Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong
Author Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoît Nadeau
Publication date
April 2003
ISBN 1-4022-0045-5

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks, 2003) is the first book from the writer-journalist team Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau.

Contents

Conception

The idea for the book came from the couple’s two-year stay in Paris from 1999 to 2001. In 1999, Jean-Benoît Nadeau received a grant from the Institute of Current World Affairs to study the French. The topic of study was: Why the French resist globalization. Two weeks after arriving in France the authors realized that the French were not resisting globalization at all. Jean-Benoît Nadeau wrote long reports to the foundation of his observations about France. Julie Barlow wrote a number of reports for the same institute. [1]

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong answers the question that the authors struggled with during their two years in France: why do the French get so much flak for resisting globalization when they aren’t resisting it any more than other countries, including the United States? [1]

The book

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong is divided into three parts.

Part 1, Spirit, has eight chapters that explain the main features of the French mindset, including history and geography, their ideas about privacy, their culture of grandeur and eloquence and extremism and the impact of major events like World War II and French decolonization.

Part 2, Structure, explains how the French created political and social structures in accordance with their values, but also to correct some obvious problems in their society. The first chapter explains how the French created a politically balanced democracy by putting in place a president "monarch" who enjoys more power than heads of state in any modern democracy. The other 10 chapters explain the value the French place on equality and the principle of assimilation, and how they have struggled to create a unified French national identity from the hodge-podge of extremely diverse cultures.

Part 3, Change, explains in four chapters how France is evolving in terms of its worldview, demography and political institutions, both because of internal forces and the influence of the European Union.

Publication

The book was published in April 2003, in the middle of the Iraq War. The French had refused to endorse the US invasion of Iraq, which happened without UN's approval, triggering an intense wave of anti-French sentiment, which culminated in the call to rebrand French fries, "freedom fries." [2]

The British edition was published by Robson Books in April 2004 during the centennial of the Entente Cordiale between France and the United Kingdom and the book appeared in Dutch at the same time. In 2004, Jean-Benoît Nadeau adapted and updated the book before translating it. The French edition was published by Seuil with the title Pas si fous, ces Français! Two Mandarin editions appeared in 2004 and 2005, one in simplified, and the other in traditional Mandarin.

Trivia

The title for the book, chosen in 2001, was inspired by Cole Porter’s title song for his musical Fifty Million Frenchmen . It is a good summary of the authors’ intent of explaining the French in their own terms. [1]

The first print (2000 copies) of the American edition of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong features an upside down French flag with the red color near the flagpole. This mistake was corrected in the subsequent prints, but copies of the book with the upside-down flag still circulate. [1]

Other books

Jean-Benoît Nadeau also wrote about their first two-year stay in Paris in a separate humorous travelogue titled Les Français aussi ont un accent (The French Also Have an Accent), published by French publisher Payot. [3]

In 2013–2014, the authors spent a year in France researching a new book on the French, The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed (St. Martin's Press, 2016). This new book is not an update of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, but it uses a similar approach to analyze and describe the way the French talk – about small things and big issues, themselves and the world around them, including their own taboos. [4]

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong inspired the authors' second book, The Story of French, (St. Martin’s Press, Knopf Canada and Anova-Robson Books, 2006), a history of French language as it's spoken across the planet. [5] There are two versions of the book in French, one published in Quebec in 2007 with the title La Grande Aventure de la langue française. In 2011, Jean-Benoît Nadeau completely rewrote and adapted the original English version for a French edition published in Paris, Le français, quelle histoire! (Télémaque and Le Livre de Poche).

In 2013, the couple also published The Story of Spanish (St. Martin's Press), which was inspired by The Story of French. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">French language</span> Romance language from France

French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to the French colonial empire, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day</span> Holiday celebrated on June 24

Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, also known in English as St John the Baptist Day, is a holiday celebrated on June 24 in the Canadian province of Quebec. It was brought to Canada by French settlers celebrating the traditional feast day of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist. It was declared a public holiday in Quebec in 1925, with publicly financed events organized province-wide by a Comité organisateur de la fête nationale du Québec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney</span> French philosopher and politician

Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais, comte de Volney (1757–1820), was a French philosopher, historian, orientalist and politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Péguy</span> French poet, essayist, and editor (1873–1914)

Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Front (French Resistance)</span>

The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the resistance organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.

<i>Atlantida</i> (novel) 1919 novel by Pierre Benoit

Atlantida is a fantasy novel by French writer Pierre Benoit, published in February 1919. It was translated into English in 1920 as Atlantida. L'Atlantide was Benoit's second novel, following Koenigsmark, and it won the Grand Prize of the French Academy. The English translation of Atlantida was first published in the United States as a serial in Adventure magazine.

<i>50,000,000 Elvis Fans Cant Be Wrong: Elvis Gold Records, Volume 2</i> 1959 greatest hits album by Elvis Presley

50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong: Elvis' Gold Records, Volume 2 is the fourth compilation album by American singer and musician Elvis Presley, issued by RCA Victor in November 1959. It is a compilation of hit singles released in 1958 and 1959 by Presley, from recording sessions going back as far as February 1957.

Bruce Benderson is an American author, born to parents of Russian Jewish descent, who lives in New York. He attended William Nottingham High School (1964) in Syracuse, New York and then Binghamton University (1969). He is today a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator, widely published in France, less so in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roman Catholic Diocese of La Rochelle and Saintes</span> Catholic diocese in France

The Diocese of La Rochelle and Saintes is a Latin Church diocese of the Catholic Church in France. The diocese comprises the département of Charente-Maritime and the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. The bishop is a suffragan of the Archbishop of Poitiers. The episcopal seat is in La Rochelle Cathedral. Saintes Cathedral is a co-cathedral.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frédéric Lepage</span>

Frédéric Lepage is a French author, theater and screenplay writer, and producer of several hundreds programs and documentaries.

<i>Things: A Story of the Sixties</i> Novel by Georges Perec

Things: A Story of the Sixties is a 1965 novel by Georges Perec, his first.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julie Barlow</span> Canadian journalist, author and conference speaker

Julie Barlow is a Canadian journalist, author and conference speaker who writes and publishes both in English and French and is based in Montreal, Quebec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Benoît Nadeau</span>

Jean-Benoît Nadeau is a Canadian author, journalist, and lecturer, and a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Cottret</span> French historian (1951–2020)

Bernard Cottret was a French historian and literary scholar.

<i>The Story of Spanish</i> 2013 book by Jean-Benoît Nadeau

The Story of Spanish is a non-fiction book written by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow that charts the origins of the Spanish language. The 496-page book published by St. Martin’s Press, explains how the Spanish language evolved from a tongue spoken by a remote tribe of farmers in northern Spain to become one of the world’s most spoken languages.

Kontradans or the French-Haitian Contredanse, is creolized dance music formed in the 18th century in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) that evolved from the English contra dance, or, which eventually spread throughout the Caribbean, Louisiana, Europe and the rest of the New World from the Creoles of Saint-Domingue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cannabis in France</span>

Cannabis in France is illegal for personal use, but remains one of the most popular illegal drugs. Limited types of cannabis-derived products are permitted for medical uses.

Jean Dard was a French teacher in Saint-Louis, Senegal who, in 1817, opened the first French-language school in Africa. He also compiled the first French-Wolof dictionary and grammar (1846).

<i>2084: The End of the World</i> 2015 novel by Boualem Sansal

2084: The End of the World is a 2015 novel by Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, published by Éditions Gallimard on 20 August 2015. A dystopian novel, 2084 was inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four and is set in an Islamist totalitarian world in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It was jointly awarded, with Les Prépondérants by Hédi Kaddour, the 2015 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. It was also named the best book of the year by the magazine Lire.

<i>Story of a Secret State</i> 1944 nonfiction book

Story of a Secret State is a 1944 book by Polish resistance Home Army courier Jan Karski. First published in the United States in 1944, it narrates Karski's experiences with the Polish Secret State), and it is also one of the first book accounts of the German occupation of Poland, including the Holocaust in Poland.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Nadeau, Jean-Benoît; Barlow, Julie (2003). Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong . Naperville: Sourcebooks. p. vii-xv. ISBN   1-4022-0045-5.
  2. ↑ Nadeau, Jean-Benoît (2007). Écrire pour vivre. Montréal: Éditions Québec Amérique. pp.  95. ISBN   978-2-7644-0541-3.
  3. ↑ Nadeau, Jean-Benoît (2002). Les Français aussi ont un accent'. Payot. ISBN   222889561X.
  4. ↑ "The Bonjour Effect". Nadeau & Barlow.
  5. ↑ Nadeau, Jean-Benoît; Barlow, Julie (2008). The Story of French. St. Martin's Press. p. 5. ISBN   978-0-312-34184-8.
  6. ↑ Nadeau, Jean-Benoît (2014). The Story of Spanish. St. Martin's Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN   978-1-250-04904-9.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.