They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  It is certainly true to state that, for the traditional French upper-middle classes or bourgeoisie, it is considered the height of impropriety to be seen drunk in a public place. The French rules of savoir-vivre – that highly complex and codified set of formal ‘manners’ devised in the nineteenth century to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the rabble – place enormous emphasis on le maintien, that is, giving the impression of always being in control of one’s body, emotions and language.*56

  * Savoir-vivre is a concept that is indispensable to an understanding of the French bourgeoisie and is discussed in depth in the chapters on French women and manners.

  It follows that staggering about, declaring undying love for one’s boss in slurred tones, or collapsing on the floor in a stupor at the office Christmas party, is utterly beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour in such circles. On the other hand, the rules of savoir-vivre are closely linked to place, with a strict demarcation between public spaces such as restaurants (where discretion and self-control are de rigueur) and private spaces such as a drinks party among one’s peers (where guests will have been preselected and therefore less likely to include the dreaded riff-raff).57 Therefore, it may be permissible in such select milieux to let your self-control go a little. A typical example of this type of event is the lengthy apéro or pre-dinner drinks session of which the French are inordinately fond, where copious amounts of wine and champagne are served with fiddly little canapés of tenuous ethanol-absorbing capacity, and where it is not uncommon to see grown men blind drunk but cleverly disguising the fact. This slight flexion of the drunkenness rule, naturally, strictly applies to men only. For a woman to be seen drunk in a public space is a mortal sin of French etiquette, and in fact it is generally assumed that any such woman is probably English. As the author of the leading French book on etiquette – written in the 1890s but still an authority today – notes, a lady should never drink ‘neat wine’, and certainly not hard liquor, if she wishes to maintain her beauty and decorum.58

  The man who likes good wine is never a drunkard; his pleasure is the appreciation of quality, not the consumption of quantity, which lowers a human being to the level of a brute.

  MARCEL BOULESTIN, FRENCH CHEF (1878–1943)

  So much for the ageing ranks of that endangered species, the traditional French bourgeoisie. But what about the generation of tomorrow? There, alas, we find that – whereas their grandfathers are downing civilized quantities of Burgundy while discussing the merits of Molière versus Racine – their grandchildren will most likely be following their Anglo-American counterparts in tequila-slamming the night away. For while (as we saw in the previous chapter) daily wine consumption across all age groups has fallen considerably in France, binge-drinking among the nation’s youth has dramatically increased since 2007. In fact, ‘le binge-drinking’ has now entered the French language as a new piece of Franglais (the official term, as sanctioned by the Académie française, is the rather less catchy biture express – literally ‘high-speed drunkenness’). Between 2005 and 2007 there was a 50 per cent increase in young people hospitalized for excessive drinking, which has become the principal cause of death among French youth, claiming three victims a day.59 Although the rate of road accidents overall in France has dropped dramatically, there is still a high rate of drink-driving accidents among the nation’s youth, with many a fatality caused by out-of-control cars smashing into the plane trees that characteristically line roads throughout the French countryside (the French, typically, have responded to this problem by chopping down the trees).* In addition, several major French cities – such as Lyons, the second city of France – have announced that all shops selling alcohol are to be closed by 10 p.m.

  * Perhaps more sensibly, a ‘zero alcohol’ limit has been in force since April 2012 for drivers under 21 years old.

  The French, of course, blame the English for exporting le binge-drinking to France. In a 2011 survey of European youth by the pan-European agency ESPAD,60 44 per cent of French youngsters aged 15–16 years admitted to having binge-drunk in the past month. This is above the European average, but well below the British level (52 per cent). On the other hand, though British students drink their French counterparts under the table, the latter easily outstrip the British where tobacco smoking, consumption of non-prescription tranquillizers, and cannabis usage are concerned. Indeed, French students are the heaviest cannabis smokers in the whole of Europe: their reported lifetime use of the drug is over twice the European average. When use and abuse of the whole gamut of illicit substances (i.e. cigarettes, alcohol, barbiturates and other drugs) is compared, French students are in fact ahead of the British. The scale of cannabis use in France, across all age groups, is quite literally mind-blowing. Hardly a day goes by without a news item on a crop of the wrong sort of grass having been discovered growing in the walled garden of a seemingly innocuous rural farmhouse, or even in a prison allotment. And when French kids do drink, it’s not wine that is their favourite tipple: rather, alcopops, hard liquor (especially whisky, currently all the rage with French youth) and cocktails are the big hitters.

  The image of the archetypal French teenage party has undergone a radical change in recent years. No longer is this an innocent affair of smooching under a disco ball, as in the celebrated 1980 French teen movie La Boum, which shot 13-year-old Sophie Marceau to stardom. The gritty British teen television series Skins, broadcast in France since 2007, first by Canal + and then by the teen channel June, was a massive hit with French teenagers, inspiring a rash of copycat Skins parties across the country. For a couple of years, French teenage girls wrapped themselves in clingfilm for the benefit of their male classmates, who filmed it all on their iPhones at ‘secret’ parties, the location of which would be revealed on Facebook a few hours beforehand. Then Skins parties became institutionalized and taken over by the events industry, turning into little more than mildly risqué fancy-dress occasions. The ‘cool’ scene moved on, this time inspired by another teen film with more grit than schmaltz: the 2012 American movie Project X, which features a massive party that gets out of control. Copycat Project X events began popping up over France, including one in the summer of 2012 on the Riviera near Fréjus, where 400 teenagers descended on and wrecked an unoccupied villa. Project X parties are now subject to strict surveillance by the French police, who expend a great deal of time and manpower searching for them on Facebook and warning the organizers to remove them from the site.

  More significant than any of the actual parties themselves is the after-party twittering, tweeting and skyping that goes on via Facebook, Myspace, and a dozen other social media sites. In essence, this is no different from what is happening with teenagers everywhere, but in France the public broadcasting by the younger generation of their not-so-private lives has resulted in a realization of the ultimate French nightmare: a breach of etiquette. The sacred Gallic demarcation between public and private space – each with their respective codes of behaviour – becomes hard to enforce when faced with this new Millennial Generation, determined to expose their love bites, high heels, and much in-between to an audience of 2.3 billion users of the World Wide Web. Have the sacred principles of savoir-vivre gone to pot? Hard to tell if the spaced-out new generation of French is going to come back to Earth and reconnect with the disciplined and self-controlled past. If it doesn’t, their grandparents may just have to… put that in their pipe and smoke it.

  Myth Evaluation: False. Older French people get drunk and hide it. Younger French people get drunk and high and post pictures of themselves in all states of inebriation and undress on social networking sites.

  PART 2

  TROP BELLE POUR TOI

  MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH WOMEN

  FRENCH WOMEN ARE THE MOST STYLISH IN THE WORLD

  Fashion is to France what gold mines are to Peru.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE COLBERT, FINANCE MINISTER TO LOUIS XIV (1619–83)

  The French woman’s sense of style is legendary. According to popular belief,
Gallic women have a mysterious ability to look classy and glamorous, even if they actually have a face like a dog’s breakfast (the French have even enshrined the notion that a plain woman may still have something ineffably attractive about her in the oxymoronic term belle-laide. Somehow, though, you just don’t notice the effortless stylishness, because of some mysterious je ne sais quoi. It is a look perhaps most famously epitomized by the legendary Coco Chanel and her eponymous suit: classy, chic and polished down to the coordinated jacket and gleaming stilettos. So powerful is the image that there is a veritable mini-industry of books giving guidance to English and American women on how to dress, accessorize and style yourself like the French: in short, on how to ‘find your inner French woman’.

  If a woman is badly dressed you notice her frock, but if she is impeccably clothed, you notice her.

  COCO CHANEL (1883–1971)

  In truth, there is no great ‘mystery’ to the bourgeois French woman’s sense of style. (Note: we are talking here about the style of bourgeois women, generally in Paris and the Île de France, along with a few other exclusive areas, not French women as a whole. As usual, Froglit* authors extrapolate from a limited sample of metropolitan women to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole of France.) Like so many aspects of the Parisian French that foreigners marvel at, bourgeois French female style derives ultimately from the rules of savoir-vivre, examined in detail below.† These rules still apply to many upper-middle-class French today.

  * Froglit, n.: a highly commercialized and formulaic genre of lightly humorous fiction or non-fiction, generally written by Anglo-American expats living in France and usually with an autobiographical bias, dedicated to eulogizing, elucidating, satirizing or otherwise promulgating stereotypical ideas about the French.

  † The rules of savoir-vivre are further considered here.

  Savoir-vivre consists of a body of rules with certain distinct objectives. Firstly, it exists to mark out those people of manners and taste from the riff-raff. Secondly, it is there to maintain boundaries and hierarchies. Thirdly and above all, its purpose is to maintain the social status quo. The rules of savoir-vivre are much more than a matter of ‘etiquette’ in the narrow sense – such as how to greet somebody, or set a table (although they do cover these things). They are really a way of life – which is why they are called les règles de savoir-vivre (‘rules of how to live’), rather than mere savoir-faire (how to do something). According to the rules of savoir-vivre, the presentation of oneself to the world is of cardinal importance. Personal appearance, in fact, is an aspect of politeness and respect to others. Key rules include:1

  Fashion fades, only style remains the same.

  COCO CHANEL (1883–1971)

  Grooming (‘le soin’). This means paying careful attention to all the minutiae of personal care and dress – no unclipped fingernails, uncombed hair, dirty shoes or missing buttons. Nipping to the corner shop in one’s pyjamas is definitely not an option. Ditto collecting the kids from school with yesterday’s baby spit-up on one’s coat.

  Harmony (‘l’harmonie’). This means coordinating one’s clothes and accessories (i.e. no clashing colours), but it also means coordinating one’s appearance with one’s location and status in the world. So, for example, a bohemian artist-type might be permitted a smattering of designer stubble or a scarlet cravat, but these would obviously be completely out of the question in the office environment. A professional woman who entertains clients to lunch during her working day orders the wine and settles the bill; when she dines at a restaurant with husband and friends in the evening, however, etiquette dictates that she cedes these functions to the men.

  THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOIS DÉCOLLETÉ (skip)

  Traditional French female style places great emphasis on discretion, on hinting at what lies beneath rather than letting it all hang out. Here, for example, is the advice of Baronne Staffe, a nineteenth-century writer on etiquette, relating to the vexed question of the décolleté:

  ‘There are three styles of “décolleté” from which one can choose, depending on the shape of a woman. They were classified as follows during the period of the Second Empire: “full décolleté”, “half décolleté”, and “quarter décolleté”. Those with alluring, shapely shoulders adopted the “full décolleté”; those with white skin the “half décolleté”, or décolleté with a square neckline; and those who had only an attractive neck, the “quarter décolleté”, a very restrained affair with a pointed neckline before and behind...

  ‘If one is obliged – from necessity – to wear a low neckline, why not veil with tulle or lace what is, after all, a tactless sight to reveal to spiteful onlookers? It is charming to see emerging from a low neckline a bust and arms whose imperfections are masked by a transparent cloud, which doesn’t completely hide the skin. All things concealed have a profound air of mystery, of the unknown, and allow one to imagine that true beauty lies beneath.’

  From Mes Secrets pour plaire et pour être aimée, 1896.

  Discretion (‘la discretion’). In the words of the celebrated nineteenth-century authority on etiquette, Baronne Staffe, ‘a woman does not truly have charm unless by her manners and toilette, she seeks to go past unnoticed.’ Even to this day, French people in a pan-European poll were the ones who most frequently declared that ‘it’s important not to be noticed too much’.2 The obsession of the French bourgeoisie with discretion approaches fanaticism. Why this should be the case is not entirely clear: perhaps because they are petrified of being hammered by the post-Revolutionary mob for wealth tax if they even hint, by the very presence of a flashy jewel, that there may be secret stashes of dosh in a tax-free haven somewhere in the DOM-TOMs.* It follows that fluorescent colours, in fact anything too colourful or eccentric, are completely out. So too are showy designer labels, the sure-fire indicator of the vulgar social upstart or parvenu (the most unforgivable of French social sins). Most bourgeois French women’s wardrobes, if not their libraries, will contain at least fifty shades of grey.

  * DOM-TOMS: Départements et territoires d’outre-mer. That is, French-administered overseas departments and territories outside Europe.

  Decorum (‘le maintien’). One must always behave with discipline and decorum. This means one does not plonk down heavily into a chair, but lightly and gracefully; one walks with elegant and measured steps; one does not grin or express any excessive emotion whatsoever unless one is in private (and even then, the degree of emotion expressed depends on the circumstances). The whole of life, in fact, becomes a piece of theatre in which every act and scene has an appropriate role that must be played, a script that must be recited. Reading the French guides to savoir-vivre, one wonders when (if at all) the role-playing stops. Is there a scene of life without an appropriate script?

  RIPENED NOT RAVAGED BY TIME (skip)

  In late 2004, the French polling agency Ipsos conducted a survey of 1,002 French people to find out which women the French considered the most beautiful in the world. The results were somewhat surprising. The two women who came out top (the actresses Monica Bellucci and Isabelle Adjani), although French-speaking, are of Italian and Algerian origin respectively, suggesting a certain exotic leaning in French taste. The results also suggest that the French take a similar view towards women as they do towards wine – that is, that a great specimen improves with age.

  Over half the women on the list were, at the time of the survey, on the ‘wrong’ side of 40. In fact, apart from the predictable inclusion of the national treasure Catherine Deneuve – at that point a venerable 61 years old – five of the women featured were then in their late forties: the movie star Isabelle Adjani, the elegant actress Corinne Touzet (little known outside France), the newsreader Claire Chazal, and the actresses Carole Bouquet and Sharon Stone. The youngest woman on the list (Julia Roberts) was then a mature 37. Women over forty can take comfort in the fact that, in French terms at least, they are in their prime.

  1. Monica Bellucci

  2. Isab
elle Adjani

  3. Corinne Touzet

  4. Julia Roberts

  5. Sophie Marceau

  6. Claire Chazal

  7. Carole Bouquet

  8. Catherine Deneuve

  9. Emmanuelle Béart

  10. Sharon Stone

  Source: Ipsos/Coyote, ‘Les Français élisent la plus belle femme du monde’, 10 November 2004.

  The discreet, polished, yet self-effacing elegance of a certain sector of the French female haute-bourgeoisie makes complete sense when read in the light of these rules. It’s a good look for many, perhaps even the majority, of women: classic, tailored elegance that maintains a discreetly charming presence but never screams its existence. It allows women with less than perfect figures discreetly to conceal what lies beneath (a bourgeois French woman will never reveal any part of her body unless it is perfect, which spares one some unsightly spectacles on public transport in central Paris). It is a look that also allows women to age gracefully, without resorting to nips, tucks, lifts or plastic inserts in their breast tissue. Special reverence, in fact, is devoted in the etiquette tomes to women who reach the twilight of their years well-preserved, rather than pickled, by time. ‘Personne n’est jeune après quarante ans, mais on peut être irrésistible à tout âge,’ the eternally elegant Coco Chanel once observed (‘Nobody is young after forty, but one can be irresistible at any age’).

  It’s in Paris that you see the most attractive faces with real beauty: women of forty-odd years old, who have kept their fine noses, their doe eyes, and who allow themselves to be looked at with pleasure.