I was reading Daniella Shreir’s LRB Diary: What happens at Cannes (10 Jul 2025; archived) when I was struck by a turn of French phrase in this passage:
Some form of disruption looms over the festival every year. Unionised electricity workers, reacting to Macron’s proposed pension reforms, threatened to cut power to venues in 2023, and last year festival workers, organising under the banner of Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke behind the Screens), threatened to withhold their labour until they were given the same rights as other culture workers.
“Sous les écrans la dèche” literally means ‘Under the screens, poverty’ (dèche ‘being broke’ is apparently a clipping of déchéance ‘decay,’ from the same Latin word as decadence), but to me it irresistibly called to mind the famous 1968 slogan « Sous les pavés, la plage ! » ‘Under the paving stones, the beach!’ (Although I learn from the French Wikipedia article that that phrase has a complicated and disputed history which depresses me too much to try to disentangle.) What I want to know is this: is that relationship a product of my particular intellectual formation, or would any Frenchperson make the connection? Is it a template, or just a similarly constructed phrase?
Incidentally, it’s always a shock to be reminded that the inaugural Festival de Cannes was supposed to happen in 1939, but it “was cancelled after only one screening (William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland.”
Second language French speaker, and even I immediately made that connection while reading your post, so I’m sure the French would understand.
Après nous le déluge.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
After such stinginess, what productivity?
After great pain, a formal feeling comes…
Wait, what are we talking about?
Here on the other side of the Atlantic from l’Hexagone, la dèche is semen, a clipping of la décharge. “Sous les écrans la dèche” could also apply to the venerable Montreal institution Cinéma L’Amour (NSFW).
Behind every great quote lies a great misattribution.
It’s surely some sort of template. A few minutes of search gives
Sous la cendre, le feu
Sous la douche, le ciel
Sous la terre, les dragons
Sous les étoiles, la place
… and this deliberate play on the slogan; Sous les pavés, le vintage
I checked fr.wikipedia and fr.wiktionary for expressions of the form “sous NP, NP” and found:—
one proverb variant (“sous le soleil, rien de nouveau”) ;
one Camerounais novel (Sous la cendre le feu — some references add a comma to the title) ;
three translated titles of films in other languages:
* Sous toi, la ville (Unter dir die Stadt) English release “The City Below”
* Sous les drapeaux, l’enfer (軍旗はためく下に, Gunki hatameku motoni?) English release “Under the Flag of the Rising Sun”
* Sous le poirier, la mort (2019 version of Unterm Birnbaum “Under the Pear Tree”; apparently no English release)
(My comment was released from moderation after mollymooly’s appeared.)
Under the Russian, the Tartar.
Or under the skin of the Russian, the Tartar, else it can be misread as reference to politics:/
« Sous les pavés, la plage ! » : Pflasterstrand – “Chefredakteur: Daniel Cohn Bendit”.
Écran, literally ‘screen’, is a basketball term in French:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/30ygr8/what_does_it_mean_to_go_under_the_screen_or_go/?tl=fr
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cran_(sport)
The equivalent terms among anglophone basketball players are screen and pick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_(sports)) and among rusophone players it’s заслон:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD_(%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB
Maybe basketball is where you should start investigating. Sous l’écran could be a play on words involving the word écran as used in cinematography and in basketball playing. I have no opinion.
Odd that Pflaster means ‘pavement’ in German.
I feel these “under the X, Y” are based on Latin models (based on some rhetorical figure?), but the only examples I could find easily are
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 3.55.1
hic Caecilianum illud: ‘saepe est etiam sub palliolo sordido sapientia.’
Sextus Propertius, Elegiae 1.4.1
gaudia sub tacita discere veste libet.
(I suppose this is where we get “cloak of silence”)
I realised that the saying I use in my joke (grattez le russe…) has same structure semantically. And that’s why I joke about it. And it is French.
Can the classic film-noir line “we’re all sisters under the mink” be recast more gnomically as “beneath the mink, the sisterhood”?
Not your (or anyone’s) point at all, but I think a better English rendering of the template would be “under the X, there’s Y”. Under the pavement, there’s a beach. Under the screens, there’s poverty. Under the ashes, there’s fire. Under the earth, there are dragons. Etc.
Very true.
And “band-aid”.
“Plaster” is just Gips, not distinguished from raw gypsum.
Modern Hebrew borrowed flaster ‘band-aid’. geves (by Ben-Yehuda) is used as ‘gypsum’, ‘plaster of Paris’, or ‘cast’ (n., in the medical sense).
I now believe I had that wrong. It works for the mass words ‘poverty’ and ‘fire’, but for countables, English indefinites limit the number (or extent) of beaches and dragons in a way the French definite forms don’t.
I’m not sure what to do about it. Maybe we need a different template for countables, “under the X is/are the Y”. I think that would work for ‘poverty’ too, but not for ‘fire’.
Norw. plaster n. “band aid”, gips m. “plaster of Paris; gypsum; plaster/cast (med.); gesso”
(My dictionary listra ‘gesso’ as a separate sense. It’s transparently the Italian outcome of Lat. gypsum, and that’s really all I know about it.)
@Trond: I think “Under the pavement, the beach” (or “a beach”) and “Under the earth, dragons” are fine, unless I’m missing a nuance of the French, which is quite possible.
Yes, “cast (med.)” too, and the same genders as in Norwegian.
FWIW, in Denmark it only means band aid. gips is what sculptors and dentists and EMTs use (both the raw powder and the finished material) , but the physical thing on your arm or leg is a skinne ~ ‘splint’ (but you har armen i gips). I don’t know what they call it if your have your whole rib cage or something in a cast, if they even do that these days, but I’m quite sure plaster doesn’t come into it. WP.da matches E cast with Da skinne but only shows the single-limb ones.
Verbing weirds language: eingipsen “put in a cast”.