Upholding the 'French tradition of caustic wit and incisive observation' ... French playwright Yasmina Reza. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP
Yesterday, to mark Bastille Day, a handful of French émigrés (a few thousand out of the 350,000 living in Britain) were voting for those of them who have contributed most to British culture in the past year. Among the shortlisted: businessmen, chefs, actors, singers, sportsmen and bankers. Last year, writer Marc Lévy won the accolade of Britain's French émigré of the year in the category "talent". Lévy, cutting a dashing figure in the world of French publishing is mostly known for the number of books he has sold in the world: something akin to 7m copies. No small achievement. His prose though is not known for having shaken nor revolutionised literature. So perhaps we should leave the British to vote for the French émigrés who contributed most to British culture.
Or perhaps, we should just drop the ominous epithet of émigré. The word never bodes well: a traitor to their country, France. It started with Marie-Antoinette's clique, abandoning the country to seek refuge in Austria, England or any other friendly monarchies for French aristocrats in distress. With time, it has also become, more often than not, synonymous of those who see Britain as nothing more than a tax haven.
However, whatever the reason for their temporary escape, be it fleeing the Republic or the tyranny of an authoritarian regime, France's demanding taxes or Sarkozy's reforms, the French in Britain have sometimes found in England a source of inspiration.
So let's vote for the anglophile French who made the biggest splash in the arts and, sometimes, changed the world. We could start with Voltaire, philosopher and father of the Enlightenment whose Philosophical Letters, a study of English society published in England in 1734, had to be secretly smuggled to France as it was deemed politically too audacious. We could follow with poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, "the queer couple" as they called themselves, who lived at 8 Royal College Street in Camden in the early 1870s. We know that Rimbaud wrote parts of his two late serial works in London: Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer.
Diplomat, man of the world and controversial writer Paul Morand also lived on and off in London between 1913 and 1933 and wrote the beautiful Londres among many remarkable novels and essays. Keeping with the French tradition of caustic wit and incisive observation, playwright Yasmina Reza, reported to be living on and off in London could provide today's French émigrés with a strong contender for Britain's best French playwright. With her latest play, God of Carnage, she displays a most English sense of humour: so sharp it hurts.
So who will be your "French émigré of the year"?
