The Politics of Perfumery: Jean Paul Guerlain Makes a Faux-Pas?

Perfumery is a minefield. It's not only perilous to make an olfactory mistake and distance your core audience, a communication faux pas might even trigger a campaign of boycotting your product. That faux pas can take many guises, but none is more "sensitive" than a random comment which can hint of racism. Jean Paul Guerlain, apparently unintentionally, just committed just that cardinal sin.
The whole incident took place in an interview to Elise Lucet concerning his work at maison Guerlain, where he created many masterpieces, Samsara among them. Concerning the latter, Jean Paul commented: "For once, I worked like a negro. I don't know if negroes have worked that much, but anyway..."

The word used in French was negro, but the translation is edgily close to the subversive nigger word (of which there is no French comparable).

The quote also inelegantly suggests that there might be laziness involved too. SOS Racisme and Cran have complained about this statement on France 2 this past Friday 15th October. (You can read the news and the original quote on this link) The reasons given for the outcry are mostly pedagogical, as they renounce the colonial cliches which are thus being perpetuated through such statements. Of course it's argued that these statements go against the values of LVMH and Guerlain in general, and action of distancing was demanded from LVMH, to which the behemoth company replied with a direct apology by Jean Paul himself on AFP via mail. In it Jean Paul Guerlain clarified that he is sorry for the statement and that it does not reflect his deeper thoughts. He also mentioned that he is not a representative of the company since 1996 and is not salaried since 2002, "taking full responsibility [for the faux pas], not wanting to hurt the company and its employees". His current position is of advisory to the head perfumer Thierry Wasser.

That was of course in response to the wildfire criticism which erupted on Twitter and blogs as well as perfume community fora (such as this one or that one) with proposals of boycotting the brand. It even reached CNN!.

As usual on Perfume Shrine, we dissect things to get to the bottom of it.

First of all, the first part of Jean Paul's statement is simple enough: "Work like a negro" is -unfortunately, but there you have it- a common idiom in many European languages (French being one of them, Greek also among them) in which it simply means "work very, very hard". Undoubtedly the French have it one better than us, having intimate knowledge of just how hard negroes might have worked because they have been colonialists for centuries, but I digress. The thing is very often the phrase springs up with no intent of offense; it's just an ingrained "memory" or "hearsay" (for those of us who never had any blacks in a colonial past working for our wealth). And anything can be interpreted the way one wants it to. The Holy Bible is filled with racism if you're willing to seek it from an objective point of view.

Blacks/Negroes have worked in plantations for many years as slaves, as recently as the previous century. This is deeply shameful, there is no other way around it. But certainly not to black people! Rather the ones who owned them and perpetuated this practice at a time in history when such a practice was not necessitated by ANY means (It's an agreed fact that slavery in antiquity falls under completely different parameters and not within our scope here). There even exist wonderful French patisserie creations that reference negroes, certainly through no desire to offend them.

The unfortunate correlation is that the word negro can be twisted into translation into the offending "nigger" word, which is undoubtedly derogatory. Which is exactly what happened on American media. This reminds me of the instance when Gérard Depardieu was a nominee for an Academy Award for Cyrano in 1990 which he eventually lost through a mass campaign smearing his name as "juvenille rapist". What had happened? He was giving an interview in French, recounting his troubled formative years in which he was seeing things on the streets. He mentioned, in way of example, witnessing a rape. His misfortune was the French verb "assister" which he had used was mistranslated out of context as "assisted" in the US press. From witness, he became accessory to the crime! Outcry ensued and Academy Award voters took the matter to heart...and decided to give a pedagogical lesson by denying him the votes. The trajectory followed was down-spiral...and the award went to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune (In no way am I intending to diminish his exceptional performance which I love myself). Thankfully Depardieu has remained unscathed since and the gossiping tongues claim the campaign was not so innocent to begin with, aiming to deny a non-English speaker an Academy Award for Leading role in a non-English speaking film. This is of course merely conjecture.

So far so good and this should be a lesson to us all on how to pick our words in a multi-cultural society such as the global one we're living in. And I wouldn't be giving any extended commentary, should the second part of the Jean Paul Guerlain quote not exist.

But the second part does exist, alas. Weirdly too, because Jean Paul is well-known for his good rapport and friendship with the inhabitants of the island of Mayotte, where Guerlain keeps ylang ylang plantations. Maybe his progressing age doesn't help too much in general?

That second part of the quote inelegantly attaches the stigma of laziness where none exists (and by association the "plight" some of the countries inhabited mainly by negroes is attributed to a fault of their own). Speaking with personal national experience, where critical geopolitical and precarious financial games are played on our backs by the superpowers, I can assure M.Guerlain (and everyone) that very seldom in politics anything is "through one's own fault". It's not school exams, you know. There's got to be someone assisting someone else's plight; someone else who is actually gaining something out of it. In this instance, it is colonialism and the wealth it accumulated for colonials. Too bad that France is still struggling to come to terms with accepting that heritage. Whatever... nevertheless a little more compassion to people who are not wholly responsible for what happened to them goes a long way.

And, before I forget, oh, I wish I could have forgotten about another unfortunate quote concerning other less privileged groups which I had critiqued on these pages back in 2008.

Because, come to think of it, what purpose is perfume accomplishing -refining us, giving us a veneer of sophistication and allure- if we forget to show basic human understanding for the misfortune of others? Let's refresh our Aimé Césaire readings.

For purposes of injecting a semi-relevant & controversial viewpoint on racial matters, France and the US, please read this blog post. Food for thought, and why not, comment!

NB: The pics are (clearly I hope?) ironic. The hypocrisy of white colonialism at its very highest.