Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

France's favourite people

In what context would Britain's Queen Elizabeth rank just above Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, but one spot below Dave, an ageing Dutch pop singer?

Give up ? The three landed midway in a list of France's 25 favourite Europeans. Number one was Ellen MacArthur, the British ocean sailor and 25th was Jose Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese president of the European Commission ("Who?", non-Europeans must be wondering).

This 2006 list is a good example of France's mania for opinion polls. The French do not go for American-style rankings, those unscientific, whimsical lists of such things as "the world's" (English-speaking) best jokes, worst sitcoms or things you must do before you reach 30. But they apply serious polling effort to sounding national opinion on just about everything.

One of the oldest fixtures of la sondomanie, as Gallic poll addiction is known, is a twice-yearly national survey of France's 50 favourite people.

Started in 1988 by the IFOP polling company for JDD, the main Sunday newspaper, this poll throws up a strange assortment of sports and showbiz stars, charity workers, politicians and television personalities.

Back in the USSR with French luxury

I wonder if others were saddened by this picture, which covered the back page of the International Herald Tribune today. What is Mikhael Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, doing hawking luggage for Louis Vuitton, the French luxury brand?

No-one cares if actors and sports people cash in on their images. I don't mind if second-ranking statesmen make money moving merchandise. The late President Gerald Ford did it and so does Bernard Laporte, the national rugby coach who is about to join Sarkozy as minister for sport (see him selling ham below).

Gorbachev, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is another matter. He may be unloved in modern Russia but he is a giant. No lesser word applies to the man who wound down the communist empire of Lenin and Stalin and engineered the peaceful end of the Cold War. He shouldn't be selling capitalist luxury goods. What's next, Nelson Mandela pitching for Tiffany's?

French anti-smokers try irony

Campagne anti tabac - Toxic corp

This is a commercial from a clever new French campaign to persuade teenagers that it really is not cool to smoke. The message says: "Tobacco kills one smoker in two. The tobacco industry is counting on you to replace them."

France was one of the first countries to ban tobacco advertising and require schools to apprise children of the dangers of cigarettes. The anti-smoking campaign has over the past few years made an impact on adults, but youngsters have proved deaf to persuasion. I caught my 13 year old daughter with a packet of Malboro the other day and my son, 16, hangs out with friends who think it's hip to light up. To get the picture, you only have to pass the gates of a lycée (senior high school) and see the crowds of teenagers striking poses with burning clopes between their fingers.

Sarko gets a sharper waistline

We mentioned Sarkozy's mean streak in the last post, so here's a chance to apply a little cruelty of our own. As the hyper-dynamic French President notches up his 100th day in office, the media are having fun today with the discovery that Paris Match magazine touched up a photograph to give him a sleeker profile.

In its August 9 edition, Match devoted a gushing spread to Super-Sarko's New England holiday. It showed him in his usual action-man mode, canoeing with Louis, his youngest son. Looking at a Reuters agency photo, they must have found that the roll around the presidential midriff -- les poignéés d'amour (love handles) -- was not flattering enough and eliminated it.

Match gave an unconvincing explanation to L'Express magazine, which rumbled its adjustment. "His position on the boat exaggerated the protuberance. In lightening the shade, the correction came out exaggerated in the printed version," said Match.

A venerable weekly that mixes celebrity froth with serious reportage, Match made its name with the quality of its pictures. Its advertising slogan used to be "Le Poids des mots, le choc des photos" -- the weight of words, the shock of pictures. This time the weight was in the picture.

Tampering with pictures is taboo in the news business but Match was operating here in its role as the Sarkozy house organ. The magazine has been dubbed Paris Pravda with its fawning coverage since Sarko won election. Its owner, as we have mentioned before, is Arnaud Lagardère, the arms, aviation and media billionaire who is one of the president's close friends.

Last year Lagardère sacked Alain Genestar, the last editor of Match, for incurring Sarkozy's wrath. His offence was publishing a front page picture of Cécilia Sarkozy with Richard Attias, an events organiser for whom she had left Sarko at the time.

Celebrity pictures are modified all the time and Sarko's midriff is hardly a matter of state. But Match's action says a lot about the obsession of Sarko and his camp with controlling their image.

Sarkozy exposed by dramatist

It's rare that I can use that cliché about Paris being abuzz over a long-awaited book. That's the case today with the appearance of Yasmina Reza's inside account of Nicolas Sarkozy's triumphant election campaign.

Sarko let Reza, a playwright who enjoys taking a scalpel to human frailty, watch him close up for nine months, ending with his installation at the Elysée Palace in May. He knew that he was taking a risk inviting her onto the inside of his campaign. She has not been kind, but he does not emerge badly from L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit.

Ego-mad, ruthless and rather cruel to those around him, Sarkozy in private is everything that we suspected. Yet her portrait, full of theatrical dialogue, also shows a fragile and even touching side to a little-boy president who, it seems, is short of affection.  Click here for my report for the newspaper.

Below are a few more Sarko quotes, but first it's worth noting that Reza's book is a very French exercise.

Mazarine and murdered babies

It's hard to know what to make of Mazarine Pingeot. The natural daughter of the late President François Mitterrand has made a modest name for herself as a novelist and wants, she always says, to be treated on her literary merits alone. She deplores the media's appetite for sensation of the kind that surrounded her childhood as secret daughter of the president's mistress. Yet Pingeot, 33, is pretty deft at stirring sensation for her own ends.

Her latest oeuvre, Le Cimetière des Poupées (The Dolls' Cemetery) , is one of an astonishing 727 new novels being published for the French autumn season which started this week. Pingeot has managed to break out from the mass, not just with her Mitterrand heritage, but because of her subject: infanticide. The topic is macabre enough, but she added spice by appearing to model her tale on Véronique Courjault, a Frenchwoman who is awaiting trial for killing three of her new-borns.

The case made headlines a year ago after Courjault admitted to putting two of her offspring in a deep-freeze at the family home in Seoul.

Rémy the rat and Americans in Paris

   

Rémy the rat is doing exceedingly well in France. Hollywood's big animated films are usually popular here but Ratatouille, Pixar studio's tale about a Parisian rat with a talent for haute cuisine, is breaking records. It has topped the box office for the two weeks since it scored the biggest-opening day for an animated film in France. This has got me thinking about the long tradition of Franco-American mutual admiration.

The audience in my cinema at the Porte Maillot gave Ratatouille a standing ovation the other night after the finale, in which Rémy triumphs with a message that echoes the can-do doctrines of President Sarkozy: If you work hard, you will prosper. Even a lowly rat can become a gastronomic celebrity

The film, for all its technical prowess, is of course another a feel-good Disney about a cute rodent and its sensibility is all American. Yet something in the film has touched a Gallic nerve.

Cécilia unsettles France

If you liked Jackie Kennedy, you're going to adore Cécilia. Those words did not come from a star-struck celebrity mag, but from Cécilia Sarkozy's adoring husband. He made the prediction on the night of his election as French president on May 6.  Today we are 100 days into of the reign of Super-Sarko and France is talking a lot about its new first lady, but not necessarily in her favour.

Since Cécilia Sarkozy snubbed George and Laura Bush and embarassed her husband at the weekend, she is being compared more with Queen Marie-Antoinette than the late Mrs JFK.  Why, people wonder, does Cécilia keep standing people up ? [In French, the expression is poser un lapin -- handing someone a rabbit. See funny video illustration]    

Few believed the official excuse for Mrs Sarkozy's last minute decision to miss a barbecue with the US presidential family at Kennebunkport, Maine. An apologetic Sarko turned up an hour late from the couple's New Hampshire retreat, explaining that his wife had a bad throat infection. Yet on Sunday, Mrs Sarko, 49, was seen strolling in shorts with friends around the town of Wolfesboro. Commentators talked of a diplomatic incident.

Le cool jazz and trying to play it in France

Here are a couple of pictures of  middle-aged guys blowing rather modest jazz in a southern French village the other night. It's an excuse for me to reflect on the struggle that it takes to raise your musical game in mid-life and on the excellent ways that France helps you do so.

The occasion was a concert for about 60 indulgent residents at the mairie at Bragassargues, west of Nimes, at the end of un stage. These short summer schools complement the ateliers de jazz -- workshops -- that operate in the academic year, mainly at conservatories. France, as everyone knows, is a jazz-friendly place, with good Paris clubs and festivals like Marciac, Vienne and Juan-les-Pins. I have been taking advantage of stages and ateliers for a few years after reviving an ambition, dropped in teenage years, to play a tolerable keyboard [I'm abusing a classic old Fender Rhodes in the picture].

Paris falls for the bike

It's not often that you return from holiday and find that your home town has changed. With only a little exaggeration, that was the case when I landed back at the weekend and witnessed the impact of the Vélib, Mayor Delanoe's rent-a-bike system that was launched on July 15 (earlier post).

Delanoe's scheme to saturate the city with thousands of nearly free wheels has proved a roaring success -- so far. The bikes are everywhere. The real test will come with the end of summer and the return of bad weather and the full quota of grumpy Parisians and stressed drivers.

But with the sun shining and traffic at its August low, flocks of stately Vélibs are slowing the pace and making the city feel a little more civilised. Despite rain, blasé Parisians and visitors can be seen grinning as they discover the delights of pedal power.

Les Vacances, Sarko-style

 

For my first post back in Paris, I was going to talk about the red deer which was grazing with her fawn outside my window in the Cévennes. I'll cut it short though, because I had better get onto the topic that has been stirring up France and exchanges on this blog -- President Sarkozy's US vacation (today's newspaper story).

In the Cévennes dawn on Saturday, a mystery was solved. We had risen to hit the road early for one of those black traffic days, when millions of French join the north Europeans for their annual treks to and from the sun. For two weeks, we had been occasionally woken by a deep barking sound, like that of a big dog,  coming from the woods. We usually hear the wild boar grunting and scuffling but this was different. As we were leaving on Saturday, the source emerged 20 yards away in the meadow:  a magnificent doe with her fawn. La biche was grazing off the chestnut trees and doing the dog-like bark.