Faire marcher quelqu'un
A French friend tells you, completely seriously, that they have just bought a château in Provence. There are 47 rooms. A
vineyard. A moat. Three donkeys named Jean-Claude, Brigitte, and Gérard. You are impressed. You ask about the
renovation. They explain that the roof needs a little work; about €800,000 worth. You start wondering whether this friendship is
going to involve a loan application.
Then they burst out laughing: Je t’ai fait marcher ! Congratulations. You have been walked.
Well… not literally. You've been fooled.
The expression faire marcher quelqu’un literally means to make someone walk. Which makes
perfect sense in certain situations:
Je fais marcher le bébé (I'm helping the baby walk), or Je n'arrive pas à faire marcher mon ordinateur (I can't get my computer to work.)
But when a French person says: Je t’ai fait marcher ! You probably shouldn't start looking for your walking shoes. They're
telling you: I was pulling your leg. I was kidding you!
The person telling the joke doesn't
necessarily lie to you in some sinister, Machiavellian way. They simply construct a little imaginary world, and wait to see whether you'll
happily stroll into it. In other words, the expression most often means to play a joke on someone by making them believe
something temporarily.
Origin
The expression is generally connected to the idea of making someone “walk” in the sense of making them follow along with something. The underlying metaphor is quite old: if you can faire marcher quelqu’un, you can make that person go along with your story, believe it, and merrily march straight into the trap. And if you do? Bravo! You've just participated in the joke.
The French have another wonderful expression for falling for a trick: Tomber dans le panneau. Literally: To fall into the signboard. Yes, the signboard. Apparently, somewhere along the road of French linguistic history, someone imagined an unsuspecting person walking straight into a sign. BONK. And that became a way of saying: You fell for it. At this point, you may reasonably conclude that the French have a slightly unhealthy fascination with people walking into things.
Interestingly, both the English pulling someone's leg and the French faire marcher quelqu'un seem to use the
idea of physically making someone lose their balance or move in an unintended direction as a metaphor for making someone believe something
false. So, did one language borrow the expression from the other?
Probably not. There's no solid evidence that faire marcher was translated from pull someone's leg, or vice
versa. What's more likely is that both languages independently developed a similar metaphor.
So, the next time someone tells you something suspicious... Don't panic. Don't call your lawyer. Don't start Googling “French
château prices.” Just ask:
Tu me fais marcher ? And if they answer: Oui ! Well, at least you caught them.
Examples
Il m’a fait marcher pendant 10 minutes avant de me dire que c’était une blague.
He had me going for 10 minutes before telling me it was a joke.