Does this weight of state-organized child intervention produce the models of exemplary behaviour intended, further down the line? It would appear not. A 2011 OECD survey of schoolchildren ranked France fifth from the bottom of 66 countries for discipline in class. When questioned, over a third of French pupils stated that there was noise and disorder in the classroom (the most disciplined classes were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Japanese).36 A UNICEF study of French primary schoolchildren in 2011 found that 25 per cent had been insulted often or very often at school, 21 per cent had been subject to regular taunting, 17 per cent had been frequently or very frequently hit by fellow pupils, and 7 per cent subject to frequent racism.37 Almost a third of French children aged between 10 and 15 years old smoke, or have tried a cigarette. Of those who did smoke, 45 per cent said their parents knew about it, 27 per cent smoked in front of their parents, and 25 per cent said that their parents had thrown in the towel on them smoking.38 On the basis that the toddler is father of the child, things don’t look good. If those little French pre-schoolers are indeed so very preternaturally perfect, whatever happens to them in later years? A release of long-bottled-up resentment, perhaps?
In my practice as a clinical psychologist, I encounter more and more parents who are powerless before what I call their child’s seizing of power at home: ‘We don’t know any more how to deal with him’... ‘He does what he likes’... ‘We can’t cope any more.’
DIDIER PLEUX, DIRECTOR OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE THERAPY, DE L’ENFANT ROI À L’ENFANT TYRAN, 2002
There is, it must be admitted, much that is laudable about French methods of education, particularly at the primary level, where a certain amount of rote learning is essential. My children – all within the French state school system – can do maths, notably mental arithmetic, better than I could at their age (despite my expensive private school education in England). They write in deliciously French spidery handwriting, like the menu on the chalkboard in the bistro down the road. They can recite reams of the poetry of Verlaine. They are passionately French, in a way I never felt (nor was taught to feel) English – even though they don’t have a French bone in their bodies. They are under no illusions about their ranking in the class. It does no harm for children to know that the world doesn’t owe them a living, that learning involves application and hard work. That they would be better to aspire to being a nurse or teacher than the next David Beckham. But to crush every spark of creativity and enthusiasm from their little souls in the process, to make learning a drudgery from the word go, does seem to be rather a case of throwing the brat out with the bath water. And it is easy to forget that, behind every seeming French wonderfemme and her supposedly immaculate brood, there is the invisible arm of the French state controlling, funding and directing most of the moves. So next time you despair because your little Tom or Harry is chopping the fingers off his grandmother’s gloves to make body bags for the corpses of his Playmobil pirates, just remember that it was the wayward Tom Sawyer, and not the sanctimonious Sid, who found the hidden box of gold at the end of the story; and that a horrid Henry – however horrid he may be – has got to be better than a not-so-perfect Pierre.*
* The motif of the renegade schoolboy who ‘turns out good’ is a familiar trope of Anglophone children’s literature, from Richmal Crompton’s William books and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer to its latest reincarnation in the form of Horrid Henry. French children’s literature, on the other hand, tends to feature whimsical and/or saintly characters like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince.
Myth Evaluation: False
PART 4
MERDE ALORS!
MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH PLUMBING
FRENCH TOILETS ARE REPELLENT
France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.
BILLY WILDER, AMERICAN SCREENWRITER AND JOURNALIST (1906–2002)
A scholarly tome on the design of public conveniences might seem an odd place to encounter a sweeping statement about French attitudes to relieving oneself en plein air. In Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets (Architectural Press, 2003), however, author Clara Greed notes that ‘Overall, continental European attitudes to toileting seem to be more open.’ She goes on to observe that ‘Anecdotally, everyone informs me that if you ask a French policeman ‘‘where is the toilet?’’, he will look puzzled and shrug his shoulders and gesture to show that the whole of France can be used as a toilet.’ Perhaps this is just as well, as public toilets in France are often hard to come by. ‘Public toilets, signposted toilettes or WC, are surprisingly few and far between, which means you can be left feeling really rather desperate,’ lament the writers of the Lonely Planet guide to Provence and the Côte d’Azur. And when you do finally track down a loo in France, you’re often left wondering whether an open field might not be a preferable place to do your business. Although comparative statistics on the relative salubrity of toilets around the world are (unsurprisingly) rather thin on the ground, the candidacy of French toilets for the lavatorial laurel is attested by a number of surveys. This includes the only known global tourist toilet survey, in which public toilets in France rank as the third worst in the world, pipped at the post by China at no. 1 and India at no. 2.1
His apartment [i.e. Louis XIV’s at Versailles] and that of the Queen have the latest inconveniences, with sight of private cubicles and everything behind them – the most obscure, shut away, and reeking.
MEMOIRS OF THE DUC DE SAINT-SIMON (1675–1755)
What ungrateful visitors to France do not realize, however, is that they are lucky to have access to any public toilets at all. For throughout history, even up to the 1980s, public toilets in France were in chronically short supply. At the court of Versailles up to the mid-eighteenth century, for example, there were no public conveniences at all, with the result that courtiers urinated and defecated on the staircases and corridors, or into whatever receptacles (including vases and fireplaces) were at hand.*
* There were no functioning toilets in Versailles until 1768. By the time of the French Revolution in 1789 there were only nine, and those belonged to the King and other members of the royal family.
In cities all over France until well into the nineteenth century, pots containing urine and faeces were routinely emptied out of the window onto whatever (or whomever) happened to be below. In a famous thirteenth-century incident, a chamber pot was emptied onto the head of King Louis IX by a student working in the early hours of the morning (he was subsequently given a stipend for being so studious).†
† The English word ‘loo’ is popularly believed to derive from the shout prenez garde à l’eau!, the warning traditionally given to passers-by when chamber pots were emptied onto the street below
Wiping one’s derrière was the privilege of the wealthy few; while common folk made do with blades of grass, fingers or yesterday’s newspaper, the rich enjoyed the smooth sensation of lace, hemp (Cardinal Richelieu’s preference), merino wool (the favoured toilet wipe of Louis XIV’s mistress and later morganatic wife Madame de Maintenon), or a valet to perform the ablution on one’s commodious commode. The post of personal valet in charge of the king’s privy affairs, including the maintenance of his nether regions, was one of particular privilege, known as the Chevalier porte-coton or, loosely translated, ‘Knight of the Toilet Roll’.‡
‡ The English monarch’s equivalent valet at this period was the Groom of the Stool, an office instituted by Henry VIII
Toilet business was a deadly serious matter: an impressive line of French kings (including both Louis XIII and XIV) held court on the privy, and the unfortunate Henri III was assassinated in 1589 while enthroned on one.
For many centuries the French public authorities battled to control this deluge of public urination and defecation. As early as 1374, Charles V issued an edict requiring every house to have a cesspit (it was ignored). When the magistrates of the town of Troyes in the seventeenth century tried to stop the locals from
using a village street as an outdoor toilet, they were faced with a mass protest by villagers in front of the hôtel de ville, chanting: ‘Our fathers crapped there, we crap there now, and our children shall forever do so.’2 Paris itself was a giant latrine, a stinking bog of excrement. In fact, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the first public toilets appeared in the capital. They were the innovation of one of the city’s most enlightened and reforming public officials – Claude Philibert de Rambuteau, Prefect of the Seine from 1833 to 1848. Unusually for a public official of the time, Rambuteau was more interested in improving public services for the Parisians than in erecting grand monuments. (Rambuteau was a somewhat earlier counterpart to the Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, creator of London’s sewerage system.) Cunningly concealed in tall columns plastered with advertising posters, the new cast-iron urinals he introduced quickly became part of the Parisian street scene, immortalized by artists of the belle époque. Initially, they were dubbed ‘Pillars of Rambuteau’ by a mocking public and press. Mortified by the unkind appellation, Rambuteau rechristened his brainchild ‘Pillars of Vespasian’, in honour of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who had imposed the world’s first tax on urine collected from public toilets in the first century ad. Of course, Vespasiennes, as they came to be called, catered only for the male population of the city. The women of Paris had to wait until the twentieth century for their toilet facilities, since it was assumed that they should be able to control their natural urges.
MISTRESSES OF THE ROLLS (skip)
There are few visitors to Paris who have not quailed at the sight of one of the city’s formidable female toilet attendants, known to the French as Mesdames Pipi. Though they are principally associated with the French capital, the first professional qualification for female toilet attendants was offered in the eastern city of Strasbourg; the certificate including training in detecting viruses, microbes, moss and signs of damp, appropriate cleaning techniques, and how to deal with the amorous approaches of clients.
Some of the great fallen women of history ended up serving in this capacity, notably the actress Marguerite Weimer, Mademoiselle George, mistress of Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia. The average Madame Pipi has an indomitable personality, necessary for the job, and it is not unknown for them to tip a bucket of water over clients who mistake their toilet for an impromptu place of fornication.
By 1930 there were 1,200 Vespasiennes or pissoirs in Paris. They were, however, the focus of a continuing debate between the hedonists (such as the American novelist Henry Miller, who considered it charmingly French to be able to urinate while looking out at beautiful women passing by), and the moralists (who disapproved of places that were considered the haunts of the dissolute and narcotically dependent). This culture clash was perhaps most vividly illustrated by the 1934 satirical novel Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier, which centred on the brouhaha created in a small village in Beaujolais by the local mayor’s proposal to install a pissoir in the village centre. The plan outrages local worthies such as the priest, lawyer and landed gentry, pitting social classes against each other and revealing the deep fault lines in French provincial society at the time.*
* The name of the fictitious village of the story, Clochemerle, has now entered the French language to designate any community riven by factional local feuding.
As for real-life Paris, various alternatives to the Vespasiennes were tried, including an attempt to imitate London by installing underground lavatories in the Paris Métro, supervised by a brigade of female attendants – known as Mesdames Pipi – who watched over their clientèle and their collecting saucers with an eagle eye. The figure of Madame Pipi has now become something of an urban legend for visitors to Paris (see here).
From the 1960s onwards the Vespasiennes were phased out, so that by the end of the 1970s, only thirty remained. They had been replaced by toilets in parks and on the Métro policed by the Mesdames Pipi, but with barely a few hundred of these available to satisfy the bulging bladders of visitors to one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations, Paris was increasingly and embarrassingly being caught short. Then, in the 1980s, the city hit on the perfect solution for cleaning up its act: Sanisettes, the Parisian version of the Superloo. Bearing no resemblance to the elegant spires of the Vespasiennes, these new Tardis-like extrusions on the capital’s pavements enabled the French public and visitors to relieve themselves in the tranquillity of a compact, self-cleaning box (as long as they did so in the twenty minutes allotted before the door automatically opened and the self-cleaning mechanism kicked in). Introduced by Jacques Chirac when he was Mayor of Paris in 1980, the Sanisettes have provided a belated imperial triumph for the French. J.C. Decaux, the French company that invented them (and which is most famous for its ubiquitous advertising hoardings), is now one of the world’s leading suppliers of Superloos, supplying over 1,000 European cities. Thus the French can console themselves with the fact that, although only 72 million people worldwide speak French as their native tongue, several hundred million people use French-made toilets. Today, there are some 400 Sanisettes in Paris,3 to which access has been free since 2006; a dwindling number of toilets manned by Mesdames Pipi, mainly in public parks; and a single, solitary working Vespasienne. This last is, somewhat bizarrely, situated on the Boulevard Arago in the 14th arrondissement, opposite one of the major Paris prisons – perhaps to discourage the newly released from celebrating their freedom by peeing against the prison wall.
All in all, the public toilet situation in the French capital has improved dramatically. But what of toilets in Parisian restaurants and cafés? There, in the words of a French commentator (note: this is a Frenchman speaking), there is a ‘descent into hell’.4 It is, regrettably, all too common for French café toilets to present scenes of medieval squalor. Nor is the so-called ‘squat’ toilet, or hole in the floor, unheard of, although to the gratitude of many, these are being phased out in central Paris. The curious thing about squat toilets is that, whereas Anglo-Saxons often refer to them as ‘French toilets’, the French themselves call them ‘Turkish toilets’ (toilettes à la turque or WC turcs). But in Turkey they are known as ‘Greek toilets’, while the Greeks insist they are ‘Bulgarian’. In fact, it seems that no one wants to lay claim to this primitive form of public convenience. Even the Japanese call it the ‘Chinese toilet’. The squat toilet has been variously defined as an Arabic, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, Turkish, or Natural-Position toilet.*
* The Turks have recently taken revenge on the French for naming the squat toilet after them – and incidentally for planning to make denial of the genocide of Armenians by Turkey in 1915–16 punishable in law – by giving a brand of toilet paper the now-outmoded appellation of Sarkozy.
A certain laissez-faire attitude to the state of public loos was noted by French and US surveys conducted in the 1990s. When asked whether they were careful to leave public toilets clean after use, 51 per cent of Americans considered this very important, compared to 31 per cent of the French (44 per cent of French people considered leaving toilets clean an optional extra, and 21 per cent considered it of no importance at all).5 In a 2008 survey for the Swedish personal care product group SCA, France came top of a total of nine countries for the percentage of people who expressed concerns about using public toilets (80 per cent of French people were worried about the hygiene risks they posed).6
Other nationalities visiting France have likewise remarked on the malodorous state of the conveniences. In the words of one Japanese analyst: ‘The Parisians don’t stoop to such details, and it has to be recognized that they are not exacting on such matters’.7 For the people of Nippon – where toilet etiquette is a national obsession – the state of the average French café toilet is enough to induce a nervous breakdown.*
* The Japanese mania for toilets and cleanliness has been traced by some to the purity rites of the ancient Shinto religion. Japanese toilets will typically have a dazzling array of functions, includi
ng a blow dryer, heated seat, massage options, water-jet adjustments, automatic lid opening, automatic flushing, and air conditioning of the room. Some Japanese loos even serenade the user. Unfortunately for foreigners, control panels tend to be in Japanese only.
It is said that the only toilets most female Japanese tourists in France feel capable of using are those in luxury hotels. Which brings us to one of the most powerful arguments used by men in support of decent public lavatories for women: they stop them from going into shops and other expensive establishments on the pretext of spending a penny, only to come out having spent a fortune. But what of those poor unfortunates among us, who would appreciate a clean toilet in Paris, but can’t afford the price of a cocktail at the Ritz? There are unfortunately but a couple of options – cross your legs and hold on, or check out a Japanese restaurant.
Myth Evaluation: Mainly true.
THE FRENCH DON’T WASH
The more the ram stinks, the more the ewe loves him.
FRENCH PEASANT SAYING
The myth of the Great Gallic Unwashed is one that sticks to the French like dogshit to a Parisian pavement. This is despite the fact that France is home to one of the largest perfume industries in the world, including the big beast of the global cosmetics and personal care product market, L’Oréal. But then, one of the charges traditionally levelled at the French perfume and toiletries industry is that it developed to its current height of sophistication precisely in order to conceal the nasty niff of what lurked beneath the scent of a French woman.
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 13