Bonjour Tristesse: a ‘charming little monster’ disrupts bourgeois morality on the French Riviera
- Written by: Frances Egan, Lecturer in Global Studies, Monash University
In 1954, Bonjour Tristesse scandalised readers with its depiction of a 17-year-old girl who partied, had sex and played havoc with other people’s lives.
The author, French writer Françoise Sagan, was only 18 herself. She shot to fame when the novel won the prestigious Prix des critiques. “Today she’s just a pretty girl,” said one reviewer, “tomorrow, she’ll be someone to talk about.”
In a big white villa on the Mediterranean sea, they enjoy a “reckless happiness”. Cécile plunges into the fresh, clear water to “wash away the shadows and dust of the city”. She bites into an orange, feeling “the sweet juice run into [her] mouth”, and lets the sun smooth “away the marks of the sheet on [her] skin”.
Enter Anne, an old friend of Cécile’s late mother. Anne spends her time with “clever, intelligent and discreet” types, rather than the “noisy and insatiable” beautiful people preferred by Cécile and her father. Anne’s arrival threatens to stop the teenager from getting cosy with Cyril, the boy next door – and from partying instead of studying.
When Anne and her father get engaged, Cécile panics she’ll lose her father’s affection and gain an unwanted mother figure. So, she hatches an ill-fated plan to get rid of the other woman.
The novel’s first-person narration is somewhat theatrical. Cécile describes the events of the summer as having “all the elements of a drama”, with “a seducer, a demi-mondaine and a determined woman”. She manipulates these figures without concern for the feelings or lives of others. This characterisation led critics to say Sagan had created a type: “the wicked ingénue, who delights in life’s absurdity and acts in the comedy of existence just for the fun of it”.
Francoise Sagan, 1958.
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It is tempting here to liken Sagan to her creation, Cécile. French novelist Francois Mauriac famously called the author “ce charmant petit monstre”, or, “that charming little monster”. The label stuck. At only 18, with her pixie cut and carefree attitude, Sagan was also a young bourgeois woman pushing the limits of what was acceptable.
But the autobiographical label tells us less about the writing and author, and more about her public, who only wanted “a scandalous writer or a young bourgeois woman”. Sagan famously played into the media furore, saying later: “I don’t really understand adult values and I never will”.
Her book tells a more complicated story. It’s too easy to label what Rachel Cusk calls an interrogation of morality as simply immoral or immature.
Fashionable feelings
As you can tell from the title, which translates as “hello sadness”, Sagan is good at writing pretty and poetic feelings. The book’s first line, in which the world-weary narrator looks back at herself and foreshadows a “strange melancholy” she would rather not name, hints at the difficulty of translation. (I owe these English quotes to Irene Ash’s 1955 translation, but you can also find a “fresh” 2013 version by Heather Lloyd.)
Feelings are what define the characters and shape their every gesture. Cécile envies “the happy nonchalance, the languid grace” love imparts to Anne’s movements, and shows bemusement at Anne’s integrity. Where Anne “can stand perfectly still while [she] talk[s]”, Cécile is more flaccid, needing the “support of a chair, or some object to hold like a cigarette, or the distraction of swinging one leg over the other and watching it move”.
Bonjour Tristesse has sometimes been accused of lacking true emotional depth. Cécile has fashionable feelings and fashionable ideas, but doesn’t always convey them with conviction. Her description of being in love is poetic, but shallow. Her dismissal of the conventional bourgeois life is halfhearted. And her grief is, for the most part, either buried or passing.
Even so, Sagan’s portrayal of a teenager reckoning with pain and self-hate has had a powerful cultural impact. Cécile’s detachment is glamorous and cinematic, embodying what was a new kind of rebelliousness in the 1950s. She is very thin and casually sexy – “a little wild cat”, in her father’s words, though he’d “rather have a beautiful fair-haired daughter”.
In Austrian-American Preminger’s adaptation, Jean Seberg’s American “preppy style” and pixie cut combined with French feminine chic. Seberg’s incarnation of Cécile was what led to her becoming an icon of the French New Wave as the boyish and mischievous “gamine”. Her performance inspired Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), a film where she embodied the modern and forward-looking.
Jean Seberg’s incarnation of Cécile in the 1958 film of Bonjour Tristesse led to her becoming an icon of the French New Wave.
Descriptions like this one in 1987 Harper’s Bazaar attest to the influence of her look: “Prettiness is back and with it la gamine, the très beguiling, naughty-naive waiflike look that has turned nightclub audiences into a sea of Jean Seberg lookalikes.”
Today’s literary “sad bad girl” could be understood as another iteration of the same. Cécile is the ultimate young white woman with money, free to wallow around. Afraid of ennui – Ash has “boredom”, but the French “ennui” evokes a privileged dissatisfaction with the world – and left alone with her thoughts, she turns to provocation and destruction.
But where the millennial (and anglophone) sad bad girl is self-abasing and flat, Cécile is outwardly and childishly confident; she also has psychological nuance. Split into narrator and protagonist, older and younger versions, thinking self and object of reflection, Cécile can’t be contained by any one “type”.
The scenes in Bonjour Tristesse that actually wrench at your heartstrings are the ones that evoke a gaping and palpable emptiness. For Cécile, the scariest thing is not losing the heady bubble of youth and pleasure – it’s coming to a painful awareness of the bubble’s emptiness.
Shameless sex
Despite having very little sex in it, Bonjour Tristesse is famous for depicting a young woman’s sexuality. Cécile is attracted to older men, and describes her father, Raymond, as both “the best-looking man I know” and “magnificent”. The relationship between father and daughter is almost disturbingly affectionate, something Preminger’s film pushes closer to the incestuous.
In his 1958 adaptation, the two kiss on the lips and Elsa labels their relationship a “perfect marriage”. This film also problematically equates “free love” with harassment of those with less power (see Raymond groping the maid, to general hilarity), something no one would get away with post-#MeToo.
The book fares better, though it engages only superficially with class. Sagan shows Cécile disdainful of snooty bourgeois ideas about how she should socialise and who with, but does not explore the privilege her position gives her to transgress.
Within this milieu, Cécile again anticipates much later heroines. Influenced by her father’s “frivolous” attitude towards relationships and women, Cécile embraces her sexuality and pursues a “rapid, violent and passing love affair” with Cyril.
While the character’s narrative arc would be unremarkable for a teenage boy, it broke from the norms for girls that separated sex from pleasure and agency, and used pregnancy as a moralising device.
Inconceivably unpunished
Anne has the job of reining Cécile in, according to bourgeois norms and pragmatic concerns. When she finds her half naked with Cyril, she warns Cécile about ending up in a clinic, which we can surmise is a reference to clandestine abortion. In this light, the superficial feelings Cécile has for him take on a transgressive dimension. What is significant is not that this girl has sex, but that she’s as casual about it as she is about everything else. Despite not being in love or wanting to marry, Cécile feels no shame, hesitation or fanfare. Her sexuality is not so much examined, as unquestioned.
When Cyril asks Cécile if she’s worried about getting pregnant, she casually responds that she would leave him to deal with it if she was. Such blitheness indicates a certain naivety from a character – and perhaps a young author – who has lived a relatively sheltered life.
Even so, Cécile’s behaviour shifts the gendered onus of responsibility, together with the emotional labour. It’s Cyril who is critical of Cécile’s father’s unconventional living arrangements, and he wishes his lover would act a little more “tormented”.
Some 30 years after writing Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan explained: “It was inconceivable that a young girl of 17 or 18 should make love, without being in love, with a boy of her own age, and not be punished for it.” Today, it’s still hard to imagine a young woman who doesn’t feel responsible for pregnancy or concern about her reputation.
Relationships between women
What strikes me reading Bonjour Tristesse today is not the romantic or sexual intrigue, but the relationships between women. While Cécile seemingly cares most about her father and idealises heterosexual love, Sagan makes these things secondary and two-dimensional. The narrator herself admits to leaving Raymond in the background. “I have spoken a great deal about Anne and myself,” she says, “and very little of my father.”
The relationships between women, including Cecile and her stepmother, are central to Bonjour Tristesse.
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Cécile is a shamelessly bitchy narrator who objectifies herself and other women, and sees ugliness as a moral failing. But, through Cécile, Sagan explores how women see other women, in a society defined by the male gaze. As art critic John Berger said, “women watch themselves being looked at”.
Cécile quickly reduces Elsa to femme fatale, but has more trouble defining Anne by her relationship with Raymond. Confused, Cécile initially categorises Anne not as a woman, but as an “entity”. She explains: “I had seen her as a self-assured, elegant, and clever person, but never weak or sensual.” Heteronormative gender roles are what makes a woman, for Cécile.
A complex relationship with feminism
Published five years after Simone de Beauvoir’s influential feminist manifesto The Second Sex (1949), Bonjour Tristesse is one of several existentialist novels written by women that grapple with meaning, and ask the question: who am I without a man?
Sagan did not identify as feminist, and Bonjour Tristesse consolidates a certain French femininity (even if it looks more modern than it once did). Still, it humanises women and grants Cécile subjectivity. Under all that objectification are complex feelings and introspection: Cécile swings between feeling jealousy, hate, care, love, fear and admiration for Anne.
At the time Bonjour Tristesse was published, the author herself was being pigeonholed, and Seberg, in a male-dominated screen industry, was reportedly abused by Preminger into looking sufficiently wistful on screen. But Sagan (shockingly) had written a three-dimensional 17-year-old girl.
Some readers today might struggle to care about a spoilt little rich girl’s melodrama – that’s understandable. But if you’re happy to get inside Cécile’s head, you’ll find depth there, as well as a sensual and timeless escape.
Sagan famously said: “scandal is just talent”. It will be interesting to see what that talent looks like in the 21st century, in Chew-Bose’s adaptation – and how it appeals to a very different gaze.
Authors: Frances Egan, Lecturer in Global Studies, Monash University
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