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    France - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
    France - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
    France - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
    Ebook213 pages2 hours

    France - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture

    By Culture Smart and Barry Tomalin

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    About this ebook

    Don't just see the sights—get to know the people.

    The French are "different." You'll often hear this in conversations among the "Anglo-Saxons," as the French like to call English-speakers. "Different" means charming, challenging, questioning, stylish, and doing things in their own way and to their own advantage.

    By looking at the attitudes and values of the French, and explaining how French life and business works, Culture Smart! France shows you how to fit in as a foreigner. It gives practical advice on how to avoid faux pas and how to behave in different contexts. It takes you through French history, festivals, and traditions, and describes the French at home and at work. Above all, it shows you how the French communicate, and how to get the best out of this idiosyncratic and brilliant people.

    Have a richer and more meaningful experience abroad through a better understanding of the local culture. Chapters on history, values, attitudes, and traditions will help you to better understand your hosts, while tips on etiquette and communicating will help you to navigate unfamiliar situations and avoid faux pas.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKuperard
    Release dateMar 4, 2021
    ISBN9781787022690
    France - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture

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      Book preview

      France - Culture Smart! - Culture Smart

      CHAPTER ONE

      LAND & PEOPLE

      "Douce France

      Cher pays de mon enfance."

      Gentle France, dear country of my childhood. So sang the French crooner Charles Trenet in 1943. Nearly eighty years on, and the gentle charms of France continue to enchant.

      GEOGRAPHICAL SNAPSHOT

      France is the largest country in Western Europe after Russia—213,000 sq. miles (551,500 square kilometers) including the overseas regions and Corsica—and, in spite of a population of approximately 67 million, it feels less crowded than other European countries. Around 80 percent of the population live in the major cities, but 15 percent still live in the country, and regional culture is still very strong.

      Mont Blanc, the Alps’ highest peak.

      Geographically, France extends from the rolling plains of the north and east, and the high plateau in the Massif Central, to the hilly south and the Mediterranean paradise of the Côte d’Azur; from the mountain ranges of the Jura and the Alps in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and the Pyrenees in the southwest. It is hexagonal in shape. "L’Héxagone, La France Métropolitaine, and La Métropole" are three ways in which French people refer to their country to distinguish it from the overseas Départements d’Outre Mer (DOM) or the Territoires d’Outre Mer (TOM).

      The four DOM are Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and l’Isle de la Réunion. The TOM are Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia in the Pacific, the French Antarctic territories, and St. Pierre et Miquelon off the coast of Canada. These bear testimony to the variety and diversity of France’s former overseas empire. Over 2.5 million French citizens live abroad, of whom 1.3 million live elsewhere in Europe and up to half a million in the United States and Canada.

      Côte d’Azur, the eastern side of France’s Mediterranean coast.

      It is also important to remember that France retains close contacts with its former colonies in North Africa, notably Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; in West Africa, notably Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Cameroon; and Indochina, notably Vietnam and Laos.

      Within metropolitan France itself live some 6.5 million foreign nationals, of whom 2.4 million are other EU nationals. France accounts for 16 percent of the total population of the European Union.

      Focusing on the metropolitan area, France is bordered in the west by the Channel (in French, La Manche) and the Atlantic Ocean, and in the southeast by the Mediterranean. She is separated from Spain by the Pyrenees (literally born of fire), and from Switzerland and Italy by the Alps and the Jura. In the east, the Rhine River separates France from Germany. Only in the northeast are there no natural frontiers separating France from Luxembourg, Germany, and Belgium. France boasts Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc (15,771 feet, or 4,867 meters, high).

      The Seine River, Paris’s commercial waterway.

      Rivers as well as mountains provide an easy way of situating a town or area. There are five main rivers, or fleuves. Paris is on the Seine River. The Loire is famous for its Renaissance châteaux, and was the heart of French civilization in the sixteenth century. The Rhine in the east separates the province of Alsace from the Black Forest in Germany, and was for a long time a bitterly disputed territory between the two countries. Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, in Alsace, now symbolizes a new era of peace. The Rhône comes from Switzerland through Lake Geneva, changes direction at Lyon, and then flows south. Marseille is situated on its Mediterranean delta. In English, Marseille is spelled Marseilles, a source of puzzlement for the French. Finally, the Garonne flows from Spain toward Toulouse, where it turns northwestward to flow toward the Atlantic. Bordeaux lies on the Garonne a few miles before it merges with the Dordogne to become the Gironde estuary.

      Cities

      France’s six main cities are Paris, the capital, in the north, and Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, and Nantes. Paris itself has a population of over two million, but none of the other major cities has a population of more than a million.

      There are 400,000 French residents in Britain, of whom 300,000 live in London. This statistic prompted former French President Sarkozy to dub London France’s fifth city.

      Climate

      France is blessed overall with a temperate climate, but because of its size and topography there are variations between the extreme summer heat on the Mediterranean in the south and the icy cold of the Alps in the southeast in winter. Basically, there are three types of climate: oceanic in the west, where France borders the Atlantic Ocean; continental in the east and in the interior of the country and in Paris; and Mediterranean in the south. In the north and west temperatures don’t vary enormously, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. In Paris, for example, average high temperatures range from 45°F (7°C) in January to 77°F (25°C) in July and August.

      In the south the differences are greater. The weather is mild in winter, but in summer it can be unbearably hot and dry, with risks of drought and forest fires. The best traveling months are May, June, September, and October.

      The Mistral

      Of particular interest is the Mistral, a strong, icy wind that blows in winter and spring and that affects the mood of the population. It starts as a cold weather front moving down across France, piling up air in the Alps, before roaring down the funnel of the Rhone valley toward the French Riviera and the Gulf of Lion. People in the south often complain of depression when the Mistral is blowing. The number of suicides is even claimed to rise during the Mistral period.

      Administration

      France is marked by a high degree of centralization and hierarchy, based in Paris, despite attempts to decentralize power to the regions between 1972 and 1986. The country is divided into 100 départements, of which ninety-five are in metropolitan France and five in the DOM (overseas regions). Metropolitan France départements are numbered 1–95 (Corsica has two).

      The départements are grouped into administrative regions. There are thirteen regions in metropolitan France (including Corsica), reduced from twenty-two in 2015, and a further five overseas, making eighteen in all. The overseas territories maintain strong links to France. For example, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion use the Euro as their currency.

      Départements are ordered alphabetically, and numbered. The numbers are used as postal codes and also as identification on car registration numbers. So on a car registration number, the last two digits, 75, stand for Paris, and a letter addressed to 75006 Paris will be delivered to an address in the sixth arrondissement (district) in Paris.

      Départements were introduced after the French Revolution in 1789, but most French people will identify themselves by the name of their region, such as Brittany, Normandy, Alsace, or Provence. The regional name immediately brings to mind a type of landscape, climate, tradition, cooking, and way of speaking. The French regions retain a great variety of culture, customs, and wine-making and culinary traditions.

      As in other countries, there is a difference between north and south in France. Northerners reckon that les gens du midi (southerners) talk and boast a lot, are expansive, make friends easily but rather superficially, have little sense of time, and never hurry. The southerners reckon that les gens du nord (northerners) are cold, hardworking, not sociable, and difficult to make friends with—but when friendships are formed they are lifelong.

      One of the most remarkable things you will experience in France is the rivalry between the Metropole (Paris) and La France profonde (the rest of France). This is partly because France is very centralized and the administration is based in Paris, but also because the Parisian lifestyle is seen as very different from life in the rest of the country.

      As Lucy Wadham puts it in The Secret Life of France, France’s rural identity, despite the entrenched centralism of Paris’s ruling elite, is alive and kicking. Indeed, one of the striking things about France’s dual nature (urban and rural) is the extent to which one exists in perfect isolation from and ignorance of the other.

      THE FRENCH: A BRIEF HISTORY

      Brief is hardly a word to apply to French history, which has had an unparalleled influence on world thought and culture. It is worth remembering that for three centuries French was the international language of diplomacy and intellectual exchange; that France had a huge empire, with outposts in America, India, the Far East, Africa, and the Caribbean as late as 1960; that English is imbued with words of French origin; and that the American War of Independence was supported by French troops and sparked France’s own epochal revolution in 1789. French philosophers, writers, artists, and musicians, such as Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Voltaire, Sartre, Renoir, Matisse, Bizet, and Debussy, are part of the world’s cultural currency, and French filmmakers uphold a tradition of cutting-edge creativity.

      The Romans

      France was one of Europe’s earliest unified countries. The original Celtic inhabitants were known collectively as the Gauls. There were some four hundred different tribes, speaking over seventy-two different languages. Over a series of campaigns, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar finally succeeded in pacifying the Gauls in 51 BCE. He described these in his Gallic Wars, and one of his sentences, I came, I saw, I conquered, has become famous. One of modern France’s most ingenious comic creations has been Astérix the Gaul, the plucky little Celt whose village outwits the stupid Romans every time and whose language is a wonderful mix of Latin and modern French. His expression of amazement "Ils sont fous, ces Romains! (They’re crazy, these Romans!") became a catchphrase. Parc Astérix, north of Paris, is a patriotic theme park equivalent to Disneyland. It is fair to say, however, that Disneyland in Marne La Vallee, close to Paris, has eclipsed even the power of Astérix in Roissy, although a quick trawl through TripAdvisor gives both favorable reviews.

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