When it comes to summer vacation, French society is split into two subcategories: les juilletistes et les aoûtiens—people who take their summer vacation in July and those who do so in August. The start of summer vacation (for both parents and children) gives way to les jours de grands départs en vacances (days of major vacation departures), or just les jours de grands départs, typically one in early July and one in early August. Needless to say, the last weekend of July gives way to epic traffic and monumentally French chassé-croisé. The cliché according to which many businesses in France shut down in August commonly holds true: with most of the staff being gone the first two weeks of August, the sound management decision is indeed frequently to close down the operation to make sure the loss of productivity is contained and circumscribed. When the domestic ecosystem is such that most other companies do the same, not much productivity is lost, since very little would get done during those weeks anyway.
Ultimately, whether for children, adults, or companies, vacation management is an essential part of French life, and one that comes with multiple headaches. Unsurprisingly, the French manage to create life complications out of being given copious amounts of time off.
Being French is exhausting.
Useful tip: To get the best deals on accommodations in France, avoid booking during les vacances scolaires.
Sound like a French person: “J’ai posé quinze jours. J’suis crevé.” (I’m taking two weeks off. I’m spent.)
JE SUIS CHARLIE—OR NOT?
“You’re going to France. Aren’t you scared?”
Five years ago, this question would have sounded hilarious. Scared of cheese, baguettes, and glorious wines maybe?
However, recently this question has become more common: things have changed. In 2015, France suffered two highly publicized terrorist attacks: Charlie Hebdo in January and the Paris shootings in November. After all the worldwide publicity, outrage, and compassionate digital outpourings of support from millions all over the world, it is safe to say that bread and cheese are no longer the only things that come to mind about France.
These attacks came as a gigantic surprise to most French people. It was not cartoonists or rock fans that had been attacked; to most French people, it was France and what France stood for.
The idea that people in France could be killed as a result of their political activism, their assumed religious beliefs (of lack thereof), or simply for being from a country whose government’s actions don’t appeal to some seemed not only egregious but truly unthinkable to most.
After the tragedies, most French people did not succumb to hatred, vengeance, or violence. They were surely aided in that by a media and political class that unanimously urged people not to jump to conclusions by pointing fingers at Muslims or Islam (France is home to millions of Muslims). In sum, the message was: Pas d’amalgame—Don’t equate Islamist terrorism with all Muslims. Muslim radicals attacked France? The key priority becomes urging the French not to think or say (let alone do) anything negative against Muslims or Islam. In a formidably modern twist, Muslims had become the potential victims and French people the potential threat.
Amid fear, anger, and shock, analysis and ongoing discourse abounded. The argument according to which Muslim radicals account for only a small minority of the total Muslim population was one of the most commonly spread ones. Fraternal indeed, but some might say irrelevant, for in France, like in the rest of the world, even small percentages quickly add up to many thousands of radicals. Mathematics are annoying like that.
Atrocities were perpetrated and plunged France into incomprehension. Emotions took over, making the analysis of some of the incongruities in the official narrative almost impossible.
Unfortunately, the bad news for the French people did not stop with the death toll and the horror stories. The official discourse morphed: fighting terrorism meant fighting les discours de haine (hate speech). The authorities’ battle in the war against la haine had started.
Week after week, irony and nuanced analyses lost ground in conversations, on- and off-line.
The peculiar concept of “Hatred” was to be sanctioned, public meetings were to be forbidden,* privacy was to be stomped, irony was to be reported, warrantless surveillance was to become the new normal* . . . In a matter of months, the days of “Je suis Charlie,” the days of celebrating “freedom of speech,” seemed long gone. It was as if a thick page had been turned, leading to a new ominous chapter in French history, one where even the highest-ranking officials in the French legal system took to the press to denounce the alarming drop in civil liberties and the fact that France’s new legal apparatus paved the way for the establishment of a perfectly legal dictatorship.*
The tug-of-war between order and liberty is nothing new. Unfortunately, these days it seems as if the people of France are getting a bit of a bad deal, losing both ostensibly and at a fast pace. One thing’s for sure, however: when wondering what the Orwellian war against “hate” and “terror” lead to, don’t say “hate” or “terror,” or you might get on the French government’s merde list.
Useful tip: Don’t forget to love.
Sound like a French person: “Tu vas être fiché, toi, avec tes conneries!” (You’re gonna get on some government’s watch list with all your shenanigans.)
SPELLING
Wanting to learn French implies a certain degree of masochism. As if assigning a gender to each noun, organizing sentences with a complex web of grammatical checkpoints, making each plural a new adventure, and applying only seemingly steady rules to the world of conjugation—as if all this did not cut it—the French language decided to spice things up a bit by making spelling particularly challenging.
“Water” in French is one sound: o. Imagine the person who came up with that talking it through with a sane person:
It’s pronounced o? Let’s make that three letters!
But it’s just one sound, and it’s water . . . should be pretty straightforward. Why do you need three letters?
Don’t worry about it. Make it . . . hmm . . . let’s see . . . E . . . E?Yeah . . . man I’m on fire! E . . . a . . . ha! I’m loving this . . . And . . . u! Ha—u! That is so good! E-a-u: Eau. Perfect. And that shall be pronounced o.
You’re a psycho.
I’m a genius.
So what about the plural? Just add an s?
Add an s? Who do you think I am? English? How can you lack ambition like that? Have some panache for heaven’s sake! Add an x!
Pff . . . So o singular . . . ox plural?
Good Lord. Who raised you? Don’t be so vulgar. Why would you need to pronounce that x?
Some subject matters are simply more French than others. Spelling is one of them. Discussions centered on spelling are surprisingly recurrent in France. (Who said, “How fun!”?)
French is a language of many unsettling asperities; their proper command is to expression what good table manners are to dining. But if the subject of spelling is frequently brought up in France, it is primarily because tragic spelling simply is a mere symptom of the dwindling command of French among French youth.
While two generations ago most people who did not go to university had a near-perfect command of spelling, the French school system is now spouting out illiterates by the tens of thousands each year. At age seventeen, a staggering 30 percent of French youth cannot even read properly.* When a person struggles to merely read, let’s just say that proper spelling is not exactly on top of their priorities. Thinking that the remaining 70 percent are a bunch of Victor Hugos is somewhat illusory. When it comes to proper French, undeniably the level has gone down. Big-time.
In fact, it is a massive understatement to say that, when it comes to the command of French, the bar has been lowered dramatically in the French school system. In a tragicomic turn, growing numbers of young teachers with a poor command of their own language are
starting to teach French to children. The start of yet another vicious circle? Certainly not. The French regime came up with a new way to hide the collapse of its education system: dumbing down the spelling of the French language! In early 2016, a new reform was introduced to vastly rid the French language of the circumflex (∧) accent, to turn oignons into ognons, and to ditch countless hyphenated words.
If you are learning French yourself, two things should boost your confidence.
You are not in the French school system. So your likelihood of one day having a good command of French is far superior than if you were learning French in the French school system.
Visit the comments section of any Web site geared toward young people in France and you will realize that not only is your spelling better than theirs, but so are probably your syntax and your grammar.
So even if your spoken French might not be as fluent as you’d like, chances are your written French is much better than that of millions of French people!
Useful tip: Google Translate.
Sound like a French person: “Je sais jamais: dilemme, ça prend un n ou pas?!” (I never know: is there an n in “dilemma”?!)
L’AGRESSIVITÉ
Talk to French people living overseas and within five minutes you will hear word for word:
En France, les gens sont hyper agressifs. (In France, people are so aggressive.)
While certainly it is less true in the countryside than in the cities, it is not an unfair statement.
The stress of modern life along with the anonymity of urban metropolises surely contributes to explaining this phenomenon, but these two factors do apply to most cities on earth. However, many French people, it is true, do seem on edge these days.
Psychology shows that people get aggressive when they are stressed, but also when they’re tired, when they’re pushed around, and when they’re in fear.
While most French people might not consciously acknowledge to be living under these conditions, there is no doubt that, collectively, France has been pushed around for a few decades and its people therefore understandably live in a constant state of anxiety. An aggressive France is a suffering France.
In all fairness, a neutral analysis of the key changes of the past decades highlights the depth and brutality of the changes imposed on French society:
Explosion of public debt to levels that can never be repaid and therefore plunge the country into debt slavery.
Mass immigration, which has introduced new social and religious tensions for today and tomorrow.
A shift away from traditional inherited Christian values toward a new set of socially acceptable values which are a 180 from the former, resulting in even more divisions.
An explosion of unpunished violence and crime on the one hand, and fiscal oppression of small-business owners and police harassment of law-abiding drivers on the other.
In France, the vast majority of people feel like they have no control over the course of things. They witness the destiny of their country slipping away from them. They distrust their leaders but also their fellow citizens for being collectively responsible for this change.
The French people are more divided than ever. While a few decades ago people were divided based primarily on political grounds, the past few decades have led to the introduction of division, on new, legitimate grounds, based on religion, morals, ethnicity, contributions to society, and so on.
French society is now eminently divided and fragmented. Fewer and fewer people recognize in their fellow human being someone who shares sufferings, anxieties, and pains and as such who ought to be treated with politeness, kindness, and compassion. By default, others have become competitors, rivals, aggressors, invaders, traitors, fascists, idiots . . . Aggressiveness galore. Under these conditions, and in an amusing twist of events, it’s actually become somewhat rebellious to be polite, thoughtful, and kind.
This perceived aggressiveness is only a symptom of the current state of France, which should prompt the French people to tackle the causes rather than the consequences of this phenomenon. Needless to say, there’s some work to do—or, as the French say, “C’est pas gagné!”
Useful tip: Despite the frequent agressivité, bar fights are typically far less likely to erupt in France than in the U.S. or the UK.
Sound like a French person: “Les gens sont à cran.” (People are on edge.)
GROCERY SHOPPING
Grocery shopping in France can be as delightful as it can be disconcerting. When it comes to buying food on Gallic soil, your options fall within three main categories:
Le marché: Undoubtedly the most commonly spread image among Francophiles—the picture-perfect open-air market where beautiful local produce is on display, offering scents, textures, colors, and seasonal specialties straight out of an urban dweller’s dream. Most towns, villages, or neighborhoods have their jour du marché frequented early in the morning by shoppers looking for the best quality and later in the day by those hoping for the best deal. In most parts of France, the local marché is a weekly invitation to fall in love with a place—and with a culture.
Le supermarché: French supermarkets offer certain strikingly disproportionate aisles. Strolling in the wine or cheese sections of a French supermarket will make you realize that certain clichés about France are still very much grounded in reality. It will also make you wonder how your local supermarket’s cheapest wine option is this French supermarket’s fanciest one. More surprising overly inflated sections include the yogurt and the gâteaux aisles. Gâteaux can be sucrés (cookies—which French manufacturers take to a whole different level) or salés (savory, in which case they’re dubbed gâteaux apéro).
France has a whole panoply of supermarkets, ranging from the huge hypermarchés (aka les hyper)—think Carrefour, E.Leclerc, Auchan—mostly on the outskirts of towns and cities; the supermarchés (aka les grandes surfaces)—Casino, Super U, etc.; all the way down to the charmingly named supérettes, which are somewhere between a local deli and a small supermarket. Some supérettes have more of an urban ring to them (Franprix, Monop’), while some have a more regional feel to them (Sherpa). Add to that grocery shopping topology what the French refer to as le ardiscoont (hard discount)—think Aldi, Lidl, Leader Price—and you’ll have a good grasp of the love affair the French have developed with sizable chain retailers.
However, for shoppers familiar with the “nicer” retailers that have grown more popular in various places of the world over the past two decades, thanks to an average quality of products and shopping experience far superior to most of their competitors, such players have thus far failed to arise in France. French supermarkets do not offer the type of pleasurable grocery shopping experience the Whole Foods of the world have managed to develop. No matter how insanely prevalent it is in France, grocery shopping at a supermarket still has a vile undertone to it, one that somewhere in the backs of most French people’s minds fosters a very discreet form of guilt stemming from the French suspicion (or knowledge) about what la grande distribution (large retailers) does in terms of exploitation of farmers, the triumph of large multinationals, and the destruction of the charm and independence of small local retailers. Aisle after aisle, French supermarkets offer a superb scene of utter oozing Frenchness: patrons pushing their carts with a very French air of mild reluctance and resignation, conveying to the world the sense that life—not just grocery shopping—is a chore. Add the exasperated looks in the checkout lane and the parents constantly scolding their children, and you’ll have yourself a nice, incomparable French slice of Frenchness!
Les petits commerçants (also called le commerce de proximité): Think of the myriad boulangeries (bread), fromageries (cheese), pâtisseries (pastry), boucheries (meat), charcuteries (cured meats), caves (wine), chocolateries (chocolate), fleuristes (flowers), traiteurs (cooked dishes), primeurs (produce), épiceries fines (fine cond
iments)—most fully independent and fully artisanal—that make musing through French towns so enchanting and tempting. While the daily stop at the local boulangerie is still the norm for 90 percent of French people (mass-produced and freshly baked artisanal bread being worlds apart),* there is no doubt that all other artisans have suffered a great deal over the past decades as the French turned massively toward supermarkets for their convenience.
Consequently, while rarely as cheap as supermarkets, les petits commerçants that are still in business tend to offer stellar quality and a taste of a very lovable France, one that reminds us of a time when the independent shops of the centre-villes did not have to compete with ugly but more convenient and more easily accessible zones commerciales outside the city. Les petits commerçants are a weekend treat. Families go downtown on gourmet excursions on Saturday or Sunday mornings. Children marvel at the dead birds and chopped-off veals’ heads at the butcher shop, pull their parents’ pants at the bakery as they point to the bonbon section, pinch their noses chez le fromager. In this common family ritual lies a form of unspoken, vastly unconscious French form of education. The kids tag along and absorb the DNA of their country. Weekend after weekend, dead birds, pigs’ brains, warm baguettes, and smelly cheeses become normal. Go figure: many grow up to become food snobs!
WTF?!--What the French Page 5
