This paper presents some results of a quantitative study that focuses on the variety and word frequency in texts from a comparative perspective. The study aims to analyze and compare French and Quebec journalistic texts on political and cultural topics written in French and recently published in major newspapers such as Le Monde, le Figaro, Le Devoir, etc. The statistical analysis concerns the number of different words in the text, the number of different adjectives, the number of different verbs (and also passive structures, participles and gerunds which contribute to syntactic and stylistic sophistication), and the number of hapaxes. French texts from France exhibit greater lexical richness and sophistication: they contain more adjectives, a greater variety of adjectives, as well as more participles and gerunds compared to French texts from Quebec. The originality of the study lies in the fact that it analyzes variation in French using a lexicometric approach.