PARIS — I HAVE an unusual item on my to-do list, wedged between home repairs and unwritten thank-you notes: Become French. I’ve begun the long process of gathering documents to apply for French citizenship.
I’ll remain American, too, of course. I’d be a dual citizen. But becoming French would bring perks. I could vote in French and European elections, stand in faster lines at some airports, work anywhere in the European Union and — crucially — make my children French, too.
But adopting a new nationality, even one from the place I’ve lived for more than 10 years, raises existential issues. I’ve gotten used to being a foreigner. I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon my otherness, which has become an identity in itself. What does “Frenchness” entail? Can it really be acquired? Will I suddenly hold a fork in my left hand, and remember whether it’s un plaisir or une plaisir to meet someone?
These are privileged problems, of course. Americans aren’t the ones targeted by the anti-immigrant parties gaining clout across Europe. Thousands of migrants have died this year on boats from Africa to Europe. Migrants in Calais, the French port city, are trying to reach Britain by clinging to the bottom of trucks.
I’ll have time to ponder this while I’m pursuing French citizenship. The whole procedure can take years. Amid repeated requests for new documents, some would-be French people just give up.
This may be by design. “The difficulty of the ordeal seems a means of testing the authenticity of his/her commitment to the project of becoming French,” the sociologists Didier Fassin and Sarah Mazouz concluded in their 2009 paper “What Is It to Become French?” Officials can reject an applicant because he hasn’t adopted French values, or merely because his request isn’t “opportune.”
So far, my favorite part of the application is the option to “Frenchify” my name. In official examples, Mrs. “El Mehri” becomes Mrs. “Emery”; “Ahmed” becomes “Ahmed Alain” (or if he prefers, “Alain Ahmed”); and the Polish immigrant “Jacek Krzysztof Henryk” emerges as the debonair “Maxime.”
There’s a long tradition of Frenchification here. Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte and spoke French with a thick Corsican accent. He and others spent the 19th century transforming France from a nation with a patchwork of regional languages and dialects to one where practically everyone spoke proper French.
Schools were their main instrument. French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
If it were just a matter of reading your way to Frenchness, I might have a chance. But there’s a whole monde of associations I’m missing, too. When a co-worker recently told me he planned to bring a cactus to our shared office, he assumed I knew this was a metaphor for life’s beauty and pain, and a reference to the lyrics of a Jacques Dutronc song.
Even the rituals of friendship are different here. The Canadian writer Jean-Benoît Nadeau, who just spent a year in Paris, says there are clues that a French person wants to befriend you: She tells you about her family; she uses self-deprecating humor; and she admits that she likes her job. There’s also the fact that she speaks to you at all. Unlike North Americans, “the French have no compunction about not talking to you.”Apparently, being a Parisian woman has its own requirements. The new book “How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are” says Parisiennes are “imperfect, vague, unreliable and full of paradoxes” and have “that typically French enthusiasm for transforming life into fiction.” I need to cultivate an “air of fragility,” too.
Apparently, being a Parisian woman has its own requirements. The new book “How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are” says Parisiennes are “imperfect, vague, unreliable and full of paradoxes” and have “that typically French enthusiasm for transforming life into fiction.” I need to cultivate an “air of fragility,” too.
Inspired by the culinary expressions in Clotilde Dusoulier’s book “Edible French,” I’ve also been waiting for the chance to tell someone he’s making “a whole cheese” out of nothing, and to complain that a meeting lasted “as long as a day without bread.” I’m planning to tell the official at my naturalization interview — who’ll be measuring my level of integration — that I’m as comfortable in Paris as “a rooster in dough.”
But true Frenchness can’t be faked. My husband (who’s British, and not trying to become French) is convinced that Parisians even walk differently. Apparently nobody expects me to achieve a state of inner Frenchness. At a naturalization ceremony that the two sociologists observed, an official told new citizens that they were granted French nationality because they had assimilated “not to the point where you entirely resemble native French people, yet enough so that you feel at ease among us.”
That sounds about right. Indeed, if that and an air of fragility are all it takes, I probably qualify, too. If it doesn’t work out, as the French say, it’s not the end of the beans.
