You don’t know shit about France
By: Frankie Faunet
Tags: Opinion, Paris, Tourism, France, Emily In Paris

What you know about France. (Original image by AndonicO)

Dear readers, dear friends, please consider this my shot across the bow, my warning volley, my courtesy call: you don’t know shit about France.

But wait, wait! You read a book about the Dreyfus Affair! You watched a documentary about traditional cheese production! You have a penpal who works in the French bureaucracy! Your sister/brother-in-law is French and smells the part! You went to the Côte d’Azur on vacation, or you even lived in Paris (for 2.3 months)! Surely you must know something about France?!

Allow me to reassure you: non. You don’t know shit. Not about France, not about the French, not about their food, their politics, their history, or even about the shit they sell to tourists.

At best you know something about Paris, and even that’s a streeeeeeetch!

Is this even representative of Paris? Right.

And that’s why I’ve decided to start writing for Medium, because there’s a whole petty industry of people who pretend to know shit about France, and it’s approximately 99.78% la merde. Either it’s the product of the French image factory, run on turbo drive and spinning out of control as France desperately tries to remain relevant and/or solvent, or it’s the product of nonsense posturing, as people desperately try to convert their aspirational selves into something sophisticated. In other words, what most people think they know about France is a noxious mix of France selling out for tourist dollars and posers trying to appear cultured.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Emily in Paris being completely unrealistic

Which is completely fine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Emily in Paris being completely unrealistic, to the point of being Paris porn for the faux chic — it’s not different from touring Versailles and taking selfies in front of Ladurée. It’s all gaudy fantasy.

What is not fine is acting like this has any correlation to the real France, its citizens and residents, its culture, its stupidities, its triumphs and its garbage.

Of course, someone will come along, someone very smart, and say, “But if this France is right there for sale, for the simple price of admission at the Moulin Rouge, isn’t that as real as anything else?” Touché.

Trop réel. (Original image by Nasreddine Nas’h)

Which brings me back to why I, Frankie Phoney, decided to start whittling away at the constantly growing edifice of fantasy France. While there is clearly no chance that I will be able to reverse the trend — and I’m tempted to ask myself if I’d even truly want to — I feel it is, to a certain degree, my duty to drive a wedge into some of the preexisting fault lines. Because I may not stop tourists from packing berets in their suitcases and talking about how their signature beef roast recipe reemploys the jus as a dressing, but I can take some of the shit you don’t know about France and throw it at you like a monkey who doesn’t truly want out of the zoo but does want you to remember your visit for the rest of your life. Feel free to snap pictures.

One last thing: if you’re one of those writers making a living out of selling bullshit narratives about France to daydreamers — experts on so-called “French parenting” and “What French Women Know” — consider this as me putting you on notice. You don’t know shit about France.