At a recent soirée thrown by parents at our sons’ school in southwest France, our hosts served frozen canapés and wine from a box. Afterwards we were given a tour of the house, during which various high-value items were pointed out to us with enormous pride.
A hot tub, a state-of-the-art toolbox, a convertible Mercedes. Don’t get me wrong — the canapés and the wine were delicious. It was just … unexpected. For a country lauded for its cuisine and historically anti-consumerist in its outlook, it all seemed a bit off-brand.
In 2019 my husband Dex and I left the UK with our one-year-old son and his baby brother in utero for a grand Gallic adventure. We’d been living in London for 12 years and, much as we loved the city, we felt unable to raise a family comfortably on the combined income of a freelance writer and an NGO employee.
Bummed out by Brexit and hankering for a change of pace, we weren’t quite ready to return to our native Ireland. I’d been desperate to live in France since I first visited Paris when I was 14 and decided my future would involve jotting down bon mots in pavement cafés and developing a daily viennoiserie habit without the accompanying weight gain. Luckily Dex is a fellow francophile and we settled on the Tarn region as the place to raise our young family.
We bought a house an hour from Toulouse with a potager and four chickens, and a local shop that sold €7 bottles of wine made from vineyards less than a 30-minute drive away. There would be the demands of work and parenting to grapple with, yes, but there would also be boozy lunches, gastronomic delights at every turn and a sense of anything goes — after all, isn’t freedom etc France’s whole shtick?
Of course, as is often the case with any major life change, adjusting to our new surroundings didn’t come easily. Covid hit not long after we arrived, scuppering our plans to expand our social circle. And the French aren’t big on mum and baby activities, so even when the world did get back to normal, it was hard to make new friends in the early days.
I felt ancient as I was forced to reactivate my Facebook account to join local groups (you can’t organise anything around here if you don’t have one). A stray dog mauled one of the chickens, our neighbour kept calling us les Anglais in a menacing tone and the baby got sick and spent a week in hospital.
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Before long, the boys adjusted to their new set-up, picking up the language in no time. Dex and I continued to struggle with the basics. I was asking waiters for condoms instead of jam, complaining to doctors of a pain not in my neck but in my rear end.
Still, at least I got to fulfil my yearning for the quintessential French life. I watched old men down espressos at bistro counters while, on neighbouring tables, students with suitably haunted expressions scribbled away in battered leather notebooks.
I took the kids to the open-air market every Thursday and we filled our panier with peaches in summer, ceps in the autumn. Every August, we went to apéro concerts in vineyards and listened to gypsy jazz while patient mamis taught the boys to play boules.
At about the same time, Carine Roitfield, the former editor of French Vogue, shared her morning health routine in an interview: “espresso and cigarettes”. How chic! I thought. How debauched! How wonderfully French. I had found my spiritual homeland!
Six years later, you can’t move for the third-wave coffee shops specialising not in java, but in matcha — these green-tinged lattes bursting with nutrients are increasingly replacing the humble cup of joe.
Matcha coffee and shopping in huge out-of-town hypermarkets is all the rage
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The latest trend in French cities is barley coffee, a more sustainable and additive-free alternative to decaf. A school mum frequently tried to rope me into hanging out with her at a juice bar. A few months ago I suggested skipping the kombucha in favour of midday wine. She hasn’t reached out since.
As for cigarettes, the accessory that once symbolised French insouciance, it’s game over for nicotine lovers. When we first got here, everyone was lighting up outside the school gates. But new restrictions recently announced by the health minister Catherine Vautrin have outlawed smoking in virtually all outdoor public areas — beaches, parks, gardens, playgrounds, sports venues, school entrances and bus stops.
I must confess that, being a non-smoker and a mother, I welcome this even if it does go against my imagined French ideal. And it’s no bad thing that tobacco use is declining among young people, with the most recent data revealing that 16 per cent of 17-year-olds smoked daily in 2022, down from 25 per cent six years prior.
My father, however, a lifelong smoker, is less enamoured with the latest regulation. On his last trip out to us, he was admonished outside a supermarket by an elderly woman. Mon dieu!
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Some are falling for fast food culture; others are going mad for American-style fitness culture, and sunbathing in the buff is under threat
ALAMY
Total wine consumption, spanning reds, whites and rosés, is down more than 80 per cent in France since 1945, while red wine is facing an “existential” decline as Gen Z explores alcohol-free options. We went to a concert a few weeks ago, our rosé-filled plastic cups and parents-on-day-release vibe sticking out amid a sea of water bottles and smug sobriety.
The demise of wine drinking might have something to do with the love of fast food over here. France is the largest European market for McDonald’s, while I’ve been shocked to discover that kids’ menus are typically chicken nuggets and chips, served with a sugary drink.
As for children’s birthday parties, my insistence on providing at least one low-sugar option, a token attempt at something resembling one of your five a day, is a frequent source of amusement among French friends.
And while tourists may love the weekly markets, the preferred destination for most we know here is a cavernous hypermarket in an out-of-town strip mall, accessible only by SUV (forget your charmingly battered Renaults — thanks to the joys of long-term rental, every car that pulls up outside the school gates is a gleaming, polluting beast.)
At the same time that some are falling for fast food culture, others are going mad for American-style fitness culture and wellness. Three new gyms have opened near me in the past year and everyone has a fitness tracker.
Plant-based eating still hasn’t quite caught on here — I recently ordered a “vegan” burger that came with goat’s cheese. Although in Paris it is becoming more fashionable: the celebrated chef Alain Passard recently became the first three-Michelin-star chef in France to stop serving meat, fish, dairy products and eggs at his restaurant L’Arpege. So maybe it is a matter of time.
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Meanwhile, the time-honoured tradition of sunbathing in the buff is under threat. This summer several resorts across the country have banned bare-chested men and women in bikini tops from town centres. In Le Sables d’Olonne, on the west coast, anyone refusing to put on a T-shirt risks a €150 fine.
Even on the carefree Côte d’Azur, tourists flocking to the beaches of Nice, Cannes and Saint-Tropez in the hope of sunning their lesser exposed parts are being warned to cover up. This has been particularly hard for some of our French male friends who, it must be said, enjoy a bit of pectoral exposure.
Perhaps the most surprising shift in French society in recent years is the public’s increasing interest in the domestic arrangements of its leaders. As a rule, the French don’t do prurience. Unlike their British counterparts, French politicians have historically enjoyed private lives that remain private. Everyone in media circles knew François Mitterrand had a child by his mistress, but his open secret was never revealed to the wider public while he was alive.
“Le Slap” has changed everything. When Brigitte Macron delivered a blow to the side of her husband’s face in May, the incident, as expected, made headlines around the world. But in France too it dominated the social discourse, with speculation rife on what prompted Brigitte to lash out.
La discrétion is no longer a given in French politics. (To be fair, it might well be a Macron thing. The French I know loathe the guy. The neighbour who calls us les Anglais? She literally spat when another neighbour uttered his name.)
So that’s modern France in a nutshell. Tops are in, private lives out. We wouldn’t live anywhere else, though. Because for all the recent changes, we love it here. French society is hard to penetrate but once you’re in, you’re well looked after. The same applies to social groups.
We’ve made some great friends. The boys are getting a good education, the countryside is stunning and did I mention it’s €7 for a decent bottle of wine? The French youth might be cutting back but we aren’t.
Dining and Cooking