Mood Sets Them Apart : The French: Passionate but Puzzling

After five years in France, an American still has a puzzling time figuring out the French. Are they really rude? Do they lack creativity? Does their school system stifle many of them? Do they posture foolishly on the world stage?

There are short answers to each of these questions: no; maybe; yes; no. But there are long, complex and contradictory answers as well, for a myriad of ambiguities befuddles any American trying to make out the French.

To many foreigners, for example, it is not surprising that the patron saint of Paris is St. Genevieve, a nun who fasted and prayed in the 6th Century to keep Paris safe from foreigners. She fits an image that France cannot shake off. All studies show that outsiders look on the French as the coldest and least welcoming peoples of Europe.

Embraced Foreigners

Yet there are few countries in the world that have welcomed and embraced so many foreigners, from the Italian Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci to the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso to the Irish writer James Joyce to the black American singer Josephine Baker.

Some of the most celebrated French of the 20th Century, such as Nobel Prize physicist Marie Curie, actor-singer Yves Montand and novelist Romain Gary, were born outside France.

Contradictions like these seem even more puzzling because the French at heart ought not to be so puzzling. To an American, the French are not really exotic like Australian bushmen or the Maya or even the Japanese. French culture seems familiar. French champagne and perfume and cheese and ballads and movies conjure up old and warm images. Yet, although Americans sometimes feel they have France within their reach, they rarely can grasp it. No other people so close seem so far.

Difficult to Fathom

A mood, a spirit set the French apart, and moods and spirits are difficult to fathom. Take the French concern for language and ideas. The French respect for intellect is breathtaking, far beyond the experience of any American.

Politicians and civil servants speak and write with unequaled style, sophistication, flair for literature and grounding in history. Daily newspapers devote far more space to philosophy and sociology than sports. The French first came up with the term “intellectual” at the turn of the century to describe writers, artists and philosophers with influence. Intellectuals still have influence and still matter.

Throughout this year, for example, a controversy has raged over the late German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a controversy set off by a Chilean professor who wrote a book accusing Heidegger of unswerving loyalty to Hitler’s Nazi party from 1933 to 1945.

Heidegger is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century, but it is hard to conceive of the same fuss taking place anywhere else.

The book, though written by Victor Farias while teaching in Germany, was published in France first, in translation from Spanish and German. Its publication provoked an avalanche of articles in French newspapers and magazines. Intellectual journals devoted entire issues to the subject. Pro-Heidegger professors fought with anti-Heidegger professors in acrimonious television debates. The book spawned a series of other books in French attacking and defending him.

Heidegger has a special place in France because his views influenced those of the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre. But that does not really explain why the French media have devoted so much attention to him. Heidegger, after all, is unintelligible to the average reader in any language, even French. But the average French reader, whether he reads Heidegger or not, knows that philosophers are important and therefore worth fussing about.

Top Students Prized

Intellectual achievement is so prized that the smartest secondary students are treated like celebrities. Le Monde, France’s most influential newspaper, published the full text in July of the student essay that won the annual prize of the Ministry of Education for the best composition in French. These annual prizes, which began in 1747, are major events. The news weekly Le Point, in a cover story a few weeks ago, profiled nine of this year’s winners in various subjects, revealing their family backgrounds, study habits, heroes and favorite dishes.

The best graduates of the French educational system have a precision of mind, command of language and store of memory that would make the heart of most American educators ache with envy. It is doubtful that any school system in the world teaches more logic and grammar or offers more courses.

But a sobering price is paid. Precision in thought and beauty of language are the products of an elite French school system that is repressive, frightening and stifling to many pupils who cannot keep up. There is no tolerance or time for spontaneity or weakness.

An elite few do well and uphold the glory and grandeur of French culture. But many other students are shunted aside by the system. Almost two-thirds of French pupils who enter secondary school fail to win the baccalaureat degree that is the crowning achievement of their secondary education. Some feel that failure for the rest of their lives.

‘Fear of Failure’

Dr. Philippe Guran, director of pediatrics at the Richaud Hospital in Versailles, once described the school system as “hazardous to children’s health and well-being.” The children, he said, are motivated by “the fear of failure rather than the pursuit of success.”

School principals and teachers are rigid and make no allowances for pupils who develop later than their classmates.

“How many children,” economist Michel Godet said in a recent attack on French education, “find themselves pushed to the sidelines because they have a rhythm of development different to that of the average?”

On top of this, the whole educational atmosphere of France prizes theory over practice. The music conservatories of Paris, for example, wring the enthusiasm out of 8-year-old children by forcing them to study the theory of harmony for a year before putting their hands on an instrument.

No Time for Frills

A school day, in any case, is so packed with courses and homework that there is little time for music or tennis or photography or theater or anything else that many French look on as frills.

Although some French educators question the rigidity and elitism of the school system, most politicians and parents do not. These kind of schools, after all, have produced a dozen winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature this century, far more than any other country, including the United States, with all its emphasis on creativity.

Parents, concerned that their children may fail the national baccalaureat examinations, complain that a school’s standards are not tough enough. Politicians denounce principals for offering too many frills. President Francois Mitterrand insists that teachers should force pupils to memorize more dates in French history.

Schools Are to Blame

No one seems to think of the school system when the French government launches one of its periodic campaigns to persuade the French to show more hospitality to tourists. Yet the schools, in many ways, must be blamed for the hoary tourist cliche that the French are rude.

French education fosters a defensive attitude in those fearful of failure. It is not surprising that foreigners sometimes run into a defensive waiter or store clerk or lower-level bureaucrat. After years of trying to avoid the strictures of their teachers, people like this handle every hint of a complaint by blaming someone else.

French education also makes it very difficult for the French to understand foreigners who do not speak French well. It has been drilled into the French for years that they must not mispronounce words or mangle grammar. Their minds cannot make much of an adjustment for a foreigner who misses the mark; many French simply do not understand.

In English, linguists, trying to assess how well a foreigner speaks, measure the level at which he or she will be understood by “a sympathetic native speaker.” The concept of such a speaker simply does not exist in French.

‘Suspicious of Foreigners’

“The cultural capital of the world is a provincial place,” a Bolivian writer said in Paris recently. “Nowhere else in the world do people treat you like the French do if you cannot speak their language. It would not happen in New York or even London. Paris is a city suspicious of foreigners; it is like the Middle Ages.”

The problem is compounded because the French, especially in Paris, are not an open, gregarious people like Americans or Latins. They are inward and undemonstrative. They do not like to commit themselves quickly; they do not like to show their feelings openly.

All these aspects of coldness infuriate some foreigners. After nine years as Paris correspondent of the British daily newspaper The Guardian, Walter Schwarz wrote in 1984, “I won’t miss the rudeness of Parisians, the way nobody says sorry (there isn’t even a French word for it). When they haven’t got what you want, they seem glad.” His diatribes provoked an onslaught of angry replies from more sympathetic British, some of whom supplied him with the French words for “sorry.”

The truth is that the cliche about French rudeness, like most cliches, is exaggerated, sometimes in a spiteful way. Most French are not defensive, intolerant and insensitive. Most are not rude.

Simple Gestures Favored

It is true that most French do not open up quickly to people they do not know, whether foreign or French. But, once contact is made and renewed, they are as kind and loyal as any other people. They show their friendship and emotion, however, with simple civil gestures--a small gift or favor or act of kindness--but not in any extravagant way. France is not the land of abrazos.

There are more puzzles for a foreigner, such as trying to understand what seems like a decline of creativity in France. Some foreigners blame the magnificence of Paris. The capital of France is probably the most beautiful city in the world, but most of its beauty lies in its past. Paris, protected by a web of legislation that keeps out most modern buildings, has hardly changed since the turn of the 20th Century.

A walker in Paris can sense historical wonders on almost any street. An art lover can find La Ruche, the building that offered inexpensive space to painters like Marc Chagall and Fernand Leger and Chaim Soutine before World War I, and still offers that kind of space to artists today.

Students crowd and laugh in front of the Lycee Condorcet where Marcel Proust once studied and Jean-Paul Sartre once taught philosophy. The bars of writer Ernest Hemingway are easy to find, and so is the postwar headquarters of Gen. Charles de Gaulle. With a few turns of imagination, one can bring back to Paris the days of writers Guy de Maupassant or Richard Wright or artist Amedeo Modigliani.

Decline in Creativity Seen

Outsiders sometimes wonder whether this mood of the past overwhelms the creativity of the present. French writers, artists and composers no longer rank among the best known in the world. No one now has the standing of Albert Camus or Pierre Auguste Renoir or Maurice Ravel. Modern architects can do little in Paris but restore old buildings.

Referring to the great 19th-Century French architect Charles Garnier, Prof. John V. Moen, a linguist and literary critic teaching at Chaminade University of Honolulu, wrote recently, “One wonders how a Garnier . . . would have felt if he had been obliged to squander his talents reinforcing and redefining the creations of his predecessors.”

Yet culture evokes so much excitement, support and joy in France that an optimist can only feel that the seeming lull in creativity is little more than one of those temporary readjustments or changes of fashion that come and go in most sophisticated societies. There is no greater celebration of theater anywhere, for example, than the annual festival at Avignon in the south of France, and it is hard to believe that all that frenetic and enthusiastic activity will not ignite new creativity.

There is another puzzle. The French, in the eyes of many foreigners, refuse to accept their role as a middling power. On an official and diplomatic level, many Americans grow irritated with French leaders for what the Americans look on as posturing on the world stage.

France was once a great power. Even as late as the eve of World War II, many analysts thought that the French army was the most powerful in the world. But such notions died in the defeat and disgrace of World War II.

Moderate Strength

Now, France is a European country of moderate strength, with enough nuclear weapons to count in some councils of war and peace but hardly enough to qualify as a superpower. Yet its leaders, unlike the leaders of Britain, never seem to accept this. The French sometimes sound as if World War II had never come to dash the pretensions of France.

At economic summit conferences, for example, Mitterrand is one of the few foreign leaders who stands up to the United States and refuses to bow to its power and influence. American officials invariably bristle at such seeming sham which, in their view, began with President De Gaulle 30 years ago and never seems to end.

Yet French officials usually present their point of view with great intelligence, self-confidence, respect for the United States and, at least in the view of some outsiders, persuasiveness.

French officials act, in fact, not as if they were trying to pose as more than they are but as if past French grandeur and the potential for future French leadership in Europe entitles them to more of a voice than a middling power might expect. The past and future ought to count for something.

The concept is novel, but it may make a lot of sense. It certainly enhances a sense of nationalism and makes the French, as ever, somewhat larger than life.

Stanley Meisler, chief of The Times’ Paris Bureau since 1983, is joining the Washington Bureau.