French culture vs American culture
Read the text. The French take immense pride in their nation and government and are typically offended by any negative comments about their country. Visitors, particularly Americans, often interpret their attitude toward foreigners as rude. Abstraction "The collective life of the Frenchman is controlled by this fact : the Frenchman regulates his conduct and judges that of others by means of intellectual standards " (the Englishman focuses on action, the Spaniard on soul, the Frenchman on thought). Everyone knows jokes such as "It is not good : it is consistent with the facts but not with the theory : let's change the facts..." This is why the French are notoriously good in mathematics, one of the few domains where they can challenge the USA. Two other examples illustrate it. The French have immediately adopted with enthousiasm Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Why? They love the global consistency of the theory, the general nature of the concepts, the (appar...