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I lived in France for several years, and I find it somewhat amusing how protective France is of their culture. They limit the number of foreign restaurant chain

I lived in France for several years, and I find it somewhat amusing how protective France is of their culture. They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle. They are protective of their language. The French dinner meal ("repas") is a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landmark. This "culture pass" is consistent with the French people's love of all things French.

Thaxll 5y ago
You should see Québec.
- jandrese 5y ago
  I was going to say the Canadian government goes to great lengths to insure that their culture doesn't become completely Americanized.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Well, the provincial government in Quebec. The rest of Canada is pretty Americanized.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Even the national government has rules like requiring a minimum percentage of the airwaves be devoted to Canadian content.
      - jedberg 5y ago
        Sure, but that's because they had to build a coalition government with the MPs from Quebec. :)
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Globalized not Americanized. Considering all of the Canadians in Hollywood and on the music charts in America how exactly do you define Americanized anyway? Don’t you have a ton of European/Asian originated things in your local culture too like we do down here in America? I love IKEA and drive there in my Japanese car. I cut my fingernails every week with a great set of German tools (Wusthof or something). Tonight we’re going to watch Train to Busan peninsula on Amazon (Korean movie) because I love zombie flicks and heard good things (the first one was good!).
      - jedberg 5y ago
        No, I mean Americanized. If you dropped someone in Vancouver who had never been, they'd have a hard time figuring out they were in Canada vs the US until they saw a Tim Hortons, because they would be hearing American made music and seeing American made TV while seeing a bunch of American brand stores.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Everything’s a little different in Kaybek.
  - foofoo55 5y ago
    See also Bill C-10, currently making its way through parliament, which is trying to tax online media but also enforce a minimum amount of Canadian content: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-content-1.6007192 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-con...
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      I'm still not sure why there is a need to set a quota for content. Or for the state to subsidize it. Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch. Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Quebec... doesn't do a lot to protect it's culture, from my understanding. Its just that French Canadians buy their own culture.
Bayart 5y ago
> They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle I've never heard of anything like that. McDonald's are everywhere, there are new American concoctions of dubious nature making their way into the mainstream everyday and half the central streets of any given city seem to be made out of kebab joints.
- paganel 5y ago
  I may be wrong and too I’m too lazy to search, but I think that at some point France was one of the biggest markets for MacDo. But honestly nothing can beat that kebab/swawarma thing, that stuff is the best meat for the buck you can get (and quite tasty, too). I’m surprised the kebab culture hasn’t made any big inroads in the States just yet, or it doesn’t seen that it has from half a world away.
  - bernawil 5y ago
    probably because kebab is basically taco. Tacos with weat tortillas and the meat prepared in a cylinder were introduced by lebanese immigrants.
  - Bayart 5y ago
    >the best meat for the buck you can get In France it's usually the worst meat available, aggregated with salt and spices to hide the horror. McDonald's has the best meat I'm aware of and they've gone to great lengths to wash their shit food image.
  - tomcooks 5y ago
    You're surprised that Arab food is not mainstream in a country that spent the last decades being mad at Arabs, while actively carpet bombing their homes?
ucha 5y ago
I never heard about the limit of foreign restaurants. Fast food chains like McDonalds are absolutely everywhere. The food there however is significantly better than in the US.
- adventured 5y ago
  Definitely. In the US there are countless better alternative fast food options to McDonald's, so it's a lower class / lower middle class targeted chain. In the US McDonald's competes on price to stay in that budget range rather than trying to move upstream on price. McDonald's is to fast food in the US what dollar stores are to retail. In foreign countries the financial targeting is different and there are always fewer McDonald's per capita. There are twice as many McDonald's per capita in the US vs France for example (and France has a lot of them at nearly 1,500); Britain has a similar ratio as France.
olivermarks 5y ago
I think it is a good thing overall. I remember the furor when McDonalds opened on the Champs Elysee. Let's be honest, identical globalist fast food plastic frontages ruin the uniqueness of places. Airports are the ultimate example, you can fly 1000's of mile and get off a plane to an airport that is virtually identical to the one you left. This is culturally banal and slowly visually homogenizing the world. The result is insane amounts of tourists heading to the few unique places left in search of differentiation
- frereubu 5y ago
  There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-magnus-enzensberger.pdf https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-ma... [PDF, 1MB] The issue is that there's effectively no "good" level of tourism (unless you sell things to tourists I suppose). Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Paris has more tourists than college towns have students. I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      Without the tourist euro, they’d just get the rest of France to pay for it. But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism. Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.
  - Miraste 5y ago
    How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.
guggle 5y ago
All good things if you ask me. Also, this measure is not really about french culture. It is about culture in general. If you visit an art museum most of time it's filled with art from everywhere. The quai Branly museum comes to my mind here, but really most museum have exhibits of foreign works.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Would you still say the same if we hypothetically replace France with US, China, UK, Russia, etc?
  - guggle 5y ago
    Sure.
- hinkley 5y ago
  My partner was a Velasquez fan and didn’t figure out that Spain had repatriated most of his paintings after the books she read had been printed. There was one wall in the Louvre and she was ill pleased. When the local art museums rotate in traveling exhibits that’s more for the locals (where ‘locals’ might loosely include a few hours’ transit in all directions). But I feel a little guilty going because I know someone risked a truck full of Van Gogh or Picasso works by sending them a third of the way around the world. It’s cool but what if there’s an accident?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Throwaway371893 5y ago
I find it quite sad to see comments like this on HN. Is it amusing to you to see countries trying to protect themselves from absorption by the anglosphere (culturally)? That's how I read your comment - I hope I am wrong though.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Pity you hid this gem behind a throwaway.
908B64B197 5y ago
> They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle. What? It's also a notoriously hard market to get into.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
France has a huge tourist economy and weirdly the reason it does it because it's France and full of French things. Not sure why that should be considered weird or bad. If all France had was Chipotle and the other American chains then I would have visited it once and never again rather than the 15 or so times I've been.
hrktb 5y ago
I generally like French culture, and also see a strong economic rationale that covers the "amusing" part. It has a strong (and also protected) agriculture sector, from memory they're in the 10 largest in the world, and having consummers buying these products is a big deal. McDonalds is fine, but they also definitely need restaurants serving steaks with blue cheese sauce with a small glass of wine. Language protection also had an incredible effect on the entertainment industry that was seriously struggling before (also due to how strongly it was enforced, notably with the 40% rule)
ggregoire 5y ago
Although it doesn't refute your claim about the limit of foreign restaurants, France ranks 4th in number of currently operating McDonalds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonald%27s_restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...
- joshuaheard 5y ago
  There isn't a hard limit. I think I should have said "discourage". I have a friend who was an exec at Chipotle. It took him two years to get permission to open the first one in Paris, in part from that sort of push back. I also remember the controversy over the first McDonalds there.
scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
It is very amusing, but also admirable. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a national security component to it as well.
tomcooks 5y ago
Nothing French in this, it's an Italian project adapted to France.

Thaxll 5y ago

You should see Québec.

jandrese 5y ago
I was going to say the Canadian government goes to great lengths to insure that their culture doesn't become completely Americanized.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Well, the provincial government in Quebec. The rest of Canada is pretty Americanized.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Even the national government has rules like requiring a minimum percentage of the airwaves be devoted to Canadian content.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      Sure, but that's because they had to build a coalition government with the MPs from Quebec. :)
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    Globalized not Americanized. Considering all of the Canadians in Hollywood and on the music charts in America how exactly do you define Americanized anyway? Don’t you have a ton of European/Asian originated things in your local culture too like we do down here in America? I love IKEA and drive there in my Japanese car. I cut my fingernails every week with a great set of German tools (Wusthof or something). Tonight we’re going to watch Train to Busan peninsula on Amazon (Korean movie) because I love zombie flicks and heard good things (the first one was good!).
    - jedberg 5y ago
      No, I mean Americanized. If you dropped someone in Vancouver who had never been, they'd have a hard time figuring out they were in Canada vs the US until they saw a Tim Hortons, because they would be hearing American made music and seeing American made TV while seeing a bunch of American brand stores.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Everything’s a little different in Kaybek.
- foofoo55 5y ago
  See also Bill C-10, currently making its way through parliament, which is trying to tax online media but also enforce a minimum amount of Canadian content: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-content-1.6007192 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-con...
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    I'm still not sure why there is a need to set a quota for content. Or for the state to subsidize it. Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch. Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
908B64B197 5y ago
Quebec... doesn't do a lot to protect it's culture, from my understanding. Its just that French Canadians buy their own culture.

Bayart 5y ago

> They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle I've never heard of anything like that. McDonald's are everywhere, there are new American concoctions of dubious nature making their way into the mainstream everyday and half the central streets of any given city seem to be made out of kebab joints.

paganel 5y ago
I may be wrong and too I’m too lazy to search, but I think that at some point France was one of the biggest markets for MacDo. But honestly nothing can beat that kebab/swawarma thing, that stuff is the best meat for the buck you can get (and quite tasty, too). I’m surprised the kebab culture hasn’t made any big inroads in the States just yet, or it doesn’t seen that it has from half a world away.
- bernawil 5y ago
  probably because kebab is basically taco. Tacos with weat tortillas and the meat prepared in a cylinder were introduced by lebanese immigrants.
- Bayart 5y ago
  >the best meat for the buck you can get In France it's usually the worst meat available, aggregated with salt and spices to hide the horror. McDonald's has the best meat I'm aware of and they've gone to great lengths to wash their shit food image.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  You're surprised that Arab food is not mainstream in a country that spent the last decades being mad at Arabs, while actively carpet bombing their homes?

ucha 5y ago

I never heard about the limit of foreign restaurants. Fast food chains like McDonalds are absolutely everywhere. The food there however is significantly better than in the US.

adventured 5y ago
Definitely. In the US there are countless better alternative fast food options to McDonald's, so it's a lower class / lower middle class targeted chain. In the US McDonald's competes on price to stay in that budget range rather than trying to move upstream on price. McDonald's is to fast food in the US what dollar stores are to retail. In foreign countries the financial targeting is different and there are always fewer McDonald's per capita. There are twice as many McDonald's per capita in the US vs France for example (and France has a lot of them at nearly 1,500); Britain has a similar ratio as France.

olivermarks 5y ago

I think it is a good thing overall. I remember the furor when McDonalds opened on the Champs Elysee. Let's be honest, identical globalist fast food plastic frontages ruin the uniqueness of places. Airports are the ultimate example, you can fly 1000's of mile and get off a plane to an airport that is virtually identical to the one you left. This is culturally banal and slowly visually homogenizing the world. The result is insane amounts of tourists heading to the few unique places left in search of differentiation

frereubu 5y ago
There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-magnus-enzensberger.pdf https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-ma... [PDF, 1MB] The issue is that there's effectively no "good" level of tourism (unless you sell things to tourists I suppose). Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Paris has more tourists than college towns have students. I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    Without the tourist euro, they’d just get the rest of France to pay for it. But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism. Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.
- Miraste 5y ago
  How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.

guggle 5y ago

All good things if you ask me. Also, this measure is not really about french culture. It is about culture in general. If you visit an art museum most of time it's filled with art from everywhere. The quai Branly museum comes to my mind here, but really most museum have exhibits of foreign works.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Would you still say the same if we hypothetically replace France with US, China, UK, Russia, etc?
- guggle 5y ago
  Sure.
hinkley 5y ago
My partner was a Velasquez fan and didn’t figure out that Spain had repatriated most of his paintings after the books she read had been printed. There was one wall in the Louvre and she was ill pleased. When the local art museums rotate in traveling exhibits that’s more for the locals (where ‘locals’ might loosely include a few hours’ transit in all directions). But I feel a little guilty going because I know someone risked a truck full of Van Gogh or Picasso works by sending them a third of the way around the world. It’s cool but what if there’s an accident?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Throwaway371893 5y ago

I find it quite sad to see comments like this on HN. Is it amusing to you to see countries trying to protect themselves from absorption by the anglosphere (culturally)? That's how I read your comment - I hope I am wrong though.

tomcooks 5y ago
Pity you hid this gem behind a throwaway.

908B64B197 5y ago

> They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle. What? It's also a notoriously hard market to get into.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

France has a huge tourist economy and weirdly the reason it does it because it's France and full of French things. Not sure why that should be considered weird or bad. If all France had was Chipotle and the other American chains then I would have visited it once and never again rather than the 15 or so times I've been.

hrktb 5y ago

I generally like French culture, and also see a strong economic rationale that covers the "amusing" part. It has a strong (and also protected) agriculture sector, from memory they're in the 10 largest in the world, and having consummers buying these products is a big deal. McDonalds is fine, but they also definitely need restaurants serving steaks with blue cheese sauce with a small glass of wine. Language protection also had an incredible effect on the entertainment industry that was seriously struggling before (also due to how strongly it was enforced, notably with the 40% rule)

ggregoire 5y ago

Although it doesn't refute your claim about the limit of foreign restaurants, France ranks 4th in number of currently operating McDonalds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonald%27s_restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...

joshuaheard 5y ago
There isn't a hard limit. I think I should have said "discourage". I have a friend who was an exec at Chipotle. It took him two years to get permission to open the first one in Paris, in part from that sort of push back. I also remember the controversy over the first McDonalds there.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago

It is very amusing, but also admirable. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a national security component to it as well.

tomcooks 5y ago

Nothing French in this, it's an Italian project adapted to France.