THE CLASS WILL COME TO ORDER

FRANCE AND SCHOOL UNIFORMS

The prototypes for French school uniforms.

France is planning to introduce a standard school uniform. If the scheme goes ahead, every student will soon be wearing a blue polo shirt, dark skirt or pants, and a sweater. The government will pay half the estimated cost of 200 Euros, with local governments picking up the rest.

The projected outfit, while not exactly Alexander McQueen, is an improvement on what we had to wear in the ‘fifties as students of Waverley College in suburban Sydney. A grey wool suit was augmented by a shirt, tie, knee socks and -a final indignity – the stiff straw hat known as a boater, an Anglo stab at translating its original French name, canotier.

Waverley College students c. 1955, with boaters.

Students at an adjacent girls’ school fared no better, with pleated mid-calf skirts of dark wool, white shirts, unbecoming black lace-up shoes, and shapeless felt hats. Some still managed to look attractive in the outfit (had girls held the slightest interest to us at the time), and gay friends have since confessed that even the boys’ uniforms induced an erotic twinge, particularly in the version with short pants, but for most of us the bus or tram ride home from school was one long cringe.

The French, of course, applied their imagination to the archetype and came up with one of the cliches of erotica, the teen schoolgirl known as a sucette or lollipop. (Did lycénennes ever wear tartan mini-skirts, white shirts and ties? It hardly matters, so stylized has the outfit become.) In a scandal of the early oughts, it was found that girls from an inner Paris academy were cycling to the Crillon or other four-star hotel after school, bolting their bicycles to the railings, taking a seat in the lounge and waiting for some nice man to buy them a menthe à l’eau and invite them upstairs.   

Some see the uniform proposal as an attempt to further strengthen the law against Islamic head scarves but I doubt that its motives are so sinister. France doesn’t have a class system – at least not one on a scale to compare with that in Britain - but the de Gaulleian principle of “a place for everything, and everything in its place” is implicit everywhere. Bureaucrats across the country will ask themselves “Would the General have approved?” and reach for their rubber stamp.