SCENES DE BARRICADES by Eugene Delacroix, 1830.
So this tourist is eating his lunch in a French restaurant when he sees a fly in his soup. He calls the waiter.
“There’s a fly in my soup.”
The waiter, not speaking English, looks blank.
“A fly,” says the patron, pointing to the bowl. He scrabbles in his limited French vocabulary. “Un mouche.”
The waiter sneers. “Pas ‘un’ mouche, m’sieur. Une mouche. Feminin.”
The patron peers at the fly with new interest. “Blimey,” he says respectfully. “You’ve got good eyesight.”
That “fly” is feminine in French while “ant” – fourmi – is masculine lifts the lid on one of the most troublesome aspects of the language.
At first, the habit of designating each noun as masculine or feminine seems insane, an antique hangover that should have been tossed out a century ago, along with the jus primae noctis and hanging, drawing and quartering. But after a while, one sees it has a fiendish sort of logic.
Dividing the world into male and female allows the French to re-assign importance among those things and institutions to whom significance was unfairly doled out by nature. Concepts like Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, not to mention Love, Death, Bread and Wine, can become, because they've been given a subtle new gender distinction, an especially French variant on the type, and therefore unique. Bread is just bread but le pain – masculine – becomes a Concept.
Because Liberty is feminine, New York has that enormous statue. It also justifies Emma Lazarus’s compassionate poem on the base – “send me your teeming masses…” etc. Would a male Liberty be so accommodating? And Death, usually depicted in the West as male: eg, the Grim Reaper, is feminine in French, which permitted Jean Cocteau to show her in his film Orphée as an elegant Maria Casares in a Pierre Balmain tailleur.
Foods are almost all masculine: bread, wine, cheese. But all the arts are feminine. So is The Republic, Revolution and, of course La Belle France its... sorry, her self.
Feminising France gave artists almost carte blanche to remake its image to their taste. Britain will never be sure if it wants to see itself represented by John Bull or Britannia. The United States has Uncle Sam round its neck forever, a stereotype of avuncular empire trotted out by every cartoonist anxious to mock the US of A.
The official image of the French Republic, however, is a woman. Her name is Marianne, though nobody quite agrees why. The manner in which she’s depicted owes something to Eugéne Delacroix’s painting known as Liberty Leading the People. It shows a woman in a Phrygian cap – and not much else – waving a tricolor and leading the mob over a barricade. I assumed, wrongly, that it showed an episode from the revolution of 1789 but in fact it wasn’t painted until 1830, was simply called Scènes de Barricades, and referred to an entirely different uprising.
Whatever the reason, someone decided she would make a useful depiction of the Republic. It was decreed that her likeness should be displayed everywhere; on coins and stamps, and, as a bust, in all town halls and public buildings, including schools..
Every few years, someone in the Elysée decides a new Marianne is needed and a sculpture is commissioned for distribution to all the mairies in France. Who’s to model for it is something of a hot potato. Over the years it has been a movie star – Brigitte Bardot in 1970, Michèle Morgan in 1972, Catherine Deneuve in 1985 – and a fashion model - Inès de la Fressange in 1989 and Laetitia Casta in 2000. In 1991, in a break with tradition, the model was Anne Sinclair, one of those TV “personalities” grouped generically under the nicely dismissive term speakerines. Another TV figure, Évelyne Thomas, got the job in 2011, against competition from actresses Sophie Marceau, Marion Cotillard and Vanessa Paradis.
Catherine Deneuve as Marianne.
I’m sure the bureaucrats who make the choice hope that the models in their private lives conform to the high ideals of the Republic but the fact that they don’t is probably a better reflection of the shaky moral foundation on which it rests. Brigitte Bardot’s crowded love life and slightly cranky obsession with animal welfare is well documented. Anne Sinclair married one-time presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose political ambitions expired in a messy sex scandal. As for Vanessa Paradis, she served her time in the trenches as wife to Johnny Depp.
How long before a man becomes the model for Marianne? Nobody has yet opened that can of worms, since they know who would be the unanimous first choice. He’s been dead for a few years but Johnny Hallyday, France’s answer to Elvis, remains to most of France the very embodiment of Gallic masculinity. Is France ready for that pompadour, that attitude, that sneer, glowering at them from every mairie? Would it mean “La Republique” becoming “Le Republique”? Well, it’s increasingly possible, in the era of female presidents and prime ministers everywhere, that a woman might be elected France’s President. The mills of equality grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.