Let them wear turtlenecks
Solidarity and roll-neck jumpers
Dear Friend,
I hope you had a good week. Nights are getting colder here and we have had a bout of rainy days. To fit in, I complain about the rain with my French friends and neighbours, but secretly I actually find the rain cosy and homely and comforting, because you can take a gal out of the cold, rainy island, but you can’t take the cold, rainy island out of the gal.
As the weather gets colder, this week in France there’s been a lot of brouhaha (fuss) about what has become known as ‘turtleneck-gate’. On Tuesday, the finance minister Bruno Le Maire told an interviewer on France Inter (kind of a Radio 4 equivalent) the following:
FR: "Vous ne me verrez plus avec une cravate, mais avec un col roulé. Et je pense que ce sera très bien”
EN: “You will no longer see me in a tie, but in a turtleneck. And I think that’s very good.”
In the interview, he was talking about the government’s “energy sobriety plan”, which President Macron trailed back at the end of August when he announced “the end of abundance”. Measures include not putting on the heating in public buildings until the temperature drops below 19 degrees (hence the turtleneck needs), and then also, when the heating does come on in public buildings (including social housing), it will be lowered from 19 degrees to 18. In addition, the lights illuminating monuments in Paris will be turned off earlier, including the twinkly lights on the Eiffel Tower.
Later on Tuesday, Le Maire tweeted a picture of himself in his office casually wearing…a turtleneck(!!) while smiling benevolently at his mobile phone. The image was posted with no caption. No caption was needed—it spoke for itself.
A lot of mockery and significant backlash ensued for Le Maire, who was accused of being patronising. By Thursday, the finance minister was doing a to-camera interview (no turtleneck in sight) to defend his comments, explaining:
“I wasn’t recommending to anyone that they dress in this or that way”
“I dress how I want. If I want to wear a turtleneck, it’s my problem”
Though he had tweeted a no-caption picture just two days before in which the turtleneck was the star, suddenly now the turtleneck was incidental—a personal choice, a cheeky secret.
In the same week, France’s prime minister Elisabeth Borne was pictured on various occasions wearing several different lightweight doudounes, or puffer jackets, including at an official press conference. Meanwhile, Gilles Le Gendre, another well-known politician from the ruling party waxed lyrical on television about his new-found admiration for drying racks. Here’s what he said:
FR: "Moi, ça y est, chez moi, ma femme et moi, on a décrété : on ne se sert plus du sèche-linge. Honnêtement, ce n'est pas très compliqué à faire".
EN: “As for me, that’s it now, in my house, my wife and I have decreed: we will not use our tumble dryer any more. Honestly, it’s not very complicated to do!”.
Now, if your household was anything like mine growing up, you might marvel at the way these French ministers are showing off about their heating-saving measures. It puts me in mind of an incident when I was at university in Manchester. In my year, there was a group of people who all went to expensive private boarding schools. They moved together in a sort of flock and emitted a collective aura of unwashed hair and self-assurance. One time I bumped into one of these types, who I knew from my English lectures, in a clothes shop on Piccadilly Gardens that was playing a song by Marvin Gaye. He pointed up towards the ceiling where the sound was coming from and said: “Do you know what this is? It’s a type of music called ‘soul’.” He had just discovered some VERY OBSCURE information and he wanted to make sure I knew about it. Well, turtleneck-gate reminds me a bit of this. Le Maire and co. are talking like evangelists who have just heard of this cool new craze called ‘saving money’. They do not realise that back in my house in the 1990s, my mum was already well onto this one.
Out-of-towners
Earlier this week I was asked by one of my editors at The Telegraph to write 100 words about an up-and-coming area in Paris. I was thinking about it and realised that, as I see it, there are not so many areas within the arrondissements of Paris that are changing very rapidly. Rather, the areas that are most dynamic at the moment are the nearby suburbs like Saint-Ouen and Pantin. There’s a lot of investment and development ahead of the Olympics in 2024, as part of the wider goal of "Le Grand Paris”—a huge transport and infrastructure project designed to close the gap between what the locals call Paris “intra muros” and the surrounding suburbs, or banlieues, as they are called in French.
While there are banlieues aisées, that is ‘well-off suburbs’, like Neuilly-sur-Seine to the west of the city, in general the word “banlieue” is associated with economically disadvantaged areas with a lot of social housing and and often a significant population of new immigrants. The first representation of a banlieue I saw was in my French A-Level class when we watched the movie La Haine. It’s a poetic tragedy, filmed in black and white, set on a council estate in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, a banlieue to the west of Paris. The film follows a day in the life of three friends, Vinz, the son of Jewish immigrants, Hubert, the son of African immigrants, and Saïd, who is North African Muslim. In one striking scene, the three men walk past a billboard with an advert saying “Le monde est à vous” or ‘The world is yours’. Saïd runs over to the sign, gets out a spray-paint can and changes the messages to “Le monde est à nous” or ‘The world is ours’. The scene succinctly illustrates the ‘us’ and ‘them’ feeling of inner Paris vs. all the parts of the greater Paris area that lie beyond the péripherique ring-road.
This division still exist (and it’s something I would like to write about in more detail in another letter), however, with the development of Le Grand Paris, the dividing line is definitely becoming more porous.
This weekend I spent an afternoon exploring Pantin, a canal-side suburb to the northeast of Paris, in the company of Myriam, a lovely pal who lives there. Pantin is one of the historical “banlieues rouges” or Communist-voting suburbs (Saint-Ouen, whose local football team is called Red Star F.C., is another), though today its mayor is from the more mainstream Parti Socialiste. It has traditionally been “populaire” or working-class and ethnically diverse, with sizeable populations of Turkish and also North African immigrants.
Myriam showed me the Magasins Géneraux, a former 1930s docking warehouse. She told me about how back in 2016 it was given to prestigious advertising agency BETC rent-free on the condition that they invest in the area, making the space not just their offices but also a cultural hub for locals. Six years later and this part of the canal, for better or worse, is the most gentrified part of the suburb—on the day I was there a vintage fashion sale was taking place. With its mix of old and modern, this neighbourhood feels in some ways more like London or New York than anywhere in central Paris. Here, and elsewhere too, what was once the industrial ‘backstage’ of the main event that was Haussmannian Paris is finding its own identity. I definitely recommend going to visit yourself: wander the urban farm and cultural space La Cité Fertile, ride a bike along the canal, or do what we did and have Turkish pastries and tea at Le Serail on the high street.
Thirty-second book club
I have been slowly getting through Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. It’s one of those books that I felt like I ought to have read, so when a friend was giving her copy away, I decided that now was the time. Focused on the murder of a whole family in rural Kansas in the late 1950s, it’s true crime before its time. It is immaculately written, but I can’t say I’m enjoying it, as such—it’s too gruesome. I’m admiring it.
My friend Myriam, mentioned above, and her two sisters have a gorgeous digital magazine called TheMyMyProject, written in English and French. I love Myriam’s ‘Everyday People House Tours’, which explore the relationship between women and their homes. It’s thanks to this series that I discovered the book Chez Soi by Mona Chollet, the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s a fascinating, far-ranging societal and philosophical study described by the author as ‘an odyssey of domestic space’. It has sadly not been translated into English. Mona, if you are reading, please hire me to translate it!
Ouf, that felt like quite a long letter this week. Thank you for reading it all and I hope you enjoyed it.
Please share your thoughts and reflections in the comments and, as my pen friend, you can of course write to me on: hannah@hannahmeltzer.com
I’ll write next Sunday!
Yours,
Hannah