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You remember this picture of Rachida Dati, the former star of the Sarkozy government, leaving the clinic with her new-born baby in her arms ? Her immediate return to work as Justice Minister earned her headlines around the world. We hear today that she wasn't holding Zohra, her daughter, just an empty baby-carrier swathed in a blanket.
This is related in a book out this week by Jamal Dati, the younger brother of the ambitious and difficult Sarkozy protegée who was cast out of the government last June and exiled to the European parliament. Scraps of A l'Ombre de Rachida [in Rachida's Shadow] appear in le Parisien today. They make clear that Jamal, who recently spent a few months in prison for drug dealing, is out to settle accounts with the sister whose Cinderella life story was meant to inspire France's immigrant working class.
Dati, one of 12 children of a Moroccan-Algerian couple, is depicted as hard-hearted and ruthless. Those qualities are usually mentioned by those who have fallen out with the woman who is seen by the establishment as a pushy parvenue. Dati refused to have anything to do with her black sheep brother when she was minister, he says. "Every time I tried to talk to her she turned a deaf ear." He accuses his sister of having him locked up because he was a nuisance. He gave a bracelet to Zohra, he says. "She did not even thank me. She just said 'put it down there'. She did not want to take the gift in here hands. That hurt me." 
The stunt on leaving the hospital last January was part of Dati's meticulous management of her image, he says. The child was taken away through a side entrance and then cared for by Dati's sister for months, says the brother.
Jamal apparently says nothing about the paternity of Zohra, which remains a mystery. But he describes the mortification of their widowed father, a strict Muslim, when it became known that she was going to have a baby out of wedlock. "For two months, he kept saying, 'It's finished. I don't want to see her any more'... We experienced the affair as a matter of dishonour. We are Muslims before anything else. My father... had to swallow his pride in front of the Arab families around us."
The brother says that his other siblings tried to prevent the book being published. They told him that he would be sent back to prison and that he would lose his own son, he says.
The book will no doubt sell well because Dati, with her glamour and steely style, continues to fascinate people well beyond France. She is already clambering back up the ladder, seeking status posts in the European parliament and keeping a firm hand on the 7th arrondissement, the Paris Left Bank district where she became Mayor before her fall from Sarkozy's grace. She is manoeuvering to run for Mayor of Paris in 2014. Sarkozy's local party chiefs are fiercely opposed, but she has a habit of getting her way.
America had Marilyn. France had BB. The two blonde stars symbolised the post-war era before they disappeared from the scene decades ago. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 but Brigitte Bardot lives on. She notched up her 75th birthday on Monday and tonight they are opening a big exhibition devoted to her at Boulogne Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris.
It's unusual to celebrate a living icon, especially when the current version is so far removed from the legend. Bardot's was that of the carefree child-woman and pioneer of sexual liberation. But younger people know her as a misanthropic recluse who fled the cinema at only 39 and devoted her life to the welfare of animals. She makes the news with attacks on Muslim practices that have earned her a conviction for racism. Older people know her as BB, the beautiful, feral girl in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu Créa La Femme (And God Created Woman). That is the version on show in Brigitte Bardot, less années 'insouciance' (the carefree years).
Bardot's face later came to symbolise France but it is hard to imagine the scandal when she burst onto the scene in the early 1950s in the prudish post-war Fourth Republic. "It was a very tranquil, sleepy, conformist France that was getting over the war and the Occupation," Henry-Jean Servat, the exhibition's curator, told the press. "She blew all of that up completely. Compared with the stars of the time -- made-up, smoothed over -- she was fresh, natural and modern. On the screen, she was just what she was in life."
The raw sexiness of the 18-year-old Bardot in Vadim's film created an even bigger shock in America. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: "In fact, it isn't what Mademoiselle Bardot does in bed but what she might do that drives the three principal male characters into an erotic frenzy. She is a thing of mobile contours – a phenomenon you have to see to believe."
As well as making 48 films, Bardot was, like Marilyn, a pretty good singer. Most people outside France do not know that Serge Gainsbourg wrote the heavy-breathing "Je t'aime, moi non plus" for BB when they were together. In the interest of protecting her image, they did not release her version until after Jane Birkin's one became a hit. The Bardot-Gainsbourg tune that everyone knows is the Harley Davidson song, "I don't need anyone", in the video below. The motorcycle is in the exhibition.
Bardot is not attending the show and has said little lately in public. She was on Europe 1 radio this morning, sounding bitter and a little wistful. She had paid dear for her celebrity, she said "as you always pay for the luck that you have in life." She mused on the "trente glorieuses", the three prosperous post-war decades of her youth:
"It was a fantastic time. Nowadays is hell in comparison. In those days it was freedom and joie-de-vivre. We had the right to do anything we liked, to have fun and drive cars however you wanted. We didn't have to put on seat-belts and be stopped every three minutes. We had cars that could do 200 (kilometres) an hour. We could enjoy ourselves, make love, we weren't afraid of Aids. We didn't have any drugs but we enjoyed a good drink..."
Bardot has used the occasion to send a public message to her Italian equivalent, Sophia Loren, who celebrated her 75th birthday earlier this month. "I wish a happy birthday to Sophia Loren, my splendid twin, and I ask her to stop wearing fur -- that is the best gift she could offer me," said BB.
I don't want to be cruel and compare the different ways the pair have aged.
The radio offered a familiar song today as I was driving down from the Channel: the French intellectual classes and government were in full cry against the United States.
The cause this time is Roman Polanski. His arrest in Switzerland has dominated the news for 24 hours in France and Poland -- ahead of the election of a new German government -- and it has been big elsewhere.
[See Wednesday update below*]
Like everyone, I feel sorry for Polanski. Aged 76, a naturalized French citizen and one of the star directors of his generation, he was arrested while on his way to a Swiss film festival held in his honour. California wants him extradited over a 1977 offence. But he is not helped by the explosion of outrage from the intello-celebrities and the way the French Government has succumbed to its anti-American reflex.
C'est normal that Bernard Henry-Lévy, the Left Bank's star thinker and auto-publicist, should be raging on the radio as I write this. It's fairly normal that France's Society of Film Directors should warn that the arrest "could have disastrous consequences for freedom of expression across the world".
It is more difficult to take the intemperate response of President Sarkozy and his government. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister and friend of the stars, used the logic that Polanski's high artistic achievement should protect him from ordinary justice. "This affair is frankly a bit sinister. Here is a man of such talent, recognised worldwide, recognised especially in the country where he was arrested. This is not nice at all,"Kouchner said on France-Inter radio.
Frédéric Mitterrand, Sarkozy's Culture Minister and big film fan, went right over the top, calling Polanski's arrest "absolutely horrifying. Polanski had been thrown to the lions, he said. "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also an America that frightens us and that one has just shown its face," said Mitterrand.
It is true that Frédo, as they call him, and Kouchner, are from the leftish wing of the government, but Sarko himself took Polanski's side, in more diplomatic language.
There are mitigating factors. Polanski has suffered terrible events in his life -- his mother's death at Nazi hands and the murder of Sharon Tate, his pregnant wife, in 1969. The Los Angeles judge and prosecutor in 1977 appear to have reneged on a deal for a guilty plea to sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl. But some perspective would help. Polanski is not a victim of monstrous injustice -- or persecution by Hollywood, as Le Monde suggests this afternoon by comparing his case to that of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s.
Since fleeing to France in 1978, Polanski has refused return to Los Angeles to end the case (He did not collect his 2003 Best Director Oscar for fear of arrest). After his LA lawyers asked last year for the case to be quashed, the judge indicated sympathy with his arguments. But Polanski still did not turn up in court for the hearing in May this year so the judge rejected the request.
You can argue about Switzerland's role. Polanski spends time there every year in his house at Gstaad and had never been molested. There are suspicions that Berne acted to extradite him this time because it wants to redeem itself with the United States after the affair of tax-evading bank accounts and other scandals.
But Polanski is in his predicament simply because the justice system, especially in the United States, is relentless once the wheels are in motion. The outpouring of sympathy from France's high and mighty is playing right into the hands of their populist opponents. Marine Le Pen, heir apparent to her father's National Front party, took an easy swipe today. "Does belonging to the super-protected show-biz caste exonerate you for 30 years from judicial pursuit?" she asked. Sarkozy's administration is setting a bad example for people fighting against sexual violence towards children, she said. For once, it difficult to disagree with Madame Le Pen.
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*Update Wednesday: Since I posted this on Monday, the pendulum has swung back in France. The Socialist opposition finally came down against the government for criticising the Polanski arrest. Several eminent figures in Sarkozy's UMP party are also unhappy with the way Mitterrand and Kouchner jumped to take sides against the USA. A few from the film world, including Luc Besson, are also unhappy with the rush to defend Polanski.
The disaster of Air France Flight 447 was the result of a preventable mix of human and technical failures, according to a London law firm that is representing families of the victims.
Stewarts Law, which is pressing claims for relatives of over 50 of the 228 dead, presented its argument in Paris today after its experts replicated in a simulator the conditions that were experienced by the crew of the Airbus A330 off Brazil on June 1.
Their findings reflect the consensus in the aviation industry -- and which we have covered here before -- over what went wrong in one of the most worrying air disasters in recent decades.
The official investigation, carried out by the French BEA accident bureau, is far from a conclusion and the black box flight recorders have not been found. Air France and Airbus are on the defensive and saying little. But enough data was transmitted by satellite from the stricken plane to identify with certainty four factors that led to the crash, said John Mahon, an Airbus and Boeing training captain.
-- The aircraft flew into an area of storms which other aircraft avoided by steering around them.
-- The pitot tubes (speed sensors on the front of the plane) suffered faults
-- There was a malfunction in the ADIRU, the three air data computers which feed information to the flight system and the pilots.
-- The pilots may not have had sufficient training to retain control of the malfunctioning aircraft.
"It any one of these issues had not happened to AF 447, the accident would not have happened," said Mahon, who is advising the law firm.
In the A330 simulator exercise, Mahon said pilots retained control of the handicapped aircraft, but they all knew that there was a malfunction. The pilots at the AF447 controls, who are thought to have been the two juniors on the three-man crew, would have been confused by conflicting information from the plane. They were also being thrown around in heavy turbulence at night. The simulator cannot replicate that faithfully any more than the fear that must quickly have gripped the crew.
James Healey-Pratt, the firm's chief aviation lawyer and also a pilot, said: "It is too simplistic to blame the pilots. They are not here to defend themselves. They did the best job they could."
Mahon said the pilots would have lost control of their handicapped plane in one of two situations.
If they entered a climb, the instruments would have erroneously shown increasing speed -- because of the blocked sensors. They would have tried to slow down and that could have led to a low-speed stall. If they were descending, the blocked sensors would have interpreted a decrease in speed. To compensate, the pilots would have increased the descent or added thrust. That could have caused the aircraft to over-speed and lose control.
Since the crash, Air France has signalled concern over its crew's ability to handle high altitude upsets of this kind. It has ordered special training for A330 pilots and called in outside experts to conduct a full-scale audit on its safety procedures. Some Air France pilots are accusing the airline, Airbus and the accident investigators of trying to put all the blame on the crew.
A separate judicial investigation is under way in France. Air France and Airbus will be asked to explain why no action was taken to replace faulty pitot tubes on the A330 series although they had suffered multiple failures over a decade.
The law firm, which has its own priorities, accused Air France of trying to settle with victims families "quickly, cheaply and quietly" in order to avoid having to pay the large sums that they deserved. Healey-Pratt estimated that if settled under European law, the final bill for Air France and Airbus would by about 450 million euros. He suggested that the two companies put one billion euros into a pot to be divided among the families. A similar method was used to avoid litigation after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001.
The saga over faulty the pitot tubes continues. The European Aviation Safety Agency today issued a new safety warning. It told airlines to check Airbus sensors from the US Goodrich company. Only two months ago, the same agency ordered airlines to install the Goodrich pitots instead of the ones made by the French company Thales which were the ones involved in all the incidents.
It's worth noting that Captain Mahon - who trains pilots in both Airbus and Boeings -- told me that he does not share the misgivings that some pilots have over the very automated flight systems of the Airbus family. He also pointed out that pitot and air data failures have caused accidents on Boeings in the past.
For an alternative view of AF447 and the plane that some pilots call the Scarebus, I would point you to the latest from John T. Halliday [no relation of our Johnny the rock idol] the well-informed expert on Huffington Post
Few nations have cultivated beauty and its attendant artifice as much as France. Now it could become the first country to impose health-warnings on all published photographs that have been retouched.
A parliamentarian from President Sarkozy's UMP party has tabled a bill that would require a "photo retouched" label on every improved picture that appears in advertising, the media or product-wrapping. Failure to signal Photoshopping or other enhancement would be punished with a 37,500 euro fine.
The idea is to end the "erroneous representation of the human body", says Valérie Boyer, an MP for the Marseilles area, who is behind the proposed law. The perfect images of women and also men in advertising and magazine portraits can drive people to despair and anorexia, says Boyer, who is a longtime campaigner in this field.
"These pictures can lead people to believe in realities which very often do not exist... There is a form of indecency in making people believe that only a certain category of humanity can attain perfection, without yellow teeth or love handles."
It's uncertain whether Boyer's bill, which has the signature of 50 other members, will reach a vote in parliament, but she has won applause from mental health advocates and drawn attention to the fact that most photographs -- except on news pages -- have been doctored. Celebrities expect electronic flattery whenever they sit for a picture. Elle Macpherson is said to travel with her own retouch artist.
The fashion world says that Boyer's law is laughable. Improving on nature has been part of the beauty business since time immemorial, they say. Michèle Fitoussi, a journalist on Elle magazine, joked on RTL radio: "While we're at it, why not write 'They have had their breasts redone and had a rib removed'."
France witnessed an egregious case this summer when Paris Match produced a feature on Sharon Stone. Under the headline "I'm 50 and so what!", the actress (who's actually 51) posed topless on the cover and across several pages, flaunting a flawless physique that a 20-year-old could barely dream of. The magazine cover, on all news stands in France, was pure provocation unless you knew that you were not looking at reality.
For men, the recent Vuitton adverts starring Sean Connery had a similar effect. It is very hard to believe that that is really the waistline of the 79-year-old former Bond.
Match was mocked a couple of years ago for tightening up Sarkozy's midriff in shots of the bare-topped President (This summer he did the job for the paparazzi by sucking in his stomach when they showed up).
Retouching of course remains taboo in the serious news business. There have been scandals when the rules have been broken. Photographers have been dismissed from news agencies for giving a little electronic tweak to shots of war and disasters. But given the ease of electronic fiddling I wonder how long the news industry can resist the temptation.
Below: a video which shows the wizardry of today's glamour trade
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The Clearstream trial has opened with the expected theatre at the Palais de Justice. The spectacle yesterday afternoon was not in the court, where the lawyers argued over procedure. It came from the melodramatic performance outside by Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister and star defendant.
Villepin, a man who has never been accused of modesty, swept up with his wife and three children and delivered a grandiloquent speech in which he cast himself as the victim of epic injustice. He was, he told the cameras, the target of a political prosecution that has been staged by a vindictive ruler. Here, in English, is a taste of the amazingly inflated rhetoric which Villepin uses about himself. Don't forget that he is accused of complicity in dirty tricks, including forgery, to discredit Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the last presidential campaign.
"It is September 21. This is the anniversary of the creation of the French Republic. It is also the day dedicated by the United Nations to peace in the world.... I am here because of the will of one man and the relentlessness of one man - Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also President of the French Republic. I will come out of this a free man, exonerated in the name of the French people.
"Some would have us believe that there is in our country no such thing as a political trial. I would like to believe that too, yet here we are in 2009 and we are in France. I wish to restate that my combat is not personal. It is the combat of all those men and women who have fought against injustrice. It is the combat of all men and women who are victims of abuse of power. Justice is a very precious commodity and it is also very fragile. It requires the engagement of everyone. I know that the truth will triumph."
In French, his language does not sound quite so much like ham Shakespeare. It landed him, as planned, the opening slot of the evening news. But Villepin is taking a risk in claiming the high ground. When the trial gets down to the detail, he will face rough cross-examination on what he was doing when he allegedly colluded in, or perhaps instigated, the plot to blacken Sarkozy. Noble, Dantonesque speech-making will not help when he is up against the prosecutor and especially Thierry Herzog, Sarkozy's redoubtable lawyer (In French criminal trials, plaintiffs lawyers take part in the proceedings).
Sarkozy's riposte to Villepin came in today. Pierre Charon, one of the president's advisers, said the former Prime Minister appeared to think the law court was a Club Med resort. "You can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose.... It's what happens inside the courtroom that counts."
Villepin is right to depict the affair as a duel between himself and Super Sarko. The president's determination to put his fomer colleague on trial has led to a new title for the case: "Kill Vill". Some in Sarkozy's own camp are worried that his pursuit of his former rival in the courts is not quite presidential.
The spectacle is good material for the comedians. On France-Inter today, Stéphane Guillon, the court jester of the state-run radio station, described the Clearstream trial as a fight for territory between two dogs -- an excitable little terrier (Sarkozy) and a languid Afghan hound. Watch below.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and author of the stillborn European Constitution, likes to be thought of as a bit of a charmer. He set out to enhance this image today with a novel which all but claims that he had a love affair with the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
[September 23 update: He says today that it is pure fiction -- see end note]
Giscard, 83, is having fun, of a dubious kind. His book, The Princess and the President, recounts the "violent passion" between a serving French president in the mid 1980s, and Patricia,"Princess of Cardiff" (capital of Wales, geddit?..), who is unhappily married to an unfaithful heir to the throne.
"Fiction or reality ?" asks today's Figaro, which has an exclusive on the book. "Only the former President has the key to this troubling story." The paper says the president gives very elaborate detail of the fictional couple's encounters in the palaces of France and Britain.
His descriptions of Princess Pat leave no doubt that she is Diana. "I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate-grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward," the presidential narrator recounts. Like Diana, the unhappy Princess Pat throws her herself into charitable work while indulging in flings with other men.
In the book, President Jacques-Henri Lambertye meets Princess Pat at a G7 summit banquet at Buckingham Palace. He then holds her hand under the table on the train back from the 1984 D-Day landing anniversary in Normandy. That would have been three years after the royal wedding and Diana Spencer was 23. Giscard was 58 and bitter about losing the presidency to François Mitterrand three years earlier.
It has been known for some time that Giscard, who is known as l'Ex, was charmed by the young princess -- along with everyone else. In 1995, after spending the evening with her (picture above) at Versailles, he gushed over her eyes in a French magazine and called her Princess Charming. "I discovered she was also a cat, a feline. She moves without noise," he said. Giscard, who was and is married, had a reputation as a ladies' man when he was in the presidency. There was a report in the late 1970s that he crashed his car while driving home to the Elysée Palace in the early morning from un rendez-vous galant.
The cerebral and patrician ex-president likes to see himself as a literary figure. He was admitted to the Académie Francaise in 2003 though his only venture into fiction was an embarrassing and widely mocked 1994 romance called Le Passage. It sounds as though the new book is in similar breathless vein. Figaro, which is kind to Giscard, defends his right to scribble sentimental prose with lines such as "this sword of absolute love, whistling as it turns over our heads".
The Figaro plays Giscard's game, teasing the reader. "Discovering this incredible modern story, one can never for a moment forget who is the narrator," writes Etienne Montety, its literary critic. "One muses, amazed, about his stature in international public life."
On the matter of verisimilitude, Giscard might have been advised to proof-read his English. His narrator-president writes "I can still hear her saying in English... 'I wish that you love me'." That doesn't sound right.
Giscard is refusing to say whether this yarn has any truth or is just self-flattering fiction. There is no doubt that he wants readers to believe it. The title page carries the line: "Promise kept". The book ends. "'You asked me for permission for you to write your story,' she told me. 'I give you it, but you must make me a promise ...'."
Jean-Pierre Corcelette, a biographer of Giscard d'Estaing, told us this afternoon: "We know that VGE is a ladies' man...Anything is possible, but I think this is really the fantasmagoria of an old geezer."
Fact or fiction, either way, the operation sounds like another chapter in the posthumous Diana industry. The book may sell but it won't win any prizes unless there is an award for bad taste.
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Wednesday update:
The storm of publicity seems to have taken Giscard by surprise. Today he has come clean and says the tale is fiction. "I knew her a little, in a relationship of confidence. She needed to communicate... I wanted to pay homage to her... Her inner feelings were disappointment and a need to be loved." He had promised Diana to write a book on "love stories between leaders of great countries," he said.
[Top picture, Giscard and the Princess at a charity event in Versailles in November 1994]
It's show-time for Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin. The occasion is the so-called Clearstream trial. Politicians land in court fairly often in France. On this occasion, the details are murky and complicated. People tune out when the TV starts explaining them. But the stakes tomorrow are high because the president is a player. We are in for some good theatre and don't forget that Watergate was initially just about a low-level break-in.
Villepin, President Chirac's last Prime Minister, is accused of plotting to destroy Sarkozy's chances in the 2007 presidential election by smearing him with suspicions of corruption. With the help of compliant prosecutors, Sarkozy has pushed the case to court. He wants to hang, draw and quarter the patrician, never-elected politician who tried to thwart his run for the presidency in 2007.
For Villepin, this tragi-comedy of revenge will probably end, as such cases do in France, with acquittal or a mild slap on the wrist. In the meantime, though, it offers a great glimpse of fear and loathing at the pinnacle of French power.
For a month, former spies, media bosses, an investigating judge and a cast from the ruling elite will parade in a spectacle played in the very court-room where Queen Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine in 1793.
The plot, boiling down to attempted slander, is more Keystone Cops than Racine tragedy. It has been elevated to drama by the hatred between Super Sarko and the matinee idol of Chirac's Government who tried to stand in his path five years ago.
Villepin, 55, a former diplomat and Chirac protégé, is accused of "complicity in calumny, complicity in the use of forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust".
At the heart of the case is the charge that Villepin tried in 2004 to expose Sarkozy as a holder of an illicit account with Clearstream, a Luxembourg clearing-house bank. Sarkozy was Interior Minister, manoeuvering to seize control of Chirac's Gaullist movement and win the presidency in 2007. Villepin was Foreign Minister, before taking over as Interior Minister and then Prime Minister.
Sarkozy's name, in thinly disguised form, was among hundreds on the bank list, which turned out to be a forgery. The supposed money was believed to have been kicked back from millions of pounds of bribes over the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. Also on the bogus list were Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now head of the International Monetary Fund, and Laetitia Casta, the former super-model. Both are among 41 plaintiffs in the case.
Villepin denies wrongdoing. However his version differs from that of two other accused, Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former Vice-President of the EADS aerospace company, and Imad Lahoud, a computer expert. Gergorin reported 2004 meetings with Villepin that the former Prime Minister denies.
Changing his story for the fourth time, Lahoud said in a recent affidavit: "I knew that Jean-Louis Gergorin was in contact with Dominique de Villepin and that the conspiracy against Nicolas Sarkozy was planned with Dominique de Villepin's knowledge."
Without Sarkozy's desire for vengeance, it is unlikely that Clearstream would have become une affaire d'état. Back in 2004-2005, when he heard that that his name was on the list and that Villepin was in the know, Sarkozy made a show of indignation. He demanded prosecution and promised to "hang whoever did this on a butcher's hook". Sarkozy was vulnerable at the time. Cécilia, his wife, was tired of his infidelity and about to leave him for Richard Attias, whom she married last year. Gossip had it that she had been told of her husband's dalliances by informers sent by Chirac and Villepin.
Villepin argues that he was merely fulfilling his ministerial job when he asked for checks on the bank list that was brought to him in early 2004. He says that he dropped the matter when told that it was a forgery. Sarkozy was aware of the case far earlier than he let on, says Villepin.
Sarkozy's ire has intensified with recent leaks from Yves Bertrand, a former chief of police intelligence (Renseignements Généraux), who tracked Clearstream as well as the love lives of Cabinet Ministers and other tittle-tattle. Bertrand, who is appearing as a witness, says that the whole affair is driven by Sarkozy's lust for revenge.
The President has sent his lawyers along with those of the other 40 civil plaintiffs to do battle in court. At the start of the trial tomorrow, Villepin's lawyers will ask the judges to dismiss Sarkozy as a plaintiff because of conflict of interest. As President, Sarkozy is the nation's chief justice and immune from legal action. Sarkozy is sending Thierry Herzog, his ace criminal lawyer, to represent him (In French trials, plaintiff's lawyers act throughout the proceedings, examining witnesses along with the defence and prosecution).
Villepin's move is expected to fail, but he has scored a point. No president has ever taken legal action in office. Le Monde this weekend criticised Sarkozy, saying that he was using the might of the state against Villepin and calling on him to withdraw his complaint.
Villepin, who was positioned by Chirac to beat Sarkozy to the presidential nomination, is trying to turn the tables on the President, depicting himself as victim of an vendetta driven by obsession.
"Some day, he will have to explain his relentlessness [acharnement]," Villepin said this month. "Allowing oneself to be dominated by passion and hatred amounts to failure...I have faith in his ability to screw things up [faire des conneries]."
Don't be fooled by the stock image of Villepin, circulating in the English-language media ahead of this trial. He is portrayed as intellectual, literary, romantic, Chirac's hussar, and so on. He is best remembered abroad for his impassioned United Nations speech in early 2003 against the US Iraq invasion. But those who know him also describe him as an inveterate but amateurish plotter and devotee of backroom intrigue. They liken him to Joseph Fouché, Napoleon Bonaparte's chief of secret police. Bernadette Chirac, wife of his longtime boss, gave him the nickname Nero when he was serving as the then president's chief of staff in the 1990s.
Villepin, who has never been accused of modesty, has been selling himself in the media as a statesman in waiting. He has started a club of admirers with an eye to running for the presidency in 2012, although he has never presented himself for election to so much as a village council. He cuts a rather lonely figure but a friend of mine reports that she lunched at the table next to his at an Italian restaurant on the Left Bank yesterday and that he is in fine form.
Watch him sticking it to Sarkozy -- elegantly -- on his site
Ségolène Royal, the Socialist runner-up in the last Presidential election, gets flakier by the day. Followers still see her semi-mystical persona as the best hope for the self-destructing French opposition. Others see her as a fading diva. She did little to help herself this week with a revamped internet site.
Hoots of laughter greeted the launch on Tuesday of the new-look home of Désirs d'Avenir, her personal brand (screen grab above). Cheesy and old-fashioned, it looked like something invented by a cult. "Is Ségo in a relationship with Tom Cruise?" wondered one commentator. Another called it "digital suicide". "It's like a leap 10 years into the past," said Rue89.com. Spoofs like this appeared [thanks DODO].
Royal's team has scrambled to undo the damage, producing a makeshift replacement which you will find now on desirsdavenir.com . According to L'Express magazine, the amateurish site was put together by André Hadjez, Royal's new companion [below in picture]. A 40,000 euro bill for building it was sent to Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint-Laurent, who is Royal's main source of finance, said L'Express. People are wondering what has happened to Royal because she used the net so skilfully to beat her Socialist rivals in 2006 and win the nomination to take on Nicolas Sarkozy.
Royal is not going to leave the scene. She is certain that her destiny is to unseat Sarko in 2012 and she is manoeuvering flat out to undermine Martine Aubry, who won the party leadership last November. The latest episode is a book by two journalists claiming that Aubry won the leadership by fraud.
It must be a little galling for Royal to see that some polls now put her behind François Hollande, the uncharismatic last party leader who is the father of their four children. Coming soon: Paris Match is to appear in court for publishing this cover picture of Royal and Hadjez, who is in the property and board game business, on holiday together.
While the world has marked a year since the financial crash this week, President Sarkozy has adopted for France a line from the US declaration of independence. Progress in the pursuit of happiness is to be factored into the nation's economic performance. I mentioned this earlier in the week, but for anyone interested, here's a look -- written today for the paper -- at the way that Sarkozy is positioning France ahead of next week's G20 session in Pennsylvania.
The idea of quantifying the quality of life, proposed to Sarkozy by Joseph Stiglitz, the US Nobel economics laureate, has drawn some mockery; with its long holidays, short working hours and early retirement, France will surely emerge as the new superpower, said the comedians.
But Sarkozy’s index for sustainable contentment was a clever move. It fits with the desire in developed nations to shun overconsumption;it raids ideas from France’s popular green movement; it nods to the recent fashion for definingle bonheur [happy French couple in picture]. More widely, it enhances Sarkozy’s claim to the mantle of world statesman. On this front it was a follow-up to his creation last week of a carbon tax, a levy on the use of fossil-fuel.
“Super Sarko” has never been known to miss an opportunity and he is seizing a big one now. As the world begins to pull itself out of recession he believes that he is well placed to play visionary and power broker. This has meant abandoning the reformist, free-market doctrines that won him election in 2007 and recasting himself as apostle of the good old French model of state dirigisme. Reborn a year ago as foe of unbridled capitalism, Sarkozy has proclaimed the “death of the all-powerful market which is always right”.
Sarkozy is preparing his next turn on the stage, starting on Tuesday in New York and moving on to Pittsburgh on Thursday. This week, he threatened to walk out of the G20 if he does not get his way — a repeat of his brinkmanship at the last session, in London in April, which he claims won a breakthrough over tax havens. This time he wants to strongarm President Obama and Gordon Brown into agreeing on a fixed, legally enforced cap on bankers’ pay. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is already onboard.
France has a strong hand, Sarkozy believes, because it has suffered much less than Britain and the United States and its recession is ending faster than the others’ — though it wallows deep in debt.
In time-honoured French fashion, Sarkozy is happy to make himself a nuisance to les Anglo-Saxons as he preaches his doctrine of “remoralised capitalism”. He calculates that with elections facing Brown and Merkel, he is the pre-eminent European, at least for the moment. He is busy cultivating Latin America and the East. He may have rejoined Nato but France is back to playing its old Gaullist game of middleman between Russia and the US. On Iran and its nuclear programme he is talking tougher than almost anyone outside Israel.
The French President is attempting a little one-upmanship over Obama. He has made no secret of his frustration over the US leader’s failure to respond to his overtures of friendship. Privately, he sees Obama as overrated, indecisive and now politically weakened. He is said to have given him “9 out of 20” for his speech on healthcare the other day.
Sarkozy’s international crusade goes down well at home. While his approval ratings have edged back up towards 50 per cent he consistently scores over 70 per cent for defending French interests abroad. However, some old hands worry that he is putting up backs with his world evangelism.
Alain Duhamel, an old-school political commentator, said on RTL radio that Sarkozy’s France was playing an old part. On one hand it was serving as an "extremely sympathique" guide for the big economic powers. “It is also playing an extremely irritating role, that of professor of virtue, the lesson-giver who breaks the rules that it lays down for others.” France is half Le Cid and half Tartuffe, he added -- models of heroism and hypocrisy from the 17th century dramatists Corneille and Molière. .
Back on the eternal theme of franglais, here is the latest effort by the French state to fight off the American-English invasion from le web, or rather...la toile.
The Ministry of Culture's language agency, or police as we Anglo-Saxons usually call them, have issued a glossary of indigenous terms to replace the jargon that French IT people and civilian internautes are so quick to embrace. All employees of the state -- which means over a quarter of the work force -- are legally obliged to use these terms at work and in public communications rather than the English original.
You must say un fouineur (and presumably also une fouineuse) and not hacker. You are put on hold by un numéro d’assistance or d'urgence and not un hotline. "These new French terms are not yet widespread," says the DGLF, the language directorate. "The more people use them, the more easily they will enter usage and the quicker they will become familiar and seem always to have existed."
That may sound a little Orwellian but, as we have seen before, the rear-guard language campaign of recent decades has had some success. Over the years, clever French coinages have driven out some English terms and even improved on them. Ordinateur, invented by an IBM engineer in the 1950s, prevented France joining the computer bandwagon. Ordinateur was good because it contains the Latin religious sense of Creator (someone who ordains).
Informatique covers computing and Information Technology more succinctly than anything in English. Logiciel is more elegant than software, though I've noticed people reverting to the English because it sounds cooler. However the state-ordered courriel has not replaced email (known just as mail or even mèl) despite its use in state radio and television and media such as Le Monde.
The language guardians are up against fashion. The English (usually American) terms sound more hip even when there are perfectly good old French words for the same thing. Worm is used though ver is the same thing. The French, with its more abstract -- and elegant -- construction, comes over as a little quaint. It is also usually longer, which is the killer. There is little chance that people will adopt logiciel espion instead of spyware, message incendiaire instead of flame or canular instead of hoax.
The language authority reminded its civil service audience that failure to use French risks widening the fracture numérique (digital divide) which separates the initiated from the less privileged. "Let us not forget: equal rights and opportunity are a function of language [passent par la langue]."
The morale of the language troops was somewhat undermined earlier this month by their own boss, Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister. Talking at a political gathering, Mitterrand said that it was "time to stop this ridiculous anti-Americanism". "It is not because one eats Big Macs and wears jeans, that one cannot read Paul Valéry." Maybe, but I wish they would ban the latest vogue import -- le buzz. It is impossible to switch on any media without hearing someone going on about le dernier buzz, usually involving un pipole* of some kind.
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* a celebrity, derived originally from People magazine
Complete glossary from the language agency (.pdf) here
Jacques Chirac, the last President, has become the latest victim of the anti-tobacco zeal that prevails these days in France. Chirac's publishers have just delayed for a month the release of the first volume of his memoirs because his staff objected to a cover portrait in which he is holding a lit cigarette.
A dangling clope was a trademark of the younger Chirac, as it was of most French stars of the last half century. The picture is a nice atmospheric shot from the 1980s of the pensive prime minister of the time. It would not have made much sense without the cigarette, though smokes have been purged in recent years from pictures of Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon,Jean-Paul Sartre,Albert Camus, Charles de Gaulle, André Malraux, the late writer-politician, and Jacques Tati, the late film-maker.
"The release of the book has been put back because of the cover photograph," said Elizabeth Franck, spokeswoman for the NiL publishing house. "Photographs of the young Chirac smoking are quite common. Everyone has seen them (but) when Mr Chirac's staff saw the photo on the cover mock-up, they preferred to change it for a portrait of his face alone," Franck told us.
The bon vivant Chirac, 76, stopped appearing in public with cigarettes in 1988 and made cancer research one of the main priorities. His presidency ended with a smoking ban spreading in public places. Nicolas Sarkozy, his successor, is a private smoker. He enjoys one fat Cuban cigar a day in the Elysée Palace -- but never touches alcohol.
The Chirac decision has been attacked as another case of excessive obedience to the anti-smoking fervour which took hold in Chirac's years in the Elysée, from 1995-2007. "Political correctness has struck again", said Le Parisien.
The doctoring of pictures has become an issue in the cultural world, with critics accusing publishers, advertisers and museum directors of air-brushing history in the way that banished Soviet politicians were once erased from Kremlin portraits.
It's pretty clear that historic pictures are not covered by the 1991 anti-tobacco legislation, known as the Evin law. This prohibits "all propaganda or publicity, direct or indirect, in favour of tobacco and its products."
Géard Audureau, chief of the Non-smokers' Rights campaign organisation, called the Chirac cover-change silly. "This is an image of the young Chirac from a time when he smoked. It does not shock me to see a smoking president because it was the reality in that period," he told us. "It is an old-fashioned picture which does not promote tobacco."
Audureau compared the decision to other acts of censorship this year. They have involved Audrey Tautou, the actress, Delon and Tati, who invented and played the comic Monsieur Hulot. The Christian Dior perfume company was widely criticised in the spring for removing a cigarette from a 1960s portrait of Delon which it is using in a current campaign [Pictures below]. The Paris transport system (RATP) refused to carry film posters of Tautou starring as Coco Chanel because her character was smoking.
Readers here will remember that a full-scale row broke out when the RATP forced the state Cinémathèque to remove Monsieur Hulot's trade-mark pipe from posters advertising a festival of Tati's work. That act, in which the pipe was replaced by a child's windmill, prompted a petition by the League of Human Rights. "It is necessary to mobilise people in the face of spreading political correctness which does not hesitate to deform works of national heritage," it said.
The RATP backed down after Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, added her voice to the outcry against the altered picture. "I am not in favour of taking Jacques Tati's pipe away from him," said Bachelot.
I wonder what will be the fate of the celebrated pipe and whisky bottles of Captain Haddock, the friend of Tintin, when Steven Spielberg produces his forthcoming Hollywood version of the cartoon boy reporter.
Here we go again. Another G20 summit and another threat by Nicolas Sarkozy to slam the door.
The last time, in April, Super Sarko huffed and puffed in the days leading up to the 20-nation economic summit in London. If he did not win consent to his demands, he would be out in a flash, he said. He stayed to the end and claimed that he won a breakthrough on tax havens.
This time, the venue is the gathering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 24-25. Sarko will march out if the other nations fail to agree on curbs bankers' bonuses, the Elysée Palace said today.
Claude Guéant, Sarkozy's chief-of-staff, made clear that he is staging another bout of brinkmanship, this time in the role of scourge of high-paid bankers. His demands for a legal cap on financial sector remuneration have run into opposition, notably from Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, and President Obama's team.
“There must absolutely be an agreement to make things change and the president is absolutely determined on that score,” Guéant said on RTL radio. Asked if that meant a walk-out, he replied: "This possibility must be taken seriously." Sarkozy was also quoted in today's Figaro as saying:"If there is no concrete decision [at Pittsburgh], I will leave."
Sarkozy believes that his walk-out threats ahead of the April meeting in London won the agreement to black-list tax havens. His strong-arm tactics went down fairly well domestically, but were seen by fellow leaders as silly grandstanding.
After summoning French banking chiefs and lecturing them on the dangers of rewarding risk-taking, Sarkozy has won their consent to a system of limits and delayed payment of bonuses. He has the support of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for an absolute cap on bonuses and sanctions for companies that break it. Brown, the only leftist in the the trio of Europe's big power leaders, agreed to sign a joint European pre-G20 letter only after it was diluted to a commitment to "explore ways" of limiting bonuses.
The G20 Finance ministers backed away from the idea of a cap in their meeting to prepare the G20 earlier this month. The focus of the Pittsburgh session has shifted from bankers' pay to the need to impose higher capital requirements on banks, as Brown and Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, want.
Sarkozy knows that he has strong public support for his crusade against bankers and traders, species which have been relegated in France to a rung somewhere below serial killers and child molesters. One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the consensus holds that the financial world has done rather well out of the crisis and changed little. Sarkozy has been quoting Talleyrand's famous line on the aristocrats who came back to France after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte: 'They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.'
A national poll for Libération showed today that a majority of the country thinks that the main beneficiaries of Sarkozy's anti-recession policies are big corporations and banks. Only seven percent rated ordinary workers as benefiting. The Viavoice poll found that 58 percent had a negative view of Sarkozy's handling of la crise over the past year, with 40 percent positive. That's actually remarkably favourable for Sarko, given the general level of grumbling about him.
Sarkozy came up with a new wheeze today for getting the French out of their grim mood. He announced that he is adding happiness as a factor to the usual measure of economic performance. The idea, which is part of the new Green Sarko, is to shift emphasis away from gross domestic product (GDP) towards quality of life matters such as well-being and sustainability.
A couple of years ago, Sarkozy commissioned the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen to come up with proposals. They made them public today at the Sorbonne university. Sarkozy said there that GDP gives a false reading because people have for years (until recently) been told that the economy was growing yet they saw that their living standards were declining. "In the whole world, people think that they are being lied to, that the (GDP) figures are false, or worse, manipulated," he said. "Nothing is more destructive to democracy".
The President called for a revolution. New factors in national performance should include such things as "the services which are rendered inside the family", the quality of public services and access to leisure activities. He has a point, as we are always arguing here. Sarkozy wants to factor in the quality of life. If everyone did the same, France would likely top the world performance charts.
Think of post-war Paris and chances are that this is one of the images that spring to mind. The little boy with the baguette was one of the immortal shots by Willy Ronis, who died yesterday at the age of 99.
Ronis was the last of the band of photographers, known as the humanist school, who snapped everyday Parisian life in the two decades after 1945, usually in black and white and in the poorer quarters. The period now seems like a golden age. The work of Ronis and his friends Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai became poster clichés in the 1980s but they were recognised as masters earlier than most realise. As early as 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored them with an exhibition. They influenced all photographers of the era. I remember my father, a keen amateur photographer, taking slice-of-life pictures in the style of Cartier-Bresson and Ronis in the north of Scotland.
Ronis, the son of Jewish immigrants from east Europe, began as a photographer in the late 1930s using an old Rolleiflex. He was very ill in his final years but remained lucid to the end. In July he drew a big crowd when he appeared at the annual photographic exhibition in Arles.
Ronis, like his colleagues and all self-respecting thinkers in the post-war years, was a leftist. He mainly chronicled the lives of the labouring classes. He was by all accounts an extraordinarily gentle man. "I never took a mean photo," he said when he was given a Paris show in 2005. "I never wanted to make people look ridiculous. I always had a lot of respect for the people I photographed." In Arles, this summer, he said he had always felt empathy with his subjects. "I met very few bastards."
President Sarkozy paid tribute to Ronis as the "chronicler of postwar social aspirations and the poet of a simple and joyous life." Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, said Ronis immortalized "for each of us the poetry of our daily lives and saved it from lost time."
The work of some of the humanists has been slightly discredited in recent years with the discovery that they posed some of their seemingly spontaneous snaps of street life. Robert Doisneau admitted late in life that he used paid drama students to stage the kiss in the celebrated "Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville". He confessed only after he was sued by a couple who falsely claimed to be the pair in his picture. I talked to Doisneau at the time and he told me that he regretted the picture because so many couples claimed over the years to have been its subject.
Ronis said he arranged only one of his shots. He came across the little boy with the baguette and asked him to run past the baker's shop two or three times. One of his other great photos, "Les Amoureux de la Bastille" [below], was just luck he said. He was on top of the monument to take views of Paris. "I didn't see anyone and thought I'd be left in peace. I turned round and saw two lovers ...looking at the view. I loaded the camera, the young man kissed the temple of his girlfiend. They didn't notice that I had photographed them."
Nowadays of course that would be impossible in France. Although almost everyone carries a telephone camera it is illegal to publish the photograph of anyone without their permission. The couple would now be able to sue Ronis for a fortune.
The video below has just blown up in the face of Brice Hortefeux, the French Interior Minister and close friend of President Sarkozy. In it, Hortefeux is bantering with Amin, a young party activist of Algerian origin from Sarkozy's UMP party. Apparently talking about France's north African immigrant population, the minister cracks a joke: “When there’s one that’s all right. It’s when there are a lot of them that there are problems.” [more of the exchange below]
That was enough to trigger a full-scale outcry from the Socialist opposition, anti-racist groups, editorialists and so on. The exchange, which has turned into a YouTube hit, is the top national news item this morning. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Madonna, has just called for Hortefeux's resignation.
Hortefeux has come up with clumsy attempts to extract himself. He was, he claimed, not talking about Arabs, but talking about Auvergnats, people from the Auvergne, because both he Amin hail from the central France region.
The mini-scandal will blow over, but it it is damaging because it plays to the racist reputation that clings to Hortefeux from his days as Sarkozy's first minister for Immigration and National Identity. It also reinforces the ugly image that has clung to Sarkozy's administration despite his appointment of ministers from the immigrant banlieues. Before the new incident, Rachida Dati and other former Sarkozy appointees from the minorities had complained that Hortefeux was condescending towards them.
Since becoming Interior Minister, which includes the job of chief of police, in the summer, Hortefeux has been trying to shed his sulphurous image. To show he meant business, last month he sacked a prefect -- top state official -- for complaining that the chaotic security measures at Orly airport were "like being in Africa". The black personnel complained to the police. Today the dismissed prefect, Paul Girot de Langlade, was crowing on the radio. "I hope he joins me soon."
Amin is insisting that he did not feel insulted or "disrespected" by the minister's banter. Hortefeux says that he said nothing about anyone's north African origins. The fuss is being overplayed, but his explanation does not wash. The exchange in the video tells you about the old-fashioned attitude in sections of the the UMP -- formerly the Gaullist -- party towards the underclass descended from immigrants from the former colonies.
A woman introduces Hortefeux to Amin, saying "he eats pig and drinks beer".
Hortefeux jokes: "So he doesn't fit the stereotype at all." [Il ne correspond pas du tout au prototype, alors]
France has a long tradition of taxing its citizens in exotic ways but you might think that now would not be the best time for hitting them with a new wheeze. President Sarkozy has done that today with the announcement of a carbon tax -- a levy on oil, gas and coal used by households and business.
In full statesman-like mode, Sarkozy talked of an historic "fiscal revolution" as he appeared on television from a heat-pump plant [in picture] to present his scheme. Earlier this week, he said his carbon tax would turn out to be a milestone like General de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of Algeria and President Mitterrand's abolition of the death penalty in 1981. Both of those were initially unpopular. Two-thirds of the public do not want the carbon tax, according to polls. But with a rise in his approval ratings, Sarkozy is prepared to put up with some unhappiness. He sees this as a chance to blaze a green trail that others will follow -- starting at a big UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December.
The carbon idea has been operating successfully over the past decade in Finland, Sweden and Denmark and in parts of Canada. This is the first time that it is to be applied in a major economy.
The scheme has been stirring a furore in the political world for the past couple of weeks. Its unpopularity is upsetting sections of Sarkozy's own camp.
The point is to encourage people to use less fossil fuel. Electricity is exempt because most in France comes from renewable nuclear power. The main feature, Sarkozy insisted, is that the tax of 17 euros per tonne of carbon gas will create no overall new burden. Revenues will be put back into taxpayers' pockets through other tax cuts and "green cheques" to the lower-earning classes. This smacks of one of those over-complicated bureaucratic arrangements known, appropriately, as une usine à gaz -- a gasworks. The immediate impact -- from next year -- will be about four cents per litre on fuel and a five percent rise in household gas costs.
As usual, Sarkozy has been astute, wrongfooting the left and the green opposition by embracing one of their themes. He employed Michel Rocard, a former Socialist Prime Minister, to draw up plans for the tax. While the party has quibbled over the detail, Ségolène Royal, the dissident Socialist star, has used it as a weapon to accuse Sarkozy of robbing the poor. The Greens have been reduced to complaining that the President has climbed onto their bandwagon with a watered-down version of what they always wanted.
Sarkozy called on the United States and Asia to follow Europe's lead on climate change. He was too modest to say it, but of course he meant Presidnet Sarkozy's lead.
At the risk of being called a carbon hypocrite myself, it's worth noting that France's new green president is not frugal with his fossil fuel. He jets around the world in the presidential Airbuses more than any of his predecessors. He took two of them to fly for his one-day visit to Brazil last weekend. His brief public outings, such as today's jaunt to the east, require lavish deployment of police, often bused in from a distance. He has just expanded the limousine fleet at the Elysée Palace and when he drives himself it is in his gas-guzzling BMW 4x4 (SUV to Americans).
PS. The Times has done its bit for cutting the carbon in Paris. Yesterday, we moved out of the elegant building on the Place de l'Opéra which has been our home for decades -- with the exception of 1940-44. We are now in much less grand, but still pleasant, premises in the 17th arrondissement. And I promise to get away from Sarkozy in the next post.
President Sarkozy appears to have pulled off a true feat of salesmanship. On a one-day visit to Brazil, he has secured President Lula's agreement in principle to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets. If it comes off, the five billion euro deal is more than a business story. It is a political and strategic breakthrough for France and Sarkozy.
The Rafale has suffered something of a jinx since Dassault aviation began developing it in the 1980s. Though highly agile, technologically advanced and beautiful from the pilot's point of view, the plane has so far failed to win a single customer outside France. Potential clients have found it too expensive or succumbed to rivals' political pressure -- notably from the United States. The Rafale was launched when France decided to go it alone and stay out of the Eurofighter project of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain.
It entered service with the air force and navy from 2000 and a squadron is on duty in Afghanistan.
The failure to sell was a big frustration. The French tax-payer forked out most of the 30 billion euros it took to build the beast and supply it to the forces. Before Sarkozy, President Chirac flew thousands of miles to press France's traditional customers such as Morocco and India to buy the successor to Dassault's legendary Mirage -- which did well abroad. Talks advanced but the orders never came. Chirac's interest was personal as well as patriotic. His father was employed in the 1940s by Marcel Bloch, who changed his name to Dassault and founded the great plane-making firm. It is still family run. I recently sat beside Olivier Dassault, Marcel's grandson, as he landed one of the family Falcons on a visit the Rafale factory near Bordeaux. Serge, his father and current chief, was in the back. He told me that Dassault had not lost money despite the export failure because the state had financed the project.
Last week, Paris even sent two Rafales (the word means 'gust' in English) to take part in Muammar Gaddafi's anniversary festivities in Libya. The Colonel has been toying with the idea of buying a few of the planes, which so far have cost about 138 million euros a piece.
Sarkozy has applied his usual determination to pulling off a first order for the hitherto unwanted plane. In Brazil, the Rafale was in competition with the Saab Gripen NG and Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet. The deal is part of Lula's plans for turning Brazil into "one of the great powers of the 21st century." Sarkozy's clincher was agreement to share all the Rafale technology with Brazil and let the Brazilians assemble many themselves. US bars on exporting military technology meant that neither Boeing nor Saab (which uses US systems) could do this.
"The relationship between Brazil and France is not one of supplier and client, but of partners," Sarkozy said in Brazil. "We want to act together because we share the same values and a same vision on the big international goals."
Brazil is already buying five French submarines - including one that will be modified to run on nuclear power - and 50 military transport helicopters, for a value of around 10 billion dollars. As part of the Rafale deal, Sarkozy agreed to buy 10 KC-390 transport aircraft to be built by Brazil's Embraer.
No contract has been signed yet and there are reports that the Brazilian Air Force feels that it has been strong-armed in a contest that is not officially to be decided until October. Optimistic French officials hope that the final Rafale contract will be announced on October 23. That is the 103rd anniversary of the pioneering flight by Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, in the Bois de Boulogne in west Paris. The American Wright brothers took off three years earlier, but, as we have seen here before, Santos-Dumont was officially recorded as making the first powered flight because the Aero Club de France was on hand to certify it.
 President Sarkozy has been caught again compensating for his modest stature. Last June, you may remember, he was snapped standing on a stool to match the height of President Obama during the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy (picture below). This time, we hear that a busload of short people was driven in to stand behind the President when he visited a factory.
Sarkozy's appearance at the Faurecia firm near the Normandy town of Caligny last Thursday was a photo-opportunity for the national television news (picture above). It was designed to show a dynamic Sarkozy, back from the summer break, making a speech to eager workers at the automotive parts plant.
A Belgian television crew decided to show how the Elysée Palace stage-manages these events. It filmed volunteers being driven in from other Faurecia plants as extras to stand around the president. They were picked because they were not taller than Sarkozy's five feet five inches, said Jean-Philippe Schaller, the RTBF tv reporter. Watch on the video below as he asks one of the white-coated volunteers if height was a factor in their casting. "Yes," she says. He persists: "You had to be no taller than the president ?" The employee replies: "Voilà" (That's it).
The Elysée has taken 24 hours to react to the RTBF report -- after it was picked up by the French media. They dismissed the story as "totally preposterous and grotesque" -- but did not actually deny it. The Faurecia company also denied ensuring a low-level crowd, but one of the firm's trade union leaders contradicted this, saying the report is accurate. "We are certain, from sure and reliable sources, that this demand did not come out of the head of a manager at Faurecia and that it absolutely was a request from the Elysée," said Jose De Sa Moreira of the CFDT, one of France's main unions. "Only short people could appear beside the President," he said.
"The request, or order, was given to the top management of Faurecia. As union leaders we just ensured that the people approached were not coerced and that they were not chosen on the grounds of colour or age..." he added.
It's possible that this story is the product of mischief from local anti-Sarkozy forces. One worker said the whole company had been talking about the height restriction in the run-up to the presidential visit. So it could have been a rumour that started it all. But the tale is plausible for anyone who has watched the elaborate way that Sarkozy's appearances are organised.
The French presidency is not much different from the American one or the British Prime Minister's office when it comes to stage-managing appearances. Nothing is left to chance. A prefect -- the local governor -- was sacked a few months ago after police failed to keep demonstrators out of earshot during a Sarkozy visit to a provincial factory. But picking a short crowd does seem to be taking things a little far.
Sarkozy's sensitivity over his petite taille is normal enough. But he sets himself up for mockery with attempts to compensate for it. His stack-heeled loafers are a running joke with cartoonists and comedians.
Height seems to be a criterion for membership of Sarkozy's government. There are few tall men. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, and Jean-Louis Borloo, who the super-minister for the environment and transport, are pint-sized. François Fillon, the Prime Minister, is of modest height.
Carla Bruni, who stands nearly five inches taller than her husband, grumbled this summer that people paid too much attention to the fact that she always wore completely flat soles in his presence. "I understand that the media prefer to talk about my pumps more than my global foundation or the fight against illiteracy," she said.
Sarkozy is not the only one to stage-manage appearances. Last month, Luc Chatel, the Education Minister and government spokesman, was caught in the act when he visited a supermarket at Villeneuve-le-Roi, southeast of Paris.
The aisles, normally quiet on an August afternoon, were suddenly full of well-dressed middle-class shoppers who showered praise on a government price freeze on school supplies. It turned out that the women were all from the UMP, Sarkozy's party, and had been driven in for the occasion.
[Below, Belgian tv report on Sarkozy's short crowd]
It is over three months since Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic off Brazil. They have not found the flight recorders but the elements are falling into place. It became clear this week that Air France, the Airbus corporation and the BEA, the French state accident investigators, would like to blame the crew for the crash of the A330 Airbus, which had 228 souls aboard.
Pilots are angry over what they say is an attempt to make them scapegoats for a failing in the Airbus design. Families of the victims are also accusing the authorities of obfuscation. A lot is at stake. I have been talking to Air France pilots. Gérard Arnoux, an Airbus A320 captain with the company, told me: "They are trying to blame the pilots. They do not want the truth." Arnoux is active in the Union of Air France Pilots (SPAF), a militant offshoot from the company's branch of the mainstream National Union of Airline Pilots (SNPL)
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President Sarkozy's team is alarmed by a familiar French mess in Gabon, the former west African colony. Crowds have rioted against Ali Bongo, the newly elected president, and attacked a French consulate and oil facilities.
Paris faces the old scenario: President Bongo telephones Sarkozy to send troops to rescue him from a popular revolt while French paratroops evacuate the 10,000 French nationals. The scene was last played out in February 2008 when the paratroops saved President Déby of Chad from insurgents and escorted expatriates out of his country.
It was not supposed to be like this. When he took office in May 2007, Sarkozy promised a clean break with "FrançAfrique", the old system in which Paris propped up African leaders, no matter how corrupt, provided they served French interests. Sarkozy has switched strategic focus to the Gulf, cut troop levels to 900 in the Ivory Coast and he plans to close one of two garrisons in Senegal or Gabon. France, he says, has ended the "complicity of a bygone era" and it will no longer play the gendarme of Africa. In 2007, he caused offence with a speech in Senegal in which he said Africans had "not sufficiently entered history." He also exonerated the colonial powers from some of their legacy. They were "not responsible for the bloody wars that the Africans have waged among themselves, for the genocide, the dictators, the fanaticism and corruption," he said.
But the trouble in loyal and lucrative Gabon shows how hard it is for France to break with ways that long have ensured rich returns. The rioters who attacked the consulate in Gabon's Port Gentil were angry over over the presidential victory of Ali Ben Bongo, son of Omar Bongo, who ruled from 1967 to his death last June [pictured with Sarkozy above]. "France imposed its new Bongo," says Bruno Moubamba, a defeated candidate.
Bongo senior was the epitome of the old system. He kept dozens of mansions and fat bank accounts in France, according to investigators. He allegedly helped funded the campaigns of President Chirac. In the 1980s and 1990s, he corrupted the bosses of the Elf-Aquitaine oil giant and the son of the late President Mitterrand, who were all sentenced by Paris courts. "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver," Bongo senior used to say. "France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel."
Bernard Kouchner, Sarkozy's Foreign Minister and human rights symbol, was embarrassed earlier this year when it was disclosed that before taking office in 2007, Bongo had paid him hundreds of thousands of euros for consultancy.
Despite Sarkozy's promises of change, it is business of usual for much of 'France-Afrique'. Total oil and other French firms need all the help they can get as they struggl to keep their share of trade in the face of Chinese and American competition. Paris laid on the honours at Bongo's funeral in June. Sarkozy attended along with Chirac, Kouchner and a platoon of present and former ministers. Sarkozy was booed by crowds after proclaiming that Bongo was France's "great and loyal friend".
With performances like that, it is not surprising that France finds itself once again as a player in the thick of upheaval in one of its old African possessions. This evening's Le Monde reaches this conclusion: "France worked to obtain the (Gabonese) election result that was proclaimed on Thursday... A chance to put into action President Sarkozy's promised new relationship with Africa has been missed. The Gabonese regime, which symbolises the caricature of "Françafrique" will thus live on."
French children went back to school today after the long summer break. The event was accorded the usual fanfare, with television and radio reporters at the school gates. My 15-year-old daughter is starting Lycée at a weekly boarding school near Paris tomorrow. What follows is a slightly expanded column that I wrote for the newspaper today --
Late this month, my son will be among thousands of British teenagers who are starting university. His arrival at Exeter would not justify a mention, except that James is fairly unusual. In his 18 years, he has spent only a few weeks in Britain. Born in New York, he has lived mostly in France and Belgium so his English sounds like Inspecteur Clouseau. I am taking him across the Channel for his first visit to a pub. He is worried about the food but he has heard that les petites anglaises are fun. This idea that English girls are charming and rather naughty lingers from the 1970s when the young Jane Birkin and other cross-Channel starlets appeared in French comedy films.
James is excited and anxious about making contact with a nearby home country that he hardly knows. We never planned it like this, but a chain of postings outside Britain has meant that the children have grown up in a slight no-man’s land. If they had to define themselves, they would say they are Franco-American Britons with a Scottish-Australian father and an Iranian-American mother.
For kids, the territory of the long-term expatriate is an odd place, even in the age of Facebook and Google. They have the privilege of enjoying a wider world but also the drawback of not really belonging anywhere. British families traditionally avoided this by packing off their young to board in the home country. [click below to read on]
Continue reading "Bringing up French Anglo-Saxons" »
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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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