'We need to talk' say organisers of France's first Festival of Conversation

In an age when so many of us communicate on social networks, by text or by email, a group of French people worried that the habit of conversation is dying, have organised a Festival of Conversations, to take place on 16 April, in Paris and Versailles

Screen capture video/Facebook page Le Festival des Conversations

The aim is to “rediscover the joy of conversation and recreate social ties, in an age where everything is electronically linked and instantaneous”, the organisers announced on Tuesday.

Paris, of course, was the scene of the great literary salons of the seventeenth century, where thinkers, artists and socialites engaged in amusing and intelligent conversation.

The 2013 version will also take place in the French capital and the nearby Chateau of Versailles, with some scheduled conversations, to which the public are invited. Selected historians, sociologists, artists and others will discuss key themes, including the importance and history of conversation.

“The challenge of the festival is to re invent the codes of conversation, to recreate social ties”, explained Guillaume Villemot, a cofounder of the event.

“We are beginning to notice that we find it difficult to converse,” he said. “We talk a lot about ourselves [on e-mail and digital social networks,] but we don’t really listen to others,” he added, explaining that the art of listening to others would be emphasised throughout the festival.

The website features pictures of young people in cafés having coffee together, each using their mobile phones and not interacting with each other.

M. Villemot notes that a teenager sends 2,500 SMS texts per month. He wants people to consider the “isolation or aggressiveness which such abbreviated communication can foster”.

The Festival hopes to change what organisers feel is a creeping idea that face to face conversation is a waste of time.

The idea is to encourage more conversations between people who share offices for example, or meet on a train, or in the dentist’s waiting room. M. Villemot also says they hope to foster more conversations in restaurants, to rediscover the ambiance of great dinner tables.

They have other plans too - money is available to help towns and villages create spaces where people chat naturally, like the village squares around the church still visible in many French towns, but no longer always conducive to idle chat.

They even intend to publish a league table of the towns where conversation most flourishes, though not surprisingly they are vague about how they will measure that.

Much of the website focuses on encouraging young people to converse well, but they are not the only ones in need of lessons. France’s politicians are currently engaged in a particularly vicious verbal war which is inflaming the national conversation.