For the past month, he has been arrested in the streets of Manhattan. She wasn’t prepared for it. Gaining a million subscribers on Instagram in sixty days hardly ever happens, and yet it happened to Cécilia Jourdan, alias Hello French, a French expatriate in New York who has just found herself at the head of the first Francophile community of the world on the social network.
“The French woman is hetero, she has three children and a great job in fashion, underlines Cécilia Jourdan. I am just trying to deconstruct it. I am queer. My wife, Criselis Pérez, is Venezuelan. » Cecilia Jourdan
Created at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to publicize its distance French courses, its page saw its audience explode on January 8 with a video entitled « Speak French to your kids » (“Speak French to your children”) where this former aspiring actress articulates words like ” stopped ! “, ” that’s enough “ et « chute » in an exasperated tone, a glass of red wine in his hand.
By some mystery of the algorithm, the post went viral, amassing twelve million views, 645,754 likes and a number of such comments. “poor French children”. From then on, the subscriber counter soared, up to 57,000 a day, so much so that, on February 12, this 33-year-old woman burst into the jealous club of content creators with millionaires in followers: 0 .18% of Instagram accounts.
In the mid-2000s, the bestseller by another French expatriate in New York, Mireille Guiliano, launched a publishing phenomenon. These French women who do not gain weight (J’ai lu, 2004) – three million copies sold in forty languages – was soon joined on the personal development shelves of American bookstores by countless treatises on the innate, but not inimitable, qualities of the French woman. How to become slim like her, chic like her, sexy like her? What is his secret to having model children?
With the rise of social networks, this vein has adapted to the digital world. Incidentally, the mythological creature has rejuvenated: what is successful on TikTok is the French girl aesthetic. Like the French woman, the French girl sells – content, lipstick – but its mystique is now controversial, especially in Generation Z. Too white, too bourgeois, too subject to the male gaze, it has become, to borrow a popular word from American youth, problematic.
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