Listen closely. A lyrical melody plays softly in the background as a heart-wrenching love story plays out, scenes woven with poetic beauty, profound meaning threaded through each performance. French cinema is an art form above entertainment, a fragment of the director’s mind externalized, staged perfectly for public consumption in an intricately stitched narrative. But what are films if not tales fabricated to conceal the harrowing reality that comes after each “CUT”?
As actress Judith Godrèche spearheads a new #MeToo movement over half a decade after it transformed the landscape of American filmmaking, the French public is discovering just how deeply these horrors are ingrained in its society. Her accusations of statutory rape and sexual assault against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon have rekindled a flame of fury within the country that appeared to have self-extinguished years ago. When the #MeToo movement first gained traction in 2017, France was reluctant to fully embrace it, calling it a new form of American puritanism that repudiated French libertinism—a philosophy based on the disregard for traditional moral boundaries and a pursuit of personal desires. But France’s reticence to adopt the #MeToo movement can also be traced, in part, back to the hierarchical rigidity of its language. Values perpetuated by the pre-revolutionary aristocracy permeate the misogynist norms of the French language. While a full-blown cultural revolution might be ultimately necessary, upending the phallocratic values central to French linguistics is a promising step in the right direction.
Although France has become the first country to enshrine abortion in its constitution and passed laws promoting equal treatment in the workplace, a distinction should be made between advancing gender equality and uprooting the foundations of misogyny. France has made significant progress with the former, but its normalization of cultural sexism persists. The country still lives with the vestiges of a class system that respected women only insofar as they reflected positively on the men they surrounded. The historic aristocratic wife was well-regarded, not for her intrinsic value but for the recognition she brought her husband. If he was venerated, she was courteously tolerated. Similar sentiments were espoused throughout the 20th century as women’s societal roles remained confined to the home while men provided financially for their families. To maintain the illusion of harmony within the nuclear family, the validity of a woman’s opinions became contingent on their conformity to her husband’s. Even as we have moved away from this default familial structure, the beliefs underlying it have remained endemic. They are woven so tightly into the fabric of French institutions that they have enabled quotidian sexism, from microaggressions to conjugal violence. In fact, the latter has seen a 21 percent increase from 2020 to 2021, revealing a society not only spun from the threads of misogyny but increasingly tangled in its iterations.
The grammatical rules of the French language—which are profoundly internalized and resistant to change—illustrate how ubiquitous phallocracy remains within the country. Since the 18th century, the linguistically masculine gender has been considered more powerful than its feminine form. Irrespective of how many nouns in a phrase are feminine, as long as one element in the set is masculine, the whole will take on its conjugation. This rule is perfectly encapsulated in a famous phrase elementary school children are taught to recite by heart: “The masculine will prevail over the feminine.” In 1767, French linguist Nicolas Beauzée contextualized the phrase, asserting that “the masculine gender is considered more noble than the feminine because males are superior to females.” Lexicographer Marie Devaux further posits that in order to render the French language more egalitarian, we must turn our attention to the French vocabulary, which is “infinitely more sexually explicit and improper” than its grammar. French is rife with sexual words used in everyday vernacular—innuendos ingrained to the extent that they often evade critical analysis. For example, une saloperie (a word derived from salope, meaning a promiscuous woman) refers to some unpleasant object or event and can be used in a profusion of ways, from describing a piece of garbage, to a contagious virus, to an insult. Degrading words like this have simply been accepted as part of everyday speech, both in casual and formal contexts.
The roots of misogyny are so profoundly embedded in the French language that it is only reasonable to infer that they have played a significant role in shaping the country’s culture. At the inception of the #MeToo movement seven years ago, more than 100 women signed an open letter published in the daily newspaper Le Monde, contrasting French and American perspectives on love and claiming that, “in America, love is mentioned almost only through hygienic terms. Sensuality is accepted only in a rational way, which is another way of refusing it.” They criticized the #MeToo movement for infringing on men’s right to “pester” women, asserting that it defeated the principle of romance. But much of what is considered harmless romantic pursuit in France often has fetishizing undertones that we have assimilated to the point of indifference. When the vocabulary used to refer to male ideals of femininity is analogous to the one used to insult women, can we honestly expect romance to eschew all traces of misogyny?
Rather, when language so openly upholds phallocracy, is an alternate approach even conceivable? Linguistic determinism—the idea that language dictates how we perceive the world—would posit that the foundations of the French language will construct a society in which misogynist tendencies are perpetually upheld. Although this hypothesis has been shown to have limited empirical validity, it is more broadly accepted that linguistic relativism—the idea that language influences, rather than dictates, how we think about the world—holds true. Dismantling misogyny in France requires a fundamental cultural change that is currently impeded by the very way we conceptualize and verbalize representations of gender roles. This is the unfortunate reality the new #MeToo movement faces as it attempts to revolutionize the way romance and sexuality are understood.
But countries with languages structurally similar to French seem to have adopted the movement with far less resistance. In Spain and throughout Latin America, #MeToo took off much faster, quickly expanding from film to encompass condemnations of broader forms of violence perpetrated against women. In France, however, cinema is considered such a sacred form of artistic expression that the public found it difficult to distinguish the movement’s condemnation of structural misogyny from a perceived attack on the beloved entertainment industry. From its onset, #MeToo was dismissed as a criticism of a cultural pillar and an ignorant misunderstanding of the values of French cinema. By immediately tying the movement to its roots in film, the French public prevented it from gaining the momentum it needed to be accepted as a vehicle for institutional change. This reductive perspective was not adopted by other linguistically similar countries, allowing them to broaden the scope of their #MeToo revolutions beyond the confines of the entertainment industry—an expansion of ideals France was not eager to embrace.
The country’s refusal to conform to international norms is not new. Turn to its pervasive nationalism and innate individualism and it becomes all too clear that endorsing a movement that began in the United States—and was built on affording women sexual agency—was never going to be a logical progression for the French. Identifying with the social revolution occurring across the Atlantic would require France to admit that a fundamental part of its culture is misguided, an impossible concession for the country to make. Admittedly, significant differences between French and American society would have inevitably prevented France’s espousal of #MeToo to the same degree, but the main concern women against the movement raised in the 2018 open letter was that they did not see themselves represented in American feminism. They believed it took on “a hatred of men and of sexuality,” further asserting that French culture, “for better and for worse, views seduction as a harmless and pleasurable game, dating back to the days of medieval ‘amour courtois.’” In attempting to defend French views on romance, this assertion hits on what might be the primary issue the country faces in its attempts to enact a cultural revolution: the principles guiding the country during the Renaissance should not be those we blindly follow in the 21st century. This amour courtois—the seduction game, as it stands—shaped a culture of romanticism based on male ideation that reduces women to mere pawns in shameless attempts at love or seduction. It should not be our reference point for modern conceptions of romance.
For as much progress as the country has made in the past few decades—and progress certainly has been made—the foundation of the French language upholds the country’s phallocracy, and the only way out is through a full cultural revolution. Beginning with changing the nature of insults to make them less degrading, redefining what romantic advances look like in modern French society, or perhaps simply repeatedly challenging sexist comments and advances, smaller steps can be taken toward embracing the movement rather than dismissing it, for a second time, as an erroneous critique of cinema. Fundamentally, the French vocabulary is hierarchical, misogynistic, and inflexible, but perhaps an overhaul of these conventions would allow the country to move toward a space where #MeToo can be celebrated for what it is: an opportunity for women to denounce their aggressors who, for too long, have been cavalier about sexual assault.
Women have been embarrassed about suffering abuse, victimized for speaking out, and ashamed of their inability to prevent it. And while it would be unrealistic to claim that merely changing linguistic norms will eradicate the culture of misogyny so deeply ingrained in French society, it is a valuable first step. As long as the solutions offered to combat sexual harassment lie within the same framework as the problem, attempts at progress will be circular and futile. The connotations evoked by the language create reticence to speak out against assault, thereby helping conceal blatant abuses of power. By expanding women’s ability to verbalize trauma without demeaning themselves in the process, societal attitudes toward abuse will inevitably be altered. Although the new #MeToo movement in France is beginning—as it always has—in the entertainment industry, there should be optimism about it breeding broader, more structural change. After all, tales of innocence are spun of glass and can shatter in an instant, leaving behind the shards of a system designed to uphold abuse.