- Anti-communautarisme : France sees as morally unacceptable the maintenance of separate communities (Jewish, Arab, Polish, Greek). This policy, called " communautarism ", is very unpopular and unfavorable. In France, no group can declare religious freedom or respect of religious traditions as a mean for maintaining a lifestyle, schooling or social customs that would be visibly different than that of the majority. Therefore, many groups, such as the Amish, which are perfectly natural in the U.S. would be considered a separatist group in France. For Americans, who believe each group should maintain and even accentuate its differences, the French attitude represents a lack of democracy. The French believe, on the contrary, that forming a common nation and common culture comes from a desire to be different from one's origins and to strive for the higher goal of "melting " into one nation with the same schools, the same language, and that all people are French (in France minorities do not describe themselves as African - French, Chinese-French, etc.). Along with the French vision of religious freedom, this is the reason for the law on the Islamic veil : no ostensible signs of religious differences in the public schools.
- Authority : A Top-Down country : the French value authority and the whole French society is built on a Top-Down model : an omnipresent and regal state, the importance of political life as compared to social life, corporate life patterns often similar to army patterns, etc..An example of the division of the French over Authority vs. Responsibility is the policy for Public Housing. In France, there is a law that requires cities to offer 20% of public housing to their citizens. If they don't, they must pay each year a penalty of Euros 153 per missing dwelling unit to the State, to fund public housing elsewhere. Rich cities prefer to pay the penalty rather than build public housing on their very expensive land (for instance the affluent suburb of Neuilly : 2,9 % vs a national average of around 25% of public housing). For the Right, this is an intelligent system : local authorities are free and know the cost of their decision. For the Left, this is a shame and a scandalous privilege (one more) for the wealthiest who can escape their duty of solidarity, just because they can afford it : it would be more fair to use legal means to force the cities to build a certain number of public housing. The same situation occurs with companies who can either hire a quota of handicapped people or pay a penalty for each reserved job not occupied. The Right and the Left are in opposition over this for the same reasons. Those examples (and many others) illustrate that many people in France prefer to rely on the State than on the market.
- Intelligence : the French highly value intelligence in itself : you can always say that you admire someone who "failed everything but is so intelligent" (a recent example is former media tycoon Jean Marie Messier) ; this comment (like the following) is indeed a stereotype, but there is certainly something useful in it to understand the French.
- Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité is the motto of France : Article 1 of the French Constitution stipulates " La France est une république indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale " which means " France is a republic (but sometimes, the president thinks he is a king) indivisible (this is why it is so difficult to make any regional reforms : see Corsica), secular (read about the Islamic veil), democratic (no question) and social (that is why a humorist once said that France is the only country which succeeded in building a communist society) ". The French value "égalité" above everything
- a classical image is the story of an American and a Frenchman watching someone driving a Rolls-Royce : the first one wishing he could drive such a car when the latter wants this too-lucky fellow to be forced to drive a smaller car. Read a wonderful anecdote about it.
- Someone said that the French concept of equality is to chop off any head that stands out in a crowd!
- Among many, the examples of "collège unique" or "carte scolaire show that in schools, the French value (formal) equality more than anything else : you cannot put in different classes children who speak French and children who don't, you cannot send you kid to a better high school far from where you live, etc...
- In the name of "égalité", there is no selection to go to college
- And many more....
| | - Logic : for the French, there is nothing more important than being "logique" and they pride themselves on being cartesians (from 17th century philosopher René Descartes) i.e. intellectually consistent as opposed to pragmatic. Even if your conclusion is pragmatic, efficient, cost-effective, etc..., when a Frenchman says "it is not logical", do not expect him to agree with you until you have addressed this objection. Read about the metric system.
- Privacy : the French do not like to mix professional and personal life and what may appear normal in American corporate life may be felt as an untolerable intrusion in privacy; Michael Johnson gives an excellent example of an American boss goofing about it ! The legislation on protection of privacy is very strict ; examples : each person has the right to forbid the diffusion of his/her image, even taken in a public place, on a newspaper or on TV, any file concerning any personal data must be declared to a specific regulatory body (Commission Nationale Informatique et Liberté - CNIL), etc... The French do not like questions about private matters and will not let you visit their house (unless you've known them for ten years). CNIL's regulation is stricter than most Western regulations (for instance, recently, CNIL opposed the application in France of some provisions of the Sabanes-Oxley law (whistle-blowing) on the ground that it would generate data files which would no be accessible to the persons involved. In the recent past, two issues (among others) have been rather controversial :
- itemized phone bills (" why should my spouse know who I call ? ")
- external electricity meters (" why should my neighbor know how much electricity I use ? ")
- Writing : The French value writing and presidents and politicians publish books, often on non-political subjects : in the middle of the Iraq crisis, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin published an 800-page book on poetry (Eloge des voleurs de feu) while he was having all his nasty arguments with Donald Rumsfeld (and a few others...).
- See a comparative poll and some examples of curious (for Americans) French behavior
- The French paradox, according to Nadeau: "Imagine a country where people work thirty-five-hour weeks, take seven weeks of paid holidays par year, take an hour an a half for lunch, have the longest life espectancy in the world and eat the richest food on the planet. A people who keep alive their mom-and-pop merchant class, who love nothing better than going to the public markets on Sundays, and who finance the best health-care system in the world. A people whose companies are the least unionized and the most productive among modern countries, and whose post industrial consumer society ranks among the most prosperous in the world.
You are now in France. - Now imagine a country whose citizen have so little civic sense that it never crosses their minds to pick up after their dogs or give to charity. Where people expect the State to do everything because they pay so much in taxes. Where service is rude. Where the State is among the most centralized and pervasive in the world and where the civil-servant class amounts to no less than a quarter of the working population. Where citizens tolerate no form of initiative or self-rule, where unions ar so pervasive that they virtually dictate the course of government and even run French ministries.
You are still in France." |
