Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

The singular French plural

George Orwell, that great scourge of corrupt language, would surely have a field day if he was around to examine an odd infection which has spread from France to plague English and many other tongues. I am talking about the phenomenon of plurification -- the addition of an s to turn abstract nouns into the politically correct plural, as in musics, behaviours, elites, learnings etc. Jacques Chirac has just gone for the s in a big way, wielding the PC plural as a weapon in the aftermath of the suburban riots.

The Fun of French Films

Perhaps I was being too hard on the quality of French films the other day (in France's Beautiful Boring Movies). Felix Lowe, among others who kindly commented, has a point about Eric Rohmer being worth more than the old joke about watching paint dry. And it is true that comedies are not the only good French films, as we saw this week. The venerable Claude Chabrol has just shown again why he is the master of dark doings in the provinces with his Demoiselle d'Honneur. The film, based on a story by Ruth Rendell and starring Laura Smet, passed without fanfare through cinemas late last year. This week, it reappeared, as most films do, on the Canal+ channel and won accolades from le Monde's and other critics. Smet, an emerging actress, is such a convincing mad young murderer that you wonder how much she is acting.  Her presence, however, supports my point that the Gallic cinema, even more than Hollywood, is a family business. Smet is the daughter of two monstres de la scène: Nathalie Baye and Jean-Philippe Smet. He is of course better known as Johnny Hallyday (see Mad About Mireille, above)

Another delicious comedy opened this week to back up my case that the genre is what the French do best these days. The subject might caused offence in Britain, because Palais Royal, starring, directed and written by Valérie Lemercier, is a send-up of the life of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Read on in in today's Times

When Angela met Jacques

We enjoyed the latest round of an old rite today when Angela Merkel turned up at the Elysée Palace for the ceremonial renewal of the marriage vows between France and Germany. Jacques Chirac bounded out to meet la chancelière, greeting her with one of his special hand kisses and then a fatherly arm around her shoulder. Chirac was deeply relieved that Merkel observed the rules and made Paris her first port of call before her date with Tony Blair in London tomorrow. The Chancellor, whose pro-Washington leanings have worried Paris, said all the right things about the undying importance of the Berlin-Paris partnership.

So much for the ritual. Everyone, including Chirac, knows that trying times are in store for the axis that has held together more or less since Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle proclaimed the marriage in the Elysee treaty of 1963.

Mad about Mireille

What do the Eiffel Tower, Johnny Hallyday, Jacques Chirac, and Mireille Mathieu have in common?. All are of course monuments to eternal France, ageless institutions that have been around for ever. At 116 years old, the tower is receiving record numbers of visitors this year. At 62, Hallyday, France's rockeur national and occasional actor, has just starred as a bank robber on prime time TV and his next tour is sold out. Chirac, a fixture of high politics since the 1960s, celebrates his 73rd birthday next week and is thinking of a possible third turn in the presidency. Mathieu, 59, would-be heir to Edith Piaf and one-time duettist with Elvis Presley, is celebrating four decades in show business this month by singing to packed audiences at the Olympia music hall.

There are differences among these four icons. Only two  -- the tower and La Mireille -- are the objects of planetary affection and special devotion in China and Russia. Hallyday, for all his vulpine virility, is largely unknown beyond Belgium and Quebec. Chirac, for much of the world, is the annoying embodiment of Gallic pretension.

The Anglo Eye on France

One of the sidelines of work as a correspondent in Paris is the invitation to air your views of the country on local radio and television. The requests multiply at times of national soul-searching, like last spring's rejection of the EU constitution and the spring 2002 crisis over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-rightist, in the presidential elections.

We have been in demand again with the autumn riots. In giving my two centimes' worth of wisdom at the beginning and the end of the three weeks of fire-raising, I have been struck by the big shift in the way that France is facing up to its breakdown.

France's beautiful boring movies

Nathalie Baye shows why she is one of France's great actresses in the week's most admired new film. Baye, aged 54 and without any make-up, is magnetic as an alcoholic detective in Le Petit Lieutenant, a dark, hyper-realist tale set in and around a Paris police station. 

Directed by Xavier Beauvois, a 38-year-old cinéaste with a reporter's eye for detail, the film has been earning warm reviews for its depiction of real world police work. Everyone agrees that Baye, as the worn-out Major Caroline Vaudieu, steals the show. The trouble, for me at least, is that she is the show. Le Petit Lieutenant is a fine example of what hs been wrong with the French cinema for at least the past decade: self-indulgence

The Minister, his wife, her lover and the publisher.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France Napoleonic Interior Minister, may have been flat out dousing the fires on the suburban estates but he has just managed time off to avert a blaze that was about to break out around his private life.

Sarko summoned to his ministry Vincent Barbare, boss of the Editions First house, who was about to come out with an authorised and intimate biography of Cécilia, the Minister's estranged wife. Straight after the meeting, Barbare cancelled next week's release and ordered the pulping of the 25,000 first run of Cécilia Sarkozy, Entre le Coeur et la Raison (Between Heart and Reason), by Valérie Domain. He even ordered the text purged from his firm's computers, according to Le Point magazine. Why ? Because publication would be "inappropriate" in France's current state of emergency. The author told us today that she is outraged by what amounts to an act of political censorship.

Chirac in Glasses Shock

France flashed back to the mid-1980s when Jacques Chirac issued his solemn appeal for peace and tolerance on television. For the first time since he became president, in 1995, Chirac adressed the nation wearing glasses. The event was startling enough to justify a whole front page of Libération.

Back in the mid-80s, the then Mayor of Paris and Prime Minister, shed his square horn-rimmed spectacles along with the American cigarette that used to dangle from his lips. Contact lenses gave him the softer look that Claude, his 44-year-old daughter and image adviser, told him he needed to win the young vote. He also took to strolling around in jeans and a sweater. Chirac has always kept his hair slicked back in 1940s businessman's style but le relooking, as make-over is known in French, worked.
      
With 18 months left in the Presidency and an ungrateful nation eager for a successor, Chirac, has decided to let himself look his age.

French hands on the Internet

In a struggle for power, first seize the language. Past master in the field of defining terms, France has come up with a new concept in its guerrilla campaign to hold back American cultural power and the technology that spreads it. It is called solidarité numérique, or digital solidarity.

At the United Nations Internet summit in Tunis this week France is pushing the rest of the world to back it in a "Digital Solidarity Fund" for spreading  web access in poor countries. Today, Philippe Douste Blazy, the Foreign Minister, made refreshingly clear that the real target is Uncle Sam.

"Do we believe in multilateralism or do we believe that one country -- the richest and the strongest -- is going to run the internet?" Douste Blazy asked on France Inter's 7-9, the public radio morning show that sets the chattering class agenda like Radio 4's Today.

France's rappers saw it coming

Perhaps Jacques Chirac should have listened to more rap. All the explosive anger that has poured from the estates over the past three weeks has been well articulated for 15 years by the poet-performers from the French ghettos. 

Starting in the early 1990s with NTM, a group whose full name was too much for the authorities of the time (see below), les rappeurs and occasional rappeuses have sung the misery of la cité, putting France on the world music map at the same time. The Culture Ministry and musical establishment have lavished praise on them,  viewing their art as a less sinister, French-flavoured answer to America's more violent version. But while patronising the music rather as a quaint tribal culture, successive governments failed to heed the warnings. Take NTM's Qu'est-ce qu'on attend? of 1995.

    Ca fait déjà des années que tout aurait dû péter
    La guerre des mondes vous l'avez voulue, le voilà
    Mais qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour foutre le feu?

    (Things should have blown up years ago
    You wanted the war of the worlds: now you've got it
    What are we waiting for to start the fires?)

Chirac, Depardieu and the Curse of the Kings

The French proletariat is rioting, the treasury has run short of funds and the ageing monarch frets in his palace, taking advice from his pretty daughter. The last straw for the fading dynasty comes when the upstart English leader tries to take over France and become the new bigshot in Europe.

Over the past week, France has been riveted by this drama. The plot may sound like Paris 2005, with Jacques Chirac holed up in the Elysée, advised by daughter Claude. It actually comes from the early 14th century.

While the young peasants were out revolting in the estates last week, nine million television viewers  watched the first two episodes of Les Rois Maudits a sumptuous five-part mini-series on the curse of the Capetian kings and the run-up to the 100 years war.

La Grande Guerre revisited

Like Britain, France has lately been rediscovering the Great War through a stream of books and films such as Jean Jeunet's Long Dimanche de Fiançailles, starring Audrey Tautou of Amélie fame. Several of the last six surviving poilus, as soldiers of la Grande Guerre were known, have appeared on television this week offering lucid accounts of a horror that seems an age away from the France of rioting suburbs.

Paris isn't burning

White-gloved waiters served us coffee, croissants and grapes from silver trays as the sunlight twinkled on chandeliers even bigger than those in the Elysée Palace across the Seine. Outside, across an exquisite Left Bank garden, stood the Eiffel tower. Just another morning in Europe's "Saddam City", as an American network called Paris this week.

Our host was one of Jacques Chirac' senior ministers. I cannot mention his name because the terms of the briefing for a few journalists was "le off", as it is known in French. It matters not who he was, because the scene spoke for itself. The minister wanted to give an inside version of the November "events" and improve our understanding of what has been going on. To be fair, he has long experience with estate unrest as former mayor from one of the troubled big cities, but his performance illustrated the old Gallic story that is emerging from the riots. Summed up, this goes: The theory is worthy and noble and it will prevail over the practice even if the reality is a mess.