The schools have closed, France is heading for the summer holidays and Lance Armstrong is back on the Tour. That summed up the news today * at the start of the 96th edition of the Tour de France. The three-week, 2000-mile ordeal is of course not just the world's greatest cycle race. Under the headline "A La Vie, A l'Amour," L'Equipe, the sports daily, waxed poetic yesterday, calling the Tour a "unifying force... that possesses us and bewitches us beyond the flaws of humankind."
For France, those human failings are at the heart of the matter with Lance Armstrong. The Texan wonder-cyclist, who won the tour an astonishing seven times in a row, has returned from retirement and is aiming for an eighth victory in the tour that opens in Monaco today. Armstrong's comeback in his 38th year stirred dismay back in the winter. He may be worshiped as a hero at home in the States, but in France he was the object of suspicion. "Good riddance" was the feeling when he left in 2005.
Unlike dozens of others in a dope-plagued sport, Armstrong had never been caught using any performance-enhancing drugs. As he explained: "For France, my story was just too good to be true." He had survived a grave bout with cancer in the mid-1990s to become the biggest champion of all time, breaking the previous record of five wins, shared by the legends Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil.
Armstrong was an American at the time that France had fallen out with George Bush. He alienated the Tour crowd with what was deemed to be an arrogant, hard professionalism. He kept to himself and surrounded himself with bodyguards. In public, he refused to play the plucky regular guy, the traditional cycling hero. He barely spoke French despite five years in residence. Crowds even booed him as he led the pack through the mountain passes.
But this year, things have changed. It's not le grand amour, but Armstrong is enjoying new respect and it's not just because France has forgiven the United States. Armstrong is recognised as a star who brought glamour to a sport that is little known in much of the world. For the young cyclists, Lance is the boss but they have a chance of beating him. Andy Schleck, a Luxembourg Tour racer, said today: "It's good for cycling to have un Monsieur like him. He inspires a lot of people. Hat's off!."
Armstrong is enjoying gentler treatment from the media. Michel Drucker, France's favourite TV host, treated him to a gushing interview last Sunday. People are not scoffing at his argument that he has returned to promote his cancer foundation Livestrong. Armstrong, who broke a collarbone earlier this year, is now benefiting from the old Tour phenomenon of sympathy for the underdog. He is not even squad boss of Astana, the Kazakhstan-owned team for which he is pedalling. First place is held by Alberto Contador, the Spaniard who won in 2007. The first week will see a battle between the two for the real leadership. Armstrong says he will ride loyal back-up to Contador if he does not make the Yellow Jersey early on. The Texan cyclist is, by the way, one of the most active celebrity Twitterers. He has well over one million followers on http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
In the meantime, the tour is holding on to its magic despite the decade of seemingly endless doping scandals. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, says that the all-out testing is making cycling the cleanest sport. No other sport employs such stringent methods to track new ways of cheating, he says.
And to wrap it up, Nicolas Sarkozy has got into the act. The President, who is an amateur cyclist and an Armstrong fan, told the Cabinet this week that it is time to stop knocking the Tour. "It is the victim of dopage, and not the perpetrator," he said. "You must support this great popular event as well as its management," he told Rama Yade, his new Sports Minister. [*Since writing this, a train crash has joined today's headlines]
For over a century, when The Times' Paris bureau has needed an English-language book in a hurry, someone has walked a couple of hundred yards down the Avenue de l'Opéra to buy it at Brentano's. Sadly, the habit came to an end 10 days ago with the demise of the American bookstore that has been a Paris fixture since 1895.
The old shop at 37 Avenue de L'Opéra, whose customers included Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was shut after its landlord, the BNP Parisbas bank, won a liquidation order for non-payment of rent. For some time, the store was locally owned, no longer part of the historic New York-based company which is now a brand in the Borders Group.
Brentano's was a Paris American institution like the Herald Tribune newspaper. It supplied reading on the old trans-Atlantic steamers and it was appreciated by US expatriates. The Nazi invaders shut down the shop when they arrived in June 1940 and turned it into the film and camera supply centre for the Wehrmacht. At the start of the occupation, a German official walked in and ordered 6,000 books, including 349 assorted titles in Everyman's Library, a variety of art books, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and some expensive erotica (The tale comes from the Brentano's site, which is still open).
During the occupation, the Brentano parent company published French writers such as André Maurois and André Gide and the books were smuggled into France via the Free French forces in north Africa.
Like many other bookshop owners, Chantal and Jean-Marc Bodez, Brentano's last proprietors, could not keep up with soaring inner-city rent. The BNP had raised it from 75,000 euros a year to 200,000.
Independent bookshops have been closing everywhere in the world, but they are better protected in France than most places because the law does not allow price discounting. Brentano's suffered from the lower prices for English-languages books on the big internet chains.
And almost no-one sells books in the prized retail zone between the Louvre and the Opéra. A nearby exception remains WH Smiths', the branch of the UK chain on the rue de Rivoli opposite the Tuileries gardens. Another is Galignani, an historic shop also on the Rue de Rivoli. And of course there is always Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank. Here's a list of English-language bookstores in Paris
And it's not just Brentano's who are pulling out of the Opéra quartier. The Times is about to do so too -- after an extraordinary two centuries. We're not closing, just moving, but that's another story to which I shall return.
Another Airbus has fallen out of the sky and once again everyone is haring off into scare territory. Since the investigators are issuing their first findings on Air France 447, the June 1 crash in the Atlantic, here's a quick reality check.
[ Friday Update: First crash investigatin of A447 shows the airliner belly-flopped onto water in one piece.]
I've been talking to an Air France A330 pilot who confirms the sequence of events that brought down the Air France A330 off Brazil and which we have discussed here. More on that below, but first the latest accident.
The Yemenia Airbus that came down yesterday off the Comoros islands, killing 152 aboard, had nothing to do with the problems that ended Flight 447. The plane was a relatively old (19 years) A310 that was in poor condition and which had been banned from French air space in 2007.
That point is being hammered by the French media today. But it seems likely that the state of the plane had little to do with the crash, from which a 14-year-old girl has survived. From the accounts so far it looks like a classic approach-to-landing mishap of the oldest kind. Witnesses said the plane appeared to have been upset by a gust of wind or a down-draft as it was approaching the notoriously tricky runway at Moroni airport. The pilots were going around for another try and hit the water in the low turn in stormy conditions. That's a demanding manoeuvre at an underequipped airport in the dark. Most airline accidents take place in the landing or take-off phases and sloppy piloting is usually responsible. The investigators may find that higher crew standards are needed at Yemenia as much as better aircraft maintenance.
The Yemeni plane was a first-generation Airbus, a relatively simple aircraft. These do not have the computerised, fly-by-wire system that Airbus has used since the 1980s and which is under suspicion in Air France flight 447
It now looks as if AF447 was a disaster waiting to happen. Thanks to leaks from pilots and engineers, we now know that Air France and other airlines had experienced a string of failures in the speed sensors and air data system of the long-range Airbus family, the A330 and A340.
Crews had always managed to recover the aircraft by hand after their electronics disconnected. Unnoticed by most media, the United States authorities (National Transportation Safety Board) has just jumped in with its own investigation of the latest two. They involved Airbus incidents on flights originating in the United States on May 21 and only last week.
In the case of AF447, it seems that the crew faced conditions that were beyond them. They were flying at night at high altitude in a storm that appears to have played an important role in the chain. After the speed sensors and computers played up, they had no airspeed indication. Saving the plane would have been a very tough job. It is assumed that the two junior pilots were at the controls. Captain Marc Dubois, 58, would have been resting.
That is the scenario described to me yesterday by Cédric Maniez, a colleague of the late captain who flies A330s for Air France. The blocked speed sensors -- the pitot tubes -- were the originating cause of the accident, he said. This led to the cascade of electronic breakdown. Air France has now intensified training for such a situation, he said. He had tried last week to fly an A330 simulator that recreated the conditions on AF447 and he had found it "very very delicate".
Maniez, who is also a spokesman for the SNPL pilots' union, said he was now satisfied that the airline had solved the problem because it had replaced all the unreliable pitot tubes. "I have more confidence than ever now that the problem has been elucidated and corrected," he said.
That will not get Airbus, the airlines and the regulatory agencies off the hook. Questions are bound to be asked about why nothing was done to mandate replacement of the unreliable pitot tubes and to explain the erratic electronics -- which had been known since 1994. Some pilots are worried that the French accident bureau, the BEA, will play down the technical failures and play up the storm and shift blame to the crew. Why they flew through the storm rather than avoiding it, we don't know. Without the black box cockpit voice recorders, it's unlikely that we ever will.
The lawyers are ready to pounce. The British firm representing AF447 victims passengers thinks the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will have to think about grounding the A330/340 fleet.
All that said, everyone should calm down. Two disasters in a month sound frightening. But remember that AF447 was the first fatal crash involving a plane of which over 900 are in the air around the world every day. Here's a comparison on air safety. Eight thousand pedestrians are killed in Europe annually. In the whole world, only 550 people die in airline accidents every year. Or another figure: flying is 32 times safer than taking the car, in terms of deaths per 100 million passenger miles, according to the French civil aviation authority.
Imagine the scandal that would ensue in some countries if prosecutors announced that they were pursuing the following trail: the head of state is suspected of possible involvement in a corrupt arms deal that led to the death of 11 of his citizens in a bomb attack attributed to Al Qaida.
That may sound like a movie plot or something from the third world but it's happening in France. It's the outline of a case that has begun to lap around President Sarkozy. With the exception of a couple of leftwing publications, the media are treading very carefully over this so-called Karachi affair. Sarkozy has dismissed it as pure fantasy. But he may not be able to escape further explanation, since vengeance is in the air -- in the person of his sworn enemy Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister and right-hand-man of President Jacques Chirac.
The story involves a jump back to the 1990s but it's worth the effort. The trigger event is a 2002 suicide bomb attack on a bus full of French shipyard workers in Karachi. Fourteen people were killed, 11 of them French citizens working on submarines which France had sold to the Pakistani navy [bomb scene in top picture]. Two alleged Al Qaida operatives were sentenced to death in Pakistan for the attacks, but their convictions were recently quashed on appeal.
The French side of the investigation plugged away slowly until two new juges d'instruction were appointed a few months ago. Two weeks ago, they told survivors of the attack and families of the dead that the Al Qaida trail was now excluded. They said they had strong reason to believe that the bombing was staged by senior figures in the Pakistani military as retaliation against the French government.
Why ? Paris had incurred the wrath of the unnamed Pakistanis because in 1995, President Chirac had cut off payment of millions of euros of "commissions" -- bribes or fees -- to middle-men in the 825 million euro submarine contract. Chirac may have taken his decision because part of the illicit commissions were being kicked back to France to finance Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister of the time, said the judges. Balladur was Chirac's party subordinate who turned coat and ran against his boss for the presidency in 1995.
And who was the head of Balladur's campaign that year? Nicolas Sarkozy. He was also, as Budget Minister of the time, the man who signed the paperwork to have the submarine commissions sent to a Luxembourg-based shell company. [Picture left: Balladur with his former chief lieutenant, N Sarkozy]
That's strong stuff. There are denials all round. But the judges in the Karachi case are not just theorizing. Documents support their suspicion. They discovered that in 2002 an internal investigation by the DCN, the state ship-building firm, concluded flatly that the bus attack was retaliation over non-payment of the full submarine commissions. The 2002 report, written by a former agent of the DGSE, the French Intelligence Service, said suitcases of cash from the commission were being delivered to Balladur's campaign in Paris, according to le Nouvel Observateur magazine
In 2007, Jean-Claude Marin, the Paris Prosecutor, wrote a memorandum mentioning a suspected link between the Karachi attack and the financing of the Balladur campaign, according to documents obtained last week by Reuters news agency.
Last week, Charles Millon, who was Chirac's defence minister after he won the presidency in 1995, confirmed that the incoming administration had halted payment of the submarine commissions because part of them were thought to be paid back into France. De Villepin, who was serving as Chirac's chief of staff in 1995, said on Friday that Chirac had "refused payment of all commissions which could have been used to send kickbacks to France". He said that he had not been alerted "specifically" to the submarine contract.
Villepin must be relishing his chance to get back at Sarkozy after the humiliation that the President has inflicted on his frère-ennemi by having him pursued over the so-called Clearstream affair. In the Clearstream case, Villepin is to stand trial in a few months on charges of trying to smear Sarkozy with claims four years ago that Sarkozy had stashed a large sum of money in a secret bank account in.... Luxembourg.
Balladur, who earned Chirac's enmity for betraying him by running against him in 1994, said yesterday that everything about the submarine deal and his election finances were above board and he is happy to answer the judges' questions. But he added that he did not follow the detail of the submarine contract. It's worth noting that the 50 million or so euros of foreign commissions on the submarine deal were legal -- and tax-deductible by the shipbuilders -- in France at the time. Such payments became illegal only after France signed up to an OECD anti-corruption pact in 2000. It was always illegal for French nationals to receive kickbacks from such commissions.
This case is unlikely to fade because the survivors and families, who are mainly from the Normandy port of Cherbourg, have banded together and are demanding a full investigation. And parliament is getting involved. Bernard Cazeneuve, the Socialist member for Cherbourg and mayor of the city, said "we are discovering manipulation on all sides in an extremely unhealthy context." Sarkozy's blanket dismissal was not enough, he said. "It is the duty of Parliament to demand that full light is shed on the case." Michèle Alliot-Marie, the new Justice Minister, has just promised that the enquiry will be given priority.
Do not expect anything dramatic. L'affaire Karachi has not yet become une affaire d'état. In France, there is a long history of politico-financial skulduggery that simmers on for years and never reaches the courts. For example, a thick cloud of financial scandal dogged Chirac for his 12 years in the presidency but nothing came of it.
It is also worth recalling that Sarkozy is about to abolish the institution of independent investigating judges -- of the kind who are pursuing the Karachi case. Under his reform, the President is to put all investigation into the hands of the prosecution service -- a body which is completely under the orders of the government.
Old television commercials are a big trigger for nostalgia. This is just one of 200,000 French ones which went on-line free today on the new site of the INA, the national broadcasting archives.
The site is a little slow this morning because everyone is clicking on to watch the adverts they grew up with, starting the the first one, for Boursin cheese, in 1968. French TV advertising does not play so much on sentiment and emotion as the Americans or situation comedy like the British. It can be as silly and annoying as everywhere else but the more creative commercials are a mix of stylish production, humour and often, eroticism. The ice-cream advert above from 1999 is an example. Some of the most fondly-remembered commercials are those of Perrier water (see below) and Orangina soda.
The INA site is fun to browse. France does these things exceedingly well. I mentioned the site when it first opened three years ago, offering a free trip down memory lane with thousands of hours of old tv shows, news footage and entertainment. The INA -- l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel -- has the task of storing and cataloguing France's broadcasting heritage. It is half way through putting decades of TV on-line and the new site makes it more accessible.
Emmanuel Hogg, the INA boss, says he is offering France and anyone who knows the country the equivalent of Proust's Madeleine -- the frisson of a flash into your past. "We are the first generation to be able to see our past in images. When you look at an old show, you see two things: the broadcast and your (younger) self watching it...We are a guarantee that everything is broadcast on radio and television will be kept, from yesterday today or tomorrow." The INA had a lively internal debate on whether old TV commercials were really part of the national heritage and it decided that they were. No other country has such a publicly accessible memory trove, adds Hogg. Yes of course this costs the taxpayer, but no-one contests such spending.
[Housekeeping note. I'm off for three days. Comments will be moderated. Next post on Monday. CB]
[Below: Perrier cavemen]
Three weeks on from the crash of Air France flight 447, it is clear that the airline and the Airbus company are going to face some hard questions over the worst air disaster since 2001.
The latest leaks from the airline and its pilots indicate that Air France and Airbus were aware earlier than they have publicly admitted of serious problems with the speed instruments on the long-range A330 and A340 aircraft. Faulty speed readings were reported automatically by the Air France plane at the start of a series of failures that ended with the plane breaking up at night over the Atlantic with 228 aboard early on June1 .
The accident investigators have yet to reach any finding, but the consensus among pilots is that erroneous speed data probably confused the flight computers and left the pilots with a plane that would have been near impossible to fly.
As more documents have come out this week, Air France confirmed to us today that a maintenance team had been sent to await the arrival of AF 447 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport during the night of the crash. They were supposed to correct faulty pitot tubes, the outside sensors that register the speed of the oncoming air.
The dispatch of the mechanics was a standard response to the automatic alerts (known as ACARS) that reported the erroneous speed data to Air France's Paris base. At the time, the airline did not yet know that the aircraft had crashed just over four minutes after its satellite transmitter sent the first ACARS alert.
The boss of Air France said last Friday that the airline had experienced a series of faulty speed incidents on its long-range Airbuses beginning last August. But last night, company documents reached the internet showing that the problem was known before that. Eurocockpit, a site run by professional pilots, including some from Air France, published an Air France maintenance notice, NT-34-029, dated last August 20. This said that at that time there had already been six cases of malfunctioning pitot probes on the company's A340 aircraft, the bigger brother of the A330 [see extract below]. These were said to be due to water and ice. Eurocockpit, which has been the source of the main leaks from the airline since the crash, said work on the technical notice had started in June last year (see full documents here).
Air France 447 was the 36th known occurrence of faulty speed readings on the A330 and A340 series, said the Eurocockpit association. The 35 previous incidents followed the same sequence as those reported by AF447, except that the pilots were able to recover control and return to normal flight.
The Eurocockpit pilots voiced amazement that the August 2008 technical note says that the faulty pitot tubes would have "nil operational impact". They called this outrageous. "How can it be imagined that there would be no operational consequence from the loss of so much information and vital systems?" it asked. "We have consulted the pilots who had these pitot problems. All told us that it took a big dose of immediate lucidity to avoid distraction by the stall warnings which came with the incident and face up to the deluge of alarms...." Maintaining control of AF447, at night in a tropical storm with faulty information, would have been a monumental task, the pilots said.
The pilots are obviously keen that the crew of AF447 should not be blamed for the crash. The flight recorders still lie on the floor of the Atlantic with only days left before their locator batteries run out. It is early to pronounce on the cause of this rare disaster, but the evidence is building up and it does not look good for Air France and Airbus. The accident investigation bureau, the BEA, is to produce a preliminary report by June 30.
Below is an extract from the August 2008 Air France note setting out the pitot problem and remedial action to be taken by engineers. AF447 reported the same auto-pilot disengagement and disconnection of the computerised flight controls as set out here at least 10 months earlier (THT is Air Tahiti Nui, whose aircraft are maintained by Air France).
![Frederic mitterrand[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201157147e63f970b-300wi "Frederic mitterrand[1]") We were right to expect Nicolas Sarkozy to dismiss Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister who was responsible for the President's ill-fated law against internet piracy. Sarkozy is about to stage one of his splashy personnel coups by replacing Albanel with a well-known character by the name of Mitterrand
The new Monsieur Culture is to be Frédéric Mitterrand, a versatile arts personality, gay activist and television presenter who was a nephew of the late President François Mitterrand. The younger Mitterrand, 61, has just made his first big mistake: he announced his elevation 24 hours before its proclamation by the palace. Sarkozy, who is recasting his government tomorrow, abhors subordinates who jump the gun.
[Wednesday update: Mitterrand's announcement forced the Elysée to name the new government last night. Here's the news from today's paper -- written five minutes after the announcement so it's a little sketchy.]
Because of the family name, Mitterrand's appointment to a plum Cabinet post has been depicted by some as a new ouverture, Sarkozy's term for his recruitment of people from the left. Mitterrand, whose late father Robert was the elder brother of the Socialist president, supported his uncle in the 1980s, when he was rising on state television as an arts presenter and commentator on European royalty. But in 1995, Frédéric threw in his lot with the then presidential candidate Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy's party boss who succeeded François Mitterrand that year. The new minister is seen by the lefty Paris cultural establishment as something of a dilettante and courtier. However Pierre Bergé, the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and senior figure in the left-leaning gay establishment applauded his appointment.
Sarkozy had already promoted Mitterrand and put many cultural noses out of joint only last year when he made him boss of Villa Médicis, the French cultural academy in Rome. The post is one of the jewels distributed by Republican monarchs to those who enjoy their favour. On TV today, Mitterrand called his new job "an exhilarating task and an honour." The Elysée Palace refused to confirm it. Asked if his late uncle would have approved his decision to join Sarkozy's government, he said: "Certainly!"
Mitterrand has enjoyed moderate success as a writer and film director and producer but he is a household face, at least for the older generation, from his television days in the 1980s and '90s. He is admired as one of the first campaigners for gay rights. His creation in 1977 of a Festival of Homosexual Film was brave for the times. In recent years he has been one of the bosses of Pink TV, France's first gay cable channel.
Mitterrand's gayness will not be a first in the Culture post, a job which in France commands much greater money (2.8 billion euros) and power than arts officials in other democracies. But his background as a homosexual rights campaigner is useful for Sarkozy's goal of diversity in his administration.
The President has been hinting at surprises in what he says will be his "second government". Among these will be the identify of the one or more new ethnic personalities who will inherit the diversity role played by Rachida Dati, the outgoing Justice Minister. It is assumed that François Fillon is staying on as Prime Minister, although Sarkozy's direct management of the state has cut the function down to a sort of chief of staff.
Sarkozy laid out his aims for this second phase of his presidency before a solemn ceremonial session of both houses of parliament in the Château de Versailles yesterday. Among other things, he condemned face-covering by Islamic women (see last post).
The grandiose exercise in self-promotion, made possible by Sarkozy's changes to the constitution last year, played into the hands of the left and media critics who depict him as a would-be successor to Louis XIV and France's other absolute monarchs. They might have a point, given that he is appointing as guardian of the Republic's culture a man who is a famous admirer of European monarchy and its rituals.
[Below: Sarkozy arriving at Versailles for his speech]
France has set itself a troublesome real-life question that could have come from this week's baccalauréat philosophy test: should society dictate how people dress ?
The matter arises because parliamentarians are calling for measures to stop Muslim women wearing full veils in public. Niqabs and burqas -- the head-to-toe costumes that cover all or most of the face -- are said to be spreading as fundamentalist doctrines gain hold among a small minority of France's five million Muslims. President Sarkozy is going to address the issue in a speech on Monday and a string of public figures have come out largely in support of restrictions in order to protect women from oppression. Ministers in Sarkozy's government hold conflicting views on the question.
[Tuesday update: Sarkozy has come out firmly against the niqab and burqa but stopped short of calling for a law. See today's story here. ]
This new debate over Muslim dress is reviving the passions that surrounded France's 2004 law prohibiting religious head-cover and other symbols of faith in state schools. The justification was the enforcement of laicité, France's tradition that keeps religious expression away from institutions of the strictly secular republic. The measure was mainly intended to ensure the equality of Muslim girls and it has worked smoothly.
The subject goes to the heart of France's ideal of itself as a culturally integrated republic and it creates misunderstanding abroad, obviously in the Muslim world but also in the "Anglo-Saxon" and north European countries which emphasise what they see as religious freedom. First-time French visitors to Britain are often shocked when they come across female police and immigration officers wearing Muslim head-gear, or male officers in Sikh turbans. The French are also taken aback by the constant references to God in the discourse of US politicians. In turn, British and Americans are often unable to understand the positive, egalitarian intentions of the French secular approach. Foreign correspondents here found their home media editing out the fact that the school veil ban was supported by Muslims. It didn't fit the Anglo-Saxon preconception that it was an undemocratic act of discrimination (The degree of support from Muslims was open to dispute, with some polls showing about 60 percent approval and others only a minority).
Only two weeks ago Sarkozy and Barack Obama crossed swords over the existing headscarf ban after the US president took a swipe at it in his speech in Cairo. He said the United States prized freedom of religion and "we are not going to tell people what to wear." To many French ears, that sounded naive. In Normandy on June 6, Sarkozy told Obama that French principles of equality meant that people should not display religious affiliation in state institutions. "It is not a problem that young girls may choose to wear a veil or a headscarf as long as they have actually chosen to do so, as opposed to this being imposed upon them, be it by their families or by their environment."
That is of course the crux of the problem. Who decides whether they have made a free choice? Extending the ban from schools and some state agencies to an all-out prohibition on any face-covering raises big questions. Veiled women who have been questioned over the past few days by the media have generally said that the choice was their own.
Critics, including some government ministers, say a ban on the burqa and niqab would be unworkable and would only force greater isolation on the victims, as the wearers are seen. Gilbert Collard, a celebrity lawyer, made the point today in France Soir newspaper:
"These caged women show the power of the fundamentalists to indoctrinate. They testify also to an odious idea of woman as an object of submission to an all-powerful master who is the exclusive proprietor of her face. But... forbidding this provocation by shadows in the streets would only reinforce their provocation."
The call for a parliamentary inquiry is led by André Gerin, a Communist MP and Mayor of a suburb of Lyons, who calls the burqa and the niqab "a moving prison for women." He has been supported by two young Muslim-born women ministers, Fadel Amara and Rama Yade.
Amara, a rights campaigner who is Housing Minister, said she is alarmed by the number of women wearing veils. "We must do everything to stop burqas from spreading, in the name of democracy, of the republic, of respect for women." Yade, Minister for Human Rights in the Foreign Ministry, said today that she supported a prohibition in the name of women's equality and human dignity. The wearing of veils "is a phenomenon which is visibly spreading," she said.
Muslim leaders have mixed views. Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, supported an inquiry, saying that face-covering for women was a fundamentalist practice that is not prescribed by Islam. But the national Muslim Council, which is less tied to the establishment, accused lawmakers of wasting time on a fringe phenomenon. "To raise the subject like this...is a way of stigmatising Islam and the Muslims of France," said Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the Council.
I suspect that Sarkozy will not favour a new law. He was not enthusiastic about the school headscarf ban, which was introduced by his predecessor President Chirac. Sarkozy sees the clothing bans as a form of discrimination and he tries to promote policies that bring Muslims, many or most of whom were born in France, into the mainstream community. From that point of view, the President is on the same ground as the activists in the banlieue immigrant estates who see him as the devil.
I've made some sweeping statements and this is touchy territory. Feel free to fire away.
And as a footnote, it's worth noting that the government yesterday published its decree banning facial cover during demonstrations. Anyone who wears a mask or other cover will face a 1,500 euro fine on the first offence and double on the second. Police unions are worried that they will be unable to enforce this law which is intended to make life harder for the casseurs, the violent extreme-left protesters who try to turn demonstrations into riots. .
France has been amused over the past week by the video below which features the country's best-loved politician -- Jacques Chirac.
The last president, who is 77, was filmed applying his well-known charms to a local Socialist politician while Bernadette, his long-suffering wife, made a speech at a gathering in the rural Corrèze. Chirac always enjoyed a reputation as an energetic Don Juan and he seems to have lost none of his taste for flirtation. The funny moment is when Bernadette gives him the withering stare after he fails to stop chatting with his neighbour. The man in glasses laughing at the video on the TV set is Jean-Louis Borloo, one of President Sarkozy's most senior ministers.
Chirac's bumpy and undistinguished 12 years in office dragged to a close in 2007 but he has re-emerged in recent months as a lovable elder statesman. People remember the good moments, like his opposition to the Iraq war, and they overlook the corruption scandals and sleaze that emerged from his previous 18 years as Paris mayor. Chirac's old-style élégance is contrasted with the brash and vulgar side of his successor -- and bête noire -- Nicolas Sarkozy. A Paris Match poll last month ranked him as the country's most popular political figure. The video has done him no damage since everyone rather likes the roguish side of the old Gaullist. His trail of romantic liaisons is well known. Bernadette said a few years ago that she had put up with a lot. Before leaving office, Chirac confessed in an interview: "There have been women I have loved a lot, as discreetly as possible."
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![Bac_philo[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570316441970c-400wi)
I did not envy my son this morning when, along with 331,575 teenagers across France, he sat down at 8am for the four-hour ordeal of le bac philo.
The philosophy test, or rather torture, is still the "royal subject" of the baccalauréat, the national high school examination that opens the way to university and adulthood. Apart from students in trades and technical schools, all pupils are obliged to take the philosophy exam.
Literacy may be declining in France like everywhere else but it says something about the intellectual skills still required of the young that about half of all late teenagers in France earn a baccalauréat that includes philosophy.
The bac, with its centralised, simultaneous examinations is a ritual of a rare kind. For weeks the media have built up to the big moment of the bac philo -- the opening test -- with tips on subjects and handling stress and bac memoirs from celebrities. Today, television and radio are reporting from the school gates.
The philosophy questions have just been released. My son, who's just 18, was required to dissert on one of the following two questions: What is gained by exchange ? (Que gagne-t-on à échanger) and Does technological development transform mankind? (Le développement technique transforme-t-il les hommes ?). [More questions below]
You can't just wing it with a ramble around the subject. Like most French disciplines, structure and method are vital. The reasoning has to follow rules and you must cite the appropriate great thinkers as you set out your argument.
The baccalauréat has demanding equivalents in other countries. But the continuing rigour of the system helps explain why the average French person is more articulate, more able to express him or herself on abstract subjects, than, say, average Britons or Americans.
The baccalauréat, inaugurated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808, was designed to promote the post-revolutionary ideal of a nation of rational citizens. Luc Ferry, a philosopher who served as Education Minister from 2002-2004, explained it on the radio this morning as the kids were drafting their philo answers: "When the bac was created, the idea was that in order to become a citizen and be capable of voting, you had to be able to sort out ideas and argue them in public. That remains true today," he said (I wonder how many professional philosophers have served as Education Minister in the UK).
There is much that can be criticised in the baccalauréat and a system run by a Ministry of Education that commands an unbelievable 1.2 million staff. The baccalauréat is too elitist, some say. Fewer than half the children of working class parents earn the certificate that gives passage to university. Others say standards have been dumbed down too far now that 63 percent of all teenagers earn the bac, compared with just 20 percent in 1970.
It's also true that the French education system emphasises information and rules rather than imagination and that secondary students perform modestly in international comparisons, such as that of the annual OECD ranking. Another point, from which my two teenagers have suffered in childhoods in French schools; is a teaching culture which relies more on criticism than encouragement.
Xavier Darcos, the teacher who is current Education Minister (and is probably about to be replaced) has been warring with the unions over redeploying resources and cutting teaching staff. Something must be wrong, he says, if France spends more than the European average on education but scores mediocre results. The unions answer that by saying the OECD rankings -- which routinely put Finland top in Europe -- are biased towards nordic and and Anglo-Saxon methods and do not take account of French priorities.
President Sarkozy has run into resistance from the education establishment in his attempts to remedy some of the flaws. His latest idea, floated last week, is for schools to open outside classroom hours and at weekends to offer extra-curricular activities. Traditionally, French schools are teaching machines. Sports, hobbies and other youth activities are largely organised by other institutions.
But putting aside the problems, the baccalauréat remains a sterling asset for France. It's internationally admired and its international -- less Gallic -- version is taken in many other countries. Perhaps I am out of date and I certainly would not have fancied doing le bac philo myself. But it remains impressive that so many kids reach a level at which they can hold forth for four hours on existential matters such as the following from today's other general baccalauréat streams.
For science students: 1) Is it absurd to desire the impossible? 2) Are there questions which no science can answer?
For the literature stream: 1) Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian ? 2) Does language betray thought ?
My son's two questions came from the economics and social science stream. He choses the one on exchange and reassures me that he wrote a suitably leftwing answer which did not sing the praises of commercial exchange. He kept it broad and talked about moral matters (The French curriculum and teachers are slanted solidly to the left). As well as the essay, the students have the option of writing a commentary on a short unprepared text.
It does not pay to cross Nicolas Sarkozy if you are a prefect or other high functionary of the French state. The President has just removed the third in the past few months for incurring his displeasure.
The latest victim is Jacques Laisné, Prefect of the Var [left below], the département on the Mediterranean which centres on Toulon. His offence, colleagues tell the media, was his failure to sort out the septic tanks around the villa of Sarkozy's in-laws, the Bruni-Tedeschi family.
A relic of Napoleonic times, prefects are the high functionaries who serve as the state's provincial governors. They wear ceremonial uniforms (picture on right), sign decrees, run the police and report to the Interior Ministry.
Sarkozy intervened over the drains last August when holidaying at Cap Nègre, a sumptuous cliff-top estate at le Lavandou where Carla Bruni's family have long owned the most impressive house (see top picture). Since 2002, the neighbours have been resisting an order to do away with their old septic tanks and hook their homes up to the municipal drains. The measure cost too much, they said.
Last summer, Super Sarko took time off mediating over Russia's invasion of northern Georgia and summoned the Cap Nègre neighbours, the prefect and local mayor. He told them that the state would handle the plumbing and help pay for the new sewage pipes.
It didn't happen. The prefect, neighbours told Mediapart.fr news site, decided that the state did not have the money and handed the problem back to the town council. Sarkozy has just signed a decree removing Jacques Laisné from the prefect's post which he had held for barely two years, sending him back to the Court of Accounts, the civil service corps from which he originated.
Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister and loyal Sarkozy soldier, has denied that the transfer was punishment. Pure fantasy, she said. Few believe her because it fits a pattern. Last autumn, Sarkozy removed the high official in charge of police and security in Corsica after his men failed to stop demonstrators entering the villa garden of Christian Clavier, a popular comic actor. Clavier is a good friend of Sarkozy. Police have been guarding the villa around the clock since the incident, at a cost so far to the tax-payer of an estimated 400,000 euros, according to le Canard Enchaîné. Clavier only uses the villa for holidays but the gendarmes' van is always there.
The other prefect to annoy Sarkozy was Jean Charbonniaud, the state's man in the Normandy département of la Manche. He was dismissed last February after his police allowed demonstrating school teachers to get within earshot of Sarkozy when he visited the town of Saint-Lô. Local Socialist leaders said the prefect was the victim of the monarch's whim.
Since Saint-Lô, the prefects have been living in fear of presidential visits. They are drafting in extra police to keep crowds away from his person. In Caen on June 6, the only public that was allowed within reach of Sarkozy and President Obama were all invited by the local Union for a Popular Movement, Sarkozy's party.
[Picture above: Sarkozy and Bruni enjoying the clean waters of Cap Nègre]
A hundred years ago, Louis Blériot, Louis Bréguet and other pioneers decided that aviation was more than a branch of the rising automobile industry. To boost their fledgling pastime, they staged the first 'International Exposition of Aerial Locomotion' at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Their successors opened the 100th anniversary edition of the Paris Air Show today at Le Bourget, the historic airport in the northern outskirts, but there is not much celebrating. Today's heavy rain is in tune with the glum mood at le Bourget, which alternates years with Farnborough, England, as the world's main industry gathering. Gleaming military and civilian jets, helicopters and other flying machines are all on show as usual, but spirits have been dampened by three factors -- the global slump, unease over the crash of Air France Flight 447 and the swine 'flu epidemic
Since airlines are expected to suffer a 12 percent drop in revenue this year, many are cancelling orders already placed with Airbus, Boeing and the other makers. The possible global 'flu pandemic is also raising doubts about the prospects for short-term recovery.
Also worrying the industry is the unexplained catastrophe that hit the Air France A330 Airbus with 228 souls on board over the Atlantic on its flight from Rio to Paris on June 1. No airline disaster for decades has had such implications for an industry that thought that it had licked the technical side of Blériot's sport.
A century since Blériot coaxed his flimsy 'flying motor cycle' across the sea from Calais to Dover [picture above], man has mastered the mechanics. With modern construction and infallible computers, modern airliners are not supposed to vanish in the night. "It is safe to say that the aviation community is still in some shock," Tom Enders, the Airbus chief executive, said last week.
David Learmount, safety editor of Flight International, said in today's Financial Times: "An event like this is the kind the aviation world hoped it would not see again because it involves a world-class carrier flying the latest generation of airliner and it occurred en route, not during take-off of landing in difficult weather."
The speculation over Flight 447 rages on as new shreds of evidence emerge. The original theory seems to hold. The jet broke up at altitude after suffering a rapid but not instantaneous, emergency. Debris was scattered over a very wide radius. Brazilian autopsies on the 44 bodies recovered so far show that the passengers and crew were not prepared for trouble and died either in the shock of the break-up and depressurization or on hitting the water. None drowned.
Suspicion still points at the mix of factors that emerged immediately after the accident. Speed readings (from the pitot tubes) were faulty, there was a problem with the electronic flight system and the aircraft went out of control, possibly stalling or overspeeding.
A US airline pilot and accident expert who reads this blog has sent me a copy of an Airbus bulletin to airlines issued after the Qantas A330 episode last October. It describes a sequence of electronic failures very similar to what AF447 appears to have suffered. The Australian crew were able to pull their jet out of its dive. Stewarts Law, a London-based aviation law firm dealing with the Qantas case, told me that there are parallels with AF447.
A new element in AF 447 is speculation over the vertical stabiliser (tail) which was found by the Brazilians last week [picture above]. Some engineers and other specialists are wondering if the tail might have sheered off because of a structural flaw as the plane was struggling for control in heavy turbulence. American Airlines Flight 557, an Airbus A300, crashed in Queens, New York, in 2001 after its tail broke off and fell into Jamaica bay. Excessive control inputs by a pilot were blamed.
If they don't find the black box flight recorders, the BEA, the French accident investigation bureau, may never be able to do more than conclude with a supposition. Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the BEA -- which is based at le Bourget -- warned last week that this might be the case. Either way, confidence in the Airbus and all high-tech airliners will be shaken.
You could sense the public anxiety at my humble level of flying this weekend. It was open day at Enghien-Moisselles, our little aerodrome which is two minutes flight north of Le Bourget. The Cessnas, Robins and other small planes were out on display on the grass. Visitors kept asking about pitot tubes. I showed the pitot on my old Robin Aiglon and explained that the plane can take off and fly even with the tube blocked and no airspeed registering. That's the advantage of having no computer. We have a few electronics though. The air force has stationed two uniformed air controllers in our club house to make sure, via radar transponder codes, that none of us strays into Le Bourget's space.
The public displays at le Bourget start this weekend. There is a lot to see, including a flying Blériot plane and a breathtaking performance by la Patrouille de France, the air force display team [below]. The Patrouille, which now includes one female pilot, has been absent from le Bourget since the 1970s
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.
Free music fans and internet libertarians are cheering today after France's highest court shot down President Sarkozy's pioneering scheme for policing the the web.
The decision by the Constitutional Council has broken ground in declaring access to the internet to be a basic human right. This is a big blow to Sarkozy and Christine Albanel, his hapless Culture Minister, because their law was supposed to lead the world in combating entertainment piracy. Instead of doing that, their operation has backfired and ended up defending the free-for-all, help-yourself culture of the web.
You will recall the struggle that Sarkozy had to push his law through parliament this spring. It innovated by equipping France with the world's first internet "police" agency, called HADOPI. This would trace pirates who were identified by entertainment firms. It would cut off net access to anyone who continued to download copyright material after two warnings.
The law was supported by the industry and many artists. They saw it as a model for the USA and Europe in the fight to keep earning a living from their music and film. Net libertarians saw it as the creation of a sinister Big Brother. Many called it technically unworkable. Some artists saw it as hostile to the young consumers who are their main customers.
The Socialist opposition appealed to the council on the grounds that the constitution was breached by the creation of an extra-judicial agency with powers to punish internet offenders. The council, which includes two former Presidents and is usually seen as a bunch of elderly fuddy-duddies, gave the left more than it was hoping for.
Les sages -- the wise men -- as the council is known, took the teeth out of the law. They ruled that "free access to public communication services online" is a right laid down in the Declaration of Human Rights, which is in the preamble to the French constitution. It also said the law breached privacy by enabling the HADOPI agency to monitor citizens' internet activity. It agreed that the law breached the separation of powers because if gave an administrative authority power to impose justice. And to boot, it violated the presumption of innocence because alleged pirates would be assumed to be guilty and cut off without being able to defend themselves, the council said.
I felt sorry for Albanel [below], a loyal Sarkozy soldier, as she tried to make the best of the defeat on the radio this morning. The HADOPI agency would go ahead and send its warnings to abusers, she said (though it's not clear how it will track them). Then it would be up to prosecutors and the courts to take action, she said. But that is the situation that exists and does not work in France and most other countries. Courts don't have time to haul in the millions of ordinary users who filch copyright material online.
Sarkozy had promised Carla Bruni, his singer wife, and their showbiz friends that he would have the law in force this year. It is now effectively dead. I would not bet on Albanel staying in her job when Sarkozy reshuffles his government in the next few days.
The affair has left a bad taste by dividing the entertainment world. Young musicians opposed the law as a weapon designed to protect the big recording companies. Old-school leftists like Juliette Greco, the grande dame of Left Bank song in the 1950s, strongly supported the crackdown and reproached the Socialists for betraying artists with their opposition to the law. Patrick Bruel, a middle-aged popular singer who prides himself on being engagé (leftist) railed against the council decision this morning. Downloading a song free is like walking out of the bakers' with a baguette and refusing to pay for it, he said.
[Below: Christine Albanel, Culture Minister, in parliament]. Top picture from Rue89.fr site which has a good account of the "crucifiction" of the HADOPI law]
We try to avoid poking fun at Nicolas Sarkozy for his short stature, but sometimes the French President sets himself up for a little mockery. Here's a classic example, taken at Saturday's D-Day commemoration in Normandy.
Speaking from the same podium as Barack Obama, Sarkozy added about six inches to his five feet five by standing on a little stool. Added to his custom-crafted elevator shoes, this took him up to the same altitude as the six-feet-two US president.
Sarkozy is naturally sensitive about his lack of height and it may not be fair to focus on it. For centuries, sneering about small Frenchmen has been a standard in the anti-French armoury of the English and later the "Anglo-Saxon" world. Try Googling "little Frenchmen", and you get the point -- or look at the comments that land on this blog -- mainly from the United States -- when we get into French-bashing territory.
Napoleon Bonaparte measured five feet six inches in his stockings, which was not small for the late 18th century. But Boney was diminished by English propaganda, which depicted him as a power-mad midget. It's interesting to note that Bonaparte's nick-name, le petit caporal, the little corporal, was an affectionate term coined by the soldiers under his early command.
Jump ahead two centuries and the British are still at it. Here is Stephen Glover, a serious journalist, venting on Sarkozy in the mid-market Daily Mail two weeks ago: "This diminutive egomaniac is increasingly becoming an embarrassment to his countrymen, and a laughing stock to the rest of Europe..." If you dig back to 1805, I'm sure you will find similar words written about Bonaparte.
The Mail article, which depicted the French as collaborationist cowards, was a rant of a kind that would be deemed crude and racist if it had been written about just about any other nation. No French newspaper would indulge in verbal abuse about a foreign leader like that, but mocking the ancestral enemy is a time-honoured sport in Britain.
Sarkozy is something of an exception among recent French leaders. For 30 of the past 50 years, they have been quite tall. Charles de Gaulle stood six feet four inches tall and Jacques Chirac is six feet two.
Having said that, Sarkozy's petite taille is a talking point and subject of mockery in France too (see cartoon from le Canard Enchaîné below). Everyone from serious biographers like Catherine Nay to the man in the local bistrot will tell you that it's important to understanding his psychology. He has spent his life compensating, goes the cliché.
It's part of his view of himself as a scrappy outsider who had to fight harder than anyone to reach the top. During his 2007 election campaign he took pride in describing himself as "un petit Français de sang mêlé" -- a little Frenchman of mixed blood. Petit in this sense also means ordinary, but is still carries the image of height. Sarkozy likes to surround himself with small lieutenants, men such as Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, and Jean-Louis Borloo, who heads a super-ministry covering the environment and transport. His arch enemies, Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, Chirac's former Prime Minister, are of tall, aristocratic build. Sarkozy always chooses tall women. All three of his wives have been taller than him. The latest one, Carla Bruni, a former super-model, wears flat-soled ballerina shoes and stoops in order to minimise her superior five-inches. In the cartoon, she is saying: "You've grown again, pussycat." Sarkozy, in elevator shoes and standing on a classic French novel, says: "I make figures say what I want."
The physical mockery of first families is not all one-way. French comedians and commentators have been having fun with Michelle Obama, focusing on her considerable size. Nicolas Canteloup, the very popular satirist on Europe 1 radio, imagined her the other day as a rugby player knocking over Sarko.
Here they all are in Caen this week
Nicolas Sarkozy has good reason for congratulating himself today. Despite his unpopularity, his UMP party arrived far ahead of the opposition in yesterday's voting for the European parliament.
The President's side certainly won but another star emerged as the surprise moral victor of the voting: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 64, the impish German leftist and hero of the 1968 Paris student revolt. His green group, called Ecologie Europe, almost beat the opposition Socialist party.
It's true that only 40 percent of voters bothered to turn out yesterday and that the left was fragmented by a proliferation of little parties, but it was still the first time for decades that France's governing party came so far ahead in a Euro-election.
The Socialists, the main opposition, were routed, winning only 17 percent compared with Sarkozy's 28 percent. "We are not yet credible," said Martine Aubry, the recently-appointed party leader, who was struggling to hold back her tears. "The Socialists need a major renovation." François Bayrou, the centrist would-be president, was humiliated with a mere 8 percent for his MoDem party.
Cohn-Bendit is the man of the day because of the surprise 16 percent third place of his green group. "Danny the Red" gave up revolution long ago, but his cheeky, subversive style charmed voters into supporting his motley band of green personalities. These included Eva Joly, a Norwegian-born French anti-corruption judge and José Bové, the anti-capitalist campaigner who became a celebrity when he demolished a McDonald's outlet in 1999. The Ecologists won 16 percent, which took them within a hair's breadth of beating the venerable Socialists. In Paris they demolished the Socialists, taking 27 percent, only two points behind Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement.
[Picture: Danny the Red in 1968]
![Cohn_bendit[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570d62bf4970b-300wi)
The greens benefited from the Socialists' collapse and Bayrou's manic vendetta against the person of Sarkozy. Bayrou helped Cohn-Bendit at the last minute with a personal attack on television in which he accused him of paedophile behaviour. The charge arose from an old controversy about a 1975 book in which Cohn-Bendit appeared to excuse sexual relationships between adults and children. That might have sunk a politician in another country, but French voters told pollsters that Bayrou damaged himself by looking vindictive.
The greens benefited from an energetic campaign and also from l'air du temps -- the positive mood over saving the planet. The greens are in tune with the idealism that drives politics more in France than, say, the Anglo-Saxon world. And they got an extraordinary election-eve boost from a sumptuous film on the plight of the planet that was shown on state television and released in cinemas on Friday night.
Called Home, the film is a 12-million euro homage to the earth that was shot over two years by Yann Arthus-Bertrand [below], a photographer who has made his name with spectacular nature reportage taken from helicopters and other aircraft. He is an admired celebrity in France and the film, financed by the PPR luxury fashion and retail group, was given huge publicity.
Likened by the media to Al Gore's film on climate change, Home was watched by eight million on television and by many more in open-air projections in Paris, London, New York and other cities. An edited version is online free here. It's worth watching for its beauty, though it has been criticised an over-aesthetic exercise in consciousness-raising. The spirit of the film was certainly well suited to Paris, with its big lefty bourgeois population.
Green voters said that they had been swayed by the film and Cohn-Bendit welcomed that this morning. "There is an environmentalist sensibility in France. It's possible that this sensibility was activated or re-activated by a film like Home," he said.
Others are crying foul. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader whose National Front managed a lowly 6 percent, said: "I want to stress the extravagant, scandalous film Home, which was made to support the candidacy of Cohn-Bendit and José Bové."
European elections do not change much and the environmentalists usually do better in them than in national polls. But Cohn-Bendit's green shock has badly shaken the Socialists and possibly set the scene for big change on the French left ahead of the next presidential vote in 2012. François Bayrou, who styles himself Sarkozy's chief opponent in 2012, may never recover.
[Below: scene from Home]
After Barack Obama's two days in France and Germany, Europe is getting a clearer idea of the way the new US president operates. Lesson number one: he keeps his distance.
In Germany on Friday Chancellor Angela Merkel was put out by Obama's decision to steer clear of Berlin during his flying visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In France, Obama's way of imposing his own schedule has been more striking -- to the embarrassment of President Sarkozy.
As I write on Sunday morning, the US imperial cavalcade (30 vehicles), has just driven up to the Pompidou Centre. The Obama family are visiting the modern art museum before the President flies home and leaves Michelle and the children to lunch with Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy and their four offspring at the Elysée Palace (There's an echo of Sarkozy's 2007 barbecue with George W Bush at Kennebunkport, when Cecilia Sarkozy, the President's then wife, failed to turn up.)
In 39 hours in France, staying in Paris a one-minute walk from the presidential palace, Obama was unable to find a moment to accept Sarkozy's repeated invitations to drop by. They had a 20 minute working lunch with their advisers yesterday in Normandy but Obama has also had time to take his family to Notre Dame cathedral and to dinner at La Fontaine de Mars, a good brasserie near the Eiffel tower (230 euros for their dinner in a private upstairs room, with water, no wine).
Sarkozy could not hide his disappointment when they appeared yesterday in Caen, but he has clearly got the message. Theirs is a good working relationship but Obama is not out to play buddy-buddy with Sarko or any other European leader (Gordon Brown of Britain included).
Obama was tackled on the coolness in Caen. He insisted, of course, that he was excellent friends with "President Sarkozy" (who called him Barack). They also performed a high-five handshake for the cameras [top picture]. "I have a very tough schedule and I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg Gardens," he replied. "I think it's very important to understand that good friends don't worry about the symbols and the conventions and the protocols."
Note that his leisure wish-list did not include the socialising with Carla and Nicolas that the French President had longed for. The Obama froideur was the top story in Le Journal du Dimanche this morning, above reports on yesterday's moving ceremonies at Omaha beach (which Gordon Brown pathetically mis-called 'Obama Beach' in his speech).
The Sarkozy administration is suffering from the unpleasant feeling of having been taken for a ride, reported the JDD. "Obama did not snub the French president in particular, but he refuses to play the game of familiarity with his peers," it said.
There is also the question of opposing personalities. "The American president is a man of reflection who turned himself into a man of action while Nicolas Sarkozy is above all famous for his spontaneity," said Simon Serfaty of the Washington International Institute for Strategic Studies.
[picture: The Obamas visit Notre Dame cathedral]
Watching the ceremonies yesterday, you got the impression that Obama was the host and Sarkozy the guest. That was certainly true in the commemoration in the Colleville US cemetery, by Omaha beach, which is US territory in perpetuity. But it also seemed to be the case in the prefecture (government headquarters) in Caen, where Sarkozy deferred to Obama. The US President led the press conference which, incidentially, the Americans did not want but the French insisted on.
I don't want to play the indignant Briton, but there was an impression of excessive American power, as usual in these events. There was of course the huge deployment in Paris and Normandy of manpower and carbon-gushing hardware -- jumbo jets, helicopters and the motorcade of behemoths -- much of it built by bankrupt General Motors. There was also the familiar impression in the ceremonies and media cover that the D-Day landings were an American affair in which Britain played a small supporting role (Brown's Obama beach didn't help). The France 2 main evening news last night referred to "the US landing in Normandy" and spent an inordinate amount of time covering Tom Hanks and his role in D-Day.
The impression of a purely Franco-American event was nicely summed up by Didier Porte, a humourist on France-Inter, the main public radio network. "The British just can't stop interfering with their disinformation. This is especially the case when they spread the rumour that they somehow took part in the Normandy landings in 1944. That's nonsense!"
Nearly five days after the disappearance of Air France 447, it is becoming a little clearer how the Airbus A330, one of the world's most modern airliners, came to grief with the loss of 228 lives.
[Sunday Update: Since this Friday post, Air France has confirmed that there was a problem with the pitot tubes (see below) on this Airbus series. They are prone to icing. The airline is in the process of replacing them. This confirms the theory of icing, faulty readings and control loss below. Also, the Brazilians have now found debris and bodies.]
Despite all its sophisticated flight systems -- and some might say partly because of them -- it seems that the airliner was knocked out of the sky by a storm.
Cloud, wind and ice bring down small planes all the time. They are not supposed to get the better of multi-million pound flying machines stuffed with computers and piloted by the elite of aviation [picture above: A330 flight deck]. The disaster cannot be written off as a freak. Airlines, manufacturers and regulators will be forced to review how they handle extreme weather.
Data transmitted automatically by the Air France jet have outlined a four-minute chain of events that began when the Airbus flew into a line of cumulonimbus cells, the heart of a full-blown equatorial storm.
The accident investigators confirmed officially today that conflicting speed readings confused the electronic flight system, which went into emergency mode. There is suspicion that this was caused by ice in the "pitot" tubes, narrow intakes that measure the pressure of the oncoming wind. For four minutes, during which the pilots apparently flew the bucking aircraft by hand, one system after another failed. The cabin lost pressure and the last message reported it plunging towards the sea.
Much is unknown. Why did the crew fly into violent weather rather than steer around it ? (Perhaps their weather radar was out of action). Did the cascade of system failures cause the loss of control or was it the result of an aircraft in its death throes?
Some airline disasters have had simple mechanical causes -- like the metal fatigue that destroyed the early Comets in the 1950s or the wing fire that brought down the Concorde in 2000. Pilot error has been blamed in many cases, most recently for last January's commuter airline crash at Buffalo, New York. Most have resulted from a mix of human and mechanical malfunctions.
That could be the case this time. The investigators are said to believe that the crew, flying in violent turbulence and possibly with a failing aircraft, may have used too much or too little jet thrust. This could have caused an upset due to excessive speed, or a stall due to low speed. Airbus put out a notice to operators of its aircraft overnight, telling them to observe the right procedures in the event of faulty speed readings. Jets at high altitude have little margin for error. Pilots use the expression "coffin corner" to describe the altitude where it becomes impossible to keep an plane in the air because its stall speed rises to meet the maximum safe speed reaching the sound barrier.
The chief investigator has said that the truth may never be known. That will become a near certainty if the flight recorders remain at the bottom of the ocean and the experts are not optimistic about the chances of finding them. No-one so far has even recovered any floating debris, though Brazilian planes say they spotted some.
Failure to explain fully the crash will worry nervous flyers and frustrate the world's desire to find a tidy cause for the worst air disaster since 2001. Somthing simple, like an explosion or a collision or a single defective component would be easier to deal with.
The disaster will certainly speed the arrival of more modern systems for tracking and communicating with aircraft in flight over oceans. In an age of satellite navigation and mobile telephones that can tell people where you are, it seems odd that airliners are flying thousands of people across oceans 24 hours a day without being tracked by anyone.
[Below: French aircrew search for wreckage over the Atlantic on Wednesday]
Barack Obama is not doing anything to help Nicolas Sarkozy. Three days from the US leader's arrival for his D-Day weekend, he is keeping his distance from the French president who was so eager to welcome him.
The White House's coolness has added to embarrassment at the Elysée Palace over the way they have bungled what Sarkozy wanted to be a supreme Franco-American moment in Paris and especially Normandy. The final straw for Paris was the White House's undiplomatic public reproach this week to Sarkozy for failing to invite the British Queen to the 6th of June ceremony.
Obama is turning up in Paris on Friday evening, but spending the evening privately with Michelle and his entourage. He is not due to see Sarkozy and Carla Bruni at the Elysée. Their only tête-à-tête will be in the Normandy town of Caen on Saturday. The Americans have refused a French request for the two men to hold a joint press conference. The D-Day ceremony at the US cemetery at Colleville, by Omaha beach, has now been widened to include Britain's Gordon Brown and Prince Charles and Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister. Then Michelle Obama is staying on in Paris on a private visit for several days.
The Elysée is exasperated with the Americans, Europe 1 radio reported this morning. "Barack Obama has truly done nothing to give value to his relations with Nicolas Sarkozy," said their breakfast news.
The trouble began, not because Sarkozy did not invite the Queen, but because of the off-hand way that his team reacted when a couple of British newspapers kicked up the "royal snub" fuss last week. This D-Day was a Franco-American celebration, the government's spokesman said. The Queen could come another year.
The leftwing media and opposition have been laying into Sarkozy, saying he had behaved like an oaf [goujat -- see comments below], as the Canard Enchaîné did today, in failing to invite the British. François Bayrou, Sarkozy's chief opponent from the centre, said he had been "crude and ungrateful" and "damaged the image of France".
Le Canard summed it up: "Sarkozy has managed a double hit: insulting Queen Elizabeth and exasperating Obama."
We know about Michelle Obama's French plans because her husband announced them in his first interview for French TV last night. Talking to Canal+, he rather damned Sarkozy with faint praise."Your President Sarkozy I think has been very courageous in some of the decisions he has made".The two examples he cited were Sarkozy's support for the US in Afghanistan and over Iran.
Asked what he loved about France, Obama replied: "Let's see. We have the food. We have Paris. We got the south of France -- Provence. The wine." Obama said that he had travelled in the south when he was at college. He also admitted forgetting all his high school French. "Michelle I think speaks a little."
Here is a list of reasons why Air France Flight 447 may have fallen into the Atlantic, but first a little explanation:
Modern airliners do not just vanish in mid-flight. That was certainly the first reaction to the news of the disappearance of the Airbus en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris yesterday. Planes missing in storms sounded like something from the old days of oceanic flight, not the world of satellite links and automated flight systems.
But the Airbus A330-200, with 228 aboard seems to have fallen victim to the same unforgiving elements that have dogged mariners and aviators throughout the ages. It's testimony to the achievement of modern aviation that the "mystery of Flight 447", as it is being called, is such an exception. The last unexplained disappearance of a big jet was in July 1996 when a TWA Boeing 747 blew up off climing away from Long Island, on a flight to Paris. The crash was blamed on an explosion in a fuel tank triggered by an electrical arc, but there is still suspicion that it could have been hit by a missile. In October 1999 a Boeing 767 of EgyptAir crashed off the northeast US coast killing 217. The flight recorder indicated that the co-pilot sent the plane into the water deliberately.
Suspicions of foul play and conspiracy theories are circulating around Flight 447 today as the search continues for wreckage between Africa and Brazil. But the reality is probably more mundane. The air is a rough place and when things go wrong there they do so very quickly.
Most plane crashes are not the result of a single event, but a chain of events, usually involving technical and human factors. Crew are taught to break the chain before it's too late. All we know is that the Air France Airbus stopped flying very suddenly when its electrical power, cabin pressure and other systems suddenly failed a few hundred miles out of Brazil. An automated data link reported the shutdown to the Air France control room at Paris airport.
No distress call was heard from the crew and the three locator beacons emitted no signal. They are independent of the other aircraft systems and are triggered by shock or extreme manoeuvres. The lack of signal suggests that something very brutal happened.
Here are the possible causes, with the most likely last:
-- A missile. Highly unlikely given the altitude.
-- Hijacking. All but ruled out because there were no suspicious passengers and the crew would have communicated.
-- A collision. Unlikely, given the separation of airliners on their oceanic airways. No other plane is missing. However a Brazilian airliner crashed in 2006 after colliding with a US business jet over the Amazon in cruising flight. A mixture of pilot and air traffic control error was blamed. Aircraft in mid-ocean are not tracked on radar.
-- A bomb. This was initially excluded but it remains a distinct possibility. Security at Rio is said by pilots to be lax. A French airliner was brought down by a bomb over Africa in 1989. Libyan agents were blamed. A blast would explain the sudden failure of all systems (see next item).
-- Accidental explosion. Unlikely but it remains a plausible possible cause. Big planes have in the past been brought down by dangerous cargo or sparks igniting fuel fumes but they are well protected now.
-- Fire. Unlikely by itself. An engine fire would be controllable and give the crew time to communicate, as would an electrical fire.
-- Lightning. Unlikely alone because airliners are often hit by bolts, which are discharged along the fuselage and off the wings. Elaborate precautions shield the flight systems. Questions are being asked, however, about the way that the composite, non-metal parts, of modern airliners conduct electricity.
-- Ice. Quite possibly a factor in combination with the storm system. Freezing rain or intense cold could block the sensors that give the plane its performance data. This could leave it "blind" and prone to upset. -- Extreme turbulence. Likely to have been a factor. Air France said the plane was flying in a zone of tropical storms. These are normal in the equatorial region and airliners use weather radar pick their way around the violent towering cumulonimbus (storm) clouds which lie in their their paths.
No crew would knowingly fly into one of these cells, which can carry the energy of nuclear explosions and are capable of throwing an airliner around like a twig in the wind.
The likely explanation is a chain of failures. Electronic problems, perhaps caused by a lightning discharge, could have interfered with the computers that control the aircraft, navigation equipment, or simply the weather radar. The pilots could also have been distracted by some other problem that let the plane fly into the heart of one of the cumulonimbus. That could have upset the plane, leading to a quick break-up.
The "black box" flight recorders can tell the story, but they may never be found at the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps data from US military survillance satellites can shed light. They may have picked up a radio transmission.
Inevitably, questions are being raised about the safety of the computers that that control modern airliners. Some pilots have doubts about the Airbus family because its "fly-by-wire" system is a little more automated than that of the rival Boeing company. Most experts discount the doubts.
Computers fly the plane unless specifically over-ridden. Pilots input their controls with little electronic sidesticks but the computers will not carry out their commands if they appear abnormal. This can be over-ridden in emergency but all the control surfaces remain electronically controlled.
The last suspicious incident involved an Australian Qantas A330 -- the same as the Air France plane. On a flight between Singapore and Perth in October last year, the system suddenly commanded a dive while the pilots had set the automatic pilot for level flight. A dozen people were seriously injured in the abrupt 600-foot descent, which has still not been explained. One theory, backed by some scientists, is that strong electromagnetic radiation -- such as an intense radio waves -- could have interefered with the flight system, causing erratic behaviour. Read this, from the New Scientist, if you want a fright.
Accident causes are usually not what they seem to be at first. This is just speculation and media do far too much of that after crashes. But pilots guess about crashes as much as everyone else and they do it from an informed point of view. I have summarized what they are saying (for new arrivals here, I have been a small-plane pilot for 25 years).
Back on an historical note, the ocean between Brazil and Africa s a graveyard of French aircraft. Several pioneers disappeared in the same area as the Airbus in the early decades of air transport. The most famous was Jean Mermoz, a colleague of Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who disappeared mid-ocean in December 1936 flying an Air France Latécoere 300 amphibious plane.
Unlike Air France 447, however, Mermoz had time to report by radio that he was shutting down a failed engine before his plane vanished.
Paris is saying adieu to one of those wonderful French inventions that prove to be just a little too avant garde. The world's fastest moving walkway is being taken out of service after seven trouble-plagued years in which it knocked over thousands of the travellers whom it was supposed to be whisking to their trains.
The 200-yard underground travelator at the Montparnasse rail terminus seemed like a brilliant idea when it opened in 2002. Its inventors had calculated the hours that the world wasted in stations and airports on walkways that crawled along at a boring 1.5 miles-per hour. The new one would zip commuters on their way at a giddy six MPH, saving 15 minutes a week or 10 hours a year for people who use the underground tunnel between distant Métro platforms ever day.
After blazing the trail at Montparnasse, the RATP transport authority and Cnim, the makers, would equip the world with new express foot transit, they hoped. From the start, however, passengers could not handle the acceleration, which came in three cunningly-engineered phases. Despite moving handrails, many keeled over in the slow-down to the exit vitesse of standard travelators.
And the machinery that meshed the different speed sections proved too complicated, putting the 4.5 million euro trottoir à grande vitesse out of action for much of the time. The speed was slowed to just over five mph. Staff were deployed to send off and greet travellers. Screens advised the frail to stay away and the rest to hold on tight with feet flat on the floor. The alternative in the picture at the top says it all. You are asked to choose between the very fast walkway or the very comfortable one. And the fast one is not working.
Yet the casualties continued. The RATP blamed the wrong kind of customer. "The fast travelator worked perfectly -- for people between 15 and 60 who were in good health without baggage and flat shoes," said an official. The manufacturers also blamed unruly travellers. "If the fast walkway did not work it is because people are not disciplined in Europe," they said. "In Japan it would have worked."
The RATP remains proud of its pioneering people-mover. "To this day it is the only one in the world which goes at this speed," Christian Galivel, RATP's maintenance director told us. "It has carried 10 - 12 million people. But it turned out to be fragile and complex to use."
The underground rail union said that it was not sorry to see the end of the flying carpet of Montparnasse. "It was broken down all the time. It was 4.5 million euros for thin air, a financial fiasco -- before counting what the new one will cost," said Cédric Menival of the SUD union.
The travails of the magic walkway offered fun for people on the internet. Over 800 people belong to one Facebook group called "Why does the Monparnasse walkway never work?"
The walkway will merit a small mention in the annals of French technological innovations that stumbled when they met the real world or never caught on outside France. Without being unkind, I would include in the first category the wonderful Citroen DS, the avant-garde but mechanically unsound saloon car of the 1960s [February post].
A modern example is the Rafale, the latest jet fighter from the Dassault company. No foreign customer has been found yet for a beautiful aircraft that has been flying with the French navy and air force since 2000. Potential customers deem the ultra-agile plane, which cost 27 billion euros to develop, to be too sophisticated and expensive for real-life service.
Here's the walkway in action:
The only thing that the ancient Gauls feared was that sky might fall on their heads, at least according to the Astérix comics. Their descendants have lately added a lot of other items to the list of terrors. The sky remains the source of one of them -- radiation from mobile phone masts.
You can understand the background, what with pesticides, asbestos and other modern menaces. But sometimes it seems that irrational fears are getting the better of common sense. France is one of four European states that remains shut to GMO crops despite the finding of the state food safety agency that they are harmless to humans. Fighting GMOs is a popular cause and José Bové, the anti-capitalist farmer is a hero for tearing up fields where they have been tested. He's now running for the European Parliament.
The latest case involves mobile phones. The government has just decided to limit the radiation risk to children. Cell phones are to be banned from primary schools and operators are being told to offer handsets that allow only text messages. Companies will also be required to supply telephones that only work with head-sets in order to limit the danger to the brain from electromagnetic waves, Rosalyne Bachelot, the Health Minister said.
This is no doubt reasonable, given the chances of long-term damage for kids who grow up with mobiles glued to their heads. Campaign groups wanted more severe measures, including a ban on mobile use by children under 14.
Less plausible is the other side of the mobile scare -- telephone masts and wi-fi networks. The Government agreed after a month-long consultation with campaigners and operators to consider the dangers of radiation from phone towers and it is likely that they will eventually bow to demands to restrict their power and locations.
The state and telephone operators are under assault by hundreds of local and national groups which are demanding the removal of phone masts near schools, hospitals and homes. Radiation is commonly blamed for insomnia, headaches, fatigue, cancer, dry cows and so on. Libraries and other public spaces in some cities have switched off wi-fi internet cover after reports that the radio waves are harmful.
Similar campaigns are under way in other countries. What is unusual is that French courts have sided with the opponents despite the absence of any evidence that electromagnetic radiation from the relay transmitters harm anyone.
The operators are alarmed by a decision from the appeal court in Versailles in February. This ordered Bouygues, one of the main operators, to dismantle a mast at Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, near Lyons, because families there feared for their health. The judges agreed that there was no evidence of a threat, but they said there was no guarantee that a risk did not exist. The "feeling of anxiety" of the inhabitants was therefore justified.
The revolt against the phone towers continues to build, with sympathetic cover in the media. Campaign groups style themselves as resistants against the ruling power. The main one is cleverly called Robin-des-Toits, or Robin of the Roofs, which is a pun on Robin des Bois, or Robin Hood. If you look at the site you'll see a lot of what they claim to be evidence of the evils of phone waves, BlueTooth and so on.
The judges' reasoning is known as the "principle of precaution", a doctrine that was used by the Socialist government in the 1990s when it refused to import British beef after it had been declared safe by the European Union. The principle, which is also behind the rejection of GMOs, emerged after Government was shown to have knowingly distributed HIV-contaminated blood in the 1980s.
That scandal gave birth to the idea of maximum caution whenever human health is at stake, but it obviously has limits. If the precaution principle was logically applied, cars would be banned, along with cigarettes, alcohol, red meat, tanning beds and so on. And what about all those nuclear power stations that provide 80 percent of France's electricity ? Other countries halted their nuclear industry and atomic power stirs fear in the United States, but very few people worry about France's 59 reactors and the waste they produce.
Jean de Kervasdoué, a former national director of French hospitals, pointed out the other day that zero risk is nonsense and obstructs progress. "It's dangerous... like the mediaeval inquisitors who demanded that heretics prove their innocence," he said in le Journal du Dimanche. "You cannot always prove your innocence."
 Trust the British to spoil Nicolas Sarkozy's plan for a dream day with Barack Obama. The French president managed after much arm-twisting last month to persuade the US leader to drop in on the Normandy beaches on June 6 to commemorate the D-Day landings of 1944 and celebrate Franco-American ties.
Sarkozy's big moment began to sour when the British, then the Canadians, Poles and other wartime allies wondered why they had not been asked to join the two presidents at the US cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, by Omaha beach. Sarkozy was annoyed at the idea of sharing his golden photo-opportunity but invitations went out. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, agreed to attend along with other allied officials.
But the Elysée Palace failed to factor in British emotion over the war, ancient suspicion of France and the skill of the British media at whipping the two together. So today the Daily Mail, a mass-market paper, reported "fury" in Buckingham palace over Sarkozy's failure to invite the Queen.
In reality, we are told that there is no anger and no perceived snub. The Royal family had not expected to be invited and had not put out feelers, a senior British official told me. The Queen attended ceremonies in Normandy for the 50th and 60th anniversaries, but the 65th was not planned as an international event.
[Thursday update: for French tv viewers. Canal+ have asked me to talk about this on Le Grand Journal this evening, after 7pm]
The French are annoyed by the snub story. Luc Chatel, the Minister who acts as government spokesman, said that Her Majesty was absolutely welcome if she wanted to come. It was not up to Paris to designate who represented Britain. "Our interlocutors are members of the British Government who wanted to associate themselves with a ceremony that was Franco-American at the outset," said Chatel. This year's event is about the US-French relationship and there will be other D-Days, he added.
You can hear the irritation there. It's also evident in the confusion over what Gordon Brown and the other allied officials will do on June 6. Sarkozy is still hoping to be alone at least part of the time as the guest of Obama at the Colleville cemetery (which is US territory in perpetuity). The French plan a Sarkozy-Obama tête-à-tête and and there will be a three-way meeting with Brown. The Elysée Palace and Downing Street have still not settled on a programme.
In other words, this looks like a mess, another case of Sarkozy over-reaching and putting up backs with his self-promotion.
Past US Presidents have attended purely bilateral ceremonies with French leaders at Omaha beach, but never on June 6 itself. Sarkozy should have known that D-Day, in which 73,000 British forces came ashore, is as sacred to the British as the Americans. Some might have told him that he would court trouble by trying to mark the 65th anniversary without them. That is especially the case as the dwindling British veterans' organisations say that this will be their last Normandy commemoration.
The criticism is not just British. It came with force today from Jean-Michel Aphatie, a commentator who is feared in the political world. Sarkozy's attempt to stage an epic lone appearance with Obama was a huge mistake, Aphatie wrote on the internet. "It is impossible to honour the memory of the dead without associating the leaders of the countries which took part in the sacrifice...French diplomacy has landed itself in a glorious mess."
"This episode illustrates an obsession of French leaders: forever measuring themselves against American power. We live in the illusion of a tête-à-tête with America..."
[Picture: Colleville cemetery, Normandy, where over 9,000 US servicement are buried]
Come to Abu Dhabi, visit the Louvre and take a degree at the Sorbonne. That seemingly odd idea comes closer to reality tomorrow when President Sarkozy starts the construction of a Gulf branch of the Paris art museum.
The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo are not leaving town, but the world's biggest art museum and other leading state galleries are to lend hundreds of works to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The venture has already earned 400 million euros just for use of the brand name.
The franchising of the Louvre is part of a push to extend French influence and power in the Gulf region. Since 2006, the Sorbonne, the ancient university in the Paris Latin quarter, has been offering law and human sciences degrees at its own campus in Abu Dhabi.
The "Louvre of the Sands" as it has been dubbed, will be housed in a sumptuous, marble-domed palace, designed by Jean Nouvel, on Saadiyat Island [picture above]. Nearby, work is already under way on a 200 million dollar branch of the Guggenheim. New York's modern art museum, whose affliliate is to open in 2011, a year ahead of the local Louvre, is said to have charged only 60 million dollars for use of its name.
The French cultural drive, started under President Chirac, is being matched by a new strategic effort in the Gulf. Tomorrow, Sarkozy is also opening a naval and air force base in Abu Dhabi, which is France's first new military outpost overseas in half a century. The step follows the new defence doctrine that focuses on the "Mediterranean, Arab-Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean strategic axis." Paris wants to signal to Iran its defence alliance with the emirates. "If Iran were to attack, we would effectively be attacked also," said an Elysée Palace official.
On his second Abu Dhabi trip in just over a year, Sarkozy is desperately hoping to convince Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan to buy the Rafale jet fighter. The very expensive new-generation aircraft, built by Dassault and in service with the French military, has so far failed to win a single export order.
France's entry into the culture export business ran into resistance when it was announced two years ago. Luminaries of the state art world staged a campaign called "Museums are not for sale" and charged Henri Loyrette, the Louvre director, with betraying the national heritage.
But the complaints have subsided as the state museums realised the windfall that is coming their way from the 30-year deal which Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, estimates will eventually earn over a billion euros.
A new agency has been set up to coordinate loans for the first 10 years from many state museums, including the Versailles palace, the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou Modern Art centre and the new Quai Branly museum of primitive art. As well as going to the Louvre, the income will be spread around the state museums.
The Abu Dhabi affiliate is already starting its own collection. One of the first items is thought to be Piet Mondrian's 1922 "Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir", which sold for 21.7 million euros at sale of the collection of the late Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris in February. The Gulf museum is also said to have bought European mediaeval figures and tapestries.
Loyrette is being congratulated for his pioneering work raising commercial funding for the Louvre, which with over eight million annual visitors is by far the worlds most frequented museum. Though heavily subsidised, the Louvre was until recently short of cash for new works. Loyrette is also opening a Louvre branch in the northern French city of Lens and a Louvre section has been on show in an Atlanta museum.
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the last Culture Minister, said the break with the old, conservative habits of the Louvre was an unmitigated success. "No principle in our museum policy has been abandoned," he wrote on his blog. "The inalienable caracter of our national collections has even been reconfirmed. We have given a new impetus to our ability to make France shine in the world," he said. Actually, he was even more gushing in French. There's no real English translation for rayonnement... shining out to the world, as France likes to think it does.
To close on Abu Dhabi, here's a nice bit of French rayonnement: The Helicopter by Hermès. The Paris leathergoods house teamed up with Eurocopter, the French-based European helicopter makers, to produce this luxurious flying machine. The first one has just been delivered to Falcon Aviation Services of Abu Dhabi. Perfect for taking you out to the Louvre of the Sands. And at only six million euros, it's less than a third of the price of the Mondrian and a fraction of one Rafale.
AUSTRALIAN NOTE:
President Sarkozy, who travels more than any of his predecessors, is to make history in early August by dropping in on Australia, a nation never before visited by French leader. Sarko and Carla Bruni can expect a boisterous welcome on their 36-hour trip to Sydney after a Pacific summit in New Caledonia. "Bonjour mate, allez down under", said the not quite French headline in the Melbourne Age.
Australia enjoys a fine reputation in France as a distant home to exotic animals and people, rugby players and Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Mel Gibson. However France's image is not so good in Australia thanks to disputes over farm exports, the Iraq war and, most of all the nuclear tests that President Chirac carried out in the mid-1990s in the French Pacific. Before that, in 1985, President Mitterrand poisoned relations with the antipodes when French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. 
Australian anger has cooled in recent years. Australians have even come to France to teach the locals how to make "modern" wine and how to play rugby. At the weekend, one Australian newspaper chain described the Sarkozys as "the world's undisputed glamour political couple" -- a rank that neglects the Obamas and which I have never seen any French media bestow on them. My Adelaide sources tell me that Bruni's latest album of songs, a flop in France, has even been given a serious airing on a local radio station.
[Note for French readers, Oz is Australia]
Spot the common factor among the following:
-- A train crash that paralyzed rail service between Paris and Bordeaux all day on Wednesday.
-- Plans this week to introduce guilty pleas in French criminal courts
-- The anguish of thousands of university students who are not prepared for end-of-year examinations next month.
The answer is not Nicolas Sarkozy. The common thread is the free market, or more precisely France's reflexive suspicion and fear of "Anglo-Saxon liberalism". Sarkozy is behind two of the three items. The case of the universities is the most immediately damaging, but first, in order:
The unions and left are blaming the train crash in the western Charente département on the opening of rail freight to commercial operators. No-one was injured but the accident was spectacular. A load of tractor diggers on a German-operated train ripped the side off a passing state railways locomotive.
According to the unions and leftwing parties, the accident was the consequence of the deregulation of rail freight that the European Union supposedly forced on France. Britain's disastrous privatised system is always held up as the example of how not to run a railroad.
In reality, the crash had nothing to do with the new rules -- introduced in 2006 before Sarkozy was elected. "Privatisation" is limited to allowing some competition for freight services. France reluctantly agreed to this to conform to EU single market rules. Dominique Bussereau, the transport minister, pointed out that the badly-loaded goods wagon was being hauled by German state railways and that foreign trains have been using French rails for over a century.
On the law courts, the traditionalists and the left are up in arms over a supposed attempt by President Sarkozy to sell out France's Republican criminal court system and replace it with Anglo-Saxon rough justice.
We've visited Sarkozy's court reforms before. What's new are the proposals this week for revamping the assizes, the jury courts which try the most serious crimes. The judicial unions are upset over two items. One is the introduction of guilty pleas, in the style of English law.
The idea is to free-up the hugely overloaded courts. In France, assize cases are given a full court trial with all the witnesses and evidence even when the defendant admits guilt. The reform, say the critics, will create cut-price "American-style" justice with plea-bargaining and pressure on those who cannot afford lawyers to plead guilty. Sarkozy has already introduced the system in lower courts.
Judges and prosecutors (who are also judges) are also resisting Sarkozy's plans to reform the court structure. He wants judges to become referees, in the English-law style, rather than super-prosecutors, as they are under France's Napoleonic law system. Prosecutors would then plead their cases as adversaries of the defence lawyers rather than high accusers. This, according to the unions and traditionalists, boils down to "privatising" criminal justice.
On the Universities, the academic year has been disrupted and, in some establishments, ruined, by a campaign of strikes and "blocages" by staff and students in protest against Sarkozy's reforms. The protesters at the Sorbonne in Paris and most of the remaining hotbeds of strife caved in this week and went back to work, but months of disruption by a militant minority has wasted a year for many students around France -- and the parents and tax-payers who finance them.
The protesters accuse Sarkozy of "privatising" the state university system. This, they say, is his secret agenda though all he has done is grant limited autonomy to university directors and encouraged competition among establishments. The protesters are also resisting changes to teaching duties by research staff but it is not clear what their objection is.
French universities have long been neglected. They are starved of resources compared with the well-endowed grandes écoles which educate the higher achievers. The waste is colossal. A third of the 741,000 undergraduates leave without a degree. Sarkozy's reform, which has already been watered down, is supported by most university chiefs as a move to help France catch up with the rest of the world. It is absurd to claim that the system is being privatised.
The conclusion from all this is that Sarkozy is still pushing on with reforms that he promised in 2007 despite his unpopularity and resistance from the left and traditionalists. He has been giving ground on some fronts, like health, where he hit resistance against plans to put managers rather than doctors in charge of hospitals. But his persistence is remarkable at a time when the old dirigiste République has been given new legitimacy by the financial crisis.
Sarkozy is no free marketeer in the Anglo-American sense. He is the first to use his formidable presidential power to shore up the old interventionist system and he has dropped the free market rhetoric that took him to office in 2007. But he is pragmatic and is largely sticking to his project for fixing what does not work in France.
Might there be a little dog envy between Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama ? After the fuss over Bo, the new White House pet, the French president has just posted a video presenting Clara and Dumbledore, the Sarkozy dogs, at the top of a revamped Facebook entry.
The video, from the Palace session in my last post, appears on a new home page with Monsieur le Président de la République looking cool in the tie-less photo here. The idea was "to present more the man than the head of state," said the Elysée Palace.
Sarkozy says he jogs regularly and tells fans that his current favourite book is Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and that he's enjoying Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant, and Lièvre de Patagonie by Claude Lanzmann. Last Saturday he went to the theatre to see Très Chère Mathilde by Israël Horovitz and his recent favourite film was Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Despite the cooler first page, Sarkozy's site is still loaded with official communiqués and photos. [Below: Clara the Sarkozy-Bruni labrador]
He has 96,153 supporters. That's fewer than the 127,795 of Silvio Berlusconi, but much more than the 8,859 who have signed up to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Britain's Gordon Brown does not apparently have a Facebook entry, though there are many mock ones in his name, with titles such as "Gordon Brown Out" and "Sack Gordon Brown".
The revamp is part of a counteroffensive against the Sarko-bashing that constitutes one of the top themes in the French blogosphere. There is a multitude of hostile or jocular Sarko entries on Facebook. One, called I bet I can find one million people who hate Nicolas Sarkozy has more than 200,000 members. The Elysée is attempting to fight back with what it calls a new web 2.0 strategy. This consists of video postings and interactive chats in various forums. Sarkozy is aware that he has been losing out on the internet and has a young team on the job. The trouble is that he is still not very modern. Unlike Obama, he has no computer in his office.
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I'll get away from the hyper-president and his family next time. To change the subject, I met Britain's first official spaceman yesterday.
This video is causing a stir in France because it shows a side of Nicolas Sarkozy that people don't usually see: the doting husband at home. We learn that Carla Bruni's term of endearment for him is "mon chou chou". An English equivalent of this quite proletarian phrase might be my sweetie, sweetie-pie, sweetheart, luv, darling and so on.
The video was taken during a session between Bruni and a group of readers invited by Femme Actuelle magazine. The President drops in on the women in their private quarters in the Elysée Palace. He and Carla make a great show of affection. Sarko says that he has just received the Iraqi prime minister and taken a shower after working out. They point out that they only live in those apartments at weekends. Their dogs are called Clara and Dumbledore, by the way.
On a related subject, Sarkozy could soon be joining British parliamentarians in the field of embarrassing expense claims. A magazine called Challenges reports today that the state auditors have caught him out charging an undisclosed amount of private items to his official expense account. No details have emerged yet but watch this space.
Mocking President Sarkozy can land you in trouble. The French law is being deployed with vigour against citizens who take the President's name in vain.
The latest case is a 47-year-old philosophy teacher from Marseilles university who was tried in the city's police court today for shouting in a supposedly jocular way "Sarkozy, je te vois" ('Sarkozy, I can see you' -- using the familiar singular).
The prosecutor called for conviction and a 100 euro fine against Patrick X, the lecturer, for the quaintly defined offence of "disturbance of the peace with insults, during the daytime". The lecturer, who is witholding his surname from the media, has become a bit of a celebrity over the past couple of days. Recounting his misadventure on the radio, he said that he was walking through Saint Charles station, the Marseilles rail terminus, in the evening rush-hour and came across police officers who were aggressively checking the identity of two youths. To "lighten the atmosphere", he called out "Sarkozy I can see you" and the surrounding crowd burst into laughter. The police took offence and hustled him off to the station for booking.
It was an easy hit since the name Sarkozy is synonymous with law-and-order and our professor, though wearing a suit and tie at the time, is obviously one of those leftwingers who worry about "police repression". "It was an attempt to defuse the atmosphere, a teacher's technique to relax the mood," Patrick explained on France-Inter radio today. "People laughed a lot. The police must answer the question: 'does laughter disturb the peace ? Is laughter subversive ?'"
The prosecutor said Patrick's conduct was no laughing matter. The incident had lasted for five minutes, during which, the police calculated, he could have said "Sarkozy, I can see you" up to 62 times.
The lecturer's lawyer demanded a re-enactment of the alleged offence with a technical expert to measure how much peace would have been disturbed in the noisy rail station. The judges refused and said they will deliver a verdict in July -- which is about average speed for French lower-court cases.
People are only half-laughing at the "case of the rowdy professor" because it reflects increasingly heavy-handed behaviour by the French police in all manner of affairs. Accounts of pointless and abusive arrests are surfacing in the media almost daily.. Sarkozy is accused by civil rights groups and the left of creating a climate of repression with his anti-crime crusade. Jean-Pierre Dubois, head of the Human Rights League, said today's case "reveals once again the slide into police and judicial excess." The League is campaigning against a surge around the country in prosecutions for the offence of insulting a police officer.
The other famous case involving the president's person was the conviction by an appeals court in March of a demonstrator who carried a small placard that was deemed to insult the head of state. This simply read "Casse-toi pauvre con" ('get lost, jerk' or equivalent), the insult that Sarko himself made famous when he was caught on video shouting it at an unfriendly bystander early last year. Hervé Eon, an environment campaigner, was prosecuted under the rarely used presidential insult law after he had held his placard in sight of the presidential limousine in the town of Laval. On appeal, he was fined a mere 30 euros but he now has a criminal record.
Sarkozy is very sensitive over his dignity and he has already used the law more than any of his recent predecessors to pursue those who impugn his honour. He is notoriously harsh-tongued towards his subordinates, but he has a thin skin when he is mocked. This partly explained his initial refusal to attend the national football cup at the stade de France the Saturday before last. "J'en ai marre de me faire siffler par des cons," [I'm sick of being booed by a__holes] Sarko told aides, according to le Canard Enchaîné weekly. Football crowds have recently whistled and jeered his appearance in the stadium.
When Sarkozy did turn up for the final between two Breton teams [top picture], the Stade de France had orders not to mention the presidential presence or show his face on any big screen. When it was time to present the cup, the announcer avoided inciting jeers by announcing simply that the "high authority of state" would hand over the trophy. It was over before anyone had time to boo, which must have been a relief to the police. It would have taken hundreds to charge everyone with insulting the head of state.
[Picture: the law checking for insults in Marseilles station]
This is a post about posts -- 335,000 of them to be precise. That's the total of these annoying little brown pikes that now disfigure nearly every street in the French capital.
Paris has a lot of pretty street furniture, like the Métro entrances, the Morris advertising columns [picture below] and the old water fountains that still grace some avenues. These posts are not among them. The city always had a few potelets, as they are known. Napoleon Bonaparte decreed a standard design in 1807, with a bobble on top for gendarmes to chain law-breakers (I do the same with my dog when I go into the baker's shop). But they began sprouting everywhere in the 1990s and Bertrand Delanoe, the present mayor, has gone, well, postal, since he took office in 2001.
To enforce his campaign to keep cars off the pavements (sidewalks), he has sown the city with 185,000 new potelets and replaced 85,000 defective ones. Le Parisien reports today that the forest of new posts has cost the city hall 15 million euros (which of course means the tax-payer) since 2001. The city has also invested in 16 machines designed to straighten the three dozen posts that are bent crooked daily.
I'm all for curbing the traffic and for the mayor's removal of thousands of street-parking spaces, but the posts are an eyesore. They seem superfluous and their density suggests that they are more about hemming in pedestrians and creating order -- like a French garden. People with children's push-chairs curse them. Many are defaced with advertising stickers and people use them to chain their motor scooters, adding to one of the current Paris blights: the parking -- and riding -- of motorcycles on the pavements.
The posts drew fierce criticism as an affront to civilised living in an internet debate started by the Pompidou modern art centre in 2007. "The post domesticates in an almost subliminal way the path of passers-by. They create a veritable frontier between pavement and street...The walker moves in an open prison, separated from the street by barriers of bar-like potelets..." and so on.
The council defended itself in the Parisien, saying that the potelet remains the best barrier against the incivisme of the city's drivers, who still blithely leave their vehicles on the trottoir if they can. And of course my dog appreciates them for the usual reason. There's no such thing as a quick walk when he can leave his signature on each potelet.
[below: One of a series of artificial before and after shots on a Paris blog. They are digitally done but make the point well ]
There's no simple English word for dépaysement, the sense of disorientation when you arrive in another place or another country. You feel it most crossing continents and time zones, but after all these years I'm still struck by how much it hits you after a quick train trip under the Channel.
A couple of days in England have been a reminder that the big island off the western continent still feels separate despite everything that has harmonised and homogenised Europe -- football, the single market, the internet, the Eurovision song contest (Norway won, France came eighth on Saturday). Here are some random notes.
Emerging from Paris into the London morning rush-hour, I feel like the country mouse arriving in the city -- le rat des champs who has come to town. It's big, fast and noisy. Paris transport is sometimes crowded but it's like the village bus compared with the Underground with its masses sweeping you along while loudspeakers bark orders and announcements.
But the jostling is good humoured. There's give-and-take in the crowd, which is more multicoloured and scruffy than on the French side. The once discreet English are now the noise-makers of Europe. English pubs are one of the country's big attractions, but the din surprises continentals. On suburban trains people talk loudly on mobile phones sharing their lives with the whole carriage.
There's more bustle in London. The city feels more alive, even if bankers and foreign billionaires have dwindled. Paper sellers shout the news. In cafes, pubs and on transport, people carry and read newspapers in a way you do not see in Paris. Another difference is service. In Britain, like the US, it is friendlier and faster because there are more personnel. In France, with high payroll charges and heavy job protection, proprietors hire the minimum so assistants and serving staff are in short supply and over-stretched.
The media talk of quite different subjects. Putting aside Hollywood stars, rock idols and supermodels, the celebrity cast is completely different. France worries about Jenifer. In Britain it's Jade. And away from posters for fashion chains and car brands, British and French advertising are still oceans apart. The British turns on urban humour and social status. The French plays on old-fashioned glamour, romance and also the absurd, with such things as dancing insurance agents.
The recession and unemployment have hit both sides of the Channel, but preoccupations are not in phase. France is worried about social conflict, street revolt and disruption in hospitals and universities. It has a strong, hyper-active leader whose exploits are a source of both fascination and infuriation.
In England, there is a sense of political collapse and drift, with a discredited government stumbling through a long fin de régime. A certain sadistic glee has greeted the drawn-out revelations of mass expense-fiddling by members of parliament. In France they would be shrugging this off with a "tous pourris" -- they're all rotten. Politicans' morality is not an issue here at the moment [post last week].
Sport is often seen as the area in which Europe has converged most. But that's really only because of football, a pastime now dominated by English clubs who depend on French players. France takes seriously such things as volleyball and handball. England has cricket. On Saturday, my French companion gave up after I tried to explain the point as 13 men in white performed the ritual on wet grass in a west Sussex village.
The cost of living is worrying France, but with the cushion of the welfare state, people do not talk money as much as the British. The English middle classes obsess about house prices, schools and health care in a way that you do not hear in France. Yet you get the impression that there is still more money for spending in England. Shops are full and in the southeast, at least, the cars are still flashier than in France.
There is one big change. Britain no longer feels like the most expensive place in Europe. The crash of sterling over the past year makes London affordable. This makes a visit to London especially welcome to continent-dwellers who are paid in pounds and have suffered a 30 percent drop in euro income. But even with the devalued currency, Britain retains the crown for Europe's most expensive rail transport. I'm still smarting from the 16 pounds (17.6 euros) that I was charged at the luggage depot at Victoria station for leaving two small bags for seven hours.
[Below: an island ritual which has never quite taken off on the continent]
It's that time of the year again when a French artiste goes to the Eurovision song contest and gets hammered by the Croats, Turks, Estonians and other entrants in the world championship of kitsch. But hold on. Tomorrow night's final might be different. France is fielding a real star: Patricia Kaas.
English-speakers may never have heard of her, but Kaas, 42, is a fine pop singer with a gutsy cabaret style who has a big following on the continent and especially in Germany and eastern Europe. Picking Kaas was clever because she is very popular in Russia. Moscow is hosting the show after walking away with last year's prize thanks to the telephone vote from the former Soviet republics. Listen above to her entry, S'il Fallait le Faire, from her latest album Kabaret. The 1930s cabaret mood, fits the current depressed climate too.
Kaas [right] is running about fifth in the British betting odds, well behind the favourite, Norway's Alexander Rybak, a 22-year-old whose song Fairytale is accompanied by a folk dance group. But the French singer has President Sarkozy's government rooting for her. Alain Joyandet, Minister for Overseas Cooperation and the French language, is going to Moscow to cheer her on. You might remember that the government disowned last year's French entrant, Sébastien Tellier, because he sang in English -- like most of the other contestants. The language wheeze didn't work for him. He came in at 18th out of 25. France has not won since 1977.
We all know that the Eurovision contest, founded in 1956 to promote postwar fraternity, is a festival of novelty acts and low-grade Europop. In 1974, though, it did manage to launch the career of a Swedish act called Abba. Yes the contest is only taken seriously by small or neurotic nations. But 42 countries have entered this year and up to 150 million people will watch the final live. I have to confess to enjoying the show, with all its silliness, awful music and patriotic emotion. Perhaps it's because as a teenager I had a crush on Sandie Shaw, a barefoot popster who won with Puppet on a String [in picture]. 
Britain is also making more of an effort this year after coming bottom last May. The venerable Andrew Lloyd Webber is accompanying Jade Ewen in one of his own songs. And juries have been re-introduced in order to make the voting a little less political than it has been from the TV viewers.
Kaas, whose mother was German and hails from the frontier region of Lorraine, says she does not see Eurovision as a joke. "I'm going there to win, but if I manage to be in the first five that's fine," she told Libération. "At the beginning the idea surprised me. It's usually beginners who go to Eurovision... but I said why not. I see it like a sporting event like the Olympic games." If Kaas cannot do well, there's no hope for the Eurovision contest.
On the subject of great pop artists, Johnny Hallyday, France's eternal rocker, has just started his farewell tour. And I take him seriously too. Here's my story from the paper.
Here's an item that is more gossip than news. Carla Bruni and her husband are house-hunting and they have taken a tour of the celebrated apartment of the late Yves Saint Laurent on the rue Babylone in the 7th arrondissement on the Left Bank. What makes it piquant is that Mick Jagger, Bruni's old flame, owns a flat in the same building.
Bruni is an heiress and former supermodel who is worth about 20 million euros, according to the popular estimate. Sarkozy has much less. It seems unlikely, though, that he would move into such a sumptuous pad when he is trying to shed his bling-bling image. But they did inspect the premises recently as part of their search for a new abode, an informed friend tells me.
The Rolling Stones singer has a flat two floors up from Saint Laurent's vast garden duplex, refurbished in Art Deco style, which was home to the spectacular art trove which he collected with Pierre Bergé, his partner. The works were sold for 373 million euros at auction in February [picture above before the sale]. The apartment is not officially on the market yet, but it is estimated at up to 10 million euros.
The couple have been looking for lodgings more suitable than the town house that Bruni rents in the Villa Montmorency, an ultra-chic private street in the 16th arrondissement. Sarkozy moved in there after their marriage 15 months ago. Neighbours in the millionaires' ghetto off the Avenue Mozart are displeased by the security personnel and official vehicles which have disturb their quiet existence around the clock.
The couple are reported over the past month to have inspected other properties, including a former Carmelite monastery nearby in the 16th. The YSL flat would suit Sarkozy better because it is in an open street in the 7th district which is home to Parliament and ministries and is just across the Seine from to the palace.
The Saint Laurent apartment would have special appeal to Bruni because she was a friend and one of the couturier's favourite models. On his death last year the new Première Dame de France said that he had "made sublime not just the beauty but also the strength of women."
On his election in 2007, Sarkozy declared assets of 2.153 million euros, but he lost a big chunk of that in his divorce settlement with Cécilia Ciganer, who left him for another man six months after his election. Sarkozy and Bruni signed a wedding contract under which each retained the title to their their existing assets while sharing those acquired after their marriage.
According to various memoirs of the time, the young Bruni enjoyed a lengthy liaison with Jagger from the early 1990s when he was married to Jerry Hall. The couple have kept in touch. Sir Mick has attended Bruni's concerts and Franck Demules, her personal assistant, wrote in a biography published last week that the British singer occupies the rank of "God" in her list of friends.
Jagger figured in Bruni's opening flirt with Sarkozy when whey were introduced for the first time at the house of Jacques Séguéla, a mutual friend, in November 2007. According to the account by Séguéla, a veteran advertising man, Bruni taunted Sarko, saying: “When it comes to the celebrity press, you are an amateur. My time with Mick was secret for eight years. We went to all the world capitals and we were never photographed once." The President riposted with the now immortal line: "How could you have stayed eight years with a man who has such ridiculous legs?"
[below: the presidential couple in the Elysée palace posing for Vanity Fair magazine last year]
France is amused, along with everyone else, by the fuss over the fanciful expenses of British members of parliament. All those claims for castle repairs and tennis court maintenance are good for a laugh. No-one could imagine such a scandal occurring in France for a simple reason: members of the government and parliament don't have to account for their expenses.
Unlike parliamentarians in northern Europe, French députés and senators do not have to hand in receipts or explain how they dispose of the fixed 70,000 euros that they receive annually to cover their their spending on housing, offices and transport. The European Parliament still uses largely the same method, to the disgust of the northerners and delight of Eurosceptics. Luxurious style and lavish perks are expected by French ministers and other high servants of the state and few see anything wrong with this.
Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, tried to explain on the radio this morning why France tolerates and even rather approves of the regal life-style of its ruling class. "There are two reasons: we have a culture of secrecy about money and also a reverence towards people in power," he said. "The Anglo-Saxons and Nordic states have a quite different culture. They don't have our delicacy about money."
Joffrin traced the attitude back to revolutionary days when the rulers of the young Republic sought to impose their legitimacy by looking like the old caste of the monarchy and aristocracy. "Napoleon said the prefect's (local governor's) house had to be as impressive as that of the nobleman." he said.
In the same debate, on France-Info, Michel Colomès, a magazine journalist, said people do not expect high dignitaries to live like ordinary people. "I don't think the French would want to see our prime minister living with the same life-style as the premiers in northern Europe," he said.
The subject came up because, parallel to the British scandal, an unusual glimpse of French ministerial spending has emerged this week. It came from René Dosière, a leftwing parliamentarian who has for years been trying to pierce the secrecy that surrounds the state aristocracy. It was Dosière who, a few years ago, exposed the way that French Presidents enjoyed an unlimited, secret budget, drawn from a number of ministries. President Sarkozy reformed this up to a point. He still lives like a king -- though that is probably the wrong expression since some of Europe's royal houses live modestly in comparison.
This time, Dosière used his parliamentary rights to force reluctant ministries to produce their running expenses. He got the figures after eight months but only one, the Justice Ministry, gave much detail. Among other things, we learn that Rachida Dati, the Minister, has put a fleet of 20 cars with 19 drivers at the permanent service of her 20 personal staff. Madame Dati [pictured above in her office] and her ministry on the Place Vendôme spent 270,000 euros last year on receptions and meals. She clocked up 416,370 euros on air travel for herself and advisers. Much or perhaps all of that was legitimate, but there's no way of knowing. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister (see last post) beat Dati on the travel front, spending 562,346 euros on flights.
Dati, who is about to leave office, does not live in the official residence which is provided for her, unlike many other ministers. Scandals occasionally break when ministers go too far on that front. Hervé Gaymard, a Finance Minister under President Chirac, was forced to resign after only a few weeks in 2005 after it was revealed that the state was renting a palatial apartment for his family because he considered that his official residence was not grand enough. As a result of this, ministers are now expected to pay some of the running charges of their mansions. That is a change from the days when President Mitterrand managed to house his secret second family at state expense in a sumptuous apartment for over a decade and no-one raised an eye-brow when the news came out in the mid 90s.
Dosière, who is regarded by fellow parliamentarians as something of an eccentric, commented drily in Le Monde today: "The culture of monitoring public spending is not very developed in France, at least it's not much liked in the ministries.... Our administration is not yet used to transparency."
A jinx seems to have latched onto President Sarkozy's scheme to make France the first democracy with an internet police agency. A furore is raging in the French blogosphere over the sacking of a television executive because he criticised Sarkozy's imminent three-strikes-and-you're-out law against illegal downloading.
The episode tells you about the cosy ties between Sarkozy and TF1, France's dominant -- commercial -- television network. Here's what happened:
Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, 33, TF1's chief of technical innovation, voiced his disagreement with the internet law -- known as Hadopi -- in a private e-mail to Françoise de Panafieu, the member of parliament for his home district in western Paris. Panafieu is a one-time minister and veteran member of Sarkozy's UMP party (She's also my MP and her office is opposite my apartent). Her assistant forwarded the e-mail to the office of Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister [above], requesting points to make in response to Bourreau.
The deputy-chief of Albanel's staff then zapped a copy of the e-mail straight to TF1. Bourreau's boss called him in, read out his e-mail and told him he was fired because it betrayed the network's policy in favour of the internet law. When the story broke in Libération, Albanel dismissed it as absurd and indignantly denied before parliament that her office had forwarded the e-mail. Over the weekend, she reversed her story and admitted that the dirty work had been done by Christophe Tardieu, her staffer. He has been suspended for a month.
Albanel says she regrets the incident but is pointing out that nothing in the e-mail said that it was confidential. Bourreau (the name means hangman or executioner) is suing TF1 for wrongful dismissal, citing a law which employees' rights to voice political opinions.
At this stage I would argue that an executive in a sensitive post should be more careful about airing opinions in contradiction with an important company policy. But that's not really the point here. The scandal comes from the Culture Ministry ratting on Bourreau to the private company that it is involved in regulating.
This is being taken as proof of the incestuous network of friends and interests through which Sarkozy influences -- some would say controls -- the media. TF1 is owned by the billionaire Martin Bouygues, a Sarkozy friend who is is godfather to his youngest son. As we saw here before, Sarkozy last year got rid of advertising from public television -- a huge gift to TF1 -- on the suggestion of Bouygues. TF1's second-ranking executive is Laurent Solly, who was deputy director of Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign. And so on.
Bourreau is being hailed as a hero, admired with dedicated Facebook groups and a special song "Qui a tué (Who Killed) Bourreau-Guggenhem ?" He has been called the first "internet martyr" in the cause of resisting what is seen as Sarkozy's Big Brother Hadopi scheme.
Much of the emotion is over-blown, but the Hadopi law is beginning to look like a loser before it has even finished its tortuous passage through parliament. It is supported not just by the big corporations of the entertainment industry but also by many artists as the only way to stop their work being pillaged. But its foes have done a good job painting it as an out-of-date plot by the establishment to punish the young and poor who download music and films.
That case was put today by a group of 90 independent record labels which have signed a declaration attacking the Hadopi law (which takes its name from the acronym for the new High Authority which will track down and punish illegal downloaders). The independents, who say they represent 90 percent of French musical artists, attacked the majors for impoverishing them and supporting a policy "which designates the public as potential thieves rather than music-lovers."
The anti-Hadopi crowd could not have wished for better ammunition than the case of the unfortunate Mr Bourreau.
[Picture at top is Albanel in parliament last month after a first attempt to pass the Hadopi law was unexpectedly defeated. It's back for a new vote later this month and will very likely pass]
Say the word France and the images that flash to mind will probably include Paris and some sunny, lavender-tinted scene from Provence. Since 1976, the Provence area is part of the entity known as Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and there lies a problem.
Since the name is a mouthful, everyone uses the acronym PACA for the administrative region which encompasses some of Europe's most sublime geography. As a word, Paca is ugly and the source of jokes, such as pacapable -- a pun on pas capable or incapable. Michelle Vauzelle, the leftwing President of the Paca, wants to ditch the embarrassing name, which he calls an insult to the history of his region of five million people. "We have a name that has deeply handicapped us," said Vauzelle. "I was welcomed in Algeria the other day as President of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Agneau (lamb chop)."
Vauzelle [below] is planning a referendum but he may find that he has stirred up more trouble than he bargained for.
Previous efforts to change the name have fallen foul of local sensitivities -- in particular of the pride of Nice. The old port city, hometown of Guiseppe Garibaldi, was Italian until the king of Sardinia gave it to France in 1860. It is an ancestral rival to Marseilles, the Provençal port to the west. Les Niçois do not like being lumped in with les Provençaux. If it were not for them, Vauzelle would probably get everyone to plump for just Provence, an historic name with global brand recognition. This has worked for the Auvergne, Alsace, Brittany and the other modern regions which re-adopted old provincial names. The people in the high Alps -- historically linked to the Dauphiné region -- would also like to be recognised in the name, but passions there are not as high as down on the coast.
To accommodate the Niçois, the name Provence-Méditerrannée is being touted. The trouble with that is that it does not answer one of the main complaints about Paca -- what you call the inhabitants. The current Pacaiens sounds bizarre and too close to paiens, or pagans. The point is important because French politicians like to address their people by the place name. Starting a speech or a letter "Chers Auvergnates et auvergnats" works. So to a lesser extent does "Chers Françiliens" -- the recent coinage for the Ile-de-France, or Paris region. They need something snappy like that to replace Paca. People in Nice will certainly not accept Chers Provençaux.
One exemple not to follow is the thankfully vain name-change that was attempted a few years ago by Georges Frêche, the longtime Socialist godfather of the Languedoc-Roussillon, just west of the Paca. He wanted to rebaptise the region Septimanie. That comes from its Roman name Septimania, but sounds more like a disease. [below: PACA logo]
Vauzelle is asking for suggestions which he would like to put to a popular vote. La Provence, a Marseilles newspaper, is also running a debate on the subject. Some ideas, such as Région Soleil, are pretty lame. People there have also pointed out that Cote d'Azur is a fairly corny name, bestowed on the Riviera for marketing purposes in the 1890s. l'Unioun Prouvençalo, a regionalist movement, is insisting on straight Provence. "The name is an economic and historic asset," it says. Some opponents of Vauzelle want him to leave the subject alone. Jean-Claude Gaudin, rightwing Mayor of Marseilles and a former Paca president, says the exercise will just lead to trouble.
Maybe we can come up with some suggestions for Vauzelle (whom I used to know when he was spokesman for President Mitterrand). I'll forward them to him.
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PACA consists of six departements: Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Alpes-Maritimes, Bouches-du-Rhone, Hautes-Alpes, Var and Vaucluse.
[Below: Marseilles]
![Bongo-sarkozy[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e20115707bdb46970b-400wi "Bongo-sarkozy[1]")
Here's a case that shows why President Sarkozy will be happy when he enacts his plan to get rid of the institution of the investigating judge. Françoise Desset, the senior juge d'instruction in the fraud division of the Paris courts, has just embarrassed the government by ordering an inquiry into the alleged corruption of three African leaders who are close to Paris.
Desset defied the request of the state prosecutor to halt proceedings and approved a case in which police investigators have already tracked tens of millions of euros of French-based assets belonging to the leaders of Gabon, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Equatorial Guinea. These include mansions, châteaux, Paris apartments, dozens of bank accounts and stables of Ferraris, Porsches and other luxury transport.
The three are Omar Bongo, president of Gabon since 1967, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, and Teodoro Obiang, ruler of Equatorial Guinea. Gabon and the Congo are former French colonies and Bongo, the doyen of African leaders, is an old acquaintance of Sarkozy and a valuable French asset. All three states are part of France-Afrique, the little club of states with close ties to Paris.
When Sarkozy won office in 2007, he promised an end to the cosy relations with unsavoury African clients and sketched a new era "free of the dross of the past." But the President soon found that he could not do without the favours of Bongo, France's oldest African fixer, and it was back to business as usual in France-Afrique.
Some of Gabon's oil wealth has been spread around French ruling circles for decades. Dr Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, was embarrassed in January when it was revealed that Bongo had recently paid him handsomely as a consultant on his health system. It is not just about money. For example, when Nelson Mandela was reluctant to grant a request by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for a meeting, Bongo stepped in and organised it. And if France needs to evacuate its citizens from the civil war in Chad, another France-Afrique nation, they will do it through Libreville, the Gabon capital.
The "case of the ill-gotten goods" was brought by the French branch of the anti-corruption watch-dog Transparency International. The group said that the three presidents’ holdings far surpassed their salaries and that corruption has deprived millions of education and medical care. "Every luxury apartment acquired in France means one hospital or school less in Libreville," said William Bourdon, the lawyer for Transparency. The group brought a suit against the three under the French offences of embezzlement of stolen public funds, money-laundering and breach of trust.
According to the police, Bongo and his family own 39 properties, including a villa near the Champs-Élysées, and they hold 70 bank accounts in France. The Sassou-Nguessos have 24 properties and 112 bank accounts. The Obiangs spent more than €4 million on four limousines in Paris.
The judge's decision has infuriated the Elysée Palace and the Foreign Ministry because it has shone a strong light on the continuing seamy side of France's African affairs. On the orders of the Justice Ministry, still run by Sarkozy's protegée Rachida Dati, the prosecutors have filed an appeal. This has halted the inquiry for the time being.
The affair may end there, but damage has been done. In trying to kill the investigation, Sarkozy is certainly behaving no diffferently than pragmatic leaders in other democracies when realpolitik prevails over commitments to ethical foreign policy. But his action conflicts with his promise of a break with the sleazy old ways in Africa. The Transparency lawyer rubbed in the point. “An appeal aimed at putting a lid on this investigation would make a mockery of President Sarkozy’s commitments at the G20 against tax havens, financial crime and international fraud," he said.
Lawyers for the African leaders say that they are victims of a vendetta and that their affairs have nothing to do with French justice. They wonder why investigators are not bothering with the Gulf families which have been buying up chunks of the Champs Elysées and mansions in western Paris.
My point about investigating judges is that this type of inquiry would never have opened under the new system that Sarkozy aims to introduce. This will abolish the juges d'instruction, the independent investigators founded two centuries ago under Napoleon Bonaparte. Some of the judges have in recent decades made life difficult for the ruling classes, exposing corruption in the political and business elite. Sarkozy plans to put investigation in the hands of prosecutors. They report directly to the Justice Ministry and its political master.
[Below: Sarkozy making his case to sceptial juges d'instruction]
The personal drivers of the past two French Presidents have caused a stir in recent years with indiscreet memoirs that reported on their master's lurid private lives. The latest exercise in the drive-and-tell genre is by Carla Bruni's chauffeur-assistant.
But Franck Demules, known as Franky, offers a reversal of the usual sensation. While the civil servant chauffeurs of Presidents Miterrand and Chirac spilled the beans on their bosses' amorous antics, Demules describes life in the showbiz world of sex, drugs and rock n'roll while making France's première dame sound like a saint.
Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, both former lovers, feature among the stars in the biography of Demules, who has worked for the past decade as confidant, driver, personal assistant and fixer for Bruni. In Un Petit Tour en Enfer (A Little Trip in Hell) Demules, 43, a former actor and cocaine addict who spent time in prison for fraud, reveals no secrets but he offers a glimpse of life in a world far removed from the decorum of the Elysée palace. Bruni and Sarkozy, whom she met and married over the winter of 2007-8, emerge as saviours of the man who describes himself as "the queen's devoted musketeer".
Sarkozy called in Demules when he returned from a rehabilitation course in Canada last February and "in a kind way told me to think of the future." The President advised him to throw himself into work: "If you knew, Franck, how much effort I had to put in in order to get here," said Sarkozy.
Demules returned to the bottle and suffered depression last year after Bruni's marriage sidelined him as her minder-in-chief. Bruni signed him into a clinic near Paris on the recommendation of her friend Marianne Faithful, the British singer. She then proposed a New Year's stay in "her friend Eric Clapton's (rehab) centre in the Caribbean." His English was not good enough so he went to Quebec.
Demules, the victim of long-term sexual abuse as a child, describes how Carla and Valéeria, her actress sister, gave him lodging and work in the mid-1990s after his young wife had died of Aids. Soon Bruni had entrusted him with her credit card and her secrets, he writes. Among other things, the Brunis paid for the schooling of his daughter, now 19 and Carla helped him overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
Demules writes with affection for Raphael Enthoven, the philosopher who was Bruni's last partner and father of their son. He describes Endhoven's "ballsy" courage in a brawl which they had with two strangers in an underground car park. Bruni's entourage has a list of friends classed by order of importance. "Mick Jagger is God," says Demules. The chief Rolling Stone behaves like a perfect gentleman at Bruni's concerts, he says. He contrasts him with Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, who sweeps up with an entourage and demands movie-star treatment.
Serving Bruni has its tough moments, he says. One was taking Naomi Campbell shopping. On a visit to Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, the former supermodel was so fierce that no-one dared talk to her, he writes.
Demules describes the shock and disapproval among friends in the leftwing entourage when Bruni began her romance with France's defiantly rightwing president. "It was violent. You would have thought I was a traitor to the cause," he writes. Since then, former anti-Sarkozy members of the circle have been asking him to intervene for presidential favours.
Franky organised the President's first birthday party after his marriage. He says that he still feels uncomfortable working with the presidential body guards, all police officers. "At the beginning it stressed me. Even if you have nothing to feel guilty about, you are always a bit scared that you might have forgotten something," he writes.
Demules realised that his boss and the President were in love when he dropped her off in the rain at the Elysée one rainy afternoon in the zinter last year. The President telephoned him and invited him to drive in with his battered car and dog. "I was impressed. The president received me divinely, offering me sausage that he had brought back from Corsica."
Bruni has redeemed him, writes Demules. "Without Carla, some people would not have talked to me. I would have stayed the former junky whose wife died of Aids, the crazy, uncontrollable guy."
Bruni has given her blessing to the book, but warned him "they'll try to make it about me, but don't be pushed around." The premiere dame talked in the latest Paris Match about her attachment to her Franky. "When I got married I never imagined for a second that I would let him go. Even if I am now very protected, there is a heap of personal and intimate things that I do not dare ask of the palace personnel or the security officers."
As a follow-up to the last post on Sarkozy's new French model for Europe, have a look at the cover of the latest edition of The Economist. Sarkozy towers over Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany while Britain's Gordon Brown wallows in a hole with the Anglo-Saxon model.
The editorial neatly summarises the ideas behind the debate that we're always having here. Naturally it's on the Anglo-Saxon side, but it admits the merits of the continental approach. Their report from inside France, by Sophie Pedder, the Economist's Paris correspondent, is excellent.
Nicolas Sarkozy has just done a favour to British Conservatives and other sceptics who like to see the European Union as a plot for putting a French face on Europe.
Super Sarko used his second anniversary in office to sketch a vision for the Union which fell somewhere between that of the late Charles de Gaulle and the pro-European French leaders of the 1970s and 80s. If Europe follows his recipe, it will be able to pull out of the "deep intellectual and moral crisis" from which it is suffering, he said.
Sarkozy wants a Union with a new "economic government" -- run by the member states not the supranational Brussels Commission. He wants a centralised industrial policy, new tight financial regulations, a closed door to "predators from the world at large". He wants a curb on the free market laws that are policed by Brussels. He also reaffirmed his pledge to stop Turkey ever joining the Union.
Sarko was speaking in Nîmes to kick off the campaign for next month's European Parliament elections but the assembly -- the other supranational pillar of the Union -- got barely a mention in his manifesto for a continent run by the Council of member governments. He shares ground with the British sceptics on that front, but not on much else.
Sarkozy sees the economic slump as a chance to assert France-friendly regulation in the Union after two decades in which, in French eyes, Europe has worshipped at the "liberal" -- meaning free market -- altar. He wants an end to competition among states on tax rates and an end to market rules that block mergers between big European companies, he said. A "European preference" must also be applied to favour the goods and services of the Union over those from outside. That was a Sarkozy campaign promise in 2007, but we had not heard about it since then.
Looking to the outside, Sarkozy said Europe "must cease diluting itself in an endless enlargement. Europe must have frontiers." Turkey could never become a member but should have a special partnership. Russia should have the same, he said. That goes down well in France and Germany but not with Britain -- nor the United States, as we saw when Barack Obama called last month for Turkish EU entry. Sarkozy has not been so tough in practice as in his rhetoric. He has not attempted to stop Ankara's accession negotiations, which began in 2005.
Sarkozy took a few swipes at Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, for not being cooperative enough and he floated another idea: a central agency to purchase the Union's gas supplies. This would prevent the Russians from playing states off against one-another. "Europe must fight to build a true energy policy, which doesn't just involve competition," he said
And French farmers were relieved to hear Sarkozy's pledge to maintain forever the Common Agriculture Policy -- the multi-billion euro subsidy mechanism that distorts the world food market and benefits France more than any other of the 27 member states. Previously, farmers had worried that the city-slicker President might yield to pressure from Britain and other northern states to dismantle their sacred system.
Sarkozy is of course telling voters what they want to hear ahead of an election which will serve as a referendum on his two years in power. He is echoing the public mood. The Socialist opposition wants roughly the same though it disagrees with Sarko's hostility to the Commission and Parliament. Northern Europeans do not generally realise it, but Europe has been widely seen in France for the past 15 years as a British-backed plot to undermine the French welfare state and way of life. Sarkozy is posing as its saviour. Or, in the gushing words of Luc Chatel, the Government spokesman, today: Sarkozy's vigorous leadership has revived in Europe "la pensée universelle française".
Nicolas Sarkozy dislikes anniversaries and plans to ignore his two-year point in the Elysée Palace on Wednesday, but France is taking stock of an eccentric presidency that was born on high hopes and now wallows in deep unpopularity.
Sixty-three per cent have written off Sarkozy's first 24 months as a failure, according to a poll today for Metro newspaper, with only 28 per cent holding a positive opinion.
Sarkozy puts the discontent down to the global slump that hit France just as he was hoping to see results from "la rupture", the clean break that he promised with the country's over-regulated, over-taxed welfare state. He is right in part because the recession has for the time being demolished his vision for a dynamic new France. His promises to reward hard work with prosperity were never as Thatcher-like as they seeemed but they ring hollow now that a fearful France has turned back to the state for succour in the face of unemployment and uncertainty.
But disappointment with "Super Sarko" set in well before America's sub-prime disaster rebounded on the French economy last year. It stemmed from a perception that he was out to help the rich, from his autocratic methods and from the brash new style that he brought to the monarchical presidency.
Instead of retreating to the palace and at least simulating a lofty distance from his government, Sarkozy created a "hyper-presidency", running the country with a handful of advisers and behaving at times more like a self-satisfied television host than father of the nation.
He turned up the gravitas after crashing in opinion polls well before his first anniversary, but France has still not digested the initial "bling-bling" phase, symbolised by his flashy friends and his lightning romance with Carla Bruni, the Italian heiress, singer and former super-model. Sarkozy has still not modified his vulgar side, typified by his slangy language, boasting and fondness for taking swipes at colleagues and fellow leaders with remarks that quickly reach the media.
The aggressive style feeds the sense of injustice that has turned Sarkozy into a hate figure for opponents, mainly on the left, among teachers' unions, students and state sector workers. As we've seen here, many hold Sarkozy personally responsible for factory closures, unemployment and other ills.
The case for the prosecution has just been set out in a book-length diatribe by François Bayrou, the centrist and would-be president who has become Sarkozy's most effective opponent. In Abus de Pouvoir (Abuse of Power), Bayrou says that Sarkozy has foisted on France an alien regime. He is violating the republic with and "an ideology which had never dared express itself in France unmasked, a model of society based on inequality," writes Bayrou
Eric Fottorino, editor of Le Monde, concluded today that Sarkozy's style rather than substance was his chief handicap -- "a style which has ended up irritating people after stirring curiosity and hope." France now expected action or Sarkozy risked being dismissed for "television Bonapartism in which the show of willpower wins over reality."
But the clamour of demonstrations and public abuse masks the credit that a substantial minority gives Sarkozy for broadly sticking with his promised revolution despite the crisis. In the face of revolt, he has compromised on several fronts, such as schools and hospitals, but he is continuing to shrink the civil service, and he is persisting in tax reform while easing labour regulation. His stimulus plan, based largely on investment in business and big state projects, is generally approved although he is widely faulted for failing to do more to help ordinary households. He has lately renewed his popularity on the right by returning to his old pet theme of law-and-order.
In one field — his handling of foreign policy — Sarkozy wins generally high marks. About 70 per cent approve of his forceful leadership in Europe and in the wider world at events such as the G20 economic summit last month. His antics ahead of the G20, with the phoney threat to stay away, looked silly outside France, but they won him credit at home, making him look like a tough advocate of new regulation. And Bruni, whom he married in February last year, is now deemed to be one of his biggest diplomatic assets.
Sarkozy has made little secret that he wants a second term in 2012. He has reason not to despair over his present unpopularity. Polls show that if the 2007 election were restaged now, he would still win hands down in the all-comers first round. The Socialists who are the official opposition have no candidate with the stature to beat him. Bayrou, though popular, looks like a loser and, for the moment, there is no other plausible alternative.
 After Audrey Tautou's appointment as the new face of Chanel, Dior have come up with a new male ambassador. He's the one in the picture, a 31-year-old actor who is known as sublimely handsome. Younger readers, don't worry if you've never heard of Alain Delon (like some of my colleagues in London today). The picture of him posing in Saint Tropez was taken in 1966.
Dior are about to use the image of the moody Delon at the height of his seductive power to sell Eau Sauvage, the men's cologne which it launched that year. "The picture has not aged and it will enable us to reach men who remember Delon at that period and a younger clientèle which will be charmed by his rebel, irrevent look," Dior told le Figaro.
Delon, a monstre sacré who is in his 74th year; is still going strong after 88 films. He made fun of his notorious self-importance a couple of years ago playing Julius Caesar in the mega-euro comedy Astérix and the Olympic Games. He replied in the film to "Hail Caesar" with the salute: "Avé moi!" [picture]
Known for this mégalo character, Delon likes referring to himself in the third person. He cried scandal last year when he dropped out of the Journal du Dimanche ranking of the 50 most admired French people. The pollsters had failed to include him in the list of candidates, he said. "There were names there that should not have been there if Delon was not there."
Dior's photo; taken by Jean-Marie Périer, is meant to evoke the golden days when Delon largely played himself starring as the smouldering, dangerous hero in movies by René Clément, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, 1963), Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Deray, Henri Verneuil and other directors. He was romantically involved with a string of beautiful actresses, including Jane Fonda, Romy Schneider, Monica Vitti and Mireille Darc. Always a star more than an actor, he missed out on the nouvelle vague film movement of the early 1960s. In 1966, when the photo was taken, he was co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer and Leslie Caron in Clement's wartime classic Is Paris Burning?
Unlike other actors whose style moved with the times as they aged, Delon seems to have stayed in those pre-1968 years when, as a global hearthrob, he stood for Gallic insouciance, dash and danger. The nostalgia picture will work in France, but I wonder how it will play in the world beyond.
[Picture: Delon now]
Did a French law professor get off scot-free after murdering his wife? The question is being asked in France today after a court in Toulouse found Jacques Viguier, 51, not guilty of killing his wife Suzy, who was 38 when she vanished from their home. The trial was fascinating because no body, weapon or hard evidence was found yet the prosecution seemed to have a plausible case.
The acquittal caused surprise because, as we have seen here before, French courts often do not allow much benefit for doubt if investigating judges and prosecutors have built a strong argument. This time they did. The case sheds interesting light on the system.
The facts: Suzy Viguier [left], a dance teacher, was last seen when her lover dropped her off at the couple's home at 4.30 am on a Sunday morning in February 2000. The marriage was breaking up and she had been due to meet a lawyer to start a divorce the next day. Viguier, a low-key man who is a star of the Toulouse University law faculty, reported her missing four days later. He did so after Olivier Durandet, the lover, had raised a big fuss [see him in video below]
Continue reading "French court clears law teacher in missing-body murder trial " »
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Paris is talking about the fine performance by Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show (Watch the Monday evening interview below). If you have only seen Lagarde inside France, it's an eye-opener. She is at ease, bantering in near perfect English, drawing applause when she says she had fired a few bankers because "they did a crappy job". Her advisers were initially nervous about exposing her to one of Stewart's comic grillings but she did well, batting off questions such as "Is America now more Socialist than France" and on France's debt to the US from the war.
Inside France, Lagarde, 53, has proved a liability to President Sarkozy. She is politically inept. Publicly, she seems stiff and out of touch and she is known as Christine Lagaffe because of her many verbal blunders. These have included telling the French last year that if motor fuel was too expensive they should just ride bicycles. As an outsider from the elite technocracy, she is flanked by junior ministers who run the financial machine. Lagarde is a non-politician who was brought into the government in 2005. She was humiliated last year by colleagues who said publicly that France needed a heavyweight Finance Minister. But a lot has changed since the slump set in last autumn. She has become an international star.
[May 4 update: Lagarde has just been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Read Tim Geithner's tribute to her in Time. Sarkozy is the only other French person on the list. Lagarde's nomination is ascribed in France entirely to the fact that she speaks good English]
Lagarde is the only member of the government who is at home in the Anglo-Saxon world. As such, she is invaluable to a President who, though an Americophile, is unable to construct a sentence in English. A former member of the French synchronized swimming team, Lagarde worked for 20 years in the USA as a lawyer with Baker & McKenzie, the Chicago-based firm. She was its international chairwoman when President Chirac recruited her as Trade Minister in 2005.
Lagarde does not just give a good impression in English, charming TV viewers. She is in her element in the world of internationl business and finance. When Lehman Brothers was collapsing last September, she was the only European Finance Minister called by Henry Paulson, the then Treasury Secretary. She knew him from his days with Goldman Sachs in Chicago.
Le Figaro, the newspaper closest to the Sarkozy court, carried a double-edged profile of her today, praising her for her new role as France's international face but noting her continuing low reputation with the Elysée Palace. A palace staffer told the paper: "She scores 100 percent for international relations. In explaining the economy she scores 30. That makes an average of 65."
While on the France-America theme, le Monde reported yesterday that Barack Obama has riposted over Sarkozy's claim that he was not up to speed on climate change. Obama pulled aside Jean-Louis Borloo, the Environment Minister, at a Washington conference and told him to tell Sarko that he was doing his homework and the next time they meet he will beat him on the subject.
[Click to watch Lagarde interview. For French readers here, Jon Stewart's satirical nightly news show is roughly equivalent to the Canal+ Grand Journal with a bit of Laurent Ruquier and Nicolas Canteloup thrown in.]
President Sarkozy is unveiling his vision of a grand new metropolitan Paris today. The idea is to break the barrier of the périphérique ring-road and sew together the dozens of separate towns that surround the relatively small capital city. Here's my preview in today's newspaper and I'll come back to Greater Paris after he announces it. In the meantime, let's salute the Louvre pyramid.
Paris is marking the 20th birthday of the high-tech glass and steel contraption that President Mitterrand planted in the courtyard of the world's most visited art museum. Back in the mid-1980s there was quite a shock when the Socialist president announced his scheme, designed by I.M.Pei, the Chinese-American architect. The idea was to use a car park as a startling new underground entrance that contrasted with old royal palace.
"You don't approach a palace by the basement," said Michel Guy, a former Culture minister who led the protests at the time. The press compared it to a Métro train entrance, a cheese cover and an upside-down funnel. Similar complaints greeted the new-fangled Eiffel tower in 1889. But the pyramid went on to become a monument in its own right.
Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's curator, said this week that his visitors cite three reasons for coming to the museum -- La Joconde (The Mona Lisa), the Venus de Milo and the pyramid. "The pyramid has become the only entrance, it marks a rite of passage, an initiation," said Loyrette. The only problem is that it needs to be expanded because it was designed for 4.5 million visitors a year and the museum is now receiving 8.5 million.
Loyrette indicated to le Parisien that he was a little dismayed that his customers are so obsessed by the Mona Lisa when there is so much else to see in his vast museum. Eighty percent of the 8.5 million troop straight to Leonardo's fragile glass-covered portrait. Visitors stay in the Louvre on average between two and four hours.
He also said that the art in the Louvre, which stops at 1850, is increasingly hard for people to understand -- compared with the impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay and other more modern work. "Visitors know less and less about mythology and history -- including those from wealthiest classes," he said.
The pyramid has stood up to time much better than most other recent architectural grands projets in the capital. The most loathed is the Montparnasse Tower, the black 600-feet tall obelisk that President Pompidou stuck in the middle of the low-rise capital in the early 1970s [picture below].
The online version of Le Figaro found that 35 percent of Parisians want to demolish the eyesore. The paper's readers are on the conservative and older side, but their hate list is roughly shared by many Parisians. Second most unpopular is the Beaugrenelle development, a collection of mid-rise towers and concrete that was thrown up on the Seine in the left-bank 15th arrondissement in the 1960s. The 1970s Pompidou modern art centre came third on the demolition list, which is a little surprising that its oil refinery look has lost its jarring novelty.
President Mitterrand's 1980s projects came next, starting with the bunker-like Bastille opera and the twin-slab National Library. Most Parisians I know would agree with that. But further down the demolition list came... the Louvre Pyramid. It is detested by 8.9 percent of the Figaro's 15,000 respondents. But I said they are conservative.
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.]
The future belongs to those who rise early. The English version of that French saying holds that the early bird catches the worm. The Spanish say a quien madruga Dios le ayuda (God helps the early riser). The virtue of a quick start on the day idea is pretty universal and Nicolas Sarkozy preached it in his 2007 presidential campaign along with "work more to earn more".
Well, everyone is wrong, according a group of Belgian, French and Swiss researchers. People who find it hard to get up in the morning perform better for longer than the virtuous early birds who leap from the nest to claim the future, say the team based at the University of Liège.
Led by Christina Schmidt, a neuroscientist, they pitted a volunteer group of 16 young early risers against a gaggle of 15 natural night owls to find out who could perform complicated tasks for longest. For two days in laboratory conditions, the early risers started the day around 7 am and would be ready for bed by 10 or 11 pm. Late starters got up as late as 11 am and went to bed up to 3 am. The results, just published in the journal Science, were conclusive. The night owls stayed alert for longer periods before flagging mentally. After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention.
The late risers have more stamina because they are less affected by a mechanism that tells the brain that it needs sleep as their circadian day cycle progresses, the researchers reported.
"We thought that the early morning subjects would perform better in the morning and vice versa," Professor Philippe Peigneux of the Université Libre of Brussels, co-author of the study, told Le Figaro. "In fact, after an hour and a half of sleep there's no difference between the early and late risers. However at the end of the day, the late risers are less tired and have improved their alertness," he said.
The researchers point out the obvious fact that there is a draw-back to being a late riser: your higher efficiency is reduced by being out of phase with the world around you. I'll use that argument in the daily struggle to get my teenage son out of bed and off to school. But I suppose the new European research may have invalidated Benjamin Franklin's dictum 'Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.'
An old but fairly accurate cliché holds that France is a conservative nation that advances through periodic upheaval. A lot of people would like us to believe that we may be entering one of those moments.
There is even a touch of 1789 in the way that the strongest prophesy of insurrection has come this week not from a ragged sans-culotte, but from an outcast aristocrat who wants to bring down the king. Dominique de Villepin, the last Prime Minister and bitter foe of his former subordinate Nicolas Sarkozy, has pronounced that "France faces a risk of revolution". He did not say whether he had in mind something like 1789, 1848, the Commune of 1871 or May 1968.
Here's the case: The economic slump is destroying jobs by the thousand. Over 20 percent of the under 25s are out of work. The sense of injustice is being fed by the golden incomes still enjoyed by disgraced bosses; dismissed workers are kidnapping managers and one lot last week sacked government offices in the town of Compiègne; about a third of the universities are "blocked" by students protesting against President Sarkozy's higher education reforms. Electricity workers are pursuing a pay claim by cutting off the current from tens of thousands of people.
Next Friday, the labour unions are joining in rare May Day unity in mass marches to alert Sarkozy to the anger and plight of the working classes. Today's Journal du Dimanche, a conservative national newspaper owned by a friend of Sarkozy, is asking dramatically on its front: "Is a 'May 2009' possible in France?'. In other words, could we be about to live a replay of May 1968, the student uprising that ignited strikes and briefly shook the rule of President de Gaulle.
I will take the risk of answering the newspaper's question in the negative. There is a lot of anger around and insurrection is certainly desired by the usual crowd on the utopian far left -- Olivier Besancenot, the Trotskyite leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, students and the hardline labour unions such as the Trotskyite Sud federation.
But history is unlikely to repeat itself. May 1968 came as a surprise to a country that was enjoying unprecedented prosperity and high employment. It was also a time of cultural revolt and dreams of other worlds. It was followed by a period of industrial turbulence in the 1970s with far more strikes and factory sit-ins than now.
Revolution is being talked up by people in the Establishment with their own ambitions at heart. Villepin is the most glaring example. He is a never-elected diplomat who owed all his government appointments to his mentor President Jacques Chirac. He is to stand trial later this year on charges of trying to smear Sarkozy in the so-called Clearstream affair. Last Sunday he talked of possible revolution saying he feared that public despair would lead to "collective behaviour that we might not be able to control". On Friday, he announced that he hoped to stand against Sarkozy in the next presidential election in 2012.
That prompted a little mirth and jokes about his mental balance. The same response has greeted the utterances of Ségolène Royal, another member of the elite who is hell-bent on bringing down the elected monarch. Royal, the Socialist who was defeated in the 2007 presidential election and failed to win her party leadership last December, is waging a manic personal campaign against Sarko. She is issuing public "apologies" in the name of France for his imagined sins and she is all but preaching revolution, siding with the workers in every violent episode. Relations between workers and employers in France "remain in the Middle Ages", she said this weekend. Like Villepin, Royal is out for revenge against Sarkozy in 2012.
So, when you hear of unrest in France, add a pinch of salt. The mood is definitely dark, as it is in Britain, Spain, Ireland and the United States among other places. The work-place violence and street and student protests may increase, but we are far from revolution. People are not ready to risk their jobs, as some were in 1968. The French welfare safety net protects the unemployed and low-paid to a degree unimaginable to Americans or even the British. Revolution is not really in the air when the leader of the French Socialist Party complains that the French president should do more to follow the example of the president of the United States. Martine Aubry, the party leader, has just done that. And on the anecdotal side, many people are not suffering too much, judging by the traffic jams around the suburban shopping centres at weekends.
Sarkozy must have been comforted by an Ifop poll just published by Sud Ouest Dimanche newspaper. This found that despite all his unpopularity, if the 2007 election were staged again today Sarkozy would still beat Royal and all the other candidates who stood in the first round that year.
[Below: The struggle of 'les Contis', northern France workers demonstrating against their factory closure by German tyre company. Their case has become symbol of immoral action by rogue employers]
Get ready for a deluge of Chanel. In an astute bit of marketing, the Paris fashion and perfume company is about to relaunch its No.5 scent with a new muse: Audrey Tautou.
The actress with the girl-next-door looks replaces Nicole Kidman, who has been Chanel's ambassador-model since 2004. There have been only four or five such égéries, or muses, since 1921 when Coco Chanel invented the heady scent that became the world's best-seller. Marilyn Monroe [below], the first after Chanel herself, ensured its fortunes in the United States in 1954 when she was asked what she wore in bed: "Why, Chanel No.5, of course."
Tautou's role as Amélie (In France known as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) in 2001 made her the world's most famous young French actress. Chanel's move is clever because Tautou is about to star as the company's founder and the perfume's inventor in a would-be block-buster film which opens this week.
Coco Avant Chanel, directed by Anne Fontaine, is the most lavish among recent films and mini-series on the woman who was fashion's version of Picasso or Stravinsky. The new movie focuses on the young Gabrielle Chanel [Top picture]. It is the latest in a trail of French biopics trying to match La Môme, the Edith Piaf film that won last year's best actress Oscar for Marion Cotillard. [Coco trailer here]
Chanel hired Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed Tautou in Amélie and Un long Dimanche de Fiançailles, to shoot a commercial. Ridley Scott, Luc Besson and Baz Luhrmann did the same for previous Chanel muses.
[Kidman]
Jeunet said Chanel's brief consisted of only three words: mystère, frisson, émotion. He scripted a sepia-tinted, atmospheric yarn about an encounter between travelling strangers. From those words you know that we are talking about the Orient Express or an ocean steamer. For Jeunet it was the Express. He filmed for three weeks with a crew of 250 on locations from Paris to Istanbul. Luxury goods, it seems, cannot get enough of steam(y) romance. Only last year Catherine Deneuve perched on a suitcase beside the same train for Louis Vuitton.
In the Jeunet advert, a whiff of Chanel 5 enables Travis Davenport, an an American model, to find the mysterious reporter (Tautou) who was on the express to Istanbul. The couple finally embrace to the strains of Billy Holiday's I'm a Fool to Want You. The idea of tracing a woman by scent is apt for Chanel No.5 because it was one of the first "parfums à sillage", perfumes that leave a wake. Unlike the floral-based scents of the time, Chanel's product contained chemical aldehydes that gave the jasmin-based essence its lingering effect. Only three people know the formula, according to Chanel.
[Bouquet]
Both Fontaine and Jeunet have been saying that Tautou is the very incarnation of Mademoislle Chanel and the actress agrees. She told L'Express this week that she had always identified with the pioneering couturière. They had similar rural backgrounds and physique. Chanel believed in independence for women, said Tautou. "That's a view that I share."
In the trade, they say that Chanel has made a smart move cashing on the big movie and using a star whose approachable style will attract younger women to its venerable scent. The Coco film opens in France on Wednesday and the commercial airs on May 5. And note: I managed to write the above without using the icon word.
 Regulars on this blog will be saddened to hear that Peter Kinsley has passed away. He died peacefully at his London home last weekend, Roger Wickham, his publisher, told me. He was 74.
We will miss Peter's contributions -- always rich, colourful and full of tales of the golden age of Fleet Street and his life on the road around Europe. In his last, on April 3, he recalled covering celebrities in the 1960s. He had a full life as a journalist in Britain, then around Mediterranean and as a novelist and memoir writer. Here's a typical taste of Peter's newspaper years, from his biography on his web site. --
Fleet Street was still a Street of Adventure, and Peter drank with Oscar Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, lunched with the Duke of Bedford in the Savoy Grill and at the Ritz Hotel, interviewed the singer Shirley Bassey in bed with her after she was held at gunpoint by a crazed lover (she told him to jump in because the room was cold as the central heating had been turned off during the police siege at the Cumberland Hotel). He met Augustus John and Lucien Freud and dined with Francis Bacon, interviewed Jean Cocteau and Alec Guinness, Trevor Howard, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Robert Mitchum, drank with William Somerset Maugham and swam in the pool in Monte Carlo with Princess Grace.
Peter had a long connection with France, first in military service at Fontainebleau in the 1950s and later living in the southern Languedoc region for 18 years in the 1980s and 90s. He wrote about that in The Valley of The Butterflies, the fourth volume of his memoirs. You can see more on http://www.peterkinsley.com And here's a link to Peter's wild Ibiza days.
The Paris transport authority has made a fool of itself by doctoring an innocent poster featuring Jacques Tati, the late film-maker and actor who played the beloved eccentric Monsieur Hulot.
Tati has been treated to an acclaimed show at the national Cinémathèque, which I mentioned last week. They chose for their poster an archetypal shot of Tati/Hulot from his 1958 classic Mon Oncle. The pipe was Hulot's trademark, along with the raincoat, and it is part of the collective memory for everyone who was around in the 50s and 60s. But it proved too much for the RATP, the transit authority, which refused to show it in the Métro and on its buses. The pipe might, they feared, appear to be an incitement to smoke and a breach of the anti-tobacco laws. [Watch the scene in trailer below - pure nostalgia for a vanished France],
Negotiations ensued with Macha Makeieff, the curator of the exhibition. She refused to let Metrobus, the RATP's advertising arm, erase the pipe. She suggested adding a notice that "This is not a pipe" -- a wink at René Magritte. The yellow child's windmill was a compromise. It still looks ridiculous though. Tati, who loved mocking the follies of modern life, would have been the first to laugh.
Tampering with art and free speech is taken seriously in France. The League of Human Rights is circulating a petition, according to Rue89 news. "It is necessary to mobilise people in the face of spreading political correctness which does not hesitate to deform works of national heritage," says the petition. "We demand that the SNCF (railways) and the RATP withdraw the posters... and that Monsieur Hulot's pipe appears.."
The transit authority obviously failed to correct other dangerous images in the Tati poster, as the media have been pointing out. Tati is riding a Solex moped (another icon, see December post) but not wearing a crash helmet and neither is the little boy. The old Solex breaches anti-pollution laws. The child is also not in an approved safety seat. And of course there is a worrying suggestion of pedophilia that should not be tolerated. Both Le Monde and Liberation have picked up that angle in their mockery of the RATP
Tati, who died in 1982, made only nine films but he left an impressive legacy. It's impossible to think of post-war France without Hulot, an old-world character baffled by modern fads and technology. Also, we are told that Tati never smoked the pipe. He just used it as a prop.
And note the moulinettes (windmills) in the opening of the film below.
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With a rent increase of that magnitude I'm not surprised Brentano's had to close. What is it about big institutional landlords that they feel the need to squeeze every last drop out of their tenants, and in doing so destroy the local ambiance? No doubt the space will be filled by yet another boring financial institution, though we will probably be spared another airline office!
This sort of thing destroyed Regent Street in London in the 70's and 80's, and the Champs more recently.
Having said that, and agreeing that bookshops are lovely places, English language ones tend to be in the centre, take a long time to get to if you live or work in the suburbs, often don't have the title you want, and seem to be very expensive.
I find walking and taking the Metro a physical strain these days, so, I'm afraid, I order on-line from my home PC.
Not as romantic, not supporting local traders etc. I know, but the world changes and time and convenience are at a premium.
Sad but true.
Posted by: Nick Moore | 4 Jul 2009 09:05:29
Maybe this is symptomatic of the demise of the Capital City...everywhere! Why have so many facilities all in one place in this high tech age?
Posted by: Edward Johns | 4 Jul 2009 08:25:07
Actually polls among French TV viewers indicate that what they like best about the Tour is the landscapes.
No wonder...
Posted by: Dominique II | 4 Jul 2009 08:10:26
We do so love the Tour de France in Australia. It reminds us that there are still warm places somewhere in the world even while we shiver. We love the glimpses of stunning French countryside during the race and, of course, of Paris at the finish. There is even a plucky underdog Australian rider, Cadell Evans, who has potential, for those who follow the race for the sport.
Posted by: Judith | 4 Jul 2009 04:55:11
re Judy Dench
Quite extraordinary, Dot.
I would have dropped everything to come to London for that.
I once tried to explain what this song meant to a friend in Chile who is a singer and fluent in english. She loved the sound of it, but really didn't have a clue what it meant. And I am not sure I helped her all that much. Context, which you get a little of in this clip, helps.
Posted by: azloon | 4 Jul 2009 01:29:12
Richard Jones
My god, man. you're saying you've been to Prescott and only now are telling me about it????? i do remember you mentioning being in Phoenix during 35C summer heat and getting blown out the door of the airport by the pressure of the air conditioning (a common arizona experience, i might say). but nothing about getting north of Phoenix, up to our little 'piece of heaven.'
i am sure whatever terrifying happened to you here that it must have been something dreadful, my poor dear.
would you care to share?
Posted by: azloon | 4 Jul 2009 01:04:28
RICHARD,
Maréchal de Mac Mahon would have said: "On en meurt ou on en reste idiot! Je le sais, j'y suis allé..."
Obviously, you left Prescott qwik enuf :). Poor Azloon!
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 3 Jul 2009 22:54:04
Thanks for pointing this out. No more cinemas on the Champs d'Elysées due to the rent bubble (well, a few, but it ain't what it used to was), and now idiots much much worse than Kerviel have extinguished a potentially historic point of intercultural exchange because they figured the rent was undervalued. We'll see how long the next tenant lasts, if and when they find one. Or was the concession simply bought by someone wishing the decline of Paris's ambiance and able to pay the cash?
Posted by: Maurice L. | 3 Jul 2009 22:48:44
TO DOT,
Indeed, indeed. And with that wonderful sonorous parlando that all great actors and actresses seem to be able to put to music even if they are clearly not singers.
Posted by: richard jones | 3 Jul 2009 19:22:39
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=232246&title=burka-ban
Another take on things.
Posted by: do-ré-mi | 3 Jul 2009 19:18:10
I was neither bullying you nor making jokes at your expense, DOM2.
Posted by: Rick | 3 Jul 2009 17:53:06
RICHARD JONES -
"We sometimes appear to be looking over the precipice of ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts….."
How apt that you should mention (all) this when there is a good worked example of democracy in action at local level coming to fruition in Henin-Beamont, Pas-de-Calais!
The PS 'Maire' and some of his associates are in jail for corruption; inter alia, they have doubled local taxes and aroused the ire of a small town that has been socialist since the year dot.
Now the FN are 'la tête' in a campaign which appears to have silenced Martine Aubry next door in Lille.
And, I'm willing to wager that, despite the importance of not having a "a shackled and complaisant judiciary", the doughty voting-townsfolk of Henin-Beamont will be more motivated by the tax hike than anything else.
Which of course is the sentiment of your penultimate paragraph (or is it the ultimate...).
Posted by: john gregory flinn | 3 Jul 2009 17:48:51
AZLOON -I'll match your Judy Collins and raise you a Judi Dench
This is what "Send in the clowns" was about - and this is the only version that really tells it like it is - and why.
Any others are insignificant by comparison IMO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rEhOnd8S-8&feature=related
Posted by: dot king | 3 Jul 2009 17:02:33
The previous post from Dot certainly makes one wonder about M. Sarkozy's temperament and emotional balance.
Posted by: richard jones | 3 Jul 2009 16:09:35
TO AZLOON,
Y'live in Prescott! The most terrifying place in the USA. I'z bin there I left qwik!
Posted by: richard jones | 3 Jul 2009 15:58:20
You see, RICK? I have the audacity to observe that in this case, the market hardly plays its halloweed benevolent part, and ask for a rational reconciliation of this factoid with the religion of the market; what I get instead is a dressing down.
Granted that's your personal style, but rest assured that's perfectly typical of the poseurs who call themselves economists these days. If they dared - and they will - they'd say "ultimately, starving is good for you".
Of course in that case the markets operate through real estate rental prices. Thank you, even in my spinster bedroom I have a TV. But that does not answer my question, does it. You in fact recognized that things were dire in France in Belgium...
oh but stupid me, it's because real estate brokers in thses countries are Socialists.
Posted by: Dominique II | 3 Jul 2009 15:30:53
As we're talking legal matters, judges and the like, I thought "outre-France" bloggers might like to know what happened to the philosophy teacher who tried to lighten an "official thuggery" situation with the words "Sarkozy, je te vois".
Well he got off. No case to answer*.
Here's what Maître Eolas writes about it
http://maitre-eolas.fr/
(and if anyone would like to read on, the articles preceding -scroll down to go backwards) on other subjects are wonderful reading, here's my favourite bit:
"Monsieur F. exercerait la noble profession de devin (bien qu'il le nie farouchement, et la suite des événements semble indiquer qu'il n'a guère de compétences dans ce domaine). Depuis la dissolution du Commissariat au Plan, cette profession ne peut plus être exercée qu'à titre libéral. Santé, travail, argent, retour de la femme aimée : il aurait pu travailler pour l'Élysée,"
extracted from the article that suggests that if Eric Besson didn't exist, he'd have to be invented . . :)
*Interviewed on today's radio news I heard our prof philo quote the article of law invoked against him and the stipulation was that he should be deprived of the instrument with which the offence was committed - therefore he expected to have his tongue ripped out "qu'on m'arrache la langue".
Posted by: dot king | 3 Jul 2009 15:23:41
'to endless streets chock full of garment retailers, opticians and bank branches' -- D2
I think that a great deal of it has to do with cheap, Chinese labor. The profit margins on apparel and eye glasses is so enormous, the retailers no longer look at business the way smaller merchants have to.
In my tiny hardware store, if you count every nut, bolt and washer, I have about ten thousand items. These items range in price from five cents to $150. I know that I have to make an average gross profit margin of 'x' and do 'y' amount of business each month to stay in business.
In modern clothiers and optical shops, as I understand it, they look at it in terms of having to sell three dresses or four pairs of eyeglasses each day to turn a profit.
I do not consider a business that can put its entire inventory into two suitcases a real business.
Banks are no longer the grand affairs they once were. Now they are simple offices with a few employees. Given the services that they actually provide in most branches, they could easily be replaced with dump bins on street corners for us to give them our money.
A friend of mine says that we are just old enough (mid forties) to remember when everything wasn't the same.
Shopping has now become a form of family entertainment, apparel has become disposable, and eyeglasses have become a fashion accessory. When I was younger, shopping was a big deal and one only did it when one needed things and one expected to buy things that would last.
It seems that the High street, like Wall Street, has become all about quick profits and not long term investment. The landlords raise the rents, the old businesses are pushed out, and the new age of retailers move in, and out, and in, and out....making it as long as they can and closing up and moving on when they can't. Many of the ones who appear to be boutiques are part of huge multinationals, and have stores all over the world.
John Kenneth Galbraith said that the real problem with monopoly was not the influence it had on pricing, but rather that it limited the amount of goods available in the marketplace. I begin to see his point. In pensée unique I used to see Morton's fork. Now I see Hobson's choice.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 3 Jul 2009 15:14:41
"re Neronic
was he playing with matches?"
AZLOON
Can't hold a candle to that one :)
Posted by: dot king | 3 Jul 2009 14:35:07
TO DOMINIQUE II and others,
It’s amazing to me after all the marvelous thinking on the topic of the ‘separation of powers’ from great thinkers like Montesquieu, Grotius, Locke, Madison and even, although a little indirectly from Max Weber that any modern politically aware and freely-informed society, like France, does not rise up when it sees this pillar of democracy being peed on. I like Dot am afeared of any society with a shackled and complaisant judiciary.
Having made my stance let me say that I think there are a series of exacerbations to the problem that need to be regulated and pretty quickly.
One is the ability to hold ‘multiple electoral office’. Here in Greece I have recently been arm-twisted into ‘helping’ a relative of my wife who sits in the Greek Voulis (equivalent of a French depute) become a member of the European Parliament, not only was his election a disfavour to both august bodies, as the man concerned has all the social skills of a rabid dog in a spa resort and the political acumen and wherewithal of an autistic tapeworm, but by this method one person holds too much power in too many different places and his ubiquity probably ensures the said person lacks time, skills and commitment in all or any of his spheres of power.
I see this multiple office thing is still true in France with M. Cazeneuve representing Cherbourg at both the local and national government levels.
I know France has passed laws to reduce the drill bit depth of multiple office but my more and more inchoate memory remembers legislation to ensure a deputy deputé when a member of l’Assemblée got re-assembled as a minister. I also remember dear Gaston ‘Dozy’ Deferre being M. le Maire de Marseille (and continuously for more than three decades too!), a deputé, a minister and (well he put them in place) president of the ‘conseil de region’ – Languedoc- Roussillon or Côte d’Azur I cannot remember, all at the same time or very close.
We sometimes appear to be looking over the precipice of ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts…...’
France needs to work this through. A chap or chapesse can be either Maire, Deputé or Euromember but not all together.
Greece has also spotted this tiresome problem in the last years. Mayors cannot be Voulis members and for the next Euro-election Voulis members need not apply without previous resignation. Greece has also decided to make voting protocols common at all levels, thus by 2011 everybody will go and vote (you can destroy the ballot papers (centimeters thick in Greece always) when you get there) at mayoral, Voulis and Euro elections.
France should also rectify this Black & Decker phenomena because of the impression it gives within the European Union, or a least the southern section that I live in. Let me try and explain. I have, including on this blog, vociferously ranted on about the ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU. I decided after a while rather than rant to do something about it. I applied to become a member of the Greek EESC (http://eesc.europa.eu/). I was refused – probably right – but was offered on the basis of my past endeavours, training and education a fees only (taxis and working meals) consultancy which I happily accepted.
Now a small digression, bear with me, Greece is the ‘old man of the EU’ in this region, the 10th member – (yes I know Spain and Portugal were barged out of the way for political expediency and France’s national interest), dating from 1981. Thus for new members like Cyprus, Bulgaria, Rumania, Slovenia (this last nation is pretty well organized already) the ‘we have this ‘Brussels’ problem, which Greece must have been through. How did Greece succeed? Is often asked. Thus an informal Balkan EESC group was already gelling (things like this don’t form in the Balkans and if they do you get civil war within a decade) when Malta, Spain, Portugal (these last come as a duo) and a four-dimensionally vacillating Italy asked to team up, mostly on the issue of immigration and the inequality of the associated EU law.
The EU law, vociferously supported by France, the new Holland, Belgium, a bit less vigourously by Germany and the old Eastern bloc, permits an immigrant to seek asylum wheresoever in the EU, but on refusal of said status they must return to the country where they set foot first.
A quick look at an atlas and any newspaper will show you that large scale emigration is taking place from the Magrebian fringe, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Sudan and ‘Palestine’. These people land on Greek islands (we currently have two small islands (Leros and Kasteloriso) where the local populations are outnumbered more than two to one by immigants), or on Malta & Gozo, or Lampedusa in Italian territory, or Andaluz or the Balearics in Spain. They all try and go to richer countries, who duly refuse them: France has the highest refusal level and until very recently UK had one of the highest acceptance levels: thus they are returned to places that very often have the least efficient resources and no real means of paying for the acquisition of resources to deal with these immigrants, either on their arrival (half-dead) or on their return to foirst footfall country. [Changes here just this day with an EU emolument, but read this argument nevertheless]. Thus immigration became a shared issue for the EESC’s of 9 out 27 members, 7 of whom could be deemed to be small and not very rich members.
A second issue also arose as we talked more and more, that of Lisbon and its associated treaty, notably the issue of national governments rather than the people making decisions on supranational issues, organization and accountability. Concern about the so-called ‘democracy deficit’ is alive and well and being nurtured where it should be with and by the people. The EU EESC in Brussels has received such levels of concern from all EU members that they have put in place an entity called ‘The Lisbon Treaty Observatory’. We 9 are contributing to that debate in a radical fashion by proposing a new constitution which takes large parts from three existing, enduring and engaging constitutions; the USA, Uruguay and Switzerland.
We have managed some work on bicameral legislative rather after the American fashion, but with the current Commissioners (God Bless Them) transitioning, initially, into the senior senator role for their country. We have also spent sometime on an independent judiciary, after the Uruguayan model (wherein the judge’s remit is more transparent and the period of office not limited by death). Obviously, as I described previously, we have not permitted multiple electoral office within any branch, nor across levels of government (local, national, supranational). We are to be finished by Christmas but progress has been wonderful. We have, as best we can, defined what decisions are made by the people in referenda style – under our Swiss mantle, Rome (well just maybe), Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon would not have been agreed without direct involvement from the people – and we have adopted Swiss rules, the referendum passes by a majority of the peoples’ votes AND by national majority (currently 14 countries). This system protects the smaller nations and makes hegemony from the big 5 (Germany, France, UK, Italy and maybe Spain) much more difficult.
I also took some parts of Max Weber’s ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’(what a wonderful Teutonic pun this title is) and am trying to show ‘my EESC’s’ through Weber’s theories on governmental hierarchies and networks why ‘leadership’ from unitary powers like France and UK is inherently dangerous to a ‘people’s EU’ and why unless their needless mutual vituperation stops the EU may well founder.
So I have covered a lot of ground but I suppose my whole point is that we must have every possible control, by the people and only the people, of political power expressed at local, national, supranational and global level, across any discipline judiciary, legislative or executive and posts and placements within any of those aforestated disciplines.
SO THERE!
Posted by: richard jones | 3 Jul 2009 14:28:55
In the mid-fifties Brentano's was was always crowded, often with the help of visiting American celebrities staying at ridiculously expensive nearby five star hotels. A humble foreign student could rub shoulders with the rich and catch ab always glimpse of their reading habits. The bookstore's assistants were courteous and well informed. Extensive browsing was allowed. What a pity to see the place go.
Posted by: christopher muir | 3 Jul 2009 11:41:22
There's a tiny bookshop on the Left Bank called the Canadian Bookshop (or something that way), in narrow Rue de la Parcheminerie (a lane linking touristic Rue de la Harpe to Rue Saint Jacques), between metro stations Cluny and St Michel.
The owner is a really nice man who'll be happy to give you plenty of advice.
You won't always find a precise reference here, though ; it's more a place to spend time and leaving with a book you had never heard of.
Posted by: Thomas V | 3 Jul 2009 11:38:08
LEX (sorry to everyone for the "bounce" off-topic) - the other day I bought a diet supplement for my dog against skin irritation (it is VERY hot here this summer and he seems to be scratching terrible well, sir - despite the fact that there's so much anti-flea stuff on him that he must be a sort of mobile toxic waste dump, poor thing).
The supplement comes in little sachets and it says on the box that it is "naturellement appétisant" and should be mixed with the meal.
César loves it, goes down with a "huge gallollop", but it smells just like something what Tiggers might like best :)
But it seems to work, main thing.
Posted by: dot king | 3 Jul 2009 11:22:28
I haven't noticed it mentioned anywhere, that the inspectors who inspect the planes on the ground are neither Airbus, nor even the airline company in question (whichever accident we are discussing, including all, past and present) but these are carried out by private specialist companies who have usually only the time to inspect the plane during the precise time of its stopover. These companies claim they never have the time to do a thorough check.
Time is money, ladies and gentlemen, time is money.
Concerning the comparison between air and road safety, it's true that you are more likely to survive even a bad car smash than any kind of plane crash, but survival often means a considerable change in life quality - unless you come out with minor or lesser injuries, you are quite likely to have to deal with severe physical disability and whatever psychological sequences you're left with.
Posted by: dot king | 3 Jul 2009 11:13:18
My guess is that it will be replaced by a Seattle based franchise selling coffee-flavoured water.
Progress I guess.
Posted by: Julio | 3 Jul 2009 10:43:39
‘Could an economist of the Chicago persuasion explain to me how that is to the benefit of everyone, as we are ordered to believe?’
Well, DOM2, you’re not looking for a bracing argument on a lazy Friday, are you? I’d have thought one can hold economists – Sunni, Shia, United Reformed, Chicagoan, or Latterday Wall Street – responsible for many of the world’s woes. But not the rental value of city centre property... in the Francosphere. Poor Belgo-France, if what you say is true...
As a recent book puts it: ‘Debt is widely perceived as a little sinful. France’s very backward banking system has never really come round to credit’. France’s failing here lies in a combination of rustic fearfulness and financial sophistication (total absence of).
Comparisons are rather odious, but don’t you think your pose is just a bit like the wise virgin’s. No not the one in the Bible...
This virgin is the kind who, having made a thorough risk-assessment of the dangers involved in air-, road-, rail-, and pedestrian-travel, arrives -- with perfectly rational deductive force -- at one inescapable conclusion.
Yes, it would be best to stay in bed. Alone.
Posted by: Rick | 3 Jul 2009 10:30:27
TO M. le Baron de Marais et Hackett,
I know Airbus is European, UK makes the wings, a distant Cypriot relative of mine makes the seats in Germany, but on the other hand, to be fair, other European countries have backed out of the venture largely because of the dirigiste management (ex-politicos) put in place by the major shareholder - France etc., etc.. But, on this basis, France more and more portrays Airbus as being of France alone, thus M. Hackett should not be blamed for his subscriptive view.
Posted by: richard jones | 3 Jul 2009 10:30:00
is this "retaliation" :) for last year's closing of the Librairie Française in NYC?
Sorry "Jason", you'll now have to buy English books via Amazon!
Posted by: Pepper | 3 Jul 2009 10:28:57
Dada
Judy Collins famously 'covered' that song on her album, 'Wildflowers,' perhaps the first mass exposure of Brel to Americans (in the 1960s).
Also on that album, "Send in the Clowns,' music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Brel and Sondheim were/are among the greatest composer/lyricists of latter half of the 20th century (Sondheim lives on). Perhaps the best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5yG1Dy5b4A
The emotional tone of the two songs is remarkably similar.
Posted by: azloon | 3 Jul 2009 10:18:25
Lex
I have never understood how the Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center stayed in business.
It didn't. Next Sept the show is over
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/arts/livres/200906/06/01-863674-le-francais-a-new-york-fin-dun-chapitre.php
"La principale raison? L'augmentation vertigineuse du prix du bail. «Le loyer est énorme ici. On payait déjà 1000$ par jour et là, le nouveau bail va passer à 1 million de dollars par année», précise Emanuel Molho assis dans son bureau exigu du sous-sol."
Bookstores will follow the same route as travel agencies. That's to say bite the dust!
Posted by: rocket | 3 Jul 2009 09:18:06
Funny how some posters (like EVE but she's not alone by far) are pontificating that France (and/or Europe) is a newcomer to electronics, airplane building et cetera.
The good ole US of A is more and more like the USSR of yore, where everything had been invented by Academician Popov.
Brainwashing will do that to people, of course.
Posted by: Dominique II | 3 Jul 2009 08:48:16
As an aside, let's observe that the free market is giving birth (not only in Paris) to endless streets chock full of garment retailers, opticians and bank branches, to the exclusion of convenience shops, bookstores (who needs them, right) and other life-bringing joints.
Could an economist of the Chicago persuasion explain to me how that is to the benefit of everyone, as we are ordered to believe?
Posted by: Dominique II | 3 Jul 2009 08:40:45
I fail to see any connection between 'la tendre guerre' and mediaeval headgear. Irrelevant, unless you can show otherwise, DADA.
Posted by: Rick | 3 Jul 2009 07:47:51
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1DpjXQUDsI
Posted by: dada | 3 Jul 2009 00:44:16
This isn't the first time a world-wide financial collapse has affected Brentano's. The company went bankrupt during the Depression, only to be rescued by Stanton Griffis, a wealthy book lover, who along with Arthur Kroch, and later with his son, operated the downsized chain of stores. The son sold it to a media company in 1962.
For the Griffis's, it was labor of love, tho the chain did become modestly profitable for a spell. And this devotion has been the life force of most bookstores going back to Gutenberg. Interestingly, even Brentano's since its early days was kept afloat by its sales of bestsellers, and greeting cards. Revenues from these allowed the less financially viable side of the business -- obscure books by obscure authors, the books we sometimes 'just have to have' -- to exist.
The Chicago branch of Bretano's, where my father and his journalist friends loved to hang out (he took me there occasionally when i was quite young), was taken over by Kroch in 1933, and operated separately as Kroch's and Brentano's. It was famous for its highly erudite sales people who could be counted on to answer the most obscure of questions about literature. The Chicago store was on North Michigan Avenue (Boule Miche -- "Bool Meesh" -- it was called in tribute to it's French pretensions), across the street from the Chicago Tribune.
it is fitting that the 'last hurrah' of this once vibrant institution should be in France, a reader and thinkers's paradise, where the past, at least selectively, is a living thing and guarded carefully. the rest of the world has long since given up on this sort of romantic sentiment, and i guess it's going to take BNP to pound it out of the French.
Imagine Arthur Brentano's reaction had he been told that in his grandchildren's lifetime every word ever written by man (well, ok, a lot of them) would be available with the touch of a typewriter keypad. sometimes it's good not to know what the future holds.
Posted by: azloon | 3 Jul 2009 00:12:54
Today, an excellent paper in LeMonde from Eva Jolly, past Juge d'Instruction and now Eurodeputy.
http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/07/02/de-la-fable-de-l-attentat-de-karachi-par-eva-joly_1214424_3232.html#ens_id=1209474
Posted by: Francois D | 2 Jul 2009 23:29:58
Landing at Moroni
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCG3tjxPRTQ
Posted by: Francois D | 2 Jul 2009 23:07:47
My family loves The Red Wheelbarrow. We visit (and buy) whenever we are in Paris. They are extremely accomodating and great with kids, as well has having a superior collection for adults.
Posted by: Howard Hyde | 2 Jul 2009 21:15:22
I hate shopping online for books. It is so impersonal. The greatest part of the pleasure is browsing. Every book looks different, feels different, smells different. It's a pity when the smaller bookstores go out of business. They may not offer as many discounts as the big stores but they don't keep pushing the "Oprah" books either.
Posted by: Daisy | 2 Jul 2009 21:08:09
Robert Marchenoir,
"On a related topic, would anyone here know about a good English-language library in Paris ?"
--> I know plenty :
amazon.com
fnac.com
abebooks.co.uk
etc...
same in german and any other language.
Posted by: Dominique | 2 Jul 2009 20:52:56
As times go by, piece by piece goes the soul of a city: gone with the rent....
Posted by: Pierre | 2 Jul 2009 20:51:10
Both airbuses and boeings have long, distinguished flying records. It always has been - and always will be - more about the quality of maintenance by the airline than the build of the aircraft with these two manufacturers.
PS. The BA 777 did not go down because of any flaw in Boeing's design. It was actually a flawed Rolls Royce engine - non RR engined planes are not subject to this failure. So, take it up with your local RR agent...
Posted by: Dave | 2 Jul 2009 20:17:49
Lex..
In answer to your question about storms, and whether they have the ability to "come up under them suddenly", the short answer is yes, but there is more. Thunderstorms can grow quite rapidly; several thousand feet per minute is not uncommon and 5-6000 fpm is not unheard of. When an aircraft is flying in an area of convective activity the flight crew would be utilizing their weather RADAR to, not only determine the best route around the strongest storms (cells), but at what height the cells currently are. One can commit to a route after dutifully examining the best options, only to find themselves in a pickle when they arrive, because the cell has grown more rapidly than first determined. It takes a fair amount of practice to get it right. With that said, normally one would not choose to fly over a cell, unless they were sure to clear the top by several thousand feet, or all other options were exhausted.
The stick shaker and the overspeed clacker mentioned in my earlier post, although noisy, are very much a welcome friend to the pilot. It's very helpful to to have audible and tactile references to the various flight envelopes, to more rapidly determine a corrective action.
Regards,
TD
.
Posted by: Tom Dunlop | 2 Jul 2009 19:51:42
Condoleances to all the families & friends of these people. It's both tragic accidents which are luckily rare.
But I somewhat question the percentage you are giving, because unlike a plane, you'd have to take into account that more people walk & drive than they are likely to fly (on their own or not). The day everyone is the owner of a flying object as a mode of transportation on the scale of car ownership today, there's going to be many more accidents.
I agree that compared to the number of planes in the air, there are very few accidents. That's something we should be happy about.
There's always a risk when you travel anyway. Not just by airplane. I find it silly all these people saying how they'd never fly again and all that...because it's only a question of destiny in the end. Everyone dies one way or another.
I hope that they do find the cause of these accidents, because it will help making aviation safer.
Fly safe Charles :)
Posted by: Anne | 2 Jul 2009 19:29:48
I have never understood how the Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center stayed in business. It seems such an odd location for a niche business, unless tourism was the bulk of their trade. It would seem to me that they are a destination, and they could be anywhere in midtown Manhattan, or even lower Manhattan if they were located close to a subway stop.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 2 Jul 2009 19:17:21
oh what a pity.
Here in London, there's an exodus from the centre as well, many shops (especially bookshops) have closed down.
Amazon is doing extremely well, I must say I'm a fan. I like FNAC too.
Posted by: Anne | 2 Jul 2009 19:16:52
A neat parallel to impending closure of the Librairie de France at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Rent rise cited there as well, though surely Amazon and the like play a role.
There was some expectation that Sarkozy would speak up for the bastion of French culture in the US. Nobody seems to be waiting for Obama to intervene on Brentano's behalf, though.
[Good point. I used to frequent the Rockefeller store when I lived in NY. The Times office was nearby too, on W47th. CB]
Posted by: tf | 2 Jul 2009 18:22:15
"I've always avoided Airbus planes.
Kind of a "me too" industry. Not indigenous or home-grown like the American industry. I won't fly on an Airbus, that started in the eighties"
Tim. You're either an American or a Boeing pilot. Am I wrong? What do you have against International Consortiums? It's completely illogical to bias your travelling preferences in Boeing's favour when Airbus - since the 80's (as you put it)- has clearly proven it's worth as a manufacturer of ultra-safe aircraft. Airbus now outsells Boeing aircraft. Give me one Airbus accident in the last 20 years whereby the sole causal factor was down to the aircraft design. You can't honestly tell the forum that every time you step onto a Boeing 777 you don't think about the possibility of it (Dual engine failure) happening again. What measures have been taken by British Airways to ensure it doesnt happen again? Increasing thrust before descending...flying lower? Stabs in the dark wouldn't you say? And how many lives were endangered whilst authorities allowed 737's to fly whilst the NTSB was fruitlessly grappling with the rudder hard-over accidents. Exactly what do you base your anti-Airbus attitude on?
Posted by: James Read | 2 Jul 2009 17:57:02
Always sad when a bookshop goes under. But frankly, their selection has been dreadful for quiet some time now. The literature section was an embarrassment, along with most other sections -- excluding thrillers/bestsellers. It was a long, slow decline.
Village Voice and Galignani have always had a far superior selection: thoughtful and hand-picked with an eye to quality.
Posted by: cricket | 2 Jul 2009 17:37:44
Charles Bremner wrote: "The Times is about to do so too -- after an extraordinary two centuries. We're not closing, just moving, but that's another story to which I shall return."
Where are you moving to exactly? To the suburbs? That might change you (and your colleagues') perspective on Greater Paris.
[haha, John. It's not impossible. We're looking for premises somewhere much less expensive. CB]
Posted by: John | 2 Jul 2009 17:02:25