To make a French nudist blush might appear to be a mission impossible. Not at Cap d'Agde, on the Languedoc coast, home to "naked city", Europe's largest nudist holiday colony.
A long-simmering war between two tribes of the unclothed – "traditional" nudists and so-called "libertines" or exponents of free sex – exploded into a public protest at the town's council meeting this week.
Old-fashioned naturists have been complaining for years that Cap d'Agde's once-sedate nudist quarter has been disfigured by an influx of partner-swapping clubs and raunchy hotels. A flurry of arson attacks on sex clubs two years ago was blamed on low-level terrorism by nudist fundamentalists.
At this week's Cap d'Agde council meeting, the protests took a more peaceful form. Old-fashioned nudists complained that they, and their children, were being confronted with "voyeurist" and "exhibitionist" behaviour, including sexual acts in public. Worse, they suggested, the "deviant" newcomers sometimes walked about in their clothes and mocked the "real" nudists….
[One councillor] asked the town's mayor, and MP, Gilles d'Ettore, to intervene before Cap d'Agde's "oversexed" image caused an "explosion of libertine behaviour in non-nudist areas" of the town….
"We didn't invent partner-swapping or libertine behaviour in Cap d'Agde. This has been a social trend for 10 years," the centre-right mayor and parliamentary deputy said. "I refuse to make value judgements on the sexual habits of other people. I can't put a policeman behind all 40,000 nudists."
