Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

The Royal road to French victory

After posting on patriotism, I spent the day following Ségolène Royal around the Loire cities. We started in Orléans, the site of Jeanne d'Arc's great 100-years-war victory. Ségo makes no secret of the fact that she sees the 15th century Maid of Orléans as a model for her one-woman campaign to conquer the Elysée Palace. Here's my report in today's Times and more on battling Ségo below.

First, in response to the debate after the last post, yes I do moderate the comments and have deleted a couple of offensive ones over the past week. To Sandrine and others who object to the French-bashing comments, let me explain.

Proud French patriots

    With less than four weeks to the first round vote for the French presidency, the campaign has taken a detour into odd territory: patriotism. The emergence of Gallic pride as a hot issue has added to a sense of unreality which now colours the race to succeed Jacques Chirac.

The strange feel comes mainly from the paradox of Ségolène Royal, the Socialist. As the weeks have gone by, Royal has been looking ever more shaky. Some of her close allies are in despair over the amateurism of her campaign, her improvisation and her failure to sound presidential. Furious at her high-handed treatment of them, the Socialist elders have all but given up. The embarrassment and humiliation of François Hollande, the party leader and father of Royal's four children, is ever more visible, even if the candidate proclaimed in a book this week that they really were a loving couple.

Yet, Ségo is regaining ground and pulling ahead of François Bayrou, the centrist who benefited from her earlier stumbles.

Strange baguettes and the French X-files

The scene sounds like a French comedy. On a sunny winter afternoon,  Monsieur Blaise, a 35-year-old dairy inspector, drives home through the Languedoc countryside after visiting his aunt. A strange object appears overhead. Mysteriously, the engine of his Citroen stalls. Struck with terror, Blaise runs for his life. He later describes the mysterious craft to the gendarmes."It was a kind of cigar that I compared to a baguette of bread."  His Citroen refuses to start for another day.

M. Blaise's encounter of the after-lunch kind, which took place in January 1981, was meticulously recorded and analysed by a unit of the CNES, the French national space agency. It has now been put on line along with 400 sightings of suspected UFOs -- OVNIs in French -- from the official Gallic X-files.

Eventually some 100,000 documents, covering 1,650 cases going back to the early 1950s, will be available in the first such exercise in public transparency. Like the United States in the post-war years, the French state has taken its UFOs seriously and devoted resources to interviewing witnesses and analysing sightings scientifically. The fascinating thing is that a full 28 percent of the cases remain an absolute mystery. These are decribed as "inexplicable despite precise witness accounts and the good quality of material information gathered." 

Naturally UFO fans from around the world are now jamming the site of the GEIPAN, the agency's "flying saucer division", as sceptics call it. 

French, gorgeous and she reads the news

  Who is the world's most famous Frenchwoman? If you are a youngish male who spends time on the internet, you know that her name is Mélissa Theuriau.

Mlle Theuriau, who is 28 and comes from Grenoble, is admired by millions of men around the world, yet she is only just becoming famous in France. The reason is YouTube.

Theuriau was a pre-dawn news presenter on LCI, a domestic cable news channel, when someone compiled a string of clips of her reading her text  and put it on the US site. The video, entitled "Beautiful News Reporter" [below]  has received almost 800,000 hits and dozens more clips and pictures of her -- some topless -- are circulating on the net.

Around the globe, and especially in the USA, Mélissa worship is doing wonders for the image of France.

Vive la Révolution

  Karl Marx would be thrilled if he tuned into French television and radio this week. No fewer than four candidates for the presidency are being given acres of air time to try to persuade France to smash capitalism and bourgeois democracy with its election next month.

Three Trotskyites plus José Bové, the rustic rebel and scourge of McDonald's,  have made it into the final list of 12 candidates for the April 22 first round. These contenders from the gauche de la gauche -- as the indulgent media label them -- are sharing their anti-capitalist space with Marie-George Buffet, leader of the Communist Party, a once-potent force which is now a shadow of its Soviet-era glory.

Under electoral law, television and radio must give the petits candidats equal appearance time with the big ones and full equality in news coverage in the final three weeks. This will ensure that France gets better aquainted with its two main celebrity bolsheviks -- Olivier Besancenot, a cherubic 32-year-old Paris postman, and Arlette Laguiller, 66, a loveable former typist who has been preaching violent revolution in every presidential campaign since 1974. [both pictured above in 2004 when they were still talking]

Terrorist or freedom-fighter?

 

The French thinking classes like a bit of violence when it comes with a romantic cause. Look for example at the affection in which Fidel Castro is still held on the Left Bank. Today we have an outcry from leftwing politicians and arts stars over the arrest in Brazil of a former Italian terrorist who enjoyed long haven in France.

Cesare Battisti, a former member of Armed Proletarians for Communism, lived in France for 14 years until President Chirac's government lifted his protection and the courts ordered him home to serve a life sentence for murder. He had been convicted in his absence for two killings and complicity in two others, committed in the late 1970s. Battisti, 52, enjoyed a new life as a successful crime writer in France until he fled in August 2004 when he lost his final appeal against extradition. 

On Sunday, Battisti was picked up by French and Brazilian police on Copacabana beach. Italy -- including its leftwing politicians and media -- congratulated Paris. In France, though, the arrest has sparked a row that plays into the presidential election campaign. For the Left, Battisti is a hero and victim. The villain is... Nicolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister and conservative favourite for next month's elections.   

How to annoy Parisians

  After watching an apparently healthy young woman hog the jump seat in my jammed Métro train this morning, it seemed a good moment to list the 10 most infuriating things that passengers do. When it opened its respect campaign four months ago (October posting), the RATP, the Paris transport authority, asked passengers what behaviour most annoyed them on Métro trains, buses and trams.

After over 100,000 votes on the RATP site, the winners are:  

Bayrou falls back but Royalists panic

A hint of change is in the air today with signs that François Bayrou's charmed rise in the French presidential race may have peaked. For the first time since January, a poll has showed him falling back in the race for the April 22 first round.

The CSA survey for le Parisien and i>tele put Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate, up a point at 27 percent, Ségolène Royal of the Socialists is up a point at 26 and Bayrou down three points at 21. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far right, now firmly in the race after gleaning the requisite endorsements, is at a healthy 14 percent.

But the Socialists are still in panic over what to do about Bayrou, who is beguiling voters with his un-French vision of  government by a centrist coalition of left and right. Political parties usually settle their scores after their candidate has been defeated. The Socialists have jumped the gun and started dishing the blame six weeks before voters start deciding Royal's fate.

In defence of French grandeur

   After living in France long enough, you end up absorbing the natives' assumptions about the world. One of these is that France is a nation unlike the rest. Jacques Chirac came up with the line on Sunday in his valedictory love letter to France [last posting], saying that France has a special destiny as a beacon for the world.

This doctrine of l'exception française is part of France's mental landscape. Children learn at school that France is regarded by the world as "the home of human rights" and model for civilisation. The belief is part of France's charm, as well as its maddening side. Many other nations cherish a view of their innate superiority, the British among them, but they do their boasting in a less obvious way. Among democracies, only the United States views and talks about itself as a universal model.

David Mayer and other contributors to this blog have asked me why France has this belief. It's a good question and it is being partly answered by la polémique of the week in the presidential campaign, ignited by Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-of-centre favourite. Sarkozy put the cat among the pigeons by promising to create a Ministry for Immigration and National Identity.

Chirac's Chanson d'Amour

  France is in wistful mood this morning after President Jacques Chirac delivered his adieux to politics with typical style and nerve last night.

The solemn address turned out to be a love letter. "Not for one minute have I ceased to serve this magnificent France. This France which I love as much as I love you," he told his "dear compatriots".

Even if you see Chirac as a bit of a rogue who has been involved in more than a  little skullduggery in his career, it was a moving moment. For the first time since 1974, France is about to hold elections in which Chirac is not one of the big players. Much of the media and political class have taken a moment to salute the artist as he prepares to leave the stage in May. "Chirac makes a success of his exit," gushed le Parisien's front page.

Exit Chirac

For nearly two generations, Jacques Chirac has been a fixture of the French landscape. Tomorrow, barring a bolt from the blue, the president is going to announce his exit in a television address. His retirement is hardly unexpected, but it will clear the air for the battle among would-be successors who all deplore the state in which he is leaving France. 

Chirac, who entered government a junior minister under President de Gaulle in 1967, is expected to sketch the legacy that he will bequeath when he steps down in May after 12 years in office. He will talk about the way that he has guided a troubled country into the age of globalisation and asserted France's voice in the world.

Chirac's rosy view of his time in the Elysée Palace, is not shared by a people who regard him as a likeable old rogue and statesman but a poor, even disastrous, manager of the nation.
        
   
   

France's three horse race

A whiff of panic is coming from the headquarters of France's two big presidential candidates this morning.  An idea that was preposterous only two months ago has become entirely plausible. François Bayrou, the mild-mannered centrist, now has a chance of knocking out both Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy and winning the Elysée Palace for himself in May.

Strange things happen in French elections, with the two-round voting system and the mutinous mood in a country that feels that its politicians have betrayed it for the past 25 years. In 2002,  Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far right dinosaur, reaped the protest vote and eliminated the Socialist Lionel Jospin in the first round. This time, Bayrou, a former education minister,  has emerged as a far more acceptable protest candidate and the latest polls show that he has a good chance of dismissing Royal, the Socialist, in the first round and then beating Sarkozy  in a run-off. So it is not surprising that both Ségo and Sarko came over tetchy and weary in parallel television appearances last night.   

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The world wants French TV

 

There were a lot of sceptics when France 24, the global TV news network, went on the air and internet in English and French last December. Who would watch a tax-financed French window on on the world, a "CNN à la française" that was created on the orders of President Chirac ?

Quite a lot of people, it turns out. Three months on, France 24 (which calls itself "France-vingt-quatre" in English) says that it has established itself as the third international news network in most parts of the world after CNN and the BBC. In Japan, it is the number one international news site on the internet, according to Nielsen figures. The network's polling shows that it is getting good ratings from opinion leaders who value its difference from the American-British slant projected by CNN and the BBC

This, anyway, is what I heard over breakfast this morning with France 24's boss, Alain de Pouzilhac, a lifelong advertising man (former CEO of Havas) who was recruited to invent the network.

A lunch to remember

On the other end of the scale from last week's post about French health warnings on food, here is my interview from today's newspaper with Anne-Sophie Pic, the new three-star Michelin chef in Valence. 

And this is what lunch was like:  Despite what colleagues believe, Paris corespondents do not often dine in Michelin three-star establishments. In my years in the job, I had never sat down to the gastronomic magic promised by les trois macarons of the venerable Red Guide. Expectations were high when Magali Delporte, our photographer, and I were led to our table chez Pic. We were in a corner, looking out on a lawn with pine trees behind. On the table, a single tall lilly, bound with a white paper ribbon, set the pared-down tone for the gastronomic rite.

A French god returns

Forgive a few days absence. We were on the road south on one of those tough  assignments: visiting Anne-Sophie Pic in Valence and trying her new three-star lunch (more on that later). Then a weekend without telephone, let alone internet, enjoying early spring up in the Cévennes hills. But the television sort of worked and it was impossible to escape the great event of the week:  not the presidential campaign, but big news -- the return of Michel Polnareff. 

All right, this is another post on a pop dinosaur and French nostalgia for the 60s and 70s, but the phenomenon is worth the detour, as Michelin says of its three-star establishments. Imagine Jim Morrison of the Doors grooving back from his grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, or picture the late Serge Gainsbourg making a comeback and you get an idea. Michel Polnareff was a huge star, a young pianist-singer with a talent for melody that marked him out from the Johnny Hallydays and other American pop imitators of the time. Back in those days, you were either for Johnny or Polna, like you were Beatles or Stones. 

Then, in 1973, he left for self-imposed exile in California.