The Bonjour Effect

1. I Greet Therefore I Am

2. Privacy Rules

Even knocking at the door shows different ideas about privacy between French and North Americans. When North Americans knock at a door, they are asking permission to enter. When a French person knocks at a door, it’s to announce she is coming in. Not that strangers walk into other strangers’ homes in France. But in French minds, entering someone’s home is a perk you get from already having established yourself as a connaissance (you obviously don’t need to be a friend).

3. Finding the Yes in Non

4. Schools: The Speech Factory

1: Nine-year-old children in France are also expected to do all their schoolwork in polished longhand, in ink. The second concern the girls’ teachers raised with us (after their mother tongue) was whether they actually knew how to write in cursive. The French press regularly runs articles about the disappearance of handwriting skills in North America, where kids now learn to type at the age of five and penmanship is jettisoned. In France, handwriting is important, not merely for tradition’s sake, but because it is recognized that children retain more of what they learn when they have made the effort writing it by hand. Other studies even suggest that cursive is best suited to that end. See Lorraine Millot, “Aux États-Unis, l’écriture sur la touche,” Libération, September 24, 2013; and Maria Konnikova, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” New York Times, June 2, 2014.

2: The sixty thousand French schools managed as part of France’s National Education are rigorously secular, but there are a relatively large number of private schools in France as well. The 8,800 private schools, which are mostly religious, account for less than 14 percent of all establishments, and about 17 percent of all students. Most of these private schools are Catholic, but 280 are Jewish and 20 are Muslim. But 98 percent of these are not strictly private, but sous contrat (under contract), meaning they are for the large part subsidized by the French government and required to meet a certain number of requirements in curriculum and training prerequisites for teachers. For more information see “Repères et références statistiques sur les enseignements, la formation et la recherche,” at www.education.gouv.fr. For the breakdown of schools by religion, see “Quel avenir pour les écoles privées musulmanes en France?,” published August 18, 2014, http://www.al-kanz.org/2014/08/18/ecole-privee-musulmane/.

5. The Family Factor

France’s high birthrate is an interesting reversal. Between 1750 and 1945, population growth was actually slower than in the rest of Europe for reasons no one has ever really established. That changed starting in 1945, when the French started making babies with a vengeance, relatively speaking. It was the post–World War II baby boom, so France was not an isolated case, but the boom did last ten years longer in France than it did elsewhere. The result is that since 1945, France’s population has increased from 40 to 66 million and is expected to almost double to 72 million by 2045.

It’s not all because of babies: immigration and increased life expectancy have contributed to France’s sustained population growth, but over the last thirty years, the birthrate has been the main factor. In fact, it was so robust that the French government decided to cut down on immigration. The cuts are often blamed on France’s anti-immigrant National Front Party, but the truth is, France doesn’t need immigration the same way, say, Germany does.

6. The Art of Conversation

7. Très Talk

2: The French love voting and they vote more than anyone else in the world: citizens vote in the presidential, legislative, European, regional, departmental, and municipal elections. And except for the European elections, which are one round, all other elections have two rounds. That means the French vote eleven times in six elections! This excludes the senate elections. French senators are elected by an electoral college composed of elected representatives: mayors, MNAS’s, and all elected councillors at the municipal, departmental, and regional levels. But even this election is done with a two-round system.

The principle for the two-round system is simple: if one candidate actually wins a majority in the first round, that candidate wins the election. Otherwise, the lowest-scoring candidates are eliminated according to a formula that varies from one election to the next. And people vote again. During the 2012 presidential elections, there were ten candidates in the first round, and the top five garnered between 28 percent and 11 percent of the vote. Only Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande made it to the second round, and Hollande was elected with 51.64 percent of the vote.

One effect of this system is that it makes it possible for a wide variety of parties to present candidates: in any election, electors have the choice of three to four types: left-wing parties, extreme-left parties, right-wing parties, or even far-right parties (though presently the Far Right has been united under the National Front Party). Had we been allowed to vote in the March 2014 municipal elections, we would have had the choice among the Union de gauche, Union de droite, Diverses droites, Europe-Écologie-Les Verts, Parti de gauche, and Front National, to name only the six that garnerered more than 3 percent of the vote.

This extreme spread meant that in 2002, the socialist vote was split between a number of fringe candidates, and the Socialist Party itself was eliminated from the second round—which gave the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen his first serious shot in a presidential election. Fortunately, the horrified left-wing voters all rallied between the incumbent president Jacques Chirac, who won the second round by a resounding 82 percent.

The French simply cannot resist sending messages—whatever the price.

8. Food for Talk

5: In the 1990s, theories about the so-called French paradox ran rampant in the North American media. Nutritionists wondered whether some magical ingredient in the French diet explained why the French could eat such rich food and drink more wine than Americans, while staying thinner, living longer, and having fewer heart attacks. By the following decade, the experts had pretty much agreed on the answer, and it had nothing do with red wine or olive oil. It wasn’t about what the French ate, but how much they ate.

In 2005, the American philosophy professor Paul Rozin, who studies food choice, tested portion sizes in French and American restaurants and grocery stores for a study published in Appetite magazine. He wandered from McDonald’s outlets to Chinese restaurants with his scale and discovered that French portion sizes were consistently smaller. An individual yogurt that weighed 227 grams (8 ounces) in the United States came in a 125-gram (4.4-ounce) format in France. When the calories of a whole day of eating smaller portions were compiled, the difference wasn’t enormous—roughly the equivalent of an apple a day. But an apple a day does add up to a pound of fat by the end of the year. In the United States, that single pound eventually makes its mark in national obesity statistics.

9. Know-It-Alls