In fine old American families where tradition holds an honored
place, the wisdom of the ages is passed down from father to son.
One early dictum, when sonny is still in short pants, is the
time-honored, “Never pass up the chance to take a leak.” When he
starts school and has trouble with the inevitable recreation bully,
the advice is likely to be, “The first stiff right to the nose
usually wins.” Then, as adolescence arrives with its raging
hormones, it’s time for delicate, tactful counsel on relations with
the opposite sex. Here the only admonition better than “Always
treat a broad like a lady, and a lady like a broad,” is surely the
classic, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”
The French, of course, do things differently in the area of
gender relations, as in most others. To help us understand their
sly, convoluted approach, we now have
La Séduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (Times
Books, 352 pages, $27) by Elaine Sciolino. A longtime Paris
correspondent for the New York Times, Sciolino holds
that the key to just about everything in France, from romance to
business, style, gastronomy, diplomacy, and politics, is seduction.
We might have suspected as much. Along with élégance, the
most overworked and overused word in the French language is
séduction. No subject is safe from it.
When the pope visited Israel in 2009, for example, the French
press had him “seducing” the Palestinians with a call for an
independent state. Museums try to “seduce” new visitors with
blockbuster exhibits. Milk producers don’t go on strike, they are
said to be on a “seduction mission,” while the interior of a new
car is touted as filled with “the spirit of seduction.” A
politician reaching for first-time voters is trying to “seduce the
young.” And so on, ad infinitum.
In our simple-minded way, we might think this obsession with
seduction means the French are badly in need of a few sessions on
the analysts’ couch. But no, Sciolino explains, this isn’t
necessarily about sex. “In French, the meaning is broader,” she
says. “The French use ‘seduce’ where Americans might use ‘charm’ or
‘engage’ or ‘entertain.’ Seduction in France does not always mean
body contact.” Still, it is always used with the intention of
winning over someone in a given situation, a mental form of
arm-wrestling. As a line in an old film by the great French
director Eric Rohmer goes (young man to young woman), “I love
seduction for the seduction. It doesn’t matter if it succeeds.
Physically, I mean.” At least he wasn’t a flatterer.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we now know, is an extreme example of
le grand séducteur. Long before he went to Washington to
head the International Monetary Fund, many in France quietly
admired him for having such an active, umm, social life. This
didn’t seem to trouble his wife, Anne Sinclair. Asked in
2006, well before last May’s sordid caper in a New York hotel, if
she suffered because of her husband’s reputation, she answered,
“No, if anything I am quite proud! For a politician it’s important
to seduce. As long as I seduce him and he seduces me, that’s good
enough.”
Clearly the French give considerable thought to this. The
celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy told the author,
“Seduction is more than a driving force. Life is seduction.
Civilization is seduction. What distinguishes men from animals is
seduction.” Lévy’s wife, the Franco-American actress Arielle
Dombasle, chimed in, “Seduction is not a frivolous thing. No. It’s
war.”
French schoolchildren learn the tactics and strategy of this
daily social warfare early. One of the first things they get is
that their grades can vary by up to 40 percent depending on their
looks and manner. (The French were shocked by the Monica Lewinsky
affair, but not because of Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Oval
Office; it was her pathetic lack of style they couldn’t take.) As
time goes on, they master the tools of seduction.
One is le regard, a way of locking someone’s eyes with
a deep, smoky look hinting at mysteries to be explored. And never
wink. It turns out that French women not only don’t get fat—they
would rather get hit by a truck than put on pounds — they don’t
wink either. “It disfigures your face,” warns one seduction
expert.
Another weapon is words. Nimble verbal banter is crucial,
conversation being less a means of imparting information than a
form of stroking. The frontal approach is to be avoided at all
costs, being just too, too vulgar. The voice is kept soft
and low — which is why Americans in Paris often seem loud to the
natives. Private coaches can be hired to teach professional women
how to eliminate unsophisticated chirpiness from their voices, and
men to cultivate those irresistible lower tones.
Adolescents from good families can polish their seduction
technique in the rallyes, ultra-chic parties where they
can mix with their own kind without interference from the riffraff.
Besides engaging in subtle banter with plenty of double entendre
while locking eyes, they learn the fine art of the
baisemain and its inflexible rules: never kiss a gloved
hand or the hand of a young girl; kiss only the hand of a married
woman; do so only indoors. And the lips should not touch
skin, merely come close.
The basics acquired, apprentice séducteurs turn to the necessary
accessories, starting with an alluring perfume. The theory is that
the seduction target will be lured by irrational feelings inspired
by a subtle — never, please, strong or obvious — scent, and be
driven by emotion. Thus the French spend more than $40 per man,
woman, and child annually on fragrances, more than any other people
in the world. (Americans spend about $17 on average.)
Just as important is the right lingerie, for which French women
spend nearly 20 percent of their clothing budget. The goal here is
the peek-a-boo effect of concealment, or, as the connoisseurs of
seduction say, hiding to show better. Arielle Dombasle, for one,
declares she would “never, never, never” appear entirely naked
before her husband, Bernard-Henri. Such gaucherie would be
anti-erotic.
Lucky man, you might think. But not on his trips to the United
States. Lévy, who spent months traveling in the U.S. to
research a book on Alexis de Tocqueville’s time there, finally gave
up on American women. “They don’t like being seduced,” he concludes
with a shrug and little moue of disappointment. “I realized that in
the U.S. I had to force myself to avoid showing a woman that I
found her seductive, because I knew that instead of creating
complicity between us, it would create a barrier.”
FRENCH POLITICIANS HAVE TO BE considered seductive. It goes with
the territory. Jacques Chirac did everything he could while mayor
of Paris, and later president, to promote the idea that he was hot.
His baisemain technique was notoriously defective —
instead of letting the kiss properly hover in the air, he planted
it moistly on the knuckles — but no complaints were recorded. He
deliberately let it be rumored that he had had the comely Italian
actress Claudia Cardinale as mistress. True or not, the idea that
he was a practiced if hasty ladies’ man was firmly held by the fair
sex. “Chirac?” whispered knowledgeable Parisiennes. “Three minutes.
Shower included.”
Giscard d’Estaing also worked hard on his image as an
irresistible male. During his seven-year term as president, he
boasted to Sciolino, “I was in love with 17 million French women.”
One technique was to stare at them individually with a smoldering
look when working a room or a crowd. “Was there some method or
trick in this to influence and seduce?” he mused. “Presumably.”
Giscard later published a novel relating the violent passion
between a French head of state and a British royal, suggesting he
might have had an affair with Princess Diana. Le tout Paris
giggled.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is an exception to the rule. Indeed,
the most likely answer to the frequent question, “Why don’t the
French like him?” is that he was slow in mastering the art of
appearing seductive. It didn’t help that this second wife, Cécilia,
dumped him weeks after he took office, leaving Sarkozy, a
teetotalling workaholic who’s not much fun anyway, looking lonely
and forlorn.
Even the woman who followed his presidential campaign for a year
before the 2007 election and then wrote a book about it, Yasmina
Reza, was surprised that he hadn’t tried anything. “It’s almost
insulting to spend an entire year with a man,” she later said,
“without him trying to seduce you.” But things have improved since
he wooed and married Carla Bruni, pop singer, former model, and
indisputable prize catch for any seducer. She loyally fosters his
new image with comments like, “His physique, his charm, his
intelligence seduced me.”
It may well be that Voltaire, that archetypal Frenchman, was
right when he wrote, “It is not enough to conquer, one must also
seduce.” But to those of us woefully lacking in the seductive arts,
it will always seem that there is something sneaky, deceptive,
manipulative — in a word, phony — about seduction. It
is, after all, an insecure way of getting around people rather than
being upfront.
Even Sciolino, who admires French seductiveprowess, admits it
has its drawbacks. “Seduction is the best that France has to
offer,” she concludes. “When it works, it’s magic.…But it can also
entail inefficiency, fragility, ambiguity, and a process that at
any time can end badly. When the game comes up against the cold,
hard wall of reality, when it reveals itself, seduction fails.”
Q.E.D. There couldn’t be a better argument for the superiority
of liquor.
