It’s the ultimate fantasy of your average male backpacker in France: to wind up on miles of white sand somewhere on the Côte d’Azur, on a café terrace caressed by a cool breeze, a troop of bronzed and semi-naked girls appearing out of the waves…
Nor does this image have to remain confined to the realms of fantasy. Not if you pick the right beach. Don’t, whatever you do, head for a windswept stretch of the Norman or Breton coastline (unless you want to spend the afternoon fossil-hunting). For those more interested in living specimens, the only way to go is the Riviera. St Tropez remains the top destination: a place where tops on beaches are largely optional, ‘bikini’ means sporting bikini bottoms and a sunhat, and the yachts moored along the coastline are draped with topless beauties who clearly spend a lot of money (mostly not their own) on the arts of pampering the flesh.
Men are born naked and live in clothes, just as they are born free and live under laws.
ANTOINE RIVAROLI, COMTE DE RIVAROL, FRENCH WRITER (1753–1801)
France was not always so laid-back about le topless, or indeed sunbathing on the beach in any attire. Tanning, or le bronzage, was frowned upon in polite society in the nineteenth century, being considered the hallmark of lowly farm labourers. That all changed in the early twentieth century, when most farm labourers decamped to factories and began to look pale and anaemic. Suddenly, a tan became très cool, the ultimate status symbol to signal that one spent one’s time on yachts or at spa towns rather than slaving in the dim light of the assembly lines. Coco Chanel created a rage for tans when she returned from the Côte d’Azur in 1920 with a bronze sheen, and the Afro-American dancer Josephine Baker (whose tan was genetic rather than sun-derived) inspired the Paris fashion élite to mimic her dusky look and minimal attire. But while Josephine Baker titillated Paris by dancing topless on stage in the 1920s, the bourgeoisie of the regions were shocked by the hedonistic rebels who were starting to take to the beaches in scanty attire (scanty, at least, by the standards of the day. Early swimsuits shrouded the body from head to toe, and were closer to the modern-day burkini than a bikini). From the 1920s on, family associations and societies for the propagation of morality confronted beachgoers in fisticuff battles, and lists of ‘immoral beaches’ were published for public consultation. In 1927, for example, in a small village in Brittany, a group of Breton housewives tore branches from the trees by the beach and whipped a posse of nubile female sun-worshippers in whom their husbands had become a little too interested.11
RAGTIME AND RESISTANCE: THE REMARKABLE MS BAKER (skip)
It is a strange irony that the woman who made toplessness on the Paris stage fashionable and avant-garde (as opposed to mere pornography) was originally American: the great African-American performer and political activist Josephine Baker (1906–75). Born into desperate poverty in the back streets of St. Louis, Missouri, Baker was spotted at the age of 15 by a travelling vaudeville showman as a ragged child dancing on street corners. Huge success as a chorus girl on Broadway followed, and when she appeared at the newly opened La Revue nègre on the Champs-Elysées in 1925, Paris was smitten.
Baker’s star turn – for which she is remembered to this day – was an erotic, topless dance in a banana-skin skirt. She was frequently accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah Chiquita, sporting a diamond collar, who added to the audience frisson by occasionally escaping into and terrorizing the orchestra pit.
But Baker was much more than just a topless dancer. Having taken French citizenship, married a Frenchman and settled permanently in France in 1937, she played a key role in the French Resistance during the war years. She also supported the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1950s and 1960s, refusing to perform before segregated audiences. Josephine Baker died peacefully in 1975, after a sell-out retrospective show. As the first American-born woman to receive the highest French award for gallantry, the Croix de guerre, she was buried with full military honours.
It was not, in fact, until the 1950s, with the advent of mass tourism and an annual summer exodus to the beaches, that sunbathing really caught on. Even so, the dress code on beaches was strictly a capacious one-piece. Unsurprisingly, the bikini was a French invention, the brainchild of fashion designer Louis Réard in the 1940s. What is more surprising is that he was also an automobile engineer. (Or perhaps not; after all, Jack Ryan, the man who gave us the Barbie doll, also invented the Sparrow and Hawk missiles.) Réard engaged in a battle with another French designer, Jacques Heim, to create the world’s smallest swimsuit. Heim had already effectively created the predecessor of the bikini, called the ‘Atom’, marketed as the ‘world’s smallest swimsuit’ (a rather heavy two-piece, it had modest panties closer to shorts). Réard trumped Heim with a far racier number: two triangles held together with string on top, and a g-string below. He called his creation the ‘bikini’ after Bikini Atoll, a group of islands in the South Pacific where the United States began testing nuclear weapons in the summer of 1946. Marketed as ‘smaller than the smallest swimsuit’ and taking up only 45 square centimetres of cloth, the first bikinis were sold in a matchbox to prove the point. They caused a scandal. A fleet of regular models turned down the assignment, so the only woman Réard could find who was willing to model his creation was a topless cabaret dancer, for whom the skimpy garment was presumably more of a cover-up than usual. The bikini was officially launched on 5 July 1946, five days after the explosion of an atomic bomb of 23,000 tonnes on Bikini Atoll. It was immediately banned in Italy, Spain, Belgium and France.12
It took until the 1960s for Réard’s bombshell to explode with the devastating effect he intended, in the form of a nubile Brigitte Bardot at St Tropez. Clad in scanty string bikinis made of girlish fabrics such as pink gingham and broderie anglaise, Bardot ensured that henceforth there was only one dress code for the French beach: le minimum. Soon, she was being caught in snapshots without her top on, and the monokini was born.*
* That is, the French version of the monokini, which was simply to dispense with the bikini top. An American designer did invent a garment called the ‘monokini’, but it did not catch on.
The hip crowd flocked to the beaches of St Tropez, which, despite the efforts of the local mairies, became havens of bare-breasted sun-worship (there were in fact as many placards banning the monokini as there were women flaunting them). Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to put a shot of a topless bather in his 1964 film Une Femme mariée (‘A Married Woman’). It was edited out by the censors. Finally, after the upheavals of May 1968 – a year when the whole of France rebelled and everybody from women to students took to the streets to protest – the battle for freedom of the boobs was won, and many French beaches either officially or unofficially condoned topless bathing.
Today, most beaches in St Tropez are ‘bikini tops optional’. Foremost among them is the famous Tahiti Beach, a pioneer in the 1960s battles over topless bathing. Nor do you need to limit yourself to le topless: there are beaches where the dress code is strictly your birthday suit, including the risqué Cap d’Agde. Here, if you wear clothes on the beach you are asked to leave, and women in trousers are banned from the swingers’ clubs. Although the Germans invented naturism and remain the nation most likely to bare all on the beach, France has one of the largest number of nudist beaches and resorts in the world. It might seem somewhat odd that the world’s best-dressed country should be so obsessed with taking off its clothes, but the fact remains that the French are fascinated by nudism. A hugely successful 1960s French comedy series, The Policeman from Saint-Tropez, featured the French actor Louis de Funès (see here) as a local gendarme in charge of a Dad’s Army of bumbling policemen, forever engaged in ‘clothing fights’ with nudists on the beaches. The nudists won. Even today, prime-time French TV dramas are set on naturist beaches, where naked bathers shock bourgeois families who stumble upon them by mistake.*
* As in, for example, the television drama À Dix minutes des naturistes, broadcast on the French channel TF1 in June 2012.
Yet des
pite France’s post-1960s liberal attitude to nudity and the naked breast, it seems that the times are a-changing. The younger generation of French women is, it appears, much less inclined to let it all hang out on the beach than their mothers. Nobody can explain this reticence for bosom-baring among younger bourgeois women (noted and much lamented by French intellectuals and the press). One theory is that the beach today is no longer a space of liberation from social norms, but just another forum for a tooth and (manicured) nail competition. One of the most celebrated slogans of the May 1968 student rebellion was sous les pavés, la plage... (‘under the paving stones, the beach’ or, to paraphrase, ‘under the oppressive rules of civilization lies freedom’).†
† The reference is to the fact that when the protesting students prised up paving stones to hurl at the police in Paris, they found beneath them the sandy shelf on which the city was built. The slogan was widely used by the Situationists, a Marxist avant-garde group that reached its peak in the 1968 revolution.
But is the beach so free and easy these days? The fanatical cult of the body beautiful in the 1990s meant that, for many women, the annual summer holiday, with its obligatory striptease, became as much a prospect of dread as anticipation. And nowadays on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur, there is so much competition from fake boobs and bottoms that the real thing looks un peu triste in comparison. As more and more foreign imports flood the Riviera and strut their (inflated) stuff, the genuine French article beats a dignified retreat.
Not only does the practice of nudism not lead to immorality, but it is a good way to combat it.
DR GASTON DURVILLE, LEADING FRENCH NATURIST (1887–1971)
Whatever the cause of their new-found modesty, 50 per cent of French women in a recent poll stated that they were bothered by total nudity on the beach, and 37 per cent were discomfited by the sight of naked breasts or buttocks.13 Today’s bikinis are more likely to be scarily high-tech, silhouette-reforming contraptions with inbuilt breast-enhancers, stomach-flatteners and buttock-lifters, than the artless strings of the 1960s. And, for the first time in decades, the old-fashioned one-piece has become a market leader once again, as increasing numbers of French women refuse to enter the battle for the best body on the beach. Even on Paris Plage – the simulated beach created on the Seine every summer – topless sunbathing is now punishable by a fine. Interestingly, the reticence over topless bathing on ordinary French beaches contrasts with a boom in nudism itself, with increasing numbers of families taking to ‘official’ nudist beaches. Which suggests that it’s not so much a question of whether, but rather where, to let it all hang out.
Does this mean an au revoir to the heady heyday of le topless, when Brigitte Bardot and her first husband Roger Vadim strolled carelessly on the then still-virgin beaches of the Pampelonne? Not quite. You’ll still find plenty of naked breasts on certain beaches of the French Southeast. Just don’t expect them to be Made in France.
Myth Evaluation: Partly true. Many women do go topless on French beaches, but increasingly few of them are actually French.
FRENCH VILLAGES ARE SO QUAINT
This is French country life at its finest – with outdoor markets, charming village cafés and relaxed friendly people.
ADVERTISING BLURB FOR A FRENCH LANGUAGE SCHOOL IN THE SUBURBS OF PARIS
Ah, the ‘typical’ French village: a cluster of mellow stone cottages clinging to the top of a hill; a patchwork of mossy rooftops; picturesque window shutters adorned with a riot of brightly-coloured geraniums… Who hasn’t at some point or another dreamt of this haven of peace and tranquillity? The French village is the quintessential fantasy of life in the slow lane, a place where time stands still, where the only noise is the Sunday morning toll of the church bell, the clink of glasses in the local village café, and the click of rolling boules as a few old men in berets play pétanque on the dusty village square… Just don’t forget the Ford showroom, Buffalo Grill and Carrefour hypermarket round the corner.
There is no doubt that unadulterated French countryside can be absolutely magnificent. France’s geographical position, straddling latitudes both temperate and Mediterranean, means that it rejoices in perhaps the most varied landscape in Western Europe. Villages so preternaturally pretty that they appear to have been plucked from the pages of Marcel Pagnol’s Jean de Florette really do exist in France, in regions as diverse as Périgord and Provence, Brittany and Burgundy, the Ardennes and the Ardèche. In all likelihood, in such villages there will be a picturesque – although somehow disconcertingly quiet – centre with an old market square, church and the local town hall or mairie. Then – within a couple of miles of this idyll – you will usually find low-cost concrete housing, homogeneous holiday villas, grain silos and warehouses – in short, anything useful (and usually hideous) that the local authority decides needs to be there.
The French don’t, as a rule, fetishize their countryside like the British (perhaps because there is so much more of it in France – at least, for the moment). In Britain, anxiety that the countryside was about to be swallowed up wholesale in postwar urban sprawl saw the introduction of ‘green belts’ around British cities as early as 1947, and planning restrictions enshrining the principle that new developments should harmonize with local landscape and architecture. Powerful lobbyists such as the National Trust and vociferous activists like the Campaign to Protect Rural England are ever vigilant, waiting to pounce on any proposal that might blot the idyllic garden of England with a dark, satanic mill. In France, on the other hand, there is no heritage-preserving body with the sheer landowning might of the National Trust; the closest equivalent – the Fondation du patrimoine – mainly helps owners of historic houses maintain and repair their properties with grants. Grassroots environmental protest in France is more muted than in England, with the exception of certain high-profile projects that have created a furore. A salient example being the current brouhaha over the French government’s plan to build an airport near the small farming community at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in Loire-Atlantique, the economic and environmental logic of which admittedly seems questionable, given that it involves spending 600 million euros to convert 1,600 hectares of rural land into an airport for a city (Nantes) that already has one.
The relative lack of vociferous local environmental campaign groups means that, although designated areas and buildings of historical significance are zealously protected in France, if a village falls outside these cultural exceptions, it will largely be at the mercy of the planning department of the local mairie. In most cases, this will have a PLU (plan local d’urbanisme) that predetermines permitted residential, commercial or public development. So if a factory or a hospital, a fire station or a block of flats, is required, it will simply be built according to the provisions of the PLU – even if that happens to be in a direct line of sight from your back garden, which previously enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the Provençal hills.
Of course, in this respect France is facing a challenge no different from the UK: namely, how to provide enough low-cost housing to accommodate an expanding and increasingly industrialized populace with a thirst for their own detached home, without wrecking the countryside in the process. And, as with so much in France, double standards apply. The ‘official’ rule is that all local authorities, or mairies, are required to have at least 20 per cent social housing, to preserve France’s hallowed principles of equality, or mixité sociale. In practice, the most exclusive communes – like the haute bourgeois village of Le Vésinet in the western suburbs of Paris – have traditionally refused to do this, opting to pay an annual fine instead. Exclusive domains in the suburbs west of Paris such as Le Vésinet, Maisons-Laffitte, and the ‘royal’ communes of Versailles and St Germain-en-Laye, were in fact some of the earliest suburban developments in France. Back in the nineteenth century, when railway lines were just beginning to criss-cross the country, suburbs such as these arose from the auctioning of building lots on the grounds of broken-up châteaux. A slow trickle of sub
urban developments followed, stimulated by reduced-rate loans for the construction of private suburban housing by French governments in the 1920s.14 France, however, still remained a largely rural population, a people rooted in the hills and mountains of le terroir.
One fine morning, the people of France woke up and found that a baobab had sprung up in their garden… In less than half a century, in almost total silence, the map of France had changed. Rubbing their eyes, the citizens of France had to take in the evidence: the famous town–country opposition, which was how people had thought of the territory for centuries, was no longer applicable. In its place, another form of territorial occupation, at the same time more complex and vague, incontestably difficult to assess in voting terms…suburbia…
FRENCH NEWSPAPER LE MONDE, ‘LE FRANÇAIS, CET HOMO PÉRIURBANUS’, 31 MAY 2012
The poor who did migrate to the French towns in the 1960s were packed like sardines in the newly constructed housing estates of tower blocks or cités, which loom ominously to this day like brooding giants around the major cities of France. Piled on top of each other and relegated to the periphery of urban life, the cité dwellers dreamed of their own little patch of paradise: a detached house with a garden. And in the 1970s and 1980s, that dream began to come true. Huge areas around small towns and villages, formerly occupied by agricultural land, farms and ancient châteaux, began to be snapped up by developers and turned into private housing estates. It was easy: all potential purchasers needed to do was choose from a range of ready-made homes from a catalogue. With names like Romance, Evolution or Azure, these homes were really identikit boxes, cubes of concrete with uniform roofs and differently coloured shutters. Dubbed in estate agents’ jargon with the ludicrously pompous name of pavillon (the word for the private hunting lodges of the old kings of France), they are France’s version of the Barratt home. You can buy one for as little as €50,000, picking up the keys on completion of the necessary paperwork at one of the ‘model home’ villages outside Paris and other major cities, such as Domexpo and Homexpo. Today, 85 per cent of all new French houses constructed are maisons de catalogue.
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 27