Review: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong.

Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. Sourcebooks Trade; (May 2003). Naperville, IL;

ISBN: 1402200455 Paperback: 351 pages

To many Americans, Edith Piaf, Gigi, and Maurice Chevalier represent France. For others, France is the place where style matters more than substance, the country that abets our enthusiasm for descriptions of obscure wines. To others, it is the country that has been “ungrateful” for being saved in WWII, that inexplicably challenged George Bush’s plans for unilateral military intervention in a foreign country. The Canadian view of France is less extreme. Many English-Canadians associate France with de Gaulle’s 1967 “Vive le Quebec Libre” that was interpreted as support for Quebec separatism, others with cheese, food as religion, and the creation of the EEC. So why do most of us love France but hate the French?

In Sixty Million Frenchman Can't be Wrong, coauthors Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow with 10 years of business journalism apiece, renovate our ideas about this paradoxical country. French-Canadian and English Canadian respectively, this married couple moved to France and spent two years researching this rare book of cultural anthropology for the general reader.

Like many cultural guides to France – Polly Platt's French or Foe?, and Sally Adamson's Culture Shock! France – they enumerate many ways in which France is "a clock that runs on a different set of gears" but Benoit and Barlow also show us how it got that way. In the process they challenge our cultural assumptions and expectations. Reasoning from history and geography, the authors explain French differences, offering cross cultural statistics and anecdotal comparisons along the way.

Take North American myths of France as insular: the authors describe France’s continuing global reach as a still-surviving colonial power. Using Guadeloupe as example, they describe the homogenous administration of colonial possessions. Why is France so far behind even less-developed countries in its business use of the Internet? The authors introduce us to France’s Minitel system. Why are the French against globalization, as Thomas Freidman complains in The Lexus and the Olive Tree? The authors tell us the French accept globalization, but are against the model and impact of the current progress of exploitive globalization as envisaged and promoted by the US and the WTO. The French, like many other countries, have even proposed a global tax on financial transactions for redistribution of wealth from wealthy states to poor nations, a “solidarity tax.”

Keenly aware of the power differentials between French and English in the foreign and business affairs of France and North America, Sixty Million Frenchman Can’t be Wrong celebrates French self-assurance, French interest in international politics. A recurring theme is the impact of that provocative and consummate politician, Charles de Gaulle in setting France on an independent path in foreign policy and economics. In every area, the authors show how de Gaulle’s single-minded pursuit of French interest, from refusing American control and reconstruction after WWII to creating the myth of total French resistance to the German occupation, to the creation of the fourth republic and France’s current democratic institutions.

From a book co-authored with a woman, you might expect more information about French women and French feminism. Is it still “Vive la Difference” - how have cultural expectations for French women changed over the years? But beyond noting that France passed a law in 2000 that requires 50% female representation among political candidates presented by any party, the authors skirt this issue.

They replace our myths with a picture a highly authoritarian and formerly homogenous country just emerging from the control of Paris and its elites, waking to local representation, decision making and participative democracy. A country that has only in the last ten years woken to the assimilation problems of its Muslim population, and realized the dangers posed by its many conservative, anti-semitic and fascist elements. A powerful participant on the global stage. A country not so different from the USA.

Sixty Million Frenchman Can’t be Wrong is a delightful book you’ll wish you had read before your first trip to France, and also one that can illuminate, interpret and deepen your last experience of the country.

Shauna Singh Baldwin