The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham Read Free Book Online Page B

political rights as their British sisters, they do not wish to give up the experience of being loved for their beauty, sexual power, mystique or indeed any other of the often illusory qualities for which they are admired.
    While the struggle for women’s rights continues to rage in France, it is as if there has been an unspoken pact to keep Eros out of the fray, the received wisdom being that you cannot regulate the bedroom. France’s version of the feminist revolution left untouched the private roles that men and women played. It was only in academic circles that traditional feminine archetypes weredeconstructed in the name of equality. These archetypes, which all centre on the notion of power, exercised or relinquished – and are the stuff that the libido thrives on – remain intact in the private sphere. For in this culture, the libido is not only fun, it is sacred.
    * Obese people make up almost 10 per cent of the population in France versus over 20 per cent in the UK.
    † In France, right up to the Napoleonic Code, a woman was subject to the authority of her father and then her husband, almost to the exclusion of any economic freedom. On marrying, the husband and wife’s assets were automatically combined, and the husband administered this joint estate without the wife’s consent. The Napoleonic Marital Code brought in a new era of economic independence, at least for wealthy women. It provided for the possibility of a prenuptial agreement, which kept the wife’s assets separate from her husband’s. If a wife chose to combine her assets with those of her husband, he was legally accountable to her in the disposal of their fortune. It wasn’t until 1882 under the Married Women’s Property Act that British married women gained access to similar freedoms as their French sisters. Thanks also to Napoleon, French daughters were given the same inheritance rights as their brothers, while England’s primogeniture laws remained intact until 1925.
    ‡ All three of these women would probably refer to themselves as psychoanalysts or philosophers rather than feminist thinkers. Indeed, they might even require a definition of that label before agreeing to it.

4
Truth versus Beauty
Tragedy, Comedy and Historic French Losers
    It did not take me long to realise that the French inhabit a different moral universe to ours, a universe that clearly placed the pursuit of Pleasure and Beauty above notions of Truth and Duty. One episode and its aftermath offered a perfect illustration of the gap between our two world views.
    It was the final of the 2006 World Cup. The French football team had clawed its way from mediocrity to brilliance to find itself in a tantalisingly close final against the Italians. For Zinédine Zidane, undisputed hero of French football, it was the last game of a flawless career. With minutes to go before the final whistle Zidane turned on the Italian defender, Marco Materazzi, and delivered a powerful head-butt to the man’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Denounced by the linesman, Zidane received a red card and was sent off. Fans watched him walk, head bowed, past the World Cup trophy on its stand, and disappear into the changing rooms. In his absence, the French lost to the Italians in a penalty shoot-out.
    In Britain the next day the Sun ’s headline was ‘Zidane’s a hero to Zzero’. For Alan Shearer ‘It was just a moment of madness’, and for the BBC football pundit, AlanHansen, ‘He let himself down, he let his team down and he let his country down.’
    Back in France a very different debate was taking shape, the tone of which was set by the then president, Jacques Chirac, interviewed at the end of the match. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ the president lied, but Zinédine Zidane ‘possesses the greatest human qualities that can be imagined and which are an honour to France’.
    The French media began to speculate, as did the rest of the world, on the exact nature of Materazzi’s taunt.