Paul Thomas: Sex on the brain, but at least they're grown-ups

COMMENT

The French are at it again. Adultery that is: thinking about it, doing it, talking about it.

Especially the latter because no one can intellectualise sex - or anything else for that matter - like the French. I learned more about adultery during the two years I lived in France than in the rest of my adult life put together - and I wasn't even married.

Though the French have long stereotyped the English as a sexually repressed people with a fetish for corporal punishment ("le vice anglais"), the counter-stereotype paints the French as sex-mad.

At its most derogatory, this stereotype portrays the French as promiscuous, and rather disgusting to boot. In old English slang, "French" was a euphemism for licentiousness - venereal disease, for instance, was known as French measles.

In a more benign form, it extends to the grudging recognition that though the French might have sex on the brain, they're more grown-up about it than Anglo-Saxons tend to be.

Among other things, this sophistication supposedly enables them to rationalise casual infidelity as human nature kicking up its heels, something inevitable but trivial that in a civilised society shouldn't break up marriages, make headlines or precipitate political crises.

British politics is regularly convulsed by sex scandals, usually manipulated by the tabloid press. The French consider it the height of irrationality that the nation's leaders should be hounded and humiliated over their private indiscretions and that the media have open season on public figures' private lives.

It was widely known that Francois Mitterrand had a mistress and what used to be called an illegitimate daughter. Jacques Chirac didn't get the nickname "Two-minutes Jacques" because of his mastery of Le Monde's crossword.

But no one had the bad taste to raise these matters in public, and both men went on to become president at an age when most of their English-speaking counterparts were coming to terms with their obsolescence.

This was partly due to France's tough privacy laws and partly to the consensus that, however messy or distasteful one's private life, it's not for others to judge.

Claude Chabrol, the French Hitchcock, satirised this elastic tolerance in his 1971 film Just Before Nightfall.

Taking their kinky role-playing too far, a married man strangles his mistress who happened to be his best friend's wife. He confesses all, expecting to be reviled and abandoned by his wife and friends but they decline to make the simple moral judgment needed to acknowledge his guilt.

Little wonder then that the French didn't know quite what to make of it when actress Isabelle Adjani gave musician Jean-Michel Jarre, her two-timing husband-to-be, his marching orders via the cover of Paris Match.

In most parts of the world, this story would have triggered a tabloid frenzy, with a ribald time being had by all. In France it cued furrow-browed debate over the relevance of fidelity, the future of marriage, and so on.

Paradoxically, the French combine this earnest intellectualism with breathtaking insouciance, often telegraphed with that inimitable Gallic shrug.

When I was working for the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus Industrie in the early 1980s, Robert Muldoon came to see us in Toulouse. Those were the days when the Prime Minister decided what sort of planes Air New Zealand should buy. Well, he was an aviation buff, after all.

Perhaps someone thought that, being a New Zealander, I could provide some insight into the workings of Muldoon's mind, because I was added to the Airbus delegation.

In Cold War summit-style we sat on one side of a long table facing the Muldoonists, and if you're wondering what the entourages did at these meetings, I can reveal it pretty much boiled down to laughing - ostentatiously - at the big man's jokes.

Our big man was a Frenchman with an attachment to Justerini & Brooks' scotch whisky that overrode protocol and common sense. Placed on the table halfway between him and Muldoon was a bottle of scotch, a bottle of Perrier, an ice bucket and two glasses.

Muldoon wasn't tempted. His expression suggested that, while he liked a drink as much as the next man (unless the next man was out to lunch), the long-suffering taxpayers might take a dim view of him getting on the grog at morning tea time.

It took more than a raised eyebrow to embarrass the man from Airbus. "I 'ave a cold," he claimed, sloshing J & B into a tall glass. Muldoon hitched his face into that strange, lop-sided smile. "Well, that ought to kill it stone dead."