Mais non! We're not rude, we're just French: Revealing the secret codes of foreign manners and conversation
- French people have different codes of convention and conversation
- For example if you speak to a Frenchman always start by saying 'bonjour'
- Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau's book uncovers these rules
THE BONJOUR EFFECT
by Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau
(Duckworth Overlook £16.99)
Here is a book, artfully published just in time for your summer holiday in France, that may stop you wanting to go to France again.
Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau are married Canadian journalists who write books about the French.
Their Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong was a bestseller in all parts French-adoring, and this follow-up is even more terrifying. Copies should be made available at every border crossing.
The Bonjour Effect is subtitled The Secret Codes Of French Conversation Revealed, and it shows us why French people have been so rude to us for so many years
The Bonjour Effect is subtitled The Secret Codes Of French Conversation Revealed, and it shows us why French people have been so rude to us for so many years.
Of course, we knew they weren’t really being rude, they were just being French. But how French is French?
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The book reveals that however French we may have thought the French were, we were only scratching the surface of their ineradicable Frenchness. They are just 25 miles away but they are as strange and different to us as aliens from the planet Tharg.
Let’s start with the bonjour effect itself. This is a rule, simple enough, and it’s that, to speak to a Frenchman, always start with ‘bonjour’. Because if you don’t, they will be mortally offended and may not even acknowledge your existence.
Barlow and Nadeau once got on a bus in Paris with their two young children and clicked their tickets without saying ‘bonjour’ to the driver, who responded by saying ‘mal élévé’, which means ‘badly brought-up’.
They later worked out that 28,000 passengers passed through his bus every single day, and yet all were expected to say ‘bonjour’ to him.
THE BONJOUR EFFECT by Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau
Put it this way: the French may not react if you say ‘bonjour’ to them, but they sure as hell notice if you don’t. As Barlow and Nadeau put it: ‘France is a culture that turned verbal expression into an art form. But like an iceberg, you can only grasp the totality of what the French say if you know what’s under the surface.’
With the French, it is a complex system of rules, codes, conventions and taboos.
But the rules can be fearsome. French people say ‘no’ to everything. ‘French children are raised in the belief that what has not been explicitly authorised has by default been denied. Saying non means you are in charge, and being in charge means you say non.’
Unlike us, the French will never say sorry for something they haven’t done. On the contrary: they fear ridicule and do not want to be found at fault for anything.
In the main, this is a fascinating, even valuable book, full of surprises.
One such is the discovery that, contrary to all received opinion, the French don’t hate the English language. In fact, they use it all the time, in often very inventive ways.
For instance, un pipole is a star who plays the celebrity game, taken from the title of People magazine, which was never even on sale in France. The French are also so bent on being precise that they will hijack a word from another language to add a nuance they can’t get in French, such as le weekend, le clown and le cockpit.
As the head of France’s language police said, with a smile: ‘They’re all French now.’
Who knew?
