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Until lately, France's luxury brands were claiming relative immunity from the slump that has hit purveyors of more common goods. Demand for the high end was holding up, driven by the nouveaux riches of Russia, China and other emerging powers, they said.
The denial has faded over the past month, as the now suffering Russians and Asians have stayed away from the boutiques of the Paris Golden triangle and from the luxury districts of London and New York. French luxury business in Japan has positively slumped.
LVMH, the biggest luxe conglomerate, has just cancelled a plan for a huge Louis Vuitton megastore in Tokyo's Ginza district. Profits in the 170 billion euro world luxury market are still expected to be substantial this year but LVMH has lost 44 percent of its share value in 2008. Richemont, the Swiss owner of Cartier and Montblanc, has suffered a similar share slide.
The latest signs of trouble have come from Chanel, one of the grandest of fashion names. A week ago, the firm, which is privately owned and secretive about its affairs, called off a glitzy travelling art show as it was about to arrive in London from New York. Now we hear that Chanel is to lay off 200 of its French staff.
Over the weekend, the house unions reported that the firm is dismissing all of its 200 personnel who are on fixed-term or temporary work contracts. Sixteen of them work in the firm's historic home in the rue Cambon where the late Coco Chanel dreamt up her little black dresses and No 5 perfume in the 1920s. The company employs 16,000 worldwide. "In the little world of luxury goods, the news has had the impact of a bombshell," said le Parisien.
By coincidence, French television is tonight showing the first part of an Italian-American miniseries on the life of the pioneering Paris couturière. Shirley MacLaine plays the older Chanel. Coco Chanel is suddenly movie material. Two other new biopics -- one starring Audrey Tatou -- are to reach cinemas in coming months. [picture Audrey Tautou in forthcoming Coco before Chanel]
The trouble at Chanel is mirrored across a French-led luxury industry which enjoyed an historic boom with sales growth of about 10 percent a year since 2003. The experts are predicting about a four percent decline in sales in 2009. Not everyone is suffering to the same degree. Swiss watchmakers have been hardest hit while Hermès, the Paris leather goods and silk-square firm, has seen its share price rise by nearly 16 percent this year and it expects about a 10 percent sales growth.
Most of the leaders of les marques de grand luxe say that they are sanguine about what they hope will be a soft landing. But some in the trade believe that times will be hard after a decade in which greed and easy money led to hubris. That's the view of Alain Nemarq, Chairman of Mauboussin, a Place Vendôme jewellery firm which has taken the risk of diluting its exclusive image by offering lower priced items.
The luxury world had gone wild in pursuit of the idea that nothing could be too expensive and no profit margin too exorbitant, Nemarq wrote in le Figaro. Some firms had been ticketing their goods at ten times the cost price he said. "It is the end of the rapture, the crash of the hubris...The pursuit of exclusive trophies... is finished. We will now return to reason, decency and discretion."
While much of the industry believes that the key to survival lies in maintaining exclusivity, Mauboussin has created a stir by reaching for a wider market, opening new, less expensive, shops, in Manhattan and Tokyo. "Let us resolutely drop our profit margins and offer affordable luxury products," said Nemarq. The alternative would be fire sales and empty shops, he predicted.
It's hard not to see his point. In my ignorance, I am still reeling from the price of the standard Burberry scarf that my daughter requested for her 15th birthday last month (don't ask).
 It's been a good Christmas week in Paris, with freezing weather but sunshine every day. Shops and restaurants have been doing roaring trade and just about everywhere is booked up for the New Year's celebrations.
President Sarkozy will be back from his beach holiday in Brazil to deliver his seasonal pep talk on Wednesday night. He aims to look on the bright side -- or positiver, to use the vogue word.
Sarko is said to be telling colleagues that he is worried about the impact of recession on the national mood. He thinks that fast-rising unemployment -- especially among the already very under-employed young -- could trigger one of the uprisings that punctuate French history. "La France n'est pas fragile mais elle est éruptive," Sarko told visitors the other day -- France is not fragile, but it has a tendency to erupt. Fear of protesters explained his retreat a couple of weeks ago over Sunday shop opening and on a promised high-school reform.
As we've often noted here, it's always hard to gauge France's mood because the default mode is pessimism, whatever is going on in the economy. France has believed itself to be en crise for the four decades that I have known it. The news media do not help. Over Christmas the top domestic story was the accidental death in hospital of a three-year-old boy. Close behind was the suicide of a teacher in her school and a sleeping pill overdose by a former minister who was France's first woman astronaut. The need to sound gloomy, at least in public, is just part of the national character. Where else would a performer make a good career with a name like Grand Corps Malade -- literally big sick body? That's the nom de scène used by Fabien Marsaud, a 31-year-old slam music star (picture above). A clinical-sounding word is used to convey the obsession with looking at the dark side -- la sinistrose, or sinistrosis.
There will no doubt be a lot of groans if Sarkozy sounds too up-beat on New Year's Eve. France is not yet officially in recession, but it is entering what is expected to be the worst one since at least 1993, according to the experts. Yet, as we've seen here recently, there are quite a few factors that suggest that the slump will not hit France as hard as other places.
One is France's failure in the past decade to capitalise, like Britain, Spain and elsewhere, on the boom in banking, financial services and real estate. Another is the much-decried and very expensive welfare state.
Elie Cohen, a prominent economist, looked on the bright side in le Parisien on Friday: "As a country with little economic specialisation and average growth, France is drawing benefit from its past failing. Add to that the fact that we have a state that redistributes wealth and which is acting as a formidable shock-absorber. We are rolling quite well with the punches."
Just listening to the middle class chatter in Paris, you hear grumbling but it's clear that people are not hurting as much as they are in Britain, Spain, Ireland, or the USA. The property boom arrived relatively late and France still has a relatively low level of home ownership. People put fewer savings in the stock market and they do not live on credit to anything like the degree of the US or Britain. I don't know anyone who has taken out a second mortgage on their flat or house.
And the French save much more of their income than the European average. In recent years they have been putting aside 15 percent, in third place after the Germans and Italians, at 16.5 and 15.8 percent. The Spanish save only 10.6 percent and the British 5.5 percent.
These are just a few elements and many point the other way -- such as France's high national debt and budget deficit compared with Germany. But Sarkozy will be entitled to sound a positive note on Wednesday.
If you want to turn heads with your wheels in Paris you don't have to splash out on a flashy car. Lately I've noticed people drawing looks when they ride by on new Solex bikes.
For those who weren't around France before the 1990s, the Solex was a funny little motorised cycle that enjoyed immense popularity as cheap transport. Its quirkiest feature was the little petrol engine perched above the front wheel. When it was engaged, a disk on the motor rubbed against the bike wheel, giving it power. They made a noisy buzz while proceeding at a few miles per hour.
The Solex, affectionately known as the Soufflex (roughly puffer), was a symbol of the post-war era like the 2CV Citroen or the bulbous Orangina bottle. To use the usual cliché, it was a true Gallic icon. It was ridden by rural shop-keepers and Paris students and it featured in films with Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve [picture below] and Jacques Tati. Steve McQueen rode one when he was in France making Le Mans in 1971 [picture]. Between 1946 and 1988 Solex sold more than eight million of the "bicycle that goes by itself," as its 1960s adverts called it.
Like the Citroen, the Solex continued to have loyal fans -- in Holland, Belgium and Italy as well as France (Popular Solex site). But attempts to revive it failed until a couple of years ago. In early 2006, Jean-Pierre Bansard, a Paris businessman, started producing an electric version. He bought the brand name back from a Fiat subsidiary and made the most of a nostalgia-laden marque that is recognised by 98 percent of the French. Pininfarina, the Italian design firm that does Ferraris, was recruited to re-invent the Solex as retro transport for hip town-dwellers.
They have sold 4,000 so far -- which is not much compared with the explosion of scooter sales in French cities over the past few years. But they are hoping to catch the green tide with an improved model and they aim to double sales in 2009. The e-Solex is made in China but it is stylish. Its performance is much closer to a power-assisted pedal bike than the noisy scooters that have invaded Paris streets and sidewalks. It won't go above 35 kph (22mph) -- about the same as the original Solex -- and the charge on its removable battery lasts for about 90 minutes.
They have kept the old Solex look with the cylindrical tank over the front wheel although it is now a just a storage container. The motor is in the rear wheel hub. The e-Solex is not cheap, at 1,500 euros for the new model. It also has a disadvantage in being deemed a motor vehicle, so it has to be registered and insured -- unlike the original, which was officially just a bicycle. You have to wear a helmet but but you don't need a licence and they can be ridden from the age of 14.
The new Solex was criticised by the WWF earlier this month as something of a green sham since its production in a Chinese factory and shipment to France invalidate its zero carbon claims. But it looks very stylish and, unlike those unpleasant scooters, it draws smiles when it glides past. You can rent them from Europcar in Paris.
Footnote: A modernised replica of the original petrol-engined Solex has been assembled in northern France for the past three years. It's sold under the name of Black 'n Roll. It's marketed in the USA with the name Velosolex.
[Below: original Solex and e-Solex]
 
This could be a picture of any tropical island, but it's one with a terrifying past. l'Ile du Diable -- Devil's Island -- is the loneliest part of the South American penal colony to which France sent convicts for a century.
I took the picture at lunch yesterday on Ile Royale, one of the two other Salvation Islands eight miles off French Guiana. The fish and wine were excellent and the place is beautiful but it was hard to escape the mournful mood of islands where thousands of men laboured, mouldered and, in many cases, died.
We were dining at the neat stone building -- now an inn -- that was the officer's mess on Royale, the island that was used for administering this corner of "the green hell". That's what prisoners called le bagne -- the penal settlements that included Cayenne, the capital, Kourou and points inland. Down the hill was the quay where the commandant greeted new prison boats with the warning that "no-one escapes from the Salvation Islands."
The last convict left only 60 years ago but the solitary confinement cells, guards' houses and acres of force-labour stonework are still there. Rusting bolts and fetters still hang from some walls. Some of the buildings are restored but much of it is overgrown by the vegetation which is home to squirrel monkeys and agoutis, rabbit-sized rodents with orange bottoms.
There is a cemetery where personnel and their families were buried but no inmates' graves because when they died -- of disease, exhaustion or executed on the guillotine -- their corpses were just thrown to the sharks. The fish were alerted by the tolling bell at the little stone chapel, according to Henri Charrière, the prisoner known as Papillon, who wrote a fanciful memoir of his time here in the 1930s and 40s.
As brutal as they were, thanks to books and films, the triangle of little islands known in English collectively as Devil's Island stirs a bit of romance for the "Anglo-Saxon" world. The most recent film was the 1973 Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. It was largely shot on Caribbean islands and was even more fictional than Charrière's highly embroidered tale. Papillon never escaped from the islands in a home-made boat as he claimed. He just walked out of a semi-open jail in Cayenne in the wartime chaos of 1944.
 [cell on Royale]
For the French, le bagne still stirs a chill -- as memories of the cruel British 18th and 19th century deportations still do in parts of Australia. Locals say the French got the idea from the British colony of New South Wales. The most famous of its victims was Alfred Dreyfus. The Jewish army captain who was wrongly convicted of spying for the Germans, spent nearly five years in the late 1890s as the lone prisoner on Devil's island. The smallest island was kept for a handful of celebrated or political offenders. A dozen guards kept a permanent eye on Dreyfus. In a cruel touch, they built a wall around his house so he could not see the sea. The building is in the picture above but now overgrown. In the days of the bagne, the convicts were made to clear all trees, leaving the islands barren. Dreyfus's letters to his family make sad reading in the little museum.
Serge Colin, who guided us around Ile Royale, ran through the horrors of the islands in matter-of-fact way, reeling off statistics on the 75,000 prisoners who were shipped off to the Guiana prisons from 1863 to the late 1940s. No more than 30,000 survived. "Many were just the kind of small-time repeat offenders with whom President Sarkozy is so tough," said Colin.
The islands lie low on the horizon when you set out for them by boat from Kourou. They belong to the French space authority, which fires its satellite launchers from the mainland. We were taken there on a catamaran by our hosts from the Arianespace firm (watch not very great video of our arrival here). A poster at the dock says: Venez vivre vos vacances aux îles du Salut -- come and spend your holidays at the Salvation Islands.
 [Picture: Sailing towards the islands. The boy is a Swiss 12-year-old who won a competition with first prize a trip to watch the Ariane launch.]
A small number of tourists visit and some stay over, camping and at the inn on Royale. US cruise liners put passengers ashore on quick visits. They are usually taken by sea for a look at Devil's Island, which is closed to all visitors. It's hard to imagine such a haunted place ever becoming a holiday resort.
[Below: At the island, members of the Paris fire brigade who are stationed on the space range. Not exactly hard labour]
[Update: here's my related story on Ariane launch Saturday night]
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It's difficult to avoid describing the scene this morning without thinking of clichés from James Bond films. The sun was beating down on the equatorial jungle when we emerged by the Atlantic Ocean and came across a new Russian space base. Towers and cranes loomed over a launch-pad for Soyuz rockets, exactly the type that took the first Soviet cosmonauts into space all those decades ago.
And adding to the atmosphere, the Russians were labouring away a few miles from the dreaded Devil's island and the rest of the pestilential penal colony off Guiana where, for a century, France sent its prisoners to be broken.
But this wasn't the cold war or the secret lair of SPECTRE. The Russians are the latest addition to an extraordinary European success story. The 100-strong team of engineers from the Baikonur space base in Central Asia are here to build and operate their rockets to reinforce the French-run outfit that has become the world's leading launcher of commercial satellites.
Sometimes it's healthy to get a little perspective away from Paris. I'm 4,500 miles away but still in France, at least technically. I am in French Guiana, on the northeast side of Brazil, to watch the latest launch of an Ariane 5 [Picture above and launch below]. This is the 20-storey tall rocket which deposits bus-sized satellites in stationary orbit half a dozen times a year (That's Ariane waiting for launch in the picture). The project, which France began in the mid-1970s, has benefited from persistence, skill and good luck to overtake the Americans and Russians in the business of commercial space launching. Now, 185 flights since the first small Ariane, they have bought Russian service. A dozen Soyuz rockets -- smaller than the French heavy lifter -- will hoist television, internet and communications satellites into orbit from the French base.
This is all done from a site of a few dozen square miles carved out of the jungle swamps at Kourou, north of Cayenne, the Guiana capital.
Continue reading "Reaching for space from French jungle" »
The European Parliament has just voted to end Britain's exemption from the maximum 48-hour working week. The usual horse-trading with member governments should water this down, but on this side of the Channel they are wondering why Britain bothers. France is reversing a question that has long come from Britain: Vous n'avez toujours pas pigé? -- haven't you got it yet?
Since the early 1980s, les Anglais have been lecturing Europe on the virtue of hard work as the path to prosperity. While the grasshopper French were awarding themselves a 35-hour week in the 1990s, the British fought for the right to sweat away in the name of competing with emerging the ants of Asia. Britain has closely guarded its 1993 opt-out from the EU's working-time directive which set the maximum at 48 hours. France's short week, which is applied to most wage-earners, has kept incomes lower but enabled people to enjoy non-working life more.
Now the shoe has switched foot. There is no French word for schadenfreude but there is a lot of it around. No-one is saying "we told you so" too openly, yet it is impossible to escape the smugness over the failure of the virtuous modèle Anglo-Saxon. The media are regaling us with tales of misery in Britain, from the collapse of Woolworths to the plight of the unemployed legions of the City. This morning a radio network featured a Sunday Times investigation that exposed allegedly Dickensian practises at Amazon UK, where employees work seven days a week and are fined for sick leave. "Even working like that, they still don't make it," said the commentator.
Of course France is suffering from the slump too. Lay-offs are multiplying, money is tight and the housing market is in retreat. But the pain is nowhere near as bad as in Britain and the United States. America's slide began with the dollar a couple of years ago, but the belittling of Britain has come as a shock.
British prosperity, flaunted by pound-rich house buyers and Eurostar weekenders, was until lately the envy of stuck-in-the-mud France even if people sneered that it came with Victorian working conditions and stone-age services. Only last year, Nicolas Sarkozy won election on the slogan "Work more to earn more". He also encouraged people to retire later. That seems a long time ago.
Since even George Bush has now temporarily abandoned the free market, "Sarko l'Américain" has switched camps and has started talking like a lefty. On Monday, he dumped a long-standing promise to allow Sunday opening for all shops.
Seen from Paris, there is little to be gained from emulating les Anglo-Saxons and their brilliant institutions if it ends in tears. The Gallic model was right all along, or so it seems to many in France. You can actually have your butter and keep the money for the butter -- French for the cake-eating concept. Super-Sarko has been rubbing it in, pointing sorrowfully across the Channel and saying that he would never give up a manufacturing industry in favour of financial services.
France has been profligate. It has piled up national debt and keeps a heavy trade deficit. Labour taxes are extraordinarily high, even by European standards, and red tape stifles entrepreneurs. But it has been helped by the conservative institutions and attitudes that looked so old-fashioned to the outside world. It has especially been protected by the strong euro -- albeit kept that way with the help of German austerity.
Against all the prevailing doctrines, France resisted investment-funded pensions, kept its big car industry, its generous welfare state, its 80 percent nuclear-generated electricity and expensive high-speed trains. And it has managed this while working the world's shortest week. Writing as a new-poor Brit in Paris, there may be a lesson here, or perhaps this is just another exception française.
Two items in a row about nudity are pure coincidence. This one is in the name of art.
Paris has just witnessed an odd demonstration. The life models who pose at the city's beaux arts schools went on strike and, despite freezing temperatures, demonstrated nude outside the municipal culture department [picture].
The 15 models, supported by teachers and trade union officials, were protesting against the end of the tradition of le cornet -- a rolled up paper in which generations of students have left a tip after their session. They are also demanding official recognition of a craft which they say is central to European art, with its devotion to the human form.
"We are as important as the teacher and the painter because without us they could not teach or paint," said Salvatori, one of the protesters. "Without Gabrielle, who would Renoir have been?. (Gabrielle Renard, the nanny of the child Jean Renoir, was father Auguste's favourite model)
Marianne, 50, another demonstrator, ran through a list of celebrated models who were their artist's muses. These included Lee Miller, who inspired Man Ray and Picasso, and Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray's companion and model, as well as Dina Vierny, the muse of Aristide Maillol, the sculptor ( Vierny, a fascinating woman, is still very much alive at the age of 89. I interviewed her a few years ago).
Although there are no qualifications for becoming a model at the ateliers (studios) of the Beaux Arts, most of them have studied art or dance. About 30 work full-time and 60 more part time. They are paid the minimum wage for the hours worked but with no benefits like holidays and special retirement funds. They say they can't manage without the tips, which added up to 20-30 euros after a three-hour session.
Christophe Girard, Deputy-Mayor in charge of culture, was sympathetic to the demonstrators, who put their clothes back on to talk to him. The city banned the tips because students were complaining and because it's against French law to tip public servants, which is what the models technically are. Girard was nevertheless sympathetic to their cause and promised to seek a ruling from Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, on a statute for them. The Deputy Mayor was himself once a model. He posed for pocket money when he was an art student in Angers.
[picture: Henri Matisse at work]
As if to underline the importance of the models, a show called "Figures of the body, an anatomy lesson at the Beaux Arts" has just opened at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts," the top fine arts school.
Le Figaro wondered this morning: Without the models what would be left of what we admire here: the drawings and engravings of Leonardo, Durer, Géricault.. the sculptures and mouldings of Michael Angelo. Without getting on to the photographs. Just white pages?
Footnote: Artists have always painted from the life in Europe. But 19th century modesty required women to drape their faces when they posed nude. European arts academies did not allow women to study the nude until the early 20th century.
The Sarkozys have taken to the law-courts again. The President failed to get a judge to ban a voodoo doll in his image last month. Today, Carla Bruni's lawyers were in court in the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion demanding heavy damages against a firm that put her naked likeness on a bag.
Madame Sarkozy is seeking 50,000 euros for the "moral offence" and a further 75,000 euros in damages to her professional image as a model-singer. Pardon, a beach-wear firm, took the liberty of printing a drawing of a well-known nude portrait of France's Première Dame on its jokey three-euro cloth bag. A speech bubble had her saying: "My guy should have bought me Pardon."
The firm, which specialises in provocation and has a couple of outlets in France and on the internet, took fright and promised to burn all 10,000 of the offending bags, but that was not enough for Bruni's lawyers. A court hearing went ahead in Saint-Denis, the Reunion capital, and a verdict is due on Thursday.
Pardon should have known better. Bruni and Sarko are quick to sue when someone attempts to cash in on their images. Bruni won 60,000 euros a few months ago after a successful prosecution of Ryanair for putting the couple in an advert (She gave the money to charity, she says). That was for damages to her professional image. The court awarded only one euro for the alleged moral damage that it had caused her.
The lawyer for the clothes firm told the court that "no-one recognised Carla Bruni in the drawing on the bag." He also wondered why Madame Sarkozy had not sued Christie's auction house in New York for selling the original 1993 nude photograph last April on behalf of the photographer, Michel Comte. The picture, taken for an Aids awareness campaign, went to a Chinese collector for 91,000 dollars -- twenty times more than its pre-sale estimate.
President Sarkozy, a lawyer by profession, has turned out to be by far the most litigious head of state in modern French history. His predecessors kept a regal distance above abuses of their image -- though, like François Mitterrand, they sometimes resorted to dirtier means of revenge than the courts.
What words do the French find the most reassuring in this winter of economic doom? It's not Sarkozy, Santa Claus or Social Security. It's Barack Obama.
This comes from a survey on the language of crisis performed by the Médiascopie institute at the request of Euro RSCG, the advertising firm. And before any Americans get too smug, the word that most frightens the French is Bush.
Bernard Sananes the head of Euro RSCG, C&O division, said he had the idea of sounding out the impact of words after realising that the financial and economic slide did not have a human face. Médiascopie drew up a list of 100 expressions and names that have been used most frequently with reference to the crisis in the media, including the internet. They asked a sample of 200 people to rate the words on two scales: worrying/reassuring and local/global.
The incoming US President scored highest in reassuring and global. That shows the expectations awaiting Obama. I would guess that the French response represents general European feeling. George Bush scored top in worrying and global, reflecting the irrevocable demonisation that he underwent with the Iraq invasion of 2003 and its aftermath. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's own leader, came only mid-way on the worry/reassurance axis.
As might be expected in France, the state is deemed very reassuring but what is surprising is the return to favour of Europe. For about 15 years, the Union has been a scapegoat, taking the blame for everything that is wrong, including rampant capitalism. Sarkozy is being given credit for the reversal with his energetic conduct of his six month turn in in the EU Presidency. The single currency, long seen as negative, gets credit for holding up so well while the pound and the dollar have gone south. "The crisis has brought the French closer to the euro and Europe as well as to Nicolas Sarkozy," said Sananes. The winners are....
The most worrying:
Bush
job redundancy
market crash
madness of the financial world
financial tsunami
subprimes,
traders,
virus of crisis,
golden parachutes
toxic products,
contamination
The most reassuring:
Obama
Europe
the euro
livret A (state-regulated standard savings account)
moralisation of the economy
transparent transactions
protection
state intervention
stimulus plan
European Central Bank
The most global:
World governance
new world financial order (a goal of Sarkozy)
International Monetary Fund
Closest to home:
Livret A
French savings
Nicolas Sarkozy
state guarantee
the real economy
rigour (which corresponds to austerity in English)
nationalisation
While Nicolas Sarkozy has been off sorting out Europe for the past couple of days, le microcosme -- the Paris political and media world -- has been chattering about another subject: his trouble with women.
When he was elected, Sarko appointed 13 female ministers. Three of them caused a splash because of their exotic origins, beauty or leftwing origins. None had political experience. These are Rachida Dati, 43, the Justice Minister, whose working class parents came from Algeria and Morocco; Rama Yade, 32, the Senegalese-born junior Minister for Human Rights, and Fadela Amara, 44, the Minister for the Inner City.
Amara, a tough-talking activist of north African back-ground, has failed to make a mark in the rightwing government. But Sarkozy's problem stems from the two glamorous protegées. Dati has been a disaster in her senior and sensitive post and Yade has committed repeated insubordination. The two icons of Sarkozy's "rainbow cabinet" are in disgrace yet he has proved unable to sack or transfer them.
[picture above: the pair at Windsor on Sarkozy's visit to the Queen last March].
So we have another chance to examine the President's well-known Achilles heel. Super Sarko may be an alpha male chief executive but he is putty in the hands of women. The point was made a couple of years ago by Simone Veil, the political grande dame who legalised abortion in the 1970s. "In the presence of women, Nicolas is a child," she said.
Yade, who was a civil servant before her elevation, has repeatedly spoken out of turn yet each time she has been forgiven. She has just refused an order from Sarkozy to leave her post to lead his UMP party in the European Parliament. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, humiliated her in public on Wednesday, saying that it had been a mistake to create the Human rights post. He spoke of her unpleasantly in the past tense.
Yade's biggest public gaffe was condemning Sarkozy's invitation to Muammar Gadaffi to visit Paris. The Libyan leader "must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can wipe the blood of his crimes," said Yade.
Yade [left] has also taken a few swipes at her rival favourite at the royal court. She recently put down Dati, saying that she "is only interested in dresses and parties."
Dati, who previously worked on Sarkozy's staff, has offended just about everyone. She has infuriated judges, prison guards and lawyers with the ruthless way that she has imposed reforms. Once adored, she has become a figure of media mockery for her blunders, her high spending on designer clothes and official jets and her delusions of grandeur.
When Barack Obama won the presidency, she commanded the French embassy in Washington to get his mobile number so she could phone him. The Elysée ordered her to calm down. Sarkozy has put Dati under political house arrest and banned her from the media.
On Thursday he was incandescent after she was said by Le Point, a respectable news weekly, to have boasted that she was unsackable because she knew about past political corruption involving Sarkozy. Dati has denied this in an angry letter to the magazine (here)
The unmarried Dati has two strong cards. She is the star symbol of the ethnic diversity upon which Sarkozy places great store. She is also expecting a baby in February. She has refused to name the father and says that she plans only brief maternity leave. Sacking or demoting the new mother would not look good. (Guessing the father has been a Paris parlour game for the past few months.)
The President's need for the favour of strong women is a constant in his biography. The trait can be tracked from his fatherless up-bringing by a formidable mother through to his dependence on Cecilia, the wife who left him in pieces last year and his lightning remariage to Carla Bruni last February.
It can also explain his fraught relations with Angela Merkel. The reserved German Chancellor is cold to Sarkozy's compulsion to dominate through charm.
In Temoignage (Testimony), a hastily written pre-election memoir, Sarkozy wrote in gushing teerms of of his admiration for women and the need, when dealing with them, to "dare to say sensitive things without being sentimental". He added: "Women generate drive in their own way. They have their own ways of thinking and acting."
Yazmina Reza, the playright who followed Sarkozy throughout his campaign, depicted him as both a bully and a little boy eager to please. Isabelle Balkany, a Paris suburban politician and friend, describes him as "un séducteur -- a seducer or a charmer -- whom it is hard for a woman to resist."
Sarkozy finds it hard to say no to women or incur their displeasure, according to those who know him. "This is the case even when they go beyond the limits in the eyes of most other people," said Caroline Derrien and Candide Nedelec, authors of Sarkozy et les femmes: Un homme sous influence (Sarkozy and women: a man under the influence). The pair describe the President as a "like a big self-centred teenager who is very proud of his political and private conquests".
The latest influence is the supermodel-singer whom he married in February. Bruni, who hails from rich artistic circles, has swayed the authoritarian president towards her leftwing thinking. She persuaded him to cancel the extradition to Italy of an alleged former terrorist last month and she encouraged him to slap down Dati last week when she proposed locking up 12-year-old delinquents.
Dati's fall from grace is dated to Sarkozy's romance with Bruni last winter. In a widely reported incident, Bruni is said to have teased Dati one evening as they walked past the Presidential bedroom in the palace. "You would have liked to be there wouldn't you," Bruni said. That tale sounded far-fetched when it came out in a book earlier this year, but I have heard from good sources that it was true.
President Sarkozy is chairing his last summit as temporary boss of the European Union today. The story in France is Sarko's struggle to get a reluctant Germany to spend more on relaunching the EU economy and to overcome German and Polish resistance to an ambitious climate control pact.
Whatever the outcome in Brussels, Sarkozy is basking in French praise for his skillful handling of the country's storm-racked six months in the EU presidency. Super Sarko has had such a 'good crisis' that he hopes to reign on as Europe's de facto leader after the lowly, and Eurosceptic, Czech Republic takes over on January 1.
France will have an advantage next year because because Germany will be focused on elections and Britain will be mired in a more painful recession than the countries of the eurozone, the Elysée Palace believes. The Elysée also thinks that Britain will soon abandon its qualms and join the euro to save itself from the collapse of the pound.
The hyper-active President is convinced that he has galvanised Europe and given it new power in the world with deft management of the financial crash and the other emergencies, such as the Russia-Georgia war in August. Close partnership with Britain's Gordon Brown is part of the new European power balance, says Sarkozy.
The President, who does not claim modesty among his qualities, is telling colleagues that he has restored a sense of political purpose to the moribund Union. He has also cut down to size the Brussels Commission -- the supranational executive bureaucracy. Power is back where it should be, in the hands of the elected governments who run the member states -- and especially the big ones, he says.
Sarkozy's team have been talking up their boss at the official end of his term as President of Europe, as he like to call it. "Europe will never be the same again," Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Sarkozy's Minister for Europe, told Libération. "There will be the before Sarkozy and the after Sarkozy." Jouyet, a respected Europe expert, has just resigned. He told me that he was exhausted with the never-ending crisis management that engulfed the French turn in the chair.
Continue reading "France hails Sarkozy, European saviour -- Germany doesn't" »
Here's a delightful story that takes us far from the ambient gloom. With snow falling outside, I spent the afternoon yesterday in a salon in the Palais Garnier -- the Opéra -- enjoying an eery trip back in time.
They were playing for the first time a trove of recordings that had been sealed for posterity a century ago. And -- I'm not making this up -- they were extracted from the exact spot deep in the Opera vaults where, in the novel, they found the remains of the dead Phantom.
We heard Nellie Melba, the Australian soprano and Enrico Caruso, the tenor, and other long-dead stars crackling from 36 pristine Gramophone records that had been locked away for posterity.[listen to Melba's Verdi here].
The tale of the Opera's "buried voices", as they are known, began on Christmas Eve 1907 with a strange and solemn ceremony. In the deep labyrinth below the Garnier, Aristide Briand, a statesman of the era, dedicated two leaden urns in which 24 records were packed in glass and asbestos [top picture].
"This will teach men (100 years from now) about the state of our talking machines and the voices of the principal singers of our times," said the message with the urns. The idea of leaving voices in a time capsule came from Alfred Clark, the American head of the French branch of Gramophone, the British company that became His Master's Voice and later EMI.
According to Gaston Leroux, who wrote Le Fantôme de l'Opéra in 1909, workers unearthed the skeleton of Erik, his disfigured "angel of music", as they were installing the buried voices. Leroux's story opens and closes at the sound vault. "I prayed beside his body the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the living voices," says the epilogue
The voices, with their rather fruity period renditions of Wagner, Beethoven, Verdi, Bizet and lesser known composers, were kept under seal for the prescribed century. They were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale for safe-keeping in 1989 but only opened last Christmas. Also opened were two more urns which were deposited in 1912. One of these was damaged beyond repair. Technicians of the National Library spent the year extracting the fragile records from the glass plates and asbestos inside which they had been packed.
[Picture: Nellie Melba, the great Australian diva and dessert fan]
The collection was put on the internet yesterday. We heard extracts at a conference that included readings from the Phantom and a lecture on the dark legends around Napoleon III's epic pile on the Right Bank (like the secret lake deep below, the ghosts of dead workmen and the passages where government troops executed communards in 1871).
Most of the recordings were commercial and have survived in less fine condition elsewhere, but the choice of repertoire and performers offers an unmatched window on the sound-track of the Belle Epoque. François Le Roux, a baritone and teacher, explained why the old opera technique grates on modern ears. Singers belted it out, indulging in showy flourishes and fast vibrato that sound odd now, he said. "The sopranos were generally nasal. The timbre is pinched. Most of them would not get past the quarter-finals in a contest nowadays," he said. "Our ears have really changed."
"The bass voices are clear and relatively high," said Le Roux as he played Pol Planson singing Gounod's Faust in 1906 and then José Van Dam on the same song in 1991. He also noted the way that singers in those pre-microphone days focused on projecting their voices and enunciating the words in a way that even in opera they no longer do. "The point was to be understood. They didn't make much effort to dramatise the characters they were playing."
Maybe Le Roux (apparently no relation to the Phantom's author) was being a little unfair. The odd sound of the old singers was partly a function of the primitive recording equipment. You can get a clearer idea of Melba's voice from a revived master disc from 1904 which, coincidentally, was released this month in Melbourne (her home down, from which she took her stage name).
Le Roux joked about the astonishing tempo of some of the singers, a feature imposed by the brief 78 RPM record. "They sang fast, sometimes really fast. Sometimes you get the impression that the orchestra is struggling to follow the singer."
The urns include some big names of the time who are long forgotten, such as Adolphe Adam and his opera, le Chalet. But it is remarkable that this showcase repertoire of 1907 and 1912 is so similar to the Verdi, Mozart and Wagner that pulls in the crowds in 2008.
Vintage recording experts marvelled not only at the sound, but at the colourful, perfectly preserved labels of the discs from what are known as Gramphone's "pre-dog" period -- before the logo of the listening dog. EMI is bringing out a CD from the contents of the urns in January. The Opera also plans to install a new time capsule with the best early 21st century music. That choice should prove interesting.
Perhaps the eeriest of all the old records was not a song. It was the 1912 disc in which Firmin Gemier, an actor-director, can be heard at the ceremony dedicating "this fatal urn from the catacombs of the Opera.". The records were "a miracle in which we preserve for our great grand-children the most fugitive thing in the world... the voice of the master." he said. "Like the painter and the writer... the lyrical artist will henceforward leave other testimony to his talent that the memory of his reputation."
A footnote: Leroux's Phantom is less famous in France than in the Anglo-Saxon world where it has been staged as theatre and film from the 1920s through to Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980s musical. His Mystère de la Chambre Jaune is probably better known in France.
In some places -- including Britain and the USA -- beauty pageants are no longer deemed suitable for prime time on main networks. Happily -- or I should probably say unfortunately -- that's not the case for France.
On Saturday night eight million people -- that's 13 percent of the population -- watched the Miss France contest, a jamboree that makes few concessions to feminist principles and is strong on soap opera. The young women parade in high heels in both one and two-piece swim-suits as the commentator praises their charms and talents [bottom picture]. The contestants tell us of their ambitions. Miss Pays de Loire, for example, hoped to "invest myself in humanitarian charities as a representative of elegance."
It's supposed to be family fun and there is usually a feud to keep up the interest. Tensions are soothed by Jean-Pierre Foucault, the oily compère, but the whole thing is ruled by Geneviève de Fontenay, a dragon who is known as "the lady with the hat" [right in the top picture].
De Fontenay, 76, has managed Miss France since 1953 and has been its boss since 1981. Without her, it's likely that the whole kitschy exercise would collapse. This year's drama arose from de Fontenay's banishment of Valérie Bègue, the 2008 Miss France after a former boyfriend circulated photographs of her in less than chaste poses. 
The unfortunate Bègue, from the French island of La Réunion, had kept her title, but she was exiled to los Angeles last Thursday to keep her away from the show where she was supposed to crown her successor. TF1, the host network, wanted her there but de Fontenay over-ruled them. They got their own back when Foucault announced on air that de Fontenay had vetoed the popular Bègue and the crowd booed the lady with the hat.
The winner this year, picked by judges and popular telephone vote, was Chloé Mortaud, a 19-year-old student from the southwestern Ariège département. Like some previous Miss Frances (It's Miss France, not Mademoiselle) she is of mixed race. She is also the first to hold dual French and US citizenship. Her African-American Mother came from Mississippi. Mortaud, who is studying business and had already been crowned Miss Albigeois-Midi Pyrénées, said she deserved the national crown because "with a smile I will transmit happiness to people." She also seized l'air du temps and made the most of her mixed race in her pre-decision pitch. "This polyvalency is an advantage," she said.
As the press talked about the Obama effect yesterday, Mortaud said she would be an ambassadress for racial tolerance. "I want to go to people and explain to them that fear of the other is unfounded. I want to incarnate today’s French diversity".
While Mortaud starts her year of glory, de Fontenay has moved on to another battle. She is fighting rebellion by Guadeloupe, the French Caribbean territory. The island has had the effrontery to send a dissident Miss Guadeloupe to the Miss World pageant in South Africa next week. "She is illegitimate", says de Fontenay. Guadeloupe is part of her Miss France empire and France is to be represented in Johannesbourg by the second runner-up to the banished Ms Bègue from 2008.
De Fontenay usually gets her way, so I hope the insurgent from Guadeloupe is watching her back. Yes this is all frivolous stuff -- despite the millions of euros tied up in the exercise. It's taken with a pinch of salt here, although France has fewer qualms than some other places when it comes to patronising women. As an example of that, I just heard Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a recent Prime Minister, defend Rachida Dati, 41, the embattled Justice Minister, on the radio, calling her "une fille exceptionnelle" -- an exceptional girl.
The Miss World contest, launched in London in 1951, has become an off-shore exercise in recent years, being staged in China, Africa and so on. But don't forget that about 2.5 billion people are expected to watch it next week. To close on a memory, one of my first assignments as a journalist was to report backstage from a Miss World contest in the Albert Hall. It was a morally confusing mission of course.
[Below: swimsuits for Miss France 2009]
It's always sad when a newspaper closes. Britons living in France -- especially those in the western regions with the big expat population -- felt a sense of loss this week when they heard that French News had folded.
For the past 21 years, the monthly, based in the Dordogne, has been serving the fast-growing community of Brits who moved across the Channel in search of of the Gallic good life. Its liquidation on Tuesday was the end of a little institution. The paper, edited and co-owned since 1995 by Miranda Neame, had a readership of up to 120,000. Without, I hope, being unfair, I'd say that it was especially appreciated by recent arrivals and the Britons who feel part of a community that keeps a little distance from French life.
The end of the News is a symptom of the struggle that thousands of British residents are facing with the economic crunch. Everyone on sterling incomes is suffering a double hit. As well as the general slump, their incomes have shrunk as the pound has slid by 22 percent against the euro since September last year (French-based dollar-earners suffered a similar fate earlier). For us expat workers, the sterling slump is mildly painful. It is truly hard for people on sterling pensions and those in the property and British-linked services and trade.
Some are giving up the struggle and going back to the UK. It's difficult to gauge the flow or conclude that the great cross-Channel exodus to France in the past decade has come to an end. But some removal firms are reporting roaring trade in shipping Brits back to Blighty.
We tried to get a measure of the mood by phoning around the country over the past two days. Thank you to regulars on the blog who filled me in on the scene where they live. Obviously I have an incomplete picture. It would be helpful to hear from others who might like to tell us how they are bearing up.
Continue reading "La belle vie ends for British expatriates in France " »
Here's some good news for anyone applying to be a Gardien de la Paix -- an ordinary French police officer. You will no longer be expected to know the imperfect subjunctive or name the author of les Fleurs du Mal. And if you are aiming to be a Garde Champêtre -- park warden -- you can forget about defining the Jurassic era.
On the orders of President Sarkozy, France's vast civil service is greatly lightening the tests of general knowledge that are compulsory for entrants to all its branches. New tests and interview methods are to replace the old-style "concours de culture générale".
Sarkozy is no doubt right when he says that the competitive tests discriminate against poorer applicants and those from immigrant backgrounds. The critics of course see the new Charter Against Discrimination in the Civil Service as another act of dumbing down by a President who has had a bee in his bonnet over culture for years.
One of his set-pieces as candidate was to mock a question from a civil service promotion test that asked clerical workers who wrote La Princesse de Clèves, a 17th century novel. Sarkozy's secretary at the time had failed the test. "I don't know if you have often had to ask the woman at the reception desk what she thinks of the Princesse de Clèves," Sarkozy joked in 2006.
The competitive culture quizzes have long been a rite of passage into the haven of a lifetime job in the police, ministries, post office and other branches of a fonction publique that employs over 20 percent of all workers. With vastly over-subscribed demand, the 3,000 different tests have been used to whittle down the candidates.
Last year, 65,000 people, many with university degrees, sat the test for 1,000 posts as junior clerks. The goal is the lifetime guarantee that comes with being a servant of the state, however humble. I have a friend, a double bass player with a music degree, who is thrilled to have scored a post as a uniformed maintenance man at the Senate. He spends his day changing the lightbulbs but says he values the short hours and great retirement benefits waiting for him in about 25 years time.
As a sample of questions, candidates for fonctionnaire catégorie C, the lowest level, at the Finance Ministry, were this year asked which divinity was not Egyptian: Anubis, Isis, Hathor or Thor?
They were also expected to know whether "the artiste Arthur H (a pop singer) is the brother of M (another pop singer), the son of Jacques Higelin (an older pop singer), the son of Françoise Hardy or the grandson of Jimi Hendrix" (He's Higelin's son).
André Santini, the Civil Service Minister, sounded off against the general knowledge tests in le Figaro. "What is the point of a history examination for firemen or police constables with university degrees? We have reached the limit of sterile elitism," he said. Santini, who does not hail from the caste of hauts fonctionnaires, said the general knowledge tests were "being used as a form of invisible discrimination". (On the police, France recruits a superior officer class with university degrees and much tougher entrance tests)
He added: "The applicants are being asked questions that are too academic and ridiculously difficult and which indicate nothing about their real aptitude for filling a post." From now on, questions would be aimed at testing common sense and aptitude for the job, he said.
Here are recent questions from a recent Culture Générale entrance test for Gardiens de la Paix. Candidates have to hold the baccalauréat high-school leaving certificate.
Into which sea does the Danube flow ? Aral, Azov, Caspian or Black. (Black)
Who sculpted the Statue of Liberty ? Maillol, Buren, Rodin, Bartoli (Bartholdi)
Which country does not have a frontier with Iraq? Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt (Egypt)
In what year was Israel founded 1940, 48, 58, 61 ? (48)
Harpagon is a character from a play by Corneille, Racine, Molière, Beaumarchais ? (Molière)
Inevitably, the reform is being seen as another step away from the educational rigour upon which France used to pride itself. Ivan Rioufol, who is news editor at le Figaro and an author, tore into Sarkozy on his blog for dumbing down France.
A basic knowledge of history and the culture is vital for civil servants to be capable of civilised communication, he said. "It's appalling to see the government trying to accelerate this mutation into a world with no differentiation."
____________
PS: Charles Baudelaire wrote les Fleurs du Mal, a collection of poems. La Princesse de Clèves, regarded as the first French novel, by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, was published anonymously in 1678
It's always impressive how quickly France adopts a fashion. One day no-one is wearing ballerine shoes, then everyone is (à la Carla Bruni). We are now in the midst of a new sartorial craze -- le gilet jaune, or the high-visibility vest.
You may remember how the state ran a tongue-in-cheek campaign that used Karl Lagerfeld to publicise a new law requiring fluorescent safety vests to be carried inside all vehicles. "It's yellow, it's ugly and it goes with nothing, but it can save your life," said Karl.
The fashion icon did the trick. Suddenly Day-Glo is everywhere. Paris cyclists, who had always eschewed safety gear as un-chic still don't wear helmets much, but yellow is their new black. The same applies to scooter riders, protest marchers and people handing out leaflets.
That's obviously commendable. More cyclists can now be seen in the winter gloom. But the really odd manifestation of the gilet jaune is a fashion for draping them around front car seats.
It seems to have started because people believed that the new law requires them to be visible, not stashed in the glove-box or seat pocket. Some mistakenly thought that this would prevent police from stopping them to check their compliance (They are still stopped because they have to carry a triangle as well). Now, somewhere about one in ten cars are sporting the yellow vest look, according to quick surveys around the country. They are more prevalent in the provinces than Paris. The gilet jaune around the seat has become the new version of the nodding dog on the rear shelf or the furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.
The fad is annoying many people and it is now seen as a joke. It has become a defining symbol of "beaufitude" -- naffness in UK English -- like Bluetooth earpieces or wearing mobile phones on the belt or the tourists who carry bottles of water around Paris.
The gilet-on-display fashion is so irritating that there are now about 200 groups on Facebook devoted to fighting it. There are 70,000 members in the biggest one, called Contre les cons qui foutent leur gilet jaune fluo sur le siège auto [Against the plonkers who stick their yellow fluorescent vest on the car seat]. Watch an anti-gilet jaune squad in street action here.
Some newspapers have studied the phenomenon. La Charente Libre, based in the west, found that drivers thought the vest was fun on the seat because it "brightens things up". Other were doing it "because everyone else is doing it." Their prize went to the man in a green Citroen Xsara who had equipped both front seats with yellow vests and had two more on the back seat on top of a Johnnny Hallyday towel.
Hallyday, France's rock'n roll monument, is himself a high-grade symbol of beaufitude. Nicolas Sarkozy is a big Hallyday fan but we don't know yet if the President has fitted a yellow vest on the seat of the black Mercedes 4x4 (SUV) which he drives about town. Black SUVs are of course another symbol of heavy-duty beaufitude, but I'm getting off the point.
 [Below: fashionable chien parisien]
The subject today is the abuse of power by French police and judges. Two lurid examples have made the headlines for different reasons. One involves a journalist and the other a recreational pilot. Since I am both, I of course feel extra indignation.
Journalists do not usually get sympathy when they complain about mistreatment, but the tale of Vittorio de Filippis [in picture], a manager with Libération, has caused an outcry. It tells you about the heavy-handed methods of a system which has extensive power to arrest and hold people.
Plainclothes officers hammered on de Filippis' door at 6.40 am last Friday. He was arrested in front of his two young sons and insulted. An officer called him "worse than garbage". He was taken in handcuffs to a holding cell and twice subjected to an intimate body search. He was questioned without access to a lawyer and released five hours later.
The police carried out their raid on the orders of Muriel Josié, an examining judge. De Filippis' alleged offence is that he was liable as publisher of Libération for a defamatory comment left by a reader on its internet site. In France, when you sue for libel, the case is prosecuted as a criminal one. In this instance, the victim of the supposed libel, an internet businessman, has already lost two cases against the newspaper.
In other words, a judge ordered a newspaper executive to be dragged from his home and abused over an internet comment. "I barely had time to reassure my son that I was not a crook and that this had to do with the newspaper," said de Filippis.
Continue reading "Rough justice for French journalist and pilot" »
Your writer
Charles Bremner is Paris Correspondent for The Times. He started out as a journalist in Russia and then moved to the United States. He has reported from all the continents but most enjoys observing the exotic tribe on Britain's doorstep. Though France is home, he avoids going native by offering what the locals call an "Anglo-Saxon" eye on their country.
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