Lucy Wadham: Ties that explain why French love the Scots

The old clichs about the Auld Alliance – and the enemy of my enemy being my friend – are not enough to explain the deep emotional attachment France feels for Scotland and its people.

I have lived in France all my adult life and, over the years, have developed a rather loose relationship with the truth when it comes to my nationality, often choosing to de-emphasise certain aspects of my origins (my maternal grandmother and both grandfathers were English) and emphasise others (my paternal grandmother was a Scot from Dundee). For it is one of my weaknesses that I cannot resist the misty-eyed joy that comes over a French face when you say that you're Scottish. Nor, it seems, can my children whose Scottish blood, watered down further by their French Dad, has dwindled to homeopathic proportions. We once encountered a group of Scottish rugby supporters who had taken over a caf in Paris. My children, who were seven and nine at the time, spontaneously burst into a heavily accented rendition of Loch Lomond for them. When they had finished, the whole caf erupted and I watched this big man in a kilt with a shaven head scoop them into a silent and heartfelt embrace that neither they, nor I, have ever forgotten.

On a visit to Edinburgh in 1942, General de Gaulle was expressing more than just relief at the momentary respite from his English hosts when he said: "I do not think that a Frenchman can ever come to Scotland without feeling sensitive to the special emotion – the awareness of a thousand ties, still living and cherished, at the heart of the Franco-Scottish alliance, the oldest alliance in the world…"

He was expressing the sense of kinship, albeit irrational and possibly even unfounded, with a nation that embodies all the traits that French culture holds dear: panache, tragic grandeur and a love of the sublime.

Explaining this real or imagined affinity with Scotland is not easy, so I will try to illustrate it. I'm thinking of the 2006 World Cup and the head-butt that marked the end of Zinedine Zidane's career. You'll remember, I'm sure, the frenzy of speculation in the media surrounding the Italian defender Marco Materazzi's insult to one of the greatest footballers the world has ever seen. Lip readers were called in and concluded that the Italian defender had made a racist jibe at Zidane's mother. In England, the judgment on Zidane's violent riposte was unanimous: The Sun's headline was: "Zidane's a hero to Zzero". Alan Shearer described Zidane's assault as "a moment of madness".

Back in France, however, a very different debate was taking shape, the tone of which was set by President Jacques Chirac. "I don't know what happened," he lied, "(but Zinedine Zidane] possesses the greatest human qualities that can be imagined and which are an honour to France." The one thing not up for discussion in France was Zidane's heroic nature. With this stunning act of self-sabotage, the final touch had been added to Zizou's hagiography. He was human.

For the French, Zidane had, in that poignant moment when he walked off the pitch and turned his back on glory, become a tragic hero. Asked in a television interview if he would have changed his career's end if he could, Zidane answered: "No. It was decided upstairs that this was going to be my end." Then he added: "I've always tried to be honest. I'm just a human being with all the weaknesses."

In Scotland, people were rather more sensitive to this line of argument than they were in England. The day after the incident, The Scotsman ran an article by Eben Harrell entitled "Another sporting genius undone by his own humanity". He wrote: "Whatever the remark turns out to have been, his (Zidane's] violence will remain as mysterious to us as his moments of sublime skill. We hope it is the latter that still defines him."

For the French, the Scots, unlike the English, are not a nation of shopkeepers. Of a tragic disposition, they understand the beauty of the grand gesture. The French are convinced that it is not money, work and gain that lie at the centre of the Scot's life but ideas, pleasure and beauty. If you were to ask me what Scotland has to celebrate about 14 July, I would suggest that it is this conviction alone, the profound belief that the French have in Scottish greatness. For it is no good arguing that, in converting in great numbers from Roman Catholicism to Calvinism back in the late 16th century, Scotland began the slippery slide towards the English cult of money, the French will just stop their ears.

No. Scotland, like France, is a nation where ideas flourish and where a broad and classical education has always mattered more than wealth or fame. Edinburgh was a centre of the Enlightenment, the home of Rousseau's great friend, David Hume, of Adam Smith and of one of France's best-loved novelists, Sir Walter Scott…

You must not tell the French that things have changed; that Scotland has joined the global rat race, has succumbed to the borrow-to-buy ethos and the cult of celebrity and all the other ills of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Just raise your glasses to the part of Scotland loved by France.

Lucy Wadham is author of The Secret Life of France.