A few women writers are also mining the vein of unadulterated sex. Catherine Millet’s 2001 memoir, translated as The Sexual Life of Catherine M., focuses on her sexual experiences from childhood to adulthood, not skipping a beat as she goes from masturbation to group sex. Even the French, used to sexually explicit works, were taken aback by her tell-all exhibitionism and took to calling her “Madame Sex.” In 2008, she published a sequel memoir, Jour de souffrance (Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.), recounting her discovery that her partner, Jacques Henric, had been having affairs with several other women. Millet and Henric, founders and editors of the magazine Art Press, had been together for more than twenty years. That Millet could experience the torments of jealousy, after decades of a promiscuous open relationship, says something about the ability of the heart to assert its rights. Toni Bentley, reviewing this book for the New York Times (January 29, 2010), speaks of a “romantic tit for tat” that “may have its own kind of poetic justice.”
Whereas Sollers, Houellebecq, and Millet come from a generation of older French intellectuals, Virginie Despentes is nothing if not young, working class, and blatantly subversive. Her 1999 novel Baise-moi (Fuck Me), followed by the film version, is a grisly tale of sex, gang rape, drugs, violence, robbery, murder, and every conceivable horror. Even with graphic sex scenes in both the novel and film, there is little one can call “erotic” and certainly nothing resembling love. Despentes co-opts the most extreme aspects of French pornography, ostensibly in the service of feminist rage, to show how marginalized peoples get their revenge on society. Her later book, King Kong théorie (2006) opens with startling prose: “I write from the house of the ugly ones, for the ugly ones, the old ones, the butch types, the frigid, the poorly fucked, the un-fuckables, the hysterical, the cretins, all the ones excluded from the love market.” 5 Unfortunately, after the opening pages, the book descends into a rehash of American feminist theories from the 1980s (I ought to know) that adds nothing new to the debate, except dirty words. As for her 2010 novel, Apocalypse bébé (Apocalypse Baby), which won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, once again Despentes demonstrates an amazing command of lowlife language mustered to attack bourgeois values. It is true that this novel, written in the form of a polar (detective story or murder mystery) about the disappearance of an adolescent girl, will grip you till the end—that is, if you can take the moral bankruptcy of everyone in the book except perhaps “the Hyena,” its lesbian savior. Sex, suspense, violence, a bit of emotion, perhaps even a whiff of tenderness suggest that Despentes, in her early forties, has the potential to grow beyond her present shock-value lure.
Let’s face it, the French novel is no longer the privileged home of love. For some time now, cinema has usurped that role and become the foremost conveyor of romance for both French and international audiences. If I tell my husband I want to see a certain French film, he knows immediately that it will be a love story. While American films excel in technological innovation, violence, explosions, mystery, animation, and science fiction, the French continue to zero in on the intimate space between lovers. Among the many great French filmmakers of the last half century, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Lelouch could package most of their films under the label “Lessons in Love.”
What was listed in the Pariscope of April 6 to 12, 2011, that fit into this category? There was Angèle et Tony, a dramatic comedy about Angèle, who is released from prison and wants to regain possession of her son. The film begins with Angèle up against a wall being fucked by a young man in exchange for a toy for her son. She is skinny, good-looking, brutal, doesn’t know how to behave in any traditional feminine sense. She meets Tony, a fisherman and owner of a small fishing company. He’s something of a bumpkin, but he has a good heart. She wants him to marry her so she can persuade the local judge to grant her custody of her son. Slowly what was a manipulative ploy on her part turns into real affection. The film has a happy ending, wedding gown and all. I’d give it two stars out of four.
Potiche directed by François Ozon and starring Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, and Fabrice Luchini, is a comedy set in the 1970s about a woman married for thirty years to a corporate executive who cheats on her regularly with his secretary and occasionally with other women as well. He had taken over her father’s umbrella company and turned it into a big money-making establishment. But his workers, unhappy with his ultraconservative policies, go on strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, his wife, moves into the breach and proves that she is something more than a mindless potiche—a derogatory word for a trophy wife. Negotiating the release of her husband with the help of the local Communist mayor, with whom she had had a one-day affair early in her marriage, she takes control of the company while her husband recuperates from a heart attack. The wife (Deneuve) and the mayor (Depardieu) do not become lovers once again, as he would wish, though they dance together with an eroticism that belies their advanced years (especially his, encumbered by his enormous girth). For a moment, the mayor believes that he is the father of her adult son, but it turns out that the son was fathered by another one of Suzanne’s short-term lovers. She speaks about her early adulterous adventures with an insouciance and lack of guilt that would be unthinkable in an American film. Suzanne goes on to run against the mayor for a seat in the National Assembly. Of course she wins, and plans to divorce her husband and move to Paris. It’s an entertaining woman-friendly fable that casts a lighthearted look backward on the feminist upheavals that began to shake up French society forty years ago. I’d give it a three out of four.
Nous, Princesses de Clèves was the highpoint of my cinematic outings in Paris. On a Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m., I lined up outside a small Left Bank moviehouse with a hundred others eager to see this remarkable film inspired by Madame de La Fayette’s novel. Set in a contemporary high school on the northern edge of Marseille, the film explores the ways in which the seventeenth-century masterpiece intersects with the lives of contemporary students from working-class families, many of whom are North African in origin. The filmmaker, Regis Sauder, encouraged by his wife Anne, a high school teacher, wanted to show how young people from a poor neighborhood “could appropriate a text from the seventeenth century, learn it, know it, and recognize themselves in it.”6 In opposition to President Sarkozy’s denigration of La Princesse de Clèves as “useless,” Sauder considers the novel “useful” because it helps young people understand themselves.
Sauder places the text itself at the center of the film. The students read it aloud or recite it by heart. From time to time, they comment on the words they have pronounced. Sauder remarks: “I remember a conversation about love with one of the young girls, Aurore, when she said, in reference to the novel but also to her own life, ‘When one loves, there are no longer any limits.’ I had the impression that I was hearing her heart beat when she said that.”
The students understood La Princesse de Clèves as “a story of passionate love” that they could carry into their personal lives and discuss with their families and friends. As they acted in the film, they sensed how much they were emotionally and intellectually transformed by it. A seventeen-year-old named Abou recognized himself in the code of honor that reigned in the French court centuries before he was born, despite the glaring difference in social milieu.
Surprisingly, all the young people appreciated the advice of the princess’s mother, Mme de Chartres, who would prefer death rather than see her daughter embark on an adulterous affair. They understood how important it was for the mother to inculcate a sense of family honor in her female progeny. The novel allowed them to talk to their own mothers about love, under the cover of La Princesse de Clèves.
Little by little, as a spectator, I became totally immersed in the lives of these young people with café-au-lait skins and features different from the conventional white faces one thinks of as French. I saw how they became one with a story about love born in a time and place so unlike their own. It was further proof to me,
if ever I needed it, that words can continue to live long after they are written, and that love is recognizable from one generation to the next, however unfamiliar its wrappings. I would give this film four stars.
On the plane home from France, I saw two films by Claude Lelouch, Roman de gare (2007) and Ces amours-là (2011). I have been a Lelouch fan ever since I saw his breakthrough film Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), which won the Palme d’Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. At that time, as the mother of three small children with a fourth yet to come, I especially appreciated the familiarity that develops between the future lovers, both widowed, around their children attending the same boarding school. It was one of the first films I had ever seen that brought the lovers’ children into the picture. I liked the slow disclosing of their past marital histories. I was particularly struck by the sensitive bedroom scene that shows the woman (played by Anouk Aimée) unable to continue with their lovemaking because she is still holding on to the memory of her dead husband. Usually cinematic lovemaking is presented as something that happens easily, leading to enormous female orgasms, without any suggestion that it can be problematic. The film was a winner then and still is.
Over forty years later, Claude Lelouch is still making films centered on love. Roman de gare (Crossed Tracks) is a quirky mystery story about a woman novelist (played by the inimitable Fanny Ardant), her ghostwriter (the smash-nosed Dominique Pinon), and an airhead hairdresser and sometime prostitute who drags the ghostwriter haplessly into her family drama. The plot is clever, the acting superb, the novelist gets her just deserts, and the ghostwriter ends up with the wayward woman. As in so many films, a tender kiss provides satisfying closure to the spectacle, even if one has few illusions about the future of the couple. Let’s say, two and a half stars.
Lelouch’s 2011 Ces amours-là (What War May Bring) rejoices in love on an epic scale. Focusing on the successive loves of just one woman named Ilva, it begins with her passionate affair with a German officer during the Occupation. On the one hand, the officer saves Ilva’s father from execution as a hostage; on the other, Ilva’s association with the German ultimately brings about her father’s death at the hands of French partisans. When the Germans are finally forced out of Paris, she risks the fate of many publicly humiliated Frenchwomen, shorn of their hair as penance for their German lovers. Ilva is saved by two American soldiers—one white, one black. Since she can’t choose between them, she goes to bed with both of them. Their spirited ménage à trois has a decidedly French amoralistic exuberance, until the plot turns tragic for one of the two men. Married to the other—I won’t tell you which one—Ilva is unable to find happiness as an American bride. She returns to France for a third love experience, this time with a Frenchman who also turns out to be her savior. The plot is complicated. Are we expected to pass judgment on Ilva, who falls in love too easily and never foresees the negative consequences of her acts? Perhaps. Yet the film ends on an upbeat note. Lelouch situates it within the entire history of cinema, and particularly within his own oeuvre, from which numerous scenes flash by in the last minutes of the film. He offers us a jubilant finale created from diverse images of love à la française, all underscored by the vibrant strains of American popular music. Lelouch seems to be saying that whatever gruesome political realities we live through, whatever moral issues we face, passionate love will always endure. Ces amours-là is a frank celebration of love in an age when love itself, treasured for centuries, is now under attack. I give it three stars.
As I unpacked from another memorable French trip, I had no way of anticipating how much the French discourse on love would change during the next few months.
EPILOGUE
PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME.
Padlocks attached by lovers to grille on the Pont de l’Archevêché over the Seine, 2011. Author’s photographs.
In May 2011, France was jolted out of its age-old indulgence toward all forms of erotic behavior by the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged with having sexually assaulted a New York hotel housekeeper. Since Strauss-Kahn was the front-runner Socialist Party candidate for the 2012 presidential elections and considered nearly a shoo-in against the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, the shock that ran through France was seismic. It was one thing to have been a known womanizer, like so many French presidents, and quite another to have been arrested under suspicion of rape.
As a prominent politician, Strauss-Kahn had already been accused once before, in 2003, of swerving from gallantry to coercion, according to a young journalist’s complaint that he had attacked her during an interview. At that time, she didn’t press charges because her mother, a Socialist Party official, persuaded her not to. Also, during his tenure as managing director of the International Monetary Fund, he had a brief affair with a subordinate employee in 2008 and was subsequently rebuked by the IMF, though not dismissed because the affair was judged to be consensual. Through all of this, Strauss-Kahn’s third wife, Anne Sinclair, stood loyally at his side.
In the wake of the 2011 New York scandal, the French began to question the conspiracy of silence surrounding the sexual indiscretions of their public figures. They had to consider the allegation that some men, especially powerful ones, not only expect erotic favors from their subordinates but sometimes use strong-arm methods to obtain their ends. Eventually the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped because it was discovered that his accuser had lied on several important issues, but French feminists were not about to forget this unsavory story: they seized the opportunity to make public pronouncements on the line between flirting and sexual aggression and hoped their clamor would cause men to think twice before forcing women into the bedroom.
This is obviously not the tawdry note I favor for the finale of a book on love. Coerced sex is not love. It is a form of violence against women, and sometimes against men. And yet, such is the complicated relationship between sex and love that the French have been known to conflate the two, and even to whitewash sexual acts committed through intimidation or brute force. The first reaction of a few French males to the Strauss-Kahn affair was to treat it as une imprudence, comment dire: un troussage de domestique—an imprudent act, like having sex with the maid.1 Certainly there is a long history in France, as in other countries, of male employers taking advantage of female domestics. This can lead to pregnancies and bastard children, as in the case of Violette Leduc, but it rarely leads to love.
There has always been a cynical promotion of carnal pleasure in France, alongside the history of romantic love, ever since the latter was invented by twelfth-century troubadours. Consider La clef d’amors (The Key to Love), a medieval advice manual that even condones force. Here’s some of its graphic counsel to men: “Once you have pressed your lips to hers / (Despite her long and loud demurs), / You must not stop at mere embrace: / Push on, pursue the rest apace.” Like men in all centuries, the author condones the use of force by blithely assuming that the lady “really hopes you ignore / Her protests.”2
This is the same mentality motivating Valmont in Les liaisons dangereuses. He will have his way with Madame de Tourvel regardless of the pain it will cause her. But in the end, his “victory” is also hers, for despite his denials, he falls in love with her. It is left to Madame de Merteuil to enlighten Valmont about the true nature of his feelings, and to unleash destructive justice.
For hundreds of years, sexual license in France was kept under loose control by the rules of courtly love, gallantry, and royal decree. As early as the fourteenth century, kings appointed their own official mistresses and looked the other way when members of their courts took lovers outside of marriage. Rarely did a king of France condemn the erotic adventures of his courtiers, unless that person tread upon territory the king himself coveted. Remember Henri IV, Bassompierre, and Mademoiselle de Montmorency in chapter 2. Even though the church took a different point of
view and condemned any form of extramarital sex—sometimes even that of the royals—France has always been a country where sex has not only been tolerated but generally prized as part of the national character.
Love without sex is not a French invention. Leave it to the English, the Germans, and the Italians to project human love into the sphere of the angels. There is no French counterpart to Dante’s divine Beatrice, Goethe’s Eternal Feminine, or the British Angel in the House. Instead, sexually vibrant women in life and literature—such as Héloïse, Iseult, Guinevere, Diane de Poitiers, Julie de Lespinasse, Rousseau’s Julie, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Madame Bovary, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras—have provided models for women in love. For men, Lancelot, Tristan, certain kings (notably François I, Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIV, and Louis XV), Saint-Preux, Valmont, Lamartine, Julien Sorel, Musset, French movie stars and presidents have offered a conjoint set of virile models.
Yet, despite their emphasis on physical pleasure, most French have always understood love as something more than mere sexual satisfaction. Love privileges tender feelings, inspires esteem and fidelity, has the potential for uniting lovers permanently in enduring liaisons or lifelong marriage. Two such eighteenth-century unions that I haven’t talked about (for lack of space) were that of Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, an exceptionally distinguished pair who enjoyed a very long, multifaceted liaison, and that of the Comtesse de Sabran and the Chevalier de Boufflers, two lovers who surmounted huge obstacles for twenty years before they were able to marry.3
How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance Page 30