About

"Pas mal non? C'est français." ("Not bad, is it? That's French") is a memorable quote said by Orson Welles from the 1993 French comedy TV-movie La Classe Américaine (The American Class). Since the early 2020s, the quote has gained notable use on French-speaking social media as a reaction image, either praising French accomplishments or mocking stereotypical French behaviors online.

Origin

On December 31st, 1993, the movie La Classe Américaine was broadcast on the French television channel Canal+.^[3] The movie consists of extracts of various films from the company Warner Bros, re-edited and re-dubbed to form a completely different plot, spoofing Orson Welles' 1941 movie Citizen Kane. The movie was initially designed as a cooperation between Canal+ and Warner Bros to advertise the 70th anniversary of the company. To do so, Warner Bros authorized Canal+ to use footage from their movies to edit a promotional film. Instead, Canal+ handed over the project to director Michel Hazanavicius^[4] (future Academy Award winner in 2012 for The Artist^[5]) who used the footage to create a trilogy of humorous films, called Le Grand Détournement (The Great Parody Redub).^[6] The first two films of the series, called Derrick Vs Superman^[7] and ça détourne^[8] aired as TV shorts in 1992, while La Classe Américaine,^[1][2] aired in 1993, was Hazanavicius' first feature-length movie.

The plot of the movie consists of an absurd parody of Citizen Kane, in which journalists have to investigate the death of the character "Georges Abitbol" (created using archive footage of American actor John Wayne^[9]), and more specifically, the meaning of his last words: "Monde de merde!" ("world of shit!").

The quote "Pas mal, non? c'est français." arrives 6 minutes into the movie when it is suddenly interrupted by a scene where Orson Welles complains about the movie's plot and the similarities with Citizen Kane. The scene was recreated using pictures from the 1970 historical comedy Start the Revolution without me^[10] (shown below, right), shot in front of the Château of Vaux-Le-Vicomte,^[11] in France. The video of the scene (shown below, left) was uploaded on YouTube in 2009 and has gained over 257,000 views in fourteen years.

Translation of Welles' monologue

Hello. I'm Orson Welles. This is my house you see over there. Not bad is it? That's French. I allow myself to interrupt this "flim" (intentional mistake) because i'm being taken for a bit of a fool.
This is theft, and plagiarism. I don't really like thieves and… sons of bitches. In this flim, the hero dies at the beginning and journalists decide to investigate his last words, like Citizen Kane. I call that Plagiarism!
Journalists will interview people about the hero. You'll see that the testimonies will be in form of flashbacks. I can see it coming. (Gets shot) Ahhh! Rosebud!

The film was never broadcast ever since on Trench TV due to copyright reasons, but during the years following its release, it gained a cult following in French cinema circles online,^[12] notably for the absurd comedy of its plot and its surreal dialogue. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, various extracts from the movie were uploaded on YouTube, where they gained popularity, and started being referenced in various mainstream media.^[13] In 2006, the fan website ciclym.se^[14] started to exhaustively catalog and track the origin of all the footage used in the movie to make an HD version. The work was completed in 2011 and the HD version was uploaded on YouTube in 2015.

Spread

The first exact usage of the quote as a meme is unknown, but uploads of pictures of the scene showing Orson Welles using the quote as a caption can be found on various Facebook pages as early as 2010.^[15] However, the popularity of the quote grew mostly in the early 2020s, notably after shorter extracts of the quote were uploaded on YouTube and other GIF sharing platforms for use as a forum weapon. It's also during this period that still pictures of the scene started to be used on social media as reaction images, ironically poking fun at various aspects of French culture or behaviors online.

In June of 2023, French ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet^[16] posted the meme on his personal Facebook page, among pictures of zero-gravity flight training that took place in France^[17]. In July 2023, an artwork of the meme was recreated on Reddit's r/place. ^[18] In August, news channel BFMTV covered the phenomenon and its growth in mainstream media,^[19] pointing out even some cases of it being used as a corporate meme.

Various examples

Search Interest

External References