Whether in restaurants or cafés, at ticket counters or museums, in the metro or in a taxi, in stores or even at an information desk, foreigners often get cold, even hostile treatment from the French if they don’t know the password for good services and don’t fully grasp the message their ignorance sends. If you don’t greet a person behind the desk somewhat humbly, she will not help you, or if she does, she will definitely not do it with a smile.
Foreigners take this as a rebuff and are mystified. But in France, you are asking something from someone, so you have to be humble.
Having forgotten her place in the world of French retail, Julie got horrible service on her first few trips to our local Franprix grocery store on rue Mouffetard. The first time, she dashed in to buy eggs (easy to miss in a French grocery since they are never stacked in a fridge, but on regular shelves, generally with the sterilized milk—a detail Julie had forgotten). She simply marched to the back of the store and asked the young man stocking shelves there where the eggs were. He looked at her, bent over, pointed to his right and said, “Dat way,” practically in a drawl, mouthing the words in English like he was speaking to a toddler. Since he was pointing to the entire south side of the store, Julie repeated the question.
What Julie really needed to do was work on her pitch. The shelf-stocker stomped over to the milk section, bent over even more—presumably to underline how childish Julie was behaving—and pointed to the shelf of eggs. “Look! Read it. Œuf-fah,” he said, pronouncing the French word for egg, œuf, in two syllables as if Julie needed it broken down for her.
Julie couldn’t believe her ears, first, that he’d made fun of her ignorance, then that he’d mocked her mother tongue. She was halfway back to the apartment when she realized her mistake. In her rush, she had not only skipped the bonjour. She had also forgotten to excuse herself for interrupting him (easy to forget since the store wasn’t particularly busy) before brazenly demanding service. You can’t skip stages in communications in France, not even to buy eggs. If you treat a French store clerk in an offhanded manner, you will get exactly the kind of treatment the French believe you deserve in return. You cannot even ask for the time without saying bonjour in France. Jean-Benoît tried it once. “Excuse me sir, do you have the time?” The man answered, “Yes,” and walked on.
It’s like you have to knock before you can come in. This sort of officiousness drives North Americans crazy. We are shocked to discover that employees in France regularly treat us like underlings, like uninvited, unwelcome intruders interfering with the exercise of other more important duties. In France, employees rarely offer to help. You have to ask, and ask nicely.
One of the paradoxes of the bonjour ritual is that, though it’s automatic, you still have to sound like you mean it. If you say bonjour in a clipped, offhand, or routine-sounding way, you might as well not say it at all. The more deliberate and drawn out you make it, the better. We’ve found it’s even good to bow a little obsequiously, or even bend your head slightly to the side to look powerless, like you are putting yourself at a merchant’s mercy.
But above all, don’t rush it. Julie nicknamed the receptionist at our local post office the “Ice Queen,” in reference to her curt, cold service. The first time Julie stepped inside the office, to carry out the deceptively simple task of mailing a letter back home, Julie looked at the automated stamp machine, blanched, and went straight to the Accueil (which incongruously translates as “welcome,” even though in France customer-service counters often operate as fortresses). She then proceeded in what she felt was a courteous enough manner, greeting the receptionist with bonjour, and explaining the nature of her problem.
By the time Julie realized her mistake, it was too late. The last twist to the French bonjour ritual is that after you say bonjour, you have to wait for your collocutor to say bonjour back. Otherwise it doesn’t count. Worse, barging forward too quickly after your bonjour makes it sound like you are issuing some kind of order—and who are customers to do that? By denying the receptionist at La Poste the several-second window she required to reciprocate the bonjour, Julie was basically foisting a problem on her without her consent.
In short, never try to carry out any kind of transaction—even the briefest—before completing the obligatory verbal transaction of “bonjour.” Sometimes there is no turning back. At the post office, the Ice Queen charged through the operation so quickly that Julie knew she’d have to come back for help again next time. Trying to salvage the situation, Julie apologized and wished the receptionist a good day, “Je vous souhaite une bonne journée, madame.” But it was hopeless. When Julie returned to the post office she got exactly the same cool reception she had gotten the first time. Post office errands became Jean-Benoît’s responsibility. He had never had a problem with the Ice Queen.
Fortunately, the damage of a botched bonjour can sometimes be undone. We learned this in our first few weeks of French school life. Every school day started and ended with our principal, Madame Montoux, standing outside the school entrance saying bonjour and au revoir to some three hundred kids and one hundred parents, grandparents, and nannies. On the third week of school Julie approached Madame Montoux to see if she could volunteer or participate in school life somehow. On her first attempt, Julie took the direct approach—too direct, it turned out. “Bonjour, I was wondering if there was a way I could get involved or help out?” Madame Montoux just stared back. For a second, Julie wondered if her Quebec accent had startled the principal.
But that wasn’t the problem. Julie had failed to wait for the reciprocal bonjour. Julie backtracked and reapproached with better pacing. Unlike the Ice Queen at the post office, our school principal was willing to forgive and forget. She directed Julie to a parent volunteer who happened to be on the sidewalk that morning, and ten minutes later, Julie was sitting in the corner café with members of the parents’ association of our school. By the end of the meeting, she was running for a seat on the Conseil des parents—no small matter, since school elections are organized nationally in France, with competing parties and formal voting ballots.
In other words, Julie was literally running for political office three weeks after arriving in Paris. That’s how far a well-delivered bonjour can get you in France.
2
Privacy Rules
While she was researching her story on services for handicapped tourists in Paris, Julie met the city’s deputy mayor of Paris responsible for disability, Véronique Dubarry. Madame Dubarry took her activist role very seriously. She actually spent most of the interview criticizing Parisians’ disdain for the disabled. According to what Julie had seen, things weren’t too bad, but there were exceptions. Julie mentioned the fact that she had occasionally watched mothers push their strollers into the zones reserved for wheelchairs on city buses. Madame Dubarry nearly exploded—not at Julie’s observation, which she agreed with, but at Julie’s inadvertent sexism. “WHO pushes strollers? People push strollers, not mothers!”
Julie tried to salvage the situation by directing the conversation away from wheelchairs to the issue of non-voyants (visually impaired). She assumed the neutral terminology would appease Madame Dubarry. How wrong she was. “Ils sont aveugles (blind)!” Madame Dubarry shouted. If Julie had been interviewing someone in Madame Dubarry’s shoes in North America, that person might have corrected her, but she would have taken care not to make it sound too much like a reproach. In France, it’s perfectly acceptable to emphatically contradict a virtual stranger.
Simon Kuper, a reporter for the Financial Times based in Paris, wrote a bold column in 2013 that got straight to the heart of what stumps most foreigners in Paris: the damn codes. All societies have codes, Kuper argues, but Paris sets the bar too high. There are two kinds of codes in France. There are the signals the French use for communicating, specific things people say all the time, like bonjour. But then there are the unarticulated rules, which Kuper was referring to. “If you overlay an intellectual capital on an artistic and fashion capita
l in a former royal capital, all of it in the country that invented how to eat, there are so many codes governing so many behaviors that the demands of sophistication become all-encompassing.”1 As he put it, “In Paris, Big Brother (often in the form of oneself or one’s spouse) is always watching to see if you commit a faux pas.”
Those codes in France can seem like invisible road signs on a stormy night. But they’re not. Many of the mysteries around French codes boil down to one issue: the French have vastly different notions of what constitutes public versus private behavior. For example, North Americans always find it a bit unsettling in casual conversation when the French decline to offer their names or state what they do for a living, sometimes after hours of talking. But that’s because names and occupations are considered personal information in France. Asking for someone’s name even after you have said bonjour is considered invasive and inappropriate, and comes across as an interrogation. Then, as Madame Dubarry reminded Julie, in France arguing is a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, thing to do with people you don’t know and may never see again.
To grasp what’s public and what’s private in France, it’s best to forget about the “damn codes” and to think about “bubbles” instead. It was the great anthropologist Edward T. Hall, in the 1960s, who introduced the concept, which he actually called “spatial dimensions.” According to Hall, people in all cultures have imaginary rings that define the territory around them in slices, or in spheres. These territories represent the degree of control a person expects to have over whoever is inside them. At the core, very near the self, you have the intimate sphere, into which very few people are admitted. The next ring is the personal sphere, where several more people are welcome. Then, outside of that, there is the social bubble, which refers to anyone with whom a person is willing to interact. And then, on the outside of that, there is the public bubble, the largest ring, which consists of everyone you are vaguely aware of.
It’s actually not that difficult to understand the French bubbles. Regardless of whether you are close or far, it’s what’s said—or not said—inside them that determines the nature of the relationship with an interlocutor. If there’s no talk, there’s no relationship. Merely smiling in France is not a signal anyone wants to be your friend. Someone has to say something first. As we’ve seen, you can’t even be part of the bubble that constitutes the public sphere in France without opening your mouth.2 If you don’t say bonjour, you don’t exist. For that matter, when you find yourself in a packed subway car in Paris, pushed physically against another passenger, even in quite intimate physical contact, the French mark the distance by not saying a word. They don’t communicate in the least, not even by smiling—something North Americans find unsettling, because it’s our preferred technique for sending the message “it’s not personal.”
Getting access to the different bubbles is mostly a matter of understanding what topics are broached inside them, and what aren’t. If someone starts arguing with you, it might not signify anything more than the fact that the person acknowledges you, and maybe wants to interact with you. It is quite acceptable to voice critical opinions to a perfect stranger in France. And if you do it, people will not cut you off or tell you to quiet down (unless maybe you are in a theater). Correcting is also normal public behavior. The French remark rather freely on everything from others’ language to their appearance. It’s not always nice, but it’s not impolite.
Julie had a hard time getting the knack of this the first time we moved to France. Like many North Americans, when a Parisian joked about her accent—or her ignorance—she took it personally. The problem was, as a North American, Julie instinctively felt that poking fun at someone is something you do in private. It took her a while to understand that for the French, ribbing someone is not only acceptable public behavior; it’s actually quite flattering in its way. Occasionally, it is blatant bullying, but more often than not, it means someone wants to talk to you. After a year of smarting from what felt like head-on attacks by the merchants in our neighborhood, Julie had a breakthrough and realized it was best to think about French conversation as a recreational sport.
It also took us a while to get used to the fact that disagreement among couples is acceptable public behavior. It is, in fact, almost desirable, since it passes for a sign that a relationship is strong. This is the main reason French couples casually slip into spats, right in front of everyone. In France, arguing contradictory viewpoints as though your life depends on it is not gauche. Up to a certain point, it’s considered good fun. We observed this over and over at different dinner parties with North American and French acquaintances. The North American couples, consciously or not, work together to project an image of harmony. They support each other’s views, or if they do disagree, they do it gently, often packaging their views with an explanatory note that opens a social escape hatch for their partner (“my wife and I don’t always agree on everything”). Meanwhile, over on the French side of the table, the couples are heartily sparring about politics, art, women’s rights, or the president’s latest fling. At dinner, French couples just do what they normally do, maybe even better. The French are actually suspicious about couples that seem too harmonious. They think they’re hiding something.
So how do you move into the French personal sphere? In the most famous French novella of all time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, one of the best-known anecdotes involves the little prince meeting a fox. When the prince tells the fox he wants to play with him, the fox answers that he can’t, because the prince needs to “tame” him (apprivoiser) first. The prince then asks what that means, and the fox explains that it is about establishing ties. With his tale about the universal theme of friendship, Saint-Exupéry appealed to audiences far beyond the borders of France, but the topic struck a chord with the French in particular because it explores the things you have to do to be part of someone’s private sphere. For the French, creating a bond with someone—entering someone’s personal or private sphere and becoming friends—is akin to taming. There are a series of stages that must be followed.
Luckily, the process of becoming friends in France is quite straightforward once you know the key words. When the French want to have a more personal relationship, when they want to go from the social bubble to the personal or even the intimate, they send crystal-clear signals, far more obvious signs than North Americans do. In a nutshell, they talk about private topics, which for them are family, work, and money. They also use humor—the private version of wit, which they display in public.
Fifteen years ago, Jean-Benoît befriended Daniel in his hiking club, after mistaking him for a snob. Daniel is always impeccably dressed in well-cut jackets and well-waxed shoes (which he actually polishes with champagne). Jean-Benoît is Daniel’s scruffy alter ego, but despite being aesthetically mismatched, the two connected instantly. That was personal chemistry. Friendship was a different matter. In retrospect, Jean-Benoît realized that Daniel was the first of our French connaissances to send a clear message he was opening the door to friendship. And he did that by broaching two topics the French only discuss with friends: his job and his family. The two became friends because Jean-Benoît reciprocated. It all unfolded spontaneously, and Julie was soon included in the circle.
When they are not at work, the French rarely talk about it with strangers, except in impersonal terms. They will not say they like their work, or discuss their true feelings regarding their peers and their superiors outside of general terms. If a French person tells you she likes her work, it’s a sign she regards you as a friend. Likewise, the French won’t mention family problems until they are ready to go all the way and welcome you into their inner circle.
In addition to talking about their families or their jobs, there’s another sure sign a French person is inviting you into his or her personal sphere: humor and self-deprecation. In France, humor is definitely reserved for the private sphere. In public, the French practice esprit, a form of high-spirited wit th
at can be quite funny but that doesn’t have the self-deprecating dimension of humor. The French love to show wit in public, essentially a spirited display of their intelligence and level of culture. Wit shows people you are smart and can communicate.
The French can be extremely funny in public, but it will rarely be humorous. Humor is almost always self-deprecating and puts you on the same level as everyone else. In North America, politicians prefer humor over wit, because with wit they run the risk of looking lofty or arrogant. Humor charms, and brings them down to a level ordinary people can relate to. But the French don’t think there’s anything funny about authority figures poking fun at themselves, particularly in public. Attempts at humor are yet another sign that the French want to establish a more personal relationship. If you try to be humorous with someone as a means of getting acquainted, he’ll think you are making a fool of yourself. Of course France has hordes of great comedians and humorists. And they do laugh at themselves in public. It’s their job description. French comedians do publicly what no one else would do, except in private.
Humor is one of the many problems of François Hollande, one of the most unpopular French presidents in French history. In Parisian press circles Hollande is reputed to be hilarious—in private. One of his many nicknames is Monsieur petites blagues (Mister small jokes). Because he’s so funny, he wins people over in one-on-one meetings. That might explain how he worked his way up to being a presidential candidate for France’s Socialist Party. But humor has no value in public. Hollande’s advisers do everything they can to make him seem less funny, to keep him from making a fool of himself. The result can be summed up by yet another nickname, Flanby, the name of a bland, jiggly caramel custard.
The Bonjour Effect Page 3
