French mayor kisses goodbye to ‘la bise’ greeting for 73 of her colleagues every day

‘I found it disagreeable. We’re not as free as all that when someone sticks their cheek in your direction’

A FRENCH mayor has made national waves by declaring she will no longer give “la bise” to 73 colleagues every morning, confessing she deliberately arrived late for meetings to avoid the Gallic greeting kiss.

Aude Picard-wolff, mayor of Morette, in Isère, Auvergne-rhône-alpes, expected to raise a few eyebrows after emailing her colleagues to say from now on she preferred to “shake hands”, but little did she know the message would go viral and ignite soul-searching in the media. Ms Picard-wolff, a Green party politician, said it was too much to give the customary peck on each cheek to droves of colleagues every time she held a meeting.

“I have enough of giving la bise to dozens of people. I hope that my action will contribute to making people think so that everyone can feel free to give or not give la bise as an elected official, in his or her profession or in any other situation,” she wrote. Later she told Dauphiné Libéré newspaper: “For many months, I have often arrived late to town meetings because I simply didn’t want to kiss 73 local councillors.”

She added: “I found it disagreeable. We’re not as free as all that when someone sticks their cheek in your direction. Even if we had done la bise for years I wanted to say that from now I would like to shake hands.” The debate comes amid soul-searching in France over gender relations in the wake of recent sexual harassment scandals.

Alain d’iribarne, a labour sociologist and economist, said the fad for la bise took off after the uprisings of 1968 which promoted “familiarity over hierarchical distance”. But he said a “new generation of feminists sees in these practices the domination of man over woman. We hesitate a little more in demonstrating this form of familiarity.”

Confusion is compounded by the fact that the number of kisses varies between regions from one to five, as do the rules on which cheek to start with.

One regional newspaper Le Populaire du Centre timed how long it took one female journalist to complete a round of morning bises on both cheeks and found that over a year it amounted to three working days.