A point of view: Sex and the French
Press reports about the French president's complicated love life highlight the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic attitudes towards sex, adultery, but above all appetite, writes Adam Gopnik.
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Whenever a French man of state has sex with someone not his wife, people call me up and ask why he did it. When I say people do, I really mean journalists (a sub-species whose personhood is sometimes in doubt) and I suppose I really mean newspaper editors and radio producers (a still more dubious class). But they do call, and they do ask. This is simply because I lived in France for some years and have written a lot about life there, and the false assumption is made that I am intimately expert on all its corners, including those obscure from my view. This is a version of the popular journalist's "fallacy of omniscience by proximity". I'm sure that anyone who ever wrote from Korea gets similar calls: "You lived there, right? You must have often seen out-of-favour relatives being eaten alive by ravenous dogs? Can't you tell our listeners something about it?"
So, though I know nothing, or damn little, of the specific habits and sex acts of French presidents (when a French statesman thinks of having illicit love, his next thought is not "I must call Gopnik to share my feelings and get his view") still, I do have a view about President Hollande's recent activities, and his supposed tryst with the actor Julie Gayet.
In this instance, of course, this is a case of a man having sex with someone not his wife because he had, in fact, no wife not to be faithful to (if that makes Parisian sense), only a series of apparently increasingly embittered partners and some kids. As I say, I claim no expertise about it, but I do have a view on it, and it is a double one that I shall inexpertly but passionately, if not illicitly, unpack for you now. And that is that the good French principle of a right to privacy against all comers, is not quite the same thing as a right to pleasure before all else.
To begin with, I think the French view of sex and life is essentially right and ought to be universally applicable: Sex with children or by force is wrong, and the rest is just the human comedy, unfolding, as it will. Puritanism is a sin against human nature, and the worst of it is that puritanism is the most leering and prurient of world views. Far from wanting to keep sex in the private sphere, the puritans can't wait to drag it out in public. Puritans are the least buttoned-up people in the world. They can't wait to pin a scarlet A for adultery on someone's clothing, or hold a public humiliation ritual.
Nothing could be more illustrative of this than the tone of outraged indignation directed by British tabloid journalists at their reluctant French press equivalents in the past week. "What is it with these people?" the Brit journalists keep saying, speaking of the French ones. "Why do they refuse to invade the privacy of someone they've never met, or hang around all night to grab a few illicit pictures, causing immense pain to some stranger's wife and children, in order to obsess over a sexual affair of a kind they wish they were having themselves? And they call themselves journalists!"
Well, France is not a puritanical society - it accepts that human appetites for sex and food are normal, or "normale", to use a word much prized there, and that attempts to suppress either, will make men and women nervous wrecks at least. French presidents have love affairs. President Mitterrand had not just a wife and a mistress but two entire families (which reminds me of the old vaudeville joke: What's the penalty for bigamy? Two wives). President Sarkozy famously switched first-dames in mid-administration, beginning with the ferocious Cecelia and ending with the beaming and beautiful Carla.
But in truth, puritanical societies are less morally alert, because the puritanical societies have the judgments pre-packaged and their hypocrisies, too. In France however, the moral rights and wrongs, I've learned, are adjudicated case-by-case. I recall a Parisian woman whose husband was ill but whose lover had a stroke - which, she wondered, demanded her attention more? The circumstance might have seemed absurd, but the reasoning was anything but amoral. Indeed, the French movie director Eric Rohmer's great films are called "moral tales" exactly because they are all about the unsettled nature of desire - about whether, say, the sight of a teenage girl's knee on the beach is worth cancelling a wedding over. Morality may be permanent, but sexual ethics among adults are situational - they depend on this knee at this moment on this beach, and on all the other knees nearby. The people so engaged have to think morally, rather than just pantomiming its practice, as we Anglo-Saxons (a term that in French usage includes New York Jews and London Muslims)
