is, some would say with good reason, a relationship that is borderline pathological
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