IN GALLIC eyes, the British may be an eccentric tribe lacking style or panache. But, when it comes to driving, they are a model for the French.

The “civility” of the British motorist was held up as the ideal yesterday as President Chirac’s Government embarked on a campaign to force France to abandon a century of lethal driving habits.

“To summarise, we should drive more like les anglais,” a state official said.

The campaign combines stiffer penalties for reckless driving with a policy of zerotolerance to stop drivers escaping punishment by pulling strings with friends in the police or local government.

French governments have promised such measures in the past. The novelty is the drive, led by M Chirac and his Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to force drivers to understand that the death-rates in other northern European states are far lower than those in France.

The plan is to convince Gallic drivers that they are among Europe’s worst and that there is nothing glamorous about the country’s culture of excess speed, drunk driving and general road hoggery.

Yesterday, M Raffarin described this traditional Gallic approach to motoring as “our national pathology”. Safer driving is “an affair of state and a personal affair which concerns the attitude of every French person”, he said.

About 8,000 people are killed every year on French roads, more than double the British and Swedish level and 50 per cent higher than the German rate. Alcohol is a factor in one-third of road deaths.

On Tuesday, TF1, the main commercial TV channel, broadcast a report on British motoring manners. “We will show you that British drivers even stop for pedestrians at crossings, something we do not do,” the reporter said. British tourists were stunned by the vicious motoring style of the French, he added.

There is widesprad agreement that the campaigning of recent months has already made France more aware of its bad driving. Le Monde said yesterday that France was ready to “envisage extending civility, even civilisation, to the country’s behaviour at the wheel”.

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