On being ‘Originale’, pink leopard skin trousers and social unrest à la française.

Nearly twenty years before moving into the granite house, after the Breton fisherman had stopped travelling to fish cod in Canada, I arrived in Rennes, France aged twenty-one. I emerged from an underground car park, in the middle of a flower market, with a suitcase, three bags stuffed with papers and an Olivetti travel typewriter.  Before moving,  I had pictured my days on the other side of the Channel. Across this stretch of water I could write, drink treacly coffee from tiny cups (I had never done this) and smoke Gitanes blondes, eased from their flat white packet  decorated with the silhouette of a Spanish ‘gitane’ woman playing a tambourine.  Living amongst Gallic poets, thinkers and philosophers, my sophisticated life would be romantic and free. This cliched fantasy has proved to be entirely true and false, a mirage that has hidden a verity, like an endless mise-en-abime.

The evening of my arrival, nearly three decades ago, I went to my first French student party in Rennes (the capital of Brittany). When I walked in, people were talking seriously in the immaculate living-room. In the kitchen, rows of saucepans hung, shining bright, in a line on the wall. Previously I’d been living in a shared London flat. For my friend B every horizontal surface was an ashtray, and she had developed a taste for pipe tobacco. The washing up was never done, underwear fell dirty on the floor. After a spontaneous visit from our landlady, we were declared a health risk. Yet here in France, the student’s space was clean, well-arranged and inhabitable.

At the party, a French girl with an impeccable bun, in well-fitted jeans and top, handed me a glass of wine ( from a matching set), half filled with a touch of red. In the UK,  I had gulped Merlot from brimming mugs. As I stood awkwardly, explaining I had just arrived in France, she looked over my pink leopard skin trousers, red lipstick and sparkly top (my party clothes) and sneered “tu es originale!” I was confused, did she mean I was cool or not? At weekends, my friend B and I had put on sequins and danced in clubs, yet the French woman’s stare seemed to say I was over-(read badly) dressed. Original in English was positive, yet, I quickly learnt in France it often meant show-offish or in-your-face. ‘Originale’ could be a euphemism for bad taste. Freedom of expression, I learnt that night at the party, was not the same à la française.

Yet, the following day, when I tried to attend a philosophy class, I discovered the students had filled the whole university, each corridor and lecture hall with thousands of stacked chairs. “It’s like May 68” a lecturer exclaimed joyfully, unable to open a barricaded door. Hundreds of students, he told me, had stopped going to lessons, and soon would be joined by the teachers. As I thought back to my own UK university marches ( involving a pitiful 40 of us) I learnt that the current French demonstrations stemmed from a government decision to let employers cut the legal minimum wage by between 25%- 70% for unskilled workers under age 25 in return for training.

In the days that followed, social unrest spread across the country. In Brittany, the fishermen left their boats in the harbours, occupied Rennes’s streets, and let off flares during violent demonstrations. The Breton parliament burnt. From my new flat in France, I saw smoke rising from piles of burning tyres, got calls from my family “They are rioting in your town!” In the end, after weeks and months of unrest, the French prime minister bowed down, and I (to my regret) stopped wearing the pink leopard skin trousers.

In France, I had discovered a culture with a deep-rooted taste for revolt, but learnt that being free was often equated with being free with good taste. Everyday life in France was regulated by strict social codes. The Académie Française controlled language and what was said. In those first months, I often longed to eat crisps for breakfast, slump around in dirty knickers and smoke a cigar.  Yet, as time passed, I discovered a rigour to defend social rights, a protection of art, of health, of people. When I studied philosophy, I learnt to structure an essay with antiquated, yet elegant, precise rules. In our capitalist free-for-all world, I found a laudable refusal to submit. This is a slow-moving culture that still protects and cares. France is a country of wildness, poetry and order. Taking initiative is a dirty word. Revolutions can be held, but it must be done right.

.(Obviously I still own the trousers!)