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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

BD are a perfect example of one the french biggest weakness : we have awesome things, and we don't know how to sell them.

We do that all the time. The minitel. The credit card chips. Hell the TGV should have been everywhere, and we struggle to sell it to a few countries.

We are a superpower with only 70 millions of people working a mere 35 hours a week and so many occasions to skip work. That's damn impressive.

France could really shine more, technologically and culturally.

Did you know that the biggest (in term of sheer content mass, quality is more subjective) Python blog is a french one ? I know, because I wrote it. 1k articles, 700 being about python.

But it's like being french is a curse that forces you to do great things... And let them stuck in france forever.

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It's also a French habit of pretending things are french. Specifically in the context of comics, it's at least Franco-Belgian (there's also a large culture of comics published in Dutch, which warrants its own genre these days).

Anyway, I leave it to the Germans to set the record straight on the smart-card. (and to the Polish to set the record straight about Marie Skłodowska)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_comics
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_card
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Are never said they were all french. But we did have innovative and robuts industries based on those techs.

Belgium is kind of like France to be honest (I'm french).

Their beer is way better though.

The Flemish would typically beg to differ.

desole :D

I don't see why you say that french BD follow the same fate as some of the other things you talk about.

From personal experience, growing up in India we always had either Astérix or Tintin to read. Even some of the lesser known works such as those by Giroud were available.

Now that I have been living and working in France for 6 years, one possible reason for this lack of penetration of french products is the language. There is very little effort to actually make the products accessible to the world at large. Now we may discuss the merits and demerits of this but the fact remains that if we want our products to be known all over the world, we have to make it known to the world. And most of the world speaks English.

Mes deux centimes.

> There is very little effort to actually make the products accessible to the world at large.

Exactly, we should stop searching for excuses.

Saying asterix and tintin are well exported to demonstarte bd are a success outside france is like saying Saying being on netflix shows the total success of bollywood outside india.

But agreed, language is a big problem.

Except Tin Tin is Belgian..

... and Rene Goscinny (the author of Asterix) was born in Poland...

He's born in Paris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny

Sorry, my mistake. His parents were immigrants from Poland.

And lived in Argentina, Buenos Aires from the age of 2 to 18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny#Early_life

Exactly, when we talk french bd, it's more things like "la quete de l'oiseau du temps", "fluide glacial", or "les chroniques de la lune noire".

"Lesser know works" such as those by Giraud? The guy is practically the god of modern BD!

Language might play a role in this, with pretty aggressive aversion to communicating with outsiders in anything other than French.

Case in point:

- the XIII comic series, very popular in Francophone countries but not much beyond

- The Bourne Supremacy, directly inspired by the series, a massive movie success worldwide.

c'est la vie.

c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre

('les biftecks' don't have an exclusive on silly rhymes)

I think this is because we are a socialist state: everything used to live or death by selling it to a government monopoly or was made by the state itself. In your examples: Minitel was developed by the Post ministry, TGV by the SNCF. In this context you have very few incentives to sell it abroad since these national companies are satisfied once the French people got the innovation.

We still have issues with this mentality: startups are created to surf on public money, often lacking a real technological advantage (e.g, "the sovereign cloud"). Some services such as Uber could not even have emerged since there conflict with an existing monopolies.

And finally there is the fiscal pressure which is killing the smart and medium companies while the biggest ones have very advantageous rates or even no tax to pay when foreign.

Interesting point. Not sure the socialism itself is enough to expalain it, but the french way of applying socialism surely plays a role.

France isn't a superpower and has never been. The french empire was once the strongest empire, but even then it wasn't a superpower, but we could be using different definitions of the word.

It's great that you maintain a python blog, but is it written in french or english? If it is in french, you are limiting your reach. And that's not just limited to french, it also applies to chinese, japanese, german, arabic, etc.

If you want to expand your reach, you have to use english as it is the lingua franca today.

> Hell the TGV should have been everywhere

The TGV is one of the crappiest trains ever. It was made for businessmen/bureaucrats who travel with a satchel, they never realized that folks would actually go in it with suitcases since there is so little space to put them and they had to modify the inside of the trains after the fact to accommodate some space for it.

Also, they never considered that people with disabilities might want to board the train as you need to climb stairs even at the first level.

And let's not mention toilets are always broken and are washed like once a day or something which makes it look like you live in a developing country or something.

Compare that to the shinkansen in Japan and you are in for a good laugh.

Funny. The last time I was in a TGV, I can indeed confirm the lavatory was broken. Specifically, I discovered the sink spigot did not work only after I had soaped my hands.

It's true in a lot of french trains, not just the tgv. Not a technical problem, but a logistic one.

You are confusing the trains and the way the trains are managed. It's like saying seats are too small on a340 planes: there are not sold with it on the first place.

I like that all your comments on this thread are a variation of: "…Yes, but Japan is better!" It's not a competition buddy.

Compared to american trains, lol.

I take the TGV weekly. It has greatly improved and is top class in the world with Japan right now. Have you tried American trains ? ;)

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