Word: frenchness
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...guys. And when Marion hysterically denounces one of them in a crowded restaurant, their bleak idyll comes to a crisis. It does not help that visiting Jim Morrison's grave in Pere Lachaise is a turn-off for him (he's more of a Val Kilmer fan) or that French condoms are too small...
...France, identity is not the sensitive subject that it is in the United States. The delicate balancing of competing identities that occupies so many Americans does not take place here; one does not speak of being African- or Asian-French, for example. If one is French, one is just that, end of story. Unlike at Harvard, where recognizing the diversity of our peers is strictly de rigeur, the French demand that their fellows keep their origins to themselves. As one legislator rhetorically asked on the floor of the French senate in 2004, “must we always call attention...
...difference is not one of conviction but, rather, of confidence. French politicians believe they can live up to their own ideal—an orthodox rendering of republican neutrality and secularity. They are confident in their ability to scrub the markers of religious affiliation from the espace public without jeopardizing religious freedom in the private sphere. Americans, by contrast...
...There is certainly no shortage of possible explanations for the differences in American and French social policy. But what lurks behind the social science is a basic uneasiness on the American side of the pond about forcing individuals into any sort of public conformity. In a country where a single religion, Christianity, is overwhelmingly dominant, and where governments dabble in “faith-based initiatives” to make political hay, it’s understandable that one would recoil at policies meant to subdue difference. What would become of the United States, after all, if the apparatus...
...that just about everyone has had more than once: you walk into a room or find yourself in a conversation, and suddenly you have the overwhelming sense--even though you know it's impossible--that you've been here before. Psychologists call it dj vu--"already seen," in French--but despite the phenomenon's universal familiarity, no one has offered a convincing explanation for why it happens...