CHM : vouvoiement ou tutoiement ?

When I first went to work for Charles-Henry, he told me that when we spoke French to each other (as we did from the first day we met) we were going to do things the American way. We would say vous, not tu, to each other but we would call each other by our prénoms (first names). I didn't have to call him Monsieur. I was used to saying vous to people I worked with from my days in Rouen and Paris. He and I followed that rule for about 15 years.

If you've learned  some French, you are probably aware that the French language has two personal pronouns that translate into to just one in modern English. You use the singular pronoun tu to address a person you consider your peer. Tu and the possessive adjectives that come with it (ton, ta, tes) are familiar forms. You use the singular pronoun vous to address a person who you consider to be your superior, who you don't know well or at all, or from whom you want to maintain a certain social distance. You would never say vous to a young child or to your canine or feline friends, by the way.

Vous is also used as the second person plural pronoun. You say vous to a group made up of people to whom  you would say tu to individually. So in modern French, vous can be singular or plural. You say vous to someone with whom you have a more polite relationship: Êtes-vous sûr que c'est vrai ? To two or more people you say Êtes-vous sûrs que c'est vrai ? The adjective sûr takes a final S when vous is being used with more than one person, and no final S when vous is being used to address only one person. There is no difference in the pronunciation of those two sentences. You only know from the context, or from seeing the question in written form,u which one it is.

That's a brief explanation. As a foreigner learning and speaking French, it is always better to assume that vous is the proper pronoun to use with adult strangers. Then you wait to see if the person says tu to you or vous. Sometimes it's made explicit. That's what happened between me and Charles-Henry after 15 years of using vouvoiement (saying vous to each other).

It was his idea. He had been my hierarchical superior when I worked on the magazine staff at USIA in Washington DC. In other words, he would write my performance reviews and he would decide if I had the skills I needed to do my job. He had given me permission to call him Charles-Henry but not to say tu to him.

After a couple of years, the Washington office of the French edition of the magazine we worked on was moved to Paris. That's another long story... for another day. C-H and I both were transferred to a different office where writers and translators worked together to produce English-language and French-language articles that might be re-published in newspapers or magazines in Africa, where there are both anglophone and francophone countries. At that point C-H was no longer my boss or manager. He was my peer. However, the pattern had been set, so we continued to say vous to each other. He was nearly 25 years older than me.

Walt and I both handed in our resignations and left Washington DC a couple of years later. We moved to California. Charles-Henry starting visiting us out there. We bought a house in San Francisco in 1995, and Charles-Henry began staying with us there at some point after we moved in, when he visited from Back East.

One morning when he was there I got up to go make breakfast. C-H was already sitting at the dining room table, waiting. After saying bonjour, he said he had something he wanted to talk to me about. It was about our saying vous to each other. You and I have known each other for many years, he said. I was wondering whether we might want to start saying tu to each other — assuming that Walt agrees. I had to be careful not to laugh. Of course Walt wouldn't object. So we did start saying tu to each other. And we said tu to each other for the next 25 years. He and C-H started saying tu to each other as well. I told C-H not to be insulted or confused if I occasionally said vous to him by mistake. Calling someone vous after having agreed to say tu instead can be seen as rude.  Saying vous to him was a long-ingrained habit that I'd have to work on breaking.

By the way, when I spent the 1972-73 school year in Rouen, giving English lessons in a high school there, I became friends with a family whose son was one of my students. His mother would often ask me over for dinner or take me shopping when she went to the supermarket out in the suburbs. I didn't have a car. We did some sightseeing around Normandy as well, and we once went to Reims in Champagne, which is where she was born and went to school.

One day I got in the car with her to go somewhere, and she realized she was saying tu to me half the time as we talked and vous the other half of the time. Merde, she said. On va commencer à se dire tu maintenant. Tu es d'accord ? Of course I was.

Here in our little hamlet near Saint-Aignan, we and our neighbors decided early on to say tu to each other. It just seemed natural to me, but not necessarily for all of them. The woman with the house across the street from ours said at one point: Ken, je ne sais pas si je vais réussir à vous tutoyer. I don't know why she said that. And she did in fact start saying tu to me. She's about 15 years older than I am. She told the woman from whom we had bought our house, who was there that day, the same thing. That woman was almost 10 years older than the neighbor, and they had known each other for decades.

Another incident: When I met the man who with his wife owns most of the vineyard out behind our property, I of course addressed him as vous. I said vous to his wife as well. On one visit to their winery a few months later, I noticed that when he talked to me he made it a point to call me tu three or four times during our conversation. He emphasized the word in a kind of unnatural way, actually. But I got the message. I think he's younger than me. I started saying tu to him as we continued talking. He smiled. I could tell he was happy that I got it. To this day, I still address his wife as vous.