I left France in the way one leaves a building on the brink of collapse; although the walls are still up, one can see the beginning of creaks in the beams.

It is always easier to tidy up the official story. For the most part, people want to move for work, for study, for love, and it gives way to a whole modular list of reasons. Cleanly assembled IKEA furniture, with the missing screws tucked out of sight, and the air still carrying that new-apartment smell. The less presentable truth is a mix of push and pull, of fear dressed as prudence and attraction as curiosity.

In my case, the push was fear. Fear of growing anti-Semitism and anti-white racism in Parisian banlieues, of terrorist attacks, of a scary revolutionary state of mind yet blended with an extreme reliance on a expanding, fattening state that, nevertheless, grew impotent. Around me, young people, second- and third-generation immigrants, spoke of France as one might speak of a hotel: temporary and inconvenient. Many said, with pride, that they did not want to ‘act French’, in the tone of a children refusing vegetables.

Yet I did not leave only for these reasons. The attraction towards Britain was a greater pulling factor. As I lived there, year after year, my instinctive appreciation for the country, its beauty and its people grew exponentially. I became more learned in the specific philosophical, political and legal tradition of the country, which culturally fused into a set of mores, habits and principles, magnified both by their particularism and their transcendent strength towards a more universal principle of modernity.

This is what culture is as a durable force: a kind of faith ‘wrapper’ between people and deep principles and attitudes, protective and yet unannounced. A country shaped less by storms than climate, as illustrated by William Waldegrave’s A Different Kind of Weather, where tradition absorbs its own contradictions and settles them in practice. It lingers in William Blake’s 1804 poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, in which England is portrayed as the New Jerusalem: a powerful vision of the nation as a spiritual paradise, a green and pleasant land wrestled from the ‘dark Satanic Mills’.

Whatever the vision, or utopia, however, many feel that the script has been forgotten, undermined by years of defective leadership. It is often expressed through frustration over the enactment of Brexit. Although it could have become an exercise in sober self-definition and moral project, many feel that the vision of Britain implemented on the back of it had to solve a problem of scale and, in doing so, became engulfed as a ‘global’ project, unmoored from the realities of its position. The litany of prime ministers in the 21st century shows a class uneasy with the limits of their country – not to say its perceived prejudices – and eager to escape them. Like provincial aristocrats aspiring to greater things, they insisted on outdoing the rest of the world while the roof leaked steadily behind them and their own fellow countrymen felt left behind.

The same nation that once mastered the art of the limited now indulges in the fantasy of the limitless. It cannot run trains on time. Mishandles a budget. Struggles to house its people. Fails to protect its borders. Castrates its own army.

Even ‘Jerusalem’, that unofficial anthem of moral ambition, has been reduced to a background track, sung at sporting events and deployed by politicians like a scented candle. Worse still, the marketing exercise remains fair game for those who are set to destroy all the patriotic and spiritual crumbs from Britain’s landscape, thus taxing the hymn with all the so-called scourges of the world, from Christian nationalism to white supremacy.

So what exactly binds the British now? In American and French contexts, for example, the revolutionary myth – the font of both of these modern states – is still potent and easily recognisable, systematically taught to all citizens with liturgical airs. Britain, in comparison, has a quasi-unbroken thread of constitutional fabric, which extends as far as Alfred the Great, Æthelstan and Bede, among others; yet it is much harder to connect with that which requires patience and pattern recognition, especially as schools have given up on a highly rigorous introduction to these figures and their philosophical might. Today, the National Curriculum programme of study for Citizenship delivers not even a ghost of this story. How can we be surprised that people fail to feel attached to what they have never properly understood, or even feel they ought to be embarrassed by?

Into this vacuum has marched a new fashion: Anglo-Gaullism. It has a certain charm. British pundits and political hacks, from the Spectator’s William Atkinson to former SpAd Ben Judah, borrow from the French inheritance in order to delineate a revival for their own. De Gaulle, that towering figure of stubborn grandeur, capable of binding an entire demos and, with it, ‘a certain idea’ of what the nation ought to be.

Now, one of the core issues that I see, as a French expat, is that de Gaulle is imported like a piece of antique furniture that one would admire in a sunlit drawing room, but misplaced and misused.

In France, Gaullism has long since dissolved into a kind of political astrology. Nowadays, everyone claims it, although no one agrees on what it means. The Socialists invoke it. The nationalists invoke it. Right and Left regularly summon his ghost. Even the illiberal communist figure Jean-Luc Mélenchon positions himself as the heir of ‘social Gaullism’, set against liberalism. One might as well consult the entrails of a chicken and declare them Gaullist.

Britain is discovering this with speed. Starting from enthusiasm and then sliding into quotation, the third, unavoidable phase is excommunication, in which all rival factions denounce each other as heretics. It is easy to imagine the outlines: the seminar, the reports, the think piece, the solemn invocation of ‘a certain idea of Britain’, pronounced with the gravity of a man discovering fire.

This pseudo-ideology will end, as it always does, in slogans. There is a simpler path, though it is less fashionable. A nation might look at its own past before importing another’s mythology. Britain does not lack for figures, but they do suffer from neglect. To revive them would not be to retreat into nostalgia, cutting ourselves off from being able to imagine the future. It would be to recover a story in which fellow countrymen, instead of being mere ‘consumers of rights’, are the proud heirs to a demanding tradition.

Every country ought to tell itself a roman national, whether it admits it or not. The question is its coherence, and whether anyone still believes it. At present, Britain’s story is like a book with its chapters torn out. So let us drop the fake imitations and weak improvisations. We shall make a bonfire of all these fantasies. A civilisation cannot live long feasting on these shadows.