Don’ts
• Don’t ask for people’s first names. It’s invasive in France.
• Don’t make jokes about yourself. In France, self-deprecating humor makes you sound stupid.
• Don’t ask, “Where are you from?” It’s insinuating. Ask, “What region are you from?”
Topics You Can Discuss Anywhere in France
• Language. The French love talking about words.
• Geography or history. The French are well versed in both topics.
• Food. Always easy, but better when you know a bit about French geography and history.
• Art, cinema, or literature. The French always have an opinion about culture.
• Finding deals. This is the only way the French talk about money.
• Holidays. This is how the French prove they don’t like their jobs.
Topics You Should Broach with Care
• Family. It’s private in France, something you only talk about with close friends.
• Work. Don’t ask what someone does for a living. The French consider it either boring or nosy.
• Money. No one thinks it’s interesting.
• National identity, immigration, race relations, and politics are tricky. Stick to asking questions.
On that final note, we wish you a bon voyage in the land of French conversation.
Acknowledgments
We are extremely grateful to our agent Roger Williams for going to bat for us with the idea for this book, and to Michael Flamini, our editor at St. Martin’s Press, for liking the idea, and loving the final product.
During our year in France many French friends helped us by hosting us, feeding us, questioning our impressions, and sharing their reflections. Among our “old” friends, we’d like to thank: the hikers Daniel Roux, Alain and Liliane Forcade, and Jeannine Coin; Valerie Lehmann and Jean-François Nantel for hosting us in Les Vosges; Miranda de Toulouse Lautrec, who gave us food, board, and incomparable conversation at her farm in the Limousin; Mireille and Jean-Louis de Keiser who welcomed us in the Landes. We were lucky to have had warm and welcoming neighbors and, in particular, would like to thank Robert and Isabel Trésor, Julien, and Angélique for the apéros and many other favors. A special thanks as well to Edith Roux, a French teacher in New Jersey, for her careful read of the manuscript.
A number of professionals in diplomacy and the media gave us access to invaluable insight, including Michel Robitaille, head of the Quebec Delegation in Paris, and Norman Smith, spokesperson of the Canadian Embassy in Paris. We would like to extend special thanks to Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, executive director of France Culture; Gilles Davidas, director at France Culture; and Franck Chabasseur, director of international relations at CAVILAM-Vichy. The professional opportunities they gave us were also fantastic windows on French society.
Many parents at our daughters’ school welcomed us into their homes, sharing meals, advice, and insight with us, and helping our daughters feel at home. We changed their names, as well as the teachers’, to protect their privacy. We thank them all but particularly “Brigitte” for her energy, her insight, and her own special brand of nonconformism, which just warmed our hearts. We would like to thank our daughters’ school friends, who were articulate, open-minded, welcoming, and just lovely company for our daughters and for us—and congratulations to their parents for raising such bien élévés children.
And from the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to thank our friend Marie-Dominique Bédouet, her husband Carol, and their whole family for being our spiritual home base in Paris. It would not have been the same experience without their help. And of course, our friends Anne Dupont, François Digonnet, and their daughter Ambre for their spirited conversation and unconditional support.
Finally, we’d like to thank our beautiful daughters, Nathalie and Erika, for being such good sports after we ripped them from their universe and pitched them into an unknown world against their will. They allowed us to see a side of France we couldn’t have glimpsed without their help, and their good-natured curiosity never ceased to amaze us.
Notes
1. I Greet Therefore I Am
1: Expressions like bon courage (hang in there), bonne journée (have a good day), and bonne soirée (have a good evening) are actually variations on au revoir and serve the same phatic purpose. They’re just more specific to the context.
2: Pamela Druckerman also used the expression in her book Bringing Up Bébé.
2. Privacy Rules
1: Simon Kuper, “When a Man Is Tired of Paris,” Financial Times, January 25, 2013.
2: Since this book is mostly about talk, we do not dig deeply into the nonverbal. What defines these rings, as well as the acceptable behavior to enter them, varies enormously from one culture to another. In France, kissing on both cheeks is appropriate behavior for people in the social or personal sphere. For English speakers, it’s an intimate gesture that provokes discomfort in the wrong context. Americans will give an affectionate bear hug to almost anyone, even virtual strangers, whereas the French find it invasive.
Even knocking at the door shows different ideas about privacy between French and North Americans. When North Americans knock at a door, they are asking permission to enter. When a French person knocks at a door, it’s to announce she is coming in. Not that strangers walk into other strangers’ homes in France. But in French minds, entering someone’s home is a perk you get from already having established yourself as a connaissance (you obviously don’t need to be a friend).
3: Comparisons are tricky, but it is possible to imagine how speaking can be used to mark a distance. It’s the case in American culture. Take again the subway example where strangers are pushed one against another by the crowd. When forced into intimacy, two Americans will actually talk, even joke very loudly, to signify that this forced intimacy is accidental and means nothing.
4: The French, however, did not invent the idea of specific pronouns to signify formal address. It is common in most languages. It was common even in English until the seventeenth century, when people used “thou” as a familiar greeting, and “you” for the formal form. And it’s strange that people think English such a familiar tongue when, in fact, we ended up using the formal form of “you” universally.
5: Shortly after he was elected president in 1981, François Mitterand was asked by a journalist, On se dit tu, n’est-ce pas? (“We should address with you tu, shouldn’t we?”). Mitterand, who was notoriously old school, replied: Si vous voulez (“If you want,” but using vous).
6: France is not a place where the idea of “friendship in bulk” resonates. The notion of a Facebook friend is almost an oxymoron to the French. While it is true that Facebook is popular in France (3.6 million users) and Facebook in French uses the term ami, the French recognize that 99 percent of Facebook friends are merely connaissances or relations.
7: The quote is from an interview by the art critic Dora Vallier, in Cahiers d’art, 1954, in an article titled “Braque, la peinture et nous.” The original French was: “On s’est dit avec Picasso en ces années-là des choses que personne ne dira plus, des choses que personne ne saurait plus se dire, que personne ne saurait plus comprendre … des choses qui seraient incompréhensibles et qui nous ont donné tant de joies. […] Et cela sera fini avec nous. C’était un peu comme la cordée en montagne.” The English translation is attributed to Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the Great Artists from Ghiberti to Gainsborough (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963).
3. Finding the Yes in Non
1: Quebeckers don’t share this particular cultural reflex of saying non outright and the use of the word si is not common.
2: “Patrice Leconte,” interview by Maryvonne Ollivry, in Le Parisien, April 11, 2014.
4. Schools: The Speech Factory
1: Nine-year-old children in France are also expected to do all their schoolwork in polished longhand, in ink. The second concern the girls’ teachers raised with u
s (after their mother tongue) was whether they actually knew how to write in cursive. The French press regularly runs articles about the disappearance of handwriting skills in North America, where kids now learn to type at the age of five and penmanship is jettisoned. In France, handwriting is important, not merely for tradition’s sake, but because it is recognized that children retain more of what they learn when they have made the effort writing it by hand. Other studies even suggest that cursive is best suited to that end. See Lorraine Millot, “Aux États-Unis, l’écriture sur la touche,” Libération, September 24, 2013; and Maria Konnikova, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” New York Times, June 2, 2014.
2: The sixty thousand French schools managed as part of France’s National Education are rigorously secular, but there are a relatively large number of private schools in France as well. The 8,800 private schools, which are mostly religious, account for less than 14 percent of all establishments, and about 17 percent of all students. Most of these private schools are Catholic, but 280 are Jewish and 20 are Muslim. But 98 percent of these are not strictly private, but sous contrat (under contract), meaning they are for the large part subsidized by the French government and required to meet a certain number of requirements in curriculum and training prerequisites for teachers. For more information see “Repères et références statistiques sur les enseignements, la formation et la recherche,” at www.education.gouv.fr. For the breakdown of schools by religion, see “Quel avenir pour les écoles privées musulmanes en France?,” published August 18, 2014, http://www.al-kanz.org/2014/08/18/ecole-privee-musulmane/.
5. The Family Factor
1: When it comes to birthrates, Europe is mostly a two-tier system: southern and eastern Europe, including Germany, have birthrates below 1.5 children per woman, and northern and western Europe have slightly higher rates, with 1.7 children per woman.
France’s high birthrate is an interesting reversal. Between 1750 and 1945, population growth was actually slower than in the rest of Europe for reasons no one has ever really established. That changed starting in 1945, when the French started making babies with a vengeance, relatively speaking. It was the post–World War II baby boom, so France was not an isolated case, but the boom did last ten years longer in France than it did elsewhere. The result is that since 1945, France’s population has increased from 40 to 66 million and is expected to almost double to 72 million by 2045.
It’s not all because of babies: immigration and increased life expectancy have contributed to France’s sustained population growth, but over the last thirty years, the birthrate has been the main factor. In fact, it was so robust that the French government decided to cut down on immigration. The cuts are often blamed on France’s anti-immigrant National Front Party, but the truth is, France doesn’t need immigration the same way, say, Germany does.
2: The history of this little document goes back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris uprising of 1871, during which the Archives of the City of Paris were destroyed. In one day, the records of the civil status of a large segment of the population went up in smoke. It took years of painstaking work to partially reconstruct the records. So to avoid the disaster reoccurring, the French government started distributing standardized booklets of records that individual families have to keep as a backup to the official archives. In the case of a natural disaster or war, it would be relatively simple to reconstitute the État civil.
3: The custom of the family as a tax unit explains why France is one of the last countries in the developed world where employees aren’t taxed at the source, with deductions made from paychecks. Instead, French employees receive full salary and have to keep reserves to pay taxes at the end of the year on their own. There is talk of changing this system and taxing at the source, but it’s a challenge. For one, the way the system is set up, employers would need information about the rest of an employee’s family’s income.
4: Quoted by Anaïs Delbarre in Devenir adulte en Europe, November 7, 2013, www.nouvelle-europe.eu/opinions.
5: Interestingly, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word “ridicule” was borrowed from the French in the eighteenth century. The French had borrowed it from the Italians two centuries before that, so there’s an argument to be made that the French have just had longer to let the idea sink in.
6: Hélène Haus, “Thomas et Marie, rois des mentions,” Libération, July 5, 2014.
7: Divorce rates in different countries are calculated differently, making it hard to compare statistics. Some countries count separation from a common law union as a divorce while others don’t. These are the most reliable figures we could find.
6. The Art of Conversation
1: Our translation.
2: Our translation, from Fumaroli, ed., L’art de la conversation.
3: Even if the French practice their own form of political correctness, as we will see.
4: Fumaroli, ed., L’art de la conversation.
5: Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Godo and Sansot are ours.
6: Salons were immensely popular throughout Europe and spurred offshoots everywhere, including in America, which got saloons, though the spirit was somewhat different there, not to mention the spirits.
7: Jean-Didier Wagneur, “Hydropathes et buveurs d’eau,” Libération, March 13, 2014, quoting Anthony Glinoer and Vincent Laisney, L’âge des cénacles, confraternities littéraires et artistiques du XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2014).
8: Our translation.
7. Très Talk
1: Isabelle Hanne, “‘Le monde’ perdu de Nathalie Nougayrède” (Nathalie Nougayrède loses Le Monde), Libération, May 15, 2014.
2: The French love voting and they vote more than anyone else in the world: citizens vote in the presidential, legislative, European, regional, departmental, and municipal elections. And except for the European elections, which are one round, all other elections have two rounds. That means the French vote eleven times in six elections! This excludes the senate elections. French senators are elected by an electoral college composed of elected representatives: mayors, MNAS’s, and all elected councillors at the municipal, departmental, and regional levels. But even this election is done with a two-round system.
The principle for the two-round system is simple: if one candidate actually wins a majority in the first round, that candidate wins the election. Otherwise, the lowest-scoring candidates are eliminated according to a formula that varies from one election to the next. And people vote again. During the 2012 presidential elections, there were ten candidates in the first round, and the top five garnered between 28 percent and 11 percent of the vote. Only Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande made it to the second round, and Hollande was elected with 51.64 percent of the vote.
One effect of this system is that it makes it possible for a wide variety of parties to present candidates: in any election, electors have the choice of three to four types: left-wing parties, extreme-left parties, right-wing parties, or even far-right parties (though presently the Far Right has been united under the National Front Party). Had we been allowed to vote in the March 2014 municipal elections, we would have had the choice among the Union de gauche, Union de droite, Diverses droites, Europe-Écologie-Les Verts, Parti de gauche, and Front National, to name only the six that garnerered more than 3 percent of the vote.
This extreme spread meant that in 2002, the socialist vote was split between a number of fringe candidates, and the Socialist Party itself was eliminated from the second round—which gave the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen his first serious shot in a presidential election. Fortunately, the horrified left-wing voters all rallied between the incumbent president Jacques Chirac, who won the second round by a resounding 82 percent.
The French simply cannot resist sending messages—whatever the price.
3: Quoted in Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.
4: Ibid.
5: “Bac 2014: Les sujets et les corrig
és de philosophie,” Le Monde, June 16, 2014.
6: The 2014 options were: Is having choices enough to make you free? (Suffit-il d’avoir le choix pour être libre?), why search to know one’s self better? (pourquoi chercher à se connaître soi-même?), or discuss an excerpt from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
7: Véronique Radier, “Écrire, c’est aussi un métier,” Le Nouvel Observateur, October 3, 2013.
8. Food for Talk
1: Interview with Claude Fischler by Laure Noualhat, “Chacun veut se réapproprier le contenu de son assiette,” Libération, January 4, 2014.
2: Chrine Nehring, “In Defense of the Notoriously Arrogant French Waiter,” The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2015.
3: Jean-Paul Frétillet, “Y a-t-il un chef en cuisine?” Le Parisien, April 23, 2013.
4: The study was quoted in Jacqueline de Linarès, “La folie des lunchbox: Salade et ordi,” Le Nouvel Observateur, November 28, 2013.
5: In the 1990s, theories about the so-called French paradox ran rampant in the North American media. Nutritionists wondered whether some magical ingredient in the French diet explained why the French could eat such rich food and drink more wine than Americans, while staying thinner, living longer, and having fewer heart attacks. By the following decade, the experts had pretty much agreed on the answer, and it had nothing do with red wine or olive oil. It wasn’t about what the French ate, but how much they ate.
In 2005, the American philosophy professor Paul Rozin, who studies food choice, tested portion sizes in French and American restaurants and grocery stores for a study published in Appetite magazine. He wandered from McDonald’s outlets to Chinese restaurants with his scale and discovered that French portion sizes were consistently smaller. An individual yogurt that weighed 227 grams (8 ounces) in the United States came in a 125-gram (4.4-ounce) format in France. When the calories of a whole day of eating smaller portions were compiled, the difference wasn’t enormous—roughly the equivalent of an apple a day. But an apple a day does add up to a pound of fat by the end of the year. In the United States, that single pound eventually makes its mark in national obesity statistics.
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