Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

The fight for cheese

My 12-year-old daughter has come bouncing back from a school trip to the mountains. La classe de neige -- the snow class -- is one of those French traditions that other nations admire but mostly do not manage to match. The kids move with their teachers for a week to a village where they ski, snowshoe and learn about nature. My daughter's spell in the Jura, near the Swiss border, was the usual mixture of fun and French rigour. The first thing she mentioned on her return was the cheese exam.

Everyone loves France

The world loves France more than ever and Paris in particular. The country has been cheered from its January gloom by this conclusion from news that a record 75 million foreigners visited in 2005, keeping France's title as the world's favourite destination. They were not quite all carrying copies of The Da Vinci Code, but Dan Brown's thriller has drawn thousands of extra tourists to Paris, where a record 16 million checked into hotels in 2005. In another sign of Da Vinci's pulling power, passengers on the Eurostar between London and Paris left behind a thousand copies of the book in the train in the past 18 months. The pilgrim trek to the Louvre and Saint Sulpice church, big venues in the book, is expected to surge when the movie, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, arrives in May. To spur the cross-Channel traffic, Eurostar has signed a promotion deal with Columbia Pictures.   

Forgetting the radiant future

There has been some good evidence this week that the world never learns. Over on the other side of Google's earth, the search firm has put up its Great Firewall, creating a censored engine to avoid offending the Chinese state and making a mockery of its own slogan, Don't Be Evil. Google's excuse is the oldest one used to justify trading with distasteful regimes: it is better to keep channels open and business flowing than to stick to principles. American tycoons from Armand Hammer in the 1920s to Ted Turner in the 1980s used the same argument for selling Soviet Russia what it wanted. 

On this side, I have just watched two debates at the Council of Europe on matters that seem unconnected but have principles in common. On Tuesday, the Council, a Strasbourg body for furthering democracy and which now groups 46 parliaments, heard a report on America's policy of abducting terrorist suspects wherever they are. .

Nuclear Chirac

A favourite saying among the French political classes holds that "promises commit only those who receive them (Les promesses n'engagent que ceux qui les reçoivent)". Politicians everywhere make empty promises, but few can match the record of Jacques Chirac.

France's president-monarch since 1995 is the virtuoso of grand pledges that are only occasionally fulfilled. Chirac has just ended his annual bout of promise-making, which he performs in audiences with various sectors of the nation to mark the New Year. The leftwing media have been having fun listing the dozens of Chiraquien commitments that have languished unfulfilled over the years. There are the obvious big ones, such as his repeated promise since 1994 to reduce France's chronic high unemployment. He has also promised for a decade to restore France's confidence in itself and to heal what he calls the "social fracture" -- the gap between haves and have-nots that led to last autumn's riots. None of this has been achieved but you would never know it listening to him reassuring the citizenry this month in his warm, confident baritone.

Johnny's Belgian blues

Anguished fans of Johnny Hallyday, eternal pop idol and highest-earner in French showbiz, have been twice relieved this week. After a five-year investigation, prosecutors have dropped all proceedings against him for the alleged rape of a hostess on a yacht on the Riviera. Today, Hallyday, still rocking hard at 62, promised that he was not about to desert France and move to Belgium to escape French taxes. He is, however,  taking Belgian nationality.

Last week, the Belgian ambassador to Paris shocked the country by announcing that le Johnny national was ditching his French nationality. Hallyday may have spent his life in the role of a hard-living, blues-twanging, leather-clad, Harley-driving all-American rebel, but he is a French national monument.  Ministers raised the news at President Chirac's cabinet meeting as France waited for Johnny to say it ain't so. Hallyday, who was born Jean-Philippe Smet, popped up today in a bad temper in Paris Match to confirm that he was indeed switching nationality because he wanted to "settle accounts" with the memory of his late Belgian father. But he is staying put. "I will carry on living in France," he said. "I will pay my taxes in France."

Not bashing, just blogging

After two months of blogging, it is time to draw some conclusions. First, It is refreshing -- and salutary -- to receive the feedback. A foreign press correspondent usually works at a distance from readers. You are in the dark about how people respond to articles unless you blunder or cause offence. With the blog, the comment is direct and often immediate. Even more, it is extremely useful to see the themes that raise debate. Thank you, to Robert Marchenoir, Sarah Hague, P.A. and the other regulars.

I'll reply to a couple of critical points. It's worth noting how, when dealing with France, the discussion settles on the features that distinguish the Gallic from the Anglo-Saxon approach to the world. Very roughly, this is France's attachment to a protective state, high ideas and the quality of life compared with the stress that the Anglo-Saxons and other protestant cultures put on the individual and getting things done, at the price of compromise. For centuries, each has envied and been irritated by these qualities in the other. Laurence Sterne made the typical English admiration the opening sentence in his Sentimental Journey of 1768:  "They order this matter better in France." Or to quote P.A.'s remark on a posting here the other day: "France is a glorious place to live (if not to work)". 

Acid trips in Switzerland

Growing up in Australia in the era of the late Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and San Francisco's summers of love, we were attracted by the call from across the Pacific to "Turn on, tune in and drop out."  One of the things that parents cited to scare you off  Dr Timothy Leary's alluring slogan was the horror of flash-backs from LSD, the chemical that drove the psychedelic movement. Acid and magic mushrooms may have been the creative juice of musicians, writers and artists, but, once consumed,  it could revisit you at any time, taking you on a horror trip that could drive you to murder, suicide or other early death -- so we were told. Most of us didn't touch it, staying with lighter stuff, like Pink Floyd. 

An acid flashback hit me yesterday although I had never tried it. I spent the day in the gentle Swiss city of Basle in the presence of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who invented LSD in 1937, took a lot of it and is now celebrating his 100th birthday (www.lsd.info).

Cécilia comes home for the Sarko Show

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and would-be President next year, was in more than his usual pugnacious form when he laid on New Year's drinks for the press today. Everyone knew the reason: Cécilia, his wife, has just returned after eight months astray with an advertising executive (in today's Times). Sarkozy's trip to the airport last week to scoop his errant wife off a plane from New York has become instant legend. It also completed a faithful enactment of the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel's Cecilia. Like the 1970 song, he begged her to come home, down on his knees, and she did. ("Jubilation, She loves me again... ")

France dreams back to a brave new world

Walking through Bagnolet, an ugly eastern suburb of Paris, I was struck by the political time warp that colours life in France. To get to my destination, I had to take la rue Lenine and turn right at la place Salvador Allende.

Russia has largely purged the name of the founding Soviet leader from public places, although his remains still grace Red Square. They still may revere Vladimir Ilyich in Latin America and other places with revolutionary aspirations but nowhere in the industrialised world do they still have such a soft spot for communist heroes as France.

France's different justice

With its tapestries and panelled walls, the assize court in the Paris Palais de Justice is designed for high theatre. Murderers, gangsters and the occasional politician usually stand below the bench to face the judicial music in all its majesty. I have just spent a day there watching a diminutive woman in the dock in a riveting trial that would have been better suited to an intimate theatre.

Hélène Castel (in today's Times) was a lost girl who held up a Paris bank with her chums, fled to Mexico and spent 24 years there under a new identity as a psychotherapist and mother. She was traced and brought back four days short of the 20-year limit that would have voided a life sentence passed in her absence in 1984.

The story of how Castel, now 46, became a Mexican and respected professional is impressive and touching. Watching Judge Dominique Coujard, the President of the Paris Assizes, gently questioning Castel, it occurred to me that this is a case which shows French justice at its best.

New Year's Thieving

Central Paris was thick with police on New Year's eve. Their presence  deterred would-be car-burners from lighting up the Champs Elysées. It did not, however, prevent thieves from robbing me and my son in broad daylight in what journalists call unrelated incidents. Though banal enough, our experience illustrates the high crime rate that now lurks behind the polished surface of the most pleasant quarters of Paris.