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The book is wrong," said my 10-year-old daughter as we walked through a crowded shopping street. Anna continued: "It should be Some French Women Do Get Fat."
We had been in France for almost two weeks. I was preparing a semester-abroad program in Grenoble for Calvin College students, and my family had come along for the duration. Grenoble is a midsized French town surrounded by mountains and populated, for the most part, by svelte women. But as Anna pointed out, there was no avoiding the obvious. Now and then, a French woman took more than her fair share of the sidewalk.
While its argument may be overstated, Mireille Guiliano's French Women Don't Get Fat became a bestseller among American readers. A striking title—one a child could remember—certainly helped sales, as did a strong marketing campaign, capitalizing on Guiliano's cachet as the New York-based president and CEO of the French champagne company Veuve Clicquot.
But is it really possible to win over readers through an implied insult about American women? In a classic conversion narrative, Guiliano succeeds by emphasizing her adopted American nationality and admitting she was the worst of all overeaters. She tells of her year as an exchange student in the United States, where she adopted American adolescent eating ways. When Guiliano returned to France, her father ungraciously called her a sack of potatoes. Unrepentant, she went on to study in Paris and enjoy, undeterred, the city's pastries.
The family doctor helped her back to the thin and narrow. She learned from him to balance her desire to appear slim with her urge to pig out. "The key, he said, was not to conquer the second, but to broker a rapprochement: make friends of your two selves and be the master of both your willpower and your pleasures. That was the French way."
The difference between the French and the American ways is ultimately theological. A French woman knows how to pursue pleasure—and not feel guilty about it. "Nothing is sinfully delicious. If you really enjoy something … there is a place for it in your life." So enjoy chocolate, but only in small amounts and preferably the best kind. By contrast, Americans veer between snacking on the sly and then hitting the exercise machines, which Guiliano describes as "a vestige of Puritanism: instruments of public self-flagellation to make up for private sins of couch riding and overeating. French women happily don't suffer from those extremes of good and evil. Wellness is a gray area of balance."
Guiliano briefly claims her Huguenot (French Calvinist) heritage but falls flatly into a trope extremely common in French analyses of American society: the United States is still suffering from the uptightness of a Puritan heritage, while France is a "Latin" country, its people more in tune with the pleasures of life, more reasonable in their lifestyle, and a lot less fat.
In addition to her own diet-story and cultural commentary, Guiliano offers a clever mix of French recipes and familiar advice (drink more water, eat smaller portions, take the stairs not the elevator, etc.). The French, after all, do not have a genetic stranglehold on thinness. No, Frenchness is a state of mind, and one that is good for you:
If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.
As her parenthetical comment indicates, Guiliano sidesteps any discussion of the undiplomatic divide between France and the United States over the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That debate spawned a number of unabashed, France-bashing books. In Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese, Denis Boyles argues that France is divided between the French (charming folks) and their ruling élite (wicked, power-hungry politicos). Author of the "Euro-Press Review" for the National Review Online, Boyles readily acknowledges that his book is meant as a polemic, deliberately over the top. (The comic subtitle has already signaled that much.) So:
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