The schools have closed, France is heading for the summer holidays and Lance Armstrong is back on the Tour. That summed up the news today * at the start of the 96th edition of the Tour de France. The three-week, 2000-mile ordeal is of course not just the world's greatest cycle race. Under the headline "A La Vie, A l'Amour," L'Equipe, the sports daily, waxed poetic yesterday, calling the Tour a "unifying force... that possesses us and bewitches us beyond the flaws of humankind."
For France, those human failings are at the heart of the matter with Lance Armstrong. The Texan wonder-cyclist, who won the tour an astonishing seven times in a row, has returned from retirement and is aiming for an eighth victory in the tour that opens in Monaco today. Armstrong's comeback in his 38th year stirred dismay back in the winter. He may be worshiped as a hero at home in the States, but in France he was the object of suspicion. "Good riddance" was the feeling when he left in 2005.
Unlike dozens of others in a dope-plagued sport, Armstrong had never been caught using any performance-enhancing drugs. As he explained: "For France, my story was just too good to be true." He had survived a grave bout with cancer in the mid-1990s to become the biggest champion of all time, breaking the previous record of five wins, shared by the legends Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil.
Armstrong was an American at the time that France had fallen out with George Bush. He alienated the Tour crowd with what was deemed to be an arrogant, hard professionalism. He kept to himself and surrounded himself with bodyguards. In public, he refused to play the plucky regular guy, the traditional cycling hero. He barely spoke French despite five years in residence. Crowds even booed him as he led the pack through the mountain passes.
But this year, things have changed. It's not le grand amour, but Armstrong is enjoying new respect and it's not just because France has forgiven the United States. Armstrong is recognised as a star who brought glamour to a sport that is little known in much of the world. For the young cyclists, Lance is the boss but they have a chance of beating him. Andy Schleck, a Luxembourg Tour racer, said today: "It's good for cycling to have un Monsieur like him. He inspires a lot of people. Hat's off!."
Armstrong is enjoying gentler treatment from the media. Michel Drucker, France's favourite TV host, treated him to a gushing interview last Sunday. People are not scoffing at his argument that he has returned to promote his cancer foundation Livestrong. Armstrong, who broke a collarbone earlier this year, is now benefiting from the old Tour phenomenon of sympathy for the underdog. He is not even squad boss of Astana, the Kazakhstan-owned team for which he is pedalling. First place is held by Alberto Contador, the Spaniard who won in 2007. The first week will see a battle between the two for the real leadership. Armstrong says he will ride loyal back-up to Contador if he does not make the Yellow Jersey early on. The Texan cyclist is, by the way, one of the most active celebrity Twitterers. He has well over one million followers on http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
In the meantime, the tour is holding on to its magic despite the decade of seemingly endless doping scandals. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, says that the all-out testing is making cycling the cleanest sport. No other sport employs such stringent methods to track new ways of cheating, he says.
And to wrap it up, Nicolas Sarkozy has got into the act. The President, who is an amateur cyclist and an Armstrong fan, told the Cabinet this week that it is time to stop knocking the Tour. "It is the victim of dopage, and not the perpetrator," he said. "You must support this great popular event as well as its management," he told Rama Yade, his new Sports Minister. [*Since writing this, a train crash has joined today's headlines]
For over a century, when The Times' Paris bureau has needed an English-language book in a hurry, someone has walked a couple of hundred yards down the Avenue de l'Opéra to buy it at Brentano's. Sadly, the habit came to an end 10 days ago with the demise of the American bookstore that has been a Paris fixture since 1895.
The old shop at 37 Avenue de L'Opéra, whose customers included Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was shut after its landlord, the BNP Parisbas bank, won a liquidation order for non-payment of rent. For some time, the store was locally owned, no longer part of the historic New York-based company which is now a brand in the Borders Group.
Brentano's was a Paris American institution like the Herald Tribune newspaper. It supplied reading on the old trans-Atlantic steamers and it was appreciated by US expatriates. The Nazi invaders shut down the shop when they arrived in June 1940 and turned it into the film and camera supply centre for the Wehrmacht. At the start of the occupation, a German official walked in and ordered 6,000 books, including 349 assorted titles in Everyman's Library, a variety of art books, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and some expensive erotica (The tale comes from the Brentano's site, which is still open).
During the occupation, the Brentano parent company published French writers such as André Maurois and André Gide and the books were smuggled into France via the Free French forces in north Africa.
Like many other bookshop owners, Chantal and Jean-Marc Bodez, Brentano's last proprietors, could not keep up with soaring inner-city rent. The BNP had raised it from 75,000 euros a year to 200,000.
Independent bookshops have been closing everywhere in the world, but they are better protected in France than most places because the law does not allow price discounting. Brentano's suffered from the lower prices for English-languages books on the big internet chains.
And almost no-one sells books in the prized retail zone between the Louvre and the Opéra. A nearby exception remains WH Smiths', the branch of the UK chain on the rue de Rivoli opposite the Tuileries gardens. Another is Galignani, an historic shop also on the Rue de Rivoli. And of course there is always Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank. Here's a list of English-language bookstores in Paris
And it's not just Brentano's who are pulling out of the Opéra quartier. The Times is about to do so too -- after an extraordinary two centuries. We're not closing, just moving, but that's another story to which I shall return.
Another Airbus has fallen out of the sky and once again everyone is haring off into scare territory. Since the investigators are issuing their first findings on Air France 447, the June 1 crash in the Atlantic, here's a quick reality check.
[ Friday Update: First crash investigatin of A447 shows the airliner belly-flopped onto water in one piece.]
I've been talking to an Air France A330 pilot who confirms the sequence of events that brought down the Air France A330 off Brazil and which we have discussed here. More on that below, but first the latest accident.
The Yemenia Airbus that came down yesterday off the Comoros islands, killing 152 aboard, had nothing to do with the problems that ended Flight 447. The plane was a relatively old (19 years) A310 that was in poor condition and which had been banned from French air space in 2007.
That point is being hammered by the French media today. But it seems likely that the state of the plane had little to do with the crash, from which a 14-year-old girl has survived. From the accounts so far it looks like a classic approach-to-landing mishap of the oldest kind. Witnesses said the plane appeared to have been upset by a gust of wind or a down-draft as it was approaching the notoriously tricky runway at Moroni airport. The pilots were going around for another try and hit the water in the low turn in stormy conditions. That's a demanding manoeuvre at an underequipped airport in the dark. Most airline accidents take place in the landing or take-off phases and sloppy piloting is usually responsible. The investigators may find that higher crew standards are needed at Yemenia as much as better aircraft maintenance.
The Yemeni plane was a first-generation Airbus, a relatively simple aircraft. These do not have the computerised, fly-by-wire system that Airbus has used since the 1980s and which is under suspicion in Air France flight 447
It now looks as if AF447 was a disaster waiting to happen. Thanks to leaks from pilots and engineers, we now know that Air France and other airlines had experienced a string of failures in the speed sensors and air data system of the long-range Airbus family, the A330 and A340.
Crews had always managed to recover the aircraft by hand after their electronics disconnected. Unnoticed by most media, the United States authorities (National Transportation Safety Board) has just jumped in with its own investigation of the latest two. They involved Airbus incidents on flights originating in the United States on May 21 and only last week.
In the case of AF447, it seems that the crew faced conditions that were beyond them. They were flying at night at high altitude in a storm that appears to have played an important role in the chain. After the speed sensors and computers played up, they had no airspeed indication. Saving the plane would have been a very tough job. It is assumed that the two junior pilots were at the controls. Captain Marc Dubois, 58, would have been resting.
That is the scenario described to me yesterday by Cédric Maniez, a colleague of the late captain who flies A330s for Air France. The blocked speed sensors -- the pitot tubes -- were the originating cause of the accident, he said. This led to the cascade of electronic breakdown. Air France has now intensified training for such a situation, he said. He had tried last week to fly an A330 simulator that recreated the conditions on AF447 and he had found it "very very delicate".
Maniez, who is also a spokesman for the SNPL pilots' union, said he was now satisfied that the airline had solved the problem because it had replaced all the unreliable pitot tubes. "I have more confidence than ever now that the problem has been elucidated and corrected," he said.
That will not get Airbus, the airlines and the regulatory agencies off the hook. Questions are bound to be asked about why nothing was done to mandate replacement of the unreliable pitot tubes and to explain the erratic electronics -- which had been known since 1994. Some pilots are worried that the French accident bureau, the BEA, will play down the technical failures and play up the storm and shift blame to the crew. Why they flew through the storm rather than avoiding it, we don't know. Without the black box cockpit voice recorders, it's unlikely that we ever will.
The lawyers are ready to pounce. The British firm representing AF447 victims passengers thinks the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will have to think about grounding the A330/340 fleet.
All that said, everyone should calm down. Two disasters in a month sound frightening. But remember that AF447 was the first fatal crash involving a plane of which over 900 are in the air around the world every day. Here's a comparison on air safety. Eight thousand pedestrians are killed in Europe annually. In the whole world, only 550 people die in airline accidents every year. Or another figure: flying is 32 times safer than taking the car, in terms of deaths per 100 million passenger miles, according to the French civil aviation authority.
Imagine the scandal that would ensue in some countries if prosecutors announced that they were pursuing the following trail: the head of state is suspected of possible involvement in a corrupt arms deal that led to the death of 11 of his citizens in a bomb attack attributed to Al Qaida.
That may sound like a movie plot or something from the third world but it's happening in France. It's the outline of a case that has begun to lap around President Sarkozy. With the exception of a couple of leftwing publications, the media are treading very carefully over this so-called Karachi affair. Sarkozy has dismissed it as pure fantasy. But he may not be able to escape further explanation, since vengeance is in the air -- in the person of his sworn enemy Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister and right-hand-man of President Jacques Chirac.
The story involves a jump back to the 1990s but it's worth the effort. The trigger event is a 2002 suicide bomb attack on a bus full of French shipyard workers in Karachi. Fourteen people were killed, 11 of them French citizens working on submarines which France had sold to the Pakistani navy [bomb scene in top picture]. Two alleged Al Qaida operatives were sentenced to death in Pakistan for the attacks, but their convictions were recently quashed on appeal.
The French side of the investigation plugged away slowly until two new juges d'instruction were appointed a few months ago. Two weeks ago, they told survivors of the attack and families of the dead that the Al Qaida trail was now excluded. They said they had strong reason to believe that the bombing was staged by senior figures in the Pakistani military as retaliation against the French government.
Why ? Paris had incurred the wrath of the unnamed Pakistanis because in 1995, President Chirac had cut off payment of millions of euros of "commissions" -- bribes or fees -- to middle-men in the 825 million euro submarine contract. Chirac may have taken his decision because part of the illicit commissions were being kicked back to France to finance Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister of the time, said the judges. Balladur was Chirac's party subordinate who turned coat and ran against his boss for the presidency in 1995.
And who was the head of Balladur's campaign that year? Nicolas Sarkozy. He was also, as Budget Minister of the time, the man who signed the paperwork to have the submarine commissions sent to a Luxembourg-based shell company. [Picture left: Balladur with his former chief lieutenant, N Sarkozy]
That's strong stuff. There are denials all round. But the judges in the Karachi case are not just theorizing. Documents support their suspicion. They discovered that in 2002 an internal investigation by the DCN, the state ship-building firm, concluded flatly that the bus attack was retaliation over non-payment of the full submarine commissions. The 2002 report, written by a former agent of the DGSE, the French Intelligence Service, said suitcases of cash from the commission were being delivered to Balladur's campaign in Paris, according to le Nouvel Observateur magazine
In 2007, Jean-Claude Marin, the Paris Prosecutor, wrote a memorandum mentioning a suspected link between the Karachi attack and the financing of the Balladur campaign, according to documents obtained last week by Reuters news agency.
Last week, Charles Millon, who was Chirac's defence minister after he won the presidency in 1995, confirmed that the incoming administration had halted payment of the submarine commissions because part of them were thought to be paid back into France. De Villepin, who was serving as Chirac's chief of staff in 1995, said on Friday that Chirac had "refused payment of all commissions which could have been used to send kickbacks to France". He said that he had not been alerted "specifically" to the submarine contract.
Villepin must be relishing his chance to get back at Sarkozy after the humiliation that the President has inflicted on his frère-ennemi by having him pursued over the so-called Clearstream affair. In the Clearstream case, Villepin is to stand trial in a few months on charges of trying to smear Sarkozy with claims four years ago that Sarkozy had stashed a large sum of money in a secret bank account in.... Luxembourg.
Balladur, who earned Chirac's enmity for betraying him by running against him in 1994, said yesterday that everything about the submarine deal and his election finances were above board and he is happy to answer the judges' questions. But he added that he did not follow the detail of the submarine contract. It's worth noting that the 50 million or so euros of foreign commissions on the submarine deal were legal -- and tax-deductible by the shipbuilders -- in France at the time. Such payments became illegal only after France signed up to an OECD anti-corruption pact in 2000. It was always illegal for French nationals to receive kickbacks from such commissions.
This case is unlikely to fade because the survivors and families, who are mainly from the Normandy port of Cherbourg, have banded together and are demanding a full investigation. And parliament is getting involved. Bernard Cazeneuve, the Socialist member for Cherbourg and mayor of the city, said "we are discovering manipulation on all sides in an extremely unhealthy context." Sarkozy's blanket dismissal was not enough, he said. "It is the duty of Parliament to demand that full light is shed on the case." Michèle Alliot-Marie, the new Justice Minister, has just promised that the enquiry will be given priority.
Do not expect anything dramatic. L'affaire Karachi has not yet become une affaire d'état. In France, there is a long history of politico-financial skulduggery that simmers on for years and never reaches the courts. For example, a thick cloud of financial scandal dogged Chirac for his 12 years in the presidency but nothing came of it.
It is also worth recalling that Sarkozy is about to abolish the institution of independent investigating judges -- of the kind who are pursuing the Karachi case. Under his reform, the President is to put all investigation into the hands of the prosecution service -- a body which is completely under the orders of the government.
Old television commercials are a big trigger for nostalgia. This is just one of 200,000 French ones which went on-line free today on the new site of the INA, the national broadcasting archives.
The site is a little slow this morning because everyone is clicking on to watch the adverts they grew up with, starting the the first one, for Boursin cheese, in 1968. French TV advertising does not play so much on sentiment and emotion as the Americans or situation comedy like the British. It can be as silly and annoying as everywhere else but the more creative commercials are a mix of stylish production, humour and often, eroticism. The ice-cream advert above from 1999 is an example. Some of the most fondly-remembered commercials are those of Perrier water (see below) and Orangina soda.
The INA site is fun to browse. France does these things exceedingly well. I mentioned the site when it first opened three years ago, offering a free trip down memory lane with thousands of hours of old tv shows, news footage and entertainment. The INA -- l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel -- has the task of storing and cataloguing France's broadcasting heritage. It is half way through putting decades of TV on-line and the new site makes it more accessible.
Emmanuel Hogg, the INA boss, says he is offering France and anyone who knows the country the equivalent of Proust's Madeleine -- the frisson of a flash into your past. "We are the first generation to be able to see our past in images. When you look at an old show, you see two things: the broadcast and your (younger) self watching it...We are a guarantee that everything is broadcast on radio and television will be kept, from yesterday today or tomorrow." The INA had a lively internal debate on whether old TV commercials were really part of the national heritage and it decided that they were. No other country has such a publicly accessible memory trove, adds Hogg. Yes of course this costs the taxpayer, but no-one contests such spending.
[Housekeeping note. I'm off for three days. Comments will be moderated. Next post on Monday. CB]
[Below: Perrier cavemen]
Three weeks on from the crash of Air France flight 447, it is clear that the airline and the Airbus company are going to face some hard questions over the worst air disaster since 2001.
The latest leaks from the airline and its pilots indicate that Air France and Airbus were aware earlier than they have publicly admitted of serious problems with the speed instruments on the long-range A330 and A340 aircraft. Faulty speed readings were reported automatically by the Air France plane at the start of a series of failures that ended with the plane breaking up at night over the Atlantic with 228 aboard early on June1 .
The accident investigators have yet to reach any finding, but the consensus among pilots is that erroneous speed data probably confused the flight computers and left the pilots with a plane that would have been near impossible to fly.
As more documents have come out this week, Air France confirmed to us today that a maintenance team had been sent to await the arrival of AF 447 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport during the night of the crash. They were supposed to correct faulty pitot tubes, the outside sensors that register the speed of the oncoming air.
The dispatch of the mechanics was a standard response to the automatic alerts (known as ACARS) that reported the erroneous speed data to Air France's Paris base. At the time, the airline did not yet know that the aircraft had crashed just over four minutes after its satellite transmitter sent the first ACARS alert.
The boss of Air France said last Friday that the airline had experienced a series of faulty speed incidents on its long-range Airbuses beginning last August. But last night, company documents reached the internet showing that the problem was known before that. Eurocockpit, a site run by professional pilots, including some from Air France, published an Air France maintenance notice, NT-34-029, dated last August 20. This said that at that time there had already been six cases of malfunctioning pitot probes on the company's A340 aircraft, the bigger brother of the A330 [see extract below]. These were said to be due to water and ice. Eurocockpit, which has been the source of the main leaks from the airline since the crash, said work on the technical notice had started in June last year (see full documents here).
Air France 447 was the 36th known occurrence of faulty speed readings on the A330 and A340 series, said the Eurocockpit association. The 35 previous incidents followed the same sequence as those reported by AF447, except that the pilots were able to recover control and return to normal flight.
The Eurocockpit pilots voiced amazement that the August 2008 technical note says that the faulty pitot tubes would have "nil operational impact". They called this outrageous. "How can it be imagined that there would be no operational consequence from the loss of so much information and vital systems?" it asked. "We have consulted the pilots who had these pitot problems. All told us that it took a big dose of immediate lucidity to avoid distraction by the stall warnings which came with the incident and face up to the deluge of alarms...." Maintaining control of AF447, at night in a tropical storm with faulty information, would have been a monumental task, the pilots said.
The pilots are obviously keen that the crew of AF447 should not be blamed for the crash. The flight recorders still lie on the floor of the Atlantic with only days left before their locator batteries run out. It is early to pronounce on the cause of this rare disaster, but the evidence is building up and it does not look good for Air France and Airbus. The accident investigation bureau, the BEA, is to produce a preliminary report by June 30.
Below is an extract from the August 2008 Air France note setting out the pitot problem and remedial action to be taken by engineers. AF447 reported the same auto-pilot disengagement and disconnection of the computerised flight controls as set out here at least 10 months earlier (THT is Air Tahiti Nui, whose aircraft are maintained by Air France).
![Frederic mitterrand[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201157147e63f970b-300wi "Frederic mitterrand[1]") We were right to expect Nicolas Sarkozy to dismiss Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister who was responsible for the President's ill-fated law against internet piracy. Sarkozy is about to stage one of his splashy personnel coups by replacing Albanel with a well-known character by the name of Mitterrand
The new Monsieur Culture is to be Frédéric Mitterrand, a versatile arts personality, gay activist and television presenter who was a nephew of the late President François Mitterrand. The younger Mitterrand, 61, has just made his first big mistake: he announced his elevation 24 hours before its proclamation by the palace. Sarkozy, who is recasting his government tomorrow, abhors subordinates who jump the gun.
[Wednesday update: Mitterrand's announcement forced the Elysée to name the new government last night. Here's the news from today's paper -- written five minutes after the announcement so it's a little sketchy.]
Because of the family name, Mitterrand's appointment to a plum Cabinet post has been depicted by some as a new ouverture, Sarkozy's term for his recruitment of people from the left. Mitterrand, whose late father Robert was the elder brother of the Socialist president, supported his uncle in the 1980s, when he was rising on state television as an arts presenter and commentator on European royalty. But in 1995, Frédéric threw in his lot with the then presidential candidate Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy's party boss who succeeded François Mitterrand that year. The new minister is seen by the lefty Paris cultural establishment as something of a dilettante and courtier. However Pierre Bergé, the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and senior figure in the left-leaning gay establishment applauded his appointment.
Sarkozy had already promoted Mitterrand and put many cultural noses out of joint only last year when he made him boss of Villa Médicis, the French cultural academy in Rome. The post is one of the jewels distributed by Republican monarchs to those who enjoy their favour. On TV today, Mitterrand called his new job "an exhilarating task and an honour." The Elysée Palace refused to confirm it. Asked if his late uncle would have approved his decision to join Sarkozy's government, he said: "Certainly!"
Mitterrand has enjoyed moderate success as a writer and film director and producer but he is a household face, at least for the older generation, from his television days in the 1980s and '90s. He is admired as one of the first campaigners for gay rights. His creation in 1977 of a Festival of Homosexual Film was brave for the times. In recent years he has been one of the bosses of Pink TV, France's first gay cable channel.
Mitterrand's gayness will not be a first in the Culture post, a job which in France commands much greater money (2.8 billion euros) and power than arts officials in other democracies. But his background as a homosexual rights campaigner is useful for Sarkozy's goal of diversity in his administration.
The President has been hinting at surprises in what he says will be his "second government". Among these will be the identify of the one or more new ethnic personalities who will inherit the diversity role played by Rachida Dati, the outgoing Justice Minister. It is assumed that François Fillon is staying on as Prime Minister, although Sarkozy's direct management of the state has cut the function down to a sort of chief of staff.
Sarkozy laid out his aims for this second phase of his presidency before a solemn ceremonial session of both houses of parliament in the Château de Versailles yesterday. Among other things, he condemned face-covering by Islamic women (see last post).
The grandiose exercise in self-promotion, made possible by Sarkozy's changes to the constitution last year, played into the hands of the left and media critics who depict him as a would-be successor to Louis XIV and France's other absolute monarchs. They might have a point, given that he is appointing as guardian of the Republic's culture a man who is a famous admirer of European monarchy and its rituals.
[Below: Sarkozy arriving at Versailles for his speech]
France has set itself a troublesome real-life question that could have come from this week's baccalauréat philosophy test: should society dictate how people dress ?
The matter arises because parliamentarians are calling for measures to stop Muslim women wearing full veils in public. Niqabs and burqas -- the head-to-toe costumes that cover all or most of the face -- are said to be spreading as fundamentalist doctrines gain hold among a small minority of France's five million Muslims. President Sarkozy is going to address the issue in a speech on Monday and a string of public figures have come out largely in support of restrictions in order to protect women from oppression. Ministers in Sarkozy's government hold conflicting views on the question.
[Tuesday update: Sarkozy has come out firmly against the niqab and burqa but stopped short of calling for a law. See today's story here. ]
This new debate over Muslim dress is reviving the passions that surrounded France's 2004 law prohibiting religious head-cover and other symbols of faith in state schools. The justification was the enforcement of laicité, France's tradition that keeps religious expression away from institutions of the strictly secular republic. The measure was mainly intended to ensure the equality of Muslim girls and it has worked smoothly.
The subject goes to the heart of France's ideal of itself as a culturally integrated republic and it creates misunderstanding abroad, obviously in the Muslim world but also in the "Anglo-Saxon" and north European countries which emphasise what they see as religious freedom. First-time French visitors to Britain are often shocked when they come across female police and immigration officers wearing Muslim head-gear, or male officers in Sikh turbans. The French are also taken aback by the constant references to God in the discourse of US politicians. In turn, British and Americans are often unable to understand the positive, egalitarian intentions of the French secular approach. Foreign correspondents here found their home media editing out the fact that the school veil ban was supported by Muslims. It didn't fit the Anglo-Saxon preconception that it was an undemocratic act of discrimination (The degree of support from Muslims was open to dispute, with some polls showing about 60 percent approval and others only a minority).
Only two weeks ago Sarkozy and Barack Obama crossed swords over the existing headscarf ban after the US president took a swipe at it in his speech in Cairo. He said the United States prized freedom of religion and "we are not going to tell people what to wear." To many French ears, that sounded naive. In Normandy on June 6, Sarkozy told Obama that French principles of equality meant that people should not display religious affiliation in state institutions. "It is not a problem that young girls may choose to wear a veil or a headscarf as long as they have actually chosen to do so, as opposed to this being imposed upon them, be it by their families or by their environment."
That is of course the crux of the problem. Who decides whether they have made a free choice? Extending the ban from schools and some state agencies to an all-out prohibition on any face-covering raises big questions. Veiled women who have been questioned over the past few days by the media have generally said that the choice was their own.
Critics, including some government ministers, say a ban on the burqa and niqab would be unworkable and would only force greater isolation on the victims, as the wearers are seen. Gilbert Collard, a celebrity lawyer, made the point today in France Soir newspaper:
"These caged women show the power of the fundamentalists to indoctrinate. They testify also to an odious idea of woman as an object of submission to an all-powerful master who is the exclusive proprietor of her face. But... forbidding this provocation by shadows in the streets would only reinforce their provocation."
The call for a parliamentary inquiry is led by André Gerin, a Communist MP and Mayor of a suburb of Lyons, who calls the burqa and the niqab "a moving prison for women." He has been supported by two young Muslim-born women ministers, Fadel Amara and Rama Yade.
Amara, a rights campaigner who is Housing Minister, said she is alarmed by the number of women wearing veils. "We must do everything to stop burqas from spreading, in the name of democracy, of the republic, of respect for women." Yade, Minister for Human Rights in the Foreign Ministry, said today that she supported a prohibition in the name of women's equality and human dignity. The wearing of veils "is a phenomenon which is visibly spreading," she said.
Muslim leaders have mixed views. Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, supported an inquiry, saying that face-covering for women was a fundamentalist practice that is not prescribed by Islam. But the national Muslim Council, which is less tied to the establishment, accused lawmakers of wasting time on a fringe phenomenon. "To raise the subject like this...is a way of stigmatising Islam and the Muslims of France," said Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the Council.
I suspect that Sarkozy will not favour a new law. He was not enthusiastic about the school headscarf ban, which was introduced by his predecessor President Chirac. Sarkozy sees the clothing bans as a form of discrimination and he tries to promote policies that bring Muslims, many or most of whom were born in France, into the mainstream community. From that point of view, the President is on the same ground as the activists in the banlieue immigrant estates who see him as the devil.
I've made some sweeping statements and this is touchy territory. Feel free to fire away.
And as a footnote, it's worth noting that the government yesterday published its decree banning facial cover during demonstrations. Anyone who wears a mask or other cover will face a 1,500 euro fine on the first offence and double on the second. Police unions are worried that they will be unable to enforce this law which is intended to make life harder for the casseurs, the violent extreme-left protesters who try to turn demonstrations into riots. .
France has been amused over the past week by the video below which features the country's best-loved politician -- Jacques Chirac.
The last president, who is 77, was filmed applying his well-known charms to a local Socialist politician while Bernadette, his long-suffering wife, made a speech at a gathering in the rural Corrèze. Chirac always enjoyed a reputation as an energetic Don Juan and he seems to have lost none of his taste for flirtation. The funny moment is when Bernadette gives him the withering stare after he fails to stop chatting with his neighbour. The man in glasses laughing at the video on the TV set is Jean-Louis Borloo, one of President Sarkozy's most senior ministers.
Chirac's bumpy and undistinguished 12 years in office dragged to a close in 2007 but he has re-emerged in recent months as a lovable elder statesman. People remember the good moments, like his opposition to the Iraq war, and they overlook the corruption scandals and sleaze that emerged from his previous 18 years as Paris mayor. Chirac's old-style élégance is contrasted with the brash and vulgar side of his successor -- and bête noire -- Nicolas Sarkozy. A Paris Match poll last month ranked him as the country's most popular political figure. The video has done him no damage since everyone rather likes the roguish side of the old Gaullist. His trail of romantic liaisons is well known. Bernadette said a few years ago that she had put up with a lot. Before leaving office, Chirac confessed in an interview: "There have been women I have loved a lot, as discreetly as possible."
.
![Bac_philo[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570316441970c-400wi)
I did not envy my son this morning when, along with 331,575 teenagers across France, he sat down at 8am for the four-hour ordeal of le bac philo.
The philosophy test, or rather torture, is still the "royal subject" of the baccalauréat, the national high school examination that opens the way to university and adulthood. Apart from students in trades and technical schools, all pupils are obliged to take the philosophy exam.
Literacy may be declining in France like everywhere else but it says something about the intellectual skills still required of the young that about half of all late teenagers in France earn a baccalauréat that includes philosophy.
The bac, with its centralised, simultaneous examinations is a ritual of a rare kind. For weeks the media have built up to the big moment of the bac philo -- the opening test -- with tips on subjects and handling stress and bac memoirs from celebrities. Today, television and radio are reporting from the school gates.
The philosophy questions have just been released. My son, who's just 18, was required to dissert on one of the following two questions: What is gained by exchange ? (Que gagne-t-on à échanger) and Does technological development transform mankind? (Le développement technique transforme-t-il les hommes ?). [More questions below]
You can't just wing it with a ramble around the subject. Like most French disciplines, structure and method are vital. The reasoning has to follow rules and you must cite the appropriate great thinkers as you set out your argument.
The baccalauréat has demanding equivalents in other countries. But the continuing rigour of the system helps explain why the average French person is more articulate, more able to express him or herself on abstract subjects, than, say, average Britons or Americans.
The baccalauréat, inaugurated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808, was designed to promote the post-revolutionary ideal of a nation of rational citizens. Luc Ferry, a philosopher who served as Education Minister from 2002-2004, explained it on the radio this morning as the kids were drafting their philo answers: "When the bac was created, the idea was that in order to become a citizen and be capable of voting, you had to be able to sort out ideas and argue them in public. That remains true today," he said (I wonder how many professional philosophers have served as Education Minister in the UK).
There is much that can be criticised in the baccalauréat and a system run by a Ministry of Education that commands an unbelievable 1.2 million staff. The baccalauréat is too elitist, some say. Fewer than half the children of working class parents earn the certificate that gives passage to university. Others say standards have been dumbed down too far now that 63 percent of all teenagers earn the bac, compared with just 20 percent in 1970.
It's also true that the French education system emphasises information and rules rather than imagination and that secondary students perform modestly in international comparisons, such as that of the annual OECD ranking. Another point, from which my two teenagers have suffered in childhoods in French schools; is a teaching culture which relies more on criticism than encouragement.
Xavier Darcos, the teacher who is current Education Minister (and is probably about to be replaced) has been warring with the unions over redeploying resources and cutting teaching staff. Something must be wrong, he says, if France spends more than the European average on education but scores mediocre results. The unions answer that by saying the OECD rankings -- which routinely put Finland top in Europe -- are biased towards nordic and and Anglo-Saxon methods and do not take account of French priorities.
President Sarkozy has run into resistance from the education establishment in his attempts to remedy some of the flaws. His latest idea, floated last week, is for schools to open outside classroom hours and at weekends to offer extra-curricular activities. Traditionally, French schools are teaching machines. Sports, hobbies and other youth activities are largely organised by other institutions.
But putting aside the problems, the baccalauréat remains a sterling asset for France. It's internationally admired and its international -- less Gallic -- version is taken in many other countries. Perhaps I am out of date and I certainly would not have fancied doing le bac philo myself. But it remains impressive that so many kids reach a level at which they can hold forth for four hours on existential matters such as the following from today's other general baccalauréat streams.
For science students: 1) Is it absurd to desire the impossible? 2) Are there questions which no science can answer?
For the literature stream: 1) Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian ? 2) Does language betray thought ?
My son's two questions came from the economics and social science stream. He choses the one on exchange and reassures me that he wrote a suitably leftwing answer which did not sing the praises of commercial exchange. He kept it broad and talked about moral matters (The French curriculum and teachers are slanted solidly to the left). As well as the essay, the students have the option of writing a commentary on a short unprepared text.
It does not pay to cross Nicolas Sarkozy if you are a prefect or other high functionary of the French state. The President has just removed the third in the past few months for incurring his displeasure.
The latest victim is Jacques Laisné, Prefect of the Var [left below], the département on the Mediterranean which centres on Toulon. His offence, colleagues tell the media, was his failure to sort out the septic tanks around the villa of Sarkozy's in-laws, the Bruni-Tedeschi family.
A relic of Napoleonic times, prefects are the high functionaries who serve as the state's provincial governors. They wear ceremonial uniforms (picture on right), sign decrees, run the police and report to the Interior Ministry.
Sarkozy intervened over the drains last August when holidaying at Cap Nègre, a sumptuous cliff-top estate at le Lavandou where Carla Bruni's family have long owned the most impressive house (see top picture). Since 2002, the neighbours have been resisting an order to do away with their old septic tanks and hook their homes up to the municipal drains. The measure cost too much, they said.
Last summer, Super Sarko took time off mediating over Russia's invasion of northern Georgia and summoned the Cap Nègre neighbours, the prefect and local mayor. He told them that the state would handle the plumbing and help pay for the new sewage pipes.
It didn't happen. The prefect, neighbours told Mediapart.fr news site, decided that the state did not have the money and handed the problem back to the town council. Sarkozy has just signed a decree removing Jacques Laisné from the prefect's post which he had held for barely two years, sending him back to the Court of Accounts, the civil service corps from which he originated.
Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister and loyal Sarkozy soldier, has denied that the transfer was punishment. Pure fantasy, she said. Few believe her because it fits a pattern. Last autumn, Sarkozy removed the high official in charge of police and security in Corsica after his men failed to stop demonstrators entering the villa garden of Christian Clavier, a popular comic actor. Clavier is a good friend of Sarkozy. Police have been guarding the villa around the clock since the incident, at a cost so far to the tax-payer of an estimated 400,000 euros, according to le Canard Enchaîné. Clavier only uses the villa for holidays but the gendarmes' van is always there.
The other prefect to annoy Sarkozy was Jean Charbonniaud, the state's man in the Normandy département of la Manche. He was dismissed last February after his police allowed demonstrating school teachers to get within earshot of Sarkozy when he visited the town of Saint-Lô. Local Socialist leaders said the prefect was the victim of the monarch's whim.
Since Saint-Lô, the prefects have been living in fear of presidential visits. They are drafting in extra police to keep crowds away from his person. In Caen on June 6, the only public that was allowed within reach of Sarkozy and President Obama were all invited by the local Union for a Popular Movement, Sarkozy's party.
[Picture above: Sarkozy and Bruni enjoying the clean waters of Cap Nègre]
A hundred years ago, Louis Blériot, Louis Bréguet and other pioneers decided that aviation was more than a branch of the rising automobile industry. To boost their fledgling pastime, they staged the first 'International Exposition of Aerial Locomotion' at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Their successors opened the 100th anniversary edition of the Paris Air Show today at Le Bourget, the historic airport in the northern outskirts, but there is not much celebrating. Today's heavy rain is in tune with the glum mood at le Bourget, which alternates years with Farnborough, England, as the world's main industry gathering. Gleaming military and civilian jets, helicopters and other flying machines are all on show as usual, but spirits have been dampened by three factors -- the global slump, unease over the crash of Air France Flight 447 and the swine 'flu epidemic
Since airlines are expected to suffer a 12 percent drop in revenue this year, many are cancelling orders already placed with Airbus, Boeing and the other makers. The possible global 'flu pandemic is also raising doubts about the prospects for short-term recovery.
Also worrying the industry is the unexplained catastrophe that hit the Air France A330 Airbus with 228 souls on board over the Atlantic on its flight from Rio to Paris on June 1. No airline disaster for decades has had such implications for an industry that thought that it had licked the technical side of Blériot's sport.
A century since Blériot coaxed his flimsy 'flying motor cycle' across the sea from Calais to Dover [picture above], man has mastered the mechanics. With modern construction and infallible computers, modern airliners are not supposed to vanish in the night. "It is safe to say that the aviation community is still in some shock," Tom Enders, the Airbus chief executive, said last week.
David Learmount, safety editor of Flight International, said in today's Financial Times: "An event like this is the kind the aviation world hoped it would not see again because it involves a world-class carrier flying the latest generation of airliner and it occurred en route, not during take-off of landing in difficult weather."
The speculation over Flight 447 rages on as new shreds of evidence emerge. The original theory seems to hold. The jet broke up at altitude after suffering a rapid but not instantaneous, emergency. Debris was scattered over a very wide radius. Brazilian autopsies on the 44 bodies recovered so far show that the passengers and crew were not prepared for trouble and died either in the shock of the break-up and depressurization or on hitting the water. None drowned.
Suspicion still points at the mix of factors that emerged immediately after the accident. Speed readings (from the pitot tubes) were faulty, there was a problem with the electronic flight system and the aircraft went out of control, possibly stalling or overspeeding.
A US airline pilot and accident expert who reads this blog has sent me a copy of an Airbus bulletin to airlines issued after the Qantas A330 episode last October. It describes a sequence of electronic failures very similar to what AF447 appears to have suffered. The Australian crew were able to pull their jet out of its dive. Stewarts Law, a London-based aviation law firm dealing with the Qantas case, told me that there are parallels with AF447.
A new element in AF 447 is speculation over the vertical stabiliser (tail) which was found by the Brazilians last week [picture above]. Some engineers and other specialists are wondering if the tail might have sheered off because of a structural flaw as the plane was struggling for control in heavy turbulence. American Airlines Flight 557, an Airbus A300, crashed in Queens, New York, in 2001 after its tail broke off and fell into Jamaica bay. Excessive control inputs by a pilot were blamed.
If they don't find the black box flight recorders, the BEA, the French accident investigation bureau, may never be able to do more than conclude with a supposition. Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the BEA -- which is based at le Bourget -- warned last week that this might be the case. Either way, confidence in the Airbus and all high-tech airliners will be shaken.
You could sense the public anxiety at my humble level of flying this weekend. It was open day at Enghien-Moisselles, our little aerodrome which is two minutes flight north of Le Bourget. The Cessnas, Robins and other small planes were out on display on the grass. Visitors kept asking about pitot tubes. I showed the pitot on my old Robin Aiglon and explained that the plane can take off and fly even with the tube blocked and no airspeed registering. That's the advantage of having no computer. We have a few electronics though. The air force has stationed two uniformed air controllers in our club house to make sure, via radar transponder codes, that none of us strays into Le Bourget's space.
The public displays at le Bourget start this weekend. There is a lot to see, including a flying Blériot plane and a breathtaking performance by la Patrouille de France, the air force display team [below]. The Patrouille, which now includes one female pilot, has been absent from le Bourget since the 1970s
|  |
|
