McGee, that's a French name. I don't know anyone named McGee who doesn't speak French.
--Cajun musician Dennis McGee (1893-1989), quoted in The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (pub. ) by Shane Bernard.
I have relatives named McGee (the children in this photo) and it's true-- they are all Cajuns and speak French.
In 1790, the Abbé Grégoire sent out a questionnaire asking which languages people spoke [in the French countryside]. The answers he received (at any rate those he could understand) were alarming. Large parts of France "were barely French at all": two hundred and fifty years after the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts, which had made the dialect of Paris and the Île-de-France the language of official documents, six million citizens still couldn't speak the national language.
--Michael Sheringham in a review of The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb. Review in the London Review of Books, 31 July 2008
In fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real.
--Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), quoted in his obituary in the U.K. Telegraph, 8 March 2007
Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.
--British historian Tony Judt (1948- )in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008
The sad truth is that little has been written in French that even the French will read for a generation. They are a nation with a thin literary heritage and virtually no literary present. Their contribution to the world's library in the past 30 years has been cartoon books which they consider art and literary criticism which is unreasonable. We have the French to thank for deconstruction. They are good at criticism. They have pathetically declined from being a second-rate nation to being the shrill, pinched, finger-pointing nag of Europe.
--A.A. Gill (1954- ) in a newspaper article ca 1995
Even if the stores closed at midnight, there would still always be people coming in to buy. So there's a moment when you just have to say stop. The customers just have to be organized.
--Union delegate Marcelle Rohr, who works at the Paris department store Printemps, quoted in an article on the possible extension of department store hours to 8 p.m., in Le Parisien, 31 March 2008
Même si on fermait à minuit, il y aurait toujours des gens pour venir faire des achats. Alors il arrive un moment où il faut s'arrêter. Les clients n'ont qu'à s'organiser.
A certain Irish Capuchin, Father Donovan of Cork, was a chaplain of a noble French family in Paris when the Revolution broke out. His friends fled, and he, as having been concerned with aristocrats, was thrown into prison. One morning, after he had spent the night preparing a number of his fellow-prisoners for death, he was suddenly called out with a batch of condemned and trundeled off to the guillotine. Just as he was about to get his foot on the ladder, an officer of the French guard called out in Irish: "Are there any Gaels among you?" "Seven," answered Father Donovan, in the same language. "Then let there not be any fear on you," shouted the officer, and the seven were saved.
--Seumas MacManus (1869-1960), The Story of the Irish Race, p. 476. New York: Devin Adair Co. 1921.
This story is not as farfetched as it might seem. Many Irishmen went to the Continent to be educated during the 1700s, a time when the British had imposed draconian Penal Laws in Ireland that subjugated the native population. Many Irish soldiers served and lived in Spain, Austria and France during these years.
The Dutch understand cleanliness better than anyone in the world. Things are very different in France. There is one dirty thing at Court that I shall never get used to: the people stationed in the galleries in front of our rooms piss into all the corners. It is impossible to leave one's apartments without seeing somebody pissing.
--Letter from Liselotte von der Pfalz, German sister-in-law of Louis XIV, Versailles, 23 July 1702. From Letters From Liselotte, translated by Maria Kroll
Why the French can't make movies.
French woman wakes up, talks French, gets out of bed, has breakfast, goes shopping, talks French, comes back, thinks about lunch, visits her mother, talks French, maybe goes for a walk, sees child, talks French, movie ends....
American woman is woken up by gunshot, stripped naked and tied up by masked intruder, manages to untie herself with teeth, goes shopping, meets handsome all-action architect in the checkout line, comes back, thinks about lunch, tracks down masked intruder and tries to blow his head off, misses, runs traumatized to handsome all-action architect and fucks his brains out, discovers by chance while looking through drawer that handsome all-action architect is in fact masked intruder, blows his head off in anger, feels empowered, sees child, child says, "Love you, Mommy," end credits.
Result? Four hundred twenty-five million dollars box office worldwide. And not a word of French spoken.
--Joe Eszterhas as told to Craig Brown, in Vanity Fair, March 2008
Where can you and Luise have been hiding, to know so little of the ways of the world? I should have thought it was quite impossible to spend any time at all at any court without getting quite a good idea of it. If one were to detest every man who is fond of young fellows, it would be impossible to find even six people to like, or at least not to dislike. Some of them hate women and only love me, others like both men and women, some only like children of ten or eleven, others young men between seventeen and twenty-five. Most are in this category. Other debauchees, who love neither men nor women, amuse themselves all alone, but there are only a few of those. And then there are those who don't mind what they have, human or animal; they take whatever comes along. I know someone here who brags that he has had relations with everything under the sun except toads.
--Letter from Liselotte von der Pfalz, German sister-in-law of Louis XIV, Versailles, 3 December 1705. From , translated by Maria Kroll
