This article appears in the November 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
PARIS — The French revel in their complications despite the
frequent inconvenience of getting tangled in them. For one thing,
it confirms their cherished impression that they are unique on
earth, a blest condition known locally as the French Exception. For
another, it makes everybody else jump through Gallic hoops to do
things their way. Even Charles de Gaulle, who occasionally admitted
to despising his compatriots as unworthy of his idea of France,
asked in a moment of exasperation, “How can you govern a country
with over 300 kinds of cheese?”
The complexities range far beyond mere varieties of dairy
products. Take the normally simple question of automobile
headlights. For decades, French ones were not white, like
everywhere else, but yellow. “Much less blinding for oncoming
cars,” was the official explanation why foreign visitors had to put
yellow covers over their headlights at the border. Then France fell
in line with worldwide standards and quietly switched to white. The
yellow ones, it turned out, had been after all simply a gratuitous
complication-although it did have a certain use as a xenophobic
tool that made foreigners, always suspect, easily identifiable at
night.
Visiting foreigners are also flummoxed by the labyrinth of
French closing days before learning that Thursday is the best day
to get things done. An unpredictable number of shops are closed on
Monday, depending, maybe, on whether they were open Saturday.
National museums shut tight on Tuesday, though an indeterminate
number of private ones might just be open. Schools are out on
Wednesday but in session on Saturday, neatly blocking any plans
parents may have for weekend trips. And Friday? Well, that
obviously is the beginning of the weekend in a nation with a
35-hour workweek, so your best bet on Friday is just to try a new
sidewalk cafe.
Then there is the problem of what to call an unmarried woman.
Anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with French knows that the
proper term, from time immemorial, is mademoiselle. Mais
non! Many single Frenchwomen, especially those in business or
of a mature age, now consider that condescending or sexist. Perhaps
borrowing a page from their American feminist sisters, they are
adamant about being called madame. The law is no help, being
tactfully unclear on that point, while traditionalist notary
publics insist that official documents use mademoiselle for
unmarried women, executives or not. Then there is the theater,
where actresses are uniformly called mademoiselle, even if they are
icons like Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve.
Such pettifoggery is all very confusing, not to say annoying,
for those of us who consider simplicity a virtue that lets us get
on with more important matters.
But of all the complications of French life, none is more
perplexing — to foreigners and French alike — than when to use
the familiar tu or polite vous form of address.
The delicate, often embarrassing question of when to
tutoyer a Frenchman is a problem fraught with social peril
where one gingerly tiptoes on linguistic eggshells. There are no
fixed rules for guidance. Make a mistake and you can become an
instant boor, make an enemy, or create a more intimate relationship
than you intended. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the
proto-Taliban of the French Revolution. True, they made somewhat
excessive use of the guillotine, but at least they decreed that all
citizens, being equal, would henceforth use tu in
addressing each other.
Alas, that good and useful rule fell by the wayside as the
19th-century bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy and sought
genteel status by using vous in clannish ways that only
they could understand. That left most speakers of French insecure,
with nothing to go on but fallible instinct and feel. When they
can’t figure out which form to use, they have to fall back on turns
of phrase, often awkward, that avoid addressing their interlocutor
directly. That, of course, can only be a stopgap measure.
IT HAPPENED TO ME RECENTLY when my French sister-in-law came for a
visit after a long absence. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember
whether we had previously used tu or vous. I had
to rely on increasingly gauche circumlocution until I could
discreetly query my wife about it. “Oh, I’ve never used tu
with her husband and she won’t with you, so go with vous,”
came the reply. This, despite long being on family terms with the
lady.
As one French linguist, Claude Duneton, explains, “All you have
to go by are more or less changing usages. There is no rationale to
it, and the possible combinations of what form to use in which
situation are infinite, depending on the moment at hand and your
individual inclination. That’s one of the charms of our
language.”
Especially charming, it seems, in certain situations. As Duneton
points out, “During intimate moments, the sudden change from
vous to tu can deliciously increase eroticism.”
(So that is what the bluestocking bourgeoisie has been up
to?) Which recalls the old cartoon of two American tourists
chatting in a Paris cafe. “And then the most wonderful thing
happened,” one girl says dreamily to the other. “He switched from
the polite to the familiar.”
But even in France there are sometimes other things to do, like
working. And in the office, linguistic confusion generally reigns
as everyone tries to sort out how to address each other. In some
companies underlings use the respectful vous with their
superiors, who themselves use the familiar — and condescending —
tu with them. To avoid this, many French firms, especially
those in fields contaminated by American mores such as advertising
and hi-tech, are trying to loosen up the stiff old hierarchical
structures by making the tutoiement permissible, or even
obligatory, along with open-neck shirts and casual Friday. Jacques
Seguela, vice president of a big Paris advertising firm, never uses
any form but tu. “It’s more direct, affirmative and cordial,” he
explains. “It creates an atmosphere of complicity.”
But the idea of using the familiar form with someone older or
higher placed in the socioeconomic pecking order disturbs France’s
old feudal reflexes. (Paradoxically, the French say tu to
God but vous to the boss.) It leads some to mutter darkly
about pernicious foreign contagion. Complaining of today’s
“galloping tutoiement,” Le Figaro attributes this
sorry state of affairs to “the influence of Anglo-Saxon manners and
an egalitarian vision of society.” One linguist, Jacques Durand,
observes sadly that the disappearing vous is another bad
sign of leveling in French society. “Some people are even calling
each other by their first names,” he notes with a certain refined
repugnance.
Thus contradictions and hypocrisy abound. Dignified chaps like
members of the august French Academy say vous to each
other while at the domed Institut de France, home of the Academie
Francaise, even if they have known each other since childhood. Then
they switch to tu once they doff their bicorne hats and
step outside into the real world.
One group that staunchly holds out against creeping linguistic
Americanization is the 20,000 or so families that belong to the
former feudal aristocracy and today’s haute bourgeoisie.
Here the second person plural among themselves is de
rigueur. Their main object in life is keeping up appearances
and transmitting inheritances; the affected vous means
everyone knows his place, stays within his own class, respects the
hierarchy — and keeps everybody else at arm’s length.
This can take bizarre forms. I know one family where Madame,
proud bearer of “one of the best names in France,” as she says,
uses the distant vous with her children until they obtain
their high school diploma. Then, as a treat, she uses tu
with them. All the while, the children have been using tu
with her. There is also the case of my good friends Jean-Pierre and
Marie-Louise. We have known each other for a quarter-century but we
still use vous, although they use the familiar with other
friends (but vous with their son). I gave up long ago
trying to arrive at a rational basis for our verbal
relationship.
BUT THOSE SLY MANIPULATORS of the spoken word, politicians, are the
greatest virtuosos of the tu-vous conundrum.
Among the members of the Communist and Socialist parties, the
familiar form is obligatory, reflecting true Marxist comradeship.
With conservatives it’s more complicated. Jacques Chirac, while
president, used the familiar with his longtime political pals but
they replied respectfully with vous. At one point he said
tu to his minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, but
vous to Dominique de Villepin, his prime minister, who in
turn said vous to Sarkozy.
Since becoming president, Sarkozy has become adept at
manipulating journalists by using tu with them whether
they like it or not, the equivalent of George Bush’s nicknames. “He
makes it hard for me to keep him at the necessary distance to
maintain journalistic objectivity,” says one newsman at Le
Monde. “He draws us into a closer relationship than we want
when trying to cover the Elysee Palace.”
Still, it might be a good sign if ordinary citizens start using
tu with him. As one sociologist explains the typical
subservient French attitude toward the powers that be, “We use
vous with the president because we’re actually still
living in a monarchy and you have to respect the king.” Now if
Frenchmen begin treating Sarkozy as a citizen-president instead of
a monarch, we will know that France is indeed venturing into the
terrain — itself complicated enough — of 21st-century
democracy.
