I'm coming to the conclusion that the Italians are better than the French, even at what the French do well: food, wine and looking good. 

Take food. My experience may not be typical, but my three favourite French restaurants are run by Italians. The food is excellent, and the waiters are not stuck up and arrogant, as French waiters are.

What about wine? I must concede that the best of the best wine is French, but the next best is Italian, and it comes at a much more reasonable price and with less snobbery.

As for looking good, Carla Bruni is the perfect Frenchwoman. She is stylish and beautiful - chic if you must - but without that miserable, haughty look that chic Frenchwomen have. She actually looks happy; a Frenchwoman of comparable looks would appear neurotic and strained with the effort of keeping them. And Italian men are vain about their appearance, certainly, but they are not precious about it, nor are they strangers to soap and water.

So, what are the French for?

Easy. The French exist to amuse the English and to give us an opportunity to make sweeping, possibly unfair generalisations like the above. That is why Anthony Peregrine, writing in The Telegraph, misses the point when he "examines some of the more persistent clichés about French life". The clichés are the point, perhaps the only point, of French life:

The French are... well, what are they? Twenty-three miles away, our nearest neighbours and oldest enemies. No other nation stirs such conflicting emotions in the British breast.

Conflicting emotions? There is no conflict in this particular British breast.

The French are cultural snobs

Granted, it is irritating to hear the French going on about Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Racine and Molière when we know perfectly well that the world would chuck all four off a raft to save Shakespeare. But it’s also rather touching - especially as, on our side of the Channel, everyone is currently in such a lather trying to define Britishness.

The French don’t bother with such questions. They know what Frenchness is. It’s an accumulation of their history, thought, arts and food - all wrapped up into a sort of “Project France”.

[...]

All Frenchmen wear berets and hooped shirts and ride bikes festooned with onions

No they don’t. Our cartoon image of the typical Français derives entirely from the Onion Johnnies. From the 19th-century to the 1960s, these guys sailed from Brittany, put on berets and pedalled round Britain peddling the celebrated pink onions of Roscoff. A handful are apparently still at it. They imprinted themselves upon the nation’s psyche at a time when most ordinary people never encountered any other sort of French person.

Non-Roscoff Frenchmen nevertheless remain puzzled beyond measure that we regularly depict them all as onion-toting cyclists. It’s as if they considered all Britons to be lobster fishermen, portraying us eternally with sou’westers and lobster pots. Should you wish to know more about the Onion Johnnies, visit La Maison des Johnnies, 48 rue Brizeux, Roscoff.

I thought an Onion Johnny was a kind of French letter.

The French say “Ooh-la-la” a lot

Indeed they do, but not as we imagine they do. First, they say it quite quickly, as one word (with a long first syllable, a long third syllable and a rapid “la” in the middle), not slowly and as three separate words, as we tend to parody them. Second, it is not necessarily, or even usually, an expostulation of delighted surprise at some frothily extravagant naughtiness. It is used much more often to indicate that one is impressed — by anything at all: a fine coq-au-vin, a particularly crunchy rugby tackle or the extent of the damage to someone else’s car. Quite how the phrase acquired its salacious overtones in our minds, I’m not sure. Certainly not from the French. Unlike us, they aren’t surprised by sex. Nudity (indeed, porn) on television, whores on country roads, adultery in high places: they’re all just part of the landscape.

So the French are impressed by a fine coq? Ooh-la-la.