France has a rich tradition of dictionaries and encyclopedias and the publishers are not giving up in the face of the competition from the internet. Tomorrow sees the publication of the latest Petit Larousse, a dictionary-reference book which has been part of French family life since Pierre Larousse invented it in 1905.
The Petit Larousse is serious and known for its fine illustrations but it is not set in stone like the dictionary of the august Académie Française, the official guardian of the language. It keeps pace with trends and mirrors the prevailing culture. So it's always interesting to note the new expressions and the people whom it adds to its new editions. The arrivals this year include Audrey Tautou, Barack Obama and George Clooney.
The inclusion of show-biz personalities is part of "la pipolisation" of French life. That word, which means celebrity culture and originated in the 1990s from the US People magazine, is one of 150 new terms in the Larousse dictionary section. There are a few from Belgium, Quebec and other parts, and some, like barré (crazy, eccentric) are current French slang but many, inevitably, have been adopted from American
They include buzz, burn-out, geek, fantasy (in the sense of Tolkien-style, nordic mythology entertainment), peer-to-peer, caster (meaning to cast in the theatre sense), blacklister (to blacklist), clubbeur/clubbeuse and toxique, in the sense of waste or loans. The new toxique is one of many examples of English usage being overlaid on old French words. A typical classic example is réaliser, which took on the English sense of to realize as well as its French meaning of to carry out. (The shift took place in the 1920s, according learned commentators below)
This may drop out of the language as fashion passes. Larousse is not sanctifying language like the Académie, whose dictionary is a safe half century or so behind the times. It just tries to reflect current use.
You can understand why French embraces American jargon when it encapsulates a sense for which nothing native has been invented. English has done that with dozens of French words (chic, chagrin, nuance, frisson...) over the past couple of centuries. Le buzz sounds ugly in French but it is a single syllable which French takes a mouthful to render as "rumeur, retentissement médiatique, notamment autour de ce qui est perçu comme étant à la pointe de la mode" as Larousse puts it.
But a lot of the English borrowing is superfluous or silly. Gilles Vigneault, a venerable Quebec singer-poet, was making the point on Europe1 radio this morning. Why say burn-out when there is a perfectly good French word for it, épuisement (exhaustion), he said. My list of recent silly franglais would include relooker (to make over), le fooding (a restaurant fashion involving modern cuisine and trendy décor) and sur-booké (booked out). All have been registered by Larousse.
To get back to less topical matters, this edition marks the 120th anniversary of La Semeuse (the sower), the illustration of a woman blowing dandelion seeds in the wind, which Larousse adopted for his publishing house in 1890 [Dandelion, an English borrowing from the French dent-de-lion, or lion's tooth]. And here is one of the famous nature illustrations: from le Petit Larousse.
Here's a little good news for Britons, Americans and other nouveau pauvre visitors to France. Restaurant owners are going to promise the government today that they will trim their prices -- by up to 10 percent on some menus.
The deal, made in return for a hefty cut in value-added (sales) tax, should soften the blow in time for summer visitors who are not blessed with the strong euro currency. But don't expect too much. Many restaurateurs say that they need the two billion euro gift from the state just to survive the recession. Restaurants and bistros lost between 20 and 50 per cent of their income from January to March and many have already introduced more modest "crisis menus" to lure back patrons.
At Taillevent, a high temple of Parisien gastronomy, they are refusing any drop in the charge for their langoustine royales, golden frogs' legs and other items on their Michelin-starred menu. "I'm not dropping my prices because that would imply that they were not right to begin with, which is not the case and because the cost of the ingredients has risen steeply," Valérie Vrinat, the owner, told us.
President Sarkozy ordered the country's 200,000 eating establishments to pass on part of a drop from 19.6 percent to 5.5 percent in VAT which he won from the European Union last month. He secured the cut, expected to take effect from July 1, after Germany lifted a seven-year veto against a pledge originally made to the restaurant industry by President Chirac.
The tax bonus does not cover wine -- which accounts for 20 percent of restaurant income -- and the universal 15 percent service charge will continue to be applied -- along with the usual expectation of a tip beyond that.
Under pressure from the Government, the catering trade is to come up with a list of a dozen everyday items which will benefit from the full VAT cut. This should include the plat du jour, basic entrées (appetizers for Americans) and desserts plus coffee. "A customer should be able to order a meal which is entirely subject to the full VAT reduction," said Hervé Novelli, the Trade Minister. An ordinary Parisian dish of the day such as a steak-frites or pavé de saumon should drop from about 15 euros to 13.20.
Restaurant owners are also expected to use the tax benefit to recruit more staff and invest in their establishments. They will in return lose some earlier tax breaks. I'll certainly welcome more staff. One of the drawbacks eating out in France -- other than in grand establishments -- is the slow service that stems from over-worked personnel. That, of course, springs from the employers' burden of huge payroll charges and strict labour contracts (but let's not divert into the usual argument here).
At the small Bistrot d'Henri in the Saint-Germain-des-Près quarter, David Poulat, the owner, told us that he welcomed the scheme though he thought many in the trade would need the benefit simply to keep their heads above water in the recession. He expects to cut his plats du jour such as blanquette de veau and gigot et gratin de courgette from 14 to 12 euros. "But at the same time I might reduce the portions a little," he said. Lowering the price of à la carte items would be difficult. "I am not sure that it would attract customers anyway. People will not be swayed much by a difference of one or two euros."
He may not be right. plenty of people, not just sterling-earners like us, think twice before dining out modestly in Paris these days because l'addition will come in at about 80 euros for two with a bottle of basic wine. Between 60 and 70 euros changes the picture. And in case anyone is wondering, expense accounts are a fading memory in our business.
[Below, the other end of the scale: 564 euros for lunch for two at the three-star restaurant of the hotel Bristol, President Sarkozy's favourite eating place, opposite the Elysée palace. From chrisoscope.com, a Paris food critic's site.]
Spring has arrived in Paris. Daffodils are out in the gardens, overcoats are disappearing and the sun is showing up the winter grime on the windows and on the ugly Porsche Cayenne that is parked in my street. Non-smokers are taking seats on the café terraces (les fumeurs frequented them all winter because of the new indoor smoking ban). The trout fishing season opened today. It's even possible to scent a hint of hope in the air despite the gloom and grumbling all around.
As the winter lifts, the French are not at all as depressed as they make out, according to a poll by le Parisien. Two out of three say they are optimistic about the future. There were other surprises from the mood survey which I'll get back to below.
One of the reasons for optimism may be the overdose of crisis. The news continued to be bleak this week, with factory closures every day, including a Sony plant where the desperate workers took the company's French boss hostage. But some of the media think that it's time to change the tune and have started putting out stories on making the most of the down-turn -- lower house prices and rediscovering simple pleasures such as home cooking, the cinema, holidays in France and so on.
And some of the news is reassuringly familiar. The Paris book fair has opened -- with a Mexican theme this year -- the fashion week was a hit as usual and Nicolas Sarkozy was caught out once again indulging his love of luxury.
The President disappeared with Carla Bruni three days before a one-day official visit to Mexico City last Monday. No-one was supposed to know where he was, but the Mexican press tracked the French royal couple to El Tamarindo Beach and Golf Resort, a very expensive enclave in Jalisco state on the Pacific Coast [picture]. This did not look good for Sarko's efforts to rid himself of the bling-bling that tainted his early months in the presidency. All that turquoise and palm trees hardly helped his new image as close to his suffering people.
Things got worse when it emerged that the presidential pair occupied their 3,500 dollars-a-day suite as guests of Roberto Hernandez, one of Mexico's richest bankers and owner of the resort.
It didn't take long for the media to recycle 1990s allegations from the United States that Hernandez was involved in the cocaine industry. The Elysée Palace kept an embarrassed silence, directing queries to the Mexican presidency who, it claims, organised Sarko's long weekend on the beach. Today the Mexicans have said that "a group of businessmen" paid for the beach weekend.
Talk of the Jalisco jaunt has eclipsed Sarkozy's two very substantial acts in foreign policy this week -- his announcement of France's return to full Nato membership (last post) and a realignment with Germany at a session with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday. Like all his predecessors, Sarkozy seems to have accepted that French power works best in Europe as part of the axis with Berlin.
Sarko has also been lecturing his government on the need for what's known in French as la positive attitude. He has given them orders to talk up his and their achievements.
Which brings us back to the spring survey, carried out by the CSA polling firm. It found that the French draw their greatest satisfaction and pleasure from leisure time with their friends and family. The best moment of the day is "meeting up with the family in the evening". Second after that came "waking up alongside the person you love".
Asked what contributes most to make their lives positive, 61 percent answered their children, 33 percent said friends, 23 percent said leisure activities and only 20 percent said that it was their work or studies.
Asked what activity gave them most pleasure, 40 percent said an evening with their partner or with friends. Thirty-nine percent said sports, listening to music or cooking. Only 13 percent cited love-making as their most pleasurable activity. That statistic is not great for France's reputation as le pays de l'amour.
At least sex got a mention. Religion appeared nowhere in the poll, not even under the question of the most important values that society should observe. First came respect for others, then "solidarity", followed by the family. The value of work came next, followed by money.
And a final question: What moments are you most looking forward to in 2009? The answers were pretty modest, in keeping with diminished times.
1) The first sunshine of springtime
2) The summer holidays
3) The birthday of your children or parents
4) A party, wedding or other social event with friends [A spring day at a café in Lille]
 Michelin published the 100th edition of its Red Guide today. That prompted the annual ritual of bashing the celebrated bible of French gastronomy. The guide, first published in 1900 but halted during world wars, has lost touch with modern taste and rewards "museum-cuisine" in the stuffy old French tradition, say the critics.
The only addition to the élite three-star category, Eric Fréchon of the Hotel Bristol in Paris [below], is coming in for his own share of sniping. The Bristol, across the street from the Elysée Palace, is President Sarkozy's favourite "cantine", so Fréchon's promotion is being called a marketing stunt. In an amusing video, the ferocious François Simon of le Figaro visits the Bristol and calls his cooking overdone, too expensive and not very original. Simon's bill for a meal for two came to 531 euros.
For the British, the other noteworthy promotion was the two-star rating awarded to Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, for the restaurant which he took over at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles a year ago. Simon of course had a put-down for the upstart Britannique. Ramsay's cooking is not bad though déjà vu and unoriginal, said Simon.
But for an institution that is so often proclaimed passé, Michelin is not doing badly. The 2,000-page Red Guide sells 1.3 million copies a year worldwide. In France it sold 370,000 in 2008 -- ten times more than its nearest competitor, the Gault et Millau guide. That's impressive for a publication that sticks to its tradition of packing a single volume with tiny print, minimalist description and no pictures.
A series of great chefs have withdrawn in recent years from the struggle of meeting Michelin's exacting standards in order to keep their stars. The latest of these was Marc Veyrat, one of the super-stars of the culinary world, who said last week that he is giving up his restaurant at Annecy, in the Alps.
But for thousands of aspiring chefs, Michelin and its feared but small team of anonymous inspectors, remains the ultimate arbiter. In a sign of the times, the French guide is now under the command of Juliane Caspar, 38, a German from Cologne. Jean-Luc Naret, director of all the guides, has been making his case for the superiority of the Guide Rouge. "We have no competitor in France or internationally," he said. Michelin went intercontinental in 2005 with a New York edition and has since opened in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The tyre-making Michelin brothers put out their first guide free to help travellers and their chauffeurs in the new-fangled automobiles to find mechanics and places to sleep and eat [1920 version in picture was first paid edition]. With its maps, guides and recently GPS brand, the firm has remained a reliable source of information for travellers in France. The Red Guide is now available on the internet and as an iPhone application. The next step is a GPS service that will list nearby Michelin recommendations automatically on your sat-nav mobile phone.
The in-tray of Barack Obama may be piled high, but he might like to put aside the banks, the Middle East and health care to focus on a truly urgent matter: the French cheese emergency.
The new President could blow the great goodwill that he enjoys in France if he fails to reverse a parting shot by George W. Bush against that symbol of Gallic gastronomy -- roquefort cheese. We could even face a new round in the war against Yankee junk food, with Coca Cola and MacDonald's in the firing line.
The story began last Thursday when Washington suddenly tripled an already heavy duty on the pungent blue cheese from the southern Massif Central. The idea was to punish Europe for maintaining a longstanding ban on beef from US cattle that had been administered with growth hormones.[background here] Roquefort had been under a 100 percent retaliatory duty since 1999.
Some in France have been quick to see the new Washington measure as petty, belated revenge against the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for their opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Americans slapped new duty on an array of other EU food imports, including fruit, chocolate and chewing gum, but none was subject to the 300 percent reserved for roquefort.
Michel Barnier, the Agriculture Minister, has urged Obama to reverse the roquefort decision and head off another French campaign against the symbols of US fast food. "I hope that he will avoid mediocre little measures like the one just taken against roquefort," Barnier said. France is to protest to the World Trade Organisation.
Philippe Folliot, a centrist MP for the Tarn, near Roquefort village, called for a super-tax against Coca Cola. "I find it especially shocking that the Bush administration, at the end of its term, should take roquefort hostage again," he said.
Jose Bové [left], France's most famous campaigning sheep farmer, threatened a follow-up to his 1999 destruction of a McDonald's outlet in the name of roquefort. His bulldozer assault that year on a restaurant under construction at Millau turned the mustachioed Bové into a celebrity and anti-capitalist hero. "If Obama maintains the supertax, then we will find a new symbolic target," said Bové, who was a roquefort milk producer at the time of his 1999 stunt.
The producers of the ancient cheese -- a favourite of the ancient Romans -- have kept their foothold in the US market despite the 100 percent tax over the past decade. Only 400 tonnes a year -- two percent of their production -- goes to the US, where it is treated as a luxury food. Their hopes of expanding will be scuttled if the new administration confirms the duty, which is to take effect in March.
Some say that they have few illusions since a Democratic administration -- under Bill Clinton -- imposed the first roquefort tax. Speaking of Obama, Béatrice Weinrich of the regional Union of Ewe Farmers said: "The boy must have a lot of other priorities."
Paris is insisting, however, that the prohibition on US hormone-fed beef will remain in force for health reasons, as will another EU measure contested by Washington: the use of chlorine to disinfect chicken carcasses.
Nicolas Sarkozy's recent energy is not just a result of his marriage to Carla Bruni. The French President's extra zoom comes from getting in touch with his pelvic floor, under the orders of a coach.
I learnt about the secret of Sarko's new zoom from the woman responsible: Julie Imperiali, 26, the personal trainer who had honed his supermodel wife for four years and who has been remodelling the President since their marriage last winter. [Here's the feature on her from today's Times]
Imperiali has the kind of looks, charm and energy that make non-French women weep. She is also persuasive. Chatting for an hour in her flat near the Eiffel Tower, she convinced me that she could make everyone as slim as Bruni and speedy as Sarko. Her clients pay her over 100 euros an hour for the privilege.
Since last April, Imperiali, a former aerobics champion and dancer, has applied to Sarkozy a method which she calls Tectonic Wellbeing (nothing to do with a French techno dance style of that name). Visiting the Elysée Palace three or four times a week, Imperiali has helped the pint-sized President break his evening chocolate habit and lose over three kilogrammes (seven pounds) and two trouser sizes. "His body has radically changed," she said. "He is a dream pupil. He is always ready and motivated."
Sarkozy, the first jogger to sit on France's the presidential throne, stopped running in public last winter as part of his attempt to look more dignified. His spreading waistline was ascribed by some to his hobby of collecting old manuscripts and pstage stamps. He has since been pounding the paths of the walled Elysée garden under Imperiali's guidance.
"He was a sporting type, but he did not have the right methods," she said. "He used just to run and run and run without being aware of his body. Now he runs faster and more solidly. He is doing about 10 kph around the garden."
Imperiali talks breezily about how she resculpts the body through exercise and diet. Her work is 60 percent mental and 40 percent physical, she said. The trick is to focus on the perineal muscles -- those around what the British call the groin. These "core" muscles are also important in Pilates and Yoga, I gather (fans of these disciplines, please forgive my inaccuracies).
For a long time, French women have been taught to work on the perineum, especially after childbirth, but in the English-speaking world it has not been quite such a big thing. "The Anglo-Saxons are a bit prudish about this and say that they don't know what we are talking about," said Imperiali. "The perineum is the floor of our body. If it is not kept in shape it like a house with no floor...By becoming conscious of your perineum you become aware of the interior of your body."
Her method not only improves posture and delivers a healthier body and mind. It also improves the sex-lives of her clients, she says. Although most are women, this applies to men too [more details in the feature].
We have not had confirmation from the Elysée Palace about Imperiali's achievements with the President, but I took her on her word after she made her public debut in Elle magazine last month. She is now expanding, with the help of her Belgian husband, into fitness via internet. For a euro a day, she will coach you electronically, almost like Sarko and Bruni. Her site is www.tectonicworkout.com , where you can watch her routine.
[Pictures by Magali Delporte. Above, Julie leaps on the Place de la Concorde, near the Elysée, for The Times]
Purists here have jumped on my headline "la belle France" over the post on wind farms. The French don't say that, I was told. So let's be pedantic and look at the odd things that happen when one language borrows from the other.
I used la belle France advisedly. The expression is old but it is used internationally and it conveys a whiff of Frenchness, like Zut alors! which no-one says much either. It is one of a long list of French words and expressions that are current in English but not in France. The same happens the other way round, or lycée de Versailles, as the kids here say [footnote*].
A friend was complaining the other day that her job requires her to 'faire du phoning' -- making prospective sales calls. She had just had her brushing and was talking about a new restaurant fad called le fooding. These coinages can be useful. I find myself talking about 'un best of' because it's a good term for selected hits. We'll soon have le best of de Sarko 2008. Le smoking (tuxedo to Americans) has long been more concise than the British dinner jacket or black tie. The French media have become très people lately. The word, meaning celebrity culture, presumably came from People, the doyen of US celeb magazines.
In the other direction, a recent Times editorial was headlined Plus ça change. A Parisian colleague asked me what that meant. The proverb plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, is standard in English but has fallen out of common use here. The same goes for déjà vu and crème de la crème (You say le gratin -- the grilled cheese topping a dish -- for crème de la crème)
Then there are the errors. When I write bon vivant in an article , it is "corrected" in the newspaper to read bon viveur, conforming to the English usage. Educated Brits say "chacun a son goût" (each has his/her taste) although the French expression is "(à) chacun son goût" (to each, his/her taste).
The Eurovision song contest has added a Gallic joke to the English language: nul points. It's not French. Here, when a contestant scores nil, they say "zero pointé".
Many meanings have changed over the years. In France, une entrée is now the starter or appetizer, while Americans use it to mean main dish. The entrée originally came between the two when people ate more courses.
People stopped saying sacré bleu! around world war two, but the exclamation lives on in British newspapers and entertainment, along with zut alors! In similar manner, Englishmen in French cartoons always exclaim Damned! and greet their friends by saying "how do you do".
French gave a lot of food words to the world but doesn't use all of them itself. A Napoleon is an item of pâtisserie in some English-speaking places as well as Russia and parts of Europe. In France it's a mille-feuille (thousand leaves). Unlike the English-speaking world, France has no restauranteurs. It has only restaurateurs, which literally means restorers.
Clothes are an old field for linguistic confusion. Un slip are men's underpants (shorts). A brassière is un soutien-gorge. And there's no space to go into all the dangerous faux-amis like préservatif meaning condom. The New York Times committed a howler not long ago when it quoted Nicolas Sarkozy as saying that he had been deceived by someone. He had talked about his déception -- which means disappointment.
The two languages have been borrowing from one-another for a thousand years. Sometimes the same word gets imported twice. Vanguard, meaning the front of an army, came from avant-garde long ago. In the late 19th century it was re-imported as avant-garde, with an arty sense. English tends to mangle French words when it absorbs them. Une discothèque is still called that in its homeland while it became a disco in English.
And then, for enthusiasts who are still with me, there is the way that imported words change the sense of the original language. To the anger of the Académie Française this has been pretty much one-way lately, with French-rooted English words re-crossing the Channel and devouring their ancestors.
The verb supporter in French (to bear or put up with) has acquired the additional English meaning of backing a team or a cause. Réaliser (to fulfill or carry out) is being used instead of se rendre compte, as in "je n'ai pas réalise que j'étais un loser (I didn't realise I was a loser).
There is an embarras du choix for scoring points in the language business. Or should that be embarras de choix? Please add the words that I've missed from this résumé.
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* Lycée de Versailles is an old rhyming substitute for vice-versa (pronounced veesay-versa) .
Update: In response to comments below, this is une clef anglaise -- an English key -- which is monkey wrench in American and adjustable spanner in Britain.
Autumn is always lovely in the Cévennes. The chestnut forests turn a spectacular orange, mushroom pickers turn up from the towns and gunfire echoes around the hills much of the week.
It's la saison de la chasse -- the hunting season -- and many of our neighbours are out on the trail of the wild boar and deer that throng the forests. The word trail is poetic. What they actually do is stand at their positions on the roadside waiting for the hounds to beat the animals out of the woods towards them.
André, a farm worker and friend, was briefing me on the new season last night. He is very safety-conscious but was lamenting the foolishness of "civilians", as he calls them, who put themselves in danger. He recalled a recent incident. He was waiting for the sanglier -- boar -- to break cover when he heard rustling in the undergrowth and raised his high-powered rifle. "Then I saw it was a woman in a T-shirt on all fours. Une belle blonde. She was trying to crawl under the brambles. I told her she was lucky that I'm careful. Some others don't wait to identify the game and just shoot." Correctly identifying the game is rule number one, according to the hunting federation.
The local association at Saint Germain-de-Calberte is doing its best to improve the poor image of les chasseurs. One of the latest ideas is for the shooters to take up their positions a few yards away from the road rather than right on it. "It sometimes frightens people when they come round the corner and see a guy with a big gun," said André.
One of the frightened civilians this year has been Angelina Jolie. The actress complained about the boar hunters who were exercising their right of access to the land around the Pitt-Jolie's base down in the Var, south of here
There are fewer accidents these days thanks to safety campaigns and stricter enforcement of the law, but a handful of chasseurs and by-standers are shot dead every year. Last Sunday, about 40 miles from here in the Ardèche, a 25-year-old mountain biker was hit in the back and killed by a stray bullet from a boar shooter. [Try your hand at identifying shootable targets in internet test for French hunting permit]
I have mixed feelings about shooting animals for pleasure, especially large ones. France does too. There is an active anti-hunting movement as well as a powerful pro-shooting lobby. A handsome cerf -- stag -- entertained us at night in the summer, grazing in our field with up to five or six females. I wonder if they are still alive. They probably are because, unlike the low-cost boar, the hunters have to pay over a hundred for the "bracelet" that entitles them to shoot each deer.
Continue reading "The French art of boar hunting" »
Various barometers can be used to track the world's economic mood, from hamburger consumption (up when times are hard) to women's hemlines (down). Champagne sales must be one of the more reliable indicators, so it's no surprise that the producers of France's most famous fizzy wine have just reported their first downturn this century.
The big story is the United States, where sales are expected to slump by over 30 percent in volume this year. The slide began in March 2007, several months before the sub-primes crisis erupted. Britain, which went champaigne crazy in the boom years, is buying four percent less. Cognac is also suffering in the Americas, where it became fashionable in recent years. Sales in North America dropped seven percent over the past year.
The global champagne boom has been a constant story from Paris for eight years as demand exploded in Britain, the USA and more recently Russia and China. Sales had risen steadily since 1999. Up in the Champagne region, they are not panicking since the overall volume fall is expected to reach only three percent this year and exports will slide only about one percent thanks to demand from the east. Rich Russians are still loading up on the very high-end brands such as Cristal and sales to China are expected to rise by about 15 percent this year after 30 percent in 2007.
At Moet & Chandon, they say that that they have weathered war and revolutions, so they are not worried about a slide. Benoît Gouez, chief vintner at Moet, came up with a dubious argument for continued consumption. "It's probably when times are hard that people really like or need to dream more and luxury products are never more necessary as in the tough periods." he told the Associated Press.
It is refreshing to step out of France for a weekend in England because you are reminded how different life still is on each side of the waterway that separates the old rivals.
Here are a few notes. Little will be new to British expatriates and readers here who know both countries. Please add all the points that I have missed.
Arriving in London, you are reminded that France is still a more formal society. In Paris, old-fashioned civility ensures a distance between strangers though this can sometimes seem unfriendly, especially to foreigners. You also notice that while the French state may be more paternal than Britain's, it treats its citizens more as adults.
Old class-ridden Britain has become more egalitarian and friendly. Strangers address one-another in familiar terms that can be equivalent to using tu rather than vous in French. But social interaction has also become rougher. After the relative harmony of Paris, London, with its bustle and multi-cultural mix, seems crowded and rushed, like New York used to feel for visiting Britons.
We witnessed a scene in Islington that seemed right out of modern-day Moscow. A multi-coloured police-car with sirens screaming blasted down a sidestreet scattering pedestrians who were nearly mown down. "C'est vraiment le far west ici," commented my French companion. The aggressive policemen are of course ultimately taking orders from bosses who with names such as Nick, Ed and Andy and who talk as if they are your mates. In France, members of the cabinet are still very much Monsieur or Madame le/la Ministre.
On the social side, my friend, who has little experience of English-speaking countries, draws the contrast between London pubs and Paris cafes. She is impressed by the cosiness and conviviality in traditional pubs, even in the shoving to get to the bar to be served. She is also puzzled by the raucous noise, made by women as much as men. In the Paris café, you pick out a table and keep to yourselves, waiting for service that is often indifferent.
One thing that hits you entering Britain is the nanny-like chivvying from loud-speakers. The London Underground is a non-stop speech. Loud voices, pitched somewhere between TV host and sergeant major, exhort passengers to move along, to stand back from incoming trains and so on. When there are no delays to report, they busy themselves by telling you that service is running normally. On a southern region train to rural Sussex, the talk never ended, between welcoming new "customers" aboard to pointing out that rain makes station platforms slippery.
France and the rest of the continent are catching up in this field, but travellers are rarely harangued this way. After years of criticising Britain's mania for closed circuit television, France is also adopting the practise, but it is nowhere near the blanket surveillance that Britain now applies.
I hesitate to use the word nannying, but the loud-speaker habit is part of a tendency to explain the obvious and organise people's behaviour. You also see it in the simplified language of British television news. That brings up a role-reversal in cultural stereotypes. British TV reporters now wave their hands all the time while French ones hardly gesticulate at all .
In the bossy vein, you could not imagine in France such stunts as the present crusade by Jamie Oliver, the television chef, and his aptly named Ministry of Food. He has set out to shame a whole city -- Rotherham in Yorkshire -- into cooking more healthy food for its children. Some of the junk food die-hards are understandably rebelling.
Linked with the new British enthusiasm for caring and interfering are taboos over language that might be deemed divisive or judgmental. The Guardian, a great newspaper in other ways, has just offered a lovely illustration with a new style guide, the house rules for its journalists.
They are now banned or discouraged from using the following terms because they cause offence: invalid, elderly, suicide, the deaf, old-age pensioner, Asians, mental handicap, grandparent and so on. They have to use softer terms -- in other words euphemisms -- such as "a person with learning difficulties" for mentally handicapped. Even the word nation is out because it supposedly implies homogeneity.
"Reserve nation to describe people united by language, culture and history so as to form a distinct group within a larger territory," says The Guardian's language master. Never could you imagine such an instruction being given in France.
Naturally, the Guardian outlaws the expression that springs to mind for the above: politically correct. This term (of American origin) is "an empty rightwing smear designed to elevate the user", says the stylebook. It's odd then that the Guardian does not ban the word rightwing, which is most certainly a smear in its vocabulary.
George Orwell, that great scourge of the manipulation of language, would have had a field day with the Guardian's strictures.(His 1946 essay Politics and the English language is still the bible on the subject).
France has gone nowhere nearly as far down these paths as Britain. State agencies probably do not do enough explaining, especially for non French-speakers and immigrants (a word discouraged by the Guardian). The bureaucracy is still a nightmare, especially, for poor French-speakers.
But France has its linguistic taboos too. It turns a blind eye to matters of race. Ethnic descriptions are avoided by using euphemisms such as "des jeunes" (young people) for young men from immigrant housing estates.
But sex distinctions ('gender' in the new sensitive English) are still very much alive. A woman thespian is une actrice and a female cabin attendant is une stewardesse. In English, people are reduced to being "chairs" to avoid being man or woman. French is still often more paternal and patronising towards women, reflecting French society. In advertising, female secretaries still take orders from male bosses. At the Académie Française, they still address gatherings as just "Messieurs", ignoring the presence of les Académiciennes.
Those are just random home-thoughts-from-abroad and before anyone points it out, these differences can generally be observed across the Germanic-Latin divide of western Europe and the story is much the same in the rest of the English-speaking world.
Continue reading "France and England: vive la différence!" »
 When no blog topic leaps to mind, at least there is usually a new French tax to report.
This year, we have had the fish tax, a two percent levy which is supposed to help fishermen but has put up the price for consumers. New taxes also apply to junk mail and stock options (almost the same thing nowadays). A couple of weeks ago ministers proposed a "picnic tax", to be levied on throw-away cutlery and paper plates. President Sarkozy scotched that after a week of mockery.
Today, the government has quickly squashed the latest wheeze: a junk food tax. Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, has rejected, for the time being at least, a parliamentary call for value-added (sales) tax to be almost quadrupled on "les produits de grignotage et de snacking" (grignotage means snacking, or nibbling).
The taxe sur la malbouffe (junk food) would be applied to high-fat and high-sugar, processed foods such as potato crisps (chips), chocolate bars and sodas. "Is it right that a kilogramme of potatoes should be taxed at the same rate as a sweet spread?" asked Valérie Boyer, the member of parliament who led the group behind the proposal. To incite healthy eating, they also want the tax to be cut to almost nothing on fresh fruit and vegetables.
Boyer's mission was to devise a plan for stemming the obesity that is increasingly afflicting France. The fat problem is nowhere near as bad as in many other parts of Europe and North America, but France is catching up. One in two adults is overweight and 17 percent are obese -- measured as body mass index of 30 and over. The most worrying thing is the accelerating mass of French children. One in five is overweight.
The fight against obesity should be declared "the great national cause of 2009," said Boyer. Children should be the primary target since a fat child stands an 80 percent chance of staying that way for life, she said. One of her big suggestions is a campaign to persuade mothers to breast feed their children -- still a minority exercise in France.
Needless to say, the food industry is fiercely opposed to Boyer's proposal. "No product is bad for health or it would be withdrawn from the market," said the main industry association. Anyway, it would be impossible to decide what qualified for the tax, it said. Would a French fry be deemed a vegetable or
junk? Would chocolate éclairs and the rest of the favourites from the patisserie be super-taxed ? Surely not.
The tax idea was batted aside because President Sarkozy has given orders to his government to stop frightening people with new taxes when times are hard. Bachelot, the least slim of his female cabinet ministers, said that the tax would penalise poorer people, those most prone to unhealthy diets. Education was the answer, she said.
But there's not much sign that this is working. Health advisories have been required on processed food advertising for the past couple of years, but the incitement to exercise and avoid sugar and fat have made little impact.
Take a good look. Henri Matisse's painting and many like it could soon be banned from the internet, at least in France. That might sound like a joke, but if the health lobby has its way, images of wine or any promotion of alcohol consumption on the web will be deemed to infringe France's strict laws on drink advertising.
[Matisse: la Désserte/ The Dinner Table]
This has arisen from a court decision which forced the Heineken company to block French access to its corporate web site. The case was brought last February by the National Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Addiction (ANPAA) on the grounds that France's 1991 law on alcohol promotion does not permit it on the internet. The worldwide web was in embryo when the so-called Evin law was passed, but, say the campaigners, that is no excuse for breaking the law.
Since the Heineken ruling, some of the biggest brands have shut out French visitors for fear of prosecution over what is a legal grey area. A click from France on the Courvoisier site down in Cognac country, for example, elicits the message: "Sorry, the regulations of your country do not authorise us to give you access to our site."
Internet visitors who identify themselves as French are even banned from dropping in on Orlando wines in South Australia -- because they are owned by France's Pernod Ricard drinks giant. The site will let you in if you say you are from almost anywhere else, including Kuweit and the United Arab Emirates.
"We are not inciting people to crime. We are sensitive to the risks of alcohol," said Frédéric Delesque, Marketing Director of Camus Cognac, which also bowed to the law and blocks French visitors. "There are three countries in the world which ban the discussion of alcohol: Iran, Afghanistan and France. It is a pity for the image of our products," he told us.
The government is preparing to draft a law to bring the internet into the Evin law, which defines the way that alcoholic drinks may be advertised and limits this only to the press, the radio and on posters. The health lobby want a complete purge of alcohol images and promotion from the internet, though the government is unlikely to go as far as that. Vineyards will no doubt be allowed to keep the sites that are one of their strongest marketing tools but there may be restrictions such as limiting advertising to certain hours of the French night.
In the meantime, the winemakers, merchants and drinks companies are fighting back, pointing out the absurdity of restricting alcohol on a medium which tolerates everything. "Today in France, the sight of a bottle of wine has become as offensive as a picture of war or pornography," said Daniel Lorson, a spokesman for CIVC , the industry body of champagne producers.
Nicolas Sarkozy promised to help the wine industry over the internet during his election campaign in early 2007, but his government has been taking a tough line, introducing measures to combat binge-drinking and under-age consumption and alcohol-related diseases.
The industry complains that it is being demonised and that an internet ban would hugely penalise one of the glories of the French economy and the national heritage. Among the recent successes of the anti-alcohol lobby has been the conviction last winter of le Parisien newspaper for breaching with Evin law with an editorial supplement on champagne. The newspaper argued in vain that its articles were not promoting alcohol.
Even the alcohol-fuelled world of sport has not been left unscathed. When Liverpool played Marseille in this week's Champions League football match, the logo of Carlsberg, the team's main sponsor, was absent from their shirts. Rugby union's Heineken Cup is simply called the European Rugby trophy in France.
The campaign to hide drink in the world's biggest wine-consuming country is inevitably producing jokes. According to one, the state is to ban dozens of place-names because they illicitly promote alcohol consumption. First to go will be Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and Cognac.
The French government has just invented another good reason to use china, glasses and cutlery when you eat outdoors. It's going to put a substantial tax on cardboard plates and plastic bags, glasses and eating implements.
The so-called taxe pique-nique is to be modelled on a Belgian law which came into effect a year ago. This applies a 20 percent levy on plastic bags, wrap, disposable dishes and cutlery. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the Ecology Secretary, confirmed the tax this morning after it was disclosed by Le Journal du Dimanche. She did not say how big it would be.
President Sarkozy's government has been seriously smitten by the green bug. The picnic tax is part of an imminent big expansion of its "bonus-malus" scheme, which adds a penalty to the price of high-polluting cars and rewards those who buy green- friendly vehicles.
Starting from next January, the green bonus-malus system will be applied to about 20 products, including refrigerators, television, computers, mobile phones, wooden furniture, lightbulbs, paint, detergent, tyres and perhaps even new apartments and houses. The Ecology Secretary added a new item today: disposable nappies (diapers). "We could arrange it so that all maternity hospitals teach you how to use reuseable nappies," she said.
France already puts up with more taxes of different types than most places but the beauty of the scheme, in the eyes of Jean-Louis Borloo, the superminister for the Environment, is that the money will be given back to people who choose the most environmentally virtuous products. The system has worked well with cars. Buyers of small vehicles get up to 1,000 euros back. Completely electric vehicles will get 5,000 euros. Borloo is working on items and the levies ahead of the 2009 budget later this month. But the Finance Ministry is said to be unhappy over the complexity of a system that will need a whole new buraucracy to operate and which could dent consumption when the economy is already struggling.
Maybe they should just ban all produits jetables -- disposable products -- for picnics. French food and drink deserves more than cardboard and plastic. Here's the correct setting for un pique-nique (except for the paper napkins).
The French love affair with mineral water is waning as high prices and concern for the environment have made tap water attractive again.
A five-year slide in sales of bottled water deepened in the first half of the year with a 6.1 percent drop from the previous summer in supermarket sales according to figures from Iri France.
Over two thirds of the French now say that they regularly drink tap water while only 56 percent imbibe still bottled water at least once a week. That compares with 73 percent in 2003, the peak of a two-decade boom in which French brands led a world-wide flight from the public water supply (from Sofres 2008 study here).
In a sign of the times, Evian, the world's top brand, shut its Alpine bottling plant for a week in mid-August to reduce its stock. Sparkling water is suffering a similar decline. The rest of the world has not lost its thirst for the bottled version, but the makers are worried that the backlash in France heralds a global trend.
Evian, Volvic, Contrex, Badoit and the other brands are suffering from the financial pinch that is causing the French to shun designer water. Cheaper brands are benefiting. Everyone now knows that municipal water is supposed to be just as healthy as most bottled brands but they do not agree with the official line that it tastes as good. They are aware, though, that the bottled version costs about a couple of hundred times more per litre. The French are still spending an average of 130 euros a year on portable water, the government says. They were overtaken by the Italians several years ago as the biggest drinkers of the stuff.
People are increasingly influenced by the environmental argument. Even in restaurants, where the bottles are glass, it is no longer quite so chic to drink water that has dumped a load of carbon on the planet during production and shipping. "Drinking bottled water creates 10 to 20 million cubic feet of waste per year in France," the Ministry of Ecology said in a recent campaign. Yet another blow to the bottle has been widespread publicity in France for a study at the University of Pennsylvania last spring that knocked down the longstanding belief that you must glug water all day to lose weight and stay healthy.
The industry is fighting back with lavish campaigns that trumpet health benefits, however fanciful. Evian, one of the water brands of the Danone group, is said to be the "declared source of youth by the body". That reminds me of a joke when imported water took off in the USA in the 1980s: Evian is just naive spelt backwards. Franck Riboud, Danone's chairman, says the makers must market their message better. "Our trade is not transporting bottles of water a a euro each in lorries. It is selling brands with a specific origin and taste," he told La Tribune newspaper.
Below: a recent cheeky advert for Cristaline, a low-price bottled water, mocking the claims that tap water is just as pure. Nitrates, lead and chlorine are coming out of the tap. The caption says "I don't save on the water I drink"
Here's a glimpse of the other French way of life -- far from Paris in the Cévennes, the sunny southern foothills of the Massif Central. The goats belong to the neighbours. After their evening graze in front of my house, they walk home about two miles to be milked. Their cheese is sold in the local markets. Click here for more on Saint Germain de Calberte, our village, which is six miles by road and about one by the crow's flight.
Of course there is a huge lot more to the Cévennes than goats and Stevenson and his donkey. The area was always a refuge for rebels and dissenters. The "Camisard" Protestants held out against the Catholic king's troops in religious wars 300 years ago. In World War Two they were a stronghold for Resistance fighters. In the 1970s, after the 1968 upheaval, young town dwellers dropped out for the simple life, trying to raise goats and live off the land. Many are still there and still struggling.
I'll be picking up as usual back in Paris later in the week.
 France has just lost one of its greatest chefs. Alain Ducasse, the holder of 14 Michelin stars and a worlwide restaurant and hotel empire, has given up his French citizenship for the privilege of becoming a Monégasque, we hear today.
In other words Ducasse, 51, whose interests turn over about 160 million euros a year, has gone into tax exile across the border in Monaco. He could have chosen Switzerland and kept his citizenship but Ducasse, a southerner by birth, has ties to Monaco, where he owns the three-star Louix XV.
Monaco imposes no income or wealth tax on its residents -- provided they are not French. In the 1960s, the late President de Gaulle got tired of deserting tax payers so he forced a deal on Prince Rainier under which French citizens in Monaco must pay their full whack to the Paris treasury. The wheeze for French would-be exiles is to become a Monaco citizen -- a privilege accorded very sparingly. Prince Albert II has just granted this "sovereign order" to Ducasse, who renounces his French nationality in return. There are only 6,000 Monaco citizens (in a population of 32,000) and there is a long waiting list for French candidates.
The move is not wonderful for the image of a celebrity whose brand name is synonymous with French haute cuisine from New York to Tokyo. Ducasse's most recent restaurant openings are at the London Dorchester and the "Jules Verne" restaurant in the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which I wrote about here. Next October, he is opening a a third restaurant in Japan -- "Le comptoir de Benoît in Osaka.
Ducasse's flight from France does not look good for President Sarkozy's "come home" appeal to his country's thousands of tax refugees. After taking office a year ago, Sarko imposed a 50 percent cap on personal taxation. This meant that no-one had to pay more than half their annual income in to the state.
Because of the wealth tax plus steep income and social security taxes, many high earners and very well off people moved over the past two decades to London, Brussels and other capitals as well as the traditional haven Switzerland. They are not returning in noticeable numbers, mainly because the wealth tax remains and they do not trust their country to reverse policy at the drop of a hat.
Sarko has maintained the Impôt sur la Fortune (ISF) as the 26-year-old annual tax is known (the exiles call it Incitation à Sortir de France). The tax gathers relatively little income and drives capital abroad but the public supports soaking the rich, so scrapping it is politically unacceptable.
Looking back at the Jules Verne opening, I was reminded how Ducasse boasted of his pride in bringing the finest French cuisine to the Eiffel Tower, that most Parisian of symbols. Fine Monegasque cuisine does not sound quite the same.
Update Tuesday: Ducasse has been on the radio (RTL) this morning saying that he is taking up Monaco citizenship because of his great attachment to the principality. He said that he was obviously not fleeing for tax reasons because his companies would continue to pay corporate taxes in France. The fact that he would be paying no income tax and no wealth tax in Monaco were mere details, he insisted. "My personal saving will be very slight... absolutely ridiculous compared with what I would save if I put my companies offshore." The "very slight" of Ducasse (presumably several million euros a year) is obviously not what ordinary mortals would consider very slight.
 Who are the world's rudest tourists ? According to a new global survey of hoteliers, they are .....the Americans. This is a little surprising since the cliché would suggest that this prize might go to the French or possibly the Russians.
The French did come second to the Americans in the least polite category of the Expedia-Harris poll of more than 4,000 hotel managers around the world. The travel firm's survey set out to find the best tourists based on their travel traits and habits.
The Japanese are the world's easiest and most delightful tourists for hotel managers. The bottom of the 30-nation list were the Chinese (full list below). The Indians came second to bottom, followed by the French. The Americans came mid-way.
I was surprised to see the British tying for second place along with the Germans. In 2002, the British ranked in a similar poll as the world's worst tourists. It's interesting that the British reputation is raised by their conduct outside Europe. In their own continent, they are ranked much lower.
Continue reading "Americans are ruder than the French, survey finds" »
You don't usually think of fashion and wine-making as part of the soldier's life and especially that of the French Foreign Legion. It was touching to see a contingent of légionnaires at the Saint Roch church for the funeral of Yves Saint Laurent yesterday [my newspaper story]. The honour guard was there among the glamour crowd because Saint Laurent was a Grand Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, the second highest rank in the state decoration (the two legions have no direct link).
On the wine front, the Foreign Legion has just announced that it is to sell to the public the product of its magnificent vineyard at Puyloubier, in Provence. The 40 hectare estate, home for 100 invalid legionnaires, is on the slopes of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, known to the world from Cézanne's paintings. The old soldiers produce 300,000 bottles a year of red, white and rosé under the Côtes de Provence appellation. Until now these have supplied Legion messes around the world. One of the traditions of the corps is that the men dine well, even in the toughest conditions. I discovered this at dinner with Legion officers during the siege of Sarajevo in 1993. We were served the legion wine in fine regimental glasses while mortar shells were exploding nearby (that was three years before Hillary Clinton's fantasy sniper episode).
The wine, being sold under the label Esprit de Corps, is the product of "the cult of the mission and the love of a job well done which is dear to all légionnaires," says the Ministry of Defence. Income will help the estate care for its residents, former soldiers who are physical invalids of have difficulties in adjusting to civilian life. Explaining the existence of its estate, the Legion quotes one of its sacred rules: "Tu n'abandonnes jamais les tiens, ni au combat ni dans la vie -- you never abandon one of your own, neither in battle nor in life.
Given the Legion's reputation for fierce discipline, it's interesting to see how it describes its rosé:
Rien d’audacieux n’existe sans la désobéissance aux règles. Cet aphorisme traduit parfaitement les intentions du vin rosé de la Légion étrangère.
Nothing bold exists without disobeying the rules. This saying perfectly translates the intentions of the Foreign Legion's vin rosé.
[Old légionnaire tends the Provence vines. Beards are Legion tradition]
One of the good things about blogs is that they allow you to add nuance. In the news business, there is little space to tell a story. To earn the limited slot you usually have to stick with one angle. That's a preface for expanding a little on the article we wrote in the newspaper today on France's embrace of New World methods for selling its wine.
The story fits into the classic category of "French tradition surrenders to superior Anglo-Saxon forces". The enlightened reader smiles at another Gallic retreat in the face of globalisation but feels a twinge of regret that obstinate French excellence is again compromising with the modern world.
The reality is a little more complicated. France has lost market share in volume to the New World and other European countries, but it still rules in quality exports. Even with its recent modification to suit Anglo-American taste, French wine is still the gold standard. A great product from the Napa or Barossa (South Australia) valleys, is still measured against the French version. Good Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy are still the essence of terroir -- the mystical combination of tradition, soil and climate that is the heart of French wine and which few others can match.
In addition, much of the French wine business has been adapting faster than realised to world taste. This is especially the case in the Loire Valley and down south in the Languedoc, the oldest wine-growing area in France. That Mediterranean region, long associated with poor bulk wine, was the hardest hit by the New World wine revolution. They are still ripping up poorer vineyards, with European subsidies, but the region has transformed itself. It has innovated and won back exports with simpler, well-marketed medium quality products. Some, with names such as "The Arrogant Frog", are sold with the kind of self-derision that Australian wines go in for. The area has also made a name for new high end wines like the Domaine de Daumas Gassac in the Hérault département. The many readers of this blog (who include winegrowers) in the Languedoc may wish to correct me or expand on this. I only have the big picture. I love the wine and my Cévennes home is in the region, but I don't claim to be an expert.
French wine is also selling extremely well in the huge emerging markets of Russia, China and India, there the cachet of Frenchness carries weight.French wine sales jumped 52 percent in Hong Kong last year, 58 percent in Korea, 25 percent in Singapore and 113 percent in China, according to French officials at the Vinexpo Asia-Pacific wine show this week.
Wide sections of the French industry, fragmented into thousands of small vineyards, are still sticking to the old ways rather than joining the Californians, Australians and south Americans. Their biggest handicap is the corruption of the once coveted AOC label. This top appellation is no longer a guarantee of quality. But I encourage them to stick with the terroir tradition -- for the same reason that I prefer the expresso from the grumpy waiter at our local café to a latte at the Starbucks a few yards away.
[picture: le Domaine Daumas Gassac]
 A glance is often enough to tell the nationality of the groups of young tourists who throng the street outside our office on the Place de l'Opéra. You don't need to listen to the language or study the dress. The American kids are really wide. The Britons are next in excessive girth followed by Germans, Australians and Russians.
All right, that's an intolerant generalisation. Obesity is a global epidemic and Americans and Brits are just leading the way, we are told. The "thin" countries like France are fast catching up, thanks to junk food and the sedentary habits of their kids. I read in a US newspaper: "Child obesity is the new 'normal' of the 21st century. It will remain that way".
Well, perhaps not. This week, France reported that it has stopped the rise in overweight children over the past decade or so.
The news emerged from the 2008 European Congress on Obesity in Geneva. One study showed that there was no change in the weight of French seven to nine-year-olds between 2000 and 2007. In another survey the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA) found no significant change in random samples of three to 17-year-olds in 1998-99 and 2006-2007.
The French results have caused a stir because they are the first evidence that it is possible to stop the blight of obesity that is sweeping the affluent world -- including France. The experts are being cautious, but credit for the French success is being given to programmes that have been running for over a decade.
Continue reading "French children beat weight problem" »
Now you can do your bit to save the French language. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister [above] has just opened a site on la toile (better known as le web) which seeks French equivalents for the American-English jargon that has invaded the language. Featured words today are coach, gender and podcasting.
Franceterme.culture.fr is a new weapon in an ancient battle. Les Anglo-Saxons, whose own vocabulary has been part Gallic since the 12th century, are always amused by the attempts of the French state and its language police to defend the purity of the tongue. Why, wonder smug foreigners, don't the French just laissez faire like the Anglophone nations and allow people to use foreign terms if they think they sounds more chic.
After living for some time on the front line in this war, let me defend France's rear-guard campaign. Yes, I share "Anglo-saxon" antipathy to the idea of policing language. It's silly, smacks of oppressive regimes and it costs a fortune -- hundreds of millions of euros a year are spent on the language bureaucracy and promoting the French language abroad.
Yet... why shouldn't a country seek ways to resist pressure from more powerful cultures -- in this case the USA? Sometimes it works. In honour of tomorrow's International Day of the French-speaking World, I shall explain:
Continue reading "Help save the French language" »
After camembert and the decision to redraw the map of champagne country, it is time to take a look at another highly successful celebration of France's terroir, or its rich rural roots.
What does it take for a television network to beat a big football match in prime time ? Manchester United was knocking Olympique Lyonnais, France's top side, out of the European Champions' League the other night, but the French preferred to watch a yarn about a bigoted 19th century widow and her search for virtue.
Seven million people tuned in to the episode from Chez Maupassant, a costume drama that has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of drawing a mass audience to high-quality television. At the start of its second season, the setting of Victorian-era short stories by Guy de Maupassant, is such a hit that President Sarkozy is using it as an argument to convince broadcasting bosses that the French will watch high-brow television if they do it right (Unfamiliar with modern Britain, he usually cites UK television as his model).
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Continue reading "France flocks back to good old days on TV" »
I've been having fun lately with France's penchant for regulating everything, but here's a rule worthy of support. It concerns camembert, the pungent Normandy fromage that springs to mind in much of the world when people say "French cheese".
A decision has just been made that will bar producers from using the coveted "appellation côntrolée" (AOC) label that designates genuine camembert if they make it with heat-treated or micro-filtered milk.
If you are outside France, this is theoretical since exported camembert is mostly the chalk-like industrial product that is made from fully pasteurised milk. Real, ancestral camembert, which goes gooey and yellow and carries a whiff of the Norman farmyard, is made only from raw milk. It accounts for a minority of the market even in France, which has only lately rediscovered a taste for authentic cheese. Lait cru (raw milk) is used to make only about 10 percent of the 650 cheeses sold in French supermarkets.
The "camembert war" was started a year ago by the Lactalis dairy giant and a cheese cooperative at Isigny, in the Calvados département of Normandy, the cheese's home region.
Continue reading "Don't mess with the camembert, say French cheese experts " »
Let me balance the slightly caustic tone of some recent postings with praise for a book that sums up everything we love about France.
Dictionnaire Amoureux de la France is a love-letter to his country by Denis Tillinac, a prolific writer whose novels mainly celebrate la France profonde, especially his native Corrèze. Tillinac, 60, is an unabashed patriot. I know that he is seen as at bit "reactionary" and a friend of Jacques Chirac, the last and not greatly lamented president.
But Tillinac, a puckish, twinkling-eyed chain-smoker, has a sense of fun and an eye for the quirky side of the French character that is so endearing -- and exasperating. I have got to know him on a TV show that we take part in and I appreciate his eloquent, self-mocking manner.
His book is part of a series from the Plon publishing house, in which famous writers celebrate their passions. It is a collection of sharp little essays on the things and people that for him are the essence of France. His country, he says, is about flair and panache plus despair and pathos. "I love France in body and soul, as a transfixed admirer and a fulfilled lover," he writes.
Run through the index and you get an idea....d'Artagnan.. Bovary... le Coq Gaulois...Cyrano de Bergerac... les Départementales (country roads)... Deux Chevaux (Citroens)... Gares (railway stations), Grandeur.... May 68... Maigret... le Panache... Paris...la Province...Sub-prefectures...Ricard (pastis)... Zidane..le Zinc (local cafe)
Take le Zinc -- the corner bistrot:
"Le zinc offers the godsend of conviviality, silent or garrulous...It is very French, this decompression chamber. We like to linger in the bistrot. The atmosphere is not like a Viennese cafe, an English pub, a German tavern or even an Italian bar. In the Zinc, once you have your elbows on the counter, you are more than a customer. You become owner of a little part of the establishment...A mysterious connivence brings you close to your neighbour, to the neighbourhood... Whether it's in the countryside, in the provinces or in Paris, le bistrot français is the temple of inexpensive fraternity, of the meditative break, the road to the stars for solitary hearts, or lacking that, their oasis.
On la Grandeur, Tillinac tries to put his finger on why France thinks it is so special. France excelled in no single field, he notes. Great western painting was Italian and Flemish. The music was Italian and German. The great philosophers were German and the three major western writers of the modern west were Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. France had no Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud or Einstein, he says. France's pride in its innate superiority is completely unreasonable, he says: "It is as if we only had this alternative: pride in being French, or grating, sneering morosity."
To justify this pride, France throughout history has striven to achieve unrealistic ambitions "far beyond its apparent capacity", from Joan of Arc through Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. "France offers an exemplary and muddled irrationality, a mixture of dashing bravoura and missionary zeal which no sporting or economic victory really conveys."
France could not be France without la grandeur, whether we are the seventh or second last economic power in the world. French genius has to astonish the world. I think it is still alive, smouldering like an ember of the spirit under the cinder of mercantilism: this naive faith is one of the well-springs of my patriotism."
Tillinac's model of the French spirit at its best -- generous and reckless -- is D'Artagnan, the musketeer of Alexandre Dumas.
D'Artagnan is the older brother who I never had... At an age when my friends were seeking a cause between Jean-Paul Sartre and Che Guevara, I had read the Three Musketeers. My cause was that boisterous camp where the four jolly fellows served up their knightly heroism with epicurian pleasure.
It's a lovely book, a perceptive, easy study of Frenchness by an insider, not one of the Brits or other foreigners who presume to know the country.
Here's another glimpse of why Nicolas Sarkozy is unlike his predecessors. In the clip Sarko gives a taste of his rough side at the annual Paris Agricultural Show. When Sarko approaches while shaking hands with the crowd, the man on the left says (in ungrammatical French): "Don't touch me". Sarko replies: "Then get lost". The man: "You dirty me when you touch me". Sarko: "Then get lost, pauvre con." This translates roughly as "stupid a-hole", stupid sod, or the equivalent.
Sarko's more regal predecessors no doubt used such language, but never in public. His readiness to mix it in an unpresidential way with hecklers is part of the reason that his popularity has slumped. The latest poll in today's Journal du Dimanche, shows him down nine points in a month at 38 percent approval. In contrast, François Fillon, his prime pinister, is at 57 percent.
The pollsters say this reflects the way that Sarkozy has reversed the traditional roles. The prime minister is reserved and dignified, staying in the background like a president, while Sarkozy is out in front taking on all-comers. The presidential visit to the annual Salon de l'Agriculture is an important ritual because of the mystical bond which France entertains with the countryside and its produce. Jacques Chirac, pretended to be a countryman and put on a great show at the salon, wandering around stalls slapping cattle, knocking back wine and tasting sausage.
Not Sarko, a life-long urbanite. He made a quick drop-by and, before exchanging the insults in the video, he delivered a speech that was mainly about protecting France and its food producers from foreign competition.
The most quaint point was his announcement that France will apply to Unesco to have French cuisine listed as part of the world's heritage.
Continue reading "Sarkozy loses cool and wants UN defence for French cooking" »
 Much of the world thinks of France as a sunny Latin place with vineyards, windows with shutters and a fine art de vivre. Many French also prefer that image and look down on the bits that do not fit the picture, especially those along the northern fringe next to England and Belgium.
This week, the far northerners -- a tribe that calls itself Ch'tis -- are celebrating a chance to shake off their uncouth image as potato-guzzling beer-drinkers who dwell in a rain-soaked rust-belt.
The excuse is the opening in Lille yesterday of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a film that makes fun of the region's unflattering stereotype in order to show the people as warmer and generally nicer than those in the sunny south.
Starring and directed by Dany Boon, the film has won critical praise and seems destined to become a hit. So it should boost the much-maligned Ch'ti country, the old port and mining area which runs from Calais eastwards to about Maubeuge (I have a fondness for this area of red-brick terrace houses and tall bell towers from four years living in nearby Brussels in the late 1990s).
Dany Boon is a popular stand-up comedian and actor who is a native Ch'ti or Ch'timi. The name comes from Picardy patois. Like comedies about England's "Geordie" northeast, much of the film's fun stems from a working class dialect so impenetrable that it needs subtitles. In Ch'ti, "ch" replaces "s" and it includes expressions from old Picard and Flemish as well from the Italian, Polish and other migrants of a century ago. The Ch'ti language splash in yesterday's Voix du Nord was: Dany Boon, Bienvenue à s'baraque!" ('welcome home'). Instead of a "chortie nachional" (sortie national-- national release) the film has started with a "chortie ch'timi". Have a look at the promotion site, with the CNN parody "ChtiNN, une chaîne qui ne perd pas le nord".
Continue reading "Self-mockery in France's unlovely north " »
The most sought-after hotel room in Paris is a shoe-box perched on a roof in the opulent 16th arrondissement. There is no room service except for breakfast. The furniture is made of plastic and there is no television. Yet every day, 40,000 people are trying to book a night there.
The word novelty comes in here. The Hotel Everland is a room with adjoining bathroom which costs at least 333 euros a night but it's not really a hotel.
It is a 10-tonne art installation that has been perched since last November on top of the Palais de Tokyo, the Art Deco home of the contemporary art museum on the Right Bank. For its creators, the Swiss artist-designers Sabrina Lang and Daniel Baumann, Everland makes the guests part of the art.
Continue reading "An exotic hotel night in Paris" »
They said it could never happen. Unlike Americans, Britons or Italians, French smokers would rebel rather than yield to government orders to stop. But nearly six weeks into the start of the ban, they have meekly obeyed and the predicted revolt has not occurred in the bars and bistrots.
As in other places, there have been some odd consequences. One is the body odour that fills the smoke-free air in discos and crowded clubs as the night drags on. Paris clubs are struggling to find alternative scents to mask the sweaty smell that is said to be turning off customers, especially women. Managers do not want to talk about it for fear of losing trade. "We've had enough trouble with the ban on smoking. On top of that we don't want people saying that the place stinks as well," said a club manager near the Place de l'Etoile.
France being the thoughtful place that it is, the pong issue has prompted discussion not of hygiene but of the psychology of odour. Why are we repelled by bodily scent, Libération wondered the other day. It hauled in Annick Le Guerer, an anthropologist and philosopher, to explain that bad smells trigger a part of the brain that makes people think of death. She suggested taking Nietzche's positive approach to smell rather than Freud's bourgeois negative one. Nietzche apparently proclaimed that "my whole genius is in my nostrils." Freud said that society could not function unless it ignored smells. Before anyone starts making anti-French remarks, the same smell problem caused a stir in England when they stopped smoking there.
Continue reading "France stops smoking, starts smelling" »
It's impossible to write this post without making an obvious pun about haute cuisine. Paris cooking doesn't get any more elevated than the restaurant that has re-opened today 410 feet (125m) up on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.
The setting of the old Jules Verne restaurant has always been superb, perched inside the iron girders of the tower. What makes it special now is the new boss, Alain Ducasse, the super-chef and businessman who has 27 restaurants with 15 Michelin stars around the world.
Ducasse [above] won the tower catering concession a couple of years ago after the old management let the restaurant slide into expensive mediocrity. Doing the promotional rounds this week, Ducasse has said that he aims to lure Parisians back onto a site that was long left to tourists, with fine, all-French cooking.
"There won't be any nems (Vietnamese spring rolls), only French products, beef, scallops, turbot, Saint Pierre, langoustines, Limousin lamb, Landes farmer's chicken with crayfish... Even the whisky will be French," he said.
The tight confines of the tower and the need for reasonable prices has led Ducasse to aim for less majestic fare than his Paris Plaza Athénée and his other high culinary temples. They are haute couture while the Jules Verne, one of two eateries on the tower, will be "luxury ready-to-wear," he said.
Continue reading "Dining high on Eiffel's Tower" »
 The air is so thick with foreigners' odes to the French rural idyll that I hesitate to commit another of my own. Yet, c'est plus fort que moi, on this All Saints day with the morning sun on the chestnut forest in our valley in the Cévennes. The autumn leaves (not yet feuilles mortes) are the most radiant gold that I have seen in the 14 Toussaint holidays that I have spent in the old farm-house. Perhaps it's the result of the declining rainfall that is also drying up the spring upon which we depend.
Yet nothing has really changed on the November 1 holiday. My neighbours -- mostly hill farmers, artisans and unemployed locals -- are out with their guns and hounds in pursuit of wild boar. The only innovation on that front is that they now wear fluorescent vests over their camouflage. The measure, imposed nationally, is supposed to help les chasseurs avoid shooting one-another, but those flashes of yellow in the forest must certainly tip off their prey.
Across the valley in the village of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte, everything but the church is closed except for the stand selling chrysanthemums, the seasonal flower for commemorating the dead.
Our spot in the Cévennes, a sort of Scottish highlands with sunshine, is only 100 kilometres north of the saturated Mediterranean coastal strip. Drive only 15 kms down the valley into the département of le Gard and the architecture starts turning from austere stone and slate roofs to the white arches and red tiles of the Med. We are far enough up into hill-billy country to keep the feeling of sanctuary that shaped the history of this southernmost fringe of the Massif Central. In the religious wars of the 17th century, the persecuted protestants found refuge, as did the resistants of world war two. In the 1970s, the first generation of drop-out ecologistes came down from the north with their guitars and 2CV Citroens to take over abandoned farm-houses to try their hand -- usually without much success -- at goat raising and living off the land.
Continue reading "Goat's cheese, chestnuts and no Sarko " »
 Imagine a country where stores could cut prices year-round, trade on Sundays and hold sales whenever they want to. Imagine if just about anyone could offer taxi services, open a pharmacy or a hair salon where they choose.
Americans and others may have no trouble doing this, but not the French. These ideas have caused such anger that some of them have already been dropped by an expert panel that is advising President Sarkozy on how to "liberate growth".
Sarko gave the job of running the commission to Jacques Attali, the banker-guru who started out in the 1980s as ideas-man to François Mitterrand, the Socialist president. After three months, he handed in their interim proposals last night. Grabbing the headlines are suggestions that France should drop or loosen its strict regulations over retailing. These were designed in recent decades to protect small and medium stores from discounting by large chains. Stores may, for example, only hold sales for two six-week periods every year, on dates set by the state.
France holds conflicting views on all of this. Everyone wants to preserve the town and village bakers, grocers and bookshops that give the country its charm -- and attract all the home-buying foreigners. At the same time, everyone flocks to the out-of-town centres commerciaux to load up at weekends and they do not like paying more for goods and services there than their European neighbours.
Continue reading "Don't kill us, say French shop-keepers" »
Don't remind the British and the Americans that their meat comes from animals and be friendly when you serve them. The tip comes in a brochure for French restaurateurs that has just been issued by the Ministry of Tourism for the Rugby World Cup.
In advising how to deal with foreigners, the booklet, updated from a 2003 version, is not only a handy guide to national habits but also a useful mirror for the French hospitality industry.
Among the meal-time dislikes of nearly all the main visiting nationalities are unfriendly service, "French ethnocentrism", poor hygiene and undercooked meat. Foreigners are also turned off by the quantity of butter and fat in French food, it says. The information was drawn from surveys of foreign visitors.
When dealing with Dutch tourists, "pay attention to the cleanliness of your premises and personnel. French hygiene rules are not strict enough to their taste," it says.
With all foreigners, French restaurateurs are advised to explain when a dish comes from offal or includes meat with blood still visible. "Americans like their meat de-animalised," it says. "Its origin with a living animal must not be visible. Offal dishes, frogs' legs and snails disgust them. Nevertheless certain adventurous Americans like to try them out."
Continue reading "How to feed foreigners, French-style" »
Rémy the rat is doing exceedingly well in France. Hollywood's big animated films are usually popular here but Ratatouille, Pixar studio's tale about a Parisian rat with a talent for haute cuisine, is breaking records. It has topped the box office for the two weeks since it scored the biggest-opening day for an animated film in France. This has got me thinking about the long tradition of Franco-American mutual admiration.
The audience in my cinema at the Porte Maillot gave Ratatouille a standing ovation the other night after the finale, in which Rémy triumphs with a message that echoes the can-do doctrines of President Sarkozy: If you work hard, you will prosper. Even a lowly rat can become a gastronomic celebrity
The film, for all its technical prowess, is of course another a feel-good Disney about a cute rodent and its sensibility is all American. Yet something in the film has touched a Gallic nerve.
Continue reading "Rémy the rat and Americans in Paris" »
Perhaps it's the execrable July weather, but Paris is in a bad mood. The rain seems to be making everyone rattier than usual. Take the man at our newspaper kiosk. He usually shrugs and turns his back when tourists ask him for directions. Yesterday, he was swearing at at them.
The kiosk man is a prime candidate for re-education under the city's new friendliness programme. This latest in many attempts to teach Parisians to smile at strangers was launched with fanfare by the municipal tourist authority this week. Tuesday was declared the first Day of Tourism. Mayor Betrand Delanoe attended festivities by the Eiffel Tower, visitors were shown round neighbourhoods by residents and the media alerted France once again to its poor reputation for accueil -- welcoming people.
A charter has been issued for the Parisians and the visitor [printed below]. The Parisian, for example, pledges to "take time to give information to visitors" and the tourist promises to try to get into the spirit of the town.
We've been around the "rude French" track with several postings already, but this gives me a chance to speak up for Parisians.
Continue reading "Stop being beastly to Parisians" »
 We all know that women still do most of the household chores despite over three decades of supposed equality between the sexes. A French researcher has just produced an interesting book that seeks to explain why women have not asserted their rights in the home like they have at work.
Part of the answer, according François de Singly, a Paris sociologist, is that women wield power over their partners by retaining their traditional role of maîtresse de maison. "The unequal split of chores has the effect of making the man dependent. While the man benefits from the service of his companion, he loses a little of his mastery over his world."
It is a sacrifice that men are of course happy to make. "The man's loss of autonomy inside conjugal life is not equivalent to the loss of independence that stems from the woman's overload of domestic chores," Singly concludes in L'Injustice Ménagère (Household injustice). "Most men accept being disposessed of a role in building the shared life in order to avoid the work it requires."
Singly and colleagues from the CNRS, the state research institute, use case studies and statistics to show that women have not made housework a priority while they imposed a revolution in male attitudes in other domains.
Continue reading "Why Frenchwomen enjoy housework" »
It's the time of year when many French families are about to send their children on home stays abroad to pick up some English. That means another chance to look at cross-Channel misunderstanding.
For decades, French youngsters have spent time with British families -- usually around the south of England -- and come home with mixed memories. Friends of my generation recall poor food and draughty houses but a reasonably decent welcome. Back then, teenaged boys used to leap at the chance of getting to know les petites anglaises, who were more fun than straight-laced French girls -- at least according to legend.
In recent years, though, the reputation of British home stays has taken a dive. French parents are turning to the warmer welcome of Ireland and countries further afield such as the USA and Australia. We took a look at the matter today after France-Inter radio reported on England's reputation for poor hospitality. [Picture: France's idea of Dickensian British welcome for children]
Continue reading "Britain's miserable hospitality -- French legend or fact? " »
 On the other end of the scale from last week's post about French health warnings on food, here is my interview from today's newspaper with Anne-Sophie Pic, the new three-star Michelin chef in Valence.
And this is what lunch was like: Despite what colleagues believe, Paris corespondents do not often dine in Michelin three-star establishments. In my years in the job, I had never sat down to the gastronomic magic promised by les trois macarons of the venerable Red Guide. Expectations were high when Magali Delporte, our photographer, and I were led to our table chez Pic. We were in a corner, looking out on a lawn with pine trees behind. On the table, a single tall lilly, bound with a white paper ribbon, set the pared-down tone for the gastronomic rite.
Continue reading "A lunch to remember" »
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John,
Sorry for still having some white people around.Are we still allowed to display old postcards, pictures of our grand-parents, see our former kings queens eventhough they were all white? If you have a problem with Europe being mainly white, Africa being mainly black, China being mainly asian, then i am afraid you'll have to deal with it and... suffer...Maybe you have a problem with skin colours?
You remind me some politicians claiming after loosing an election "We are right, the people is wrong, let's change the people!"
Daniel Strohl,
Et pourquoi voulez vous me changer mon biotope à moi que j'ai? Vais-je me plaindre des concerts, des bateaux sur les canaux, ou de l'accent charmant des habitants de Strasbourg en des termes aussi violents? Je pense que vos mots ont dépassé votre pensée. Les parisiens ont-ils encore le droit d'organiser des évènements sur Paris ou bien n'est-ce réservé qu'aux provinciaux en province? Les parisiens vous semblent "rances"? Je ne n'aventurerai pas sur ce terrain là...
Posted by: Dominique | 17 Jul 2009 18:17:21
"Touché" (DOMINIQUE II)
LOL !
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 17:11:22
DOMINIQUE II,
Per pure coincidence, we watched a "retransmission" of Dr.Knock on TV may be 3 or 4 days ago (on cable TV - can't remember the channel).
A perfect complement to an article about (the well and purposely organised) waste of money in our Sécurité Sociale system :
http://www.lefigaro.fr/sante/2009/07/18/01004-20090718ARTFIG00001-medicaments-des-milliards-d-euros-gaspilles-.php
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 17:04:54
"and France's moderate drinking habits" (CHARLES)
LOL - reminds of some recent poster comments on various more or less exotic drinking habits :).
"which will throw all these central Paris bobos and their stale view ..." (JOHN)
Let us hope so - mais ils vont essayer de s'accrocher :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 16:51:29
(demure single-piece swimsuits are the fashion this year, but I'm not sure what's the tower is doing there).
Surtout qu'elle est agressivement placée sous le menton de l'ondine volante.
Posted by: DODO | 17 Jul 2009 16:40:30
.....I'm sure Cabu will have a nice pension until his last quiet days drawing such rubbish. I'm not so sure about the rest of us.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 17 Jul 2009 12:41:42
Excellent comment Robert! Délicieusement politiquement incorrect. A chaque action répond la réaction. Loi physique implacable qui fait que le jeune révolutionnaire (Paix-au-Vietnam) devienne généralement un vieux conservateur (Bobo)
Posted by: DODO | 17 Jul 2009 16:30:09
RM
you've explained the lack of comment on countering the vandalism, and the dismissive tone of remarks about 'hard to discover in the middle of the night,' other excuses for not pursuing perpetrators.it almost excuses the abuse, the price society pays for pissing off various societal sub-groups because of lack of opportunity, gross inequity of wealth, etc.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 15:12:58
What's shocking in this picture is the whity-white Aryan woman that they chose. It completely negates the ethnic diversity of the Parisian population. But then it's typical of Delanoë's municipality, which has unfortunately ruled this city since 2001. Their waspish and Amélie-clichéesque boboism is sickening. I can't wait for Nicolas Sarkozy to finally create a Greater Paris including the ethnic and working-class suburbs which will throw all these central Paris bobos and their stale view of the city into the dustbin of history.
Posted by: John | 17 Jul 2009 15:05:38
[demure single-piece swimsuits are the fashion this year] CB
is 'poster woman' flying or diving? no matter, esther williams 'lives.'
the only good thing i can think of about one-piece suits is not having to look at navel rings/studs, or those defiling, small 'gremlin,' or rose, tattoos peeking out above the suit line.
how do you do 'topless' in a one piece suit? the upper portion of the suit hanging down at the waist? hmmmm, not the 'look' you'd want to emphasize.
Paris Plage: cool idea. CB, will you be taking your pastey-white (i presume) British form, and sandwiches, over there from time to time? Take SPF 30 or above.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 14:51:49
RICK my anecdote on the U-Boot (which I can substantiate on request) was not meant as random entertainment nor as a profound view of potential parallel histories. It was to be read in the same breath as the previous sentences: "I wouldn't have posted the pics but you were fair game. Enough with the posturing." (said pics being HRH the Duke of Edimburgh and the Missus on the best of terms with the distinguished Chancellor of the Third Kingdom).
My point, which was clear to anybody with average command of standard English, was that you do not, and should not, enjoy immunity from taunts about appeasement and ill-placed sympathies, because only a very thin hull or a leaking gasket spared you the dire straits we floundered in.
We were not a weak, cowardly populace as opposed to you, a proudly fighting nation; we were very similar human beings in slightly different circumstances. And Sir Winston, who perfectly perceived this, had the genius and the unique ability to mold the circumstances so the English had no choice but to stand proud. In so doing, he took the only path to the good side's victory and I am unreservedly thankful to him.
(Layman's summary: I was not delving in non-realized theoretic possibilities, but in historical fact, ie the status of opinion and political tendencies in Britain before and at the beginning of the war).
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:51:44
ROCKET "Whereas in the case of French soldiers, both men and women no hygienic products necessary. (very wide grin)"
LOL it is clear Daniel had opened himself to your well prepared and well delivered broadside. Touché.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:14:56
RICK "persecution fantasies, (...) xenophobia, ‘esprit de clocher’, localism, infantilism, and so on"
Are you morphing into the blog's Dr Knock, head shrink variety?
(I won't insult you by explaining to you who Dr. Knock is).
It's so much easier to slap pathological-sounding labels on arguments than to address them...
I know, I know: René's post contained no arguments. That's your standard and rather tiresome summary of anything that riles. Find something else... it's especially ludicrous in that case. René certainly held an opinion, but he made his points with clarity, supported them with fact and remained courteous throughout. (The last one is why I'm not promoting him to honorary Frenchman).
Meeting his post with such undeserved contempt may help you vent your bile, a laudable end per se, but your own credibility isn't enhanced a single bit.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:04:25
Thanks Azloon - yes you are right in principle: Democracy is to be valued. But my problem is that France has a long history of extreme division and when the figures are that close it leaves a lot of people disgruntled as we have seen lately. It would have been better if they had been more like 60% - 40% something decisive even though I still wouldnt have liked the outcome (smile). Anyway we shall see at the next parliamentary and presidential elections. I just hope by then that the *Socialist* party has got itself together so there are real differences of policy. Democracy is about choice and if there is no real difference (look at Con servative and New Labour policies over the last 20 years broadly speaking) then there is no real choice. Anyway as you say keep hoping!
Posted by: thinknoworpaylater | 17 Jul 2009 14:02:25
[since old hand posters like myself and others know your name and address] Daniel
Thanks for reminding me. Just knowing this helps keep me from going completely overboard. and we 'old salts' don't want to become 'all wet.' :)
Rick, indeed.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 13:54:18
"consistently monochromous' -- Dom2
i love it when you talk that way to me.....
'probably sincere'
faint praise, indeed. but better than a stick in the eye. :)
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 13:34:27
As Charles Bremner has hinted, the official poster campaign purporting to dissuade vandalism on Vélibs is woefully inadequate. In fact, it encompasses the contradictions of modern-day political thinking on multiple levels.
Cabu, who drew the poster, is one of the French icons of May-68 rebelliousness. He spent decades using his (real) talent to depict, in his cartoons, long-haired youngsters making fun of old farts : teachers, army officers, priests, bosses and politicians.
Unfettered freedom was good ; authority was bad.
Cabu's character "mon beauf" acquired such celebrity that he coined a new word into the French language.
Cabu's "beauf" was the brother-in-law ("beau-frère") of the young, cool and leftist narrator.
His "beauf" was the anti-hero : middle-aged, working-class, ugly, vulgar, loud-mouthed, and, especially, right-wing and racist.
"Mon beauf" spent hours at the bistro du coin drinking Ricard, ranting about law and order and criticising excessive immigration.
Cabu's young, easy-going and likeable hero (presumably himself) seemed constantly appalled by his beauf's dreadful inclinations. The cute, blonde young things with short skirts and pointing tits who always seemed to surround the hero helped ram the message home : racist right-wingers don't get laid.
(How do I know they were blonde, since the cartoons are black and white ? Don't ask. That's obvious.)
Now, everybody in France understands what "un beauf" means : a middle-aged reactionary, pleased with himself, disparaging the young and ranting about law and order.
The irony is even greater, since Cabu's character evolved into a second-generation "beauf", more in line with modern times. This born-again, upmarket beauf' sports a ponytail and flashes his wealth around.
He's dangerously close to the "bobo", the bourgeois-bohême who, surprise, suprise, is the prime user of Vélibs.
Now Cabu seems to be on the Paris mayoral payroll : he has a regular column in the free municipal magazine, drawing cartoons as tame and unfunny as the Vélib poster.
Of course, the Paris mayor is socialist. I suppose that might be viewed as an excuse.
Also, note the downright stupidity of the poster's argument : don't attack Vélibs, because they can't defend themselves.
This shows how deeply out of touch our elites are with modern-day reality. If anything, such an argument will encourage vandals, not the other way round.
Haven't they noticed that the traditional, Western, French, Christian sense of honor, borne out of Middle-Ages chivalry, that this poster is appealing to, has completely disappeared ?
When was the last time hoodlum violence followed those time-honoured rules : you will fight one-on-one, you won't attack from behind, you won't hit a man on the ground, you won't hurt the weak, the old, the handicapped, or, God forbid, the women ?
Did not those snotty intellectuals and politicians notice that the rules for street violence have been turned on their head ?
Did not they notice that the rules now are : you will attack ten to one, you will hit from behind, you will make your victim fall, you will kick him in the head when he's on the ground, you will jump on his head with both feet, you will preferrably target the weak, hit the women, hit the old, hit and torture the handicapped ?
Did they not notice that the rules of chivalry have been replaced by the rules of Muslim warfare and African barbary, thanks to 40 years of uninterrupted immigration, of "anti-racist" propaganda and policy ?
If those rules stopped at Vélib vandalism, we'd be very fortunate.
Now that those old leftists are beginning to fathom the consequences of the hostile and deadly immigration they have foisted upon us, all they manage to do in order to repair their mistakes is use our money, from our taxes, to distribute to their friends who'll draw some lame propaganda posters.
I'm sure Cabu will have a nice pension until his last quiet days drawing such rubbish. I'm not so sure about the rest of us.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 17 Jul 2009 12:41:42
Oh la la - quelle belle phrase - vraiment formidable - "est-ce que le pays a les moyens de ses ambitions"? Really, when you come to think about it, it could apply to practically any other European country and European leader, and to Gordon and New Lab more than most. Helas, trois fois helas, l'Angleterre n'a plus les moyens des ambitions de New Lab. Cher Premier Ministre, que vous le vouliez ou non, vous devrez tres bientot couper les defences publiques, et tout le monde le sait- ca a deja commence- sauf vous. Cher Monsieur Brown, le pays n'a plus les moyens de vos ambitions. Excusez, je vous prie, le manque d'accents - mon PC est plutot New Lab et n'a pas les moyens de ses ambitions- graves, aigues ou petit chapeau circonflexe.
Posted by: Marguerite | 17 Jul 2009 12:24:20
They tried this too in Dublin's docklands for the last couple of years, but being typical Irish summers it rained every day and was a washout
Posted by: Evening Herault | 17 Jul 2009 11:42:27
"No, DOMINIQUE 2, to stop France looking foolish - something her friends DON'T want!" [RICK]
Gardez moi de mes amis. Quant à mes ennemis, je m'en charge.
("Protect me from my friends. I'll take care of my enemies").
Yes, ho ho, but unfunny, undignified too. The sheer capacity some French bloggers have for making for making fools of themselves is a source of constant wonderment.... and great disappointment.
Elsewhere, I wrote two long pieces to YOU. You quote for one (above). They were written in a sense of earnest seriousness. In return I get a snide aside.
Please understand this, PIERRE, I wrote “to stop France looking foolish”. That fact stands, no matter how often you scoff. In the big wide world out there, a lot of people don’t have much time for the French. Undeceive yourself. And recognise a friend.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 10:18:43
The Paris scheme is truly excellent and its a shame so many bikes are being lost. To be honest its not really a French phonnomeon if you put schemes things like this in big cities where people with huge degrees of wealth live side by side your always going to get people inclined to steal or vandalise such things, its just the way it is whethet in London, New York Paris or wherever. I'm suprised there's been such problems in Norway though can't account for that.
Posted by: sct | 17 Jul 2009 10:17:24
RH OMEA
2. And the idea that any American, where most every violent crime rate far exceeds that in France
If you are speaking about violent crime your appreciation is erroneous and this since the early 2000s
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/266umtwb.asp
en français
http://laurent.mucchielli.free.fr/france-usa.htm
which goes deeper into the phenomenon of criminality. So your remarks about criminality should really be checked before you are certain that you hold the absolute truth (stereotyped of course)
A few years back Le Figaro did a long piece on this subject.
But as DOM2 said
We laugh at ourselves much more, and much more cruelly, than you could even dream. I suppose that he also meant that France's own offer a critical eye also.
But lest one of "sang impur" dare raise their voice in opposition to the "esprit de corps" and "pensé unique" of "il ne faut pas affoler les français" then we hear many crying foul.
Posted by: rocket | 17 Jul 2009 09:36:21
"No, DOMINIQUE 2, to stop France looking foolish - something her friends DON'T want!" RICK
Gardez moi de mes amis. Quant à mes ennemis, je m'en charge.
("Protect me from my friends. I'll take care of my enemies")
Posted by: Pierre | 17 Jul 2009 09:35:34
STEPHANE (a bit late) AFAIK a troll is somebody who gets his jollies by incensing fellow bloggers with outrageous posts, which generally have nothing in common with his true opinions (if he has any). AZLOON's posts are consistently monochromous, thus probably sincere, and he's not the most obdurate basher - I'm not even sure I would qualify him as a basher, more as an honestly prejudiced product of his education and environment.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 08:38:03
‘There was a German U-Boote commander who had to be promoted to a land-based posting after he underwent a deep nervous breakdown: a torpedo he launched was one of the many pieces of defective ordnance the Kriegsmarine had in its arsenals... and the target was a dreadnought with Churchill onboard. But for a rusty gasket or a leaking joint, you might now be in thrall of Lord Halifax, Prince of Peace and Gauleiter von der See.’ [DOM2]
Whether this is true or not is a matter of profound insignificance. The past is cluttered with ‘what ifs’.
On the other hand this kind of recourse to the realms of theoretic possibilities – non-realised – is richly illustrative of the state of your troubled psyche.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 08:11:09
‘RENE MOYA : wow, was that a cavalry charge or carpet bombing? you sure don't take prisoners. A pleasure to meet you, sir.’ [DOMINIQUE II]
It takes one to know one. DOM2, herewith your diagnosis:
Denial. Ego defence mechanisms are psychological strategies brought into play by various people to cope with reality and to maintain self-image. The observed features include:
persecution fantasies, morbid fear of straight questions, rationalisation, (deliberate) misunderstanding, misquoting, bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, shooting the messenger, projection, moral cowardice, obfuscation, narrow-mindedness, wishful thinking, mythomania, provocation, the ‘smear and sneer’, hypocrisy (‘cheap and cheerful’), hypocrisy (advanced, tangled), deceit, self-deceit, delusional vanity, ‘fool’s paradise’ syndrome, ‘exceptionalist’ delusions, morbid inability to admit to mistakes, recourse to not-entirely-convincing-or-comprehensible American demotic mode of speech, narrow vision, lacunae in comprehension of standard English, anxiety-projection on near-to-hand ‘hate object’, minimal self-awareness (‘figure of fun’ syndrome), retreat into Oblomovian womb-substitute, compensatory tactics ( ‘Francophonie’), xenophobia, ‘esprit de clocher’, localism, infantilism, and so on... oh, and chickening out of straightforward questions (bis).
Now, how many of these boxes do you tick? Sorry, pal, but your credibility is shot to hell.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 07:59:20
"the infrastructure in the United States is not crumbling."
Remember what I was saying the other day about believing that 'saying it makes it so'?
"For example, the inter-state highway system is proably the best in the world."
Do not confuse the extent of the system with the quality of the roads. (The Autopista in Spain is first rate. I hear that the Autobahn is something to behold.) The Interstates I've been driving in various parts of the US in the last couple of years are in bad shape. In a couple of places it is downright dangerous. It has not always been this way. Billions have been spent on improvements, while far too little has been spent on maintenance.
"The infrastructure falling down bit was way over exaggerated by politicians from the Left"
Fox or Limbaugh, no doubt. Bridges? School buildings? Power grid?
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 17 Jul 2009 07:40:46
AZLOON, I presume that the first two paragraphs of your most recent posting were not intended for me. We MUST continue to disagree like this and set - as I know you will agree - a fine example in the art of reconciliation.
For the last two paragraphs, thanks.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 07:13:48
‘CHARLES - I am, as you know, not David Moorcroft, nor he I.
However he (David Moorcroft) makes a very fair point.
A very fair point indeed.’ [DOT KING]
As, usual, DOT KING is her own worst enemy. A few months ago, I complained about her antics. These actions make her ‘fair game’, now and in the future.
‘‘I do not post under anything other than my own name (except I was Henry Wilt briefly last week only to take the p-ss, quite gently, out of Rick as a teacher*’ [DOT KING] Beneath contempt. Worse, the problem of assumed identities again rears its head. (Henry Wilt from the Tom Sharpe novels) In this writer’s case, we’re into anonymity and poison-pen territory. How charming! Like the Yanks, I can take this kind of thing, but can’t help wondering: ‘What if it had been someone else?’’
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 07:02:49
"They convey a reaction against the problems of mobility in general." -- Bruno Martzloff
I think he is referring to the difficulty of getting around in a large city. So many people spend a couple of hours each day going to and from work and doing other errands, which can be tiring and frustrating and sometimes infuriating. People may lash out at the bicycles because they are seen as taking money away from the metro, buses and roadway improvements, which would more directly improve the lives of the vandals.
How respectful of pedestrians are bicyclists in Paris? I have been run over and knocked to the ground three times in Boston, each time while walking down the sidewalk.
I imagine that it is difficult to know if the vandalism is being done by various types of people for various reasons, or if there are a handful of people doing most of the destruction. A dedicated few can wreak a great deal of havoc, as with graffiti.
In fighting graffiti in New York, the metro found that if no train which had been painted left the yard, the graffiti artists derived no pleasure from their work. Eventually, most of them lost interest, and went on to other venues where their work would be seen.
In Australia or New Zealand, they have tried insinuating that men who drive too fast have small penises. I have heard how well this has worked.
Others perception of one's act seems to be important in anti-social behavior. Maybe the ad campaigns should focus more on only losers vandalize bikes, or cool people ride bikes, or girls don't date boys who do such things.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 17 Jul 2009 06:45:16
To all those forlorn French (and French-loving) souls who are offended by my remarks, let me try to establish my bona fides as an admirer of things French. I came to this blog as a lifelong admirer of French culture which began when I first encountered the wonderful word of french film as a teenager. If this is 'trolling,' I plead guilty.
So Let Us Now Praise the French:
Agnes Varda, whose wonderful film autobiography is just opening here, is one of the world's truly great film makers, and she only happens to be a woman. And she had the good taste and good fortune to marry another of the planet's true film masters, Jacques Demy. The French invented great film making, and the world is in its debt.
Nuclear Power. The French fearlessly surged forward in this fleld when the rest of the world cowered. It will now reap the benefit of being the 'go to' country for all things nuclear which is as it should be. Chapeau.
Health Care. French citizens can rest easily knowing that their health care is provided for, and high quality health care at that. Not having to face debilitating anxiety, as many do in the u.s., about catastrophic illness, the French can pursue their life interests with more zest and assurance. The country also has world-class pharmacological research and development.
Cultural Preservation. With a culture worth preserving, the French do this as no other country. And the natural beauty of France is taken seriously and protected. A great example for others.
Innovational Financial Instruments. France has been ahead of much of the rest of the world in the development of sophisticated derivative instruments used in risk management. It's regulatory approach to its financial services industry is an example the u.s. might well have followed (and may yet:)) A nod to you, Daniel.
This may or may not dissuade you from your impression of some of us inveterate critics of contemporary French goings-on as cretinous French bashers. Some of us actually like the place. And we take our cue for our criticism from Voltaire, and our deep solace from Montaigne
I believe that if this were a blog about Fiji, we'd be talking now about Fiji-bashers. Please lighten up a bit. Life is short.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 02:24:35
DON -
And how is California doing?
Posted by: christopher muir | 17 Jul 2009 02:23:43
1. Discussing bike theft as if it were a uniquely French tendency is bollocks. In Holland, bicycle theft is as normal and expected as the sunrise. The expression quoted in a WSJ article concerning the composition of the canals below the water line was:
"een derde Modder
een derde Water en
een derde Fiets"
2. And the idea that any American, where most every violent crime rate far exceeds that in France - while many LE budgets have been slashed, has any moral high ground from which to lecture about enforcing the law is laughable at best.
Posted by: RH Omea | 17 Jul 2009 00:40:32
GILL,
Bona fides is also used occasionally in French. However, one would not use it (or its translation "bonne foi") to say that a word or expression is correct because it is listed and defined in a recognised dictionary.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 00:21:11
AZLOON,
No major problem with French bashing or whatever bashing, as long as it is not morbidly obsessional and not courageously :) anonymous.
Fortunately, you don't fill these criteria since old hand posters like myself and others know your name and address and know also that you are not morbidly persuaded that you alone (along with your country) hold the universal truth :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 00:09:07
The 14th July always produces mixed feelings. There is the toy soldiers' bit like the parade of tanks and bridge layers in my local High street or our miniature Joan of Arc military parade in front of the statue in my street (8th May).
But it might be worth reflecting on the ambiguity of the situation : a French army and navy with its aristocratic officers still in a very anti-British tradition. No meaningful participation in World War II (the soldiers were all made German prisoners). Yet a Franco-German axis it is said (German president was there too). Yet an army that put down immediately after the war the Algerian, Vietnamese etc populations using Gestapo torture methods. I would like to think that modern France is that creator of republican freedoms.
In, case in any one thinks the Sarkozy interview was an exceptional example of bad French journalism, remember the exploitation by Giscard and Mitterrand of journalists who could be on very intimate and private relations with the same politician (the French word is 'couché'). On the other hand French viewers who look around their channels can find excellent discussion programmes for the happy few (C dans l'air, or the excellent parliamentary channel LCP AN.
,
Posted by: paul | 16 Jul 2009 23:29:14
DANIEL,
I had thought perhaps that nous was only UK English and not American English but I was obviously wrong. It is in the Oxford English Dictionary which I think proves its bona fides (bonne foi in French?)
Posted by: Gill | 16 Jul 2009 22:59:18
The problem in Paris must be related to the fact that it houses a large proportion of the under-priveleged in relation to the highly priveleged but I cannot understand why Norway should have the worst vandalism. I am sure if this scheme is introduced in London, as has been mooted, we would also see a high level of vandalism.
Posted by: Gill | 16 Jul 2009 22:51:02
RENE C MOYA AND STEPHANE,
I know that Azloon is old enough and big enough to look after himself but I cannot ignore your comments. Azloon made valid comments on Charles' article and asked some equally valid questions. You, however, have contributed nothing constructive to the discussion and I am not even sure if you have read Azloon's comments in their proper context. All you have done is to criticise another blogger for no readily apparent reason. Who are the trolls?
Sorry, Charles I do not normally get this uptight but this incensed me.
Posted by: Gill | 16 Jul 2009 22:42:44
On a more practical note, I've been using Velibs in Paris since the beginning.
The system was horrendously complex to work out on the first time, but once you'd went through the hoops once, it was OK.
However, there has been a dreadful fall in the quality of service since the system was launched. The proportion of out of order bikes, docking posts or even whole stations is staggering.
Vandalism is bad enough, but it's not the only culprit. Many bikes obviously in working order are locked onto their posts, with a red light signalling that the computer won't release them. Sometimes, half of all the bikes on a given station are unavailable because of that.
It's not uncommon for a whole station to be out of order, because of a mysterious computer glitch.
There's also one particularly irritating and now frequent failure -- or should I say deliberate scam ?
If you pay by the day as I do, the machine gives you a ticket. You need it if you want to take advantage of your "subscription", which enables you to as many further free rides as you wish during the next 24 hours, provided they last less than 30 minutes.
More and more often, the expected ticket does not appear at all. If you wait too long for a ticket that refuses to come out, you've lost your 1 euro : you are entitled to begin the process all over again for free -- except that you need to punch in your client number, which is supposed to be printed on the ticket, which doesn't exist.
Knowing the French, I suspect some foul play is at work there.
I'm about to give up Velibs altogether.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 16 Jul 2009 22:27:14
And then you surpassed yourself, RENE:
‘I've got to say, Charlemagne, that this post by itself--and the tendentious Europhobia it displays--is more than enough to get me off reading your blog, and almost enough to get me off reading the Europhobic, Psycophantic/America-Praising Economist as a whole.’
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 22:09:44
On March 12 of this year a RENE C MOYA addressed the European correspondent of ‘The Economist’ as follows:
‘Charlemagne, Your logic is impecable(-ly stupid).’
‘...but did The Economist hire you because there was a gap in the 'tortured logic' department?’
Needless to add, you continued in this way for a long time. You’ve got ‘form’, boy.
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 22:06:23
"I don't really know what that means."
A delightful understatment by our favorite British correspondent.
Actually, he's far too polite to give it straight to you : most French sociologists, and 100 % of those who get quoted in the media, are half-wits on the state payroll churning out leftist propaganda -- and that's in the rare cases where anyone can make some sense out of their pronouncements.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 16 Jul 2009 21:56:50
DAISY "Perhaps the french [sic] should learn to lighten up a bit and poke fun at themselves. If they did, others wouldn't have to do it for them."
Ma petite Marguerite, perhaps you should learn some French and peruse some French media. We laugh at ourselves much more, and much more cruelly, than you could even dream. Why, think you guys actually keep bleating Sarko is the best ever thing that happened to France... when he is the most mocked man in the country.
What we find unpleasant and boring is the endless repetition of prejudiced stereotypes which only advertise the inanity of those who mouth them with such naive self-assurance. And what makes these inanities unpleasant is not that they hurt our pride, which they don't; it is that they end up building a wrong, adversarial, despicable picture of a great people we always liked and admired.
Now, Daisy dear, do feel free to "poke fun" at us. As long as it is - you know? witty. Funny. To the point. Otherwise, don't be surprised if you're booed. And, it now appears, from both sides of the pond.
Posted by: Dominique II | 16 Jul 2009 21:50:32
RENE MOYA : wow, was that a cavalry charge or carpet bombing? you sure don't take prisoners. A pleasure to meet you, sir.
Posted by: Dominique II | 16 Jul 2009 21:35:50
p.s. to Daniel
You can't be oblivious to the fact that there is liable to be more french-bashing on a blog about France that there is to be A-S bashing. Just the way it is. If we had met on a blog about Fiji, we'd be arguing about Fiji-bashing. :)
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 21:26:03
[Azloon, may be you are not the best placed to qualify a person or a nation as being hypersensitive - I remember some of your reactions which one could have qualified as "réactions de vierge outragée" :)).]
sans doute, c'est vrai. why am i supposed to 'best placed to qualify' in order to spout off? that' no fun.
and do i have to be insensitive myself in order to accused others of excessive sensitivity? not possible :)
Rick, my comment about Indian troops was truly simpleminded, in keeping with my simple mind. Marching 'british style' means behaving marginally like those who are occasionally derided by he French. that' all. about u.s. troops? just another potentially controversial invitation. no big deal, or deep meaning.
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 21:23:00
'the xenophobia of some half-wits'
'Perhaps WASPs could stop being so self-righteous. That includes you, in case there is any doubt.'
STEPHANE, are you applying for the post of judge or the accused?
By the way, you have a nice line in reasoned argument - not.
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 21:12:12
Daniel
"The reason why the American army deems it necessary to have more personnel in logistics than for instance the French army is now fully clear for me: they have to transport all the extra stuff needed by their lady warriors - creams, powders, mirrors, combs, mobile showers with huge water reserves, hair dryers with powerful generators to feed them adequately in the desert and so on :). I am not sure whether the yield is optimum..."
Whereas in the case of French soldiers, both men and women no hygienic products necessary. (very wide grin)
Posted by: rocket | 16 Jul 2009 21:10:16
[Perhaps the french should learn to lighten up a bit and poke fun at themselves. If they did, others wouldn't have to do it for them] Daisy
Daisy, your check is in the mail. :)
and, of course, as usual, you are spot on !
But don't expect widespread French 'lightening' soon. it's a bit endemic, but mercifully not universally accurate, witness several French posters here, Dominique II being a prominent example (he will probably disavow any praise from me out of concern for his reputation :)).
-----------
To: Rene C. Moya
Rene, I welcome your characterization of me, unflattering though it is. You've got spunk, a good brain and write well.
But, of course, as we all are from time to time, you're dead wrong in this matter.
You said:
[And then of course you round on the French by obliquely suggesting they're either law-breakers ('...a population that thinks taking your boss prisoner is just fine.') or too watery to hold criminals to account] Rene
'Lawbreakers' is a perfect description of the French in the matter of sequestration (what the rest of the world calls 'hostage-taking'), and it's done with a wink of the eye from police. If you had participated on this Blog as long as i have, you might recall CB's piece that cited a poll showing more than 50% of all French approve of 'sequestration.' Enough said?
And as for bicycle vandalism? Is it not fair, and completely logical, to inquire of about law enforcement efforts to catch offenders? You may not be a particularly curious person. I am.
I obviously feel no compunction about defending France's reputation, or the u.s.'s for that matter. Stupid is stupid, wherever it occurs, and there's no known cure for stupid. If you want a tamer blog, a little more polite, and sugar-coated, may I suggest La Petite Anglaise.
---------
[But on most blogs and chatrooms the likes of Azloon are just called trolls] Stephane
About other chatrooms/blogs, I wouldn't know since I participate in none of them, and never have. I've been here two and half years and have made my share of outrageous comments. But my reading of the various definitions of 'troll' leads me to believe I don't quite achieve a level of troll pathology.
But I'll accept your verdict if enough other posters here agree with you. You're off to a good start with Ms. Moya, and Jay Whachamacallit.
BTW, are you aware that you are not required to read the posts of those who annoy you? This isn't a school exam. You won't be tested on everything printed here. :)
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 21:03:20
[I wonder, Azloon, how you manage to have nothing better to do than come to this blog just to make snotty comments about the French. …. Because that's a sure-fire way of getting the generally high-quality public services the French have...as opposed to, say, a decrepit train network as in the UK, or a crumbling public infrastructure as in the United States. - Rene C. Moya]
Rene, the infrastructure in the United States is not crumbling. For example, the inter-state highway system is proably the best in the world. The infrastructure falling down bit was way over exaggerated by politicians from the Left to get the Obama stimulus bill passed a few months ago.
You think the French have “generally high-quality public services”? Tell that to the 15,000 older people who died in ONE month in France a few years ago (Aug. 2003). That would be equivalent to 75,000 older people dying in one month in the United States. Not even close.
Or how about the deficit of 200,000 people willing to work in the French health care system.
http://www.webinfrance.com/france-hopes-to-recruit-200000-young-people-over-5-years-to-hospital-jobs-in-france-221.html
For two generations young French people have been avoiding going into probably the most important of the public services in France. If it is so ‘high quality” then why are they avoiding it like the plague?
Or the fact that the average age of a French surgeon is over 55 or that they periodically go into exile in Spain or Britain (strike). Why is this? Or the fact that almost no new drugs, diagnostic procedures, surgical procedures have been developed in France over the past two generations. The U.S. produces 80% of the world’s new drugs, diagnostic procedures (e.g. MRI scanners) etc.
You might want to read several books by French authors who have detailed the many, many years of America bashing by the French. (“Anti-Americanism” by Revel, “The American Enemy – History of French anti-Americanism” by Philippe Roger.)
The criticism of the French by Americans is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the bashing the Americans have taken from the French for many decades. Think I am
exaggerating? Read those books and contradtict the facts that they recount and document copiously. Revel was a member of the Academie Francaise and hardly a Francophobe.
Wouldn’t you do better to get your facts straight before going after Azloon? Just a suggestion.
Posted by: Don | 16 Jul 2009 20:28:20