They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  From high-end whores in kept apartments to the hookers who walked the boulevards around Place de Clichy, the bidet was the indispensable tool of the trade for the world’s oldest profession – a receptacle for ablutions, a cleansing contraceptive, purger of venereal disease, and in some cases an aid to home abortion. Even the French dared hardly speak its name. French home inventories and bathroom catalogues of the nineteenth century discreetly skirt around the word bidet, tactfully referring to the ‘unmentionable little piece of furniture’, the ‘device for watering the thighs’, the ‘indispensable little unit’, or even that ‘discreet item of furniture, with the equestrian name, impolite to mention’.31 The term eau de bidet, or ‘bidet water’, came to refer to worthless people or things – any sort of scum.32 At the same time, the French soft-porn industry had a field day with salacious prints and engravings of newly fallen young women from the provinces perched on bidets, assisted in their morning ablutions by the Madame of the house, playing on multiple forbidden connotations.*

  * As in, for example, the painting by Louis Leopold Boilly, The Morning Wash: Woman on a Bidet, c.1790.

  In its early days the bidet was used by men as well as women, particularly cavalry soldiers, to soothe the aches and pains of a hard day on horseback (Napoleon – probably its last great male aficionado – bequeathed his splendid silver-gilt bidet to the King of Rome). By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the bidet in France had become the exclusive preserve of women, synonymous with the mysteries of female personal hygiene. But despite its dubious associations, the bidet somehow made the leap into the twentieth century as an indispensible component of the French salle de bain. The bathroom trio of toilet/basin/bidet endured (even as other relics of partial bathing, like the sitz bath and foot bath, were consigned to the dustbin of history). Somehow, the bidet survived the purge of other bathroom paraphernalia, even if its bland and sanitized new form was a far cry from the showy clothes in which it started life. Why this was the case has been the subject of much debate and speculation amongst French social historians. Could the key to the bidet’s survival have been the alleged contraceptive powers of its cleansing water jet? The bidet had remained one of the few discreetly legitimate means of attempting to stay nature’s course after a French law of 1920 decreed contraception a crime. Whatever the reason for its tenacity, the bidet was by the 1950s a standard fixture of most French bathrooms, including those in council housing.

  SOME FRENCH SLANG EXPRESSIONS USING THE WORD ‘BIDET’ (skip)

  chevalier de bidet (knight of the bidet) = pimp

  l’eau de bidet (bidet water) = trash

  rinçure de bidet (used bidet water) = abortion

  Today, however, the bidet is no longer the ubiquitous presence in the French bathroom that it once was. The advent of the Pill, the pressures of space in modern French apartments, the ease with which water is now available on tap or in the shower, but most of all, its associations with the demi-monde, have all played their part in its gradual disappearance. In 1951, 62 per cent of French bathrooms had a bidet; by 1986, this had diminished to 47 per cent; and by 1993, it was only 42 per cent.33 Successive changes to the criteria for hotel ratings also illustrate its demise: whereas all French three-star hotels and above were required to have a bidet in every bathroom in 1964, these days a bidet in a hotel room carries a few extra points, but is not obligatory on any rating level. (Just 25 per cent of French hotel bathrooms are now equipped with bidets.)

  The irony of all this is that the start of the bidet’s demise in France coincided almost exactly with its brief heyday in England. That the good-lifers of the 1980s, so eager to keep up with the Joneses, actually realized that they had in fact installed a piece of (outmoded) Parisian brothelware with their avocado bathroom suites is unlikely. Today, the proud title of Europe’s most bidet-loving nation has passed from France to Italy, where, it would appear, there really is a bidet in every bathroom. But those who do possess a relic of a bidet in their 1980s bathroom suite need not despair. When filled with ice, they really do make fantastic wine coolers: the ultimate accessory for a truly relaxing, post-modern soak.

  Myth Evaluation: False. In fact, it is every Italian bathroom that has a bidet.

  PART 5

  BOF! JE M’EN FOUS!

  MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH MANNERS

  THE FRENCH ARE UNCOMMONLY RUDE

  I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.

  JOSEPHINE BAKER, AMERICAN-FRENCH DANCER (1906–75)

  If, in the celebrated dictum of William of Wykeham, manners maketh man, they maketh not the Frenchman. Or at least, so the popular belief goes. The French, and in particular Parisians, are famed for turning rudeness into an art form: from swearing taxi drivers and offhand shop assistants to the legendarily churlish Parisian waiter, they are world-renowned for their service without a smile. (The principle of ‘The Customer is King’ seems not to have reached Paris; or if it ever did, it was summarily dispatched the same way as the aristos of old.)

  We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they’re so rude.

  DOUGLAS COUPLAND, CANADIAN WRITER (b.1961)

  The French have traditionally topped virtually every rudeness poll going. For instance, for four years in a row an annual poll of some 4,000 world hoteliers conducted by the travel website Expedia has found that French tourists are the most reluctant at trying to speak English,* leave the lowest tips, yet are the first to complain about everything. According to a survey in 2012 conducted for the online ticket-seller Skyscanner, the French were voted the most impolite nation in the world towards visitors to their country (followed closely by the Russians).

  * Although the French tend to default to English at home to put foreigners down when they try to speak French.

  A TripAdvisor survey in 2010 found that tourists thought Paris had the least friendly locals, the rudest taxi drivers, and the most hostile and aggressive waiters. The proverbial rudeness of the French, in fact, is more than a national myth; it has become a part of global folklore. When a new cartoon character – Mr Rude – was added to the children’s television series Mr Men in 2008, what other nationality could he possibly have been but French? (Mr Rude, who had a very British top hat in the original books, lost it in favour of a strong French accent in the TV series. He is also smelly, another archetype associated with the French.)*

  * A spokesman for the French ambassador in London at the time stated that the new Mr Rude was ‘unlikely to improve Anglo-French relations’.

  The irony of the modern French reputation for rudeness is that it was certainly not ever thus. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French manners and etiquette were considered the peak of refinement (even if writers such as the seventeenth-century comic playwright Molière took great delight in lampooning the gauche attempts of the bourgeois gentilhomme to ape the refined habits and manners of the aristocracy). As one of the hundreds of nineteenth-century guides to French etiquette noted, ‘Throughout all time, French courtesy has been cited as the model of grace, gallantry, and true noblesse oblige.’1 Under the ancien régime, convoluted rituals were a means for the king to stop the nobles taking up arms against each other (or against him), by keeping them busy with the complicated codes of court etiquette. Of course, there was (as there always has been) a distinction between courtesy in the sense of an unselfish regard for others in daily life, and the more complex rules of etiquette or savoir-vivre, designed as unspoken codes to mark out the well-bred from the common rabble. French court etiquette was decidedly of the latter type.

  After the Revolution of 1789, there was a general revolt against the rules of politeness that had been a means of dividing those who were comme il faut from those who were not. ‘Rudeness is a form of resistance to oppression,’ wrote the fanatical Jacobin Louis Antoine de Saint-Just: from now on, the new buzzword was antipolitesse. Attempts were made to ban the use of the polite form of address, vous, and replace
it with the familiar tu, and the titles Monsieur and Madame were abolished in favour of the levelling Citoyen. While the common citizens were busy being rude to each other, however, the old rules of savoir-vivre were being codified by the new (and therefore deeply socially insecure) bourgeoisie into a system of rules that was positively Byzantine in its complexity. At table, a ‘man of good breeding’ of the new ruling class was expected to know the difference between a snail- and an oyster-pick, the exact circumstances in which to use a three-tined rather than a four-tined fish fork, and to avoid the heinous faux pas of complimenting a hostess on a dish at dinner.

  Bourgeois savoir-vivre as developed in nineteenth-century France extended from the mastery of manners to every aspect of genteel living – dress, food, arts of the table.*

  * The principles of savoir-vivre in so far as they impact on French bourgeois personal appearance and dress are discussed in detail here.

  A woman comme il faut would never be seen outside without a hat, have more than one aperitif before dinner (such an act being a sure sign of an alcoholic or an Englishwoman), or wear precious stones if she were under thirty-five (this was of course reversed for those above that age, since no respectable woman in middle age could possibly be seen wearing a jewel that was not real, as that would be an admission of one’s husband’s failure in life). Her male counterpart, meanwhile, would not be seen without his cravate (the essential mark of the well-bred gentleman), or without his gloves, although of course not just any old gloves would do. As the writer, journalist and astute social commentator Alphonse Karr remarked, ‘There now are only two classes of men in France… those who wear yellow gloves, and those who do not. When one says of a man that he wears yellow gloves, it is a concise way of saying that he is a man comme il faut.’2 The intricate network of social mores was disseminated (and in many cases invented) by a formidable battery of books on etiquette, written by bourgeois housewives with often faux-aristocratic noms de plume like Baroness Staffe, Madame de Grandmaison, Countess Berthe and the Marquise of Pompeillan.

  The French tendency to view politeness as an aspect of subservience to, or rebellion against, hierarchy and oppression, rather than a purely courteous consideration of others as in other cultures, was exacerbated in the twentieth century, particularly in relation to foreigners after the Second World War. In the immediate postwar period and under the strain of the Marshall Plan, the hostility of the French to their former allies, now seen as cultural oppressors – in particular the Americans – was extremely strong, leading to a number of clashes with American visitors in Paris and a proliferation of ‘rude French’ stories.*

  * For more on the Marshall Plan and anti-Americanism in France in the postwar period, see here.

  The American writer Sylvia Plath recalls this simmering hostility in an incident that occurred on the Parisian Left Bank in the 1950s, when she attempted to buy a kilo of peaches from an ‘oily’ stallholder in the rue de Buci market. Plath, who spoke French fluently, asked for a kilo of red peaches; the stallholder replied that everybody asked for red peaches, and proceeded to quickly fill her bag with green ones. She wrote:

  ‘I looked in the bag whilst his back was turned to take the money; I found a solid rock-hard green peach; I put it back and took a red one. The man turned just as the hostile little old woman made a rattling noise of furious warning to him, like a snake about to strike. One is not allowed to choose, the man raged, grabbing the bag back and rudely dumping the hard green peaches on the counter. We fumed, sick at the outrage, meanness and utter illogic.’3

  ‘Like it or not,’ wrote the travel writer Temple Fielding, ‘the American tourist of 1953 is despised by thousands of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.’4 The author John Steinbeck noted how sad it was that American visitors came to Paris all excited by their trip and keen to learn about the new culture, yet when they arrived, ‘they find themselves scorned, and they suspect they are being cheated… They find themselves huddling together fearful of raised brows of headwaiters, the superior smiles of guides. Local people who have not in their lives been fifty kilometres from their village look down on tourists. They become lonesome and some of them grow angry.’5

  THE CHAMPIONS OF CHURLISHNESS (skip)

  Rude as the French are generally considered to be, it is Parisians in particular who are widely regarded as the champions of churlishness. Even the French themselves take this view. In a 2010 poll by the French polling agency CSA (Conseil, sondage, analyse) for the French current affairs magazine Marianne, of 1,000 French people questioned, more than 70 per cent considered Parisians more snobbish than other French people; more than 65 per cent thought they were more aggressive and arrogant, 62 per cent more chauvinistic; 71 per cent found them unsmiling, 59 per cent unwelcoming; 58 per cent regarded them as navel-contemplating, and 61 per cent as lacking in wit. On the plus side for Paris, its inhabitants were generally seen as more chic, more switched on, and bigger party animals than their provincial counterparts.

  In fact, Paris holds the dubious distinction of having a psychiatric condition named after it: Paris Syndrome, characterized by an acute delusional state, persecution complex, hallucinations and panic attacks. Paris Syndrome is a psychosis to which Japanese tourists in Paris are peculiarly susceptible, resulting in the hospitalization of several dozen a year. Theories as to why people from the Land of the Rising Sun are so adversely affected by the City of Light are legion, but the general consensus is that the root of the psychosis probably lies in the idealization of Paris by the Japanese media as a city of refined manners, glamour, romance and gorgeously slim women. This dreamy vision is rudely dispelled when the visitor from Tokyo or Kyoto encounters the reality of canine excreta on the streets, brusque waiters, dirty toilets, and the dawning realization that they themselves are slimmer and wear more Louis Vuitton than the average French woman. Japan’s embassy in Paris has a 24-hour hotline for Japanese visitors in the throes of this reality crisis, and a whole department at the Parisian psychiatric Hospital of St Anne is devoted to caring for its victims. But the only known cure to date is to go back to Japan – and never return to Paris.

  The dual inheritance from the Revolution – levelling rudeness on the one hand and a highly codified set of manners to distinguish the genteel from the mob on the other – together with a residual hostility to Anglo-Saxon foreigners, has left an indelible mark on French social interactions with foreigners to this day. On the one hand, there is the typically offhand manner of people in the French service industries (who are of course those with whom most tourists will come into contact), whose general attitude tends to be to equate civility to foreigners with servitude. On the other hand, there are the rarefied and aloof circles of the French bourgeoisie, who remain hidebound by the strict and obscure codes of French manners and etiquette. It is generally true that, even today, French social interactions are more formal and highly codified than in England or the USA. In France it is obligatory, for example, to say Bonjour to anybody in a shop, restaurant, bus or café before saying anything else. Not to do so is considered the height of discourtesy, and will guarantee a brusque response. And then there is the vexed question of when Bonjour becomes Bonsoir (generally, this nebulous transition occurs around 5 p.m. in the afternoon, but it can be later. It depends partly on the whim of the person greeting you. You will know you have got it wrong if you say Bonjour and receive an icy Bonsoir in reply, or vice versa). Not to mention the bewildering rituals of French greetings: the requisite order of introductions, form of handshake, and whether to give social kisses (and if so how many; see the next chapter for guidance), all of which are guaranteed to terrify the innocent visitor.

  In fact, every type of social interaction in France has its established form. Even the wheedling of French beggars on the Paris Métro runs along set lines. It invariably begins with the address, ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, Mesdames and Monsieurs’, continues with a catalogue of the history of misfortunes the speaker has suffered, and concludes with a request for mo
ney or a restaurant ticket (again asking to be excused for disturbing everybody). The intricate web of formalities and set patterns of behaviour inevitably leave the foreigner in a state of confusion. Nor will a big smile help: smiling for the French (as with so much else) is usually a strictly private matter. Aware of the problems caused by the traditional French froideur in public spaces, the RATP* has done its best to jolly its compatriots up. ‘Two smiles exchanged with each other light up a journey,’ reads one campaign poster. ‘The person who exchanges a smile travels in happiness,’ reads another.

  * The French transport authority that runs the Paris Métro.

  In fact, it would appear that nowadays even the French are fed up with their own rudeness. An Ipsos poll in 2012 revealed bad manners and aggressive behaviour as the leading cause of stress for the French, greater even than unemployment or the debt crisis.6 The government has reacted with a number of measures, including a return of ‘morals classes’, teaching basic manners, in French schools. The RATP has also for many years run ‘politeness’ campaigns on the Paris underground. In 2012, for example, it set up a project for the annual review of rudeness on the Métro, with a series of ‘politeness forums’ to instruct the citizens of the Republic in how to behave on the underground, and an associated poster campaign. But beware: smiles don’t always have the intended effect on the Paris Métro. At 10 a.m. on a late August morning in 2012, travellers on Line 4 witnessed a fellow passenger behaving in a suspicious manner. The individual in question had given up his seat to an elderly person. Not only that, on entering the carriage, he had beamingly announced ‘Bonjour, tout le monde’, before apologizing when he bumped into another passenger. Worse still, he proceeded to give his free newspaper to a fellow traveller. Tension mounted as he laughed when a girl trod on his toes: ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry about it!’ he said affably. The other passengers, alarmed by this bizarre display of bonhomie, phoned the security services. The man was arrested. Under examination, he admitted to having returned from his summer vacation in an ebullient and happy state. ‘I just meant to be pleasant, not to arouse suspicion,’ was his sad refrain. All of which goes to show that smiling on the Paris Métro can be a risky business. Better to scowl, hunch your shoulders and look vacantly ahead. You will be precisely comme il faut.