The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  The French are not prone to talking about whether gender differences are the result of biology or social conditioning—the famous “nature versus nurture” debate. They take difference as a given; the reasons don’t matter and the topic rarely comes up. In France’s most conservative circles, as we saw, even questioning the principle of gender difference can become an explosive issue. In 2014, the French minister of education, Vincent Peillon, along with France’s minister of women’s rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, launched a series of workshops in six hundred classes in ten of France’s twenty-six school districts to break social stereotypes, which are very present in French society, and also to deflate gender prejudices that influence career choices down the road. The program was called the “ABCDs of Equality.” The idea was to supply training, resources, and materials to primary schools to help fight prejudices and clichés, and teach children about the equality of the sexes. The work was based on academic “gender” studies that examined the question of how sexual identity is acquired.

  But the use of the word “gender” was enough to push right-wing conservatives and religious groups—Catholic and Muslim alike—into the streets. Initially, a few hundred parents showed up at school and pulled their children out of school for a day. They claimed to be protesting “Gender Theory,” which they claimed the government was using to “deny biological differences between the sexes,” and “encourage masturbation.”10 When that argument started to run out of steam, the movement pounced on a book, reportedly endorsed and distributed by France’s National Education system, called Tous à poil! (Everyone in the nude!). It turned out the book was not, in fact, part of any program of the National Education system, but France’s Catholic Church had joined the clamor by then, and the controversy dragged on for months.

  Again, it’s as if there are two entirely different documentaries playing simultaneously everywhere in France on the place of women.

  Conservative groups can actually find much to complain about in France. The French have done a lot of social engineering to offset sexism and its effects. For one, the French government has put in place many measures to encourage women to stay in the job market after they have kids. As in many traditional societies, French grandparents are expected to pitch in when it comes to taking care of grandchildren. So there is a nifty combination of traditional values and progressive government measures that together make France a working mother’s paradise. The state fills the gaps where grandparents are absent. France has great services for “families” that are clearly geared at keeping mothers on the job market. Children can start preschool as early as age three. Schools in France have inexpensive school cafeterias and after-school activities that can keep kids occupied until 6:00 P.M.—and the price is adjusted according to family income. Throughout the school year, which runs from September to July, French schoolchildren stop for holidays roughly every six weeks, which sounds like a nightmare to working parents who don’t get the same holidays, but the whole system is remarkably well organized to provide day camp for children who don’t go on their vacations in the Alps or whose parents don’t have country homes.

  Moreover, France’s social programs and education system are structured in a way that help make it possible for women to work like men. Aside from religious and national holidays, there are no surprise days off in the middle of the week, like parent-teacher conference days. During scheduled school holidays, children can go to affordable day camps in schools—and, again, the price is adjusted to income. This is very different from Germany, where school days end at noon. And French working mothers are not stigmatized the way they still are in Germany, where there’s an expression for working mothers, Rabenmutter (literally, “mother crow,” meaning uncaring, unnatural, unfeeling, or just plain bad mother).

  The French government has been promoting women’s rights explicitly since the 1970s, and today affirmative action is a fact of life in French politics (which of course doesn’t mean that life for female politicians is necessarily easy). The first president to set the example was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. His first prime minister, Jacques Chirac, appointed four female ministers in 1974 and two more two years later. When Chirac became president in 1995, his prime minister, Alain Juppé, appointed twelve female ministers. Since Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in 1997, gender parity among ministers has been the norm. But President François Mitterrand’s government (in power from 1981 to 1995) was the first to pass antisexist laws, starting in 1983, at the initiative of Yvette Roudy, minister of women’s rights, who created laws on abortion and job parity. These laws have been progressively improved over the years. In 2012, France’s prime minister went as far as banning the title Mademoiselle (the equivalent of Miss) from all government correspondence and writing, the logic being that nothing in the male title Monsieur implies the married status of men. Forms have also replaced the expression nom de jeune fille (maiden name) with nom de famille (family name).

  France has had laws requiring political parties to propose an equal number of male and female candidates since 2000. Loopholes have been progressively eliminated, and women now make up a quarter of all députés (elected representatives) and senators. In François Hollande’s first government, almost half of the thirty-nine ministers were women. Women represent only 16 percent of France’s mayors but make up nearly half of city and regional councilors, which typically function as a farm to recruit candidates for the upper echelons of French politics.11

  That’s not to say the French job market is especially egalitarian. A recent study showed that half of French women work in just ten sectors, including social services, health, and education. The same study showed that women occupy 97.7 percent of the jobs in housekeeping, child care, and domestic services. In some professions, gender segregation appears to be increasing: thirty years ago, 56 percent of teachers were women. In 2014, that number had risen to 66 percent, and 82 percent in primary schools.12 But the famous glass ceiling that prevents women from rising to top executive positions appears to be falling faster in France than in other industrialized countries: in 1960 16 percent of French executives were women. Today it’s around 40 percent (compared to about 20 percent in the United States).

  And some deeply ingrained traditions are ceding to the forces of change, like job titles. In classic French the proper title for either a man or a woman holding the function of minister is le ministre, a masculine noun, with the masculine article. La ministre, with the feminine article, has traditionally been the title of the wife of the minister. Even in the 1920s, when French women were first granted the right to graduate from high school (by taking the final baccalauréat exam introduced by Napoleon in 1800), the word étudiante denoted the wife of a (male) student, not a female student. The same logic has applied to président. Until quite recently, a female president (say, of a company, or a board) who introduced herself “la présidente,” with the feminine pronoun la and the final e, caused confusion because some French still assumed she was the “wife of” the president.13

  But things are changing. The example is coming from Quebec. In the late 1970s, Quebec’s government displayed strong sympathies to the feminist movement. In 1977, the government created a commission to produce feminine versions of titles. By 1979, it had come up with feminine versions of titles for some five thousand jobs, sometimes with a mere change of article (le or la ministre), sometimes by adding an e at the end, as in la professeure (the professor, the masculine version being le professeur). Sometimes this required more elaborate changes in suffixes, as for le directeur, which became la directrice (the director).14 Belgium adopted this revolution wholesale in 1993, and Switzerland followed in 2002.

  The French are following the example haltingly, but they are following it. The French government tried to pass similar laws to feminize titles in the 1980s but met the resistance of the ultraconservative French Academy—among others—whose members made the ludicrous claim that feminizing titles would “debase the French language,” or, even more absurdly,
create “segregation.” But those attitudes are fading. In France today, if you say madame la juge, you may get corrected, but you will not be laughed at. Most newspapers and media in France use la juge or la ministre, though some do so only if the woman in question expresses the wish to (many French women avoid feminizing job titles to dispel any suspicion of benefitting from affirmative action). In 1995, Prime Minister Alain Juppé was ridiculed for agreeing to have his female ministers called la ministre. But the designation is now common. The French media refer to a female minister as la ministre, and, more and more, female members of Parliament as la députée.

  Unfortunately, as we would see, whether it’s Madame le député or Madame la députée, nothing changes the growing contempt the French public has toward politics, and specifically, its traditional political parties.

  17

  The Poetry of Politics

  Julie got involved in school politics just a few weeks after our arrival when she rather naively inquired about the possibility of joining a parents’ committee. Our school principal’s first answer was a flat non. By the end of the morning, Julie understood why. Parents don’t volunteer in France; they run for office.

  Every fall, two French associations present parent-candidates in school elections across the country. After being directed to a parent meeting taking place at a café down the street from our school, Julie found herself running for La liste indépendante (the independent slate), which was looking for a parent available at the last minute to complete their slate of fourteen candidates. After a brief discussion, one father took a head shot of Julie, posted the list of candidates in the display cabinet on the front wall of the school, and voilà, Julie was running in a French election.

  Luckily she didn’t win. The day after the election a parent from the opposing party, the FCPE (Fédération des conseils de parents d’élèves), informed her that La liste indépendante was “right wing and religious,” definitely not Julie’s crowd.

  Before learning that there are political parties, and that parents choose camps according to political ideology, the thing that amazed us most about school politics in France was the voting process itself. If anyone needed proof that the French take voting seriously, this is where it is. The school election process is governed by the French state. School votes take place simultaneously across the country. Nothing is improvised: there are voters’ lists, voting booths, and real ballot boxes. Of the 600-odd parents at our school, some 188 voted, an impressive turnout in a country where beyond helping children with their homework, parents aren’t supposed to stick their noses into school business.

  Of course the fact that school elections actually had institutionalized, ideologically opposed parties shouldn’t have surprised us. The French did invent the political “Right” and “Left,” after all. The concepts arose from how members of France’s National Assembly were seated at the beginning of the French Revolution—those in favor of the royal veto (the aristocracy and the clergy) sat on the right side of the king, while those who opposed it sat on the left. The cleavage became more entrenched when the Right went on to unite ultraroyalists and counterrevolutionaries, and the Left brought together revolutionaries, liberals, and those defending individual liberties.1

  In addition to the left-right distinction, the French coined dozens of new words during the French Revolution, some of which went on to lead successful international careers in other political systems: like “revolutionary,” “vandalism,” and even the term “terrorism.” Others, like the term Jacobinisme (from the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary movement), referring to proponents of extreme centralization, remain part of political vocabulary in France and are still commonly used even though they sprouted from a phenomenon that took place over two centuries ago. Yet whether at school, municipal, or national levels, politics is a radically different art in France, and talking about it requires mastering completely novel concepts and an entirely new class of vocabulary, much of which doesn’t translate. You can’t even begin to understand what’s going on until you know the nomenclature.

  Strangely, when it comes to devising new political terminology, the French ignore the language purism that bridles them in other areas of life (like education or publishing, as we saw). During our stay in France, French socialists were trying to cope with France’s burgeoning conservative movement, which was leading the protest against same-sex marriage and assisted reproductive technology. In the process, French conservatives invented a term that became their rallying cry, familiphobie (family-phobia), which they used to implicitly accuse socialists of destroying family life by changing its definition. Progressive politicians, meanwhile, shot back with a new expression to discredit the influence of conservatives on the right: la tea-partisation (the Tea Party-ization) of French politics. While that was going on, the proponents of a growing antitax rebellion in France repopularized the medieval protest terms jacquerie (peasant revolt) and fronde (seditious revolt). And with both the French Right and Left in an identity crisis, a term coined by the late singer Serge Gainsbourg in 1977 came back into style: aquoiboniste (from à quoi bon?, what’s the use?), for proponents of “what’s-the-use-ism” (fatalism). It certainly captured the mood of many French the year we were there.

  And then there are all the parties themselves. Under France’s Fifth Republic (the name of the regime after France’s constitution was rewritten in 1958), there have been 789 registered political parties so far. Even for Quebeckers, like us, accustomed to a political environment with half a dozen parties spread over two levels of government, it’s hard to grasp why the French could possibly need so many political parties. Between them, France’s two traditional political family trees have about five separate trunks: right, center-right, communist, socialist, and ecologist, each of which has a dozen national parties. Innumerable parties then sprout from these like different-sized branches, or sometimes just twigs, each embodying a subtle ideological distinction. Part of the plethora of parties can be explained by the fact that some exist at only one level of government, like the famous Parti Chasse, pêche, nature, et traditions (Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions Party), which won 7 percent of the vote in the European elections of 1999, and only operates at the European level. There are also a number of parties that present candidates only in France’s regional elections, notably in Brittany.2

  And if this isn’t complicated enough, some political parties in France are essentially nothing more than organized followings of a single charismatic politician, who for some reason decided to stick to the same platform but gather his or her admirers under a different party banner. For instance, the only difference between the Socialist Party and the Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (Citizen and Republican Movement) is the latter’s founder, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The same is true of the Communist Party and the Parti de gauche (Left Party), whose members are followers of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a brilliant orator but notorious loose canon who can’t seem to function inside the bounds of an established party. On the right, one can see how the strong personalization of French politics endures beyond the grave with the chronic debate over who is Gaullist (follower of General de Gaulle, who passed away nearly five decades ago) and who isn’t. The cult of leadership even spawns subparties within parties. When the media speculate over whether something is Hollandais or Aubryen, they sound like they are talking about cheese or sauce (au brie, Hollandaise), but in fact they are pondering distinctions between the policies of President François Hollande and those of his socialist nemesis, Martine Aubry.

  The extrapoliticized French media are the trailblazers in this endless political branding exercise. French journalists love using one popular device in particular to inject drama into political stories: they label political figures by their initials, like DSK, for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former socialist minister and director of the IMF. Using their initials somehow endows them with larger-than-life status, whether good or bad. During most of 2014, France’s left-leaning weekly magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur was hard at work rebaptizing France’s new generation of political leaders by their initials, starting with Prime Minister Manuel Valls who became “MV,” and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who became “NVB.”3

  The French press also scrambles to report on the latest petite phrase (sound bite) from a politician’s mouth, and by doing so, sanctions new expressions as mainstream political vocabulary. Politicians’ crafty—or clumsy—words can keep them in the news for months. When we arrived in September 2013, political commentators were still having a ball with a blooper the former prime minister François Fillon had committed—four months earlier. Fillon was talking about the upcoming municipal elections and tweeted: “J’appellerai à voter pour le moins sectaire des candidats” (I’m asking voters to choose the least partisan among the candidates). The intended message was that he wasn’t going to support the National Front, but the phrase was meaningless, verging on silly (it’s pretty hard to imagine a nonpartisan candidate in party politics) and consequently sparked a wave of ridicule. The media continued to badger Fillon about the comment for months.

  Politicians’ televised New Year’s wishes, les vœux, is another topic the media love to dwell on, often for the whole month of January. French politicians are expected to start off the year by eloquently expressing good wishes to their constituency in televised speeches. The press spends the weeks leading up to the speeches anticipating what politicians might say and editorializing about what they should say. To be fair, the speeches are substantive. President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French one year that he “understood their frustration”; François Hollande promised to “fight unemployment.” But les vœux are above all an important ritual in French democracy. The French actually write back to politicians, even to the president himself, to tell them what they thought about their speeches and present their own vœux. The media then continue to dissect the speeches for a few more weeks.