Almost French (23 page)

When I first arrived in Paris the women in the street seemed to confirm every cliché I’d ever read about
les Parisiennes
. In their little skirts and figure-hugging tops they appeared almost like cardboard cut-outs to me—so steeped in myth and mystique they weren’t quite real. The sexy classicism of their look was proof of the French powers of seduction. Sophistication seemed to ooze from every gesture, their habit of drinking wine in tiny, unhurried sips, the nonchalant way they wave their cigarettes in the air. They were like smoky seductresses in films: unruffled, together, so self-assured.

It took me just a few dinners to get an idea that
les Françaises
are in fact immeasurably complicated creatures. It has taken me much longer to begin to understand what lies beneath their polished, impenetrable exteriors. Although still trying to figure it out, I have reached a couple of conclusions. Peel back the layers (and there are invariably many) and what you find at the core of many French women is a well of insecurities. Add to them this country’s cult of
séduction
, an age-old tradition of coquetry and femmes fatales, and the result is a pervasive rivalry among women. Which perhaps also explains why I have so few French girlfriends.

This fact is brought home to me after my trip to Australia. Once I’m settled back in Paris, I begin to understand why
being in Sydney had seemed so easy. Why I’d felt as though I could drop my guard. I
did
drop my guard there—and especially with other women. My month in Sydney had been a series of wine-soaked sessions catching up with girlfriends. Several times our group swelled to four of five when friends brought along other friends whom I’d never met. These girls’ lunches and dinners were great fun, a release, and back in France they suddenly have a greater resonance. Because in Paris you hardly ever see groups of just girls out together.

The fact is, in almost two and half years I haven’t once gone out with a group of French women. That isn’t to say my social success rate hasn’t improved. It has. As well as meeting a new, cosmopolitan crowd in our inner-city
quartier
, relations with some people whom at first I didn’t like have changed for the better too. For example, Marie—who made the ‘how’s your little girlfriend’s French coming along?’ comment—has turned out to be really nice. In the last six months she’s made a special effort towards me, drawing me into conversation and persevering until I thawed. Either she realised she’d been rude or perhaps I’ve passed some test of time; I don’t know which. The hosts of that lunch—who’d coolly ignored me—have turned out to be fun and gregarious. Several months after my return from Sydney, as the weather is beginning to improve, we go away on a motorbike trip together in the Somme. Chatting before dinner, something comes up about our first few meetings. Emboldened by a few rum and lime cocktails, I decide to ask what I have never really understood.

‘Why were you so unfriendly at first?’

Arnaud contemplates my question, which doesn’t seem to have offended or even surprised him. ‘The problem is the French aren’t very comfortable meeting new people,’ he
says. ‘For us, friendships form over years, at school or university. And after that, we’re not interested, we’re no longer curious. We think we’ve got enough friends already.’

It’s a simple, honest answer. But it is revealing and for me somehow healing because even though that lunch was more than two years ago now, the cool reception, those unreciprocated what-do-you-do’s, my anger, the hurt, had all accumulated in a knot which needed untangling.

It wasn’t me
, I think.
It was nothing personal.

But despite these positive changes, despite a strong sense of life falling into place, I don’t seem to be able to bond with French women. So many books and chapters have been devoted to unravelling their mystique that I’m almost loath to write about them. Yet we
are
incredibly different—and by ‘we’ I don’t just mean French women and Anglo-Saxons. I’ve spoken to women from Mexico, Malaysia and Iceland; my girlfriends in Paris come from countries ranging from Morocco and Denmark to Austria and England. And
without exception
, for all of us, in varying measures,
les Françaises
represent an ongoing—and sometimes distressing—conundrum.

This was brought home to me one evening when we went to a dinner hosted by a lovely French couple, Anne and Serge, whom Frédéric has known for about ten years. They’d invited two other couples who we’d never met before. Although I had interesting chats with both guys, their wives remained unresponsive and cold. Far from the immediate complicity I felt with those girlfriends of girlfriends in Sydney, this was more like instant animosity, perfectly tangible even if it was unspoken. When Serge filled up my wine glass practically to the brim—a long-standing joke between us because someone told him that’s how Australians drink—the two women remained stony-faced. I felt a wave of disapproval—
resentment
would not
be too strong a word—as though my robust consumption was yet another black mark against me. After we left I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I’d been looking forward to meeting Anne’s friends.

‘Did I imagine it or were those two girls really weird to me?’ I asked Frédéric, half wondering whether I’ve become oversensitive. After all, he’d managed to have conversations with both of them.

‘They
were
really weird to you,’ he quickly confirmed. If in the past Frédéric used to get defensive when I raised a question that implicated his culture—or worse, his friends—now he has more distance.

‘Why, though? What am I doing wrong?’

‘You’re not doing anything wrong,’ Frédéric said. ‘It’s just, I think, women here …’ He hesitated then said simply, ‘In France, that’s how it is between women.’

In the months following my Sydney holiday my lack of Gallic girlfriends bothers me. It seems like a personal failure. The idea of living in a foreign city where nearly all my close friends are also expats makes me uneasy. That is not what I’d envisaged. After all, I have an advantage over many foreigners—I have a French partner. Most of our socialising is with French people. I’m not leading a closeted expatriate life.

I do have a couple of French girlfriends. It’s probably no coincidence that they tend to be less conventional, well-travelled types. Florence grew up in an unorthodox household outside Paris with a lion and chimpanzee brought home by her father, who was a circus vet. Patricia, who comes from a
grande famille
in northern France, felt compelled to break out of the buttoned-up, bourgeois world she was born into and with her husband spent many years living in various African countries. Sophie is married to an Aus
tralian and after several years in Melbourne they have moved back to Paris. One day I broach the subject of French women with her and straightaway she pinpoints the differences.
Les Françaises
—particularly
les Parisiennes
, she stresses—perceive those of the same sex as rivals, not as potential friends.

‘As soon as a French woman meets another woman, she’ll look her up and down, check out her clothes, her makeup, her shoes. She’ll be very critical of the other one,’ Sophie tells me. ‘She’ll be thinking: well, she might have nice blue eyes but she’s got a really big bum.’ The competition is not limited to looks, though. According to Sophie, the fear is also that the other woman might appear more intelligent, more interesting to their husbands or boyfriends. Foreign females represent an even greater threat, apparently, because of their alluring accents and ‘exotic’ appeal.

Sophie’s unequivocal words, which echo what countless people had already told me, bring home a troubling truth: while I’ve been looking at women as potential new friends, they’ve been sizing up my legs and bottom! Of course, not everyone is competitive and I’ve been to many dinners where girls have been very pleasant to me. But there is no sisterhood in France. The sort of complicity that hints at the possibility of sharing wardrobes and wine, tears and jokes is absent from every encounter.

My early, naive attempts at befriending French women nearly always backfired. I met Charlotte midway through my first year in France when she came over for dinner. Attractive and opinionated, with intelligent brown eyes, she is a friend of a friend of Frédéric’s and studying in Paris to be a doctor. I was hoping we might get along well: only a few years younger than me, she was one of the first Frenchwomen I’d met then who didn’t have children. I envisaged us meeting
up in the future for a drink. But while Charlotte laughed frequently as she talked to Frédéric, I soon realised I’d made a serious misjudgment in thinking we might be like-minded. In an erroneous effort to engage her in conversation, I brought up the story I was working on at the time concerning the number of women in French politics. According to the press, on this score France lagged behind all but one of its European partners—behind even Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan and on par with Albania. In raising the issue, I wasn’t trying to be provocative. Rather I was interested in Charlotte’s opinion (she had one on everything else).

But to my surprise, her brown eyes snapped with impatience.

‘You know, in France there’s no battle between men and women,’ she replied tartly, shooting Frédéric a look of sympathy. Her expression hardened. ‘Your Anglo-Saxon style feminism doesn’t belong here.’

And I’d been hoping we might find some common ground! That we weren’t so different, after all. Instead, an iron curtain of mistrust and misunderstanding had gone up between us. We could have been Brigitte Bardot and Germaine Greer, regarding each other with total incomprehension. Just pronouncing the words ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘feminism’ in the same sentence had made her mouth pucker in disgust, like she was tasting one of those unsweetened
citron pressés
French cafés serve. To Charlotte, raising the topic was obviously akin to lighting a bonfire of bras. The look on her face—a mix of derision and horror—was to become all too familiar. Although at home my views were entirely normal among my friends, in France I have a new identity. I am a Radical Anglo-Saxon Feminist.

It is remarkably easy to become one. I haven’t had to
attend protests, write ranting letters to newspapers or join any women’s groups (there aren’t any). All it took was voicing a few rather unradical ideas. For example, I’d always thought if I marry I’d like to keep my own surname instead of taking someone else’s. Politely suggesting to the
sommelier
that in fact I might like to taste the wine (instead of Frédéric or some other bloke) since I’d chosen it. Other small signs gave me away. Drinking beer as an
apéro
. Drinking more than the usual half-filled flute of champagne that French women indulge in at dinner parties.

Foreigners tend to be forgiven for not conforming. Our idiosyncrasies and un-French opinions can be intriguing (at least to men)—up to a point. But you know what they’re thinking, you can see it in their eyes.
You’re not one of us.
Occasionally, such as the time with Charlotte, I sense sympathy for Frédéric (who, it should be pointed out, has no problem with any of the above). How does he cope, they wonder, living with a Radical Anglo-Saxon Feminist?

This is another unexpected cultural shock. France may be famous for feminists such as Jeanne d’Arc and Simone de Beauvoir but the notion of ‘feminism’ is scorned in this country by both sexes. Despite the French penchant for revolutions, reforms for women have occurred through slow evolution, and generally later than in other developed countries. Incredibly, French women didn’t get the vote until 1944, about forty years after laws were passed in Australia and New Zealand. Until the mid sixties they had to have their husbands’ permission to obtain a passport or even open a bank account, and their property and family rights were severely restricted.

It’s not that other countries don’t have issues to resolve concerning women—take a look at Australia where paid
maternity leave is almost non-existent and the number of women in senior management remains negligible. But the situation in France is intriguing. Why, when it seems they could have done with one, has there never been a real women’s movement here? And what was Charlotte’s reaction all about?

Some answers begin to trickle through five months after our trip to Australia. In June 1997 when the Socialists stun everyone (including themselves) by winning the elections, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin puts women in key cabinet positions. One of them is Elisabeth Guigou, who is appointed Justice Minister. An attractive, elegant blonde, several months earlier she published a book,
Etre Femme en Politique
(
Being A Woman in Politics
) which attempts to explain the absence of women in French politics. Certain passages are particularly insightful. Grabbing a pen, I highlight her words:

‘The very specific history of France, which excludes women from a political role while granting them a well-recognised place in society … has created a unique situation between the sexes,’ she writes. ‘If women have not felt totally inferior, it is because their right to speak out has been consistently recognised, bringing them a certain role and power.’

In other words, if French women haven’t fought for their rights, it’s because they have traditionally been treated with respect. If women haven’t shown anger towards men, it’s because in this country there is no simmering male anger towards women either. As a woman, walking into a pub full of blokes in Australia can be intimidating: the attention often has a discomforting edge. Yet in France the male vibes are totally different. Sure, you might be stared at and one of the zinc bar ‘philosophers’ will no doubt try to buy you a drink. But it’s all done in an overt, light-hearted way as though it’s
a game and the men are just playing their part.

Whereas in Australia both men and women enjoy the occasional night out with the boys or the girls, in France the sexes would much rather be together. The tradition of men’s clubs doesn’t exist here. A conversation one day with Frédéric’s father exposes deeply ingrained differences in our societies. An avid golfer, Alain has heard that in Australia golf clubs often have restrictive policies concerning women.