The French do not wear berets, and others things I have learned about French culture (2024)

“Maybe a raccoon stole your contact lenses,” said Gabrielle. She manages the apartment where I have been living in Montmartre.

A ziploc bag of my daily wear contact lenses had disappeared from the bathroom and she’d come over to help me look for them. We searched everywhere, including inside the refrigerator and under the bed. After scouring the apartment for 20 minutes, Gabrielle blamed the raccoons. The pop culture reference to an episode of Friends coming from someone who’d never lived in the United States surprised me, so I invited her to lunch to learn more. Over a plate of garlicky, buttery escargots, Gabrielle explained that she has been watching American television and movies and reading American books and newspapers since she was a kid.

“Why do you love America so much?” I asked.

Gabrielle said that in France, the social class lines are almost impossible to break through. Whatever class you are born into determines where you end up. According to her, if your family were working class, you will be working class. If your father was a baker, you will be a baker. When you do choose a different career, it will likely be in the same class of profession. Once chosen, you can never veer far from that path. Reinventing yourself is not an option. In America, I’ve made multiple career shifts since graduating from Law School and practicing law for a few miserable years. I’ve invented my “job” since then, a job that has never fit neatly into any kind of professional box. Gabrielle says radical career shifts are virtually impossible in France.

Gabrielle believes that the anti-immigration rhetoric in France is much worse than in the U.S. She visited New York City once and saw a Muslim man worshipping in a public park and she saw many Muslim women wearing scarves on their heads, which is discouraged in France. Gabrielle complained about a potential presidential candidate named Éric Zemmour who has risen rapidly in the polls recently by saying things like, “Muslims are lazy terrorists who are dependent on handouts from the government.” Zemmour is the son of Jewish Algerian immigrants who decries the decline of France, which he blames on the rejection of traditional and Christian values and what he describes as reverse colonization by people from former French colonies. I am not so sure that Zemmour’s rhetoric differs much from things I hear American politicians and media personalities saying.

Zemmour’s views illustrate another interesting thing about French culture: the belief in absolute assimilation and conformity to an ideal of what it means to be French. French is the official language and its use is policed by the Académie Française. The French sniff at those who stand out and assert their individuality, according to Gabrielle. She admired American individualism. I called myself the Chief Creative Contrarian when I started an arts group called The Pink Line Project years ago. Straying too far away from normative thinking confused people, though, even in America. I had to learn how to balance my heretical views with a certain amount of conformity if I wanted to succeed financially. “The minute you become an iconoclast, the system shuts you down,” says my friend Kapil. The belief in American individualism persists, though, and attracts people from around the world.

“Is there anything you dislike about America?” I asked.

She didn’t hesitate to admit two things: the culture of violence and a healthcare system that could bankrupt an average person with one diagnosis. American ex-pats I have met here usually point to those same two things as reasons why they left their homeland. Even as a visiting foreigner, if I hurt myself or get sick in France, seeking care won’t impoverish me. Years ago while visiting Berlin, where the healthcare is similarly socialized, my ex crashed on his bicycle. A few months later, we howled in astonishment when we received a bill for the emergency room visit that amounted to less than 50 euros.

I told Gabrielle that one of the things I loved most about France was the reverence for conversations. I presented this piece of observed evidence: I never saw people with laptops at cafés, unless they were American-style, hipster-y cafés. After visiting numerous adorable cafés in my neighborhood looking for a place where I felt comfortable sitting for hours with my laptop, I finally discovered the Tabac Café. Tourists stop there, too, on the way up the hill to Sacré-Cœur. In the mornings, though, locals with laptops and journals populate the tiny shop.

Unlike traditional French cafés, they offer cappuccino à l’avoine (oat milk!), which satisfies my recently discovered intolerance for lactose (which hasn’t prevented me from eating all the cheese). The barista wears a vest and sports a thick, trimmed mustache that reminds me of 1920’s Paris and reminds me of baristas in coffee shops in Bentonville, Zagreb, Saigon, and every coffee shop I have ever gravitated toward anywhere in the world.

In my quest to find out what it means to be American, these coffee shops have revealed another culture to me called cosmopolitanism, which is not limited by geographic borders or nationalism. My new favorite philosopher, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, defines cosmopolitan like this:

“I think the key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is that you approach the world in the spirit of assuming you can learn from the world. Conversation, which is one of my metaphors in the book, conversation is only worth doing if you’re listening as well as talking. So I think it does require a kind of cultural and intellectual humility and tolerance, absolutely, though again, tolerance has to have its limits. We can’t tolerate people who are deeply inhumane, who are cruel. We obviously can’t tolerate genocide and so on, but we, I think cosmopolitans are gonna be much more broadly tolerant than anti-cosmopolitan or un-cosmopolitan people.”

Though the word cosmopolitan has commonly signified an elitism that disturbs me, Appiah’s ivory tower interpretation appeals.

As Gabrielle and I walked back toward the apartment, she pointed out numerous people staring into their laptops at café tables lining the busy street.

“You see what you want to see,” she said with a chuckle.

I asked her if any French women wore berets, and she responded with a definitive and emphatic, “Non!”

Tourist shops sell berets in a variety of colors for as little as three euros each, or four for ten euros. Though I have yet to see a French person wearing a beret, I walked by a shop window in the residential 8th arrondissem*nt displaying presumably authentic ones for 26 euros and I have seen pictures of women wearing berets on Parisian street-style Instagram accounts. So far, the only people I see sporting the woolen caps IRL look like groups of Instagram-ready young women. One blogger wrote, if you wear a beret in Paris, you will give “the impression that you lack sartorial savoire-faire.” Wearing the beret back home could be a fashion statement, though, or maybe even signal an admiration for the best parts of French culture.