Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, right down to his underpants and socks. Unfortunately, six Ikea forks, a Chinese guitar and unsourced wall paint stopped him being declared a 100% economic patriot, but nobody is perfect. Carle, 26, set out, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary. The idea was triggered by the Minister for Economic Renewal Arnaud Montebourg’s call for the public to buy French to save the country’s industrial production sector. The experiment cost Carle his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his spectacles (Italian); his underpants (Moroccan); morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his adored David Bowie music (British). Fortunately, his long-suffering girlfriend, Anaïs, and cat, Loon, (both French) stuck with him. “Politicians say all sorts of things and expect us to go along with it. I wanted to see if it was possible and feasible to do what the minister was asking us to do; to hold him to account for his words,” Carle told the Guardian over a non-French coffee in a Parisian café after finishing his documentary. He set just three rules: eat only foods produced in France, eliminate contact with foreign-made goods and do so on €1,800 a month (above the minimum wage of €1,430 to cover the extra expense of living in Paris). The