Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
    Unavailable
    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
    Unavailable
    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
    Ebook458 pages7 hours

    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French

    By Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The French...

    -Smoke, drink and eat more fat than anyone in the world, yet live longer and have fewer heart problems than Americans

    -Work 35-hour weeks, and take seven weeks of paid holidays per year, but are still the world's fourth-biggest economic power

    So what makes the French so different?

    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong is a journey into the French heart, mind and soul. Decrypting French ideas about land, privacy and language, Nadeau and Barlow weave together the threads of French society--from centralization and the Napoleonic Code to elite education and even street protests--giving us, for the first time, a complete picture of the French.

    "[A] readable and insightful piece of work." --Montreal Mirror

    "In an era of irrational reactions to all things French, here is an eminently rational answer to the question, 'Why are the French like that?'" --Library Journal

    "A must-read." --Edmonton Journal


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateMay 1, 2003
    ISBN9781402230585
    Unavailable
    Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
    Author

    Jean-Benoit Nadeau

    Canadian journalist-author JEAN-BENOÎT NADEAU is an award-winning contributor to L’actualité. Writings with his life partner, JULIE BARLOW, have appeared in the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, Saturday Night, The Christian Science Monitor and the International Herald Tribune, among others. In 2003, Nadeau and Barlow published their critical and popular success, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong. They live in Montreal.

    Read more from Jean Benoit Nadeau

    Related to Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Lost Mandate in Europe

      Mar 26, 2020

      A Lost Mandate in Europe
      2 min read

    • Article

      Now Is The Moment To Change The World

      May 8, 2020

      HOW WILL THE CORONAVIRUS change the world? Nobody knows yet. But we do know where we were before the pandemic hit: inequality had reached historic records worldwide, Australia had burned for months on end, autocrats were suffocating democracy in Hung

      4 min read

    • Article

      Now Is The Moment To Change The World

      May 8, 2020

      HOW WILL THE CORONAVIRUS change the world? Nobody knows yet. But we do know where we were before the pandemic hit: inequality had reached historic records worldwide, Australia had burned for months on end, autocrats were suffocating democracy in Hung

      4 min read

    • Article

      What Are The Roots Of The French Riots?

      Jul 13, 2023

      The tragedy of a youth identified as Nahel M., a teenager of North African descent who was shot dead due to traffic violations after being stopped by traffic police in a Paris suburb on June 27, sparked a week of chaos in France. According to officia

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Oct 15, 2021

      There is a magic money tree after all, but only for the super-rich who can avoid paying their fair share of taxation by ensuring that their assets are registered offshore beyond democratic control (The Pandora papers, 8 October). This is also true wh

      3 min read

    • Article

      How Napoleon Won In The End

      May 25, 2023

      Reports of the death of the Fifth Republic have been greatly exaggerated. There are no pyramids of moutons morts blocking the Grande Corniche. The gilets jaunes whistle cheerfully as they jet-wash the paving stones of the Promenade des Anglais. And t

      3 min read

    • Article

      Macron Asks A Restive France: What Would You Like To Change?

      Feb 11, 2019

      Even in the best of times, many in France feel their government isn’t listening to them, and today that is especially true. Can a “national debate” counteract their malaise, or will it feed into skepticism?

      5 min read

    • Article

      Progress And Its Discontents

      Jun 26, 2019

      Progress And Its Discontents
      19 min read

    • Article

      Of Bananas And Sex

      Nov 25, 2017

      Of Bananas And Sex
      2 min read

    • Article

      Eros and Thanatos, Both Masked

      Sep 4, 2020

      Eros and Thanatos, Both Masked
      9 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Oct 29, 2021

      John Harris’s excellent article (“Soon the reality of leaving the EU will be too hard to ignore”, Opinion, 22 October) was extremely sobering. “What happens,” he asks, “when some watershed is reached, and the fact that people were conned becomes ines

      3 min read

    • Article

      The End of Economics?

      Jan 22, 2019

      The End of Economics?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Words

      Apr 3, 2023

      I lived in France 20 years ago for a year, and 30 years before that I lived there for four months. The French are definitely different from other Europeans. They do believe in their tradition of not accepting the rules if they disagree with them. It

      3 min read

    • Article

      Opinion

      Jul 1, 2022

      Opinion
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Power of Le Pen

      Mar 18, 2017

      The Power of Le Pen
      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Live With Inflation

      Apr 28, 2023

      How To Live With Inflation
      2 min read

    • Article

      In A Post-COVID-19 World, The Choice To Regress, Reform, Or Reset

      Jul 13, 2020

      When the pandemic fades, a key question will be its impact on efforts to confront issues like global warming, economic inequality, and race relations.

      6 min read

    Reviews for Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

    3.5/5

    112 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Wide-ranging look at all aspects of modern French life. Most interesting is how the state has come to dominate and be accepted as the dominator. Also, how much Napoleon did to lay the foundations, shaky through most of the 19th and half of the 20th centuries, ready for de Gaulle to complete the structure after WW2. These French generals knew a lot more than bang-bang shoot-shoot. The authors talk of the French lack of interest in overseas (evident in their relative low numbers as international tourists), but this does not accord with their desperate rearguard fights to hold onto Indochina and Algeria, nor with Louis XIV's and Napoleon's costly attempts to dominate Europe. Seems to me the French have been just as expansionist as the Brits, just didn't have the same eagerness for sea battles and banking. Tricky to grasp, but important, is how the Revolution eliminated many social structures with emphasis on égalité. Result: you are defined as a citizen of the French state with all that demands and provides. Ethnicity, religion and the rest are cleared away. This has created special difficulties for the Muslim population, which is both large and unassimilated, clinging on to a separate identity. The book is now more than a decade old but this accounts much for current difficulties. A chatty conversational style makes for easy reading in what is really quite a complex and fact-filled analysis. A few facts inevitably miss the mark: e.g. Novartis is a Swiss company, not french at all, Tarot is not a card game.
    • 3/5
      This was a fun introduction to French culture. The two authors, Canadian journalists who relocated to France for two years, set out to explain why the French are the way they are, and why Americans and the French often have so much trouble getting along. There are chapters dedicated to the influences of World War II and the war with Algeria, chapters dedicated to the education system, and sections dedicated to the French insistence on precision in language, their ideas of personal space, and their opinions on which topics are appropriate to discuss in public and which are not. Nadeau's writing style is clear and lively and punctuated with personal anecdotes.
    • 4/5
      A comprehensive book about France from a different perspective, that of 2 Canadians, one from Quebec and one from Ontario. Very interesting read from non-US authors whose research is thorough and accessibly presented. That said, this book will appeal more to the Francophile who wants to dig deeply into the roots of French society, politics and culture, and who is not looking for travel logs, house-restoration tales, or the woes of English-language speakers in France. Densely populated with statistics and inside information, the book may not be finished by those who are looking for a 'lighter' read. But a good addition to the library of books about France.
    • 3/5
      This looks from the cover and blurb like yet another of those handy guides to expat life written by some self-declared expert who has parachuted into Paris/the Dordogne for a few months, but it turns out to be something rather more ambitious: the bilingual Canadian couple Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow are both serious journalists who set themselves the task — with the help of a handy grant from an international foundation — of working out how the French state and its economy really work in practice, and they have tried to condense the results of that investigation into a format that would make sense to a North American reader. Their project clearly involved a lot of discussions on and off the record with influential people in France, as well as plenty of burrowing in libraries and databases, but the result is lively and informative. Admittedly, it's twenty years old now, so probably well past its use-by date. Also, I'm not a North American reader, and there were only a few parts of the book where I really felt I was learning something new about France — I found the chapter about the inner workings of the elite civil service college ENA very interesting, for example, but I didn't really need a rehash of De Gaulle, World War II and Algeria. Or half a chapter on Minitel, for that matter! And what Nadeau and Barlow say about the French role in the EEC and EU seems too superficial to be of any use to anyone. Obviously you can't cover the whole of French life in one small paperback: being mostly interested in economic and constitutional matters, they don't find any time for the role of art and design in France, and what they say about food is also oddly narrow — there's quite a bit about the importance of local food production and terroir, but next to nothing about the way the French buy and consume food.I was amused by the way they were both so shocked by the French insistence that every encounter, however superficial, must start with a greeting: it never occurred to me that that might be strange to a North American. Don't they say "bonjour" in Quebec?Better than it looks, but out of date.
    • 3/5
      by Ruth: The book really is as interesting as the title would lead one to believe, though honestly it plumbs such depths that I still don’t feel as if I have begun to grasp all of its implications. But it has provided us with a helpful framework to begin to understand how the French are different from us as Americans, and why we can’t begin to understand their thinking and perceptions by analyzing them through our “American glasses”.The French SpiritWritten by a Canadian duo, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, which spent two years living in and studying France, the book is divided into three main sections: spirit, structure and change. In the first section on the French spirit, the authors undertake the task of explaining some of the intricacies of French culture and how so much of France’s modern orientation and worldview is derived from her long history. How her passion for the land and her sense of nobility go all the way back to the days of feudalism (when, I might add, no one but some Indians were running around in North America).The authors relate how attached the French are to rhetoric and how much they value the process of developing thoughts more than the ultimate goal of getting to a solution. In a chapter titled “Private Space,” the authors describe the French notion of public versus private, including what sorts of things the French would consider acceptable for public conversation (e.g. politics) and what topics would be considered completely taboo (e.g. religion) to their way of thinking. The authors also dealt with World War II and the Algerian Conflict and explored the many ways in which those major events have defined more recent French culture and thought.The French Structure The second division of the book identified the basic governmental and sociological structures upon which modern France is built. This section was especially helpful to my understanding of how France operates. Though it may seem paradoxical when one considers the significance of the French Revolution, the authors recount that the French have kept an undeniable attachment to absolutism. “The French, it seems, can’t resist making kings” (p. 118). The authors also observe how, unlike North Americans who build entire platforms around the notion of keeping the government out of their business, “the French look to the State for answers to everything” (p. 127). This section contained descriptions of the French judicial system, educational system, and their view of their own language. (“Anglo-Americans consider language a tool, but the French regard it as an accomplishment, even a work of art. … It’s their national monument” (p.162).) As a future immigrant to France, I found the topic of assimilation to be especially interesting. The authors explain that because the French are so committed to the concept of the State (l’Etat), they are consciously committed to ignoring facts like one’s ethnic origin or religious affiliation. “Once you’re French, you’re nothing else. This attitude means the State doesn’t give—or really permit—anyone to have any other identity” (p. 139). Of course, where the rub comes in is in the fact that if one’s devotion to one’s ethnic origin or religious affiliation is perceived to be stronger than one’s commitment to the State, then you may be perceived to be at odds with the State, which necessarily puts you at odds with the common good of the entire French people.Future ChangeThe final section summarizes the French worldview as presented in previous chapters. Here are some highlights (taken from pp. 283-85): -Because of their centuries-old attachment to the land, restriction is their second nature, not expansion.-The French glorify what’s elevated and grand, not what’s common and accessible.-They value form as much as content.-The French don’t just glorify their élite; French society needs a clearly identified élite.-They affirm the State’s role in virtually everything—culture, language, welfare, and the economy.-The French have learned to live with the idea that they are neither the biggest, nor the strongest, power on earth. But they still believe they are the best.The authors conclude by showing that the French are becoming more flexible than they used to be, recognizing the necessity of change in order to accommodate relationships with the European community and the world at large.“One thing is certain: France is not what it used to be. France has never been what it used to be, and it never will. So we might as well enjoy it while it lasts” (p. 343).
    • 3/5
      Written by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, this book tries to explain why so many people love France but not the French. An interesting book, although a bit dry at times, it travels through the reasons the French are just worlds away from any other country.It starts out with French history and how the French people are ingrained in their history even when they are moving forward and becoming more modern. The French hold their elite up and expect them to be better (grandeur); going as far as to create elite schools just to make some people better than others. The book also covers the wars France was involved in, including WWII where they persecuted their Jews before Germany could. Explanations of the various forms of government explain why the French are more than ok with one large governing body and ok with being taxed on everything. Overall, the system works even if it looks unwieldy to everyone else. Most people are covered for medical and unemployment and retirement in France.This book doesn't explain everything about France but it's pretty close. A good introduction into why the French are the way they are and why they are not necessarily what we think they are.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed reading this book. It is written by a Canadian husband and wife team, the first is French and the second is English. They spent two years in France to explore and understand the country. The country is enigmatic for North Americans, with a large bureaucracy and a top-down style but actually results in a very good economy. The most original idea is that the French are the aborigines of France, the sense that the people had a continuous history back to prehistoric times. The authros take you the relationship with the land, le terroir, the existence of privacy in ones life , the desire for grandeur, and their art of rhetoric. Also covered are the problems with wars, algeria, and political stability over the centuries; the legacy of the French Revolution, the training of an elite, the respect for an overarching state, etc. This book should be read for those in the Western hemisphere who cannot penetrate continental ways, particularly in its Gallic form.
    • 4/5
      Nadeau and Barlow embark in a thorough journey to determine what make the French tick from a North American perspective. This book has become somewhat of a bible for North Americans who wish to experience France and with reason. The book is carefully crafted into various themes, easy to read and well-researched. The authors are careful to stay objective but occasionally interject making their effort personable. This last edition dates from 2002, but I feel it is still largely applicable. I hope they continue to update their work: I would be interested to find out their take on Sarkozy and the new shift in French politics.