Why French women are suddenly the internet’s sleep gurus

The French have been banging on about how good they are in the bedroom for years, but until now I always assumed superiority between the sheets was a uniquely male boast. 

Now, it seems, women must also suffer performance anxiety compared to their Gallic counterparts, because les filles have just established dominion over good sleep habits.

Ask Google for tips on how to get a good night’s sleep and you can’t help but notice a growing trend for clickbaity titles conferring a cultural advantage.

"I tried the French woman sleep hack – here's why I'm adding it to my bedtime routine,” reads one. Or: “Sézane's founder has the perfect French-girl nighttime routine.” 

Or just: “French women get their sleep,” as a particularly direct blog post put it.

Read more: meet Paris's last artisanal mattress maker

Exactly what the secret to top-drawer French slumber is varies, but generally you can count on light dinners, a protracted skincare regime, candles, expensive-sounding bed sheets, relaxation exercises and, crucially, some kind of fragrance on your person or pillow. 

One writer seemed to advocate decamping a more somnolent area of France altogether: “In Provence in summer, the bloom of lavender delivers a natural sleep aid into the night air.” 

To be fair, it’s not the craziest idea – that goes to the former insomniac writing in the Guardian in October, who has played Ratatouille – the Pixar movie about a rodent chef in Paris – without fail every night for 15 years to help her drop off. 

Good habits are also instilled at school. In early years an obligatory rest period is provided after lunch. Beds are provided and children are encouraged to nap as long as they need, with or without teddies or blankets from home.

The French, too, have flair for sleep furniture; prized beds run the full gamut of ornate Louis XIII-XVI styles; in Britain we have Tracey Emin’s unmade one.

Their sleep language, too, is the more lyrical. For every tomber dans les bras de Morphée (literally ‘to fall into the arms of Morpheus’) we can only parry with the more prosaic “hit the sack”, “sleep like a log”, or “have a kip”.

Writing this, in bed, well past 01:00 on a Monday night, it’s hard to make any convincing case for British form at all. 

“Hard to woo, hard to be divorced from,” the English writer Anthony Burgess once wrote of his testy relationship with sleep, which seems analogous with most Brits’ experience: a 2024 survey by the health app Lingo found we average just six hours and 20 minutes a night. 

But, fellow countrymen, don’t roll over just yet. The French may certainly talk a good game but in a head-to-head we can always fall back on one particular area of nocturnal preeminence – the pillow. 

Not for Blighty slumberers the unwieldy, tubular traversin, nor the ill-suited European square; rather, much rather, rectangular, downy, with width to turn over. And here I rest my case. And with it, at last, my heavy, heavy eyes.