Something stinks today in the French perfume industry. It’s the stench of bigotry.
If you doubt the power of words, consider the discomfort today of a man whose name itself is a household word in France, Jean-Paul Guerlain.
The patriarch of the French perfume house that bears his name has managed to briefly distract the nation from the impending national strike that threatens to shut down much of the country, and he did it with two words.
One was Samsara, one of the perfumes he created during his career, which went on to become of the world’s most popular fragrances for women.
The other was the N-word.
It happened as Guerlain, 82, was giving an televised interview on the national France 2 television network. It started out as what you’d have to consider to be a classic French story, about how he created Samsara to impress a woman. When he asked the lady what kind of fragrance would seduce her, he said, she suggested a blend of jasmine, rose and sandalwood.
“And for once, I started working like a nigger,” he said, smiling.
He could’ve cut his losses and stopped there. He chose instead to dig the hole a little deeper.
“I don’t know if niggers ever worked that hard.”
The YouTube video cuts off before we see how the woman conducting the interview reacted to this, if at all. But the smile never seemed to leave his face. Judging by the look on his face, he seemed to think he was being charming, even un petit peu seduissant.
(For her part, the France 2 interviewer seemed not the least bit discomfited, either.)
You French speakers out there can hear the interview for yourself here. English speakers can read about it on CNN or France24.
Of course, expressions of racism are nothing new in France. The ultra-right National Front headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen has been notorious for it for decades.
But that’s politics. This is perfume. Doesn’t seem to matter, though.
If the videos of this interview have gone viral on the Web, the reaction in France to Guerlain’s comment has gone volcanic. Twitter and the French blogosphere are boiling with outrage. People are calling for a boycott of Guerlain products, a boycott of French products, even a boycott of France altogether. And French media are tearing Guerlain to pieces.
Guerlain has already issued those now-standard backhanded post-racist-comment-apologies — which someone else read on his behalf on French television — apologizing for the harm he may have done to the company’s image with his remarks and pointing out that he’s no longer directly employed by the firm.
(Interestingly, he did not apologize for the remarks themselves, also standard these days.)
Apology or not, the damage has already been done — and the damage could be considerable.
Anti-racism groups in France, specifically SOS-Racisme and Le CRAN, the Representative Council of Black Associations, may take Guerlain to court over his comments, which French law would permit them to do.
The flap has reached as high as French finance minister Christine Laguarde, who called his remarks “pathetic.”
“I simply hope this is just senile and grotesque,” she said, a reference to his advanced age.
As repugnant as his comments are, I feel a certain gratitude to Monsieur Guerlain. His remarks are a reminder that words have power, and that not all attitudes of Europe’s colonial past have faded with the passage of time.
He’s also added a word to my French vocabulary: “nègre.”
Merci beaucoup…
Let’s hope many people boycott his brands in disgust. And when someone says something along the lines of ‘well, he’s very old’ it always sounds like a cowardly excuse for the behaviour, even if it wasn’t meant as such.