OPINION:
THEY EAT HORSES, DON’T THEY?: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH
By Piu Marie Eatwell
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, $26.99, 342 pages
Like family traits, national characteristics may evolve or dilute over the generations, but they never really go away. As with family DNA, national DNA is reinforced by attitudes, traditions and surroundings — nature working hand in hand with nurture. This is especially true in countries with long-standing national and linguistic unity and a strong sense of cultural identity.
Which goes a long way toward explaining some of the most admirable — as well as annoying — things about the French. Of all the major European states to emerge after the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, France was the first to become a large, strongly centralized, homogenous nation. By the time Louis XIV started calling himself the “Sun King,” France actually held sway over the European solar system. A relatively backward Spain, corrupted as much as it had been temporarily enriched by the gold and silver of its American colonies, had begun to sink into a long, decadent sleep from which it would not awaken until the late 20th century. Germany, despite its common language and culture, was a patchwork quilt of more than 300 squabbling principalities, not to be unified until the 1870s, as a fragmented Italy was in the 1860s.
Even those mighty offshore empire builders, the British, were divided along English, Scots, Irish and, to a lesser extent, Welsh lines. As for the vast Hapsburg domains, while impressive on paper, they were an uneasy conglomerate of hereditary territories with drastically different populations — Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Transylvanians, Italians and southern Slavs — sharing little in common but the same ruling family.
Small wonder then that the most vivid European stereotype was and remains the Frenchman, supremely smug if not downright arrogant in his hereditary sense of self and nationality. After all, under Louis XIV — and later Napoleon — the French had been a “master race” of sorts, the sole continental superpower that could only be checked when the rest of Europe united against them. Even the word “chauvinism” was inspired by an absurdly overpatriotic character named Nicolas Chauvin in a 19th century French play.
In “They Eat Horses, Don’t They?” ex-pat English writer Piu Marie Eatwell (a great last name for a Francophile Brit), sets out to be expose popular myths and stereotypes about the French. Up to a point she does, with abundant wit and good humor along the way. Too often, however, she sets up a straw man (for example, that there is no fast food in France), knocks it down with a fact or factoid (McDonald’s outlets have sprung up like mushrooms throughout France) and declares victory, before acknowledging that the French still take their food more seriously than most other people.
It’s all very well — and good for a laugh — to cite the familiar “Simpsons” quote describing the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” as yet another bad rap for France, but the fact is that the French really do consume more than twice as much cheese per capita as the Brits and nearly twice as much as we Americans. In her defense, Ms. Eatwell quotes Charles de Gaulle, who once asked despairingly, “How can one be expected to govern a country with 246 different cheeses?” De Gaulle, she adds, actually “underestimated quite badly the number of cheeses produced in France. The real total is closer to 1,000.”
Often the alleged misconceptions Ms. Eatwell cites, be they culinary, political or hygienic, are more generational than national: Modern plumbing is finally taking hold in France, younger people are less likely to take wine with every meal, horse meat is not as popular as it once was, and the French aren’t really “surrender monkeys,” having twice militarily dominated Europe before the disastrous end of the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent debacles of the Franco-Prussian War, the Maginot Line and colonial defeat in Indochina and North Africa. To win some and lose some is the inevitable fate of continental land powers in Europe. Only the British Isles — and, of course, we Anglo-Saxon “cousins” across the Atlantic — have avoided foreign conquest and occupation in modern times.
What really comes through in sifting Ms. Eatwell’s collection of highly amusing data is that the cultural homogenization that began after World War II and accelerated thanks to the Internet and related technical innovations, is making all of us a little less like ourselves and a little more like everyone else. As someone who has dined on horse steak at the Harvard Faculty Club and eaten Quarter Pounders in a Parisian McDonald’s, I’m not sure that this particular type of change really amounts to progress. To borrow a phrase from the French, “Vive la difference!” — or what’s left of it.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.