In Communist East Europe, commissars and cops do it. In Rome and Madrid, moppets in dancing class do it. Frenchmen perform the ritual with sinuous grace, Spaniards smackingly, Germans with a click of the heels. However widely their techniques may vary, Europeans from Barcelona to Bialystok in recent years have taken to hand kissing with fervor and frequency unmatched in their history. After World War II, the custom seemed in decline. But today, men of virtually every class and calling on the Continent dive for distaff knuckles as assiduously, if not always so expertly, as do the courtiers in a Lehar operetta.
Telegraphed Admiration. Traditionalists deplore the trend and complain that it has vulgarized a stylish, patrician ritual. In the old days, no well-bred European kissed a woman's hand before noon, or outdoors (except at garden parties or the race track), or if she wore gloves—and not at all, in most countries, if she was unmarried. Nowadays, even in strait-laced Spain, girls who are barely old enough to hold up a strapless bra have their hands out. When it is enclosed in a glove, uninhibited males blithely peel it off or smooch the wrist instead. And now that the hand kiss has become democratic, it is bestowed alfresco, any time, any place, even when the recipient is on horseback or in church.
Notwithstanding the celebrated advice of Lorelei Lee ("A kiss on the hand may be quite Continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend"), most European women welcome the new wave of hand kissing, and to their men it has always seemed a more intriguing approach to a woman than the aseptic Anglo-Saxon handshake. As a Viennese satirist wrote in 1825:
To take your hand for a kiss
Is merely to ask this:
Will the mouth of the miss
Permit further bliss?
To speed the answer, ardent Latins, in particular, sometimes telegraph their admiration for an attractive woman by squeezing her fingers or locking on to them with both hands. After all, cracks Italian Moviemaker Vittorio De Sica: "You've got to start somewhere."
Capitalist Hangover. Hand kissing got its start in Europe with the Roman emperors, who exported the gesture as a symbolic act of fealty. In Central Europe it ceased to be a pledge of loyalty to the sovereign in the late 18th century, when Austrian Emperor Joseph II snatched his hand from subjects' lips with the cry: "It isn't there for someone to wipe his nose on!" More recently Mussolini, who frowned on the custom in any form, tried to discourage il baciamano. He might as well have tried to suppress spaghetti. The Nazis also deplored the Handkuss— good Germans were meant to give the Hitler salute instead—but der Führer himself was often photographed with his forelock fanning some actress' paw.