Our Man in Paris: Sexual education in the French style

Our eldest child, Charles, has been in a French school for five years. On his first day, when he was nearly seven, he was mortified to receive a welcoming kiss from his teacher. As if that were not embarrassment enough, he had to wear a smock, which made him look like a cross between a Russian peasant and a chic hairdresser. Five years and four months later, he is 12, huge, bilingual, spared smocks and entering puberty, and he has just had his first formal lesson in sexual education in the French style.

Much of French education (though it has many things going for it) is neither creative nor factual, but abstract and theoretical. From a tender age, French children learn the facts of grammar and maths; they also have to memorise the theory of sentence construction and complex geometrical definitions. But there was nothing abstract about the inaugural sex-education lesson administered by the deputy headmaster of Charles's Catholic school. Boys were separated from girls. Both were given drawings showing the development of male and female bodies. They were handed fact-sheets and questionnaires to dispel the most common confusions and anxieties of puberty: "All adult penises are the same length, true or false?"

The aim was to reassure the children that, although their bodies and horizons were about to explode, everything was normal. They were starting to get body hair? Normal. They weren't? Normal. The girls were starting to have breasts? Normal. They weren't? Normal. All normal, normal, normal.

The deputy headmaster also put a brisk emphasis on personal hygiene. Relations with girls were "for later", he told the boys. In the meantime, keep your equipment in working order by keeping it clean. He pointed to the dreadful fate that had befallen Louis XVI, who had failed to clean himself properly and was therefore sexually dysfunctional as an adult. (His failure to consummate his marriage to Marie Antoinette and to produce an heir for years was one of the factors that undermined the authority of the crown and helped to generate the French Revolution.)

All of this advice to 12-year-olds seemed sane and sensible, just as you would expect in a country without sexual complexes, such as France. Well, not really. Sexual education in French schools is a recent thing and still controversial. Although schools were informed that they could introduce sex education as long ago as 1973, it wasn't made a part of the national curriculum until 1998. The official requirement is just two hours a year for 14- and 15-year-olds. An hour a year for children from 10 upwards is "recommended".

The slow, shy introduction of sexual education in France is partly explained by a rearguard action by the more Catholic and conservative parents' associations, who fear an intrusion by the trendy, libertarian left into impressionable young minds. The ministerial directive of 1998 said that children should be taught that "sexual behaviour can take many forms": an invitation to "preach homosexuality", one pressure group complained.

Three events in recent days have demonstrated how disconnected from the brutal realities of 21st-century childhood such attitudes are. A report in Libération said that, by the age of 11, one in two French children has been exposed to the hardest forms of pornography, through the internet or videos or cable TV. In other words, many children in France (and, no doubt, Britain) are getting their first, muddled impressions of sexuality not from playground gossip, as I did, but from the most extreme, violent forms of porn. (Charles received an unsolicited e-mail the other night from a "teensex chatline".)

Last week, eight boys, aged 14–15, were arrested in Lyon for the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl. There has been a series of similar attacks in France, involving boys as young as 13. In most cases, the children showed no remorse or even understanding that they had done anything wrong.

Two hours a year of sex education for 14-to-15-year-olds is hardly an intrusion into impressionable minds. The risk is that, by that age, their minds may already have been impressed to a pulp.

Blessed were the cheesemakers

Camembert is part of the heritage of France and, more importantly, Normandy. Its reputation as the big cheese among the 300-plus different French fromages was established during the First World War, when every French soldier received a camembert a day in his rations.

In recent years, there has been a decline in the popularity of the cheap and relatively tasteless, mass-produced varieties of camembert made with pasteurised milk. There has been a modest boom in the sales of the real thing: the dozen or so brands of camembert still made in the traditional manner, with hand-held scoops of untreated milk from selected Norman cows (moulé à la louche au lait cru). The depth of taste of such a camembert compares with a pasteurised camembert like a holiday snap compares with a Monet.

Dreadful news for lovers of Normandy and real camemberts. Lactalis, the largest dairy company in Europe, manufacturer of Président, the biggest-selling brand of pasteurised camembert, has made an appalling discovery. Its laboratories in Brittany (a further provocation to Normans) have invented a way of messing around with the bacteriological process in order to produce a Frankenstein of cheeses. They claim to have invented a pasteurised camembert that tastes like a raw-milk one.

The new product, called "camembert campagne", will be hitting French supermarket shelves shortly. The manufacturers insist that the new cheese will survive in the shops, and in the home, for longer than the traditional camembert. It has to be admitted that those can go critical in a matter of hours unless handled with extreme caution.

France claims to be the country of "la bonne bouffe" ("good grub"). In other words, the French believe that they are superior to the slop-eating British and Americans. Blurring the distinction between real and fake camemberts is no way for such a country to behave.

Touché

More on the Bernadette Chirac-Hillary Clinton connection. France's first lady was campaigning in an old people's home for one of her husband's supporters, Jacques Toubon. An old woman asked if she was Mme Toubon. "Certainly not," Bernadette shot back. "If I was, he would be President of the Republic." Whether consciously or not, that is a lift from Hillary Clinton. Hillary once introduced Bill to an ex-boyfriend working as a petrol-pump attendant. "And just think," Bill said. "You might have married her..." Hillary interjected: "And he would now be the President of the United States."