Myth Evaluation: Partly true.
FRENCH PEOPLE ALWAYS KISS WHEN THEY GREET YOU
The social kiss is an exchange of insincerity between two combatants on the field of social advancement. It places hygiene before affection and condescension before all else.
LONDON SUNDAY CORRESPONDENT
How do I kiss thee? Let me count the ways…
In his celebrated 1,040-page treatise on the art of snogging, Opus Polyhistoricum de Osculis, the seventeenth-century German philosopher Martin von Kempe identified no fewer than twenty kinds of kiss. They included the reconciliatory kiss, the kiss that marked social distinctions, the contagious kiss, the lusty or adulterous kiss, the hypocritical kiss, and the kiss bestowed on the Pope’s foot.7 But what about the art of the French social kiss? Alas, there the great polymath was silent. Which is a pity, as the mysteries of French social kissing – or faire la bise, as the French term it – remain in dire need of elucidation.
So, to kiss, or not to kiss? That is the question. And if the answer is the affirmative, how many kisses? Starting which side? And what sort of kiss is expected – a light peck, an enthusiastic smack, a graze, caress, scrape, tickle, or flick of lips to cheek? Whose lips to whose cheek?
The good news for foreigners is that the answers to these questions are far from clear, even to native French people. Kissing as a form of greeting outside one’s circle of close friends or immediate family was not widespread in France until the social revolution of May 1968. Just as les événements led to an increase in the use of the informal tu rather than the more formal vous, so they also resulted in an explosion in the exchanging of affectionate bises – and perhaps more intimate displays of friendship – between young people who had only just met for the first time. Since those halcyon days, it is fair to say that things have calmed down a bit. Contrary to popular foreign belief, it is never obligatory in France to kiss a person whom you haven’t met before. Social kissing is still mainly reserved for relaxed occasions with family and friends of the same age, although it is gradually becoming more common between work colleagues who know each other well, as is the case in other European countries. Most disconcertingly for uptight heterosexual Anglo-Saxon males, it is perfectly acceptable – even commonplace – in France for straight men who are good friends or relatives to kiss each other. This causes acute consternation for some stiff-upper-lipped men of Northern Europe and America, who baulk at brushing beards with the same sex. As one Lieutenant Colonel D. M. C. Rose complained in a letter to the Spectator in 2003:
‘Sir: I was horrified to see our Prime Minister kissing the President of Russia. Can you imagine Neville Chamberlain kissing Hitler, or Churchill kissing Stalin? Anglo-Saxon men have never gone in for this kissing performance. Sometimes they shake hands, but never the double two-handed shake or clasping of the arm. Only the Gallic race and the Arabs go in for hugging and kissing. No British general would even think of giving or accepting a kiss from another man, surely?’8
Aside from the question of whether to kiss at all, how many kisses to give – and which side to start with – is at least as prickly an issue. Every region of France has a different customary number of kisses and a different starting side, with the result that kissing collisions are an everyday occurrence, as even the French don’t know half the time when to turn the other cheek. In most regions of France, especially the cities, one exchanges two kisses, starting on the right cheek; but in parts of eastern France one exchanges two kisses, starting on the left. In Finistère, at the furthest tip of Brittany, it is customary to give just one kiss; but in whole swathes of the South including the départements of Cantal, Aveyron and the Drôme, one exchanges three. And across the départements of northern France, the affectionate locals share as many as four bisous on average.
THE SOCIAL KISS THAT IS NOW A SOCIAL DINOSAUR (skip)
Those who approach the rituals of the French social kiss with trepidation can be thankful that another form of French social kiss, the baisemain, is now all but obsolete.
The baisemain requires a man to bow slightly and, raising a woman’s hand to his lips, lightly brush it with his chin. The practice was invented in the early twentieth century as an affectation of the haute bourgeoisie. Only a married woman is entitled to the baisemain, and that only in certain circumstances. It is, for example, generally limited to private receptions, and not usually permitted on the street – although some French etiquette guides have conceded that it could be practised in a street without too many passers-by, and where discretion can be assured.
The baisemain is anachronistically featured in a number of films that are set in a period prior to its invention – a prime example being Stephen Frears’ film of Les Liaisons dangereuses.
To guide the uninitiated through the labyrinthine landscape of French kissing, in 2007 a Frenchman named Gilles Debunne produced a wonderfully helpful kissing map of France, combiende bises.free.fr, an interactive site where over 69,000 French people have registered their kissing preferences by region. But even here, there is confusion within regions. In Pas-de-Calais, for example, roughly 50 per cent of respondents say they kiss twice as a greeting, while the other 50 per cent declare that they kiss four times. In the Charente, in southwestern France, the situation is even more obscure, with voters divided between two, three, and four or more kisses. In general, Parisians will limit themselves to two, starting on the right cheek; just one kiss gives a dangerous suggestion of secret intimacy, and more than two runs the risk of one being regarded as a provincial bumpkin (or, as they would disparagingly say, un plouc). Generally, the urban bourgeoisie limit themselves to fewer kisses than effusive provincials.*9
* If these French kissing conventions seem complicated, they are as nothing compared with Belgium, where one kiss is the norm for someone the same age as oneself, but three a mark of respect for someone at least ten years older. A social minefield, especially when it comes to women d’un certain âge.
So much for the number of kisses; but what type of kiss are we talking about? The ancient Romans, after all, distinguished between the friendly peck on the cheek (osculum), the passionate meeting of mouths (basia), and the kiss involving the use of tongues (suavia). The French bise or ‘social kiss’ is none of these. In fact, it is barely a kiss at all. If done correctly, it involves merely the lightest brushing of cheek to cheek; but at the moment of brushing, one is expected to make a loud and explosive sound of the lips, as if to imitate a good ‘mwah’. It is here that some Anglo-Saxons can get it wrong, with a slobby lip-to-cheek (or worse, lip-to-lip) contact that has the average Gaul cringing with disgust. To the extent that several Frenchmen abroad have remarked that they would prefer to shake hands, or even partake of a good, old-fashioned American-style hug, than wipe off saliva juices from a bearish foreigner.10
Which brings us to the time-honoured alternative to the bise, the handshake. Surely a safe retreat from the hazardous minefield of the social kiss? Not quite. It should not be forgotten that the French expression for ‘shake a person’s hand’ is serrer la main, in other words, a hand squeeze and not a handshake. In France, it is not customary to grasp the hand and energetically pump it up and down, as Anglo-Saxon practice dictates. France – like Japan and China – is a country of limp handshakes. This is especially true if you are a woman, as it is considered the height of rudeness energetically to grasp or pump a woman’s hand. So if your zealous piston meets a limp-wristed response, don’t take it personally. Nor should you make the faux pas of proffering a hand to someone older or more senior than yourself. French bourgeois etiquette – always concerned with establishing boundaries and limits – dictates that the older or more senior person, or a woman, proffers their hand first.
Social minefield as it may be, those who would love to kiss goodbye to the French bise will be disappointed. Despite a brief period of panic during the bird flu epidemic of 2009, when the official advice was to avoid social kissing (some schools installed ‘kissing boxes’ in classrooms for
pupils to post ‘kiss-notes’ to their friends rather than swapping possibly contagious pecks on the cheek), the bise has fought back with a vengeance. Social snogging is now pretty much de rigueur in France between friends – as it increasingly is among the chattering classes of Britain and the United States.
Die-hard enemies of the social kiss can, however, take comfort in the fact that in some parts of the world, including many parts of Asia and Africa, kissing is looked upon with repugnance. In China, for example, kissing was for many years considered a revolting allusion to cannibalism, and in southern Africa the native tribes people recoiled at the European habit of ‘sucking each other’s saliva and dirt’.11 So if you really can’t cope with friends and colleagues slobbering over you, there are places to escape to. But if you come to France, you have no real option other than to dive in and have a go at the kissing game; but if you botch it, be prepared to take it on the chin.
Myth Evaluation: True. The French kiss when they greet you most of the time, certainly between family and friends, but there is huge variation in the number of kisses and with which cheek to start. The safest bet is to give two kisses and start with the right-hand side.
THE FRENCH ARE A NATION OF INVETERATE SMOKERS
There’s nothing like tobacco; it is the passion of all decent men – a man who lives without tobacco does not deserve to live.
MOLIÈRE (JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN), FRENCH COMIC DRAMATIST (1622–73)
The cigarette is as integral to our image of the archetypal Frenchman as the baguette, beret or bicycle. Be it a Jean-Paul Belmondo lookalike with a trilby hat, moodily puffing on a Gauloise, or a cluster of leather-jacketed intellectuals hotly debating philosophy in a Left Bank café, tobacco fumes are as essential a component of the French landscape as crottes de chien on the pavements. In terms of French literature and culture, smoking has traditionally held a quasi-spiritual significance. The poet Charles Baudelaire, for example, eulogized the pleasures of puffing in his poem ‘La Pipe’, in which the pipe of a habitual smoker (‘un grand fumeur’) is described as gladdening his heart and reviving his spirits (‘…charme son coeur et guérit / De ses fatigues son esprit’). Baudelaire had yet more praise for the subliminal qualities of the pipe in his Paradis artificiels, where he wrote:
‘You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?’
Admittedly, the substance being here consumed is less likely to be tobacco than a somewhat stronger narcotic. Even so, later French artists and writers have not been hesitant to proclaim the virtues of the humble weed. The goatish chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg, for example, once crooned that God is a smoker of Havana cigars. The sulphurous Sylvie Vartan, one-time wife of the veteran rocker Johnny Hallyday, famously sang in husky tones that l’amour est comme une cigarette, wishing she could turn into a sultry Gitane and go up in smoke between her lover’s lips. The most famous poem by France’s unofficial poet laureate, Jacques Prévert, concerns a fateful coffee and cigarette consumed on the morning after a night before, stubbing out a mysterious relationship. The poem, ‘Déjeuner du matin’, is the most-recited verse in French schools, although the exact nature of the relationship concerned has been hotly disputed by French literary critics ever since it was first published in 1946. In fact, the only sure thing about the poem is that it introduces French schoolchildren to desolation, existential angst, coffee and cigarettes at an early age.
A RIGHT ROYAL HERB (skip)
The smoking of tobacco was first practised by American Indians more than 3,000 years ago and brought from the New World to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The use of tobacco in France, however, was popularized by a Frenchman, Jean Nicot (1530–1600). Believing that the ‘sot-weed’ had curative effects, Nicot sent some tobacco powder to Catherine de’ Medici in 1560, after a visit to Portugal, to treat the terrible migraines of her son, the frail and sickly child-king François II. The treatment initially appeared to have been successful; tobacco was hailed as the ‘queen’s herb’, and subsequently licensed for sale by apothecaries. The species of tobacco plant used to treat the French royal family was later christened Nicotiana tabacum in honour of Nicot, from whom we also derive the term ‘nicotine’.
Behind the tabacomanie of Anglo-Saxon myth, are the French really a nation of voracious smokers? The answer is yes, they are. With daily cigarette smokers making up 26 per cent of the population as a whole, the French do not smoke as much as the world’s most ardent puffers, the Greeks (39 per cent), but they do smoke more than the British (22 per cent) or the tobaccophobic Americans (16 per cent).12 24 per cent of 15–19-year-old French teenagers smoke,13 and the average age of first exposure to cigarettes for French smokers is a tender 11 years old. Moreover, for the first time in many years, smoking in France has recently been on the increase, particularly among women. Today, 38 per cent of French women aged between 20 and 25 smoke,14 and a slightly worrying 24 per cent of pregnant women.15 The cost of tobacco-related illnesses to the French state in 2005 was €47 billion or 3 per cent of GDP, the equivalent of an annual tax of €772 per citizen.16
The French government (which cheerfully flogged cigarettes to its populace for decades under the auspices of the state-owned cigarette monopoly SEITA until it was privatized in 1995)17 has done everything in its power to extinguish the fire. Massive duties and price hikes have been slapped on cigarettes, smoking in public spaces was outlawed in 2007, and EU-imposed bans on cigarette advertising were observed. There are even proposals to follow the Australian example, requiring manufacturers to sell cigarettes in unbranded packets displaying shocking pictures of bodily parts afflicted with every type of smoking-related disease. The French reaction to all of this, perhaps predictably, is a great Gallic rolling of eyes, shrugging of shoulders, and a bored ‘et alors...?’ In fact, the country’s response to the new regulations – far from quitting – has simply been to go and puff in other, as yet unregulated, places: cars, for example (a great favourite), or the tent-like enclosures tacked onto café terraces which nowadays have become Dantesque infernos filled with swirling tobacco fog.
The French anti-smoking lobby lays the blame for the continuing high levels of French tobacco addiction partly on Gallic cinema, which has traditionally portrayed smoking as the epitome of cool – the preserve of virile men, sexy women, and rebellious teenagers. Given that having a Bond Street Classic at an elegant angle in your fingers seems to be as much a prerequisite for a French actress’s credibility as a Gitane for the French male, most French actresses won’t admit to not smoking. Catherine Deneuve, Eva Green, Sophie Marceau, Charlotte Rampling, Karin Viard, Delphine Chanéac, Béatrice Dalle, Anouk Aimée, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Françoise Arnoul, Audrey Tatou, Monica Bellucci, Nathalie Baye, Clémentine Poidatz, Jacqueline Bisset… all have been shot in moody poses with a cigarette held to their pouting lips. As early as the 1930s, smoking was glorified on French celluloid as a symbol of machismo for men and sexiness for women, with filmed competitions for the man who could smoke his cigar quickest, and, for women, the contest for the Most Graceful Smoker in France.
I don’t know. Everything. Living. Smoking.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, FRENCH PHILOSOPHER (1905–80), IN RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION ‘WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR LIFE?’
In 2012, the French League against Cancer commissioned a study by the market-research group Ipsos of the top 180 French films released in the five years from 2005 to 2010.18 It found that 80 per cent of them contained at least one smoking scene, and 30 per cent more than ten. On average, smoking took up 2.4 minutes of movie time per film – the equivalent of five advertisements. One of the top films in the list was the 2009 film Coco before Chanel, which featured Audrey Tautou lounging in a white satin pyjama suit with a cigarette on one of its publicity posters. (The 2010 film Ga
insbourg: A Heroic Life, which outstripped every other film in the survey by clocking up no fewer than 43 minutes of smoking time, was excluded from the analysis as ‘atypical’.) The study also found that characters who smoked in French films had gradually become more and more ‘respectable’ over the years, and that the virtual world of the cinema portrayed situations which flagrantly flouted French law in real life, with characters on screen lighting up in cafés, schools and dozens of other places where smoking is banned.
If I had to choose between a last woman and a last cigarette, I would choose the cigarette: you can get rid of it more easily!
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 16
