The Secret Life of France Read online

  The Secret Life of France

  LUCY WADHAM

  For L.E.L.

  … Remember where we are,

  In France, among a fickle wavering nation.

  Shakespeare, Henry VI Part I

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 Proposal

  Driving and Breakfast

  2 The Secret Garden

  Slap and Tickle, Guilt and Parking

  Adultery and the Cult of Beauty

  3 Being a Woman

  La Libido, La Femme Fatale and the Sisterhood

  4 Truth versus Beauty

  Tragedy, Comedy and Historic French Losers

  Television, Hypocrisy and Ideas

  5 The Wedding

  Catholicism, Anti-Semitism and Le Pen

  Language, Yoghurt and Hot Rabbits

  6 Sublime, Necessarily Sublime

  Mayors, Mass Demonstration and Mayhem

  Nobility, Freedom and Status

  7 Maternity

  Glory, Breastfeeding and the Norm

  8 Education

  Freud, Maths and the Cult of Reason

  Smiley, Happy People

  9 The Past

  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  French Rudeness, Surrender and Betrayal

  Collaboration and Defeat

  10 Foreign Affairs

  Cake and Spies

  Anti-Americanism and La Force de Frappe

  11 Tolérance Zéro

  Cops and Spooks

  France’s War on Terror

  12 Sarkozy and the End of Ideology

  Sex Dwarves and the Patriarchy

  The Society of the Spectacle and the End of the Secret Garden

  13 Black, Blanc, Beur

  Football, Rap and Role Models

  14 Douce France

  15 Everything in Its Place

  16 The Broken House

  17 Ride a Fast Horse and Stay Ahead of the News

  18 Patriarchy in Peril

  19 Hating the Rich

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  1

  Proposal

  Driving and Breakfast

  I was nineteen the first time Laurent Lemoine asked me to marry him. We had met in London when I was seventeen, the Christmas before my parents moved to Australia. A year later, he went to Sydney on business and took them out for an expensive dinner. It was a strange, old-fangled move but it achieved the desired effect. My mother rang me in a state of high excitement.

  ‘He’s gorgeous and he’s definitely taken a shine to you!’

  My father, who finds it difficult to resist a man who picks up the bill, was no harder to win over.

  Laurent was my eldest sister Florence’s flatmate. One day a French psychoanalyst would suggest that marrying him had been a form of deferred incest. I assume she meant between Florence and me, Laurent acting as a kind of stand-in (though using criteria this loose makes my whole family either perpetrators or victims of incest).

  Florence had moved to France years before to escape her four younger sisters, and it would not be long before two of them decided to follow her: my elder sister Irene and, a year later, myself. Florence had brought Laurent to London for an English Family Christmas and he had settled into the sofa and played charades and watched our histrionics, interspersed, of course, with Quality British Television, as if he had been born to it. The sheer drama of my very female family had dazzled this brother of three, and his decision to marry me had, he later told me, been inextricably linked to his feeling of well-being that Christmas.

  Laurent’s first proposal came half a year later, in the summer of 1984. I had come to the end of my first year at Oxford. The holidays had begun and I was signing on for unemployment benefit in London. My parents had moved to Sydney with our younger sister and precious only brother and I was still torn between a giddy sense of freedom and the vertigo of abandonment. In their absence I spent most holidays with my best friend, but she had recently become involved in an abusive relationship, which had turned me into a reluctant and unwelcome witness, so I was looking for a job and somewhere else to live until the autumn term began.

  One evening, I went round to have dinner with two of my university friends. They were planning a train trip round Eastern Europe and their first stop would be Paris. They offered advice about places where I might find work. I knew that if the worst came to the worst, I could always go and live with my boyfriend in his parents’ house in Romford, but I was hoping to avoid this; our two-month-old relationship was already floundering and I was having escape fantasies. We had had a row three days before because he had caught me looking out of the window while we were having sex.

  I spent the night with my two girlfriends, and the next morning, having nothing better to do, I went to Victoria Station with them to wave them off. At the time I hadn’t identified my pathological reluctance to be left behind and, unaware of my motives, while they were waiting for their train, I cashed in my dole cheque and bought a ticket to Paris. I thought I would go for a week to stay with Florence and then come back and find work.

  The three of us took the ferry to Calais and then sat on what felt like a ludicrously modern train to Paris, newly upholstered in orange and brown and festooned with noisy French children playing cards. When we arrived at the Gare du Nord, the sun was setting and the streets were still warm from the heat of the day. As we emerged from the station, the smell of desiccated dog shit wafted up from the pavements and the dizzying miasma of human urine hung in every dark corner. A few years later this would be a thing of the past, not because people had stopped pissing in dark corners or because they picked up their dog’s excrement but because Jacques Chirac, the long-standing mayor of Paris, set up a proud drone army in fluorescent green overalls which daily sprayed the pavements with dirty water from the Seine, leaving a whole new olfactory imprint on the city.

  My girlfriends caught the Metro to their youth hostel and I went in search of a call box. Florence was not in. I left a message on her answering machine, then I called the only other number I had in Paris, the number of Florence’s old flat. Laurent, of course, answered.

  ‘Allô?’

  ‘Hello, Laurent. It’s Lucy. Florence’s sister.’

  ‘Ah Luç-ie! How are you? Are you coming in Paris?’

  (However good his English would become during our years together, he would always cling on to that quaint Gallicism: Welcome in Paris!)

  ‘I am in Paris. I’m trying to get in touch with Fly but she’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘It’s a long weekend. She’s probably out of town. Why don’t you come here? Where are you?’

  Fifteen minutes later Laurent pulled up outside the Gare du Nord in his improbably small car, a navy-blue Fiat 500, leant across and opened the passenger door. I climbed in and he kissed me on both cheeks, or more accurately on each corner of my mouth. Then we sped off up into the cobbled streets of Montmartre to his flat.

  The last time I had come to Paris, Laurent had taken me out to dinner, after cleverly informing my sister that he fancied me. We had sat in a cramped restaurant on the Ile de la Cité and he had spent most of the evening talking about his ex-girlfriend, Aurélie, who had just left him for somebody else. Laurent explained that out of the sack Aurélie had bored him but that in it, she was unsurpassable. I suppose that he was deliberately throwing down the sexual gauntlet but all this news did was terrify me, and cause lasting damage to my self-confidence. What he didn’t mention at the time was that his erotic infatuation with Aurélie had driven him to spend most night
s hammering on the door of her new lover’s flat, just like a character from one of the many Nouvelle Vague films that Laurent would later encourage me to watch as part of my instruction in French culture and consciousness.

  While Laurent made me a plate of spaghetti with Gruyère, I tried Florence again. She was back home and eager to see me. I ate the spaghetti and accepted his offer of a lift across town.

  Driving in Paris, even before I passed my test, has always been a pleasurable experience for me. I have never had a problem with yielding to traffic coming from the right. It’s just a matter of getting used to the possibility that at any moment a car might shoot out at you from the most insignificant side street, crash into you and then hold you responsible. This puzzling rule which has thwarted so many English motorists was, in fact, adopted by the International Automobile Convention in Paris in 1926, confirmed in Geneva in 1949 and then again in Vienna in 1968. Known in English as ‘nearside priority’, this diverting ritual, so deliciously contrary to common sense, is nowadays suited only to the Parisians. That evening Laurent’s own approach to this rule consisted of gaily tooting his horn at each intersection, like Noddy on speed. It was his way of warning everyone that he had no intention of conceding priority. The multitudes of reasonable roundabouts, which have since sprung up all over France, testify to the sad demise of this idiosyncratic driving rule.

  The other distinctive feature of the Parisian motoring experience is of course the Place de l’Etoile, a huge roundabout with Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in the middle, involving thirteen avenues, each one holding right of way. The Etoile has been written of endlessly as a symbol of French chaos. There are in fact rules – rules that are redolent of the game ‘chicken’ – they’re just not the kinds of rules that come easily to Anglo-Saxon drivers.

  Being a pedestrian in Paris is not as pleasurable as being a driver. It was some time before I learnt that zebra crossings were rather like Bosnia’s ‘safe zones’: places where, if you die, you may simply die with the knowledge that your killer was in the wrong. For years, both my sister Irene and I waged dangerous and fruitless personal campaigns to force drivers to let us cross, striking guilt into their hearts when they did not. Irene could be seen in her very smart, manicured suburb of Paris, standing on a pedestrian crossing and yelling out the most florid of English obscenities, learnt mostly from her youth in the stands of QPR. After many years, we both conceded that it was a pointless and shaming business. Pedestrians do not have the power in France; cars do. It’s as simple as that. Cross at a zebra crossing that is not served by a red light and the driver will probably call you a mal baisée (literally, a person who is poorly or infrequently shagged).

  When I come to London I am so thrilled by the deference shown towards pedestrians that I find myself walking back and forth over zebra crossings, just for the joy of watching the car come to a halt and seeing that benign, closed-mouth smile, accompanied by the understated nod of magnanimity the English driver likes to give to the pedestrian.

  It was Laurent who taught me how to drive. In his mother’s battered 2CV only two weeks after my arrival at the Gare du Nord. For in spite of all my resolutions, it only took him a week to get me into bed. Seven days after that drive across Paris, I had moved in with him for the summer, and seven days after that he had taken me to Normandy to meet his parents. There, his mother Madeleine, who had a reputation as a terrifying misogynist, welcomed me warmly. After Aurélie and her high-octane sexuality, I was an agreeable respite.

  My first French family breakfast struck me as a peculiarly messy affair. There are never any plates at breakfast time in France, so the trick, in the absence of plates and with limited cutlery (there are no knives, just a spoon in the pot of jam for collective use), is to daub your toast in mid-air above the table. Then, even the most polished French person, including my future mother-in-law, will proceed to dunk the toast – butter, jam and all – into their bowl of hot chocolate. When, years later, I mustered the courage to ask her if this wasn’t a little ill-mannered, she looked up at me, chocolate seeping down her patrician chin.

  ‘Bien sûr que non! On peut tremper au petit déj.’ Of course not. You can dunk at breakfast time.

  Although I was only nineteen, Laurent was thirty and ready to settle down. In September, before it was time to go back to Oxford, he took me on holiday to the Amalfi coast and proposed to me over a plate of spaghetti vongole. I told him that I was too young and suggested that he ask me again in five years’ time. Ten months later we were married and our first child was on the way.

  *

  The journey that began at Victoria Station more than twenty years ago has pulled me – often against my will – into the bosom of a culture so different from my own that even today, with four children born and raised in France, I still struggle against the embrace. When I moved to Paris to be with Laurent we made a pact that I would make an effort to adapt to life in Paris but if, after five years, I was still homesick we would move the family to London. That was more than twenty years ago, and although Laurent and I are no longer together, I am still here. What follows is an attempt, by reliving my perplexed discovery, rejection and ultimate acceptance of this country, to understand why that is.

  2

  The Secret Garden

  Slap and Tickle, Guilt and Parking

  Laurent’s extraordinary adroitness in pursuing me was one of the most attractive things about him; his self-belief was utterly compelling. The experience of sexual surrender was new to me. Until then, I had only known English boys my own age, who were all infected by a certain erotic timorousness, which had made it necessary for me to be the pursuer. It was always I who had to make the first move. Even the Jewish boy from Kingston-upon-Thames, who had received the gift of mother-worship and was therefore considerably more sexually confident than most, had waited for me to kiss him. On that occasion, a combination of desire and exasperation had driven me to spit tea in his face. This had freed things up and we never looked back. But he was the exception. Most of the time, having sex with English boys had meant battling my way through their insecurities long before we got anywhere near mine.

  One of the things I noticed that summer about Laurent and his male friends was that they were all totally unreconstructed by feminist ideology. It was as if the feminist revolution had never happened in France. I wondered if some of the sexual paralysis afflicting my English male contemporaries was brought on by post-feminist guilt, which only seemed to compound the puritan tendencies inherent in our culture. Two of the boys I had slept with had actually confessed to feeling uncomfortable in the missionary position, saying that it made them feel ‘too dominant’.

  It soon became clear that this was not the kind of complex my future husband suffered from. Early on in our relationship his hand had shot out while we were having sex and slapped me smartly across the face. Supine and submissive as I might have been, the gesture backfired and my desire went out like a light. Laurent wasn’t put off, though. He merely observed that smacks were obviously not my thing and that I shouldn’t feel bad about it. He admitted that he had probably done it out of habit (Aurélie, the sex goddess, had apparently appreciated a carefully timed slap in the face).

  In retrospect, my poor husband’s erotic universe must have shrunk somewhat when I came into his life. What is certain is that after we split up, seventeen years later, he went back to some of his former sexual habits. For even though Laurent could hardly be called a libertine by Parisian standards, the opportunities offered by Paris’s bourgeoisie for a tasteful kind of sexual adventurousness are both varied and plentiful.

  Although my personal experience of sex with French people is limited, I would venture to argue, in spite of the old myths peddled about the French lover, that the quality of each individual sexual encounter is no better or worse in France than in England. Good sex and bad sex can of course be found everywhere, and one person’s ecstasy is another person’s nightmare. What I do believe, however, is that there is a cli
mate surrounding sex in France which lends itself to a more open enjoyment of the seductive game.

  For that is what sex is to the French: a game – with all the artifice that the word implies. The contractual nature of gender relations, both in Britain and America – requiring of us that we behave like adults – makes the kind of games played by men and women in France seem childish by comparison. For French women, the playing of games – the most hackneyed of which is not returning your lover’s call for at least three days – is a vital part of their romantic arsenal. Overhearing my French-born, teenage children discuss their amorous affairs with their friends, I was often struck by the mixture of candour and duplicity that seemed to dominate their relations with the opposite sex – those hitherto workaday creatures whom they had sat beside in the classroom and whom they had now to pretend to worship. It has taken a long time for me to reach the point where I no longer judge this kind of behaviour. Looking beyond the often tawdry games French people play in the name of la séduction, it has become clear to me that the driving force behind sex in France is quite simply the pursuit of pleasure. Not ecstasy, not oblivion, but pleasure.

  When Laurent and I began to live together, long before we really knew each other, I became aware of a gulf between our world views that I knew must be cultural. Mostly, we differed in our susceptibility to guilt. Laurent seemed to be virtually free of it. I was surprised to discover in his company how infected I was by various kinds of guilt: sexual, moral and political. It is hard to find examples of this since they go back a long way and I have been reformatted over the years to fit better into the French way of life. But I can tell that I have changed because when I go back to England I have a subtle but persistent feeling of discomfort, a kind of constant moral pressure to think and say the right thing.