The French Love for Gossip  

Gossip is interesting. It brings people together but also destroys the solidity of friendships. It is tea, sometimes served to keep the cold away, and other times served with malice. Gossip is culture, a habit, and even more so, it can be a hobby.

Culture can be shocking and I wasn’t spared for this shock when I learnt of the French love for Gossip.

A few weeks into my stay in France, I was already comfortable making small talk and hanging out with my colleagues.

Suffice to say, they had made my settling in magnificent and my debut as a foreigner felt auspicious. It was akin to a special guest whose arrival had been long awaited.

During my mini-conversations, I would confide things openly with the naivety of a foreigner happy to make friends in a new land.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that in France, small gossip is a hobby. Information diffuses faster and it doesn’t discriminate by gender.

Before you know it, everyone in the office is either asking about or commenting on things you never even mentioned to them. 

One weekend, I offered to make a Kenyan dish for one of my friends at school. By Monday morning at the lunch table, word had already spread, and everyone seemed to know about it. They were even asking me more questions about the dish.

At my apartment complex, I was quite close to the staff at the social offices who helped tenants with administrative matters. Whenever I chatted with them individually, they would always bring up things I had shared in confidence with just one of them. Amusingly, they would even say, “So-and-so told me that…”

It quickly became clear that none of them could keep information to themselves without spreading it around.

I became acquainted with two friends, and before I even got to know them well, each had already confided in me about the other, saying things like how the other was a spendthrift, careless, borrowed money frequently, or drank too much. I couldn’t help but think, Wow, I thought you guys were friends.

Some of this gossip really bothered me. Like when one of my colleagues openly shared details about my pay check with another co-worker and they discussed it right in front of me. Or when someone announced to others that we had gone shopping and even listed everything we had bought.

To me, none of this information seemed relevant to any real discussion, other than serving as proof of just how much some people love to gossip.

Initially, I took these actions personally. However, after talking to a few friends, I realized it cuts across almost everywhere in France. I remember complaining about it to a French person, but they couldn’t see the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, gossip exists in Kenya and everywhere else. But the kind where personal information is openly dissected, and every detail of a conversation gets passed around? That was new to me.

Where people are eager to ask about your private life and just as quick to spread the news. It’s easy to mistake their curiosity for genuine interest in getting to know you.

Here, sharing any information feels like giving consent for it to be discussed with everyone. It might even become a topic at a dinner table full of people you’ve never met, and they’ll ask you follow-up questions about it, eager for you to elaborate.  

Over time, I got used to the idea that if a colleague invited me to their home, everyone at school would hear about it. If someone gifted me something, everyone would know what it was. If I needed help, the next day, the whole school would ask me about it.  

To be honest, it took me a while to adjust to this new definition of privacy. Where a casual conversation rarely stays just among two people. It has to find its way around.

I am still adjusting. Let’s just hope I don’t catch the habit.