The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  In short, authority is never understated in France. It is probably the central notion that unifies all French families. This is why no one shies away from using words like enfants sages (well-behaved children), cadre (frame), or éducation (the rules of which everyone agrees on). They are universal and well-accepted foundational concepts. Nor do you often see French parents trying to be their children’s “friend.” Whatever their failings as parents—and France’s divorce rate is 55 percent, roughly comparable to that of the United States at 53 percent—trying to be a child’s friend is a mistake as far as French parents are concerned.7 French parents consider it their prerogative to call the shots.

  French parents can be strangely permissive: at parks, at parties, even in restaurants, French kids do all sorts of annoying things in front of other parents, and sometimes parents carry on the conversation without seeming annoyed at all. But when enough is enough, parents clamp down and don’t apologize for it. French children make demands and parents often give in. But both parents and children know who’s in charge. We never hear French parents justify their decisions with long explanations appealing to children’s sense of responsibility, for instance. When French parents complain about other parents, the first thing they say is that they “are not strict enough.”

  So why don’t little French kids all grow up to be docile, subservient adults? For one thing, when they go to school, the first thing they learn is how to talk like adults themselves.

  6

  The Art of Conversation

  One drizzly November evening in Paris, we left our daughters at home and headed out to a small dinner party near the Luxembourg Gardens. Our hostess was Guillemette Mouren, the editor of a magazine put out by the lobby group Défense de la langue française (Defense of the French language). A sharp and elegant woman in her early seventies, she had interviewed Jean-Benoît earlier in the year about our book on the French language and, afterward, invited us for dinner.

  After a short walk through the winding streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter, we found the door to Guillemette’s building on le boulevard Saint-Michel and typed the digicode to get in. Then we walked through not one, not two, but three inner courtyards before arriving at the door of her elegant ground-floor apartment (which had its own private garden, as we would see). The dwelling was a perfect example of the Parisian bourgeois style, sumptuous and spacious with high ceilings and pristine white walls, furnished with brightly polished antiques.

  Guillemette greeted us warmly at her door and invited us into the living room for the apéro, before-dinner drinks. Her husband was seated there with another polished-looking couple in their seventies, Corrine and Giorgio. As Guillemette served champagne, cherry tomatoes, and finger pastries, we chatted about current events. The previous week, a Quebec writer of Haitian origin, Dany Laferrière, had been elected to the French Academy. As fellow nationals, we thought we’d share a few thoughts on Laferrière’s literary merits.

  No sooner had we opened our mouths than one of the ladies, Corrine, veered off into left field with a completely off-color remark about the French Academy. It was what the French call une énormité, an outrageous comment. “Everyone knows it’s easier to be elected if you are a homosexual,” she declared. We stared dumbly for a few seconds. It was the first time we’d heard anything of the sort about membership criteria for academicians, let alone speculation about Dany Laferrière’s sexual orientation. We told her that Dany Laferrière was aux femmes (into women) as far as we knew and waited for someone to change the topic.

  Things improved half an hour later, when we figured out why this particular small group had been brought together. It turned out we were the guests of honor at a small gathering of hard-core Quebecophiles. Corrine and her Italian husband, Giorgio, had met during a snowstorm in Quebec City in the 1960s, when she was a ballet teacher and he was a young diplomat. After they got married, they lived in Montreal for a few years. They seemed to have loved every minute of it, including the snow. Corrine then told us, in delicious detail, about how she met the French president Charles de Gaulle during his famous state visit to Quebec in 1967.

  Dany Laferrière was long forgotten and the conversation was rolling by the time Guillemette invited us to passer à table, move to the table. Guillemette had placed platters of sauerkraut, sausages, mashed potatoes, and bread on the table so she wouldn’t have to run back and forth to the kitchen serving all night, which would interrupt the flow of the conversation, or make her miss out on something. In short, she had put together a meal not so much designed to show off her cooking skills as to keep the conversation flowing. The group regaled us with stories from their long lives in France and overseas. After Quebec, Corrine and Giorgio went on to live in the United States and Australia. Just before Guillemette served dessert—a simple apple pie that we cut and served ourselves—the conversation turned to Paris itself. Over the years, these couples had seen it all and were still reveling in the city’s cultural life. We listened carefully, taking mental notes.

  And then, more than an hour after we had arrived, we finally woke up and remembered our manners. French conversation does not follow rules so much as adhere to values. The most important one is that you have to give as much as you take. We had been doing a lot of listening that evening. Too much, in fact. The French love to hear foreigners’ observations and insights about their own country, and we had been doing that, but it wasn’t enough. You can’t be a good conversationalist by just being polite. If you spend the whole evening just listening, commenting on other people’s observations, and politely agreeing or demurring, you aren’t playing fair—or well. Conversation in France is like tennis: to be a good player you have to do more than just return the easy balls.

  Julie suddenly snapped out of her reserve just as the cheese course arrived. The conversation had turned to a new Art Deco show going on at the museum of the Trocadéro, behind the Eiffel Tower. She leaned forward and cocked her head to the side apologetically to soften the blow of what she was about to say. Then she just spit it out. “You have to admit, Art Deco was European fascists’ favorite decoration.”

  Julie had just uttered her very own énormité. There was a pregnant pause around the table. Then Giorgio smiled and leaned forward like we were about to start a game of poker. “How interesting,” he said, with a smile. On the other side of the table, his wife Corrine called Julie “charming,” with a wink. And the conversation took off. Everyone has something to say about fascism. And about art. So for the next half hour, we had a spirited discussion about whether one could separate art from politics or enjoy the aesthetic quality of Art Deco independently of its political associations. We hadn’t been invited simply as a courtesy, and no one here expected us to be polite or respectful. Our hosts were hoping for some action, some friction. They wanted to have some fun.

  As we walked back out through all the courtyards after leaving Guillemette’s apartment at the end of the evening, we felt as though we had been to a French salon (partly, of course, because of the swank surroundings). A French person might actually laugh at us for thinking such a thing. Most French consider salons a thing of the past, and strictly speaking, they are. Over the course of French history, forums for conversation have shifted, notably from salons, to discussion groups, to clubs, to dîners en ville (our experience at Guillemette’s). But one feature unites French conversation wherever it happens: a certain culture of eloquence. In other words, the spirit of salons lives on.

  Strangely, although everyone in France knows about the salons, French aren’t really conscious their conversation has a particular style. To them, it’s simply the way it is. The French don’t seem to realize how much their conversation style today owes to rituals that developed centuries ago.

  French salons started popping up, in an early form, in the seventeenth century. At the time, they were informal gatherings in private homes, mostly in Paris, called cercles (circles) or académies (academies). The French were actually emulating the Italians, w
ho, during the Renaissance, had revived the ancient Greek “art of conversation.” But if the French didn’t invent this art, they certainly succeeded in branding it as uniquely French. The French marquise de Rambouillet, who was born Catherine de Vivonne in 1588, is credited with running one of the first truly influential speaking circles. When she was still a young bride, she got bored of life at the French court and decided to create her own private conversation circle. She moved into a new town house, located on the site of today’s Louvre, painted her bedroom blue—pretty scandalous at the time—and then turned it into a reception room.

  Until the death of the marquise de Rambouillet in 1665, the Hôtel de Rambouillet was frequented by some of the most intriguing and provocative minds of seventeenth-century France, including the poet François de Malherbe (who invented language purism) and the Cardinal Richelieu, King Louis XIII’s chief minister (who was behind the rise of political absolutism). Guests read poetry and letters, criticized the latest literary works, analyzed French grammar, and discussed the state of morals and society’s values. After that, salons just took off.

  Historians attributed the multiplication of literary circles—which would only later be called “salons”—mostly to the intellectual atmosphere of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Salons gave people a place to talk, away from the stiff rules of the French court. According to the French historian Marc Fumaroli, France’s preeminent thinker on the art of conversation and member of the French Academy, salons were practically born of necessity. In his book Trois institutions littéraires (Three literary institutions), Fumaroli argues that French salons were a pressure valve for the increasingly rigid French state, what he characterizes as “the unstable, arbitrary and damaging character of France’s political and administrative institutions.”1 According to Fumaroli, salons were also a place the French could rebel against their ultraconservative clergy.

  Early salons, like Madame de Rambouillet’s, ended up playing an important role in the development of the French language. There was relatively little published literature at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France, and the grammar rules of French had not yet been formalized. Elevated conversation was an ideal forum for hammering out French grammar. In fact, one of Madame de Rambouillet’s most revered guests, the Cardinal Richelieu, was so impressed by the quality and nature of the debate at her house, he hijacked another literary circle in Paris and turned it into the French Academy.

  But salons weren’t exclusively aristocratic think tanks. Figures of relatively modest origin were welcome there, as well as personalities with less stellar intellectual credentials, like soldiers. All they needed was esprit (wit) and something interesting to add to the conversation. Each participant’s value was measured by the quality of his or her commentary, and how much he, or she (women were welcome, too), contributed to the common pool of topics and ideas. And new participants could truly make their mark in society by perfoming well at a salon. Madame de Rambouillet regularly invited the poet Vincent Voiture, son of a wine merchant who went on to become one of the first members of the French Academy when it was founded in 1635.

  Even today, conversation operates as a remarkable equalizer in French society. As Marc Fumaroli puts it, “Joining a conversation, whether it is sophisticated or natural, is a game you play with partners you consider your equals. The only thing one expects from them is to play well.”2 As the French literary critic Emmanuel Godo argues, in the salons, different sexes, different talents, different conditions, and different characters were not considered a source of conflict, but of richness, and promised enjoyment. The French love conversations in which diverse perspectives clash and people duke it out intellectually. That’s considered far more interesting than reaching consensus. So it’s easy to understand why “political correctness” irks the French. It’s boring.3

  Generations of French thinkers have dissected the art of conversation in attempts to define its precise qualities, essence, and true objectives—which is paradoxical, since reaching consensus is usually the last thing the French really want to do when they enter into conversation. As Marc Fumaroli writes, “Salon participants had to be interesting and informed but not weighty and erudite; they had to speak brilliantly but without humiliating anyone; their words had to be moderate but at the same time spontaneous and personalized, a bit racy, spiced with a bit of irony, but no bad will.”4

  To an outsider, the French art of conversation sounds like a bundle of contradictions and it is. Excelling in the art of French conversation was, and remains, a tall order. Participants are expected to be playful, or, as the modern-day French philosopher and anthropologist Pierre Sansot puts it, in an essay called Le goût de la conversation (The taste for conversation), conversation requires a certain “lightness.” “Dreary or serious conversations worry us and make us self-conscious about enjoying life,” he writes. “Conversation requires good-natured familiarity and a propensity for marveling at life.”5 At the same time, Sansot argues, good conversation requires “impertinence, and a little discomfort.” As we were reminded at Guillemette’s house, playing the conversation game well does require taking risks: everyone is expected to plunge in at some point. Corrine’s early comment regarding Dany Laferièrre’s sexual orientation was probably just that—a bit of what the French call provoc (short for provocation, provocation).And that’s a good thing.

  Yet provoking just to get a rise out of someone is off limits. Why? Good conversationalists have to be honest ones. Or as Godo puts it in his Histoire de la conversation (History of conversation), participants should consider conversation a game, and respond to its rules. You need to listen to other participants rather than make a show of yourself, Godo argues. But then, there are limits to being honest. As Sansot points out, “No one should use conversations as an excuse to spill their guts.” Taking the game too literally, he says, and dragging everyone into your drama, will ruin it for everyone.

  Then there’s the rule of reciprocity. To play the game well, you need to known when to talk, and when to listen. Everyone should try his or her best. But no one should steal the show. That would be tantamount to stealing from the kitty. As Sansot puts it, “I would absolutely never invite back a pedant, an opportunist or a whiner, nor someone pretentious or ironic who breaks up the harmony and mutual trust of the company.” And of course, there’s spontaneity. If you really want to make your mark as a good conversationalist, you need to have all the above qualities, plus an excellent memory to quickly conjure witty reparties, comebacks. Because conversation is meant to be spontaneous, not studied. And finally, you need a fine mastery of the language—because using the language well is paramount, if not the whole point.

  In short, the art of conversation in France, as it was originally conceived, and still practiced, is something like an English garden: it’s highly cultivated to look and feel natural.

  Curiously, talking about literary salons with the French spurs mixed reactions. Modern French tend to associate salons with one of the sillier contingents of young women who attended them, whom the French literary giant Molière dubbed les précieuses ridicules (pretentious young ladies), the name of a play he wrote about them. Many French associate the art of conversation itself with the frivolous French court life of the seventeenth century. It’s a strange bias, because salons (and the word wasn’t actually used until 1783) became serious business with the arrival of the French philosophes and with the events of the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. As Godo puts it, the purpose of salons was no longer to celebrate the present but “to change society, to invent the future.”

  No one embodied this spirit better than Madame de Staël (1766–1817), a trailblazer in French salon culture who is enjoying something of a comeback among French intellectuals today. Born Germaine Necker, she was the daughter of King Louis XIV’s finance minister. She began attending her mother’s salon in Paris when she was five. When she grew up she was married off to Sweden’s ambassador to France. It was not
a happy union and Madame de Staël dedicated the rest of her life to finding more stimulating company. She opened her first salon on Paris’s rue du Bac in 1786, three years before the French Revolution, and kept it running during the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, even after Napoleon sent her into exile for disagreeing with and defying him.

  Madame de Staël kept running her salon in the middle of social and political upheaval and wherever she found herself (at different points she lived in Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Italy, and Germany). Her years living abroad also gave her a new appreciation for what she came to think of as an innate French talent for conversation. Italians had imagination, she said. English had originality. Germans could write, but not talk—and when Germans did converse, she was stunned to learn they didn’t allow interruptions (though this is mostly because of a grammatical feature of the German language itself: German verbs often come at the end of the sentence).

  Though it was partly for her own pleasure, Madame de Staël did promote conversation as a way of bringing ideas of great thinkers to a wider audience. By her day, salons had started operating like media at a time when there was no radio and hardly any press to speak of, and when most news circulated through gossip, songs, or poems. The salons served to popularize or legitimize new ideas, in the same way high-standard radio broadcasters like NPR, the BBC, CBC, or France Culture do today. Madame de Staël herself opposed slavery and favored constitutional monarchies like England’s. She argued for a society founded on justice and humanity and was a great advocate of political power heeding public opinion—one of her biographers, Michel Winock, describes her as simply “modern.”

  Like that of her predecessor Madame de Rambouillet, Madame de Staël’s salon was frequented by some of the most brilliant minds and influential figures of her era: the philosopher Denis Diderot, the author of France’s first encyclopedia; Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), the French ambassador to the United Kingdom, considered the best conversationalist of his time; the Enlightenment philosopher Nicolas Condorcet; and the scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon.