Every time the news exposes a public figure as an adulterer someone invariably brings up the French. The French, we say, are more civilized and realistic about affairs. Look at the famous photograph of Prime Minister Francois Mitterand's wife, mistress and illegitimate daughter grieving together in 1996 at his funeral, for instance.
When Jesse Jackson, married for 38 years, was forced last week by a tabloid expose to confess that he has a 20-month-old child with another woman, I was reminded again of the French. I thought back to the late '60s, when I was studying in Bordeaux and first heard about "le cinq a sept"--"the five-to-seven," a don't-ask-don't-tell time French couples supposedly give one another to be with their lovers. To a naive young American, raised in the suburbs in the 1950s, it was a thrillingly liberating concept, as romantic as the glitter of l'amour that permeated French public life and made every walk down the street an adventure.
The relative lack of outrage in the Jackson affair, the latest in a never-ending stream of similar revelations, made me wonder whether Americans are finally getting ready to adopt the French attitudes we've been talking so much about.
Some think it's already happened. Others say it's just not possible.
Basically, the French and the Americans are two different peoples with two different histoires de mentalite, or histories of thinking, says Laurent de Veze, the French cultural attache in Los Angeles and a former student of philosophy. Unlike Americans, the French inherited their attitudes toward l'adultere from deep cultural roots untouched by the Puritans, he explains. First, he says, there is the tradition, inherited from the French kings, that men of power proudly claim lots of mistresses openly. Henri II, for example, gave Chenonceaux, one of the most beautiful chateaus in the Loire Valley, to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers.
Next, the French have the tradition of "boulevard theaters"--a popular comic theater that flourished from 1830 to 1916, he says. The plot of the plays always centered around a love triangle--a husband and wife and a lover who hides in beds and cupboards or jumps out of windows to avoid being discovered. "The hero is always the man or the woman who has two lovers," de Veze says. "People laugh at the cocu (the cuckold). Because for 100 years, adultery is the major subject of Theatre de Boulevard where people come to laugh, it becomes less and less tragic. It becomes a laughing matter."
