The terrorist attacks on France were a shock. The ensuing wave of mostly uninformed foreign opining about France was not. Even more than other countries, France has a distorted international image.
Perversely, that’s because foreigners tend to feel they know France. After all, it’s the world’s most visited country. It used to foist its “civilisation” on other people. It still takes up disproportionate global mindshare. It rejects many international shibboleths on how to run a country. Many foreigners speak a bit of French. So the temptation is to feel that they understand France, and disagree with it. Hence the phenomenon that the French call le French bashing (something at which they themselves excel). I live in Paris and collect misunderstandings about France. Here are a few:
“France is sliding back into anti-Semitism.”
Many French Jews are rightly scared. This month’s murder of four people in the kosher supermarket was only the latest anti-Semitic attack here. But it’s the anti-Semitism of a small extremist cluster, a tiny minority within French Muslims. Meanwhile mainstream anti-Semitism looks weaker than ever: 89 per cent of French people polled by Pew Research last year expressed positive attitudes towards Jews. France today is neither Vichy nor Eurabia.
“France is a museum, stuck in the past.”
To the contrary, just before the terrorists attacked, France was having a very creative moment. Fed up with economic stagnation, the French were borrowing ideas from abroad. People across France have become “open to the world”, argues French economist Robin Rivaton. International thinking is changing France: les start-ups in the tech sector venerate Silicon Valley; restaurant chefs have brought home ideas from stints in the Anglosphere; and, as French schools wonder how to emulate Finland, there’s a national debate about dumping France’s brutal grading system. Or read French novelist Patrick Modiano’s speech accepting the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature: it’s a eulogy to foreign role models from Osip Mandelstam to Alfred Hitchcock. Is France a museum? Economist Jean Tirole just won a Nobel too, Thomas Piketty is changing the global economic debate and on January 11 million marched for freedom of expression.
“The French reject change because they want to hang on to their privileges.”
It’s true that whenever any government timidly proposes a reform, some group shouts it down: farmers, notaries, pilots, trade unions, etc. But these are small privileged interest groups. Only 8 per cent of French workers belong to a union — fewer than in the US. Ever more French people are unprivileged outsiders on temporary contracts. Most of them want change.
“Francois Hollande is an extreme socialist.”
He’s a poor manager, communicator and politician, but he’s not Lenin. Instead, like his predecessors Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande has done almost nothing. His only radical gesture, the 75 per cent tax on incomes over €1 million (Dh4.14 million), was recently quietly dropped.
“The French distrust the rich.”
When I put this notion to the writer Christophe Deloire, he retorted: “They distrust the poor too.” France is a low-trust society, he noted. Everyone here is suspect.
“The French have no word for entrepreneur.”
This quote is often attributed to George W. Bush. In fact, polls show widespread French admiration for entrepreneurs. In November, 89 per cent told pollsters Ipsos Steria that they viewed enterprise positively. The number of entrepreneurs here has surged in recent years.
“France is ‘finished’,” said Andy Street, managing director of British department store John Lewis, last year. True, France has low growth, high debt and high unemployment. So do most western countries. But France also has excellent healthcare, a relatively high birth rate, high equality and no runaway financial sector. And, as Rivaton says, France has had a balanced economy since the 15th century.
“The national pastime is adultery.”
This ancient stereotype has had a lift from Hollande’s exhausting private life. However, French presidents are almost constitutionally obliged to commit adultery. Whereas a US president is expected to be a general-cum-priest, a French president is a medieval king. By contrast, ordinary married French people interviewed for surveys consistently report rates of adultery similar to Americans and other westerners.
“France has 741 (or 251 or some other startlingly precise number) ‘no-go’ zones outside state control.”
The notion — long popular in conservative media — is that these zones are ruled by Sharia police who hunt down unveiled women. In fact, as Fox News finally admitted last week, the actual number of French “no-go zones” is zero. Foreign pundits may have confused them with France’s zones urbaines sensibles — in effect, “urban renewal zones”.
Most honest foreigners accept they don’t understand China. They could try acting humble about France, too.
— Financial Times
