La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (10 page)

I consider myself a faithful, fervent feminist
à l’américaine
. And yet Bardot has always intrigued more than repelled me, even with her pouting, ass wiggling, breast baring, and blatant use of sex in her films to get what she wanted. It took a while to figure out why. Bardot was the product of a comfortable upbringing in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. But instead of conforming, she became the most powerful liberated woman of postwar France. She burst onto the scene as a free spirit with the same sexual urges as men at a time when France was still recovering from World War II and the Nazi Occupation. She had affairs, married four times, and said openly that she hated being a mother. Even Simone de Beauvoir, the early French feminist, fell under her spell. “Brigitte Bardot couldn’t care less about what other people think,” de Beauvoir wrote in 1959. “She eats when she’s hungry. She falls in love with the same simplicity…. She does what she wants and that’s what’s so disturbing.” De Beauvoir was enthralled by the delicious contradictions of Bardot’s beauty. She wore elegant clothing, corsets, perfume, makeup, and other artifices but often went barefoot. As for her way of moving, it was so sensual that, in de Beauvoir’s words, “a saint would sell his soul to the devil for nothing more than to see her dance.”

Bardot’s style endures as the most persistent source of female sensual inspiration both inside and outside of France. The actress Drew Barrymore and the supermodel Kate Moss have imitated her poses. In 2009 you could buy a Louis XV–style silver vinyl armchair with a close-up photo of Bardot’s face serigraphed on its back for 814 euros. For his May 2010 collection for Chanel in Saint-Tropez, Karl Lagerfeld, the reigning king of French fashion, paid tribute to Bardot by casting Mick Jagger’s model-daughter Georgia May as a modern-day, mambo-dancing Juliette, the free spirit of
And God Created Woman
. The leather goods firm Lancel, meanwhile, turned Bardot into a handbag with curves.

In the 2008 promotion of the perfume Miss Dior Chérie, Bardot’s red-hot sexuality was cooled down for the mainstream and filled with pleasurable clichés. It was the first-ever television commercial directed by the American film director Sofia Coppola, who set it to a classic Bardot song in picture-perfect Paris. Dressed in pale pink, the model rides a bike, strolls across the Seine, is fitted in a Dior dress, admires roses at a florist, nibbles on pastries, kisses her boyfriend, and is swept into the sky while holding a bouquet of balloons.

All the while, Bardot is singing “Moi je joue” (“I Play”). The song is of a love game in which the woman forces her lover into submission. “I won, too bad / it’s what you deserved / you are my toy,” goes one verse. Coppola described the song as a “a charming, catchy melody, a little ‘bubble gum.’” “Bubble-gum” sweet is the last thing the lyrics would have been called in the 1960s. The commercial ends with “
Oh! Oui, oui!
” It leaves out Bardot’s orgasmic cry at the end.

The ultimate tribute—or perhaps insult—to Bardot came in a six-euro, limited-edition chocolate éclair created by Fauchon, the luxury food purveyor. Fauchon prides itself on its outrageous éclairs. The Bardot éclair was filled with rose-perfumed almond cream. It was covered with a firm curve of white chocolate on which had been printed in edible ink a 1959 photo of Bardot, her lips parted, holding a coral-colored towel loosely over her naked body.

According to Fauchon, the main customers for the Bardot éclair were men. In describing it, the Gogoparis travel website was too graphically sexual to be seductive. “How perfect to be able to eat her,” it wrote. Fauchon took a more refined approach, calling the Bardot éclair full of “sensuality.”

This was manipulated beauty, artifice at work, Fauchon’s way of enhancing the appeal of a ubiquitous French cream pastry, altering it to create a lovely illusion that pleased the eye. It was not unlike painting the Eiffel Tower in three colors or shaping sugar into cubes. The humble éclair became a vehicle to promote a national symbol of French beauty, as she is lovingly and lustfully remembered. I wondered whether customers would eat the éclair more slowly, with more gusto or more delicacy, because of Bardot’s presence. As for the taste, I preferred Fauchon’s chocolate-almond éclair decorated with the eyes of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, announced in a speech to the National Assembly one day that the French needed to abandon what she called an “old national habit.” That habit was thinking.

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the deputies. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. In our libraries we have enough to talk about for centuries to come. That is why I would like to say: Enough thinking, already! Enough hesitation! Roll up your sleeves.”

She praised Alexis de Tocqueville for his revolutionary idea that making money is honorable, citing his book
Democracy in America
, an account of his nineteenth-century travels throughout the United States. She told the French to work harder and earn more, and expect to pay lower taxes if they get rich. The message was consistent with the policies of her boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the presidency of France in 2007 on a platform of dynamism and change based on France’s integration into the productivity-driven global economy. His mantra on the campaign trail was “Work more to earn more.”

What neither Sarkozy nor Lagarde had factored in, however, was the deep national attachment to a particular form of seductive dalliance that I call intellectual foreplay.

For the French, life is rarely about simply reaching the goal. It is also about the leisurely art of pursuing it and persuading others to join in. How much fun would the sex act be without the flirtation, or the dinner without the bouquet of the wine? What joy is there in words without wordplay, or in ideas without fencing and parrying? And in the mundane arena of daily work, why rush to construct an action plan while skipping the nonlinear, often slower, more laborious, less efficient but perhaps pleasant step of theorizing about it? In other words, why focus only on the goal when there are so many other luscious things to distract? If something is too straightforward, direct, or easy, it feels incomplete.

Training begins early. In school, answering a math question is useless without an account of how the student arrived there, because the process, the demonstration, is more important than accuracy. The method for solving a problem might be worth nine out of ten points, the correct answer only one. The process requires such intellectual rigor that when it works, the pleasure that results is enormous.

Lagarde knows about the deep-rooted intellectual culture of her country. She looks like the pinup girl for the perfect French woman of a certain age. Tall, slim, tanned, silver-haired, she knows how to pose with the air of refinement that comes from good breeding.

But she is the most American of the ministers in Sarkozy’s cabinet. She speaks such elegant English that she sometimes prefers it over French. She looked west to make her fortune, spending much of her career as a lawyer at the Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie. She rose to become the first woman to head the firm’s executive committee and was named one of the world’s most powerful women by
Forbes
magazine. Returning to France, she became minister of foreign trade under President Jacques Chirac before joining Sarkozy’s cabinet.

As soon as she uttered her offhand line in the National Assembly, deputies in the chamber—even some from her own party—erupted in howls of protest. “They were screaming at her; they were shouting,” said her speechwriter, Gaspard Koenig.

It didn’t take much prodding to get France’s intellectual class—or at least its male members—to strike back with full force. Most female intellectuals didn’t bother to comment. Perhaps they were too busy balancing the demands of work and family to consider whether they were thinking too much. Perhaps they agreed with Lagarde’s practical approach. But for the men, here was a French woman brainwashed by too many years in America who was trying to castrate the intellectuals of France!

“How absurd to say we should think less,” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor, and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat. Before discovering the truth, how many false starts must you endure!”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the splashier philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s American travels, claimed to have been even more shocked, shocked! “This is the sort of thing you can hear in café conversations from morons who drink too much,” he said. For maximum effect, he spoke in sweeping historical superlatives. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister has dared to utter such phrases.”

Lévy found Lagarde too selective in quoting Tocqueville and suggested she read his complete works. “In her leisure time,” he said.

The satirical weekly
Le Canard Enchaîné
, meanwhile, mocked Lagarde for praising the sheer joy of work and for quoting an oft-cited line from Confucius: “Choose a work you love and you won’t have to work another day.” Such “subtleties have escaped the cleaning lady or the supermarket checkout clerk,” the newspaper wrote.

One reason the speech was so savagely criticized is that it was brutally direct and certain. It was delivered straight, American-style, like a double shot of Jack Daniel’s. Had it been sweetened with humor, understatement, or irony, it might have gone down easier. Simply put, it lacked seduction.

Lagarde’s salvo fits perfectly into the image we Americans have of France as a static country, stuck in the past, paralyzed by a thirty-five-hour workweek, a perpetual chain of workers’ strikes, and an inefficient and bloated bureaucracy. We picture brooding, cigarette-smoking, espresso-drinking French intellectuals who seem to do nothing in particular for a living and have all the time in the world to ponder deep philosophical conundrums in Left Bank cafés.

The reality is more subtle. Thinking and verbalizing thoughts is a ritual the French use to decide whether they have found a shared basis on which to function. It is not a business transaction. “Seduction is saying, ‘I want to create something in common with the other,’” said Stéphane Rozès, one of France’s top political scientists. “To seduce someone you have to know what you share. It’s not, ‘Are you with me or against me?’ It has to be a conversation, not an imposition.”

France’s history and literature reflect centuries of crafting ideas and intellectual concepts. The French have long pushed to persuade the rest of the world to consider and even adopt them. Modern philosophy originated in France, with Descartes. The eighteenth-century French
philosophes
—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot—forged a set of values for society that gave preeminence to reason, democracy, and freedom. In the twentieth century, existentialism bloomed with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

The clash of ideas is part of French national identity, from the corridors of power in Paris to the central square in a remote village. Everyone is a philosopher. Madame de Staël, the renowned novelist and
salonnière
, observed in 1810, “In all the classes in France, one senses the need to talk; speech is not only, as elsewhere, a means of communicating ideas, sentiments, and business matters, but it is an instrument that one likes to play.” During the global oil crisis of 1973, when petroleum-producing Arab countries threatened to cut off France’s supply, the French government encouraged consumers to conserve electricity, launched a major campaign to develop nuclear energy, and touted the country’s creativity. France’s state-run television station ran an advertisement with the slogan “
En France, on n’a pas de pétrole, mais on a des idées
”—“In France, we don’t have oil, but we have ideas.”

Americans tend to value pragmatism in everyday life: “Great prices so buy now,” or “New strategies for better health.” In France, people often talk for the sake of talking, not with the purpose of resolution. “We’re taught to believe in the beauty of the coherence of the argument,” said Philippe Errera, a senior Foreign Ministry official. “We’re taught to prevail not by convincing but with beauty.”

Talking is a way to deepen emotions and spread France’s “civilizing mission” around the world. Words are put on everything. One reason why Nicolas Sarkozy has been so often criticized as uncivilized is that he has boasted of being a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he once told a television interviewer. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!” In the eyes of a Parisian intellectual, he might as well have said he wasn’t French.

Intellectual foreplay at its best is strategically and cunningly played. It has an old-Europe, self-confident quality: knowing but not revealing all, reveling in the ability to keep secrets, being indirect. At times, the verbal play is a lot of fun; at times, it is nothing more than circle-spinning using irony or understatement to give your interlocutor a laugh when it works and a feeling of inadequacy when it doesn’t.

For those who master this art, life can be more interesting, more rewarding, and more pleasurable, although often less efficient than going directly to the goal. Until you learn the rules—or at least how to fake them credibly—you can never be seductive enough to fit in.

When the verbal seduction is complete, the playful game is over. There is a victor and a vanquished. If you try to continue the game after that, it becomes boring. So the goal is to enter into a conversation and keep it so enticing that it never ends.

The 1996 film
Ridicule
, about surviving at the royal court of Versailles, offers important clues for navigating this verbal minefield. An experienced hand gives advice about verbal sparring to a young man seeking a favor from the court: “Be witty, sharp, and malicious…and you’ll succeed. No puns! At Versailles, we call puns ‘the death of wit.’…One last thing: Never laugh at your own jokes.” One of the hardest conversational maneuvers is to make a pun subtle enough to allow the game to continue without breaking its rhythm. Otherwise, the pun becomes a verbal orgasm that brings the conversation to an end. It is even worse if the punster seals it with a laugh.

Among the refined tools of a French conversationalist is
le second degré.
Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, the writer and jurist, explained it to me.

“
Second degré
is when you say something and you can take it for exactly what it is, but there’s a second sense which is the real sense,” she said. “You say something and you don’t take it literally. It’s tongue in cheek; it’s between the lines. You have very little of this with Americans and none at all with Germans. When you say something to a German, you mean it one hundred percent or else you don’t say it. With
second degré
, you have to be intelligent. That doesn’t mean you have to be droll all the time. But you have to feel the formulas to have a brilliant conversation with depth.”

Second degré
creates a dangerous climate because you can’t always be sure when you are crossing the line into another meaning.

On the most primitive level,
second degré
can be racist, sexist, cutting, and cruel, the kind of bad-taste joking that went out of style in the United States decades ago. Alexandre Deschamps, my physical therapist, told me he learned the hard way never to use
second degré
with Americans. He found they were thin-skinned and didn’t appreciate the humor.

Alexandre is an amateur jazz musician. Once he was playing bass in a French group that included an American drummer. “The French musicians started criticizing the United States, and the drummer got really upset,” Alexandre recalled. “The drummer said that America had liberated the French in World War II and that we should be grateful. One of our group said, ‘Oh, but we had it much better under the Nazis!’ It was a joke, of course. It was irony. It was classic
second degré.
But the American got so angry he walked out.”

Alexandre’s story helps explain why
second degré
is a step beyond irony. An American would be unlikely to make this joke for fear of being taken too seriously; the French expect the double meaning to be understood.

Second degré
can be used for even more cunning verbal jousts. Raphaël Enthoven, the philosopher, told me his version of a famous anecdote: The writer and humorist Sacha Guitry and his second wife, Yvonne Printemps, were in a courtroom getting divorced. “In front of the judge, Guitry turned to his wife, who was ‘hot,’ and said, ‘You know, Yvonne, I just had an idea for what they can write on your grave: Finally cold.’ She looked at him, didn’t move, and said, ‘Point taken. And I have an idea of what they can write on your grave: Finally stiff.’ Not bad, no? You get it? It’s beautiful!” he said.

“But it’s cruel,” I said.

“No, it’s fun,” he countered. “You don’t like it? I love it.” What Enthoven particularly liked was that for once, Guitry’s sarcasm had been trumped.

Conversation works best when it appears effortless. “The real seducer is one who isn’t seen,” the writer Pierre Assouline told me. “For me, a man or a woman gifted in conversation is one who knows how to keep quiet, not someone who knows how to talk. A real conversationalist is someone who knows how to keep quiet in three languages.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s a paradox, to know how to keep quiet in three languages,” he explained.

“I don’t at all understand the
second degré
,” I said.

“This is the
troisième degré
” (third degree), he said.

Great, I thought to myself. This is what keeps outsiders out.

“To know how to keep quiet in three languages, it is to keep your place in society, whether it is with Americans or Italians or English,” he continued. “There are codes to respect. It’s to know how to be in a conversation but not to monopolize it, not to cut off the others. Sometimes in a conversation you say negative things about a person who is not there. But if someone else says, ‘He’s my friend,’ you change the subject.”