In Defense of the French

There’s been another small eruption of France-bashing in the blogosphere (I personally like “blogspace” better, but I guess it’s best to go with the flow) over the past couple of days, following the news that American tourism to France has crashed hard. Lileks is all over them on both foreign policy and their pretty dumb choice of spokesmen, while Den Beste hammered them Tuesday and heard back today for their attitude toward tourists.

Personally, I have a good friend who is fluent in a couple different European languages and pretty well-traveled, who learns new languages for fun, and who is a good ways to my left on the political spectrum. She’s already removed French from her list of possible “next languages,” based on her bad personal experiences flying Air France and navigating CDG during her most recent European adventure. My little brother purchased a French flag on his Spring Break school trip last year, and had all the other kids on the trip sign it. It was hanging on his bedroom wall; he’s taken it down. Shoot, I’ve quit wearing the authentic French World Cup soccer jersey he picked up for me on that trip. It hangs in my closet now, glowing royal blue, but hidden behind England’s conservative navy, Sunderland’s shimmering white and red stripes, Blackburn’s bright road red, and America’s stark white with Nike-standard angular trim.

What I’m here to say is: put the brakes on, folks.

I’m not defending French policy. The recent crackdown on the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq smells like yet another counter-American play for regional influence with one of the few groups still willing to go along with that game, the Iranian mullahs — particularly given its timing, in the middle of a week of hard-core protests by young Iranians that is one mis-directed tank away from becoming another Tiananmen Square. I also probably wouldn’t go to France now on vacation, just on general principles. There are better places to spend my money, and at some level, every elective financial transaction you make involves some assignment of moral value as well as objective physical value of goods or services. That goes double when you’re paying high taxes on it — first, do you approve of the producer/vendor, and second, do you want to hand over 19.7% in value-added tax (in this case) to the government(s) involved? My answer might well be yes to the first, but no to the second.

The people-bashing from travels is over the line, though, and the “freedom fries” stuff is getting downright juvenile.

Restricting the discussion to Paris (because that’s where most Americans go and thus draw their stereotypes from), Paris is first and foremost a big city. You wouldn’t expect super-courteous treatment from New Yorkers on a visit there; why expect any different from Parisians? The comparison also works well in a couple other venues; New York’s subway system is only slightly ahead of the Métro in cleanliness, and Paris has some of the same melting-pot ethnic nature as NYC — witness the Vietnamese street vendor outside the Louvre trying to sell me an Ajax Amsterdam jersey, and all manner of people working the plaza under the Eiffel Tower.

Bigger and more fundamental to the problem is the language issue. Both sides need to back off a little here.

The French, on one hand, still cling to linguistic past glories (although not quite as strongly as their left-behind cousins in Québec, who actually forbid the public display of English-language signs). French was the civilized language of 19th-century Europe, and remained the language of diplomacy at least into the interwar period. (Fun fact: Russian royals dating back at least to Catherine the Great preferred French to their own language — Russian was for peasants and children, not important people.) The French don’t like being reminded of its downfall, but they need to accept matters and move on.

But we need to give them some respect too here. Let’s play role-reversal: if I had, say, a Spanish- or Japanese-speaker ask me something on the street, and start repeating himself louder and slower when it appeared that I couldn’t understand his language, I think I might be at least perplexed, and perhaps annoyed. Now repeat that over and over again, and you have what many of these folks face on a regular basis. (I watched it happen a few times in my 2.5 days there — I probably should have tried to help translate, but I wasn’t very confident in my own language skills.) Furthermore, it baffles me that people wouldn’t take the time to at least learn basic survival vocabulary before they visit, including numbers, basic travel phrases, and the like. If this means buying a $30 Berlitz course a month before you leave, do it — for yourself if not out of consideration for the people there. I was a lot more confident being able to pick up key phrases on train PA announcements and being able to at least start conversations in French, even if I usually ran out after a minute or two.

There’s even hope in the policy world: the French unions’ tactic of shutting the country down every time they want something appears to have finally pushed some people there over the edge. Sabine Herold, a 21-year-old student, and her organization, “Liberté, j’écris ton nom” (“Liberty, I am writing your name” — it must sound better in French) have started rallying counter-protests. Some liken this to the early-’80s union-busting actions of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; clearly it’s one of the things France needs to break out of its economic death spiral. (By the way, the verbal gymnastics in that last article are a joy to read; the columnist bends the American political vocabulary to very near its breaking point in order to label those he hates as conservatives and those he likes as liberals. It’s also rather cute for him to complain that “Much as I dislike the inequality that comes with a dynamic market economy, I hate the torpor of the union-enforced status quo more,” when the socialist policies he prefers are what created and what have perpetuated the current problems.)

I could be wrong — maybe I was just naïve enough to believe that they appreciated me, a pretty obvious American, trying to speak their language. And maybe all the rumblings in France will come to naught, and they’ll stay on their internal economic slide and their external anti-American track. But that still doesn’t change the overall fact that we need to get some rational discourse back in this relationship, instead of lobbing verbal grenades France’s way whenever we get bored.