Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Sarko fluffs it

Nicolas Sarkozy has lost the winning touch that made him such a star until Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, was beatified by the media this autumn. The conservative hope for the French presidency next spring has today blown his formal entry into the race.

Sarko's bungled announcement drew mockery in the media this morning. The best came from Nicolas Canteloup, the talented impressionist who is  France's version of Britain's Rory Bremner (no relation). On his Europe-1 radio slot, Canteloup did a Sarkozy confessing that he suffered from "premature declaration".

Mummy threatens relations

With one diplomatic incident already on its hands (see last post) today, Paris has run into a second incipient row over an ageing ruler. This time the offended party is Egypt.

The affair hangs on a question: Does a French Alpine village postman have in his possession the hair of Ramses II, the great pharaoh who died in 1213 BC and was entombed in the Valley of the Kings ? [see update at end]

The story began at Saint Egrève, a peaceful spot near Grenoble. The police went this morning to the home there of Jean-Michael Diebolt, 50, and detained him after he offered on the internet to sell hair, samples of embalming resin and fragments of bandages from the mummy.

Guess who didn't come to dinner

Jacques Chirac turned 74 today after using his birthday to show that despite the passing years, he remains the king of culot -- as France calls gall or chutzpah.

To mark his anniversaire Chirac pulled off a stunt which infuriated the Americans, upset the Baltic states and embarrassed Tony Blair. Typically, it ended with egg on the French presidential face. L'affaire de l'anniversaire, was also a study in how governments bungle their handling of today's over-wrought media.

The wheeze that turned into a diplomatic fiasco was a plan for President Putin of Russia to join Chirac at a birthday dinner in Riga, the capital of Latvia. President Bush has been meeting the other two dozen leaders of the Nato alliance there for the past two days.

It is hard to imagine how Chirac could have found a better way to wind up les Anglo-Saxons or the Latvians than to agree to a private party with Putin under their noses and on the territory of a nation which has, to put it mildly, no great love for Russia.

A rival for Eiffel

  London and Moscow may be vying to be home to Europe's tallest skyscrapers, but greater Paris has just come up with what may be the most original -- or bizarre, depending on your taste.

The new tower, to be built at La Défense, the business district on the western edge of  Paris, will measure 300 metres (990 feet), the first French building to come close to the height of the Eiffel Tower, with its 324 metres. Its distinction is a design that looks like a cross between an exotic plant and an elegant ship's funnel.

The organic, plant-like look was the goal of Thom Mayne, the radical Californian architect whose Morphosis agency won the competition to build a monumental tower for the Unibail property group. The prime specification was that it must be a a model for sustainable development.

The double-skinned, asymetric building is designed with soft curves on the sunny southern side and geometrical rigour on the windy north. Its most distinctive feature is a wind farm on top which will generate power to cool its 130,000 square metres of office.

A French artist and gentleman

France paused today to salute a great and beloved actor and for once the superlatives were justified. Philippe Noiret, the warm-hearted, velvet-voiced veteran of 120 films, succumbed to cancer at the age of 76. He was not a star in the sense of glamour and sex-appeal. He was no Alain Delon or Yves Montand.  He was Monsieur Ordinaire.  His rumpled face, hang-dog expression and nonchalant character was the essence of Frenchness. For nearly 50 years, he was part of the landscape.

Noiret, a stage actor in the 1950s, is best-known abroad for his Franco-Italian films, Cinema Paradiso in 1988 and and Il Postino in 1994. But at home, he is remembered for decades of hits, starting with Louis Malle's Zazie dans le Métro in 1960 and ending with Claude Zidie's Les Ripoux 3 in 2003, his third outing as a corrupt but loveable police detective.

For those of us of a certain generation, Noiret, bon vivant, world-weary and wry, was one of the reasons we fell in love with France.

The plot against Sarko

What is Jacques Chirac playing at ? The question is topic number one among the ranks of the Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) the party that was cobbled together out of the French president's RPR Gaullist movement and smaller groups in 2002.

For the past two years, the UMP has rallied around its new leader and dynamic presidential contender, Nicolas Sarkozy, 51. But now that Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, has been triumphantly anointed by her party and elevated to saint-like status by the media, Chirac is busy trying to derail Sarkozy and his own party's chances in next April's elections.

In the Florentine world of Paris politics, the suggestion is that Chirac would prefer to see his side lose next year than be succeeded in office by "the traitor" as he used to call Sarkozy.  The president seems to be doing everything to feed the conspiracy theory.

A French eye on the world

  France's new global television news network takes to the air and internet in two weeks time. France 24, as it is called, was ordered into existence by Jacques Chirac in the acrimonious run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003. The president was frustrated by what he saw as the single-sided view of the world purveyed by CNN, the BBC and the other "Anglo-Saxon" networks. France, he decreed, must be a player in "the visual war" for the world's opinion. 

I spent the afternoon visiting France 24 in their brand new premises at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just south of central Paris, and I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the multinational staff there. The average age of the 170 journalists is 31.

The English motto over the entrance spells out the network's mission. "Everything you are not supposed to know". 

Royal rules

She did it. Ségolène Royal has defied the combined resistance of France's Socialist elders and persuaded a remarkable 60 percent of the party members to endorse her as their candidate for next spring's elections. (Profile and latest story)

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, the two government veterans who could not disguise their disdain for the upstart Royal, scored a meagre 20 percent each.

The day makes history for two reasons. For the first time, a woman has become a front line candidate for the French presidency, a monarchical, patriarchal, institution that was tailor-made for Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s. French presidents are supposed to be elderly men of destiny, good at grandeur, not a youngish woman with television charisma but no clear vision.   

The other novelty is the way that Royal, 53, has emerged as a relative outsider and hijacked the country's most tradition-bound party.

France stops smoking

Here is a line that I never thought I would write. Smoking was banned in France today -- and no-one made much fuss.

I am simplifying, but not much. The government published a decree that outlaws smoking in all places open to the public from February next year. An additional 11 months have been given to bars, tobacconists, restaurants and nightclubs. From 2008, their customers will be allowed to smoke in small fumoir rooms which staff are not required to enter.

In other words, France, home of the Gauloise, smoky cafes and the cigarette as as tool of seduction, has joined Ireland, Italy, Scotland and those other European states that have banished tobacco. A decade or two ago, no sane French government would have dreamed of outlawing la cigarette, let alone six months ahead of presidential elections.

Lost in French translation

  Since we are in election season, it might be helpful to offer a little glossary of French political terms. Some are useful. Some convey concepts that are too abstract for the language of Chaucer. Some mean their opposite or nothing at all. [Read here for latest on Ségolène Royal and Socialists]

Of course this word game can be played with any culture. Try translating Tony Blair's  "joined-up thinking" into another language. I'd be grateful for suggestions for expanding this guide:

acteur = anyone involved in anything. ex: les acteurs du développement rural = farmers etc... 

altermondialiste = anti-capitalist, anti-free trade (literally other-worldist). A little flaky but to be admired

Anglo-Saxon = hegemonic power bent on promoting le libéralisme (see below) and harming France

Branding Europe

France has sent a stiff complaint to Brussels over the European Union's choice of logo to commemorate its 50th birthday next year. The offending image, a child-like rendition of the English word Together,  does nothing to serve the cause of European unity, said the government.

French objections have followed a shower of rude comment from around Europe about the logo which was chosen at a cost of 200,000 euros last month by a jury of experts from EU institutions and member states. The winning entry  from among 1,700 submissions was the work of a Polish art student. A common jibe is that the jumbled letters evoke a ransom note more than festive celebration of the 1957 Treaty of Rome.  More recent members among the 25 are also objecting to the full slogan: "Together since 1957".  Only six countries were joined that year.

Left Bank laurels for an American

  We witnessed a fascinating episode in the field of Franco-American one-upmanship today.  Jonathan Littell, an American who writes in French,  clinched his conquest of the Paris publishing world by winning le Prix Goncourt, the top literary award. His epic novel, les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) was the first by a native English-speaker to win the 103-year-old prize.

The 900-page book,  an account of the wartime massacres of Jews written in the voice of a retired SS Colonel,  has taken the French literary world by storm since August. It won the grand prix de l'Académie Française last month and it is the number one best seller, with over 250,000 copies sold.
   

Le Pen swaggers back

The French presidential election is less than six months away and we know that the next occupant of the Elysée throne will be Ségo or Sarko. Well, not so fast. Ségolène Royal has yet to be anointed by her Socialist party and the membership vote at the end of next week is not guaranteed to go her way. Nicolas Sarkozy is also no longer the shoo-in for the centre-right. President Chirac is trying to undermine Sarko and the Interior Minister's harsh style is seen as a turn-off by a growing minority of his Union for a Popular Majority. And now, like an old nightmare, Jean-Marie Le Pen is back haunting the electoral landscape.

   

Pioneers and patriotism

  Everyone knows that aviation was invented in France. That may sound like a provocation to admirers of Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, yet the French believe it and in many ways they are right. Today, on the Bagatelle field in the western Paris parkland,  we are to watch a flying machine take off in a re-enactment of the flight that is officially recorded as the world's first by an aeroplane. 

The contraption is a faithful replica of the "14bis", a boxy, bamboo-framed plane with a 50hp motor which Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Franco-Brazilian showman, coaxed into the air on the same spot in November 1906. For France and Brazil that 21-second hop over 220 metres marked the start of powered flight and the centenary is being celebrated with fanfare as such in both countries. This is a good example of how the facts can be clouded by patriotism and prejudice (yes, France-versus-USA again, I'm sorry). Yet, France has good grounds for claiming to be the main home of aviation.

French saints see off Halloween

Christianity is fading in France and churches are closing for want of parishioners and priests, so today's festival of All Saints is something of a paradox. The holiday, in which families visit cemeteries and lay chrysanthemums on graves, is enjoying a comeback. Florists this year are reporting high sales, churches are being attended and traffic is heavy around cemeteries in towns and villages.

Curiously, the revival of the traditional Toussaint, is being attributed to ... anti-Americanism.