How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  In the wake of the 2011 New York scandal, the French began to question the conspiracy of silence surrounding the sexual indiscretions of their public figures. They had to consider the allegation that some men, especially powerful ones, not only expect erotic favors from their subordinates but sometimes use strong-arm methods to obtain their ends. Eventually the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped because it was discovered that his accuser had lied on several important issues, but French feminists were not about to forget this unsavory story: they seized the opportunity to make public pronouncements on the line between flirting and sexual aggression and hoped their clamor would cause men to think twice before forcing women into the bedroom.

  This is obviously not the tawdry note I favor for the finale of a book on love. Coerced sex is not love. It is a form of violence against women, and sometimes against men. And yet, such is the complicated relationship between sex and love that the French have been known to conflate the two, and even to whitewash sexual acts committed through intimidation or brute force. The first reaction of a few French males to the Strauss-Kahn affair was to treat it as une imprudence, comment dire: un troussage de domestique—an imprudent act, like having sex with the maid.1 Certainly there is a long history in France, as in other countries, of male employers taking advantage of female domestics. This can lead to pregnancies and bastard children, as in the case of Violette Leduc, but it rarely leads to love.

  There has always been a cynical promotion of carnal pleasure in France, alongside the history of romantic love, ever since the latter was invented by twelfth-century troubadours. Consider La clef d’amors (The Key to Love), a medieval advice manual that even condones force. Here’s some of its graphic counsel to men: “Once you have pressed your lips to hers / (Despite her long and loud demurs), / You must not stop at mere embrace: / Push on, pursue the rest apace.” Like men in all centuries, the author condones the use of force by blithely assuming that the lady “really hopes you ignore / Her protests.”2

  This is the same mentality motivating Valmont in Les liaisons dangereuses. He will have his way with Madame de Tourvel regardless of the pain it will cause her. But in the end, his “victory” is also hers, for despite his denials, he falls in love with her. It is left to Madame de Merteuil to enlighten Valmont about the true nature of his feelings, and to unleash destructive justice.

  For hundreds of years, sexual license in France was kept under loose control by the rules of courtly love, gallantry, and royal decree. As early as the fourteenth century, kings appointed their own official mistresses and looked the other way when members of their courts took lovers outside of marriage. Rarely did a king of France condemn the erotic adventures of his courtiers, unless that person tread upon territory the king himself coveted. Remember Henri IV, Bassompierre, and Mademoiselle de Montmorency in chapter 2. Even though the church took a different point of view and condemned any form of extramarital sex—sometimes even that of the royals—France has always been a country where sex has not only been tolerated but generally prized as part of the national character.

  Love without sex is not a French invention. Leave it to the English, the Germans, and the Italians to project human love into the sphere of the angels. There is no French counterpart to Dante’s divine Beatrice, Goethe’s Eternal Feminine, or the British Angel in the House. Instead, sexually vibrant women in life and literature—such as Héloïse, Iseult, Guinevere, Diane de Poitiers, Julie de Lespinasse, Rousseau’s Julie, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Madame Bovary, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras—have provided models for women in love. For men, Lancelot, Tristan, certain kings (notably François I, Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIV, and Louis XV), Saint-Preux, Valmont, Lamartine, Julien Sorel, Musset, French movie stars and presidents have offered a conjoint set of virile models.

  Yet, despite their emphasis on physical pleasure, most French have always understood love as something more than mere sexual satisfaction. Love privileges tender feelings, inspires esteem and fidelity, has the potential for uniting lovers permanently in enduring liaisons or lifelong marriage. Two such eighteenth-century unions that I haven’t talked about (for lack of space) were that of Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, an exceptionally distinguished pair who enjoyed a very long, multifaceted liaison, and that of the Comtesse de Sabran and the Chevalier de Boufflers, two lovers who surmounted huge obstacles for twenty years before they were able to marry.3

  Loving marriages and liaisons that endured over time were probably as difficult to maintain in the past as they are today. George Sand called love a “miracle” requiring the surrender of two wills, so as to mingle and become one. She went so far as to compare love to religious faith, in that both share the ideal of eternity. Well, eternity is a long time. Let us say that Sand held on to her idealistic vision of lasting love for the decade she spent with Chopin and then for the following fifteen years she shared with Manceau. To remain faithful to two men, successively, over a period of twenty-five years was not such a bad record for Sand.

  A proper history of love in France would probably fill at least ten volumes. Most of these tomes would harbor romantic liaisons that were consummated in the flesh. But some, a small minority, would center on unconsummated loves. Consider, for example, the Princess de Clèves, who chose the ideal of love over its realistic fulfillment with the Duc de Nemours. Consider the youthful Félix de Vandenesse and the maternal Madame de Mortsauf in Balzac’s Lily of the Valley. Consider the “white marriage” between André Gide and his wife, whom he professed to love until she died. Consider the characters in Eric Rohmer’s films, such as My Night at Maud’s, where talking about love preempts the sexual act.

  For love in its infinite variety refuses to be bound by any outside notions of what it should be. It can take the form of irresistible passion and mutual ecstasy, or mental understanding and sweet harmony, or disharmonious jealousy and rage, to mention only some of its most notable forms. It can begin with silence, hesitation, double entendre, hidden desire, before finding the words that capture one’s feelings. The formal declaration of love can be little more than a whispered “Je t’aime” or a drawn-out exposition designed to inspire a reciprocal declaration. When one says, “I love you,” it is always in the hope that the beloved will feel the same way and repeat the magic formula.4 The French, honoring Cyrano rather than Christian, tend to be fluent in love speech. For centuries, they have promoted love as an emotional and verbal engagement, a union of heart and mind, a passionate symphony that pulls out all the stops. Beethoven should have been French.

  Mozart almost was, if you consider the fact that French culture dominated Europe during his lifetime, and that two of his most famous operas were based on French sources: The Marriage of Figaro and Don Juan captured the French amorous spirit to perfection. The first, based on Beaumarchais’ play, is the consummate expression of French love as a game played between men and women, with men of power usually having the upper hand, but with clever women able to entrap them. In contrast, Don Juan, based on Molière’s play, represents a more cynical, libertine attitude. Serial sex is all that Don Juan desires, and he enjoys it successfully for quite a while, but in the end, his quest for episodic pleasure is aborted. The gods of love condemn him, and take their revenge with his life.

  Today, it seems, we are living through a period when the physical aspect of love tends to efface its emotional value. In both the United States and France, and elsewhere in the Western world, the trajectory goes something like this: first there is sex, then there is a lot of sex, then—sometimes—lovers learn to love. The French are going through a cynical period, similar to Flaubert’s anti-romanticism, which is now infecting both women and men.

  Still, even in this desolate environment, the ideal of love has not died. We find it most notably in cinema. There, film after film projects into the world the fundamentally French belief that love is the greatest of all endeavors, the most important thing on earth. Even unhappy
love is preferable to no love at all. La grande amoureuse—we don’t have an English word for the kind of woman who gives all to love—is admired, however catastrophic her behavior. The man who drives a thousand kilometers overnight, in Lelouch’s film A Man and a Woman, to be with the woman he loves becomes something of a national hero. In 2010, the coastal city of Deauville celebrated that 1966 film on Valentine’s Day by reenacting the beach scene in which the lovers are reunited. Journalist Elaine Scioloni was there with several hundred couples, including the mayor of Deauville and his wife, following a script that sent partners running toward each other across the beach for a voluptuous embrace. How’s that for a civic event!5

  During the summer of the Strauss-Kahn affair, I found myself walking behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame and wondering how I could finish this book. Had love in France become little more than a myth? Were the French abandoning the ideal of “the great love” in favor of serial affairs? Had seduction won out over sentiment? And then my eye was drawn to a strange sight. I saw, attached to the grille on the Pont de l’Archevêché crossing the Seine, a forest of glittering objects, small padlocks with initials or names on them, sometimes with dates or hearts: C and K, Agnes & René, Barbara & Christian, Luni & Leo, Paul & Laura, 16–6–10. There must have been at least two or three thousand. And already, on the other side of the bridge, a few similar locks were clinging to the grille. How long before that side would also be completely covered?

  I hung around, enchanted by the spectacle, and was rewarded by the sight of two youthful lovers, who came across the bridge arm in arm, affixed a lock to the grille, drank from each other’s lips, and threw the key into the Seine.

  Acknowledgments

  Some of the most important people who influenced this book are no longer alive. These include my high school French teacher, Mary Girard; my Wellesley College professors Andrée Bruel, Dorothy Dennis, Louis Hudon, and Edith Melchior; Professor René Jasinski at Harvard University; and Professor Nathan Edelman at Johns Hopkins University.

  Others to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude are my good French friends Philippe Martial, former head librarian of the French Senate, and Elisabeth Badinter, distinguished author and public intellectual.

  At my Stanford University home base, I was able to count on the knowledge of Professors Keith Baker, Daniel Edelstein, Marisa Galvez, and Arnold Rampersad; Susan Groag Bell, Edith Gelles, and Karen Offen, senior scholars at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research; Romance Languages librarian Susan Sussman; Marie-Pierre Ulloa at the Stanford Humanities Center; mathematician Marguerite Frank; and psychiatrist Carl Greaves. Stanford undergraduate Alyssa Dougherty was the ideal research assistant.

  A special thanks to Stanford professor emeritus René Girard, my doctoral dissertation director at Johns Hopkins and a source of inspiration ever since.

  Writers Theresa Brown and Susan Griffin offered suggestions for the improvement of early chapters, as did medievalist Dorothy Gilbert for chapter 1. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, translators of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, read and critiqued the Beauvoir-Sartre chapter. The French journalist Hélène Fresnel and Stanford professor emeritus Marc Betrand pointed me in the direction of relevant French movies.

  Emerita professor Kathleen Cohen of San Jose State University generously researched and provided many of the photos that appear in this book.

  Larry Hatlett, my yoga instructor and friend of thirty years, provided enthusiastic support throughout the project.

  My literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, suggested that I write this book, and my editor at HarperCollins, Michael Signorelli, carefully shepherded it to completion.

  My French daughter-in-law, Marie-Hélène Yalom, helped me with contemporary French colloquialisms. My son, Benjamin Yalom, added thoughtful comments on the manuscript, and my husband, Irvin Yalom, critiqued every word. Although he is challenged by the French language, he has shared my enthusiasm for French literature and appreciated the warm reception always offered us by our French friends.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 51–52. All citations from The Letters and Abélard’s Historia calamitatum are from this translation.

  2. François Villon, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis.” My translation.

  3. Louann Brizendine, The Male Brain (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).

  Chapter One: Courtly Love

  1. Jean-Claude Marol, La fin’amor (Paris: Le Seuil, 1998), p. 56. All English translations in this chapter are mine, except when otherwise indicated.

  2. Ibid., p. 72.

  3. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

  4. Josy Marty-Dufaut, L’amour au Moyen Age (Marseille: Editions Autres Temps, 2002), p. 64.

  5. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, eds. and trans., Chansons des trouvères, (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), pp. 411, 403, 415.

  6. Jacques Lafitte-Houssat, Troubadours et cours d’amour (Paris: PUF, 1979), p. 66.

  7. Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart, trans. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

  8. Marty-Dufaut, L’amour au Moyen Age, pp. 20–21.

  9. Rosenberg and Tischler, Chansons des trouvères, pp. 376–379.

  10. Marie de France, “Equitan,” Lais (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), pp. 80–81. My translation.

  11. Marie de France, “Guigemar,” Lais, pp. 28–29.

  12. Emilie Amt, ed., Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe. A Sourcebook (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 83.

  13. Ria Lemaire, “The Semiotics of Private and Public Matrimonial Systems and Their Discourse,” in Female Power in the Middle Ages: Proceedings from the 2d St. Gertrud Symposium, ed. Karen Glente and Lise Winther-Jensen (Copenhagen: 1986), pp. 77–104.

  14. Rosenberg and Tischler, Chansons des trouvères, pp. 80–81.

  15. Ibid., pp. 84–87.

  16. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Pantheon, 1956).

  17. Elaine Sciolino, “Questions Raised About a Code of Silence,” New York Times, May 17, 2011.

  18. Elaine Sciolino, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (New York: Macmillan, 2011), pp. 229–230.

  19. Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).

  20. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. xix.

  21. Michele Scheinkman, “Foreign Affairs,” Psychotherapy Networker, July-August 2010, pp. 29–30.

  22. Miriam Johnson, Strong Mothers, Weak Wives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

  Chapter Two: Gallant Love

  1. Cited by Maurice Daumas. La tendresse amoureuse. XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin), 1996, p. 92. My translation. See also Henri IV, Lettres d’amour et écrits politiques, ed. Jean-Pierre Babylon (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

  2. Mémoires du Mareschal de Bassompierre, vol. 1 (Cologne, 1663), p. 187.

  3. Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Clèves, trans. Terence Cave (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 14. All translations from La Princess de Clèves are from this work.

  4. The Princess of Cleves the Most Famous Romance: Written in French by the greatest wits of France; Rendred into English by a Person of Quality, at the Request of Some Friends (London, 1679), cited by Cave, ibid., p. vii.

  5. Pierre Darblay, Physiologie de l’amour: étude physique, historique, et anecdotique (Paris: Imprimerie Administrative et Commerciale, 1889), p. 74.

  6. Alain Viala, La France galante (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), pp. 9–10.

  Chapter Three: Comic Love, Tragic Love

  1. Molière, (The School for Wives, 1662). All translations from Les précieuses ridicules (Th
e Pretentious Young Ladies, 1659), L’école des maris (The Second School for Husbands, 1661), and L’école des femmes (The School for Wives, 1662) are my own.

  2. Molière, The Misanthrope; and Tartuffe, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). Subsequent citations from Le Misanthrope are taken from this translation.

  3. Jean Racine, Phèdre, trans. Timberlake Wertenbaker. Performed under the direction of Carey Perloff, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, 2010.

  4. Jean Racine, Phèdre, trans. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Subsequent citations from Phèdre are taken from this translation.

  Chapter Four: Seduction and Sentiment

  1. Gabriel Girard, “Amour,” in ed. Gabriel Girard, Nicolas Beauzée, and Benoît Morin, Dictionnaire universel des synonymes de la langue française: contenant les synonymes de Girard et ceux de Beauzée, Roubaud, Dalembert, Diderot (Paris: Dabo, 1824), pp. 53–56.

  2. Rémond de Saint-Mard, Lettres galantes et philosophiques (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1721), p. 132.

  3. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La femme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 174. My translation.

  4. Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 14. Subsequent citations from Prévost are from this translation.

  5. Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, The Wayward Head and Heart, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 5. Subsequent citations from Crébillon fils are from this translation.

  6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Eloise, trans. Judith H. McDowell (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), part 1, XXIV, p. 68. Subsequent citations from Rousseau are from this translation.