Nobody shrugs like the French.
It’s not just the mouth; ready to inhale a slug or an oyster. Not just the sardonic eye-roll that has that glow of prank love. No, it’s the tilt of the shoulders, the open palms, the ‘I don’t care if I add these documents to your request to open a bank account in Lyon when last week I told you that ‘it only needed the passport and visa’, the puzzled posture of the elbow – so tight and tucked in, the prolonged ‘ouiiiiii’ which means ‘no’, the question within the question represented by the shrug itself, and the timing, oh the shrug timing, designed to suck the marrow out of your impending joy.
As I have already noted in these pages, France is a miniature paradise populated by people who believe they live in hell. They yearn to drag you into that Hades.
Having lived in Lyon for a few years not too long ago, due to an investigation that took me all over France and the contiguous lands, I marveled at the force of the contrast between the “violence” a French shrug in a bakery or a bank or a barber (whether it’s from Lyons and slow, noble Grenoble, clever Breton, Marseille gangster, Nice from Nice, provincial Provençal, brutal Clichy, Saint Etienne or straight from Strasbourg) and the shrugs of the Germans, Belgians, Swiss and Spaniards.
The French shrug is the beginning of the end of the beginning of friendships. The French shrug their shoulders louder at the English “rosbif” than anyone else.
And they generally shrug, in their faded greatness, at the world fashioned by “Anglo-Saxons” (their term, not mine) even as it exists in Melbourne. Uncivilized, too open, too direct and stripped of the beauty of hierarchical norms.
Go to a wedding, any wedding, in France, in any city, at any socio-economic level, and you will dance to the third song (“It’s Raining Men”) and eat the same dessert at 2 a.m. and smoke the same and hear the same toast. The uniformity of architecture, law and education (every child takes the same class on the same day) masks a constant revolution about to erupt into violence.
Law, precise law, is their answer. But capriciously applied. With a shrug. And replied with a shrug “that’s life and it sucks”.
Harry is joined by Brett McKay and Jim Tucker for an instant reaction to events in Melbourne
The shrug is reflected in Napoleonic codes of law. While Australia and other former colonies of England have thin canons, abstract constitutions capable of adaptation (even if decades behind), a seamless web of precedents, a common law designed to reflect common sense yeomen in commerce and tort, and subtle evolution (smith v jones said that, so jones v smith has to say it), french law is gigantic and tries to anticipate every event and assign an outcome . Certainty is the goal, but of course people are people and they have friends in high places, so French jurisprudence is a little messier than it is supposed to be.
Yet they try.
“If a dog bites a man, but the dog does not belong to the man, and the man bit the dog first, and the dog was claimed to belong to a woman, and the woman denies while it’s her dog, and it turns out the dog belongs to the woman’s cousin and the bite is 3mm long, the woman will pay the man twice his medical bills, but only if he refuses to pay him in full within 72 hours of written notice.
Or: “If a team wins a penalty and chooses not to kick for the posts, that team must kick the ball within ten seconds after the referee says ten, if the referee means ten seconds, not ten for the opening half, the penalty being the penalty turns into a scrum for the penalized opponent.
But in the minds of the French, the fact that this penalty is pronounced only once out of eight in a match or once out of eight thousand times in a season or once out of eight million in the history of rugby: increase of ‘shoulders.
Raise your shoulders! It happens! It just happened to you. A law has been applied. It is a law. The law is not mocked. The same unofficial French referee who officiated the third and decisive Test between South Africa and the British and Irish Lions in Cape Town in 2021 made a big call to pass a Bernard Foley kick to an All Black scrum five in the final moments of 2022 Bledisloe Two.
A referee is part of two very big rugby matches. Either way, he called. And shrugged.
Referee Mathieu Raynal talks to Nic White and Bernard Foley. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
As I think referees are too famous in rugby, I won’t say his name, but I will tell you that he was born and raised in Perpignan, just north of the Spanish border, and his childhood heroes were David Campese and Jonah Lomu. He was a good player himself, being part of a team that won the French Junior Championship in 1998.
But I must add that he was a half-back. And teacher at the Lycée Jean Lurçat in Perpignan.
And if the French shrug their shoulders better and bigger than anyone, and if their sportsmen do it better than anything, I would risk stating the obvious by saying that a demi-Frenchman can shrug his shoulders like the gendarmerie at motorbike giving you a ticket for having a phone in his car turned on because he saw it speeding by, if merged with a French teacher, since teachers invented the shrug, a teacher- Perpignan’s scrum-half is the very god of the shrug.
The ref who gave the All Blacks a scrum for Bernard Foley not understanding that ‘ten’ meant ‘cut it now or lose it’ instead of ‘ten seconds’ or ‘ten back, All Blacks’ or ‘ Hello Bernard, how are you? ‘ was quoted as saying, “The first five minutes are often crucial in setting the tone.” Apparently, the tone can also be set in the last five minutes.
The Perpignan referee shrugged, and that should have been Foley’s warning. He had already warned him. But the referees warn the nines to use it dozens of times per game, and have we ever seen a punishment? Is this an exhortation or a last and final warning? I guess the old one.
The same scrum penalty could have been imposed on almost every postless penalty in the match. And there were many.
When in France, watch out for the shrug. It’s not a friendly gesture. Foley would immediately if he could know what he knows now.
An ignored French shrug, while that Frenchman has a truncheon or a whistle, is a big risk.
But here’s the rub, as an old Anglo-Saxon playwright put it: in our mostly Anglo-Saxon common law sport, is it now the law?
Common law?
Or was it an anomaly? A Napoleonic shrug and tic, never to be repeated?
Will all referees everywhere impose a maximum of 39 seconds on kick-outs?
Is “use it” or “ten” the new command?
Also in scrums, lineouts and shots on goal? I have seen several kicks go over 60 or 90 seconds and they are rarely punished or defeated.
The box kick and set kick delay exceed the kick to touch delay by several multiples.
Shrug or precedent?
