Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow is an incredibly well researched piece about how the French work, behave, and live. The history, French system, and future are written very well and reads very much like a textbook. It's informing, gives insights into many aspects of the French (history, cultural practices, language, health, etc.), and can open your eyes into the French culture as a whole.

Personally, I couldn't connect with this book well. I wasn't engaged and got bored easily. It's the kind of book I'd need a professor to break down and explain. Perhaps in audiobook form, I might have been more engaged. Regardless, I can tell the research was well down and it is written well. It just didn't connect to me personally.

One star out of five. The book just isn't for me, hence the one star. For how well it's written, someone else will thoroughly enjoy it! ( )

A comprehensive book about France from a different perspective, that of 2 Canadians, one from Quebec and one from Ontario. Very interesting read from non-US authors whose research is thorough and accessibly presented. That said, this book will appeal more to the Francophile who wants to dig deeply into the roots of French society, politics and culture, and who is not looking for travel logs, house-restoration tales, or the woes of English-language speakers in France. Densely populated with statistics and inside information, the book may not be finished by those who are looking for a 'lighter' read. But a good addition to the library of books about France. ( )

This looks from the cover and blurb like yet another of those handy guides to expat life written by some self-declared expert who has parachuted into Paris/the Dordogne for a few months, but it turns out to be something rather more ambitious: the bilingual Canadian couple Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow are both serious journalists who set themselves the task — with the help of a handy grant from an international foundation — of working out how the French state and its economy really work in practice, and they have tried to condense the results of that investigation into a format that would make sense to a North American reader. Their project clearly involved a lot of discussions on and off the record with influential people in France, as well as plenty of burrowing in libraries and databases, but the result is lively and informative.

Admittedly, it's twenty years old now, so probably well past its use-by date. Also, I'm not a North American reader, and there were only a few parts of the book where I really felt I was learning something new about France — I found the chapter about the inner workings of the elite civil service college ENA very interesting, for example, but I didn't really need a rehash of De Gaulle, World War II and Algeria. Or half a chapter on Minitel, for that matter! And what Nadeau and Barlow say about the French role in the EEC and EU seems too superficial to be of any use to anyone.

Obviously you can't cover the whole of French life in one small paperback: being mostly interested in economic and constitutional matters, they don't find any time for the role of art and design in France, and what they say about food is also oddly narrow — there's quite a bit about the importance of local food production and terroir, but next to nothing about the way the French buy and consume food.

I was amused by the way they were both so shocked by the French insistence that every encounter, however superficial, must start with a greeting: it never occurred to me that that might be strange to a North American. Don't they say "bonjour" in Quebec?

Better than it looks, but out of date. ( )

A good overall read on French history, culture, and language by two French Canadians. This is mainly for people who are planning a visit but don't really speak the language or aren't too familiar with the country, but want to learn a little more than what's in the usual guide books to make sure you understand the basics and don't make too many faux pas. ( )

Wide-ranging look at all aspects of modern French life. Most interesting is how the state has come to dominate and be accepted as the dominator. Also, how much Napoleon did to lay the foundations, shaky through most of the 19th and half of the 20th centuries, ready for de Gaulle to complete the structure after WW2. These French generals knew a lot more than bang-bang shoot-shoot. The authors talk of the French lack of interest in overseas (evident in their relative low numbers as international tourists), but this does not accord with their desperate rearguard fights to hold onto Indochina and Algeria, nor with Louis XIV's and Napoleon's costly attempts to dominate Europe. Seems to me the French have been just as expansionist as the Brits, just didn't have the same eagerness for sea battles and banking.

Tricky to grasp, but important, is how the Revolution eliminated many social structures with emphasis on égalité. Result: you are defined as a citizen of the French state with all that demands and provides. Ethnicity, religion and the rest are cleared away. This has created special difficulties for the Muslim population, which is both large and unassimilated, clinging on to a separate identity. The book is now more than a decade old but this accounts much for current difficulties.

A chatty conversational style makes for easy reading in what is really quite a complex and fact-filled analysis. A few facts inevitably miss the mark: e.g. Novartis is a Swiss company, not french at all, Tarot is not a card game. ( )