by Lucy Wadham
My sister Irene, who also raised her children in France, saw the moral formatting that my children were being exposed to and vowed to make sure it didn’t happen to hers. She eschewed a free education and put them into a Steiner school outside Paris. It is a measure of the general climate of mistrust towards any ethos that might conflict with republican values that France’s few Steiner schools were at one point put on a list of cult organisations to be watched by the Renseignements Généraux.
Language, Yoghurt and Hot Rabbits
My bucolic, shotgun wedding (I was five months pregnant) would be marked with a certain Madame Bovary-like melancholia, helped on by the leaden Normandy skies and my hormonal disarray. The kindness of Laurent’s family seemed only to exacerbate my tearfulness. As everybody sat down to lunch, the asphalt clouds opened and the rain beat down on the marquee. The guests sat through the long, muggy afternoon, waiting for the party to begin. My brother-in-law had kindly offered to be the DJ, and I had been to enough French parties to dread the results. My pregnancy meant that I was more than usually emotional, and as I stood at the edge of the tent and watched my new husband moving among the guests, I felt a wave of alienation. I looked at the small huddle of friends from England. The men – or, more accurately, boys – were all wearing dark suits and sunglasses, like extras from The Blues Brothers; they were all clutching their drinks and, I guessed, feeling baffled and a little depressed by the sobriety of the occasion. As I looked at my dashing, juvenile father-in-law flirting with one of my closest friends; at my handsome, long-suffering mother-in-law floating about in her silk sari; at Aurélie, the should-have-been-me sex goddess – also dressed in white – and at my new husband, presiding over a table of earnest smokers, deep in what I knew would be ‘intellectual conversation’, I was seized by an overwhelming desire to run away, back to my unsophisticated student life, back home to England.
Instead, I went and sat down beside Laurent and hovered on the edge of the conversation, a position I was finding increasingly uncomfortable but from which it would take me about five years to disengage. Living in France and not speaking French properly is a torturous business that cannot be compared to the experience of living in England with approximate English or in Spain with bad Spanish. The French are, as it has often been noted, ruthlessly unforgiving of foreigners. The reason for this is that they love their language beyond all reason. (‘My country’, as Albert Camus put it, ‘is the French language.’) They relish it, turn it in their mouths and savour it like wine in a way that smacks of the obscene to most Brits, for whom language is principally a means to an end. French is not an efficient language. There are too few nouns for it to be properly useful. It is a language given to digression and subordinate clauses – the language of diplomacy, the language of non-commitment. It would take many years for me to be able to enjoy it for this very reason: in French you can be as long-winded and pretentious as you like. No one will blame you for it. In fact, the sight of a foreigner who appears to be enjoying their language is a pleasurable experience for French people – like watching a person really savour something you’ve cooked for them.
There is, on the other hand, no tolerance for the learning process. The French do not like to hear their language spoken badly. They would rather butcher yours than hear theirs being eviscerated: hence their very rude tendency to reply in bad English after you’ve been struggling in French. I believe that the reason for this intolerance is that language is central to their culture in a way that it is not in Britain. The French are addicted to ideas, and their language, with all its wonderful imprecision, is a perfect vehicle for abstraction.
The British are, by contrast, rooted in the concrete. Their talent for comic detachment enables them to communicate in ways that are not necessarily linked to the expression of ideas. Indeed they mistrust ideas, which are seen as the domain of the pretentious. A sense of the absurd or a sense of irony will be enough to make someone entertaining in Britain, whereas both these faculties are frequently lost on the French.
This love of ideas explains the status of the intellectual in French culture. In Britain we have journalists, social commentators, academics, but we don’t have les intellectuels – those foppish, self-regarding creatures who clog the French media and regularly hit the best-seller lists with titles like The Meaning of Beauty or The Misery of Prosperity, which many people buy, everyone discusses, but rather fewer actually read. A figure like Bernard-Henri Levy has only recently become an object of derision in France. For years he was her most glamorous and sought-after intellectual. With his handsome face, mane of dark hair and trademark white shirt unbuttoned to reveal an eternally juvenile chest, he has been wheeled out for decades to comment on every social ripple from fashion to war. Having achieved international notoriety by his posturing on the geopolitical stage – first in Sarajevo, then in Afghanistan – he became every Paris correspondent’s favourite interview (apart from Le Pen and, more recently, Carla Bruni). Since becoming the object of Anglo-Saxon derision, however, even his French public now see how ridiculous he is. I, personally, have always been intrigued by his shameless narcissism. I once followed him for about twenty minutes down the Boulevard Saint-Germain and was astounded by the frequency with which he checked his reflection in the shop windows.
In Britain, communication can exist beyond and in spite of language in a way that it cannot in France. The miraculously bonding effect of alcohol, for example, operates in British culture beyond language, so that it is enough to have a few pints and watch some sport together in order to determine whether someone’s company is good or bad. In France, this judgement can only be made according to a person’s capacity to express and exchange ideas. There is also – and this is true of every milieu – a deep love of loud debate. To say of a conversation that it is Café du Commerce refers to the widespread practice of sitting around and talking loudly, though not necessarily informedly, about one’s ideas. This love of ideas has dominated the history of France, conditioned her particular brand of colonialism and led her to Glory or Ignominy, depending on your perspective. Napoleon said, ‘There is no occupation more honourable, or more useful to nations, than to contribute to the extension of human ideas. The real power of the French Republic must henceforth lie in the assurance that no new idea exists that is not hers.’†
Napoleon also said that the essence of France is the French language well written. Because of their logocentric culture, the French like their politicians to be eloquent. One of the main objections formulated by her opponents against the candidate Ségolène Royal was that she spoke badly. For an entire week in the run-up to the last presidential elections, the media was dominated by her use of the word bravitude for ‘bravery’ (a neologism of her own invention). Following in the footsteps of her mentor, François Mitterrand, Royal was standing on the Great Wall of China with an escort from the Chinese Communist Party when she made the linguistic faux pas. The word she should have used was bravoure. Her opponents seized on the slip as the ultimate proof of her unsuitability as president, whose French, it was pointed out, had to be ‘pure and irreproachable’.
For Royal’s supporters, the gaps in her education were a sign of ‘authenticity’. Indeed, her sudden rise to stardom before the presidential race was in part the result of a growing backlash against the kind of eloquence that was being seen increasingly as a trademark of the ruling classes, trained in the art of rhetoric by the same prestigious schools, ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and Polytechnique. Her opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, rarely missed the opportunity of pointing out that, unlike her, he had attended neither of these schools but had trained as a lawyer. He also claimed to have a mistrust of ideas, unprecedented in a French politician. In the introduction to his extremely popular autobiography, Témoignage, Sarkozy wrote, ‘In my opinion words, ideas, communication, only mean something if they permit, but more importantly, facilitate action.’ These words sound like common sense in English. In French, they are highly polemical.
/> With the exception of de Gaulle, whose extensive oeuvre related entirely to defence and military matters, a widely proclaimed love of literature and art has always been a necessary part of the presidential profile in France. Georges Pompidou – the man behind Rogers and Piano’s iconoclastic Pompidou Centre and one of the key initiators of France’s lavish and robust cultural policy – edited an anthology of French poetry that is still in print. His successor, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing (in spite of the fact that he has only published one, rather mediocre novel called Le Passage), has the reputation of a man of letters and was elected to France’s most illustrious literary body, L’Académie Française. Even Chirac, with his badly cut suits and his dubious reputation for preferring beer to wine, writes rhyming poetry and is adept in the art of Alexandrine verse, a talent that he has used to seduce more than one mistress. Mitterrand, probably the most intellectual of all the presidents of the Fifth Republic, published nine books during his lifetime, two of which were collaborations – one with the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and the other with the novelist Marguerite Duras.
It appears that the more overtly literary France’s politicians are the more promiscuous they seem to be. François Mitterrand, throughout his open marriage to Danielle, has been described as a bumble bee, constructing his parallel love lives like a complex honeycomb. Beyond the tranquil haven of his ‘secret life’ with Anne Pingeot and Mazarine and the duties of his marriage to Danielle, the Elysée Palace became a hub of erotic activity. It has been said of him that he tried, and invariably succeeded, in seducing any attractive woman who passed through his office. An employee from those heady days explained how one summer the president hired a helicopter to meet one of his new conquests. Another civil servant recounts how, on a state visit to Switzerland, the president decided, after breakfast and in the middle of his official programme, to look up one of his old flames: ‘We waited on the doorstep … At the appointed time we knocked on the door and the official schedule continued.’
Sex and power are seen in France as intertwined; or, as Henry Kissinger put it, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ But while the American public will ultimately punish their politicians for libidinousness, the French will always admire and applaud them. Chirac is known as ‘Monsieur ten minutes, shower included,’ and viewed affectionately – even by those who would never vote for him – as a bon vivant, a man with a Rabelaisian appetite for life.
In this frivolous nation, the career of any politician (male or female) who does not appear to be interested in the art of seduction will suffer as a result. The dark years of the Nazi Occupation no doubt made the prudish figure of General de Gaulle an exception to this rule. But men of moral rectitude, like Edouard Balladur or Lionel Jospin, even Michel Rocard (who suffered a lapse in rigour late in life by having an affair and then, like the Protestant that he is, leaving his wife), are broadly perceived as unsexy. Indeed, all three of these politicians were thwarted by voters when within sight of the presidency. When I asked Laurent about this puzzling state of affairs, he taught me a new expression.
‘Politicians have to be chauds lapins,’ he said. ‘The more they seem to enjoy sex, the more it adds to their charisma.’
Hot Rabbits?
*
That rainy afternoon of my wedding, I watched the earnest gesticulation, the heavy drawing on cigarettes, the trappings of intense debate, and felt bored and stupid. I couldn’t have guessed that in years to come I too would develop a taste for abstract conversation that would make my English friends squirm with embarrassment.
It has often been observed that the habit of embarrassment is quintessentially English. That night, when my brother-in-law began to play a rotation of Queen, Pink Floyd, Supertramp and his collection of rousing French hits from the seventies and eighties, the party divided into those who were embarrassed and those who were not. The French flooded onto the dance floor and began to jive expertly or else jump up and down and sing along at the tops of their voices, while the English huddled together in the hope that they might achieve invisibility.
That was the first time I heard the expression yaourt.
‘Yoghurt’ is the word used to describe the practice of singing along to tracks in English, usually with an unconvincing American accent, when you have absolutely no idea of the words. Yoghurt doesn’t have to be English, it only has to sound English. Singing along to ‘I Want to Break Free’ in Yoghurt would sound something like this: ‘I wo’ do’ bek fee.’ Sit on the Metro and you’ll hear plenty of amateur French R’n’B singers doing ‘Papa gode a ban noo bang’ in perfect Yoghurt. There are even current French expressions derived from Yoghurt. My favourite is ‘C’est la waneugaine’ – a bizarre distortion of the English, once again – meaning it’s crazy or outlandish.
With a few notable exceptions, French pop music is by and large diabolical. Often described as the art form that calls least upon the intellect, music relies too much on intuition and the imagination to be really accessible to the French, who are coached from birth for rational thought. Ballads are fine, because they are firmly rooted in an easy melodic tradition and there are plenty of words: hence the particular genius of a composer like Serge Gainsbourg. There is no need, however, for any musical excellence in the rendition of these songs, so long as the singer looks good. That is why the French are quite happy to listen to some tone-deaf actress with a breathy voice, like Adjani or Deneuve or Bardot, sing Gainsbourg’s compositions. It also explains why Serge Gainsbourg’s ex-wife, Jane Birkin – a pretty, sixty-year-old femme-enfant with no voice – is an icon of the music business here and why her concerts are always sold out.
For a nation with such little aptitude for music, the French are wonderfully enthusiastic about it. In the early years of François Mitterrand’s presidency, just before he made his spectacular U-turn in economic policy, France was in the deepest doldrums. Those who had voted for him were bitterly disappointed that his bold decision to invite the communists into his cabinet, followed by his audacious programme of nationalisations, appeared not to have worked; nor had raising the minimum wage, shortening the working week and lengthening the annual paid holiday improved the quality of their lives. (Mass unemployment, the collapse of the French stock market and a global recession certainly didn’t help.) Those who had not voted for Mitterrand were appalled that they were living in an almost Soviet-style economy in which the state had a 95 per cent share in banking and one in four people was working for the public sector. By June 1982, under pressure from his finance minister, Jacques Delors, Mitterrand made several currency devaluations and introduced a series of austerity measures, suddenly making himself the most unpopular president since the founding of the Fifth Republic. In the midst of this misery and hardship, Mitterrand’s popular, perma-tanned culture minister, Jack Lang, pulled an old idea out of the drawer and the Fête de la Musique was born.
This, as I soon discovered, is an annual celebration of French musical mediocrity during which all manner of amateur musicians are invited to come out onto the streets of their city, town or village and ‘Make Music!’ (Faites de la Musique!). In the tradition of popular festivals dear to the French Republic in its quest to provide meaning to a society that is at once rigorously secular and prone to idealism, Jack Lang chose the summer solstice, 21 June, for his music day. Every year since 1982, the French have celebrated the arrival of summer and on that night ‘Yoghurt’ fills the streets. The first time Laurent and I went together to the Fête de la Musique would, I swore at the time, be the last. Lone, middle-aged electric guitarists, long thwarted in their ambitions, had come out of their basements to stand on street corners and play that Led Zeppelin riff over and over again, while rapturous teenagers banged their heads in appreciation. The culture ministry had not shown our eighteenth arrondissement the bounty she had shown other parts of the city, and there were no professional concerts that night, only the keen cacophony of amateur musicians, with their bongos, their accordions or their keyboards, playing cov
er versions on café terraces while everybody – young and old – danced together.
In spite of my vow never to go again, I would, with time, be infected by this French gift for innocent ebullience and take my children to the Fête de la Musique. Most years it would rain and we would wander through the warm, wet streets of Paris, slipping in our flip-flops as we danced with strangers to the terrible music. At the risk of sounding priggish, there is no need for money, or drugs, or alcohol, to have a good time at the Fête de la Musique, nor is there anything to fear from letting your children wander the streets until dawn. French self-restraint, which is so often a bore, in circumstances like these becomes a blessing. The equivalent to the Fête de la Musique could not exist in Britain. Not only would the music have to be of a higher standard – thereby destroying the rather makeshift, spontaneous flavour – but also the event would have to be accompanied by huge quantities of drugs and alcohol and a considerable police presence. Good, clean fun is not feasible in today’s Britain.
One of the advantages of France’s rather undistinguished musical status (despite more recent aberrations like Air, Daft Punk, Justice or Kid Loco) is that the French have not been affected by the tyranny of Cool. The vast majority of French people are not ashamed of looking ridiculous while dancing to bad pop music, and I find this very charming. When my father-in-law pulled me onto the dance floor on the evening of my wedding and piloted me expertly through a jive, I wished that the ground would swallow me up. Having lived for so long in a country where people suffer so little from embarrassment, I can now appreciate how liberating is the experience of being completely uncool. Later, while the guests swayed in unison to ‘A Kind of Magic’, Laurent and I drove off on our honeymoon.