When to visit

Late April through mid-June is the answer most years. Spring in the south is already swimmable; Paris is mild and the cafés have their terrasses out; the lavender hasn't quite bloomed in Provence but everything else has. The bigger sites aren't crowded yet — Versailles in May is a different planet than Versailles in August.

September is the secret-second-best window: the water is still warm, the wine harvest is on, the kids are back in school, and the French themselves stop traveling. October is fine for cities but the south starts feeling autumnal.

Avoid August unless you have a reason. The entire country goes on vacation simultaneously. Paris is half-shuttered — your favorite restaurant's owner is in Brittany, and the sign on the door says fermeture annuelle with no return date. The Riviera is the opposite problem: a wall of European holidaymakers, prices double, and locals visibly tired of you.

Winter works for the Alps (December–April for snow) and for Paris museums (no lines, gray skies, melancholic in a way that's kind of the point). Don't try Provence in winter — half the villages are essentially closed.

Money

Cards everywhere, including the tiny bakery. France is one of the most card-friendly countries in Europe. Contactless works on amounts up to €50; chip-and-PIN above that. Bring a card with no foreign-transaction fee; your bank's standard card will lose you about 3% on every purchase, which adds up faster than you'd think.

Carry some cash for boulangeries and markets. Outdoor markets, small village shops, public restrooms in train stations, and the guy selling chestnuts on the corner are still cash-only or cash-preferred. €50 in coins and small bills covers a week.

Tipping is built into the price. Service compris is the law — the restaurant bill already includes the server's wage. Rounding up €1–€2 on a casual meal or 5% on a sit-down dinner is what the locals do, and only when the service was actually good. Leaving 20% American-style is not seen as generous; it's seen as confused.

Taxis: round up. Hotel porter: €1–€2 per bag. Hairdresser: 10% if you like the haircut. That's it. Nobody's expecting anything from the cashier, the museum guide, the bus driver, or the person scooping your gelato.

ATMs (DAB) are everywhere and reliable. Use bank-branded ones (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, La Banque Postale) and decline the conversion when the machine offers it — your home bank's rate is always better. Skip Euronet ATMs in tourist zones; their rates are predatory.

Food + dining etiquette

Bread goes on the table, not on the plate. The little wooden table or the tablecloth is correct. Putting your baguette on top of your dinner plate is a tell that you're American or German.

Don't ask for substitutions. The chef cooked the dish a specific way. 'Could I get the sauce on the side?' is a question that goes from 'unusual' to 'rude' depending on how the server is having their day. Order something else if the description doesn't work for you.

Coffee is after the meal, not with it. Café crème, espresso, or noisette comes after dessert. Asking for a latte with your lunch confuses everyone and you'll likely get a long drink in a tall glass that nobody wanted.

*The bill (l'addition) does not arrive automatically. You have to ask. The server is being polite by letting you sit. In the US a server bringing the bill while you're still eating is normal; in France it would be insulting. L'addition, s'il vous plaît* with a hand-mime of signing — universal.

Lunch is 12–2, dinner is 7:30 onwards. Outside these windows most real restaurants are closed or only serving cold plates. The exceptions are tourist zones (Champs-Élysées, Saint-Germain), which serve continuously and aren't where you want to be eating anyway. Plan around the windows or eat from boulangeries.

Wine with lunch is not unusual. A glass at lunch on a workday isn't notable. A bottle is — but it's also fine. France is one of the few places where ordering wine before noon doesn't get the server's eyebrow raised.

Cheese comes before dessert, not after. In a traditional French meal: starter → main → cheese → dessert. The cheese plate with the leftover wine is the high point of the meal for many locals.

Speaking the language

*The bonjour opens every door. Walk into a shop without greeting and you're a tourist; say bonjour madame / bonjour monsieur on entry and you're someone the shopkeeper will help. It costs nothing and changes every interaction.

Speak French at first, even badly. Excusez-moi, parlez-vous anglais ? is the magic sentence. Nine times out of ten the person will switch to English immediately and be helpful about it. Walking up and starting in English is the move that gets you the rumor about French waiters being rude. They're not — they're professional, and you skipped the handshake.

Address waiters as Monsieur or Madame, not garçon. Garçon (literally 'boy') is the 1920s movie shorthand and reads as patronizing now. Monsieur is the universal call-for-attention. S'il vous plaît* works too.

Quieter than home. French restaurants are not quiet places, but the American baseline is louder than the French baseline. Lower your voice on the métro and in cafés and you'll stop feeling like the table everyone is looking at.

What to pack

Layers. Paris and the north can swing 8°C between morning and afternoon any month of the year. A light wool sweater you can wad into a daypack is worth more than a heavy coat for half the year.

Walking shoes that don't look like walking shoes. Parisians judge the bright-white sneakers immediately. Dark leather sneakers or low-key trainers blend in; you'll wear them 8 hours a day for a week and you don't want to advertise that fact to every pickpocket in the 1st arrondissement.

A real raincoat or compact umbrella. Spring and fall both include the kind of two-hour rain that ruins a museum day if you're wearing canvas anything.

One outfit that's slightly nicer than your default. Restaurants beyond the most casual will let you in wearing whatever, but you'll feel out of place at a Lyon bouchon or a Provençal village restaurant in athleisure. A collared shirt or a non-flannel dress, decent shoes — that's enough.

Type C/E plug adapter. France uses the two-round-pin Europlug with a grounding pin on the wall socket. US flat-pin plugs don't fit. Dual-voltage chargers handle the 230V automatically; check the fine print on your hair dryer (200W American hair dryers fry).

Skip: travel towels (your hotel has them), full-size toiletries (supermarchés are everywhere), bottled water (Paris tap water is excellent — the carafe d'eau is free at any restaurant, just ask).

Getting around

The TGV is genuinely fast and genuinely worth it. Paris to Lyon in 2 hours, Paris to Marseille in 3, Paris to Bordeaux in 2. Book on SNCF Connect (the official app — avoid the resellers) at least a week ahead for the Prem's fares, which are absurdly cheap. Same trains, half the price.

The Paris métro is fine — use it. It's not new and it's not the cleanest in Europe but it goes everywhere and runs every 2-4 minutes. Get a Navigo Easy card (€2 deposit, then top up in carnets of 10 tickets) for any visit longer than three days. Single tickets (€2.10) are wasteful otherwise.

Uber works in Paris and Lyon, less so elsewhere. Taxis (G7 is the dominant fleet in Paris) are reliable and metered. Don't take an unmetered car from a guy at the airport — Roissy and Orly both have official taxi stands with clear fixed fares to central Paris (€55 / €35 respectively, post-2024 rate). Anything lower is a scam.

Driving in cities is a bad idea. Paris parking is theoretical and expensive; Lyon is similar. Rent a car for the countryside (Provence, Loire, Brittany, Alsace) where it actually helps. The highway tolls are real (Paris→Lyon is about €40 in tolls each way) — factor them in.

Where to actually go

Paris is the photograph everyone knows. Plan for it; it's worth it; manage expectations. The first day will feel slightly like a movie set. The second day, when you wander a residential block in the 11th and find a bakery the size of a closet selling the best croissant of your life for €1.40, is when Paris becomes real.

The Loire Valley is what most first-time visitors imagine when they say 'France.' Châteaux, vineyards, slow rivers, villages with one bakery and one church. Rent a car from Tours or Blois; do four nights. Chenonceau and Chambord are the famous ones; Cheverny is the one you'll remember. Wine: Sancerre, Chinon, Vouvray.

Provence + the Côte d'Azur are two different trips that share a region. Provence (Avignon, Arles, Aix, the Luberon villages) is the lavender + farmers' market + Cézanne France. The Côte d'Azur (Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Monaco) is the yacht + casino + sunburned-Russian-tourist France. Pick one. They feel nothing alike.

Lyon is the food capital. The bouchons (small traditional restaurants) serve offal-forward Lyonnais cooking that's been in slow decline elsewhere — quenelles, andouillette, salade lyonnaise with the warm bacon and the runny egg. Stay two nights, eat four meals, leave heavier than you arrived.

Brittany + Normandy are the wet, green, dramatic-coastline France. Saint-Malo, Mont Saint-Michel, the D-Day beaches, the oyster shacks of Cancale. Cider instead of wine; salted butter on everything; rain. Go in summer or you'll be cold.

Alsace is the half-German France. Strasbourg, Colmar, the Route des Vins. Christmas markets are the best in Europe. The food is heavier (choucroute, baeckeoffe), the wine whiter (Riesling, Gewürztraminer), the architecture older. Underrated.

Corsica is a separate country pretending to be French. Mountain trails, hidden coves, a strong nationalist streak. Worth the ferry from Nice if you have a week and a car.

Common mistakes

Trying to see Paris in 48 hours. You will burn out, hate it, and tell everyone Paris is overrated. Four days minimum. Pick three neighborhoods and walk them slowly. The Marais on a Sunday, the Canal Saint-Martin on a Saturday afternoon, the rue Mouffetard on any morning — that's more authentic Paris than four days of museum lines.

The Eiffel Tower at sunset on a weekend in August. This is the worst-case scenario for everything Paris does wrong. Go at 10pm on a weeknight in May. Or skip it. The view from the tower doesn't include the tower; the view of the tower from Trocadéro or the Champ-de-Mars is the picture you actually want.

Eating dinner on the Champs-Élysées. Don't. Walk three blocks in any direction. The rue Saint-Honoré has better food at half the price; the 1st and 2nd arrondissements behind the Champs are full of small bistros that cater to locals.

Day-tripping to Versailles on a Tuesday. Versailles is closed Mondays; the rebound crowd on Tuesday is brutal. Wednesday or Thursday, early morning, get the timed entry online a week in advance. The Hall of Mirrors at 9:15am is empty. At 1pm it is a scrum.

Assuming everything closes at 5. Closing times in France are more compressed than American visitors expect: most museums close 5:30–6, shops close 7 or 8, but restaurants serve until 11+ and bars later. The afternoon dead zone (3–6pm) is when locals are working; plan your lunch and your museum visit around it.

Notes for the diaspora

French outside France is still useful. Belgium, Switzerland (west), Luxembourg, Quebec, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Vietnam (older generations), and large swathes of West Africa speak French — sometimes with accents that take a week to tune into, but mutually intelligible. The phrases you learn for Paris work in Dakar.

Regional languages exist and matter. Breton in Brittany, Occitan in the south, Alsatian in Alsace, Basque in the southwest. Most speakers also speak French. You don't need any of these to travel; you'll see them on signs and they're a part of how the regions feel different from each other.