July 26, 2013
I think that my comprehension of French is improving, but sometimes I get big things wrong.
An example of this is the rumor I have started regarding the "Femen" stamp that has just been released by the French postal service, a new stamp to commemorate the presidency of François Hollande.
The symbol of the French Revolution which the French live with year-in-and-year-out is the postage stamp of Marianne, the image of a woman wearing a Phyrigian cap. If you don't know what a Phyrigian cap is, it is a sock-like head-covering, a sort of loose-fitting sailor's watch cap. The Phrygian bonnet is always red in its French iteration, and it is synonymous with liberty.
Many beautiful women have modeled for Marianne, including Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Inès de la Fressange, and Laetitia Casta. The designers of the latest Marianne stamp, David Kanewa and Olivier Ciappa, declared when the stamp was released, that an inspiration was Imma Shevchenko of the radical feminist group "Femen".
Imma Shevchenko is a radical feminist from Ukraine whose stock in trade is going topless in protest. As the French have always had an easy relationship with small-breasted topless women on beaches, the fuss over Shevchenko's inspiration is hard to fathom. She is not French, but she has French residence, and the French do not object to young, gorgeous blonds going topless for what they believe in.
Yet a great deal of ink has been spilled over the latest Marianne. I have been trying to make sense of it, but at some point my grasp of what I was reading in the newspapers fell behind what seems to actually have been placed on the page. I thought the controversy was over the fact that the new Marianne was a transvestite! I drew this conclusion from the frequent references to Femen in the press.
This is not as wild an idea as it sounds. The female gender is femelle in French, the male, mâle. Femen suggests something beyond the feminine, something that might offend the French sense of the strictness of gender roles. Although perhaps that is not a sentiment that can be easily reconciled with Liberty Equality and Fraternity in the 21st century.
On the other hand, maybe I got it wrong: maybe the protest was a picayune snipe by the Right, protesting the use of someone other than a Frenchwoman as the inspiration for Marianne.
However, if you look at the stamp itself, one thing immediately strikes you: Marianne has huge hands, the size of transvestites'! Kanewa and Ciappa admitted to being inspired by images from the Renaissance, bandes déssinés (French hard-bound comic-strips), and manga, eroticized comic books from Japan. And Femen sounds --at least to my ears-- like a merger of feminine and men --a word that bespeaks androgyny.
It was with that in mind that I went to the post office in Caunes-Minervois today, to see whether it had any of the Femen stamps, as I called them. The man behind the desk is a quiet, unassuming, friendly person, slender in build. He wears small wireless eyeglasses and has a retiring, but cheerful demeanor.
"I would like some of the new Marianne stamps, the Femen stamps?"
"We don't have any yet, but eventually we will."
"I want to buy a sheet of them--"
"They come in large and small denominations--"
"I want to frame a sheet, since the new Marianne is so controversial--"
"Oh? Why controversial?"
"It's a femen, a transvestite--"
"I have a flyer here that announces the issue--"
"There she is. Do you see how large the hands are? It's a man! --Or it's half-man, half-woman --or it's a transvestite, I don't know. All I know is that it's a scandal!"
"Where have you read this?"
"In Le Figaro and other newspapers. It's very controversial."
"Well, if you want to buy a sheet, you can buy a sheet of 100 stamps at the centime level, which will cost you a Euro."
"Great! Then I can frame it!"
Has Caunes-Minervois ever heard of such a thing? Inadvertently, I have passed on misinformation. Yet if you look at the image on the stamp, that girl has some big hands.
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