VERY year, in the first week of July, I sit down to write this piece, and every year the same thing happens: I set out to write about France and end up writing about Lahore.
The fourteenth of July is the National Day of France la Fête Nationale. It looks back to 1789, the year the French people claimed liberté, égalité, fraternité as ideals to live by, and thosethree words have lost none of their meaning in the 237 years since. In France the day brings parades and fireworks. In Lahore, where I have the honour of serving as Honorary Consul of France, it has become something quieter but no less real: a day to take stock of a friendship.
What has always struck me about the fourteenth of July is that it is not really the celebration of an event, but of an idea. Nations mark many things victories, independence, the birthdays of founders. France chose instead to mark the moment its people decided that dignity was not a privilege to be inherited but a right to be shared. That is why the day travels so well, and why it is honoured in cities far from Paris. Liberty, equality and fraternity need no translation in Lahore; this city has produced enough poets and reformers to recognise them on sight.
This past year has been a busy one for the consulate.
We hosted and supported exhibitions, performances, and musical evenings, many of them with the Alliance Française, whose French classes stay full year after year something that quietly delights me every time I visit. Some of these events were grand affairs; others were thirty people in a gallery on a warm evening. I am not convinced the small ones were not the better ones.
The other half of the work is less photogenic but matters just as much. French companies have been present in Pakistan for decades in energy, pharmaceuticals, transport, consumer goods yet Lahore’s business community and French business did not always know each other as they should have. We have spent the year making introductions, receiving delegations, and bringing the Embassy of France closer to the people of this city.
None of this makes headlines. All of it, I believe, adds up. Trade, like friendship, grows out of familiarity, and there is now far more of it between Punjab and France than there was.
I must record my gratitude to the Ambassador of France in Islamabad, whose support for what we attempt in Lahore has never wavered, and to the many Lahoris artists, students, businessmen, friends who keep showing up. An honorary consulate runs on goodwill, and this city has never once left me short of it.
So today, when the tricolour goes up and the Marseillaise is sung from Paris to Islamabad to Lahore, I will be celebrating more than a date in history: the simple conviction that liberty, equality, and fraternity belong to everyone, and that the friendship between France and Pakistan hasitsbestchapters stillahead.
Joyeux quatorze juillet. vive la France, Pakistan zindabad.