The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  This heritage goes a long way to explaining the attitudes of people employed in the service of the State. From post office workers to railway clerks to teachers, the French have traditionally been brought up to believe that there is no position more secure, more comfortable, nor more worthy than Le Service Public, and they will leap through countless hoops to get there. The endless tests and exams in order to become a civil servant, even at the most junior levels, contribute to the sense of having been ‘chosen’, and the smug, haughty, intransigent manner of the man or woman behind that sheet of glass is the result of a very particular combination of the pride of belonging to an illustrious caste and a certain resentment about the realities of belonging to that caste.

  For as in most aspects of French life, there is a huge gap between the idea and the reality. The reality, of course, is the drudgery of stasis, of the repetitive task and the increasingly problematic confrontation with the outside world, which has its own expectations and demands. On the other side of that counter or window the world is shifting, people are starting to brandish phrases like ‘customer service’, and the great tide of Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalism, bringing with it concepts like job flexibility and privatisation, is threatening to sweep away privilege and certainty. The only rampart against this tide is the State itself, and the State has failed.

  *

  In France, the civil servant’s mentality is not confined to the Service Public. It is everywhere. You can encounter it in organisations that are supposed to be committed to the idea of private enterprise. My local bookshop, which is part of a small chain affiliated with the illustrious publishers Gallimard, is one such place. Recently I bought a novel there for a friend, only to discover that she already had it. On my way to have lunch with my son, I took the book back and chose another novel by the same author, which was a little cheaper. Instead of giving me the change, the woman at the cash register offered me an avoir (credit note) for two euros fifty. I told her that I would rather have the money, to which she replied that they didn’t give out cash. The smugness of her delivery was so irritating that I asked to see the manager. She huffed, and marched to the back of the shop. I could tell from her gesticulations that she expected to be defended by her boss, which of course she was. The manager was a middle-aged man with exactly the same attitude: what I was asking was simply ‘not done’, he explained. When I dishonestly pointed out that I was a foreigner and would not be likely to ever use my avoir, he apologised in the most unapologetic way possible and repeated that it couldn’t be done. I asked him why, and he folded his arms and said, ‘Because we don’t do it, Madame.’

  ‘But what about customer service? Can’t you be a bit flexible?’

  To which he replied, ‘The customer has to respect the rules like everybody else, Madame.’

  This was his profound conviction: all equal in slavery. By this time a small queue had gathered behind me and people were watching me with marked hostility. I was making a scene. I was probably American. I had come to their country and tried to impose my free-market mentality on their egalitarian system.

  By the time I got to the café where I was meeting my son, I was fuming with rage. This was something that hadn’t happened to me for a long time. I usually took this kind of behaviour in my stride, laughed it off, saw it as part of a wider context that brought with it an array of other, wonderful things: long lunches, paid holidays, a pleasant lack of competitiveness … Today I had relapsed.

  My son, Jack, who was in his first year at the Sorbonne studying philosophy, laughed when I told him the story. He had just read Nietzsche and explained the attitude I had encountered in the following terms: ‘Nietzsche said there were two types of mentality in the world, defending two opposing kinds of civilisation: the slave mentality and the noble mentality. The slave mentality basically says “No” to life and the noble mentality says “Yes”.’

  In Nietzsche’s merciless view of humanity, Jack explained, men were born with either a slave’s or a nobleman’s mentality, the former fuelled by resentment and envy and the latter by the conquering spirit and the will to power. Nietzsche believed that the first champion of the slave mentality was Socrates and among the civilisations built upon it were Christianity and Marxism.

  ‘What you encountered in the bookshop,’ Jack explained, ‘that habit of saying, “No, it can’t be done,” is a pure example of what Nietzsche was talking about. Fear of change, devotion to a system, mistrust of the individual will; these are all manifestations of the slave mentality.’

  The French paradox, then, lies in the attachment of its population to an apparently noble status that ultimately enslaves them.

  *

  It has often been pointed out that Protestant culture is a culture based on ‘confidence’, confidence in the individual as an autonomous, self-regulating entity. Theoretically, in this type of society, the State believes in the idea of limiting its own role. France, in turning her back on the Reformation, chose to maintain a hierarchical system in which the individual would continue to be both dominated and pampered by the State. The history of France is the history of her people’s paradoxical or at least dual relationship with authority. As René Rémond, one of France’s leading political scientists, put it: ‘The attitude of the French towards authority, throughout history, proceeds from a double and contradictory heritage: the cult of the State and the inclination to rebellion.’*

  This oscillation between contestation and worship occurred throughout the Ancien Regime, both towards the monarchy and the Catholic hierarchy, anti-clericalism having always been much stronger in the French than in their Catholic neighbours. In a family with a powerful father figure, perceived to be at once tyrannical and indulgent, the children find a kind of reassurance in the perpetual interface with the authority figure; indeed, they are defined by it. So it is with the French and their State.

  This legacy, however, is being undermined by an equally powerful current, which is gathering momentum and is generally referred to as ‘the Anglo-Saxon model’. Today, political discourse in France is entirely conditioned by where you stand on this influence, whether you are for it or against it, whether it is something to be embraced or resisted at all costs. This ideological divide does not follow party lines. It is also a divide that dares not speak its name.

  When Nicolas Sarkozy came along with his defiant mantra on the value of work, he was striking at the very heart of the republican dream. His electoral message was revolutionary because it was quintessentially un-French. ‘I propose the following options to the new presidential majority: social policy … work, educational policy … work, economic policy … work, fiscal policy … work, commercial policy … work, immigration policy … work, monetary policy … work, budgetary policy … work. What I’m proposing is to make our politics the politics of work.’

  Apart from during the ignominious Vichy period, work has never been a value in France. Nor, indeed, has profit. The prevailing moral code, inherited from the Ancien Regime, sees work and gain as a means to an end; the end being an elevated life. The Catholic Church did not adopt the idea of salvation through work, and post-revolutionary France, in its clever appropriation of Catholic values, knew better than to integrate the work ethic into its new ideology.

  *

  During my first winter with Laurent the papers were filled with the chilling story of the murder of a four-year-old child called Gregory. The story – that came to be known as ‘Le Petit Gregory’ in an eerie echo of Perrault’s fairy tale ‘Le Petit Poucet’ – would grip the French imagination for years to come, and the mystery remains unsolved to this day. But it was not so much the story itself that fascinated me but, like Zidane’s head-butt decades later, the particular way in which it was told and interpreted.

  For months the prime murder suspect was Gregory’s mother, Christine Villemin. Christine’s cold beauty seemed to incite extremes of feeling, and the country was divided between those who saw her as a victim and those for whom she was a mo
nster. Nine months after little Gregory’s body was found, bound with rope, in the Vologne river that flows through the dark, industrial valleys of the Vosges mountains, an article appeared in Libération† that seemed to be an attempt to unite this polarised view of Christine.

  The article was written by Marguerite Duras, at the time France’s most eminent female writer and winner, that same year, of the Goncourt Prize for her world-famous novel L’Amant (The Lover). The long piece, marked with Duras’s special brand of laconic lyricism, entirely presumed the poor woman’s guilt (Villemin would later be acquitted), but went on to ‘forgive’ her for her supposed crime. Extolling the defendant’s will to overcome the narrow circumstances of her life, Duras paints a picture of a working-class Medea who chooses infanticide in a grandiose bid for freedom.

  The article, which was published under the dazzling title ‘Sublime, Necessarily Sublime’, still strikes me today as emblematic of the particular blindness of the Parisian bourgeois intellectual. Embedded in Duras’s absurd eulogy are all of France’s founding myths and obsessions: the taste for the tragic, the obsession for nobility, grandeur, freedom and equality. For mad though it may sound, Duras suggests in her piece that the subject of her fantasy, Christine Villemin, by killing her own child, somehow rises above her social status: ‘I see only her,’ says Duras. ‘At the centre of the world, surpassed by only time and God.’

  * René Rémond, ‘La société française et l’autorité’, Ville-Ecole-Intégration 112 (March 1998).

  † 17 July 1985.

  7

  Maternity

  Glory, Breastfeeding and the Norm

  When I told my tutors at Oxford that I was pregnant, they kindly granted me a year off. I would have the baby in France and return for my final year. Some of them, I’m sure, thought that I wouldn’t come back, but they were all very supportive. In my college, which had only recently started admitting women, this was a first, and the dons seemed determined to be as positive as they could be.

  In Paris that winter I was undergoing my gradual transformation. My resistance to the cult of appearances was being worn away, and I found that going out in my bedroom slippers was something I would no longer consider. Every month I went for a check-up at the maternity hospital where I was due to give birth in December. A girlfriend of mine, an anaesthetist called Sandrine, had recommended it to me for its glamorous head of obstetrics, Professor Minkowski, a renowned specialist in neonate and developmental biology.

  In France, the best practitioners work in the public sector. The State pays them a standard wage and they are allowed to augment their income with private consultations outside the hospital. When I asked Sandrine why they stayed with the public service, she simply answered: ‘Pour la Gloire [for the glory].’

  There is more prestige in the Health Service than out of it. Practitioners are decently paid but, more importantly, they are respected and admired. Within the lavish public health system they can carry out their research, publish their findings and achieve that most prized of French dreams, not wealth or glamour, but that old-fashioned commodity, recognition.

  As it turned out, I never clapped eyes on Professor Minkowski. Like most French National Health maternity hospitals, his was run by a team of midwives. He would only appear if there was trouble, dealing only with Caesareans and emergency procedures. His midwives carried out most of the deliveries.

  In France, to become a midwife or sage-femme – literally, ‘wise woman’ – you have to complete the first year of medical school, after which you’re admitted to a special training course that takes a further four years. Like everything in the French education system, the course is extremely rigorous and theoretical. As well as learning the practical skill of delivering babies, the aspiring sage-femme has to study anatomy, physiology, pathology, microbiology, pharmacology, anaesthesiology, obstetrics, paediatrics, gynaecology, psychology and sociology, public health, law and, of course, sexology.

  Hospitals have always been the core of the French healthcare system. This probably accounts for the extremely specialised, technical and curative nature of the healthcare. A medical report carried out in 2000 showed that after diagnosis of lung cancer, patients in Britain were twice as likely to die from the disease as they were in France. Sandrine, who is currently involved in a massive programme of reform of the French Health Service and who has travelled frequently to the UK to compare systems, explained that the reason for this therapeutic gap is not the quality of British practitioners but rather the lack of resources and the resulting waiting lists. Lung cancer has to be treated quickly otherwise there is little chance of survival. In France there are no waiting lists for this type of disease, so the patient is treated immediately after diagnosis. As a result, the survival rates for people with lung cancer five years after diagnosis are only 7 per cent in the UK and 14 per cent in France.

  Because everything revolves around the hospital, there is virtually no community care in France. Once you leave hospital with your baby, you’re pretty much on your own. There’s no health visitor unless your neighbour denounces you to the social services, and as for home births, they are very rare and strongly discouraged. You would have to fight the very interventionist system that kicks in as soon as you become pregnant and which has you under close medical surveillance from start to finish. This includes monthly check-ups, endless blood tests, three obligatory scans and hospitalisation if there’s even the hint of a premature birth. Once you’ve had your baby, you are kept in hospital for a minimum of three days, five to ten if you’ve had a Caesarean. As you get your own room, good food and the option of night-time care of your newborn from a staff of truly devoted men and women – all for free – this was not something I ever resisted. Each time I had a baby in France I came home completely restored.

  Just before I left the hospital, I had a visit from a gynaecologist who asked me if I needed a prescription for some contraception. That dealt with, she handed me what appeared to be a vibrator. I asked her if this was a kind of going-home present from the French Public Health Service, and she smiled and said ‘sort of’.

  As it turned out, it was not a sex toy but a vaginal probe. I was to take it to my local kiné, short for kinésithérapeute or physiotherapist (of which there are huge numbers in France), and she, or he, would plug the other end into a machine that would send electrical impulses into the probe in order to tone and ‘re-educate’ my perineum. When I had got over the shock of being handed such a rude-looking object, I was overcome with admiration at a society willing to pay for millions of women to tone their fannies in the aftermath of birth. In retrospect, it not only makes sense for the healthy sex life of the nation, it makes sense economically too. The health costs incurred by mass female incontinence must be higher than a few million vaginal probes and some sessions with the kiné.

  *

  When you get home from hospital, the compulsory visits to the paediatrician begin. He or she will strong-arm you into vaccinating your baby, endlessly weigh and measure him and plot his developmental progress on the various little graphs in the back of his precious medical ‘log-book’. This carnet de santé, as it is called, is part of an elaborate system of professional surveillance that continues all the way through childhood. It was, I suppose, the first sign of a phenomenon that would become increasingly obvious to me: France loves norms, and this love is part of her identity.

  I soon realised that this was extended to breastfeeding as well. When my first child was born I was asked by my midwife if I intended to breastfeed. She smiled encouragingly at me, adding ‘bravo’, and scribbled something on her clipboard. When I went on to say that I hoped to keep it up for at least nine months, her face fell.

  ‘Nine months! That’s not necessary. They get all they need in the way of immunity in three.’

  This, clearly, was a universally acknowledged fact and explained why of the mothers who did choose to breastfeed, the vast majority stopped after three months. In France only about 55 per cent of
mothers breastfeed, and because most of them return to work within the first six months, they tend to wean their babies early. I think, however, that the objection to late weaning runs much deeper. The reactions I got from my Parisian entourage when I allowed my ten-month-old boy to suckle at my breast at a dinner party were too violent for them to be purely practical.

  ‘It’s unnatural!’ the inimitable Nathalie protested. ‘He’s got teeth!’

  A few of the women present on that occasion were, I think, a little jealous that my work enabled me to go on breastfeeding when theirs had not. But, in most cases, they agreed with Nathalie that it was ‘unnatural’, expressing the deep-seated but unavowed conviction that breasts were first and foremost for sexual pleasure and the erotic delight of men.

  Magali, who was seen by the other members of la bande as the most maternal among us – since she had been the first to have children, was the best cook and had a nurturing personality – had chosen not to breastfeed any of her three children. She once explained to me that her breasts were her best feature and that she didn’t want to risk damaging them.

  At the time her remark had struck me as selfish – immoral even. Surely that was what breasts were for? Of course there is always the risk of damage, with or without breastfeeding, but her husband should love them anyway and if he didn’t, well … he was an arsehole. In retrospect, however, I can appreciate her point of view. Her breasts did indeed stay lovely for many years and her children didn’t seem to suffer from having been bottle-fed. They appeared neither unhealthier nor more insecure than other children I knew who had been breastfed, since there are obviously plenty of ways to mess up your children after you’ve weaned them. Magali was clearly a devoted mother, and her choice was a happy, guilt-free one that has been beneficial to her sexual fulfilment and, by extension, to her whole family. The moral imperative that has come to surround breastfeeding in Britain may simply be another manifestation of puritan guilt and, as such, one that needs to be watched.