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- or What Mother Never Told You About the French

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This page is about France, French culture, mentality, politics and what the Brits call the Frogs. This page is for those who want to get behind the tourist brochures and know what France is also like. According to many Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, France would be so much better without the French. When you've read this page, you'll know why.

Disclaimer

This page is not meant to be a source of immigration or travel information. Its contents are based on real experiences or knowledge and a bit of exaggeration and added a dash of sarcasm. The views expressed are my own and cannot be considered objective. I hope you will have a good time reading the stories, even if you are French. If I talk about "the French" doing so and so on this page, it doesn't imply that all the French - or even a majority of the French - match the description, but rather that there is more of a tendency for that sort of behaviour than elsewhere. Also, France and the French and their mentality and culture vary with the region. Some of the experiences described on this page may not apply everywhere in France. They are mainly based on life in the greater Paris region, Lille in the North and Provence.

Den der kun tager spøg for spøg og alvor kun alvorligt, han og hun har fattet begge dele dårligt.
Piet Hein.

(People who take fun only as fun, and serious matters only seriously, haven't fully grasped either one).

Table of Contents for This Page

Recent updates are indicated in red.

BOOKSHOP

"[The British] are people who have a great sense of humour. It is the French who are cretins."

Gérard Dépardieu, October 2005

Source: The Daily Telegraph 31 October 2005

"The Czechs are the most selfish, obnoxious, unfriendly, envious, covetous, lacking in any kind of empathy kind of people, they are xenophobic, racist, not funny, the are very depressing to observe just by taking the public transportation, only interested in themselves and I could go on."

Source: A known Czech expat living in the USA and whose identity I'd rather not publish, February 2007

Now, replace "Czechs" with "French" and you have a quite eloquent description of many Frenchmen.

Introduction

The French are a breed of weasels as corrupt, conniving, favouritist, selfish, cynical, manipulating, scheming, cheating, lying, dishonest, fraudulent, self-important, narcistic, incompetent, negligent, bureaucrat, stubborn, inefficient, disorderly and messy as anyone you could possibly find in the western world. The whole business world, political world, administration and judicial system is permeated by this mentality. What is right or wrong doesn't have the slightest importance in France; only what you can get away. Individuals are the same since the only way of preventing everybody else from walking all over you is to adapt the same mentality to compensate for the losses incurred on other accounts. Such behaviour is a kind of self-defence against an all-controlling, paternalistic state that never leaves anything or anybody in peace. It is in fact the only way to survive the hell that France is. There is no stigma associated with exercising this mentality because everybody knows that everybody is like that, so if someone is caught out; well, better luck next time. If you move to France, be prepared for eternal fights with the administration, companies, shops, landlords and everybody else. It never ends. I can certify to that after living in France since 1998.

Many French politicians believe they are the masters of Europe and that their country's importance cannot be overestimated. The rest of Europe is there to serve their French masters and pay for French overspending. Half the EU's agriculture budget goes to French farmers, for example. Just before the second Gulf war, President Jacques Chirac told the leaders of 10 Eastern European states, some of them about to join the EU in 2004, that they'd missed a good opportunity to keep silent, and that they'd been behaving childishly. Regarding the Iraq crisis, they'd dared to state in public that they agreed with the USA and not France. That lese-majesty made Chirac threaten to block their entry in the EU. Chirac could just as well have said "Europe, c'est moi !", crowned himself as Chirac XIV of Europe and moved into Versailles. When some European leaders support the American position, it's called manipulation by the French politicians. When Chirac makes his gang of African friends sign a declaration he's written, we must all keep silent and listen in awe. Whether you were for or against the war is irrelevant for demonstrating how French governments function. How France has managed to get away with it for decades without being stopped by the other member states could seem a mystery, but one must admit that the French master diplomatic skills to excellency.

Not the entire leading class like this behavour. In an article in le Figaro the 22 April 2006, Gérard Longuet, conservative Senator for Meuse and former minister, said: "La France est en Europe un voyageur qui n'accepte pas de régler son billet." (France in Europe is a traveller who refuses to pay his ticket.)

Le Government and la Street

France has a government and a parliament like nearly every other country. They also have a president and a senate. These brilliant institutions have the power to vote laws and regulations if they are not disputed by the street and socio-communist unions representing 10% of the labour force. Anything that is not accepted by the street, be it students or workers and their manipulating unions, will not survive, even though governments will occasionally put up a facade during a few weeks during which they insist that they govern the country, well knowing that the real rulers are those in the street who block, demonstrate, shout, strike and vandalise. As a result, France is facing economic ruin and mass unemployment, but the French prefer being unemployed rather than having a job where they risk being laid off before they reach pension age. Who can blame them? Like zombies, they are brought up to think they can claim all necessary comfort from the state. Like blind sheep, they are running after an utopia of eternal employment, comfort, retirement and other benefits, not realising that the money to provide all this is not there. 75% of youth consider it attractive to get a career as civil servants, administering each other, paid by money that is miraculously dripping in from nowhere. France used to devaluate their battered franc regularly, when overspending had undermined its value too much. Since introducing the euro in 1999, that is no longer a possibility, and that has accelerated France's economic problems.

La Press & Television

Foreign languages on French television are systematically dubbed in French so that the French are lulled into a cocoon of never hearing any other language than their own. This has the side-effect of making it easier for the government and the press to control the flow of information. Also, it makes it very difficult for the French to take up work abroad if they're not satisfied in France. To make the population go along like sheep, the ever-present bogeyman of the barbarism of the Anglo-Saxon culture and language invasion and their threat to French language and culture is frequently taken out of the box. This situation is called l'exception culturelle française  by the French snobs - the French cultural exception.

As an example of the nearly Orwellian 1984-style manipulation to pretend that reality does not exist, a French news channel promptly declared on the 15 March 2004 - while commenting on the loss of power for the Spanish Popular Party that had actively supported the US-led intervention in Iraq - that the Spanish government in that aspect had acted against its European partners. Let's step back and recap: France and Germany and a few others were ferociously opposed to the intervention in Iraq. About half of Europe, including the UK, Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and many more actively supported the intervention. As George Orwell would have said it if this episode had happened in "1984": The whole of Europe has always been against the intervention in Iraq, except for the mentally deranged Spanish Popular Party which has now paid the price for setting themselves up against Big Brother - or the French political elite. France is Europe. Who is against France is against Europe and an enemy of the people. Again, this demonstration of French media manipulation is valid whatever your personal views on the war.

On the 5 March 2005, after the liberation of the Italian hostage in Iraq, Giulina Sgrena, ended with an episode during which the car driven by the Italian secret service approached an American checkpoint, the American forces opened fire against the vehicle for yet unknown reasons, and one Italian secret service agent tragically was killed, French state-controlled TF1 and the Gaullist propaganda newspaper Le Figaro quickly presented the American action as a "blunder", without further need to understand what actually happened. What really happened doesn't matter for the French media if the Americans can be blamed. It may or may not have been a blunder, but it was unknown when it was reported.

On cnn.com, the following provisional explanation was offered:

"In a written statement, Multnational Forces said that at 9 p.m. (1800 GMT) they opened fire on a vehicle that was approaching a checkpoint at a high speed. U.S. troops "attempted to warn the driver to stop by hand and arm signals, flashing white lights, and firing warning shots in front of the car," the statement said. "When the driver didn't stop, the soldiers shot into the engine block, which stopped the vehicle, killing one and wounding two others." CNN's Nic Robertson said coalition forces's rule of engagement permit them to use escalating levels of force if they felt threatened. They can use lethal force, for example, if a car refuses to stop for a checkpoint. The road where the incident took place, near Baghdad's airport, was particularly dangerous, Robertson added."

No such details were found relevant by French press, which deliberately avoided to present any explanation at all, leaving the French public with the impression that the American military are incompetent cowboys who are shooting uncontrollably all over the place. That's what the French think about the Americans anyway, so it's much easier just to confirm it. Why inform if you can misinform? In the evening edition, TF1 presented a brief version of the American explanation after first having presented a statement from Ms. Sgrena, who was of course very surprised about the shooting. Would anyone have expected a just liberated hostage to systematically observe everything on the road in a foreign country?

No single mainstream news organ in France dares tell the full, objective truth. While a few writers still dare to speak up and are even admitted in print, the overall policy of the entire French press follows the Gaullist view of the world to a great extent, some with a more socialist flavour than others. Inconvenient truths are left unmentioned. Inconvenient truths that cannot be left unmentioned are contorted.

A large part of French television programmes consist of a live audience around a few people who are babbling away about something that's not interesting and laughing at their stupid attempts to make jokes - and sexist remarks about the single, young, good-looking woman who has been invited just so they and the viewers have a good-looking woman to look at.

If they make documentaries, such as consumer programmes, the subject may be interesting, but the programme may last 2 to 3 hours, because it is watered out with silly remarks, babble and other irrelevancies. While the British make such programmes mainly to inform and make them fast-paced, the French do it the other way around, prioritising entertainment over the information.

The conclusion is that French television is largely unbearable, except that the Franco-German Arte uses subtitles instead of dubbing, and that their choices of movies are based on cultural factors instead of mass entertainment. If you sign up for French cable or satellite TV, then you get five times as many unbearable programmes.

L'Individualism

The French are diplomatically described as individualists. That is to be understood as egoists. For a Frenchman, he or she comes before anybody else, whether justified or not. If the French government see France's or their own interests threatened, they shout out for respect for the law, treaties, conventions or whatever. If it suits the French government, they break the law without hesitation. If French politicians are trying to build a political union in Europe, it's to further what they consider to be their own interests. French politicians see the Single European Market as an opportunity to expand French business into other countries while keeping the others out of France. In an excellent demonstration of this, French state-owned EDF used the opening of electricity markets in other countries to buy into companies there, while they still enjoyed a monopoly in France. Sharing a meal with a Frenchman means to him that he eats and you do the dishwashing. This "grab what you can for yourself" mentality permeates everything in France and that is partly what makes France and the French so infuriating.

It is easy to blame this mentality on the individual, but that would be too simplistic. France is a paternalistic state that puts its nose in all its citizens' matters from early childhood and grabs a large part of their earnings in taxes, leaving little room for initiative and little money for the citizen to build his own life. The French are suffocated by the state. They don't have freedom to do what they want without first going through 10 kg of paperwork over 2-3 years to get permission. Somehow, as human beings, they need to let the steam off, and it seems to be through selfish behaviour and by not being a good citizen towards the state and fellow Frenchmen. Those who reach the top keep this behaviour intact and apply it to governmental affairs, thereby assuring the perpetuity of the individualism, not least through setting bad examples.

The trouble is that this pattern of behaviour generally leads to irresponsibility. It is common to observe that the French do not think about the consequences of their acts - or inaction. For example, I warned my landlord in Provence, a farmer, that the oil burner (a model that must have been installed shortly after the second world war) could blow up because it had no thermostat to lower the flame if the water got too hot. He didn't take me seriously, and then one day it blew up. When he came to inspect the shattered pieces of the burner, I mentioned that it would have been cheaper to install a thermostat. He didn't comment. The ad mentioned that the house was renovated. Judge for yourself on the photo of the exploded boiler to the right.

This pattern also leads to a firm belief that nothing can be changed, and that it is therefore pointless to waste any efforts trying to change or improve anything. This can be seen in low participation in elections. Why bother voting when you know very well that the country will remain in the same poor state as before the election? You will only get trouble if you suggest any improvements or changes in France, and you will hit a brick wall of resistance and a zombie-like disinterest. That is the human reaction to a system that has left its citizens powerless. There are many similarities to people who have grown up under a communist regime. The French mentality is the exact opposite of the American go-get-it and the Asian work attitude.

This mentality is particularly destructive in the massive public administration where an army of zombies are paid not to do anything useful. Why should they bother learning to do their job properly when they cannot be fired and they are guaranteed a safe and tranquil career? Why even get to know the laws for the little area they deal with? Well, they don't, and that's why you will get any sort of nonsense as a reply when you ask the administration about anything. But try to print out a page of the law and go and show it to the civil servant dealing with your file, and he will look confused at it, only to invent some vague remarks like they don't do like that there etc. The truth is, it's not his problem, it's yours, and he or she doesn't give a damn. Hence, the French administration move at a snail's pace.

The DIY chain Castorama used a symbolic slogan in their ads in 2007: "Castorama ; il y a tout pour moi", meaning "Castorama; there is everything for ME". The advertising agency got it exactly right by focusing on ME, as that is the one thing that is sure to interest every Frenchman.

If you can't change anything and everybody is thinking about himself, then you can just as well concentrate on the available pleasures and on minimising the unpleasant parts, such as work and responsibilities. Hence, the French now firmly believe they have a right to all comforts of life, for example a steady income (which unfortunately in many cases means they have to work), holidays, and Sundays without work. With that comes a right not to take the consequences of their actions, a right to make mistakes, and a right not to apologise for their mistakes.

Of course, the French are not stupid, so they know very well that there could be unpleasant consequences of certain actions. Thus, they build up each their personal moral code for acceptable behaviour. The criteria for acceptable behaviour is whether they believe they can get away with doing any particular thing without getting in too much trouble.

There is, unfortunately, a large part of the French population who do not enjoy their right to a steady income, because they are unemployed, only get the occasional short-term job or are in a similarly difficult situation. In 2006, France counted about 7 million persons living in poverty, or close to 12% of the population. These persons are paying the price of the comfort of those in permanent job contracts in the public administration and mostly large corporations. These permanent contracts cannot be broken by the employers, unless the company is about to go bust or the employee commits a serious error. So long as these employees behave just reasonably well, they are therefore assured jobs for life. The price for this extensive job protection is paid by those who cannot get these permanent contracts and therefore go from short job to short job or unemployment. There is a lot of work to do in France, but many smaller businesses will not hire anyone on the restrictive permanent contract type, so they either take someone for a short period or say no to customers to avoid hiring anybody. The right to a protected, comfortable income for the privileged middle class is thus paid for by someone else. While the socialist party is protecting the comfort rights, there is no workers' party to protect the rights of those on unstable jobs. Neither is there any political party to improve the very bad conditions for the small businesses that could employ many people and increase economic output if they were not often destroyed by heavy taxes and a very unfavourable employment law. These people - both the casual workers and the small employers - are left to fend for themselves. No one is interested in this segment of the French population. Some of these people would be Arab immigrants piled up in concrete towers in concrete suburbs. When people go around having nothing to do, some get involved in crime. In a certain way, they are thus sending back the bill for having been excluded from society to the middle class population that look on in shock and horror when youth run riot and burn cars. But the majority, whether Arabs or not, just suffer in dignified silence.

Les Schools

French schools are run by tyrannic cows that try to force education into the poor children already from the age of 4. Although school is only mandatory from the age of 6, working parents have little other choice than letting their children start in maternal school early. Where other countries let children be children, the French cannot help but trying to stuff learning into their heads so early and then complain to the parents that the children will not sit still in the classroom. Of course they won't, they are only 4 years old, but try explaining that to the staff. Motivating the children, even when they are 6 and have to go to school, seems of little importance to the teachers, who seem to think they work at a military academy. Given the record low results French schools produce in terms of foreign language capabilities, you can't even defend the tyrannic system because results are fantastic, because they aren't. It is during these tyrannic school years that the French start building up a mental defence against the tyranny by doing the opposite of what is expected when it's possible. Hence, you have a country full of ill-disciplined Frenchmen who only care about themselves. It would be wrong to blame the individual, because he is simply a victim of a hopelessly old-fashioned system that is still not taking into consideration that the 21st century will need a highly motivated, multi-lingual and independently thinking workforce. French thinking is stuck in a time warp around the industrial era that ended in the early 20th century. In France, conformity is rewarded, not innovation. Hence, the French can build technologically demanding industrial projects like the high-speed TGV trains, but they rarely invent anything new.

Les Snobs

Hierarchy is important in France. Those who have managed to get high positions, whether by merit, bribery or exchange of favours, expect that their own importance be expressed at all times. To such an individual, it's an insult to address him as simply Monsieur. Instead, the proper title must be used, for example Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, Docteur, Maître, for an ambassador, doctor and a solicitor respectively. Correspondence to such important people must end with a greeting that is suitably adapted. Otherwise, those people might think that you were addressing them as if they were simple people. My wife worked temporarily at the Foreign Office's health insurance office, dealing with claims. One day, she received a phone call and addressed the caller as Monsieur. The caller immediately corrected her and said "I'm an ambassador". My wife's English teacher told her that another of her pupils was a doctor. He refused to begin with the simple stuff, because he found that would be much too simple for of person of his education. Never mind that he's terribly bad at learning English. A cleaning lady can tell about company directors so important that they could never humiliate themselves to say "hello" or "goodbye" to a being so low as a cleaner.

Unfortunately, too many of these fine people with fine titles start believing that the title is a carte blanche to do whatever they please while fending off any criticism with a shield of arrogance and aggression, a shield that also in certain cases covers an astonishing lack of intelligence, common sense or knowledge about their profession. For example, after courteously and in due form having contested a document sent by an huissier, a ministerial official, I received a letter from him in which he used the word "stupidity" about one of my arguments concerning proof of the date of posting. Lawyers are equally sensitive if you dare question or criticise anything they are doing - or much too often why they haven't done something yet. One sometimes wonders how some of these persons managed to obtain their titles, but anything can be bought with money or favours in this corrupt country.

Provence for the provençaux

Many people may think the double feature movie Jean de Florette - La source en Provence and Manon des sources - is about the beautiful landscape of Provence. It certainly is, but it also shows the devious character of some of the people having been born there - the provençaux. A real provençal is first provençal and then French. Don't even mention Europe. In the movie, we see how an apparent foreigner - a foreigner for a provençal meaning anyone not from Provence, whether French or not, Parisians being the most hated of all - who has inherited a farm and arrives with his family is driven to despair and finally death by the scheming provençaux who are all against him. For those who have not yet seen this beautiful film, I will not reveal the rest of the plot.

It was in fact only when I arrived in Provence myself that I discovered the film's hidden meaning. I can now see how exact the author Marcel Pagnol's description of the provençal character is. For the old provençaux, the natural resources are everything, and if you know where to find wood, water and other resources, you keep it to yourself and try to prevent others from getting to it.

Apart from the farmers, many provençaux in more modern jobs genuinely don't like foreigners either. Only after arriving in Provence have I been told: "Why don't you just go back to your own country"! Never in Paris. Never in Lille. Never in Luxembourg. Never in Germany. Never in England. In Provence, the little racists or xenophobes are everywhere: I've been told by a lawyer, a magistrate, a civil servant and by a France Télécom hotline operator. That's right, for some operators in the country's leading phone company, getting rid of paying foreign clients is apparently more important than providing customer service. But it's not because it's France Télécom, it's because such is the provençal character. From school age, children are taught the provençal language in parallel with French in some schools, while foreign languages are of course as neglected as everywhere else in the Republic. Very useful for these children when they grow up and need a job and is asked by the prospective employer if they speak English - "no, but I speak provençal". That will help France increase exports!

The provençaux are of course very happy about all the money that tourists are throwing around during summer, and tourists are not staying long enough to be felt as a threat to the pure character of Provence.

Many provençaux are of course too clever to succumb to such primitive behaviour, and they can on the contrary be extremely friendly. But the presence of the character described above is undisputable. I now understand why our former neighbours in Lille said that they didn't like the character of the provençaux.

France, the United States, the United Kingdom and many other countries have immigrant populations and native populations of non-European ethnic origin. In the Anglo-Saxon world, as the French like calling the rivalling English-speaking world, businesses and individuals have seen the opportunity to provide products and services for these ethnic groups where their particular features require different products and treatment than the ethnic European population. Not in France. People of Afro-Caribbean or mixed origin will find it extremely difficult to find notably hair styling products suitable for them, and French hairdressers are taught to take care of European hair only. In the United States, you will see one marvellous Afro-Caribbean hair style after another, created by competent and creative hairdressers. In France, you will see badly kept Afro-Caribbean hair, because the French simply cannot bother learning how to deal with it or import suitable hair styling products. In a few cities, though, you may find a few hairdressers able to do it, but due to the lack of competition, they are very expensive, and the results are often disappointing.

While it can be argued that hair is harmless, the real issue is one of attitude towards the ethnic population. It is not by accident that the extremist National Front party with Jean-Marie le Pen as leader gets so many votes as it does.

Many French males have a first name starting with "Jean-", for example Jean-Jacques, Jean-Michel, Jean-Louis, Jean-you-name-it. Similarly, an awful lot of female names start with "Marie-", for example Marie-Françoise et Marie-Claire. The combinations are endless. 

Note that the name Peter is rarely used, since it's pronounced as péteur, which is someone who's farting. So, if your name is Peter, and you try to pronounce it in French, don't be surprised to be met by giggling people who look like they're about to crack up. If that really is your name and you live in France, for God's sake keep pronouncing it the English way.

Some last names reflect the fact that the French are generally smaller than their neighbours to the north. Thus, you'll find Mr. Petit (small), Mr. Mignon (cute) and Madame Mignonnet (a variant of "cute") in huge numbers in France.

The French being small, you can expect huge difficulties buying beds, mattresses, bed linen, and clothes in France if you're taller than 180 cm. As for shoes, most shops will only have a few models to choose from if you need 46 or larger. Clothes sizes normally stop at XL.

The French wheelie bin - poubelle - got its name from the prefect of the Seine who imposed its use. You still find the family name Poubelle in the French white pages, though not many, so the chance of stumbling upon a Mr. Dustbin is microscopic.

Nom in French means "surname" while "First name" is prénom - literally "before name". Quite logic - it's what you put before the nom. Nevertheless, the logic stops there, as it's very common in correspondence, on envelopes, in files, lists and whatever that the French put the nom before the prénom. While this may be useful for filing and sorting, I've never found a good reason for putting the nom first in correspondence, or why you never find the nom first in newspaper articles. You'll never read about de Gaulle Charles or Chirac Jacques in a newspaper.

Once I was in a hospital for an appointment, the nurse told the doctor that they couldn't find my file. Only when I suggested that they might have filed it under my first name did they find it. The good doctor had made the faux pas of writing my prénom before my nom.

Don't try to understand this. It's all part of le paradoxe French.

La Language French

Moi ! Moi ! Moi ! ...

As we have seen above, each Frenchman likes himself a lot because no one else does. This is sometimes reflected in daily speech, typically when someone expresses his opinion:

Moi, je vais me coucher, moi ! (me, I will me lay down, me, meaning "I'm going to bed")

The person mentions himself 4 times. Most frequently, the trailing moi is omitted, to be fair, but it can occasionally be heard. To be fair to the language, the correct way to say it is 

Je vais me coucher !

But as fairness is not a part of French culture, what is fair doesn't matter. The excess of moi is thus an individual expression to highlight that it's all about moi.

The arithmetic of numbers

The French like to do things their way, so the words for the numbers 70-79 and 90-91 have been creatively elaborated to confuse foreigners.

"Sixty" is soixante in French.
"Seventy" is soixante-dix, that is, literally, sixty-ten.
"Seventy-one" is soixante-onze, that is, literally, sixty-eleven.
It continues like that until 79.

The same system applies to "ninety", which is quatre-vingt-dix in French, literally eighty-ten.
Then it goes eighty-eleven, eighty-twelve, etc.

In fact, quatre-vingt, which means eighty, literally means four-twenty. That is short for the calculation 4 x 20. So you see, ninety is 4 x 20 + 10 in French.

L'Académie française

The French Academy are responsible for defining the French language. Their most important task seems to be inventing French words for new English words such as for example courriel instead of "e-mail" as it was published in the Official Journal of the French Republic number 141 of the 20th June 2003 on page 10403. English words have already polluted French enough. It's hard to disguise the origin of French words like hamburger, tramway and ferry-boat. Of course, the members of the Academy could never dream of doing anything useful, for example by making the numbers more logical, or simplifying the complicated and redundant French grammar.

Anyway, despite this official order to send courriel instead of e-mail, the French disobey, and the word "e-mail" remains the most commonly used in daily life. You are unlikely to find the word "courriel" outside official correspondence and other documents that have nothing to do with daily life. Writing lois, ordonnances, décrets, arrêtés, bulletins, circulaires and other official documents that serve no practical purpose remains a pastime for the French administration.

One wonders if the Academy should not rather protect the French language against the French themselves rather than the hated Anglo-Saxons, as the French are the first to deform their own language.

In Paris, you will notice that some Parisians instead of saying "oh r'voar" for au revoir (goodbye) say "aarrhvoar". I never understood where the "a" sound came from, and never did my French wife, by the way.

The prefix "re" means "again". "entrer" means "enter" and "rentrer" means re-enter or returning home and many more things related to returning to or repeating something. However, many Frenchmen seem to think that it is more literary to say "rentrer" than "entrer", and so, you can observe that many have banned the word "entrer" from their vocabulary and have replaced it with "rentrer" in all cases. You can hear people discussing if something they just bought will "rentrer" (re-enter) in their car when the item cannot possibly have been near the car before. When discussing whether this or that country will join the European Union, many will question whether or not the country will "rentrer dans l'Union européenne" (re-enter the European Union), never giving it a thought that a country that has never been a member cannot possibly re-enter.

Linguistic Fascism

In March 2006, GE Medical Systems, a company near Versailles in the General Electric group, was condemned by the appeal court to provide French translations of all internal technical documents to the 1500 employees that encompasses 45 different nationalities. The communist union CGT was behind this attack on companies' rights to manage themselves and to demand certain skills, such as the ability to understand other languages than frog-speak, from the personnel. During a time when everybody are asking for more jobs to cut down the 10% unemployment, did it ever appear to CGT that such actions could be discouraging other foreign companies from investing in France? If people have no linguistic skills, nobody is forcing them to apply for jobs in an international group.

Les Dogs, Les Pigs & Les Crottes

A large number of French dog owners are so happy about their animals that they want to share their joy as much as possible with their fellow bourgeois. Therefore, the little souvenirs that the dogs place on the pavements and elsewhere to remind others of their existence are left untouched by the dog owners - but not necessarily by others.

If you enjoy this page, then you'll roll on the floor laughing while reading

The Parisian dogs alone produce 15 tonnes every day, that is 5500 tonnes per year, enough to fill 27 average size houses. 650 citizens are hospitalised each year after having slipped in a poo. For some reason that I cannot explain, it seems that narrow streets and pavements are favoured targets for the dog droppings. In such streets, like for example rue de Félicité (literally "Bliss Street" - which I used to call rue de Félicité des Chiens - "Dogs' Bliss Street") in Paris' 17th arrondissement, it can be hard to find a place to step without walking in a 'souvenir'. In this street, which is only 300 metres long, I once counted at least 15 'droppings'. The dog 'souvenir' pastime is not limited to Paris. I found a street in the centre of Tarascon in the département Bouches du Rhône, rue Edouard Millaud, that has apparently decided to take up the competition with Paris. They are doing a good job, and with some more training, they might rival rue de Félicité. In the quiet village of Noves in Provence, near Avignon, the mayor decided to refurbish place Lagnel in the old centre. The square had been left to itself and the local dogs for decades. The photo shows the very good result with the cleaned fountain, cobble stones and nice colours - and the traces of the local dogs just in front of the refurbished fountain. It is notoriously difficult to teach new tricks to old dogs, so the pooing continues, thereby assuring that the dogs largely keep the expensively refurbished square to themselves. The children from the school just across the street presumably learn quickly not to roll their school bags in the poos. This is part of what the French like to call l'exception culturelle française - the French cultural exception.

For a real Frenchman, it's only normal that everything is a bit dirty, and he wouldn't really feel at home in France without a dog poo here and some dirt there. In fact, it's part of the particular charm of France that it's a dirty country where you're not stressed by orderly people frowning upon everything you do like in Germany. In France, you can do as if you were at home, and everybody will be happy. 

In French, "pavement" is trottoir, and "dog poo" is crotte; trottoir is thus a code that really means crottoir, namely a place for les crottes. Tourists in France are faced with the dilemma of either watching the sights and slipping in a 'souvenir' or returning home without such incidents but having seen only the pavements and their 'features'.  It's of course illegal not to clean up after your dog, but nobody seems to bother about what's legal and what's not in France - except if it's about criticising other countries for not respecting the law. Someone who always sticks to the law is regarded as a bit of a weirdo by the French.

Les Pigeons

Another source of pollution that foreigners should be aware of is pigeons. If you don't try to avoid walking under trees and other places pigeons find comfortable, you're likely to end up as the target of a pigeon dropping. Town halls do try to get rid of the pigeons, but despite their efforts, pigeons are still around in large numbers. The fact that old ladies illegally feed them doesn't help. Elle met du vieux pain sur son balcon, pour attirer les moineaux, les pigeons ("she places old bread on her balcony to attract the sparrows, the pigeons"), sings the French artist Jean-Jacques Goldman (did you notice the "Jean-" prefix again?).

La Break Lunch

Formally, the lunch break is one hour. But this is intended as an informal guideline, and anything up to two hours is considered normal and quite acceptable. Typically, the lunch hour is spent with colleagues at the local brasseries, cafés, etc., but an increasing number of Frenchmen satisfy their hunger with a sandwich from one of the many bakeries (there's one on every street corner). Thus, the rest of the lunch hour(s) can be spent running errands.

Let's not forget that the lunch hour is a favorite time to meet your mistress. Two hours is enough to relax in between the boring work, and presumably no one finds out, except maybe some colleagues. Office gossip about who's dating who is not uncommon. But as no one wants to ruin any marriages, they usually keep quiet.

Shops are open during the lunch hour without interruption in Paris and other major cities. In the rest of the country, everything is closed for 2-3 hours or more. Do not telephone anyone in an office, unless you know them, between 11:45 and 14:00 if you don't want being snubbed. Even though lunch doesn't start until noon, staff start preparing themselves for lunch a quarter of an hour before.

Le Sheep-ish Behaviour - and Le Work

When you put an ad in the paper to sell for example a car and it's a Frenchman who reacts to the ad, he shows a surprisingly normal behaviour by asking you a few questions about the item for sale. But the normal behaviour ends there, because the first things he asks about are not the specifications you didn't find place for in the ad but the things you've already written in the ad! Let's say you've published the following ad:

"Citroën 2CV, 1970, 200 000 km, blue, 500 €.

A typical conversation would be (translated to English, because as we know, the French cannot and will not speak other languages than their own):

- Hello, John Carseller speaking.
- Hello, yes, hello, Jean-Michel Lebœuf in the apparatus ⁽¹⁾. I've seen you have a car for sale.
- Yes, what can I do for you?
- It's a Citroën 2CV?
- Yes.
- How old is it?
- Eh, I think it's written in the ad, it's from 1970.
- Ok, how many km has it driven?
- I really think I wrote that in the ad. I don't have the ad in front of me, but I think it's 200 000 km.
- And the price is 500 €?
- Yes, it's the price written in the ad.

1) When the French present themselves on the phone, they say for example Jean-Marie à l'appareil, meaning "on the phone" but literally meaning "in the apparatus". Some Frenchmen find that a bit too short and say Allô, oui, bonjour, Jean-Michel à l'appareil, literally meaning "Hello, yes, hello, Jean-Michel in the apparatus" but in reality just meaning "Hello, Jean-Michel speaking". Many don't bother to present themselves, simply saying "bonjour, puis-je parler à Marie-Machin", meaning "hello, I'd like to speak to Marie-Whatever", leaving the family member who picked up the phone wondering whether he or she had missed a career opportunity as switchboard operator.

And so on. The clever car buyer will get on to a few questions about things not written in the ad later. Job interviews are quite similar. The interviewer will take your CV and start reading up from it mechanically, sometimes asking questions that seem quite irrelevant and certainly not useful for getting to know the potential employee. Creativity is clearly not something they are looking for; rather someone who can adapt to the hopelessly outdated rigid hierarchy still practised everywhere in France; a hierarchy that discourages creative and clever employees from even trying to do a good job and which controls so many decisions at such a detailed level that the employee cannot deal with many more problems himself than organising his coffee break - within certain limits of course, such as notably not starting the coffee break so late that he can't finish it before it's time to go home. So frankly, when it's not wanted, not rewarded and not encouraged, why on earth even try to do a decent job when you can relax and just follow orders, however useless, from the hierarchy. If something goes wrong, you're covered so long as you've done what you've been told. Taking risks such as trying to work in a clever way simply exposes you to the risk of offending the hierarchy - a gang of self-important managers - who see their power watered down if you try to think and decide in their place.

And so, as it's the case for the lunch break, the working day for the office worker is more relaxed than in Britain. The manager comes around saying good morning to his or hers employees, and up to an hour may be spent discussing the latest news, gossip or whatever, and a few words about what you're supposed to do today. Foreign managers in France could fall in the trap of thinking that they can just line out the target for the French employee and then expect him to get on with it, only disturbing the manager in case of problems he cannot fix himself, and deliver on time. Not so. If you don't tell them every day - or at least every week - what they are supposed to do, they won't do anything. This is quite similar to the worker mentality in the former Eastern Germany. When the wall fell, it ended there, but there is no similar wall in France (except the infamous Maginot line that was supposed to protect France against invading Germans but that never came into use because the Germans just walked through Belgium instead), so it's not obvious when - or if - it will end in France. The British say the French are lazy and don't like to work. Well, the truth is that it looks like they are lazy, but they are simply covering their behinds by working in a way that won't get them into trouble. They could work harder, but why bother when it's not rewarded.

In an article in le Figaro the 22 April 2006, Gérard Longuet, conservative Senator for Meuse and former minister, mentioned "la fuite collective devant le travail" (the collective flight when confronted with work) as a major problem. He continued: "les Français travaillent moins que les autres Européens (ils commencent plus tard, ils s'arrêtent plus tôt, moins d'heures par semaine et moins de semaines par an)" (the French work less than the other Europeans (they begin later, they stop earlier, fewer hours per week and fewer weeks per year)).

In March 2004, I went across the border to Belgium to try a Japanese car model that's not marketed in France because the French chauvinists prefer their national brands of car - Renault, Peugeot and Citroën - that persistently score at the bottom of reliability and consumer satisfaction surveys. The car salesman turned out to be a Frenchman who was fed up with France and had started a life in Belgium 15 years ago. I'd never thought that I should hear a Frenchman say that the French are lazy, but he did it!

Handshaking is a very important pastime in French working life. When you arrive at work, you shake hands with everybody who works in the same department, walking in and out of their offices to disturb their work. If you later in the day walk into an office, the coffee room or somewhere else, you must shake hands and say bonjour to everyone in that room, except if you've already shaken hands that day. It's very rude not to do so. To avoid saying bonjour to the same person twice on the same day, you need to keep a mental table and clear it at the end of the day. People with a bad memory are sometimes the cause of quarrels where one insists that they've already said bonjour and refuses to shake hands, and the other insists that they haven't yet said bonjour and insists on shaking hands. It also happens that two people crossing in a corridor have to stop and think in order to figure out if they've already said bonjour. Two women meeting each other will not shake hands but kiss each other on each cheek. A man and a woman meeting will shake hands if they don't know each other too well and kiss on the cheek if they are closer colleagues. If as a man you find it difficult to remember which woman is in which category, the easy solution is to let the woman take the initiative.

French employees in the public sector have 12-14 weeks of paid holiday per year:

• 2 weeks of sickness.
• 1 week of strike (2-3 weeks at the SNCF (national rail) and RATP (public transport in Paris)).
• 1 week of floating days to cover Fridays that fall between a bank holiday Thursday and a weekend.
• 3 weeks to compensate for the 35 hour working week.
• 5 weeks of plain holiday

Because the French have understood that it's not worth working more than absolutely required, a sick employee must post a doctor's certificate (arrêt de travail) to the employer no later than the day after the first day of illness. The certificate will state the start and end date for the illness, and at what time of day the sick employee is allowed to leave home for necessary shopping, etc.

During the public sector spring strikes in May and June 2003, unions and civil servants were outraged that the conservative government issued strict orders that the law must followed to the letter, which means that strike days will be deducted from the strikers' salaries. Such unfair punishment of strikers who are only making use of their constitutional right to strike used to be unheard of in France.

So, you see, everything in the working life is organised from top to bottom. Everyone has his or her place, where (s)he can keep sitting until retirement or move up in the hierarchy if (s)he has obeyed orders, had sex with her manager or knows someone of importance (the piston principle). It is quite possible that competence could be an alternative criteria, but I haven't found such a case yet. Globalisation and the real competition that comes with it is therefore seen as a fierce and evil attack on French values, to be fought with all the protectionism, manipulation and manoeuvring available. That the French economy is not working is obviously not the fault of the corporatism and its lack of adaptability but the fault of the evil, Anglo-Saxon capitalism and its exploitation of workers.

To be fair, it has to be underscored that the above description does not apply to industrial workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. They sometimes work in inhuman conditions that you might expect in China but not in Western Europe and for the lowest possible pay. They may be treated not much better than slaves. The fresh, crisp salad from Provence that you eat in a Paris gourmet restaurant may have been washed in such conditions. As the French don't want to do such jobs, you will often find that these jobs are filled by immigrants, often of Arab origin. As many French do not like or respect the Arabs, nobody bothers about these poor working conditions.

Les Strikes

If you hear something about grève while in France, then prepare yourself to walk, manage without cash dispensers, sit in a queue on a motorway, be stranded in an airport, getting your mail weeks later, or something similar. Strikes and demonstrations are an integrated part of French public sector, semi-public sector and industry culture. Particularly in the transport sector, it is a tradition to strike 1-3 weeks a year. On the public transport networks, the employees normally strike in only one particular district at a time, and a minimum service is kept in place. Next time there is a strike, it's a different district and so on, until all the districts have had their scheduled strikes, and it wraps around to the first district again. One strike cycle is approximately six months in the Paris region. There is a particularly persistent type of strike, where no minimum service will be put in place, and which may last longer than the scheduled strikes. That is if the workers believe that they have a real reason to strike or if it's a political strike (which is illegal, but before a court has declared a political strike illegal, a month has passed). Any change in working or pay conditions can serve as official excuse for striking, such as for example switching train schedules from the summer timetable to the winter timetable. Even if workers are not concerned by some changes affecting other groups, they may go into "preventive strike".

Some of these groups of workers have obtained highly privileged conditions through the years. Here is what Le Figaro revealed on 16 December 2009 about the striking drivers of the Paris RER A metro:

They drive the trains only 2:50 hours a day.
Gross salary at start of career: 2,833 euros a month. 
Salary at end of career: 3,333 euros.
Duration of working day: 6:30 hours, 5 days a week.
They do only 2 return trips a day.
When they don't drive, they can be on training or in "meetings with administrative staff to analyse problems".
Most of the time, they just have to be available to move trains at the depots.

So France has an upper-class of spoilt unionised workers and an underclass of workers in smaller companies who struggle to make ends meet and who never attract the interest of unions because there is no politics involved.

France is a law-abiding country that observes equality between citizens. Wrong! Whenever the members of a pressure group feel they need more money, they go down into the streets, go on strike, vandalise something, obstruct public services or whatever they may find reasonable, until the government throws a few million euros at them to make them shut up. People who are not members of any pressure group rarely get anything. Liberté, égalité et fraternité (freedom, equality and fraternity), as it says on the French coins, should be understood in the sense that French citizens are free to cheat others and rake as much of other people's money in their pockets as possible, that some people are more equal than others and that the fraternity between members of France's leading class - the énarques - will always observe their own best interests.

L'Indecency Public

French males believe that women are there for the sole purpose of pleasing them. Women are advised not to travel in public transport in miniskirts. A foreign hand might suddenly be under the skirt. Particularly during strikes, when the travellers envy sardines in a can, males take advantage of the enforced proximity of their prey. Also beware that if women dress lightly, males may be staring them down throughout the journey and make indecent gestures. Propositions may be encountered anywhere, on the street, in the supermarket, wherever.

Le Christmas

A Frenchman who doesn't eat foie gras, a pâté made of swollen liver from force-fed ducks or geese, for Christmas isn't a real Frenchman, or he's been the victim of an Anglo-Saxon plot. Little does it help reminding them about the suffering they impose on the birds just for their pleasure. A real Frenchman only considers the pleasure himself and his family can enjoy.

In January, everybody is eating galettes des rois, a tart with a heavy marzipan filling.

Le Removal

Maybe the more relaxed attitude to work explains that three items of furniture that had survived five international removals were damaged by a French removal company when I moved from Paris to 25 km outside Paris. British and Danish companies had moved for me before, and without any problems. The French company was late, the van was too small, and they had split the removal up over two days without telling me first. Their removal cartons were of inferior material, for one use only, and only suitable for carrying light weight contents. Fortunately, I had a stock of more robust cartons from Britain, Denmark and Luxembourg. To add ridicule to the unorganised removal, their quotation letter contained the phrases "Find your furniture in the same condition as when you confided them to us" and "Have to do with a conscientious, polite, clean and organised team". The name of the company is Leader Déménagements. Prospective removers, beware.

Le Traffic

As explained above, the French are egoists. That explains the chaotic state of the traffic, the mindless driving, and the nearly 8,000 people killed on French roads every year.

Pedestrians will cross the street anywhere and regardless of the colour of the little man at the traffic light. They are normally busy looking out for dog poos, so they cannot look up to check the traffic lights as well, or they might end up in hospital after having slipped in a poo. Occasionally, they may look around to see if cars are coming, but normally, they'd expect the driver to give way. He'd be in big trouble if he were to run over them anyway, so he'd better look out. But beware that drivers frequently assume the right of way in pedestrian crossings, traffic light or not. Also beware of cars coming down the street at the wrong side of the road, not to mention drivers exercising a liberal interpretation of red light.

If a Frenchman sees a car reversing, he will rush over to walk behind it, where people from other countries might find it prudent to avoid walking behind it. This is happening so regularly that you seriously need to be aware of this particular pastime.

Motor cyclists will frequently behave like pedestrians, except that they sometimes stop at the red lights. This is because most of the dog poos are on the pavements (crottoirs). That leaves the motor cyclists more time to check the traffic lights. However, they will expect pedestrians to give way if the latter are crossing the street at a green light.

Car drivers fear the motor cyclists, whom they regard as anarchists, because they may appear from any direction, at any speed, at any time, without notice, and cross your path in any way they find appropriate. Car drivers must always look out for pedestrians walking all over the place. Special care must be taken if passing a green traffic light. Car drivers should also respect priorité à droite, a centuries old rule that gives right of way to traffic coming from the right if no signs indicate otherwise. While suitable for traffic moving at horse carriage speed, nobody has ever considered repealing the rule when car speeds made it unworkable. Be warned that if you assume that others will give way because you arrive from their right, you'll cause a lot of accidents. You can't expect someone racing down a boulevard to stop just because you insist on your right of way. 

Similarly, in roundabouts marked as such, you're supposed to give way when entering the roundabout. Since some French have great difficulty understanding this, such roundabouts are systematically signposted "Vous n'avez pas la priorité" (you don't have the right of way). Despite this, you'll sometimes see them behave as if they had the right of way when entering the roundabout. This mainly appears to be a problem with mini-roundabouts. After a sign warning it's a roundabout and a sign to give way, half the drivers still cannot understand that it's a roundabout and that they must give way.  It adds to the confusion that some roundabouts operate on the principle of giving way to the right. This particularly applies to the large roundabouts in Paris in order to make them clog up during the rush hours. Because you have to give way to cars entering the roundabout, no one can get out. The government is keeping it this way because tourists find it charming to watch the big traffic jams at the Place de la Concorde and similar places.

Drivers should be aware that buses are allowed to use the bus lanes if they're not used for parking or clogged up with ordinary traffic.

White paint on the street is for guidance only, particularly lane separations and arrows. Beware that the paint may be worn off or out of date, thus making you think you can make manoeuvres that are not permitted.

Obviously, road authorities are not completely blind to the lack of knowledge amongst French drivers. For example, when joining a motorway at the end of a slip road, there is a "no left turn" sign, so you don't accidentally drive the wrong way down the motorway. Also, when leaving a motorway, the slip road has speed limit signs with decreasing speed for every couple of hundred metres (yards). Just in case you were not aware that you would not make it through the bend with 130 kph (80 mph). Because of the spending on all these signs, there's not always enough money to put up signs on less important roads, such as "no left turn" when joining a one way street, or "no entry" to prevent you from joining for example a dual carriageway in the wrong direction. The locals know the roads anyway, and they know where they're not supposed to go. People without local knowledge should try to figure out if they are about to join a one way street before they make any accidents. It's a good idea to look around to see what other drivers are doing. Just beware that the locals may not always respect the regulations. Some places, the local authorities are keen on avoiding accidents. Their philosophy is: "better put up ten STOP signs too many than one too little". Such places, you will find junctions where all the roads that join are equipped with STOP signs, meaning that everybody should yield for anybody. This is of course not possible, so the locals adapt their own interpretations, for example "give way to the right" (this is the rule a Frenchman will follow if he doesn't understand the priority rule somewhere). At other junctions, you will see the main road being equipped with "give way to the right" signs in both directions, and the other road having STOP in both directions. Of course, drivers using the main road ignore the "give way to the right" sign, because they know that the other road has STOP signs. A driver arriving at a STOP sign could of course ignore it if turning right, because he knows that the other road has a "give way to the right" sign. If you don't know the local conventions, be alert before ignoring the signs. Or better, stay home. The locals didn't ask you to go to their town anyway.

If you drive in a tall car, such as a minivan that is 190 - 200 cm high, always check the height limitation signs before entering an underground car park. Often, the limit is 180 or 190 cm. The trouble is that the sign is placed so that you can't see it when you leave the street to enter the car park but only just before the descent. That means you only know if your minivan will enter the car park when there are five other cars behind you on the one-way entry lane to the car park. When you find out that your car is too tall, you can have five minutes' good fun making the five cars reverse out so you can get out. Real-life experience tried out in Lille and Marseille.

A real Frenchman will park his car (bagnole) anywhere, including such places as the middle of the street, street corners, bus stops, space reserved for delivery vehicles and pedestrian crossings. In Paris, an army of inspectors issue large numbers of parking tickets every day, and many illegally parked cars are removed. At shopping centres outside the cities, where there are large car parks with plenty of space, a real Frog will dump his car as close to the entrance as possible, carefully avoiding the marked spaces.

Les Queues

A behaviour similar to that seen in the traffic can be seen wherever there is a queue. If a real Frenchman sees a chance to jump a queue, he'll do it straight away. Supermarkets have special checkouts for disabled people, pregnant women, and people with small children. If you happen to belong to a privileged group, and you want to benefit from the special checkout service, then you have to fight your way through the queue of normal people, who don't think twice about taking a place from those who need it more than themselves. This is a fine example of French individualism.

Curiosity Killed le Cat

Maybe curiosity doesn't kill the French, but they are at least as curious as cats, and they are notably indiscreet. In pharmacies, people will often be staring at other customers and what they are buying, listening to their conversations with the pharmacist with the greatest interest. The French like to stare at others. The best defence is to stare back.

La Bureaucracy

The French administration is working in silos. That is, one administration rarely communicates with another. If administration A requires that in order to obtain benefit X, then you must provide a certificate to prove Z, then it's your task to write to administration B and ask them to provide a certificate proving Z, wait for them to send it, and then send it on to administration A. This can make dealing with the administration cumbersome and slow. 2 to 6 months to fulfil a simple request is not unusual, depending on the type of administration. 

When you move from one département to another, the CPAM health care administration treat you as if you had just landed from Mars. The easy solution would be to look up on the computer under your social security number, copy your file and maybe ask for a copy of your paper file from the place you were previously registered. No, No, No! Much too simple for the French. You must fill in a complete form with all the information they already had where you were registered and attach copies of all the paperwork that proves that you are entitled to health care. After one month, they will then ask for further documentation. You send it, and one month later, they tell you that you are not entitled to health care. You then send them further documentation to prove that in your situation, you are entitled, but they never asked you for that document in the first place. One month later, they finally send you a social security card, but they forgot to put the children's names on it, so you have to write to them again to get that corrected. Now, the $1,000,000 question is: Why do you think French social security has a deficit of several billion euros?

Another problem with French administration is the increasing complexity of laws, codes, regulations, decrees etc. As politicians cater for particular groups of the population to win the next election, so the legal texts have become clogged up with exceptions. If you thought the difficult task was figuring out your rights in a particular situation, then think again. Civil servants are only human, and once you proudly present them with the request that had cost you hours of research, they may simply turn it down, notifying you that you have no such rights. I have caught them wrong on several occasions. And let's get this straight: They were plainly and simply wrong. As 2 + 2 does not equal 5, so it was not a question of borderline interpretation or a matter for discussion or individual evaluation. Eventually, they have admitted their fault, but each time, it delays the request.

If you are from the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic sphere, you may naively think that if a public office displays opening hours, for example on their website, then they are going to be open during these hours and you can walk in with your request until five minutes before they close. It is not so. You need to warp your mind into the French mindset first. What "open 9-14" means is that it is a statement of intention saying that "we will mostly be open during that interval; in no case will we be open one minute longer; you should not arrive so late that we cannot finish dealing with your request before closing time, particularly if many people are already waiting; we may occasionally not be open during all of these hours and if you are lucky, we will put a sign on the locked door to that effect so you know why the door is locked when you arrive; do not expect us to inform you of the occasional closure on our website".

As the civil servants are guaranteed a job for life, they often don't care about the consequences about what they do. It's not their money and time they are wasting, and it's not their businesses they are ruining by their irresponsible behaviour.

La Kitchen French

If you want to eat well without being ripped off, you are well advised to do so outside Paris. Note that many restaurants in Paris are for rich American and Japanese tourists who smile and say "thank you very much" while the French waiters present a rude remark in French or give you a shabby service. If you insist on eating out in Paris, leave the tourist areas and go to the places where the French work. There, you'll find many small restaurants where you can get a reasonable meal for less then 15 €, drinks included. Since they are not dealing with tourists, who only come once, they cannot afford to be rude to their clients.

Note that the quality of cakes, biscuits, pies, and desserts may be inferior to the quality of those in Britain. Unless you really like an expensive, dry and sour apple tart, you may just as well skip the dessert. Unfortunately, Marks and Spencer have now closed their shops in France, so you can't buy your English cakes there any more.

Contrary to the cakes, etc., French bread is still worth eating, but you will never find a choice of any type of bread that is not French, while in the UK bread quality is steadibly increasing, and you can get a wide choice from American bagels to Italian ciabatta. But beware that the quality of bread in France is slowly falling, as bakeries leave traditions alone and find easier ways to make bread. Look out for the sign "Banette" for a good quality of bakery, although it is no guarantee. Also, if something says "artisanal" (traditional, small-scale craft), you have a good chance of getting a good and tasty bread, but the word is abused more and more. A chain store named "Paul" produces what they call traditional bread, but I personally find it too much of a challenge for my teeth. It's a matter of taste - or strong gums.

For people on diet, it's a major problem that food sold in supermarkets rarely have any nutritional information printed on the pack. This is because a real Frenchman doesn't care what he eats, or how it's produced, so long as he likes the taste. And obviously, it makes production much more flexible for creative food manufacturers.

France is said to be the country of gastronomy, but it's near to impossible to buy fresh cream, except if you happen to live near a farm with cows. It's all UHT treated, so that it can be kept for months on the supermarket shelves without waste, and it's difficult to taste that it has once been fresh cream. The French think that whipped cream is something you buy in a spray-can and that it has a sweet taste. The sweet taste is because the manufacturers add sugar to the UHT spray-can to sell more of them. If you ask a Frenchman to make whipped cream himself, he wouldn't know how to do. A chef who works at the canteen at Radio France in Paris told me that it was easier to work with UHT cream. Never mind the taste. I strongly disagree with him. Fresh cream not only tastes better - it's also easier to whip.

The French cuisine as a whole is declining, as housewives are too busy to cook fresh meals and therefore go for the ready-made packs in the supermarkets. It's the same story in restaurants, unless you get close to the Michelin level. Many small restaurants simply buy their meals more or less prepared in large stores like Metro and heat it up when someone orders it. Dominique Magada Cahill said more or less the same in an article in the Weekly Telegraph in December 2004.

British visitors to France may find the following guide helpful. You should be aware that the French are not afraid of red meat. In general, it's difficult to get your steak well done. If you insist, the waiter will think that you should rather have gone to see a psychiatrist than a restaurant. Beware that if you send your steak back to the kitchen for further cooking, there's a risk of the cook dropping it on the floor and stepping on it.

Le Wine

French wine is overestimated and overpriced in general. Presumably, this is due to snobs falling over themselves to praise the bouquet, fruitiness and subtle finesse of a wine, as soon as they see "France" on the label. In reality, the wine may be mixed with some plonk of unknown origin, as it's been seen in some Bordeaux and Bourgogne (Burgundy) wines.

Note that the only thing the name "Champagne" guarantees is that the grapes are from the Champagne region, which is quite a bit larger than you may think. It does not guarantee a consistent quality, or that the wine is from a particular vineyard. Well-known producers have been revealed buying up cheap Champagne of no name and selling it under their own brand. Thus, you may pay 25 € a bottle for something that's worth 8. If you don't want to pay rip-off prices for Champagne, you may get a wine just as good if you look for crémant or méthode traditionelle, which indicates that the wine is produced the same way as Champagne, but in another region. Note that pétillant is just white wine with bubbles. But better, take a trip to Luxembourg and buy their most reasonably priced méthode traditionelle.

Red wine is sold years before it's ready to drink. That's because in the traditional French society, a Frenchman will remain all his life in the same village once he's settled. Thus, he can build up a cave of wines maturing. If you want a red wine ready to drink, look for "cave" in the store. That's a special department for drinkable wines. But expect the price to be steep. If you really want a good and reasonably priced wine to drink straight away, look for Spanish or Portuguese wines in street markets or the gradually, but slowly, increasing space for foreign wines in the large supermarkets.

White wine is relatively competitive. My favourite region is Alsace, from where comes a selection of fruity and well-balanced wines. But also Vouvray is worth looking at. You can find cheaper imitations of the Alsace wines in the Mosel region in Luxembourg and Germany.

As for rosé wines, the Anjou district produces some very fruity and sweet wines. These are best drunk on a hot summer day. The prices are normally attractive.

La Beer

French beer is meant to persuade you to drink their wine instead. It's mainly coloured, sparkling water, but without taste. A notable exception is the high quality beer from the Flandres region that borders to Belgium. Fortunately, there's an increasing number of foreign beers on offer in the supermarkets.

La Hygiene

While la French cuisine is well reputed, the same cannot be said about French hygiene. Sniffing your way around Paris will confirm this. Of course not all the French are dirty. I'm really only talking about a very small minority, but that minority really stink. Once on a Parisian suburban train, I had to go and sit somewhere else, because some foul-smelling bloke came and sat in front of me. The stench was unbelievable - something between old, rotten cheese and public toilet. The number of baths he'd had since birth could most likely be counted on one hand - it was a young fellow.

In my wife's office, they once had a fairly young employee who apparently had a soapophobia. They had to hint at him that getting a more intimate relationship with soap might be a good idea. When he left their group, they had to send his office chair for cleaning to remove the smell.

One of my former French colleagues seemed to find soap too complicated to use. It reeked all the way down the corridor from our office. I had to place a perfumed candlelight discreetly in a cupboard to avoid the risk of falling in a coma (I accidentally once forgot the candlelight overnight and found it burning the next morning - this smelly guy could have been the original cause for burning the building down). The manager eventually gave him a briefing in soap for dummies, because he himself would have to share office with my colleague from the month after.

Once I returned from Birmingham UK and had to change planes in Paris to continue to Marseille and got into the Air France plane, I immediately noticed that I was in France: One passenger nearby could have done with a shower, and another kept farting.

But, I repeat, not to offend the washing majority: No need to be offended by this if you're one of them.

Within the same week in July 2006, I was told the same joke about the French by two independent Belgians. It goes: "Do you know why the French say aller aux toilettes (go to the toilets (many)), where the Belgians say aller à la toilette (going to the toilet (single))? It's because in France, you always have to try several toilets before you can find a clean one."

When you rent a house in France, you can't just presume that it fulfils even basic sanitary norms. This photo shows the sewer where the water from our toilets pass before going into the septic tank next to our rented mas - a farm house in Provence. The owner was told about the problem 7 months before this photo was taken, but he doesn't care. He's a retired Provence farmer. The mayor of the village was informed about sanitary problems one and a half year before, but although she was responsible for having completed inspection of all the council's septic tanks before the end of 2005, she hadn't even started, and she has done nothing about this. Such is the happy laisser-faire laid back living in Provence.

This photo shows why the sewage is stalling and overflowing. The hole measures about 10 cm across, and paper from the toilets get stuck and gradually block the sewer. The owner is aware of the hole. The worst of this is that drinking water for the house is pumped up just about 5 metres from this, which is purely illegal, as there must be 35 metres between a septic tank and a water supply. But in Provence, what is legal and what is not doesn't mean anything. I sued the owner in December 2005, and the court ordered an expertise report to be filed by May 2006. It was filed more than a year over time. While my case dragged along at a snail's pace, in December 2006, the owner gave notice that he wanted to move back into the house in June 2007, as he can do after three years. When my case was finally heard by the court, the tenancy period had lapsed so the judge concluded that the owner didn't need to do anything and that I should compensate the owner for having disturbed him with a trial. This house was advertised as an "exclusivity" when I rented it. That's what you get for 1100 € a month in Provence. They may not know or care about the law, but they know about money!

I figured out that doing things the right way in Provence only leads to trouble. So in protest against the miserable state of French justice, the dishonest landlord, the conniving judicial 'expert' and the mayor's favouritism, I started doing things the Provence way, disobeying every order and obligation. When the owner gave notice in December 2006, I contested. When the tenancy lapsed in June 2007, I stayed. He then had to sue me to validate the notice. He won in February 2008. So I stopped paying rent - and stayed. He then had to get a bailiff to give notice of eviction. That came in September 2008. I stayed during the two-month grace period. The winter truce started on November 1, before the two-month grace period ended. The winter truce ends on March 15. During that period, no eviction can take place. In February 2009, I received notice that the landlord had requested help from the police to get us out. So we had to go and talk to the police and the prefecture. The latter understood our difficult situation and gave us until mid summer to move. July 2009, we're still here. The government has to pay our rent starting from the moment the landlord requested assistance from the police. I'd never have done this in a country like the UK, but in France, disobedient behaviour is rewarded. When in Rome, do as the Romans do: They shaft you - you shaft them.

Restaurants: The few hygiene inspectors available keep fining restaurants and food stores for lack of hygiene. Given the limited number of inspectors, their findings are alarming. The whole range of dirt and fraud is on the menu: Rotting food, food past its use-by date, refrigerators not cold enough, dirty kitchens, lack of personal hygiene, inadequate storing and transportation of food, mixing raw and cooked meat, advertising Charolais beef (a quality branding) on the menu at accordingly high prices but having none in the restaurant and no invoices to prove that such meat was ever purchased, food stores putting new dates on food that has passed its use-by date etc. Tourist areas in southern France during summer are particularly problematic. Contrary to what many tourists think, you can safely drink tap water in France, as it is rigorously controlled, but you have no way of knowing if a restaurant's kitchen is clean. If you like the delicately balanced taste of the sauce, then my advice is not to think about where the aroma comes from. Bon appetit!

In July 2006, the news programme on the primary TV channel TF1 showed images from beaches and elsewhere, showing how people dump their rubbish in the nature or bury it in the sand, rather than take it to a bin.

Same summer, my French wife observed how other bathers in an outdoor swimming pool in the south let their babies and small children poo in the water. Of course they were not wearing nappies. This French invention of combining a swimming pool with toilets makes it possible to save money on building and maintaining toilets (even if there were toilets, they wouldn't have been cleaned anyway, so there's nothing to save there).

Le System Health

Doctors take plenty of time to examine the patient, being sure to listen to the patient describing his symptoms. This is in stark contrast to Britain, where a doctor under the National Health Service will time your allowed two minutes to say whatever you like, before he starts writing something on a prescription and shows you the door. In France, you're normally sure to leave the surgery with a prescription that will supply you with a load of medicine that you need a suitcase to take away from the pharmacy. Most of it won't have any effect, but it'll make you think that you're being taken care of. This of course helps to justify the army of workers at the caisse de maladie that manages the reimbursements of medical care. Furthermore, the doctor will supply you with an arrêt de travail, a document establishing how many days you're not supposed to work, and at what time of the day you're allowed to leave home for necessary shopping. This system ensures that people have some additional holidays, since they don't return to work before the doctor prescribed, even if they're cured.

Le System Security Social

The French social security system has a lot to offer, notably to people without work. Without getting into any boring details, let's have a look at some of the more amusing ones:

When you become unemployed, you can get unemployment benefit from the ASSEDIC for relief (ASSociations pour l'Emploi Dans l'Industrie et le Commerce).

When you've been unemployed for 2 years, the party ends, and you can only get ASS - Allocation Spécifique de Solidarité, of course.

When you have young children and you go on leave to mind them at home, you can get APE - Allocation Parentale d'Éducation.

When the children get older, for further relief, whether or not you're working, you can get ARS - Allocation de Rentrée Scolaire - to help pay their books.

"Das" meaning "privy" in Danish, Danes may want to notice that the DDASS (Direction Départementale des Affaires Sanitaires et Sociales) - is the Department of sanitary and social affaires. Toilets are actually their business.

Les Thieves Little

"In England, everything is permitted, except what’s prohibited.
In Germany, everything is prohibited, except what’s permitted.
In France, everything is permitted, even what’s prohibited.
In the USSR, everything is prohibited, even what’s permitted."

Winston Churchill

France is filled with little, everyday thieves. I'm not talking about real criminals doing robberies, burgleries, car crime, violence and all that. Of course, like in most other civilised countries, that is a regular part of life not even worth writing about, because it's not a particular feature of France. What I'm talking about are ordinary people like you and me. People who are normally considered good and honest citizens. Nevertheless, it appears from experience that particularly in France, there's a little devil in such people.

Nicking a book from someone's desk isn't really considered theft in France. It's rather seen as the individual's unwritten right to take advantage of any given situation. Pinching a couple of your paid supermarket items while you're temporarily occupied could always be explained as a mistake, so that isn't really theft either. Handing less coins back than what's correct or overcharging a bit in a shop easily happens by distraction. Such mistakes are of course not theft. Removal staff forgetting to deliver all items is not theft. Customers must understand that removers have a centuries old tradition of keeping a few souvenirs (if you are so selfish that you want to break this tradition, use a removal company that's not French). Drivers delivering mail order office supplies have a particular need for those supplies that can be used for general purposes. A roll of bubble wrap is impossible to trace anyway. The client can always get another one after having waited a month when the company has given up tracing it. And if the company can get away with charging you twice for the disappeared item, they'll do it - even what you would consider well-reputed mainstream suppliers.

If a Frenchman offers you an item for free, run away screaming. It's likely to be a poisoned present, as they say in French. Someone from the same club as my wife offered her a caravan, telling her that it just needed a bit of maintenance. Unfortunately, she didn't listen to my advice of going to see it before accepting it. I asked her to find out why they were giving it away. So the day arrived when they brought it along, removed the wheels and left. They'd borrowed the wheels from someone else, they said, so they had to return them. Unfortunately, my wife did not pay attention before they'd left. It was a wreck that should have been taken to the scrap yard. Perhaps this generous Frenchman mistook our courtyard for a scrap yard. No, as we later found out, a new law had just come into force, making it illegal just to dump wrecks at a scrap yard and making it mandatory to recycle them. There is a cost involved in that. So what do you do if you have a wreck and you don't want to pay for its being recycled? You find some naive idiot and offer it as a present! As my wife found out, local scrap yards didn't want to touch it, despite signs saying that they collect old cars, wrecks etc. When she calls the nice people who generously offered her this caravan, there is a message from the phone company that the off-directory number has been changed. By dumping the cost of recycling their wreck on someone else, these people are indirectly thieves.

A Frenchman has confirmed what I suspected, that since everybody feels cheated by the system, they do what they can to cheat back. Having lived in France for several years, I know that they are right about being cheated by the system. They have an incompetent and bloated administration that is not treating people fairly or even correctly. To survive in France, you someone have to cheat back. But the French don't limit themselves to cheating back the system; they cheat anyone they can - even their own family. A recent, sad story confirmed this. While my father in law's partner lay dying, her 3 children immediately flew over from another island - it was in the Caribbean. What's more natural, would you say, than approaching a dying parent? The trouble is that they seemed more interested in getting to empty the house for "their" inheritance - whether these items really belonged to my father in law or not - than looking after their mother. Like vultures, they were simply lining up to be ready to run off with as much goods as possible. There is apparently no limit to French selfishness in certain families.

To conclude, the merry pastime of optimising your personal situation by taking advantage of given opportunities is a central part of the well-known French individualism. Because everybody is practising this pastime, nobody is really losing - except for foreigners who have not yet learnt to practise. But that's their own problem.

Les Pigs and Les Supermarkets

In some suburb supermarkets around Paris, you'll see some customers eating pastries, crisps, and other goods they've taken on the shelves. When they don't want any more, they drop the rest on a shelf somewhere. Even though this particular form of shoplifting is obviously illegal, there are rarely enough personnel to do anything about it. Or maybe they just don't care. As for the four-legged wonders of the canine race mentioned earlier, the owners find it appropriate to bring them everywhere, that is in shops, bakeries, do-it-yourself stores, you name it. They are frequently allowed to walk around without restrictions from the owner. If you have children, watch out that they don't accidentally touch a dog dropping in a bakery or slip in the pool left from a dog that didn't withstand the temptation of a discreet wee on a curtain or whatever is on the shelf in a DIY store. But the dogs are obviously useful in the supermarkets, where they can keep the floor clean by eating what the eating customers drop.

Anywhere in France, you'll see customers regretting items they've taken on the shelves and placing it anywhere. In most cases, staff will tidy up and put the things back, but frozen or cold food can obviously not be put back for sale. Whether the personnel benefit from this waste is unknown, but someone has to pay for it.

In supermarkets, you'll sometimes have great difficulty hearing what your spouse or mistress - or whomever you're shopping with - is trying to tell you. This is because some idiot is shouting in a microphone, babbling away about promotions or whatever, adding to your stress level.

Cows Mad Political and Hypocrisy French

Long after the European Commission ended the ban on British beef, France kept up an illegal ban in a badly disguised protectionist measure.

At about the same time, it was published that some French and other European cattle and other farm animals had been fed on sewage.

In 2000, a report from the European Commission revealed that French authorities were neglecting their responsibility to effectively monitor and control the spread of the mad cow disease, the cattle feed, and the slaughter of sick or suspected animals.

In June 2000, a French farmer said that government inspectors had warned him to keep quiet about a mad cow found at his farm. They appeared not to be interested in finding the cause of the disease, but rather to cover up the government's irresponsibility.

In May 2001, the French Senate published a report that damned the government for having covered up the risks and put economy before health.

That is French hypocrisy, protectionism and selfishness in a nutshell !

France's intention of creating an integrated Europe is getting a Europe with France in the centre and all the other members as vassal states around it. Supreme masters of diplomacy as they are, the French have for decades had the upper hand in running the secretive French-Italian style of corrupt bureaucracy in the EU. France never intended to give much in return; maybe a few sweeteners, but never any power or control. As it was revealed in early 2000, the late François Mitterand bribed his way into political power in Germany through the corrupt Helmuth Kohl.

Special treatment unavailable to other Member States has been granted to France when they insisted. France has for years been sabotaging reform of the expensive European CAP (Common Agriculture Policy) that pours EU money into the hands of French farmers. France is sabotaging that the European Parliament can be gathered in one city instead of moving between Bruxelles, Luxembourg and Strasbourg every three weeks, because France insists on keeping the Parliament in France. France is at the time of writing (2001) sabotaging the approval of important Single Market legislation.

Piston - or Having Friends in the Right Places

In most countries, your individual situation can sometimes be improved if you know someone in the right place who can do you a favour; it's not a matter of what you know but who you know. The trouble in France - and probably many other Latin countries - is that the whole country is working according to the piston principle. Literally, a piston is just that - a piston. In daily speech, it refers to knowing someone who can push you forward in the system. If you want to get anywhere in France, you need to get to know one or more influential people who can remove the obstacles in the system for you. If you know the right people, you never need to worry in France; you'll be taken care of. If you don't, there may be nothing to help you. This becomes obvious during winter, when newsreports of homeless people having frozen to death in their car or unheated shelter under a bridge appear daily in the coldest periods. France has a serious housing and poverty problem, but not many bother about it, because the poor ones are those excluded from the piston system. France has of course signed the UN Charter of Human Rights, they made their own human rights more than 200 years ago, and they have signed all the same treaties as other Western European countries. These treaties provide for quite extended protection against poverty, guarantees for housing and economic rights and much more, but France happily ignores these boring obligations. Chirac is more interested in maintaining relations with his African chaps and sending them French money than feeding and housing his own people. Those in the piston system are cared for, and those outside don't matter, so why should there be a problem with that?

Promotion de canapé (sofa promotion) is a particularly effective way for young, attractive women to enter the piston system. In general, the piston system assures that the most incompetent persons end up being promoted above their abilities. Having the clueless people at the top ensures that those who are able are occupying the lower posts of the hierarchy, where they will continue doing good work for a bad payment. As long as they get their holidays, etc., they don't mind too much. 

La Police

The Police (or la gendarmerie or le commissariat or whatever they call them) is there to ensure that the citizens complete all the paperwork they have to do. For example, moving to a different county (département) without immediately updating the registration of your car and your insurance documents is a serious offence, punishable with a fine of 90 €. The change of registration includes changing the number plate on the car, which must be done no later than 48 hours after you get the new vehicle document. To be fair, the obligation to re-register when moving within France will soon be abolished.

Citizens and visitors must at all times carry personal identification, and the police can demand anyone to produce this identification without any reason. Car drivers must carry a file with the registration document, the insurance document, and the driving licence whenever using the car. The front screen must carry an insurance certificate, a technical control certificate, and a low pollution disc (la pastille verte) if the car fulfils the strict pollution standards. If the owner is a resident of Paris, and he wants to use the special rate for residential parking in the streets, the car must also carry the card certifying that it is entitled to the residential rate. For small cars, it can be a problem finding a free space to look out through the front screen, once all the stickers have been placed.

Some people, including Frenchmen, think the police are there to help them fight crime or take reports on theft or loss. Strictly, the police should handle such details, but they will frequently tell you to go to another police station, until you give up.

If the police occasionally have to arrest a suspected criminal, they will be sure to beat him up first and ask questions afterwards. They do that to get relief for the frustration of having to interrupt their office duties. For people outside the police, this apparently brutal behaviour may appear to be a problem. In fact, Amnesty International is criticising the French police for brutality. But one may wonder if that will change anything in a country whose government blew up Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship in a New Zealand harbour.

Les Affairs

Mark Twain once wrote in his diary: "A Frenchman's home is where another man's wife is. There is nothing lower than the human race except the French". As we've seen above, a Frenchman always considers himself first, so unfaithfulness is obviously quite common. The determining factor is what you can get away with, not what's right or wrong. Presidents as always lead the way. The late François Mitterand was discovered to have a secret daughter with his mistress, and his chauffeur revealed in a book that Mitterand frequently had one or more women lined up for the night. Since having a mistress is considered normal in France, not much fuss was made about it. He'd lied about his cancer before the presidential elections anyway. In 2001, president Jacques Chirac's wife published a book according to which her husband's unfaithfulness nearly ruined their marriage. He went wild with girls, she says.

Le Service Customer

NEW: French shoppers agree that French customer service is among the worst in Europe. Read the article French agree: their shop staff are surly in the Daily Telegraph.

Customer service is a relatively new and unknown concept in France.

Don't be surprised if in a shop the person who's supposed to help you take your order is occupied with more important business, such as chatting away on the phone or with a customer he knows about holidays, children, the weather, the family and their illnesses, plain gossip, and similar themes suitable to make the time go faster.

At supermarket entrances, shopping baskets are sometimes not available. Customers are directed to go search for one at the check-outs, as staff couldn't be bothered moving them back to the entrance. When you make it to the check-out desk to pay and you need to place your stuff on the carrier belt, you discover that the check-out lady has kept all the little sticks that you place between different customers' goods for herself instead of sliding them down to the customers.

After having read this, you may wrongly think that you never get any help in a shop. Not so. Once, I was buying new clothes at a place called Celio, a young lady was keen to help me find what I wanted - and more. She even showed me where the underwear was. Unfortunately, I didn't like their models of underwear, and they didn't have the right size, so I didn't take any. I took my place in the queue to pay for the other clothes I'd found. When it was my turn, she asked me if I'd seen the underwear. I said yes, but I didn't find my size. She then promptly took a pair of underpants and started folding them out, insisting that they ought to be big enough. By then, there were several other people behind me in the queue, eagerly following the conversation about my underwear. I fancied that they'd had enough fun already, so I once again thanked no, politely but firmly.

My landlord's plumber was supposed to finish some work he'd started and had said he'd come on Wednesday, August 24. He didn't come. He hadn't called to cancel the appointment. He didn't call later to excuse and to make a new appointment. I called his mobile later the same day and left a message. He didn't call back. I called and left a message on his mobile every weekday for the next week and a half. He didn't call back once. He finally answered during the afternoon on Saturday, September 3,  to tell me that he had the right to take some holiday, complain that I disturbed him on a Saturday, ask me to call again Monday, and then he hung up. I called him three times on Monday, each time leaving a message, and he didn't call back. It must be nice to have so many clients that you don't need to do anything to keep them.

During the frequent strikes in public transport, be it the SNCF, Air France, Paris Airports or whomever may have as their secondary activity to transport persons in between strikes, the striking company often publishes a phone number where the public can get information about the strike. However, the trees don't grow into the sky. These numbers are nearly always overcharged payphone numbers beginning with 0825. When they can't get money for transporting people, at least they can rip them off when they try to find out where their train, bus or plane is.

Les Pages Jaunes - the French version of the Yellow Pages obviously make their living by selling adverts. But as with the rest of French businesses, the only part they understand is the hard sale. Once you're on board, they couldn't care less. The adverts I unfortunately bought included a space for a company logo. As the logo was not ready when the advert was created, I had to submit it later. I phoned them to ask how to do, and they wanted me to print my (computer generated) logo so they could scan it. Not having a colour printer, I told them that it was not possible, and since they would not take it by e-mail, I had to write a diskette and send to them by post. In the 21st century, in a company that must receive thousands lf company logos all year long, why use computers if you can use paper and post? That's French logic. It took two months and countless reminders before the logo was online. Next problem: The ordinary, French person has never heard of the Anglo-Saxon concept "relocation". Relocation is all about service, and since service is unknown in France, the French wouldn't bother. You can guess that it's almost exclusively foreigners who provide relocation services in France. Therefore, the French yellow pages have no classification for relocation. Having placed my relocation ad under the closest classification I could find, it gave no results, and when the Pages Jaunes called me to sell next year's ads, I mentioned this problem. They accepted to consider my suggestion to create a classification but later refused it. Nevertheless, they kept telephoning to push me to renew my ads. As I firmly told them that I was not going to renew any ads so long as they would not create a classification for my activity, they just hung up! No French politeness; no bonne journée, au revoir Monsieur; no attempt to hide that she was sulking because I would not buy their ads on conditions to suit them only; never mind my own business.

La Post

You know by now that service isn't exactly top priority in France. So you can't be surprised to know that La Poste doesn't really care if you can post your letters or not. Letterboxes in Paris have two slots. One for letters to be delivered in the local region, and one for the rest of the world. The trouble is, because of the minuscule size of the letterboxes, at least one of the two compartments is always full. That problem can be overcome by putting the letters in the compartment that is not yet full. They probably mix it all up when they collect the letters anyway. A more annoying problem is that the slots are made for letters no wider than 15 cm. Thus, in order to post an A4 size letter measuring 21 cm on the short side, you have to either vandalise it to squeeze it into the letterbox or go to the post office.

Because of trouble with communist unions that want to monopolise newspaper distribution, newspapers are mainly sent through the post. That means that the newspaper arrives at best at noon and often 1, 2 or even 3 days later - at which time it contains history; not news.

During the summer holidays in August, the distribution of post is chaotic and on some days, the post is not delivered at all. In general, throughout the year, there are not people enough on duty to step in case of illness. That means that if more than two people are sick in a district of 40 post offices, then some parts of the town are not getting their mail.

The post may also be good old-fashioned slow. I've seen first class letters take a week to be delivered from the north to the south (average speed: 6 km/h - or walking speed), and a letter posted by a financial advisor within a post office only 15 km from where I live take 4 days to arrive (average speed: 150 metres/h), while second class letters are sometimes delivered more quickly than first class letters. French post offers a more expensive way to get letters and packets delivered late: Chronoposte. They guarantee next-day delivery, but in practice, the only thing that is guaranteed is that it's 30 times more expensive than an ordinary letter, while it can arrive just as late. A local shop that produces high-quality chocolate and used Chronoposte to deliver orders for Christmas 2005 received a large number of customer complaints about non-delivery at the time promised. Chronoposte explained the shop that packets were accumulating in a warehouse because there was not enough staff to deliver them.

La Circus Card Credit

As with anything else, the French have made it difficult to use international credit cards in France. The French national bank cards, called cartes bleues (blue cards) make use of a computer chip in the card to verify the PIN number when you use the card. The trouble is that foreign cards, such as MasterCard and Visa, do not have chips built in - or if they have that they are not compatible with the French chips (except that the new generation of UK chips work). The majority of the personnel in French shops don't know that, so if you try to pay with a foreign card, they will put it in the chip reader instead of swiping it through the magnetic strip reader. Then they will tell you that the card doesn't work. Most of them don't even know that their terminal has a magnetic strip reader. It's up to you to explain how it works. The large majority of the shops accept the card if you can explain to them what the problem is. Sometimes the personnel have to ask the manager how to swipe the card.

The French centralised computer network that clears the transactions often fail communicating with foreign clearing systems, meaning that foreign cards are rejected. In such cases, they will turn you away without your goods, whatever the circumstances. I've seen that in a supermarket in a tourist town on a New Year's evening. Tourist or not, whether you have a wad of dollars or pounds doesn't matter; they couldn't care less. The only reason they smile at tourists is their money. When the money doesn't work, the smile turns sour.

The following is a fine example of French customer service. I tried to pay for computer parts with my English MasterCard in a shop in Paris. The shop had a MasterCard symbol on the door, meaning that they have to accept MasterCard. However, the woman at the till said she could not read magnetic stripes. I pointed to the magnetic reader on her terminal, and she tried to swipe the card a couple of times, just to show me that it didn't work. I pointed out the MasterCard symbol on her door, and that such a symbol obliged her to accept MasterCard. She told me that she accepted only French MasterCards. I informed her that MasterCard is an international system. Yes, she said, in a more and more annoyed and unfriendly tone, she knows, but she only takes French MasterCards. Having discussed five minutes, I gave up, left the goods in the shop, bought them somewhere else, and complained about the shop through my bank that they display a MasterCard symbol but will not accept one.

On another occasion, I wanted to pay a large amount to a garage for car service. I tried to use my French carte bleue. The system kept refusing the card. I had enough credit on my account, I knew. The garage phoned their bank to get help. They spent about one hour discussing the matter with their bank, while I was waiting. On one occasion, the bank hung them up. On another occasion, the bank didn't phone them back as promised. The shop activated the speaker on the phone, and I could hear that the man at the call centre was arrogant and showed no interest in solving the problem. He was more interested in criticising the shop for a minor procedural fault. I myself was on the phone to my bank to ensure that there were no problems with the account. The problem was that La Poste imposes a fixed, running limit of 2300 € for card spending, and that I was about to exceed that limit. They said on the phone that they would approve the transaction. But the garage's bank said they could not approve the transaction until the day after. After one hour without a solution from the French banks, and with the personnel having stayed on 45 minutes after normal closing time, I decided to use an English MasterCard to avoid that the garage keep the car to have security for the payment. Fortunately, the card worked on this occasion.

After that incident, I asked La Poste to increase my running limit. They did that, but the month after, I had the same problem again, because I had exceeded the 2300 € limit. They then informed me that they'd only increased the limit for one month. I said I had asked for a permanent increase. The woman on the phone insisted that she could not do that. The 2300 € limit was fixed. I had to explain to her that the money on the account was actually mine, not La Poste's, and that I alone decided what to do with them. After a further five minutes discussion, the increased limit was finally granted.

On yet another occasion, the call centre at a French bank showed their disgust for their customers. I wanted to use my English MasterCard to pay a large amount for goods in a shop. The system refused, and a call to the call centre did not help. They insisted that I must have exceeded my credit limit. I knew that I had not, and my English bank confirmed that there should be no problem with the transaction. After 30 minutes, I went home for lunch without the goods and came back towards the end of the afternoon. The circus repeated itself. The shopkeeper kept phoning the call centre to no avail. I spent one hour waiting in the shop. Then I gave up and left the shop without the goods. I phoned MasterCard in France. They could do nothing to help or explain. But they gave me a freephone number for MasterCard in the USA. The chap over there couldn't do anything either, except assuring me that many American tourists had problems using their MasterCards in France. But he gave me the advice that solved the problem: Make several small transactions. I returned to the shop the day after, and the shopkeeper now informed that the call centre had said it would take two more days to get a clearance. MasterCard is meant to be a quick and easy way to pay - except in France. But she accepted to try the many small transactions. It worked, and I could finally take home the goods. I'm still awaiting my English bank's reply to my written complaint. I'm sure it must be held up in France.

Once I wanted to withdraw money from a cash dispenser, its computer software fell over when I had introduced my card. I saw the OS/2 boot messages while it was restarting itself. The machine kept my card, and fortunately the bank was open and could hand me back my card. The lady confirmed that their dispenser sometimes falls over when cards from La Poste are introduced, thus implying that nothing was being done about it.

Les Trains

France has one of Europe's most developed and sophisticated train networks. This is because of the government's policy of investing in efficient public transport. High-speed trains (TGV - Train à Grande Vitesse) are cruising the country with speeds of up to 300 km/h. But the price for this prestige project is that the rolling stock transporting daily commuters in and out of Paris and other cities is worn down. Trains up to 40 years old are occasionally breaking down on the tracks. Once I needed to get home from Paris to a village north of Paris, a train had broken down on the tracks, blocking them, and as someone from the SNCF explained to me, there was no longer any personnel that could manage sharing the one available track between trains in each direction, so the train was redirected via an awkward route and very little information given to passengers.

Another morning, I found myself stuck at the local train station after the announcement of a broken down train. That morning, the SNCF that I was contracting for had booked me a seat on a TGV to visit their reservation centre in Lille. Because of the delay of the suburb train, I found myself on the TGV leaving one hour later.

At another occasion, during winter, a TGV was delayed one and a half hour on arrival to Paris. During that time, the train was standing still just a few minutes from the Gare de Lyon in Paris. But due to a bit of snowfall that afternoon, the tracks were blocked. Obviously, after having paid for the expensive trains, there was no money left for effective equipment to clear the snow, except for a single person with a match.

To conclude about the TGVs: They do indeed go very fast when everything works. But the infrastructure surrounding them is just not up to speed, so the gain is in certain cases limited. Of course, TGV services are no better than standard French "service", so count on blocked toilets, toilets without paper, coffee machines out of order that keep your money, snacks from the in-train cafe that are partially frozen when served after insufficient heating, and unreadable screens at certain railway stations (Charles de Gaulle TGV - screens unreadable in sunlight). At some stations in cities, it is very difficult to park your car for the day, and in Lille, there is no set-down / pick-up zone for cars for those who either collect someone at the stations or take someone there. Apparently, the socialist politicians there don't like cars and so decided to make life as difficult as possible for them. The parking for the new Avignon TGV station is already exhausted, and it's a problem for travellers arriving by car that they risk missing their train while searching for a parking space. The parking for the new Aix en Provence TGV station was much too small. When you return late in the evening to the Avignon TGV station and pay for your parking, you risk that there are no more receipts in the machine so you have to contact the parking company if you need a receipt. When you pay for your parking at the station and then walk to the farthest parking, where you parked to save money, by the time you have loaded your car and parked the trolley, your 15-minute grace period for getting out has expired, and the gate asks for more money to let you out. Indeed, there is a machine out there where you can pay. ONE machine. Knowing how things work in France, I would rather not walk all the way out there to discover that the ONE machine is out of order, only to walk all the way back to the station building and then back to the parking again. One learns. At least the guy on the intercom opened the gate without my having to pay a ransom.

At the underground stations, it's a problem that the French think they can get into the train quicker if they block the doors for the passengers leaving the train. Be prepared to push your way out of the train and step somebody on their feet, by accident of course, if they are standing in your way.

L'Airport Charles de Gaulle (CDG) in Roissy

As for the trains, the infrastructure surrounding France's largest airport is not quite up to speed. Signposting is incomplete for travellers and car drivers. A major destination when leaving the airport by car is simply not signposted at all. A motorway is passing by the airport, going to Paris in one direction and Lille in the other direction. So signs have been posted for Lille and Paris. Never mind other destinations, not served by the motorway. If people really want to go such obscure places, they've asked for it. They're in for a tricky search to get out of the maze the airport is. A neighbour of mine worked for Hertz at the airport. He said that because the airport is government owned, the management just don't care about service.

That may explain why nothing appeared to be done about a large hole in the floor just outside the exit from customs. While waiting for a family member to arrive in Terminal 1, the circular bunker, I watched with amusement how one traveller after another got the front wheel of their baggage trolleys stuck in the hole. The abrupt stop of the trolley frequently made baggage fall on the floor. No personnel were there to do anything about the hole or help the travellers.

Another day, when taking someone to the same Terminal, we ordered a cup of coffee in a cafe in the terminal. It was not overcrowded, and it was not very large, but the waiter took half an hour to serve two cups of coffee, after having taken the order, and we almost left before.

When leaving from Terminal 1 on a morning flight, I needed to visit a toilet. The only toilet nearby was about to be closed for cleaning, but I insisted it could not wait. Of course, there was no soap in the soap dispensers, and the cleaning lady had no soap to put in them. Why would travellers need soap in a toilet? They should know that the French don't need soap and adapt to that or stay away from France.

CDG is a large airport with long distances between the terminals. Therefore, someone got the excellent idea to connect them with an unmanned light rail system. Because of someone who was good friends with an executive of a company producing cable-driven light rail systems, that company got the order by chance. The trouble was that the cable-driven light rail system was not designed for the distances at CDG or for the curves that were necessary. This type of system had never been implemented on such a scale before. The technical limits were known in advance, but why should that ruin a good company of friends? In 1999, the system was ready for the first tests. They tested. They tested. They kept testing. A hotel complained about the noise from the cables that would mean they would have to make conference rooms soundproof. The system was not reliable. In the end, it had to be scrapped. The carriages are sitting somewhere collecting dust, while the tracks are unused. It was eventually decided to replace it with a suitable "Val" system that had shown that it could work elsewhere. At the time of writing, June 2006, the new system is still not ready but is undergoing tests. The inconvenience to passengers who've had to take buses around the airport 10 years more doesn't matter. The public may have wasted a few million euros, but they've ended up in good hands at a company owned by good friends, so it doesn't matter. A lot of people would have been kept in work installing and testing a useless system. So, hocus-pocus, nobody has lost anything (taxpayers and travellers don't count), and the circus can continue.

When changing flights from Terminal 2D to 2E in 2004 in the morning, I felt like a coffee and a croissant. Very sensibly, there were a couple of cafes in the terminal. However, the space and the number of tables and chairs available would make you think it was designed for no more than 2-3 families at a time, and smokers assured that no-smokers had nowhere to sit anyway. A small cafe may be all right at a street corner in Paris, but one might expect that capacity would need to be increased at a major airport. So I ended up eating a banana I'd brought along on a bench instead.

After the impossible cafe visit, I needed a toilet in the secure area before boarding. Many others had got the same idea, and so too many people were lined up in too little space in a toilet with too few cubicles.

When taking an Air France flight (I'm not French-nationalistic, but with government "help", they're able to make promotions that match low-cost operators) in Terminal 2D in June 2006, I noted the customer service. I had printed out my boarding card the night before, so all I needed was to dump my suitcase. Since I arrived by train, I had scheduled to arrive at the airport in good time. I easily found the e-check-in zone, but no signs informed passengers who had already checked  in where to dump their suitcases. Fortunately, an Air France guy was available to inform me that I could not dump my suitcase until 90 minutes before the flight. At least I was sure Air France would not damage it during the last hour during which I had to carry the suitcase around in cafés, newsagents and toilets, but I would after all have preferred getting rid of it. When the time came for check-in, the screens sent me halfway down through the terminal. Ok, I cannot expect that they put the check-in zone exactly where I stand. The entrance to the gate was exactly where I started, so I got to see the half terminal again. They are good at organising sight-seeing tours in the terminal. Tourists appreciate sight-seeing, so that is good logic. After security, I came into a too small, over-crowded secure area, where people lining up in front of the gates assured that it was virtually impossible to move anywhere. The few, battered, old tube screens available were completely unreadable in the sunlight. On the gate number I was given, another flight was displayed. Someone occasionally babbled on the PA system in French and English, but it was totally inaudible in the noise. At an empty gate, I was informed that my flight had been moved to another gate.

When I returned, we came in to the new Terminal 2F (that collapsed in 2004 after some of the architects had spent too much time for coffee breaks). As I was about to approach the conveyor belt to get my suitcase, police pushed passengers back without explanation. Someone was babbling something completely inaudible on the PA system. Why would they have tested the PA system in a new airport terminal? Why would passengers need to know what they were waiting for?

For some reason I don't understand, ADP (Aéroports de Paris), the public company running the airport, has started spending money on TV commercials, but it's very French: Instead of spending money on improving customer satisfaction, money is spent on commercials. Maybe someone at airport management knows a good chap at a TV commercial company.

Les Sewers

The sewers of Paris are a tourist attraction. If the dog poos are not enough for you, then you can immerse yourself in the smelly universe of a unique underground canal system. As opposed to almost anything else that's French, the sewers are immaculately organised. The sewers are laid out to mirror the streets, and street names and numbers are indicated on the sewer walls. With a bit of luck, you may find the exit where the sewage is collected for feeding cows, when visiting the underworld (see the section about mad cows above). You might even be given the opportunity to add your own contribution to the animal nutrition.

L'Abuse of Tourists

As a foreign tourist in France, expect to be treated like an idiot who cannot taste the difference between good and bad food and who does not know what you're ordering. Here's what to expect:
Overcharging in tourist areas.
Meals as you would expect them in the UK: Example from a village near Pont du Gard: Chicken cooked in herbs from Provence on the menu. It had no herbs, it had no taste, and it was overcooked.
Restaurants serving ready-made meals bought in Metro and other professional stores so that they just have to open the pack and heat it up. They sometimes don't heat it up enough, so that it's still cold when you get it. Impossible to tell which restaurants are doing it, but I've seen them go shopping in Metro. Cold, re-heated food experienced in a so-called Mexican restaurant in Paris. The waiter there forgot our starter and came with the main course first. We asked for the starter; he took the main course back and served our starters; then gave us our main courses again - cold.
Restaurants serving food that has passed the use-by date and is no longer fit for consumption. Example from Provence from a friend who worked in the kitchen: The ham ordered by a Swiss couple was over the date and had gone blue. The owner told the server just to turn it over to hide it, since the Swiss tourists in her opinion were unlikely to return anyway.
Arrogant service.
Serving something else than what you ordered and then pretending that it's correct when asked. Real episode from Orange: You order café au lait because you don't like black coffee; you get expresso; you ask (in French) if that's café au lait; they say yes.
Misrepresenting meals on the menu. Example from the same restaurant in Orange: On the menu: Tex-Mex pizza. What you get: Pizza with egg. Example from the fraud inspection: On the menu: Expensive Charolais beef, ordered by the food inspectors. The order was accepted. When they asked to check the kitchen, there was no Charolais beef in sight or even invoices showing that they should have bought it.

If your change is less than one euro, some waiters don't return it unless you ask for it.

Some shops find it appropriate to cheat a few extra euros out of the innocent tourist - or anybody not giving the impression of being a local. Instead of returning 3 x 1 €, you could get 2 x 1 € + 10 cents, for example, as a local dry cleaner once did. Or you could get a coin in a foreign currency. Or the local shopkeeper "accidentally" counts 1 € too much. They always have some pathetic excuse, like "it was in the wrong compartment". The only way to avoid this is to be vigilant. Strangely enough, as one becomes more and more fluent in French, these incidents become more and more rare.

Have you ever - God forbid it - by accident bought a French book? If so, did you notice that the title printed on the back was printed in such a way that if the book is standing on a book shelf, you have to tilt your head to the left to read it? Did you notice that virtually any other book makes you tilt your head to the right? Of course, l'Académie française would say that it's your own fault, as you should only read French books, and I'm sure some of them would have been lobbying the government to forbid the import of non-French books, stopping and searching people at the borders to check if they were trying to smuggle in British newspapers or other material that could threaten to spiritually corrupt the French. I don't know the reason for the book title phenomenon, but could it be that since the rest of the world does it one way, the French just have to do the opposite? Just like the yellow headlights they used to have on their cars, and the SECAM television system that virtually no one else uses and that is incompatible with other systems. I myself have one good reason for calling the French book title way the wrong way: If you put the book flat down on a shelf, perhaps in a pile of books, then the title printed on the back of the French books is upside down. Somehow, this is the French in a nutshell!

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