The weather, politics or even the price of fruit… All excuses are good for complaining. In France, this attitude has become a habit or even a tradition. Indeed, it is an art that we master particularly well and tourists from all over the world have noticed it.
“The soup is too cold, the salad too hot, a neighbor didn’t say hello to me.”, in an article for the BBC, an American journalist is ironic on the subject. “When I arrived in France more than ten years ago, I was a 19-year-old American girl who was fascinated by everything and disturbed by the incessant complaints.”, she confides.
Also, she wondered where this strange tradition came from and why the French liked to moan so much. “I wondered why the French were always in such a bad mood, but when I finally had the courage to ask a French friend, he corrected me: they don’t complain, he says. They are moaners.”, she recounts in her article.
Also, to facilitate her integration, the young woman decided to lend herself to the game, trying to control the complaint like a native. “My friends laughed at my attempts to grumble like a Frenchwoman, because the relevance of when, with whom and about what to complain is a very delicate art that I had not yet fully mastered.”
Thus, if the French are high-level complainers, to the greatest dismay of foreigners, some are still more so than others. Discover in our slideshow the classification of the astrological signs from the most to the least grumpy.
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