Line dancing insanity is sweeping France.

He said the French shunned the square dancing that is popular among country and western fans in the United States because it involved physical contact. “They don't want to take anyone by the hand or anything like that,” he said. But they were passionate about line dancing, where participants follow the steps without touching anyone else. “I think this corresponds to the individualism of our times,” Mr Chauveau said.

Village associations boast dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of members; competitions are flourishing, and a country music festival is expected to draw 150,000 people this summer, he said. “Britain caught the line dancing bug a long time before us, but now we are really going for it,” Mr Chauveau said. “It's complete madness here.”

So powerful is the craze that, of course, the French are forming a bureaucracy to regulate it. Because we wouldn't want, um, unregulated line dancing, would we?  If one thing is certain from this, it's that while the line dancing craze may fade into the obscurity of France's past decades-late obsessions with Michael Jackson, Sylvester Stallon, and disco, thirty years from now the government will still include a Minister of Line Dancing, who will seek to expand his agency into a Europe-wide regulatory body for forgotten dance crazes.

The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls.

Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.

The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state's obsessive desire to organise all public activity. “France is the only country in Europe apart from Greece where sport is controlled through the state,” he said. “Line dancing is now considered a sport, so it is being controlled, too.”

France: making Florida look positively normal by comparison for 200 years.

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