Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Praising older Frenchwomen

For those on the wrong side of 40, France offers a refreshing contrast to the Anglo-American obsession with youth. Where else are politicians, singers and actors routinely described as young when they are approaching the half century or beyond?  In Britain, Tony Blair, a weary 52, faces an opposition leader in his 30s. In France, the supposedly young political guard are Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, who are both in their early 50s. The Interior Minister and Prime Minister are each promising generational change in their duel to succeed President Chirac, 73, in elections next year. On the celebrity front, Johnny Hallyday, 63, the eternal rockeur national, still rules the roost as France's highest-earning star. He is a spring chicken beside the two still-performing dinosaurs of French pop, Henri Salavador, 89, and Charles Aznavour, 81.

The French exception over age is even greater for women.

French denial

President Chirac goes to the main Paris synagogue this evening to attend a service for Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old man who was tortured to death over three weeks by a band of young residents of a housing estate in the southern suburbs. Meanwhile Youssouf Fofana, 26, their alleged leader, is being flown back from the Ivory Coast, where he had fled.

Chirac's presence is intended as a strong signal that the state has got the message that Halimi was probably kidnapped and murdered because he was Jewish. This official recognition of the anti-semitic nature of an odious crime is part of a bout of soul-searching about the racism in France's midst, especially among the young of the immigrant ghettoes of the city outskirts. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for the politicians and media to face up to what was obvious to anyone who followed the affair.         

Savary's magic opera

Conventional wisdom holds that the French can't do musicals. The cliché is certainly true for the style of shows that have prospered on Broadway and London's West End in recent decades. With the exception perhaps of the 1978 hit Starmania, the Gallic sensibility doesn't seem to suit the meaty, rock-based genre and local versions of shows such as Les Miserables and Miss Saigon flopped in France.

The picture is quite different when it comes to French-style comédie musicale, the gentler, cabaret-influenced, descendant of 19th century light opera.  Take Demain la Belle (Escape Tomorrow), a new show at the Paris Opéra-Comique that, in smaller scale, offers singing, dancing and story as stylish as anything that is pulling in the Anglo-Saxon crowds. I have just spent a delightful evening there watching this yarn about the life of Alexandre Marius, an anarchist cat burgler in Belle Epoque Marseilles who was said to have been the inspiration for Arsène Lupin, the fictional gentleman thief.

The production, starring Arnaud Giovaninetti and Sophie Duez, is heavy with nostalgia for a bygone France of accordeon waltzes, likeable crooks and fetching prostitutes à la Irma la Douce, but it comes with a modern bite. This is due to Jérôme Savary, the very polyvalent director and boss of the Opera house.

Bernadette backs Ségo

From deepest Uttar Pradesh, the formidable Bernadette Chirac (see Chirac's women in today's Times) has just delivered her verdict on Ségolène Royal: she likes her and thinks she would make a good president to succeed Jacques.

"She can be a serious candidate. She may even win," she told French reporters who went boating with her at Benares while her husband did business on a state visit in Delhi. Bernie's remarks were not without mischief towards Chirac's Socialist opponents or his own imperious style. "Ségolène's little Socialist comrades will not make things easy for her, but the hour of women has come," said la première dame de France. "She has a look. These days that counts a lot. In the future, there will be more and more women giving orders to men. That may be annoying to them, but that's the way it is."

Royal blogs for the presidency

Another day and another poll records the seemingly irresistible rise of Ségolène Royal in the race among Socialists to become the party candidate for the French presidency next year. According to le Parisien today, 56 percent of leftwing voters want Ségolène to be anointed, far ahead of her rivals who are led by Lionel Jospin, the school-masterly former Trotskyite and Prime Minister. François Hollande, her partner and party leader, comes in with a humiliating three percent. Two polls this month have shown the very telegenic Ségo even beating Nicolas Sarkozy, the champion of the right, if the two faced a run-off now. Not bad for a woman who has never served higher than junior minister and is dismissed by her own party bosses as an emotional lightweight.

Skiing policemen

Anyone who braves the jammed slopes in France's February school holidays may wish to cheer the indefatigable Nicolas Sarkozy in his latest enterprise. The Interior Minister and would-be president helicoptered into Chamonix a few days ago and declared war on piste-hogs, those speed-mongers on boards and skis who roar through the slower-moving masses. They may not always mow down those in their path but their presence inflicts a stress that  takes the fun out of the sport. 

Last season, French resorts recorded 16,789 injury-causing collisions -- more than one accident in 10. Four people were killed. The rate has been rising fast since 2001 as the slopes have become saturated.

The greens' toxic revenge

Rarely can Greenpeace have scored the kind of revenge that it exacted today with President Chirac's humiliating decision to recall the asbestos-ridden aircraft carrier Clemenceau from its voyage to a scrapyard in India.  For Greenpeace, this was personal.

Just over 20 years ago, French secret agents blew up Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, sinking the vessel and killing a Portuguese photographer who was on board.  Chirac's predecessor Francois Mitterrand was in command at the time. The French agents were so incompetent that the operation was swiftly rumbled and Charles Hernu, the Defence Minister, was forced to resign. It was never known if Mitterrand himself ordered the sabotage, which was supposed to frighten Greenpeace away from interfering with French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The incident poisoned French relations with the Antipodes for years.  Just when anger was cooling, Chirac took office in 1995 and blew a raspberry at the Pacific peacemongers by restarting the atomic tests in the name of ensuring France's nuclear grandeur.   

The Great Serge

While Europe is celebrating Mozart's 250th, France is about to fete a local and more recent musical genius: Serge Gainsbourg. It would be hard to imagine France without the composer,  poet, singer, cynic and romantic who is bigger now than on his death 15 years ago next month.

Gainsbourg was the sound-track and style for the generation of 1968 and beyond. He set hip Gallic lyrics to the sounds of jazz, reggae, Latin disco and soft rock. The current crop of young singer-writers were all weaned on Gainsbourg's dark humour, bitter-sweet tunes and erotic puns. Streets are now named after the provocateur who once scandalised the establishment with Aux Armes Etcetera, his reggae version of la Marseillaise. Anthems for ageing baby boomers such as Le Poinçonneur des Lilas and La Javanaise are now texts for school exams. Yet, beyond the French-speaking world, the former Lucien Ginzburg is largely remembered only as the perpetrator of Je t'aime, moi non plus, the heavy-breathing duet with Jane Birkin, his English muse and girl-friend. The title was banned from US and British air waves in 1969 and condemned by the Vatican, which probably failed to notice the song's line l'amour physique est sans issue (Physical love is a dead end). For many Anglo-Saxons who came of age around 1970, Gainsbourg is wrongly lumped into the same Paris nostalgia trip as Peter Sarstedt and his clunky Where Do You Go To My Lovely.    

Next week, to spread the Gainsbourg gospel, a bunch of big Anglo-Saxon stars including Franz Ferdinand, Jarvis Cocker, Mark Almond and Portishead are releasing a tribute album with English reprises of some of Serge's greatest hits.

Plonk, kangaroos and quality

A couple of days ago, I strolled in warm sunshine into the a wine shop on Melbourne Street, Adelaide. The shelves groaned with a hundred different labels, much of it produced in the vineyards that throng South Australia's coastal region. After being greeted with the usual "G'day mate," and some unfussy advice, I loaded a case of one of the fine local whites into the car.
   
Back in Paris, in a jet-lagged scan of the news today, I came across the latest Gallic put-down of wine from the Antipodes. "French wine has nothing in common with the factory product that is Australian wine," sniffed Philippe de Villiers, champion of the Catholic conservative right. He was reassuring growers in Avignon that he would defend them against the heinous assault on French identity that had been launched against them by Australian wine-makers. "A country that abandons its vines, abandons its national heritage," he proclaimed.

This was a good illustration of the disease afflicting the French wine business as its exports reel from the onslaught of the New World. De Villiers also spoke for the malaise that is dragging France backwards in the world.   

Cartoons: the heat goes on

Three days now and the affaire of the Danish cartoons shows little sign of cooling. Nothing in my blogging time has come close to the flow of heartfelt, often angry and sometimes virulent reaction that has swirled through this and other sites for the past few days. If there are lessons to draw, they are not necessarily encouraging ones. For all the reasoned argument, there is a lot of emotion and sometimes -- to use an overworked word -- hate.  I have, by the way, refrained from publishing the nastier comments and suggestions which have come from writers defining themselves as enraged Muslims or from those who are out to insult the Arab world rather than argue a case.

Ban le Pod

Don't say 'podcasting', say la ballado-diffusion. The ruling has come down from France's official language guardians and must be obeyed at least by journalists on France television and Radio France channels. Before everyone laughs, the state's rear-guard action against the American language has notched up a few successes over the past couple of decades. L'informatique, which was coined in the 1970s to cover computing and information technology has worked well. It has even been catching on in the USA lately as informatics, a more elegant and comprehensive way of saying Information Technology.  And in French le logiciel still sounds better than le software though le materiel is not as vivid as le hardware.       

Upsetting Muslims the French way.

The Americans may call them surrender-monkeys, but the French can sometimes teach the world something about pluck -- or maybe foolhardiness. France Soir has just courted big trouble by printing across two pages all 12 of the Danish newspaper cartoons that have caused such a furore in the Muslim world. For good measure, they ran their own cartoon across the front page, featuring not just the Prophet Muhammad but the Jewish and Christian deities and Buddah. "Yes, we have the right to caricature God," said the headline.

Fear of fatwahs or worse had until now caused the rest of the French press to follow the European media in not publishing the offending cartoons of the Prophet. Other papers in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy today joined France Soir in publishing some of the cartoons. The French paper claims that it is striking a blow for freedom of expression and against the tyranny that "backward bigots" are inflicting on the world's media.