Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Marry me Sarkozy, says Chinese star

Nicolas Sarkozy did not just bring back billions of euros of contracts from his state visit to China. He also received a proposal of marriage. Namu, a well-known Chinese writer and singer, delivered her declaration of longstanding love for the recently divorced Sarko on a video that made the French media this morning.

"I want to say to the President of France: 'Choose me. I will be a perfect wife for you and I will love you like the way I love, my love'," she says. (The video here has French voicing over English and Chinese, but you can pick up enough of the English to get the idea).

"I know that he had a wife who did not help him at all. I think that I suit him much better," she says. "In diplomatic affairs, the wife is important. I find that he especially needs a girl like me to accompany him, who can bring him romance and sing and dance for him," explans Namu.

The 41-year-old singer, who has turned into a writer and television personality in China, also loves Sarko's skin and is "certain that he must be a great kisser", according to the French translation.    

Namu, whose full name is Yang Erche Namu comes from the region neighbouring Tibet. She is enitled to make the marriage proposal because she is of  the Himalayan Mosuo minority, a matriarchal and matrilinear people.  She wrote about them in a 2004 US-published book that reached the New York Times best-seller list: Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World.

Here's the book's description of "the place the Chinese call 'the country of daughters'...a society in which women rule men."

According to local tradition, marriage is considered a foreign practice; property is passed from mother to daughter; a matriarch oversees each family's customs, rituals, and economies. In this culture a young girl enjoys extraordinary freedoms—but the impulsive, restless Namu is driven to leave her mother's house, to venture out into the larger world, defying the tradition that holds Mosuo culture together.

The video has disappeared from the French Dailymotion site, so perhaps Sarko's people are not pleased by Namu's offer and her suggestion that "the private life of the French president needs innovation."

It is interesting to note that one of the smart moves that Sarko made on his trip to China was to take along Andrée, 81-year-old mother. After he presented Andrée to President Hu Jintao and he gave her a shawl, Chinese officials told the media that Sarko must be a good man, taking such care of his mother.

Since then, Nicolas Canteloup has a new running gag, in which Sarko is constantly interrupted by his mother asking if he's done his homework, cleaned his teeth and so on.   

Sarko did not meet Namu on the visit.

   

Behind the new riots of outer Paris

Black wet sludge was all that remained of the books in the library at Villiers-le-Bel when I walked in at lunchtime. The Louis Jouvet library, attached to a nursery school, was burnt down in last night's riots in the town in the outer north Paris suburbs.

The mess in the single-storey building, set in a pleasant garden, is an obvious symbol for the futility of the latest crisis to blow up in France's troubled suburbs. Hundreds of kids -- for that is what most of them are -- rampaged through this town for the second night last night fighting police and burning and looting the district that is their home.

The biggest outbreak of banlieue violence since the riots of 2005 was sparked by the deaths of two teenagers when their motorcycle ran into a police car on Sunday afternoon. Moushin, 15, of Moroccan origin, and Larami, 16, from a Malian family, were driving, underage, fast and without helmets on an unregistered dirt bike when they hit the car. That is the official version and the local kids don't believe it. 

Three cellophane-wrapped bouquets of flowers sit by the wall at the spot where the boys were killed at an intersection between two quiet residential streets. "Dead for nothing" says a scrap of paper. The boys lived nearby in relatively well-kept housing estates that do not live up to the media's sinister image of the French outer-city ghetto. Money has been spent to improve the area, a district of neat bungalows behind laurel hedges and medium-sized public housing estates.  But you can feel the anger in the air, along with the smell of the overnight fires.

Sarkozy's favourite (government) woman

Since gossip is acceptable in blogs, it's time to look at the close relationship between President Sarkozy and Rachida Dati, his Justice Minister.

Why not, since much of France is chattering about Sarko and his glamorous favourite and some of the speculation is -- unusually -- making it into the media. [above: the couple in Xian, China, yesterday]

Dati, who turns 42 today, is the supremely self-confident daughter of a Moroccan stone-mason and an Algerian mother. Last May, she became the main face of Sarko's "open" multi-ethnic, feminised government when he promoted her from back-room adviser to one of the most august Cabinet posts.

Since then, Dati has put up backs like no-one else. Her chief of staff and seven other advisers have resigned after conflict with her and judges and lawyers across France are demonstrating and threatening to strike over her quest to close about  100 courts and tribunals.

The line from palace insiders, passed around at Paris dinner parties, is that the couple are not an item. Sarkozy is just dazzled by the energy and charisma of his protegée. He has played her Pygmalion, seeing in her a younger version of his own hyper-dynamic self, they say. 

There is no evidence to suppose otherwise but I'll carry on because of the way that the recently-divorced president makes such a point of showing off his fondness for Sarkozette, as she is nicknamed. If he wanted to provoke gossip, he could hardly do better. 

New towers for Paris

This could be Paris in the fairly near future. These fashionably crooked towers are among 11 architects' visions for developing the French capital in the next few years. They were presented by Mayor Bertrand Delanoe this week in his latest attempt to convince reluctant citizens to get over their aversion against tall buildings.

The projects aim to give life to three ramshackle districts near the edge of the compact capital, at the Porte de la Chapelle in the north and Bercy and Masséna on the Seine in the southeast. Some of the concepts are over 200 metres (660 feet) tall, as high as London's Canary Wharf towers. Delanoe, a popular Socialist, is taking a risk, promising high rise development if he is re-elected next March.

Since he was elected in 2001, Delanoe has been struggling against the prevailing view that "the world's most beautiful city" is fine as it is and the last thing it needs is modern architecture.  Parisians have been queasy about new high structures since 1889 when Gustave Eiffel foisted his new-fangled contraption on the Left Bank. His tower, unpopular at first, was supposed to be temporary but Parisians eventually got used to it and no-one has suggested removing it since the 1920s.

More recent attempts to fiddle with the skyline -- in the 1970s and 80s --  were disastrous.

[Picture: Bercy project by Barthélemy-Grino]

France laughs at comedian Sarkozy

Like almost a million other radio listeners, I look forward every morning to hearing President Sarkozy announce his latest act of megalomania and his ministers making fools of themselves. I'm not talking about real Sarko, but the president's alter-ego, as performed by Nicolas Canteloup, a comic whose brilliant impersonations have made him part of the political landscape.

I've mentioned Canteloup and his daily sketches before and French-based commentators on this blog often quote him. It's hard to convey inside jokes across cultures but it's worth taking a look at Canteloup and his Europe 1 radio show because he has become a force as the licensed jester of the Sarkozy court.

Like other gifted impersonators -- Rory Bremner as Tony Blair comes to mind -- some of Canteloup's caricatures are so accurate that they have have taken on a life of their own, shaping the way people see the original. Canteloup's Sarkozy is insufferably slick, power mad and pleased with himself. The real president has had to tone down some of his verbal tics because the comedian has turned them into a running gag. These include Sarko's standard protests "c'est quand même remarquable!" and "c'est extraordinaire!".

When Sarko was in Washington the other day, his Canteloup version come on in English with a George Clooney drawl, to the theme of the TV commercials that star the US actor. Today, "Sarko" was crowing about "Chirac en prison" -- an allusion to yesterday's opening of a criminal case against Sarkozy's predecessor and adversary.

Read on below, but first' here's Canteloup doing Sarkozy on TV.

Nicolas Canteloup - 11 Novembre 2007

How to speak French -- strike style

Since France is deep in strike season, with transport still disrupted and the civil service stopping work this week, it's time to visit the jargon of French labour conflict.

The main feature is euphemism  --  a strike is a "social movement" for example. This masks unpleasant reality and confers legitimacy. Regulars here might recall my French political glossary last year.

A frustrated commuter's guide to French "social conflict".

base (la) = the base, workers who won't stop striking even when the union calls it off

barrage filtrant (le) = filter roadblock, when pickets or "militants" disrupt passage or access to non strikers and public

blocage (le) = shut-down, done to universities by militants

bras de fer (le) = arm wrestle, trial of strength = ritual which ends when government surrenders to la rue (see below)

coagulation (la) = fusion of protesting trades, feared by government (une coagulation de mécontentements, le Monde last week)

colère (la) = anger = emotion, always legitimate, justifies blocage, barrage filtrant etc. (ex: les routiers en colère ont bloqué l'autoroute (protesting truck drivers stopped traffic on the ring road).

Revisiting the Sixties with Sarko

This amusing advertisement from the French division of Volkswagen could not be better timed. Trotskyite and other far left students have shut down about a third of France's universities this week, many of them dreaming of overturning the "Facho-Sarko" regime. (today's story). 

VW is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the trusty old Combi van just as President Sarkozy is trying to face down hardline strikers and their student sympathisers.      

The caption says: It has belonged to a Trotskyite, a Maoist, a Socialist and a Sarkozist without ever changing owner.

Volkswagen tell us that the advert has only been placed in le Figaro, the newspaper of the Sarkozy-voting middle and upper classes.  Though the WV Microbus of the flower power hippy years was really a US phenomenon, the advert is a wink at France's 1968 generation. Many of those students who worshipped Leon Trotsky and Chairman Mao matured into Socialists in their 30s. They moved fruther right over the years and voted for Nicolas Sarkozy last spring.

Philippe Jourdain, marketing boss for Volkswagen commercial vehicles, says that the advert is gentle humour. "The Combi van has passed through the generations since the post war period, through the Woodstock festival up to the present day. It's a travelling companion that has also traversed different political opinons.  The message is, 'One changes in life. People's beliefs evolve, but the Combi van is always appreciated'."

It's worth noting that Sarko himself was an exception to the VW idea. He was always a right-winger, even as a 13-year-old school pupil in Neuilly in May 1968.  When his class-mates were out  supporting the students, he tried to take part in the anti-strike marches organised by Gaullists who were sick of the anarchy.  His mother asked the school principle to stop le petit Nicolas from leaving the classroom to march down the Champs Elysées.    

    

The funny side of French strikes

 

The great French strike of 2007 seems to be turning into a struggle between the union bosses and the transport workers who do not want to heed their call to go back to work.

Commuting was la galère (misery) again today as much of the national train services and the Paris transport system were at a standstill for the second day despite a compromise that has deflated their cause. The leaders of the big CGT and CFDT unions settled the outline of negotiations with President Sarkozy's government yesterday, but the strikers seem hell-bent on keeping their early retirement, however unpopular or unrealistic it may be.

Workers' meeetings have just voted a third day's stoppage for tomorrow. You could feel the tension on radio and TV this morning as the radicals of the railway and Paris transport unions voiced their defiance despite what they see as betrayal by Bernard Thibault, the CGT leader, and François Cherèque of the CFDT. The national union chiefs want to save their face and credibility for resisting the next, broader, phase of the Sarko revolution next year, when the president tries to rewrite the labour laws.

So the ordeal continues, at least into the weekend. The Opéra and Comédie Française, the two most prestigious theatres, are also staying out. They are state workers too. Here is how Pascal, a technician, explained his miserable life on France Inter radio this morning. "I have been a machine operator at the Opera for 22 years. That's 20 tonnes of scenery a year, with slipped discs, anti-social hours and completely messed up home life. .. Now they are telling me 'No you can't retire at 55 any more. You have to work to 60 and even if you're broken (casse), too bad, you'll retire broken."

Poor guy. At least the strikes are letting France indulge in black humour. Look at this video. It's a send-up of the strike-happy SNCF state railways set to the tune of YMCA, the Village People's old hit. Get past the slow intro about three-month train delays and the lyrics are fun.

SNCF, we have no competition, we are the kings of France. With our outrageous strikes, we'll spoil your holidays. The SNCF is always right, never makes concessions. We take you for fools... For us it's the grand slam. No half-measure. 

Sncf

[Full French lyrics below]

Grumbling to work in the Paris strike

I wonder what to call the Paris equivalent of 'blitz spirit', London's term for pulling cheerily together in the midst of mayhem.

Commuters in the French capital and, more importantly, its outlying suburbs, were not exactly grinning and bearing it this morning as they struggled to work amid the transport strike. Bad temper was more the order of the day. There was some sense of shared adversity among the pedestrians who were tramping along around me on the march downhill from the 17th arrondissement to the centre of town. But there was not much blitz spirit in the snarled-up traffic. Intersections were jammed, with drivers leaning on horns and cursing one-another. Scooters weaved kamikaze-style through them, cutting up the cyclists who appeared en masse today -- not just on Vélibs but on vélos new and old. At least the sun was shining. I saw two punch-ups between drivers, but that is only a little above average. Out in the badlands beyond the périphérique, people sat in jams for hours, listening to radio reports of 150 kilometres of bouchon around the region (French traffic reporters take special delight in telling motorists how many kilometres of jam they are sitting in. There's none of that cheery New York chopper talk: "We gotta little traffic backed up on the 59th street bridge approach, Chuck, but no big deal.).

So it is with some relief that we hear that both sides appear to have lost their nerve for a long battle and have started talking.

After bicycles, Paris tries self-service cars

.

                                                                                                    

Readers have asked for an update on the Vélib scheme, which has equipped Paris with thousands of self-service bikes since last July. The almost free bikes are no longer a novelty. They are part of the landscape, already a bit last summer, mon cher. So now, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe has come up with a grander wheeze, which is to be announced for his campaign for re-election in a month or two. This consists of self-service cars that you can pick up and park almost where you want, like the bikes.

First the bikes: The scheme has if anything been too successful. Tomorrow,  just about all 15,000 will be in use as people, many of whom have not pedalled since child-hood, attempt to beat the all-out public transport strike.  On normal days, the parking bays are not enough to cope with the rush of morning commuters, leading to bike rage as people struggle to dock their machines down town near their work. I have given up using them on weekdays because I was spending more time looking for a hitching post than freewheeling downhill to work.

The colder wet weather and a few accidents have not done much to dim the enthusiasm with which Parisians use Vélibs to get to work or wobble home at night when taxis vanish (There are fewer taxis in Paris than before World War Two and most don't work at night). The bikes have been used for eight million trips so far and there will be 20,000 by the end of the year, according to JC Decaux, the company that provides them in return for city advertising space. There has been one death -- a woman in her 50s who was crushed last month when a truck cut her off on the inside of a turn. The bikes now carry warnings to be careful of trucks and three training courses have been opened to help debutants get the hang of la bicyclette (details on www.paris.fr City Hall site).

France readies for the Sarko showdown

We have been treated to an odd coincidence of imagery over the past couple of days. They invoke the futile but inevitable clashes of great armies. One is the Armistice Day remembrance of World War One, over which Nicolas Sarkozy has just presided. The other arises from the battle, opening tomorrow night, between Sarko's troops and the forces of resistance to his campaign of reform on multiple fronts. Here's the story from today's paper.

Without overdoing the parallel, the showdown feels just as inevitable as that of August 1914. Sarko is propelled by the big part of France that voted for his promise last spring to end the archaic labour practises and corporatism that drag on the economy. Dug in across no-man's land are the railway and other state sector workers and leftwing students who believe they have common cause. Their aim is to halt the Sarko-revolution.

"This is our chance to stop the Sarkozy government", an excited student leader presumptiously said on the radio this morning. Just before her, we heard an SNCF (railway) employee, say: "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to retire at 55. I will fight to keep the right. Everyone should be able to retire at 55."

Those two quotes will have been cheered by die-hard leftists, but they could not have been better designed to serve the Sarko cause.

A Paris policeman and his bordello collection

 

Here's one of those only-in-Paris stories. I've just been chatting to a former police officer who is selling his lifelong collection of art and objects from the world of Paris prostitution. 

The 355 lots, ranging from oil paintings and brothel furniture to erotic walking sticks and pornography, are being auctioned today at Drouot, the central art house. To set the mood, the sale room has been decked out in the red velvet of the old maisons closes, the bordels that were legal until 1946. And the auctioneers are dressing up like old-style maquereaux, or pimps.

There is of course nothing romantic or charming about prostitution, but les filles de joie and the seedy side of the Paris night were, and still are, part of the city's lore. That the Drouot collection should be put together by a flic (cop), seems fitting, when you think of all the old movies and novels about the milieu around Pigalle with their petits voyous and good time girls. (La Vie en Rose, the new Edith Piaf biopic, gives a fair idea).

Jean Feixas, a retired Commissaire Divisionnaire, Chief Superintendent in British terms, told me that he became fascinated by the netherworld of prostitution when he served as a young Paris detective.

"I was drawn to collecting by la femme. Woman in all her moral and social sense," Feixas said.

How Sarko did in America

Above is a video summary of the French fall-out from President Sarkozy's trip to Washington. It comes from a chat today with Daniel Finkelstein, our Comment Editor.  [I apologise for my webcam and sound] As I mentioned, French reaction has followed  fairly predictable political lines, but with the advantage on his side. Le Monde, voice of the thinking establishment, gave him good marks this afternoon. It said that he had managed to "avoid casting himself in the mould of Tony Blair, caricatured as George Bush's Poodle."

"Without saying so overtly, he announced the end of a French diplomacy which has too often in the past defined itself through opposition to American foreign policy."   

Sarkozy in Washington as France rates his six month score

Barely back from a rescue mission to Africa, Super Sarko has dashed off to Washington to save the Bush administration. That may sound a stretch, but not if you have watched the whirlwind of chutzpah that Nicolas Sarkozy has displayed in the six months to the day since he won the French presidency.

Yes, six months already, so France is pausing for breath in his absence to take stock of the Sarko-revolution and wonder how long the hyper-president can keep up his manic act.

It's hard to remember that only last May, Jacques Chirac still presided as a near invisible monarch while a Prime Minister governed a disgruntled country with a cabinet of ministers. Since then, Sarko has blown up the old system. He runs everything himself, calling the players into the Elysée Palace or leaping aboard his Airbus to solve every crisis. Government has been relegated to supporting cast.

Sarkozy flies to rescue, lands in French-African mess

Super Sarko is riding to the rescue once again today, flying to Africa to bring back French journalists and Spanish flight crew who were caught up in the fiasco of Zoe's Ark in Chad.

For those new to the story, catch up here. What's fascinating about the affair is the way that a bunch of over-zealous charity cowboys from the northern Paris suburbs have dragged President Sarkozy into just the kind of traditional French-African mess that he wants to avoid. France is once again cosying up to one of its African clients and it has tripped over its own humanitarian doctrines, as propounded by Bernard Kouchner, the dashing activist whom Sarko appointed Foreign Minister last May.

The arrest of the Zoe's Ark crew was a windfall for Idriss Déby, the Chadian president, because it has given him leverage at a time when Sarko wanted to distance France from its history of propping up unsavoury leaders in its former colonies. The French military helped install Déby in power in 1990 and on the orders of President Chirac the French contingent of 1,200 men plus Mirage jets saved his skin from an imminent revolt last year.  With his power under threat from armed opponents, Déby needs France more than ever.

Goat's cheese, chestnuts and no Sarko

The air is so thick with foreigners' odes to the French rural idyll that I hesitate to commit another of my own. Yet, c'est plus fort que moi, on this  All Saints day with the morning sun on the chestnut forest in our valley in the Cévennes. The autumn leaves (not yet feuilles mortes) are the most radiant gold that I have seen in the 14 Toussaint holidays that I have spent in the old farm-house.  Perhaps it's the result of the declining rainfall that is also drying up the spring upon which we depend.

Yet nothing has really changed on the November 1 holiday. My neighbours -- mostly hill farmers, artisans and unemployed locals -- are out with their guns and hounds in pursuit of wild boar. The only innovation on that front is that they now wear fluorescent vests over their camouflage. The measure, imposed nationally, is supposed to help les chasseurs avoid shooting one-another, but those flashes of yellow in the forest must certainly tip off their prey.

Across the valley in the village of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte, everything but the church is closed except for the stand selling chrysanthemums, the seasonal flower for commemorating the dead. 

Our spot in the Cévennes, a sort of Scottish highlands with sunshine, is only 100 kilometres north of the saturated Mediterranean coastal strip. Drive only 15 kms down the valley into the département of le Gard and the architecture starts turning from austere stone and slate roofs to the white arches and red tiles of the Med. We are  far enough up into hill-billy country to keep the feeling of sanctuary that shaped the history of this southernmost fringe of the Massif Central. In the religious wars of the 17th century, the persecuted protestants found refuge, as did the resistants of world war two. In the 1970s, the first generation of drop-out ecologistes came down from the north with their guitars and 2CV Citroens to take over abandoned farm-houses to try their hand -- usually without much success --  at goat raising and living off the land.