From Riviera Reporter issue 94

SEEMING IN THE KNOW…

Colette Brunton on a couple of books designed to help you appear up on colloquial French and on French history. 

“If you had been living in France at the end of the last decade you would have encountered many words and expressions on radio, television and in the newspapers which were not part of the French scene at all in 1970, in 1980 or even in 1990.” This is the opening paragraph of Insider’s French: Beyond the Dictionary (University of Chicago Press, U.S. and U.K.), a compilation by Eleanor and Michel Levieux which attempts to offer, through language, “an accurate snapshot of the France of today.” A lot of people, leafing through it, will realise how far the French they learned at school is out of date.

The aim of their listing of words and expressions, heavily and usefully cross-referenced, is to introduce the reader to everyday language as used in the media and educated conversation. So, to take a few examples, they explain Bercy and BCBG (well glossed as “a cross between preppy and yuppy”), langue de bois and LICRA, SDF and Sidi Brahim. Even as a native speaker (though with many years of expatriation behind me) I learned a few things. La monétique was a new one on me—it means all forms of money other than notes and coins. Some of their items struck me as rather odd and I’ve hardly ever heard them used: infotélé, for example, for the news and current affairs output of television; libellule (“dragon-fly”) for a helicopter, the equivalent of “chopper” in English; and néfaste food—the common term for McDo fare, is, surely la mal bouffe.

A compilation like this gets dated rather quickly. No RTT, for example, and nothing from the pervasive world of télé-réalité although we are told about Hélène et les garçons (who they?, many French would ask). The carte vermeil—which allows price reductions to oldies—no longer exists (it’s now the carte senior). But enough of nit-picking. This is an invaluable aid for those having to understand and to use French, enabling them to rap out the idiomatic equivalents of anything from “insider trading” to “bungee jumping.” And they’ll also learn to distinguish between une technopole and un technopôle. As I did.

French is littered with historical references from Bérézina to the Loi Falloux, from “Paris is worth a mass” to… le procès Papon. The natives are gratified when foreigners pick up on these. Few of them, though, have time to read large chunks of serious history. They might glance, however, at Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories: France (Scholastic, U.K.). Deary, I learned from a recent newspaper profile, has become a millionaire writing books of this kind which offer a sort of comic-strip view of their subjects with heavy stress on the more gruesome aspects of the past. The books are primarily intended for children and, given his enthusiastic blood and guts approach, Deary obviously accepts that view of child psychology which sees kids as having naturally and normally sadistic imaginations.

But this little book is worth looking through if you want to pick up a basic sense of how France has happened. After Joan of Arc, “Suddenly the French people were fighting for a new idea—that they were not just people of Paris, or Bordeaux or Normandy but the idea they were French.” The end of Napoleon III and its sequel is briefly but clearly summed up: “He gets into a war with Germany (the Franco-Prussian war) and loses it. He is forced to pack his bags (and crown) and go. The people of Paris rise up against their new republican government. They are called communards and they are massacred by the army.” Lots of incidental oddities: Louis XIV’s Versailles housed 5000 servants but had only two loos (guests brought their own pots) while the invention of sliced bread is ascribed to Louis XVI’s guards during his imprisonment in 1792 (actually, this story is quite convincing). So read Deary and dazzle your friends—and impress the French—with your learning.

© Collete Brunton 

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