Living or traveling on a different country can be sometimes frightening, especially caused by the famous cliché. These convey a lot of rumours or informations about the way of life, the custom or the attitude of a population. And sometimes, that is not true.

In this post, we explain three famous clichés about french people.

1. French people don’t have a wash

The origin of this cliché probably date back to the time of Louis XIV, one of the king of France, between 1643 and 1715. In this time, science was consider as heresy and medicine wasn’t really good. Indeed, physician have accused the water to spread diseases. And so, the court didn’t use to have a wash and used a lot of fragance to conceal their odour, this getting worse the smell.

In spite of the time and the improvement of our lifestyle, this cliché remains, maybe because of the toilet of restaurants and the underground, whose the non-cleaning repulse the tourist.

2. French people are never happy

From the point of view of international, France is considering as a complainer country, never happy and always doing strike. Zoé, from south of France, remember that during a language study holiday in the United States, she saw a picture of her district in France, on an article in the Washington Post.

The origin of this cliché can be from the french Revolution, in 1789, when the Third Estate (major part of french population), rebelled against monarchist system. Then, a lot of rebellion have occured.

Last, in 2009, a study performed by TNS Infratest for Expedia (study carried out with 15,000 europeans hotels) reveals that french people are the worst european tourist: non-liable to learn other language, rude, …

3. French women don’t shave

This cliché circulate since Second World Ward. During this dark period of world history, France was occuping by Nazi Germany. And in this time of fighting and rationing, we can thing with good reason that french women have other concerns than shave.