Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

French food warning

What is France coming to ? Four weeks ago they banned cigarettes from most places. From Thursday, a health warning must appear on advertising for food products.

The messages are part of the state campaign against obesity. Compared with the rest of Europe and Britain in particular, France does not have much of a weight problem, but the kilos are piling up, especially among the young and lower income groups.

Under the new law, one of four messages must be carried on broadcast commercials and print and internet ads or the manufacturer must pay a fine of 1.5 percent of its advertising budget to a national health fund. The one pictured above says: "For your health, don't eat food that is too fatty, too sugary, too salty."

French Oscars go to Lady Chatterley

 

It was not a good idea to stage the Césars, the French version of the Academy Awards, at the weekend. The Hollywood monster has stomped on news of the clean sweep of the "French Oscars" on Saturday night by a little film d'auteur that came and went almost unnoticed at the end of last year.

Lady Chatterley, a version of the D.H. Lawrence novel directed by Pascale Ferran, won Best Picture and best actress for Marina Hands, its star. She is the daughter of Terry Hands, the celebrated British theatre director, and Ludmila Mikael, a French actress. It also won best adaptation, best costume and best photography.

Chatterley's success is a blow for the good old director's film in the face of the big-budget juggernauts that dominate the French cinema, whether US or locally made.

The boys and girls on the bus

Nothing beats a private chat when it comes to sizing up a presidential candidate. I have just had a 90 minute session with François Bayrou, the man of the moment in the French presidential race. Well, it wasn't quite private. My colleague from the Financial Times was also on the small plane taking us on a trip to the southwest but we got the feeling that Bayrou really opened up. Here's my newspaper report and more on Bayrou in a minute.

But first a few thoughts about about the rituals that we follow in elections and how the media shape the results.

Frenchwoman wins in kitchen

 
To get away from Ségolène Royal and the gang, here is an item about another French woman who has made it in a male-dominated business. The small sisterhood of grands chefs is celebrating over the award of three Michelin stars to a ground-breaking self-taught cook. No Frenchwoman has won the culinary distinction since 1951.

Anne-Sophie Pic, 37, whose grandfather and father also held three stars at the family restaurant in southeastern France, was one of five newcomers to the elite 26-member group this year. Pic, a business school graduate who came relatively late to cooking, won back the third star that was earned by her grandfather before the war rbut lost after her father’s death in 1992.

She told us of her pride in restoring the award to the Maison Pic, a Relais & Châteaux hotel-restaurant in Valence. But she also hailed it as a victory for women.

President Bayrou of France

                                                                                   

I have been taken to task, most recently by Ros and Frenchie33, for calling Nicolas Sarkozy the candidate of the centre-right.  It depends of course where you are looking from. In European terms, a Gaullist is not really a rightist or a conservative. Sarkozy defines himself as a mix of modernising Gaullist and liberal. The other day Jean-Marie Le Pen, the anti-immigrant populist, said that he himself had "always been on the centre right" and not the far fringe where he was usually consigned. It's all very confusing.  Maybe we should listen to François Bayrou, a centrist who insists that left and right are obsolete labels.

François Who ? Here's the story for non-French readers:

Ségo's very long show

You could virtually hear the sigh of relief from the Socialists when the long-awaited Ségolène TV show ended an hour ago. The candidate made no gaffes and ran into little trouble. She was just dull and a little annoying. Here is an initial after-midnight report [see below for update with next-day reaction]
 
She cast herself as the saviour that France needs, promising reform without pain.   After her fumbled outing this month in Socialist red, the candidate reverted to her trademark white jacket as she fielded voters' questions that elicited many promises on social welfare, subsidies for environmental excellence and other minutiae,  but nothing in the way of big picture.   

Royal, who has fallen behind Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate, in opinion polls, worked hard on the TF1 broadcast to respark the chemistry that won over much of the country last year, but initial reaction was unenthusiastic. "It was like listening to a pep talk from the school religion teacher," said the Socialist voter who watched with me. 

Royal relaunches -- again

Ségolène Royal has a chance tonight to revive her limping campaign with a two-hour television show in which she will answer questions from 100 voters. The TF1 broadcast, called J'ai une question à vous poser (I have a question for you) amounts to a town meeting in US campaign terms. The show, which is expected to score up to eight million viewers, reflects the media fashion in this French presidential season for "real people". Journalists are supposed to take a back seat while citizens dig out the truth.

Ségo was the chief instigator of this direct democracy when she won the Socialist nomination last year by casting herself as champion of the real people. Her almost mystical communion with des vrais gens -- which reached a peak with her nomination -- inspired huge expectations. She may hail from the heart of the French elite but she succeeded in projecting herself as an outsider who talked a different language.

The trouble began when she had to stop pleasing everyone all the time and announce policies for her presidency.

Left Bank Turns Right

   Ideas have always been a grave matter in France. The wrong ones took many a penseur to the grave via the revolutionary guillotine, the Commune of 1871 or the 1940s Nazi occupation. Thinking life has become less lethal since then, but France's professional penseurs are still taken seriously -- especially by themselves. France has been riveted this week by news from the thinking front: famous intellectuals are shunning Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for the presidency.

Some are even supporting Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the right. These include André Glucksmann, the philosopher [second left], Pascal Bruckner, a writer, and Max Gallo, a novelist [fourth right] who once served as President Mittererand's spokesman. A group called "La Diagonale" has gathered 1,000 leftists who plan to vote for Sarkozy. Bernard Henri-Lévy, the star philospher,[centre, with the scarf] caused a stir in Saint-Germain-des-Près by criticising Royal. But she invited him to dinner and he decided that she was all right after all and he is is staying on the left.

Paris in black and white

Picture Paris and chances are that the images that flash into mind include those nostalgic shots of ordinary people by Robert Doisneau, Brassai, Willy Ronis and the other street photographers of the post war era. More than ever, they are everywhere. As well as filling the world's poster shops, the monochrome icons of 1940s and 1950s France are stacked high as post cards in Paris kiosks. The Amélie film of 2001 was one long homage to their style.

You couldn't take those photos any more because France's ridiculously strict law requires the subject's prior approval. A signed  waiver is needed for publication. This applies even to people who might appear in the background, as Magali, our Paris photographer, was lamenting the other day as we walked down the street spotting Doisneau-type scenes. And, of course, do not even think about photographing children -- as Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the others did all the time.

Now anyone with a mobile phone can play the photo-reporter. You don't have to haul around a Leica, or a boxy Rolleiflex like the oldies. But a batch of exhibitions around Paris this winter show the vast difference between art and the quick snap. Doisneau is featuring in a fine (free) exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville until April 3. The City Hall is of course the scene of his over-commercialised Baiser de L'Hotel de Ville.

The French President's Women

Jacques Chirac has just given away a few secrets as he approaches retirement from the presidency after 12 years in office and an amazing four decades at the top of politics.  Following the example of François Mitterrand, the Socialist predecessor to whom he always felt inferior, Chirac has just "confessed" to Pierre Péan. Mitterrand used the same writer to air murky episodes from his past in a book before leaving office in 1995.

Péan's book, l'Inconnu de l'Elysée (The Stranger at the Elysée), is out in a couple of days. We can deal with the political stuff then, but in the meantime let's look at the president's love life. I was scolded on France Inter radio this morning for my Anglo-Saxon fascination with such trivial matters, but too bad.   

In an extract published by Marianne magazine, Chirac confirms his appetite for extraconjugal affairs.

Back to the old French future with Ségolène

Ségolène Royal has at last filled in the blanks of the New France that she will create if elected president in May. Under her leadership, we learn, France will finally enter the radiant future, as imagined by its Socialist visionaries since, well...about 1880.

Ségo's 140-minute speech yesterday has been rapturously received by a Socialist party that is relieved to have confirmation that its charismatic, modernising, candidate is a true leftist. The headline in Libération said it all: "Enfin!" (At Last!). "Ségolène Royal has found her voice," gushed Libé. "Royal stands for a protective France in which youth has the essential role."  Socialist party barons such as Jack Lang, her former opponent, marvelled at the "dazzling radiance" of Ségo as she cast herself as the mother of all France.

There is a tiny problem. Royal presented her list of 100 pledges to make everyone -- except the capitalists -- richer, happier and healthier, without any suggestion of how she will pay for it.

France's feminine far right

When it comes to makeovers, you have to hand it to Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, perennial French presidential candidate and boss of the National Front.   As campaign director and number two to her father, the 38-year-old politician has crafted a new, gentler face for the old ultra-right bogeyman, now nearing 79. She is winning support for the party from novel quarters, including some immigrants. 

She has also transformed her own looks as she does battle as her dad's television stand-in against the front-runners, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, and Nicolas Sarkozy, of the centre-right Union for a Popular Majority. 

I dropped in on Marine this week at le Paquebot (the Ocean Liner), the FN's rambling headquarters over-looking the Seine at Saint Cloud, and I found a changed woman. I last sat opposite her desk in 2003, when she was still a physically formidable replica of the old man. They called her the clone and caricatured her as a Wagnerian Valkyrie.

Ségo lurches left

Ségolène Royal has performed a spectacular lurch to the old-fashioned left in an attempt to catch up with Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate whose robust campaign for the French presidency has eclipsed her for weeks.

After months of wooing the middle ground with her soft, inclusive vision, the Socialist party candidate is now depicting herself as a victim of dark rightwing forces and champion of the workers against capitalists who will stop at nothing to exploit the people. Overdoing it a little, she compared herself to Joan of Arc and likened Sarko to Louis XIV and that other absolute ruler (in French eyes) George Bush.   

"How can we accept that this new oligarchy, through one of its own (Sarkozy), takes over the republican state?" she asked a packed hall in central Paris last night.  "We are fighting a hard right, without principles without virtue, an arrogant right which...never varies on its aim: the defence of its privileges...."

France spies on itself

Scandal over the antics of police spies are a regular feature of French elections. The air is once again thick with malicious leaks and charges of dirty tricks by the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence service. Unusually, though, this time the boss of the shadowy RG has emerged to explain why France needs to keep secret tabs on its citizens. 

Let's look at this old exception française: the way that France considers it normal that 4,000 agents and many more thousands of part-time informers, are busy in their midst reporting on them. Even in these times of "homeland security" (awful expression) and wars on terror, no other democracy runs a domestic spying service on this scale and few would tolerate it. The RG, which dates back two centuries to the Revolution and acquired its modern form during the world war two Nazi occupation, is still in large part a political police. It operates in addition to the external intelligence and counter-intelligence services, the DGSE and DST (like Britain's MI6 and MI5) 

Joel Bouchité, the chief of the RG who reports to Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and centre-right presidential favourite, has come out to defend his service over its investigation of an aide to Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy's Socialist adversary.

Sex, lies and the French campaign

Three months ahead of the French presidential elections, the web war is hotting up among the candidates. 

If you want info on the love life of Ségolène Royal or a compromising video of Nicolas Sarkozy, it's all there on the net as the parties, supporters, bloggers, trouble-makers and comedians pile into the free-for-all.   

Distrust of France’s compliant media and a love affair with blogs and video have turned the web into a strategic weapon of a kind seen so far only in US campaigns.  The main candidates have multiple sites and battalions of web infantry fighting their causes with both fair and dirty methods.

Unlike the US, the French version has added spice because of the traditional squeamishness of the press over private lives and off-the-record talk. Royal, the Socialist, and Sarkozy, of the centre-Right Union for a Popular Movement, are discovering that little now can be hidden.

Day one of semi-smoke-free France

An update from the no-smoking front. France has survived the start of its semi-ban on smoking, with some grumbling but little conflict. Office workers turned up to find ash-trays removed from their buildings and new défense de fumer signs in their cafeterias.

Agence France-Presse, the old national news agency, reported on the sorrow of its own heavy-smoking staff as cartloads of metal free-standing ashtrays were hauled out of their headquarters opposite the stock-exchange.  At La Défense, the business district with high-rise buildings, workers gathered on the pavement to complain that a cigarette break was costing them over 10 minutes of travel time by lift.  

But it seems clear that Gallic flexibility is being applied in order to soften the impact.

Sarkozy the Anglo-Saxon

The French often mock the British for having a fixation with France while the opposite does not apply. The idea is usually true, if only because Britain is small fry compared with the the real bogey-man and object of desire for France -- the United States.  In this French presidential campaign though, Britain is serving along with the USA as the touchstone for everything that France both does and does not want to become.

Look at Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign trip to London on Tuesday.  No presidential contender has ever campaigned outside French territory. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, of course never left "France" when she was in the Caribbean last weekend. Sarko, the centre-right favourite, chose for his first foreign trip London, home of 300,000 French exiles and Tony Blair. In the British capital Sarkozy the free-market Gaullist showered praise on le modèle anglais and even called the Labour Prime Minister "one of us" before correcting himself.

What is Sarkozy up to?