As it stands, France are the only Six Nations team against whom Ireland have a negative head-to-head record in the 21st century.
After Ireland turned over England in Twickenham in 2010, George Hook attributed our shocking record against the French to a lack of tribal rancour. That we simply didn't mind losing to France in the way we did England.
That probably seems like antiquated guff in the era of work-ons and learnings and depth charts. The kind of hoary old nonsense leant upon by those incapable of technical insight (we've Bernard Jackman here if you're looking for that).
But then, we've been assured by the proper rugger analysts that 'emotional energy' is a major factor in the oval ball game.
'Emotional energy' is probably not that much use to you in golf or snooker. But in a sport like rugby, where players are thundering into one another at very regular intervals, it can, they tell us, make the difference between getting over the gain line and being knocked backwards.
We saw its worth in Cardiff the other week, with Tadhg Beirne afterwards blaming the Irish media for the match being a surprisingly close shave.
By matchday, we picture the Welsh dressing room as resembling a Tracey Emin-style collage of dismissive Irish press cuttings, with a projector in the corner playing "could we beat them with 13?" on a loop for the entire morning.
As a result, the 'worst Wales team of all time' - they'd get it hard to contest that tag now given their recent win-loss ratio - almost derailed Ireland's historic three-in-a-row attempt.
Afterwards, Brian O'Driscoll issued a stately and paternalistic rebuke, telling the Irish fans/ media that they needed to take a hard look at themselves.
Irish rugby, at least in the 20th century, had been historically associated with wry self-deprecation and cheerful good loser-ism. ("May the best team win, Moss!", "Jaysus, I hope not..."). But now we had embraced arrogance with the zeal of the convert.
There should be none of that this week.
Adoration for Les Bleus had been the default in Irish rugby circles for several decades, and it has returned in a big way since they finally got past their lost decade of the 2010s.
Antoine Dupont is the object of much of the hero worship nowadays. Probably no other sportsman since Roger Federer has been so relentlessly slathered in fawning praise by those within his own sport. Even Messi had to contend with pot-shots from those philistines who insisted Ronaldo was better.
His reputation has reached the stage that, on the off-chance he were to play badly, it would still be an act of daring contrarianism to say so.
He's joined in the backline by out-half Romain Ntamack and the electric Damien Penaud, sons of beloved French players from the late 1990s. And it's all under the direction of a feted French number nine of yesteryear, Fabien Galthie these days resembling a middle aged rockstar who embraced clean living a while ago.
The admiration for the French isn't universal across the Irish rugby firmament. Peter Clohessy, who was hit with a long ban after an infamous stamp on a prone French player in the mid-90s, despised them with a passion, having been nose-to-nose with their terrifyingly violent forward pack for much of that decade.
In Tom English's book 'No Borders', a generation of Irish forwards speak about those games in Paris in vaguely traumatised tones, with the French forwards of the day being painted as a cross between Oddjob from Goldfinger and that Russian chap who managed to evade Paulie and Chrissy in the Pine Barrens.
'The Claw' would later tell English that the win over France in 2000 was his greatest day in green, noting that he "never liked them."
France beat Ireland 14 years in a row between 1986 and 1999 - the talk about Parc des Princes being a graveyard for Irish rugby side-stepped the reality that Ireland couldn't beat them in any location at the time.
By the turn of the millennium, Ireland were no longer the whipping boys and they even mustered a few wins over the men in blue, although rarely when it really counted.
It was France, under the coaching of the bald, bespectacled Bernard Laporte - who just recently completed a suspended sentence - who stopped Eddie O'Sullivan getting his hands on the Six Nations trophy during the Celtic Tiger years.
The dear old Triple Crown has probably never recovered its hallowed status in Irish rugby folklore since that period in the mid-2000s when Ireland kept winning it while finishing runners-up to France.
In 1982, by contrast, the delirium with the Triple Crown victory was such that it's barely adverted to that Ireland's subsequent Grand Slam game in Paris ended in a 22-9 defeat to the wooden spoon bound French, the footage from which was perhaps wisely cut from the Reeling in the Years edit.
Then came the 2010s when Ireland finally gained the whip-hand in the relationship for the first time since Jackie Kyle's heyday. By the latter part of the decade, the question of what was wrong with the French was a well-worn talking point.
The dominant theory was that the attritional Top 14, bankrolled by domineering and egocentric club owners who called the tune, left the cream of the French game wrecked by the time the Six Nations rolled around.
Ronan O'Gara, in his early years coaching in the Top 14, spoke about their comparatively slack work ethic and lack of diligence around training, which suggested they were stubbornly determined to coast by on natural athletic ability.
Jackman, a former Top 14 coach, hinted back in 2019 that the French regarded all that stuff about processes and training habits and marginal gains as being more dreary Anglo-Saxon moralising.
"So, yeah, they don’t work as hard probably as Irish players but they would argue they don’t need to."
Their turnaround since 2020 has been almost as rapid as Ireland's in 2000. By 2021, ROG marvelled at how they'd turned the corner, noting that they were now big into their GPS stats and their high-intensity training and all that jazz.
"It was unbelievable to think when I was coaching at Racing that you had some guys you'd hear that weren't interested in going to French camp. That's very, very strange. Now it's the complete opposite. Now it's different – they'd run the 200km from La Rochelle to get to French camp."
Perhaps the surprise is they've only won one Six Nations title in this decade, claiming the Grand Slam in 2022. They were clearly the strongest side in the Covid-interrupted campaign of 2020 but blew it with an unexpected loss to Scotland in Murrayfield.
That old casually self-destructive tendency still seems to be an indelible part of their make-up, adding character to a beautiful face. Signs are on them, there's no Grand Slam on the table this month.
France have won just three times in Twickenham since the start of the 1990s (1997, 2005, 2023) despite being an obviously superior team to England for good chunk of that period. (Ireland have won six times in London in the same span).
Watching the England-France game in real-time, one got the suspicion their downfall was borne of that old deeply ingrained desire to win with a strut rather than just simply making sure of winning. Sure enough Fin Smith made them pay at the death. The Roundheads had edged out the Cavaliers again, etc.
The failure on home soil in the 2023 World Cup remains a deep sickener, leaving them too wounded to raise a gallop in last year's Six Nations.
There is a sense abroad that Galthie could come under some pressure if they don't add another title soon. The notion that he's underachieving with a golden crop of players may gather steam.
The 'emotional energy' should be strong from France this afternoon.
