

If your girlfriend is not fluent in french, I wouldnt go there if I was you.
Depending on your profession you could consider the UK or Ireland - or the Netherlands (or even Sweden, Norway) or larger cities in Austria or Germany. In either of these places you will get around with English until you picked up enough of the native language and then, people will still talk english with you.
Source: German with strong work-ties into the Netherlands that is married to someone not speaking German and getting along just fine for 6 years and counting.
Fellow German here.
Want to point out that I had to attend a minute of silence during school after the terror-attacks of 11.09.2001 (“9/11”). And that was ok. I even remember how a teacher got into Trouble for not wanting to do it because we dont do shit like that when “others then westerners” die.
To me, the official reaction of state and media is and was always a question of who dies.
3000 US citizens - gotta have a minute of silence. Same number of dead people world wide due to landmines? C’mon, thats boring and uninteresting!
1200 Israel citizens- jupp, gotta be all down and sad, flags need to be half-masted. 100k Palestinians, c’mon, they had it coming, deserve it, where hiding terrorists…
To me, everything is bad and sad.
But politicians and media here and elsewhere in the west have it nicely separated. All double-standard bs.