No

The French are no more inclined to tell you what you ought to do than anyone else. But they have always been the silver medalists in telling you what you better not do or else—the gold, of course, going to totalitarian states of one stripe or another, from Mao to Mugabe. Maybe the bossiness seems more present and fussbudgety in Paris than elsewhere in la France profonde because everywhere else in France is much less dense and built-up, offering fewer places to put up the familiar signs.

Défense de cracher sur le plancher.

Ne pas stationner.

Il est formellement interdit de faire pipi sur le gazon.

The messages these signs convey are plain enough—Don’t spit on the floor, No parking, Don’t pee on the grass—and not more unfriendly than they need to be, but only if you reduce the actual message lurking in these stated warnings to the actual meaning. The statements taken literally, however, are much more forbidding and somehow, at the same time, detached, as if the speaker and the spoken-to are not quite equal or on the same plane of being: Prohibition of spitting on the floor, Not to park, It is formally banned to pee on the lawn. The signs tell you this or that is forbidden—and don’t ask why—in a stilted, rather chilly language that no one has ever spoken aloud: sign language. It has been this way, so they tell me, since the days of Charlemagne and has always seemed to me to be a part of Paris that is there and that you swallow because there is no alternative.

This does not mean that it’s impossible to spit, park, or pee without a visit to Mme la Guillotine, but I wonder who was actually being warned not to do these terrible things. Prohibition, Not to, and It is formally banned do not address you—or me—as a human being: they don’t address anyone, making only negative statements to the world rather than telling you and me not to spit, park, or pee. Perhaps to the bureaucrats who decided—no doubt after long and contentious discussion about les mots justes and profound consultations on the final wording with l’Académie française—thought it would be beneath their dignity and the dignity of any français and française to be addressed directly, especially using the imperative form of the verb, which implies a grammatical subject. Thus, Ne crachez pas sur le plancher was formally banned from their vocabulary because, as anyone who remembers studying grammar in French or English knows, the subject of an imperative is vous or you, depending. So it follows that Prohibition of spitting was and always has been more comfortable for them than Don’t spit—of course, because it anticipated the daunting question “You talking to me?” with an implied “No—I didn’t say you, did I?” 

No, it was not said. The composers of signs, I have a hunch, reserved vous for their families and close friends. It is hard to believe that they ever used the familiar tu—not quite the equivalent of “thou” because it is current, not quaint—with their wives even when they were making love to them, supposing they did.

So, if any of them are still left, I wonder how shocked, mortified, and aghast they are if they happen to take a ride on the Métro in Paris. On the doors of each subway car there are warning stickers, still nannyish and bossy, but about as cuddly as a French warning can get. 

Ne mets pas tes mains sur les portes,

Tu risques de te faire pincer très fort.

“Don’t put your hands on the doors—you could pinched good and hard,” more or less. Quelle horreur! Bad enough that a real imperative is used—no banning or prohibition or unconjugated verb—but the forms of the verb and the pronouns are the familiar, as if a total stranger just walked up to you and said tu. Might as well slap me in the face—and maybe that’s what I should do with this impudent fellow. Don’t these new sign-writers know that Il est formellement interdit de tutoyer, that a sign forbidding something that actually has a subject, a familiar one no less, is both a grammatical and social solecism and is bound to be ignored? And just look, look, look at all these people who have actually put their hands on the doors of the train. Well, what do you expect? 

Nothing, actually. The old signs worked no better, and I like the new ones. They get to the point, they talk to me, and I ignore them the same as always, but more companionably. Most people do: the parisiens I asked about the signs shrugged and said it was fine and who cares anyway? But when I mention these signs to Americans or Brits, they look unhappy because, I suspect, foreigners who know Paris and have known it for a long time have an inclination to go native, possibly because the city they find themselves in today still somehow (delusionally, that’s how) looks like the city they first visited twenty or forty years ago when everything was new and somehow compelling because it was different. Their soundtrack for Paris is Piaf, not Sébastien Tellier. The signs of the first visit years ago needed some decoding and, afterwards, became cherished for their… what was it?… their old-worldliness, their status as cultural artifacts that required discernment, their Frenchness? 

They don’t say, and I’ve stopped bringing it up. If I did, they’d look unhappy with me or think I didn’t quite understand. But I do, really. If I’m going to be bossed around, and the French are not going to give up on going for the nanny gold medal, even if it’s a hopeless (but noble) cause, isn’t it better to be told how to behave myself with intimacy than with bureaucratic bombast? It doesn’t much matter in any event because most of the people who think I don’t understand don’t take the subway anyway—what I told them was news. And their cabdrivers never say tu, except to their wives and always when they are making love to them. 

© Joseph Lestrange