Decrypting French Culture

I just finished a book that added to my knowledge of an area I thought I didn't have much left to learn about.  Wrong!  Two Canadian journalists, one anglophone and one francophone, spent 2 1/2 years in France and produced an incisive and informative book called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong:  Why We Love France, But Not the French.*  Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau set out initially to determine why the French are resistant to globalization, but over time the question was reframed.  The book is a broader exploration of France and French thinking.  It focuses on present-day France, but includes a wealth of insights on how the past informs contemporary culture.   

Barlow and Nadeau make the case that we tend to judge the French according to our own models.  They explain Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of France in this way:

The typical traveler to Japan, China, or Africa is more open-minded than the typical traveler to France.  The fascinating rites of the Chinese, Japanese, or Zulus may cause travelers considerable discomfort and inconvenience, but travelers in these countries tend to accept these obstacles stoically, reasoning (rightly) that things are just done differently in foreign cultures. For some reason, when it comes to the French, North Americans drop this reflex.  ( . . . ) When North Americans, or more broadly, "Anglo-Saxons" are faced with France's peculiar way of doing things, they do not reason that they are dealing with an ancient people who have their own way of doing things.  Actually, they accuse the French of being inefficient, overly bureaucratic, unhygenic, and stuck in their ways.  And they take it personally.

We know that France has only existed as a country in the modern sense for a few hundred years.  Before the the rise of the monarchy, it was a patchwork of barbarian tribes.  However, as Barlow and Nadeau point out, the ancestors of the French go back to the Cro Magnon man of the Paleolithic age.  Although France is a melting pot and has gone through plenty of upheaval, the French people never arrived in the midst of a primitive culture, wiped the slate clean, and started over as we did in America.  This framework of a modern country influenced by a past stretching back twenty thousand years provides the backdrop for their ethnological analysis of the French relationship to food, the land, war, education, governance, economics, law, religion, language, Europe, and other topics.  The study can be read cover-to-cover, or by cherry-picking chapters.  These Montreal-based journalists are now working on their next book--The Story of French.

*I initially balked at reading this book because of the title, but learned from one of the co-authors that the second part of the title had been imposed by the publisher.  It does not accurately reflect the content of the book.  The authors clearly grew to love both France and its inhabitants while working on the project.

Comments

[Elisabeth]

I read this book last year, and thought that it was extremely well done, indeed. I had followed up my reading of that book by Jonathan Fenby's "France On the Brink : A Great Civilization Faces a New Century," the most biased and anti-French book - couched under a glossy, scholarly front - that I have ever read (Fenby is a Brit, this may explain it.)

One of my favorite books on France and the French remains Richard Bersntein's "Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French" although, with a 1991 copyright, it's getting a bit dated. I also like Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon." And, of course, I strongly suggest, if you have not done it yet, that you read Philippe Roger's "L'Ennemi Americain" (now available in English translation as well."

I am developing an online French Civilization course this Fall semester (to be taught in the Spring smester), and I am up for good suggestions for readings. I have noticed a couple of things on Amazon that I may want to get.

[Michele]

I've looked at this book in stores several times and chose not to get it because of the title. Looks like I'll have to change my mind and get it after all. Thanks for the great review.

[LEYRAT François]

As a French citizen, I find your blog well-informed, openminded and insightful. Congratulations!

I haven't read Barlow and Nadeau's book but I would like to share a few thoughts on globalisation and traditional "anglo saxon" wiews of France as backwards, resisting change, ...sometimes strangely completed, when change is indeed noted, by regrets that France is "losing its Frenchness", "getting americanised", etc.

I feel many view globalisation as an irresistible process leading humanity to an unescapable future, a certain state of things which would be the "end of history" (understood as the worldwide generalisation of US way of life and democratic institutions, with Starbucks at every street corner, SUVs in every garage, etc).

In my view, this perception lacks historical perpective. We know there have been early experiences of globalisation, for instance the Roman Empire, the trade domination of the Republic of Venice in the Mediterranean, followed by periods during which the world has "shrunk" again.

As far as I can appreciate things from Europe, I feel globalisation has not been too much of a controversial issue in the US as it is commonly seen as a mere geographic extension of America's "soft power".

For that reason, at the risk of being caricatural, my feeling is that many Americans (and others), consciously or unconsciously, traditionally view alien ways as temporary, albeit picturesque aberrations, which should soon give way to the blessings of (US) civilisation, except for those few who foolishly seem to suggest there are possibly other ways...I am not casting stones here, as European nations, including mine, were thinking along similar lines in a not too distant past...

However, I would suggest views on globalisation are changing in the US, as highlighted by reactions to the loss of American manufacturing jobs and outsourcing in low-wage countries, or to the attempts of a Chinese company to buy a US corporation... In itself, terrorism is a form of globalisation, using state-of-the art communication technology.

I do hope here readers will not misinterpret my feelings towards the United States, of which I try to keep an informed and healthy wiew. For all the good US dynamism has brought to the world,I view the remarkable experience of the United States, emerging as a world superpower as extraordinary, but noneless historically situated (a vast continent, an abundance of natural ressources, a constant influx of hopeful manpower, no archaic social structures to get rid of..) and hence not reproducible elsewhere in the same terms.

Those unique original conditions imply no particular determinism, however : to take the exemple of another nation of the New World, Argentina, blessed with comparable advantages, was one of the world's major economic powers in the nineteenth century, outweighting Germany. But history, in that case, has followed a different path.

Concerning the comparison with France, and the idea of "wiping the slate clean", I do not totally agree with Francofile, as the French revolution was precisely a tentative, sometimes naive and vain, sometimes successful, and in part bloody, to set up a new order and invent modernity, to found a new society, to throw away the old ways for a better future. "Le bonheur est une idée neuve en France" as one of the revolutionary figures said. However there cannot be a complete break from the past. For all the changes, so much of pre-revolutionary France has survived until the present day, while the sucessive waves of immigration to the New World have brought part of their original traditions.

Coming back to standard "anglo-saxon" views of France, I feel the irritation originates from the fact that "French ways" (for what it may mean, I am not sure even myself) are not entirely seen as pleasant exotic folklore, but as something vaguely challenging. In relation to the French-American love-hate relationship, much has been said about clashing visions of modernity (the individual versus the group, etc..) and conflicting universalisms, partly as a legacy of our respective revolutions. French arrogance and US arrogance have similar roots.

France changes, despite the claims to the contrary, as the US does. But neither France nor the US really knows where it is headed to. We do not know our future, despite the optimistic visions of globalisation.

Grumpy older nations (by the way, a few hundred years is not that old for an nation, think of China) have learned the hard way that "l'histoire est tragique" and there is definitely no "end of history".

François, Paris

[Michele]

Isn't not knowing the future the best part?

[Kaylee cope]

this sucks ass so bad