By Ira Katz
December 20, 2025
I have lived in France for almost 20 years. As a typical American from Chicago, I can tell you that one of the primary cultural differences to adapt to is living on French time. This is to say, the French think of time differently than Americans. I will explain through a few examples.
My French wife has told me dozens of times that we will be having dinner with someone in Paris. I ask at what time. At whatever time she tells me, say 20h, we cannot arrive before 20h30. If we arrived after 21h we would be considered late. When I inevitably tell her it is time to go, say 23h30, she agrees but we are never out of the door before midnight.
Eating in France is famously slow. It is built into the economic model of the typical local restaurant where there is typically one server for a dozen tables and there is one serving per table per night. In the US it is necessary for the bottom line to have multiple servings per table per night. French fast food is often American. My daughter and her friends often go to McDonald's. French fast food is an oxymoron.
I could never count the times I arrived at a small business like a butcher shop wishing to make a quick purchase. There is only one customer, an elderly lady, who has been coming to the shop for years. Her purchases for the week required special preparation from the butcher. Of course, they must discuss the weather, children, and the state of the business. It is all very quaint, but forget about a quick dash in for a purchase.
In the summer many businesses close for a month or more for vacation. I was dumbfounded years ago when my wife and I bought a couch. It was June but we could not expect delivery until October because the factory would be closed for the summer vacation.
The pièce de résistance in my experience of French time was an exchange of emails with my employer's administration. I requested information on negotiating vacation days into early retirement days. I sent my email request on Friday, December 8, 2017. I received a reply on Tuesday, December 18. I know what you are thinking, ten days is not so bad. There is even a weekend as part of the delay. You probably have your own experiences of examples worse than this in the US. But the exceptionally astute reader will have noticed that December 18 fell on a Monday in 2017. This response was in 2018, more than one-year after my initial request ! The three line response made no mention of the time lag after my message. This culture is contagious; even an email response from the American embassy can take multiple months.
Related to the sense of time is how people talk, that is reflected in how people write. Long drawn out sentences with many commas or semi-colons is an accurate representation of many of the discussions I had in meetings at work. I am sure most Americans, and those from other countries would agree with me. But I may be the only person to have noticed that the French keyboard reflects this pattern in that commas and semi-colons are available directly while one must shift to access a period!
There has been much commentary on the decline of Europe these days with the disaster of Project Ukraine and Trump's new National Security Strategy. As Doug Casey has explained,
"Europe, in particular, is a sinking ship. It is drowning in taxes, regulation, debt, mass migration driven by welfare benefits, and the European Union bureaucracy. It's forgotten how to be productive and has embraced suicidal environmental and social policies."
Some of this decline can be attributed to cultural peculiarities such as French time. Take the example of the Tour Triangle, a new 42 story tower under construction on the south side of Paris. According to Wikipedia, the groundbreaking was in 2008. The project was given civil approval in 2015 after a rejection in 2014. The construction started in 2022 and is scheduled to be completed in 2026. Considering this timeline, how could any project make money ? I imagine it would take one tenth of the time in Beijing. My recent observation of this construction is what motivated me to write this article.
My photo of the Tour Triangle was taken from Meudon l on December 18th. Please excuse my typically poor photo.
Don't get me wrong; I am not a fan of this architecture (a modern glass and steel tower) at this location. Furthermore, I very much enjoy the French pace of life (being retired helps); but it is not conducive to attaining geopolitical power. Therefore, with this culture and for many more reasons, the French would be incredibly foolish to follow that Napoleon wannabe Macron into war with Russia.