I’ve previously written that I got married in summer 2025 and moved to France to join my wife in her country in September 2025 — and that I am incredibly lucky to be here.
Here are some quick, scattered thoughts on aspects of living in France that stood out to me over the last few months.
As a new immigrant to France with a visa granted thanks to marriage, I was required to attend a series of mandatory appointments with OFII, the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration. In the autumn of 2025 I had a French language test, a health exam, and a signing of the Contract of Civic Integration, in which I pledged to abide by French laws and values. Particularly striking were the Civic Integration Days, a four-day course in which a tranche of migrants arrived at an OFII-linked Paris office building at 8:30 in the morning and attended a class on everything the state wished them to know to become good French residents and potential future citizens until 4:30 in the afternoon, with a break for lunch. I had my first two Civic Integration Days in early January with one cohort of students, then requested and received to be reassigned to another, later cohort, then went to China for my reporting journey, then had my second two Civic Integration Days in February.
These were the most diverse spaces I’ve ever been in, with migrants from around the world lining up to become more French. At a rough estimate, the crowd filing into their different classrooms was generally maybe 30% people of African descent, maybe 20% Middle Eastern/North African, 20% East or South Asian, 10% Latin American, and 10% people of European descent. I was generally one of the only white guys around. There were Chinese, Afghan, Indian, Malian, Brazilian, and many other passports on display. I found it all rather heartwarming, a “common ground of humanity” feeling. OFII staff (or rather the staff of the company OFII had contracted to administer these classes) were uniformly kind, polite, and respectful, even when people were freaking out a bit over potential visa issues. Good work was being done.
A lot of what was taught in those classes was what you’d expect from a welcome-to-France class: very France-specific information that’s practically useful in day-to-day life or gives a general sense of important cultural background. The phone number for an ambulance is 15, for police 17, for firefighters 18. We learned how many régions there are (18), how many départements (101) and how many towns (over 34,000). We got a whistle-stop tour of French history: the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, the First Republic, Napoleon I’s First Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Third Republic, World War I, World War II, Nazi occupation, the Fourth Republic, the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic1. There was a rundown on symbols of the nation from Marianne to Marseillaise, highlights of French artistic culture from Delacroix to Debussy, and even — delightfully stereotypically — traditional cuisine items from different regions of France, from Brie de Normandie to Fondue Savoyarde.
But beyond the specific facts, I was really very positively impressed by how firmly the French Civic Integration Days were trying to instill liberal humanistic values, or at the very least make clear to you that no matter what you personally believe the French state and French civil society run on liberal humanistic values. There was a certain uncompromising quality to it which felt positively thrilling to an exiled American Democrat used to years of politically necessary kowtowing to swing voters. France says “This is who we are, this is how we do things here. Deal with it.” At one point the teacher told us, almost in these exact words, “In France, the schools will teach your children that gay marriage is okay, and you do not have a right to stop them from doing that.” A lot of time was spent on the admirable core French civic value of Laïcité, which translates into English as “secularism” but has a lot more historical weight than that, freighted with centuries of struggle against religious conservatism from Voltaire and Diderot through the Dreyfus Affair. It is illegal in France for a government employee to wear a religious symbol like cross (or a hijab, or a Star of David) while on duty, because on duty you are representing the French state, and the French state must serve everyone equally. Religious rhetoric in politics is verboten, or rather interdit. I wholeheartedly approve.
France, unlike the United States, is doing integration on Hard Mode. Many of the very poorest countries in the entire world are former French colonies in the Sahel — Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Central African Republic — and many of them still use French as a major language of administration. France is unsurprisingly a preferred destination for emigrants from these countries (as well as the many slightly-less-poor Francophone nations of West Africa, like Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Guinea), and it’s quite common for me to see Paris bodegas advertising cheap rates on remittance transfers or phone call plans to Mali.
A migrant to the U.S. from Guatemala is practically part of U.S. culture already compared to the vast gulf of historical and socioeconomic differences separating the Sahel and Western Europe. But they’re making it work! These Civic Integration Days are geared to be applicable for almost any human on Earth, to take someone who was perhaps a nomadic Fulani cattle-herder or a millet-grinding subsistence farmer from a village of scattered huts in the drylands around Timbuktu and turn them into a French person believing in liberté, égalité, fraternité. You have to admire the bold universalist vision of it. These French Civic Integration Days were trying to be nothing less than an extraordinary kind of “Modern World 101” class, downloading centuries of hard-fought Enlightenment values over four days in a classroom. It’s almost what you’d imagine a “Welcome to Earth” class taught by the Federation in Star Trek would be like. My class cohort in Days 3 and 4 had — it sounds too cute to be true, but I swear I’m not making this up — one Israeli and one Palestinian student, and the only interaction I heard between the two of them was a comparison of makhlouba recipes.
Some of the curriculum was basic stuff like “Taxes. Here’s what they are. Here’s what they fund. You have to pay them, it is not optional. No, really, you definitely have to pay them, the government will know if you don’t pay them and you will get in trouble.”
Some of it was clearly patching odd stuff that had become a problem before. One that particularly surprised me was “Tall building windows. If you live in a tall building with windows, do not leave them open or your child may fall out and die. Very very few children die from falling out of windows in France, but almost all of those who do are the children of very recent immigrants who left a window open in a tall building.”
One that didn’t surprise me but that I appreciated was a scared-straight session that clarified that all forms of female genital mutilation (FGM, tragically common in some parts of West Africa that send a lot of migrants to France) were ABSOLUTELY 100% ILLEGAL in France and YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED for it, and no it was not okay and it WILL STILL BE PROSECUTED as a French crime even if it was done on a “vacation” outside of France back to the country of origin.
There was overall a very strong emphasis on women’s rights and worker’s rights across the Civic Integration Days. Perhaps unsurprising from the nation of feminist pioneers like Christine de Pizan, Olympe de Gouges, and Simone de Beauvoir, but nonetheless deeply satisfying to hear for a member of the American diaspora in 2026. “In France, women and men are completely equal” was a repeated refrain. It was emphasized that husbands do not have legal authority or control over their wives, and that women had the right to work outside the home if they wished. There was even a class role-play where two students were selected to represent a marital discussion over this, with one spouse trying to order the other one to stay home and care for the kids and the other one insisting on their right to earn money themselves. It was clearly intended to reproach patriarchal norms, but the folks in my class had fun with it and role-played their own gender-flipped version, with a stay-at-home-dad arguing for the right to work against a businesswoman mom.
My Civic Integration Days 1 and 2, before my trip to China, were taught by E., a charismatic African-French woman. She was somehow both dead serious all the time and an incredible comedian, reeling off the clearly state-mandated talking points and then enlivening it with her own commentary that really helped it come alive. In discussing French constitutional values, she glossed “solidarité” as “giving a damn about other people.” She was particularly fierce when describing human rights and Enlightenment values. “In France, if you hit your kid, the state will damn well take your kid away from you.” In the FGM-is-bad discussion, she poignantly described the horror of a girl being mutilated by her own family, and launched an uncomfortable but salutary call-and-response for the folks in class to say what they felt about it.
Another time, the official slideshow was doubling down on the importance of education. Education is mandatory, it’s a parent’s responsibility to their child, it’s free and there’s state support to help you access it, it’s a path to personal and social advancement, et cetera, et cetera. E. said all that, then added, “That means if you don’t send your kid to school, you will FUCK UP THEIR LIFE and it will be TOTALLY YOUR FAULT!” At a different point in the education discussion, she quipped “Schools will not teach your children forbidden magics, despite what Harry Potter tells you.”
At one point, the official slideshow was solemnly relating that in the modern age, France accepts immigrants from around the world and has become a society of many different ethnic backgrounds and mixed-race people.
“And why are there mixed-race people?” she asked the class rhetorically. (In French, of course). “Because people moving to new countries don’t just masturbate!” There was a brief pause of utter shock — I saw a guy from Indonesia cover his face with his hands — and then the room burst out in laughter.
One other interesting thing I’ve really noticed about France, both in the Civic Integration Day curriculum and in day-to-day life, is a strong form of “linguistic nationalism” that doesn’t really pattern-match with the Anglosphere. In American English, if enough people make the same error or use made-up slang long enough, it becomes an acceptable version of the language, generally considered no better or worse than something from the pen of Shakespeare or Franklin or Melville.
In France, there is a One True Canonical French Language, decided by a National Academy led by forty sword-bearing dignitaries named the Immortals (seriously), and even though nobody actually speaks it perfectly and tons of people actively try to subvert it, everyone at least relates to it as the standard. And the French language, in both its official version and its penumbra of faster-evolving dialects, is central to the concept of being French. Code-switching is super common: even if you speak totally unofficial verlan slang with your friends or join a half-anglophone Discord group, you’re probably still speaking Immortal-approved old-school French with your boss. My in-laws sometimes debate French grammatical forms over the dinner table, and they occasionally won’t know the answer and will pause to look up the canonical construction on their phones. This is not just a family thing, this is a national thing. When officials proposed to remove the circumflex (the little thing on top of this î) in 2016, a mass movement to defend the circumflex sprung up overnight. There were protests in the street! (Admittedly, that’s quite a low bar here).
The Civic Integration Days definitely conveyed the message that you could be black, brown or white, gay, straight or trans, male, female, or non-binary, Christian, Muslim or Jewish, atheist or theist or agnostic, and be truly French. But you could not be a non-French-speaker and be truly French. If you want to be French, you absolutely have to speak the French language. If you didn’t speak it, it was your duty to learn it. If your kids did not speak it, special classes to help them learn French are available for free, and it is your duty to speak French with them at home.
This is interestingly distinct from U.S. politics, where even the extreme far-right Republican Party will happily buy ads and give speeches in Spanish advancing their white-straight-Christian identity politics. In France, it would be egregiously far-right to suggest that a person of Middle Eastern descent and Muslim faith cannot be French, but it’s entirely “normie lib” mainstream to say that someone who cannot speak French cannot be French, and it would be (and has been) wildly controversial even within the center and left for a French politician to speak at all in Arabic.
I am now simultaneously excellent at speaking French, in the sense that I can easily communicate pretty much any thought in my head and be understood, and still pretty bad at speaking French, because I constantly make errors (especially with stuff English doesn’t have, like noun gender and some of the more recherché forms of verb conjugation and tenses). But this is true of everyone, apparently, including native French speakers! There are entire tenses that barely anyone uses and that you only see in old books these days. Big chunks of the official French language are “legacy code” from the 1600s and 1700s intended to display erudition in the complex Versailles-era webs of nobility and intelligentsia, and a deep appreciation of the beauty, complexity, and difficulty of the French language still remains a profound cultural value.
On a more somber note, I think that people in the U.S. really, really, really don’t realize the extent to which we’ve lost Europe. A recent poll found that 37% of French respondents described the U.S. as a “threat,” 29% as a “competitor,” and just 10% as a “close ally.” Since 2025, American aid to Ukraine has essentially ended, and the EU has been stepping up to help fund the (increasingly successful!) fight for freedom. America’s still selling some weapons, but the EU is now paying for them — we’re not an ally anymore, we’re an arms dealer.
In (my liberal-leaning bubble of) France today, Trump is spoken of in the same breath as Putin: the two vile autocrats on either side of the European Union, both insulting European values and threatening to invade European territory. France actually sent troops to Greenland in January 2026, along with Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, clearly to deter the threatened “Venezuela-style” American invasion. And that was an overt, public, acknowledged act. There was also that one time in March 2025 when a French nuclear attack submarine mysteriously surfaced in Halifax right when the maniac in the White House was threatening to invade Canada. France has a substantial military and economic base with independent nuclear arms capacity, and it’s realized this kind of great-power brinkmanship is, sadly, needed now.
In March 2026, President Macron announced a massive new “forward deterrence” military posture, increasing the French nuclear arsenal and announcing unprecedented plans to deploy French nuclear-armed fighter jets in partnership with (and potentially on the territory of) Britain, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, and, notably, Denmark. France will become the third-ever country to operate a “nuclear weapons sharing” program like this, after the longstanding U.S./NATO agreements with the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey and the more recent Russian agreement with Belarus. (There’s also widespread speculation that a recent 2025 defense pact could soon lead to Pakistan sharing its nuclear arsenal with Saudi Arabia).
France has stepped up to become the new nuclear guarantor of European freedom. A balance of terror isn’t great, but it’s better than falling down and shattering.
This stuff may have been a blip in the American news cycle, but it’s an epochal realignment in Europe. De Gaulle was right: the Americans are not to be trusted in the long term. Sure, individual Americans are still welcome as tourists in Paris, but so are individual Chinese and the Saudis and even some Russian citizens, although EU visa spots for them are now very strict and limited. Sure, America heroically fought the Nazis in World War II, but so did Soviet Russia, and that doesn’t make Putin your friend. The U.S. is no longer on the same team as France, NATO is a dead letter, and that’s entirely 100% America’s fault. I weep for my country of birth, but I’m very proud of France.
In American discourse, I’ve recently read many people asking some variation of the question “what will we do when AI automates all the jobs?” Leaving aside the highly debatable plausibility or practicality of the premise, I think this is fundamentally a culture-bound question to ask, one that makes sense in places like America and China where “workism” is a central value but doesn’t make sense in many other fragments of humanity. This doesn’t even parse as a sensible question in France, for two very good reasons. One, because if you live in France you already have an answer for what you would do if you don’t have work today: you’d go to the park or a museum or a café or something. And two, because if someone’s considering automating your job it’s time for a strike, riot, protest vote, or all three.
When I went back to the U.S. to visit my family, I was struck by the sudden predominance of AI-related ads, and shifting from U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, broader-Anglosphere)-based to EU-based news outlets reveals a sharp discrepancy in AI-related headlines. I’ve even seen major AI commentators writing things along the lines of “It’s not all about the technology, there won’t be a magic wave of hyper-prosperity due to LLMs alone, whether AI has a net positive or negative outcome for the average person depends on choices made in politics and institutional structures.” Really? No way! This would not be a surprise in France, where centuries of tumultuous democratic politics since before the Industrial Revolution really got started have inculcated a deep knowledge that technology is made for people, not people for technology.
Futurist and Substacker Azeem Azhar once gave a presentation called “The future of work is artisanal cheese,” about how handmade imperfect crafts, where the whole point is that it’s made by human hands, are the most AI-proof of jobs now. France seems rather well prepared for that future. All the stuff that seems idiosyncratic and gets criticized as inefficient, the super-strict labor protections and super-generous vacation days and pensions and, yes, the heavily regulated artisanal cheese, now looks like a really good hedge against automation-induced social disruption. And hey, while you’ve got all that stuff so that people still have jobs, you can still enjoy the mass-produced machine-extruded version industrielle as a cheaper option, a supply chain backstop, or just another variety! Oreos didn’t wipe out home-baked cookies, we can have both. I think the French labor market model points towards a future in which we can have AI-assisted hyper-automation to make amazing technological progress and have lots of human jobs to give people a sense of meaning, dignity, and independence.
To be clear, every word of what I write about France, now and most likely forever, is profoundly biased by my personal circumstances. Of course France seems utopian to me, I’m a newlywed in Paris! I don’t have “rose-tinted spectacles” so much as “rose-tinted corneal implants” — impossible to peer around and very difficult to remove. La vie en rose, so to speak.
Thanks to the pioneering ecological urbanism efforts of Anne Hidalgo’s mayoralty (set to be continued by the new Gregoire mayoralty), Paris has now overtaken Amsterdam as the bike lanes capital of the world, with a network over 1,500 kilometers long in total, interweaving throughout the city. And it is awesome. I haven’t owned a bicycle of my own since I was a child, with walking, backpacking, kayaking, buses, rideshares, trains, and planes being my primary modes of locomotion in my adult life. But I don’t even need to own my own bike to bike all the time now! The city of Paris provides high-quality bicycle rentals at the incredibly reasonable price of three euros per hour, and that Velib system — a rough portmanteau of “free bikes” — isn’t entirely frictionless, but it’s pretty freaking close. Sometimes you go to a Velib station and all the bikes are already taken, and on sunny days it can be hard to read the little screens where you tap in your code to unlock the bikes, but overall the system is just spectacular.
The bike lanes interweave between paved road alongside cars, paved road separated by barriers, broad sidewalks, and even sandy trails in the parks. You can really just pick one up and go wherever you want anywhere in the city. It’s incredibly convenient, and healthy, and fun.
I haven’t been inside a car in months2 (and, like, only 20ish times total since moving to France in September, half of those being taxis during the China trip!), and I’m absolutely loving it. If it weren’t for reading the news, I would never have known that there was a global fossil fuel shock due to the stupid war in the Strait of Hormuz.
In fact, even if all fossil fuels were Thanos-snapped into nonexistence tomorrow, France would be better prepared to weather the ensuing chaos than almost anywhere else in the developed world. A recent report finds that France had a national grid of 95.2% zero-carbon electricity (!) in 2025 as electricity production hit all-time highs, with fast-growing solar and wind at 27% and French specialty nuclear at 68.2%.
And even transport and heating, classically fossil fuel-dominated sectors (France still gets around 60% of its total energy from fossil fuels even with the almost-totally-clean electric grid due to this), are rapidly decarbonizing. A new national energy law passed in February 2026 set a target for 70% of French energy to come from decarbonized electricity by 2035. Chinese EVs like BYD are an increasingly common sight on Paris streets. The Paris Metro is fully electric, and increasingly the buses are 100% electric too. Just recently in April 2026, the state-owned EDF utility announced an extra 240 million euros in new funding to help French consumers purchase electric heat pumps and electric heavy-duty trucks to escape the shackles of price-skyrocketing fossil fuels. Paris is increasingly a solarpunk city in a solarpunk (and atompunk) country.
Recently, my wife and I were cycling through the lovely Parc de Vincennes when we noticed other cyclists ahead of us stopped in the middle of the road and pointing at something on the ground. I was delighted to observe a sprightly serpent in our path.
I’ve always been fond of snakes, and this was an impressive one. I managed to snap a picture while it was still crossing and before it slithered away into the long grass. Indispensable citizen science app iNaturalist informed me that it was a fine specimen of Zamenis longissimus, a species among the largest serpents in Europe. Its common name, I was thrilled to note, was the Aesculapian Snake. This is the snake that through long association with Asklepios/Aesculapius, the son of Apollo long worshipped as the Greco-Roman god of healing, became a symbol of medicine when twined around a staff. (One snake twined around a staff, not two: two snakes on a staff is the caduceus, a symbol of Hermes/Mercury, often confused with the medical snake staff these days). Aesculapian snakes are non-venomous, and were sacred animals to the doctor-priests of their namesake, used in healing rituals and allowed to slither around on the floor of temple-hospitals in the ancient Mediterranean. I would 100% sign up for the inclusion of friendly snakes in doctor’s visits if that was an option today, but I sadly doubt that it will catch on again anytime soon.
Later on the same journey, we stopped at a snack kiosk near the Lac Daumesnil which offered their customers free use of a fascinating new climate adaptation measure. It was a contraption that was a mix of an air-blower and a sprinkler, blowing a hearty mix of cold water and high-pressure air at the user. I shoved my face straight in it three times in quick succession, and I found it very similar to the experience of being struck full-frontal by a head-high wave when wading in the Gulf of Maine. I walked back towards my Velib bike a little bit wobbly, but definitely cooled down.
I’ve meant to write and share this piece for months, but I’ve hesitated and procrastinated on it a lot — I think for two main reasons. First, because I couldn’t come up with a unifying narrative for all these bits and pieces I wanted to share. I still can’t, but I’ve decided to share them anyway, hence “Scattered Thoughts.” Second, because I almost feel guilty about getting to live this dreamlike life — I’m a freaking newlywed writer in Paris! — at such a dark and chaotic time for the United States, the nation of my birth. I feel as though I’m getting away with something, as though it would be unkind bragging to share these stories with my majority-American audience. I felt fortunate to go on the reporting journey to China too, of course, but that at least was work, I was making an effort to go there and share the story. All this stuff in France has just become my ordinary daily life.
Nonetheless, I’m sharing it. As with my previous article on France, I think that one way it could be helpful to other nations is by helping to redefine the boundaries of the possible. Ambitions can be high. We can have nice things. We can welcome immigrants, build strong civic institutions and values, fill cities with parks and pedestrianized plazas and bike lanes, celebrate the joys of life. It’s all doable.
To summarize an eventful 250 years of history with a common profane colloquialism: France has seen some shit, man. When you’re on your Fifth Republic, the disturbances of today are a bit more contextualized against the sweep of history.
To be clear, that’s not a claim to some kind of environmentalist virtue points — given the amount of plane trips I’ve taken lately, my carbon footprint is still enormous even by developed-world standards. It’s just really nice to not have to be in cars all the time. (And I also think the whole concept of a carbon footprint is a deeply unhelpful scarcity-mindset framing, shaming the individual at a point when transitioning to an electrotech economy is a net-positive opportunity for global abundance with structural and institutional interventions as the primary levers of change…but that’s a whole nother article).
Great article! As expats living in Germany, it was fascinating and enlightening to read about the integration program that France requires. Unfortunately, Germany does not have a similar system and many non-Europeans neither integrate nor care about their host country. France offers a model that could greatly benefit other EU nations.
Sam, thank you. This made my day. Such a powerful personal reminder that things don’t have to be this way. Timely too, because, if planes are flying, I’ll be heading for a visit in Paris and then Bordeaux, in mid-May. Things seem so dismal here in the U.S. , despite Maine’s peepers, daffodils, and protests doing their best to cheer us on. Thank you!