La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (9 page)

One of the negatives of the love of show is that aesthetics can trump practicality. A famous historical example is the uniform worn by French soldiers until early into World War I. It was important for the French to confront the enemy not with stealth but with dignity. They wore bright red trousers and blue coats and caps to announce their presence long after the British, Americans, Italians, and Russians had adopted neutral drab to blend in with their surroundings. It took carnage in the early World War I battles to get the generals to drop this line of thinking.

I learned firsthand how even the ordinary can be made exceptional when I met François Jousse, the lighting engineer for the city of Paris. For more than twenty-five years, Jousse, now in his sixties, was responsible for illuminating more than three hundred monuments, buildings, bridges, and boulevards.

His job was to adorn Paris to make it as beautiful as it could be. In the French way of thinking, the structures had to seduce, not only in the day but especially at night. Even the ugly ones were worthy of dressing up.

Working with a staff of thirty decorative lighting specialists, Jousse had Paris as the object of his passion, and the city succumbed to his charms. Unremarkable buildings glowed, like ordinary-looking women who turn beautiful in candlelight. Architectural details that were lost by day suddenly proclaimed themselves.

In some cities, lampposts are designed to light only the sidewalks and streets, with the surrounding buildings receding into darkness. In much of Paris, however, streetlights are attached to the sides of buildings, highlighting the curves and angles of the structures themselves.

When I met Jousse for the first time, in a café on the Île de la Cité, I expected a buttoned-up bureaucrat in a rumpled suit. Instead, he arrived in baggy corduroy pants and a worn leather jacket spattered with paint. His gray and yellow beard was long and bushy. His skin had the leathery look of someone who had spent too much time outdoors without a hat. He did not remember the last time he had worn a tie. He ordered a big glass of dark beer and chain-smoked foul-smelling Fleur de Savane cigarillos. So began my first lesson on the use of light to make any edifice beautiful.

When Jousse began to devote himself to light in 1981, most of the Paris monuments were either unlighted or illuminated crudely with big spotlights that shone directly onto the facades. Jousse sought wisdom from urban architects and theatrical lighting experts. At a research laboratory, he and a team created fixtures and experimented with the color and intensity of light.

Jousse and I drove around Paris one day in his white Renault compact. He rattled off details about lighting history: in the fourteenth century King Philip V ordered candles to be lighted in three sites in Paris every night; in 1900 Paris earned the nickname “City of Light” with its electrical light displays at the Paris Exposition.

He recalled the time several years earlier when he and a team had been experimenting with light on the Sacré Coeur Basilica in Montmartre. They had colored it mauve. “The priest came running out and ordered us to turn it off,” Jousse said, laughing between puffs on his cigarillo. “We just wanted to have some fun. Sacré Coeur is like an enormous cake with lots of whipped cream. But Paris is a very serious city.”

As the afternoon light began to fade, Jousse drove straight onto the cobblestone walkway at Notre Dame, pushing tourists aside. He wanted to show me the redesigned lighting of the cathedral’s south facade. He pointed out tiny fiber-optic electrical wires tucked into corners and crevices. We entered the cathedral, climbed a private stone staircase to the south roof, then waited for darkness to fall.

For half a century, the only hint of light on the south facade had come from spotlights hidden in phony booksellers’ storage cabinets on the far side of the Seine River. The new lighting scheme allowed spectators to discover the cathedral’s facade slowly, through the power and drama of detail. We did not have to wait long for the southern facade of the cathedral to light up, its pillars, gargoyles, and flying buttresses dressed in white. “Look, the light is stronger at the top, so you feel that you are moving closer to heaven,” Jousse said. “This is not just a monument. It’s a virgin floating above the city.” Shortly afterward, in the distance, the Eiffel Tower began to glitter on the hour. “A visual clock,” he called it, looking at his watch to make sure she was on time.

When the demand for beauty is applied to individuals, it can be oppressive. When a cover story in the magazine
Marianne
posed the question, “Do you have to be good-looking to succeed?” the answer of the experts interviewed was a resounding yes. The director of human resources at a luxury conglomerate said that despite fixed standards for hiring, the beautiful have an advantage. “Because we go so fast, we see so many CV’s…in the end, the decision is based on criteria that are less rational,” she said. “It has something to do with seduction. As though the brain had fallen asleep.” A psychology professor quoted in the story determined that in France, grades can vary between 20 and 40 percent depending on a student’s looks. The secretary-general of a French psychoanalytic and management institute said the pattern of favoritism of the beautiful begins in childhood. “When children are seen as seductive, they will be convinced of their ability to seduce,” he said.

In the world at large, French men feel they have the right to comment publicly on a woman’s looks. At a political meeting in Paron, a small town an hour from Paris, a young man stood up to ask a question of Rachida Dati, the former justice minister. Before he posed it, however, he said, “I find you very, very beautiful.”

She neither ignored him nor told him he was out of line for commenting on her looks. Just the opposite. “Thank you for the compliment!” she said.

French tolerance of judgment and commentary about people’s looks is bound up with the idea of personal attractiveness as a cultivated trait. Despite the emphasis on a seductive appearance, missing out on the gift of natural beauty is far from fatal in France. Like the Eiffel Tower’s filigree of pig iron, a pleasing and stylish appearance—or at least a refined aesthetic sensibility—may be constructed by the plain, the elderly, the less fortunately born.

The sin is not the failure to meet a standard of perfection but the unwillingness to try. It is almost a civic duty to seduce—or if one cannot appear seductive, at least not to take a prominent spot on the public stage. By no means does everyone play along, but what is striking is how many people do. During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in the United States, both men and women in France questioned Bill Clinton’s judgment. That he was sexually aroused by a woman other than his wife was less of a shock than the fact that Monica Lewinsky was not especially attractive—and seemed to lack style and elegance.

Men in public life, too, may be judged on their physical appearance. One reason that Barack Obama appeals to the French is his beauty. I was surprised that men—straight and gay alike—appreciate his good looks even more than women do.

The election of Obama gave the French a new hero. His intelligence and style charmed the elite; his blackness seduced those of Arab and African origin who so often feel invisible. Obama doesn’t even have to work at being attractive. The French like Obama not because he’s hot, but because he’s cool. He is a leader more mysterious than confessional, a fierce guardian of his privacy, the guy who plays hard to get. Even though smoking is politically and culturally incorrect in America, he smokes. In secret.

Jean d’Ormesson, whose reputation as a
grand séducteur
accompanies him into his eighties, contrasted Obama’s seductive power to that of the late president François Mitterrand. Mitterrand, he said, was less naturally seductive than the president of the United States and had to work at it, playing sophisticated games to win over others. By contrast, Obama’s seduction is so immediately obvious that it requires no effort. “Obama is the image of American seduction,” d’Ormesson told me. “He is elegant, he is handsome, he is intelligent.” Whether he is black or white doesn’t even count: “Accidentally, he is black. He is seduction itself…. Very handsome. He is very handsome.”

Jacques Séguéla, the advertising executive, said much the same thing: “Obama—this is the triumph of seduction since his
beauté
makes you forget that he is black. You must not take me for a racist. But this is what is fantastic. His race has been transcended by his
beauté
.”

“What do you mean by his
beauté
?” I asked Séguéla.

“
Beauté
, Obama’s
beauté
, it’s first of all one of gesture,” he said. “His movement is seductive, his way of advancing, the way he looks at you, the extremely discreet play of the hand which is a game of fingers. The way you dress counts in seduction, and he is dressed like Americans of the belle epoque in films of the fifties or sixties…the same cut, the tie that falls a little bit longer, the black shoes. And the real seduction, in the end, is in words.”

The French insistence on seductive appearance also helps to explain the culture clash involving the Muslim veil. In recent years France has been embroiled in an emotional political debate about whether to ban the “total veil,” the all-encompassing garment that covers all but the eyes and is referred to universally as the
burqa
(even though the garment is technically not a
burqa
, which leaves a narrow gauze over the eyes, but a
niqab
, which leaves the eyes uncovered). No more than a few hundred to a few thousand women in all of France wear the garment. But just about every politician in the country seems to have an opinion on it.

In an interview on France Inter radio, François Hollande, the former head of the Socialist Party, trotted out the standard arguments about Islamic dress. First, he said, for a woman to cover herself, especially her entire body and even her face, is un-French because it violates the country’s strict adherence to secular, republican values. Second, such coverage is an affront to a woman’s dignity. Third, for anyone—man or woman—to hide behind a mask poses a security risk.

But then Hollande offered a fourth argument against the total veil, one that evoked aesthetics. No woman, he said, should have to feel herself “assaulted by the sight of another woman being imprisoned in a
burqa
.” And not only women. Men, he added, “must also have the same attitude of revolt.”

In other words, the veil is not pleasing to the eye. Hollande made no mention of the fact that a woman might wear the veil for her own reasons, as a declaration of identity, an expression of religious values, or a refusal to be viewed as a sex object.

I am convinced that Hollande’s objection, which mirrors the larger French opposition to the head scarf, was not motivated solely by concern for the welfare of women but was connected to their appearance. Just as you would not want buildings to be badly lit, you would not want public spaces to be stained with ugliness. The female body should be seen and shown in its best light.

Women and men walking on the street belong to the cityscape. So they should be beautiful, or at least pleasant to look at. That’s why the head scarf and the veil evoke such an emotional response from the French. Claude Habib, a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, argued that the French tradition of gallantry demanded an encounter with the female face, which the veil denies. “The tradition of gallantry presupposes a visibility of the feminine and more precisely a happy visibility, a joy of being visible—the very one that certain young Muslim girls cannot or do not want to show,” she wrote. “The veil interrupts the circulation of coquetry.”

No discussion of beauty and seduction in France is complete without mentioning the woman who has held the status of the most seductive woman in France for more than half a century: Brigitte Bardot. Not the Bardot of today, mind you, but the Bardot of the past, the sex-goddess actress who shocked and enthralled with her performance in Roger Vadim’s film
Et Dieu…créa la femme
(
And God Created Woman
) in 1956, the film that made her an overnight star. Bardot today is in her seventies, overweight, gray-haired, her face sagging and lined from the cruelty of aging and too many summers in the unforgiving sun of southern France. Her twin obsessions are the protection of animals and a hatred of immigrants and Muslims. For an American parallel, imagine James Dean still alive, solitary, wizened, and a gun-toting member of the Tea Party.

Bardot’s power rests in a permanent image that continues to grip the French imagination: the carefree child-woman and symbol of sexual liberation. She introduced a brand of aggressive, sexually supercharged beauty to the world, styled and perfected under Vadim’s management but playing into her own natural inclinations.