The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  Even the motto of Paris, Fluctuat nec mergitur (tossed by the waves, it doesn’t sink), has a curiously negative ring to it. France’s institutions seem to cater to a preordained pessimistic mind-set. When we left France, we had to close accounts for a number of utilities. After wrapping up our business with France’s electric company, we received a survey asking us to evaluate waiting times on the phone, quality of answers, the level of courtesy (amabilité), and other aspects of customer service. The four choices were nul (lousy), pas à la hauteur (not up to standards), correct (fine), and bon (good). In other words, on a French rating scale, the opposite of “lousy” is not “excellent.” “Good” is as good as it gets.

  There’s an old joke that when two British people meet in the street, they shake hands, then get in line, but when two French people meet, they shake hands and start complaining about France. For the French, the glass is either half empty or totally, desperately empty. The French even have a way of presenting their pessimistic starting points so they don’t seem to require substantiation. It’s more of a state of mind than an opinion, but more of an opinion than an observation.

  Because the French tend to be so negative about so many things, it’s hard to get an unbiased assessment of their actual feelings. Still, it’s a mistake for foreigners to take French negativism at face value—the same way it would be a mistake to think that everyone is happy in North America when they smile. (It’s just our peculiar way of being polite.) Over the years, we have learned to take the overly pessimistic viewpoints of the French with a grain of salt.

  Though it seemed to go against the grain of everything happening in France, the spring of 2014 in Paris was Le Printemps de l’Optimisme (The Spring of Optimism)—at least thanks to a Frenchman named Thierry Saussez. It was actually a three-day event, the first of its kind, and consisted of high-profile round tables and workshops on positive thinking. Jean-Benoît met Saussez, the event’s founder and a right-wing political organizer, public relations specialist, former communications adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, and author. Prior to the event, Saussez had commissioned a national survey on optimism. What he discovered was that the French were, in fact, optimistic about their own prospects, but pessimistic about their society. “This is bizarre,” he told Jean-Benoît. “Think about it. How can 80 percent of people be optimistic about their own lives, while only 20 percent are optimistic about the society they live in and whatever doesn’t concern them personally?”

  National statistics in France reveal the same dichotomy between high personal optimism on one hand and high “societal” pessimism on the other. Aside from France’s sustained high birthrate (which we discussed in chapter 5), generally considered a sign of optimism, the French, historically, have never felt things were so bad they had to leave their country. The French have always emigrated less than other European nations, and by a large margin. According to the latest figures available, the French have created six times more businesses than Germany, the UK, or the United States over a five-year period, a phenomenon generally considered to be a sign of optimism.3 In a recent survey by OpinionWay, 66 percent of French youth between eighteen and twenty-six stated they were “rather optimistic about the future,” a score 20 percent higher than that of older generations, which is surprising given that unemployment rates among French youth are high, above 20 percent. The French appear to be closet optimists wrapped in a thick cloak of pessimism.4

  In April, just a month before Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event, the French TV channel TF1, roughly the equivalent of the BBC, launched a publicity campaign that made fun of France’s split personality. The concept was simple: a voiceover expressed a series of common gripes, then contrasted them with images that showed the exact opposite. “The French are sulky” was illustrated with an image of people around a table, laughing; “the French are lazy” showed a tractor tilling a field at dawn; “the French believe in nothing” showed a newborn; “the French are racist” showed a pair of black feet and white feet interwoven on bed sheets; “the French are losers” showed a French soccer team cheering a victory. It ended with TF1’s new slogan: Partageons des ondes positives (let’s share positive vibes). It could have been an ad for Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event. Sales of books on personal motivation and positive thinking are at an all-time high in France with sales of two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand copies now common.5

  So why exactly do the French refuse to sound optimistic even when they are, or at least want to be? The answer is: some posturing mixed with philosophy and a few deeply anchored French taboos. Xavier North, a high-ranking French civil servant, was one of the first people to talk to us about this contradiction. We initially met North when he was in charge of cultural cooperation at France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then talked to him again, years later, when he was head of France’s main language regulation body, the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF). It’s a mistake to take the French attitude at face value, he told us. French negativism is simply the French manière d’être (way of being) with foreigners, a bit like the Japanese who tend to portray their culture as impenetrable to outsiders. “Negativism is posturing. To a lot of French, being happy seems naïve.” A number of famous French people have said the same thing in different terms, including the French actor Jean Gabin, who, in Mélodie en sous-sol (Any Number Can Win, 1963), declared, “L’essentiel, c’est de râler. Ça fait bon genre.” (The important thing is to moan. It makes you look respectable.)

  To be fair, as a general manner of speaking, the French do consider criticism to be more honest than praise. To the French, unbridled optimism, enthusiasm, or unwarranted contentment all scream simplemindedness. As France’s most popular stand-up comedian, Jamel Debbouze, put it, you have to sound pessimistic to look intelligent in France.6 Overt pessimism has an elegant antiestablishment quality about it, like wearing all black. In a society where everyone is expected to produce opinions, negativism is a convenient form of intellectual prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear), a ready-made opinion that doesn’t have to be substantiated. The French even coined a metaphor for this, inspired from rugby: botter en touche (drop back ten yards and punt). The idea is, you proffer an énormité, then let people fight over it while you buy time to think of something interesting to say.

  But French negativism is more than just posturing. French pessimists are on solid intellectual grounds, the product of an intellectual tradition favoring doubt over certainty that dates back centuries. The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) philosophized about the necessity of doubt. In his play The Barber of Seville, the French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais (1732–1799) writes, “J’aime mieux craindre sans sujet que de m’exposer sans précaution” (I would rather fear without reason than expose myself carelessly). Then the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed up with the claim that man was “born free and everywhere is in chains,” meaning things necessarily go downhill.7 In 1932, a young Albert Camus crossed happiness off the list of noble goals in life, writing: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”8

  But the most forceful attack on optimism came from a contemporary of Rousseau, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) in his satiric novella Candide, or The Optimist. Voltaire actually wrote the novella in response to the new word “optimism,” which only entered the French lexicon in 1737. The story is of a young man, Candide, who grows up living a sheltered life in a castle, which gave him the naïve belief that “all is for the best in all possible worlds.” After a series of catastrophic misfortunes Candide is reduced to misery and concludes that “not all is for the best” and, as a result, that “one must cultivate one’s garden” (protect yourself). It is an astute description of the French mind-set that sounds familiar even today and fits the paradoxical findings of Thierry Saussez’s survey.

  But it’s probably
fair to say that French pessimism is a healthy reaction to another French tradition: excessive and unrealistic official boosterism. The eulogy of France is a subgenre of French poetry dating back ten or even twelve centuries, which French poets produced in an attempt to win their king’s favor through flattery. Such writings were commonplace until the Enlightenment, when a new form of hyperbolic and all-encompassing criticism—the pursuit of truth beyond authority—established itself as a type of counter-discourse. Perhaps because authority in France remained absolute (and in many respects, still is today), the French criticism of authority became absolute as well. Artists are automatically expected to embrace this.9 For that matter, absolute criticism lives on as a literary genre of its own. Some creators have built entire careers on pessimism, the prize going to French-Romanian writer Emil Cioran (1911–1995). Born in Romania, Cioran moved to Paris in the late 1930s where he published A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The Trouble with Being Born. Cioran was known for claiming that the only thing that made it possible to keep living was the possibility of suicide (he ended up dying at eighty-four, from Alzheimer’s disease).10

  Negativism is also a ploy the French use to address taboo subjects like money, nationalism, and racism. Given the extent to which money is a private topic in France, speaking negatively about economic matters is the most acceptable way of broaching the topic. In a culture where the tax system tends to be punitive and people want to avoid attracting the attention of their neighbors or of tax inspectors, casting a negative light on anything relating to money, status, financial questions, or estates also operates as a smoke screen.11 The French don’t want to look like they are hiding anything, and the best way to deflect attention is to complain. According to historians, this tactic dates back centuries.12

  Many extreme expressions of negativism in France also stem from repressed nationalism. One effect of the two world wars was that overt nationalism was virtually banned from public discourse in all of Europe. The only political party in France that openly embraces “love of country” is the far-right National Front Party. The love of country exists among the general population, but more often than not, it is expressed in the form of regret: “France is not what it used to be.” The same logic applies to the topic of race relations, yet another taboo in France (we address this topic at length in chapter 18). The French (except National Front members, anyway) are generally quite careful when they discuss the topic and tend to express their concerns, whatever they are, again, in the form of “France is not what it used to be.”13

  Thierry Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event actually had a political agenda behind it that was surprisingly nonpartisan (given that Saussez ran President Sarkozy’s communications department from 2008 to 2010). Saussez denied being a proponent of positive thinking but said he hoped the event would lead to a lucid assessment of the risks of intractable French negativism. In his view, unrealistic negativism was politically dangerous. “It produces a discourse of victimization, impotence and malingering and pushes people to look for scapegoats. That’s dangerous.”

  The French use the term sinistrose to describe this discourse. Though a synonym of pessimism, sinistrose is actually a term from psychiatry; it describes a condition best translated as malingering. The French term was created in 1908 to describe people who, having suffered a wrong owing to an accident, do everything they can to exaggerate the effect of it in order to gain compensation. That’s when negativism stops being mere posturing and starts acquiring a really ugly side. It has happened before in France. In a memoir called Strange Defeat, the revered French historian Marc Bloch (1886–1944) documented the experience of the first days of World War II, when the French army caved in the face of the Germany army. The capitulation was completely out of proportion with the actual threat France faced: the French army was a large, well-equipped army at the time. Bloch attributes the defeat to an excessively pessimistic, fatalistic attitude among French elites in the 1930s. What he describes is eerily similar to the mind-set the French have now, seventy-five years later.

  The saving grace for the French this time may be that they have no objective enemy.

  11

  Fixation on French

  One of the most endearing idiosyncrasies of the French is their passion for words. The French adore linguistic nuances, revere dictionaries, and collect new words and expressions like precious artifacts. There is probably nothing they love talking about more. One of the best ways to make conversation with the French is to mention an interesting word or novel expression. Over the years, we got into the habit of doing this by translating English metaphors, or using French expressions we picked up on our travels in North Africa, Belgium, or even Louisiana. The French always take the bait. They can’t help it. Pondering language is a national reflex.

  Introducing exotic expressions is also a great way to change the subject when you need to. Jean-Benoît resorted to this one evening during an Arabic class he was taking at the Arab World Institute in Paris. Just before the end of class his turn came to read a particularly difficult selection. To buy some time, he described his situation with a common expression from Quebec, but unheard of in France: C’est un cadeau de Grec (literally: “It’s a Greek present,” meaning a Trojan Horse). The half-dozen other students and his teacher forgot about what they were doing and zoomed in on the new phrase, even though it was totally off topic. They wanted to know everything about it: where it came from, how long people had been using it, who used it, where. In the excitement, everyone forgot it was Jean-Benoît’s turn to read and he was off the hook.

  Jean-Benoît had gotten the idea from French politicians, who frequently use this trick to avoid having to deal with topics that are potentially detrimental to their reputations. For instance, in January 2014 we watched in awe as President François Hollande used a particular term to get out of talking about the painful love triangle he found himself in. Paparazzi had discovered his love affair with the actress Julie Gayet, and Hollande’s “First Girlfriend” Valérie Trierweiler was refusing to talk to the media. With a verbal pirouette (about-face), Hollande completely diverted media attention from the love triangle to—get this—the economy. On January 15 he announced to French media that he was a social-démocrate (social democrat), a controversial term in socialist circles because it implies sympathy to the market economy. Hollande was the first socialist leader to ever openly embrace the term, and the surprise effect worked its magic. The media dropped the Julie Gayet story and spent the rest of the month speculating about what exactly Hollande meant by “social democrat.”

  Languages come with their own narrative. English speakers think of their language as “open,” “flexible,” and “accommodating.” The French story is exactly the opposite. In French minds, their language is a particularly complex and nuanced tongue with no gray zones and little, if any, à peu près (approximation). Words are right or words are wrong. Every word has a precise meaning distinguishing it from other words. Grammar is correct or incorrect. The French even think about synonyms differently than do English speakers. Roget’s English thesaurus is a cornucopia of synonyms organized in categories with no definitions. French dictionaries of synonyms have few words per category and more definitions. In the French mind-set, it’s virtually impossible for two words to mean the same thing. So the French want to know the exact nuance that differentiates one word from another.

  Not surprisingly, given this mind-set, linguistic nitpicking is a pretty popular pastime in France. It’s not the exclusive domain of France’s elite or literary circles. French people from all backgrounds talk about semantic nuances. It’s one of the most startling particularities of French culture. As self-employed writers we are constantly asking for receipts for deductible expenses. The French, we learned, have four different words for the word “receipt”: reçu, ticket, fiche, and quittance, each with a slightly different meaning. A reçu is the generic term, but implies a detailed statement with tax numbers. Le ticket is produced by
a machine and is less detailed. La fiche is similar, but handwritten. La quittance is the most formal kind of receipt, something like a discharge: it states the name of the payer and payee, what the payment is for, and is often signed. Needless to say, we still get them confused.

  The French are so bent on being precise that they’ll resort to hijacking a word from another language to add some nuance they can’t get in French. That’s how “weekend” ended up becoming a French word. Quebeckers translate weekend literally into fin de semaine, end of the week. But the fin de semaine, in France, signifies “end of the working week,” or Friday. So the French decided to call Saturday and Sunday—which come after the fin de semaine—le week-end. As far as Quebeckers are concerned, this is pointless hairsplitting, but Quebeckers are a lot less picky about language nuances than are the French.1

  However, it’s fair to say that all French speakers share a certain level of interest in linguistic precision. Every March, the fifty-four member countries of the Francophonie (plus three associate members and twenty observer countries) celebrate the Semaine de la francophonie (Francophonie Week). In almost every country, organizers set up local dictées (dictation contests) for the general public or members of associations. Throughout the 1990s and until 2005, there was even an international contest, called La dictée de Bernard Pivot, named after a famous literary critic, which was broadcast to millions of viewers who actually did the exercise at home. Dictée contests are still organized locally, but since 2005, official francophone celebrations have been more geared toward celebrating regional differences in the French-speaking world. Francophonie celebrations in France are called Le mois des mots (the month of the words). A typical activity is to have people submit lists of their “favorite ten words,” often with a specific theme, like language, love, or travel. Governments in French-speaking countries also publish their own lists of favorite words. In 2014, France’s Ministry of Culture and Communications produced a series of twenty words that the organizers had chosen because they expressed the variety and creativity of the francophone world, including the Senegalese verb ambiancer (to liven up) or the archaic expression à tire larigot (continually, to one’s heart’s content).