None of this is flaunted, because that would spoil the polite social veneer. It is an unavowed law of nature, the equivalent of a bodily function that you don’t impose on other people.
Politicians, too, are expected to have lovers. As Paul West says in A Year in the Merde, a politician without a lover is like a sheriff without a gun – people think he has no firepower.
The conventional wisdom is that the French don’t care about politicians’ adultery. This is untrue. They love to read about sex. When President Chirac’s extra-marital adventures were chronicled in a book by his chauffeur, the French were fascinated by his success with women (and his alleged speed when ‘dealing’ with them). President Mitterrand’s love child Mazarine was hounded by the paparazzi, and is now something of a star in her own right. And when Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife walked out on him with her lover, and Monsieur Sarkozy took his own lover on holiday to Mauritius, the French media went into a feeding frenzy.
However, the big difference is that the French don’t judge. They love to read the exposés, but no one howls for the politicians’ resignation, because the French don’t see how it could stop them doing their job. On the contrary, a politician’s job is to seduce the voters. So what if a few people are literally, physically seduced rather than just lied to on the election platform? A good adultery 44 scandal will only boost a politician’s ratings in the polls.
If the French media don’t disapprove on the public’s behalf, this is not just out of respect for the law preventing the press from intruding into people’s private lives. That would be relatively easy to get round by claiming that their reporting of the affair was in the public interest. It’s also because journalists don’t want any stones they cast to bounce back and hit them. What magazine editor, for example, is going to whip up a public scandal about a minister’s indiscretions with a researcher, when he’s been doing exactly the same thing with one of his reporters for years? And what upright bourgeois citizen is going to express disgust at the minister’s misbehaviour, when he or she read the magazine article about it while lying in a hotel bed between bouts of illicit sex? The French can be hypocritical, but they’re not stupid.
The politicians’ wives, meanwhile, remain aloof or silent. Despite the revelations about Chirac’s fondness for the ladies, Madame Chirac carried on as First Lady, apparently unperturbed (if the continued rigidity of her hairdo was anything to go by). Whether she was pleased at the revelations is another matter, of course. But at least in France she would never have to watch the interrogation of her husband on TV. No French politician would ever have to say, Clinton-style, ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ After all, in Mitterrand’s case, it would have been a pretty silly thing to say.
Playing (Away) with Words
Adultery is so ingrained in French culture that it has its own, rather charming, jargon.
An overnight bag is called a baise-en-ville or ‘screw in town’, the implication being that someone coming to the city on business is actually staying over for less professional reasons. The French have also formalized the concept of the cinq à sept, or quick sex session between five and seven o’clock after work. In the old days, when France had hundreds of brothels, this was the time when men went to visit prostitutes. Now it’s usually used to refer to a less professional meeting. So while British office workers are at the pub having a post-work drink, the French may be enjoying an altogether different aperitif.
There is one essential set of phrases that prospective members of the cinq à sept community will need to know:
37 Though there is probably a niche market for Romanian air hostesses, too, as there is for all fantasies. A British friend of mine told me that he got rid of a French trainee after he found the young man looking at a website featuring naked old ladies chained to trees.
38 Just for information, this would be expressed most effectively as ‘Vous avez des seins remarquables, Madame.’
39 On a purely practical note, a woman accepting a dinner invitation might find it useful to take a pack of contraceptives (préservatifs, pronounced ‘pray serve a teef’) along with her, because most French men are ignorant of their existence. And later on, she should not allow herself to be fooled by a Frenchman’s claim to be suffering from ‘condom allergy’.
40 Sorry, but this is a deliberate double entendre.
41 This title has nothing to do with gardening, as it would if it were a British film. It is apparently a lesbian term for a woman’s ‘lawn’.
42 What’s more, being French, there’s a good chance she’ll be a decent cook.
43 This law ruined a French film I once saw. The premise was that a poor West African man was posing as a priest to earn a living and get a roof over his head. He started doing weddings, which would have had wonderful comic possibilities in an Anglo-Saxon country, but fell totally flat in France, because the people he claimed to be marrying were all married anyway.
44 Although I have
