Being a French woman isn’t all it’s cracked up to be...

THE fabled French woman doesn’t get fat, she wears her silk scarf with style and makes a perfect knot in the belt of her trench coat. She ages gracefully without recourse to botox while her children behave impeccably in restaurants.

But even if this suite of enviable female accomplishments were true rather than exhausted clichés, being a Frenchwoman can’t be all it’s cracked up to be.

Okay, I get why grande dames like Catherine Deneuve had a problem with #MeToo.

The earthquake caused by the feminist campaign that put Harvey Weinstein in the dock meant that women who were harassed and abused by powerful men were believed for the first time.

But the aftershocks caused a new timidity on the part of men in their encounters with women, which Deneuve – who came of age in an antediluvian era when men were men and women were taken – mourned deeply.

But while Deneuve’s clinging to old-fashioned dating norms and macho behaviour can be excused because of her advanced years, the same cannot be said for the public figures who have rushed to defend Gerard Depardieu now engulfed in scandal over his lechery.

French president Emmanuel Macron has praised the cinematic idol, who is being investigated for rape. Macron seems to expect compassion for the actor because of his cultural significance and artistic genius.

Depardieu’s fellow celebrities, including Carla Bruni and Charlotte Rampling, have published a letter decrying his ‘lynching’ in Le Figaro newspaper.

The actor has been charged with the rape of the 22-year-old daughter of one of his friends, and faces a string of accusations about assault and sexual harassment from more than a dozen women, all of which he denies. A recent documentary about his 2018 trip to North Korea shows him making obscene comments to women, sexually harassing a female translator and making sexual comments about a child in an equestrian centre.

The tragedy is that France’s elite sides with him rather than his alleged victims.