Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks, 2003) is the first book from the writer-journalist team Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau.

Part 1, Spirit, has eight chapters that explain the main features of the French mindset, including history and geography, their ideas about privacy, their culture of grandeur and eloquence and extremism and the impact of major events like World War II and French decolonization.

Part 3, Change, explains in four chapters how France is evolving in terms of its worldview, demography and political institutions, both because of internal forces and the influence of the European Union.

[1] The first print (2000 copies) of the American edition of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong features an upside down French flag with the red color near the flagpole.

This new book is not an update of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, but it uses a similar approach to analyze and describe the way the French talk – about small things and big issues, themselves and the world around them, including their own taboos.

In 2011, Jean-Benoît Nadeau completely rewrote and adapted the original English version for a French edition published in Paris, Le français, quelle histoire!