Why the French Hate the Internet

By AMY HARMON

Jan. 27, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PARIS —

If the gathering had been in San Francisco or London or even Moscow, the e-mailing, Web-surfing party-goers would have been reveling in their role as bearers of their nation’s digital future.

But the recent fete at the offices of AOL France was marked by a conspicuous absence of swagger.

“In France, when you speak about e-mail, they think you are a fashion victim,” said Jean-Francois Marti, head of business development for America Online’s French arm. “My parents don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m doing. My friends, I try to convince them it’s very cool and useful. They say it’s useless and expensive.”

In most of the industrialized world, the spread of the Internet is taken as destiny, its early disciples mostly revered as keepers of the keys to national competitiveness.

But here, high-tech hipsters are regarded as, well, gauche. Intellectuals write diatribes against the global network. Web cafes go out of business. Online providers can’t find subscribers.

The French response to the Internet has been a lot like that of Madeline, the French schoolgirl in Ludwig Bemelmans’ classic children’s books, to the tiger at the zoo. She said simply: “Pooh-pooh.”

This attitude stems in part from a cultural heritage that has long made resistance to the dilution of things French a point of pride. More so even than movies or fast food, the Internet whisks cultures and blurs national boundaries--and perhaps most alarmingly, it does so almost exclusively in English.

Some of the Internet’s harshest critics have been those who fear it will destroy the French language, and thus the identity of the nation. Its chaotic structure cuts against the French tradition of strong centralization in government, education and life. A certain studied existential angst may be at work too, the embrace of technology as a force of progress seen in itself as a surrender to crass American optimism.

“It is not apparent in the minds of the French that the more technology you have, the happier you live,” said French sociologist Gerald Mermet. “They would like to be in a society where life would be more harmonious, where work would not be as big a part of life.”

Ironically, another big reason for the French resistance to the Internet’s incursions is the nation’s embrace of an earlier online technology known as the Minitel. Electronic commerce took root in France more than a decade ago in the form of squat terminals given away for free by the state telephone company, France Telecom.

The devices now reside in about 7 million French homes and can be found in nearly every public building. Limited to communication within French borders, the Minitel is used mostly for practical purposes such as ordering plane tickets and looking up phone numbers--services the Internet does not yet readily provide.

There are a few signs that the Internet is beginning to take root in France.

A recent blizzard of media attention has raised public awareness, and the gradual deregulation of the communications industry is expected to lower the high phone rates that have provided a more material reason for the French to stay off the Net.

But France still has fewer than four Internet-connected computers per 1,000 residents, about half the rate of Germany and one-third that of Britain. California has 61 per 1,000 people, while the overall U.S. rate is 31 per 1,000. And even countries with fewer connections, such as Mexico and Poland, are adding them at a far higher rate than France, according to Matrix Information & Directory Services, a research firm based in Austin, Texas.

France, in fact, is one of the few holdouts refusing to join the worldwide information technology love-in, and its stubborn resistance calls into question what is often seen as the Internet’s inevitable and immutable ascendance.

“The Internet is 95% not interesting,” said Jean Le Nouaille, an environmental consultant waiting in line to use the Minitel at a Paris post office on a recent afternoon.

Still, might it not be more efficient to conduct his research via e-mail?

“When I am doing research I like a bit of conviviality,” Le Nouaille said. “This might be hard for you to understand, but if the person is in front of you, that can be more efficient even than a computer.”

The French convivialite, which has roughly the same meaning as its English transliteration, is the term most often used by Parisians to describe what the Internet lacks.

“We like the direct contact in France more than online chatting,” said Laurent Loiseau, 31, who is trying to launch an online service for job ads. “In France, the appearance, the look is more important. People don’t like to go home and get on the computer to relax. They prefer going to cafes and bars.”

Even when cafes and bars are combined with computers, the French show little enthusiasm. A “cyber-cafe” in the back of (le) Shop, a trendy clothing store where crowds of French teens smoke cigarettes as they try on sale items, yanked out its computers recently because no one used them. Across town, Le Web Bar drew only a handful of patrons on a recent weekend.

And if French teenagers aren’t surfing the Internet, neither is another likely group, the students at the nation’s universities. Few of them have Internet connections.

“There’s no need for it,” said Jacques Hilbey, 27, a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. “For most American people, it’s a game more than a tool.”

Fellow student Jerome Vidal-Lahti, shivering under the imposing statues of Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo outside the school’s library, agreed: “Maybe we just have other games in France and don’t need the Internet. We like drinking wine, reading, going to cinema.”

Cecile Feront, 22, who attended school in the United States before graduating from France’s prestigious Institute for Political Science (President Jacques Chirac is among its alumni), said she lobbied for Internet access at the school and blames the centralized structure of the French education system for her defeat.

“In France, we have an elite culture, and because the Internet is not under the control of the authorities, they don’t know how to manage it and they are afraid of it,” Feront said. But she acknowledged that most of her colleagues “didn’t see the point.”

Vincent Gourdon, who teaches history at the Sorbonne, is opposed to the Internet at school, not because it takes control away from teachers, but because he believes that it gives students the illusion of knowledge without true understanding.

“They think they are going to study by using the Internet, but the question is not to find all the information, it is to think about it,” Gourdon said. “With the Internet, there is no concentration on what you are doing. It’s like TV. It gives the illusion of thinking, and in this, it is a danger.”

Part of the rap on the Internet in France, indeed, is that it’s anti-intellectual. Philosopher Paul Virilio denounced it as “disinformation” in Le Monde Diplomatique: “It has to do with some kind of choking of the senses, a loss of control over reason of sorts. Here lies a new and major risk for humanity stemming from multimedia and computers.”

Christian Perrot, one of France’s few Web devotees, speaks of Virilio and other Net naysayers through clenched teeth. “They have lost touch with reality,” said Perrot, whose Nirvanet Web site, based at his home outside Paris, is a trove of multilingual information on cyber-culture and politics. “I don’t think of Nirvanet as a French site. I don’t need to say, ‘Hello, look at me, I live in Paris, I eat baguettes.’ It’s a multicultural site, and what is wrong with that?”

Quite a bit, according to some government officials, who believe the Internet has the potential to overwhelm the French language. An estimated 85% of Internet sites are in English, while about 2% are in French.

Earlier this month, a group partially funded by the Culture Ministry went to court to press a Georgia Tech campus in eastern France to translate its Internet site into French, citing a 1994 law that bans advertising in any single language except French.

France has long limited imports of American television programs and subsidized its domestic film industry to counter the dominance of Hollywood; it would like to do something similar about the Internet.

After first trying a policy toward the Internet that one observer likened to “De Gaulle and NATO”--in reference to Charles de Gaulle’s historic withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization so as to retain power through independence--the government now appears to be trying to put a French stamp on it. Even the Academie Francaise, guardian of French culture, is thinking of putting up a Web site.

But a general cynicism toward technology remains prevalent here. Even the editor of Planete Internet, the country’s biggest Internet magazine, is uncomfortable talking up the technology.

“‘We’re not techno-enthusiasts,” Jerome Thorel assured a visitor. Owned by French media giant Hachette, the magazine sells better in Quebec than it does in France, where circulation is 15,000 a month and falling.

“I think Wired works in the U.S. because there are so many techno-yuppies there,” said Thorel of the boosterish American journal that chronicles high-tech culture. Pained that he often finds himself in the role of explaining the virtues of the Net to friends and neighbors when he would prefer to point out its flaws, Thorel said he thought there was a need to demystify the Internet here: “But it doesn’t sell.”

Franck Zayan, chief technologist for AOL France, is well acquainted with the application of classical French skepticism to the online world. Sitting at a cafe last summer after the American parent of his firm had a well-publicized lapse of service for 19 hours, he idly asked a waiter whether he had heard of the Internet.

“I don’t know what the Internet is, but I know it broke down last night,” came the reply.

AOL France suffers none of the busy-signal problems of its American parent. The nation’s second-largest provider after CompuServe boasts a mere 25,000 subscribers, compared with 200,000 in Germany and 100,000 in Britain.

Along with CompuServe, AOL competes with France Telecom’s newly launched Internet service and a handful of small independent companies for customers who tend to dubiously conceptualize the Internet as a “worldwide Minitel.”

But Bertrand LeFicher, charged with selling AOL to the French, says that for all the cultural traits that repel the French from the computer network, there is one that will draw them irresistibly to it.

“In France, it won’t work simply because it’s an innovation,” LeFicher said. “But this is about communication, and if you have noticed, the French always have something to say, on the street, in the Metro, in the cafes. They don’t care where they say it, and when they realize that this allows them to say whatever they want to a huge audience, they will flock to use it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Not Wired

France has fewer Internet hosts, computers that house Web sites and other Internet data, than most other industrialized countries.

Location / Hosts per 1,000 people:

Finland: 62

California: 61

U.S.: 31

Texas: 23

Britain: 11

Germany: 7

Czech Rep.: 5

France: 4