“It’s not racist if it’s against the French,” quipped a British comedian once, eliciting a sympathetic laugh from his audience. He was referring to the perennial English game of scoring points off the French.
The game has been played for some 1,000 years, but the levels of intensity have varied. During the Hundred Years’ War that ended in 1453, it was rather passionate. In the end, having won every significant battle, the English lost that war, which didn’t do much to promote Gallophilia on these shores.
The last time the English and the French found themselves on the opposite sides in an armed conflict was during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French acquired a distinctly diabolical character in British folklore.
“You must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil,” said Horatio Nelson to his sailors, adding mystical touches to the traditional rivalry. Since then, though, French-baiting has become mostly jocular, with jokes targeting the French compulsion to eat cheese, have kinky sex and lose wars.
However, though the desire to aim our slings and arrows across the Channel may have abated, it hasn’t disappeared. Sometimes it springs to the surface, as it did in the Times article France’s Rape Case: The Week That Put a Nation on Trial by Peter Conradi.
Although Mr Conradi entered the game with gusto, he ended up heavily outscored. It’s France that has emerged the clear victor.
The trial in question is that of Dominique Pélicot, 71, who got his kicks in a way that even the most passionate Gallophobes would agree is rather atypical even of that naughty nation. It all began in September 2020, when Dominique was caught ‘upskirting’ women at a local supermarket near Avignon.
Personally, I don’t see the point of surreptitiously photographing women’s knickers (assuming of course they wear them – one never knows in France, as any true Englishman will tell you), but we all get our jollies as we can.
In any case, it’s good to see a fellow septuagenarian who is so much more au courant with modern technology than I am. Apparently, if you know how to use your phone camera (which I don’t), you don’t have to lie supine on the floor, aiming your Nikon upwards to get the requisite angle.
Anyway, having nabbed Mr Pélicot, the police then looked at his camera first and his computer second only to see a horror story unfolding before their Gallic eyes. Over a decade, Pélicot had been drugging his wife of 50 years and inviting strangers to come and rape her while she lay unconscious.
All in all, about 80 men enjoyed Mme Pélicot’s unwitting favours, some of them more than once, and 50 of them are sharing the dock with her hubby-wubby. He recruited them all through a sleazy website, but then I told you he was technologically literate.
Pélicot is clearly degenerate to the point of being deranged, while his accomplices are as wicked as he is. I sincerely hope the court rules that they should be locked up, with the key hopelessly lost in eternity.
However, they are the ones to be held responsible for this crime, not France in general. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices who are on trial, not, as Conradi’s title will have us believe, their country.
To insist on wider implications, it should be argued persuasively that such crimes are both typical and widely condoned in France. Otherwise, the Pélicot case is as symptomatic of marital relations in France, as Fred and Rosemary West are of British parenting or Dr Shipman of British care for the elderly.
Now I have quite a few French friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them invites platoons of strangers to copulate with their drugged wives. Moreover, I’ve never heard any of them telling stories about such a pastime involving anyone else, and some of them are lawyers.
I doubt Mr Conradi is any better informed than I am, and yet he sees fit to nail the whole country to the cross of his opprobrium. He extrapolates France’s perversity from “the treatment of the case by France’s leading newspapers, which have largely tucked away the grim proceedings on their inside pages”.
“If such a case were taking place in Britain,” he adds, “it would dominate the front pages and lead the television news”. Conradi makes it sound as if such obsession with lurid sex crimes were a good thing: “It’s also a matter of media culture: leading national newspapers, such as the left-leaning Le Monde or right-wing Le Figaro, do not stoop to putting [such stories] on their front pages.”
Good for them, I dare say. But note how Le Monde, the French counterpart of The Guardian, is only “left-leaning”, whereas Le Figaro doesn’t just lean to the right – it’s already irredeemably “right-wing”. It’s clear enough to what side Mr Conradi himself leans.
True enough, our broadsheets are these days barely distinguishable from tabloids. At a time when a major war is raging in Europe, another one is brewing in the Middle East, either of them can lead to a cataclysmic conflagration, and Britain herself has fallen into the hands of those evidently committed to doing her harm, they’d doubtless put on their front pages the story of some degenerates having their wicked way with an elderly grandmother.
Their voyeuristic audience would rejoice: it’s so much more fun to read about the STDs Mme Pélicot contracted during her ordeal than about Ukrainian children blown up in Mariupol or tortured in Bucha. Our editors know how to give due prominence to things that really matter. That’s why they are already allocating more column inches to the Pélicot case than it’s receiving in France.
However, I can see Conradi’s point. The Russians are only murdering hundreds of thousands, whereas the Pélicot case can be used to promote the MeToo ideology so dear to the heart of our formerly conservative paper. And Conradi does his bit with relish.
He quotes approvingly the gibberish mouthed by a French social worker who doesn’t sound in any way superior to our own homegrown variety: “I think it’s symptomatic of our society, which is still patriarchal and doesn’t take the measure of the revolution that’s unfolding before their eyes,” she said.
Revolution, nothing less. Sans-culottes are on the march, and Mme Pélicot, whose own culottes were so heinously removed on so many occasions, is their standard bearer.
Meanwhile the French legal system has neglected even to come up with a definition of rape that Conradi would countenance. All their code says is that rape is “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. That sounds exhaustive enough to me, but not to Conradi. This definition is deficient because it “does not explicitly include the question of consent”.
That’s it, I must have a serious talk with the French jurists among my friends. How dare French jurisprudence describe nonconsensual sex while omitting the buzz word of woke ideology? Anyone may misunderstand and decide that raping a woman at gunpoint may be construed as consensual hanky-panky.
The French have already picked up quite a few rotten things from Britain: tattooed, facially metalled proledom, education that doesn’t educate, law enforcement that doesn’t enforce law, healthcare that doesn’t care for health. Please let them stay for a little while longer in the state of blissful ignorance about our woke imperatives.
It’s not France that’s on trial, Mr Conradi. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices. Leave France to her vices and devices, will you? And for God’s sake spare us the woke idiocy that’s convulsing Britain. Before long, it’s the French who’ll put us on trial.
Being a master of the obvious and at the risk of boring you or any other reader of these comments, it goes without saying that had Pelicot been Amir or Ahmad instead, Conradi would have put his journalistic tail between his legs and moved on to safer subjects.