Money is a Very French Taboo

If you really want to offend a French man, don’t ask him if you can see his wife naked—you may end up in one of Paris’ seedy swing­ing clubs. Instead, just ask him how much money he makes. That would cer­tainly stop the con­ser­va­tion dead.

Each soci­ety has a taboo. I could go on and on about North Amer­i­cans and their obses­sions for breasts: from the Janet Jack­son Super Bowl “boob scan­dal” to the pub­lic breast­feed­ing con­tro­versy, nip­ples and cleav­age def­i­nitely draw way more atten­tion on this side of the Atlantic Ocean than it does in Europe. On the other side, the French are almost patho­log­i­cally shy with money. Go figure.

French like to pre­tend money and every­thing around it just doesn’t exist. Some peo­ple are very well off and some peo­ple aren’t—to French, it is some­what of an axiom. Some are born in rich fam­i­lies, inher­ited a for­tune or mar­ried into money (which is slightly vul­gar). At the other end of the spec­trum, some earn the min­i­mum wage and strug­gle to make ends meet. Ends of a story as old as time… what’s going to change it anyway?

In France, if you are rich, you do not show it. Peo­ple already know you are rich: money talks for itself. For instance, the real bour­geois live in Paris’ posh­est neigh­bour­hoods. In fact, their apart­ment takes the whole floor or even bet­ter, or they own an his­toric pri­vate man­sion that has been in the fam­ily for gen­er­a­tions. The “de,” the par­ti­cle indi­cat­ing you belong to a noble fam­ily, is like an insur­ance against any eco­nomic strug­gle. Not that it is always true: plenty of “noble” fam­i­lies are far from being wealthy these days. Yet, they keep on pre­tend­ing. Money is not just cash in the bank, it’s a sta­tus, a way of liv­ing and behav­ing, of car­ry­ing on the “rich genes.”

Mak­ing money is not cool. French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy’s slo­gan dur­ing the elec­tions, “work more to earn more” was received with a lot of crit­i­cism. In fact, regard­less of whether they sup­port him polit­i­cally or not, a lot of French have issues with the way the Pres­i­dent is osten­si­bly dis­play­ing Rolex watches and expen­sive clothes and par­ty­ing on his mil­lion­aire friends’ pri­vate yachts. This is seen as ter­ri­bly vul­gar. As said above, when you have money, you just don’t show it. This is just… Amer­i­can. And the French don’t really believe in the “Amer­i­can Dream”—his­tory taught them that for­tunes are more often inher­ited than made. Besides, the French tend to value their qual­ity of life over mate­r­ial things. That can explain why so many peo­ple are against open­ing stores on Sun­days—yes work­ing on Sun­day is ille­gal in France. Sure, giv­ing busi­nesses the right to open on Sun­days may help the econ­omy but a lot of French fear that some employ­ees will be forced to work against their will. And ulti­mately, free time and leisure mat­ter more than money.

The money ques­tion some­times reaches absurd lev­els of taboo. Salary, for instance. When I was a stu­dent, I used to work with a staffing agency doing odd jobs. We would always be paid around the hourly min­i­mum wage. The key word being “around”-some places paid us exactly €8, oth­ers would fork out €8.25, €8.45 even. When you are a poor stu­dent, it makes a dif­fer­ence, as ridicu­lous as it seems. But we would never know how much we would be paid until after the job was com­pleted when receiv­ing the pay slip by mail.

One day, I got tired of it. I had the choice between two tem­po­rary jobs, so I called the staffing agency and asked what would be the hourly salary for each, to help me make a deci­sion. Obvi­ously, I’d pick the better-paid one. My inter­locu­tor shrieked, out­raged: “But we can’t tell you that! If we were to dis­close employ­ees their hourly rate before they com­pleted the job, nobody would ever accept the lowest-paid one!” Irrefutable logic—what could I say?

Things are very dif­fer­ent in Canada. While peo­ple don’t obsess with money, it is per­fectly accept­able to talk about finances, debts, and to pass on money-related tips. Cana­di­ans also believe in upward social mobil­ity: start small and make your way to the top. After all, this is an immi­grant nation and a lot of peo­ple are com­ing here to improve their lives. I got used to talk­ing about money now. I just hope I don’t embar­rass my French friends too much…