France might have guillotined its own monarchy and replaced them with courtly figures such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, but the “Wills et Kate: So British!” media frenzy knew no bounds. Celebrity magazines forecast a tripling of their sales. State television began broadcasting live from Bucklebury before breakfast. WH Smith in Paris reported manic memorabilia-purchasing.
But in true republican style, coverage was punctured with plenty of irony, condemnation of “Broken Britain”, and the odd dig at the Olympics.
Surely the canniest piece of commentator casting was the Paris-based fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who propped up state television for hours wearing a black tie with a crown on it, spearing the proceedings with his mumbled one-liners.
Kate’s dress was “much nicer than Diana’s which was a giant white taffeta curtain”, he said, giving thanks for the absence of a chignon. “I love the fact that her hair is flat … Flat hair is very elegant, it gives an allure of the 1930s.”
But for poor Princess Beatrice, “Where did she find that hat, in a bin? It’s atrocious. There’s a word for those two sisters but I’m not going to say it.”
Overall, he loved the wedding, particularly his new idols Carole and Pippa Middleton (“sexy but not vulgar”), concluding that the proceedings would really cheer up unemployed people sitting at home.
‘Opium of the people at play’
France Inter radio’s equivalent of Britain’s Today Programme was under no illusions that this ridiculous piece of folklore would mask the Thatcherite horrors of Cameron’s austerity cuts and “tensions” over the voting system. “Social mobility, my arse” was the general theme of the debate with the panel fuming that high tuition fees had sent Britain “back to Victorian times” ensuring poor people could no longer access universities let alone leapfrog the class system à a la Middleton. Not to mention Britain’s outrageous axing of the Film Council.
Jean-Marie Le Guen, Socialist MP and supporter of the left’s potential presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, sighed: “I do feel French republican about this. There’s opium of the people at play.”
Marc Roche, the esteemed French analyst of the royals, wanted to set the record straight on William’s so-called modernity. “He speaks no foreign language, has little interest in world affairs and his entourage is essentially made up of aristocrats. He represents an England that is white, Protestant and noble in contrast to a civil society that is meritocratic and multicultural.”
None of this could dampen the ecstasy of France’s great monarchist TV presenter, Stéphane Bern who felt that via Kate, the next generation of the monarchy “will carry as much blood of Welsh miners” as their royal genes. – guardian.co.uk