I used to lament the fact that French people overall are really bad at foreign languages, English in particular, especially in comparison with some of our neighbors e.g. Germans and Dutch. I mentioned it in one of my previous posts and shared the following article.

Les Français ont un mauvais niveau en langue : pourquoi ? | Assimil

It turns out that it could actually be a blessing in disguise! If you’ve read my profile or some of my writing, you already know there are a lot of things I appreciate about the U.S. That said, I also think there are instances in which we should most definitely not follow America's lead; I'm thinking about race relations for instance.

Maybe you’ve heard the saying: “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. I remember when I was much younger, when a trend started in the U.S, it usually took years for it to become popular in France. For instance, when American rappers started wearing their pants below the waist or with one leg rolled up, people here would make fun of you if you did that. A few years later, it had caught on.

Things seem to be going much faster nowadays, maybe in part because of internet. For instance, the whole world demonstrated over George Floyd and BLM has become a global phenomenon. 

However, France seems less receptive than the U.K for instance to what has become known as woke culture and this has already been widely commented.
 

Macron, France Reject American 'Woke' Culture That's 'Racializing' Their Country (newsweek.com)

The French are absolutely right to say 'no thanks' to US woke-ism (nypost.com)

I saw a debate on this issue on French TV and one of the participants suggested that one of the reasons France is more impermeable to all these ideas that have swept across the Anglo-Saxon world is that, by and large, French people don’t understand English. Although no evidence was presented to back up that statement, I have to admit it made sense to me.