The press has been awash with stories and those outpourings of why-oh-why female columnists' angst about French Children Don’t Throw Food, a book written by Pamela Druckerman, an American with three kids, an English husband and a place called home in Paris.
It is a little like that Mireille Guiliano book Frenchwomen Don't Get Fat which suddenly changed for its French translation to Ces françaises qui ne grossissent pas, coincidentally or not after I had pointed out that the original was, strictly speaking, untrue (can you honestly say you've never been behind an enormous female bottom in Carrefour or Auchan?). The change was commercially unimportant; the book had already run up seven-figure sales and the delightful Mme Guilano had treated me to a splendid dinner at the Crillon.
Druckerman has a point or two. French kids do still get smacked an awful lot more than English children; it was surely the other way round once upon a time. But I cannot be alone in having seen signs banning French school trips from English shops or, indeed, les gosses flinging food around.
But the main point is that all this adulation of French womanhood is making les françaises feel a little uncomfortable.
On their behalf (rather than hers: the photo vouches for her trim figure and I am an unqualified champion of her cooking and maternal skills, the rest being none of your business), Mme Salut has addressed the British nation.
Today's Daily Mail carried the following letter from someone who might have written from the Var but on this occasion did so from west London:
Following Kathryn Knight's article on French mothers in Femail last Thursday, I must say on behalf of French women that this type of article is setting impossibly high standards for us.I have spent most of my adult life in Britain, since arriving as an au pair in Darlington when I was 20,and am not sure how I can ever live up to the mantra that I must be slim, gorgeous and chic as well as being a fabulous cook, a great lover and, now, a better mother than British women.
Please, please give us a break. We may avoid snacking to improve our chances of staying slim, and most of us probably reject the idea that growing older means you have to dress dowdily, but we are just normal human beings like the rest of the female poplation, not performing seals!
... can be bought at Salut!'s Amazon link
So that means Mme Salut has had rather more published in the Mail than her old man in the past 10 months, my devoted readers (!) these days being forced to the Salut! empire, The National and the TES.
But leaving aside the hack nature of the genre of books into which Pamela Druckerman's work falls, isn't there just now a much weightier issue concerning French womanhood, namely the growing threat that May could theoretically see Marine le Pen enter the Elysée as president on behalf of the despicable, far-right Front National? No, I know it is not supposed to happen and probably won't. A scary thought all the same ...
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