“So, what region are you from?” As casual icebreakers go, the question would sound a little too specific for North Americans, who normally ask new acquaintances, “So where are you from?” But in France, an open-ended inquiry about someone’s origins is an outright insinuation.
Assimilation is one of the core values of the French Republic, meaning all national identities (theoretically) are supposed to blend into the national melting pot. Taken to its logical conclusion, questioning anyone’s origins, even subtly, is taboo. If you ask an immigrant, even second generation, “Where are you from?” the question will be interpreted as a subtle challenge to the person’s right to be in France, or worse, to be French. In the case of the “old stock” French—and you would never know unless they told you—even raising the possibility of not being French sounds derogatory, if not accusatory. For everyone between these two poles, the question is unsettling: no one in France likes having his or her membership credentials challenged.
On the other hand, if you ask precisely what region the French are from—De quelle region êtes-vous?—there’s no harm done and no offense taken. If your interlocutor is from a different area of France, he’ll likely tell you what department, region, or even town he’s from, then branch into some trivia about local geography, history, or culinary achievements. If the person turns out to live in the very commune you are standing in, she could take the question as an invitation to expand on her family origins. You never know where the question will lead, but it’s rarely a dead end.
What gives the word “region” its magic power? The French like talking about themselves as much as anybody, but the word “region” helps them avoid a touchy topic: identity, either personal or national (we address this more in chapter 18). On the other hand, asking the French about regions, or towns, allows them to talk about two topics they love: geography and history. The French know a lot about geography and history, particularly their own, and they delight in displaying their knowledge.
Learning history and geography are practically republican duties in France. Both are fundamental components of what the French call culture générale (the term translates literally as “general culture” but has the sense of “good education”). The French have iron faith in the idea that there are a certain number of things everyone should know. It is something like the universal ideal of the humanities (the study of culture), but it applies to everyone, of every age and stage in life.
The concept of culture générale is so deeply engrained in France, it has its own niche publishing industry. A few months before we arrived in France a 160-page quarterly magazine called L’Éléphant was released with a subtitle that said it all: La revue de culture générale (the review of general culture). The first issues had a profile of the writer Alexandre Dumas, a list of key dates in contemporary art, an article about black holes, another explaining the international currency system, an essay on the philosophy of comic books, a piece on existentialism, and finally—just in case anyone needs to know—an article on the taste of an obscure citrus fruit called a cédrat (citron).
Displaying one’s culture générale in France is not considered elitist behavior. On the contrary: L’Éléphant’s manifesto is “to know is to be equal and free.” Its founders, Guénaëlle Le Solleu, a former journalist, and Jean-Paul Arif, an engineer who worked in geomatics, set out to make a publication with information people could both read and memorize easily. To this end, the pair conscripted the Laboratory for the Study of Cognitive Mechanisms (Laboratoire d’étude des mécanismes cognitifs) at the University of Lyon II to design the magazine’s quizzes, crossword puzzles, and other mental games.
Nor is culture générale written in stone. The actual facts that constitute it change over time, which is why yet another French writer, the journalist François Reynaert, published a book called Le kit du 21e siècle (The kit for the 21st century), subtitled A new guide to culture générale. Reynaert argues that no one can really function in today’s world without knowing about antioxidants, carbon footprints, the human genome, or George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. To say that the French openly embrace the power of knowledge is an understatement.
Before there was Wikipedia, the French had their own homegrown paper version of it in the form of a reference book called Le Quid. Le Quid had more than twenty-two hundred pages with 2.5 million entries on topics about France and the world—or everything that is supposed to matter to the French. In its heyday, Le Quid sold 250,000 copies a year. Unfortunately it didn’t adapt well to the arrival of Web-based, free reference tools (like Wikipedia); it stopped publishing its paper version in 2007, then closed definitely in 2010 when the Web version didn’t break even. But until its demise, Le Quid had sales comparable to those of popular dictionaries like Petit Larousse (which adapted very well to the Internet). For that matter, culture générale is a recipe for success in France. Even the American “Dummies” got in on the action, publishing La culture générale pour les Nuls (General culture for dummies) in 2008. And every week, an established author or philosopher releases a new dictionary or volume designed to quench the huge French thirst for general knowledge, like author Charles Dantzig, who sold seventy thousand copies in France of his 970-page Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Egotistical dictionary of French literature).
As far as the French are concerned, you are never too young to start acquiring culture générale. By the time they get to school, French kids are supposed to be primed to acquire the knowledge and information they will “need.” School is not considered the exclusive repository of culture générale in France, but it’s expected to play a big role in fostering it. It’s an enormous difference in philosophy from North American ideas about education. Only real outliers in France question the value of acquiring factual knowledge. The gap between French and North American teaching philosophies sunk in when we returned home and our daughters started grade 6 in Canadian school. One of the first things their teachers told us at the September parent-teacher meeting was that students would be reading a lot and would be expected to “react” to books. We had to pinch ourselves.
In France, we learned, children are expected to assimilate what they read. It goes without saying. For her first school research project in French school, Nathalie was instructed to choose a French classical painter and write a short report on him. (Nathalie was perfectly able to do this: she just googled “French Classical Painters” and came up with Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), the most famous artist of the seventeenth century. She did need some help interpreting the information; on the other hand, she ended up learning some basic concepts of art history that she would apply over the course of the year.) Back in Montreal the next year, our daughters’ first school assignment was to write about “my favorite body part.” Again, our jaws dropped. The idea (we assume) was for them to learn how to organize information. The content didn’t matter. In France, form also matters, but never at the expense of content, especially when children are supposed to be building their culture générale.
To be fair, the universal French faith in knowledge acquisition means they end up cramming a lot of stuff into children’s heads that probably doesn’t belong there: some of it doesn’t stick no matter how hard teachers try. Julie accompanied Erika’s class one morning to Paris’s “Festival du Pain” (Bread Festival), held in an enormous tent erected in the open square in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Before entering the bread tent, it dawned on Erika’s teacher that there was a great learning moment standing one hundred yards behind her. “That’s an example of Gothic architecture,” she told the class, pointing to Notre Dame Cathedral and slowly enunciating. Her tone suggested the children should have known that already (and since most of the kids lived a twenty-minute walk from Notre Dame, they probably should have). But the kids just shrugged. Even French kids can’t know everything.
That doesn’t stop the French from trying. Nobody questions the necessity of children learning La Fontaine’s fables, or the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus’s plays, even if the content is not exactly appropriate for children (by our standards). At the end of the year, our daughters memorized a forty-line fable by La Fontaine called “The Wolf and the Dog,” the moral of which was “better to starve free than be a fat slave.” Children start learning the names of France’s rivers and the major dates of history as early as first grade. When a French teacher asks ten-year-olds, “Marignan?” children are supposed to be able to automatically answer, “1515” (1515 was the year King François I waged the famous battle of that name near Milan). There’s no pedagogical “approach” backing up all that memorization, just the rock-solid certainty of the French that everyone should learn as much factual information, especially about France, as possible.
Geography is the most concrete and the most unifying among the topics that constitute French culture générale, so it’s always a good bet for starting conversations. History is fascinating, but it can be polemical. Geography is neutral. It’s also a topic that shows France in a flattering light. France is a geographical wonder with a wide range of geological, agricultural, and climatic conditions packed into a relatively small territory. What the French don’t learn in books, they get to experience themselves during the country’s abundant holidays.
However, with geography, as with almost all topics of French culture générale, a certain French tunnel vision can make foreigners feel foolish. In a typical conversation, one friend of ours told us she had a summer home in Plougasnou. When we asked her exactly where that was, she just answered, “It’s in Brittany.” We continued to probe, “Okay, but where in Brittany, exactly?” To which she answered: “Between Le Trégor and the Coast of Armor.” It would have been a lot more helpful for us to hear that Plougasnou was one hundred kilometers west of Rennes, Brittany’s capital city. But that’s typical North American reasoning. The French give directions strictly with reference to other French landmarks (to be fair, Germans do the same). They never use cardinal points (though strangely, they do learn these in school) and hardly ever talk about numerical distances. Everyone is supposed to know where places are so they can figure out where other places are in relation to them.
French schoolchildren memorize things like the exact height of France’s highest summit, Mont Blanc (4,807 meters), all stuff that can make grown-up North Americans feel ignorant, all the more so because French kids are taught to demonstrate their knowledge, so they tend to flaunt it. A popular gauge of good education in France is being able to recite the names and numbers of all of France’s ninety-five départements by heart. Children are supposed to know this by the end of middle school. (French license plates all indicate the car owner’s department; when driving, parents quiz their kids on these numbers.)
It probably struck us because as North Americans, we have to grapple with the vast distances of our continent so much: although France is by far the largest country of Western Europe, the French look at their country with a completely different mindset. They squint at it as if they are examining its features through a microscope, dividing it into the smallest units possible and contemplating the sometimes minute differences between, say, two neighboring towns. Administratively, France has thirteen régions that split up France’s ninety-five départements, which in turn are split into thirty-seven thousand communes (towns). France has more towns than England, Germany, Spain, and Belgium combined. Unofficially, the country is also divided into 420 pays, distinct zones with their own geography and cultural particularities. (And those, in turn, are divided into 1,800 micro-pays.)
The reason French wine labels don’t have grape types listed on them is that the French are expected to know, by seeing a department number (indicated on all wine labels), where the wine comes from, then deduce from their general geography knowledge what kind of grapes grow there (or simply what type of wine is produced there, skipping the grape types altogether; or by the shape of the bottle, which differs according to wine type). Learning France’s minute territorial divisions at school means this should be part of one’s culture générale by drinking age. Although French winemakers have added grape types to export labels to appease foreign markets, the French still like labels that are exclusively geographic because they don’t insult their intelligence. L’héritage de Carillan is from le Pays d’oc, and that’s that. The back of the bottle may tell you it is from Nîmes, but more often, it will simply give the number of the department, 30, by which you know that the wine comes from Le Gard, northwest of Marseille. A Saint-Pourçain is from Saint-Pourçain, in the Loire valley. The smaller and more specific the geographic area on the label, the more exclusive (and generally higher priced) the wine will be: the little known Bonnezeaux wine, for instance, comes from a small estate of one hundred and twenty hectares in Anjou, a minuscule patch within the seventy thousand hectares of the Loire Valley (to put this in perspective, Saumur wine is produced in an area of fourteen hundred hectares).
This splintered vision of their geography means the French have to look elsewhere to get a unified view of their country and that seems to be the job of weather reporting. The French view weather with a very wide lens. French newspapers’ weather sections start with seventy-five-word paragraphs, rather poetic in tone, which convey the overall mood of the country, not meteorological conditions anywhere in particular. For example, one chilly May morning, Le Parisien newspaper wrote: “The Ice Saints Days Are Here. It’s St. Servais’ Day, after St. Mamert’s and St. Pancrace’s. The three Ice Saints are bringing back the North Wind and adding a chill to the beautiful spring sky. ‘Beware of Frost,’ say gardeners, who won’t plant anything before the Saints have passed.” The paragraph wrapped up with jaunty advice, ostensibly for anyone on French territory who might be thinking of leaving their house: “It might be a good idea to take a little scarf with you this morning.” The story gives the French the illusion that the weather has some overarching grasp on the nation and that there’s something “French” about the weather no matter if it’s in Paris or Rennes.
The French also love to talk about history, which of course they know well, having started learning major dates in first grade (or earlier). Every day, every week of the year, either one of France’s public television channels runs a special about a historical event or period, or a magazine publishes an entire issue about a historical period, or a new book on history is released—and that’s not counting the many museum exhibitions about history. Whether it’s ancient Egypt, the Freemasons, or Roman Gaul, the French just lap it up. Any major event is a good excuse for delving into related history: just before the World Cup started in Brazil, Historia published a special edition on the Portuguese colonial empire. World War II and the Algerian War are perennial topics.
The risk in talking about history with the French is that the book is never shut on it. The French have many parallel histories: there is the official timeline, but also local and personal histories that fit into that timeline. The two only converge in rare cases, as in World War I, during which 15 percent of France’s population was either killed or injured and which everybody experienced more or less the same way. That’s one reason the World War I soldier, called a poilu (“hairy,” because they never got to shave), became an iconic figure in French history.1 But in other cases, like the violent upheaval in Paris that happened a few decades earlier, La Commune, in 1870–1871, there is no consensus about what happened to this day.2 World War II is even touchier. The country was divided. Some French collaborated with the German occupiers, some resisted, and in many ways, the war has not yet ended. When our young landlady visited us in our apartment, she made a point of telling us that her father had been a Grand Résistant, a fighter in the French Resistance. “But I can’t say as much for other owners in this building,” she alluded. It still mattered. Then again, people who experienced it are still alive. One friend from Jean-Benoît’s hiking club, Huguette, still remembered Germans arriving in her village of Sarthe in 1940, when she was ten—a story she told for the first time as we were hiking on the seventieth anniversary of D-day.
Even beyond the great conflicts, the French have a complex, conflicted relationship with the past. The French Revolution aside, the French on the whole love the symbols of France’s defunct monarchy, the ancien régime. Since 1984, Paris has celebrated something called Les Journées du Patrimoine (Heritage Days), by opening some seventeen thousand national buildings, normally closed to the public, to visitors. One Paris daily speculated about the curious popularity of the event, where people flock to admire the vestiges of a regime they love to hate—not just in Versailles Palace, but at the Luxembourg Palace (which houses the French Senate), the Élysée Palace (where the president lives), the Panthéon, and the Palais Bourbon (which houses the National Assembly). People still want to feel close to the monarchy, and they do it through historical monuments associated with power.
Then there’s the issue of official history versus local history. Official history in France is essentially “Parisian” history. It is the official narrative of France that Parisians supply to the rest of the country. This is partly because Paris is where France’s national institutions are located but also because throughout France’s history, the government, located in Paris, has bulldozed local cultures and identities. Unofficial history is the history of the rest of France, the local history, which local people know very well. The relationship between the two is as fraught as that between a Native American or an Afro-American version of history and mainstream American history (or Canadian, for that matter). Naturally, a lot of local history is left out of France’s official history, including local heroes one only hears about outside of Paris (and even Paris has its own local history). The French love supplementing “official” history with tidbits about their local history. Knowing just the smallest details about a place—not to mention having a decent grasp of official history—can go a long way in breaking the ice with people. When Jean-Benoît visited the town of Bourges, he only had to mention the name of the local hero Jacques Cœur (c. 1395–1456) to get people talking. Cœur was a local hero, a very rich merchant in the fifteenth century, and a famous treasurer of the king whose career ended as a result of an unfair trial. In remote French departments like Guadeloupe, locals told us about the slaves’ heroic struggle for liberation, an episode that is ignored in official history—and here again, knowing about local fighters like Louis Delgrès (1772–1802) or La Mulâtresse Solitude (circa 1772–1802) makes it easy to talk to people.
As with geography, the French love their own history, even if it’s not all glorious. This fascination can leave outsiders with the distinct impression that the French are backward looking, not to mention inward looking, victims of a giant case of nostalgia. There is no doubt that a sizable portion of the French population is falling back on tradition as an answer to challenges of the present. But France is not alone in that respect. And the French have not always been fond of the past. Classical art was about the rejection and destruction of Gothic art, which owes its name to the fact that the French regarded it as barbaric (the word comes from gotico, in sixteenth-century Italian, and originally meant “savage despoiler,” in reference to German tribes who invaded the Roman Empire).
The present fascination of the French for their history is actually quite modern—it dates back to the romantics, particularly Victor Hugo’s fascination for the Gothic and the grotesque. And for a country that boasts one of the biggest tourist industries on the planet, the past is very good business. Jean-Benoît visited Bourges, the capital of the Berry and very close to the geographical center of the country. His hostess, Michelle, belonged to a historical society that organized Veillées aux Flambeaux (candlelight vigils) and other events to celebrate local historical anniversaries. She knew a lot about the city’s superb cathedral, which competes with Salisbury’s in beauty and luminosity, and about Jacques Cœur, the local grandee whose remarkable Gothic house is still open to visitors. Bourges is a superb city with hundreds of timber-framed houses, built after the city burned down in the mid-1400s. A century ago, most of these timber frames were hidden under mortar to prevent fire. They were uncovered when architects and developers understood their potential as a tourist attraction.
In short, the French are a furiously modern people that live with a combination of beautiful things and ugly memories from the past. When you are talking about history in France, you need to tread carefully to avoid inadvertently stepping on toes. It’s always a loaded topic. But there is one advantage to being an outsider: you are usually perceived as neutral. If you inadvertently ruffle their feathers, the French are likely to cut you some slack.
After geography and history, art is the third pillar of the French conception of culture générale. Because it is linked to taste, art is a more controversial topic than geography, and equally as debatable as history. But like Julie’s famous Art-Deco-is-fascist declaration at Guillemette’s table, the French love to hear opinions about art and culture—the more provocative, the better.
Though they tend to forget it themselves, the French have not always been geniuses of taste. The interest for art in France goes back to the French king François I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547 and brought the Italian Renaissance to France at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Prior to François I’s rule, the French were considered rather crude. France was known for religious fanaticism (they led the Crusades), and for excelling in trade and the military arts, but not culture. François I did more than import Italian art (and cuisine): he was the first French ruler to make cultural promotion into a royal policy. The French have placed a high premium on art and culture ever since. According to a report from Ernst and Young, France’s cultural industry employs 1 million people—that’s one job out of forty—with half of those in Paris alone. A full 21 percent of the jobs in culture are in the film industry, and an amazing 19 percent are in live performance.3 Not surprisingly, Paris has more public libraries and art galleries than any other capital city in the world.4
Art is the small talk of high talk in France. Almost all conversations veer toward some field of art at some point. Whether you are at a business lunch or having a picnic with friends on the lawn of the Louvre, you’re bound to talk about the latest art shows, films, plays, or productions going on, and not just in Paris but anywhere in France. People like to know what’s going on, but mostly, they want to hear what you think about it. While discussions about art, or the arts, often have a predictable element of evaluating the other’s taste, the real goal—as in conversations about anything in France—is to spar. For that matter, when the French can’t come up with something interesting to say about an event, they tend to fall back on the acceptable French default position of “hating it.” And as we know, in French conversation, this is often just part of the opening remarks.
Knowing about art—any kind of art—is, of course, a mark of good culture générale, but writing is the most universal, and most highly respected, art form in France. The message comes straight from the top. Highly placed figures of all types in France almost universally aspire to publishing at least one book. They write books not to share wisdom or lessons learned from their experiences but to demonstrate that they can exercise France’s cherished art of self-expression.
Yet there is one distinct feature of art and culture discussions in France: they are not especially class dependent. The subjects interest pretty much everyone, and to some degree they connect social classes. That might be because like good food, art is not considered a luxury in France but a basic necessity. It’s also because the French state does its part to make sure the French “consume” art in whatever form, encouraging the film industry, offering free admission to museums, and even setting a TV schedule that gives cinema (and French cinema in particular) an edge. Everyone in France is expected to have some kind of cultural varnish.
Art has another distinctive quality in France: it excuses just about any kind of behavior. The French have an uncanny sympathy for artists turned criminals, or vice versa. Illegal actions or questionable gestures are not enough to get a brilliant artist expelled from good society, particularly if that action has nothing to do with the person’s art. To the French, the fact that the film director Roman Polanski was charged with unlawful sex with a minor, or that Woody Allen essentially married his stepdaughter, is beside the point. In French minds, bad morals just do not trump artistic achievement. Particularly if there is no link between the action for which an artist has been criticized and his or her artistic production.
There is also a side of French culture that just loves equivocal artists. Famous criminals can change public opinion about themselves just by producing something of artistic value. The petty criminal Henri Charrière, aka Papillon (1906–1973), wrote a brilliant biography, mostly fictional, about his time in, and escape from, the famous island prison Île du Diable (Devil’s Island) in French Guiana—the book inspired a Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen as Papillon. Another thief and murderer, Jacques Mesrine (1936–1979), became a popular hero when he published two books about being a convict, then a fugitive. Not to mention Pierre Goldman, half brother of the famous composer Jean-Jacques Goldman (who penned hits for Celine Dion among others). While serving a life sentence for armed robbery, Goldman wrote and published his autobiography in 1975. The book impressed certain left-wing intellectuals, like Jean-Paul Sartre, so much that Goldman ended up winning an appeal and being acquitted for his crime. He went on to work as a high-profile journalist, interviewing the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, before being assassinated in 1979.
If artists or writers are good enough, they’re also allowed to say just about anything without jeopardizing their careers. The most blatant case is the author Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), still revered for having modernized French literature in the 1930s by introducing argot among other things. Céline was a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the fascist regime of Marshal Pétain during the German occupation of France. In 1950 the French state convicted him for collaborating and declared him a national disgrace, but Céline bounced back and restored his literary reputation when he published a trilogy about his exile (he fled France for Denmark before the liberation) in 1957. In 2011, the French government refused to include him in a list of five hundred literary icons, but that didn’t change the fact that Céline is a revered writer in France (this is partly because his novels actually contain little of the violent racism he expressed in pamphlets).
Though the French view of art often comes across as elitist, they don’t systematically eschew lowbrow or vulgar entertainers or creators. Rather, they transform low art into a kind of high art of its own. For example, the French take circus arts, comic books, and drag queens quite seriously. This is a country where a man led a successful music hall career by farting in a microphone every night. Joseph Pujol’s (1852–1945) stage name, le Pétomane (flatulist or fartist), said it all. In 2014 Paris’s Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme (Museum of Jewish Art and History) held a five-month exhibition of the work of Marcel Gotlib, an illustrator and comic book author who is the closest thing the French have to Monty Python.5 Gotlib’s zany weekly series and his humor magazine, Fluide Glacial, profoundly influenced French comedy, not to mention the entire comic book industry. The venue was also surprising given that Gotlib is spectacularly irreverent when it comes to religion—he is famous for a six-page cartoon entitled God’s Club in which Monsieur Jupiter invites his friends Gaston Jéhovah, Louis Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Claude Allah to get drunk and watch a porno film together.
While we were in France, the National Library had a five-month-long exhibition about the comic book series Astérix, about the adventures of a diminutive hero in Roman-occupied France. The series has sold over 360 million copies in 107 languages and dialects and its authors, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, are national celebrities. The French are voracious consumers of these bandes dessinées, and comics, usually referred to by the acronym BD (“bay-day”), are considered an art form of their own. France is the world’s third market for comics after Japan and the United States, but it represents a staggering 12 percent of the publishing business, compared to 8 percent in the United States.
One peculiarity of the French relationship to art is that they never divorced masculinity from artistic taste, which has been the case in North American society since the nineteenth century. That probably explains why one never hears diatribes about how the arts are “useless” in France. On the contrary. What Americans qualify as a “liberal arts curriculum” is just considered plain old education in France. Children are initiated into the arts—whether it’s Rodin’s sculptures or Gothic architecture—starting in la maternelle, kindergarten. The French are willing to invest a lot of personal time and collective resources to make sure the lessons stick. Public museums grant free admission not just to children under eighteen, but to all students under twenty-six, as well as card-carrying journalists (so that’s where we spent our free time in Paris).
France also has extensive cultural policies that encourage new creation in all fields. All public works projects have architectural design contests before they are built. Not all the architectural projects selected turn out to be popular—many French think Paris’s high-tech Georges Pompidou Center, with its multicolored exposed skeleton (the plan was chosen from among 681 entries), is a horror. But no one questions the need to make buildings that are more than utilitarian.
Just as no one questions the need to know a thing or two about architecture. Because that, too, is just part of what the French consider a good culture générale.