Everything you've ever wanted to know about the French....
...but were too afraid to find out. PLUS: my ultimate French reading list
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We were in a small town east of Dijon when we remembered why we had vowed never to return to France. It was quarter past midday and we had stumbled upon a small cafe in the shade of a giant pine. Already a few tables had been taken, largely by French shopkeepers whose businesses all bore the same sign in the window: Ferme pour dejeuner, the precise timing of which was left unclear; like a giant Gallic shrug in the face of any tourist who dared try the door handle.
A middle-aged man in the uniform of the French waiter- black trousers, scuffed shoes, a white shirt tinged with the day’s sweat, hung about outside shuffling menus back and forth in his hands.
‘Bonjour…’ I said, my voice at least three octaves higher than normal because French waiters always make me nervous. Which, I believe, is the entire point of them.
‘Est-ce que vous avez une table pour deux personnes, s’il vous plait.’
He looked up at me, then through me, then at me again. He then sort of grimaced, shrugged his shoulders and walked back inside, never to return again.
I tried another person, this time a young girl who appeared to be a hostess of some kind. I smiled. She did not smile back. I asked the same question gesturing to the twenty or so empty tables that surrounded us.
She looked at her watch.
‘Maybe in 8 minutes come back and try again,’ she said. (The 8 minutes was as mysterious to me then, as it probably is to you right now).
Smiling, I asked if we could wait at the small bar area for the 8 minutes it would take to find us a table.
‘No,’ was all she said. Except this time she smiled as she said it.
And so we did what we were dutifully told. We waited, with our two panting dogs, in the midday heat, under the shade of the pine. My husband muttered something about ‘never coming back….’ to which I squeezed his shoulder and reminded him that there were no there other cafes in this village, and besides, we had been driving for close to five hours.
Finally a large, authoritarian-looking man arrived, wiping his hands down his trousers. The small woman muttered something to him whilst pointing in our vague direction. Then it appeared -the same look I have seen pass on so many French faces before his; a mix of mild irritation, disgust and sheer fury all in one perfect Gallic scowl.
‘No!’ Was all he said before gesturing us out with his chin and forefinger.
There was no point arguing. We had been here many times before. This, we reminded ourselves, was why we had given up on France.
But my God, it’s hard to give up on something you have loved your entire life. And make no mistake, I have always loved France. I grew up on art house French films that I neither understood nor enjoyed, but whose sophistication was like caviar for the soul in 1990s Salford. Oh how I longed to be a pouty, New Wave heroine with a fringe in her eyes and a Gauloise in her hand- Francoise Hardy, Juliette Greco, Jeanne Dumas. I’d have settled for any of them to be honest. I had a wardrobe full of Breton T-shirts that I wore on rotation for over a decade, studied French at university, then took off to Paris for a year to moon about the streets like every other cliched 20-something before me. France, my husband and I had decided long ago, was the place we would live out our days, eating Roquefort under a purple Provencal sky. Or at least we thought.
‘Portugal, Spain, anywhere where they actually like us would be better than France,’ my husband said over breakfast last winter, as we looked out over our frozen Kentish garden. For the first time in my life, I agreed.
I had always thought it a British thing, this complexity with the French. We love them. They hate us. We love to hate them; they hate to love us. But I have Dutch friends who roll their eyes when I mention their rudeness, as if to say: what do you expect? And German associates who find them equally exasperating. There are entire Reddit threads dedicated to What’s wrong with the French? with almost every nation on earth offering up an example of churlish behaviour and aggressive service. But it was an Italian, who lives in France, who perhaps put it best to me recently: ‘The thing with the French is, they’re just big kids. But at least you know where you stand with them…’
Where France has stood for many of us has been on a pedestal, especially since the turn of the last century where the French have trotted out so many of the things culturally-inclined folk hold so dear to their hearts. Great art, exotic food, cars that look like sexy wasps and fresh baguettes dipped in boules of cafe creme for breakfast. For many years France set the template for what it means to be insouciant, which is quite different to cool. Cool is Pharrell Williams, Beyonce 2014 and limited edition trainers that cost the earth and take four hours to queue for. The French would never dream of anything so try hard.
But the truth is all the great art- Picasso, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Baldwin, whilst all conceived in France was always done by a foreigner. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a proper andouillette or ris de veau in any bistro nowadays - they all sell hamburgers and fries. No one eats fresh baguettes for breakfast anymore because all the bread comes from some industrial maker on the outskirts of town and tastes exactly like Tesco’s Finest. And the only people who drive a Citroen DS are the village pensioners.
The France of our imaginations therefore, is long gone. It is why the French scoff at Emily in Paris, which is a syrupy simulacrum of what a middle-aged American thinks France is like (which is exactly who it was created by) rather than a sound approximation of la vraie France.
And so I have another theory. Perhaps the very things we foreigners find so grating about the French nation, is the very thing that in truth, turns us on.
I’ll give you an example. One of the biggest complaints the world throws at France is its utter incapability of embracing modernity. It has consistently rallied against the Americanisation of its culture, from the protests of the 1950s when the US brought Coco Cola into town, to today where French cinema is given a number of highly favourable protectionist measures to ensure screens are not overrun with Vin Diesel action flicks.
Some see this as France being churlish at best; xenophobic at worse. Theoretically- and the French love nothing more than theorising, this is about protecting national identity and a culture they are fiercely proud of. Practically it means for you and me and every other tourist who dreams of la vraie France, we still get to walk down the Boulevard Saint Germain and see posters for reassuringly moody-looking French films whilst being served a Diablo rather than a Coke Light at dinner.
The French are aggressively protective of their language too. It is why, if you have ever attempted to speak French to a waiter, you will almost always be corrected. Or worse, they will reply to you in English. To us, this further solidifies the theory that the French are a bunch of petulant frogs. In practice it means there is a steadfast respect for one of the most beautiful languages on earth. You see the French, unlike the English or Americans, have genuine anxiety over their lingua franca. In fact it is one of the only countries in the world that has an official state guardian - The Academie Francaise, whose job it is to police any linguistic flotsam like Le Big Mac, from making it into everyday parlance. And frankly, thank God for that.
But perhaps the most astonishing story I have ever read which best sums up the French is a story I read a few years back about two second home owners, the French justice system and a cockerel called Maurice. A case was brought against the 2 year old bird whose early morning wake-up calls in western France disturbed a couple of second homers who had moved next door. The case incensed the nation, whereupon Maurice became both hero and symbol of France’s ‘sensory heritage’ and the right to protect it. Though the case seemed both juvenile and pedantic to outsiders (so French!), it meant that everyday rural noises such as cow bells, bird song and even early morning tractors going about their business are now protected by environmental legislation. Now you may laugh, but this is the exact same reason why one might choose to holiday in The Auvergne, say over Lincolnshire.
It is often said that the French’s problem is the gap between ideation and realisation. Their Cartesian way of being - I think, therefore I am, presupposing that if it works in theory, then it will work in practice. But maybe, this is our issue too. Perhaps if we all stopped living with the fantasy we have of France, as opposed to its reality, then we would come to understand it much better. Perhaps if we are wiling to see that what makes it so difficult to understand is also what makes it so special.
I still don’t ‘get’ France or the French, but then I think that is sort of the point. It’s certainly why, as I write this to you know, I am sat at a table, somewhere in the south of France, plotting how we can come back again next year.
If this has whetted your appetite for something to read about France then I’ve put my favourite ever bookS set in France below. These are the biographies, the novels and the non-fiction must-reads that I swear by.