Thursday, February 28, 2013
Boyards and bleus
Every morning except Sundays in the early 1970s I woke up in a flat on the Rue du Temple in the Marais quarter of Paris and put on my bleus, those uniforms of dark blue thin denim, jacket and trousers, and made my way by metro to Courbevoie which lies on the other side of the Seine from Paris. There I shook the hands of thirty or so fellow workers at the BP building there. It's something of an effort shaking so many hands at that time of the morning. I later found out that the habit of handshaking, still very much alive in France, was introduced from England, where it seems to have more or less died out. Wearing bleus marked you out, and still does, as a prolo, especially if you wore a flat cap with the ensemble. The classic look was finished off with a cigarette, a clope or a tige de huit in argot, hanging from a corner of the mouth. Marching down the street, you would swing around in response to a greeting from another, and grunt "Hein?" The best cigarette for the look was the Boyard, better than a Gitane or a Gauloise, and like them made out of caporal tobacco. That reminds me, how often do you smell that in France these days. The ubiquitous cigarettes of blond tobacco seem to have taken over. The Boyard resembled a stick of yellow chalk, as the foul smelling and rough tobacco was wrapped around by yellow maize paper. They were of course unfiltered. They were manufactured from 1876 but changing times meant plummeting sales as they were loaded with tar. A fire in the factory finished them off, although now an electric Boyard has been introduced!!http://www.djibnet.com/photo/boyard/boyards-caporal-french-unfiltered-cigarettes-packet-late-1970s-3847003550.html
Labels: Boyard cigarettes, Parisian working class
