Bring back brothels! It’s not your typical political slogan, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has launched a campaign to reopen and regulate France’s brothels for the benefit of sex workers. In an interview last week Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of Le Pen’s senior MPs, said his party would table a bill to reopen the brothels – known as maisons closes in France – which were closed in 1946.
‘The prostitutes would be empresses in their own kingdom,’ explained Tanguy. Le Pen’s party believes that regulated brothels would better protect sex workers from violence. But some on the left are outraged at the proposition. In an op-ed in the left-wing L’Humanité newspaper, 12 lawyers dismissed the idea as a ‘fascist project’. Let us remember, they added, ‘that 80 per cent of women and girls in prostitution are foreign women in precarious situations. The client is deeply sexist, racist, and paedophilic’.
Half a century ago the left wasn’t so prudish. ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ was the rallying cry of the students who took to the streets in the cultural revolution of 1968. This libertinism came to define France in the late 20th century: a country so much more laid-back than the strait-laced Anglophone world. This was particularly true of sex. There was no shame in it: in the act itself – in or outside of marriage – and everything that went with it.
One of the joys of holidaying on a French beach for a teenage boy in the 1980s – or so they tell me – was the number of bare breasts. Almost half of Frenchwomen under 50 bathed topless on the beach in that decade. By 2023 the figure had fallen to 16 per cent. Women said they didn’t strip off for a variety of reasons: ‘lustful’ stares from men, the possibility of physical assault and the fear of ‘negative comments about their breasts’. Why didn’t women in the 1980s feel the same way? Camera phones and the cruelty of social media weren’t around in the 1980s, which must be factors, but there is a prudishness pervading France that can’t all blamed on technology.
Last year, a poll revealed that 28 per cent of French 18- to 24-year-olds hadn’t had sex in the previous 12 months, compared with a mere 5 per cent in 2006. This is one factor why France’s birth rate has dropped to its lowest level since the second world war.
Extra-marital affairs are also going out of fashion. A decade ago, a third of the French admitted to infidelity, but a survey this year found only a quarter confessed to having a bit on the side. Perhaps that is because the fabled French lothario is losing his skills of seduction. A poll last year found that 59 per cent of French men aged 24 to 35 didn’t dare chat up a woman in public.
One of the joys of holidaying on a French beach for a teenage boy in the 1980s – or so they tell me – was the number of bare breasts
They’re not helped by all the rules and regulations introduced by the left in recent years. The days of gliding over to a woman on a café terrace and offering to light her Gauloises are gone. Smoking is forbidden in cafes, bars and parks, and this summer France became the first European nation to ban it from beaches. No smoking! It’s enough to drive a Frenchman to drink – but fewer and fewer are in fact raising a glass. In 1960, the French guzzled 120 litres of wine per person per year; today it’s down to 40.
No sex, no smoking, no seduction, no drinking and even no barbecues, at least if one left-wing French MP had her way. No one epitomises this new Gallic puritanism better than Sandrine Rousseau. ‘We need to change our mindset so that eating a barbecued ribeye steak is no longer a symbol of masculinity,’ she declared in 2022. The following year Rousseau was aghast at the sight of Emmanuel Macron downing a beer surrounded by cheering rugby players. It was, she said, ‘toxic masculinity in political leadership’.
One is tempted to blame this puritanism on progressive America. ‘Wokeness’ was slower to arrive in France than Britain, but it has captured the left in recent years with the same fervour. But one might argue that the original progressive prude was actually a Frenchman, the clean-living Maximilien Robespierre. He executed thousands of his compatriots during the Revolution because they lacked the virtue and purity required for his new France.
Maybe what we’re witnessing is France reverting to type: the angry, neurotic joyless puritans of the late 18th century. Perhaps the 50 years after the end of the second world war was just a brief interlude of joie de vivre; of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, or in France’s case Johnny Hallyday. He was one of the icons of the age, along with the actress Brigitte Bardot. In 1958, Life magazine said of Bardot that ‘not since the Statue of Liberty has a French girl lit such fires in America… her name is now a synonym for sex from coast to coast’.
Bardot doesn’t think much of what France has become. In a book published in October, the 91-year-old lamented that France is now ‘dull, sad, submissive, sick, damaged, ravaged, ordinary, vulgar’. It sounds as though France has become like Britain, only with better weather.
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