The Frost Is on the Citrouille as French Adopt Halloween

To learn how the Grinch stole Christmas, you can look it up in a book. But how have the French now gotten ahold of that quintessential American holiday, Halloween?

Tonight, as darkness settles on the French capital, they will be pouring special “evil death cocktails” at the Ho-La-La cafe near Les Halles, the old market district. At Le Lutece, a club in the Latin Quarter, the traditional student neighborhood, costumed monsters will storm onto the dance floor.

Five tractor-trailers carrying 85 tons of pumpkins (citrouilles to the French) have been unloaded at the Trocadero gardens across the River Seine from the Eiffel Tower, as part of a France Telecom promotion of cellular phone service.

Toys R Us stores in France are offering a sale with “massacred prices.” Even Veuve Clicquot, the venerable brand of champagne so beloved by Ernest Hemingway that he once said its namesake widow was the favorite woman in his life, is out with a special Halloween bottle.

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So what’s the party all about? Many of the French still aren’t sure. Earlier this week, Jean-Louis and Sylvie Graulle of Paris were in a Right Bank costume and magic shop, the Marvelous Doll, looking a bit confused. They had been invited to their first Halloween bash, for adults only, and he planned to go as a vampire, she as a witch. Their 9-year-old son was staying home.

“We don’t know why people celebrate it in France,” Jean-Louis Graulle, fingering a display of fake plastic scars, said of the strange new rite. “Maybe on the commercial level it’s doing well, but this holiday isn’t part of French culture.”

All signs, however, are that Halloween is fast becoming as French as raw oysters and foie gras on New Year’s Eve, driven by the increasing mingling of global cultures, fallout from American movies and TV programs, and commercial interests on the prowl for an effective sales hook.

“Last year, we felt it was really starting to take off,” said Isabelle Cuadros, purchaser for La Kermesse, another Paris costume and holiday decoration shop. “You have young French people who have gone to the States during Halloween, and they come back raving about this mega-party. They’ve served as a sort of springboard for the holiday.”

At the Marvelous Doll, sales of masks, pumpkins and other Halloween paraphernalia have skyrocketed in the past three years, and Oct. 31 “is now the biggest day on the calendar for us,” salesman Guillaume Beauquesne said.

About 70% of the clientele is French. The appeal? “A new opportunity to wear a costume, especially in an evil way,” the salesman said.

Tracking the rapid spread of Halloween, the newspaper Le Monde this week found that the celebrations have filtered down to a few villages near the Loire River and Mediterranean coast. In the city of Nantes, 40,000 visitors are expected for a parade through the streets that for children will include an organized round of trick or treating (une farce ou une friandise).

Christina Mannai of Paris explained that her two sons, who will be having a party and pumpkin-carving session with friends this year, first learned of this imported fete from the film “ET.” “Halloween is when everyone wears a costume to scare people,” said Pablo, 8, who will be disguised this year as a skeleton.

However, the French version of the holiday so far is mostly for adults eager for a reason to cut loose and party. At the Pub St. Germain, a bar and brasserie in the Latin Quarter, Oct. 31 has rapidly grown to be the second-biggest night of the year, topped only by New Year’s Eve. Tonight, the establishment will be decked out with cobwebs and jack-o’-lanterns, and a magician will perform tricks.

Most customers in costumes will be English-speaking visitors, and though the pub has thrown a Halloween bash for the past six years, manager Jacques Huret admits that he is still a bit mystified as to what the occasion is. “I do know that the Americans celebrate it a lot,” he said.

Like France Telecom, which trumpeted its plan to decorate the Trocadero gardens this week with 8,500 pumpkins as a plug for Ola, its cellular phone service (it has dubbed the operation “Olaween”), other French firms have been quick to seize upon the imported holiday as a business-generating gimmick.

Though France does mark the day after Halloween--Toussaint, or All Saints’ Day--as an official holiday, the weeks between autumn back-to-school sales and Christmas and New Year’s are retail doldrums. Now, “Halloween is becoming a commercial opportunity of the first order,” Babette Le Forestier, a retail research director, told Le Monde. “It is an effective promotional vehicle, whether for selling seasonal products or, quite simply, for creating a stir to increase one’s renown.”

At Galleries Lafayette, a department store chain with 70 outlets, Halloween is being used as a sales theme for the first time this year. “We hope to do good business and sell 90% of the merchandise,” spokeswoman Laurence Tankere said. “For each franc invested, Halloween sales should bring in 2.5 francs.”

There may be a deeper, atavistic instinct at the bottom of all this. Some sociologists have theorized that the French, like the denizens of many other modern societies, are hungry for ritual and tradition. In fact, Halloween’s roots may lie somewhere in the French past. The ancient Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France believed that between harvest time and the onset of winter, the shroud keeping the living apart from the dead was at its most penetrable, and that spirits walked the Earth. It was Irish immigrants during the 19th century who brought the prototype of Halloween to the New World.

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Cuadros of the shop La Kermesse thinks the holiday has quickly become popular because it allows the French--who like to think of themselves as rational, faultlessly polite beings--to indulge some of their darker and more macabre fantasies. The most popular costumes, after all, are those of zombies, ghosts, vampires, witches and, this year, the Grim Reaper-like killer from the Wes Craven movie “Scream.”

“We don’t want to be Snow White, we want to transform ourselves into the bad guy,” Cuadros said. “Halloween allows us every possibility to be frightful, to change ourselves with makeup and terribly ugly masks.” When night falls on Oct. 31, she said, the French “don’t want to wear the Mr. Nice Guy hat.”