When France is such a joke, there's nothing else to do but laugh

This is, for the most part, what it has felt like to be a French person living abroad for the last few years. In the past fortnight alone, we got a new government, sent a former president to prison, had our largest museum robbed and… God, heaven knows what else. I’m only one person. I have a life.

Before the pandemic, friends would pity my move to Britain and ask, smugly, how I felt about my new compatriots having gone insane. From Brexit to Boris, the news just refused to stop, and the French watched it all like it was a TV show.

Well, to them I say: “Ha! Haven’t les tables turned!” Though it’s not exactly smooth sailing on our side of the Channel, the UK feels like a haven of stability compared with whatever they’ve been up to recently.

In case you missed it, Sébastien Lecornu is now serving as our 638th prime minister in about two years, having replaced none other than Sébastien Lecornu, who was prime minister for about 17 minutes before deciding that, actually, no, thank you ever so much, but I’m good. Somehow, Emmanuel Macron convinced him to have another go, and only last week I covered the failed no-confidence vote against his new government.

Now, though? I checked the news on Friday morning and found that the centre-left, which saved Lecornu’s jambon in the vote, is now threatening to decapitate him if its demands aren’t met by Monday . My reaction, inexplicably, was to burst out laughing. I wasn’t the only one.

Not too long ago, I phoned my grandmother and asked her about the political situation. She said it was all pathetic and that – this is when the giggles began – there’d only been one speech in recent memory that she’d enjoyed.

It was, it turns out – she really was giddy by this point – Lecornu’s resignation, 13 hours after forming his government. She was hysterical after that. We both were. It’s better than bursting out crying, right?

Inspired by our conversation, I asked a number of my loved ones what they made of… well, of it all. At this stage, it’d be tough to narrow it down.

“We can’t take it any more,” my 29-year-old Parisian brother typed on WhatsApp. “Voilà”.

My mum, a seamstress who lives in Nantes, reported that her customers are “dismayed”. She added: “They don’t know what to think any more – we talk about the weather because we’re too scared to talk about anything else.” She, on the other hand, and despite her Muslim upbringing, has reached Buddha-like levels of Zen.

“Nothing shocks me any more,” she said. “We’ve just seen it all since Macron got into power. Two terms! Everything’s just normal!”

I listened to the voice note and thought that I should maybe check in on her when I go home for Christmas.

My dad, nevertheless, told me in an especially dad-like fashion: “Bottom line: France isn't doing well.” Probably the most switched on member of our family, he said: “If Nicolas Sarkozy ended up in prison, one assumes that he did something to deserve it” – but, regrettably, he ”just couldn't face actually looking into it”.

The poor man has finally been broken by the news cycle. It took him longer than most, but he got there.

My friend Lucie, on the other hand, was so delighted by former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s jail sentence that she watched the video “on loop” of him waving goodbye before going into the prison. “We're all delighted,” she said, calling the story “blessed bread”.

She also loved – loved – the Louvre heist. “It’s been nice to have a lighter story [to focus on],” she told me. “We’re just so happy about it because, actually, no one got hurt, it’s not that bad, it’s nice to get something that entertaining and it’s a proper crime!”

The various subplots have also been a delight to follow, from the mysterious immaculately dressed man snapped outside the museum on the day, to the German maker of the crane used by the robbers creating a tongue-in-cheek ad about its equipment being best “when you need to move fast”.

Lucie’s conclusion was: “France isn’t doing well but we’ll take what we can get with open arms.”

It is, I think, healthy that she can focus on the silver linings, though it’s obvious that neither she nor anyone I know back home is feeling good about the present or the future.

Still, I started this endeavour by wondering if I’d find people on the collective verge of a nervous breakdown but, instead, what I got was this pervasive will to look on the bright side. It was a surprise as, let’s face it, the French never were known as an especially “glass half full” lot.

Clearly, as circumstances change, people change with them. We can all drink to that – I’m sure they will...

Photograph by Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images