Hélène invited Julie to watch a debating contest between two clubs, La Conférence Olivaint, whose members are law students, and La Conférence du Stage, whose members are business students. According to Hélène, formal debating contests fell out of fashion in France but are now enjoying renewed popularity. “The French are suddenly realizing it’s a skill you have to learn,” she said. At the end of the debate, she agreed that when it came to debating, this particular cohort of students still had some learning to do. At least one person saw it coming before the debate even started: the president of the jury opened the event by warning the jousters that they weren’t just there to exchange ideas (converser) or throw insults. “Debating is the opposite of conversation,” he said. “It’s about combining eloquence and conviction. And it’s about winning.”
The joust took place in a dark wood-paneled courtroom. Each team had four members. About a hundred of their classmates huddled in camps on each end of the room while nonaligned observers like Julie sat in the middle. The candidates (all men) had all drawn a topic from a hat earlier that afternoon and had had five hours to prepare their arguments, either for or against their topics, which were a mix of current events and philosophical questions like, “Should women be allowed in the Pantheon?” or “Must one listen to one’s enemies?”
When it came to presenting their cases, the debaters showed themselves to be incredibly inventive. There was no rigid rhetoric, no stiff monologues. It was all smooth talking, theatrics, and strategically placed hyperbole. The participants bounced from one position to another like acrobats. One delivered an entire argument in rhyming couplets. Another fell on his knees to plead his case before the audience.
The winner of the event, a law student of East Indian origin, simply did the best job of using creative oration to make a compelling argument. He had drawn the “No” side of the question, “Does integrating mean renouncing your identity?” and built his case on the idea that it was ridiculous to expect immigrants to parrot their culture of adoption. For his concluding remarks, he assumed a mock Italian accent and did a breathtaking parody of the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni first in French, then in English. Everyone was smiling. The contest was only half over, but the audience could see the law student had it in the bag.
Then again, the spectators probably knew the second half of the debate would not be as entertaining as the first. After their orations, candidates began the actual debate segment, during which they paired up with a participant from the other team to argue out the topic. Even the brilliant East Indian student couldn’t quite pull this off. Without preparation, these brilliant young French elocutionists just lost their panache. For starters, they couldn’t seem to snap out of conversation mode. Instead of attacking his adversary, one jouster posed rhetorical questions to himself, then answered them himself, seemingly because he wanted to demonstrate, once again, that prized rhetorical tool of la réplique, the smart comeback. It sounded like he had rehearsed it. None of the participants could think on their feet; some just fell back on name calling. In his closing comments, the president of the jury characterized the jousting as “disappointing.” It was the understatement of the evening.
What the French call “debating” is usually just an in-depth discussion. True debates—where confrontation serves to establish a winner—seem to go against everything they learn about oral expression. We spoke about the issue with Stéphane André, an actor and opera director who has a master’s degree in psychology from one of the most prestigious business schools in France. For the last twenty years, he has been running a school, L’École de l’Art Oratoire, to teach the art of public speaking and debating to French managers and executives. The problem, says André, is that French education places too much emphasis on writing. “The French are very talkative, and often brilliant at la discussion du Café du Commerce [everyday discussions]. But when they have to use talking to win—whether it’s to change an opinion, win a negociation, or get a new client—they tend to overprepare in writing. They prepare, prepare, prepare.” It was exactly what Julie had witnessed at the Paris courthouse. “Then they have trouble getting outside of what they have prepared,” André continued. “Debating is about improvisation and coming up with arguments that change people’s minds. It’s about being ready to listen, and [being] prepared for surprises. It means dealing with l’imprévu (the unforeseen). And naturally, when they find themselves facing l’imprévu, they think they are in danger. So they tend to wrap up with repartee that is stupidly aggressive.”
There is another French cultural trait that works against the art of debating. The French almost universally value expression over communication. We observed this ourselves, again, in the journalism world. French journalism tends to put editorializing ahead of content, or even the facts. In French news articles, the point of view of the writer is often clearer than what happened. Even when the French speak, expression is paramount, and is often carried out at the expense of connecting with the very audience to whom that expression is directed. (For that matter, public personalities in France can say the weirdest, most senseless things, and no one seems to care.) This tendency to editorialize (and esoterize) pops up in all communications. The French seem more interested in the act of passing a message than in how it will be received, or whether it will be understood (which is the essence of communication). The “meaning” is often left to the reader or listener to divine. The same reflex also operates in the arts. French universities have always resisted teaching writing workshops or courses in literary creation owing to the belief that learning would be too technical and too formulaic, contradicting the essence of artistic expression.7
You see this posture everywhere in France, not just in highbrow culture, or among France’s elite. French beggars don’t simply ask for change. They are more likely to construct a three-point argument to explain exactly how they ended up in their present plight and conclude by asking for help. Of course, the emphasis on creative expression can backfire anywhere. We witnessed this watching two panhandlers one morning near Paris’s Métro Capucines. The pair had developed a truly eye-catching technique. They sat on the edge of the street holding long fishing rods with cans at the ends of the lines. That got people’s attention. Unfortunately, the mixed message turned most people off—were the beggars reeling us in like fish? We didn’t see anyone reaching into their pockets. But the fishing pole beggars made another, more fundamental mistake. They sat silently waiting for donations. They should have been talking to people. The beggars had missed the essential point: nobody gets anything in France by keeping his mouth shut.
Part Two
Content
8
Food for Talk
No matter how much the French love food—and they do—they will never let eating get in the way of a good conversation.
We vividly recalled how much French dining rituals are made to get people talking the first time we were invited to a friend’s house for lunch in Paris. Our hostess Janine, a friend from the hiking club Jean-Benoît joined fifteen years ago, had invited us to her apartment in the nineteenth arrondissement for a casual, midweek meal with a few other hiking friends. An elegant widow in her early seventies who walks twenty-five kilometers in the woods every weekend, Janine is also what the French call a redoubtable (a mix of excellent and formidable) cook. She has been known to show up for hikes with fifty crêpes au rhum in her backpack, “just in case we need a snack.” Fortunately, the other lunch guests, all fit, active retirees like Janine, were bonnes fourchettes, healthy eaters: we were about to spend five solid hours eating lunch.
We started with an apéro of champagne, which took about an hour. Then Janine set bowls of cold escargots, small cheese pastries, and shrimp hors d’œuvres on the table. That took another hour. For the main course Janine served steaming bowls of bœuf carottes, beef and carrot stew, with linguine in butter. After another hour passed, she brought out a cheese plate with Camembert, a goat cheese, and an Emmental. Then Janine app
eared with the grand finale, an île flottante, floating island, essentially a soft mound of meringue bobbing in crème anglaise (caramel cream sauce). But that wasn’t the final curtain. Another hour passed and we moved back to the living room for the coffee and limoncello, an Italian lemon liqueur, which we drank while Janine told us about her holiday in Italy.
By the time we finished eating lunch, it was practically supper time.
You have to hand it to the French: they know how to pace a meal. French meals have a fixed order for courses. Hosts rarely deviate from these, though some simplify or combine courses to speed things up or cut down on cooking time. First comes the apéro and hors d’œuvres. Then the entrée, which can be more hors d’œuvres, or soup, and doesn’t necessarily have to be eaten at the table. The main course is normally served in large dishes guests help themselves to. Then comes the cheese course (cheese is never an appetizer or an hors d’œuvre in France), then dessert, then a digestif and coffee. It sounds like a lot of food to consume, but it’s not really when you consider meals can last five hours.
Do the French eat slowly and methodically in order to allow plenty of time to talk? Or do they talk in order to kill the time it takes to eat? They probably don’t know themselves. Though French meals are undeniably longer than they need to be, eating rarely feels tedious, partly because the food is so good, partly because the French know how to combine food and conversation and make the whole production feel effortless. After fifteen years of dining with the French (in France, and elsewhere), we’ve come to the conclusion that as much as the French love food, they love talking more. Even food takes a backseat to conversation at the dinner table. The point of the slow pacing is not to fill stomachs gently—it’s to build a frame for conversation.
In other words, talking is the real point of it all.
French meals are built on a series of rather complex table codes meant to give people time to talk. Our friend Janine followed French eating rituals to the letter, creating perfect conditions for her guests to say all the things we had to say. As she served consecutive courses, the conversation topics glided from serious health problems to lighthearted nostalgia, reports on recent trips, intercultural comparisons, and plain old gossip. Over the course of the meal, we compared notes about international adoption: the other couple there, Liliane and Alain, had adopted their son Stéphane, and one other guest, Jacqueline, had a four-year-old grandson adopted from Russia. Then we moved to a heartbreaking subject: one of the guests, Denise, had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and in a streak of disastrous luck, was knocked down the stairs of the Paris metro while her five-year-old granddaughter was watching, traumatizing them both and worsening Denise’s Parkinson’s symptoms overnight.
French dinners come in many shapes and forms, but French meals almost universally share a certain rhythm. That’s because the French believe conversations need time to breathe, like wine. Having many courses is a built-in mechanism to ensure a lot of different topics get on the table. Courses insert into the conversation breaks that give everyone the opportunity to change topic or tone. Otherwise, the French would probably feel like they were eating the same dish all night long.
After the first course, Denise herself changed the topic from Parkinson’s disease. Like all French, she knew that conversation is a shared resource, just like the bowls of escargots, and if you hog it—even with the best of intentions—you might ruin the experience for everyone. The end of the hors d’œuvres offered an elegant opportunity for us to switch to reminiscing about memorable hikes and gossiping about a few unforgettable hikers. One former member we had all known had to leave the club when he became a préfet (prefect), the state’s representative in one of the ninety-nine French départements, and began moving from post to post. We chuckled as the hikers reported all the privileges they had garnered from visiting him at his succession of residences. As the meal progressed, we worked up to some cross-cultural analysis, which gave the hikers the (always) welcome opportunity to vent about France going down the tubes, an eternal complaint. Liliane swore the French “don’t like to talk to each other anymore.”
We told her that was impossible.
French anthropologists who study food and the table recently revived an old, archaic term, commensal (table companion), and turned it into a new concept: commensalité, or table companionship, the ritual of sharing one’s meal. They simply found a name for the quality that is at the heart of France’s relationship with food. To the French, dining is about expressing relationships with others. The idea of commensalité applies to all French, regardless of their background, education, or social class. In contrast to the custom in the United States, in France meals are taken at a fixed hour, at the table, and they avoid eating alone if possible.1 They are akin to Catholic rites, like communion. To be capricious is to exclude oneself, or to excommunicate. If we sent French people to live on Mars and served them dried food out of packets, they would still eat together and observe the same rituals.
Dining rules have been passed down from generation to generation in France—probably not since the days of the Roman Empire, as many French believe, but long enough to convince everyone in the country that there’s no other way to eat properly. Since the nineteenth century, dining rituals have been a subject of serious, even academic, study in France. In one treatise, called Le goût de la conversation (The taste for conversation), the historian Pierre Sansot (mentioned in chapter 6) argues that a table with no ceremony, one that does not respect the order of servings, will “drain conversation.” Nor should the service itself be so elaborate that it “steals the show,” he says. In reality, though French eating habits are deeply ritualized, there’s no philosophy of “appropriate” topics of dinner conversation. You can talk about anything the French will talk about. The idea is to let conversation enjoy its natural lifespan, whatever that turns out to be.
Of course, the French spend a lot of time talking about food itself. You can talk about food anywhere in France, anytime, with just about anyone. Talking about cuisine is not particularly class dependent in France. It’s also a great way to talk to one of the most famous stereotyped characters in France: the waiter (or restaurant owner, as the case may be). North Americans tend to look at people waiting tables as part-time or temporary workers: waiting tables is not a highly respected vocation. But in France, waiting tables is a career. Good waiters have a solid knowledge of the menu and type of cuisine they are serving. Outside of lunch and dinner rushes, when waiters are not pressed for time, most are happy to discuss food at great length. (French waiters also tend to welcome criticism of the food they serve, not just compliments, as long as it is informed.)2
But don’t try to talk to the French about food unless you have at least a basic understanding of terroir. The word itself is difficult to translate. The French originally used it to describe the particular taste wines get from specific soils, growing conditions, and techniques used to create them. It was gradually applied to food, starting in the 1930s, when the French historian Lucien Febvre introduced the concept of France’s “map of food,” which consisted of four territories delineated by the type of fat each used in cooking: butter, olive oil, goose fat, or lard. Some French still refer to France’s four distinct regions and their fonds de cuisine. The actual word terroir only started being used for local specialties around the middle of the twentieth century.
We discovered the concept of terroir during our first stay in France when we heard locals boast about their culinary specialties in almost the same terms, everywhere we went. But when the French talk about terroir, they are not just bragging. Though some of France’s territories are naturally better endowed for culinary achievement than others, discussions about food rarely pit one region against another or place local foods in a hierarchy. Terroir is a synonym for authenticity. Eating cuisine de terroir is a way of connecting to regional identity, and to a certain extent, a gesture of solidarity with the few small-scale farmers left out there who stubbo
rnly resist the trend to industrialize production.
The idea of terroir is not really about taste or quality. Food in France is not for “foodies” (hobby gourmets). In fact, you meet relatively few foodies in France, probably because most French have at least a rudimentary knowledge of French cuisine and no one thinks anything of it. So North American foodies traveling in France are bound to end up feeling foolish unless they know the basics of where things come from in France—which boils down to having a basic knowledge of French geography.
Although France is not the only country in the world with excellent regional cooking, there’s a reason it was the French who branded the notion of terroir: the country does produce an incredible variety of food. France has a natural advantage over most nations (with the possible exceptions of Italy and China) because its territory is remarkably varied, with landscape ranging from high chalk cliffs on the Normandy coast to mountains and volcanic plateaus in the Massif Central, stretching from an almost subarctic climate in the North to a semiarid climate in the Mediterranean and boreal rainforest where the Pyrenees descend into the Atlantic. France even has a natural advantage in climatology: since the average altitude rises almost evenly from the western shores to the eastern interior, rain falls evenly over the country. In short, France has excellent growing conditions from one end of the country to the other.
The Bonjour Effect Page 10