Paul from Paris

Diesel, the jeans maker, has launched a new campaign. I noticed it in Paris, and photographed its billboards, along an entire platform of the métro. (As you can tell from the photos, the wall of the métro platform is curved.)

Diesel’s campaign has a tagline: Be stupid.

In France, the slogans are written in English, translated into French word-for-word in small print.

In French, I’m confident that the slogan doesn’t work; French people don’t want to be stupid. And as an American, I can’t think of a positive connotation to “stupid”.

From Diesel promotional materials, being “stupid” has something to do with living intensely and without care. It has nothing to do with being unintelligent or slow or dim-witted.

Musical group The Black Eyed Peas sang “let’s get stupid” on their hit “Let’s Get Retarded” from the album Elephunk; the song was subsequently re-released with the title “Let’s Get It Started“. I understood “stupid” in this case to suggest being inebriated or high, but maybe I’m reading too much into the lyrics. Perhaps this song matches the meaning sought by Diesel.

Maybe Diesel wants to appropriate “stupid” by using it ironically, much like people of color (among themselves) use the word “Negro”, or homosexuals use “gay” or “queer”.

As an American in Paris, here’s something I never stop noticing: French people are thin.

What I notice most are waist sizes: men seem to wear trousers sized for teens, and women seem especially thin-waisted. I’m not alone in this observation. Others have noticed, and made best-sellers from their investigations.

The French instititute for preventive health and education (French acronym: INPES) has just come out with a survey –the third in a series– with data on eating and exercise. It’s a serious work, with a lot of data.

Where relative thinness is concerned, three points struck me:

1. French people don’t snack. Only 5% of French people (age 15-75) eat repeatedly outside three daily meals. (There’s a definition issue here: having one snack doesn’t count, but eating twice outside meal times counts, for the French, as “snacking”.) The result is generation and age-sensitive: close to 10% of those age 12-25 snack, compared to 2.8% of those age 55-75.
2. French people eat at home. Images of cafés and restaurants aside, most French people eat at home most of the time. Specifically, 65% of French people, age 15 to 75, eat lunch at home. (More than 92% eat breakfast at home and 87% eat dinner at home.) When you consider only people who work, a majority –55.9%– eat lunch at home. Most French people mostly eat home-cooked meals, at home, with their family.
3. French people don’t drink often. The stereotype of French people downing glasses of wine also doesn’t exactly reflect how people live. Only 37.4% of French people (age 15-75) had one or more drinks (with alcohol) the day before they were interviewed. This percentage has fallen consistently over the past decade –44.7% had had at least one drink the day before being surveyed in 1996– and has fallen most for people over 35. This point struck me less for what it says about alcohol and drinking than for its insights into hidden calories.

More than 120 people –men, women, children, whole families– washed up on a beach in Corsica. They were first given shelter in a nearby gymnasium. Then they were hastily moved to a handful of cities in France and locked up. As the authorities had acted without any legal basis, judges soon ruled unlawful the detention or retention of the new arrivals, who were released.

The new arrivals say that they are Kurds, subject to persecution in their homeland; they intend to seek asylum in France. In addition to administrative assistance, they benefit from temporary lodging in hotels, paid for by the Red Cross or the public purse.

In telling this story, I’m concerned that media in Europe have dramatized too much and failed to provide helpful context. Here are my concerns:

1. As reported, this story will be a boon to the National Front, which views immigration as a problem in need of urgent and forceful action. The contrast could not be greater between the solicitude shown to the new arrivals and the often indifferent treatment by government that ordinary French people encounter. Widely reported references to the offer of free lodging, in hotels, will certainly sound unfair to the many French households that struggle to ecure affordable housing.
2. This anecdote does injustice to a long and honorable asylum policy. France can be proud of a tradition of granting asylum to persecuted and stateless people from around the world. Rules may not always be applied, or justly applied, but the humanitarian policy deserves admiration. This having been said, asylum is a special case, distinct from immigration in general. Much of the reporting I see in Europe seems to confuse or conflate asylum-seekers with other immigrants. Some of this may be attributable to migrants themselves, who sense that a humanitarian case may be their best argument. But these choices do not, for me, justify reports on the Corsican arrivals’ “claims”, the itinerary of their travels, or inoperative coastline radar (that would have corroborated the new arrivals’ story, or permitted a hypothetical interception).
3. This story highlights problems with European Union asylum policies, problems that call out for creative solutions but that linger due to insufficient awareness. In the European Union, uniform rules require a migrant to seek asylum in the EU country that he or she first entered. Although many migrants intend to travel to the UK or to Germany, many first enter the EU in Greece or in Italy. These southern countries find themselves subject to a strong migrant influx and tend to adopt expeditive policies. One reason why the Corsican story received attention is that arrival in Europe on a French shore is rare.

I had the good fortune to attend the Salon internationale de la lingerie.

This trade show –which I understand to be the largest in the world devoted to women’s lingerie– is held in Paris. This is appropriate, as French women reportedly are the world leaders in lingerie consumption. It’s a € 2.5 billion market.

But the French woman’s average annual lingerie budget is down, to €93.

In prior years, younger women (15-34) were the top lingerie buyers. This makes sense: changing tastes, evolving personal situations, maternity. But in 2009, the top lingerie buyers in France were –surprise!– women age 45-54. Younger women are actually spending less than they used to.

Apart from these figures –all of which were supplied in materials provided by the trade show itself– the women’s lingerie profession struck me as unusually mum about matters financial, treating sales figures like state secrets. The Institut français de la mode offers information, mostly at prices in excess of an annual French lingerie budget. The French trade association site makes available some data, from 2005.

Unfazed by stunning displays of innovative and inventive intimate apparel, I took the organizers at their word when they spoke of a sector in crisis.

If women’s lingerie purchases are down, perhaps men can help revive the sector, by buying gifts? Industry insiders laughed at this; only one man in seven has ever bought a woman lingerie (including pyjamas). Here’s the lowdown: these men tend to be older, fifty-plus, and they tend to splurge on pricier sets. I have not been able to find data to back this up, but several people in the industry told me that women are much more likely to buy men’s underwear as a gift. (socks!)

Finally, an enigma: the women’s lingerie industry is certain –absolutely certain– that most women –at least two out of three– wear the wrong bra size. But can so many women really be wrong? And if they are, might the problem rest with sizes or sizing on offer?  And what has the lingerie industry done to make it less likely that their customers purchase an incorrect size?

(photos courtesy Salon International de la Lingerie)

Last week, a trio of young men zig-zagged along the avenue Foch, in front of the town hall in Woippy, a town in eastern France. It was about 1:30 a.m.

The men weren’t in a car; all three were riding a single motorscooter (a lightweight, lower-powered motorcycle, usually able to carry, at most, one driver and one passenger). None wore a helmet.

The police took note, turned on the patrol car’s flashing light, and moved to stop the scooter.

Rather than pulling over, the scooter headed down a one-way street (traveling in the wrong direction) and accelerated. The driver lost control and missed a turn.

Malek Saouchi, age 19, died on the scene from head trauma. Nabil Bouafia, 19, and Joshua Koch, 20, suffered severe injuries and were hospitalized. None of the three men carried identification. The scooter had been reported stolen last December.

Why didn’t the scooter pull over? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself. The answer turns out to expose a huge divide –a chasm– in cultural expectations between Americans and at least some French people.

I grew up in the United States, where pulling over and stopping is the evident response to pursuit by a police patrol car. Doing otherwise invites trouble. Even Hollywood movies, with their customary high-speed chase scenes, follow that lead.

What is a serious rule in the United States seems in France (or among certain French people) to be akin to a game, specifically a game of cat-and-mouse, where the mice are expected to take flight. The cats might give chase, but the game allows the mice to flee. When things go wrong, fault lies with the cats, as much or more than as with the mice.

Metaphorically, this explains the Woippy incident, and the surprise and alarm that the incident provoked, the morning after. The same pattern was shown in the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, near Paris, after a couple of youths fled from police, only to be electrocuted in a power transformer yard where they had hidden.

What happened next? The Woippy incident occurred in the early hours of the morning. At the end of the same day, Woippy –a town of less than 15,000 people– was the scene of rioting. Rioters pelleted police with stones and a few molotov cocktails (bottles set afire). During three hours of violence, rioters set fourteen vehicles on fire, including: cars, a bus, a truck, and a backhoe.

What about the police? In the United States, everyone knows that there are the police and the sheriff, and that the two are somehow different. Likewise, in France, everyone knows that there are the police and the gendarmes. The police are national, under the authority of the interior ministry, and tend to work in towns; the gendarmes are under defense ministry command, and tend towards mobility, often deploying in rural areas or trouble spots.

The French law enforcement landscape includes a third category: the municipal police, who are under the authority of the mayor and have a limited set of responsibilities. In France, the municipal police are widely suspected of being: subject to political control by the mayor; staffed by over-zealous but under-prepared personnel; and prone to racial profiling or ethnic discrimination.

In an offhand way, Fadela Amara, the junior minister for urban policy, gave voice to these suspicions when, in the wake of the Woippy incident, she commented that “Today, we have a police that’s diverse, extremely respectful of citizens, even if there have been some slip-ups, abusive checks that tensed relations between urban youth and the republican [national] police.”

For this reader, the key word in Amara’s comment is: respectful. Many French people seem to harbor an expectation that authorities will show deference to citizens, even those suspected of criminal conduct.