The “godfather” of Parisian taxis has offered hundreds of cabbies free politeness lessons, conceding that the controversial arrival of Uber and other minicab companies in the French capital has forced them to finally go up a gear in customer service.

Parisian taxi drivers, whose cars are easily recognisable by their green or red signs, have long had a reputation for being among the world’s rudest.

Tales long abounded of grumpy cabbies playing loud music, almost never accepting credit cards and turning up for a booked ride with €10 already on the meter.

They have also often been notoriously hard to find. But the boss of the French capital’s main taxi company insisted all that is changing.

Nicolas Rousselet, CEO of G7, by far Paris’ biggest taxi company, confessed that with minicabs flooding Paris and cabbies now receiving marks on smartphone applications, the industry has been forced to enact a “cultural revolution”.

He told The Telegraph he had a crack team dedicated to retraining hundreds of cabbies in need of lessons on how to be polite to customers.

“We found that 800 out of 8,000 drivers in our Service Plus category had less than three stars on our application,” he said. “We decided not to take them off the platform but to retrain them.”