Why don’t French people make small talk?

Are French people rude?

No, but the rudeness test is different. In France the offence is skipping bonjour and going straight to your request, which many Americans do without knowing. To a French shopkeeper it reads as treating a person like a vending machine. Silence after the greeting is not rude at all.

A café in Nice made the point with a price list. In 2013 La Petite Syrah put up a sign: “Un café” cost €7, “Un café, s’il vous plaît” €4.25, and “Bonjour, un café, s’il vous plaît” €1.40. The owner said it started as a joke aimed at customers who barked orders at lunchtime. It went around the world because every French person recognised the rule, and so did every American who had broken it.

The American writer Polly Platt, who coached Americans settling in Paris, called “Bonjour, monsieur” the Parisian version of a smile. She also warned that a cab driver or post office clerk who does not smile back is not snubbing you. Smiling at strangers is simply not part of the deal.

What counts as polite in a French shop?

A short sequence, said every time, to everyone. Bonjour madame or bonjour monsieur when you walk in, before anything else. S’il vous plaît when you ask. Merci when you are served. Au revoir, often with bonne journée or bonne soirée, when you leave. In a small shop people say bonjour to the room, other customers included.

That is the whole exchange, and it is complete. The person behind the counter is not waiting for you to mention the weather. They are waiting for you to say what you want, clearly, using vous. Tu is for friends, family and children, and using it with a stranger is presumptuous rather than friendly.

Why does American friendliness confuse him?

Because a question is a question. When a stranger asks how his day is going, the French reading is that they want to know, so he tells them. The American convention, a greeting shaped like a question, took him about a year, and he still occasionally answers it properly.

Erin Meyer, who teaches at INSEAD near Paris and wrote The Culture Map, explains this with a model she credits to Fons Trompenaars: peach cultures and coconut cultures. Americans are peaches, soft on the outside. They smile at strangers, ask about your family and share their own, but the friendly outside does not mean you are now friends. France is a coconut, with a harder shell. People are reserved with strangers and personal questions feel intrusive, but once you are through the shell the friendship is real and tends to last. Meyer, an American married to a Frenchman, writes that her husband compared asking a stranger how they met their spouse to asking the colour of their underwear.

So the cheerful questions at an American checkout land strangely. To him they are either sincere, which means a real answer, or insincere, which feels a little false. Neither reading is quite right. It is just how the peach says hello.

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Do French people ever make small talk?

Yes, with people they know. Ça va is the everyday greeting between neighbours and colleagues, and the expected answer is ça va, not a report. Regulars chat with the baker, the café owner and the pharmacist, and complaining about the weather is allowed. What is missing is the friendly chat with a stranger you will never see again.

Some French people miss it too. In 2022 Carrefour said it would roll out the “blabla caisse”, a slower checkout where customers can take their time and talk to the cashier, after trials inspired by a supermarket in the Netherlands. There is one per store, the cashiers volunteer, and they are aimed mainly at older shoppers. Even then, France turned small talk into a dedicated lane with a name.

And when the French do talk, they talk at length. A dinner in France can run for hours on politics, food and whose argument is wrong. That is not small talk. It is the opposite: big talk, with people who have been let in.

Which one is warmer?

They front-load differently. American warmth is broad and immediate and does not necessarily deepen. French warmth is withheld from strangers and then given with some weight. Neither is friendlier overall; they simply spend it in different places.

The anthropologist Raymonde Carroll, French by birth and a professor at Oberlin, spent a whole book on these misunderstandings. In Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience she shows how each side reads the other’s manners through its own unspoken rules. That is how Americans come to find the French cold, and the French come to find Americans superficial. Friendship gets particular attention.

How do you talk to strangers in France?

• Lead with bonjour. Before your question, every time, with madame or monsieur.
• Use vous. Wait to be invited to tu.
• Get to the point. A clear request is polite. A long preamble is not needed.
• Answer ça va briefly. Ça va, et vous? is enough.
• Hold the personal questions. Work, family, money and how you met are for later, if the other person brings them up.
• Close the loop. Merci, au revoir, bonne journée on the way out.
• Don’t read a straight face as hostility. It is the default, not a verdict.

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it.

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