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For 57 years, Michel Georges Alfred Catty, known to all as Michou, has run the transvestite Cabaret Michou on the Rue des Martyrs at the base of Montmartre in Paris. With his white demi-bouffant, oversize sunglasses and eccentric ways (he dresses only in blue), he is so recognizable that passers-by stop him on the street — to chat, perhaps, or to ask to take his photo.

“I sit on the terrace and 20 people come up to me to take pictures,” he said over a glass of Champagne at La Mascotte, the bar-restaurant on the Rue des Abbesses where he holds court at 6 p.m. nearly every day. “And I love that! How I love to be recognized! ‘You are Michou? The real Michou?’ Ah, I adore it. To your health! I am the last muse.”

But Michou, 81, is not a caricature of seedy old Pigalle or Bohemian Paris. He is a showman; a successful, self-made businessman; and a beloved member of the community. Long before the term “drag queen” was used, he created the first song-and-dance show after World War II in which male performers impersonated female stars of the era. The cabaret is said by some French cultural critics to have inspired Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film, “La Cage aux Folles.”

For years, Michou has been a trailblazer for gay rights, a promoter of the art scene of Paris and a supporter of neighborhood causes. A 92-year-old charitable and cultural organization called the Republic of Montmartre has named him its “minister of the night.” “I am the best-known and the most-loved homosexual of France,” he likes to say.

Michou, who was raised in Amiens (north of Paris) by his maternal grandmother, moved to Paris penniless in 1948 at the age of 17. He vowed that if he ever made it big, he would never turn his back on the elderly. So he hosts a free monthly lunch in his club — with wine and entertainment — for more than 80 elderly residents of the 18th Arrondissement, where his club is located.

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A cabaret artist portraying the French singer Chantal Goya performs on stage at Cabaret Michou in Paris.

When he celebrated the 83rd birthday of Régine, the veteran nightclub and discotheque queen, at the cabaret in February, Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, turned up. When some residents recently wanted to tear down the children’s carousel on the Place des Abbesses — too noisy, too intrusive, too tacky, they said — he lobbied and helped win to keep it there. He called it a symbol of the chaos and whimsy of the street.

Michou sees himself as a symbol of Montmartre’s glory days, when poor artists and writers were celebrated and everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else by name. Gentrification has brought the invasion of upscale women’s clothing boutiques and overpriced bistros, and despite neighborhood opposition, a Starbucks is soon to open on the Place du Tertre.

So he picks his battles — and his causes.

Last January, he donated his blue bicycle to L’Association des P’tits Poulbots de Montmartre, which supports a neighborhood group of teenage military drummers. It was raffled off, and raised 6,800 euros. In early April, the group honored him with Champagne, a tower of blue macarons from a local bakery and a performance by five drummer girls.

“How thrilled I am,” Michou said. “What a great moment.”

‘“Long live Michou!” one of the spectators exclaimed. “Here’s to prosperity and happiness.”

Michou is so respected that in 2005 President Jacques Chirac decorated him as chevalier of the Legion of Honor. You are being decorated “as the artist but also as the man with a big heart who discreetly brings such active support to great humanitarian causes,” Chirac wrote in a letter that hangs on a wall of Michou’s rambling, eighth-floor apartment with a grand terrace in Montmartre.

“I didn’t want to accept it, but everyone said, ‘You must!’” he said. Now he’s so proud that he pins the slim red ribbon every day on the left lapel of a royal blue satin dinner jacket that is part of his uniform, along with a blue shirt, blue tie, blue sunglasses, blue shoes and blue cashmere-blend overcoat — all different shades.

He calls Bernadette Chirac, the former first lady and fellow humanitarian fund-raiser, a friend. “I like her very much,” he said. “She sometimes criticizes me for drinking too much Champagne. One day I said to her, ‘Madame, I don’t touch girls; I respect them. I don’t touch cocaine. I don’t touch hashish. Champagne keeps me young!”

The framed photos that line the walls of the cabaret bear witness to his celebrity: Michou with Josephine Baker, Michou with Lauren Bacall, Michou with Jean-Paul Belmondo. And with Peter Sellers, Jacques Brel, Romy Schneider, Liza Minnelli, Gérard Depardieu, Sophia Loren, Jeanne Moreau, Serge Gainsbourg, Joan Collins, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alain Delon, Claude Lelouch, Johnny Hallyday, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé.

Michou’s transvestite show happened by accident. For Mardi Gras in 1956, Michou, on a dare from a friend, dressed up as Brigitte Bardot and performed with him and a third friend. “Brigitte Bardot once told me that we have the same derrière,” he said.
Soon they were joined by other “Michettes,” waiters and barmen who served drinks and dinner before shedding their aprons and dressing up for the show.

The cabaret is small, dark and decorated with mismatched chandeliers, gilt-framed mirrors and a touch of Art Nouveau. It offers a three-course dinner (classic dishes like duck à l’orange and pear tart), with or without Champagne. Dinner is served at 8:30 and the after-dinner entertainment, more PG-13 than R, goes on until nearly 1 a.m. “There is never vulgarity,” Michou said.

On a recent evening, most of the crowd was over 50, under 80, respectable looking and French. Two groups were celebrating birthdays. “I will never, ever call you clients,” he said to the packed house before dinner. “You are friends!”

When the show started, a male singer in a sheer, low-cut shirt, tight jeans, a leather jacket and a shaved chest exclaimed, “What a beautiful night!”

“Youpi!” the crowd replied. (That’s French for yippee.)

Marie-Pierre, a waiter, transformed himself into Maria Callas in a diamond necklace and red satin ball gown; Cher in a fur-trimmed and gem-encrusted headdress and robe; and Amy Winehouse in big hair. Fred, another waiter, did Edith Piaf so convincingly in an unadorned black dress that by the time she got from “Je Ne Regrette Rien” to “Milord,” the crowd was singing along.

Céline Dion, Lady Gaga, Patricia Kaas, Arielle Dombasle, Sylvie Vartan, Michael Jackson — they all performed (lip-syncing along the way). The impersonator of Dalida, one of the most beloved of all French performers who killed herself at 54, by contrast, performed live. When the show ended, the crowd was cheering, smiling and asking to be photographed with the stars.

Michou, who has suffered from cancer and serious heart problems, is convinced that he is kept healthy by two things in his life: lots of Champagne every day and his cabaret. “This is my life,” he said. “If you tell me tomorrow that I can no longer come here, I would prefer to die the day afterwards.”

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A horse fillet, cooked with morels, peas and parsley.

Last October, the super-starred French chef Alain Ducasse invited Dan Barber, of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York, to the Plaza Athenée to cook for some special guests. American Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin and his wife, Susan Tolson, showed up, as did dozens of Paris luminaries. The Americans were wowed by Barber’s inventiveness, including his use of charcoal made from pig bones to roast a whole pig. The French, by contrast, were horrified.

One food critic called it a “sacrilege.” Another said that for Europeans, charred bones evoke the ovens of Auschwitz. Barber, meanwhile, was clueless that his gastronomic masterpiece had caused such commotion.

When it comes to food, the French and the Anglo-Saxons can find themselves caught in a clash of culinary cultures. “Horsegate,” the widening food scandal in which horse meat labeled as beef has been discovered in prepared foods in Europe, proves it. In Britain, where horses are beloved as intelligent, social creatures and heroes of war, there has been outrage. In France, the reaction has been more complicated.

Certainly, the French share the global concern about lack of transparency in food labeling and the untrustworthiness of processed foods. But they also defend their right to grow, raise, hunt and eat whatever they want. And they are convinced they do it better than anyone else. “To give all of Europe the idea that horse meat is an illicit, dangerous product” is a “demonstration of English ethnocentrism that is also applied to rabbit, andouillette, frogs and tête de veau,” wrote the food critic Jean-Claude Ribaut on the Web site of Le Monde. “The butchers are laughing.”

France, after, all gave us the very idea of cuisine, and food here holds an almost sacred place in the culture. Never mind that 40 percent of the French food budget is now spent on prepared dishes and frozen products, according to a 2012 report commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture. The report also concluded that the French are “contradictory” in their eating habits, just as likely to fuss lovingly over a multicourse meal as to throw a pizza on the dinner table.

Additionally the report noted that cooking is a source of pleasure and enrichment for 94 percent of the French, and “health, pleasure and conviviality” are more important to them than money in determining what to cook and eat. “France is still far away from the Anglo-Saxon culinary model,” the report said, which it defined as “no matter what, no matter when, no matter how and often alone.”

France is so certain of the superiority of its cuisine that it lobbied successfully for recognition in 2010 of its “gastronomic meal” as part of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage” by Unesco. In January, as part of this initiative, a governmental commission named Tours, Dijon and the Rungis wholesale food market near Paris as “cities of gastronomy.” There, national temples for the “culture and discovery” of French food will be built, with exhibitions, resource centers, banquet halls and shops.

Culinary adventurism has, in fact, long been a part of the French way of life, as foods that might be provincial or daring in other countries are reason for celebration in hundreds of local food festivals. For three days in August, for example, the town of Digoin in Burgundy hosts an escargot festival, with fireworks, a fair, a ball, a flea market and about 100,000 escargots prepared with garlic, parsley and butter.

And every April in the spa town of Vittel, up to 30,000 people gather to eat seven tons of frog’s legs prepared a score of ways: grilled, sautéed, souffléed, in pizzas, quiches and omelets. Nearby, the town of Attigny hosts an annual rabbit fair, the town of Le Val d’Ajol a festival of andouilles sausage.

Even star chefs feel compelled to crisscross the country in search of the perfect raw materials for their kitchens, rather than wait for suppliers to come to them. “I can’t stay closed up in my Paris kitchen,” said the chef Michel Rostang. “I have to go on the road and talk face to face with people about their oysters, their chickens, their truffles.”

This elevation of the raw ingredient has little to do with business, in the end, and everything to do with national pride and historical preservation, with a certain idea of Frenchness. The failure of foreigners to appreciate, say, the gelatinous texture of cooked veal head or the crispiness of small birds eaten whole is seen as a lack of sophistication. In such delicacies, the French see a celebration of a common past, the preservation of the myth of the terroir — the soil (but more like soul than soil), a word that encompasses geology, history, farming traditions.

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In Paris, a “boucherie chevaline,” or horse butcher.

As for horse, there was a “boucherie chevaline” — horse butcher shop — in just about every neighborhood decades ago; only 700 such shops and market stalls remain. Yet, since the scandal broke, horse meat sales in France have increased by 15 percent. (Le Taxi Jaune, an old-fashioned bistro in the Marais, offers horse charcuterie, brains, heart and rib steaks.) And many who don’t eat horse meat themselves have defended it, not only for its reputation as a healthier protein than beef, but also for what it signifies: watching a butcher grind a hunk of horse flesh into burger meat represents a kind of purity lacking in the industrialized world of agri-business.

Which helps explain why there is one thing the French will not stomach: genetically modified food. An IFOP polling agency survey last year concluded that nearly 80 percent of the French are afraid of eating genetically-modified food.

France has been locked in a battle with the European Union since 2008, when its food safety authority ruled that there was no “specific” scientific evidence that genetically modified crops were unsafe. Earlier that year, the radical French farmer Jose Bove, who gained notoriety for his fight against junk food, went on a hunger strike against such crops. He called it off when the government declared a moratorium on the cultivation of genetically modified corn eight days later.

French environmental activists routinely destroy genetically modified foods imported and used for animal feed; last November, for example, 100 protesters climbed a grain silo and poured inedible ricin oil over soy bean feed. One anti-genetically-modified-food poster in France shows a man with his eyes shut tight, his mouth pursed, a gun pressed to his temple. It is made of an ear of corn.

A French anti-genetically-modified-food poster.

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Members of the Paris Opera Ballet and students of the Paris Opera Ballet School pose inside the Opera Garnier.

The Paris Opera Ballet, the oldest national ballet company in the world, dating to the 17th-century court of Louis XIV, has dared to break with tradition: for the first time in its history it is asking ordinary citizens for money.

At a news conference on Feb. 5, a handful of Paris Opera officials made the case for a one million euro fund-raising project to renovate the decorative pillars, lampposts, columns and statues that hold up the 60 outdoor light fixtures of the Palais Garnier, the ballet’s jewel of a theater made famous by the Gaston Leroux novel and the Broadway musical “The Phantom of the Opera.” The pitch was direct: the Louvre and Versailles solicit individuals as well as corporations for financing their projects. Why not the Palais Garnier?

As Christophe Tardieu, deputy director of the Paris Opera, announced that anyone could make a donation — “no matter what the amount” and “by check, by credit card!” — it was clear that the Paris Opera Ballet, without exactly admitting it, is trying to redefine itself.

The Paris Opera Ballet is perhaps the second most elitist, insular and self-breeding cultural institutions in France. (The Comédie-Française is first.) Unlike Britain’s Royal Ballet or American Ballet Theater, with their rosters of international, multilingual stars, the Paris dancers are almost exclusively French and the products of the Paris Opera Ballet school.

That makes for a purity and uniformity of style, certainly more refined than that of Russia’s bold and brash Bolshoi, now mired in an internal investigation into an attack on its artistic director, Sergei Filin, who had acid thrown in his face by a masked assailant last month. But it also discourages risk-taking. Unlike any other ballet company in the world, the Opera is trapped in a military-style hierarchy and system of promotion. In order to move to a higher level (which comes with a better salary and better roles), a dancer must perform in a brief but psychologically grueling two-solo competition before a jury.

Participation is voluntary, and about half of the company’s 154 dancers don’t bother, having given up the idea of a promotion. After all, once dancers join the company, which is state-supported, they are like civil servants, with a guaranteed salary until mandatory retirement at 42, and a pension afterward.

There have been overtures toward democratization: every year, 1,000 students from high schools in troubled neighborhoods meet with administrators, artisans and artists at the ballet company, where they attend performances, organize an exhibit and put on their own shows.

But attempts at modernization have been few. Two of the top dancers have created pieces with hip-hop dancers for a hip-hop festival in Suresnes — but only twice, in 2007 and 2011.

So this is a welcome moment for change. In April, the company will mark the 300th anniversary of its ballet school with a gala performance for 1,700 people followed by dinner for about 600. There will be round-tables, a conference, a six-part documentary on a year in the life of the Paris Opera Ballet. From May through September, the Opera Garnier will host an exhibition on the school.

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Dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied of the New York City Ballet.

A much bolder move is the company’s recent decision to appoint the 35-year-old dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied as its next dance director. He’s a natural-born charmer: a guest judge on the Fox television series “So You Think You Can Dance”; a model for brands from the Gap to Yves Saint Laurent; and, of course, the husband of the American actress Natalie Portman, whom he taught to dance for “Black Swan,” the film that won her a best-actress Oscar.

But he’s also an outsider. Even though he is French, he rejected the idea of studying with the Paris Opera Ballet School and at age 16 moved to New York to study at the School of American Ballet. “I was reluctant about joining a school that seemed too strict for the way I experienced dance, which to me was so natural and joyful,” he said in a recent interview in Paris. “That regime was not for me.”

When he moves to Paris with Portman and their toddler son, Aleph, and takes over in September 2014, the hope is that he will use his gift for cultivating donors and raising money to make the Paris Ballet sexy — and bankable. “People are born as stars, and Benjamin has always been starlike,” said Olivia Flatto, head of the American Friends of the Paris Opera & Ballet, a New-York-based fund-raising organization for the ballet company. “He is an artist and also an entrepreneur who can reach out to the donors and make them feel they are part of his world.”

In a recent profile in ParisMatch, he appeared barefoot and shirtless. His jeans are slung low on his hips, revealing a prominent indigo-blue tattoo (an interpretation of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 logo for the Bauhaus School). “He is to dance what Beckham is to soccer,” the magazine declared. Indeed, Van Cleef & Arpels has already latched on, announcing that it will sponsor a new Millepied enterprise, “Reflections,” to be staged in May at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

Millepied was chosen by another outsider, Stéphane Lissner, the artistic director of Milan’s La Scala, who, in 2015, is to become general director of the the entire opera and dance organization that is the Paris Opera. During the interview process, Lissner and Millepied talked a lot about their plans for the company: opera-dance collaborations, workshops for dancers who aspire to be choreographers, dancers working with artists or fashion designers, taking the ballet to museums and other public spaces, touring regularly throughout France, producing films.

“Instead of always letting the audience come to you, I’d like to take the company outside,” Millepied said, adding, “there is an elitist element that I want to break by doing outside projects.” In short, he said, “I want to develop a new identity.”

Additional reporting by Roslyn Sulcas.

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When it comes to erotica and pornography, whether hard, soft, sadomasochistic or merely steamy, the French believe they have done it first, done it better and done it all. So the French version of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy should have flopped.

After all, the author E.L. James has none of the poetry of Anaïs Nin, the muse of Henry Miller whose journals made her the 20th century’s pioneer of female erotica. James is not profound like Georges Bataille, the 20th-century French intellectual whose philosophical works explore the dark side of sex. She is not wanton like Catherine Millet, the French art critic and editor whose 2001 memoir graphically catalogs her never-ending anonymous sexual encounters — in swingers clubs, offices, parking lots, cemeteries and trucks in the Bois de Boulogne. And James is certainly no Marquis de Sade, the 18th-century French aristocrat whose fictional fantasies about sexual abuse, torture and murder created the word “sadism.”

But the French version of the first volume of “Fifty Shades” has defied the naysayers, selling an estimated 900,000 print copies and 40,000 e-books since last October, according to its publisher, and rocketing to the top of best-seller lists. A half million copies of Volume 2, which arrived after the New Year, have already been shipped to bookstores in France.

“The French literary tradition of sexually liberated women in control of their bodies and their sexual pleasure is seen today as old-fashioned,” said Michèle Fitoussi, a novelist and social commentator: “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is a fantasy fairy tale about a heroine trapped in the worst clichés — the ingénue, the innocent, the nursemaid, the bubble-head and, finally, the pregnant Madonna. But it has a special appeal to ordinary Frenchwomen who don’t read much and long for a classic fantasy fairy tale.”

French critics have competed with each other to heap scorn on the work, which recounts the sexual awakening of a beautiful virgin by a troubled, handsome young billionaire obsessed by domination and bondage. One persistent criticism is cultural: that “Fifty Shades” is a lightweight, sanitized Anglo-Saxon trifle that bears little resemblance to French literary S&M.

The weekly magazine Les Inrockuptibles said it lacked the philosophical master-slave relationship found in the French “erotic heavyweights.” “Fifty Shades,” it added, exposed the “cultural shock between Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy and the old authentic S&M of the French.”

Franck Spengler, the founder of the publishing house Blanche, which specializes in erotic literature, called the books a product of “American-style Puritanism” in which sex acts can only be justified by love. “The heroine is going to lead her man to the right path, marry him, have children, and rid him of his sexual ‘abnormality,’” he told Le Point magazine. Calling himself “very French,” he said that eroticism is for him a “space of freedom and rebellion, liberated from moral criteria.”

Le Figaro chimed in with a critique of its “suspicious obsession with hygiene.” (The couple take lots of long baths.) The paper’s Web site ran what it called the 20 most ridiculous quotes, including, “He smells of freshly laundered linen and some expensive body wash.” It predicted that the French would soon tire of the heroine’s “Barbie Doll orgasms.”

Clearly they haven’t. According to Isabelle Laffont, the managing director of JC Lattès, which bought the French rights to the books, their popularity is precisely because they break with the traditional French erotic novel in which, she said, “most of the time it’s sex without love and women are submissive to men.” Laffont called the books’ protagonist a modern heroine. “She falls in love and discovers sex and has orgasms right away — which is rare. She’s always having orgasms, more and more. It’s a dream for women — we succeed!”

The trilogy even seems to have emboldened readers to take their own walk on the wild side: the popularity of sex toys — which the French sold and celebrated long before they went mainstream in the United States — is on the rise.

Fleur Breteau, the artistic director of Passage du Désir, a chain of boutiques selling sexual paraphernalia that opened in 2007, said that sales of handcuffs trimmed in fur, feathers or pearls are up 25-fold; blindfolds and masks 15-fold; and $65 geisha balls 20-fold. All of which she attributes to “Fifty Shades.” “The book is an educational tool for women,” she said.

It has also justified more serious examination of subjects like orgasms and kinky sex. The release of the second volume of “Fifty Shades” coincided with a 50-page survey by the respected polling institute Ifop that queried more than 1,000 French adult women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds about their fantasies and sexual practices.

Questions included whether they had played sexual games of domination and submission (including spanking, blindfolding, handcuffing, scratching and biting); whether they used sex toys or had sex in a public place or in a libertine club; and to what extent would they submit to a partner’s sexual desires, and would they do so to keep him?

Some answers reflected a generational divide. Only 10 percent of women 65 and older were willing to “submit to every desire of their partners,” compared with 26 percent of women under 25. Nearly half of the under-25s have received a backside slap during sex compared to only 7 percent of the over-65s.

Even Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former chief of the International Monetary Fund — who has defended himself as a sexual “libertine” — apparently has weighed in. The weekly L’Express reported that he told a socialist deputy in parliament that he regretted “the moral hypocrisy of the French” who condemned him but have devoured James’s “erotic-pornographic fluff.”

Similarly, France’s Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti confessed on Canal Plus television on Jan. 7 that she had not been “seduced” by the text. Filippetti knows a thing or two about literary seduction. She is a novelist whose second book recounts the doomed relationship between a younger woman and her older, married lover.

The television host read a graphic passage from it — about an act of cunnilingus. Filippetti was visibly embarrassed, but recovered. “All the same, it’s extremely classic,” she said. “No?”

Additional reporting by Emerik Derian.

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Adrian Gaut

Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and one of the richest men in the world, is a master of emotional concealment. But there he was, in a television interview in 2007, pouring his heart out about feeling unappreciated in his own country. He boasted that his company, LVMH, is a “beautiful” enterprise dedicated to producing made-in-France luxury goods and to spreading French creativity and culture throughout the world. In other countries, he said, corporate heads are highly respected; in France, they are not. “France has a problem with a market economy,” he said. “The influence of Marxism still exists.”

After François Hollande, a Socialist, was elected president last May, Arnault quietly rented an apartment in the leafy Brussels suburb of Uccles and applied for Belgian citizenship. When the story broke in a Belgian newspaper in September, Arnault was condemned as an ingrate and a traitor. How could the “Napoleon of luxury” whose brands — Dior, Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, to name a few — symbolize French savoir-faire, become a citizen of the country that gave the world thick waffles, fried potatoes, Tintin comics and 500 brands of beer? Was he abandoning his homeland to avoid Hollande’s plan to impose an emergency tax of 75 percent on personal income of more than a million euros a year?

Arnault’s insistence that he would keep his French citizenship and remain a resident in France for tax purposes did little to quell his opponents. On the far right, Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front, said she was “shocked.” On the far left, the politician Jean-Luc Melenchon said that France did not need such “parasites” whose only concept of homeland was money.

But the Arnault affair is about much more than dual citizenship — it’s about the French antipathy toward capitalism and the profit-making rich. Early this year, Hollande defined France’s “main enemy” as the “world of finance,” a comment that echoes back through the centuries, even before 1685, when Louis XIV confiscated the property and possessions of the country’s 1 million Protestants. Protestant business leaders, who had been the country’s best entrepreneurs, either fled or died. “Aristocrats were not allowed to engage in trade,” the business consultant Alain Minc once told me. “So there was nobody to engage in trade in France.”

As that antibusiness sentiment has endured, so have complex codes of how wealth is displayed — or, more likely, concealed. Even now, the best way to live as a rich person in France is to pretend you are not. I learned early on living in Paris that less is more: never dress entirely in the same designer; make sure your new clothes don’t look new; keep your real jewels in the safe. A threadbare runner up a flight of stairs is not shabby but chic if the walk-up is an 18th-century “hotel particulier” in the Sixth Arrondissement. In other words, old money trumps new.

That’s certainly one reason why Carla Bruni-Sarkozy replaced the nouveau-riche Rolex of her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, with a more discreet — and vastly more expensive — Patek Philippe. (When I went with her on a first-lady humanitarian mission to Ouagadougou in 2009, she greeted the receiving party on the red carpet wearing jeans and a dark jewel-necked sweater.)

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L.V.M.H. CEO Bernard Arnault and model/designer Inès de la Fressange.

Likewise, the first time I interviewed Inès de la Fressange, the model, designer, author and daughter of a French marquis, in her office at Roger Vivier, she was wearing jeans, a shapeless sweater, loafers and fake gold bangle bracelets.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn shocked the French even before that notorious sexual encounter with a maid in a New York hotel suite in 2011. A photograph of him in Paris getting into a friend’s black Panamera S Porsche set off a debate about whether it was possible to be a socialist and rich. “We suspect that, behind his extravagant hedonism hides a social amateurism and a fake socialism,” wrote Christophe Barbier in an editorial in L’Express magazine. Even after the sex scandal broke, some French — particularly men — were more distressed about the fact that he and his third wife, the heiress Anne Sinclair, rented a $50,000-a-month town house in TriBeCa and ate a $100 plate of truffled pasta on his first night out of house arrest.

A counterpoint to this is Pierre Bergé, the fabulously wealthy longtime partner of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent, who told Le Monde recently that he keeps an old Jaguar at his house in Normandy. “The people, however modest, love it, because it’s no longer a car; it’s a symbol of tradition. The French love beautiful things,” he said. “On the other hand, there is something arrogant when you buy a new Ferrari today.”

But the younger generation is revolting. A group of young entrepreneurs and heads of Web start-ups calling themselves “pigeons” — French slang for “suckers” — has started an aggressive social media campaign against Hollande’s plan to almost double the tax on capital gains, to some 60 percent.

Using the face of an angry pigeon as their Facebook logo, the “pigeons” warned that the tax measure would stifle creativity, kill the start-up boom, force them to flee France and become “an example of hostility to entrepreneurism in Europe and in the world.” Among their tweets: “From oppression freedom will be born” and “Let’s coo together.”

After their Facebook page went viral, including support from 500 French entrepreneurs in California, the government pledged to modify the proposal.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron promised this summer to “roll out the red carpet” for French companies if Hollande’s new tax-the-rich projects go into effect. In Britain, where LVMH employees more than 3,000 people across its holdings that include Thomas Pink and Glenmorangie whiskey, Arnault is embraced. The British government announced in October that he would be decorated a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for “services to business and the wider community in the U.K.”

And in Belgium, exiles will be welcomed with open arms by Alain Lefebvre, 65, a French former media executive who settled in Brussels seven years ago and started a magazine devoted to “Franco-Belgian art-de-vivre.”

“People who relocate here are looking for a more welcoming environment for entrepreneurs and successful people, a place where they will be admired rather than hated,” he said. “When I first came here I visited a friend, the C.E.O. of a Belgian company. I noticed an Aston Martin in the parking lot. This would be unthinkable in France. It would be considered a provocation of the employees.”

The flip side, he added, was when another C.E.O. traded his big Mercedes for a smaller, more practical model. He was summoned by the employees. They were worried. They wanted to know whether the company was in bad financial shape.

Additional reporting by Emerik Derian.

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Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in the 1963 Billy Wilder film “Irma la Douce.”

Not all that we see on-screen of Paris is Paris.

The square where Gene Kelly sells his paintings to a wealthy American woman in “An American in Paris” is a soundstage in Hollywood. So is the rue St. Denis in the old Les Halles market where Shirley Maclaine streetwalks in Billy Wilder’s “Irma la Douce.” And the outdoor cafe in “April in Paris.” And Notre Dame Cathedral in the 1939 version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

But it hardly matters. So much of Hollywood’s version of Paris is fantasy, a place where the line between the real and the imagined is delightfully blurred, where adventure, mystery, beauty and even love lurk just around the corner. (The filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, who made a dozen films in the 1920s and 1930s using fake Paris, even preferred it to the real. “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris Paramount,” he said. “Paris Paramount is better.”)

Now Paris is celebrating the American film industry’s love affair with the City of Light with “Paris Viewed by Hollywood,” an exhibition that brings together film clips, posters, photographs, paintings, costumes, documents and memorabilia from 100 movies about or set in Paris. (Since 1900, about 800 American films have been set in Paris.)

The show moves chronologically from silent to 3-D, starting with Thomas Edison’s jerky black-and-white images shot from a boat in the Seine in 1910 and ending with Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo.” Fans of the latter film should look for two resin statues of ghosts built for the cemetery scene. It is on loan from Paris’s Cinémathèque Française, a 14,700-square-foot building designed by Frank Gehry dedicated to the preservation, restoration and showing of films. Scorsese himself drew heavily on the Cinémathèque’s vast collection of films and ephemera from the director Georges Méliès, and as a gesture of thanks he gave it the automaton that father and son contemplate at the beginning of the movie.

City Hall, the host of the show, has built a 42-foot-long screen in its Salle St. Jean to project scenes from several films: Greta Garbo discussing the number of steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower in “Ninotchka”; Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and Kay Thompson singing at the top of the Eiffel Tower in “Funny Face”; and Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dancing dreamily in “An American in Paris.”

It’s a particular delight to observe the ways Hollywood has portrayed Paris over the years — “Absinthe,” a 13-minute silent film from 1913, depicts the decadent, alcohol-sodden bohemian lifestyle of the late-19th century — and how it used the city to experiment with risqué themes that would be off-limits in American settings. In Lubitsch’s 1933 adaptation of the Noel Coward play “Design for Living,” Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March and Gary Cooper play a sophisticated trio involved in a romantic triangle — they both want her and she wants both of them. The three of them end up living together, in Paris.

“Desire, libertine living, prostitution, illicit love — Paris was the place without taboo for Hollywood,” said Antoine de Baecque, a film historian and the exhibition’s curator.

Baecque has also pulled together costumes including a gold-sequined ball gown from the musical “Lovely to Look At” (1952); Greta Garbo’s black velvet gloves with angled cuffs, sequins and rhinestones from “Camille” (1936); Gene Kelly’s brown suede dancing boots from “The Three Musketeers” (1948); and the bolero jacket Hubert de Givenchy made for Audrey Hepburn in “Love in the Afternoon” (1957).

Among the other objects are three “mood boards” for Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” the studies for the pastry confections in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie-Antoinette,” and Mary Pickford’s receipt for lunch for two at the Ritz.

The city-run museum is free, so the wait to get into the show, which runs until Dec. 15, can be long. So if you can’t get in (or even if you can), head to the Cinémathèque Française in the 12th Arrondissement. On Oct. 23, it will open an exhibit exploring the 1945 French classic “Children of Paradise,” directed by Marcel Carné, with paintings, photographs, documents, costumes and audiovisual clips that examine the film in various aspects, including how it came to be made during the German occupation of Paris.

“It’s the most beautiful film on Paris and on Paris in film,” said Jean-Christophe Mikhaïloff, the Cinémathèque’s director of development. “It’s a great French superproduction — our ‘Gone With the Wind.’”

In the meantime, every day for several weeks starting Oct. 3, the cinema Le Champo in the Latin Quarter will show a different Hollywood film set wholly or partially in Paris. Among them will be Stanley Donen’s “Charade”; three Lubitsch films, including “The Eighth Wife of Blue Beard”; Billy Wilder’s “Love in the Afternoon”; Howard Hawks’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; and Roman Polanski’s “The Ninth Gate.”

And for strollers, there’s “Paris Movie Walks” — both a book and an iPhone app — that offers guided walking tours through the city along with delicious movie trivia.

My favorite: What restaurant was booked solid for months by American tourists after its signature roast chicken was featured in a film? Answer: Le Grand Colbert, the setting for the dinner scene in “Something’s Gotta Give,” with Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves.

Vincent Rossell/Visuel TCD/Universal Pictures Company, Inc./Stanley Donen, Inc.
Audrey Hepburn in the 1963 Stanley Donen film “Charade.”

Perhaps the most cutting-edge screening room in Paris is also the most exclusive: Warner Brothers installed it recently in the residence of American Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin. Rivkin, the former president and C.E.O. of entertainment companies like The Jim Henson Company (Remember the “Muppets”?), is crazy about movies.

An original poster from “An American in Paris” hangs in his outer office in the embassy. When Woody Allen was in Paris filming “Midnight in Paris,” Rivkin hosted him and his family in the residence for a week. When the film “Julie and Julia,” about the American chef Julia Child had its premiere in France, he held a reception for Nora Ephron, Meryl Streep and the Cordon Bleu cooking school, which gave them honorary degrees. He hosted a dinner for Clint Eastwood in honor of his decoration as commander of the Legion of Honor and brought the actor Samuel L. Jackson into the troubled suburbs to meet local residents as part of a cultural outreach program. Rivkin has organized meetings with dozens of aspiring artists, directors and writers from the suburbs with the actress and director Jody Foster and Allen.

When Rivkin arrived as ambassador in 2009, he even used Hollywood to charm Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president. In Sarkozy’s speech to the United States Congress two years before, he had expressed his love for American movies and admiration for stars like John Wayne and Rita Hayworth. Rivkin sent him an unreleased publicity poster of Hayworth set in an Art Deco frame. When Rivkin formally presented his diplomatic credentials at the Élysée Palace afterward, Sarkozy purred, “I adore that photo.”

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Everett Collection
A scene from François Truffaut’s 1970 film “Bed & Board.”

Summer this year came with special radio programs about a subject the French take very seriously: sex. On Saturday nights, Europe 1 focused on desire. In “Chaude Est la Nuit” (“Hot Is the Night”), famous actors with voices of velour read erotic literary texts about female pleasure. RTL, a competitor, took a more clinical approach. In a daily two-hour series throughout July, sexologists, psychiatrists and gynecologists explored such subjects as “the trouble with the erection,” “sex for seniors” and “perversions.”

These are not the sort of shows you would find on NPR. But talking about sex is a national pastime here, finely honed over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, France was the first European country to create a culture of love. Lust was sublimated to romance and complex rituals, ceremonies and verbal entreaties were used even in pursuing an outcome as modest as the touching of a woman’s hand. That gamesmanship has endured, helping the French when it comes to mastering the heady language of desire and seduction. But when it comes down to actual carnal mechanics, the French can seem as clueless anyone else.

“Contrary to our reputation as sexual know-it-alls, we need help,” said Sophie Bramly, the co-author of a popular new book in France, “Everything Women Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Finally Dared to Ask“.“We like to think we’ve mastered the arts of eroticism and seduction, but we also seem to be tortured.”

Her book deals in concrete sex tips culled from “The Second Sex,” a five-year-old Web site begun by Bramly that promotes women’s sexual pleasure — intellectually, and also practically. (It sells sex toys.) The popularity of Bramly’s book and Web site perhaps underscores how little many French know about the sexual functioning of their bodies. Gynecologists and psychologists say the phenomenon is particularly striking — and surprising — among young French women.

“I fear that we’ve regressed,” the psychologist Philippe Brenot wrote recently in Elle. “Young women become active sexually at 15 or 16 years old, and come to see us at 25 because they are not having orgasms. It’s not pathological; it’s a lack of sexual education.” Michel Cymes, a doctor and the co-host of the RTL radio sex series, agreed. “The most misunderstood phenomenon is the female anatomy,” he told Le Figaro, the daily newspaper.

But how could so many French be clueless about sex when so much of it is out in the open? Women’s naked breasts grace billboards, explicit sex appears on prime-time cable television, and infidelity, particularly among the powerful, is often overlooked. But as it turns out, this very laissez-faire attitude toward sex actually conceals problems, and possibly makes them worse. A study on sexuality in France published in 2008 blamed the flood of information from mass media — sex in books, the media and the Internet, including the mainstreaming of pornography — for sowing much of the confusion that Bramly is trying to clear up.

French women, it seems, don’t always know where else to turn. Sex education in schools, introduced in in 1973, deals almost exclusively with contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. And in the doctor’s office, there is a tradition of distance between physicians and patients. In the United States, women may question their gynecologists, but many French women are timid around doctors who fancy themselves lofty authority figures without time to chitchat. (Patients also don’t get disposable paper gowns in the exam room, which can have a chilling effect when the doctor is fully clothed but you are stark naked.) “I never thought about talking about sexuality with my gynecologist, and I am not alone,” Bramly said. (She is currently directing a 70-minute film on the female orgasm. It will be entitled “OOOOOH!”)

There is at least one area in which France far outstrips the United States in helping women stay sexually vital: la rééducation périnéale, or perineal re-education, for new mothers. The French state subsidizes as many as 20 sessions of physical therapy to get a woman’s postnatal pelvic floor back into shape. “Can you imagine our health care system paying for something like that?” asked Marilyn Yalom, a former Stanford professor whose new book, “How the French Invented Love,” will be published by Harper Perennial in October. “One can remain a sexual being in France as long as you live if you make the effort. French women don’t give up.”

But some of them actually do give up! Sophie Fontanel, a novelist and veteran journalist, became so frustrated with bad sex that she stopped having it altogether. In “L’Envie” (“Desire”), an autobiographical tale of sexual renunciation published last year, she writes about inventing pretend partners so that her friends wouldn’t think she was “nothing,” before finally embracing celibacy and declaring herself a liberated woman. After it was published, the French branded her a politically incorrect prude. But her book was a best seller.

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Courtesy of Plaza Athénée/Dorchester Group
The entire Club des Chefs des Chefs outside the Plaza Athénée.

It’s good to be a chef, particularly if your boss is a president, a prime minister or a prince. So when the “Club des Chefs des Chefs,” a group of chefs to world leaders, visited Paris this week, they were welcomed as if they were chefs d’état — heads of state.

In French diplomacy, the meal is a means of loosening the lips and softening the resolve of the adversary by giving pleasure. As the 17th-century writer and envoy François de Callières put it his classic book, “The Art of Diplomacy,” “The natural effect of good eating and drinking is the inauguration of friendships and the creation of familiarity, and when people are a trifle warmed by wine they often disclose secrets of importance.”

So every year, the club members don their custom-made, double-breasted white jackets embroidered with their names and their countries’ flags and gather in one or more of their capitals to swap recipes, make new friends and refine their culinary diplomacy. This year, twenty of them (most of them from Europe and North America, but others from South Africa, China, Sri Lanka and Israel) started their food and drink fest with a low-key visit to Berlin followed by four red-carpet days in Paris.

The Plaza Athénée hotel housed them in mini-suites. Renault drove them around town in chauffeur-driven black sedans and silver mini-vans. Petrossian, the caviar purveyor, served them dinner, starting with transparent plastic pots of eight different caviars. Armed with mother-of-pearl spoons and slim flutes of chilled vodkas, they were instructed to start with the Baeri Imperial (grey with brown flecks, light texture, woody, dried-fruit notes) and move clockwise to the Beluga Imperial (jet black, suave, buttery), then start all over again. Each chef, if he finished each pot, consumed nearly 100 grams of caviar.

Gabriela Plump
A selection of eight caviars were served as the first course at the club’s dinner at Petrossian.

Alain Ducasse hosted the group for lunch at Le Jules Verne, his restaurant high in the Eiffel Tower, with a six-course tasting menu and the best of his wine cellar, including a 1996 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque, a 2000 Château Cheval Blanc (Saint-Emilion) and a 1996 Château d’Yquem. The Saint-Emilion was so spectacular that Rupert Schnait, Austria’s chef, sniffed and swirled for what seemed like a full minute before he dared to taste. “Saffron! A touch of honey!” he exclaimed.

Gabriela Plump
The chefs gather in the fruit and vegetable hall at the Rungis market outside of Paris.

At the Sèvres ceramic center and museum, the chefs watched as an artisan worked on a set of ceramic plates (each one costs $3,700) ordered by a private client. In the grand ballroom of the Baccarat mansion, they noshed on foie gras petits-fours and sipped champagne from heavy, foot-high crystal flutes. There was harder work as well: a tour of the vast Rungis wholesale food market south of Paris started at 4 a.m. (It’s about the same size as the principality of Monaco.) The chefs sampled oysters at 5 a.m., cheeses at 6 a.m. and a refined version of tête de veau for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. The veal cheek and skin, but not the tongue and brain, came in a vinaigrette sauce, accompanied by a 2009 white Burgundy.

The high point came on Tuesday when François Hollande, the meat-and-potatoes-loving president of France, honored them with a reception at the Élysée Palace.
“Depending on whether you bring pleasure to those you serve, they will leave a negotiation either happy or unhappy,” Hollande said as the group stood at attention in their chef’s whites and toques. Diplomacy is a lot more difficult, he added, “If you make a mess of the meal.”

Laurent Blevennec/Présidence de la République
Gilles Bragard introduces France’s President François Hollande to Obama’s chef Cristeta Comerford, with Prince Albert of Monaco’s chef at right.

Hollande praised Ulrich Kerz, Angela Merkel’s chef, for his Wiener schnitzel. He asked Shalom Kadosh to give warm regards to his boss, Israeli President Shimon Peres. He told Cristeta Comerford, the chef to the Obamas, that he had not yet had the pleasure of dining at the White House. Even after he posed for a formal group photo in the garden, Hollande seemed in no hurry to leave, sticking around to schmooze and pose some more.

How different from Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor, who was a teetotaler and a gobbler, not a savorer. The former president was so determined to save time at official functions that he eliminated the cheese course. He could chew and talk at the same time. “It was so sad,” said Gilles Bragard, the founder of Bragard, the couturier of cooks and kitchen staffs around the world, who created the club on a whim in 1977 and provides all their uniforms. “Sarkozy was a prisoner of time.”

Still, Hollande prefers country fare to haute cuisine. When he was asked last year to contribute to a cookbook of favorite recipes by members of parliament, he submitted a receipt for “farcidure grillée du pays d’Egletons,” a potato-based peasant dish that looks like a latke crossed with a Spanish omelet. Cheese is now back on the Élysée menu, as are generous portions. Despite having slimmed down thanks to the high-protein Dukan diet, Hollande likes seconds, said Bernard Vaussion, the Élysée’s top chef who started in its kitchen 40 years ago and is on his sixth president. The president has to be coaxed into eating his vegetables, Vaussion added.

The chefs weren’t supposed to dish, but other (harmless) secrets spilled out. President Vladimir Putin of Russia travels with military officers who sample his food before it touches his lips. Nothing unusual, said Anton Mosimann, a chef who has cooked for several British prime ministers. At one visit to Britain by George Bush (he did not say which one), two tasters from the F.B.I. came along.

When a French television reporter asked Comerford whether French food was the best in the world, she parried diplomatically. “French food is like classical piano, and we chefs are all classically trained,” she said. “But in the U.S., we play jazz — and improvise!”

Daryl Schembeck, the top chef at the United Nations, said that some guests request that there be no knives on the table — but not because of security concerns. “They don’t like the noise of knives on the plate during speeches,” he said.

There were only the mildest of culinary missteps. One was the White House gift for the chefs and other folks in Paris: a small white tin elegantly decorated with the presidential seal. Inside were four Whitman’s Sampler chocolates, including a dark chocolate coconut-filled piece coated in white “bloom.” Among the ingredients were partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, corn syrup, sugar, artificial vanilla, invertase and tocopherols. Does Michelle Obama know?

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Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
At left, President Hollande’s companion Valérie Trierweiler wears Apostrophe at Elysee Palace in Paris. At right, former President Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni wears Dior at Zarzuela Palace in Madrid.

The French like their leaders to be regal, so François Hollande’s pledge to be a “normal” president will take some getting used to. Not that Hollande seems ready to surrender any of the powers of his office or abandon Charles de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” as an exceptional nation. For now, the changes are a matter of style. Less spending, less glamour, less Versailles. More caution, more prudence, more modest living. So what is the new “normal” in Hollande’s France?

Le Central is the new Fouquet’s
Nicolas Sarkozy was never forgiven for celebrating his election night victory with dinner at Fouquet’s, that touristy, chichi Champs-Élyseés restaurant owned by a business group better known for its casinos. (Never mind that Sarkozy has no interest in fine dining and doesn’t drink.) His successor eats with gusto and likes to cook — especially red meat. For lunch on election day, “Monsieur Normal” scoffed down duck terrine with asparagus, beef filet with potatoes and a strawberry tart at Le Central, a favorite brasserie for local politicians in Tulle, the small, working-class town in central France that Hollande represented in parliament. In Paris, he goes a bit more upscale, frequenting Les Cocottes, Christian Constant’s trendy restaurant in the Seventh Arrondissement, for a good steak.

Apostrophe is the new Chanel
While other first ladies stuck with France’s grand couturiers — Bernadette Chirac once tromped around the muddy grounds of a pig farm in chestnut-colored suede Chanel boots, and Carla Bruni split her affection between Chanel and Dior — Hollande’s partner and first lady of sorts, Valérie Trierweiler, tends toward ready-to-wear staples befitting a journalist. She regularly turns up in trench coats, silk blouses, tailored blazers and scarves by brands like Georges Rech and Apostrophe, whose split-to-the-thigh, black chiffon silk dress (500 euros) she wore to Hollande’s swearing in. She told The Times of London that she has never worn couture, although that could change if she hopes to showcase the best made-in-France fashion, as one of Hollande’s campaign promises was to promote and save French industry.

Swatch is the new Patek Philippe
Sarkozy was much maligned for wearing a Rolex, so much so that Bruni replaced it with a more discreet 50,000-euro Patek Philippe. Hollande wears a Swatch.

Tanneur is the new Dior
Both Bernadette Chirac and Carla Bruni carried Dior bags. (In 1995, Chirac gave a Dior to Princess Diana; Bruni was spotted in 2010 in New York with the 3D bag before it had even hit stores.) Trierweiler wore a Tara Jarmon cobra-patterned calfskin handbag (210 euros) at Hollande’s swearing on. At the White House in May, she gave Michelle Obama a $600 cream-colored, woven leather Vicky handbag by Le Tanneur, the leather-goods maker that has, since 1898, had its headquarters in Hollande’s electoral fief of Corrèze. “A traditional model, at an affordable price, symbol of our savoir-faire,” is how Trierweiler described it. She did not mention that the Qatar Luxury Group now owns 55 percent of Le Tanneur, or that the leather is woven in southern India.

Stilettos are the new ballerinas
Arriving for the NATO summit in Chicago, Treirweiler emerged from the French Presidential plane in five-inch-plus strappy platform stilettos. At a luncheon at the White House for spouses of G8 heads of state, she wore Yves Saint Laurent suede peep-toe stiletto pumps. Bruni, who is several inches taller than Sarkozy, usually wore flats, even to meet the queen of England.

SIPA, via Associated Press; Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press
President Hollande at a train station in Metz, France. At right, former President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni on board “Air Sarko One.”

Trains are the new planes
Sarkozy never traveled by train as president, preferring planes, including “Air Sarko One” (176 million euros). Hollande plans to make official trips inside France and to European summits in Brussels by train.

Jeans are the new jewels
As Sarkozy’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, now the head of the International Monetary Fund, liked to wear jewelry, real jewelry. When Sarkozy made his first official visit to the White House in 2007, he instructed her to “leave her jewels in the safe.” The 17 women on Hollande’s ministerial and sub-ministerial team are not jewel wearers. Cécile Duflot, the minister of regions and housing, caused a stir when she showed up in jeans to the first weekly Council of Ministers meeting, led by Hollande. Benoît Hamon, one of Hollande’s deputy ministers, defended the look, calling it “an everyday outfit.” Duflot said, “I’m not going to play someone I’m not.”

The handshake is the new hand kiss
Jacques Chirac, when he was president, greeted just about every woman in government with a baisemain — a kiss of the hand. Sarkozy was fonder of the double-cheek kiss. (He could be an awkward hand kisser.) Hollande is playing it safe. On a visit to Berlin the day he took over as president, he exchanged a formal handshake with Chancellor Angela Merkel, holding her elbow to control the gesture. (She and Sarkozy cheek kissed, even though she complained privately not to enjoy the practice.)

The 15th is the new 16th
Sarkozy lived with Bruni in a private mansion in a gated community in the swank 16th Arrondissement. But if security wrinkles can be ironed out, Hollande will continue living with Trierweiler in their two-bedroom, $4,000-a-month apartment (parking included) in an architecturally uninteresting modern complex on the Rue Cauchy in the un-chic 15th Arrondissement.

Abnormal is the new normal
“Normal” may have worked to get Hollande elected, but it’s already turned cliché. Last week, the popular Web site Rue89 started a crusade against normality, asking journalists to refine and expand their vocabulary to include words like “ordinary,” “natural,” “honest” and “sober.” This week, in a stunning lack of judgment, Treirweiler tweeted her support for the opponent of Ségolène Royal, the former partner of Hollande and the mother of their four children, in this Sunday’s parliamentary elections. “A simple tweet of 135 characters made Hollandienne ‘normality’ fly into pieces,” Le Monde wrote. Geoffroy Didier of the center-right UMP party said that with this act, “the ‘normal’ presidency is dead. It’s ‘Dallas’ at the Elysée.”

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From left: PiL; Didier Truffaut/Armor LuxLocal politicians are pushing to keep brands in France, such as J.M. Weston moccasins, Armor Lux shirts and Repetto flats.

When Lejaby Lingerie, the 82-year-old French bra-and-corset maker, announced last year that it was shuttering its fourth and only remaining factory in France and heading to Tunisia, it represented more than just another blow for French industry. It also provided one of the most unexpected symbols of the French presidential campaign: the bra.

Lingerie has a special place in French society. The Ipsos polling agency found in a survey several years ago that 91 percent of French women and 83 percent of French men believe that lingerie is important in life.

And the Lejaby brand is so embedded in the French psyche that François Truffaut evoked the bra maker in his 1977 film, “The Man Who Loved Women.” Bertrand, the film’s Casanova, was able to describe to a telephone operator he had never met the exact model of bra she was wearing that day: “Ah yes, I know it,” he told her. “Lejaby. It fastens in the back, with adjustable straps and a plastic hook in the shape of a double S.”

 

Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Workers at the last remaining Lejaby Lingerie factory protested its closing in February. The factory was subsequently bought by a French company and all of the jobs were saved.

After the announcement, the seamstresses at the Lejaby plant in the rural town of Yssingeaux, in central France, took action to save their jobs. They strung a giant white lace bra as big as a protest banner across a metal barricade and posed for journalists. They brought in mattresses and sleeping bags and slept together on the factory floor. They sang protest songs about bras.

The strategy worked. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who’s running hard for re-election behind the Socialist candidate François Hollande, moved to save them. A handbag maker who supplies Louis Vuitton (which is owned by Sarkozy’s friend Bernard Arnault) is taking over.

“You have left your troubles behind,” Mr. Sarkozy assured the seamstresses. They will be making purses instead of bras.

But the last-minute rescue only serves to highlight a bigger problem in France: despite a reputation for artisanal savoir-faire that goes back centuries, the country has lost much of its competitive edge.

France has lost a fourth of its industrial workers since 1991 as factories continue to close. Unemployment is at a 12-year high of nearly 10 percent. Ninety-five percent of clothing sold in France is foreign made; the other 5 percent consists largely of luxury brands.

The specter of even more economic decline has contributed to campaign promises of more protectionism. “Le Made in France” became a campaign rallying cry for many of the 10 candidates who faced off in the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.

François Hollande, who came in first with 28.6 percent of the vote, has called for “industrial patriotism” and government incentives for companies that relocate back to France. In his speech to supporters in the city of Tulle after the results were announced on Sunday night, he pledged to carry out his campaign promises, including the protection of French industry.

Sarkozy, who came in second with 27.1 percent of the vote, has advocated a “buy-French” policy and proposed a “Buy European Act” modeled on the United States’ “Buy American Act” of 1933. In his speech Sunday night, he ticked off a list of voters’ anxieties, including the movement of jobs out of France. The two men will face off in a runoff on May 6.

To promote “Le Made in France” movement, the political parties of Sarkozy, Hollande and the centrist candidate François Bayrou (who came in fourth) took the symbolic step of ordering thousands of T-shirts for their campaigns from the French companies Armor Lux and Lemahieu — at three-to-five-times the cost of the Chinese-made versions.

But what exactly does it mean to be a French product? Except for geographically designated foods like wine and cheese, it’s often hard to define it. Repetto “ballerina” flat shoes for women (the Dordogne), J.M. Weston moccasins (made by hand near Limoges) and Bleu Forêt socks (the Vosges) are and plan to stay French.

An online “Made in France” quiz by the French television channel TF1 revealed that Reynolds pens are made in China, as are some lower-end Laguiole knives, but that the Toyota Yaris is wholly French made.

Classic striped cotton Breton sailor sweaters are made by Armor Lux in Quimper, although the cotton comes from North America or West Africa, the unbleached thread from Germany and Austria, and the sewing machines from Britain or the United States. When demand gets too high, the company has allowed a small portion of its inventory to be made in Morocco.

Last year Sarkozy introduced a label called “Origin France Guaranteed” — but it is not widely used and is misleading because certification requires that only half of the contents of a product are French.

Then there is the price differential. A Renault Clio made in Turkey is 1,300 euros less than the same model made in France, and a Peugeot 208 made in Slovakia is 1,500 euros less than the same French-made model. (Many parts — like motors and transmissions — are made in France and sent abroad for less expensive assembly).

Coca-Cola, meanwhile, ahead of the curve, started its own made-in-France campaign long before the idea caught on with the politicians, and 90 percent of the raw materials for the product are now French.

In recent weeks, the two leading candidates have turned the “made in France” campaign into a rallying cry about more than just the economy and jobs. Protectionism has come to mean protecting grander ideals about the country. Both Hollande and Sarkozy have talked about the special “genius” of the French.

“Protectionism is no longer just an economic and social issue,” said Stéphane Rozès, a political analyst and former pollster. “It’s also an attempt to project the power of the French nation, the French Republic in a globalized, uniform world. It’s preserving and promoting an identity — the identity of the imaginary Frenchman who knows how to create, to work, to produce, to think.” And to make a beautiful lace-covered, strategically wired, ribbon-trimmed bra.

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