bluefrog: Resistance is Futile

Jean -Luc from Star Trek: The Next Generation

I surprised by Paris when I moved here. The last time I had been here as a teenager I had found the Parisians rude and blunt, not a friendly people by any stretch of the imagination. One of my recurring memories is the name that our bus driver referred to us as– The Crazy Irish. Well, 50 Irish teenagers ARE going to be anything but sane, that’s a large pool of energy and hormones after all!!

This time around though, things are different. I, for one, have matured a little. When I first arrived here and tried to speak in French I got a warm response from most people – quelle surprise!! They just love it when you try to speak ze French, a little too much I think! They smile and encourage you - I would often struggle, say my French is poor and revert back to English. Most people would have none of that. ‘Oh but you MUST try’ they would say, in French of course. The mindset in France is that French is a precious language, its part of their national identity and it must be used with pride and care.

Herein lies the next problem. There is a proper way to speak in French; it’s all very formal and accurate. Whereas someone in Ireland would tolerate a foreigner saying something in English like ‘I is looking for the station of trains’ the French compulsively jump in mid-sentence to correct your poor grammar. ‘Yes speak our language, but speak it correctly’. The weird thing is, after awhile you become as anal as them about getting it accurate. Suddenly language becomes more than a means of communication; it’s an expression of your knowledge and syntax abilities. Suddenly you take pride in a well composed sentence; it’s a thing of beauty after all.

And then they have you. All of a sudden its bad taste to snack on the metro, everything must be debated at length and you long for your own small fluffy dog. You come to expect the state to redistribute wealth, to level differences and you see Paris as the centre of the world. Your name is now ‘Fay-nay’ and you shorten your first name to something intelligible like Benoit!

There it is; somehow, somewhere and sometime in the past few months it has happened: you’ve become assimilated. C’est la vie!

I don’t know what exactly it is about the French psyche that creates such a powerful and overriding single identity but its signs can be seen throughout the city. There are twice as many Muslims in France as Protestants and Jews; the Arabic culture has even become part of mainstream French culture. Add in a large number of Algerians and there you have it, the melting pot that is France. Not forgetting of course the Swiss-French, the Belgians, the Americans and many other Europeans. But you cannot tell them apart psychologically, they are all French. They have all been assimilated. Welcome to the cube: welcome to France.