Bare Breasts on French Beaches? You Can, Despite Police Warnings

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/world/europe/france-beach-topless.html

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The scene was anodyne: women were sunbathing on a beach in southwestern France last week, bare breasted.

But it seemed too much for a nearby family with children. They complained to police officers, who asked the women to cover up, even though no national law prohibits beachgoers in France from going topless.

The kerfuffle, which unfolded on Thursday in Ste.-Marie-la-Mer, a town in the southwestern area of Pyrénées-Orientales, ignited outrage on social media, and even prompted the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, to defend the women’s rights.

“It was wrong that the women were warned about their clothing,” Mr. Darmanin wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Freedom is something precious.”

(Mr. Darmanin, who is the head of the French police, has been under investigation over rape accusations that date from 2009; he denies the allegation and has filed a libel suit against his accuser.)

As a country that celebrates individual freedoms, with one of its most famous paintings depicting “Liberty” as a bare-breasted woman leading people to revolution, France has nevertheless often dictated what women should wear — or not wear.

In the summer of 2016, a nationwide debate erupted after several towns in southern France enacted local bans against the “burkini,” the full-body swimsuit designed to accommodate Islamic modesty codes. The country’s highest administrative court overturned the bans, yet the burkini remains an obsession for some right-wing politicians who complain about women “invading” French beaches with burkinis.

And last year, Décathlon, one of Europe’s largest sporting goods retailers, dropped plans to sell a sports hijab after controversy around the clothing item exposed the long-running tensions between secularism and religious freedom in the country, once again focusing on female attire.

After the dust-up in Ste.-Marie-la-Mer garnered widespread media attention, the police in Pyrénées-Orientales said on Tuesday that its agents had taken a conciliatory approach when they asked the three women to cover their chests.

“Guided by a desire for appeasement, the police asked the people concerned if they would agree to cover their chest after they explained the reason for their approach,” the police said on Facebook.

Marie Hebrard, a woman who was present on the beach, told France 3 Occitanie that the officers — a man and a woman — had first asked a woman in her 60s to cover up before asking others to do the same. When Ms. Hebrard confronted the officers, she said they asked her to move on, and left the beach shortly after.

In France, where the bikini was invented nearly 75 years ago, being topless has been associated with women’s liberation since various movies in the 1960s and 1970s showed actresses like Brigitte Bardot or Miou-Miou bare-breasted outside. More recently in “An Easy Girl,” an acclaimed coming-of-age movie, the main character strolls the French Riviera topless, as the director’s camera glorifies her sexual freedom through various intimate encounters.

The bra (or lack of one) has also been associated with the women’s rights movement. But more women in France — particularly those under 25 — are ditching the undergarment for reasons of comfort, prompted by the recent coronavirus measures, the Ifop institute found in a recent poll. Nearly 20 percent of the women surveyed said they never wore bras, up from 4 percent before France imposed lockdown in March. More than half of those who said they continued to wear a bra in public said they did so out of fear of verbal or physical harassment.

While nothing in national law prevents women from going topless, municipalities can ban “monokini” — wearing only the bottom of a bikini — or thongs through local decrees. They are, for instance, banned on the urban beaches that pop up every summer along the Seine in Paris.

But there is no such ban in Ste.-Marie-la-Mer, the police in Pyrénées Orientales said, acknowledging on Facebook that the officers had showed “clumsiness” in asking the women to cover up.

Maddy Scheurer, a spokeswoman for the French gendarmerie, echoed that message.

“You will always see me in uniform,” she wrote on Twitter, along with a smiling emoji. “It was clumsiness by two gendarmes who had the best intentions.”