Published by Xenophobe’s® Guides. E-mail: info@xenophobes.com Web site: www.xenophobes.com Copyright © Xenophobe’s® Guides Ltd., 2013 and all other editions. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Xenophobe’s® is a Registered Trademark. Printed 2018 Editor – Catriona Tulloch Scott Series Editor – Anne Tauté Cover designer – Vicki Towers Map – Jim Wire Printer – CPI Antony Rowe, Wiltshire Cover – Waiter at La Fontaine bar, Paris ©Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo Illustrations – Gunda Urban & Franziska Feldmann, courtesy of the German edition of this book, So sind sie, die Franzosen, published by Reise Know How Verlag.
Thanks are given to Michael England for his help and information. ePub ISBN: 9781908120397 Mobi ISBN: 9781908120403 Print ISBN: 9781906042325
Contents Nationalism & Identity
1
Character
8
Attitudes & Values
14
Behaviour
26
The Family
31
Manners
35
Leisure & Pleasure
44
Humour
50
Culture
51
Eating & Drinking
58
What is Sold Where
62
Health & Hygiene
63
Systems
66
Crime & Punishment
72
Government & Bureaucracy
74
Business
79
Obsessions
84
Language & Ideas
84
‘The French see brilliance in everything they do, and French statesmen from the Renaissance to the present day have likened France herself to a guiding light.’ The French population is 65 million – compared with 11 million Belgians, 55 million English, 49 million Spanish, 62 million Italians, 8 million Swiss, 81 million Germans, 35 million Canadians and 325 million Americans.
Nationalism & Identity Forewarned The French care about what really matters in life – being French. They care more about doing everything with enormous style than about what they do. They are convinced of their corporate and individual superiority over all others. Their charm is that they don’t despise the rest of us: they pity Their charm is that us for not being French. they don’t despise the The notion of ‘la force’ lies at rest of us: they pity us the heart of everything the for not being French. French have done, well or badly, in the last thousand years or more. La force is their sense of the essence of life. It is bound up with other grand ideas such as ‘la gloire’ and ‘la patrie’, feminine words that speak of boundless stores of energy. The French are attracted to all things vibrant, alive, moving. Beneath their chic and natty appearance they respond to atavistic and primitive impulses.
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Since 1789, the French have tried a revolution that turned society upside down, an imperial autocracy, a revived monarchy, an elected king, a republic, another emperor, another revolution, more republics, and lots more attempted revolutions. They’ve somehow absorbed all this and at the same time created a lifestyle that the whole world envies. Where most nations would be somewhat discon1
Nationalism & Identity
certed by the notion of the thinly veiled body of Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) leaping over the barricades, musket in hand, the French are moved to patriotic fervour (and audiences at Les Misérables are moved to tears). The cockerel may be their national symbol – a colourful male bird that makes a great deal of noise, chases off all rivals and lays no eggs – but they never forget that their country is la France. They are a sensual people who kiss where others shake hands; who proudly say that they make love in the same way that they eat; who write music that sounds like the sun rising out of the sea. This is why they delight in such refinements as taking seven and a half minutes to wrap a small tarte aux cerises – putting it in a box, tying it with ribbon and handing it to the customer as though it were a newborn baby – when the blessèd thing is going to be consumed the moment it’s taken out of the pâtisserie.
How they see themselves The French see themselves as the only truly civilised people in the world. Long ago they discovered the absolutes, the certainties of life, and thus they feel they have a duty to enlighten the rest. 2
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On anything that matters they consider themselves experts. Anything in which they are not experts does not matter. All life, all energy, is a grand force of nature, which they embrace whole-heartedly. They see glory in what others regard as defeat. They may lose an empire, Algeria, or a rugby match at Le Stade de France, but they know that France will rise again, more glorious than before. The They see world French would never say ‘Poor old supremacy in a France’ in the way the English have bottle of grand cru. been saying ‘Poor old England’ day in, day out for the last couple of thousand years. The French have no time for national or corporate selfpity. Instead, the cry is ‘On, on!’ to the barricades, the next election, the next invention and negotiation. There is a childlike enthusiasm and optimism about the way the French view Fate and Destiny. All will be well, they believe, simply because everything French is the best in the world. Playing second fiddle is not a French pastime. They also see honour in seduction, triumph in a well-cooked entrecôte, and world supremacy in a bottle of grand cru. Not for nothing was Louis XIV called ‘the Sun King’, for the French see brilliance in everything they do, and French statesmen from the Renaissance to the present day have likened France herself to a guiding light. Their role in relation to the rest of the world borders on the Messianic.
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How they see others To give their own feeling of superiority some validity, the French are generously prepared to accept that other nations have to exist. But do not expect the French to be ‘politically correct’ They can be racist, in anything they do. They can chauvinistic and be racist, chauvinistic and xenophobic, but always xenophobic, but always with with great charm. great charm, and whereas other nations would feel guilty for having such sentiments, the French believe that it’s natural. They see the English as small-minded, uncultured, badly dressed; a nation of people who spend most of their time gardening, playing cricket and drinking sweet, warm beer in pubs. (Also, the French jury is still out on the little matter of whether or not Napoleon was poisoned while on St. Helena.) The Scots are viewed in an entirely different light: apart from historic ties, the Scots supply malt whisky. They find the Spanish proud but noisy, and believe they produce more wine than is healthy for the vineyards of the Midi. Although Spanish wine may be sub-standard to the taste buds of the French, ‘ça existe’ – an ominous phrase. The French don’t dislike the Germans but they are not fond of them. In good times, the French are happy to portray themselves as leaders of the EU; in bad times they are happy to see the Germans as leaders of
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the EU. The French see nothing glamorous or romantic in being in charge of a sinking ship. They are willing to acknowledge the Germans’ industrial supremacy but regard their culture as inferior to their own. (This is not discrimination. In their view, every other culture is inferior to their own.) They also feel politically superior to the Germans since the Germans lost all international ‘presence’ when they were stripped of their colonies after the First World War. The French may no longer own much of the world, but French law, language and culture persist in every continent. Despite their reservations and however uncomfortable they find the thought, the French have much in common with the Germans – a sense of formality, a reserve, a concept of racial purity, The French may no a belief in an historical destiny. longer own much of In contrast to this admiring–disthe world, but French liking axis is their attitude towards law, language and the Swiss and the Belgians. The culture persist in Swiss are objects of merciless every continent. satire in French television commercials. They may be hospitable, but they are obsessively clean and speak French in a most odd fashion. The Belgians are seen as universally dull and totally lacking in finesse – both contemptible traits to the French who value style in everything. In their eyes the Belgians have always been ‘bête’, ‘thick’, and they are the butt of an endless stream of French jokes, for example:
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Two Belgian soldiers are sleeping under a tree. Suddenly a terrible rumbling sound awakes them. ‘Hell and death,’ says the first. ‘A storm!’ ‘No,’ says the other, ‘those are bombs.’ ‘Thank God for that,’ says the first. ‘I’m terrified of thunder.’ A little envy has crept into these jokes now that the French realise the Belgians have a better standard of living than they do.
Special relationships Historically, the French have had a special relationship with the United States and Canada, having owned much of the former and populated much of the latter. But complications have arisen. When a French film is shown at a French-Canadian cinema it has to have subtitles because the Canadians cannot understand the soundtrack since their accent is so different. The French have long admired the Americans – for their constitution (which they believe is based on the French one), for their code of law (which really is based on the French one), and for kicking out the British. Yet they go to considerable lengths to stave off the corrupting influence of American culture – restricting the number of American fast-food outlets, limiting imports of goods from the United States, and 6
Nationalism & Identity
dumping Euro Disney sufficiently far from Paris to give it a sporting chance of failure. Curiously, the French have successfully persuaded generation after generation of Americans to fall in love with them, without reciprocating that love.
How others see them Views vary: shrewd, sceptical, susceptible to women. But, in the eyes of many, the trouble with the French is that they are inconsistent. This is because others fail to see that the French decide all big issues on the basis of self-interest, a feature of peasant ideology. This trait is to be seen in all aspects of French life. They exasperate with their lumbering approach to the delights of a market economy, but exhilarate with their Quixotic flights of fancy. They produce the most beautiful paintings in the world They produce the and the ugliest wallpaper. They most beautiful paintings grow the finest vegetables and in the world and the never serve them in their restauugliest wallpaper. rants. They work hard, but are never seen to be working. Drive through France at any time of the day, week, month or year and 95% of the country appears to be uninhabited or fast asleep. What others need to understand is that the French regard consistency as boring, and to be boring is to be avoided at all costs.
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7
Character
How they would like others to see them Since the French have been endowed with an abundance of self-esteem, they don’t really care how others see them.
Character The essential Frenchman It is every Frenchman’s covert wish to be Cyrano de Bergerac, the braggart, swaggering hero of Edmund Rostand’s play. Cyrano, like the heroic musketeer d’Artagnan, was a Gascon. He was strong yet sensitive; a great swordsman, but It is every Frenchman’s also a poet of infinite tendercovert wish to be ness; a passionate lover, yet Gérard Depardieu. one who died of the greatest unrequited love in all literature; a man who failed, but failed gloriously. And what most endears Cyrano to all Frenchmen is that, to the end, he maintained his panache. Casting Gérard Depardieu as Cyrano in the 1991 film was a stroke of genius, for Depardieu is one of a long line of French stars (Edith Piaf, Yves Montand, et les autres) who have risen from the gutter to the glitter. The French love their heroes, real or fictional, to have had a past that is depraved, deprived or delinquent – an outsider who forces his or her way in.
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They love Depardieu for what he does off-screen, for who he really is, a complete turnabout from the old Hollywood system where the screen image of the star was idolised. Depardieu is They love the latest – a man first, a film star second. but the latest lasts only a He may have taken Russian few days, and then it’s on citizenship as a gesture against to the newest latest. the increase in French taxes, Not for nothing is passé but he is the man who turned a French concept. down a film rôle because the harvest was due in his vineyard; the man who says that had he been a woman, he would have made love with director Ridley Scott; the man who is called ‘a force of nature’, the French Hercules.
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Fad followers The French are fad followers. They will take anything if it’s fashionable. They love the latest clothes, the latest films, the latest gadgets, the latest slang, but the ‘latest’ lasts only a few days and then it’s on to the newest latest. Not for nothing is passé a French concept. They love ideas, concepts, innovations – playing around with things, like democracy, railway systems, architecture. What matters is being up-to-date. People will happily accept the hard sell if they think the paint on the item is still wet. They love to feel that life is fast moving, energetic and stylish. At one 9
Character
extreme this results in an elitist technocracy; at the other in short-lived cults, such as that of the pop song ‘Dur dur d’être bébé’ (‘It’s hard to be a baby’) which inspired hordes of teenage girls to dangle babies’ dummies on ribbons around their necks. In this, as in everything they do, the French frequently seesaw from the superb to the absurd. Take the erection of the glass pyramid at the Louvre. The French see this as something that had to be done, not only because it The French frequently eased the flow of visitors seesaw from the superb and inspired debate, but to the absurd. because not to plonk a pyramid in front of the Louvre would be to treat one’s country as a museum – and that must never be done. Similarly, they are proud of the Grande Arche of La Défense, a huge concrete arch slapped down in the outskirts of Paris, brilliantly lined up with the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower in a line of architectural continuity. It doesn’t matter if some regard it as neither a thing of beauty nor a joy, the concept is futuristic and brave. It is avant garde. It is arriviste. That alone is worth knocking down some old buildings for. It is impossible not to admire such courage.
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Farmers at heart Intellectually and spiritually, the average French citizen still identifies very much with the land, romanticising rural and village life to a wholly improbable degree. To the urban French, the burly farmer – gunning down the local squirrels, fattening geese for his foie gras and counting every cob of corn in his fields – can be forgiven because of all Intellectually and he does to protect a way of spiritually, the average life that they abandoned French citizen still identifies long ago. Even as the very much with the land, sophisticates fume at the romanticising rural and wheels of their Peugeots village life to a wholly and Renaults in traffic improbable degree. jams caused by agricultural industrial action (the throwing up of barricades of old tractors, rioting, lobbing stones at the police), they feel deep empathy and spiritual communion with the perpetrators, among whom could well be their grandfathers. Inside every Bordeaux businessman, Parisian restaurateur or Grenoble academic still beats the heart of a genuine paysan.
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Sixty-five million philosophers From this rustic base the French have stormed the intellectual high ground. The Germans, Chinese, Koreans, Americans, British and others fight to take the lead in the seedy business of It is the passion for making money. The French are matters of the intellect more concerned to protect and that makes the French promote European culture, and natural philosophers. by this, of course, they mean de They worship ideas Maupassant, Degas, Debussy – and those who their own being the only culture generate them. worth having as far as they are concerned. The French only acknowledge other nations’ culture as adjuncts to their own. It is the passion for matters of the intellect that makes them natural philosophers. They eat, drink and breathe philosophy. There is not a farmer, fisherman, waiter, car-worker, shop assistant or housewife who isn’t a closet Descartes or Diderot, a Saint-Simon or Sartre. The reason for this is that the French are brain-driven. They worship ideas and those who generate them, even if the ideas are only in vogue for the briefest of periods. Sartre’s existentialism, born in the Occupation and flourishing in the late 1940s and ’50s, was a spent force by the 1960s – but it doesn’t matter: new ideas are like buses on the Paris autobus system, there will always be another along in a few minutes.
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Their preoccupation with perceptions and conceptions makes the French much harder to govern than the Germans, who have a natural tendency towards acceptance of authority, or the English, who will grumble but do as they’re told. The French examine every facet of modern life through a philosophical microscope. For instance, in the whole Western world there exists the problem of unemployment. To the Americans, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, Italians, British, Germans and Belgians it is exactly that – a problem of unemployment. To the French it is ‘a question of civilisation’. A French man or They have an expression, le woman will hold up a discours, which can mean anypiece of nifty reasoning thing from idle chatter to a with the same pride that formal speech, but their another might feel when favoured use of it is as ‘a piece displaying a Sèvres vase of discursive reasoning’. Those or a Fabergé egg. skilled in this craft (about 95% of the population) are held in high esteem. A French man or woman will hold up a piece of nifty reasoning with the same pride that another might feel when displaying a Sèvres vase or a Fabergé egg. And so, in cafés philo (philosophy cafés) across the nation, argument rages on every subject from literature to liberty, from privilege to privacy. Away with old thoughts, let us embrace the new. At their computers from Cannes to Calais, from Nantes to
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Nancy, budding philosophers are tapping away, formulating new theories and new conceits. All over France, 65 million philosophers are hungrily waiting.
Attitudes & Values Despite a past littered with revolutions and upheavals, the French have maintained a stable and unchanging outlook on what matters in life. They have a high regard for the intellect, for qualifications and for the products of certain academic institutions. For, although there are remnants of Although there the old class system among the are remnants of the old French (a few aristocrats whose class system among forebears were not pruned by the French, France is Madame la Guillotine), France above all else is above all else a meritocracy. a meritocracy. In the United States the belief is that anyone can do anything if they really want to. In Britain the belief is anyone can do anything if they prove they are able to. In France the belief is that anyone can do anything they are qualified to do, and must be allowed to do so unchallenged once they have proved that they went through the right channels, and observed the right formalities. This gives French politicians carte blanche to come up with bold, imaginative, costly and sometimes silly
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projects that receive widespread approval – even when they become disastrous failures – simply because they were originally so bold, imaginative, etc. The French proceeded apace with their nuclear programme despite Chernobyl. Concorde was a financial fiasco, but a conceptual triumph. In the The French 1980s they began excitedly have the courage prospecting for oil beneath Paris. to experiment, fail, One has to admire such wild and and then experiment terrifying aspirations. The French again. have the courage to experiment, fail, and then experiment again. This is a nation not burdened by its past, but one that revels in its ability to use the present as a springboard to the future.
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A passion for roots France enjoys a huge amount of land relative to the size of her population. That is why visitors from more crowded countries experience a feeling of space on arrival in France. There seems to be plenty of room for everyone. But the French don’t see it that way. They feel there is not enough land to go round. Not only is there an undercurrent of resentment that immigrants are taking up houses, flats and jobs, there is a festering resentment about the possession of every ditch, manure heap and nettle patch in the entire country. 15
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Land – the ownership thereof – is the one bone of contention that can shatter family loyalties and general bonhomie. Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources were no figments of Pagnol’s imagination. Gérard Depardieu blew himself up in the former and Daniel Auteuil hanged himself in the latter because of a feud about the ownership of land. Every French citizen would understand and empathise with the characters in both films. Although, theoretically, there may well be enough land to go round, in practice there can never be enough, not if the population were to be halved or quartered. From Balzac to Zola, French literature teaches that, without the slightest compunction, a French ........................
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