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Why it is time to stop idealising French women

As sexual politics hits the headlines in France, Lucy Wadham considers why the mystique of the French woman holds such enduring appeal

by Lucy Wadham / January 14, 2014 / Leave a comment
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Trierweiler has checked into hospital to deal with emotional stress resulting from the French President François Hollande’s alleged affair ©PA


French Women Don’t Get Facelifts
by Mireille Guillano (Doubleday, £14.99)

For the past fortnight I have been suffering my way through a pile of books from a growing branch of the self-help tree, all inviting me to think, look, and generally be more like a French woman. La Française, I now know, has the answers to life’s problems. The titles alone should give a hint of what I’ve endured: Two Lipsticks and a Lover: Unlock Your Inner French Woman by Helena Frith Powell; Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl by Debra Ollivier; Bonjour, Happiness!: Secrets to Finding Your Joie De Vivre by Jamie Cat Callan; Chic & Slim: How Those Chic French Women Eat All That Rich Food and Still Stay Slim by Anne Barone; and by the same author, Chic and Slim Encore and Chic and Slim Toujours.

As I read these books, all published over the past decade, I imagined their British or American target audiences throwing out their greying underwear, their comfy tracksuit trousers and their tasty ready meals. I saw them giving up their boxsets, their cosy, confessional friendships, and their girls’ nights out. I pictured them investing in improving literature, a poodle, a new “capsule wardrobe” with requisite little black dress (petite robe noire) and cultivating the legendary mystique of the French woman. The idea left me feeling more than a little depressed.

This flourishing arm of the publishing industry, which sprung up at the beginning of the 21st century, has become sub-genre all of its own, complete with its absurdly long subtitles and its own visual language—curling typography, slender 1950s cartoons of chic French women trailing miniature poodles, pull-out lifestyle tips and unfeasible oyster and champagne-based recipes. The books all embrace a canon of unchallenged myths, clichés and stereotypes designed to target the chronically dissatisfied and/or overweight women of the English-speaking world. Mireille Guillano, one of the pioneers of the genre, published her latest offering in January, under the brazenly fallacious title French Women Don’t Get Facelifts.

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Comments

  1. La Parsienne
    January 15, 2014 at 11:58
    Hahahaha! I simply cannot believe someone can write something like this, and think they wrote an inteligent piece, whereas its extremely pretencious and patronising. La Française that is described here is not the actual French Girl, but whatever ridiculous idea you have of her: And this idea came from you "Anglos" - you invented her yourselves, through a completely superficial interpretation of chic, style and customs you find in commercials for parfums... Pathetic!
  2. Alyson
    January 21, 2014 at 18:28
    Where do you find British women supposed to be so self-obsessed that they'd buy such 'ancien regime' books? I'd be surprised if any Prospect readers of either gender have any interest in this form of self improvement. Books about beautiful French women with natural pouts and ironed underwear are perhaps the marketing of envy to wealthy wives who lunch.Too far removed from Austerity Britain with its androgynous youth and multi-cultural pluralism.Oh good - chips for tea again tonight.
  3. c young
    January 21, 2014 at 19:35
    So British women were elegant seductresses right up until Feminism put an end to that in the 1970s? Clearly that's not true. While British women really are alienated from their femininity, Anglo "Feminism" is as much a symptom of that as it is a cause.But the central point about the literary cult of the French is correct. A similar industry of delusion consists in Jamie Oliver's successful campaign to convince the British that they are also alienated from the kitchen, and that they can only learn to cook by the supposed cultural immersion he sells. Again its hard to distinguish the supposed cure from the disease itself.
  4. Max
    January 21, 2014 at 20:57
    Do not pretend such gaumlessness.Though a few exceptions may exist, middle-class French women think o fthemselves firest, last, and always as women. They like being women are very comfortable as such. Among other things effective womanliness means looking one;s best, being organized to do all things they like. Having a squared-away house, squared-away children, smooth operation, economy, mmotion, color, and a sense of lively joy.You want a French woman who thinks wearing wrap-around skirts or sweats outside the gym is okay, maybe you should look at cleaning women. Wonder how many of those are really immigrants from elsewhere.
  5. Cross
    January 21, 2014 at 21:09
    I recall one of the heads of a French fashion house (in the 90s?) lament that women no longer want to be elegant today, only sexy, or something to that effect. Today, I suspect he would use another "s" word to describe large swaths of younger Western women's fashion. Is the alleged longing for the French ideal, or the ideal of the French ideal, the only sartorial haven from an ever encroaching hyper-hedonist popular culture. Its quite remarkable to compare mens and women's clothing in high street stores; topman et al have rather preppy if not smart causals for men; the adjacent topshop window is like an twerkers paradise...hmm there''s a contra French lit book title.
  6. Rick Elliott
    January 22, 2014 at 06:13
    'their tasty ready meals' is the sort of thing that that someone who has spent too long in the kitchen might write. I promise you, Lucy, hand on heart, that they are not tasty. Lest you gain the wrong impression, I studiously avoid anything organic or 'bio' and find 'les anti-OGMs' a bunch of overgrown cry-babies.
  7. Lucien Aychenwald
    January 22, 2014 at 10:29
    The books mentioned in this article have little or no accuracy with respect to the lives of the great majority of French women, except for the fact that feminism, at least in its American form, has never really taken off in France. The residues of a patriarchal and chauvinistic culture are still in evidence, as the DSK affair (and, in a different way, Hollande's current Scootergate misadventures) has shown.The majority of French women work full-time to make ends meet, dress more or less identically with their British and American counterparts (and look neither "better" or "worse"), are rather stressed-out from their daily routines, and have exactly the same problems with their children. French child psychologists, especially in Paris, do a booming business. At our crèche parentale -- where the parents spend a few hours each week supervising and playing with the children alongside the professionals -- there is neither more nor less anarchy than one would find at any typical British or American family gathering. As for the ever-recurring topic of "fat," a trip through the suburbs or provinicial towns of France reveals that most people -- though not quite at American levels -- are hardly "thin." It seems as if all of these middle-class fantasies (neuroses?), in the spirit of Adam Gopnik's bland missives, are nursed along by people who have had little sustained contact with France as it is today -- a country of immigrants whose daily lives -- like those of most "Gauloises" -- are a million times removed from the nostalgia-soaked je-ne-sais-quoi-ness of stolen kisses on the Pont des Arts and secret rendez-vous in postcard cafés, with Piaf warbling in the background and subtle "intellectuals" debating whether existence comes before essence. I would like to escort these people to some of the quartiers chauds at night (or even during the day), and watch their faces melt in shock. Or one could simply stand on the RER platforms at Châtelet-Les Halles at 6:00 P.M on a weekday. It is not for nothing that one hears the phrase, "Liberté, Egalité, Morosité."One of the few stereotypes I can confirm is that the average young British woman can drink the average jeune fille under the table -- not that one should read anything into it.
  8. Jon Smyth
    January 22, 2014 at 11:36
    awwwww somebody doesn't like french women because she's jealous that she's not a french woman bwahahahaha feminism at its lamest finest
  9. Chris Nation
    January 22, 2014 at 12:28
    As Spike Milligan so rightly said, in a moment of serious rage at the gap between reality and fantasy, "Hollwood has a lot to answer for." Let's include cinema of France and Italy in that. He was referring to the cinema version of 'luuurve' at the time but of course it covers the waterfront - cuisine, looks, money, status.The English equivalents of Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor, with the shape that the French and Italians regarded as the ideal in a woman, were never taken seriously. In the case of Windsor's pneumatic body, without a line of dialogue required, it was a running joke through endless 'Carry On..' films. The joke on the mountainous Hattie Jacques, though, was not her shape but that she manifested 'male' characteristics, notably bossiness as the architypal matron/head mistress.It seems to me no coincidence that Edward and Wallis Windsor went into exile in Paris. It was the duchess, after all, who said, "Nobody can be too rich nor too thin."Buñuel has a marvellous parody of this, with a scene in one of his films of a dinner party of the smart bourgeoisie around the table, seated on lavatory pans. Occasionally one of the guests leaves the room, goes into a w/c-sized closet and eats a meal. If another guest tries the door of the closet and finds it occupied, there is that moment of uncomfortablity as one emerges and the other goes in. One in the eye for deny, deny, deny.
  10. Mark Kennedy
    January 23, 2014 at 06:43
    Woody Allen shot his unaccountably well-received 2011 movie, Midnight in Paris, on location but might as well have stayed at home in New York. All he was able to see in France was the same romantic, Hemingway-in-Montparnasse-in-the-twenties’-style myth that’s imagined as easily (and perhaps more clearly) by someone who never left Brooklyn. We can afford to be forgiving of this cognitive limitation; as Nietzsche pointed out, in the final analysis ‘we experience only ourselves.’ What Lucy Wadham’s dog’s breakfast of an article manages to achieve, though, in common with Mr. Allen’s movie, is to remind us of how snottily and patronizingly the limitation can manifest itself in some ‘Anglos.’ What begins by masquerading itself as commentary on the eccentricities of Anglo ‘self help’ publishing soon drops the mask and degenerates into an offensively ignorant, pop sociological rant against French sensibilities, culture and history, or at least cardboard cut-out facsimiles of them.Ignoring the obvious fact that the French cannot logically be assigned responsibility for the faults of Anglo authors, books, readers or publishers, Ms. Wadham denounces the many ways the French—not our own mythologies or marketing strategists—have supposedly misled us. That the style, language and intellectual substance (?) of the expose exemplifies the same publishing niche shortcomings with which the article takes issue seems not to have occurred to her. A modicum of self-insight might have prompted the additional realization that imputing causal deficiencies to the object(s) misunderstood, rather than to the process of (mis)understanding itself, is a typically Anglo way of extrapolating from shortcomings.Apparently, credentials relevant to authorizing distributing the burden of our misapprehensions amongst the French are, 1) residing in France for a time, and, 2) being married to a Frenchman for twenty years before divorce intervenes. I’ve lived in France and my marriage to a French women has lasted thirty-three years, with no divorce in sight. Couple this with an academic background in philosophy, wide reading interests and aquaintance with French cinema that extends beyond 1983, and my inability to develop an intellectual shorthand capable of summarizing French lives demands some explanation. Was it the hubris, chutzpah, or just plain arrogance I failed to acquire in timely enough fashion? Or did I make a huge mistake by neglecting to enrol in Posturing 101?
  11. brassdoff
    January 23, 2014 at 12:48
    Years ago I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with a friend who said: 'What I like most about French women is that they have no hang-ups about being women.' We accepted that this is not true of all French women, but a particular type that seems to have become the archetype for approving observers, male or female. These women appear fully at ease with their own femininity - or maybe femaleness is a better word - they don't mind, they even enjoy, 'playing the game' between men and women - and if that involves a little innocent flirtation, where's the harm? They also seem to have an innate 'cool', and to know instinctively how to make the most of their appearance, without fuss or show. Hence the phenomenon of the 'jolie laide' (a plain girl who somehow manages to look very attractive); as far as I'm aware, we have no equivalent expression in English. Wonder why...
    1. Alan M.
      July 4, 2015 at 02:19
      Absolutely!
  12. Lawrence Magee
    January 23, 2014 at 13:14
    I would agree and add the idealization of the culture of India.
  13. Carol Sandberg
    January 23, 2014 at 13:40
    I want to commend the writer for a well thought out and well written article. As someone who does live in France she is expressing her views on what she sees in life. I respect that.
  14. nina
    January 25, 2014 at 23:20
    I thought this was a very well written commentary on the recent trend in publishing toward idealizing French women. I don't understand half the comments here disparaging this article. They would be better directed to any glorifying articles on Mirielle Guillano's (and the like) sad books that feed into this relatively new publishing industry that perpetuates these "unchallenged myths" regarding Les Françaises. Her article is certainly not championing this type of generalization found in these books. You must have all misread the article, or skimmed it? I'm perplexed. This is the first article with a tad of insight and anthropological reference vs. the others dictating that what really exists is un "vrai mystere" to the French woman!
  15. AT
    January 28, 2014 at 02:43
    Why are Americanisms excruciating? They remind you that the author is, alas, American? Tant pis pour vous.
  16. nina
    January 31, 2014 at 01:04
    @Mkennedy Again, do not get your reply. But perhaps you'd prefer to whittle it down to 3 or 4 concise sentences as I came of age in a more concise era. Cheers.

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About this author

Lucy Wadham
Lucy Wadham has lived in France since 1987. Her study of the French, “The Secret Life of France,” is published by Faber. Her website is www.secretlifeoffrance.com
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