The Truth about French Women
Marie-Morgane Le Moel
Vintage, $32.99
Australia's fascination with French culture, and especially their women, bewildered Marie-Morgane Le Moel when she lived in Australia.
Our bookshops were full of glossy titles about why French women didn't get fat, how to entertain like French women, why their children didn't throw tantrums.
"I'm still not sure why anyone would be interested in how we raise our children, but I was very interested in why people were so fascinated with us," Le Moel says from Paris, where she works as a freelance journalist.
"The way people talked to me and looked at me made me realise these stereotypes mattered. It was quite nice but it's really not true."
She embarked on a two-year research project to identify where the notion of French women as slim, designer-clad, sexually sophisticated free spirits came from, and how true this archetype was.
The results are captured in her new book, The Truth about French Women.
Le Moel is not new to writing about the colourful confusion between French and English speakers. Her first book, the memoir Confessions of a Lazy French Cook, explored her marriage to the Australian journalist and historian Paul Ham, and the many cultural hurdles she clambered over when she lived in Sydney for several years.
To understand how French people could be reduced to stereotypes, Le Moel pondered what stereotypes French women had of others.
"Italian women are the pinnacle of perfection. English women we believe to be very open-minded sexually, and Australian women are all about the beach. They seem silly when you say them out loud."
The Truth about French Women traverses a wide range of cultural quirks and their causes to establish what defines French women. It skips from the beauty of Brigitte Bardot to the French Revolution, from sexual peculiarities to the lingering influence of the Catholic Church.
Le Moel sketches moments of her life embroidered with observations and anecdotes from friends and beds these among statistics to give a sense of everyday French life and the female experience.
But the most potent explanations and antidotes to stereotypes she found in history, and she spent many more months trawling through library archives than she expected.
Her exploration homes in on women as diverse as martyr Joan of Arc, designer Coco Chanel and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, celebrating their ability to criticise and discuss, which Le Moel describes as an essential characteristic of French women.
Buried in the history books she also discovered lesser-known rule-breaking French women such as Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier from the 1700s.
Le Tonnelier married young, to a high-ranking aristocrat she did not profess to love. Joined by friendship rather than passion, the couple had three children and several lovers each, spending most of their lives amicably but apart as he served in the military.
As her children grew, Le Tonnelier spent more time at salons, where her singing and conversational skills were much in demand.
She studied for several years under a famous scientist, who was briefly her lover. She became so enraptured with her new knowledge that she often disguised herself as a man to gain entry to Gradot, a men-only café salon on the Seine.
Le Moel says this kind of daring, and the formative role of salon culture that soon opened to women also, have created a culture in which both genders are always expected to play their ever-evolving roles.
"So much of who and how we are is related to the salons, particularly our preference for mixed events and mixed everything," Le Moel said.
"We don't really have 'girls' nights' in France. Or maybe some do, but almost all French women would be thinking it would be nicer with some men there too."
