France has had – and continues, in many respects, to have – such an overpowering influence in the realms of high culture, intellectual discourse and the production of art that it is often forgotten that the French are as given to flightier things as the rest of us. McDonalds’ biggest market outside the US is L’Héxagone, one of the three busiest KFC outlets in the world is the one at Les Halles in central Paris, and rap and hip-hop took hold in France long before in any other European country. The big domestic box-office successes in French cinema history have not been the more cerebral offerings of Godard, Renoir and Pialat but popular fare such as La Grande Vadrouille (1966), Bienvenue chez les Chi’tis (2008) and Intouchables (2011). For every literary-inclined chanteur such as Alains Bashung and Souchon or Benjamin Biolay, you will find a dozen purveyors of pap and trash, from Patrick Bruel to Mylène Farmer. The French bestseller charts are dominated by much the same names as elsewhere – the Dan Browns, the J K Rowlings and the Steig Larssons – along with a few local pulp writers such as Marc Lévy and his younger upstart rival Guillaume Musso. France is not a bad place to be a literary writer, and there is certainly a healthy respect afforded even young men and women who blithely announce they are “writing a novel” but the sales figures don’t lie: the French are ultimately no more highbrow than other countries.
Of course, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, the French are incredibly generous and democratic when it comes to taking low art seriously – don’t forget that the French, intellectuals and civilians alike, love comic books (bandes dessinées) and Jerry Lewis is (rightly, in my view) a subject of serious critical study. However, even though French is possibly the least “alien” foreign language for English-speakers, much of French popular culture has failed to travel far. For decades Serge Gainsbourg was best known to Anglophones for writing a naughty song supposedly containing real sounds of him and Jane Birkin copulating and for drunkenly propositioning Whitney Houston on a talk show. Whenever the BBC wants to accompany film footage of 1960s Paris, it reaches for what seems to be the only (non-naughty) French pop song of the era in its library – Françoise Hardy’s “Comment te dire adieu?” The average British music fan’s knowledge of French rap goes no further than MC Solaar, which causes no end of amusement to French people. It is for this reason that the recent spate of biopics devoted to French pop culture icons of the post-war era has made only a limited dent in the English-speaking world.
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