Mayor says she will no longer do the ‘bise’

A mayor is taking a stand against the ‘bise,’ the daily kiss for colleagues – and says she has even arrived late for meetings so that she does not have to kiss all of those in the room.

Aude Picard Wolff, the mayor of Morette, in Isère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, emailed each of her 73 colleagues on the area’s communauté de communes to say that she no longer wanted to ‘faire la bise’ with them all – and would prefer to shake hands.

She said that with all the meetings she attended it was too much to kiss dozens and dozens of people and thought it was time for people to reflect and to have more freedom so that the bise had meaning and was no longer systematic.

Speaking to Dauphiné Libéré newspaper, she said it had “always felt wrong to be doing the bise with people she barely knew. It annoyed me. Even although we had done the bise for years I wanted to say that from now I would like to shake hands, like men do.”

She said that she had received many notes of support, with people saying they felt the same and some men saying they never knew how to deal with it and had simply thought it was the ‘done thing’.

However, business coach Pierre Blanc-Sahnoun told FranceTVinfo that it should not be stopped entirely as it was a local reaction to a world becoming more globalised and anonymous, it was a way to say “here we are in our little gaulois village, and in our little gaulois village we do the bise”.

French-based British comedian Paul Taylor – who is interviewed in the new issue of The Connexion, available in newsagents from tomorrow and available as a download here – produced a very funny (the language will offend some) on the problems of the bise.

The newspaper Le Populaire du Centre even timed how long it took a young journalist to start their working day and said it took five minutes to go round all the staff.

And that, in Limousin where they only do two kisses, soon added up and the paper said that over a year it amounted to three working days.

You can find how many kisses people give in this map of France with the colours getting more intense from 1 kiss to 5 (no department does five!).