French Clichés: How Much Truth Is Really in Them?

Introduction

As a French person, I used to think most clichés about France were pretty far from reality — exaggerated ideas foreigners had picked up from movies, disconnected from how people actually live. Then I spent a year living abroad in Japan, and came back with a very different, more complicated answer.

”Comme ci, comme ça” — the Cliché That Isn’t Real

Let’s start with the most obviously false one. Say you’re French while traveling abroad, and there’s a decent chance someone responds with “ah oui, comme ci, comme ça.” It’s genuinely a French expression, technically — but it’s not something people actually say in everyday conversation. I think people abroad picked it up simply because it sounds fun to say, and it’s stuck around as a kind of shorthand for “sounding French” without ever really reflecting real usage. If you want to sound genuinely French, this is one cliché worth leaving behind entirely.

The Beret, the Baguette, and the Wine Bottle

Then there are the more visual clichés, often tied specifically to Paris: the striped sailor shirt, accordion music, a baguette tucked under one arm, a bottle of wine in hand while walking down the street. I used to file these under “exaggerated for tourists.” Living in Paris myself, though, I noticed they weren’t as far off as I’d assumed — people really do walk out of bakeries with a baguette under their arm regularly, whether in the morning or after work. And bringing a bottle of wine when invited to someone’s home is a genuinely common habit — pick one up at the supermarket on the way, show up with it as a matter of course.

What a Year Without Bread and Wine Taught Me

It wasn’t until I lived a full year in Japan that these clichés really clicked into focus for me — through their absence. Wine in Japan isn’t impossible to find, but it’s expensive and the selection is limited. The dominant alcohol there is sake (nihonshu), widely available and far more central to daily life than wine ever is. Given that France is likely the world’s largest wine producer, this contrast seems obvious in hindsight — but living it made it real in a way that simply knowing the fact never did. Over that year, I drank barely a few glasses of wine total, and a lot of sake instead.

Bread told a similar story. Bakeries were rare where we were, and when we did find something resembling a French-style bakery, prices were high enough that daily bread simply wasn’t realistic. On a two-week vacation, you barely register something like that — you just notice, distantly, that a country has less bread or wine than home, and move on. Living somewhere for a full year is different: eating a baguette or drinking a glass of wine stopped being routine and started feeling like an actual event.

Cheese followed the same pattern. Japan has its own fermented foods with a comparable intensity — natto being the closest equivalent in terms of strong smell — but French cheese, especially the stronger varieties, was hard to find and expensive when we did. Cheese abroad often tastes noticeably blander than what you’d find in France, and living without easy access to it for a year made that difference obvious in a way it never had been on shorter trips.

New Habits, New Perspective

Living somewhere long-term changes your actual habits, not just your awareness of a place. In Japan, I got used to drinking sake at gatherings, or eating natto over rice for breakfast — genuinely new routines, not just tourist novelties. Coming home, the reverse effect kicked in: I was thrilled to have my baguette, wine, and cheese back, but I also noticed, for the first time, how hard and expensive it now was to find good Japanese products in France — items that had been an ordinary five-minute walk to the corner convenience store (konbini) during our year there.

A More Honest Take on Clichés

That experience reshaped how I think about clichés generally. Before, when I pictured someone believing clichés about France, I’d picture an American who’d watched Emily in Paris and mistaken it for how people actually live — no offense intended. But the longer you live somewhere else, absorbing that country’s specific rhythms and habits, the more you start to recognize a real kernel of truth in the clichés about your own home. It’s a strange kind of homesickness that works in reverse: distance revealed things about French daily life I’d simply been too close to notice before.

Coming Home With New Eyes

If there’s one lasting effect from that year, it’s this: I appreciate France more now than I did before I left. I’d always been proud to be French — the French have a bit of a reputation for that kind of patriotism, and I’m no exception — but returning gave me a sharper sense of exactly what I’d taken for granted: the food, certainly, but also things like Paris’s architecture, which struck me as genuinely, freshly beautiful the first time I walked through it again after a year away, in a way I’d stopped noticing before I left.

Conclusion

Most clichés carry some exaggeration, and “comme ci, comme ça” deserves to be retired entirely — nobody actually says it. But baguettes under the arm, wine as a routine dinner gift, cheese that actually smells like something: these turn out to hold up better than I expected, once I had the distance of living somewhere completely different to notice what daily French life actually looks like from the outside. Sometimes the cliché isn’t wrong — it’s just something you only fully recognize once you’ve spent enough time away from it.