Sunday Service

Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to repeal a law dating from 1906 and protecting the special character of Sundays. The first decade of the twentieth century was certainly not a high-point in France’s history as “the Eldest Daughter of Holy Mother Church”. It was in 1905 that France enacted a law, still in force, secularising all aspects of public life in a way which strikes most Britons as thoroughly draconian. For the very good reason that it is thoroughly draconian. Yet the very next year, France legislated to protect Sundays.

After all, church attendance in Britain was hardly, if at all, higher twenty years ago than it is today. Yet Sundays were completely different. They were much more as they are in France. It is not as if you cannot buy anything in France on a Sunday. But it is frankly unlikely to occur to you to want to. The whole mood and pace are totally different, as they used to be here. Sunday afternoon, in particular, is sacrosanct, set aside for family and contemplation. Again, as used to be the case here.

Any conservative would want to keep this. But Sarkozy is not a conservative. He is an economic neoliberal and a geopolitical neoconservative. He is in no sense a Gaullist. He knows nothing of the General’s Eternal France, to be defended against all comers as the General rightly defended her against all four of German occupation, Soviet infiltration, American domination, and the unbalancing of the nascent EU against French interests by means of British accession. Such defence against global capital is of no interest to him.

Although huge numbers of people would want them, we no longer have conservative and patriotic politicians, indivisibly pro-family and pro-worker, in Britain. The last place to try and keep anything like that alive has now been beaten into submission by a company owned lock, stock and barrel by the State and administered by the devolved Scottish administration. But France used to be different. Whether that is still the case, we will soon be able to judge as we see whether or not Sarkozy succeeds in destroying the traditional French Sunday.