Summer has arrived and the holidays have already begun for many French people. Among them, a certain number hastened to reach the coasts to finally be able to rest on the sand, under a blazing sun.

On the beaches, the French have their habits and this did not escape the British and in particular this journalist from the Financial Times who, over the course of her pen, had fun drawing the portrait of the typical holidaymaker, as reported our colleagues from Courrier international.

According to her, families from France would be easy to recognize. The kids are tanned, “in frilly swim trunks, flanked by mums sporting bobbed hair and slender one-pieces, and a troop of dads in surprisingly high-cut red or blue swim trunks discussing sailing conditions and deplore the closure of the port bakery”.

In her article entitled “Nobody does the beach better than the French”, which could be translated as “At the beach, there is no better than the French”, the journalist points out two rules which illustrate the way of be vacationers blue white red.

First of all, there would be the question of regularity. Every year, the French would go to the same patch of beach, to the same place with the same people. “If you had to play the game of the seven differences, you would find neither more nor less than the number of babies born since the previous summer,” she writes.

The second rule would be about sometimes surprising behavior. “No music or barbecue, but lots of cigarettes,” reads the Financial Times article. “The rule is tacit but strict, and borders on disdain, especially in large families: you don’t snack between meals.”