The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  ‘Non, non. It’s not the medication. It’s probably psychological factors. Tell her she can make an appointment to discuss it.’

  The secretary smiled sweetly at my friend and then closed the door behind her. Without the slightest ripple of unease, the GP picked up where he had left off.

  *

  There is an entire sub-genre within the canon of French cinema that deals with the subject of frigidity. When I first arrived, Laurent was always taking me to see these films, the first of which was one of his favourites: L’Eté Meurtrier, with Isabelle Adjani. This film is also part of the category known as Femme Fatale films, for which the French seem to have an inexhaustible appetite. In the film Adjani plays a tragically frigid, pouting beauty who seeks revenge for the rape of her mother by marrying and mentally torturing the son of one of the supposed rapists. The film, set in a picturesque village in Provence in the mid-seventies, is a vehicle for Adjani’s lithe and permanently sweaty body. At the time I couldn’t believe that my new husband, a man who had three university degrees, could actually fall for such drivel. Now, when I see the film, I’m struck by how accurately it portrays French provincial life – a certain turn of phrase, a certain era and a certain type of French woman, who really does exist. French women do pout. Widespread pouting among women is a reflection of the belief that women are allowed to, expected to, behave badly. (It is also a fact that the French language – with its reliance on the various forms of the short ‘o’ and ‘u’ sound – is set up for pouting.)

  Pouting is also the speciality of the femme-enfant, a label that would be highly inappropriate in Britain but which has wide currency as a compliment in France. The term would probably translate into English as ‘bimbo’, losing all positive connotation in the process. For the French, on the other hand, Brigitte Bardot was the classic femme-enfant, and the scene which best depicts this feminine ideal is the opening moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt) in which Bardot lies naked on the bed and asks her lover which part of her body he likes best. The refrain ‘And my feet, do you like my feet? And my breasts, do you like my breasts? Which do you prefer, my nipples or my breasts?’, the monumental stupidity of Bardot, comes across in France as irresistible coquetry. In French she sounds sexy; in English, like an overgrown and deranged toddler.

  Another classic that Laurent took me to see was Le Septième Ciel (Seventh Heaven), by Benoît Jacquot. It’s about a woman called Mathilde who cannot reach orgasm. To solve her problem she goes to see a hypnotist. The hypnosis works and she goes home to her husband and her climax wakes up the neighbours. Betty, a girlfriend with whom I discussed the film, informed me that I was wrong, that the story wasn’t at all implausible. Plenty of Parisian women, she explained, went to hypnotists to help them relax enough to come, and if I liked she could give me the number for hers, a very nice man (though with bad breath) whose practice was near the Place de la République.

  *

  Having been brought up in post-feminist Britain, it took me almost a decade to adjust to the experience of being a woman in France. Since France seemed to have been bypassed by the feminist revolution, women appeared to me woefully un-emancipated, still pitted against each other and trapped in the archaic patriarchal model of sexual competition. They seemed to have no interest in friendship and would invariably gaze past me at parties when I tried to engage them in conversation, as if they were watching a world of erotic opportunity disappearing down the plughole. Often I would come home after such evenings and cry on my husband’s shoulder. I missed England and above all, I missed my female friendships.

  My eldest sister, Florence, after ten years in Paris, had fled her younger sisters a second time and gone to live in Manhattan. Irene and I hardly ever saw each other. She had moved with her French husband to a chic suburb to the west of Paris and I found myself repeatedly bowing to Laurent’s bourgeois Parisian reluctance to cross the périphérique (Paris’s ring road) to visit her. Over the years, Irene and I developed opposing techniques to cope with our homesickness. Irene made a haven of Englishness for herself and her Anglophile husband. They spoke to each other in English, listened to Radio 4, watched English football on satellite TV and, when their children were born, employed an English-speaking nanny to look after them. I, on the other hand, slowly but surely and much to Irene’s amusement would, as she would put it, go native.

  Recently, I had lunch with Hortense, one of those Parisian women whom I had found so icy and who has, over the years, become my friend. She was interested to hear that she had terrified me when I first met her, and that she had seemed disdainful and unapproachable. She smiled.

  ‘You frightened me,’ she said. ‘You were so … open, so different.’

  Her hazel eyes shone with affection. I’ve known her for twenty years and she has changed very little. She still has the same mass of shiny, beautifully blow-dried hair, the youthful spattering of freckles across the nose and the same (pouting) mouth.

  ‘It was the role we had to play,’ she explained. ‘La femme fatale. You have to remember that here the pleasure all lies in the business of being a woman. That’s where real life is played out, in our love affairs. Nowhere else. There’s really not much difference between the life of a bourgeoise like me and the life of a courtesan.’

  ‘But you’ve been more than that. You did a brilliant degree. You’ve got a high-powered job.’

  ‘Still. My energies all went elsewhere. We were brought up to be, above all, seductive. We put on our high heels and our make-up to go to Sciences Po and we hunted for men among the elite.’

  ‘How exhausting.’

  ‘Sometimes. But it’s in us. We can’t be any different. We have an obligation to our femininity. In our company a man should feel like a man. There should always be a spark of mystery.’

  ‘And what about as you get older? Do you still have to go on doing this in your fifties and sixties?’

  ‘Actually, it gets easier. You learn to wear only what suits you and you use what you have.’

  ‘Do you wish things were different?’

  She leaned towards me, lowering her voice.

  ‘It was fun.’ Then she added, ‘In theory, of course, love affairs should just be the icing on the cake. They shouldn’t define you but they do. They take up so much time.’

  She paused.

  ‘The trouble is, of course, you dwell in appearances.’

  ‘And we all lose our looks,’ I said.

  She smiled mischievously.

  ‘Men lose their looks too. You must just take a younger lover.’

  Even though I knew the answer, I asked her if she had had affairs.

  ‘Many,’ she said.

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Do most of your girlfriends have affairs?’

  ‘Yes. I would say that most of the couples that we know are unfaithful to each other. There is a tradition of libertinage in my milieu, which is very strong. It’s in our literature, our theatre and our cinema. Of course there is guilt. I never want to hurt my husband but a love affair is irresistible. I don’t want to resist it.’

  I will never share with Hortense the intimacy and camaraderie that I share with my English girlfriends. There is an ease among both British and American women that is the direct result of the lack of rivalry. Because of the archaic, unreconstructed nature of gender politics in France, women still perceive each other as rivals in the game of love. I know that for Hortense her love affairs come first, that she wouldn’t hesitate to cancel me in favour of an assignation. This is understood. With the sisterhood in England and America, things are different. We’re taught to put our female friendships first, or at least make sure that we appear to do so.

  *

  I think of Aurélie, the sex goddess, and remember how terrified I was by her erotic legacy in the early days of my marriage. To me she embodied everything that I mistrusted about the French woman. Her agenda was seduc
tion and all her energies seemed to go in that direction. She seemed to have no female friendships at all and always seemed to be stealing other people’s husbands or boyfriends. When I discovered, over dinner in a restaurant with Laurent, the manner in which their affair had begun, all my worst fears were confirmed.

  Aurélie was the girlfriend of one of Laurent’s oldest friends, Robert, a photographer who would become godfather to our first child. After they had been together for about two years, Aurélie found herself suddenly and irresistibly attracted to her boyfriend’s best mate, Laurent. Laurent had recently taken up running first thing in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, close to where he worked. Aurélie asked if she might join him. Laurent described to me over dinner how she had made her move on him:

  ‘She stopped to rest against a tree. She was panting, her insolent little breasts [I remember he used the word narquois for those breasts, meaning, literally, mocking] heaving up and down under her tiny vest … She was staring at me and panting, waiting for me to jump on her. I couldn’t resist.’

  This is the French woman’s way: you never make the first move, but you try to make it impossible for the man not to. Judging from a conversation that I would have years later with my own daughter, this is still the approach of the Parisian female. Ella had recently returned from a weekend in London, where she had been to a party given by the daughter of a friend of mine. Her description of the dance floor took me back to my own adolescence: all those lovely, strong females dancing together in the middle of the room and all those insecure, faltering males hovering around the edge as if repelled by the contrapuntal force of the girls’ erotic empowerment. Apparently, Ella tried the waiting game she usually plays at parties in Paris and the boys all ignored her.

  Laurent went on to tell me how poor Robert, six months later, discovered his affair with Aurélie. They and a group of friends were having dinner together in a big, noisy brasserie off the Place de la Bastille. Aurélie was sitting beside her official boyfriend and opposite her lover. When Robert bent down to pick up his lighter, he saw his girlfriend’s foot comfortably nestled where it shouldn’t be and that was that. She moved out of Robert’s flat and in with Laurent. It is a measure of the banality of adultery here that Laurent and Robert – and indeed Aurélie – are still firm friends.

  When I heard this story I inwardly vowed to cut Aurélie out of my life. At the time Laurent had the elegance not to object, but after we had split up he and Aurélie became close again. Today I feel a good deal more charitable towards her. In fact, as Hortense once explained to me, women like Aurélie fulfil a useful role in society. They are erotic catalysts. Not all women should be matronly or sisterly or otherwise sexually passive. If they are, the erotic charge disappears from the social group, or goes underground and becomes pathological, disembodied, infected by guilt. The idea is that in the presence of this type of predatory woman, wives and girlfriends feel at risk and this sense of risk reboots the libido. Significantly, Carl Jung identified the vital social role of this type of woman in his book Aspects of the Feminine. Even he, however, could not help giving her the pejorative label ‘The Overdeveloped Eros’.

  *

  There is no ‘sisterhood’ in France and for many years this was something I missed profoundly. With time, however, I realised – as I did of most areas of French life – that in losing one thing I had found another. I learnt that the extraordinary female friendships I had known in Britain were part of a wider landscape, itself not so pretty – a landscape ravaged by a low-level and persistent war between the sexes. The absence of gender conflict in France has become a source of relief to me. Once I had overcome my prejudices, I realised that the constant flirtation – often heavy-handed and irritating but sometimes subtle and uplifting – was a pretty harmless thing compared to the deep-seated resentment that seems to infect gender relations in Britain. There is no tradition of gender segregation in France because men enjoy the company of women. Stag parties are a recent aberration imported by Anglophiles, and the gentleman’s club is reserved for a tiny proportion of the French aristocracy that enjoys aping the English. There is no such thing here as a ‘ladette’ because French women are happy to be admired for their femininity.

  I had imagined that the hostility between the sexes in Britain began with feminism, but I now think that it must have been a much longer-standing feature of British life. You only have to look back to seventeenth-century Jacobean tragedy to find evidence of an already entrenched and elaborate misogyny that was absent from French courtly drama. From as early as the fourteenth century, British women had become targets of male animosity as they found ways of engaging in Britain’s emerging market economy, mostly as manufacturers and sellers of goods. France’s Salic Law (which barred female heirs from the throne) and her enduring chivalric tradition – whose values were perpetuated by the French court – kept French women in a subordinate position, shielding them from male resentment.† It may be that it was simply England’s mercantile culture that shaped the special blend of chumminess and competition that seems to characterise male–female relations in Britain and America. For feminism, when it came, sat far better in our two Protestant cultures than it ever could in France’s Catholic one.

  The cross-gender tension that permeates both British and American society is not easy to describe, precisely because it is everywhere. In England, at least, I can feel it at dinner parties, on the radio, on the street. An unspoken agenda seems to exist between men and women in Anglo-Saxon Protestant societies that produces a certain carefulness in men – or else an irritating defiance – and in women, a kind of guardedness, brittleness, even a sanctimoniousness. I have noticed that the tension is often camouflaged by that chumminess, which is not only unsexy but also slightly disingenuous. I’m not suggesting that men and women hate each other in Britain or America any more or less than they do in France, only that there is a lack of ease in their relations that is the direct result of having tried – and to some degree succeeded – in extending the rules of our contractual, mercantile society to the sexual playing field. In our otherwise laudable quest for transparency, we have managed to sabotage one of the greatest pleasures of life: the experience of enjoying being a woman in the company of a man or a man in the company of a woman. In Britain and America this pleasure has become shot through with a whole new kind of post-feminist guilt, and no one, it seems – neither man nor woman – is entirely free of it.

  I’m also struck by the frequency with which public and private discourse in both Britain and America returns to the issue of gender, like an itch that has to be scratched. At least as a concept, to be endlessly discussed and scrutinised, gender doesn’t really exist in France. Indeed, the French word genre, meaning gender, is a purely grammatical or literary term. (It is, I think, significant that if you want to talk in French about gender politics you have to use the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’: les relations hommes–femmes.)

  Even though Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated a flourishing and highly intellectual feminist tradition in France, and even though many of the mothers of feminist theory are of French nationality or culture (Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva‡), anyone wishing to take a course in Women’s Studies would probably have to do so outside of France, as it exists in only one, small department of one university. In France, the representation of women in society can be studied as part of a course in literature or philosophy or history or psychoanalysis or sociology, but it cannot be cut off from a wider cultural and intellectual context. Although French intellectuals, men and women, were among the first to scrutinise cultural representations of gender, the practice of decoding the myriad power struggles that exist between men and women has not become the national pastime that it is in Britain. The French are too romantic for that, even the most seemingly hard-nosed of them. Perhaps the fixation with gender politics is simply puritan Britain’s way of taking the sex out of sexuality.

  I am convinced that the reason I notice this low-level hos
tility in Britain is because I do not encounter it in the place where I live. In France, the war between the sexes simply never got off the ground. Somehow, social evolution has brought about changes to the status of women without ever giving men the impression that they were losing something in the process. French women also happen to be very attached to the particular privileges that have always gone with being a woman – privileges the Catholic Church cleverly conferred upon them over the centuries in exchange for their submission. While they are just as eager to secure their social and political rights as their British sisters, they do not wish to give up the experience of being loved for their beauty, sexual power, mystique or indeed any other of the often illusory qualities for which they are admired.

  While the struggle for women’s rights continues to rage in France, it is as if there has been an unspoken pact to keep Eros out of the fray, the received wisdom being that you cannot regulate the bedroom. France’s version of the feminist revolution left untouched the private roles that men and women played. It was only in academic circles that traditional feminine archetypes were deconstructed in the name of equality. These archetypes, which all centre on the notion of power, exercised or relinquished – and are the stuff that the libido thrives on – remain intact in the private sphere. For in this culture, the libido is not only fun, it is sacred.

  * Obese people make up almost 10 per cent of the population in France versus over 20 per cent in the UK.

  † In France, right up to the Napoleonic Code, a woman was subject to the authority of her father and then her husband, almost to the exclusion of any economic freedom. On marrying, the husband and wife’s assets were automatically combined, and the husband administered this joint estate without the wife’s consent. The Napoleonic Marital Code brought in a new era of economic independence, at least for wealthy women. It provided for the possibility of a prenuptial agreement, which kept the wife’s assets separate from her husband’s. If a wife chose to combine her assets with those of her husband, he was legally accountable to her in the disposal of their fortune. It wasn’t until 1882 under the Married Women’s Property Act that British married women gained access to similar freedoms as their French sisters. Thanks also to Napoleon, French daughters were given the same inheritance rights as their brothers, while England’s primogeniture laws remained intact until 1925.