Once Upon A Time In France: Brexit Blues, Nitpicking Nation, and Lockdown III
Macron says the French are obsessed with finding mistakes. You don't say?
Among the joys that living abroad brings is the chance to experience your own culture through the eyes of others. In this case, it’s the NFL because my hometown team, the Kansas City Chiefs, has improbably become the league’s powerhouse. To my surprise, the League Championships were broadcast live over here this weekend, and listening to the play-by-play in French as the announcers desperately explain the rules to their compatriots is, well, a delight.
While I was chuckling over references to “mouchoir de penalty” or “penalty handkerchief”, the rest of France has been keeping amused by following the rolling disaster known as Brexit. It’s too bad that schadenfreude isn’t a French word, because there is a lot of it going around these days.
Brexit has been a catastrophe more than 4 years in the making, but the reality only seems to have sunk in when Britain officially left the European Union at the end of 2020. Basically, everything that critics warned would happen in terms of disruption to trade and the British economy is happening.
In France, we first started noticing it when the shelves at Marks & Spencer in Paris became frighteningly empty of their signature sandwiches.
Turns out, this was just a glimpse of the horrors that have followed. There’s the poor British woman living in France who tried to order £32 of food from her homeland only to be told there would be a £2,012 shipping fee.
Worse off are the British fisheries, an economically small but politically outsized contingent (think U.S. coal miners and Trump). Promised that Brexit would deliver them independence from those Green Meanies of Europe, they are now feeling betrayed because they can’t actually sell their fish to Europe.
“We thought it was going to help the industry, that it was going to put the fishing back into the control of British fishermen,” one fisherman told the Financial Times. “We were shafted.”
So what about France? Well, British authorities are now telling business owners that the best way to avoid the newly imposed trade hassles and shipping taxes is to…move their businesses to Europe. To that end, France’s Central Bank recently revealed that thanks to Brexit it estimates 2,500 jobs and at least €170 billion in assets had been moved from the U.K. to France.
Everyone’s A Critic
One of the first things an Anglophone will notice when moving to France is that the French love to correct you. They offer unsolicited corrigées when one makes a grammatical error or if you mispronounce a word. It takes a while to adjust to the fact that these are offered as a sign someone cares enough to help you improve and overcome your faults. Still, it’s something I would never do, for instance, if I was speaking with an Indian engineer in Silicon Valley just because he or she had a heavy accent or forgot to put “the” in front of a noun. It would be obnoxious. Plus, as long as I can understand them, who really cares?
I have become so accustomed to constant corrections that it just washes over me. So I was mildly surprised to hear that President Macron, facing constant criticism for his handling of the pandemic, had gotten fed up with these French people and their obsession with pointing out mistakes.
“What goes with French mistrust is also this kind of incessant hunt for error," he said during a presentation about a new science program, according to Le Figaro. “We have become a nation of 66 million prosecutors. This is not how we face the crisis or move forward.”
Incessant hunt for error? This is something so fundamental to French culture that I’m not really sure how Macron could possibly just be realizing it. Though maybe when one is so ensconced in one’s own culture, then such things are not apparent. That said, it’s an attitude that the French education system spends years drilling into the souls of students.
It starts with the French grading system, which is based on negative reinforcement. Assignments and exams are scored on a 20-point scale. A student starts with 20 points and then is marked down based on the number of errors. So a 12 means you got 8 things wrong. This is considered a decent result in France. But when our kids first enrolled in school here and were getting 12s and 13s, we thought it was catastrophic. (Oh, god! They’re getting a D- and 60%! What have we done?) It took some time to accept that a 15 was really really good.
Meanwhile, at teachers’ conferences, they congratulated us because our kids were always raising their hands and asking questions. That just seemed to be normal to us. It was hard to understand why that would be notable until we asked the kids about it. They explained that the French students didn’t like to ask questions because it was an admission that they didn’t know the answer and would be embarrassing.
I experienced the result of this nitpicking mentality a couple of years ago when I was hired to be the host of a weekend hackathon for a large French company. A friend had been hired but had to withdraw at the last minute and I agreed to fill in. The French team running the event spent the whole 48 hours delivering a stream of feedback about all the things I was doing wrong or could be doing better. In some cases, they would be standing in the back of the auditorium and commenting in real-time through frantic hand gestures and mouthing words WHILE I WAS ON STAGE.
By the end of the weekend, I decided to put the whole disaster behind me. I called the friend who had gotten me the job and apologized because I had probably cost him a bigger contract. He was puzzled and explained that he didn’t know what I meant: The company had called him after the hackathon to tell them how happy they were about my hosting. I was dumbfounded.
It’s all just to say that France doesn’t have a real pat-you-on-the-back culture. Nobody is going to give you a blue ribbon for Best Effort or Perfect Attendance. Macron shouldn’t expect otherwise.
Lockdown III: Return of the Attestation
To that end, things aren’t likely to get much easier on Macron. The government is likely to announce a 3rd national lockdown on Wednesday. While the much-criticized vaccination campaign has kicked into high-gear, officials are worried the more contagious and potentially more deadly British variant will lead to an explosion of cases.
We are still awaiting details of the lockdown in terms of what will be closed and what will be open and what the travel restrictions will be. It appears schools will remain open. But it likely means we’ll have to start filling out the dreaded attestations each time we got outside to run errands or to exercise.
Among the biggest losers economically are the ski resorts and mountain communities. France is coming up on a 4-week school vacation period in February (each region has 2 weeks spread over that period) that are critical to delivering a flux of tourists. The government has already said ski slopes can’t re-open this month and with the season typically over by March (thanks to global warming), this year is likely a writeoff.
It’s a particularly cruel blow because the mountains are seeing unusually heavy snowfall this year.
Dreaming Of France
The ski season in France may be gutted, but I still can’t stop thinking about a trip to the mountains. Maybe the forced separation has made me even a bit more obsessed. I had a chance to speak with some local tourism officials during a two-day conference last week to get the scoop on regions I have yet to visit.
Those destinations now on my list include La Clusaz, a ski resort village in the Haute-Savoie department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. It’s nestled in the corner near the Swiss and Italian borders, and just to the west of the more renowned Mont Blanc. Less famous perhaps, but also a bit calmer and more accessible.
Great Reads
The city of Paris has announced a €250 million plan to turn its famed Champs-Élysées avenue into an “extraordinary garden” that is more pedestrian-friendly. This is part of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s broader effort to make Paris less car-centric and greener. Considering that Paris is one of the most polluted cities in Europe thanks to its automobile congestion, such overhauls are urgently needed.
Lindsey Tramuta writing in Condé Nast Traveller takes a look at these plans:
“Over the last 20 years, the avenue has become a hub for luxury shops and restaurants and completely ruled by cars,” says Carlos Moreno, a scientific director and professor at the Sorbonne. “There has been no real life there; no social mixing, no permanent residents…”
From the department of Solving Humanity’s Biggest Crises: The French government has passed a law declaring that rural sounds and smells are officially part of the nation’s heritage, according to Forbes.com. This will make it tougher for those urbanites fleeing the city for green pastures to complain.
From The Guardian comes news that an iconic French bookstore has become the latest economic victim of Covid. The Local had a great profile of a young data nerd who independently built the CovidTracker website that has become a go-to resource for the French during the pandemic. Probably a good thing because Foreign Affairs believes French Technocracy Is No Match For The Pandemic.
Finally, on a more sobering note, James McAuley, a Paris-based correspondent whose upcoming book explores the history of Jewish art collectors in the decades leading up to World War II, offers up some lessons that France’s infamous Dreyfus Affair could hold for the post-Trump United States.
Writing in The Atlantic, McAuley says:
“That period in France, known as the Third Republic, never resulted in any reconciliation. It turned out to be impossible to compromise with those who not only rejected the truth but also found the truth offensive, a kind of existential threat. The social divide simply grew wider and wider, to the point where bridging the gap became a futile proposition.”
Chris O’Brien
Toulouse, France
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