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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781908120397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oval Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2009 |
| Series: | Xenophobe's Guide , #14 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Xenophobe's Guide to the French
By Nick Yapp, Michael Syrett
Xenophobe's Guides
Copyright © 2011 Oval ProjectsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908120-39-7
CHAPTER 1
Nationalism & Identity
Forewarned
The French care about what really matters in life – being French. They care more about doing everything with enormous style than about what they do. They are convinced of their corporate and individual superiority over all others in the world. Their charm is that they don't despise the rest of us: they pity us for not being French.
The notion of 'la force' lies at the heart of everything the French have done, well or badly, in the last thousand years or more. La force is their sense of the essence of life. It is bound up with other grand ideas such as 'la gloire' and 'la patrie', feminine words that speak of boundless stores of energy. The French are attracted to all things vibrant, alive, moving, irresistible. Beneath their chic and natty appearance they respond to atavistic and primitive impulses.
Where most other nations would be embarrassed or appalled by the notion of the thinly veiled body of Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) leaping over the barricades, musket in hand, the French are moved to tears of real patriotism. The cockerel may well be their national symbol – a colourful male bird that makes a great deal of noise, chases off all rivals and lays no eggs – but they never forget that their country is la France.
This is why they are a sensual people: who kiss where others shake hands; who proudly say that they make love in the same way that they eat; who write music that sounds like the sun rising out of the sea. And it's also why they are so concerned with appearances, taking seven and a half minutes to wrap a small tarte aux cerises – putting it in a box, tying it with ribbon and handing it to the customer as though it were a new-born baby – when the blessed thing is going to be consumed the moment it's taken out of the pâtisserie.
They are a public, unembarrassed people, made for special occasions – banquets, weddings, festivals, fêtes. Here they perform, happy in their roles and the overall production. In their homes, they are too cabined, cribbed, confined. The settings in which they are best seen are offices, restaurants, airport lounges (who else looks good in these?) opera houses, and grands boulevards. They may sometimes behave badly, but they always act superbly.
How they see themselves
The French see themselves as the only truly civilised people in the world. Long ago they discovered the absolutes, the certainties of life, and thus they feel they have a duty to lead and illumine the rest.
On anything that matters they consider themselves experts. Anything in which they are not experts does not matter. All life, all energy, is a grand force of nature, which they embrace whole-heartedly. They see glory in what others regard as defeat. Since they have won almost every war they have entered, they assume that the final battle must have resulted in a French victory. Because of this, the French who visit England and happen to travel through Waterloo Station wonder why the British named it after a battle they lost.
They also see honour in seduction, triumph in a well-cooked entrecôte, and world supremacy in a bottle of grand cru. Not for nothing was Louis XIV called 'the Sun King', for the French see brilliance in everything they do, and French statesmen from the Renaissance to de Gaulle and Chirac have likened France herself to a guiding light. Their role in relation to the rest of the world borders on the Messianic.
How they see others
To give their own feeling of superiority some validity, the French are generously prepared to accept that other nations have to exist. But do not expect the French to be 'politically correct' in anything they do. They can be racist, chauvinistic and xenophobic, but always with great charm, and whereas the English would feel guilty for having such sentiments, the French believe that it's natural.
They find the Spanish proud but noisy, and believe they produce more wine than is healthy for the vineyards of the Midi. Although Spanish wine may be substandard to the taste buds of the French, 'ça existe' – an ominous phrase
They see the English as small-minded, uncultured, faintly ridiculous, badly dressed; a nation of people who spend most of their time gardening, playing cricket and drinking thick, sweet, warm beer in pubs. Yet they remain curious about them. They may refer to English day-trippers to Calais as 'les fuck-offs' and still regard the British generally as 'perfide' (because the French jury is still out on the little matter of whether or not Napoleon was poisoned while on St. Helena). The Scots are viewed in an entirely different light: apart from their historic ties, they supply malt whisky.
The French don't dislike the Germans but they are not fond of them. They are willing to acknowledge their industrial supremacy but regard their culture as inferior to their own. This is not discrimination. In their view, every other culture is inferior to their own. They also feel politically superior to the Germans since the Germans lost all international 'presence' when they were stripped of their colonies after the First World War. The French may no longer own much of the world, but French law, language and culture persist in every continent.
Despite their reservations and however uncomfortable they find the thought, the French have much in common with the Germans – a sense of formality, a reserve, a concept of racial purity, a belief in an historical destiny.
The exceptions to this admiring–disliking axis are the Swiss and the Belgians. The Swiss are objects of merciless satire in French television commercials. They may be hospitable, but they are obsessively clean and speak French in a most odd fashion.
Because the French value style in everything they do, they have contempt for the Belgians, who they see as universally dull and totally lacking in finesse. To the French, the Belgians have always been bête, 'thick', and they are the butt of an endless stream of French jokes, e.g:
Two Belgian soldiers are sleeping under a tree.
Suddenly a terrible rumbling sound awakes them.
'Hell and death,' says the first. 'A storm!'
'No,' says the other, 'those are bombs.'
'Thank God for that,' says the first. 'I'm terrified of thunder.'
A little envy has crept into these jokes now that the French realise the Belgians have a better standard of living than they do.
Special relationships
Historically, the French have had a special relationship with the United States and Canada, having owned much of the former and populated much of the latter. But complications have arisen. When a French film is shown at a French-Canadian cinema it has to have subtitles because the Canadians cannot understand the soundtrack, their accent is so different.
The French have long admired the Americans – for their constitution (based on the French), for their code of law (based on the French), and for kicking out the English. Yet they go to considerable lengths to stave off the corrupting influence of American culture – restricting the number of American fast-food outlets, limiting imports of U.S. goods, and dumping EuroDisney sufficiently far from Paris to give it a sporting chance of failure. Curiously, the French have successfully persuaded generation after generation of Americans to fall in love with them, without reciprocating that love.
How others see them
The trouble with the French, in the eyes of many, is that they are inconsistent. This is because others fail to see that the French decide all big issues on the basis of self-interest, a feature of peasant ideology.
This trait is to be seen in all aspects of French life. They exasperate with their ox-drawn, lumbering approach to the delights of a market economy, but exhilarate with their Quixotic flights of fancy in some international projects. They produce the most beautiful paintings in the world and the ugliest wallpaper. They grow the finest vegetables and never serve them in their restaurants. If anything goes wrong with the heating or air-conditioning on one of their trains, a uniformed conducteur will visit each compartment apologising profusely ("nous sommes désolés ..."), yet the same conducteur will cheerily slam the coach doors shut in your face as you race to get on board.
The French work hard, but are never seen to be working. Drive through France at any time of the day, week, month or year and 95% of the country appears to be uninhabited or fast asleep.
What others need to understand is that the French regard consistency as boring, and to be boring is inexcusable.
How they would like others to see them
Since the French are so full of their own self-esteem, they don't really care how others see them.
CHAPTER 2Character
The essential Frenchman
It is every Frenchman's secret wish to be Cyrano de Bergerac, the braggart, swaggering hero of Edmund Rostand's play. Cyrano, like the hero d'Artagnan, was sensitive yet strong; a great swordsman, but also a poet of infinite tenderness; a passionate lover, yet one who died of the greatest unrequited love in all literature; a man who failed, but failed gloriously. And what most endears Cyrano to all Frenchmen is that, to the end, he maintained his panache.
It is every Frenchman's overt wish to be Gérard Depardieu. Casting him as Cyrano in the 1991 film was a stroke of genius, for Depardieu is one of a long line of French stars (Edith Piaf, Yves Montand et les autres) who have risen from the gutter to the glitter. The French love their heroes, real or fictional, to have had a past that is depraved, deprived or delinquent – an outsider who forces his or her way in.
They love Depardieu for what he does off-screen, for who he really is, a complete turnabout from the old Hollywood system where the screen image of the star was idolised. Depardieu is a man first, a film star second. He is the man who turned down a film role because the harvest was due in his vineyard; the man who says, had he been a woman, he would have made love with director Ridley Scott; the man who is called 'a force of nature'.
Fad followers
The French are fad followers. They will take anything if it's fashionable. They love the latest clothes, the latest slang, the latest films, the latest gadgets, but 'latest' lasts only a few days and then it's on to the newest latest. Not for nothing is passé a French concept.
They love ideas, concepts, innovations – playing around with things, like democracy, railway systems, architecture. It's not the practical end of the road they're interested in, but the journey and the possibilities, hence the way they drive, as though safe arrival at their destination was the last thing on their minds.
What matters is being up-to-date. People will happily accept the hard sell if they think the paint on the item is still wet. They do not share the British cynicism about advertising. The British admire the advertisement but don't buy the product, whereas the French don't value the advertisement as an art form in itself, but throw themselves headlong at the product. They love to feel that life is fast moving, energetic and stylish. At one extreme this results in an elitist technocracy; at the other in obnoxious – but usually short-lived – cults, such as that of the 'Dur dur d'être bébé' ('It's hard to be a baby'), where hordes of teenage girls mimicked the words of a pop song of that name and wandered about with babies' dummies dangling on ribbons around their necks.
In this, as in everything they do, the French seesaw constantly from the superb to the absurd.
Farmers at heart
Intellectually and spiritually, the average French citizen still identifies very much with the land, romanticising rural and village life to a wholly improbable degree. Inside every Bordeaux businessman, Parisian restaurateur or Grenoble academic still beats the heart of a genuine paysan.
To these displaced urban French, the burly farmer – shooting the local squirrels, fattening geese for their foie gras and counting every cob of corn in their fields – can be forgiven because of all he does to protect a way of life that they abandoned long ago. Even as the sophisticates fume at the wheels of their Peugeots and Renaults in traffic jams caused by agricultural industrial action (the throwing up of barricades of old tractors, rioting, lobbing stones at the police), they feel deep empathy and spiritual communion with the culprits, among whom could well be their grandfathers.
Sixty-four million philosophers
From this rural base, the French have stormed the intellectual high ground. The Americans, British, Germans, Koreans, Chinese and others fight to take the lead in the seedy business of making money. The French are more concerned to protect and promote European culture, and by this, of course, they mean de Maupassant, Degas, Debussy – their own being the only culture worth having as far as they are concerned. The French only acknowledge other nations' culture as adjuncts to their own.
It is the passion for matters of the intellect that makes them natural philosophers. They are a people that eat, drink and breathe philosophy. There is not a farmer, fisherman, waiter, car-worker, shop assistant or housewife who isn't a closet Descartes or Diderot, a Saint-Simon or Sartre. The reason for this is that the French are brain-driven. They worship ideas and those who generate them, even if the ideas are only in vogue for the briefest periods.
Sartre's existentialism, born in the Occupation and flourishing in the late 1940s and '50s, was a spent force by the 1960s – but it doesn't matter: new ideas are like buses on the Paris autobus system, there will always be another along in a few minutes.
This preoccupation with perceptions and conceptions makes the French much harder to govern than the Germans, who have a natural tendency towards acceptance of authority, or the English, who will grumble but do as they're told. The French examine every facet of modern life through a philosophical microscope. For instance, in the whole Western world there exists the problem of unemployment. To the Americans, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, Italians, British, Germans and Belgians it is exactly that – a problem of unemployment. To the French it is 'a question of civilisation'.
They have an expression: le discours. It can mean anything from idle chatter to a formal speech, but their favoured use of it is as 'a piece of discursive reasoning'. Those skilled in this craft (which is about 95% of the population), are held in high esteem. A French man or woman will hold up a piece of nifty reasoning with the same pride that another might feel when displaying an Impressionist painting, a Fabergé egg or a Sèvres vase.
And so, in Cafés Philo across France, argument rages on every subject from literature to liberty, from privilege to privacy. Away with old thoughts, let us embrace the new. At their computers from Cannes to Calais, from Nantes to Nancy, budding philosophers are tapping away, formulating new theories and new conceits. All over France, 64 million philosophers are hungrily waiting.
CHAPTER 3Attitudes & Values
Despite a past littered with revolutions and upheavals, the French have maintained a stable and unchanging outlook on what matters in life. They have a high regard for the intellect, for qualifications and for the products of certain academic institutions. For, although there are remnants of the old class system among the French (a few aristocrats whose forebears were not pruned by Madame la Guillotine), France is above all else a meritocracy.
In the United States the belief is that anyone can do anything if they really want to. In Britain the belief is anyone can do anything if they prove they are able to. In France the belief is that anyone can do anything they are qualified to do, and must be allowed to do so unchallenged once they have proved that they went through the right channels, observed the right formalities.
This gives French politicians carte blanche to come up with bold, imaginative, costly and silly projects that receive widespread approval even when they become disastrous failures, simply because they were originally so bold, imaginative, etc. The French proceeded apace with their nuclear programme despite Chernobyl. Concorde was a financial disaster, but a conceptual triumph. In the 1980s they began excitedly prospecting for oil beneath Paris. One has to admire such wild and terrifying aspirations. The French have the courage to experiment, fail, and then experiment again. again. This is a nation not burdened by its past, but one that revels in its ability to use the present as a springboard to the future.
A passion for roots
France enjoys a huge amount of land relative to the size of her population. That is why the British, Dutch, Belgian, German and Japanese visitors experience a feeling of space on arrival in France. There seems to be plenty of room for everyone. But the French don't see it that way. They feel there is not enough land to go round. Not only is there an undercurrent of resentment that immigrants are taking up houses, flats and jobs, there is festering resentment about the possession of every ditch, manure heap and nettle patch in the entire country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Xenophobe's Guide to the French by Nick Yapp, Michael Syrett. Copyright © 2011 Oval Projects. Excerpted by permission of Xenophobe's Guides.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Nationalism & Identity,
Character,
Attitudes & Values,
Behaviour,
The Family,
Manners,
Leisure & Pleasure,
Humour,
Culture,
Eating & Drinking,
Health & Hygiene,
Systems,
Crime & Punishment,
Government & Bureaucracy,
Business,
Obsessions,
Language & Ideas,
About the Author,
Copyright,