Often, foreign friends tell me of their bewilderment at their British colleagues – who never speak their minds. So I translate for them the English sentences they hear in the office, and their subtext. “It’s a brave decision” means “it’s madness”. For “it’s an interesting perspective”, understand again “it’s madness”. If you are told “you are the boss, after all”, hear “I will do anything to sabotage your plan”. And “let’s have lunch together one of these days” is equivalent to “I don’t want to see you again for all my life”. Another convention gives a crucial role to humour: the British use it to cut short any conversation that slips dangerously towards too much technique, boredom or emotion.
But London codes are flexible. Even after Brexit, the city remains more international than strictly British. An analogy often circulates to describe the local business world: as at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, foreign players compete on the English lawn. Londoners are lenient if you don’t master all their codes.
In 2002, when I moved from London to Paris, I discovered a more rigid straitjacket: the codes of Parisian life. When I arrive, I’m determined to master them — whether it’s saying hello at the start of any interaction or not walking into a restaurant wearing bright orange shorts and demanding dinner at 6 p.m. I even tell myself that I will be able to climb the wall of ice that the Parisians are putting up against me. After twenty years, I still plant my crampons at random on the icy wall. And, to tell the truth, I believe that most Parisians do too.
As a former royal capital, an artistic hotspot, a beacon of intellectual life, at the pinnacle of a country that quite simply invented gastronomy, Paris presents an infinite number of rules on every subject. In addition, the French are, in general, more suspicious than the British, and it is therefore necessary to prove that you belong to the group by mastering the standards in force. And, unlike London, there is still a dominant culture in Paris, basically that of the well-educated elite.
supreme knowledge
The British have been struggling to unravel the French enigma for centuries. A booklet published by the British Foreign Office in 1944, intended for soldiers deployed in France, continues to meet with success over the course of its reissues. The anonymous author (in reality the journalist Herbert David Ziman) dispenses his advice to the troops: “Better to abandon your received ideas about French women based on Montmartre anecdotes or on erotic cabaret shows. If you get the idea that a pretty French girl smiling at you actually wants to start cancaning for you or get you into bed right away, you might get yourself in trouble. , even harming Franco-British relations. »
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