19 Awesome Conversation Starters About France
Learn how to start conversations about France & French culture with these 19 really awesome conversation starters.
What’s worse than being stuck in a conversation where you simply couldn’t rack your brains hard enough to come up with something brilliant to break the ice?
Well, that’s right: nothing.
Nothing could be more awkward or nerve-racking than just sitting there looking like an idiot. The longer the silence, the sweatier your palms get, the more awkward the moment becomes, and the more you fall deeper into the awkwardness spiral and you’re hardly ever going to recover from it. By that time, your conversation partner would already be toying with the idea that you must be some sort of an idiot with IQ lower than a goldfish. Ouch.
The good news is, we’re nice enough to help you out with this one. And since this is a site about everything French, we’re giving you a bunch of super awesome conversation starters and icebreakers about France that will take you from awkward moron to knowledgeable worldly fella in just a minute or two. Cool huh.
So are you ready? Here goes.
1. Here’s an absurd joke about a Parisian street mime: he took his art so seriously that he got stuck inside his imaginary box and eventually died of starvation. Now that’s what we call being dead serious about your job. Treat it as a joke, rather than an actual historical event.
2. Crayola is a brand name with a French connection! Alice Binney coined it from craie, the French word for “chalk,” and ola, from the English word oleaginous, meaning “oily.” Crayola itself is not an ordinary French word for “oily chalk.”
3. Nîmes, a French city now in the Occitanie region, has a connection to denim’s name! Modern riveted blue jeans were developed in the United States: Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss received their patent in 1873. The French connection is the fabric’s name, rather than Nîmes being the birthplace of those jeans.
The word “denim” comes from serge de Nîmes (“serge from Nîmes”).
4. April Fool’s Day has a popular French origin story, but its precise origins are uncertain. Charles IX’s Edict of Roussillon in 1564 made January 1 the official start of the year in France; this was not the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. One story says people who kept celebrating New Year around the spring were teased by their friends. A good conversation starter—as long as you present it as a theory, not a proven origin.
5. The Bikini has a French fashion connection. In 1946, Jacques Heim and Louis Réard promoted smaller two-piece swimsuits, called l’Atome and Bikini. Earlier two-piece bathing suits already existed. Réard’s design appeared at the Piscine Molitor in Paris on July 5, 1946, and its name referred to Bikini Atoll. July 5 is popularly marked as Bikini Day to commemorate that presentation.
6. French is spoken in the United States, too. The 2013 American Community Survey estimated about 1.25 million people aged five and over spoke French, including Cajun and Patois, at home; that measure does not count everyone who has learned French. American celebrities with a French connection include Jodie Foster, who speaks French fluently, and Johnny Depp, who played a French-speaking Louis XV in Jeanne du Barry.
7. Could speaking French help you break the ice? A YouTube entertainment video explored the idea that you can pick up girls more easily if you speak French. That is a playful premise, rather than a controlled social experiment proving the theory.
8. Dom Pérignon helped improve Champagne’s wines through careful grape selection, blending and winemaking. Early bubbles could be unpredictable, and producers gradually learned to control them. The story that he and his fellow monks simply changed their minds about a “terrible mistake” is an oversimplification of that history.
9. French respondents ranked among the more sexually active in Durex’s 2003 online survey. France was not first in that report: Hungary and Bulgaria topped the frequency chart. These were self-reported answers from people who chose to participate, rather than a definitive ranking of whole populations—or a current fact about everyone in France.
10. In 1386, in Falaise, Normandy, a pig was publicly executed after killing a child. An executioner’s receipt preserved in the Orne archives records payment for hanging the sow. Later historical accounts add the even more bizarre detail that the animal was dressed in human clothes.
11. Speaking of pigs, the supposed French law against naming a pig Napoleon is a myth. The Napoleon Foundation traced the story to French editions of Orwell’s Animal Farm whose publishers renamed the pig “César”—not to a French law.
12. Former French first lady Carla Bruni dated rock stars Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger before marrying Nicolas Sarkozy. But the often-repeated claim that she also dated Donald Trump is one she has explicitly denied in interviews. Celebrity trivia can get a little carried away!
13. France helped shape the modern department store and restaurant. Paris’s Le Bon Marché became a pioneering department store under the Boucicauts from 1852, and modern restaurant culture developed in Paris in the eighteenth century. Claims about the very “first” anywhere depend on the definition; shops and places serving meals existed much earlier.
14. Paris is called “The City of Light.” Its long history of public street lighting helps explain the nickname. The city’s role as a centre of intellectual life also makes the metaphor fitting, but literal illumination is part of the story, too.
15. Beer and wine prices vary by the drink and where you order it. Wine can be inexpensive in France, but it is not automatically free with a restaurant meal. Some set menus include a drink; check what is included. You can request a free carafe of drinking water with your meal.
16. Speaking of wine, winemaking in what is now France goes back to antiquity, including Roman times. In 2004 alone, France produced about 57.4 million hectolitres of wine, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. That’s a lot of bottles!
17. Wearing a white wedding dress is part of French bridal tradition, but it cannot be traced to a single proven French origin in 1499. White dresses were worn before Queen Victoria’s 1840 wedding, which helped popularise the fashion more widely.
18. Lady Liberty is French! The Statue of Liberty was given by the French to the Americans to celebrate the US’ centennial.
And lastly,
19. A toasting superstition says that if you cross your glass with someone else’s when you’re toasting, you’ll receive seven years of bad sex (gasp!). A superstition, of course—not a literal prediction!
So there you go, 19 cool conversation starters to help you out in your daily conversations… or even on dates! Come to think of it, these factoids might be just what you need to land a hot date (or two).
…and you’re welcome.
