The word faute doesn’t fully translate into English. It’s a combination of “wrongdoing,” “responsibility,” and “blameworthiness.” Curiously, the word is used to designate language mistakes: it shows how seriously the French take language. Spelling and grammar mistakes in French are called fautes, not errors (erreurs) or mistakes (méprises). The full meaning of faute is much more serious than a mistake or an error. The word actually has strong religious connotations. Faute evokes sin. “Worse than a crime, it was a faute,” said Napoleon’s oft-quoted minister of police, Joseph Fouché. Fouché was referring to a political opponent executed on the emperor’s orders. But the word lacks gravity in translation. The notion of faute can apply to situations as minor as small professional oversights or as major as criminal offenses. “Not knowing an answer” at work is considered a faute in France. So is gross misconduct or criminal negligence.
The big difference between a faute and an error is the element of personal responsibility it implies. A faute always has repercussions. French law—in particular, labor law—has even created a number of categories for faults—faute simple (which poorly translates as negligence), faute grave (serious misconduct), faute lourde (gross misconduct), faute inexcusable (inexcusable conduct), faute matérielle (a factual error). These notions, which hardly translate, delineate degrees of faute. A faute simple refers to a failure to meet one’s essential obligations through carelessness, incompetence, or stupidity. A faute lourde adds the notion of intention and negligence. That means that the difference between both is not in the actual damage caused by the fault, but in the behavior of the person who committed it. In French law, which is inquisitorial by nature, confession is paramount. Admitting you are at fault is tantamount to pleading guilty. Whatever you argue, don’t ever say it was your fault.
It’s not hard to see why, no matter how trivial the matter, the French will do anything they can to avoid being accused of a faute. It’s one reason conversations so often start with no. “No” is a safe default position the French take to reduce the risk of being blamed for something. It even has the added benefit of deflecting responsibility onto someone else.
This universal French fear of faute does breed some bizarre behaviors and lead to surreal conversations. In the spring before we moved to Paris, Jean-Benoît was passing through the city as part of a lecture tour and had made an appointment to touch base with one of our publishers at their office near the Luxembourg Gardens. On his way over, he phoned our publicist there, Élodie Royer, on her direct line, just to let her know he was running a few minutes late. “No problem. We’re expecting you,” she told him with cheery enthusiasm.
When Jean-Benoît arrived on the premises, the welcome was anything but cheery. The receptionist buzzed Élodie to announce there was a Monsieur Nadeau there to see her, after which Jean-Benoît became party to what sounded like a lunatic exchange between them. The receptionist turned back to him. “You had an appointment?”
“Yes, I just spoke to her.”
“Your first name is?”
“Jean-Benoît.”
“And you are?”
“I’m one of your authors.”
The receptionist picked the phone up again, relayed the facts, then turned back to Jean-Benoît and announced, “Madame Royer will see you after her meeting.”
Jean-Benoît wondered if he was losing his marbles. Didn’t he just speak to Élodie Royer? How could she possibly have forgotten him? Was there some kind of office behavior code he hadn’t picked up? After a half hour of waiting, Jean-Benoît started getting nervous. So he returned to the front desk to get to the bottom of it.
“Are there by any chance two Élodie Royers on your staff?” he asked the receptionist.
“No.”
“Are you sure? Because I spoke to Élodie five minutes before I got here and this just doesn’t make sense. She said she would be expecting me.”
“Oh, let me see … ah, yes, we have Royer and Royez. Did you want to see -ez or –er?”
“Royer, -er.”
The receptionist’s final words: “Well you should have said so, monsieur.”
Jean was stunned. This sort of misunderstanding can happen anywhere in the world, especially when receptionists are new on the job. But this particular exchange had one unmistakably French quality about it: the receptionist blamed Jean-Benoît for her own mistake, then just stared at him, unperturbed. The error was minor, but she could be “faulted” for it, and being French, she would have instantly associated this risk with job security. So she did the one thing she could do: put the blame straight back on Jean-Benoît.
The magnitude of the French faute taboo only becomes obvious when you compare the frivolity of a given offense with the amount of effort spent—or the ridiculous things said—trying to avoid being blamed for it.
In the total of four years we spent in France between 1999 and 2014, we hardly ever heard anyone pronounce the words je ne sais pas (I don’t know). The fear of not knowing is so great in France that people will do anything to cover up their ignorance. In this faute-fearing universe, not knowing is even worse than exposing oneself to ridicule, which is bad enough for the French.
Jean-Benoît witnessed this less than twenty-four hours after arriving in Paris when he went to the store to buy margarine. It wasn’t located with the butter. At least he didn’t see it. So Jean-Benoît went to ask a clerk. His inquiry was answered with one of the usual variations on non: this time, the almost farcical “It doesn’t exist.” Jean-Benoît thought this was pretty amazing since margarine was invented in France (in 1869, for a contest organized by Napoleon III to find an alternative to butter; margarine was patented by the French pharmacist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès the same year, and then the inventor sold his patent to a Dutch industrialist who went on to found the multinational consumer goods company Unilever). But Jean-Benoît decided against giving the clerk a history lesson.
Instead, he said, “Si (no-no). It’s like butter, but it is made with vegetable oil.”
“Okay, then it’s in the oil section,” the clerk replied.
“No,” Jean-Benoît said. “Because it is refrigerated and it’s solid.”
“Then it’s butter.”
“Maybe, but it’s not a dairy product.”
While the clerk was looking in the cheese department, Jean-Benoît decided to take a second look in the butter section. He found products labeled “butter” and others that weren’t called butter but weren’t identified as “margarine” either. Then he spotted a telltale “Omega-3” badge on one of the plastic containers and read the list of ingredients, confirming it was oil based, not a dairy product. When Jean-Benoît showed it to the clerk, who, by then, was busy rooting through the cream section of the fridge, she replied with the closest thing the French have to “duh,” like Jean-Benoît should have known himself. “Mais la voilà, la margarine [well there it is]!” When faced with the irrefutable proof of the existence of margarine, and of confirmation of her ignorance, the clerk actually scolded Jean-Benoît for not having looked more thoroughly. By the time Jean-Benoît realized he’d inadvertently switched on the clerk’s fault shield, she had moved on to some other problem.
The anecdote would not seem significant to us, but we lived it over and over. In France, everyone is trained to know. In French labor law, the definition of a faute simple (which is sometimes enough to get you fired) includes “incompetence” and “stupidity”—which are also just euphemisms for “not knowing.” We estimate that three quarters of the spontaneous noes we heard in France were default noes designed to hide the fact that someone didn’t know something. It is a remarkably easy and, on the whole, widely accepted technique for getting out of a fix. (It is also, we noticed, one of the great sociological differences between Parisians and non-Parisians. For some reason, people outside of the capital are more willing to admit they don’t know things when they actually don’t.)
The astounding creativity the French use to avoid uttering the words �
�I don’t know” might be a product of France’s salon culture, which was at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but is still present in France in modern forms. People were, and still are, invited to participate in salons on the basis of their ability to defend an idea or position, to speak like they “know.” The French need to know might also come from their ancient fear of ridicule, which was also part of salon culture. Although there’s a French proverb that says le ridicule ne tue pas (ridicule doesn’t kill anyone), no one in France really believes that. In 2014, the Paris daily Le Parisien published an interview with the director Patrice Leconte who had made a popular film called Ridicule in 1996. Leconte explained how incredibly liberating he had found it to say “Excusez-moi, je me suis trompé” (Sorry, I made a mistake).2 Apparently, only a famous film director can get away with something as outrageous as admitting he was wrong in France.
Another method the French have adopted to hide their ignorance is making categorical declarations and putting an end to discussions before questions can arise. It’s basically another way of saying no. We got a taste of it at the Préfecture de police (police headquarters), where we showed up shortly after our arrival to get our titre de séjour (residence permit). The receptionist at the police headquarters told us we had to obtain our working permits before we could get our residency papers, and she sent us across the city to the Centre de Réception des Étrangers (literally, Foreigners Reception Center) in the seventeenth arrondissement. We thought it was strange, since we had arrived in France with what we believed to be a rare visa, the Carte compétences et talents (Skills and Talents card), which we had obtained by virtue of being authors. But the receptionist seemed very sure of herself (and very indifferent to the specialness of our visa).
We should have heeded our instinct. Instead, we spent two hours waiting on the pavement, under a threatening sky, outside an immigration office, only to discover we would have to wait another hour because the police officers had left for lunch. When we finally got inside the Centre, and when our number was finally called, the policewoman behind the desk took a quick look at our paperwork and informed us that the Centre didn’t process the type of visa we had. When we told her we were following specific instructions from the Préfecture de Paris, she answered with that kind of absurd bureaucratic logic the French have turned into an art form: she blamed the mistake on us. Then she blamed us for having listened to the staff there. “You had to ask more questions,” she said. We pointed out that it’s hard to ask a question if you don’t know there’s a question to ask. But of course, she was right. We really should have known enough to ask, all the more so since no one in France ever admits they don’t know.
One final way the French fend off faute is by inactive listening, a behavior category they seem to have invented. Actually, they listen. They just don’t register information that comes from outside of the box. Julie phoned a photography agency in Paris to inquire about getting new author photos. We knew the studio did author photos because a photographer there had taken one of Jean-Benoît years ago. Still, the first answer was “No, we only deal with publishers, not authors.” Julie knew enough to keep talking. She hoped the receptionist would eventually come to the realization that a customer is a customer.
The problem this time was a simple cultural difference. French publishers always pay for their authors’ photos (the opposite of the United States, where publishers never pay for author photos). As a result, French photography agencies seem to have developed a firm belief that authors can’t have pictures taken without their publisher’s permission—or they won’t be paid. Once Julie had connected the dots and understood why the agency was shooing her away, she simply explained the cultural difference, citing examples from her own publishing experience. The receptionist grasped the difference between American and French publishers, and once she became confident Julie would pay, told Julie the agency would be happy to take her photo.
Contrary to popular opinion, the French do listen, and well, but this usually happens after they say no a couple of times. It takes a certain amount of faith, and sometimes a lot of talking, but you can almost always find the yes hiding behind a French no, if it’s there.
4
Schools: The Speech Factory
It was September 4, the day after la rentrée scolaire, back-to-school in France. Our daughters weren’t in school yet. The four of us were rubbing our eyes after the night flight from Montreal to Paris. When we arrived at the customs gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport, we handed our passports to a placid-looking customs agent. Because of residency requirements, we watched carefully to make sure he actually stamped all passports with the date of our entry, something customs agents used to be rather casual about. He glanced at the first two, then handed them back to us, properly stamped, without a word.
Then something in the machine jammed. The customs agent sat up straight, suddenly looking punctilious. He carefully matched our daughters’ (almost identical) faces to their passport photos. Instead of handing the photos back to us like he did before, he held them up in front of us and shook them in our faces. “Your children aren’t in school!”
And so they weren’t. We hesitated. One should never give customs agents more information than they ask for, and we didn’t have the best excuse for missing school anyway. We had arrived in France a day late because it was 25 percent cheaper: airfare to Paris dropped by a quarter after la rentrée. Jean-Benoît tried to reassure the agent. “Ne vous inquiétez pas [don’t worry], monsieur, our daughters will go to school as soon as we get them registered at city hall.”
Jean-Benoît probably should have stuck to the Golden Rule of customs communications and kept his mouth shut. “Ça ne se fait pas!” (That’s unthinkable!) the officer shot back. “School started yesterday!” He swung around to his neighboring agent and spread his arms wide so we could see that everyone in the country agreed with him.
We had been expecting a bit of heat from school authorities when we showed up late for school. But we really thought border authorities had bigger issues to tackle. Still, we shouldn’t have been surprised. The French don’t value education. They exalt it.
France is a country that has turned films about school life into a cinematic subgenre of its own. In 2004, one French citizen out of ten went to theaters to see a film about a school choir, Les choristes (The chorus). Two years earlier, one million viewers saw the documentary Être et avoir (To be and to have), about a one-room rural school in Auvergne. During the year we spent in France, there were two more documentary film hits about school life: La cour de Babel (School of Babel), about a class for immigrants in a Paris school, and Sur le chemin de l’école (On the way to school), which follows children in Kenya, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and Argentina who have to climb mountains and walk through deserts every day to get to school.
After registering our daughters at city hall, we returned to our apartment, across the street from their new school, and walked fifty feet with them on their own chemin de l’école. It was day four of classes, and the sidewalk in front of the school was packed with parents, grandparents, and nannies trying to figure out what was going on. France had changed its school schedule the year we arrived, adding a half day of school on Wednesday mornings and shortening the school day on Tuesdays and Fridays. Parents were confused and frustrated, and our principal (the first one; he would go on sick leave the next week) looked as if he were trying to manage some kind of humanitarian crisis. Canada’s and France’s school years don’t quite coincide so we had to talk to him to figure out which grade to put the girls in. We said bonjour and began to explain our situation.
The principal cut us off when he heard our daughters speaking English to Julie.
Mais ces enfants parlent français? (These children speak French?) It was more of a cry of distress than a question. Bigotry was not the issue here: his concern was administrative. We had registered our daughters in the regular class. Immigrant students who do not speak French are normally
put in special integration classes in another school. Jean-Benoît assured the principal that our daughters spoke French to him.
But when we went to pick the girls up at the end of their first day of school, the hammer fell on their language skills, once again. We were again waiting in the throng of parents on the sidewalk when a tall man in his late fifties waved to us from the back of the crowd. He was dressed in a blue overshirt, and at first we thought he was a janitor. It took us a moment to remember that the smock was the traditional schoolteacher’s blouse. He was Nathalie’s new teacher, Monsieur Laouni. “I’m delighted to have Nathalie in my class,” he said with a sparkle in his eye. “There’s just one problem. Nathalie needs to speak more.” We were dumbfounded. Surely a teacher would understand that a ten-year-old newcomer might not steal the floor on her first day in a new school, in a new country. Monsieur Laouni did understand. But it didn’t matter. “Nathalie needs to make herself heard. She needs to take her place in the classroom,” he explained.
That’s when we understood what we had done. By bringing our daughters to France, we were actually sending them to a boot camp where children learn not just to speak, but to speak a lot, and well.
Although the military image might sound far-fetched, it’s not. Public education in France is one enormous centralized machine, with 64,000 schools, a veritable army of 840,000 teachers, and 12 million kids. For the French, the national education system, the Éducation nationale, is a campaign. It has a one-size-fits-all approach: the curriculum is identical from the British Channel to the Mediterranean (including overseas territories).
Making sure citizens master French is the number one objective of French education, and strong oral skills are a big part of the project. “Speaking well is primordial,” paramount, Monsieur Laouni announced to parents at the first parent-teacher meeting two weeks later, as if everyone didn’t know that already. Our daughters’ teachers were a master study in contrasts. Erika’s teacher Madame Letendre was soft-spoken and methodical, her hair in a neat bob and her classroom suitably tidy and organized. Next door, Monsieur Laouni’s classroom had no particular order we could discern. Desks and odd tables were scattered about the room and cluttered with gadgets we couldn’t identify.
The Bonjour Effect Page 5