School for scandal

A Parisian course teaches the fine art of seduction to lame wannabe Lotharios.

By David Downie

Jun 15, 2000 | A miniature black sheepdog darts through Paris' fashionable Bois de Boulogne among other coiffed pooches. The man at the end of the retractable leash approaches a Catherine Deneuve look-alike attached to a poodle.

"Madame Fifi?" he splutters, taking cues from another woman nearby. "Perhaps you could help me and my dog adapt to Paris life -- we've just moved here."

Cut to a crowded Paris cafe. Another guy, a schlump in his mid-30s, has been eyeing the woman at the next table but hasn't dared talk to her. On cue from a half-hidden figure seated behind, the man stutters, "Pardonez-moi, I know this sounds strange, but there's something really interesting on the back page of your newspaper and ..."

At an upscale boutique on the Rue Saint Honori, a 40-ish character dressed like Marcello Mastroianni steps in bearing a single perfect white rose. "Your eyes are so beautiful I wanted to thank you," he sings, handing her his card. "Next time I'm in Paris, can I take you to lunch?"

What do these corny pickup scenes have in common? Vironique Jullien, founder of Paris' first and only School of Seduction. She and her crack team of Italian and Latin American "seduction coaches" lead luckless French lovers into the field for just such hands-on sessions. Dogs in parks, newspapers in cafes and roses in boutiques are three of the hokey tricks Jullien uses to nudge tongue-tied Parisian Romeos to besiege the femme fatale of their dreams.

"It's not a technique," says Emmanuele, a 25-year-old white-collar worker and enthusiastic graduate of Jullien's school. "You learn to develop your innate ability to seduce people, and Vironique helps you to bring that out -- she had me join a theater company to learn to act, and now I'm engaged."

Judging by her success, Jullien must be more than a mere monger of egregious platitudes and soft-porn hokey-dokey. Her school opened in 1995 and the concept has attracted American backers. A knockoff Vironique Jullien Seduction School may be coming soon to a town near you, probably in Silicon Valley. Negotiations are also underway in Singapore. And the press has been falling all over her: CBS, NBC and the Discovery Channel have shown up in the past month for interviews, not to mention the main French and Italian newspapers. Why?

Simple: No one can believe Parisian men need to be taught how to seduce women. What has become of the Jean-Paul Belmondos, the Jean Gabins, the Alain Delons of this sex-steeped country, where every ad campaign seems to feature burgeoning crotches and topless sex bombs?

"Frenchmen aren't seducers the way they were up to the mid-1980s," Jullien tells me in rapid-fire French, flailing her arms for emphasis. "The relationship between men and women began to go downhill starting then. The reason is 50 years of feminist revolution -- at a certain point it had to backfire. We've become victims of the war we've waged."

Tall, muscular and in her 40s, Jullien is an ex-Club Med staff member, a former sales team manager and business consultant, matchmaking agency director and dancer/cabaret artiste. She has an imposing presence, a permanently bronzed alpha-female look, with large mobile features, big brown eyes, vast quantities of hair, lavish gestures and cannon-shot exclamations. Her body language and speech are pushy-randy, verging at times on raunchy.

In my 15 years in Paris I have encountered French women like her, though none wearing, as she is, a loose white shift paired with red basketball shoes. Her mane is crowned by a pair of sunglasses, despite the fact that we're inside an office building. Most of the Parisian alpha females I know sport Chanel suits and flirt outrageously with executives who come to cut a deal with them, perhaps before leaping into the sack.

Next Page: "We are ball cutters, but Frenchmen have become pretty wimpy"

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