In an unprecedented triumph of business marketing in France, October 31st has in less than five years been transformed from an ordinary day into a holiday so popular that it now rivals Christmas.
French children of all ages have embraced Hallowe'en costumes, jack o'lanterns and trick-or-treating. It is difficult to find a French shop or restaurant without Hallowe'en decorations. Roller-bladers parade disguised as witches and ghosts. French primary schools celebrate it. But some intellectuals and religious leaders have denounced the festivities as a transparent moneymaking scheme imported from the US.
Timing is crucial in business, Gilles Masson, director of marketing at Euro-rscg, France's largest public relations firm, told the M6 television channel. "There are two big shopping seasons in the second half of the year," he said. "The return to school in September and Christmas. There was a low point in October. Hallowe'en was the perfect holiday to raise consumption then." M6 devoted its weekly advertising programme, Culture pub, to the Hallowe'en phenomenon in France.
Hallowe'en is part of a wider trend towards the commercialisation of holidays here. "Holidays are a driving force behind people spending money," Mr Masson said. So the number of fetes for everything from music to the Internet to grandmothers and secretaries has doubled in 15 years. "It's pure marketing. The big brand names manage the country as if it were a department store," he added.
St Patrick's Day celebrations, like Hallowe'en, have increased exponentially. But Hallowe'en's Irish origins are often ignored here.
"In the past three years, the pumpkin market has exploded," Laurent Damiens, the marketing director for the association of French fruit and vegetable growers INTERFEL, said. "A few years ago, pumpkins made people think of grandmother's soup, but since Hallowe'en came to France, it's become a very fashionable vegetable. Eighty per cent of all French pumpkins are sold at Halloween, but to encourage retailers to sell even more, INTERFEL gave away 1,500 "Hallowe'en kits" containing posters, balloons, witch and bat cut-outs at the Rungis wholesale market south of Paris.
Hallowe'en is an advertising executive's dream. It comes ready-made with official black and orange colours and the jack o'lantern symbol. In France ghouls, witches and pumpkins are used to sell Twix and Smarties chocolates, McDonalds burgers, Uncle Ben's rice, even women's cosmetics.
French intellectuals are further angered by the international dimension to Hallowe'en. "Hallowe'en is the orange and black icon of globalisation," Jean-Marie Gautier wrote in a much-quoted editorial in Le Havre Presse newspaper. "There is no French flavour to it, and it corresponds to nothing in our history. It was parachuted from the United States solely to make money."
French religious leaders have for years protested over the "pagan and satanic" nature of Hallowe'en, but this year an evangelical Protestant group decided to go for the advertisers' pocketbooks by asking supporters to send 300,000 form letters to the company which uses ghosts and skeletons to sell Mars, Bounty, M & M and Twix chocolates. "If you want to keep us as clients", the letter says, "we ask you to cease such publicity campaigns".
The evangelicals' crusade hasn't got a bat's chance in hell of succeeding.
