It’s a strange phenomenon to encounter French people everywhere, at any time of the year, and in the farthest corners of the world. No other people seem to feel such a need to travel.
And yet, we are far from being the richest country. On the contrary, we are experiencing a real decline, and it’s only getting worse, especially in recent years. Despite inflation, impoverishment, and the shrinking middle class, the French are literally going broke to fly away from their homeland. They will never clearly say why, nor even explicitly acknowledge it. Do they want to escape insecurity, endemic violence, social and political tensions, or noise? Perhaps they don’t even know themselves.
There is either a strong hypocrisy or a deep denial at play. In truth, it’s impossible to know exactly what the French are fleeing. No destination, no matter how distant, seems exempt from encountering them, driven, it seems, by a vital need to escape their country, to get as far away from it as possible, as often as they can, to forget it.
These moments lead to awkward situations where, instead of greeting each other or exchanging a few words as a gesture of camaraderie—something citizens from almost every country in the world do when meeting a compatriot—French people glare at each other with hostility, as if in a paranoid standoff. Or they pretend to ignore each other, making no effort to hide their mutual displeasure. It’s deeply unsettling.
Everywhere in the world, abroad, Italians bond with Italians, Chinese people form communities with other Chinese, Americans greet one another warmly while traveling, and so on. But the French are unique in their eagerness to avoid one another. French people abroad do not form communities, do not create any kind of diaspora. They only associate for professional or circumstantial reasons. They do everything they can to avoid crossing paths.
At heart, I think they hate each other. The divisions within the population are far too deep, existential, perhaps irreconcilable. Are we truly on the brink of killing one another?
It feels as though we are on the cusp of a partition—or perhaps a great slaughter.
