Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Press 'send' and pay your dues

If you would like to comment on this post, please give your credit card number to the government. That might sound like a joke, but it is a serious proposal that is circulating among high levels of -- you guessed it -- the French state.

The idea is to levy a small tax on every email and telephone text message. It was publicly aired a few days ago by Alain Lamassoure, a former Budget Minister from President Chirac's UMP party who is now a senior member of the European Parliament. He is drafting the Parliament's proposals for new methods of financing the European Union. Not surprisingly, Lamassoure's idea has caused a storm in the French blogosphere and it made the national news this morning, but he's sticking to it (alain.lamassoure.com).

Interestingly, France's state radio reported on the scheme at the same time as it interviewed Didier Lombard, the boss of France Telecom, on the company's launch of a global digital-everything network under the brand name Orange. The timing was a good case of ancient France meeting the modern.

The Office, version française

 

(left: François Berléand as Gilles Triquet, the French Office boss. Below Ricky Gervais as David Brent in the British original)              

We were talking the other day about how comedy has trouble crossing frontiers. A great case study has just been served up by Canal+, the French pay-TV channel which made its name with a more lively output than the stodgier national networks.

Canal has brought the BBC's cult comedy The Office across the Channel, not just translating it, but producing its own Gallic version. A US version has been done, but Le Bureau, which opened at the weekend, is the first in a foreign language. The result is hilarious but also a little off-key.

A year on and a year to go

French voters killed the European Constitution one year ago this weekend so the politicians and media have been doing a little stock-taking. The conclusion seems to be that things have got worse.

The "no", voted by 54.67 percent, was of course not really about Europe but about France's malaise. It was a protest against a discredited governing class and a cry of alarm over France's loss of prosperity and protection in the face of globalisation, or le libéralisme, as the free market is called. The revolt was followed by two other convulsions -- the immigrant riots of last autumn and the student rebellion early this spring.  The "no" voters are now telling pollsters that they feel their vote achieved little but that 90 percent would do it again.

Chirac vanishes

 

This will be a little unfraternal, but I can't resist. Working in Moscow in Soviet days, it used to be fun to spot when Pravda and other state organs doctored photographs of the Kremlin leadership. The censors reached for the airbrush if a picture included someone embarrassing or who had been written out of history. Today, Le Figaro, the venerable Paris daily, has been caught red-handed fiddling the portrait of a disgraced Japanese banker. Guess who has been painted out of the original photograph.

         

No Sex Please, We're French

If any country is at ease with sex, it must be France. That is certainly the legend that the French have cultivated about themselves from the courtly love of the middle ages, through the dangerous dalliances of the 18th century to the sex-saturated imagery of modern advertising. This week the world's cliché of sex-happy France is being given a good airing with the opening of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, in which the Versailles royal court is presented as a non-stop frolic.

The stereotype is of course accurate, up to a point. Compared with, say, Americans or northern Europeans, the French handle matters romantic and erotic with style. Whether the subject is fashion, cuisine or gardens, the refinement of pleasure has long been a Gallic speciality. 

Well, forget all that. This spring, we are being told that France is turning off sex.

The Crow and the Clear Stream

                                         

The Crow revealed himself today, but he insists that he is not really a crow.  I am not talking about the feathered kind, but le corbeau at the heart of the Clearstream affair. The scandal that rumbles on under the Government of Dominique de Villepin is so involved that people retain little of the cast of murky characters except that there is a general, a judge and a crow. That bird is old slang for the author of what the English call poison-pen letters.

The tale of Jean-Louis Gergorin, 60, a former high state functionary, colleague of de Villepin and a now suspended vice-president of the EADS aerospace corporation, adds another sorry piece to the puzzle over a plot to smear Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister. But the crow's story is interesting because it leads us into a darker side of France. This is covered by a single word: la délation, which means anonymously turning people over to the authorities. [the Cartoon by Plantu is from today's Le Monde]

Competing for culture

Back on our favourite subject of duelling national systems, here is an interesting case. On one side, we have a centralised state agency that uses a load of taxpayers' money to project the nation's cultural glory to the four corners of the world. The other country bumbles along with a confusing array of outfits that promote its arts without much coordination. Surprisingly, the first country is Britain and the envious poor relation is France.

With much fanfare, the French Foreign Ministry has just created a new agency to rebrand Gallic culture abroad and its model is the British Council. Read on in today's Times

Bearing down on Europe

It says something for the good old European Union that it stirs such passions. I had not expected such a voluminous and heartfelt debate after posting my rather flippant remarks on the French celebrations. And now I see that the Pyrenean bears (good New Europeans from Slovenia) have been recruited to the cause.  In passing, I'd like to make a small suggestion. It is great to have so many people joining in the arguments and please keep posting but maybe some of the sharper personal exchanges might be better continued on e-mail.

A few points on bears before I back into the Europe quarrel.

Good bears and bad bears

It would be impossible to imagine a more glorious setting for a day's work than the Pyrenees mountains in springtime. I have just returned from a short break from the surreal soap opera of Paris politics, which I spent on the trail of bears.

You would think that nothing could be farther from the baroque last stand of Dominique de Villepin than the sublime green valleys of the central Pyrenees where I went to report on a project to replenish the bear population with animals from Slovenia. But no; the Pyrenees story (in today's Times) is a violent one involving plots, death threats and a battle for territory -- not among bears but humans, just like in Paris.

Celebrate Europe, or else...

Walking out of the Opéra Metro station, it was impossible to miss the order of the day: "Fête l'Europe" (Celebrate Europe). In honour of Europe Day, the blue flag of the Union is flying above the facade of the Opéra and small versions of the 12-starred emblem flutter on all municipal buses. The flag is on every state building and the Eiffel Tower was floodlit in Euro-blue before dawn, along with the Arc de Triomphe and other monuments. The lights come back at dusk.

For the past 20 years, France has observed Europe Day, the anniversary of the 1950 speech by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, that paved the way to the embryo European Community. This year, in its zeal to make amends for the voters' rejection of the EU Constitution last May, the state is orchestrating an orgy of Euro-festivities. It really is called fêteleurope.fr. And for an old Moscow resident, it feels like the Soviet Union on May Day or the October Revolution anniversary when the state whipped up patriotic enthusiasm and every bus flew the flag.

King Louis' Marvellous Machine

France's modern rulers love spending fortunes on grands projets to demonstrate the genius of the age and leave their mark for posterity. The late François Mitterrand bequeathed a mixed bag of monuments. Some, like the Louvre Pyramid, are acclaimed, and some decried, like the Opéra Bastille and the Bibliothèque de France, the impractical four-towered library that was mocked during its construction as the TGB (Très Grande Bibliothèque, Very Big Library). Jacques Chirac has just made his bid for posterity by allocating millions for high-technology projects that include Quaero, a Gallic search engine and digital book repository that is supposed to balance the Anglo-Saxon Google.

None of these, however, rival in relative cost and daring, the monstrous high-tech machine that Louis XIV, the Sun King, built on the Seine at Marly, just west of Paris.

Flying points

While France glides into another long holiday weekend (VE Day), here is a reply to queries and points about my last flying posting that were raised by Peter Carrington, Selwyn, Michael Robertson, Edward Johns and Sarah. Stop here unless you are of an aviating nature.

To stage or not to stage

There is nothing that les intéllos love more than a good polémique. The sharp-minded contributers to this blog may care to join in the latest one, which is a classic skirmish involving the theatre, free speech, morality and political correctness. 

The row was started by Marcel Bozonnet, administrator of the Comédie Française, the venerable national theatre.  His offence was cancelling a scheduled production of a work by Peter Handke, the Austrian playwright, after he attended the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president and indicted war criminal.

Bozonnet's decision not to stage Voyage to the Sonorous Land or the Art of Asking (which has nothing to do with the Balkan conflict) has brought down the wrath of the creative world.

Villepin's desperate denials

Dominique de Villepin seems to have forgotten that rule of life for courtiers in the ancien régime: le ridicule tue, nothing finishes you faster than making a fool of yourself.

The Prime Minister's indignant and eloquent denials of malfeasance over the Clearstream affair are making him look very foolish.  He has been at it again today, dismissing as nonsense the latest devastating judicial leak published by Le Monde. President Chirac is determined to keep de Villepin in the job, but some of the Elysée courtiers now believe that the aristocrat-Prime Minister has incurred too much ridicule and may soon have to be banished.  Today's episode also sheds intriguing light on a mystery about what President Chirac gets up to in Japan, but first....

De Villepin plays victim

After a long weekend off,  Dominique de Villepin has delivered his counter-offensive in the Clearstream affair, the "French Watergate" that is exciting the political world and media and leaving the public indifferent. The Prime Minister had the good sense to start early, submitting to Europe 1's breakfast interview, which meant that I could savour his words on a jog through the sunny Bois de Boulogne. 

Defiant and haughty like a Napoleonic marshal in a tight spot, de Villepin said that he had done nothing and was standing firm with President Chirac's support. He had never instructed anyone to investigate Nicolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister and his rival. He was, he said, the victim of a political lynching and would be happy to face an inquiry. De Villepin, who gives the same line to parliament later today, even managed a little lecture on democracy, French style. So where does that take things ? Nowhere really.

A funny French secret agent

Movie-makers have been sending up James Bond since Dr No reached cinemas in 1962. But few have taken the mickey of Sean Connery's early Bond as well as Jean Dujardin, the star of a spy comedy that is one of France current hits. In OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Dujardin, who rather resembles Connery, is a French agent, but he does such a good job at imitating the virile seducer of Dr No and From Russia with Love that you imagine for a moment that you are watching the original Bond.

Written by Jean-François Halin and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, OSS-117 is far from high brow but it has won critical praise as well becoming a commercial success. The comedy works because it is more hommage than spoof. They have managed to produce such a retro look and feel, with washed-out colours and panoramic camera work, that you imagine that you are seeing a film of the late 1950s. The sets of Cairo and Paris with their post-war interiors and period fashion are superb. The plot is lightweight nonsense, but it is just an excuse to play with the early Bond rituals.