How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  In three centuries, we have thus gone from repression and religious sublimation to libertinage, from libertinage to romantic passion, from there to exaggerated modesty, and once again from there to sexual and pornographic proliferation, before returning, via sickness and reproductive technology, to original, ordinary repression.

  What kind of contemporary repression is Sollers talking about? Certainly not sexual repression since French men and women, like Americans, find bed partners more easily than ever before. What has become repressed is the possibility of giving oneself, heart and soul, to what used to be called “true love.” Bombarded by “amour-publicité, amour-cinéma, amour-chanson, amour-télé, amour-magazines, amour-people,” the French are compelled to love according to criteria concocted by the media. But has one ever loved “naturally”? Hasn’t there always been an intermediary that provides the model for lovers? René Girard’s work on mediated desire has convinced us that the greatest works of Western literature, from Dante and Cervantes to Stendhal and Flaubert, present literary figures who took their romantic cues from earlier fictions.3 How many women and men in the second half of the eighteenth century learned to love passionately and cry plentifully from the gospel of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse? Today, movies, television, magazines, and the Internet provide models that literature can no longer compete with on a numerical level.

  Sollers looks back to a time when the French, and the rest of the Western world, turned to literature for exemplary lovers. He evokes love as it was captured in Stendhal’s greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma and in his essay On Love. What we in the year 2011 have lost is Stendhal’s process of cristallisation—the ability to imagine the loved one, to fantasize about that person, to gift him or her with the desirable attributes we admire.

  What’s more, since Internet dating services come up with whatever qualities we would like to find in a person, people can go straight to a site and construct a potential partner from online data. You want someone tall, short, into rough sex? Go to Match.com. Whereas Swann built Odette into an idealized woman, we now start with the ideal construct and then find the matching person. The satisfaction of physical and psychic desire, made too easy, has ruined the process of love.

  Or has it? The Sollers persona has found his ideal love in Minna, in their silent entente and mutual adoration. He is sure of himself: “I love Minna, and she loves me.” Encapsulated within the miracle of Venice, descended from an old Italian family, enmeshed within their shared admiration for Stendhal (who not incidentally adored Italy), Minna emerges from a process of crystallization—like the crystals that develop on the branches left in a salt mine, to use Stendhal’s metaphor—with all the perfections Sollers has projected upon her: youth, beauty, intelligence, and a distinguished Italian genealogy.

  Now and then we get a sense of what Minna thinks. She finds Stendhal’s essay On Love old-fashioned. She loves his statement that “the admission of women to perfect equality would be the surest mark of civilization: it would double the intellectual force of the human species and its chance for happiness.” Watch out, Sollers, there may be a feminist hidden under the skin of the ineffable Minna!

  But Minna is not one of those “terrible” feminists who cause problems. She “has never thought of ‘having a career’ in a university or elsewhere. The idea of assuming power . . . is strange to her. . . . She likes her independent life, her daughter, her apartment in Venice.” And so would I, and so would many other women, if we didn’t have to support ourselves or contribute to a family economy. Come on, Sollers, what century are you living in? Sollers is but one of many writers—both men and women—uneasy with the changes wrought by and for women since the 1960s. He evinces a creeping malaise between the sexes, even as the narrator of Trésor d’amour lauds his perfect relationship with Minna.

  One wonders how Sollers, married in 1967 to the feminist psychoanalytic writer Julia Kristeva, has felt about her international success in academic circles. And one wonders who the model or models might have been for Minna. Sollers and Kristeva, in the tradition of Sartre and Beauvoir, have long been an iconic couple whose private lives are subject to ongoing public scrutiny.

  Even more pessimistic are the works of the poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq. In his much-discussed novel The Elementary Particles, he writes for an age when “feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared.”4 Houellebecq offers detailed descriptions of masturbation, pornography, prostitution, and sex tourism as quick fixes for the absence of love. Though I can appreciate his seriousness as a thinker, he puts me off—totally. I simply do not want to follow Houellebecq in his nihilistic portrayal of unlovely individuals unable to find human connection.

  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 cou
ld 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 create
d 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.