The Secret Life of France (5 page)

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 hostility 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.

It did not take me long to realise that the French inhabit a different moral universe to ours, a universe that clearly placed the pursuit of Pleasure and Beauty above notions of Truth and Duty. One episode and its aftermath offered a perfect illustration of the gap between our two world views.

It was the final of the 2006 World Cup. The French football team had clawed its way from mediocrity to brilliance to find itself in a tantalisingly close final against the Italians. For Zinédine Zidane, undisputed hero of French football, it was the last game of a flawless career. With minutes to go before the final whistle Zidane turned on the Italian defender, Marco Materazzi, and delivered a powerful head-butt to the man’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Denounced by the linesman, Zidane received a red card and was sent off. Fans watched him walk, head bowed, past the World Cup trophy on its stand, and disappear into the changing rooms. In his absence, the French lost to the Italians in a penalty shoot-out.

In Britain the next day the
Sun
’s headline was ‘Zidane’s a hero to Zzero’. For Alan Shearer ‘It was just a moment of madness’, and for the BBC football pundit, Alan
Hansen, ‘He let himself down, he let his team down and he let his country down.’

Back in France a very different debate was taking shape, the tone of which was set by the then president, Jacques Chirac, interviewed at the end of the match. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ the president lied, but Zinédine Zidane ‘possesses the greatest human qualities that can be imagined and which are an honour to France’.

The French media began to speculate, as did the rest of the world, on the exact nature of Materazzi’s taunt. Professional lip-readers were hired to decipher whether or not the Italian had insulted Zidane’s sick mother or his wife, called him a terrorist or a dirty Arab. But while the British press referred unequivocally to Zidane’s ‘shameful’ act, the French press was much more careful in apportioning blame. However rash Zidane’s gesture had been, shameful was clearly not an appropriate adjective. The one thing that was
not
up for discussion was Zidane’s heroic nature. To respond rashly to injury is not shaming. Zizou had merely shown himself to be
human
, as President Chirac had wisely put it.

What was broadly agreed was that with this stunning act of self-sabotage, the final touch had been added to Zizou’s hagiography. He was human. In other words, his crime was nothing more or less than
hubris
. Or as the daily newspaper
Libération
put it: ‘In destroying the dream that he himself had created, Zidane remained unfathomable to the end. For some, his gesture verged on the sublime.’

For the French, Zidane had, in that poignant moment when he walked off the pitch and turned his back on glory, become a tragic hero. Asked in a television interview if he would have changed his career’s end if he could, Zidane answered: ‘No. It was decided
upstairs
that this was going to be my end.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve always tried to be honest, I’m just a human being with all the weaknesses.’

An interesting parenthesis to the story of the Fall of Zidane is that he was, at the time of the insult, having an affair with a young singer. He and the young woman had been photographed together by one of the newly emerging tabloid magazines,
People
(pronounced ‘Pipol’), but the mainstream press had dutifully avoided the story –
jardin secret oblige
. Materazzi had apparently insulted Zidane’s wife and, by extension, his honour. For the general public, to whom Zidane’s liaison with the lovely young singer was widely known, there was no hypocrisy in the footballer’s sense of outrage. A wife is still sacred, even if you happen to be cheating on her. As for the matter of the Truth, the French – as I would soon learn – do not hold the virtue of truth in such high esteem as the British.

The day after the World Cup final, President Chirac invited the French team to the Elysée Palace and addressed Zidane directly in the following words: ‘Dear Zinédine Zidane, what I have to say to you at this intense moment, perhaps the hardest moment of your career, is all the admiration and affection of a whole nation; its respect too … You are a virtuoso, a genius of world football. You
are also a man of the heart, a man of commitment, engagement and conviction. And that is why France admires and loves you.’

The key, then, is not winning, nor is it – as our Protestant mythology likes to claim – the joy of simply participating. France loves men like Zidane for their commitment, their virtuosity and their
panache
, not for their success. Traits like rigour, reserve and resilience – qualities which, significantly, are usually attributed to France’s Protestant minority – are begrudgingly admired but never championed. Only the great losers of history repeatedly capture the imaginations of French writers and filmmakers: figures like Joan of Arc, Napoleon and the martyr of the French resistance, Jean Moulin.

France and her history are tuned to a tragic register. Every one of her regimes – monarchies and empires included – right up until the Fifth Republic, ended in bloodshed, rebellion or catastrophe. Tragedy is her element. Britain, with her tradition of political compromise and her attachment to the durability of custom, is more at ease with the comic.

The French are not. They’re not, as we know, at all funny; they rarely understand irony and they’re never, ever self-deprecating. They are too
involved
, too committed for comedy, too busy
feeling
.

Of comedy the philosopher Henri Bergson said in his essay on laughter,
Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du
Comique
: ‘Indifference is its natural element. There is no greater enemy to emotion than laughter.’

The comic view requires a certain detachment from life and its vicissitudes, something of which the French are quite incapable. Even the French language – with its paucity of nouns and their multitudes of meaning – is more emotionally charged than English. I recently went to see a production of
Krapp’s Last Tape
, a play that Samuel Beckett wrote initially in English, and then translated into French. The director had been granted permission by the notoriously finicky Beckett estate to put on the two versions of this one-man show back to back. First we sat through the French version then the English, each one acted in strict accordance with Beckett’s precise and plentiful stage directions. In spite of there being little or no variation between the performances, the play, as it moved from French to English, shifted imperceptibly from a tragic to a blackly comic register.

The comic view is also one that looks at reality between the eyes and dares to describe it. Comedy rolls around in the nitty-gritty of reality, while tragedy seeks escape through ideas. The French love of the tragic view of life goes hand in hand with their love of ideas.

Comedy is the resource of the long-suffering. For the British, it is an antidote to the various hardships associated with living on a damp, windy island in the North Sea. Our humour has been honed and crafted over centuries. The easier people have it, it seems, the less their need for comedy. Today, France’s only decent stand-up comedians are her outcasts and fringe-dwellers – her Arabs and her North African Jews.

The French, who have a horror of appearing stupid, tend to prefer wit to humour, and so the one has thrived to the detriment of the other. I was struck, when I first arrived in Paris, by how totally lacking in silliness dinner-party conversation was. I was stunned to find that people – even young people – thought that punning was funny; I would watch the gay rallying of
jeux de mots
in amazement. As the years went by, I entertained myself by becoming sillier, until it grew apparent that I had become
l’Anglaise de service
, a kind of clown, reliably irreverent and accommodatingly dippy.

France, in the eighties, seemed to me a comic desert. When I discovered, from his domination of prime-time television, that for most French viewers English humour meant Benny Hill, I was even more horrified. Today Mr Bean has replaced Benny Hill in the hearts of French comedy-lovers. On the one or two occasions that I made the mistake of trusting my French friends enough to bring out the latest example of English or American comedy, I have been met with stunned incomprehension. When my own children, thrilled by the prospect of a relaxed evening’s entertainment with their friends, brought back an Eddie Izzard DVD from London, they had to accept the chasm that existed between their humour and that of their peers.

‘But why does he dress like a woman? Drag isn’t funny any more …’ said one.

‘The gags are too long-winded …’ said another.

Unable to explain that being in drag was not the point
and that being long-winded was, my two children gave up and now confine themselves to clandestine comedy-viewing with their English cousins.

There is something contrary about the French; something that the English often perceive as perverse. But this
awkwardness
is the stuff of which French identity is made. It is born of the perpetual and irreconcilable confrontation between
the idea
and
the reality
.

Recently I asked a French friend, a former English teacher and enthusiastic Anglophile, what it was that she liked about the English. Her answer goes a long way towards explaining what it is that I have found most difficult about living in France.

‘In England’, she said, ‘I learnt that it was possible to be more than one thing.’ When I pressed her for an explanation, she answered, ‘In English society a person can be complex, hold contradictory positions and ideas. In France, because of our idealism and our history, we are encouraged to take sides, and this can be very boring.’

To my mother-in-law, Madeleine, and to a great many French people, the dominant characteristic of the English is their alleged hypocrisy. Indeed, the expression
l’hypocrisie
anglaise
refers to what the French see as our perfidious habit of dissimulation. It does not occur to them that where they see duplicity may simply be doubt, nor that our unwillingness to take a stand might not be a posture but a genuine state of mind. In French, the words ‘equivocal’ or
‘ambivalent’ both carry the negative connotation of moral ambiguity before they convey the more neutral idea of multiplicity of meaning. Once again, as experts on the vicissitudes of reality over ideas, the British are aware that nothing is as simple as it seems.

A good example of this confusion between pragmatism and duplicity can be found in French accounts of the personality of Oliver Cromwell, a man endlessly puzzling to the French. As leader of the English Revolution, Cromwell should have been an idealist. His life and actions proved him to have been quite the opposite and so for the French, he must have been a hypocrite.

Drawn to the complexities of Cromwell’s character, Victor Hugo combed through countless seventeenth-century pamphlets and newspapers in the course of writing an interminable and rarely performed play about him. In the play, Cromwell is characterised as a parliamentarian who dreams of becoming a monarch. This Romantic conceit works perfectly well in French. The idea that the epitome of moral complexity is the figure of a man in whom two conflicting ideas are constantly vying for supremacy would have served perfectly the character of Napoleon, with his legendary histrionics. But Cromwell was an Englishman, and therefore not necessarily required to be consistent or even coherent. John Buchan beautifully described Cromwell’s paradoxical nature in his 1934 biography and at no point judged him for it: ‘A devotee of law, he was forced to be often lawless; a civilian to the core, he had to maintain himself by the sword; with a passion to construct,
his task was chiefly to destroy; the most scrupulous of men, he had to ride roughshod over his own scruples and those of others; the tenderest, he had continually to harden his heart; the most English of our greater figures, he spent his life in opposition to the majority of Englishmen; a realist, he was condemned to build that which could not last.’

For the French, complexity very quickly becomes hypocrisy. Bishop Bossuet, the scourge and converter of Protestants under Louis XIV, described Cromwell as ‘a man of an incredible depth of mind, a refined hypocrite as well as a skilled politician’.
*
Recent French scholarship on the man hardly differs in its interpretation: ‘As much as his political acumen, Cromwell owed his success to his profound hypocrisy.’
†

This confusion explains the strange mixture of admiration and contempt with which the French judge the English character. When they call Oliver Cromwell a hypocrite, they are not referring to any gap between what he might have practised and what he preached. Hypocrisy in French does not necessarily infer the pretence of virtue, which is a person’s private affair, but rather an excess of complexity, a lack of moral
readability
.

The French need to know at all times whose side you are on, which – for an English person – can become very tedious.

The French love of ideas has had a devastating effect on the independence and quality of her media. Television was seen from the outset as a hugely powerful vehicle for ideas, and the habit of presidential meddling is a long-established tradition that has been hard to break. France’s two most influential newspapers,
Le Monde
and
Le
Figaro
, were basically created – or in the case of
Le
Figaro
, re-created – after the Occupation by de Gaulle, and in his own image. From as early as 1944, in his configuration of France’s post-traumatic political landscape, the general was animated by a deep mistrust of communism. Forced – by the legitimacy conferred by their Resistance credentials – to compose a government with communist ministers, de Gaulle was careful to make sure that French radio and newspapers fell into the hands of his political allies. Driven by his dual mistrust of communism and the Americans, de Gaulle also created a new daily newspaper –
Le Monde
– and named his Resistance buddy, Hubert Beuve Méry, as its editor. It was Beuve Méry who said on the eve of the Allied landings: ‘The Americans constitute a real danger to France. They can stop a necessary revolution and their materialism does not have the tragic grandeur of the totalitarian regimes.’ Once again, at the heart of this quite widespread anti-American sentiment, lies the conviction that Anglo-Saxon culture is basely materialistic and lacking in grandeur. It is this very sentiment, this love of so-called ‘tragic grandeur’ that led legions of French intellectuals to support two of the worst totalitarian regimes in history –
Mao’s and Stalin’s – long after everyone else had woken up to their horrors.