The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  The new admiration for Quebec would only be a footnote in this book if it didn’t signify something more fundamental going on in French society. Quebec embodies two things the French, especially the Parisian elite, have long rejected: America, and the francophonie, the French-speaking world beyond France’s borders. The new attitude toward Quebec owes at least partly to the fact that French attitudes about these two entities have also changed radically over the past decades.

  To understand the change, it’s important to grasp that French anti-Americanism started out as a rejection of the whole idea of the New World, not just the United States. The French historian Philippe Roger traces the origins of this anti-Americanism to the middle of the eighteenth century. In The American Enemy he argues that sentiment owes to the writings of the French naturalist de Buffon (1707–1788), the founder of natural history in France and a precursor of the theory of evolution. De Buffon never actually set foot in the Americas, but nevertheless, on the basis of very questionable evidence that its mammals were smaller than those in Europe, Africa, and Asia, he claimed it had to be “inferior.” A Dutch philosopher, Cornelius de Pauw (1739–1799), chimed in a few years later with the same conclusions, though he never actually went to the New World either. The negative views of America then migrated from biology to political philosophy and sociology, where they spawned even more dubious claims. Even though later thinkers like the French marquis de Lafayette and Alexis de Tocqueville made sophisticated, insightful conclusions about America based on their actual experience there, their writing didn’t make a dent in the popular anti-American prejudice that had become solidly implanted in French minds by that time.

  Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire who denounced the French colonization of America as costly and pointless just reinforced the already negative view of the New World. The case against colonialism was not hard to make. Not enough French had ever immigrated to the New World to give France a shot in empire building against competitors like Portugal, Spain, or England. When colonization began, France had a population of about 20 million, or four times the population of England, Spain, or Portugal. By the time France abandoned New France, in 1763, it had only sent 15,000 settlers, or ten times fewer than the British (and a paltry number next to the 750,000 Spanish or the 600,000 Portuguese colonists in the New World). Although French explorers scouted the continent aggressively, their discoveries didn’t impress the French back home. On the contrary, the pre-existing negative perception of the colonies left the field wide open for nonsensical propagandists like de Buffon and de Pauw. And the tradition of European anti-Americanism lived on.

  What struck us about the anti-Americanism in France fifteen years ago was that the United States was used as a scapegoat to make the French feel better about themselves (Americans do the same thing with France, by the way). The French would criticize American race relations as if there were no such problem in France, with the subtext that France would somehow be safe if it avoided “importing” this American problem. That, of course, was ridiculous. French commentators would dismiss any positive measures in the United States as “Anglo-Saxon,” therefore incompatible with French values. Anti-Americanism was a form of chauvinism that united both France’s Left and Right for different reasons—the Right because it flattered their nationalism, and the Left because it buttressed their ideology.

  Of course not everyone in France bought the anti-American crusade, even fifteen years ago, at what was probably the peak of anti-American sentiment in France. There have always been plenty of Americanophiles in French society. But they were strangely silent. Those who were not, like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who founded the magazine L’Express as a French version of Time, paid the price for expressing admiration of the United States. The magazine still exists but Servan-Schreiber’s attempts to start a political career (he was a centrist) fell flat. In 1974, he became a minister in Jacques Chirac’s government but only lasted thirteen days before being fired. Back then, the pro-American discourse was just too much for the French to take.

  The reasons anti-Americanism is waning in France are complicated but mostly boil down to the fact that morale has gotten so low in France, and criticism of French society so harsh, that the French are only blaming themselves for their problems. Now they are looking beyond France for solutions, not scapegoats. The startling Anglophilia in French society (discussed in the previous chapter) is one by-product of this.

  But the French also have a new scapegoat for their problems: the European Union. The EU is increasingly perceived as a dangerous, even nefarious, external influence, especially in populist circles. Though the reasons, again, are complex, popular support for Europe is much lower than it used to be, and the French are quick to blame the European Union for many of their challenges, notably immigration controls, the liberalization of labor laws, and forced austerity measures.

  It is very possible that the terrorist attacks of 2015, first at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher grocery in January, and again on November 13, will shift the French worldview by creating a new declared evil called Islamism. Yet because the attacks involved a large proportion of French nationals, the effect could be greater on how the French view themselves.

  When we were in France in the years 2013–2014 we also saw a France that was opening up to the rest of the French-speaking world, a very recent change in thinking. Despite being a founding member of the francophonie organization (akin to the British Commonwealth), France has always kept the French-speaking world at arm’s length. The issue was just too close to home for the French, too wrapped up in their colonial history, something the French wish they could forget. For France, the decolonization process that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1962 was painful and drew them into two wars (in Indochina, from 1946 to 1954, and in Algeria, from 1954 to 1962). While France watched its colonial empire explode into two dozen independent French-speaking countries, English was supplanting French definitively as the preeminent global language. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the French began to wake up to the fact that there are considerably more French speakers outside France than inside. The numbers today are significant: 275 million people speak French in the world, in four dozen countries.4 France accounts for only a quarter of the total, but has never considered the French-speaking world as a potential source of strength, even in an increasingly globalized world.

  Much of the “declinist” thinking in France today owes to the fact that the French are still grappling with what it means to be outnumbered. Some don’t even realize it; others are still struggling to understand what their role in the French-speaking world should be, or if they even have one.

  The history of the term francophone provides a good illustration of the difficulties the French have had coming to grips with this new reality. Francophone was coined by a French geographer, Onésime Reclus, in 1880, while he was writing a linguistic geography of the world. (Reclus also invented terms like anglophone, arabophone, germanophone, hispanophone, and, for Portuguese speakers, lusophone.) Francophone was then forgotten until the 1930s, when it was revived to describe colonial subjects who had renounced their culture to become French. In the 1960s, as the former African colonies had become independent, the Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor resuscitated the term and restored its original meaning of “anyone who speaks French.” The term then slowly spread throughout the postcolonial French-speaking world. The result was that the French came to think of a Francophone as anyone from outside of France who speaks French. Thus, the French consider themselves “French,” not francophone.5 Few French identified themselves as Francophones the way Quebeckers or Belgians more or less automatically would.

  The issue was further complicated by French politics. The French Right has always been more open to the French-speaking world, although many see it as the perpetuation of the old empire. But traditionally, it’s the attitude of the Left that dominates public discourse on immigration. The French Left sees the francophonie as the product of French coloniali
sm and therefore nothing to celebrate. The closer you get to Paris’s power circles, particularly on the left, the more pronounced this attitude gets. Even the fact that both Quebeckers and postindependence Africans identify themselves as Francophones—a phenomenon that should normally appeal to the Left—has not been enough to completely change French views of the term. For the same, essentially political, reasons, language protection became, and has remained, a right-wing cause in France. The French Left is suspicious about it. It evokes nationalism to them, and they associate nationalism with fascism. Many French today would prefer to see English invade their country than stoop to what they consider chauvinistic patriotism or, worse, nationalisme. Because of this stance, the French have traditionally underestimated the number of French speakers in the world in a kind of self-imposed blindness.

  The French also have some less honorable reasons for refusing to embrace the francophonie: namely, if they admit they are part of a larger French-speaking world, that means France isn’t the center of that world anymore. Of the 275 million French speakers in the world, only 66 million live in France. A large block of the French intelligentsia clearly opposed the implications of considering themselves part of a larger whole. In a recent interview, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut actually scolded journalists and editors for writing “Victor Hugo, poet” and “Léon Blum, former prime minister” because in his mind, neither Hugo nor Blum needs a title.6 Finkielkraut, one of the main grouches of Parisian intellectual circles, was completely ignoring the fact that for some Francophones outside of France, such cultural references—especially Léon Blum—really do need explanation. In the mind of certain French intellectuals, like Finkielkraut’s, Paris is not just the center of the world, Paris is the world.

  But things are changing. It’s getting common to hear young Parisians or people from the regions refer to themselves as Francophones, and to acknowledge, sometimes even embrace, the idea that French-speaking civilization is more than just a satellite, or a big fan club of France. This is partly because young French are growing up in a more cosmopolitan society. People from France’s regions play up their francophonie ties, particularly with Quebec, to get the edge over Parisians by bypassing Paris to access the growing international networks of French speakers in science, business, or culture directly. Younger generations of French (and those from classes that don’t benefit from the Paris-centered culture) are exposed to much more French-language culture from outside France today. One reason Quebec culture is gaining popularity in France is precisely because of its popular, nonelitist, and accessible side. And many French welcome the idea that French-language civilization has, or will have, more than one center someday.

  Like the new admiration for Quebec, this attitude has also been coming on slowly for decades. French culture has been in a process of brassage (stirring, intermingling) since the 1960s. Since the Tunisian writer Tahar Ben Jelloun won France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1987, one laureate out of six not only has been foreign born, but did not have French as a mother tongue—including the American writer Jonathan Littell (2006) and the Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi (2008). In 2007, the French chose a president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is of Hungarian and Greek Jewish origins. France’s current prime minister, Manuel Valls, was born in Barcelona and is of Catalan origin. And the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is from Cádiz in the south of Spain. One minister in the government, Axelle Lemaire, was born and spent her childhood in Quebec. In effect, what is happening is that the French-speaking world, the francophonie, is beginning to work just like the English-speaking, or the Spanish-speaking, worlds, with circulation between many cultural (and economic) centers. Yet France’s official public discourse only recently started to reflect this reality.

  Just eleven days after we arrived in Paris in September 2013, two financial analysts at the French investment bank Natixis, Jérôme Bodin and Pavel Govciyan, published a study on the financial prospects of the French media. Bodin and Govciyan had looked at statistics about the number of French speakers in the world and proceeded to draw the obvious conclusion that France’s media should wake up and look beyond France’s border, to the global French-speaking market, the same way English-language and even Hispanic media have.7 To our knowledge, this was the first time French financial analysts took such a bold stance in favor of internationalizing the French media. The idea was revolutionary in Paris. Incredible as it sounds, nobody in Parisian business circles had ever argued for an international strategy for the media.

  Bodin and Govciyan were back in the news the following spring when Forbes quoted them regarding the potential for expansion in the francophone world.8 The fact that this was news in France shows how adamantly Paris had been ignoring the economic potential of the francophonie, or at least has until now. This time, the story had a discernable impact. In the fall of 2014, fifty French-speaking CEOs of media companies from eighteen different countries met in Montreal to discuss the future of francophone media. Two months later, the Summit of the International Organization of the Francophonie (the French-speaking version of the British Commonwealth) in Dakar got more media coverage than the biennial event had garnered before.

  The French can see it’s time to update their worldview, including their view of the francophonie. Half the countries in Africa have French as one of their official languages, and many francophone countries have had economic growth rates of 5, 6, and even 10 percent in the last fifteen years. Major African capitals like Kinshasa, Abidjan, and Dakar all have the potential to become important francophone centers. As African populations explode, and as their economies grow, the potential for francophone media and business to develop ties beyond national territories will grow, too. The French could miss out on some tremendous opportunities—when all they have to do to take advantage of them is start looking a little differently at the outside world.9

  14

  Economy of Speech

  Fifteen years ago, it was regarded as a highly specialized field of study. Most French barely had an opinion about it, and even if they did, they systematically avoided it in conversations. It was practically a taboo.

  We’re talking about economics. The year we arrived in France, we discovered that economics had gained a new respectability, if not outright popularity, among conversation topics. For the first time, we heard people in polite society quoting national debt figures, taxation rates, unemployment figures, and interest rates, and even mention esoteric concepts like derivatives. At first, we thought we were hallucinating. We weren’t. Economic coverage in the French press, we discovered, had almost doubled in the decade prior to our stay. A study by the Institut pour le développement de l’information économique et sociale (Institute for the Development of Social and Economic Information) found that the percentage of airtime French media devoted to economics had jumped from 6.5 percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2008. Economic journalists, like François Lenglet on France 2 and Nicolas Bouzou on iTélé, had become household names in France.1 The change in attitude about money was so disconcerting we had to constantly remind ourselves it was okay to talk about it.

  The European Union was one of the big factors that explained France’s new openness to economics. The European Union began as the Common Market in 1958, and it morphed into the more political European Union in 1993, but it’s still mostly about business. Many of its policies have to do with economics, trade laws, currency (the euro), the removal of borders, and budget rules for member countries. The financial crisis of 2008 also contributed to the change. It got the French to look at how heavily they were being taxed in comparison to their neighbor countries (taxes make up 57 percent of France’s GDP). In a survey by Ipsos-Steria published in the French daily Le Monde in January 2014, 56 percent of the French said they were worried about unemployment and 43 percent about high taxation. The proportion worried about taxes had increased from 27 percent the previous year.2

  During our stay it was common to hear people say quite confidently that “something had to be done
about” taxes, or the economy. This was not the France we had lived in fifteen years earlier, when a good friend who was a high-placed functionary in France’s Ministry of the Interior actually told us the economy “didn’t exist.”

  In a period shorter than a generation, the topic of money has gone from being “touchy” to “acceptable.” Yet money is still, roughly speaking, a taboo in French conversation. Even at business meals, the French typically only get around to the topic entre le fromage et le dessert (between cheese and dessert)—meaning late in the evening, if ever. Talking openly about money is considered a little vulgar in France. It’s a confounding cultural difference for Anglo-Americans, who talk about any kind of money, anywhere, pretty much anytime.

  But there are now a number of avenues available to broach the topic. The key to talking about money in France is in understanding the different ways the French talk about it, which are all arranged on a sort of gradient of acceptability. There is impersonal money (the economy), money that you want to make (business), then personal money (your own). The only really acceptable way to talk about personal money, still today, is to talk about what you don’t have. That’s why the French spend so much time talking about les bons plans (the best deals). Discussions about where and how to save money are almost universal. Rich or poor, the French constantly exchange tips about where to get deals. The summer before we moved to Paris, the head of media relations at the International Organization of the Francophonie, whom we had just met, insisted we check out a Web site called leboncoin.fr, where we could find used goods in Paris by neighborhood. (She wasn’t exactly the type of person you’d think needed to buy used furniture, but she gushed about the site, so we assumed she used it.) We subsequently discovered there were a remarkable number of Web sites and ads that pushed le bon plan in France: lebonplan.fr, le-bon-plan.com, le-bon-plan-immo.com (for real estate), plusdebonsplans.com (even more bons plans), http://www.bonplanlocal.fr/ (for local deals), lebonplanmotard.fr (for motorcyclists), and the list went on.