A Key to Understanding the French.

I’m sure that many of you who have visited France and met the French have been struck by their apparent surliness and distant nature when in public. Well, don’t worry, that’s perfectly understandable because even I, who have lived here for many years, had problems figuring it out. Until recently.

We all have stories to tell of the notoriously cold and detached service in restaurants and shops, unhelpful public officials, and the general atmosphere of people not interacting in public any more than they have to.

Ok, so here’s the reason why, in two separate and very revealing personal experiences, five words, and a piece of advice.

One of my friends here in Lyon is a “Bobo”, a term derived from the phrase “Bourgois-Bohéme”. (Oh, I can hear you. I am not a Bobo, ok?) This means she has a cushy public administration job, a chic apartment in the artistic quarter of the city, dresses like a hippy in the evening and, most importantly, she (says she) is “left-wing” and is thus, obligatorily, not enamoured of Anglo-Saxons. And she is into cultural activities big-time.

Which is why, one day towards the end of last year, she announced sullenly that she had finally been obliged to buy a plane ticket to Liverpool, England, because Liverpool was the European Cultural Capital last year. She visits the Cultural Capital each year, whatever country it’s in. “Oh" I said. "Well, good luck, try your best to enjoy yourself anyway, and be nice to the natives”. So off she went, deep foreboding filling her heart at the prospect of having to tolerate the uncouth hordes of Perfid Albion.

One week after her return I put on my flak jacket and combat helmet, and met her for a drink. “Euhhhh, how did it go..,” I ventured tentatively. To my utter stupefaction her eyes lit up with joy, she beamed an enormous smile, and she said “Great! Wonderful!! The English are so alive! There’s colour everywhere, they all dress differently, laugh and joke in the street, they seem oblivious to everything but having fun, and people you never met before even come up and talk to you in bars! InCREdible!!” (Daaarling).

Then she frowned and added “But I’ve been kind of depressed since I got back home. There’s no fun. Everyone looks the same and it’s all so sad.....”. This perplexed me. I mean, I knew what she was saying about French/English cultural differences, but I still didn’t know how to explain them. End of story one.

An American friend came to visit me here at the end of the year. It was her first ever visit to France. She found Lyon to be an elegant and clean city. We did the tourist thing, ate out all the time, and I was pleased to be able to show her how I lived.

After a couple of days though, she asked me this. “Fripouille, is there a problem in France right now? I mean, people look so mournful. They don’t talk much in the street, they look introverted and unsociable. Ok, your famous “French Girls” are prettier than us, but they sure don’t look like much fun! Service is bad too”.

Hmmmmm. That rang an inverse bell in my head, and I thought about what “Bobo” had said. And, very slowly, like the realisation of something cosmically momentous and true, things began to fall into place.

Then, dear reader, I knew the answer to it all, and told her this....

“Well, the French DO appear that way, but it isn’t really true. It can all be summed up in the five words contained in the French expression which defines their recipe for happiness. Those words are “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés....”

What do those words mean? They mean “To live happily, hide”. Yep, you read right. TO LIVE HAPPILY, HIDE!! The French actually believe that happiness is something lived behind closed doors, and that public displays of emotion and fun are rather vulgar. But I also explained to my friend that, when I visit or invite my French friends to eat, their jokes are just as scabrous and politically incorrect as ours, their laughs are just as loud, their sense of humour is just as sharp as ours, and their tears of sadness are just as hot as ours.... What you see in the street here is something deeply seared into French collective subconsciousness, and that’s why they appear cold and indifferent.

So what are the origins of this apparently auto-restrictive lifestyle philosophy? Well, the author of that expression was a French poet named Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, and he died at the end of the 1700’s, just after the French Revolution. The Revolution resulted in what is called “Le Terreur”, a kind of social and political pogrom carried out in the years that followed. Equality in deed and thought became the norm, and all ideas of  individualism were discarded. This was translated into the fact that people began to “blend in” as much as possible to avoid social castigation, and the kind of freedom of personal expression which led to the Revolution ironically became the victim of it.

The French national motto is “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (Freedom, Equality, Friendship). Since the Revolution, the French have always fundamentally believed in the “Egalité” part, at the expense of freedoms and friendships, and this can be seen in the rigid and socially-encoded French way of life even today. Being different is not really de rigeur, and the English image of a young man dressed as a Punk-Rocker peacefully drinking a beer with a bowler-hatted business type would be impossible to see here.

So my advice to you when visiting France would be to ignore the stereotypes, disregard what you see in the street, meet people, and invite them to share a good bottle of Bordeaux wine, three good cheeses and a good baguette!

Then you’ll see that they are “just the same” as you are, and they will see that you are “just the same” as they are...

A votre santé!!