Bayeux Tapestry less significant to France than Englandpublished at 08:48 BST
08:48 BST
Hugh Schofield
Paris correspondent
A few months ago France was full of foreboding about the departure of the Bayeux Tapestry. The first time it was to leave French territory in nearly 1,000 years.
It was too valuable, said the experts. It was too risky. Those English potholes were going to play havoc with the fibres.
Funny how these media frenzies die.
Today… not a squeak. The tapestry has arrived in London, is going on display, and the “controversial” loan has suddenly become consensual.
Even the “two threads” damaged in transit barely got a mention in the French press.
The truth is that the tapestry features far less prominently in the national mindscape in France than in England.
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption,
In April, workers moved a fake Bayeux Tapestry box from Bayeux, northern France, as part of a transport exercise
In England, it is a record of perhaps the one date in history that people can still recite.
The Norman conquest, said Sellars and Yeatman in their hilarious 1066 and All That, was a “good thing” because from that time on “England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation”.
But for the French it has always been a regional treasure, one among many that the country can boast. Normandy was its home, and to Normandy it will return.
All of which suggests that Emmanuel Macron was right in his instinct to ignore the experts and just do it.
Of course the lofty way he managed the affair, sniffily dismissing the art world’s objections as so much special pleading, has not won him friends. But as a lame-duck president, that hardly matters.
What matters is that he’s pulled off cultural and diplomatic coup de force. They said it would never happen, but it did. And now no one in France appears to mind.