The Thing About France: the podcast that auscultates Francophile Americans

The American Francophile is a strange animal. He or she often knows more about France than many French people; can, depending on his type of beauty, quote Montaigne in the text or sing Gainsbourg like no one else. In short, his fascination with France fascinates us, French people, who love nothing so much as to look at ourselves in the mirror that these informed observers hold out to us.

It is to these Francophiles that the podcast The Thing About France gives the floor – in English. The third season is launched this Tuesday, July 14. Produced from the start by the cultural services of the French Embassy, ​​the podcast now has a new presenter – and a new partnership with French Morning. Literary critic for the New York Times, teacher and translator, Liesl Schillinger takes over from Bénédicte de Montlaur, the former cultural advisor who invented this podcast. For this new season, ” we wanted to see what a conversation about France would look like if it was led by an American this time around, in the hopes that listeners would identify with and learn even more », Explains Gaëtan Bruel, the cultural advisor who took over from Bénédicte de Montlaur last year.

If Liesl Schillinger is now responsible for confessing these American writers, artists and other intellectuals, it is not by chance. She has cultivated Francophilia from an early age. ” I was so in love with the French language when I was little that my parents enrolled me in French lessons at university, and sent me at the age of twelve to spend a summer in “exchange” in a farm in Nièvre », Says Liesl Schillinger. This summer at Mr. and Mrs. Jamme’s, in the village of Langeron, then others who followed, made the little girl from Indiana a Francophile for life, who sings Daniel Balavoine, loves Tintin and became, among others , translator of Alexandre Dumas fils. With the title of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres which was awarded to her in 2017, it was more than enough to be one of the guests of the first season of podcast, alongside famous Francophiles such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, writer David Sedaris or journalist and essayist Adam Gopnik.

Now in the interviewer’s seat, she wants, she says, to question these Francophile Americans on ” how their French experience transformed their identity “. By force of circumstances, this third season was recorded against a background of COVID-19. Biographer William Middleton, who contracted the disease in Paris, speaks at length differences between the French and American health systems – but also ” infinite pleasure to find the Parisian terraces at the end of confinement “. Graydon Carter, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, whose interview will be broadcast in the fifth episode of this season, told him about his confinement on the French Riviera where, since leaving the famous magazine, he spends most of his time. ” He simply told me about his happiness to live there, his fishmonger who delivers him to his home and that sort of thing […]. This is what is wonderful about this subject: our guests cannot stop talking about “their” France, like a lover – or a sublime chocolate cake! “

The interviews do not avoid the hottest topics of the moment, including Black Lives Matter, with essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of “Self-Portrait in Black and White”. Married to a French woman, he lives in Paris from where he leads ” the same type of intellectual mission as James Baldwin in his time ”, Notes Liesl Schillinger.

The guest of the first episode of this season 3 is John von Sothen, American journalist based in Paris since 2002. He is the author of hilarious memoirs, “Mr. Mediocre: an American learns the art of being a normal Frenchman”. He talks with Leisl Schillinger about his life as an adopted Parisian, about the 10th arrondissement where he is living with his French wife and their two children, and of course about the confinement, which he spent in the countryside with his family. – who every evening at 8 p.m. would knock on pots and pans in the middle of the fields to join in the tribute to the caregivers.

Each episode of the series will then be broadcast every two weeks and available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, the The Thing About France podcast site, as well as on French Morning, a media partner.