The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  The refreshing thing about the French is that once you grasp these basic codes, you pretty much know where you stand with people. When the French don’t want a relationship or a friendship, they simply don’t reciprocate. They won’t engage in humor or talk shop or about family. And if you refuse to broach those topics as well, they’ll instantly understand that you are keeping them at bay. No explanation required.

  Two months after our arrival, we were invited to an informal supper at the home of Mélanie and Antoine, the parents of one of our daughters’ school friends. Julie had met Mélanie at the café near our daughters’ school, where parents’ association meetings took place. An invitation to dinner soon followed. The evening was odd, even odder than the mismatched meal of waffles and good burgundy wine. While we ate, we learned that Mélanie was part of a group of parents who were trying to get a teacher at our daughters’ school fired. We tried to keep an open mind, but we really liked the teacher, who was an immigrant himself and particularly welcoming to students from other countries. Our reticence to engage with this couple probably shone through in our reserve. We didn’t really pry. Like almost all French dinner parties, opinions flowed as fast as wine, so when we left, we had a pretty clear idea of what Mélanie and Antoine thought about religion and the quality of France’s school system. But we didn’t have a clue what either of them did for a living. And while we spent half the evening listening to stories about Antoine’s family wine business in Burgundy, we didn’t hear a peep about either Antoine’s or Mélanie’s actual families beyond their involvement in the wine business. Jobs and family are just not things you talk about with strangers, or even connaissances, and that’s what we were, connaissances—and that’s what we remained. No questions asked.

  French people who have lived for a while in North America, whether in New York City, Los Angeles, or Montreal, all have the same traumatic story. They find themselves in a bar chatting with a perfect stranger. They drink; they tell each other their personal story. The French are convinced they have a friend for life. And then, when they meet that person two days later and realize that person doesn’t remember their name, they are lost. This situation happens because in North America, giving your name and talking about your personal life is something you do in public and it doesn’t mean anything. In France, name exchanges amount to something of a commitment. (Strangely, outside of formal contexts, introductions almost never happen, and when they do, they come late—if at all. The logic is that if you know about a person, you’re in and you don’t need to be introduced.)3

  The zone between friend and stranger is where things get tricky in France. Many people learning French assume that the choice of the personal pronoun tu versus the more formal vous is directly related to the degree of intimacy you share with a collocutor and can operate as signposts to tell you where you are with someone. If only it were that simple. Tu and vous are, indeed, codes. The French even make them into the verbs tutoyer (“to use tu”) and vouvoyer (“to use vous”) and nouns tutoiement (“tu-saying”) and vouvoiement (“vous-saying”), to make it possible to talk about the rules that govern their use.4 In whatever form, the terms can signify many things. The use of vous signals formality but also solemnity. Vous is used to address someone older; it’s a mark of rank or perceived distance. Even someone who is introduced to you by first name should be addressed in the vous form to mark rank. A waiter, for instance, who uses tu with a customer is being condescending, even insulting. Tu is used, in some contexts, not to mark familiarity but common membership or allegiance. For instance, graduates of any grande école address each other with tu no matter what their differences in age or rank.

  The French choose whether you use tu or vous to send specific signals. Even in a formal or relatively formal context, a stranger may address you as tu because of perceived or demonstrated equality. When the proper use is not clear, it’s usually a good idea to use vous as a default. (It’s never impolite.) The worst that can happen is that you end up sounding a bit insecure. But you’re better safe than sorry. Especially if you are unsure about French proxemics and don’t really know exactly what bubble you are in.5

  When used properly, the tu-vous distinction can be a great tool for building relationships with the French. That’s because acknowledging hierarchical positions is a good way to establish a foothold with anyone in France. We had brunch one afternoon with Armand Compte, the brother of a friend who had invited us. Armand, who was working on a Ph.D. in history, regaled us with stories of letter writing in the academic world, in particular, the strict codes—formulas, really—that scholars and students use to mark rank. If you are a professor writing to a student, he told us, you have to sign your letter “Bien à vous” (with best wishes) or “Cordialement” (cordially). But if you are a student responding to a professor, you have to write “Respectueusement” (respectfully). Likewise, if you are a professor writing to a superior, say, to a minister or to the principal of your university, you have to conclude your letter “Respectueusement.” But then the principal will come back to you with cordialement or bien à vous (because he or she is your superior), unless a previous relationship allows for more familiarity. “If you deviate from these rules, you’re sunk,” Armand told us. (Armand was just dumbfounded by the almost universal habit in U.S. academic circles of signing exchanges with “Best.” “Who is best?” he asked us. “Why are they best?”)

  Jean-Benoît did not know about this nuance—Quebeckers are more casual about such things. But when he consciously applied Armand’s rules, he suddenly got more answers to his e-mail queries. The people he approached as a journalist did not feel slighted. That’s what understanding the codes can do for you.

  One of the most remarkable cultural differences between the French and the Americans is that the French have few amis, friends. Despite what English-French dictionaries say, ami does not have the same meaning as the English “friend.” The French have strict rules about what constitutes un ami, and the term can’t be used casually to refer to someone you like but don’t know well. They refer to that category of acquaintances as a connaissance. A connaissance still has to travel quite a long road to become un ami.

  When the French have a business or social connection with a connaissance, that person becomes a relation. Interestingly, even connaissances have degrees. When the French speak of someone they know very well, they will qualify the connaissance as “old” rather than “good”—a vieille connaissance implies that you have known the person for a while, but it actually refers to someone you know well. The expression is curiously dispassionate: a vieille connaissance may or may not be someone you actually like. When this connaissance becomes more affectionate, the French speak of a pote (pronounced like “putt”), which is very colloquial. A pote isn’t exactly a friend either. It’s a person with whom you share les atomes crochus (good chemistry). In today’s French, copain implies a love relation. (Strangely, the French have no direct translation of “girlfriend” or “boyfriend.” Quebeckers do. They call a girlfriend une blonde and a boyfriend, un chum.)

  A true ami, also called un intime, is for the happy few and has the specific meaning of a “very good friend, almost family.”6 You have to beware of its use in certain contexts: when someone you hardly know speaks directly to you as “mon ami,” it’s almost always condescending. And you become un ami after you have gone through the obligatory stages of connaissance, relation, and pote, and have progressed from talking about ideas and arguing to discussing family and work and using humor. It is the French adult’s version of the little prince taming his fox.

  French authors and artists have written beautifully about friendship over the centuries, and it’s a testament to the incredible value the French place on intense relationships. The French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) is probably most famous for summing up the essence of friendship when he wrote about his relationship with the French writer and philosopher Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563). “Parce que c’était lui, parc
e que c’était moi” (Because he was he, and I was I). It might be the most beautiful pair of phrases ever written about a platonic relationship.

  Second prize would go to the painter and sculptor Georges Braque (1882–1963), who wrote about his relationship with Pablo Picasso. The two artists, who jointly forged Cubism among other things, had a legendary, fusional friendship between 1907 and 1914, when they saw each other at least once a day and developed a totally new way of looking at physical reality and representing it. Much later, in a rare interview, Braque said: “In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say anymore.… It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together.”7 (World War I separated the pair. Picasso, a Spaniard, was never called to arms. Braque, a lieutenant, was nearly blinded in combat and spent a year convalescing. By the time Braque recovered, he had moved on and the rope was cut, their atomes no longer crochus.)

  The true dimension of un ami is something close to family and love, and it is a mutual and reciprocal feeling—this is the intimate circle. Although the process is codified, it doesn’t necessarily take long to get through the stages to friendship. When we met our friends Anne and François in March 1999, things moved so quickly that Julie became the godmother of their daughter Ambre a year later.

  To the French, having a lot of friends sounds like you take friendship lightly. Like love and like family, friendship comes with privileges, and with responsibilities. The main privilege is access. The responsibility is an unspoken promise to help whenever asked, no questions asked. During one of our first dinners with Anne and François, when we returned to France in 2013, we told them we had not brought our daughters’ guitars to France because of luggage limitations. François stared at us for a second, then turned around, picked up the phone, and called his old friend, Alain Mazaud, a guitar maker in the Normandy village of Fresney-le-Puceux. “Salut, Alain, it’s me.… Look, I have a friend here, Jean-Benoît.… Yes, him. He has these twin daughters who play guitar. But they left their guitars back in Montreal. So, listen, I need that old guitar of yours. You know the one … yes. They are here for the year.… Bring it with you when you come next weekend. And don’t forget the case. Bye.”

  François didn’t even specifically ask his friend Alain to help us. He told him he needed a guitar, thanked him, and hung up. Alain probably remembered meeting us a decade earlier, but it didn’t matter. Alain and François were friends. And François was our friend. In France, friends don’t explain why they are asking favors (or in our case, receiving favors). That’s one big reason the French may have lots of relations, but very few friends. Who could possibly manage more than a few?

  3

  Finding the Yes in Non

  All cultures have distinct ways of saying no. Not all of them include actually saying no. The British and Americans pad refusals with expressions like “I hear you” or “I understand what you are saying.” The Japanese never say the word “no” when they are speaking to a superior or to a client; instead, they hem and haw until their collocutor picks up the cue and provides them with a way out.

  The French just say no. They say it everywhere, all the time, with no états d’âmes, no compunction. They say no when they mean yes. And they say no when they want you to think they might eventually say yes. The trick is in understanding the many things “no” can actually mean.

  In situations that require politeness or deference, “no” can be dressed up in perplexing phrases like “Ça ne va pas être possible” (That will not be possible), or sometimes even “C’est la France” (That’s France for you). In other situations, the French can turn a no into a categorical refusal with expressions like “Pas question” (It’s out of the question), or our favorite, “Ça n’existe pas” (It doesn’t exist). The most polite form of “no” is “je suis désolée” (I’m very sorry).

  Whatever its form, non is a foundational concept in French culture. It’s actually something of a republican reflex: the French Revolution was about the irrevocable right of all citizens to refuse, and non has a quality of revanche des petits contre les grands (revenge of the underclasses) that seems to satisfy the inner peasant or proletarian in every French person, of any class.

  But the non reflex is more than revolutionary romanticism. Non is how the French express and emphasize authority, whether at home or at work. French children are raised in the belief that what has not been explicitly authorized has by default been denied. Saying non means you are in charge, and being in charge means you say non. Non, for that matter, is one of the key ingredients of France’s deeply entrenched tradition of bureaucratic obstinacy—even the French know this. In 2013, we watched in awe as the French government tried to force bureaucrats to start saying yes. France passed a law stipulating that all queries to the government would have to be answered within sixty days—revolutionary enough in itself—and if this didn’t happen, the official answer, by default, would be yes—yes. We didn’t have time to see whether this initiative had any effect.

  It’s hard to imagine it will. The French even say non to non. Between the French oui and non, there is si, an interesting nuance, completely absent from the English lexicon. Si is often translated as “yes,” but its grammatical purpose is actually to contradict a negative statement. For the question, “Luc n’est pas venu?” (Didn’t Luc come?), the proper response—if it turns out that he did—is si. In other words, instead of saying yes, the French have a word that says non twice.1

  Luckily, non is often a oui in disguise. The trick is figuring out how to turn no into yes. Although its uses are broad, there is really only one thing outsiders need to grasp. The French don’t take non for an answer, and neither should you. It’s difficult for foreigners to desensitize themselves to the sting of the non, which sounds like a refusal to engage. In fact, non is the opposite. When the French vehemently disagree with something, non doesn’t mean the conversation is over. It’s more like a conversation starter, a bargaining position, or an invitation to make a counteroffer. The mistake is to consider non a stone wall when it actually operates like a trampoline.

  Like negotiations with Mediterranean merchants—and the French do share that heritage—interactions in France tend to begin when two parties have laid their positions on the table. Non is what gets things rolling. If everyone agrees, there’s nothing to talk about. (Paradoxically, talking is even the key to understanding when a French person doesn’t want to talk to you. The French don’t send the signal with body language or facial expressions. When French really don’t want to talk to you, they don’t open their mouths. To them, the message is loud and clear.)

  The best thing to do when facing a firm French no is to keep talking. The lessons came flying back to Julie when she went to buy her first Paris subway pass. Transport is not exactly a free market in Paris. Monthly bus and metro passes are only available to Parisians who can prove with a utility bill that they live there. Unfortunately, Julie only recalled this after she had made the thirty-minute trip to the Opéra metro station to buy her pass. But she thought it was worth trying to talk her way into a pass. She started explaining to the young woman behind the ticket counter: “I live in Paris. But I just moved here. So I don’t have my justificatif de domicile [proof of address] with me.”

  “Je suis désolée madame,” the agent replied. It was that gently wrapped no. But Julie could tell from the clerk’s body language that the door was still open. Julie had used some key French terminology—justificatif de domicile—and it was a good start. She scoured her mind for other bureaucratic buzzwords that might break the agent’s resistance. “I don’t have my lease with me because my husband has it. He went to get our Carte Vitale [France’s health card] at the Caisse primaire d’assurance maladie [Health Insurance Primary Fund],” she said. The bureaucratic brand names worked their magic. The agent was still shaking her head, but more gently, so Julie soldiered on. She pulled our daughters up to her side and talked about how fortunate we were to h
ave a school that was right across the street from our apartment.

  “What school do your daughters attend?” the agent asked brightly. Julie named the school. The receptionist turned to her computer and crosschecked it with our address, then smiled and took Julie’s photo. “Welcome to Paris,” she said. “What do you think of the French school system?”

  Sometimes the French say no out of pure gamesmanship. It’s a curious cultural difference: in some cultures (like ours) agreement can actually lead to sharing and comparing stories. But to the French, “yes” often sounds like a dead end. A frank non is a better show of spirit than automatic acquiescence, and it often sparks a discussion. But there is more to the French non than just verbal jousting, and foreigners should never take no for an answer in France until they have figured out what it actually means.

  The French say no to get around a series of French taboos.

  The first of these is the fear of ridicule, and of being blamed for things. North Americans have a quasi-universal fear of being disliked or not being accepted. The desire to be liked produces a culture that values huge smiles, even in the most desperate and unfriendly situations. When disputes arise, North Americans usually try conciliation and consensus building first. We don’t like appearing too authoritative. We even say we don’t know when we do. It’s a way of reaching out. We also say we’re sorry when we’re not, and accept blame that’s not ours, because it’s often just the best way to keep things moving.

  This would never work for the French, and for one reason: the French almost universally fear being found en faute (at fault) for something. This fear of faute is behind many, if not most, of the spontaneous noes you hear in France. It’s not that the French are opposed to pleasing people. But pleasing is not nearly as important to them as making sure they never get blamed for a problem or oversight.