1884

Description

Military personnel patrolling the streets is not an unlikely scene in Paris, especially around the city's most notable sites and monuments. However, while the presence of such overt authority is considered to be extremely menacing in the United States, the opposite is true in France. The French actually welcome it. As Julie Barlow and Jean-BenoƮt Nadeau eloquently put it in their book, "Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong," "there is a strong element of theater policing in France." And in fact, the French government feels so compelled to display so much power because otherwise, the French citizens actually complain when the police fail to send out the brigade to demonstrations, riots, etc. "It looks like the government isn't taking them seriously." So this is a shocking cultural difference - how the French perceive their authority figures to be a necessary and obligatory presence in daily life.