#french things

[somuchbetterthanthat]

Tous les gens français/ francophones de tumblr vous pourriez mettre un like à ce post pour que je sache si ça vaut le coup d'avoir de la promo de petite maison d'édition indépendante de l'imaginaire ici ou c'est un doux rêve et que vous nous mangeriez pour x ou y raisons si on mettait un pied ici

[atlantis-just-drowned]

✨A Nazi died today✨

[kcrabb88]

Found Jean Prouvaire’s ghost quoted at the French impressionist exhibit I went to this weekend! 😂

Plus Bonus Gautier:

[flo-nelja]

Obscur-echange, session 19

Bonjour !

Cette année encore a lieu l’échange de fics et fanart sur les fandoms rares en français obscur-échange.

Si avec le filtre “français”, votre fandom a moins d’une page sur AO3 et sur ffnet, alors c’est bon ! Vous pouvez le nominer, vous pouvez en nominer un nombre illimité ! Tout fandom nominé deux fois sera retenu.

On peut y trouver des fandoms énormes en anglais qui n’ont jamais marché en français (Mob Psycho 100, Gideon the Ninth, The Old Guard), des fandoms francophones (Le Petit Prince, le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Gradalis), des fandoms tout neufs (Gloutons et dragons, The Summer Hikaru Died) ou des fandoms qui sont rares partout.

Pour nominer des fandoms, c'est là : https://obscur-echange.dreamwidth.org/262540.html

11 avril-25 avril : Nomination des fandoms ! Chacun fait une longue liste de ses fandoms rares préférés, tous les fandoms qui ont été cités deux fois sont retenus !

26 avril-9 mai : Fiches de participation ! C'est le moment des inscriptions, chaque inscrit.e fait une liste avec la liste de ses fandoms, personnages, ships, genres et thèmes préférés. Il faut être multifandom, car chaque fiche doit contenir au moins dix fandoms rares !

10 mai - 25 mai : Requêtes ! Chacun regarde les fiches des autres et envoie des prompts à quiconque peut écrire quelque chose qui l'intéresse

Juin-juillet-août : écriture / dessin ! ON envoie les oeuvres au fur et à mesure, elles sont postées anonymement.

1er septembre : Tout le monde devrait avoir reçu quelque chose ! On désanonyme et on reposte les oeuvres.

[trivialandvague]

[mask131]

If you ever want to get distracted with some of the little scandals of France, here's one if you want.

During the 2010s, Chinese investors and fortunes frenetically bought a LOT of the wine estates of France. It is known that China always ha little something for France, and already at the time it made lot of people grumble (the usual saying of "Why are we letting foreigners buy what's typically and traditionally French?"). The Chinese desire to buy or import a certain "French art de vivre", a French lifestyle, wasn't so much the problem, as some of their open and public commercial projects (some clearly announced they wanted to produce 5-euros wine in France to sell it back in their own network in China 100 euros).

Today, the Chinese are selling back the wine estates. Why? Well the most obvious and immediate reason was the Chinese government's decision of regulating more harshly the Chinese investments in foreign countries, and closing a lot of ways through which money went elsewhere than China itself. This resulted in the Chinese owners of these wine estates realizing they couldn't keep up. It becomes too difficult for them: after all, they realized that having a wine estate isn't as easy as just buying it and waiting for results to happen. Not only are Chinese people buying and drinking less and less wine year after year, but wine-making in France became QUITE difficult since the 2010s thanks to the climate change.

Because unlike what Trump and his insane clowns are saying, climate change is real and wine-makers suffered a LOT from it. Between the winters way too hot, the violent thunderstorms and hailstorms, the regular floods in river-adjacent areas, and this year a summer way too gray and rainy... Vines suffered a lot.

But that's not the scandal. The scandal is all what is coming up now that the Chinese are selling the domains. Already the mayors of the towns around were alerting people on the fact the Chinese are fracturing the domains - because typically a wine estate in France is a domain made up of a historical castle and the vineyards, and they always went together for quite some times. The Chinese bought them together, and now are selling the castles separately from the vineyards. That's a patrimonial problem, but not the biggest.

The biggest is the state of the castles... Turns out, after the Chinese bought the castles of the wine-estates, they didn't do ANYTHING with it. They didn't pay to maintain them, to clean them, to keep them up. They hired nobody for them, no one ever came to live within them, host things or even inhabit them. Basically... These castles stood empty and uncared for, for YEARS. The Chinese are selling them back now, at quite a low price... but they won't get a lot of people for them, because now they are filled with the usual problems led to castles left empty under storms, warm winters and rainy summers - fractured walls, broken roofs, mold everywhere, dust and vermin and animals... So whoever buys the castle, even for a low price, will have to pour a LOT of money to make the castle inhabitable again, or even safe. They're on their way to become ruins.

[Ironically, this careless, not to say clueless, handling of the castles and the wine business around them was explained by a Chinese businessman by the name of Hugo Tian as resulting from a different of investment model between Europe and China. In his own words, European people typically invest in estates on the scale of "generations", and that's how they measure time, in "generations", as opposed to China who has a model of buying-and-selling on a scale of usually five years, with no generatonal investment]

And that's not even talking of how the fracture of the wine estates, and the poor managing of the Chinese investors, results in hundreds of jobs being threatened - because now that everything is being sold back, the disastrous handling of the wine businesses. The companies owning them now have absolutely no representative in France, all the decisions are taken in China without anybody actually there to manage things in France, employees haven't been paid in years, and many taxes also have not been paid in years... Already before the re-sales had been announced, these businesses were about to crumble apart.

So, you know... French people are not very pleased.

[adarkrainbow]

Question: was it a shoe in "vair" or in "verre"?

It was "verre". I talked about this in a post a long time ago: while very popular and quite widespread, the idea that "verre" was meant to be "vair" has been proven by modern and scholarly research to be a misinterpretation, or rather a misconception. It was presented, spread and used by a lot of famous authors and cultural figures of France, from Balzac to André Breton, and so it is part of the "cultural heritage" of the French Cinderella tale, and you can still reference it or make jokes about it. But you can't claim it is an actual real fact. When Perrault wrote the story, he clearly meant the slippers to be a glass, and he might have invented the detail himself (like how he actually seems to have invented the "red" in "little red riding hood", despite people for centuries believing the "red" part was older than Perrault).

Last time I checked this article did not exist, but apparently the French Wikipedia created an ENTIRE article about the controversy of the Cinderella slipper if you are interested:

It is especially funny when you look at how all the "sources" for this claim are all biased but just happened to be popular enough it became accepted. Balzac had the theory being offered by a character in a fictional tale - not just any character, but a fur-seller who OF COURSE is going to have an extravagant story to explain how yes, Cinderella's slipper was made of fur. Later Anatole France also reused it in his dialogues about fairytales, but it is a series of texts meant to literaly mock and have fun at all the strange theories and interpretations of fairytales (he notably has the characters explain how the little dog briefly described by Perrault in Sleeping Beauty's lap is of a "crucial" importance as symbolizing the Sirius star). And from there, authors and theorists had a blast...

But if we trust the Delarue-Ténèze catalogue of French folktales and fairytales (our local Aarne-Thompson classification), the shoes of Cinderella in France were always made of glass (or crystal), or of gold (like in the Grimm version).

[haveyouseenthisskeleton]

I think every day life customs are okay, also, thank you very much for helping me with this

Hum... I can think of a few that are very cliche lol, but also very true.

We kiss each other on the cheeks to say hello and goodbye (a lot less since COVID but some still do). Depending on when you live in France it can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 kisses. Not sure why we did this, but we do it lol.

We say "hello" (well "bonjour") to everyone we meet, in the street, at work, in transport... It's a polite thing to do when you cross road with someone, just to acknowledge their existence.

Before dinner, a lot of people have what we call "L'apéro", which is a sort of pre-dinner with salty biscuits and sometimes alcohol. It happens in other countries too, but in France it's like a big tradition when you're receiving someone at home. Sometimes we even have dinner with only the stuff we eat in the apéro. We call that "apéro dinatoire" (literally dinner-aperitive lol).

We have a ton of sorts of bread, the most famous one being the baguette. A lot of people eat baguettes everyday. In the North of France, you can have lines for half an hour in front of the bakeries after work hours.

We love cheese. There's like a ton of differents cheese in France and that's a huge addiction. One of the most famous is the raclette, which is a mountain cheese we eat in winter, but that people love so much we eat it all year really. We have also our very famous camembert, which is a very popular cheese. In my region, we have the maroilles, which is a cheese that smells awfully bad but it's really good in a quiche and cheese tarts!

We have also funny expressions. For exemple, you have "poser un lapin" (put down a rabbit literally) which means not going to an appointment. You also have "ne pas pousser Mémé dans les orties" (don't push grandma in the nettle) which means "don't go too fast please".

We add "little" in front of a lot of words for... I don't know reasons. We just do it. "A little coffee", "a little dessert", "a little walk", ... It's usually to say that we're doing something that is not supposed to take long to do. I think?

To say you're mad, you use "putain", to say you're really mad, you say "putain de merde". When you're extra mad, you use the entire dictionary of insults to show that you're super mad and you just add them one after the other.

We have the most fucked up way to count. After sixty, we decided that seventy would be "sixty-ten". Eighty is "four-twenty". And ninety is... "four-twenty-ten" lmao.

We have two ways to use "you" in France. We have the "tu" which is a "you" that you use with family, friends, and people you know well and the "vous", which is the "you" you're using with strangers and people higher in your work/school hierarchy (teachers, bosses, ...). "Vous" is a serious and professional "you".

We're complaining a lot. No, actually, we're complaining all the time lmao. And when we're complaining and it doesn't work, then we go to protest in the streets just to piss off the people who didn't listen to us. We protest a lot in France, mainly for social laws, but also when something doesn't please us lol.

Hating Paris is also a typical French thing, ironically. Everyone hates Paris. It's polluted like hell and actually a lot less beautiful that what people think lmao. Even people living in Paris hate Paris. Both the subway and the train are not working one time out of two, and sometimes they randomly decide to go on a strike and good luck with that.

I think that's already quite a lot of things lol.

[grlsbian]

oh to be a teenager during the french new wave

[callmejud3]

hey so uhh what the FUCK is going on in france

WAR ZONE/GTA IN REAL LIFE !!! That’s what is happening, it’s literally the apocalypse and everything is so dangerous at night, and some cities have curfews and they are burning down schools and bus and tramway and they are stealing in supermarkets and they burn down cars and it’s so wild and for the first time people are United like people for the 77 are cooperating with the 91 and apparently the marseillais are going up to Paris (which is like WILD !!!)

But anyway it happened bc a cop killed a 17yo who was driving without a license…..

France has been like that for the past 5 days, please don’t come here, stay safe where you are !!

[p0mmia]

Pain au chocolat ou chocolatine ?

Venant du nord de la France... Pain au chocolat ! ✨ J'ai passé le test..?

[somuchbetterthanthat]

Okay but WHY are fiction podcasts so popular in English-speaking countries, and is it the same in other countries? Like is there a super cool Italian horror podcast out there somewhere, or myriads of Polish ones, or Excellent Thai ones, or Egyptian ones or, etc.

Like. Is it just France that apparently isn't doing it (to my knowledge??? Like. France Culture has a few which, eh. There was this one french horror podcast of five episodes that I've listened to for an article forever ago. but although we have TONS SHIT of non-fiction podcasts and I thiiink a few dnd/rpg podcasts growing, fiction doesn't seem to be a thing????

Answers and comments definitely welcome here, I'm curious about how it is in other country, or fellow french people passing by if you've got recs i guess???

[atlantis-just-drowned]

France is full of queer goth guys until you're desperately trying to find a datable one

[hipstersbleedroses]

absolutely insane how 5 days in france has reignited my wish to learn french. i took french in school. I studied french quite intensely a good ten years ago for my paris trip and apparently a lot of that stuck because i understood most of what people were saying to me, i just never knew how to respond beyond "merci" and "oui" lol.

but the fact i usually got the gists of what people were saying to me?? addictive!

also what if i went back to disneyland in a year and by then i could speak french to the cast members WHAT IF

[theinkbunny]

my French teacher: oh, have you gotten better at French? I’ve seen an improvement in the past bit with your fluency…

me, panicking, because I’ve only been using French with a rayman ai: oh yeah! I’ve been practicing at home with my textbook!

French teacher, oblivious: wonderful job!

[flo-nelja]

Obscur échange 2023

Bonjour !

Cette année encore a lieu l’échange de fics et fanart sur les fandoms rares en français obscur-échange.

Si avec le filtre “français”, votre fandom a moins d’une page sur AO3 et sur ffnet, alors c’est bon ! Vous pouvez le nominer, vous pouvez en nominer un nombre illimité ! Tout fandom nominé deux fois sera retenu.

On peut y trouver des fandoms énormes en anglais qui n’ont jamais marché en français (Sense8, Gideon the Ninth, The Old Guard), des fandoms francophones (Tintin, le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Gradalis), ou des fandoms qui sont rares partout.