13 Observations About France
Reflections on an extended visit to Paris.
When I first lived in Paris, nearly twenty years ago, waiters and shopkeepers would steadfastly refuse to speak to tourists, who even then made up a large part of their customer base, in English. Foreign visitors were greeted with a rapid stream of French, with no allowances made for their difficulty in comprehending the language of Racine and Molière. In this respect, at least, the city is unrecognizably transformed. The waiters and shopkeepers remain just as haughty. But they have found a more cosmopolitan way to express their hauteur: when tourists try out their poor French, acquired by watching Emily in Paris and doing some quick lessons on Duolingo, they immediately switch to English.
Machiavelli famously advised republics to keep the private poor while making the public rich. France has followed this advice more than many European countries, and much more than the United States. After tax, the median Frenchman makes a little less than €2,000 a month, or about $30,000 a year. Most participants in the yellow vest protests, set in motion by a rise in gas tax, live within tight material constraints. But impressive public riches compensate, at least to an extent, for the comparatively low incomes of average people. Paris is perhaps the most functional major city in Europe. Its metro is much more impressive and reliable than London’s Underground or Berlin’s U-Bahn. The free or cheap amenities the city offers, from parks to swimming pools, from museums to theaters, are in a league of their own. There are high-quality public childcare options for babies and toddlers and kindergarteners. Unlike in London or New York, the city’s most prestigious schools and universities are free and public. The country’s affordable train system is as good as any in the world. To be sure, this heavy reliance on the state has serious disadvantages, including the thicket of regulations that saps innovation and touches every aspect of life in the country. But the equilibrium persists, for now, because—unlike in many other places that rely too much on the government—the state really does deliver on an impressive array of public goods.
There is a basic incongruence in Europe’s politico-emotive geography. Italy has for decades been deeply dysfunctional, and Italians have for decades been commensurately disillusioned with their institutions. Germany has (though that is now changing) for decades been comparatively functional, and Germans have (though that too is now changing) for decades been reasonably content with their institutions. France upsets the equation. The country does, of course, have serious problems—from the state’s worryingly high budget deficits to the exclusion and malaise of its banlieues. I’m not surprised that the French are more angry than the Germans. But whenever I visit France, I can’t help but notice that—certainly compared to Italy and many other European countries—things in the country do kind of work. And that makes it hard for me to understand the disproportionate anger that pervades French culture and politics.
One of my favorite essays about Paris, written back in the 1990s, is called the “Tale of Two Cafés.” Adam Gopnik tried to find out why Parisian intellectuals at that time continued to frequent one of the two cafés beloved by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the Flore, while they had fully abandoned the other, the Deux Magots, to tourists. Gopnik considers three hypotheses, each of which turns out simultaneously to be a theory about the nature of modern France. I have long aspired to write a similarly structured essay about the puzzle of France’s disproportionate rage. One theory would posit that the French are so much angrier than their neighbors because the legacy of the Revolution gave them higher aspirations, ones that no state, however functional or generous, can fulfill. Another theory would perhaps posit that there is a bit of folklore in the supposed expressions of rage—a penchant for live action reenactments of 1789 and 1871 that, as the French might say, contains a hint of deuxième degré, which is to say that it should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet another theory, of course, would insist that the French are completely sincere in their anger, and that it is fully justified to boot: France, despite appearances, fails its citizens worse than any neighboring country, the advocates of this theory hold, embracing an inverse exceptionalism to which countries with universalist ambitions are often drawn.
Germans are famous for their creative words. For the most part, this is rooted in a misunderstanding of the way the language works. Just as you can combine different concepts by adding a marker like “of” between them in English, you can do so by squishing nouns up against each other without an intermediary element in German. No, it is the French who genuinely have a knack for evocative terms. Glauque originally described a bluish green; now, it is used to evoke a particularly dreary neighborhood, a particularly dark fate, or a particularly depressing relationship. A guy who seduces a woman only to exploit her affections for his own selfish purposes is universally known as a pervers narcissiste; you will rarely sit in a café for more than an hour before the term wafts over from some neighboring table. But perhaps the most ubiquitous of these words is the bobo, short for the members of the bohemian bourgeoisie who earn middle-class wages while affecting the lifestyle of starving artists. (This last term is actually an American import, coined by no other than David Brooks. But insisting upon this intolerable—and therefore largely unknown—fact is one of the few affronts that can easily cost you a friendship in Paris.)
The French believe that they are in the grip of pernicious polarization. Switch on the television or open a newspaper and you will hear about this endlessly. And a look at the current composition of the Assemblée nationale suggests that they are right, at least to some extent. France’s parliament is now divided into three implacable blocks: far-left, center, and far-right. The far-left hates the far-right, the far-right hates the far-left, and everyone—including, increasingly, his own allies—hates Emmanuel Macron. (Only the two political parties that once claimed 80 percent of the vote between them but have since been reduced to sad shadows of their former selves, the Socialistes and the Republicains, are unhappy hinges between these blocks, and in part for that reason only they are even more despised than the president.) And yet, that is not the feeling I got. Being used to the United States, where there is no serious exchange between the blue tribe and the red tribe, where the possible answers to all questions of public importance are quickly flattened into two options, and where the members of one bubble are living in increasingly hermetic isolation from members of the other, I was struck by the extent to which French politicians and intellectuals still talk to each other. Members of different camps debate each other in newspaper interviews, are interviewed by the same hosts on public television, and sometimes even break bread with each other.
Every elite sucks in its own way. The French have strong reason to be dissatisfied with the particular failings of their own. Those with real power and influence in the country are recruited from far too small a number of educational institutions, are far too smug about their position atop a meritocratic hierarchy, and are far too ignorant about anything happening outside of Paris. As a result, they are dangerously insular in both their social and their intellectual habits. And yet, the things that strike me about the French elite are largely positive. Unlike their American counterparts, for example, French elites still believe in something. They have a sense of mission, one animated by the oft-invoked “valeurs de la République,” the founding values of the French Republic. Their conception of these values can sometimes be too rigid and their references to it too self-congratulatory. But the attachment is real, and it has made French institutional leaders far more willing to stand up to the kind of fashionable nonsense that has swept the American establishment in recent years. Having values that you feel some genuine obligation to defend, it turns out, is a great bulwark against the kinds of social media mobs that have cowed American CEOs and university presidents, editors and nonprofit leaders into such easy submission. And ironically, this has protected France’s insular elite from drifting too far from the views of its fellow citizens. In social terms, the gulf between French elites and the citizens over whom they reign is probably wider than in America; when it comes to beliefs and values, it is far less stark.
France may be the last country in Europe that has an ambitious intellectual culture of its own. Germany’s consensual culture does not invite intellectual ambition. Britain, though producing a far greater number of globally acclaimed writers and artists, increasingly feels like a North American outpost. France, by contrast, dances to its own tune. The big stars of the French scene are barely known outside France—just as, within France, the voices which shape big debates in other countries are only known to a few oddballs who specialize in such things. An example: When I encouraged the editors at my excellent French publishing house to publish a translation of a new book by a friend who happens to be an internationally bestselling author, the first—and, it turns out, the only—question they asked me was: “Can he do media in French?” When I reported that he couldn’t, they regretfully told me that it just wouldn’t be financially viable to publish him. Part of it is that you won’t sell many books if you can’t go on the big radio and television shows. But it goes further than that: “We have our own experts,” one editor explained to me. “If you can’t speak to the French in French, we’d rather stick with someone who directly addresses us.”
Public media retains a pride of place in France it has now lost in just about every other country. In a country of less than 80 million people, the morning show of France’s biggest public radio station regularly has four million listeners. Every day, France Inter’s Matinale features a main invitee who is grilled about a serious topic, often a recently released book, for half an hour of nearly uninterrupted airtime. If you were to plot all Western radio and television shows on a chart measuring audience size on one axis and depth of content on the other, nine of the ten furthest into the top right quadrant would be French; in the Anglosphere, only the best podcasts could begin to compete.
The French famously retire early. Macron’s attempts at mild reforms of the pension system exacted a huge political price. The contrast to other countries is visible in many offices, and especially at the universities: In America, there are many septuagenarian CEOs and octogenarian professors; in France, they are a rarity. Only the practitioners of one profession seem to eschew the call of early retirement. Outside my apartment, on the Rue Saint Denis, which has been known for such commerce for centuries, a number of women were openly plying the world’s oldest trade. I would be astounded if any of them are below the official retirement age.
The cheese and the pâtés and the patisserie are as good in France as everyone believes. Shopping at one of Paris’s many markets remains a genuine pleasure, as does popping into your neighborhood boulangerie. The range of Asian food options, once restricted to the ubiquitous traiteurs asiatiques who would microwave a bland imitation of Vietnamese food for you upon request, has greatly improved. Within a few steps of my apartment there was a passable dumpling place, a good Sichuan eatery, and a great hot pot restaurant. But French restaurants are terribly overrated. The average bistro in Paris offers the same rotation of uninspired dishes, from Steak Tartare to Entrecôte, mediocrely executed. If you know where to go, you can eat in a manner Parisians would qualify as correct. Even then, the food is likely to be bland, uninventive and overpriced. For a while, I believed the protestations of my French friends that I simply didn’t know the right places; having since eaten at plenty of the establishments they urged me to try, I no longer do. Paris does, to be sure, retain a lot of Michelin-starred restaurants. Like in Berlin or Copenhagen or Chicago or Tokyo or Shanghai or Dubai, you can eat well if you are inclined to spend hundreds of euros on a meal at a seriously upscale establishment; but very few Parisians can afford to do so more than a couple of times a year. When I met a friend for lunch on an average Wednesday or for dinner on an average Friday, I consistently found myself hankering for any restaurant in Italy run by a competent grandmother or any restaurant in New York run by an ambitious immigrant.
At the beginning of the 20th century, France was one of the undisputed centers of the world. The country ruled over a vast empire. Paris was the home of many of the globe’s most famous artists and thinkers. French remained the language of diplomacy and the courts. Unlike Germany or Britain, la Grande Nation also had a claim to being a political model: like America, it claimed to be founded upon universalist principles that could and should be exported to all humanity. The history of postwar France is in many ways marked by the slow process of coming to terms with the loss of that grandiose past. The country tried to hold onto the remnant of its empire in bloody wars, most notably in Algeria. It kept its distance from the American hegemon in a vain attempt to maintain its strategic independence, most notably by De Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO’s military command. It even put up a valiant fight against the influence of the English language, refusing to adopt loan words like computer or weekend. From the end of World War II until a few years ago, it was impossible to understand France without chronicling the tension between the reality of the country’s declining political, cultural, economic and military importance and its implacable insistence that it remained la Grande Nation.
Spending time in France this time around, I was struck by the extent to which the country has finally come to accept the reality of its relative decline. Gone (for the most part) is the refusal to use English loan words, the pretense of remaining a world power on the level of America or China, the general sense of fighting windmills. France has begun to accommodate itself to its new status in the world: that of a middling power (albeit one that remains highly influential in the European Union and Francophone Africa). As is so often the case, acceptance turns out to have its benefits. Giving up on the pretense that you are the protagonist is the prerequisite for making the most of your supporting role. It might even allow your waiters to make tourists feel inadequate in all new ways. France has for much of the postwar period been pretentious in the literal sense of pretending to be something it no longer was; now, the country is starting to feel comfortable in its own skin and its own time. It is all the better for that.
Next time you come to France let's have coffee.