Don’t tell them but the French didn’t in fact invent etiquette

When dining in France, it is considered rude to finish the bread before the main course has been served, and ruder still to slice the bread with a knife, lest the crumbs land in a lady’s décolletage. In China, you should never place your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, and in Bangladesh you may eat with your fingers, but should avoid getting sauce above the knuckles.

If you are guilty of any of the above, may I direct you, politely, to a new documentary on the World Service. The programme takes aim at many outdated traditions (including those that resign women to the kitchen), but the conversation is far more informative than censorious and more eye-opening than dour. It makes for particularly delicious listening for the English, for we have long prided ourselves on our good manners, not least in relation to the French.

Our Gallic neighbours, it seems, have laid claim to the invention of etiquette on rather dubious grounds. The French étiquette means ‘a label’ or ‘a placard’. It supposedly developed as a reference to the signs one of Louis XIV’s gardeners put up around Versailles to ward people off the lawns. But according to one of the experts interviewed for the documentary that’s a myth; the term is more likely to have developed in the context of courteous behaviour at the Spanish court back in the 16th century. While Henri III of France borrowed the word back – his mother Catherine de’Medici introduced many new rules that had been learned across Europe – etiquette was by then most popularly associated with the Italians.

This was due in large part to the publication of Il Galateo in Venice in 1558. Penned by a Florentine, Giovanni della Casa, the highly readable treatise offered the kind of advice that was most valuable to inhabitants of plaguey, overcrowded cities.