This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Beyond the Tunnel of History, given by Jacques Daris,

was originally broadcast in 1989.

The north for a Frenchman usually means north of Paris.

It extends from Port de la Chappelle, our Whitechapel, if you like, all the way to Norway,

where by some climatic and climactic transmutation, it suddenly becomes the great north.

One is a French driver. One has left Paris for a couple of hours.

One has been driving for some time up north, in a sort of haze and days, and all of a sudden

one sees a reindeer cross the road.

This is exactly where, for a Frenchman, North, becomes great north.

The real north is when the reindeer start crossing the road.

This is to say that the French are mainly Mediterranean, if not all by birth, at least by choice, by history.

And my personal claim is by a kind of amnesia.

Being a northerner myself, I'm usually regarded by my Mediterranean compatriots, first with a sense of commiseration, then as a strange species living halfway between Port de la Chappelle,

Whitechapel and Lapland.

There is a French phrase which literally translated says that one sometimes has lost the north,

Terdu the North, to mean that one has become mad.

North by Northwest, Hamlet would have said to Polynes. Well, in my eyes,

France must be totally mad for some time already, since it has lost the north for good,

for several centuries, for six centuries, to be more exact.

It is no exaggeration to say that the North has completely vanished from French history and tradition.

All the more so, since it's been screened from our view, by the 19th century mountains of ashes and kel, as well as by the 20th century

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