Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Help save the French language

Now you can do your bit to save the French language. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister [above] has just opened a site on la toile (better known as le web) which seeks French equivalents for the American-English jargon that has invaded the language. Featured words today are coach, gender and podcasting.

Franceterme.culture.fr is a new weapon in an ancient battle. Les Anglo-Saxons, whose own vocabulary has been part Gallic since the 12th century, are always amused by the attempts of the French state and its language police to defend the purity of the tongue.  Why, wonder smug foreigners, don't the French just laissez faire like the Anglophone nations and allow people to use foreign terms if they think they sounds more chic.

After living for some time on the front line in this war, let me defend France's rear-guard campaign. Yes, I share "Anglo-saxon" antipathy to the idea of policing language. It's silly, smacks of oppressive regimes and it costs a fortune -- hundreds of millions of euros a year are spent on the language bureaucracy and promoting the French language abroad.

Yet... why shouldn't a country seek ways to resist pressure from more powerful cultures -- in this case the USA? Sometimes it works.  In honour of tomorrow's International Day of the French-speaking World, I shall explain:

France flocks back to good old days on TV

After camembert and the decision to redraw the map of champagne country, it is time to take a look at another  highly successful celebration of France's terroir, or its rich rural roots.

What does it take for a television network to beat a big football match in prime time ? Manchester United was knocking Olympique Lyonnais, France's top side, out of the European Champions' League the other night, but the French preferred to watch a yarn about a bigoted 19th century widow and her search for virtue.

Seven million people tuned in to the episode from Chez Maupassant, a costume drama that has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of drawing a mass audience to high-quality television. At the start of its second season, the setting of Victorian-era short stories by Guy de Maupassant, is such a hit that President Sarkozy is using it as an argument to convince broadcasting bosses that the French will watch high-brow television if they do it right (Unfamiliar with modern Britain, he usually cites UK television as his model).

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Don't mess with the camembert, say French cheese experts

I've been having fun lately with France's penchant for regulating everything, but here's a rule worthy of support. It concerns camembert, the pungent Normandy fromage that springs to mind in much of the world when people say "French cheese".

A decision has just been made that will bar producers from using the coveted "appellation côntrolée" (AOC) label that designates genuine camembert if they make it with heat-treated or micro-filtered milk.

If you are outside France, this is theoretical since exported camembert is mostly the chalk-like industrial product that is made from fully pasteurised milk. Real, ancestral camembert, which goes gooey and yellow and carries a whiff of the Norman farmyard, is made only from raw milk. It accounts for a minority of the market even in France, which has only lately rediscovered a taste for authentic cheese. Lait cru (raw milk) is used to make only about 10 percent of the 650 cheeses sold in French supermarkets. 

The "camembert war" was started a year ago by the Lactalis dairy giant and a cheese cooperative at Isigny, in the Calvados département of Normandy, the cheese's home region.

Why France is grand, by writer-patriot

Let me balance the slightly caustic tone of some recent postings with praise for a book that sums up everything we love about France.

Dictionnaire Amoureux de la France is a love-letter to his country by Denis Tillinac, a prolific writer whose novels mainly celebrate la France profonde, especially his native Corrèze. Tillinac, 60, is an unabashed patriot. I know that he is seen as at bit "reactionary" and a friend of Jacques Chirac, the last and not greatly lamented president.

But Tillinac, a puckish, twinkling-eyed chain-smoker, has a sense of fun and an eye for the quirky side of the French character that is so endearing -- and exasperating. I have got to know him on a TV show that we take part in and I appreciate his eloquent, self-mocking manner.

His book is part of a series from the Plon publishing house, in which famous writers celebrate their passions. It is a collection of sharp little essays on the things and people that for him are the essence of France.  His country, he says, is about flair and panache plus despair and pathos. "I love France in body and soul, as a transfixed admirer and a fulfilled lover," he writes.

 

Run through the index and you get an idea....d'Artagnan.. Bovary... le Coq Gaulois...Cyrano de Bergerac... les Départementales (country roads)... Deux Chevaux (Citroens)... Gares (railway stations), Grandeur.... May 68...  Maigret... le Panache... Paris...la Province...Sub-prefectures...Ricard (pastis)... Zidane..le Zinc (local cafe)

Take le Zinc -- the corner bistrot:

"Le zinc offers the godsend of conviviality, silent or garrulous...It is very French, this decompression chamber. We like to linger in the bistrot. The atmosphere is not like a Viennese cafe, an English pub, a German tavern or even an Italian bar. In the Zinc, once you have your elbows on the counter, you are more than a customer. You become owner of a little part of the establishment...A mysterious connivence brings you close to your neighbour, to the neighbourhood... Whether it's in the countryside, in the provinces or in Paris, le bistrot français is the temple of inexpensive fraternity, of the meditative break, the road to the stars for solitary hearts, or lacking that, their oasis.   
 
On la Grandeur, Tillinac tries to put his finger on why France thinks it is so special. France excelled in no single field, he notes. Great western painting was Italian and Flemish. The music was Italian and German. The great philosophers were German and the three major western writers of the modern west were Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. France had no Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud or Einstein, he says. France's pride in its innate superiority is completely unreasonable, he says: "It is as if we only had this alternative:  pride in being French, or grating, sneering morosity."

To justify this pride, France throughout history has striven to achieve unrealistic ambitions "far beyond its apparent capacity", from Joan of Arc through Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. "France offers an exemplary and muddled irrationality, a mixture of dashing bravoura and missionary zeal which no sporting or economic victory really conveys."

France could not be France without la grandeur, whether we are the seventh or second last economic power in the world. French genius has to astonish the world. I think it is still alive, smouldering like an ember of the spirit under the cinder of mercantilism: this naive faith is one of the well-springs of my patriotism."

Tillinac's model of the French spirit at its best -- generous and reckless -- is D'Artagnan, the musketeer of Alexandre Dumas.

D'Artagnan is the older brother who I never had... At an age when my friends were seeking a cause between Jean-Paul Sartre and Che Guevara, I had read the Three Musketeers. My cause was that boisterous camp where the four jolly fellows served up their knightly heroism with epicurian pleasure. 

It's a lovely book, a perceptive, easy study of Frenchness by an insider, not one of the Brits or other foreigners who presume to know the country.   

Sarkozy loses cool and wants UN defence for French cooking

Here's another glimpse of why Nicolas Sarkozy is unlike his predecessors. In the clip Sarko gives a taste of his rough side at the annual Paris Agricultural Show. When Sarko approaches while shaking hands with the crowd, the man on the left says (in ungrammatical French): "Don't touch me". Sarko replies: "Then get lost". The man: "You dirty me when you touch me". Sarko: "Then get lost, pauvre con." This translates roughly as "stupid a-hole", stupid sod, or the equivalent.

Sarko's more regal predecessors no doubt used such language, but never in public. His readiness to mix it in an unpresidential way with hecklers is part of the reason that his popularity has slumped. The latest poll in today's Journal du Dimanche, shows him down nine points in a month at 38 percent approval. In contrast, François Fillon, his prime pinister, is at 57 percent.

The pollsters say this reflects the way that Sarkozy has reversed the traditional roles. The prime minister is reserved and dignified, staying in the background like a president, while Sarkozy is out in front taking on all-comers. The presidential visit to the annual Salon de l'Agriculture is an important ritual because of the mystical bond which France entertains with the countryside and its produce. Jacques Chirac, pretended to be a countryman and put on a great show at the salon, wandering around stalls slapping cattle, knocking back wine and tasting sausage.

Not Sarko, a life-long urbanite. He made a quick drop-by and, before exchanging the insults in the video, he delivered a speech that was mainly about protecting France and its food producers from foreign competition.

The most quaint point was his announcement that France will apply to Unesco to have French cuisine listed as part of the world's heritage.

Self-mockery in France's unlovely north

Much of the world thinks of France as a sunny Latin place with vineyards, windows with shutters and a fine art de vivre. Many French also prefer that image and look down on the bits that do not fit the picture, especially those along the northern fringe next to England and Belgium.

This week, the far northerners -- a tribe that calls itself Ch'tis -- are celebrating a chance to shake off their uncouth image as potato-guzzling beer-drinkers who dwell in a rain-soaked rust-belt.

The excuse is the opening in Lille yesterday of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a film that makes fun of the region's unflattering stereotype in order to show the people as warmer and generally nicer than those in the sunny south.

Starring and directed by Dany Boon, the film has won critical praise and seems destined to become a hit. So it should boost the much-maligned Ch'ti country, the old port and mining area which runs from Calais eastwards to about Maubeuge (I have a fondness for this area of red-brick terrace houses and tall bell towers from four years living in nearby Brussels in the late 1990s).

Dany Boon is a popular stand-up comedian and actor who is a native Ch'ti or Ch'timi. The name comes from Picardy patois. Like comedies about England's "Geordie" northeast, much of the film's fun stems from a working class dialect so impenetrable that it needs subtitles. In Ch'ti, "ch" replaces "s" and it includes expressions from old Picard and Flemish as well from the Italian, Polish and other migrants of a century ago. The Ch'ti language splash in yesterday's Voix du Nord was: Dany Boon, Bienvenue à s'baraque!" ('welcome home'). Instead of a "chortie nachional" (sortie national-- national release) the film has started with a "chortie ch'timi". Have a look at the promotion site, with the CNN parody "ChtiNN, une chaîne qui ne perd pas le nord".

An exotic hotel night in Paris

The most sought-after hotel room in Paris is a shoe-box perched on a roof in the opulent 16th arrondissement.  There is no room service except for breakfast. The furniture is made of plastic and there is no television. Yet every day, 40,000 people are trying to book a night there.

The word novelty comes in here. The Hotel Everland is a room with adjoining bathroom which costs at least 333 euros a night but it's not really a hotel.

It is a 10-tonne art installation that has been perched since last November on top of the Palais de Tokyo, the Art Deco home of the contemporary art museum on the Right Bank. For its creators, the Swiss artist-designers Sabrina Lang and Daniel Baumann, Everland makes the guests part of the art.

France stops smoking, starts smelling

They said it could never happen. Unlike Americans, Britons or Italians, French smokers would rebel rather than yield to government orders to stop. But nearly six weeks into the start of the ban, they have meekly obeyed and the predicted revolt has not occurred in the bars and bistrots.

As in other places, there have been some odd consequences. One is the body odour that fills the smoke-free air in discos and crowded clubs as the night drags on. Paris clubs are struggling to find alternative scents to mask the sweaty smell that is said to be turning off customers, especially women. Managers do not want to talk about it for fear of losing trade. "We've had enough trouble with the ban on smoking. On top of that we don't want people saying that the place stinks as well," said a club manager near the Place de l'Etoile.

France being the thoughtful place that it is, the pong issue has prompted discussion not of hygiene but of the psychology of odour. Why are we repelled by bodily scent, Libération wondered the other day. It hauled in Annick Le Guerer, an anthropologist and philosopher, to explain that bad smells trigger a part of the brain that makes people think of death. She suggested taking Nietzche's positive approach to smell rather than Freud's bourgeois negative one. Nietzche apparently proclaimed that "my whole genius is in my nostrils."  Freud said that society could not function unless it ignored smells. Before anyone starts making anti-French remarks, the same smell problem caused a stir in England when they stopped smoking there.

Dining high on Eiffel's Tower

 

It's impossible to write this post without making an obvious pun about haute cuisine. Paris cooking doesn't get any more elevated than the restaurant that has re-opened today 410 feet (125m) up on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.

The setting of the old Jules Verne restaurant has always been superb, perched inside the iron girders of the tower. What makes it special now is the new boss,  Alain Ducasse, the super-chef and businessman who has 27 restaurants with 15 Michelin stars around the world.   

Ducasse [above] won the tower catering concession a couple of years ago after the old management let the restaurant slide into expensive mediocrity. Doing the promotional rounds this week, Ducasse has said that he aims to lure Parisians back onto a site that was long left to tourists, with fine, all-French cooking. 

"There won't be any nems (Vietnamese spring rolls), only French products, beef, scallops, turbot, Saint Pierre, langoustines, Limousin lamb, Landes farmer's chicken with crayfish... Even the whisky will be French," he said.

The tight confines of the tower and the need for reasonable prices has led Ducasse to aim for less majestic fare than his Paris Plaza Athénée and his other high culinary temples. They are haute couture while the Jules Verne, one of two eateries on the tower, will be "luxury ready-to-wear," he said. 

Goat's cheese, chestnuts and no Sarko

The air is so thick with foreigners' odes to the French rural idyll that I hesitate to commit another of my own. Yet, c'est plus fort que moi, on this  All Saints day with the morning sun on the chestnut forest in our valley in the Cévennes. The autumn leaves (not yet feuilles mortes) are the most radiant gold that I have seen in the 14 Toussaint holidays that I have spent in the old farm-house.  Perhaps it's the result of the declining rainfall that is also drying up the spring upon which we depend.

Yet nothing has really changed on the November 1 holiday. My neighbours -- mostly hill farmers, artisans and unemployed locals -- are out with their guns and hounds in pursuit of wild boar. The only innovation on that front is that they now wear fluorescent vests over their camouflage. The measure, imposed nationally, is supposed to help les chasseurs avoid shooting one-another, but those flashes of yellow in the forest must certainly tip off their prey.

Across the valley in the village of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte, everything but the church is closed except for the stand selling chrysanthemums, the seasonal flower for commemorating the dead. 

Our spot in the Cévennes, a sort of Scottish highlands with sunshine, is only 100 kilometres north of the saturated Mediterranean coastal strip. Drive only 15 kms down the valley into the département of le Gard and the architecture starts turning from austere stone and slate roofs to the white arches and red tiles of the Med. We are  far enough up into hill-billy country to keep the feeling of sanctuary that shaped the history of this southernmost fringe of the Massif Central. In the religious wars of the 17th century, the persecuted protestants found refuge, as did the resistants of world war two. In the 1970s, the first generation of drop-out ecologistes came down from the north with their guitars and 2CV Citroens to take over abandoned farm-houses to try their hand -- usually without much success --  at goat raising and living off the land.

Don't kill us, say French shop-keepers

  Imagine a country where stores could cut prices year-round, trade on Sundays and hold sales whenever they want to. Imagine if just about anyone could offer taxi services, open a pharmacy or a hair salon where they choose.

Americans and others may have no trouble doing this, but not the French. These ideas have caused such anger that some of them have already been dropped by an expert panel that is advising President Sarkozy on how to "liberate growth".

Sarko gave the job of running the commission to Jacques Attali, the banker-guru who started out in the 1980s as ideas-man to François Mitterrand, the Socialist president.  After three months, he handed in their interim proposals last night. Grabbing the headlines are suggestions that France should drop or loosen its strict regulations over retailing. These were designed in recent decades to protect small and medium stores from discounting by large chains. Stores may, for example, only hold sales for two six-week periods every year, on dates set by the state.

France holds conflicting views on all of this. Everyone wants to preserve the town and village bakers, grocers and bookshops that give the country its charm -- and attract all the home-buying foreigners. At the same time, everyone flocks to the out-of-town centres commerciaux to load up at weekends and they do not like paying more for goods and services there than their European neighbours.

How to feed foreigners, French-style

 

Don't remind the British and the Americans that their meat comes from animals and be friendly when you serve them. The tip comes in a brochure for French restaurateurs that has just been issued by the Ministry of Tourism for the Rugby World Cup.

In advising how to deal with foreigners, the booklet, updated from a 2003 version, is not only a handy guide to national habits but also a useful mirror for the French hospitality industry.

Among the meal-time dislikes of nearly all the main visiting nationalities are unfriendly service, "French ethnocentrism", poor hygiene and undercooked meat. Foreigners are also turned off by the quantity of butter and fat in French food, it says. The information was drawn from surveys of foreign visitors. 

When dealing with Dutch tourists, "pay attention to the cleanliness of your premises and personnel. French hygiene rules are not strict enough to their taste," it says.

With all foreigners, French restaurateurs are advised to explain when a dish comes from offal or includes meat with blood still visible.  "Americans like their meat de-animalised," it says. "Its origin with a living animal must not be visible. Offal dishes, frogs' legs and snails disgust them. Nevertheless certain adventurous Americans like to try them out."

Rémy the rat and Americans in Paris

   

Rémy the rat is doing exceedingly well in France. Hollywood's big animated films are usually popular here but Ratatouille, Pixar studio's tale about a Parisian rat with a talent for haute cuisine, is breaking records. It has topped the box office for the two weeks since it scored the biggest-opening day for an animated film in France. This has got me thinking about the long tradition of Franco-American mutual admiration.

The audience in my cinema at the Porte Maillot gave Ratatouille a standing ovation the other night after the finale, in which Rémy triumphs with a message that echoes the can-do doctrines of President Sarkozy: If you work hard, you will prosper. Even a lowly rat can become a gastronomic celebrity

The film, for all its technical prowess, is of course another a feel-good Disney about a cute rodent and its sensibility is all American. Yet something in the film has touched a Gallic nerve.

Stop being beastly to Parisians

Perhaps it's the execrable July weather, but Paris is in a bad mood. The rain seems to be making everyone rattier than usual. Take the man at our newspaper kiosk. He usually shrugs and turns his back when tourists ask him for directions. Yesterday, he was swearing at at them.

The kiosk man is a prime candidate for re-education under the city's new friendliness programme. This latest in many attempts to teach Parisians to smile at strangers was launched with fanfare by the municipal tourist authority this week. Tuesday was declared the first Day of Tourism. Mayor Betrand Delanoe attended festivities by the Eiffel Tower, visitors were shown round neighbourhoods by residents and the media alerted France once again to its poor reputation for accueil -- welcoming people.

A charter has been issued for the Parisians and the visitor [printed below]. The Parisian, for example, pledges to "take time to give information to visitors" and the tourist promises to try to get into the spirit of the town.

We've been around the "rude French" track with several postings already, but this gives me a chance to speak up for Parisians.

Why Frenchwomen enjoy housework

  We all know that women still do most of the household chores despite over three decades of supposed equality between the sexes. A French researcher has just produced an interesting book that seeks to explain why women have not asserted their rights in the home like they have at work.

Part of the answer, according François de Singly, a Paris sociologist, is that women wield power over their partners by retaining their traditional role of maîtresse de maison.  "The unequal split of chores has the effect of making the man dependent. While the man benefits from the service of his companion, he loses a little of his mastery over his world."

It is a sacrifice that men are of course happy to make. "The man's loss of autonomy inside conjugal life is not equivalent to the loss of independence that stems from the woman's overload of domestic chores," Singly concludes in L'Injustice Ménagère (Household injustice). "Most men accept being disposessed of a role in building the shared life in order to avoid the work it requires."

Singly and colleagues from the CNRS, the state research institute, use case studies and statistics to show that women have not made housework a priority while they imposed a revolution in male attitudes in other domains.

Britain's miserable hospitality -- French legend or fact?

It's the time of year when many French families are about to send their children on home stays abroad to pick up some English. That means another chance to look at cross-Channel misunderstanding.   

For decades, French youngsters have spent time with British families -- usually around the south of England -- and come home with mixed memories. Friends of my generation recall poor food and draughty houses but a reasonably decent welcome. Back then, teenaged boys used to leap at the chance of getting to know les petites anglaises, who were more fun than straight-laced French girls -- at least according to legend.

In recent years, though, the reputation of British home stays has taken a dive. French parents are turning to the warmer welcome of Ireland and countries further afield such as the USA and Australia. We took a look at the matter today after France-Inter radio reported on England's reputation for poor hospitality. [Picture: France's idea of Dickensian British welcome for children]   

A lunch to remember

On the other end of the scale from last week's post about French health warnings on food, here is my interview from today's newspaper with Anne-Sophie Pic, the new three-star Michelin chef in Valence. 

And this is what lunch was like:  Despite what colleagues believe, Paris corespondents do not often dine in Michelin three-star establishments. In my years in the job, I had never sat down to the gastronomic magic promised by les trois macarons of the venerable Red Guide. Expectations were high when Magali Delporte, our photographer, and I were led to our table chez Pic. We were in a corner, looking out on a lawn with pine trees behind. On the table, a single tall lilly, bound with a white paper ribbon, set the pared-down tone for the gastronomic rite.