Jan-Maat’s Reviews > The French > Status Update

"The real cause of dissatisfaction with foreigners in France comes not fro the French feeling humiliated by borrowing from America or other countries, but from an annoyance that foreigners are not borrowing much in return"

"There are other regions, too, like the Haut-Rhin, where the parents still give their children 'a good fill of eau-de-vie' every morning before sending them off to school; in the Auvergne, village football matches played by 15 year olds are preceded by each player drinking a litre of wine; it is not unknown for toddlers of two to be given wine so that they can get used to it"

"as was revealed by doctors investigating the Breton village of Plozevet 10 years ago; they found that it had 50 times more mental disease than Parisians of equivalent social status, 8 times more sexual diseases, 3 times more digestive troubles & twice as many bone & muscular defects"

"That a person should, after 50 years, still feel that he has been branded as a bad pupil says something very profound about the place of schools in the lives of the French. It does not signify hate of the schools, but love-hate, for Effel deeply regrets that he never had a good teacher"

"Dutourd is a humorist for those French people who dislike the French people, & whose leader, of course, was General de Gaulle, who loved France but not the French. He resolves the paradox by worshipping the past, which allows him to hate the present"

"Every three months the French Academy publishes a list of warnings against new mistakes in the use of the French language, which are constantly creeping into common usage and threatening to ensconce themselves permanently"

"France is surprisingly the country in Europe where people spend the smallest proportion of their incomes on clothes"

"After General de Gaulle, Asterix is the best known Frenchman of modern times. The General was so unusual & so extraordinary that it is quite misleading to draw conclusions about his countrymen from his qualities & his eccentricities. However he once conceded, in an unusual fit of modesty, that there might be just one other person who could rival him - the comic-strip hero Tintin"