Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Electric flight over France

As we know, the French did more than any other nation to pioneer aviation a century ago. Now they have scored another flying first. Little noticed by the outside world, on December 23, a pilot took off from an Alpine airfield and flew for 48 minutes in the first light aircraft to be powered by electricity.   

With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d'Argencon, have just achieved.

Their "Electra", a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. "This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It's a machine built for anyone with a pilot's license."

Sarkozy flaunts Bruni on the Nile

There is no respite from the Sarko show. Past French presidents used to disappear over the Christmas week to stay in expensive hotels in Egypt or the Indian Ocean. They were sometimes accompanied by women who were not their wives. François Mitterrand was a regular with Anne Pingeot, his mistresss, at the Old Cataract Hotel on the Nile at Aswan, where Agatha Christie wrote her Egyptian murder story. But the old presidents were always discreet and no-one knew where they were. Two months after his divorce, Nicolas Sarkozy has just descended on the Egyptian town of Luxor with Carla Bruni, his new girl-friend, and he wants everyone to know it.

The president's astonishing zest for self-exhibition is still amusing the French, according to opinion polls. A majority still believes that his splashy private life and taste for glitz are not a hindrance to his job, but I sense the tide turning. His antics with Bruni, presenting her to the country at Disneyland Paris last week and now holding hands with her on the Nile, seem, to use an old-fashioned word, unseemly.

A Paris Christmas Thank You

This is the main Sunday when France breaks its working-time rules and the stores are packed with last minute Christmas shoppers. I could hardly get to the office door on the Place de l'Opéra.

[Picture:Galeries Lafayette department store around the corner from here]

It's also the start of the Trêve des Confiseurs, the "confectioners' truce", or seasonal break when the politicians head for the sunshine or ski slopes. After a visit to French troops in Afghanistan yesterday, President Sarkozy is off to cruise the Nile with Ms Bruni in tow, at least according to the rumours.

So it's a good moment to wish everyone here a Joyeux Noel and to say a big thank you for the contributions to this blog over the past year.

The comments are much more than that. Their flow turns posts into conversation and debate. I don't want to overdo it, but after two years, the blog has become quite a little community.

Dining high on Eiffel's Tower

 

It's impossible to write this post without making an obvious pun about haute cuisine. Paris cooking doesn't get any more elevated than the restaurant that has re-opened today 410 feet (125m) up on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.

The setting of the old Jules Verne restaurant has always been superb, perched inside the iron girders of the tower. What makes it special now is the new boss,  Alain Ducasse, the super-chef and businessman who has 27 restaurants with 15 Michelin stars around the world.   

Ducasse [above] won the tower catering concession a couple of years ago after the old management let the restaurant slide into expensive mediocrity. Doing the promotional rounds this week, Ducasse has said that he aims to lure Parisians back onto a site that was long left to tourists, with fine, all-French cooking. 

"There won't be any nems (Vietnamese spring rolls), only French products, beef, scallops, turbot, Saint Pierre, langoustines, Limousin lamb, Landes farmer's chicken with crayfish... Even the whisky will be French," he said.

The tight confines of the tower and the need for reasonable prices has led Ducasse to aim for less majestic fare than his Paris Plaza Athénée and his other high culinary temples. They are haute couture while the Jules Verne, one of two eateries on the tower, will be "luxury ready-to-wear," he said. 

French qualms over the Sarko show

President Sarkozy is off to Rome to be blessed by the Pope tomorrow. His absence will afford slight relief in a week in which Super-Sarko has broken his own record for self-promotion. He is, we learn, highly pleased with the way that his romance with Carla Bruni, a model-singer, has played out since he launched it from Disneyland Paris last weekend.

"It doesn't annoy me at all," he told reporters who asked him about the media frenzy over his new girl-friend yesterday.

Sarko's mise-en-scène of his new liaison has been dissected from every angle. Psychiatrists, sociologists and movie directors are pronouncing on the breath-taking ego of the republican monarch. Claude Chabrol, the movie-maker who has spent his career chronicling the dark side of the bourgeoisie, opined today that the Sark-opera is partly due to the President's small stature. "That has shaped his spirit. He says: 'I know that I'm little but I'm a smart guy. I am going to prove it to everyone and be loved by everyone'."

[picture: Sarkozy dresses for lunch before outing with Bruni on Saturday. From today's Match]

Chabrol was talking to Libération which devoted its first five pages to "President Bling Bling." It said that Sarko risked descending into "Berlusconian comedy" and it noted that his unabashed showing-off offended France's old upper classes. "Sarkozy's lack of modesty is incompatible with good manners," it said. But it is not just the lower orders who are relishing the latest episode of the palace soap opera. A couple of friends in senior state posts told me that Sarko-Bruni was the talk of their offices on Monday.   

A interesting sign of backlash to the Sarko show came today from the journalists of Paris Match. Owned by Arnaud Lagardère, the president's friend,  the celebrity and news weekly has become the palace organ. The journalists' union, which represents 80 percent of staff, rebelled over today's 17-page cover spread of photographs of the president at work and play, taken by Bettina Rheims, a photographer to the stars.

The scribes complained that they had not been allowed to write any words to run with the flattering pictures of the statesman and put them in perspective. "We had no editorial choice. They imposed a ready-made subject on us," the union told Agence France-Presse. "In France the president chooses his photographer."

The French media are eager to avoid offending the monarch so they have been largely laying off a track that has been taken by their foreign colleagues. This is the remarkably rich and diverse love life that Ms Bruni has squeezed into her 39 years.

Le Canard Enchaîné, the satirical weekly, today nailed Libération for a bit of uncharacteristic self-censorship. This involved a now infamous remark that Ms Bruni made about her love life to le Figaro last February. "Monogamy bores me stiff. I am monogamous from time to time. Love lasts a long time, but ardent desire only for two or three weeks." Libération, along with other media, decided cut out part of the original quote, which said: "I am monogamous from time to time but I prefer polygamy and polyandry".

Since the President met Ms Bruni in late November, his three weeks would soon appear to be up.

Here's a new video from Closer magazine of the famous Disney outing and this is today's Libération.

Sarkozy's new love story

They don't call him Speedy Sarko for nothing. It's exactly two months since President Sarkozy very reluctantly confirmed that Cécilia, his wife, had left and divorced him. Today, he has presented France with a new girlfriend, Carla Bruni, who turns 39 this week. Sarko being Sarko, he chose as the venue the Christmas parade at Disneyland Paris.

Bruni, a singer-songwriter and former model -- who resembles Cécilia -- is a household name in France and her native Italy. She is known for her successful first album of songs, sung in gravelly Leonard Cohen-style voice, four years ago. Her second, based on the works of great English poets, has flopped.

Known as a tempestuous and intellectual beauty, she is celebrated for a busy romantic life. Newspapers today discreetly mentioned her reputation as une dévoreuse d'hommes, a man-eater. Former close friends range from Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton to Laurent Fabius, the former Socialist Prime Minister and other famous actors and writers. A couple of years ago, Bruni featured as the villain in a book by Justine Lévy, daughter of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the thinker, after she departed with Lévy's husband  Raphael Enthoven. 

It was obvious that Sarkozy would move as fast as possible to fill the vacuum left by Cécilia's absence and to shed the image of abandoned husband. He did the same when his wife left him temporarily in 2005, moving swiftly into a public relationship with Anne Fulda, a Figaro journalist, whom he dropped when Cécilia came back nine months later.

French culture dies again

There is a type of story that American and British journalists in France know will always score in their papers. It is the genre that we call "The death of..." On quiet news days, you fill in the blank. It can be corner café, baguette, the concierge, the railway sleeping car and so on (I am as guilty as anyone).

It's an easy hit because ancestral envy in the Anglo-Saxon soul is tickled by the idea of the demise of some cherished Gallic tradition. The winner in this field is culture. We have been writing this obituary periodically since... well, about the mid-18th century when Voltaire proclaimed the demise of French thought.

Time magazine has just taken the old chestnut out for a whirl with a cover story in its European edition. "The Death of French Culture," mourns the cover with a picture of a fake Marcel Marceau, the mime who died two months ago, weeping over a rose. Alongside, it asks: "Quick, name a living artist or writer from France who has global significance."

That question of course says more about the self-centred obsession of American -- "Anglo-Saxon" culture than anything else. If you ask the question on continental Europe, Latin America, Africa, China or Japan, you'll be told plenty of French names, from cinema and music to architecture and fiction. You don't need to read Time's long article because you know that it will run round the old pitch, touching the familiar bases.

The Gaddafi circus leaves Paris in a mess

Nicolas Sarkozy is counting down the hours until his unwelcome guest, Muammar Gaddafi, finally pulls out of Paris. For the French president and many Parisians, the five-day official visit by the Libyan leader has seemed endless.

My post on Gaddafi's arrival on Monday drew some interest, so here's an update, drafted for tomorrow's paper. The Colonel has spent the week playing to his fans like an old rock idol, revelling in provocation, insulting his hosts, snarling up traffic and indulging his whims. The last of these was pheasant shooting on the presidential estate at Rambouillet and then a tour of Versailles. "His excellency is a great admirer of King Louis XIV", said an aide. The Supreme Guide of the Revolution, who was initially invited for two days, first asked to go fox-hunting at Fontainebleau, but he was dissuaded.

Gaddafi has also shown off his expertise in recent French history, lecturing his hosts for abusing the human rights of north African immigrants. He put himself in the skin of the kids in the rioting banlieue and said: "They brought us here like cattle to do hard and dirty work, and then they throw us to live on the outskirts of towns, and when we claim our rights, the police beat us." He was talking there to an audience of admirers -- mainly African -- at the headquarters of Unesco. Unlike France, Libya has an impeccable rights record, he added.

The Colonel has been holding court in the Bedouin tent next to the Elysée Palace that was erected at his request in the garden of the Marigny guest mansion. Embarrassed French officials banned photographs, so Gaddafi invited in Paris Match to do a glossy spread on him in prayer and relaxing there. Le Monde's television critic, my old friend Dominique Dhombres, came up with a wonderful comparison. The Libyan leader has been behaving just like Abdullah, the insufferable little boy who taunts Captain Haddock in the Tintin tales, said Dhombres.

Colour brings old Paris back to life

When you think of Paris a century ago, the images that spring to mind are black and white or sepia. A stunning correction to this view has just been opened at the City Hall. They have put on display over 300 colour photographs and some ancient colour movie film of Paris, including dozens of extraordinary shots from la Belle Epoque before the first world war.

[Above: a humble family in the Rue du Pot de Fer, 24 June 1914 by Stéphane Passet]

These pictures, collected from attics and archives to celebrate the 1907 invention of colour photography, bring the old city alive in a way that is moving and somewhat spooky. You are struck by the vivid tones -- of facades and faces and clothes and gardens -- from a time that we imagine as dark and shabby. The colour reveals detail that is screened out by black-and-white. The bright lights of Pigalle, the young flower-sellers, the straw hats, red dresses and the ubiquitous advertising remind you that life in the early 20th century was not so different.

You notice how little Paris has changed. The French capital has almost been preserved intact compared with London or Berlin, which were transformed by world war two bombing, or American cities which have gone for constant renewal. Paris has made an effort, right down to keeping the old Métro entrances, street lights and traffic lights. The great squares such as the Concorde and Vendôme, look the same,  except for the sootier facades. You can see from a 1920s movie that our building on the Place de l'Opéra hasn't changed.

[Below: Dior's New Look,  Place Vendome 1948, by Robert Capa]

France says adieu to sleeping-car trains

A great railway era ended when France's legendary Train Bleu pulled into the station at the end of its final journey from Paris to the Riviera yesterday. After 135 years, the French railways have taken their last wagons-lits --  sleeping-cars -- out of service.

With high speed trains and air travel, there were no longer enough customers willing to pay between 251 and 395 euros for a night in bed aboard the elegant blue carriages of the Wagons-Lits. The Train Bleu, which ran between Paris, the Côte d'Azur and the Italian frontier was one of the last three surviving sleeping-car services, along with Luxembourg-Nice and Paris-Briançon. Operating at under one quarter capacity, the 40-year-old old sleeping cars have reached the end of the line, said the SNCF, the state railways.

The SNCF is still operating night trains to the Mediterranean and across the frontiers but their beds are  bare couchettes in four or six-berth compartments. These austere fold-down surfaces are better suited to the young and impoverished customers who still favour the trains de nuit. The couchette night trains have become notorious for the thieves who lift passengers' belongings as they sleep.

For my generation and those before, the Wagons-Lits, with their dark blue and gold livery, stood for the romance of travel in Europe. As a student who could only afford couchettes, I used to admire the wagons lits in London Victoria, the Paris Gare de Lyon and other stations, watching their well-dressed passengers boarding them. Grace of Monaco or Cary Grant was certainly among them, or so we imagined. The last remnant of those Orient Express days is the Train Bleu restaurant, the gloriously opulent brasserie on the first floor of the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

A seven-coach train of wagons-lits will still continue to run across Europe. This is the luxuriously renovated Pullmann Orient Express, which takes customers on very expensive nostalgia trips on the old routes from London and Paris to Venice, Budapest and other points east, including occasionally Istanbul.

To end with a personal note, I met my first wife on a night train, in eastern Turkey, when I was a  student.   

[Catherine Deneuve plays French rail nostalgia] 

 

Gaddafi lands in French storm

Muammar Gaddafi is landing about now at Orly airport. But the arrival of the Libyan leader in Paris for the first time since 1973 has already stirred up a hornet's nest. It may even cost the job of Rama Yade, President Sarkozy's young Minister for Human Rights [picture below]. 

Yade, 31, has joined in a chorus of indignation over Sarko's invitation to "The Tyrant of the Desert", as the papers are calling Gaddafi. Everyone is piling joyously into Sarko for conferring the royal treatment on the former international pariah.  The Presidency has erected a huge Bedouin tent for Gaddafi in a garden alongside the Elysée Palace. The Guide, as he likes to be called, has booked himself six fun days in Paris, including meetings with "leading women" and Renault factory workers and outings to the Chateau de Versailles and a spot of mounted fox-hunting. His whims are sending the protocol people spare. The visit was supposed to last three days. Gaddafi announced that he would prefer two weeks. He is now going to leave after five days in and around the French capital.   

There is a strong whiff of humbug  in the outcry from the leftwing opposition and most of the media. France, they note, is a country of high moral principles. After cosying up to Presidents Putin of Russia, Hu Jintao of China, and now Gaddafi, Sarkozy is breaching his election promises to put human rights before business, they say.   

That is all fair game for the opposition, who are happy to forget the shady regimes befriended by the late President Mitterrand and the, shall we say, pragmatic conduct of  foreign policy by all French leaders since Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.

But there has not in my memory been a case of a President coming under such public attack from his own team.

France bends its imminent smoking ban

French smokers are counting down the days. On January 1, the national ban on indoor smoking will be extended to bars, cafés, restaurants, night clubs and the other "places of conviviality". These were given a one-year reprieve last February while smokers got used to the new prohibition on work places and other indoor space.

Can it really be possible that no-one in France will be able to griller une cigarette as they down their apéro at the bar or savour their express after a brasserie meal?. In theory, yes. Smoking will only be allowed in specially ventilated, closed chambers which no staff may enter while in use. Since no service will be available, very few of these have been installed.

But wait. Die-hard smokers -- and there are about 10 million of them -- have now been given hope by Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister. Under pressure from the tobacco lobby and catering industry, she has revised the rules for café and restaurant terraces. Under the previous definition, smoking would be tolerated on out-door terraces only if these were not covered overhead and were open on the front. Under Bachelot's new definition, smoking will be allowed on terraces under awnings and open only on one side. 

This obviously defeats the intent of the law since most people sitting on the terrace will get a dose of smoke and the anti-cigarette lobby are annoyed. It has also had another undesirable consequence: a boom in out-door gas heaters.

Mum Sarko tells Nicolas: No more weddings

It's hard to get away from the Sark-opera when the French first family offers such rich pickings. Yesterday, I spent an instructive couple of hours in the august Palais de Justice of Paris watching Jean Sarkozy, 20, the President's second son, answering charges of fleeing the scene of an accident [story here].

Today Andrée Sarkozy, the no-nonsense First Mother, has gone public with her thoughts on Sarko, Cécilia and les Sarko girls -- the women in the President's administration. She has had enough of daughters-in-law and hopes that her boy will not marry again, she says.

The case of Sarko Junior and what must now be the world's most expensive scooter, offers an amusing lesson in the monarchical ways of the French Republic. There in court was young Jean, chic in a neat grey suit, looking very uncomfortable among the anorak-wearing drug dealers, thieves and other racaille (louts) of the kind Dad wants to purge from la banlieue.

The young Prince (he looks like one) enjoyed judicial concern that the other voyous in the court -- mostly with Muslim names -- could not dream of.

"It wasn't my fault," says Ségolène Royal.

You have to give Ségolène Royal credit for persistence. The Socialist who lost the French presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy is seen by many of her party colleagues these days as an embarrassing loser. Her bumbling, quasi-mystical campaign is the subject of mockery and eye-rolling in the wider political world and media. But now she is back to relaunch her run for the presidency next time round -- in 2012.

Today Ségo, 54, hits back at her many detractors in a book that gives her version of the race. True to form, she writes as if she did not really lose, at least not morally, when she went down in the run-off with 47 percent of the vote to Sarko's 53 percent last May.

Her non-victory, as she depicts it, was the fault of everyone else, especially the party elders who she says set out to sabotage her.

She was also dragged down by François Hollande, her party leader and life-long partner who was having an affair with a journalist. The media were unfair to her because she was a woman and she had nothing like the organisational fire-power of the Sarkozy camp, she says.

The book's title, Ma Plus Belle Histoire, C'est Vous (My most beautiful story is you) is straight from the feel-good, emotional tone of her campaign. It is borrowed form a hit by Barbara, the late singer from whom Royal also lifted one of her more notorious electoral slogans: "Love one-another" (see Barbara video below).

Royal dismisses one by one the charges that she was incompetent, inconsistent, disloyal and slightly dotty with her religious language. "I am neither Joan of Arc nor the Virgin Mary," she writes.

Why France turns a blind eye on race

After the latest bout of ethnic riots, it's worth looking at a curious and very French ruling by the constitutional court that makes a nonsense of the effort to help the unhappy kids on the housing estates.

I wrote ethnic although you will never see the violence described that way in France. This is because of the fiction, laid down in the constitution, that France is an indivisible, colour-blind republic in which all are equal. Officially, no account may be taken of differences based on race. This was reinforced in a 1978 law which "prohibits the collection or treatment of personal data which show, directly or indirectly, racial or ethnic origin."

So France is one of the few developed nations which does not ask for ethnic origin in the national census. There are no reliable statistics that can be used to measure discrimination or gauge diversity in education and the work place.

Researchers and some anti-racism campaigners have been trying to abolish this taboo, or at least circumvent it, on the grounds that a yardstick is needed to measure discrimination before it can be remedied. Everyone knows that France's minority of black and Maghrebin origin -- the majority on the troubled estates -- face big obstacles in education and employment.

[picture: children at a high school in Villiers-le-Bel, scene of last week's riots]