Gum-sucking is what my gran called it. “Tongue-sandwich” is another good one. Or how about “tonsil hockey”? There are as many names for kissing with tongues as there are bacteria in saliva, but the one that everyone seems to agree upon is “French kissing”. Now the French can be credited with inventing many things (margarine, bras, the Etch A Sketch) but did they really invent tongue kissing?

The term “French kiss” was first coined in 1923 and is credited to American and British troops returning from the WWI battlefields of northern France. It seems that they had been doing some kissing out there in France and, impressed by the novel, open-mouthed technique employed by the mademoiselles, began requesting the same style of snogging back home. The “French kiss” was born! The term became even more popular after yet another world war that put British and American troops in close contact with French ladies once again. French kissing became firmly established as the way to kiss to show great passion and intimacy.

Case closed! The French invented the tongue tango!

Except not quite. Because, though it’s certainly true that the French introduced – or perhaps more accurately popularised  – this style of  kissing among their type-lipped Anglo Saxon chums, it would be incorrect to say that they were the first or only nation to practise this form of kiss.

To find out who else liked to tongue kiss, we can look to the French themselves for a clue. The French, you see, don’t call it French kissing. In fact, it was only in 2013 that the French invented a formal term for “to French kiss” and it is “galocher“.  (Which, curiously, also means “to walk noisily in clogs”.) 

Look back further, however, and we discover that it was referred to as a “Florentine kiss” (un baiser florentin).  Its exact origins are unclear but it is likely to have originated during the time of Catherine de Médicis, the 16th century French queen from Florence. Wild, unfounded, rumours of her court’s sexual deviancy circulated among her French subjects, many of whom hated this Italian queen. It’s not such a stretch, then, that they would claim that these Italians were responsible for creating this erotic kiss. 

True or not, the term was established by the 17th century in France. “Un baiser florentin” is used by Abbé du Prat in 1683 in his saucy novel about lesbian nuns, La Venus dans le Cloitre ou La Religieuse en Chemise. In it, Angélique teaches fellow nun Agnès how to get low down and dirty, Florentine style.

Agnès – I think that you are mad. Doesn’t everyone kiss the same way? What do you mean by “Florentine kiss”?
Angélique – Come to me and I will teach you. […] This is how people who love each other really kiss, entwining lovingly the tongue in between the lips of the one they cherish: for me, there is nothing sweeter and more delicious…

It turns out that the French did exactly the same thing as the British and Americans, albeit a few hundred years earlier: attributed this kiss to their naughty neighbours. In their case, it was the Italians. 

Marvellous though it would be to say that this was some kind of Renaissance creation, invented by Leonardo da Vinci say, it would be ignoring the kiss’s far longer history. The Florentine’s ancestors, the Romans, were in all likelihood also practioners. The Romans were big kissing fans. They kissed to show affection, respect and, of course, sexual arousal.  They even had a law that allowed you to kiss your wife to check that she hadn’t been drinking wine because it was illegal for women to drink wine.

Three types of Roman kisses were documented by writer Maurus Servius Honoratus in the 4th century:

– osculum: a kiss on cheek that you would give your child
– basium: a closed mouth kiss  that you would give your wife
– savium: a deep, passionate kiss that you use with prostitutes

Sadly we don’t have Roman mosaics depicting the exact nature of the savium kiss – though they had them for other acts – so it’s difficult to acertain its exact mechanics.  I’d be willing to bet my last denarius that it was a tongue twister.

Fortunately for us, however, we do have an earlier source that does just that. Indian erotic classicThe Kama Sutra, was written between 400BC and 200AD and details types of kisses, and places on the body which can be kissed. Because there’s nothing sexier than lists.

The following are the places for kissing, viz. the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the bosom, the breasts, the lips, and the interior of the mouth.

The “interior of the mouth” – proof positive that French kissing goes back at least two thousand years to India – long before France was even established as a country. One theory goes that Alexander the Great learned Indian kissing customs during his attempt to conquer India. His military campaign failed but he brought the practices back to Europe with him. Time to rename it “Indian kissing”?

Don’t worry too much about the French losing their reputation for being sexually sophisticated because – even if we acknowledge that they’re not tongue-kissing inventors – there’s another, older, meaning to the verb “to french someone” and that’s to perform oral sex on them. We Anglophones really just can’t help ourselves.