On the other hand, if you ask precisely what region the French are from—De quelle region êtes-vous?—there’s no harm done and no offense taken. If your interlocutor is from a different area of France, he’ll likely tell you what department, region, or even town he’s from, then branch into some trivia about local geography, history, or culinary achievements. If the person turns out to live in the very commune you are standing in, she could take the question as an invitation to expand on her family origins. You never know where the question will lead, but it’s rarely a dead end.
What gives the word “region” its magic power? The French like talking about themselves as much as anybody, but the word “region” helps them avoid a touchy topic: identity, either personal or national (we address this more in chapter 18). On the other hand, asking the French about regions, or towns, allows them to talk about two topics they love: geography and history. The French know a lot about geography and history, particularly their own, and they delight in displaying their knowledge.
Learning history and geography are practically republican duties in France. Both are fundamental components of what the French call culture générale (the term translates literally as “general culture” but has the sense of “good education”). The French have iron faith in the idea that there are a certain number of things everyone should know. It is something like the universal ideal of the humanities (the study of culture), but it applies to everyone, of every age and stage in life.
The concept of culture générale is so deeply engrained in France, it has its own niche publishing industry. A few months before we arrived in France a 160-page quarterly magazine called L’Éléphant was released with a subtitle that said it all: La revue de culture générale (the review of general culture). The first issues had a profile of the writer Alexandre Dumas, a list of key dates in contemporary art, an article about black holes, another explaining the international currency system, an essay on the philosophy of comic books, a piece on existentialism, and finally—just in case anyone needs to know—an article on the taste of an obscure citrus fruit called a cédrat (citron).
Displaying one’s culture générale in France is not considered elitist behavior. On the contrary: L’Éléphant’s manifesto is “to know is to be equal and free.” Its founders, Guénaëlle Le Solleu, a former journalist, and Jean-Paul Arif, an engineer who worked in geomatics, set out to make a publication with information people could both read and memorize easily. To this end, the pair conscripted the Laboratory for the Study of Cognitive Mechanisms (Laboratoire d’étude des mécanismes cognitifs) at the University of Lyon II to design the magazine’s quizzes, crossword puzzles, and other mental games.
Nor is culture générale written in stone. The actual facts that constitute it change over time, which is why yet another French writer, the journalist François Reynaert, published a book called Le kit du 21e siècle (The kit for the 21st century), subtitled A new guide to culture générale. Reynaert argues that no one can really function in today’s world without knowing about antioxidants, carbon footprints, the human genome, or George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. To say that the French openly embrace the power of knowledge is an understatement.
Before there was Wikipedia, the French had their own homegrown paper version of it in the form of a reference book called Le Quid. Le Quid had more than twenty-two hundred pages with 2.5 million entries on topics about France and the world—or everything that is supposed to matter to the French. In its heyday, Le Quid sold 250,000 copies a year. Unfortunately it didn’t adapt well to the arrival of Web-based, free reference tools (like Wikipedia); it stopped publishing its paper version in 2007, then closed definitely in 2010 when the Web version didn’t break even. But until its demise, Le Quid had sales comparable to those of popular dictionaries like Petit Larousse (which adapted very well to the Internet). For that matter, culture générale is a recipe for success in France. Even the American “Dummies” got in on the action, publishing La culture générale pour les Nuls (General culture for dummies) in 2008. And every week, an established author or philosopher releases a new dictionary or volume designed to quench the huge French thirst for general knowledge, like author Charles Dantzig, who sold seventy thousand copies in France of his 970-page Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Egotistical dictionary of French literature).
As far as the French are concerned, you are never too young to start acquiring culture générale. By the time they get to school, French kids are supposed to be primed to acquire the knowledge and information they will “need.” School is not considered the exclusive repository of culture générale in France, but it’s expected to play a big role in fostering it. It’s an enormous difference in philosophy from North American ideas about education. Only real outliers in France question the value of acquiring factual knowledge. The gap between French and North American teaching philosophies sunk in when we returned home and our daughters started grade 6 in Canadian school. One of the first things their teachers told us at the September parent-teacher meeting was that students would be reading a lot and would be expected to “react” to books. We had to pinch ourselves.
In France, we learned, children are expected to assimilate what they read. It goes without saying. For her first school research project in French school, Nathalie was instructed to choose a French classical painter and write a short report on him. (Nathalie was perfectly able to do this: she just googled “French Classical Painters” and came up with Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), the most famous artist of the seventeenth century. She did need some help interpreting the information; on the other hand, she ended up learning some basic concepts of art history that she would apply over the course of the year.) Back in Montreal the next year, our daughters’ first school assignment was to write about “my favorite body part.” Again, our jaws dropped. The idea (we assume) was for them to learn how to organize information. The content didn’t matter. In France, form also matters, but never at the expense of content, especially when children are supposed to be building their culture générale.
To be fair, the universal French faith in knowledge acquisition means they end up cramming a lot of stuff into children’s heads that probably doesn’t belong there: some of it doesn’t stick no matter how hard teachers try. Julie accompanied Erika’s class one morning to Paris’s “Festival du Pain” (Bread Festival), held in an enormous tent erected in the open square in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Before entering the bread tent, it dawned on Erika’s teacher that there was a great learning moment standing one hundred yards behind her. “That’s an example of Gothic architecture,” she told the class, pointing to Notre Dame Cathedral and slowly enunciating. Her tone suggested the children should have known that already (and since most of the kids lived a twenty-minute walk from Notre Dame, they probably should have). But the kids just shrugged. Even French kids can’t know everything.
That doesn’t stop the French from trying. Nobody questions the necessity of children learning La Fontaine’s fables, or the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus’s plays, even if the content is not exactly appropriate for children (by our standards). At the end of the year, our daughters memorized a forty-line fable by La Fontaine called “The Wolf and the Dog,” the moral of which was “better to starve free than be a fat slave.” Children start learning the names of France’s rivers and the major dates of history as early as first grade. When a French teacher asks ten-year-olds, “Marignan?” children are supposed to be able to automatically answer, “1515” (1515 was the year King François I waged the famous battle of that name near Milan). There’s no pedagogical “approach” backing up all that memorization, just the rock-solid certainty of the French that everyone should learn as much factual information, especially about France, as possible.
Geography is the most concrete and the most unifying among the topics that constitute French culture générale, so it’s always a good bet for starting conversations. History is fascinating, but it can be polem
ical. Geography is neutral. It’s also a topic that shows France in a flattering light. France is a geographical wonder with a wide range of geological, agricultural, and climatic conditions packed into a relatively small territory. What the French don’t learn in books, they get to experience themselves during the country’s abundant holidays.
However, with geography, as with almost all topics of French culture générale, a certain French tunnel vision can make foreigners feel foolish. In a typical conversation, one friend of ours told us she had a summer home in Plougasnou. When we asked her exactly where that was, she just answered, “It’s in Brittany.” We continued to probe, “Okay, but where in Brittany, exactly?” To which she answered: “Between Le Trégor and the Coast of Armor.” It would have been a lot more helpful for us to hear that Plougasnou was one hundred kilometers west of Rennes, Brittany’s capital city. But that’s typical North American reasoning. The French give directions strictly with reference to other French landmarks (to be fair, Germans do the same). They never use cardinal points (though strangely, they do learn these in school) and hardly ever talk about numerical distances. Everyone is supposed to know where places are so they can figure out where other places are in relation to them.
French schoolchildren memorize things like the exact height of France’s highest summit, Mont Blanc (4,807 meters), all stuff that can make grown-up North Americans feel ignorant, all the more so because French kids are taught to demonstrate their knowledge, so they tend to flaunt it. A popular gauge of good education in France is being able to recite the names and numbers of all of France’s ninety-five départements by heart. Children are supposed to know this by the end of middle school. (French license plates all indicate the car owner’s department; when driving, parents quiz their kids on these numbers.)
It probably struck us because as North Americans, we have to grapple with the vast distances of our continent so much: although France is by far the largest country of Western Europe, the French look at their country with a completely different mindset. They squint at it as if they are examining its features through a microscope, dividing it into the smallest units possible and contemplating the sometimes minute differences between, say, two neighboring towns. Administratively, France has thirteen régions that split up France’s ninety-five départements, which in turn are split into thirty-seven thousand communes (towns). France has more towns than England, Germany, Spain, and Belgium combined. Unofficially, the country is also divided into 420 pays, distinct zones with their own geography and cultural particularities. (And those, in turn, are divided into 1,800 micro-pays.)
The reason French wine labels don’t have grape types listed on them is that the French are expected to know, by seeing a department number (indicated on all wine labels), where the wine comes from, then deduce from their general geography knowledge what kind of grapes grow there (or simply what type of wine is produced there, skipping the grape types altogether; or by the shape of the bottle, which differs according to wine type). Learning France’s minute territorial divisions at school means this should be part of one’s culture générale by drinking age. Although French winemakers have added grape types to export labels to appease foreign markets, the French still like labels that are exclusively geographic because they don’t insult their intelligence. L’héritage de Carillan is from le Pays d’oc, and that’s that. The back of the bottle may tell you it is from Nîmes, but more often, it will simply give the number of the department, 30, by which you know that the wine comes from Le Gard, northwest of Marseille. A Saint-Pourçain is from Saint-Pourçain, in the Loire valley. The smaller and more specific the geographic area on the label, the more exclusive (and generally higher priced) the wine will be: the little known Bonnezeaux wine, for instance, comes from a small estate of one hundred and twenty hectares in Anjou, a minuscule patch within the seventy thousand hectares of the Loire Valley (to put this in perspective, Saumur wine is produced in an area of fourteen hundred hectares).
This splintered vision of their geography means the French have to look elsewhere to get a unified view of their country and that seems to be the job of weather reporting. The French view weather with a very wide lens. French newspapers’ weather sections start with seventy-five-word paragraphs, rather poetic in tone, which convey the overall mood of the country, not meteorological conditions anywhere in particular. For example, one chilly May morning, Le Parisien newspaper wrote: “The Ice Saints Days Are Here. It’s St. Servais’ Day, after St. Mamert’s and St. Pancrace’s. The three Ice Saints are bringing back the North Wind and adding a chill to the beautiful spring sky. ‘Beware of Frost,’ say gardeners, who won’t plant anything before the Saints have passed.” The paragraph wrapped up with jaunty advice, ostensibly for anyone on French territory who might be thinking of leaving their house: “It might be a good idea to take a little scarf with you this morning.” The story gives the French the illusion that the weather has some overarching grasp on the nation and that there’s something “French” about the weather no matter if it’s in Paris or Rennes.
The French also love to talk about history, which of course they know well, having started learning major dates in first grade (or earlier). Every day, every week of the year, either one of France’s public television channels runs a special about a historical event or period, or a magazine publishes an entire issue about a historical period, or a new book on history is released—and that’s not counting the many museum exhibitions about history. Whether it’s ancient Egypt, the Freemasons, or Roman Gaul, the French just lap it up. Any major event is a good excuse for delving into related history: just before the World Cup started in Brazil, Historia published a special edition on the Portuguese colonial empire. World War II and the Algerian War are perennial topics.
The risk in talking about history with the French is that the book is never shut on it. The French have many parallel histories: there is the official timeline, but also local and personal histories that fit into that timeline. The two only converge in rare cases, as in World War I, during which 15 percent of France’s population was either killed or injured and which everybody experienced more or less the same way. That’s one reason the World War I soldier, called a poilu (“hairy,” because they never got to shave), became an iconic figure in French history.1 But in other cases, like the violent upheaval in Paris that happened a few decades earlier, La Commune, in 1870–1871, there is no consensus about what happened to this day.2 World War II is even touchier. The country was divided. Some French collaborated with the German occupiers, some resisted, and in many ways, the war has not yet ended. When our young landlady visited us in our apartment, she made a point of telling us that her father had been a Grand Résistant, a fighter in the French Resistance. “But I can’t say as much for other owners in this building,” she alluded. It still mattered. Then again, people who experienced it are still alive. One friend from Jean-Benoît’s hiking club, Huguette, still remembered Germans arriving in her village of Sarthe in 1940, when she was ten—a story she told for the first time as we were hiking on the seventieth anniversary of D-day.
Even beyond the great conflicts, the French have a complex, conflicted relationship with the past. The French Revolution aside, the French on the whole love the symbols of France’s defunct monarchy, the ancien régime. Since 1984, Paris has celebrated something called Les Journées du Patrimoine (Heritage Days), by opening some seventeen thousand national buildings, normally closed to the public, to visitors. One Paris daily speculated about the curious popularity of the event, where people flock to admire the vestiges of a regime they love to hate—not just in Versailles Palace, but at the Luxembourg Palace (which houses the French Senate), the Élysée Palace (where the president lives), the Panthéon, and the Palais Bourbon (which houses the National Assembly). People still want to feel close to the monarchy, and they do it through historical monuments associated with power.
Then there’s the issue of official history versus local history. Official history in Fra
nce is essentially “Parisian” history. It is the official narrative of France that Parisians supply to the rest of the country. This is partly because Paris is where France’s national institutions are located but also because throughout France’s history, the government, located in Paris, has bulldozed local cultures and identities. Unofficial history is the history of the rest of France, the local history, which local people know very well. The relationship between the two is as fraught as that between a Native American or an Afro-American version of history and mainstream American history (or Canadian, for that matter). Naturally, a lot of local history is left out of France’s official history, including local heroes one only hears about outside of Paris (and even Paris has its own local history). The French love supplementing “official” history with tidbits about their local history. Knowing just the smallest details about a place—not to mention having a decent grasp of official history—can go a long way in breaking the ice with people. When Jean-Benoît visited the town of Bourges, he only had to mention the name of the local hero Jacques Cœur (c. 1395–1456) to get people talking. Cœur was a local hero, a very rich merchant in the fifteenth century, and a famous treasurer of the king whose career ended as a result of an unfair trial. In remote French departments like Guadeloupe, locals told us about the slaves’ heroic struggle for liberation, an episode that is ignored in official history—and here again, knowing about local fighters like Louis Delgrès (1772–1802) or La Mulâtresse Solitude (circa 1772–1802) makes it easy to talk to people.
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