The Secret Life of France

Please forgive me for not posting over the next few weeks. I shall be in the bosom of that miraculous nebula that is the French healthcare service but hope to return to work soon.

I would like to thank everyone who visits this blog, for their readership and/or comments and their participation in a conversation about France and Britain that has so far been fascinating to me.

A tres bientot.

Lucy

I had a call the other night from Jon Henley of The Guardian, who had reviewed my book and wanted to talk about a piece he was writing about French women. It seems there has been a sudden onslaught of books on the subject, some of them written by Anglo-Saxon women driven by the question: what do they have that we don’t? And some of them by French women driven by the desire to tell us. Among the authors are Debra Ollivier, American author of ‘What French Women Know‘ and  Mireille Guiliano, the former executive turned lifestyle guru, who brought us ‘French Women Don’t get Fat‘.

Henley and I spoke for about an hour on the subject, covering the differences between catholic and protestant cultures when it comes to attitudes towards beauty and love, as well as the differing attitudes towards feminism and gender in Britain and France. Towards the end he asked me what I thought the key differences might be between French and British women – clearly an impossible question but one I still rashly attempted to answer.

I don’t think French women ever took on the patriarchy, not in its symbolic form anyway and that – for the continuing survival of the pleasure prnciple – they have accepted a certain level of symbolic domination by men. Back in the late sixties, as the feminist revolution swept through France, it was as if there was an unwritten agreement to leave the private roles that men and women played untouched by the new movement. French women would fight with the best of us for social and political equality but the feminist revolution, it was tacitly understood, would not enter the private sphere, or indeed the bedroom. As a result, French women, unlike British women, still feel completely unembarrassed about playing ‘traditional’ feminine roles: domestic goddess, temptress, petulant princess or (when necessary or possible) femme fatale. British women, on the other hand, feel they have to behave properly, that they have to earn men’s respect. French women feel that they play by different rules to men and therefore have little interest in earning their respect; what they’re after is their desire.

In two days time, six-power talks on Iran and its putative military nuclear programme are to be held in Germany, so I thought a little background to this show of international indignation might not go amiss…

In 1974, in the midst of the cold war, America gave France permission to provide Iran, whose northern border was unprotected from a possible Soviet missile attack, with enriched, weapons-grade uranium. Eurodif (European Gaseous Diffusion Uranium Enrichment Consortium), founded in 1973 by French industrialist, Georges Besse, still produces 25% of the world’s used enriched uranium. In 1975 Sweden, one of the five founding countries, withdrew from Eurodif and France agreed to offer Sweden’s 10% share to Iran. The Shah, Reza Pahlavi contributed an initial one billion dollars and then two years later a further 180 million dollars towards the cost of building the consortium’s uranium enrichment plant, in exchange for which his nation was granted the right to buy up to 10% of its precious output.

When the Iranian Revolution brought the Mullahs to power in February, 1979, two months before the Eurodif plant was due to begin production, France no longer felt inclined to honour the contract. Ayatollah Khomeini cancelled the Shah’s nuclear power programme due to lack of funds but reiterated his country’s claim to 10% of Eurodif’s enriched uranium output. When Mitterrand came to power in 1981, he continued to ignore Iran’s claim and so the regime in Teheran decided to use coercion. For ten years France was repeatedly targeted by Iranian-backed terrorism both on her soil and abroad. In an attempt to keep France’s conflict with Iran out of the news, most of the attacks, carried out by Hezbollah, were attributed to the western world’s bogeyman at the time, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Eight French hostages taken by Hezbollah in Beirut and a series of bomb attacks in Paris finally put an end to France’s reluctance to honour the Eurodif contract and on December 29, 1991 Mitterrand terminated this secret war and signed an agreement re-establishing Iran’s rights to her 10% of weapons-grade uranium. France also refunded Iran over 1.6 billion dollars.

Main sources: Yves Bonnet’s “Nucleaire Iranien: Une Hypocrisie Internationale” and Dominique Lorentz’s “Une Guerre.”

I like this photo of Chirac and Sarko taken in 1981.

Chirac is 49 and pleased as punch.

Sarko is 26 and struggling. With many things. His hair is but one of them.

I’m back in France after the longest time spent in England since I left twenty five years ago. My two and a half months in the motherland has left me dazed and confused and as far as this blog is concerned, mute for weeks on end. In writing about my understanding of France, I have come to realise how little I understand of my own culture.

Like many long-term ex-pats, I imagine, I am afflicted with nostalgia for a place that has ceased to exist. A place of the imagination, distilled from childhood memories of 1970s London and the intense, adolescence experience of hating Margaret Thatcher and what she had planned for the nation. Leaving in 1984, at that particular moment in history – when the class system was breaking down and social mobility dawning, when feminism was finally reaping its rewards, when Channel Four was leading the way to cultural democratisation and race riots paving the way for multi-culturalism – I carried off a snapshot of a society in transition and full of hope.

When I returned I saw all the unwanted concomitants of Thatcher’s revolution: class war, gender war, mass ignorance encouraged and condoned by a rampant and omnipotent media, a pusillanimous state that seems to roll back its own powers with one hand and the personal liberty of its citizens with another.

But then I noticed the dissent. Not of the petulant French variety, but the quiet and determined, free-thinking kind. You find it in pockets in Britain, like desert dew and when you find it you relish every drop.

I’d like to apologize in advance for posting a little less regularly over the next few months. I’m starting my next book, an aching, heart-wrenching, coming-of-age comedy set in a small village in the South of France in the 1970s. Talk about escapist.

I have a confession to make. I came home yesterday and found that someone had added the following comment to my last post: “This blog is as dull as it sounded in the newspaper.” Tired and emotional after a long day and a sleepless night, turning the spaghetti with one hand, I deleted with the other.

Clearly this is a gesture that can’t be undone but I wish to apologise to the person who made the comment. Firstly he was right, the post about food was rather dull (thankfully I didn’t write about food in my book) and secondly I had no right to delete his comment, however unhappy it made me at the time. I would like to invite him to post it again, with added vitriol if he likes. I looked at his blog (The Daily Fail) this morning and discovered that we are probably ill-matched as blogging buddies but that is not the point. He must feel as free to insult me as I (should I ever feel so inclined) must feel to insult him.

This shameful gesture of mine came in the aftermath of a fantastically bad review in the Mail on Sunday. Night brings counsel, as the French say, because this morning I woke up feeling strangely relieved that The Mail had hated my book (though the funniest thing is that the reviewer castigated me for French bashing!?) Even if he didn’t actually read the book, I’m glad he panned it. As I’m glad now that the author of the Daily Fail finds my blog boring.

Chacun son truc.

The other day I took my four year-old son for a swimming lesson in the public baths close to where I’m staying in Suffolk. Florine, a fourteen year-old French girl who is over for a week from the village where I live in France, came with me. This was my son’s third lesson and he was clearly past the first flush with his teacher and reluctant to get into the water. While the coach cajoled him down the steps, Florine and I took our seats in the viewing gallery.

“Don’t you want to swim this time?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“It’s rubbish, this pool (C’est nulle). In fact,” she added, gazing sadly at the rows of swimmers moving sedately and tidily up and down the pool. “It’s not even a pool.“

“What do you mean?”

She threw out her hand.

“Look at it. It’s not a pool. It’s a church! You’re not allowed to do anything here. Pools aren’t like that in France. In France, it’s chaos. (C’est le bordel). People jumping in and shrieking and chasing each other about…Just having fun.”

I had a flashback to the 1970s. Remember? Before Health and Safety. Before the US contagion of litigation.

“And look!” she went on. “There’s a sign saying ‘No diving’.”

“That’s just in the shallow end.”

She puffed out air.

“Why do they have to tell us not to dive in the shallow end? They think we’re stupid or something?”

I smiled and turned to the baby pool to see my son swimming towards his teacher.

I stood up and clapped furiously. His little face peered up at me from beneath the surface of the water as he paddled furiously to keep that tiny island around his nose and mouth from becoming submerged with the rest of him.

“Quick!” I said to Florine. “Where’s the camera?” She handed me my bag and I rushed down to the poolside, switching to film mode. I was picturing my son’s pride at seeing his father’s delight at seeing this moment; a whole chain reaction of joy would be triggered by this film.

As I crouched down a whistle blew.

“I’m sorry love,” the coach said, wading towards me. “No photography allowed. It’s the Children Act.”

“What?”

The penny dropped: The Internet. Child pornography. The modern world.

Appalled, I stood up, blew my son a kiss and returned to my seat to find Florine laughing and shaking her head.

“I told you. It’s not a pool. It’s a church,” she said.

Afterwards, the coach took me aside and explained. I could film him, she said, but under certain conditions. We’d set them up. Next time.

“He can get his badge, though. Today,” she said encouragingly. “He can pick up his five metre badge from reception.”

I looked down at my son.

“Did you hear that? You won a badge!”

His face lit up.

“What’s a badge?”

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “We’ll go and get it now and you can show Dad when you get home.”

I had spoken too soon. At the reception I met with the inimitable, close-mouthed, compensatory smile of UK officialdom, the one that’s always, always accompanied by an “I’m sorry Madam but…”

THEY HAD RUN OUT OF 5 METRE BADGES. I looked down at my son who was looking up at me expectantly. Then I turned back to the woman behind the desk. But how could they run out of five metre badges? Did they not comprehend the emotional stakes they were dealing with here? Instead I asked,

“When do you think you’ll receive them?”

“Should be some time over the next few weeks.”

Florine was laughing. I wanted to cry.

I’ve been in England for two weeks, promoting this book about France and two encounters with British broadsheets have given me an interesting lesson in the workings of the media in this country.

The first newspaper contacted my publishers offering to run an ‘extract’ from the book. Great excitement all round: it was every writer’s and every publisher’s dream. I was not particularly surprised when I learned that they were interested in a chapter called ‘The discrete charm of the bourgeoisie’ which features an account of a Parisian dinner party I once attended with my husband, which – for a small handful of the guests – moved seamlessly from good food, and good conversation, to good sex. My point in the chapter, was to note my astonishment – and my admiration – at the relatively guiltless nature of the incident for the people involved. I have no interest in judgment, really. It bores me but I was interested in what the incident revealed about my own conditioning and about the differences inherent in our two cultures. Clearly, this was an exceptional occurrence but there was something in the way it played out that spoke of an entirely different attitude towards pleasure.

When I opened the paper that Sunday morning I discovered that they had not actually run ‘an extract’ but had instead ‘extracted’, as they put it, from the book, all the bits that they found most juicy and then jammed them all together. This, of course meant all the various references or anecdotes relating to my own experience of the French attitude towards sex. When I read it, one of the things I felt was pity for those prospective readers who would rush to amazon thinking that they were buying a book about sex only to find that they were being asked to read about things like, politics, religion and history.

The second incident flowed inevitably from the first. Another national newspaper had read the ‘extracted bits’ and someone called to ask me for an interview. Once again, as I would discover, it wasn’t really an ‘interview’. It was a conversation with a journalist over the telephone about the sexy bits, which she would then write up ‘in the style of the paper’, as she phrased it, and then put into the first person. (!) I was immediately wary of such a procedure: words written ‘in the style of the paper’ but passed off as my own? It sounded dangerous. And of course it was. However vigilant you are, ultimately they’re not your words and the photos and captions flag a message that leaves you staring at yourself in bewilderment and asking, who on earth is that?

I take great comfort from the fact that these experiences confirm the thesis in my book about the nature of the British press and its roots in protestant morality.

In response to a chapter of the book that was published this month in Prospect Magazine, Arthur Goldhammer cautions me:

“Ms. Wadham needs to take a cold shower. True, Yasmina Reza did overhear Sarko telling another pol that “nous [referring to the French political class as a whole] sommes des bêtes sexuelles.” But the president wears elevator shoes. Surely that has to be a turn-off, even supposing that voters were waiting to be ravished…”

Tex_Exile comments: “Reading this piece, one learns more about Ms Wadham than about Sarko or the French electorate. One cannot but wonder if her attitude towards the president is not tainted by her frustration that he did not pursue what his eyes had tacitly promised her.”

Touché!

I shouldn’t be, I know, but I am little amazed by the puritanical responses to my remarks about Sarko as a sex dwarf. I’m also amused and faintly gratified that this was the only part of the chapter to have drawn any comment: it only confirms my belief that in Anglo-Saxon societies, Eros walks in shackles.

I will go and take that cold shower now and hope that my wantonness abates.