5 types of people who think they know shit about France
By: Frankie Faunet
Tags: Paris, French, France, Emily In Paris, Fantasy

5 types of people who think they know shit about France

This guy knows shit about France. Photo by Alicia Steels on Unsplash

As I wrote recently, most of what people think they know about France is, well, shit. This isn’t to start a campaign against fantasy — my elegy for Emily in Paris is already on the upcoming schedule — but I want to trouble the water with a few drops of realism.

As I said, my main problem with Make-Believe France isn’t the fantasy itself, but the industry selling it, the worst of French commercial predators, and the worst of false sophisticati. Among other things, this industry is one of the primary forces driving the emptying of Paris residential neighborhoods, caught between the twin threats of status-seeking foreign real estate investment and Airbnb-oredom. Never mind how it contributes to the cheapening of what remains of French culture behind the lines in the constant assault on the imagination.

So while my campaign may not save all of French culture, this is about resisting and slowing its erasure. To do that, we need to address who claims to know shit about France. They may not all be out to profit commercially, but they contribute to the overall effect, they create the climate of Paris Porn we have to wade through to reach ground.

Today, let’s start by identifying some of the types of people who think they know shit about France. It’s not a rigid classification, for sure, but it’s a useful tool when it comes to avoiding bullshit about my fellow Franks.

1 — People who took French in high school

Real French kids in 2020 (Pre-COVID19, of course)

Okay, okay, you spent four years periodically wearing berets while forgetting how to conjugate être, calling your friends poissons and chasing extra credit by making your French teacher mousse au chocolat. Maybe you learned some key phrases, to help you ask people what they did for fun on the week-end and tell them how much you enjoyed dancing at the discothèque. You might have even peddled your feeble grasp of vouloir in order to persuade the desperately lonely French exchange student, Marie-Claude, to kiss you after the homecoming game.

Congratulations. Just like people who know only what they’ve learned from French restaurants — “let’s have the coq au vin!” — you don’t know shit.

You have to recognize, first, that you didn’t learn French as it is actually spoken, or even how it was ever spoken. The crushing majority of French teachers abroad are only French in the sense that they have “lived” in France (see #3) for short periods of time. The French they speak? They mostly learned it through studying the language outside of France (Quebec doesn’t count. If you think you know shit about France from time spent in Quebec, you really don’t know shit).

Nobody talks like they do in French textbooks. Nobody even writes like that.

And the saddest truth of all is that French textbooks are absolute garbage. Nobody talks like they do in French textbooks. Nobody even writes like that. It’s not just a question of register, either, pitting l’Académie Française against l’Argot du Coin. The fact of the matter is that even the old guard are liable to shift and change, because French is a living language.

Meanwhile the textbooks are lifeless repositories of already-questionable formulae (often written by non-native speakers) frozen in time and then applied imperfectly. And that’s before we even begin to think about the so-called cultural information these textbooks present — I can assure you that planche à voile is nowhere near as popular in France as you think!

Yes, you are more persuasive than your friends when ordering escargot in English. You did learn how to hum La Marseillaise, you can recognize Zinedine Zidane on TV, and you can probably explain why Marie-Claude was a weird kisser. But this doesn’t amount to much, when it comes to real knowledge of France or French culture and language. Frankly, it amounts to shit.

2 — People who have gone on vacation in France

So much knowledge on display here. Photo by Anna Oliinyk on Unsplash

To be honest, it pains me to even have to say it, but it seems there are still millions of people out there who think visiting France equates to knowing shit about it. I’m going to have to lay it out concretely: you had an amazing holiday, but it wasn’t in France, about which you know shit.

I know, it was romantic and funny and inspiring and eye-opening and full of embarrassment and cheap wine and good cheese. You saw the carousel from Amélie and kissed your fiancée at the top of the stairs in front of Sacré Coeur and then got a couple’s caricature in Montmartre and bought Nutella crèpes from a stand on La Rue Mouffetard and took a Bateau Mouche past the Eiffel Tower at dusk and got lost in the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa and jogged around the Luxembourg Gardens and bought an overpriced sandwich by the Arc de Triomphe and met a real French couple at the café where you had breakfast every morning after spending the night sleeping like a tomb in your tiny hotel room because you were just so exhausted after tramping across the city all day long. Too bad you didn’t run into Hemingway.

I know, you don’t go around claiming to be an expert on France, you modify your statements before you say anything, you disclaim “oh it was only a short holiday, but…” and the “but” always comes, followed by an anecdote, an intuition, or a statement corroborated by other people you know who went on holiday in Paris and had similar experiences.

But it should be obvious: what you visited is not France, it’s Paris, and not just any Paris, but the Paris that more or less all foreign tourists (and some domestic tourists too) consume and which is literally lined with profiteers from all over the world, ready to sell you a piece of your Edith Piaf dream.

Yes, it’s a real place, yes, those things really happened, and it’s a reality interwoven with the greater reality of the French capital. But even so, your experience is honestly just another iteration in a massive international narrative of mediocrity, at best dressed up as cosmopolitan Paris, and not much better than a visit to a Parisian-themed casino in Las Vegas. Which might be worth a pile of poker chips and trip through the Village Buffet, but that’s another way of saying it isn’t worth shit.

3 — People who have “lived” in France

Authentic life in France. Photo by Viktor Kiryanov on Unsplash

Unlike those in the past two categories, people who have “lived” in France are the most likely to make definitive claims to know shit about France or French culture. Which also makes them the most unsufferable, or close (see #5).

It doesn’t matter if these people have spent ten years or two months, and it doesn’t change much if they were studying abroad for a semester, doing an internship at an international organization, or languishing for half a year as a nanny — these people are certain that they understand things about France that other people don’t. In their minds, they’ve had an authentic experience. Are you one of them?

Do you tell people that the real way to enjoy a summer evening in Paris is with a picnic and a cheap bottle of wine, sitting with friends on the quays along the Seine? Do you have a foolproof way to avoid long lines at L’As de Falafel by swinging by between mealtimes on a weekday? Do you know the secret entrances to the Louvre? Do you have a café where they know your name and how you like your noisette? Do you know where to hang out in the 17th, or the 13th, or even Pantin? Better yet, do you have friends you can stay with whenever you go back, who’ve taken you to their country homes in Provence and would still love you to meet their single brothers? You might even be someone with bonafied experience in such far-flung cities as Lyon, Strasbourg, Aix (which you call just Aix, leaving off the en-Provence), Bayonne, or Orléans?

You lived in the 16th and got room and board and an allowance for babysitting upper-class kids.

Where to begin? By now it should be clear that anyone who only knows Paris should just sit down, even if you think you know the real Paris. Your experience was still so chock full of privilege and whimsy, you wouldn’t know the real Paris if it smacked you in the face with all the concrete in St. Denis. This is especially true if you were a nanny. You might have felt poor, you might have felt a lack of freedom, you might have felt ogled by the father of your host family, but you lived in the 16th and got room and board and an allowance for babysitting upper-class kids. And for everyone who felt the aura of Paris wane when something mean or foul happened to you, this is not the badge of honor you think it is. Getting pissed on in the metro is not your mark of authority on anything other than getting pissed on in the metro that time. That’s gross, by the way.

A special mention should be reserved for journalists who have been stationed in Paris during their careers. I actually empathize with these people, because their professions lead them to seek out meaningful data, real testimony, and as complete a story as possible. Unfortunately, they are almost all enthralled, whether they know it or not, by the importance of the people they meet, the out-scaled influence of Paris on the country, and the preconceptions that guide them while they conduct their work. It’s a rare foreign journalist who spends significant time in Paris and manages to question how representative their sources really are and manages to see past the claim to insider knowledge.

If you lived in France outside of Paris for any significant period of time, you might — you just might know a little more than shit about the country, but I still wouldn’t bet on it, because your year in Chartres, or your season in Biarritz, can still be as monocular as what we tend to find in the capital. Mostly this has to do with who would associate with you in the time you lived there, the way you made a living (or perhaps didn’t need to), and how much you really dealt with the banal quotidian existence that was yours on offer. So while we might be able to award an exception or two to the rule, the stunning ubiquity of people not really learning shit about France while living there (and the inverted ratio between the shortness of the stay and the cocky certainty of knowledge claims is so beautiful as to be a gift from God) means that the rule remains.

4 — Historians

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Don’t blame yourselves, historians!

Your job is to think you know shit, so of course you’re going to forget that you’re just reading (old) books like the rest of us!

5 — French people themselves

So much shit known here. Photo by Howard Bouchevereau on Unsplash

It is time for the worst of the worst when it comes to thinking they know shit about France, and that honor is reserved for the French themselves.

You might think I’m just having a laugh here, but it’s true that the French really don’t know shit about France or French culture. To a certain degree this is the old problem of fish knowing they’re swimming in water, and the percentage of French people who have stepped far enough outside of their cultural comfort zone to gain some perspective is critically low. Meanwhile, some people would claim that this is a problem with education, that French kids aren’t learning the basics anymore of what it means to be French. Those people are right-wing assholes.

One of the principal issues influencing our ability to know shit about any place or culture…is the constant will to transform our experiences into self-pleasing narratives.

But the truth does remain that French people can be the most myopic when it comes to France and French culture, and it fundamentally comes back to the theme that has been lingering here all along: fantasy. One of the principal issues influencing our ability to know shit about any place or culture, especially France and French culture, is the constant will to transform our experiences into self-pleasing narratives. Who is more beholden to a desire for France to live up to a fantasy than the French themselves?!

Our thirst for glory, stymied by tales of humiliating defeat by foreign armies, lead us to project a fantasy of France as a great military power, to the point where we militarize every inch of society while still looking foolish in war. Our hunger to appear rational pushes us to exalt the values of the French Republic to an extreme and spartan logic, so far that we cannot see its failings, whether dealing with racism, community, or creed, so far that we exalt Republicanism into a semblance of religion. Our need for superiority is so overblown that we truly believe we have the best food on earth, a belief so rigid and implacable that we can come back from a two-week visit to New York Fucking City and complain about the food.

Which, of course, brings up a related point, that French ignorance about France and French culture is never more on display than when we make our decrees regarding other countries and cultures. Just listen to a French person talk about Francophone Africa and see how long you can last before hate-cringe laughing.

But whatever the topic of conversation, with whomever, regardless of their level of education, their profession, or their state of inebriation, one chat should be enough to show you that French people are more slavishly fixated on a fantasy France than anyone, even if their particular kinks are different from those of foreigners. It may not be berets and accordion music (though it can be the case more often than they’ll admit), but the French spin their own fanciful tales of France, while acting like they know something about reality. The refrain remains the same, though — they don’t know shit, but they’ll still try to sell it like they do (neo-Marxist analysis coming soon!).

Bonus: People who have watched Emily in Paris

Knowing so much shit. Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

A special bonus category is reserved for people who have watched Emily in Paris, almost all of whom suddenly think they know shit about France. What makes this category special is how it shows the ways in which these categories can overlap, exchange, and come together over the most trivial of details. Just look at the countless think pieces published on everything that Emily in Paris got wrong! People who have lived here, people who have visited, Francophiles, casual viewers, and the French themselves have chimed in to let us know just how unrealistic the series turned out to be in its portrayal of Paris and Parisians. I’m honestly a little doubtful about the constant assault on Emily’s realism, but the joyous fête of people piling on the series and pretending to know shit about the city or the country is pure magic.

The point to make, of course, is that these categories are not exclusive, and there are more we can identify if we’re passionate about it…and I just might be. But for now, the next time you hear someone acting like the know shit about France, see how they measure up and know the truth. That way you can listen, smile, and think “blah blah blah fantasy land blah blah wine & cheese” and, frankly, you’ll have yourself a better, truer day.