Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Sarkozy insult returns as French rap hit

You might remember the singer who made a splash by setting to music the "come back" text message that Nicolas Sarkozy may have sent to Cécilia, his ex-wife. Now a young musician from Lorraine has scored with a video in which he raps to Sarko's notorious insult: Casse Toi Pauvre Con

The President used the line in February to put down a man who refused to shake his hand at the Paris agriculture show. We had an argument here about the English equivalent, which is something like "Piss off, jerk" or "Get lost, wanker".

Sarko would prefer to forget it, but his flash of unpresidential temper became one of the milestones of his first year. As well as being repeated often on television, it has been watched over five million times on video sites.

This spoof song, by a 25-year-old video technician who uses the name Tum Sally, is crude, but it has created such a buzz that the mainstream media have picked it up and a Paris record label his given him a contract.

French teachers strike again

We're enduring another day of the old French civil war today. About 45 percent of the country's 800,000 state school teachers have gone on strike, along with a smaller proportion of the five million civil service. Tens of thousands of high-school pupils are out marching with them [picture is from Nantes this afternoon].

This means that millions of parents have once again been forced to find someone to take care of their kids so they can go to work. Town councils allied to the government are offering basic supervision at schools but the majority with leftwing mayors -- including Paris -- are refusing to do so. Providing this minimum service amounts to strike-breaking, they say.

The cause of the "mobilisation", as the strikers and media call the stoppage, is the noble one of defending public service. President Sarkozy is accused of dismantling France's cherished services with cuts to teaching staff and civil service posts. Schools are to lose 11,000 teaching posts in the autumn. One in three civil servants is not being replaced on retirement from this year.

The classic battle lines have been drawn up. From the moral high ground, the left applauds resistance to the destruction of the national heritage and depicts its opponents as stooges of a brutal rightwing Government. Those on the other side, branded "rightwing" by the left, lament the obstructive, conservative reflexes of the state functionaries.

France elected Super Sarko to perform a radical cure a year ago, but on days like this you get the impression that nothing has changed.

Chatting up the revolution, French style

 

We saw the other day that the French Socialists, the main opposition party, are giving up their hope for revolution. But don't throw away the red flag yet. The past couple of days have seen the consecration of a new hero who has won millions of fans with his struggle to overthrow capitalism.

The star of the moment is Olivier Besancenot, the baby-faced Trotskyite who scored over four percent of the vote in last year's presidential election. Besancenot, 34, who works as a postman in the rich suburb of Neuilly, has made news with an appearance on French television's most consensual talk show, Vivement Dimanche. This is a Sunday ritual in which Michel Drucker, the dean of celebrity interviewers, sketches the life of his guest with soft questions and the help of musicians and friends of the subject. The media fuss was prompted by the supposed incongruity of the cosy talk host inviting a fire-breathing Trotskyite onto his red sofa for the ritual three-hour chat [video below]. 

In reality, there was nothing surprising. As we have noted here before, Besancenot is quite a standard French product: the loveable revolutionary. He was not even the first popular Trotskyite to be invited by Drucker. Arlette Laguiller, his grandmotherly rival, made it onto the show a decade ago. 

France enjoys the lazy, hazy days of May.

It feels like an August weekend in Paris today. The sun is blazing, as it has for the past week. The streets are largely empty except for tourists. Much of France is enjoying a fifth successive day off work.

President Sarkozy may preach the doctrine of "working more to earn more", but his country has seized the chance to enjoy what the headline in le Parisien newspaper called "Five days of happiness".  The long spring break has been made possible by the lucky timing of two public holidays for the nation that already enjoys more vacation days than any other. Last Thursday, May 8, was the holiday marking victory in World War Two and today is Pentecost (Whitsun in Britain). Friday was supposed to be a working day but schools in the Paris area and many other regions stayed shut  -- so people took the day off, enjoying what is known as le pont, or bridge.

Many even managed nearly 10 days because there was another unofficial pont on Friday May 2, after the May Day holiday fell on a Thursday. Half of France either took that Friday or last Friday or both, according to a poll.

Sarkozy revises the last war

World War Two ended 63 years ago but it sometimes seems that Nicolas Sarkozy does not want France to emerge from its shadow. The President used Thursday's celebration of victory day to try once again to revise the history of France's four-year occupation by the Nazis.

Sarko went to the spot on the Normandy coast where 177 French commandos landed with British forces on D-Day to celebrate what he said was the true story of France's war. "Real France was not at Vichy. It was not collaborating," said the President. "Real France, eternal France, had the voice of General de Gaulle. Its face was that of the resistance." 

"We are not celebrating a military victory, we are above all celebrating a moral victory," he added, with military flags snapping in the breeze on the landing beach at Ouistreham.

Sarko's speech at his first VE day ceremony was in line with his doctrine that France as a nation has no guilt to bear over the years when the puppet government based at Vichy collaborated with the Nazis and sent thousands of Jews to their deaths. France must shed its "culture of repentance", Sarkozy argued in his election campaign last year. "France never committed a crime against humanity" during the occupation, he said.

Sarko wants to restore the healing fiction that was adopted by de Gaulle in the aftermath of war and followed by every president until Jacques Chirac in 1995.This held that "real France" resisted the occupation and that the Vichy state was a criminal aberration. That's why there has been such a fuss over the current Paris exhibition of wartime photography, including on this blog.

French "news babe" gets married

One of the most popular posts on this blog featured Melissa Theuriau, the French television journalist whose good looks turned her into a global internet celebrity. So I feel it my duty to advise her fans that they may wish to adjust their fantasies. She got married yesterday.    

Theuriau, 29, who hosts a weekly news programme on the M6 channel, wed Jamel Debbouze, 33, a popular comedian-producer. in a village south of Versailles. They flew with showbusiness guests to Morocco to continue the party in Marrakesh.

Debbouze, the pint-sized French-Moroccan star of two Astérix films, Amélie and other hits, is by far the greater celebrity in France. Theuriau is barely a household name, but abroad the union will disappoint the multitude who have swooned over videos of her since she achieved cyber-fame.

"The beautiful French news anchor" as she is known to her American admirers, rocketed to celebrity after clips of her turned up on Youtube. She was not doing anything risqué, simply reading routine items on the pre-dawn news on the LCI cable channel.  Her "perfect beauty" won her the title of "TV's sexiest news anchor" in the online edition of the US Maxim magazine. The feat was impressive given that she was running against America's TV superstars and readers would have understood little that she said. Melissa-mania has led millions to click on her 150 videos on Youtube and she features on countless screensavers.

Theuriau, from Grenoble, has sought to retain an image as a serious journalist as host of "Forbidden Zone", her investigative show. She also presents "Two or three days with me", an M6 programme in which she invites a celebrity to visit a favourite city. In January, Gérard Depardieu broadcast with here from Tel Aviv.

Laments on the internet over her marriage have focused on her choice of groom. Debbouze, a subversive comedian from the ethnic estates (projects), plays the underdog. He is helped by his disadvantaged physique, which includes a paralysed arm. "With all the hot guys there are in France, she had to fall for this clown," Jorge, a reader grumbled on one celebrity site. "She wouldn't look at him if he wasn't loaded with money."

French state decorates Kylie Minogue, culture star

In the picture, you see the French Minister of Culture awarding a top state honour to an illustrious artist for high achievement and for enhancing the reach of the French creative arts. That's right, the decoration is being pinned on Kylie Minogue, the Australian pop singer.

The ceremony yesterday at the Ministry's headquarters in the sublime Palais Royal, beside the Louvre, is not as odd as it seems. Official France has long taken a paradoxical approach to "Anglo-Saxon" pop culture. It spends hundreds of millions of euros a year promoting the Gallic arts against the "commercial steamroller" of English-language entertainment. At the same time, it confers high-brow status on Anglo-Saxon stars and showers them with honours.

A stop by the Ministry of Culture, or even the Presidential Palace, has become almost routine for big names from Hollywood and showbiz when they drop into Paris or the Cannes festival. This is not a product  of the arrival last year of Nicolas Sarkozy, the pro-American President who prides himself on his friendship with Tom Cruise. It began around 1983, when the Socialist administration of François Mitterrand awarded Jerry Lewis, the comic, the Légion d'Honneur.

Hope for Sarkozy in Year Two

A year ago tomorrow France elected Nicolas Sarkozy as the sixth president of its modern republic. No-one is in the mood for celebration given that Super Sarko the would-be saviour is now wallowing in lower public esteem than any of his five predecessors.

We know what went wrong and we've seen Sarko's attempt to make amends on TV 10 days ago but it's worth noting that things are not as bleak as they seem.

It's easy to make the prosecution case over the crash of the reformer who promised une rupture with France's stagnant society. The left-leaning media are full of it today, led by Libération with the front page above. All hubris and narcissism, Sarko betrayed the trust of France from the day of his election, writes Laurent Joffrin, Libé's Editor and bête-noire of the president. "As promised la rupture took place: it was une rupture with the French people."

Le Monde has devoted a whole supplement this afternoon to France's "disenchantment" with its "impossible president". "After arriving in the Elysée palace with more trump cards than most of his predecessors, the head of state wasted them with as much energy as he had spent winning them," it says.

Sarkozy certainly committed glaring errors -- mainly with his gaudy, self-indulgent style and the soap opera of his private life.

France revels in nostalgia for magic May '68

It is a little sad, but inevitable, that France's last revolt in the name of liberty should be reduced to a tin of expensive tea. Here it is, "May 68 -- a tea with the flavour of revolution" from Fauchon, the most luxurious food store in Paris

Forty years ago this weekend, the students of the Sorbonne university staged their joyous insurrection on the Paris Left Bank. Their carnival of slogans and barricades helped trigger the country's biggest general strike and briefly rattled the government of President Charles de Gaulle. The confused rebellion soon fizzled but "the events of May '68" marked a middle-class generation. Since they were the baby-boomers, no-one is allowed to forget it.

Now passing on power to their juniors, la génération de soixante-huit are enjoying a last hurrah, an orgy of nostalgia for the glorious upheaval in which, for a moment, it seemed they could remake the world. They may have given up Fidel Castro for Fauchon, but they are proud of their youthful ideals.