Guinguette spirit, are you there? It’s been a year since nobody dances on the banks of the Marne or on any other waterway, and about seventy years since these popular balls are on the decline, but it doesn’t matter: the French love the open-air café. There is like a heritage bugle, a compendium of caricatures that the writers of the Netflix series would not deny. Emily in Paris : a red balloon, accordion, Vichy tablecloths and couples of tipsy workers embracing each other to the rhythm of a waltz.
But here it is: when decoration magazines invite us to breathe a “guinguette spirit” into our interior, there is no question of pinning up large-format posters of Yvette Horner, drinking liters of twist-gut or putting thoroughly Bourvil (“In Joinville-le-Pont, pon-pon / Both of us will go, ron-ron / Look at guincher, dear-dear / Chez Gégène”). The perfect nod, the sober and tasteful cultural reference, is the garland. Bare bulbs, a long black cable, a plug: if you look closely, nothing very elaborate, and nothing particularly beautiful. However, the guinguette garlands are available by the hundreds on shopping sites, from Maisons du monde to La Redoute, from AMPM to Decoclico.
Let’s bring the party to us!
A quarter of French people (27%, according to a CSA poll for Cofidis of March 19) have bought new decorative objects during the past year. The study links these purchases to the “nesting” reflex, in other words, the need to make one’s nest at home in times of crisis. But as we nestle deeper into our multitasking couch every day, a parallel movement is underway, to bring the outdoors in, to incorporate into our apartment vestiges of our past social life.
For the luminous loupiotes, the logic seems clear: since we can no longer go guincher, let’s bring the party to us. In gardens, on balconies, or even nailed along a wall in a bedroom, the garland carries a message: you are entering a joyful home. Here, it’s a fiesta every day (and, a masterful double stroke of the semantics of objects, it’s also Christmas every day).
Hope this works. Do those who have opted for a parrots and palm trees wallpaper have the impression of living in the tropics? Do our objects have a performative function? In the end, it doesn’t matter, because the essential is in the symbol. In the statement, as the Americans say, that is, the declaration of intent. So much so that the object no longer needs to exist in its original environment.
Kerosene lamps
If we light up ballrooms and bistros today with these long swarms of electric bulbs, this was obviously not the case in the 1850s, at the time of the greatness of the cabarets in the town of Belleville, before its attachment to Paris. No trace of garlands in Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) or in the a ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), by Renoir.
In 1931, Simenon took Maigret to Morsang-sur-Seine, in the Parisian suburbs, where the commissioner discovered The two-penny Guinguette : “There was no electricity. The shed was lit by two kerosene lamps and others were placed on the tables in the garden, so that the decor was divided into spots of light and shadow. “ Consider ourselves happy: the garland, at least, does not smell of fuel.