The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  As with geography, the French love their own history, even if it’s not all glorious. This fascination can leave outsiders with the distinct impression that the French are backward looking, not to mention inward looking, victims of a giant case of nostalgia. There is no doubt that a sizable portion of the French population is falling back on tradition as an answer to challenges of the present. But France is not alone in that respect. And the French have not always been fond of the past. Classical art was about the rejection and destruction of Gothic art, which owes its name to the fact that the French regarded it as barbaric (the word comes from gotico, in sixteenth-century Italian, and originally meant “savage despoiler,” in reference to German tribes who invaded the Roman Empire).

  The present fascination of the French for their history is actually quite modern—it dates back to the romantics, particularly Victor Hugo’s fascination for the Gothic and the grotesque. And for a country that boasts one of the biggest tourist industries on the planet, the past is very good business. Jean-Benoît visited Bourges, the capital of the Berry and very close to the geographical center of the country. His hostess, Michelle, belonged to a historical society that organized Veillées aux Flambeaux (candlelight vigils) and other events to celebrate local historical anniversaries. She knew a lot about the city’s superb cathedral, which competes with Salisbury’s in beauty and luminosity, and about Jacques Cœur, the local grandee whose remarkable Gothic house is still open to visitors. Bourges is a superb city with hundreds of timber-framed houses, built after the city burned down in the mid-1400s. A century ago, most of these timber frames were hidden under mortar to prevent fire. They were uncovered when architects and developers understood their potential as a tourist attraction.

  In short, the French are a furiously modern people that live with a combination of beautiful things and ugly memories from the past. When you are talking about history in France, you need to tread carefully to avoid inadvertently stepping on toes. It’s always a loaded topic. But there is one advantage to being an outsider: you are usually perceived as neutral. If you inadvertently ruffle their feathers, the French are likely to cut you some slack.

  After geography and history, art is the third pillar of the French conception of culture générale. Because it is linked to taste, art is a more controversial topic than geography, and equally as debatable as history. But like Julie’s famous Art-Deco-is-fascist declaration at Guillemette’s table, the French love to hear opinions about art and culture—the more provocative, the better.

  Though they tend to forget it themselves, the French have not always been geniuses of taste. The interest for art in France goes back to the French king François I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547 and brought the Italian Renaissance to France at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Prior to François I’s rule, the French were considered rather crude. France was known for religious fanaticism (they led the Crusades), and for excelling in trade and the military arts, but not culture. François I did more than import Italian art (and cuisine): he was the first French ruler to make cultural promotion into a royal policy. The French have placed a high premium on art and culture ever since. According to a report from Ernst and Young, France’s cultural industry employs 1 million people—that’s one job out of forty—with half of those in Paris alone. A full 21 percent of the jobs in culture are in the film industry, and an amazing 19 percent are in live performance.3 Not surprisingly, Paris has more public libraries and art galleries than any other capital city in the world.4

  Art is the small talk of high talk in France. Almost all conversations veer toward some field of art at some point. Whether you are at a business lunch or having a picnic with friends on the lawn of the Louvre, you’re bound to talk about the latest art shows, films, plays, or productions going on, and not just in Paris but anywhere in France. People like to know what’s going on, but mostly, they want to hear what you think about it. While discussions about art, or the arts, often have a predictable element of evaluating the other’s taste, the real goal—as in conversations about anything in France—is to spar. For that matter, when the French can’t come up with something interesting to say about an event, they tend to fall back on the acceptable French default position of “hating it.” And as we know, in French conversation, this is often just part of the opening remarks.

  Knowing about art—any kind of art—is, of course, a mark of good culture générale, but writing is the most universal, and most highly respected, art form in France. The message comes straight from the top. Highly placed figures of all types in France almost universally aspire to publishing at least one book. They write books not to share wisdom or lessons learned from their experiences but to demonstrate that they can exercise France’s cherished art of self-expression.

  Yet there is one distinct feature of art and culture discussions in France: they are not especially class dependent. The subjects interest pretty much everyone, and to some degree they connect social classes. That might be because like good food, art is not considered a luxury in France but a basic necessity. It’s also because the French state does its part to make sure the French “consume” art in whatever form, encouraging the film industry, offering free admission to museums, and even setting a TV schedule that gives cinema (and French cinema in particular) an edge. Everyone in France is expected to have some kind of cultural varnish.

  Art has another distinctive quality in France: it excuses just about any kind of behavior. The French have an uncanny sympathy for artists turned criminals, or vice versa. Illegal actions or questionable gestures are not enough to get a brilliant artist expelled from good society, particularly if that action has nothing to do with the person’s art. To the French, the fact that the film director Roman Polanski was charged with unlawful sex with a minor, or that Woody Allen essentially married his stepdaughter, is beside the point. In French minds, bad morals just do not trump artistic achievement. Particularly if there is no link between the action for which an artist has been criticized and his or her artistic production.

  There is also a side of French culture that just loves equivocal artists. Famous criminals can change public opinion about themselves just by producing something of artistic value. The petty criminal Henri Charrière, aka Papillon (1906–1973), wrote a brilliant biography, mostly fictional, about his time in, and escape from, the famous island prison Île du Diable (Devil’s Island) in French Guiana—the book inspired a Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen as Papillon. Another thief and murderer, Jacques Mesrine (1936–1979), became a popular hero when he published two books about being a convict, then a fugitive. Not to mention Pierre Goldman, half brother of the famous composer Jean-Jacques Goldman (who penned hits for Celine Dion among others). While serving a life sentence for armed robbery, Goldman wrote and published his autobiography in 1975. The book impressed certain left-wing intellectuals, like Jean-Paul Sartre, so much that Goldman ended up winning an appeal and being acquitted for his crime. He went on to work as a high-profile journalist, interviewing the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, before being assassinated in 1979.

  If artists or writers are good enough, they’re also allowed to say just about anything without jeopardizing their careers. The most blatant case is the author Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), still revered for having modernized French literature in the 1930s by introducing argot among other things. Céline was a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the fascist regime of Marshal Pétain during the German occupation of France. In 1950 the French state convicted him for collaborating and declared him a national disgrace, but Céline bounced back and restored his literary reputation when he published a trilogy about his exile (he fled France for Denmark before the liberation) in 1957. In 2011, the French government refused to include him in a list of five hundred literary icons, but that didn’t change the fact that Céline is a revered writer in France (this is partly because his novels actually contain little of the violent racism he expressed in pamphlets).

  Though the
French view of art often comes across as elitist, they don’t systematically eschew lowbrow or vulgar entertainers or creators. Rather, they transform low art into a kind of high art of its own. For example, the French take circus arts, comic books, and drag queens quite seriously. This is a country where a man led a successful music hall career by farting in a microphone every night. Joseph Pujol’s (1852–1945) stage name, le Pétomane (flatulist or fartist), said it all. In 2014 Paris’s Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme (Museum of Jewish Art and History) held a five-month exhibition of the work of Marcel Gotlib, an illustrator and comic book author who is the closest thing the French have to Monty Python.5 Gotlib’s zany weekly series and his humor magazine, Fluide Glacial, profoundly influenced French comedy, not to mention the entire comic book industry. The venue was also surprising given that Gotlib is spectacularly irreverent when it comes to religion—he is famous for a six-page cartoon entitled God’s Club in which Monsieur Jupiter invites his friends Gaston Jéhovah, Louis Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Claude Allah to get drunk and watch a porno film together.

  While we were in France, the National Library had a five-month-long exhibition about the comic book series Astérix, about the adventures of a diminutive hero in Roman-occupied France. The series has sold over 360 million copies in 107 languages and dialects and its authors, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, are national celebrities. The French are voracious consumers of these bandes dessinées, and comics, usually referred to by the acronym BD (“bay-day”), are considered an art form of their own. France is the world’s third market for comics after Japan and the United States, but it represents a staggering 12 percent of the publishing business, compared to 8 percent in the United States.

  One peculiarity of the French relationship to art is that they never divorced masculinity from artistic taste, which has been the case in North American society since the nineteenth century. That probably explains why one never hears diatribes about how the arts are “useless” in France. On the contrary. What Americans qualify as a “liberal arts curriculum” is just considered plain old education in France. Children are initiated into the arts—whether it’s Rodin’s sculptures or Gothic architecture—starting in la maternelle, kindergarten. The French are willing to invest a lot of personal time and collective resources to make sure the lessons stick. Public museums grant free admission not just to children under eighteen, but to all students under twenty-six, as well as card-carrying journalists (so that’s where we spent our free time in Paris).

  France also has extensive cultural policies that encourage new creation in all fields. All public works projects have architectural design contests before they are built. Not all the architectural projects selected turn out to be popular—many French think Paris’s high-tech Georges Pompidou Center, with its multicolored exposed skeleton (the plan was chosen from among 681 entries), is a horror. But no one questions the need to make buildings that are more than utilitarian.

  Just as no one questions the need to know a thing or two about architecture. Because that, too, is just part of what the French consider a good culture générale.

  10

  Down by Nature

  Although there’s no specific rule against it, French schoolchildren never eat out of lunch boxes. They either go home for lunch or eat at la cantine (school cafeteria). That means that in addition to registering children for school, parents have to trek to their local mairie (town hall) to sign them up for lunch service.

  And that’s how we ended up in conversation with Monsieur Fitoussi, the director of the Caisse des écoles (the body that manages cafeterias and after-school activities) in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. We had to show him our tax return so he could decide what fiscal category we belonged to, lunch prices being scaled to family income, and in the process, we mentioned we were freelance journalists. Fitoussi jumped on the opportunity to boast about some of his office’s achievements, starting with the fact that 60 percent of the food served in all cantines is organic. Monsieur Fitoussi was quite proud of this. He reported that a delegation of Canadian school officials had just visited our arrondissement to talk about lunch menus. His next plan was to make sure all the fish in his cantines are “caught by French fishermen.”

  Taking his cue from Fitoussi’s buoyancy, Jean-Benoît decided to relate some observations about other things that we, as foreigners, felt worked quite well in France, like good access to medical care, the excellent road system, reliable fast trains, high-quality teachers, and universal pre-school starting at age three. In our research we had also learned that life expectancy and productivity rates in France were high, and energy consumption low (the French use half the energy North Americans do). Jean-Benoît even backed up his claims by mentioning a fascinating study he had recently come across by the Atlantic Council, called Companions in Competitiveness, which concluded that France outranked the United States in infrastructure, education, and health care.1

  Monsieur Fitoussi didn’t buy it. “You can’t possibly believe France has anything to teach to the world?” he replied. A mere thirty seconds earlier Monsieur Fitoussi had been bragging about foreigners who were interested in his achievements. Now he refused to believe that his country could do a single thing right. Monsieur Fitoussi’s reaction actually highlighted the one field in which the French do demonstrate unparalleled excellence: the art of extreme and extravagant self-criticism. When it comes to systematic pessimism, nobody does it better. The French are the world’s undisputed heavyweight champions of negativity.

  While French bashing is practically a subgenre of the Anglo-American press, what amazed us when we lived in France was the degree to which the French press parrot it, almost to the letter. We considered it a bit of a riddle: are the French regurgitating criticism from outside the country, or are foreign journalists simply reporting all the bad things the French say about themselves, verbatim?2

  We tend to believe the latter, based on the extent to which negativity, pessimism, and skepticism are permanent and universal features of French discourse. The form and intensity of this negativism have varied over time. On our first visit to France in 1992, the country was in the middle of severe budget cuts. The mood was foul. Then when we moved to France seven years later, the economy was vibrant and this negativity had waned. On visits and stays in France between 2004 and 2008, the mood slipped and pessimism seemed to be on the rise. But in 2013, we arrived in an all-time low (for us). France was grappling with economic stagnancy and fiscal reckoning. Even the French Left had lost its pluck. It normally blamed France’s problems on the usual suspects—capitalism and the United States. Not anymore.

  Whether we were discussing language, the quality of cafeteria food at Radio France, or even bread, wine, or cheese, the prognoses were uniformly bleak. If we had written a travelogue about France after our year in France, we would have at least subtitled it Tout va mal (nothing works).

  But things in France always sound worse than they are because of the simple fact that the French are chronically negative. The systematic pessimism we are describing goes well beyond the universal “no” with which most verbal exchanges are initiated (which we discussed in chapter 3). French negativism is a customary starting point in almost any French conversation. It is a form of hypochondria that frames almost everything the French say. In France, it’s as polite to start speaking to a stranger by complaining as it is to comment on the weather (as long you are complaining, that is).

  French negativity doesn’t require any prompters. It is spontaneous and always presented as self-evident. If you contradict an assumed negative stance off the bat, the reaction will often be a baffled stare. After Julie finished an interview one evening with the director of one of France’s language-protection groups, she walked with the gentleman to the metro station where they were both leaving, in opposite directions. He asked Julie what she thought about public transport in Paris, evidently expecting a familiar complaint to ensue. When Julie answered, “It’s great,” the man just loo
ked at her blankly, then turned on his heels and walked off. Witnessing unexpected satisfaction is one of the few things that leave the French speechless.

  The popular expressions used to characterize France’s decline change over time, we noticed. Fifteen years ago, we frequently heard: “La France, ce n’est plus ce que c’était” (France is not what it used to be). Today, the French are so down they don’t seem to think their country was anything to start with. They have a new maxim: “The way the country is going today…,” alluding to the supposedly self-evident “decline” in French values. Then there is the good old “Ça, c’est la France!” (That’s France for you!), which actually translates as, “Of course things in France are getting worse.”

  When it comes to negativism, defeatism, alarmism, and catastrophism, the French make full use of the resources their language offers. Expressions we heard describing this sentiment included morosité (morosity), sinistrose (malingering), vague à l’âme (melancholy), abattement (dejection), idées noires (gloomy thoughts), spleen (melancholy), cafard (the blues), and la déprime (depression). Thanks to the unique ability of the French language to transform adjectives into nouns, the French also have a special category of titles for the different groups of people affected by bad times. There are les insatisfaits (the dissatisfied), les agacés (the irritated), les énervés (the irritated), les impatients (the impatient), and les exaspérés (the exasperated), not to mention les râleurs (the moaners), les rouspéteurs (the grumps), and les mécontents (the malcontents), to name but a few.