In her salon, participants discussed religion and literature; argued about the limits of the power of the state, the place of individual liberties, and the nature of the institutions being established in the new French Republic; and talked about how to defend individual liberties against the power of the king and avoid authoritarianism in all its forms. Even in the middle of a revolution, wars, coup d’états, and regicide, French salons kept honing the art of conversation, with all its idiosyncratic rules and built-in contradictions, no matter how serious the topic. That is, the salons never became simple debating clubs. In Trois institutions littéraires, Fumaroli argues that the French love of conversation contributed to the loss of the colonial empire. He describes an eighteenth-century French diplomat who visited the United States and pointed out that there were many more French talking in cafés in New Orleans than there were working the land on their farms in rural Louisiana. Indeed, the French threw in the towel on Louisiana a few years after this visit and sold it back to the United States for $15 million. It just wasn’t a place where their true talents could flourish.
Literary salons more or less disappeared from France in the years following the French Revolution.6 The aristocracy was not gone—nor the monarchy, as the French would see when the king returned in 1814—but in this new middle-class era, aristocratic activities like salons became stigmatized. As Fumaroli puts it: “A violent prejudice against conversation came crashing down on France.” Nineteenth-century writers like Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert even made fun of organized conversation in their works.
But the French love of conversation didn’t evaporate. In the nineteenth century, artists took over from aristocrats as the cream of the crop of conversationalists. As Fumaroli says, in the new utilitarian, businesslike society of nineteenth-century France, the artist was the only one who could claim to be “a genius in leisure” (avoir du génie dans le loisir). What were originally circles, academies, and salons became cénacles (clubs). Flaubert himself had his literary club where Maupassant was a habitué. The period had its own renowned conversationalists in the form of the romantic novelist Stendhal and the writer and historian Prosper Mérimée. Victor Hugo had a club, as did Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier. The gatherings had all sorts of names, one more imaginative than the next: camaraderies, phalanstères, bandes littéraires, sociétés d’admirations mutuelles—as did the groups themselves: there were Les Réalistes, Les Parnassiens, Les Vivants, Les Hydropathes, Les Zutistes, Les Zutiques, Le Doyenné, and Les Buveurs d’eau.7
Instead of aristocratic homes, artists, poets, and the other talkative free spirits of nineteenth-century France headed to cafés. It was an important change: for the first time, conversation became an integral part of the French dining experience. In 1803, France’s very first food critic, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837), set out the rules for table talk in his Almanach des gourmands (Almanac for gourmets). Rule one: never talk about politics. “There are so many more lively and appetizing subjects … like literature, artistic performances, gallantry, love and art,” he wrote.8 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), an Epicurean who launched the first French gastronomical journal, La Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste), in 1825 had the same advice: avoid politics. It would be “troublesome to both ingestion and digestion.”
The love of conversation for its own sake lives on in modern France, and the French still embrace its contradictory values. So it’s no wonder outsiders find French conversation so baffling. There is, however, a dark side to the art of French conversation. Although meant to be amicable and inclusive—yes, even when it’s confrontational and contrarian—it produces a culture of people who feel silly if they can’t come up with a good replique, or comeback. Put simply, French culture penalizes people who are not voluble. In 2007, the French author and literature professor Pierre Bayard published a bestseller called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (How to talk about books you haven’t read) that sold eighty thousand copies in France and was translated into thirty languages. It was a perfect product of a culture where the worst thing you can do is be at a loss for words and not know what to say about a book you were supposed to have read.
That said, the French always know when a discussion has run its course. As Godo writes, conversation is “cet art de l’instant,” the art of the instant. It is “par nature fugace et insaisissable,” fleeting and evasive by nature. During the rest of our evening with Guillemette and her guests, the conversation remained stimulating and polemical, warm but never argumentative, and no one stole the show.
Then, at the strike of midnight, Giorgio gently announced he was tired. Everyone understood that the conversation had run its course and that it was time to go home.
7
Très Talk
Swimming is the most popular recreational sport in Paris. Julie learned this and other interesting facts after she asked the lifeguard at our local pool why he wasn’t doing his job. In the months she had been swimming, she hadn’t seen the young maître nageur (master swimmer) intervene a single time in the unruly waters. Now he wanted to talk about anything but his shabby work, and being French, he expertly deflected the faute for the whole problem straight back to Julie. “With so many swimmers, who could really expect Paris pools to be safe?” he asked. “Personally, madame, I would never swim here.”
In his defense, Paris’s pools are always full, and with good reason. Swimming is an inexpensive and accessible sport. Paris has thirty-seven municipal pools where swimmers can do laps for three euros. The pools are also quite nice. When we lived in the eighteenth arrondissement, our local pool faced an interior garden that provided natural light.
Julie swam in half a dozen Paris pools before she bought a membership card at the pool in the Latin Quarter, named after the former French world swimming champion Jean Taris. It wasn’t the worst place she’d swum, just the most lawless. With up to ten swimmers per lane, there was so much water being pushed around that Julie felt seasick after five laps. But the particularly high volume of swimmers just made a bad situation worse because all Paris pools have one thing in commom: a total absence of etiquette.
There are rules in a pool. Before she moved to Paris, Julie assumed these were international. You choose a lane that corresponds to your real (not imaginary) speed and you don’t kick off the wall when another swimmer is arriving; if you have a faster swimmer on your heels, you shift toward the lane marker and let her pass or wait at the wall while she turns. If French pools have similar policies, no one respects them, and lifeguards don’t enforce them. (At one of the other pools, when Julie complained about kids jumping into the lanes reserved for swimmers doing lengths, a lifeguard told her, “Children pay to swim just like you do, madame.”)
Given how fixated the French generally are on the notion of the common good, Julie always found it perverse that they put individual freedoms and laissez-faire ahead of safety the second they dive into water. Yet strangely, as soon as French swimmers left the pool and returned to the change room, Julie noticed that they snapped back into their old French ways and talked civilly. Julie even heard swimmers having a spirited discussion about their own near collision, before heading off to the hair dryers, no offense taken, apparently.
The explanation for this anomaly, we realized, is actually pretty simple. Talking is the key to all French social interactions. Since there’s no way to say bonjour, je vous en prie, or pardon under water, the speechless French revert back to a state of nature, and the swimming pool becomes a free-for-all. In chapters 1 and 2, we explained in detail why phatic terms are so important in how the French define who’s in and out. But pool tourism got us wondering: since talking is so important to the French, maybe being able to talk is an essential condition to keep French society functioning.
Jean-Benoît went to a cocktail party where he met a sociologist who studied that very issue: Professor Jean-Pierre Brun, a consultant in labor relations from Lava
l University in Quebec City who works in both Canada and France. Indeed, according to Brun, French companies systematically run into management problems whenever they make the mistake of not letting their employees discuss things, or not letting them debate enough. “The minute employees are deprived of the opportunity to express an opinion, all work relations become difficult,” he told Jean-Benoît. French employees demand and exercise this right even in situations when they know their superiors have already made up their minds, he added.
We observed the same phenomenon over and over during our year in France, including in our own business of journalism. That year there was a dispute between staff and the editor in chief of the French daily Le Monde, Natalie Nougayrède, after she announced she would be cutting some sixty jobs or be transferring them to the digital version of the paper. The editor in chief wanted to turn Le Monde into “the premier global francophone media,” she said. She had even tested out her ideas during consultations with staff. Her mistake, apparently, was that she presented the final plan as “final.” The staff of Le Monde never had the opportunity to discuss or express their opinion about the plan. So middle management turned around and had Nougayrède fired.1 French businesses are notoriously hierarchical, even at newspapers like Le Monde (or Libération) that have strong traditions of egalitarianism. But employees have to have their say anyway.
Spontaneous expression matters a lot to the French. Their entire political system is built around it. For most elections, they favor a two-round system. In the first round, voters choose their favorite party (and candidate) from a list of up to fifteen parties. Then in the second round, the voters choose between the two finalists from the first-round vote.2 The French love for protests and other public demonstrations is a direct product of their need for spontaneous expression. Demonstrations and protests are political forums in France. After the slaughters at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher grocery, 5 percent of France’s total population took to the streets. North Americans, who don’t protest in the street nearly as much as the French do, interpret it as a sign of unrest, if not political chaos. In fact, it’s the opposite: if the French couldn’t protest, that would lead to political chaos.
It’s hard to overestimate how important oral expression is in France. In the previous chapter, we explained how salon culture raised conversation to the level of an art. However, the French also have a distinct conception of this art. It’s one of the fundamental differences between the French and North Americans, and it’s nothing new. Gustave de Beaumont, the travel companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author of the classic study of American culture Democracy in America (published in 1835), was also a keen observer of American political and social mores. He wrote: “They don’t chat in the United States the way they do in France. The American always argues. He has no knowledge of the art of lightly skimming the surface of topics in a large group, where each one puts in a remark, brilliant or dull, heavy or light, where one person finishes a phrase begun by someone else, and where everything is touched on but never in depth.”3 Tocqueville, himself, had great admiration for American pntranslatable term that means both answer booklet and past racticality in speech among other things, even though it contradicted everything he had been taught about talking growing up in France. “The sole object of the people I was raised by was amusement and diversion. They never talked about politics, and I believe they scarcely thought about them.… One studied how to please as today one would study how to gain wealth or power.”4
We were struck by how these different conceptions showed up in pop culture (even when French pop culture is getting more American day by day, as it is). On American talk shows, hosts invite guests for a chat. When new guests arrive, the old guests take a backseat and listen, maybe laugh or add a thing or two, but leave the floor to the new guest. French talk shows are just a free-for-all. There can be up to eight guests, each of whom the host introduces, then releases into the ecosystem with the other guests. The point of the French talk shows is not really to hear what each guest has to say. It’s to see how they all play together, or survive each other. Each guest is expected to shine in his or her own way, while the host just makes sure the newcomer gets a chance to get a word in.
In other words, it’s a conversation. In France, conversation focuses on the relationship between interlocutors. Discussions are different. They are about examining a topic. Two or more participants dig into a topic in depth, considering different elements and perspectives. As much as the French shine in the art of conversation, discussion comes easily to them, too. And like conversation, they are practically raised to discuss. In particular, French students have been doing compulsory philosophy studies since the French Revolution (which was at least partially a product of Enlightenment philosophy itself), partly to train them in analyzing and expressing ideas. Today, all French students get a huge dose of philosophy before the age of seventeen.
The goal of philosophy studies in France is to teach kids to think, and by extension talk formally. The by-product is the French get early formal training in how to discuss issues intelligently. It shows whenever they open their mouths. Most French have been given the challenge, early in their lives, of discussing a topic, that is, carefully studying an idea or issue by analyzing it or at least weighing the pros and cons. The French are trained not to think about things in simple binary terms (good and evil, black and white, good or bad) but rather to cultivate nuances. Not everyone is good at discussing ideas and issues, but everyone understands the exercise.
French education at the lycée level (the equivalent of high school) strongly emphasizes philosophy. In the last of the three years of lycée, known as la Terminale, literature students do as much as eight hours of philosophy per week, studying as many as fifty authors in their thirty-week program. Even students who specialize in economics and social sciences do four hours of philosophy per week; science students do three hours and technology students do two. Students in vocational programs are the only ones who get to avoid philosophy altogether. This adds up to more philosophy than most university students in any American institution ever do, and it is mandatory.
Nothing illustrates the importance of philosophy quite like le bac (short for baccalauréat), and the exam that lycée students take at the end of their final year to get it. The bac exam was introduced by Napoleon in 1808. Today, every second week of June, the French media speculate about and comment specifically on the philosophy exam, which they call l’épreuve reine (the mother of all exams) for the bac. Some seven hundred thousand students across France are given four hours to produce about ten pages of copy answering one of a selection of questions. The stakes are high. The bac is a high school diploma but also very narrowly, an entry ticket to university. Students who get a très bien (a mention) on their bac exam get access to the best programs and institutions in the country. Everyone else has to settle for second (or third) best. It is so big that even a daily like Le Monde, for instance, publishes the full list of questions for the philosophy exam as well as the corrigé (an untranslatable term that means both answer booklet and past papers).5
Predictably, the students in Bac L (for literature) have to tackle the most difficult philosophy questions or topics. In 2014 they had three choices: Do works of art educate our perception? (Les œuvres éduquent-elles notre perceptions?), should we do everything to be happy? (doit-on tout faire pour être heureux?), or, finally, discuss an excerpt from Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Students in Bac ES (Economics and Social) and students in science, who do half as much philosophy, have it slightly easier.6 Students in technology had it easier still, but most North Americans sophomores would probably have trouble making a convincing philsosophical case even for the questions these French students faced: Are exchanges always self-interested? (Les échanges sont-ils toujours intéressés?), can a truth be definitive? (une vérité peut-elle être définitive?), or discuss an excerpt from Plato’s Gorgias. Statistically, at least the Fre
nch are getting better at the art of discussing as every year passes: Only 20 percent of kids passed le bac fifty years ago. Today, some 80 percent do. (That hasn’t stopped philosophy professors from complaining about how “mediocre” students are getting. On the other hand, professors are still teaching philosophy the same way they did in 1945, when not more than 5 percent of French students got to the lycée.)
Not surprisingly, because of the high value the French place on the art of discussion, philosophy has a high premium in French society. Even the École Polytechnique, France’s celebrated engineering school, has an in-house philosopher. Respect for philosophy also explains the high status of the intellectual in French society. Whether or not France is still producing thinkers of the stature of Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault is debatable, but it’s also slightly beside the point. The French admire their intellectuals. However, French intellectuals aren’t “experts” in the way we North Americans think of them. They are expert “discussers,” people who can express themselves forcefully or brilliantly about a topic, either because they have studied it thoroughly or because they just feel strongly about it. In other words, intellectuals become prominent in France not because they know the most about something, but because they talk the best about it.
Arguing is part of discussion, and the French do it well, but formal debating is another matter altogether. Curiously, as comfortable as the French are with contradiction and with juggling different perspectives, their education doesn’t serve them when talking becomes a formal showdown. Early in our stay, Julie was invited by Hélène Guinaudeau, a young press attachée at Québec’s diplomatic offices in Paris, to attend a verbal “joust” at a Paris courthouse, on Île de la Cité. In her spare time, Hélène acts as secretary general of the Conférence Olivaint, France’s oldest student society, founded in 1875. Public speaking is the raison d’être of this exclusive society, whose membership is limited to just 150 and whose alumni read like a Who’s Who? of France: from Laurent Fabius and Hubert Védrine (respectively the present and former ministers of foreign affairs) to Jacques Attali (a former adviser to President François Mitterand), actress Isabelle Huppert, and TV news anchor Christine Ockrent, among others.
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