French Technology

Nothing ruins a good meal like sitting around for what feels like years, waiting for the check. Once it's been hunted down, there's still the inevitable trouble that comes with trying to pay by credit card. Who can honestly say they enjoy watching their card disappear into the bowels of the restaurant? Even Oprah admits she's still terrified that her card will be rejected and cut into pieces, never to be seen again. What's more, few if any servers bother to verify identity or check for matching signatures, leaving the patron feeling like anyone who stumbles on their card could be living it up on lobster and filet mignon, all on their dime.

The French know no such worries. Sure, the bill takes its sweet time arriving, but once it appears, credit and debit transactions are fast and efficient thanks to portable smart card readers and embedded microchip technology. The card is swiped right at the customer's table, after which a four-digit PIN is entered directly into the card machine. Using a carte bleue, as they are called, is far more reliable and secure than cash exchanges. Such cards contain information about the holder's identity, spending patterns, security settings and custom withdrawal parameters. Few ATMs or banks in France impose surcharges for nonmember transactions and all machines can read all card microchips. With each card protected by and traceable via its internal tracking system, there is little threat of bank-breaking credit card fraud. Losing a credit card becomes the comparatively minor hassle of getting a replacement — the old chip is simply invalidated.

In light of such advanced technology, a person could justifiably believe that France is at the helm of the computer age. That person would be wrong. While the rest of the Western world and much of the East skips merrily down the information superhighway, France stays dourly stranded at an offramp named Minitel. Developed by the national French phone company in the early 1980s, Minitel serves as something of a digital telegraph. To access it, one uses a special terminal which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Commodore 64s of old. At its inception, Minitel was pegged as a more secure and convenient French alternative to the increasingly pervasive Internet. Commercial enterprises in France still list their Minitel numbers second only to their phone numbers. Most schools in France boast a Minitel kiosk in their foyers. Yet hardly a Frenchman will admit to using Minitel or understanding its purpose.

Americans are used to a society where a quick e-mail is all that is needed to track a package, purchase tickets or inquire about job opportunities. In France, that e-mail would go soundly ignored, happily buried in the ubiquitous mountains of paperwork found in every office. The Internet is still as costly as it was when it was introduced. Few schools teach computer literacy and even fewer can claim to run more than one or two fully functioning, Internet-ready computers. Most French civil servants either do not have e-mail addresses or rarely use them, keeping e-mail secure in its position as least effective method of contact. To add insult to injury, the average bureaucrat types at a speed of approximately one character an hour, rending e-mail meaningless as a form of speedy communication. Because businesses typically lack voice-mail and automated answering systems, letters and personal visits — even with their insufferable waiting periods — remain the only consistently successful way of getting in touch with anyone. As far as etiquette goes, sending an e-mail is akin to throwing a note wrapped around a brick through someone's office window and likely to be met with a similar level of disgust. Even typewritten correspondence is frowned upon, as handwritten notes remain the height of quiet sophistication in formal contact.

French technology might seem enormously inconsistent, with its hyper-secure credit cards and independently developed digital information systems on one hand and its complete refusal to embrace the Internet and general computer literacy on the other. Yet each pocket of information technology in France bears something in common: It's only accessible within France's borders. Minitel does not operate beyond France, and rare is the non-French national who has even heard of it. Those smart cards with their nifty microchips? They, too, are valid only within France. To obtain a card that will reliably work outside of the country, a bank customer often must pay exorbitant fees and register for special international access. Even then, cards often fail to work and transactions regularly take upwards of a week to be processed in a cardholder's account, lending an exciting element of chance to checkbook balancing. Even cellular phones, long more advanced in France than in the United States, have special regulations and registration procedures attached to international usage.

Such dogged parochialism is as quintessentially French as baguettes and berets, though perhaps less quaint. Recently, debates surrounding French national identity and its institutional secularism have reached a fever pitch over the headscarf issue. Staunchly sticking to its guns and promoting the security of the republic over the citizen, the French nation and its technology stay rooted in the notion that what is French must come first — "French" being defined as that which serves the country as an entity unto itself. As currently interpreted, "brotherhood, equality and liberty" refers to the state first and the individual a distant second.

As minority communities go unrecognized and ethnic differences are smothered in the name of the republic, traditional French identity pushes further into popular rhetoric as the only way to preserve the ideals of the nation. With the headscarf law put into effect this spring, the French government is demanding a uniform public national identity. When the nation as an abstract matters more than its place within a greater superstructure, its development as a modern nation moves as slowly as France's still-popular IBM 486 towers.

— Madhu Krishnan (moutarde_mechante@hotmail.com)