Nathalie Monsaint-Baudry

About Nathalie Monsaint-Baudry

I hate Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. I didn’t do an MBA, I’m not a scientist: I’m off the beaten path. It is thanks to this difference that I was able to work on leading independent auteur films in Hollywood. I studied Humanities between Italy, France, and America. At the intersection of the so-called humanities (literature, philosophy, linguistics), painting, and culinary arts, my approach is a constant and multidisciplinary weaving between the supposedly useful language and the so-called futile languages.

As an Anglicist, I did not arrive empty-handed in America; nevertheless, nothing had prepared me to take the big leap: I had to dive in, do the work of an explorer, and clear a new land, off the beaten path. Twenty years, two children, a return to France, five years of writing, and five hundred pages later, I invented and developed the concept of Cultural Crystallizations to revisit certainties about American culture, and, by reflection, about French culture (Book available for free download on her website: “Being French and American, Cultural Crystallizations”).

This work allows me to define what belongs to the French cultural DNA, and what is intrinsically and irredeemably American. Starting from the language-culture infusion, I question our syntax, the use of the passive form in French, the subjunctive, the role of the personal pronoun. What does it mean to think French? To thoroughly examine the issue, take a roundabout way, get straight to the heart of the matter? What does it mean to think American? In a nutshell, to make a long story short? Who are we really? How does culture manifest in reality?

After digesting this American experience, I was able to extract, through the long work of writing, about thirty cultural knots that differentiate us. In my lecture, I review these nodosities to untangle them for a better understanding of how to communicate and decode our respective cultures. Like Tocqueville, who advised against blindly copying Americans, I am interested, for example, in the relevance of importing ready-made formulas into French, such as thinking outside the box; political correctness, the invasion of processes, the use of categories. I delve into language and by extension culture, and I open perspectives, breaches by identifying and encouraging awareness of our own cultural genius (French, Italian, etc.), its uniqueness and its je-ne-sais-quoi. My lecture serves this purpose: to raise awareness of one’s own cultural identity, and to have the courage to embody it.

An Anglicist (CAPES 1990) and Italianist, teacher (Lycée International de Los Angeles, Business Schools), consultant and facilitator (Executive Relocation, WDHB Consulting Group), I collaborated with filmmaker and director Michael Henry Wilson in Los Angeles (post-production). I design and facilitate itinerant seminars in California and Italy, and women’s workshops (women retreats). I am also a painter (figurative/oil) and a fine cook, activities involving staging, aesthetics, and meaning, in a complex arrangement. Finally, and not so incidentally, I have been ensuring the smooth running of a castle for 7 years and for 25 years, I have been harmonizing a bicultural family. I am in the process of writing an Alphabet Book of America as well as a book on the French mentality (jointly with my husband, Pascal Baudry). Finally, I regularly publish in the French press, in the form of vignettes that are as many breaches in cultural myopia, reflections in line with current events to invite the French reader to ask themselves the right questions about their own culture by reflection: Are we victims of our language? Good luck vs. Enjoy! Do we really need to think outside the box? I paint portraits, scenes of daily life, like L’Angelena, allowing a mise en abyme of American doing and French being, which are stagings of culture seen in dynamics.

Possibility of a joint presentation with her husband, Pascal Baudry, author of “French and Americans, the Other Shore”.