PARIS LETTER:Parisians are not rude, like the stereotype, but exasperatingly polite, if you use the proper etiquette, writes RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC
SOME STEREOTYPES endure because they’re so deeply ingrained and so broad that it doesn’t take much to convince us they have a ring of truth. No matter how many extrovert Finns or nonchalant, easygoing Germans you meet, it only takes a single encounter with a dour Martti or a Jürgen with a passion for queues to elicit a knowing nod and reassure us that we were right all along.
But the more time I spend in the French capital, the more I’m convinced that the most popular stereotype about Parisians is not just a myth but a total inversion of the truth. They’re not rude at all. Actually, they’re endlessly, sometimes exasperatingly, polite.
Nearly every social exchange here, from the corner shop to the minister’s office, is underlaid by an intricate series of codes and signifiers that tell you not only what words and phrases are demanded in a given situation, but the tone, the rhythm and the timing with which each one should be delivered.
In Ireland, standing in a lift packed with strangers can make for a fairly awkward 30 seconds. Not in France, where everyone knows exactly what to say.
When someone steps in, he greets everyone with a Bonjour, and knows he is expected to say Bonne journée, and to hear it repeated back to him as he departs.
If you happen to find yourself stepping into a lift with someone for the second time in a day, the ritual plays out again, but this time a Re- bonjourmay be required. Of course there are some obnoxious people in Paris, just like in every city, but my guess is that the stereotype is mostly down to the cultural gap.
I recently saw some American tourists mutter to themselves about a brusque shopkeeper being impossibly rude. They were friendly and open, but had made the fatal mistake of not saying Bonjourwhen entering the shop and making their order sound like an instruction rather than a request.
They saw their familiarity as friendliness, but the woman behind the counter had clearly marked them down as louts.
I learned quickly after arriving a few months ago, while going through the mind-bending ordeal of opening bank accounts and phone lines that, if you want to get anything done over the phone, there’s a very specific tone you have to adopt, insistent but respectful, stressing certain syllables, watching the rhythm, raising the pitch of your voice at just the right moment. Otherwise, you’ll spend your week on hold, listening to Johnny Hallyday on a loop. Tone matters a great deal in person as well.
Bonjour, Monsieur or Merci, Madamecan suggest warmth, froideur, reserve, irony or intimacy, depending on how they're said, and choosing how to sign off a letter or an e-mail in a way that conveys the right message is worth mulling over.
Should it be Cordialement, Bien à vous, À plus, À bientôt, À très viteor simply Amitiés? Or does the occasion call for a formal and florid variant of J e vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments distingués,a virtually untranslatable sign-off that means, more or less, "I ask you kindly to accept, Sir, the assurance of my highest consideration"? But by far the most intriguing, and heavily land-mined terrain of French politeness is the second person pronoun. When to use the familiar tuover the formal vous?
Generally, most strangers and all work-related acquaintances require vous, but not children, other journalists or footballers, for example. Vousis a little less common than it was (a French friend jokes that you can now use tu to anyone wearing jeans) and most of the time you can intuit the best form of address, but it can sometimes be a tricky call, and not just for foreigners.
When Nicolas Sarkozy became president three years ago, he raised eyebrows when he departed from convention and began addressing his ministers by the familiar tu, and some of them, including prime minister François Fillon, still can't bring themselves to follow suit.
In English, there’s a shortage of linguistic tools to signify to a colleague, say, that he or she has become a friend. In French, it’s fairly easy to know where you stand, most of the time.
During a conversation with my landlady a few weeks after I arrived, I was so absorbed in the topic to notice that, out of nowhere, she suddenly adopted the familiar tufor the first time. By the time I noticed, I'd already spoken a few more sentences, still using the formal vous.
Without blinking, she immediately reverted to vous, probably presuming that her Irish tenant felt our relationship wasn't yet ready to progress to such intimate heights.