Talk to the Snail Read online

  When you arrive in France, if you’re not used to the rhetorical question, it can make any kind of serious conversation a farce. You’ll be trying to talk about, say, why some new French film is the usual navel-gazing dross about a poor, misunderstood artiste who has to smoke a lot and sleep with chic women in fabulous apartments. And at first you will get the impression that your French conversation partner is genuinely interested in what you think of the movie.

  ‘Why is this film almost exactly like his last film?’ the French person will ask.

  ‘Perhaps because—’ you’ll start to answer, but suddenly the French person is drowning you out with their own opinion. And just when you’ve recovered from your confusion, you hear another question apparently aimed at you.

  ‘And why do young French actresses seem to be contractually obliged to show their boobs?’

  ‘Because—’ you begin, but the same thing happens again. And you finally realize that the French person is not asking you a question at all. They’re having a conversation with themselves. During which, of course, no one will be able to interrupt them and tell them they’re wrong.

  The funniest example of this is, apparently, the first day of lectures at Paris’s elite school, Sciences-Po.6 It accepts lots of non-French students, who go nervously along to their first lecture, eager to participate in a debate with one of France’s most respected intellectuals. Inevitably, when the esteemed professor gets up to speak, he begins to pontificate in a typically French manner.

  ‘And when did France realize that a colonial war in Vietnam was unwinnable?’ he will ask the assembled young minds.

  Non-French hands will shoot up, their owners keen to play their part in the exchange of ideas that is the very engine-room of French culture.

  And they will be ignored, as the professor replies to his own question and moves on to the next one, that again only he has the right to answer.

  The foreign students cringe in embarrassment at their intellectual faux pas. Meanwhile, the French students – who know what is (or isn’t) expected of them in these lectures – all lounge at the back of the auditorium, taking notes, rolling cigarettes and sending each other text messages along the lines of ‘Do you think I’m sexy? Yes you do.’

  A Slice of Truth

  The big question is, of course, where does this French sense of paranoid rightness come from?7 Well, I’m no anthropologist or historian, but I think it goes back to 1789 and the Revolution. There is a French verb that means to decide who is wrong and who is right, to make the final decision. It is trancher. Not at all coincidentally, this also means to slice or cut off, as in trancher la tête de quelqu’un – to cut off someone’s head.

  Back in 1789, the French started letting the guillotine decide who was right and who was wrong. The king at the time, Louis XVI, was the great-grandson of Louis XIV, the man who had modestly declared himself the Sun King and espoused the theory of the divine right of monarchs to rule over a nation. By Louis XVI’s time, this had become the divine right to waste all the country’s money on wigs and garden parties.

  Some Parisian intellectuals decided enough was enough, so they whipped the people into a frenzy and the guillotine started to make its decisions, first getting rid of the aristos, then anyone who dared to challenge the ideas of the clique of intellectuals that happened to be in power on any particular day.

  The French Revolution was not just about replacing a monarch with a parliament. It imposed some extreme – not to say traumatic – ideas on the people.

  For a start, the official language suddenly became French, whereas up until 1789 the vast majority of the nation had been happily speaking its various patois and was totally incapable of understanding the language used by the Parisians. When Molière, France’s comic Shakespeare, toured the country in the seventeenth century, his troupe of actors often had to resort to putting on slapstick shows because no one could understand their spoken plays.8 Then suddenly, by decree, the patois was banned and everyone had to learn the new ‘right’ language. Anyone who disagreed had their quarrelsome brain detached from their body.

  At the same time, in order to reduce the risk of local dissent, the central government started to displace people around the country. Instead of consisting of regional regiments, the army became a national force, mixing up people from different parts of the country, who were forced, of course, to communicate in French. This kind of thing still happens today, so that someone from Provence who qualifies as a teacher at the university of Nice, and who would love to stay on in their region, stands a very good chance of getting posted to Brittany.

  The Republic also imposed a new calendar, with the year starting in September and the months getting descriptive names like brumaire (‘misty month’), pluviôse (‘rainy month’) and thermidor (presumably ‘the month in which lobsters are cooked’). Instead of weeks, the months were divided into three ten-day periods, and the ten days were renamed primidi, duodi, tridi, and so on, till 9 decadi. Yes, the revolutionaries invented the metric week.

  In any case, what happened in the few years after 1789 was that everyone in the country had their value system cut off like a guillotine victim’s head. Everything they’d always assumed to be right was suddenly wrong. If they stayed in their own region, they were told they’d been speaking the wrong language. If they were shunted off to a different region, they were suddenly living like foreigners in their own country, eating the wrong foods, and talking with the wrong accent. In many ways, it’s the same experience as being an English expat in France today, and I for one know how disturbing that can be. The sense of alienation tends to push people towards two basic extremes. We expats can end up adopting French culture wholeheartedly, pretending that cricket and Marmite never existed and going to see Johnny Hallyday live at the Stade de France. Or we can cling on desperately to our old truths, and may feel the sudden urge to write to English newspapers about the demise of the unsplit infinitive and the cucumber sandwich. Most expats try out both extremes for a while and then settle about halfway between the two.

  As I said, I’m no historian, but it seems to me that over the two-hundred-odd years since the Revolution, the French seem somehow to have combined these two extreme reactions to being disconnected from their old values. They seem to have embraced the new values (or had them pounded into their brains by the French education system), and then decided that their perfect new way of doing things was under threat, adding the touch of paranoia that they are famous for.

  And most of it is the fault of us Anglos. As soon as the French started cutting royalists’ heads off, they added a new level of antagonism to their relations with the traditional enemy across the Channel. At first, it was easy for the revolutionaries to sneer at the Brits. Those ridiculous royalist English fops with their mad German monarchs – how could they possibly be right about anything? After all, they had just lost their biggest colony, America, to rebels aided by the French. Huh! But things soon started going wrong. Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo and sent to die on a colony that Britain hadn’t lost, Saint Helena. And then, just a couple of decades after the French Revolution, how dare these Anglais have their own revolution – the industrial one – and start inventing machines that made French technology look outdated? And they even had the effrontery to call one of their first new railway stations Waterloo! It was more than enough to make a nation paranoid, non?

  Things that the French are

  right about

  • An adulterous politician is probably no more corrupt than a monogamous one.

  • Just because a man compliments a woman, it doesn’t mean that he is planning to rape her.

  • Getting out of Vietnam in 1954 was a pretty good idea.

  • Invading Iraq was not such a good idea.

  • If a country’s schoolkids are taught mathematics to a good level, its technology industries will never lack qualified engineers.

  • Children do not die if they stop eating French fries for a week.

&nb
sp; • Spa holidays should be available as state-subsidized medical treatment.

  • If you have a regular office job, there is no point working on Friday afternoons.

  • Putting foreign words on menus does not make the food taste better.

  • If you invest money in railways, they are more efficient.

  • All you need in salad dressing is olive oil, vinegar, mustard and salt. Anything else is window dressing, not salad dressing.

  • If the French ignore a European law, no one will be able to force them to obey it.

  Things that the French are

  wrong about

  (though it is not wise to tell them so)

  • The more you boast about sex, the better you are at it.

  • Everyone just adores passive smoking.

  • Pétanque is a sport.

  • Motorway bridges are so beautiful that they must be celebrated on picture postcards.

  • The Earth does not revolve around the Sun – it revolves around Paris.

  • Benny Hill represents the cutting edge of British comedy.

  • The words to a song are so important that you don’t need a tune.

  • Supertramp are (or were ever) hip.

  • If you push in front of someone in a queue, they will respect you more.

  • All films should be about the director’s love life. (This is why they love Woody Allen so much.)

  • It is fun to eat calf’s brain and pig’s anus.

  • Vegetarians cannot have sex.

  • Many customers do not actually want to be served.

  • Nuclear power is totally unpolluting.

  • Johnny Hallyday is world-famous (he’s an aging rocker, by the way).

  • Serge Gainsbourg was sexy. (He was a chain-smoking, drunk, toad-faced physical wreck. Their best-ever songwriter, though.)

  • The louder you laugh at your own joke, the funnier it is.

  • France invented French fries. (The whole of the rest of the world accepts that it was either the Belgians or the British.)

  • A word does not exist unless it’s in the dictionary.

  • When there is fog on the motorway, it is safest to drive as fast as you can and get out of the low-visibility zone as quickly as possible.

  • Red traffic lights do not always know best about the need to stop.

  • Designated flood zones do not flood and are therefore safe to build on.

  • You can cure anything by inserting the relevant medicine up your back passage.

  • All Americans care enough about France to know where it is on a map of the world.

  • All British people are polite.

  1 Just look at the little accent under the c in français and you’ll see why. Even the French have trouble spelling French words.

  2 The Parisian driver has other reasons to ignore red lights. See the Eighth Commandment.

  3 On the subject of getting things right, I deliberately phrased that sentence to avoid choosing whether the Mont Saint-Michel is in Brittany or Normandy. Whichever you choose, someone in France will write and tell you you’re wrong. So I’m just saying that the village of La Masse is in Brittany, which it undoubtedly is – see the Michelin map number 309 for confirmation. It’s a French map, so it must be right.

  4 For the upside of this bacteria-sharing method, see the Third Commandment on food.

  5 Some American readers might prefer to call this a Freedom train.

  6 Po is short for politiques. Yes, a French political-science school, a scary idea.

  7 I know I just poured scorn on the French habit of asking rhetorical questions, but sometimes they are quite effective. Don’t you agree?

  8 This seems to account for the baffling popularity of The Benny Hill Show in France, even today. Three centuries ago, most French people’s idea of culture was a bunch of actors and actresses chasing each other around the stage making lewd gestures.

  9 And in doing so, seem to have reduced the number of French weekends to three a month. Which may go some way to explaining why Robespierre, the man behind the most radical changes, had his own head removed in 1794. You don’t mess with a Frenchman’s weekends.

  The French protesting after being told that they

  will have to work on Friday afternoons.

  THE

  2ND

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Ne Travailleras Pas

  THOU SHALT NOT WORK

  THOU SHALT NOT WORK

  ‘LIFE IS NOT WORK. WORKING TOO MUCH SENDS YOU INSANE.’ That was said not by a French anarchist, artist or ‘aristocrat, but by a president, Charles de Gaulle, to André Malraux, a former minister of culture. Quite a political statement.

  The French say that they work to live, whereas Anglo-Saxons live to work. What they mean is, while we think that getting into the office at five a.m., skipping lunch and staying on till midnight to close that deal with New York is a virtue, the French have better things to do.

  And they’re right. Given the choice, who wouldn’t agree to earn less money if it meant that they got the chance to lie in for two extra hours in the morning, enjoy a long gourmet lunch, and then spend the evening nibbling at the earlobe (and other nibblable bits) of their loved one?

  This is exactly why I came to live in France. I was working for a British company that regularly offered me promotions and rises, and I felt very proud of myself until I noticed that I didn’t have weekends or evenings any more and couldn’t remember what my girlfriend looked like. Mainly because I was drinking so much as soon as I left the office that most evenings were a blur.

  I took a job in France with less stress, less responsibility and less money, and immediately clicked into the French philosophy: hard work is just too much hard work.

  Très Long Weekend

  Looking in a French diary, you might get the impression that no one in the country is ever at work. Trying to phone an office on a Friday afternoon will usually confirm this.

  French workers get the following bank holidays: New Year’s Day, Easter Monday, 1 May, VE Day (8 May), Ascension Day, Pentecost Monday (the first Monday in June), Bastille Day (14 July), Assumption Day (15 August), All Saints’ Day (1 November), 1918 Armistice Day (11 November) and Christmas Day. In a bad year, 1 and 8 May can fall on a weekend and aren’t replaced by a weekday off. But in a good year, they might fall on a Tuesday, so that workers will take a pont (a ‘bridge’, an extra day off to make it a long weekend). That way, the first and second weekends in May and the Ascension Day weekend (between mid-May and mid-June) will be four days long, and then Pentecost Monday could make it four long weekends out of six. In a good year, the French take almost as many days off in May and June as some Americans get in a year – and still have almost all their holiday to take.

  Most French people in full-time work get five weeks’ paid holiday a year. Some get even more – in my last journalism job, the company gave us thirty-seven days a year – seven and a half weeks. (All this on top of the bank holidays, remember.)

  This calendar, combined with the ‘work to live, don’t live to work’ attitude, can lead the French to take what you might call a relaxed attitude to work. By Friday lunchtime, they’ll be mentally engrossed in their weekend. Come May, it’s almost summer so there’s no point over-exerting themselves.

  But if you work with the French, this isn’t necessarily a problem. When they are actually working, they’re very productive. You just have to choose the right time to ask them to do something. Don’t bother trying to get anything done between twelve and two p.m. on any day, at any time after eleven a.m. on a Friday, or between 1 May and 31 August. Simple, really.

  God Save the Thirty-Five-Hour Week

  The working week was reduced from thirty-nine to thirty-five hours in France in 2000, but this didn’t mean that all full-time workers suddenly stopped an hour early every day. Companies introduced the policy after negotiation with their workers. Some firms settled on five seven-hour days, others gave a half-day off
per week or a day off every fortnight.

  My employer gave us the time as holiday – an extra twenty-two days a year. This meant that I now had fifty-nine days’ leave a year, plus eleven bank holidays – a total of fourteen weeks per year.

  All this, I should add, with no reduction in salary.

  When I boasted to friends and family, I could feel the waves of jealousy flooding across the Channel and the 10 Atlantic.

  Contrary to popular opinion amongst employers, the idea of the thirty-five-hour week was not to bankrupt all of France’s businesses. It was to create jobs – since the working week had been reduced by about 10 per cent, logically, a team of ten people would now need one new colleague to make up the hours. Companies were promised large subsidies to take on 10 per cent more staff, and the government hoped to create seven hundred thousand jobs this way.

  This worked fine for companies with lots of people doing the same job, but I was working for a magazine with a staff of ten. To make up our lost hours, our new recruit would have had to be 10 per cent editor, 20 per cent writer, 20 per cent designer, etc, etc.

  In practice, we didn’t get any new recruits. We were told that we would all have to become 10 per cent more efficient during our reduced work time. Which we did. It’s not hard to become more productive if the incentive is twenty-two days’ extra holiday a year.

  An OECD report said that productivity in France went up 2.32 per cent between 1996 and 2002, compared with only 1.44 per cent in the rest of the EU. And four of those years were before the thirty-five-hour week was introduced. If you took just 2000–2002, once the thirty-five-hour week had begun, I’m sure the results would be even more startling.