La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (2 page)

Armed with the realization that seduction is a driving force in French life, I felt as if I had put on a special pair of 3-D glasses that made confusing shapes snap into sharp focus. It suddenly became clear that the French impulse to seduce applies to many features of French life. The tools of the seducer—anticipation, promise, allure—are powerful engines in French history and politics, culture and style, food and foreign policy, literature and manners. Like much else in France, the power and influence of seduction are profoundly centralized. Paris, the capital of France and home to French corporations, media, fashion designers, and intellectuals, is also the place where seduction and its hold on French life are most palpable. Wherever I go in the country, all roads seem to lead back to Paris, and in much the same way, the cultural imperative of seduction that is nurtured in Paris remains a potent force even in the grim suburbs and the distant countryside.

A key component of seduction—and French life—is process. The rude waiter, the dismissive sales clerk, the low-ranking bureaucrat who demands still another obscure document is playing a perverted version of a seduction game that glorifies lingering.

When I decided to explore the meaning of seduction
à la française
more systematically, as the French themselves might do, I began with words. I set up a Google alert for the words
séduire
,
séduction
, and
séduit
in the French media. I sometimes got as many as a dozen hits a day.

Then I did an analytical study of these alerts over a three-month period. My researcher and I found 636 occurrences of the words falling into nine categories. Some were predictable, like love/sex, fashion/style, and tourism; others were more unexpected, including the seductive powers of presidents, commerce, gastronomy, the arts, “anti-seduction” (people and items lacking in seductive techniques), and the military-sounding
opération séduction.
(In English,
opération séduction
becomes something tamer: “charm offensive.”)

The two largest categories, with more than ninety articles apiece, were
opération séduction
and commerce (the selling of “seductive” items). These were closely followed by the arts (seduction of the general public), with eighty entries. The love/sex category had a meager thirty-four, tourism twenty-five, fashion fifteen. “Anti-seduction” tied with gastronomy at eleven. The presidents category was quite small, with Barack Obama accounting for ten and Nicolas Sarkozy with just two.

Seduction appeared to be omnipresent in the French consciousness. During a trip to Israel in May 2009, the pope was said to have “seduced the Palestinians” with his call for the creation of a Palestinian state. Museums wanted to “seduce” new visitors. Sarkozy’s political strategy was to “seduce the young.” The milk producers of northern France were not simply on strike; they were on a “seduction mission” to negotiate with milk processors and to explain to consumers why they were blocking trucks and collection points. The interior of the Citroën DS automobile was filled with the “spirit of seduction.” The Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi “knew how to seduce in using all of the modern techniques” of politics. By far the most “seductive” selling items were computers and phones; when the sales of Dell laptops declined, it was because the company had “a hard time seducing.”

The word is also deployed ironically, sometimes with dead-serious effect. The left-leaning newspaper
Libération
once ran a two-page article illustrated with a photo of a French soldier in full battle gear and pointing a large automatic weapon under the headline “Afghanistan: The French in Seduction Mode.” I thought nothing would top that headline until another one popped up in the same newspaper about the mass execution of eight thousand Bosnians by Serbs in Srebrenica during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It read, “Srebrenica: Serbia Offers Its Apologies to Seduce the EU.”

As for
opération séduction
, it surfaced in the broadest range of topics—from golf to high schools, from agriculture to doctors, from the environment to business. One newspaper headline read, “
Opération séduction pour draguer les sédiments
” from polluted harbors. Literally, it means, “
Opération séduction
to extract sediments.” The article opened with the sentence, “Not sexy, sediments?” It explained that the region was trying to sell its dredging and land treatment plan to the central government. But
draguer
also means “to flirt with,” so the headline could be read as: “
Opération séduction
to flirt with sediments.”

The word
séduction
no longer surprised. It overwhelmed.

I reached out to French writers and thinkers and quickly found that my new subject had special hazards—like the time I interviewed Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher and essayist who has written extensively about the disorderly state of relations between men and women. We were in the café of a grand Paris hotel, and the closeness of the encounter coupled with the word
séduction
created unexpected intimacy. I put on reading glasses and a serious look, clenched my knees together, rested my hands in my lap, and asked him about his daughter. I wanted to avoid the appearance of flirting. (I shouldn’t have worried. I ran into him months later at a private film screening, and he didn’t even recognize me.)

When I told French women about my investigations of seduction in their culture, they got it right away. And they joined in with complicity and lightness. When I described my project to French men, by contrast, there were two reactions. Some got a deer-in-the-headlights look, as if to say, “Get me away from this pathetic, crazed American woman of a certain age.” Others jumped in with a bit too much enthusiasm.

One morning I uttered the words “seduction” and “France” to a museum curator as we were walking down a curving staircase. He stopped short, grabbed the banister, and leaned over me so excitedly that I had to step back. “Seduction—maybe it’s chance!” he exclaimed. “You can find the man of your life, the woman of your life, in a restaurant, in a café. It starts by an innocent, stupid sentence. ‘Can you pass me the salt?’ ‘Can you pass me the carafe of water?’ And then, a look!”

Early in my research, I was dealt a cruel blow. I was informed that while I could try to play the game, I was destined to lose. The bearer of this grim message was a former president of France, not Chirac this time but one of his predecessors, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Our meeting at his home on a quiet street in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris was for the most part pleasant. He tried to establish common ground between us. He told me the story of his visit to my hometown of Buffalo, New York, when he was twenty-three. He had met “a nice, very sweet girl” on the
Queen Mary
crossing the Atlantic. She went to Vassar College and lived in Buffalo. She had become his girlfriend and at one point, he had visited her home. They had toured Niagara Falls. Giscard confessed his love for America. He said little about its inhabitants but professed an attraction to its vast open spaces. He even fantasized about buying a ranch someday in the Southwest.

That gave me the opening I was looking for. I knew I couldn’t be so brazen as to ask a former president to explain France through the prism of seduction. So I took a more indirect route. Suppose he was having dinner on such a ranch with a group of Americans, and one of them posed the question, “Mr. President, could you explain to us how we can understand your country?”

Giscard is now in his eighties, and age has made him ever more certain that he possesses the truth. He resisted the temptation to play the game with me. “My answer is clear—you cannot,” he said. “I have never met an American, never, who has really understood what drives French society.”

France, he said, operates as “an extremely strange system, impenetrable from the outside, rather agreeable to live in, but totally different from anywhere else.”

“The French do not practice hospitality at all,” he went on. “No. They can be generous. They can say, ‘There are Americans here. We have to do something. Let’s invite them over.’ But after one time, it’s over. You’ve done your duty. The idea that an American is going to penetrate the system? No. Ours is an old, extraordinarily fragmented society, with thousands of small strata in which everyone is inferior to someone and superior to someone else. There can be reciprocal acceptance but not the desire to come together. The French want to stay in their cultural and educational milieu and certainly do not want to change.”

I was
déstablisée
—shaken.

When I later told Charles Bremner, the veteran Paris correspondent for the
Times
of London, about the conversation, he urged me not to be discouraged. “Maybe the French aren’t as perceptive about themselves as outsiders are,” he said. “Seduction is so much a part of them that maybe they don’t think about it. Like goldfish not knowing what water is like.”

And so, I dared to venture on.

For centuries, the most perceptive experts on seduction in France have been its female courtesans. More important than their youth, beauty, and sexual performance have been their experience and maturity. Therefore, I sought advice from the two women I consider to be France’s icons of the modern world of courtesans (without the sex part): Arielle Dombasle and Inès de la Fressange.

The women have a lot in common. They have Latin roots: La Fressange’s mother is Argentinian; Dombasle lived in Mexico as a child. That has given them the air of outsiders who had to master the rules. Both are past fifty and have been performing for more than three decades. They move with the swiftness and fluidity of cats—Dombasle as an actress, singer, and dancer, La Fressange as the former supermodel for Chanel. Both are impossibly tall and thin, with bodies that long to be stared at. Both are smart businesswomen who understand the need to continue to market their allure and their beauty. They are professionals: aware of their power and how to use it. And they are national treasures: each has been awarded the Legion of Honor.

The main difference between them is the way each has chosen to promote her look. Dombasle seems to have been worked on and is always done up. Her allure comes from her resemblance to a gorgeous alien. La Fressange, a mother of two, often wears jeans and loafers, and she smokes. She has retained the innocent air of a much younger woman.

Over tea one afternoon, Dombasle compared seduction to a battlefield of communication. “Seduction is largely transmitted through words—what you say and when you keep quiet,” she said. “That’s the key. Voilà.”

I had no idea what she meant. I asked her to explain. “You must choose your words carefully as you would in a war,” she said, “The way you seduce depends on whether you want to win or you want to lose.”

It could be a campaign to weaken your opponent by injecting an element of surprise, for example. “You could play against type to throw your adversary off balance,” she said. “Seduction is not a frivolous thing. No. It’s war.”

I was encouraged. “I know war,” I said. “I was a war correspondent. I don’t understand seduction, but I understand war.”

Dombasle and I had found common ground. She explained that this war is nonviolent. The woman warrior must avoid the sort of traumatic exposure that comes with vulnerability in front of the adversary. Dombasle has not hesitated to bare her breasts for a
Paris Match
cover or for a revue in front of hundreds of people at the Crazy Horse cabaret. But she insisted that nakedness is a vulnerability that must be used with care. Apparently, on the battlefield of the bed, the rules are different. “Nudity is extremely violent to gaze at,” she said. “I would never walk naked in front of my husband. Never, never, never.”

“So you’re only nude in the shower?” I asked.

“I’m nude when I’m alone, and I’m nude when I’m in his arms, but never in a sort of casually stupid gesture of the morning or whatever. Never.”

“So nudity is not something trivial?”

“Of course not. But we know that.”

How do you know something like that?
I wondered.

I told her how different it was in the United States, where many women feel liberated and sexy walking around the bedroom in the nude. I thought that perhaps her insistence on the value of concealment was an affectation of an aging sex symbol struggling to cling to her youth. A young French journalist from my office was with us, so I turned to her and asked, “If you were in a love relationship, and you were getting out of bed to go into the bathroom, you would not be totally nude?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s not only prudishness. It’s just, you know…”

I too should never be nude in front of my husband, Dombasle advised. “You shouldn’t,” she said. “Otherwise, he won’t buy you lunch.”

She had now warmed to the subject. “The relationship to nudity, the relationship to love, the relationship to men, the relationship to women—all this carries great complexity and great danger,” she said. “I have felt my whole life that it is extremely positive to engage in combat and rule over one’s own life.”

Her advice about my work was similar: I should be a modern-day courtesan who makes full use of the weapons of my profession. “You are a serious journalist, truly a journalist who represents strength after the liberation of women,” she said. “You have succeeded with weighty work about politics and diplomacy, with solid things. So now it will be very interesting for you to reveal that there is another woman inside of you, who was born once you came into contact with France.”

But I have never been one of those women who dreams of taking a dizzying carousel ride of passion and learning colloquial French with the help of mysterious Gallic men. I love to read those fictional and real-life romantic confections about leaving a job and a bad relationship behind in the United States and discovering good sex and even better coffee with an experienced, long-waisted, velvet-voiced, poetry-spouting French man. That doesn’t mean I can do it.