Imagine a country where people work thirty-five-your weeks, have five weeks of paid holidays, take an hour and a half for lunch, and eat the richest food on the planet and where the life expectancy is four years longer than that of Americans. This is France. But now, imagine a country where citizens have so little civic sense they barely give to charity and expect the state to do everything because they pay so much in taxes. You are still in France.

These are the opening words of our book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, originally published in 2003. When we wrote it, the French were still paying for groceries in francs and Facebook hadn’t been invented. We launched the book in the middle of the wave of anti-French sentiment that followed when France refused to join the US-led war in Iraq in 2003.

The book went on to become an international bestseller. It was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Le Monde, The Sunday Times, The Globe and Mail the Daily Telegraph and many more (for a brief moment, it was even in Amazon’s top ten bestsellers) and was translated into six languages.

In short, it appears the French are fascinating no matter they say or do.

That’s still true today, but two decades after our first edition, the world—and France— have definitely changed. From the rise of populism and the #MeToo movement to online shopping, France has had to contend with new forces while forging its own, unique destiny.

We decided to explore those changes in a new, completely revised edition of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, to be released on December 8, 2026.

Many features of France remain. The French still protest a lot; they still have a highly centralized state with a strong social safety net and are still devoted to their local cuisines. Like the original version, our new book untangles the mysteries and contradictions of a country and people who can be as enchanting as they are frustrating to travellers and answers the question, What makes the French so French?

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: The Je Ne Sais Quoi of Being French is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Borders, Indigo and your local bookseller.