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
