Safe France thinks edgy London is so cool

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What is it about London and the French? Two weeks in a row, the two most influential French weeklies have published special issues about London - first, Télérama and now Le Nouvel Observateur. That they should both choose London is not a coincidence. Of course, a weak sterling, on almost a par with the euro, makes a huge difference for French tourists: at last, London and its many excesses have become affordable. For all Europeans within the eurozone, everything wears a 30 per cent off tag: what a bargain. However, beyond that incentive lies something deeper.

London is today what Paris was in the 1920s: cosmopolitan, full of energy, daring, untidy, a microcosm of the world. In just two hours and 15 minutes French visitors are plunged into a world that couldn't be more exotic and different.

They love what they see from a double-decker bus: the myriad colours and cultures cohabitating peacefully, at least on the surface. They marvel at the city's exuberant youth, dressed in anarchic style without respect for the rules of bon goût. They envy London's insouciance and free museums.

More fundamentally than that, they admire Londoners' calm in dealing with the evils of deflation and skyrocketing unemployment. They wish they were, like Londoners, more audacious and taking more risks in their lives - but this would mean abandoning their cherished welfare-state comforts. These they happily go back to after a weekend in London.

Yet, as soon as they are home, they long to return. For them, London is a little like an addiction. Or rather, a forbidden fruit. Accustomed to being well looked after by the French state, they come to London to get a taste of Darwinian danger and neoliberal titillation: the fever of consumerism on Oxford Street, the discoveries of new restaurants that didn't exist yesterday and will probably close before they return, the opening of yet another contemporary art gallery in the East End. London is a city where only the fittest survive; the pulse rises fast and plummets as quickly, things get done and undone in a split-second.

The French know that London is a harsh place for many, where the idle rich can ignore the value of money, but they also know that this is where great ideas are born every day. For the French, London has the audacity they wish they displayed more often; it is a capital that dares. And that is perhaps the highest quality in French eyes.