The French Condition

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The French are a morose people, and I'm not the only one to make this assessment. Roger Cohen recently wrote about France's Glorious Malaise in the New York Times. Cohen thinks that the French temperament reflects a fatalistic realism. I don't think it's necessary to get quite so philosophical to explain the French condition. They simply haven't mastered some of life's basic routines.

The problem starts with a horrible night’s sleep. I’ve been to France multiple times, slept in many hotels and few French homes, and I’ve yet to find a comfortable bed. In France, any rectangular object with a sheet qualifies as a mattress. I'm staying in a Paris apartment right now where my bed is a pair of wooden shipping pallets.

For the tired and sore, a good cup of coffee and a croissant can compensate for a terrible night’s sleep. The French don’t make bad coffee, they just serve small portions in tiny cups and call it espresso. It delivers a strong caffeine dose but it's not very filling. By the time they’ve consumed enough coffee to equal just one Starbuck’s Venti Caffe Americano, they’ve had entirely too much caffeine. It makes them hyper and agitated, a bad combination that might account for their lightning reflexes and universal ability to honk their car horns the moment a traffic light turns green. 

The excessive caffeine consumption is aggravated by a croissant shortage. There's no mention of this problem in the local press. Kellie and I discovered it when the hotels we stayed at offered continental breakfast buffets with unlimited fruit, coffee, yogurt, meats, bread and anything else you wanted–except for croissants. These are strictly rationed, one per person. Waiters deliver the croissants to your table and record your room number to ensure no one exceeds their allotment. Croissant rationing is the only act known that will make the French fight. (Here's a little known historical footnote: prior to invading France during World War Two, the Germans flooded the country with counterfeit croissants to quell the French fighting spirt.)

A hearty bacon and egg breakfast might still resurrect the start of an otherwise dismal day for the French, provided, of course, that they could find eggs on a French breakfast menu. They can't. What they can find is 537 varieties of cheese. And guess what’s for lunch? More cheese. Then, for dinner, they take all the leftover cheese that wasn’t eaten earlier in day, melt it in a pot, serve it with basket of stale bread scraps and call it fondue. All that cheese tends to make the French gassy and irritable. Passing gas is normally quite enjoyable but the French have even managed to take the fun out of farting. If they try to avoid cheese and eat something comforting like pizza, they'll discover where all those missing breakfast eggs went–they use them as pizza toppings. Pizza is the one food you should be able to order without ever having to say sans oeuf. 

Tired, over-caffeinated and flatulent, it’s not surprising that the French are sullen and gruff. In an attempt to shorten the misery, they smoke like the industrial revolution. (I think smoking is mandatory in France after age twelve.) Given how long it takes to get medical care, most French people die of lung cancer long before they ever see a doctor, saving the government tons of money and allowing it to fund other vital public services, like men on scooters armed with vacuums to suck dog excrement off sidewalks.
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