Hey so absolutely no mean thoughts here. This is a genuine question. I’m French and look, I know we’re not better than other countries. I laughed at the trends at first but it has led some people to be openly mean to me on servers (people I had literally never interacted with became jerks just because they learned I was French)
Please avoid hate, this is an actual question. Where is this coming from? Thank you
What’s with the French hate?
r/ask
Comments
📣 Reminder for our users
>1. Check the rules: Please take a moment to review our rules, Reddiquette, and Reddit’s Content Policy.
>2. Clear question in the title: Make sure your question is clear and placed in the title. You can add details in the body of your post, but please keep it under 600 characters.
>3. Closed-Ended Questions Only: Questions should be closed-ended, meaning they can be answered with a clear, factual response. Avoid questions that ask for opinions instead of facts.
>4. Be Polite and Civil: Personal attacks, harassment, or inflammatory behavior will be removed. Repeated offenses may result in a ban. Any homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, or bigoted remarks will result in an immediate ban.
🚫 Commonly Asked Prohibited Question Subjects:
>1. Medical or pharmaceutical questions
>2. Legal or legality-related questions
>3. Technical/meta questions (help with Reddit)
This list is not exhaustive, so we recommend reviewing the full rules for more details on content limits.
✓ Mark your answers!
>If your question has been answered, please reply with
Answered!!to the response that best fit your question. This helps the community stay organized and focused on providing useful answers.I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
I think this is a common trend of how hate of some nationalities happens: it starts as a funny joke, then people bring up vague reasons to actually hate it (French people are rude, Paris is shit etc) and people take that as an excuse to full on hate.
Same thing happened with China. People claimed it was hate of their government or covid related. Really 90% of it was an excuse to make fun of their accents and music and dumb social credit jokes. It’s pathetic.
I don’t get it myself, I’m Canadian and I love France and never had a bad interaction with a French person.
We’re in Belgium, had a French person scoff at me because of the way we say 90. I guess it goes both ways.
I expect this is something that is about 700 years old and derives from the traditional antagonism between England and France. Check out the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. It’s traditional.
American here. I hear it from others at times and I’ll usually counter it with the facts to put a stop to it. Uncalled for!
Groundskeeper Willy? Isn’t it he who said “It is good to hate the French”? I’m not sure. However I do remember submitting a limerick to a contest Jonah Goldberg ran before the start of the original Gulf War. It had to begin with with the first two lines:
There once was a nation called France
that became such a pain in the pants
she lay down supine
with Sadam’s rapine
all for the sake of finance
Dude, I understand that the English behave nastily during the time of Joan of Arc, but it was so long ago that even you have people who don’t know what it’s about.
I’m talking about your attitude towards the English language.
Yes, I have experienced this personally.
No, I’m not an Englishman.
I’m from Ukraine, I live in Ukraine and I’m not going to leave.
Canadian. Love the French.
I bought a used MAS 36 in a gun store. The owner said it was never fired and only dropped once.
Jerks will be jerks as a first priority. Finding a thing to be jerksome about is a second priority. If it wasn’t for your being French, they would select some other attribute about you to target their jerkitude.
I’m currently in UK and you’d be surprised at how many Francophiles there are here. The old rivalry and “complicated” history between France and England is now just a lazy punchline for dumb jokes. It’s not a real hatred, it’s just a lame shortcut for people who cannot tell jokes.
There was a dumb thing from the Iraq-USA war about renaming “french fries” to “freedom fries” many years ago. I cannot remember the details, and I suspect most people cannot remember it either. Again, just a lazy punchline for lame jokes.
Love to France from your UK+EU family!
French people are unrepentant snobs, but the hate is because it seems they have good reason to be.
I don’t hate French people and I’m English. When I’ve visited France I had some pretty rude treatment, even as a kid in 1999.
When I was with my parents they would be speaking French to whoever we encountered and when I visited with my ex she would speak French for us, so it’s not like we were the typical Brits abroad.
I’ve been to a few places in France but I don’t want to go to Paris again, it totally sucked balls. I feel the same about London to be fair.
I think it’s a mix of bad personal experiences with the stereotype of France as rude cheese eating surrender monkeys with a superiority complex who couldn’t wait to kick us out right after we’d won two wars for them. Not that I subscribe to this.
As a Brit, it brings me joy knowing our campaign of hating the french has started to catch on after 1000 years.
Well the US exported it’s culture around the world after WW2 and the US gets its French hate both from the fact that the American colonies were established by England (who were rivals all the way back to when God was just a corporal) and the fact that the American people and France fought a war just before the US’s independence and right after it.
Also, the fact that a lot of Americans think that the french were ungrateful for taking care of their little German infestation twice in a single generation.
Ultimately it’s just a cultural meme and my fellow Americans have a lot of growing up to do.