The French objection
French officials are desperately trying to persuade their compatriots to be less rude to visitors, but it may not be the locals’ attitudes that need adjusting By Sarah Treleaven
Can Paris rehabilitate its reputation for rudeness?
On a recent visit to Paris, I dined at Chez Paul. Admittedly a bit of a tourist trap in the 11th Arrondissement, it’s also a place where you can still find plenty of locals enjoying a fantastic gratin dauphinois. Upon arrival, my friend and I were sent down to the basement as soon as a word of English left our lips. We were alone in this dungeon section, and obscured by a large pillar. We waited for 20 minutes before I finally got up and wandered over to the bar to ask if we might place a drink order. “You'll get a menu in a few minutes,” the bartender said as he turned his back on me and I slunk back down from whence I came. A place that I so fondly associated from previous trips with cheap Côtes du Rhône and hearty comfort food became just another place to feel vaguely unwelcome. Paris, I thought, you’re killing me.
It’s no secret that the French — and, particularly, Parisians — have a reputation for rudeness. Even people who have never had the chance to worship at the foot of the Eiffel Tower have heard the rumours. Word travels, and pop culture is full depictions of snooty French, so much that it’s a stereotype. The reality is that countless tourists dedicate a significant portion of their time in Paris to trying to avoid disdain.
My favourite homage to rude Parisians is in the movie National Lampoon’s European Vacation (the underappreciated, I think, sequel to Chevy Chase’s “Wally World” pilgrimage), where the Griswald family, wearing matching peppy berets, encounter a Parisian waiter who refers to Coca-Cola as “American Champagne” and offers to bring, instead of wine, dishwater. “You won’t know the difference,” he says, smiling, en Francais.
A look through the TripAdvisor Paris forum shows this kind of exchange doesn’t just happen in fic- tion. “Why are the French so rude to tourists?” posted one man, with a clear hint of desperation, describing a typical visitor experience. “I took the time to learn some French before I arrived so I could try to speak in their tongue, we always said please, thank you good day, good morning etc (in French),” he wrote. “We dressed well so as not to look shabby in their establishments, we did not order the cheapest meals on the menu, we were quiet and did not disturb other patrons/diners/travellers/locals etc. In short we did nothing to bring negative attention to ourselves. If we were having trouble understanding we apologized before resorting to English. However we were not met with any understanding or compassion in return.”
Being famous doesn’t seem to help, either. Actor Scarlett Johansson — who moved to Paris in 2013 — has blamed rude locals for making her more aggressive in her daily interactions, telling talk show host David Letterman during an appearance last year that, “People decided that once I wasn't going away they could just be really terribly rude to me.”
Pamela Druckerman, an American writer living in Paris, is the author of several books about life in France. “I’ve been to countries where you walk into a gas station and people light up at your arrival,” she told me. “This is not one of those countries.”
Over the last several years, in some kind of self-reckoning, Paris has actually made multiple attempts at improving its reputation for rudeness — from hiring “smile ambassadors” to be nice to tourists near the top attractions, to actually manufacturing a step-by-step guide on how to be nicer to foreign visitors.
But apparently it hasn’t been sufficient. Just last year, the French finance minister issued a warning that tourists would leave and never come back if the country failed to “recover a sense of hospitality.”
It seems unlikely that worst-case scenario will unfold. Despite the ubiquitous perception of rudeness, Paris is still the top tourism destination in the world. According to the Paris Region Tourism Board, more than 32.4 million tourists visited in 2013. There is, of course, much to recommend Paris even if you find attitudes a bit wanting. But rather than remodel French culture, perhaps visitors would do well to adjust their expectations.
Ican remember the first time I visited, when I was 19 and making a half-assed monthlong grand tour through Europe with my then best friend. My mother booked us a hotel in Paris, concerned that we should have a nice start to a trip that would rapidly devolve into the typical experience of lumpy bunk beds, cheap beer and money belts worn while sleeping. I remember the fitful overnight flight from Toronto, and then taking a considerable period of time trying to figure out which train would take us from Charles de Gaulle to “downtown.” We emerged from the subway — I can’t remember where now — and as soon as I saw the morning sun hitting the immaculate window boxes on a pretty row of Hausmann buildings, I dropped my luggage on the curb and immediately succumbed to being just another fool in love.
Little did I know that my love for Paris would turn into a sometimes-torturous affair I just can’t quit. While I can always luxuriate in the simple, everyday pleasures that Paris offers — eating pain des amis while sitting alongside Canal Saint Martin is one favourite — I’ve also been confronted many times with a general sense of rejection. Sometimes, when I’m actually in Paris, I curse myself for not just going to Mexico instead. I love Mexico and Mexico loves me. Mexico never makes me feel like a jerk for asking questions or speaking barely passable Spanish. Mexico loves me for my fondness for mescal, my appreciation of mariachi bars, my taste for street tacos and my ability to carry many American dollars.
For me, the height of my exasperation with Paris — a place I have visited frequently for work, as well as to visit my brother who once lived there — came a couple of years ago during a trip to Le Verre Volé, previously one of my favourite bistros. My boyfriend and I were pressed into a table in a tiny back area I quickly realized had been turned into some kind of annex for tourists. The food was fabulous but the service haughty and impatient. While we were finishing up our desserts, a couple of glasses of wine still in the bottle, a waiter came over to tell us that our time at the table was up. We protested briefly, were informed (for the first time) of a two-hour limit on dinner, chugged our wine and stumbled out into the warm Paris evening feeling slightly queasy — not from the food, but from the lack of hospitality.
Pervasive tales of legendary French rudeness finally seemed to reach the French in recent years, and have been met with earnest-seeming promises to improve. In 2007, the tourism board produced a pamphlet called C’est So Paris, a guide for how to blend in by emulating locals’ rude gestures — which also served as an attempt to persuade wary tourists that dour-seeming Parisians can actually laugh at themselves. Body language examples included “Le Camembert” (a hand gesture used to shut somebody up) and “Le Moue” (an intense pout).
In 2011 came the “smile ambassadors.” Then, in 2013, Paris's tourism chiefs launched a formal campaign — Do You Speak Touriste? — including a booklet with a stepby-step guide to being nicer to for- eigners. The manual was distributed to 30,000 tourism professionals, including shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs, with the stated aim of creating “a better command of foreign languages, a better knowledge of good manners and tourist expectations.” Attempts to demystify groups of tourists and their varying demands has, fascinatingly, resulted in a booklet rife with national stereotypes, describing the Chinese as prolific shoppers, Germans as clean freaks and Spanish as cheap night owls. The Paris Region Tourist Board has kept mum on whether anyone’s manners have improved, but news of the manual (much of it tongue-in-cheek) has been broadcast around the world.
(It’s worth noting that I had an interview scheduled with a representative from the Paris regional tourism office to ask about Do You Speak Touriste? and any other efforts to de-snob the city, but when the time came, I was stood up. I probably don’t need to point out the irony here, but I will. It was pretty rude.)
Beyond the complaints by jilted tourists, and despite efforts to the contrary, a deep-seated malaise appears to dominate. A study by the World Health Organization found that the French have the highest rates of suicide in Europe, and depression in the world. Two years ago, the French declared that they'd had enough, with 60 per cent citing the rudeness of their compatriots as their No. 1 source of social stress. By the time the French finance minister made his 2014 cri de hospitalité, there was already distinct chatter about the fundamental gloominess of French character; the Guardian newspaper referenced Claudia Senik, professor at the Paris School of Economics, who notes that there is “something in the culture that makes French people miserable.”
In the Paris metro, they recently erected billboards to try to remind the French of their manners. The campaign depicted Parisians as animals (literally) engaging in all kinds of uncivil behaviours, from a sloth refusing to offer his seat to elderly passengers to a chicken loudly clucking away on her phone. In other words, the French can no longer stand themselves.
And so it’s no wonder that “Paris Syndrome” is a real and persistent thing. Every year, dozens of tourists — often Japanese and, increasingly, Chinese — experience anxiety symptoms because they can’t cope with the distance between their ambitions for Paris and the actual reality. Paris Syndrome was first noted in Nervure, the French journal of psychiatry in 2004. According to the BBC, the Japanese embassy runs a 24-hour support line to handle distress calls specifically related to the condition. “Chinese people romanticize France, they know about French literature and French love stories,” Jean-Francois Zhou, president of the Chinese association of travel agencies in France, recently told Bloomberg. “But some of them end up in tears, swearing they’ll never come back.”
In all of those daydreams of Paris, people fixate on the gilded monuments and the delicate crunch of a bright pink macaron. They neglect to factor in brusque treatment, the often-grey sky and chilly vibe, and the remarkable stench of urine that seems to permeate every inch of sidewalk in the early morning hours.
Last spring, I couldn’t help but think of Paris while visiting Italy, where I spent two weeks checking out Rome, Umbria, Bologna and Venice, gobbling up tiny canolis, wandering under porticos, eating in sun-dappled courtyards, my eyes watering at the simple goodness of Italian tomatoes, and sucking down as much creamy carbonara as I could muster. It was like a lifetime of marvels packed into one delightful trip, but when I got my boyfriend on the phone by the end of my stay, there was only one thing I really wanted to report. “No one here has been an asshole to me,” I said, incredulous. “What’s with these people?”
But I wonder whether it’s partly me, and not Paris, that’s the problem. In North America, we’ve become accustomed to a certain kind of service. Pioneered by our neighbours to the south, but certainly in evidence in Canada, it is characterized by a fawning, the-customer-is-always-right idea. There’s a certain narcissism in our insistence that everyone play nice at all times, that the experience of being a consumer is all about “me.”
Elizabeth Bard is the American author of two memoirs of her life in France: Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence, and she says that unpleasant encounters aren’t reserved for tourists. “Parisians can make you feel like you’re interrupting someone’s day when you go into a shop or a restaurant, like it’s an inconvenience to consume this service,” she says “And I’ve had this experience and my French husband has had this experience. It might be related to a basic pessimism and an unwillingness to pretend otherwise. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I love being greeted at the Home Depot by ‘Hi, how are you, what can I help you with?’ But that’s a script. One of the pleasures of conversation in France comes largely from unscripted things.”
In France, there’s a cultural allowance for having a bad day, and no great lie that every customer is actually a friend. “The service culture is so strong in North America, that you really have to dislike someone to shatter that veneer,” says Druckerman, whose books include Bringing up Bébé and French Chil- dren Don’t Throw Food. “In France, there’s no veneer to begin with.
There are invisible formal social fault lines all over daily life in Paris, and most of us, when we visit, unwittingly stomp all over them. “Rules and conformity are the dominant note,” wrote Sophie Peddar, Paris bureau chief for The Economist, several years ago in its Intelligent Life magazine. “Until fairly recently, you could only give your children names from an official list. Even today, purebred dogs born in any given year must be given names that start with an officially designated letter of the alphabet. This year it is the letter e.”
Bard agrees that there’s a culture of basic pretence. “Whenever you go into a shop you say ‘bonjour,’ and when you leave you say ‘ au revoir.’ I’ve seen plenty of tourists, particularly Americans, barge up to people and demand in English to be told where the bathroom is. There’s no acknowledgment that the person in front of them is even human, and the French have a real problem with that.”
“Once you learn the rules and observe them meticulously, your life gets much, much easier,” says Druckerman, who moved to France 12 years ago. At that time, her French was awful, her knowledge of “the dance” was limited and her instincts were American. “I now know how to read the signals (French people) send out when they’re in the mood to be more friendly,” she says. “But I still flub it. I give away too much personal information, which makes people very uncomfortable. There was one place I used to go to a lot, and after the holidays, people say, ‘Did you have a nice holiday?’ But after we exchanged that, I said, ‘ Where did you go?’ He looked at me like I had just asked him how much he weighs. So that was an interesting line to learn.”
Bard says that North Americans are also very impatient with rela- tionships, that we want an instant connection and that the French are wary of instant connections. “North Americans are used to very low-barrier relationships, and the French are used to more highbarrier relationships,” says Bard. “It takes a lot longer to construct a relationship, but once you’re in it can be much deeper and more significant — even with the guy who cuts your meat or your hair.” It’s, of course, very difficult to build trust with a fishmonger over the course of a five-day vacation, but Bard swears you can make some form of progress: “If you go into the same boulangerie for five days, you’ll get a different reaction on day five than you did on day one.”
Parisians aren’t the only ones subject to sweeping generalizations. The Germans are expected to be efficient and the British notorious drunks. The Russians are also supposed to be rude, even more aggressively than the French. When my mother was recently in Thailand, a hotel owner told her that they were losing business because Europeans didn’t want to stay in the same hotels as the Russians. “Apparently, they hog the pool loungers,” said my mother, with an amused shrug.
All of this is absurd, of course — the reduction of millions of people into simple caricature. This kind of labelling actually says more about our inability to tolerate cultural difference, and I recognize my own selfcentered impatience with scenarios that don’t unfold in a way I blindly perceive to be favourable. When I once spent five weeks in Paris, renting a tiny but charming apartment in the haute Marais, I found myself lonely and surprisingly self-pitying for someone on a sabbatical that mostly consisted of eating cream puffs and sighing heavily every time the Seine came into view. I yearned for overt “y’all” style friendliness of American hospitality, seeking out American tourists to chat with. But what does it really mean to be “nice” anyway? The Americans would smile at me and engage in small talk, scratching a serious social itch. But French society supports universal maternity leave, subsidized daycare and generous vacation time. So who’s really nicer?
In May, I went back to Paris and worked up my nerve to return to Le Verre Volé for dinner. Things got off to a bad start when I tried to make a reservation in French over the phone, then got confused and switched to English, then heard a loud groan on the other end. When I made it to the restaurant with a friend, we asked if we could sit in the charming and empty front section and were told no. We were shoved into the same old tourist annex, along with some Chinese, Japanese and German couples. We were given wine without much consultation, and I was then mocked lightly when I asked to see the label. As on every previous visit, the food was very good. My sausages and buttery mashed potatoes were perfectly accompanied by lightly dressed greens. My friend had a wonderfully delicate smoked white fish paired with cream fraiche and sweet peas. I still felt some combination of patronized and barely tolerated.
But this time, I didn’t mind as much and I certainly didn’t take it personally. I tried to keep Bard’s parting words to me in mind: “Of course I miss the basic premise of North American service culture, that someone is there to help you,” she says. “But there are other things about my life in France that are much more genuine and less transactional. It’s not all about someone smiling at you for money.”