The banks of the Saône in perspective, a pink beret on her head, and the phone turned to selfie mode in order to tell thousands of subscribers the details of her trip to Lyon… Apparently, the video shot on January 5 by Angela , an American TikToker from San Francisco, resembles hundreds of other sequences published daily on social networks by influencers specializing in tourism, eager to share their experiences in real time with their community. But the young woman’s speech, already viewed by more than 7.3 million users on TikTok, denotes. With tears in her eyes, she describes her few days spent in Lyon as a “great moment of isolation”, before talking about the difficulty of traveling alone in France, particularly for foreigners who do not speak French. “People seem very indifferent,” she laments, comparing her trip to other experiences in Germany or Italy. “Here, the locals make you feel bad for not knowing their culture and their language. I’ve been here for five or six days, and I haven’t met anyone,” she laments. The tourist even goes so far as to say “[se] feel stupid for having spent money” in France and for having wanted to immerse yourself in the local culture – in particular by equipping yourself with your famous pink beret, which seems to have come out of an episode ofEmily in Paris.
Angela’s complaints went viral on the Internet, generating tens of thousands of comments about the lack of hospitality and the vanity of the French. To the point that the local tourist office offered the young American, via the Actu Lyon website, a new visit to the City of Lights, in order to “(re)discover its treasures”. If the situation may make you smile, it nevertheless illustrates a cliché that sticks to the French, and which could, a few months before the Paris Olympic Games, slightly dampen the optimism of the thousands of tourists expected in the territory. “The stereotype of the pretentious, vain Frenchman, who would not make the effort to approach others and would not mix, does not date from this video. It is a cliché that we have found since the 17th century! ” laughs Marie Treps, linguist and semiologist, author of the work Oh dear, these French people! From worst to best, how the world talks about us (La Librairie Vuibert, 2015).
“Feeling of pretension and omnipotence”
This heritage can be explained in particular by the spread of the French language over the centuries. Widely practiced by part of Europe in the 17th century, “[le français] is then considered, in the most elitist circles, as the most appropriate language for living room discussions and refined conversations”, recalls Marie Treps. At the same time, French fashion, expected and watched every year – particularly in Northern Europe -, takes many French terms and expressions on the road, taken up in the most cultured circles. “Until the beginning of the 20th century, there was both a real attraction for French manners and vocabulary and a certain mockery of preciousness of the French, of their excessive politeness expressions, which could be tinged with a slight contempt, even a feeling of hypocrisy and superiority”, she describes. These clichés are also permeated in certain expressions still used abroad – the Dutch readily speak of “French compliments” to describe sycophantic comments, the Danes refer to “French visits” to describe short, unannounced visits, the Turks use a derivative of “my dear” to designate people perceived as hypocrites, while, in Naples, a slightly snobbish boy will be called a “francioso”.
“We must not forget that the Napoleonic campaigns in Northern and Eastern Europe and then the use of the language in the various French colonies also left traces of French all over the world,” adds the linguist. In fact, during the 19th century, a certain number of French people became accustomed to being understood everywhere and by everyone: “For a long time, the French did not make the effort to speak anything other than their language maternal, leaving a feeling of pretension and omnipotence behind them. Even if this is no longer necessarily true today, this cliché has had a lasting impact on foreign tourists”, concludes the semiologist.
“Industrialized and standardized” tourism
To this linguistic heritage are added, according to the sociologist and ethnologist specializing in tourism Jean-Didier Urbain, prejudices “as old as time”, crystallized by historical facts or media phenomena. “In the 19th century, the French were, for example, with the English, involved in mass tourism in the Orient and the Mediterranean, in particular. An image then spread of the conquering, invading French, which is felt everywhere at home and expects the foreigner to adapt completely to his customs”, explains the author of Forbidden planet (Ed. de l’Aube, 2023). A cliché that certain films, books and travel stories have continued to convey, while widely communicating the delicacy, romanticism, or even the supposed aestheticism of the French. “The traveler is preceded by the ghost of reputation, the images which have been broadcast to him predetermine what he expects to experience. And this can lead him to a certain frustration in his relationship to what he expected of the traveler. ‘other’, describes Jean-Didier Urbain.
Overtourism and the development of urban tourism have not helped the feeling of “rejection” experienced by certain travelers in France. “When a place becomes very busy, especially if it is a very dense city, there is an inversion that takes place in the host between the expectation of the visitor and the fact that we fear “You will not be welcomed in the same way in a city already overwhelmed by tourism and in the heart of rural Burgundy”, underlines Jean-Didier Urbain. Following the same logic, the sociologist also believes that “hospitality develops in proportion to the interest in welcoming others”, directly linking it to a certain commercial practice. “Countries like Italy, Malta or Greece, extremely aware of their dependence on tourism, do not provide the same welcome to foreign travelers as France,” he argues.
Asked about the virality of Angela’s famous video, the researcher denounces the perverse effect of globalization on the travel experience. “Everyone now expects us to adapt to them, to their culture, their language and their codes. And that’s surely where the problem lies,” he explains. Evoking the “non-places” theorized by sociologist Marc Augé – these interchangeable spaces, such as means of transport, large hotel or restaurant chains, within which human beings remain anonymous -, he regrets “industrialized” tourism and that travelers “increasingly expect to find what they leave behind as soon as they arrive in a foreign country.” “This promotes a real standardization of travel. And this is also how the cliché of the lack of openness of the French can be explained: a disappointed expectation on the part of those who expected a trip without roughness, without contrasts, without any adaptation to the local culture.”
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