You might have heard that Tony Musulin, France's latest folk hero, has lost a little of his stardom. Musulin, 37, became a celebrity last weekend after pulling off what looked like the perfect heist, to use the Hollywood term. He drove away with an armoured van full of 11 million euros in cash and disappeared. Police have now found 9.5 million, packed into a lock-up parking bay, so Musulin does not have such a fortune to enjoy (please insert the appropriate "alleged to have" throughout this narrative).
The driver, employed by the Loomis security company, was in the three-man crew of the van that was delivering the unrecorded notes to banks and cash machines around Lyons. While the other two were visiting an office, he took off. Police found the empty van parked a few streets away within three hours.
Musulin, whose parents came from former Yugoslavia, planned his operation well. He had worked for Loomis for a decade and had a spotless record. He exploited flaws in the security system. He had cleaned out his bank accounts and his apartment before disappearing. Even Xavier Richard, the Lyons prosecutor, was impressed. He noted that even if he was caught, Musulin could only get a maximum three year prison term because his non-violent offence was considered to be "theft of an employer's property." That means a likely 18 months behind bars. Police also found that Musulin had a shady private existence. Last spring, he bought a Ferrari for over 100,000 euros although he earned less than 2,000 euros a month.
Musulin won instant fame for painlessly separating bankers from their money. Unlike the last hero, Jérôme Kerviel, who lost five billion euros trading for Société Générale, Musulin seemed to have got to keep the cash. The inevitable Facebook entries have drawn two or three thousand fans and T-shirts are on sale on the net. "The World is Yours: Tony Best Driver 2009" says one page that has been drawing a steady flow.
Police assumed that Musulin was working alone and had probably skipped to the Balkans. They now think that he may be closer to home -- and that he is not such a genius. For someone admired as an Ocean's 11-style super-thief, he committed some basic errors. He rented the garage under a friend's name, wearing no disguise. He also hired a Renault Kangoo van three weeks ago under his own identity then used it to transfer the 49 bags of loot to the garage [that's the nine million in the picture].
The prosecutor said last night that he was still convinced that Musulin acted alone. They think he may be in Switzerland or Italy, which are not far from Lyons.
[Tuesday update: This is an amended version of earlier post to reflect later developments. Sarko wasn't there on the 9th after all, it seems]
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Nicolas Sarkozy is being challenged today over the truth of his claim to have been in Berlin on November 9 1989 to witness the fall of the wall, and even help knock it down with a pick[end of last post].
The President, who is in Berlin today,recalled his dash to the city on his Facebook site yesterday. There is also a picture of the 34-year-old Sarko chipping away at the wall. Sarkozy was Mayor of Neuilly and a deputy leader of Jacques Chirac's RPR party at the time. .
"On the morning of the 9th of November, we were were following news from Berlin that seemed to announce change in the divided capital of Germany," Sarkozy says. "Alain Juppé and I decided... to leave Paris to take part in the event which was taking shape. When we arrived in West Berlin, we went straight to the Brandenburg gate where an enthusiastic crowd was already gathered on news of the probable opening of the wall.."
Along with Alain Juppé and François Fillon, who is now Prime Minister, they went to Check Point Charlie to cross into the east and look at the wall. "We were able to take a few shots at it with a pick. Around us families were gathered to demolish the concrete.."
But there were immediate claims that Sarkozy could not have been in Berlin that day. He was in France marking the anniversary of the death of Charles de Gaulle, according to today's reports. Alain Auffray, the Berlin correspondent of Libération at the time, says on his blog that the account of the November 9 excitement in west Berlin is "total fantasy".
On the morning of November 9, there was no news from Berlin of an imminent opening of the wall, he says. It was only at 11 pm that east Berliners, gathered at a frontier post, began entering the west, he says. "On my word as a witness, there was no advance warning,"Auffray writes.
Auffray kindly blames an over-enthusiastic internet scribe in the President's office for exaggerating his role as witness to the fall of the wall. But the Elysée palace is sticking by its story and Fillon says that he did indeed bump into Sarkozy on the night of November 9. Other accounts contradict this. Sarkozy, we are told, took a private plane to Berlin for an overnight visit along with Juppé and two other Gaullists. He then went back for another visit on November 16.
The story sounds fishy. Various former officials, roped in to stand up Sarko's tale, have conflicting versions. Confusion remains because of the details Sarkozy recounts. His travelling companion Juppé now says that he cannot recall the date of their visit. In a book in 1993, he only talked of a visit on the 16th November 1989. Juppé today modified his own blog entry on the subject, saying that it was "the 9th or several days later, my memory is not precise about the exact date." All a bit of a storm in a tea-cup, but Juppé must be one of the few people who do not remember what they were doing on the day the wall came down.
The affair has prompted a little fun. Sarkozy was on the moon in July 1969, and so on. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who still wants to be president, had her own dig. "Manifestement, Nicolas Sarkozy n'était pas à Berlin le 9 novembre. Donc il n'a pas dit la vérité. Heureusement qu'il n'a pas prétendu être là le jour de la prise de la Bastille, parce que je ne sais pas comment il s'en serait sorti!"
Obviously, Nicolas Sarkozy was not in Berlin on November 9. So he has not told the truth. It's lucky that he didn't claim to be there the day the Bastille was taken, because I don't know how he would have got out of it."
Below: Plantu of le Monde. Sarkozy tells Gorbachev: "I remember, I was tapping with my little pick. Then Snow-White arrived. And there she is..."
If you wanted to parody a Carla Bruni website it would be hard to do better than the real thing which has just opened. The new showcase for the chanteuse-supermodel looks like a caricature of the persona which President Sarkozy's image minders have shaped for the new première dame since their marriage early last year.
Opened yesterday to great fanfare, carlabrunisarkosy.org has been unable to keep up with demand. It froze for much of the day, but now works in sticky fashion.
In impeccable pastel tones, Bruni is cast as a caring, free-spirited but demure artiste and patroness of noble causes. Portraits of Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suukyi, the Burmese opposition leader, are among the heros in Carla's gallery. Her other acquaintances, such as the Obamas and Sarah Brown, the wife of the British Prime Minister, appear in rather odd line drawings. The home page is topped by an interview with Jean-Paul Gaultier, the fashion designer.
A gushing Paris Match-style biography notes that the single name Carla now suffices to identify the French first lady the world over.
"Born at the beginning of the women’s liberation movement, she questions the contradictions that afflict all self-assured people in this period," it says.(What does that that mean ? She lives with one of the world's most self-assured men). Then they drag in that good old tabloid invention, "a close friend", who notes: “She may not have been a suffragette or invented the miniskirt, but she is the very epitome of the modern woman in the way she approaches the world”,
The first lady's hectic first two years with the President are sketched thus:
What memories will France’s current First Lady take away with her? Her state visit to the UK making her title official? Her trip to Burkina Faso after taking up her functions as ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS? The shot fired just a few metres away at Tel-Aviv airport on leaving Israel? This exposure to the cameras in life and death situations is unavoidable for anyone who has to face history with a cool head and a smile on their lips.
The site -- much slicker than Ségolène Royal's disastrous new internet base -- is meant to publicise Bruni's charity work in France and her post as ambassador for the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
It comes in French and English versions -- with a few adjustments in the translation. For example, Bruni was "born into a wealthy family of Italian industrialists" in the English one, but "into a rich family" in the French. Bruni's showbiz friends get a mention. There are links to Bob Dylan, Cindy Lauper and the Rolling Stones, to whose leader she was once especially close.
An "A to Z" of Carla mixes causes and first lady-like pursuits with some light nods to themes that have not helped her husband. For example, "Bling bling", the showy style which Sarkozy brought to the presidency, is dismissed as an invention of the media. It gets a mention above Sarah Brown, wife of Britain's Prime Minister.
The delicate, sugary site, with its emphasis on fashion and hip causes, fits the mission that the Elysée Palace has conferred on Bruni -- that of antidote to her brash, combative husband. Occasional web visitors may find it pleasant enough. The trouble is that bland corporate-style communication of this type does not work in a medium which prizes spontaneity and sharpness. Reaction on the French web to the Bruni site today has been contempt. "Nauseating...propaganda...they take us for fools..." was one of the more caustic lines.
Those wishing to visit Carla Bruni the singer can always go to her old site, carlabruni.com .
Super Sarko is also benefiting from a web remake. Under the direction of Nicolas Princen, its 25-year-old manager, the presidential site has loosened up a little. This week they are featuring a "making of" video from behind the scenes of a television interview with Sarkozy in New York last month. It neglected to include the scene in which Sarkozy tore a strip off Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, in front of the television crews. Sarkozy's official Facebook entry is being freshened and a Twitter account has been opened for the President's visit to the Copenhagen environment summit in December. Twittering is still not deemed presidential activity, so staff will be pecking out the copy.
Ségolène Royal, the Socialist runner-up in the last Presidential election, gets flakier by the day. Followers still see her semi-mystical persona as the best hope for the self-destructing French opposition. Others see her as a fading diva. She did little to help herself this week with a revamped internet site.
Hoots of laughter greeted the launch on Tuesday of the new-look home of Désirs d'Avenir, her personal brand (screen grab above). Cheesy and old-fashioned, it looked like something invented by a cult. "Is Ségo in a relationship with Tom Cruise?" wondered one commentator. Another called it "digital suicide". "It's like a leap 10 years into the past," said Rue89.com. Spoofs like this appeared [thanks DODO].
Royal's team has scrambled to undo the damage, producing a makeshift replacement which you will find now on desirsdavenir.com . According to L'Express magazine, the amateurish site was put together by André Hadjez, Royal's new companion [below in picture]. A 40,000 euro bill for building it was sent to Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint-Laurent, who is Royal's main source of finance, said L'Express. People are wondering what has happened to Royal because she used the net so skilfully to beat her Socialist rivals in 2006 and win the nomination to take on Nicolas Sarkozy.
Royal is not going to leave the scene. She is certain that her destiny is to unseat Sarko in 2012 and she is manoeuvering flat out to undermine Martine Aubry, who won the party leadership last November. The latest episode is a book by two journalists claiming that Aubry won the leadership by fraud.
It must be a little galling for Royal to see that some polls now put her behind François Hollande, the uncharismatic last party leader who is the father of their four children. Coming soon: Paris Match is to appear in court for publishing this cover picture of Royal and Hadjez, who is in the property and board game business, on holiday together.
Back on the eternal theme of franglais, here is the latest effort by the French state to fight off the American-English invasion from le web, or rather...la toile.
The Ministry of Culture's language agency, or police as we Anglo-Saxons usually call them, have issued a glossary of indigenous terms to replace the jargon that French IT people and civilian internautes are so quick to embrace. All employees of the state -- which means over a quarter of the work force -- are legally obliged to use these terms at work and in public communications rather than the English original.
You must say un fouineur (and presumably also une fouineuse) and not hacker. You are put on hold by un numéro d’assistance or d'urgence and not un hotline. "These new French terms are not yet widespread," says the DGLF, the language directorate. "The more people use them, the more easily they will enter usage and the quicker they will become familiar and seem always to have existed."
That may sound a little Orwellian but, as we have seen before, the rear-guard language campaign of recent decades has had some success. Over the years, clever French coinages have driven out some English terms and even improved on them. Ordinateur, invented by an IBM engineer in the 1950s, prevented France joining the computer bandwagon. Ordinateur was good because it contains the Latin religious sense of Creator (someone who ordains).
Informatique covers computing and Information Technology more succinctly than anything in English. Logiciel is more elegant than software, though I've noticed people reverting to the English because it sounds cooler. However the state-ordered courriel has not replaced email (known just as mail or even mèl) despite its use in state radio and television and media such as Le Monde.
The language guardians are up against fashion. The English (usually American) terms sound more hip even when there are perfectly good old French words for the same thing. Worm is used though ver is the same thing. The French, with its more abstract -- and elegant -- construction, comes over as a little quaint. It is also usually longer, which is the killer. There is little chance that people will adopt logiciel espion instead of spyware, message incendiaire instead of flame or canular instead of hoax.
The language authority reminded its civil service audience that failure to use French risks widening the fracture numérique (digital divide) which separates the initiated from the less privileged. "Let us not forget: equal rights and opportunity are a function of language [passent par la langue]."
The morale of the language troops was somewhat undermined earlier this month by their own boss, Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister. Talking at a political gathering, Mitterrand said that it was "time to stop this ridiculous anti-Americanism". "It is not because one eats Big Macs and wears jeans, that one cannot read Paul Valéry." Maybe, but I wish they would ban the latest vogue import -- le buzz. It is impossible to switch on any media without hearing someone going on about le dernier buzz, usually involving un pipole* of some kind.
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* a celebrity, derived originally from People magazine
Complete glossary from the language agency (.pdf) here
The video below has just blown up in the face of Brice Hortefeux, the French Interior Minister and close friend of President Sarkozy. In it, Hortefeux is bantering with Amin, a young party activist of Algerian origin from Sarkozy's UMP party. Apparently talking about France's north African immigrant population, the minister cracks a joke: “When there’s one that’s all right. It’s when there are a lot of them that there are problems.” [more of the exchange below]
That was enough to trigger a full-scale outcry from the Socialist opposition, anti-racist groups, editorialists and so on. The exchange, which has turned into a YouTube hit, is the top national news item this morning. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Madonna, has just called for Hortefeux's resignation.
Hortefeux has come up with clumsy attempts to extract himself. He was, he claimed, not talking about Arabs, but talking about Auvergnats, people from the Auvergne, because both he Amin hail from the central France region.
The mini-scandal will blow over, but it it is damaging because it plays to the racist reputation that clings to Hortefeux from his days as Sarkozy's first minister for Immigration and National Identity. It also reinforces the ugly image that has clung to Sarkozy's administration despite his appointment of ministers from the immigrant banlieues. Before the new incident, Rachida Dati and other former Sarkozy appointees from the minorities had complained that Hortefeux was condescending towards them.
Since becoming Interior Minister, which includes the job of chief of police, in the summer, Hortefeux has been trying to shed his sulphurous image. To show he meant business, last month he sacked a prefect -- top state official -- for complaining that the chaotic security measures at Orly airport were "like being in Africa". The black personnel complained to the police. Today the dismissed prefect, Paul Girot de Langlade, was crowing on the radio. "I hope he joins me soon."
Amin is insisting that he did not feel insulted or "disrespected" by the minister's banter. Hortefeux says that he said nothing about anyone's north African origins. The fuss is being overplayed, but his explanation does not wash. The exchange in the video tells you about the old-fashioned attitude in sections of the the UMP -- formerly the Gaullist -- party towards the underclass descended from immigrants from the former colonies.
A woman introduces Hortefeux to Amin, saying "he eats pig and drinks beer".
Hortefeux jokes: "So he doesn't fit the stereotype at all." [Il ne correspond pas du tout au prototype, alors]
Get ready for some Anglo-Saxon gloating. We hear today that France is giving up its four-year struggle to keep the barbarians of Google from Gallic gates, at least in their literary form.
"Google has won", said the headline in La Tribune, a business daily. It reported that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) -- the national library -- is on the verge of a deal under which Google will add its stocks to its controversial digital library.
The pact will mark a big climb-down because the BNF led the counter-attack that was noisily launched by President Chirac in early 2005 against what France saw as a dangerous new American imperialism. That spring, Paris mustered continental backing for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
According to Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the BNF chief at the time, Europe's literary and cultural heritage was under digital threat from les Anglo-Saxons. France faced the prospect of being force-fed with such things as the biased English-language version of its revolution in which "valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man", said Jeanneney (he has since lost his job).
Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender today: "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Some readers joined the lament. "The harm is done, now that the European mountain gave birth to a mouse," wrote a patriotic book-lover called Thierry. However the main reaction from France has not been shock and horror, just a virtual shrug.
Economics explain the shift, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the BNF, which joins 29 other major world libraries in opening its shelves to Google's project (including Oxford's Bodleian). France provides only five million euros a year for digitizing books. This is done by Gallica, the national digital library. Yet the BNF needs up to 80 million euros just for its works from the Third Republic era (1870 to 1940), said Bruckmann. "We will not stop our own digitizing programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?"
Google scans almost free and it has so far added some 10 million works to its Books search base, the great majority of them out of copyright. These can be read free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
After a long battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues, especially in Europe. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several grounds, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.
In France, publishers and booksellers are worried about the forthcoming e-book revolution. Strict laws on pricing have helped 12,000 bookshops survive while small sellers in many countries have been driven out by the big chains. It is doubtful whether the French protection rules can be applied to electronically-delivered books.Amazon isn’t launching its Kindle in France until next year and Google's pay book service is still some way off. Before the Americans move in, the French industry wants to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the number two national publisher, called in la Tribune today for the circling of French wagons before Amazon and Google come galloping over the horizon.
[Top picture, the Richelieu reading room in the old National Library.]
The Paris bike-share scheme, has marked its second birthday this week. As we've seen here before, the "vélib" has been an extraordinary success. But there is one big blight -- the mindless vandalism and thieving that has claimed about 16,000 of the bikes so far.
The sturdy grey bicyclettes have been used 54 million times and they have over the past year been installed beyond the périphérique with 300 stations in neighbouring suburbs. The bikes have lightened up the traffic in some areas and provided great alternative transport, especially in the summer. I use two a day, year round, to go the 3/4 mile to the gym in the early morning, I use them sometimes at night and also to go to the office at weekends -- weekdays are too dangerous. They are quick to pick up with a swipe card and drop off and they cost nothing beyond the annual 29 euro subscription if you use them for less than half an hour at a time.
Six riders have been killed, which is not extraordinary given the dangers of Paris traffic and the total of 23,000 vélibs on the street. There are now 1,750 bike ranks around the city and suburbs. The depressing thing is the way that people delight in stealing and trashing them. JC Decaux, the company that supplies the service, has been taken aback by the losses. An astonishing 8,000 have been stolen, with the great majority never recovered. A lot are said to have been simply thrown into the Seine for a laugh. Another 8,000 have been damaged beyond repair. At 400 euros per bike that's expensive.
Mayor Delanoe recently plastered the city with the above poster, drawn by Cabu, a well-known cartoonist. The playful message about vélibs not being able to defend themselves is woefully weak given the viciousness of the attacks on the machines. The bikes are supposed to be damage-resistant but every morning several on the ranks that I use bear the marks of torture. People knife the tyres, rip off the chains and the steel panniers and they twist their frames by bending them on the dock. Some post their handiwork on the internet, on dedicated blogs and on Youtube. [Picture: mangled vélib] 
Why do the vélibs attract such treatment ? Sociologists have been explaining. For some people, smashing vélibs is a lark because the bikes are a symbol of the bourgeois-bohème class, the comfortable, educated young who are among their biggest users, say the experts. As well as envy, there is also the pleasure in destroying public property as an act of contempt for authority. Bruno Martzloff, a sociologist who specializes in urban mobility, tells Libération today: "The destruction cannot be understood separately from the cars that are torched or the theft of personal bikes. They convey a reaction against the problems of mobility in general." I don't really know what that means.
The bike company says that the vandals fail to understand that the bikes are their own property. "We have to make people sensitive about the notion of the collective," said JC Decaux. That's a pretty tall order, but they are no doubt right. The anti-vélib crowd do not treat the scheme as their own, but rather the symbol of something alien, ridiculous, hostile and capitalist. You only have to dip into the blogosphere to see the bile which they stir. One of the most reasonable of the hostile sites is velib-pourri.com (which means rotten velib). People use it mainly to grip about the flaws, such as charging people for bikes that have already been returned.
This post will no doubt attract the obvious comment that vélib vandalism reflects something unpleasant in the French, and especially Parisian, character. It's true that JC Decaux's similar -- and older -- scheme in Lyons suffers nothing like the destruction in Paris. But the experts say you can't go by stereotypes. The worst vandalism against self-service bikes apparently takes place in law-abiding Norway, while they are treated relatively well in free-wheeling, Latin Barcelona.
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]
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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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]
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."
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.
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]
Violence is in the air in France thanks to a coincidence of news events. They are not particularly related but, magnified by the media, they are anxiogène, to use a useful French word -- they breed anxiety. They are also cause for political discomfort.
The "boss-napping" I wrote about on Tuesday is an element. Since then, the overnight detention yesterday of four executives -- three of them British -- at a plant owned by a British firm has strengthened worries in the government over the spread of physical coercion against employers.
Setting the tone for the week were the ugly riots at the weekend -- led by demonstrators against the Nato summit in Strasbourg [below] and by Corsican nationalists in the port city of Bastia. In both there was serious arson as well as fierce battles between les casseurs -- smashers -- and the Robo-Cop-style officers of France's CRS and Gendarmerie riot police. Seventy policemen were injured in the Bastia fighting, three seriously.
As a result, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, wants to ban hoods and masks from demonstrations. These, she said, are always worn by the thugs who are intent on violence, never peaceful protesters. The proposal prompted predictable indignation this morning over interference with the right to demonstrate. Alliot-Marie was also mocked for trying to dictate people's dress. Germany outlawed head cover in demonstrations some time ago.
Hoods were in evidence in the week's most shocking episode: a six-minute video of four youths robbing and badly beating a young man in a bus in north-central Paris [picture at top. Victim with scarf just before attack]. They punched passengers who intervened, while the driver sat impassive throughout . The security camera video, from an incident last December, was put on Facebook by a police officer, and picked up by all the media. Extracts made the TV news but the police are trying to remove it from the net. You can still watch it here but beware, it's disturbing.
The police officer is likely to be charged for disseminating the video, which is circulating on far-right sites as an example of the ultra-violence committed by kids from the immigrant ghettos. The non-white attackers insult their victim as "sale français" -- dirty Frenchman.
The police say two of the youths were arrested on the spot after the driver called for help and a third has since been detained. The RATP tranport authority says that its bus drivers have orders not to intervene in defence of passengers but to stay at the wheel and press a silent alarm button. RATP drivers say that such attacks are fairly common on the all-night buses. "If you do not have money for a taxi on Saturday night, it's better to stay in the disco and wait for the morning," a driver said in today's le Parisien.
The sense of violence running out of control is also being fed by reports of an explosion of corner-shop (convenience store) hold-ups in Paris and other cities by teenage robbers. Armed robbery by minors jumped 44 percent in 2008. The police say they are being overwhelmed by casual stick-ups in which groups of baby bandits with airguns or fake pistols or knives help themselves to the takings of small shops. A bébé braqueur describes the fun in Le Point news magazine, out today: "When you arrive, you scream straight away. Just the sight of your hood and they start trembling."
And while on the subject of the immigrant estates and violence, I'll throw in a rap video which has upset women's groups and led to the withdrawal of a regional government subsidy for its performer, a Normandy artiste named Orelsan. In Sale Pute (Dirty Slut), he plays a man who discovers his girl-friend's infidelity and threatens her with grievous harm in obscene and graphic language [Watch here, but be warned]. Orelsan has apologised and explained that he was playing a role, but his act sounds painfully plausible. The bad treatment of young women in the estates has been a running news story for several years and it is the subject of a new Isabelle Adjani film, The Day of the Skirt. And of course there is nothing new in getting indignant over rap lyrics.
As I said, there's no common thread though reaction to these events splits down political lines. The left and nearly half of France excuses the boss-nappers -- for reasons that are understandable in the current climate. The hard left excuses the violent anti-Nato and Corsican demonstrators. Olivier Besancenot, the charismatic and very influential leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, blamed the police for the Strasbourg mayhem, in which rioters burnt down a large hotel. "The authorities did everything to make the situation degenerate," he said.
On the other side of the political fence, the bus thugs and baby bandits play to fears and prejudices over the anti-social and criminal behaviour of youths who are assumed to be of Arab or black origin.
There is no conclusion to draw except to note the unpleasant climate and the fact that President Sarkozy is said to be worried that unrest on the left and among students over the economy and his government could lead to a broader break-down of law-and-order of the kind that erupted in Paris in May 1968.
Within a few months, Big Brother will be watching your internet habits when you go online in France -- and he might decide to cut you off.
[Thursday update: surprise defeat for Sarko]
This seems sure now that both houses of parliament have approved President Sarkozy's novel scheme for punishing people who habitually grab copyright music, video and films from the web. A new state High Authority (yet another) will run a three-strikes-and-you're-out system against pirates. Illicit downloaders will receive two e-mail warnings. If they persist, the service provider will be ordered to cut access to the net for the offenders (and their families) for up to a year.
Officials start tomorrow producing the final version of the so-called "Creation and Internet Law" after a lower house session attended by only 16 members voted through the bill last Thursday. The new law should be adopted in a month or two. Many artists and all the entertainment industry are delighted to see France blazing an innovative trail that will help stem the piracy that is endangering their trade. Sarkozy, who has been advised by Carla Bruni, his singer wife, will claim victory in what he calls the battle against "the High-Tech Wild West... where outlaws pillage creative work without limits."
Needless to say, others see the law as a threat to liberty. Internet user groups, civil liberties monitors, bloggers, the European Parliament, the French left and others are calling foul and saying the law is unworkable. In the words of Christian Vanneste, a Sarkozy MP who opposes the law, "legislating over downloading is as presumptuous as trying to chase the horizon... A solution exists, but it is for the market to find it, not the lawmaker."
On the face of it, the new law sounds sensible. It replaces failed attempts to deter illicit downloaders by prosecution and, as the government says, it is gradual. A poll reported that one in three of France's 30 million web users admits downloading music, films or video games without paying -- one of the world's highest rates of piracy. One billion files are estimated to have been illegally shared in France in 2006.
Here's what will happen once the law is in place. Music and film companies will monitor file-sharers on the net and turn them in to the new authority, called HADOPI from the mouthful of its initials -- Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights on the internet). Service providers will be required to name the owner of the IP address and the agency will send its warnings or cut-off order. A blacklist of offenders will be circulated to prevent them signing up with other operators during their suspension.
You don't need much knowledge of the net or the law to see the flaws in the scheme, which is expected to lead to hundreds of people being blacklisted daily. One campaign group called Quadrature du Net says the law breaches the French constitution in 50 different ways.
For a start, it will be hard to identify offenders. Someone parked outside your window with a laptop could be hooking onto your WiFi, whether protected or not. How about people at work, visiting teenagers or copyright abuses who are simply using public WiFi? It's also apparently quite simple to pirate IP addresses.
Jacques Attali, the economist and thinker who has advised successive governments, has joined the blog assault on the law, saying it "paves the way for blanket surveillance" of the web. "It is absurd, because people no longer download, they stream audio and video ... absurd because it would deprive entire families of internet access ... because real artists have nothing to lose by letting people know their work."
The service providers are also unhappy because -- contrary to what the government originally promised -- they will have to strip out the internet from bundled TV-net-phone contracts without any compensation. The system will cost an estimated 70 million euros a year, with no money going to the holders of violated copyright, they estimate.
France, which loves big regulation, sees itself setting a trend for a new more orderly internet. Google -- which is not free from Big Brother charges itself -- is upset because the government aims to introduce a "label of quality for legal downloading sites". Search engines will be obliged to give them priority in their results, which Google says contradicts its policies.
The Hadopi is also expected to use secret codes to track banned offenders. Apart from the breach of privacy, this will create problems for users of Linux and other open systems, according to the experts.
The American and European industry hopes that the French law, which goes much further than experiments already tried in Ireland and New Zealand, will inspire similar action in other countries.
And before you think this is all about the French devotion to regulation, the law was enthusiastically praised today by Paul McGuinness, manager of the band U2. France has become "a pole of resistance to the blight of piracy. The (new) law is the right solution... It is equitable and balanced and will work in practice," he wrote in le Figaro.
In my humble opinion, the new scheme sounds like une usine à gaz -- a complicated, unworkable contraption. It means more bureaucracy and seems unlikely to fulfill the worthy aim of helping a troubled industry. But I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.
 The French rather enjoy wallowing in gloom while Americans often seem impossibly cheerful, at least in European eyes. That old stereotype contains a degree of truth but here's a sign that the Americans might be becoming more French.
Americans are flocking to a new French-made internet site where people lament their misfortunes and recount the big and little disasters that ruined their day. FMyLife.com is simply an English-language version of VieDeMerde.fr, a wildly successful site that was started in January last year by two young Paris entrepreneurs, Guillaume Passaglia and Maxime Valette. VDM, which could be translated as Life Sucks, is now in the top 10 in Google's French search list and after only six weeks, FML is receiving a million visits a day, mainly from New York City and the Los Angeles area.
The idea of VDM and now FML, is simple. Losers tell their sob story in a few words, for the amusement or commiseration of others. The darker, bleaker and more humiliating the better. The episode must start Aujourd'hui or Today and end with the curse VDM or FML.
Two examples: "Today, my boss fired me via text message. I don't have a text messaging plan. I paid $0.25 to get fired. FML."
"Today, I received two text messages from my girlfriend. The first to tell me that it was all over. The second to tell me that she had sent it to the wrong person. VDM".
Most involve failure at work or in love and sex but some are just domestic, such as: "Today my little sister got a hamster. After four deaths, we hoped that this one would live a long time. The new rodent broke a record: 20. That's the number of minutes until it died of a heart attack after seeing the cat. VDM."
Passaglia and Valette are surprised by the way that Americans have taken to their site to unload their woes. "This sort of humour is quite specifically French but nevertheless it has worked in the USA straight away," Passaglia told us by phone.
The sites have been helped by the economic crisis, he says. "It favours this type of mentality. You have even more need to distance yourself from the difficulties of the world by laughing at your daily problems." Passaglia, whose site produced the material for a book last December, said that his team rejects the great majority of the 20,000 stories they receive every day on the French version and they only publish the best. They attempt to weed out the exaggerated and the outright false and they produce rankings of the most impressive failures. An American team does the same on FML.
The success of VDM in France has spawned half a dozen other self-pity sites, on which self-styled "serial losers" (now adopted as a French expression) can lament their shabby lot. These include include Jaipasdechance.com (I've no luck) and JobDeMerde.com (Sh--tty Job). The latest opened to instant success last Monday under the name RaterSaVie (FailingYourLife).
The spur for the site was an ill-advised remark last month by Jacques Séguéla, the veteran advertising man and friend of President Sarkozy, that "anyone who doesn't have a Rolex watch by the age of 50 has failed his life." The idea is to come up with joke things to do by a certain age that are even more preposterous than Séguéla's defence of Sarko.
With their sense of sardonic self-mockery, the hard-luck sites reflect the pessimistic streak in the French character and also illustrate Voltaire's remark that "the misfortunes of some make for the happiness of others". Some have described the sites as Twitter for losers.
Danielle Rapoport, a well-known psychologist, thinks that the sites reflect a very French mixture of defiance and anxiety. "The French are champions of depression and pessimism because they have a culture of comfortable status quo and life in fear of losing something," she told us. "At the same time they have a sense of rebellion which pushes them to act."
Some experts think that too much negativity is bad for the character. Pierre Mannoni, a sociologist who wrote a book called "Social Bad Luck" said that there was a danger in falling victim to what is known in French as "le miserablisme". "Even if it's done with humour, it can be dangerous to
describe oneself endlessly as a loser," he said in a Swiss newspaper. "It can prevent you from succeeding."
To end on a lighter note, Libération is leading today with four pages on the positive side of le marasme ambiant and la sinistrose, two good expressions for the prevailing sense of depression. It points out that "in Europe, the French are always more afflited by anxiety than their neighbours by bad economic times". Yet, it says, there is a sense that people are making do with less and even rather enjoying the latest trend, which goes by the name of la nouvelle frugalité.
[Below: A recent book, How to be a failure in life in 11 lessons. ]
[UPDATE SATURDAY: As predicted in the final paragraph of this post, the site has just closed after only a day in operation. The founders said they were overwhelmed both by the criticism and the volume of visitors that they received.] One industry doing well in France these days is private tuition for school pupils. One in six receives coaching outside the classroom, often from moonlighting teachers or one of the big firms that charge hefty fees to give kids an academic edge.
So we should not be surprised that two bright young entrepreneurs have come up with the idea of an internet homework service. It's not exactly coaching. They do the work for you.
My 17-year-old son thinks that Faismesdevoirs.com (DoMyHomework.com), which went online today, is great and insists that it's an "educational idea". Le Petit Nicolas, the fictional schoolboy whose 50th birthday is being celebrated this week, would have loved the scheme. The schools and government do not.
Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister, joined in a chorus of condemnation for the service, which says that it has a team of students from grandes ecoles, the elite colleges, standing by to help out their customers. In return for payment they guarantee to supply A-grade essays, class projects, maths solutions and so on. The answers to three maths problems costs five euros while a full-length essay can cost more than 30 euros. Pupils send the questions by e-mail and receive the completed copy within 24-48 hours. They can also scan their own work and send it to have it corrected.
"The place to get educated and have your work corrected is in the nation's schools," said Darcos. "In no way do I encourage paying systems which provide this kind of service."
Le Monde devoted its main editorial today to attacking the start-up as "terrifying and scandalous," because it "empties education of its basic principle -- learning, with all its rigour and satisfaction." There was already enough trouble with cutting and pasting and unfairness with well-off parents who pay for private tuition for their children, it said
All the free publicity -- which has included cover in the main TV news -- has been great for the founders Stéphane Boukris and Romain Benichou, recent graduates of two top Paris business schools. They are defending themselves by saying that they are merely extending the possibilities of outside coaching. Parents help out with homework so why shouldn't they, they say. Pupils would learn from the comments from the experts when when their work is corrected and returned to them, said Boukris.
The key to their scheme is an elaborate payment system. Apart from borrowing the parents' credit card or Paypal account, kids can buy pre-paid cards online and in certain Paris shops. Mobile phones can also be used via the method of sur-taxed text messages. They will even accept pocket money in the form of postal orders.
Boukris says that he had recruited dozens of eager students as well as a number of teachers who wanted to top up their state school salaries. Here's their Facebook entry.
The state will no doubt find a way to outlaw the service, as they have done with other internet ventures involving education. Last year they used France's privacy laws to close a site in which school pupils could rate their teachers.
[Below: TV cover of homework service]
This is the March page in a calendar on the theme of "The Tribes of Paris". Produced by ActUp, the gay campaign organisation, it would not normally cause a stir except that the gentleman on the left, in the wrestler's mask, is a state dignitary, the Chairman of Radio France, the public broadcasting corporation.
Jean-Paul Cluzel, 61, a senior civil servant and former director of the Paris Opera, was already in President Sarkozy's bad books. His exotic picture has now given the president an extra reason for sacking him when his mandate comes up for renewal in May. "This is not worthy of the boss of a public service," Sarko told his advisers, according to today's Canard Enchaîné. "This guy is mad. He thinks he can do anything. His private life is whatever he wants but he can't display himself like that."
Sarko, who recently awarded himself the job of appointing the heads of the public TV and radio services, really wants to dump Cluzel because he dislikes the impertinent output of France Inter, the biggest and most popular of the seven stations in the national radio group.
Inter is the direct equivalent to Britain's BBC Radio 4. It offers solid current affairs and entertainment with a leftish, public sector streak. It holds its own well against the big commercial networks RTL and Europe 1 thanks to a lively, impertinent tone that it has sharpened further since Cluzel took over in 2004. Auntie Beeb's stolid Radio 4 would be unlikely to go in for some of the antics recently heard on Inter.
[Picture below: Cluzel in civilian dress]
Sarkozy is especially incensed by Stéphane Guillon, Inter's new court jester, who delivers a vitriolic black humour commentary on the political news of the day in the peak-audience 7.50am slot. Guillon lacerates everyone, pulling no punches on the grounds that "bad taste is sometimes necessary." It's meant to be taken in the spirit of knock-about grand guignol but for some, including me, he goes over the top. The other day, for example, he mocked Martine Aubry, the Socialist party leader, as a "fat tobacco jar".
His worst offence, in the eyes of Sarko, was a vicious job last month on the supposedly predatory sexual habits of Domnique Strauss-Kahn, the French Socialist who runs the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn, who landed in trouble last year over a one-night stand with a subordinate, was in the studio for an interview when Guillon announced that all female staff at the station had been ordered to wear demure clothes in order not to excite "the beast Strauss-Kahn". A siren would be sounded to evacuate all women if the bromide in his coffee failed, he said. A camera had been placed under the table to ensure correct behaviour by DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is known.. and so on. DSK, who is regarded as a potential presidential candidate for 2012, blew a fuse and complained about Guillon's méchanceté -- nastiness.
The incident turned Guillon into an internet sensation thanks to the studio webcam. Watch him below. Cluzel defended his satirist, saying that spicy, irreverent humour was an old French tradition and it brightened up the day.
Sarkozy did not agree. He sounded off against Guillon and France Inter to journalists and also at a palace meeting. "It's insulting, it's vulgar, it's nasty. Do you realise what he said, at prime listening time, about the private life of Strauss-Kahn or the physique of Martine Aubry," Sarko fumed. "What's this country coming to?" [Mais dans quel pays vit-on]
Cluzel, who describes himself as "gay, catholic and liberal" has a strong argument for resisting Sarkozy, though it probably will not do him much good. France Inter is scoring high ratings and Guillon is very popular. All of Cluzel's stations are doing well, with the exception of France Musique. If and when Cluzel is dismissed, Sarko will be attacked yet again for ruling the state air waves like a monarch, or at least like the late President Charles de Gaulle.
As we've noted here before, France is enjoying a boom in political satire. This is being interpreted as a reflection of the need to lighten up in grim times. Over on Europe 1, Guillon's rival is the brilliant Nicolas Canteloup. But Canteloup's daily impersonations of a manic and Napoleonic Sarko are much gentler than Guillon's
 Michelin published the 100th edition of its Red Guide today. That prompted the annual ritual of bashing the celebrated bible of French gastronomy. The guide, first published in 1900 but halted during world wars, has lost touch with modern taste and rewards "museum-cuisine" in the stuffy old French tradition, say the critics.
The only addition to the élite three-star category, Eric Fréchon of the Hotel Bristol in Paris [below], is coming in for his own share of sniping. The Bristol, across the street from the Elysée Palace, is President Sarkozy's favourite "cantine", so Fréchon's promotion is being called a marketing stunt. In an amusing video, the ferocious François Simon of le Figaro visits the Bristol and calls his cooking overdone, too expensive and not very original. Simon's bill for a meal for two came to 531 euros.
For the British, the other noteworthy promotion was the two-star rating awarded to Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, for the restaurant which he took over at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles a year ago. Simon of course had a put-down for the upstart Britannique. Ramsay's cooking is not bad though déjà vu and unoriginal, said Simon.
But for an institution that is so often proclaimed passé, Michelin is not doing badly. The 2,000-page Red Guide sells 1.3 million copies a year worldwide. In France it sold 370,000 in 2008 -- ten times more than its nearest competitor, the Gault et Millau guide. That's impressive for a publication that sticks to its tradition of packing a single volume with tiny print, minimalist description and no pictures.
A series of great chefs have withdrawn in recent years from the struggle of meeting Michelin's exacting standards in order to keep their stars. The latest of these was Marc Veyrat, one of the super-stars of the culinary world, who said last week that he is giving up his restaurant at Annecy, in the Alps.
But for thousands of aspiring chefs, Michelin and its feared but small team of anonymous inspectors, remains the ultimate arbiter. In a sign of the times, the French guide is now under the command of Juliane Caspar, 38, a German from Cologne. Jean-Luc Naret, director of all the guides, has been making his case for the superiority of the Guide Rouge. "We have no competitor in France or internationally," he said. Michelin went intercontinental in 2005 with a New York edition and has since opened in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The tyre-making Michelin brothers put out their first guide free to help travellers and their chauffeurs in the new-fangled automobiles to find mechanics and places to sleep and eat [1920 version in picture was first paid edition]. With its maps, guides and recently GPS brand, the firm has remained a reliable source of information for travellers in France. The Red Guide is now available on the internet and as an iPhone application. The next step is a GPS service that will list nearby Michelin recommendations automatically on your sat-nav mobile phone.
UPDATE Wednesday 3/3: The accident investigation confirmed today that apparent inattention by the pilots led to the Amsterdam crash after one of the two radio altimeters malfunctioned.
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Why do airliners seem to be falling out of the sky these days ? The question is worth looking at after the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam this week added to what looks like a series.
Part of the answer in some cases could be that the sophisticated systems on modern airliners are lulling some pilots into a false sense of security. In other words, they might be rusty on the stick-and-rudder skills of basic flying. This is dangerous territory. I am not a professional, just an amateur pilot, but the matter is being discussed by the pros.
I won't speculate about what caused the Turkish Boeing 737 to come down short of the runway at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, but let's look at the recent pattern. In the past 13 months in west Europe and the USA at least five airliners have crashed after suffering stalls or apparent stalls and two have safely crash-landed after losing all power.
First, to clear up a common misunderstanding, an aerodynamic stall -- to use it's full namel -- happens when the wings suddenly stop producing lift [see picture below]. They do not stall because engines stop. It happens because the plane is flying too slowly or performs an abrupt manoeuvre. If the engines fail -- or "stall" in media parlance -- a plane becomes a glider. It remains controllable -- as Captain Sullenberger showed masterfully when he ditched his Airbus in the Hudson river last month. The pilot's first action must be to push the nose down, turning height into speed. That obviously has limits if the plane is already very near the ground, as with the Boeing 737 at Amsterdam .
There are common patterns in the recent incidents:
In August, 154 were killed when a Spanair MD 80 stalled after take-off. The pilots failed to set the take-off flaps so the plane was unable to climb out of ground effect, the air cushion near the surface. That accident arose from apparent negligence.
In November, an Air New Zealand Airbus with two pilots from a German airline hit the Mediterranean, killing all seven aboard as it approached the French city of Perpignan. The accident investigators reported this week that the plane stalled after the crew took the risky decision to test its slow flying performance while they were at a dangerously low altutude. Technical factors may have contributed, but the pilots' unwise action led to the crash.
On February 12, a Continental airlines Dash 8 turboprop crashed on the approach to Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 on board and one on the ground. Though the inquiry is far from over, the investigators have found that the plane stalled and the crew apparently failed to take the right emergency action -- according to media leaks. Rather than gliding, it fell like a stone.
The latest was the Amsterdam crash on Wednesday. What is known so far is that the engines appear to have lost power a couple of miles from the runway and the plane flopped into a field. Passengers and witnesses described what the investigators have said was an apparent stall, from which the pilots may have been unable to recover. The sudden gyrations of the plane could have been caused by a number of events, including possibly the turbulence left in the air by a heavy airliner that preceded it.
The two successful powerless landings involved airliners that suddenly lost engine thrust but were under control until they made contact with the earth. A British Airways Boeing came down short of a runway at Heathrow on a flight from China in January last year. And Captain Sullenberger glided his Airbus A320 onto the Hudson last month after birds stopped the engines just after take-off. In both cases no lives were lost, thanks to good airmanship.
All pilots practise stalls in order to avoid them. You learn on the first day that no matter what, you fly the aeroplane right down to the ground. Airline pilots practice in simulators handling potential emergencies on approach. Airliners are equipped with systems that shake the control columns or sticks and provide aural warnings if their flying speed decays and they are approaching the danger zone. Some, such as the Airbus, have computers that do not let the plane stall -- unless they are over-ridden by the crew as they were in the case of the Air New Zealand plane in November.
The theory that is doing the rounds is far from new. Ever since the Wright brothers took off in 1903, complacency has been the biggest killer and pilots are trained to fight it. But, some are wondering whether the advanced electronics of the modern plane lead pilots to lose the edge? Landing a modern jet is usually a matter of monitoring the system until the pilot hand-flies the touch-down. With the autothrottle on and the electronics guiding the plane down the glide-slope, it is conceivable that pilots might not realise that they are approaching a stall.
Here for example is a pilot's remark on PPRUNE.org (Professional Pilots Rumour Network) after the Amsterdam crash this week. "We've not seen the end of this type of accident. Forget birdstrikes - in this instance. Inattention may be the real enemy". PPRUNE, by the way, has a lot of uninformed people contributing, but you can tell the difference.
 [Image of wing stalling]
[Footnote: the confusion by the media over engines "stalling" and aeroplanes stalling is avoided entirely in French, and I assume many other languages, because the words are different for each. An aerodynamic stall is un décrochage. A plane stalls = un avion décroche. If the engine stops, as in a road vehicle, the verb is caler. The engine stalled = Le moteur a calé. Décrocher is also much better than stall because it literally means unhooking, which is what the wing does from the air when it stalls. CB]
Last week the English city of Birmingham caused a furore when it dropped apostrophes from street names. The reason was confusion over spelling for satellite navigation. An elegant Norman town near the English Channel has come up with a similar high-tech problem. It wants to change its name because internet searches are unable to find it -- and because the lady mayor may be a little embarrassed.
The town of 8,000 on the border of Normandy and Picardy is called Eu. It is an honorable, ancient name that has featured in literature and is appreciated by cross-word enthusiasts. It is pronounced in the same way as "euh", the delaying sound in French speech that corresponds to err or um in English.
Eu, which is close to the coastal town of Tréport has been suffering from a drop in holiday visitors and they think they know the reason: the internet. People booking on line are not directed to the town's fine hotels and inns because search engines fail to recognise a two-letter place name which is the same as the past participle of the verb avoir (J'ai eu, pronounced roughly like the letter U in English, means I had). It also does not help that EU stands for European Union in English. Further complicating Eu's problem is the fact that two other French words are pronounced the same way: eux, meaning them and oeufs, meaning eggs.
After making only 7,700 euros in hotel visitor tax instead of the expected 24,000, Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the new Socialist Mayor of Eu (above), has set out to add a few more letters. She has an extra good reason for doing so. Try saying her title in French. La Maire d'Eu (The Mayor[ess] of Eu) is pronounced the same as La merde (sorry for spelling out what will be obvious to most here).
Because of that, the town hall stationery carries the careful heading "Mairie de la Ville d’Eu". (...of the Town of Eu) That is one of the possibilities for a new name, along with Eu-en-Normandie or Eu-le-Château. That's its historic château in the picture.
Of course the change is being resisted by locals who are not keen on bowing to the internet. Eric Pradels, owner of the town's main newspaper shop, told Paris Normandie newspaper that he likes the quirky name: "When people ask my address, I hear them hesitate. They think that I have not finished my sentence. That gives me a chance to talk about the town."
Jean-Claude Andréoni, another local, said: "If people don't know it, we say near Tréport. Or Dieppe. There is no way it is going to be changed because of the internet."
Madame la Maire says that it will take four years to make the change. This requires a council vote, a referendum, a parliamentary act and approval by the President's cabinet of ministers.
A pilot's footnote: Eu has a nice little aerodrome. It's almost impossible for English weekend flyers to state their destination on the radio as "Eu". So the airfield is called Eu-Mer (pronounced roughly 'Ermer' in English).
As a follow up to last week's post on the evils of wine, the Health Minister has just injected a little common sense in the debate. Roselyne Bachelot says that alcohol should be consumed in a "reasonable, cultural and balanced" way. That's Bachelot with the pink champagne above, with Xavier Bertrand, the new boss of President Sarkozy's Mouvement Populaire party.
Bachelot noted the conclusion of the cancer institute that a single glass of wine a day more than doubled the risk of certain types of cancer. But she added: "We are a country that produces wine. I enjoy a glass with my meals. Banning wine in our country is impossible and not desirable."
Growers are reassured. They are also pleased that the Government does not, as they feared, intend to forbid wine-tasting at winery cellars and food fairs. This prospect had arisen because a new law will ban open bars at public social events. This is intended to discourage youngsters from getting drunk. These as-much-as you-can-drink venues are said to contribute to the rapid spread of British-style binge-drinking among French teenagers and students. Wine-tasting has nothing to do with this, said Bachelot. "I have never heard of wine growers offering as much as people want. They usually just put a little drop in the glass."
The industry was also pleased to hear from Bachelot that the government will not prevent them from advertising and selling on the internet. A new law will set rules on the net and the alcohol trade. No pop-up advertising will be allowed and none will be tolerated on sites for sports or young people. But vineyards can continue to promote their produce and take electronic orders.
![Dutronc_hardy[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011278d61e3528a4-400wi)
Nostalgists and fans of French music should have a look at a feature just offered by the INA, the excellent national radio and television archives, in honour of St Valentine's day.
February 14 was not a commercial festival in France until it arrived from the United States and Britain in the late 1940s. It took off after being promoted by florists in 1947. Observed with outings, messages and presents, le Saint Valentin is now almost as much an obligation as in the Anglo-Saxon world though the exchange of cards is still not so common and people do not call one-another their Valentines.
The INA have put up a batch of hit love songs by stars of recent decades, as well as old interviews in which they talk on the subject. The singers include the young Francis Cabrel, still at the top over three decades later, France Gall and the late popster Claude François. I wonder why there is no Serge Gainsbourg, one of the all-time best singer-composers of love songs
It's fun to watch Françoise Hardy, the melancholic young hearthrob of the sixties, insisting in her 1991 interview that love is une saloperie -- roughly crap -- and by definition always ends badly. "It's synonymous with suffering,"she says. She is talking about her relationship with Jacques Dutronc, the singer with whom she has had a long and bumpy existence. They were married in 1981 and are still more or less together [that's them in the 1990s in the picture]. Dutronc talks in another interview about their difficult courtship. "At the start I couldn't listen to her records because they were so down, they gave me the blues," he says. Their son Thomas, born in 1973, is a very successful jazz-inflected pop singer and musician [post last month].
Then watch the great Edith Piaf, a tragic figure, talk of her devotion to the state of being in love. "To write a love song the composer has to be in love. ...I am always in love," she says. "Love is the greatest joy.." Or look at Sacha Distel, the late elegant crooner, warbling "Love is four letters written by two."
The INA has an excellent site that now contains on-line half of the last 60 years of French television and radio. To watch the whole Valentine's material you have to pay a little, but clips of the songs, interviews and old TV films, and are free.
And all that without mentioning France's most famous lovebirds (last post).
And for those who would like to get away from soft themes, here's a commentary on the French model that I did for today's paper:
For the first time, a French government minister has announced that he is homosexual. The coming out of Roger Karoutchi, 57, Minister for Relations with Parliament and a longtime friend of President Sarkozy, has consumed a fair bit of media space.
Karoutchi's message, in television and radio appearances as well as a book, is roughly: 'Yes I'm gay. So what?'. On TF1 TV last night he said: "I live with a partner and am happy with him. End of story. It's my life and I draw no special glory or shame from this."
It's interesting that this is always called le coming out. French adopted the American expression in the 1980s, along with "le outing". Karoutchi's decision reflects the gradual retreat of the old taboos and stigma in France over homosexuality. Twenty or 30 years ago, Karoutchi would have committed electoral suicide making such an announcement. Now it might even help him.
Being officially gay became acceptable in the arts world about the time of the Cage aux Folles comedies in the 1970s and 80s. The gay world featured in a string of 1990s comedies and since then gay characters have become normal in in tv series and films. Public figures remain partly protected by the French media taboo over private life but there was no difficulty last spring with the public mourning of Pierre Bergé, the fashion tycoon and patron of leftwing causes, after the death of his partner Yves Saint-Laurent.
And this year is the 10th anniversary of the PACS, the civil union that was created primarily for gays in 1999 (It has subsequently proved highly popular for straight couples, while gay campaigners want France to establish full marriage for them).
But acceptance has come much later in the political world. It was only 17 years ago that Edith Cresson, then Prime Minister under President Mitterrand, tried to put down the British with a sneer that "a quarter of Englishmen are homosexuals." A breakthrough came when Bertrand Delanoe, the Paris Socialist, confirmed in 1998 that he was gay and went on to win election as Mayor of the city in 2001. Apart from Delanoe, who benefits from the tolerance of the cosmopolitan capital city, no other national-level politicians have ever confirmed their homosexuality. It's fair to say that in the provinces of la France profonde, professions of homosexuality still make voters uneasy.
Karoutchi said he felt confident in going public because Sarkozy had behaved so well towards him, inviting his partner along with him to stay at his holiday house and to official dinners at the Elysée Palace. "If I had to dedicate to someone the fact that I am speaking out, it would be to the President of the Republic," he told le Monde.
Politics are behind Karoutchi's coming-out. He is running in a party primary election in March for the candidacy for the presidency of the Ile-de-France -- the Paris regional government. His opponent is a cabinet colleague, Valérie Pécresse, Minister for Higher Education [below]. Karoutchi was stung by what looked like an attempt by Pécresse to score off his homosexuality. She was asked to describe the difference between her and Karoutchi. "I am a mother in a family," she replied. There was also a whispering campaign on the internet, said Karoutchi.
This may be the first time that a profession of homosexuality has helped a French politician. Karoutchi was running far behind Pécresse in opinion polls and many voters reported that they had never heard of him. Now they have.
As a footnote, Sarkozy's easy relations with homosexual friends mark a change. In 2001, Sarko attacked Delanoe in a book (Libre) for coming out in public. "What got into Bertrand Delanoë, wanting at all costs to reveal his homosexuality?" Sarko wrote.
It's Sunday in Paris and as usual most of the newspaper kiosks are closed. You don't need to look much beyond that absurdity to understand why the French press is in trouble.
The newspaper business is suffering everywhere, but the French one is in worse shape than most. Restrictive practices by communist-led print unions and a bizarre distribution system hobbled the press long before the internet began eating into its readership. France is one of the most expensive places in the world to print and sell newspapers. This created a vicious circle with dwindling readership driving away advertising and forcing prices even higher. Ouest-France, a provincial daily that is France's best-selling newspaper, ranks only 77th in the world circulation league.
Now, after saving the banks and car industry, President Sarkozy has turned his attention to our trade. He is offering 600 million euros in emergency aid, beyond the 1.5 billion euros subsidy that the newspaper and magazine industry receives annually from the state. To whet the reading appetite of the young, every 18-year-old will receive a year's free subscription to the paper of their choice. It is the state's responsibility to ensure "a free, independent and pluralist press", said Sarkokzy
Needless to say, this makes a lot of people uneasy -- especially journalists. They do not like being instructed, as they were by Sarko on Friday, to attract readers by improving the quality of the content, both in paper or internet form.
As in most western countries, the French press likes to see itself as a watchdog that keeps a healthy distance from le pouvoir -- the government and powers that be. That ideal is breached to some degree in most places and especially in the France of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The president has long nurtured a love-hate relationship with the news business. He befriends, bullies and cajoles political writers and editors. He cultivates their proprietors. There are few big titles now that do not have a Sarkozy ally as part or whole owner. Even Le Monde and Libération, the left-leaning dailies that are most critical of le régime Sarkozy, have important minority share-holders in the president's orbit.
The business conditions are so dire that even Sarko's foes are happy to accept his helping hand. "Where is the harm if it helps the conditions of the practical life of newspapers?" asked Laurent Joffrin, editor-in-chief of Libération, and one of the most acerbic critics of the President. Libé is about to announce its umpteenth austerity plan after making 80 staff redundant.
It may be too late to save the old titles in France -- as opposed to the news weeklies such as the Nouvel Observateur and L'Express, which still do well. There are four mainstream national dailies -- Le Figaro (conservative, Sarko's house organ), Le Monde (establishment left), Libération (nostalgic 60s left) and le Parisien/Aujourd'hui en France (mass-market pro-Sarko). Their combined circulation is a fraction of the British and German equivalent. Their standards are high but their resources are meagre so they offer less value than richer papers elsewhere. It's worth noting that only one of the four main titles -- le Figaro --dates from before the end of World War Two. Because of war and revolutions, there has been little continuity in French newspaper history. The biggest-selling national daily is L'Equipe, a sports paper.
Sarkozy rightly noted that the future depends on integrating the traditional press with the internet and finding a model that works. One of his plans is to give professional internet-based media outlets the same tax benefits as the print media.
This takes us into the media upheaval everywhere. Last year marked a tipping-point in the USA, with more people getting their news from the internet than the printed press. The French press was slow to embrace the net and cannot afford to put all its content free online. Over the past year a few web-based news sites have made a mark -- notably Rue89.com and Médiapart -- but they have yet to work financially. The rest of the French-language internet news is the usual recycling of mainstream media plus fantasy.
To close, there is a fun comedy film out this week that plays on the low esteem in which journalists are held in France."Envoyés Très Spéciaux" (Very special correspondents) [trailer here], starring Gérard Lanvin and Gérard Jugnot (picture below), is about a couple of reporters who fake a reporting trip to the Iraq war. Hiding in Paris, they become national heroes as supposed hostages of Baghdad insurgents. I enjoyed the way the film mocks the pretensions of our trade -- like the CNN correspondent who falsely reports in the film that he has been with the French pair in Baghdad simply because he does not want to look behind the curve.
Nicolas Sarkozy's recent energy is not just a result of his marriage to Carla Bruni. The French President's extra zoom comes from getting in touch with his pelvic floor, under the orders of a coach.
I learnt about the secret of Sarko's new zoom from the woman responsible: Julie Imperiali, 26, the personal trainer who had honed his supermodel wife for four years and who has been remodelling the President since their marriage last winter. [Here's the feature on her from today's Times]
Imperiali has the kind of looks, charm and energy that make non-French women weep. She is also persuasive. Chatting for an hour in her flat near the Eiffel Tower, she convinced me that she could make everyone as slim as Bruni and speedy as Sarko. Her clients pay her over 100 euros an hour for the privilege.
Since last April, Imperiali, a former aerobics champion and dancer, has applied to Sarkozy a method which she calls Tectonic Wellbeing (nothing to do with a French techno dance style of that name). Visiting the Elysée Palace three or four times a week, Imperiali has helped the pint-sized President break his evening chocolate habit and lose over three kilogrammes (seven pounds) and two trouser sizes. "His body has radically changed," she said. "He is a dream pupil. He is always ready and motivated."
Sarkozy, the first jogger to sit on France's the presidential throne, stopped running in public last winter as part of his attempt to look more dignified. His spreading waistline was ascribed by some to his hobby of collecting old manuscripts and pstage stamps. He has since been pounding the paths of the walled Elysée garden under Imperiali's guidance.
"He was a sporting type, but he did not have the right methods," she said. "He used just to run and run and run without being aware of his body. Now he runs faster and more solidly. He is doing about 10 kph around the garden."
Imperiali talks breezily about how she resculpts the body through exercise and diet. Her work is 60 percent mental and 40 percent physical, she said. The trick is to focus on the perineal muscles -- those around what the British call the groin. These "core" muscles are also important in Pilates and Yoga, I gather (fans of these disciplines, please forgive my inaccuracies).
For a long time, French women have been taught to work on the perineum, especially after childbirth, but in the English-speaking world it has not been quite such a big thing. "The Anglo-Saxons are a bit prudish about this and say that they don't know what we are talking about," said Imperiali. "The perineum is the floor of our body. If it is not kept in shape it like a house with no floor...By becoming conscious of your perineum you become aware of the interior of your body."
Her method not only improves posture and delivers a healthier body and mind. It also improves the sex-lives of her clients, she says. Although most are women, this applies to men too [more details in the feature].
We have not had confirmation from the Elysée Palace about Imperiali's achievements with the President, but I took her on her word after she made her public debut in Elle magazine last month. She is now expanding, with the help of her Belgian husband, into fitness via internet. For a euro a day, she will coach you electronically, almost like Sarko and Bruni. Her site is www.tectonicworkout.com , where you can watch her routine.
[Pictures by Magali Delporte. Above, Julie leaps on the Place de la Concorde, near the Elysée, for The Times]
A hint of revolt is floating in the French air these days. It's not dramatic enough to grab foreign attention, like rioting on the Left Bank or cars ablaze in the ghettos. But you get a sense that, with recession biting, a small part of the country is spoiling for a bit of old-fashioned insurrection.
There is a whiff of the old civil war which France has never really resolved since the revolution of 1789. President Sarkozy is, as usual, stirring it up, demonizing the foe. The adversary is embodied by Olivier Besancenot, the anti-capitalist figurehead, and a cast including a bloody-minded trade union called SUD, radical school students and an assortment of dreamy anarchists.
The most dramatic incident so far was the 24-hour shut-down by SUD workers last week of the Gare Saint Lazare, France's second-busiest railway station. Their wildcat strike caused havoc for hundreds of thousands of Paris commuters. It made a mockery of Sarkozy's new law on minimum public service during labour disputes. He told them that they would not get away with it again.
This was a new kind of strike -- or social movement, to use the funny euphemism. The SUD people have been gaining power over the past few years. They use the hard language of revolt and make clear that they want to break the system, not earn more money or retire earlier. Even the CGT, the communist-led union that used to dominate the railways, flinched from supporting SUD stoppage.
Besancenot, the cherubic Trotskyite who is one of France's most popular political figures, backs the SUD movement -- which extends beyond railways -- and the other radical stunts which have been making headlines.
Among the odder episodes has been the affair of the "Tarnac gang". This involves a group of anti-capitalist, middle class university drop-outs who were arrested in a spectacular police raid on a farm in November. They were charged with terrorism. Their alleged offence was to have stopped three high-speed TGV express trains by sabotaging their electricity lines. All but the alleged ring-leader have now been released on bail. Their rural neighbours are rallying behind them, the leftwing media like them and concerts are being organised to support them.
Then there are the highly publicised raids on supermarkets by self-appointed "Robin Hood" groups. They walk through the aisles of busy supermarkets piling up carts with food and drink, including luxury items like champagne and foie gras. They proceed to the check-out and refuse to pay. They explain to management that they are "liberating" the food for distribution to the poor. In all but one of about a dozen raids so far, the Robin Hoods have got away with their goods after causing a scene that risked driving customers from the store.
Since a raid that garnered 5,000 euros of food in Paris on December 20, the Monoprix chain has been attempting to prosecute these 'subversive shoppers' for robbery with violence and insults. Civil disobedience of this type is sometimes organised via Facebook. It is encouraged by various websites and leftwing media such as Libération and le Nouvel Observateur. Cheeky stunts like that please older journalists who remember chanting "Property is Theft" back in the demonstrations of their youth.
The Obs published an admiring piece last week on "Those French who don't want to play the game". It tracked groups that go around switching off department store lighting and state post-office workers who disobey orders to raise the price of services.
Writing approvingly of the "collectives" who raid supermarkets, Libération said: "The politicians would be wrong not to listen to these sounds from a society pushed to the limit, which feels that the straightjacket of ultra-liberalism is being torn apart." Of course Libé talks like that. It was born in '68. But it is also a respected mainstream daily, so that gives a flavour of the mood in part of France. (And for the record, I love Libé and it's the paper I buy first in the morning)
Sarkozy's people say that the President has been getting warnings from police intelligence that discontent is brewing, especially among the young. He is worried that a hard year will stir unrest in the streets. Fear of Greek-style riots by teenagers caused him over Christmas to shelve plans to reform the Lycées -- the high schools. The left are pointing out, with some cause, that Sarkozy is using the threat of the hard left for his own political ends in the same way as President Mitterrand used Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far right bogeyman in the 1980s and 90s. By inflating the importance of Le Pen, the Socialist president discredited the moderate right. Now, with the Socialist opposition in semi-coma, Sarkozy is exaggerating the dangers of Besancenot and the potentially violent left.
On the plane coming home from the Middle East two weeks ago, King Sarko I sounded a little anxious about his fickle subjects and his possible fate. "France is one of the most difficult countries to govern," he said. "Louis XVI, with his young wife, was one of the most loved kings for 10 years. Both of them ended with their heads on the block." Don't worry. No-one imagines that Sarko and Carla Bruni will end up on the guillotine.
 Here's a picture of a courageous super-woman. No, it's not. It shows a bad mother and disgrace to the feminist cause. The argument has been raging since the unexpected return to work of Rachida Dati, the French Justice Minister. Only five days earlier, she gave birth to her first baby -- by caesarean section. The father's identity remains a state secret. More on that below
Dati, 43, the glamour-figure of President Sarkozy's government, left her clinic in the 16th arrondissement yesterday morning. In freezing weather, the single mother showed Zohra, her baby, to admirers (picture below). An hour later, she turned up looking trim in stiletto heels and a tight suit for the weekly cabinet session. Sarko opened by contratulating "la jeune maman" -- the young mummy.
The very image-conscious Dati was pulling off one her stunts. Her decision to forego the standard three-month maternity leave was ridiculed by those who see her as a pushy, over-promoted favourite of the President. Her admirers saw her return as typical of the pluck that took her from a childhood on the immigrant housing estates to one of the highest government posts.
Everyone understood that Dati, who is deemed to be a disastrous minister, was desperate to keep her job and be there when Sarkozy announced his radical plan to abolish the institution of investigating judges (last post). The argument is whether she has set a bad example for women and is neglecting her daughter.
In the media, blogs and internet forums, the criticism is outweighing the approval. "Dati is doing a disservice to the women's cause," Sophie de Menthon, a feminist businesswoman, told Metro newspaper. "She is driving herself to a point that women who have children know is superhuman. Instinctively and not rationally, I abhor this."
Claude Askolovitch, Editor of the Journal du Dimanche, tore into Dati in his daily breakfast commenatary on Europe 1 radio. She was betraying the women who had fought for their rights by giving the impression that maternity leave is a luxury option, he said. It had been a mistake to see Dati as an icon of ethnic diversity because her case was unique. "She is a solitary character.. and even in happiness, she often inspires a little sadness."
Catherine Nay, a veteran journalist who wrote the authoritative biography on Sarkozy, said Dati was making a mistake because she was stirring up yet another row over her behaviour. "There is in her action an excessive determination to stay in power... It is not clear that being modern means being rushed and reckless," said Nay.
Luc Chatel, the minister who acts as government spokesman, defended Dati. "Rachida has always said that to be a mother was the greatest of happinesses, but at the same time that she had important duties that she would continue to fulfill," he said.
Everyone is bored with the Dati soap opera -- or so we are supposed to believe. A poll on the media in La Croix newspaper today ranked her as one of the subjects which the public believes is over-reported. Yet the internet is full of Dati and she repeatedly scores as a profitable cover story for magazines -- both news and celebrity. So a lot of people are intrigued by her.
It's obvious that the Dati saga has a lot of good old-fashioned ingredients: power, sex and rags-to-riches. Dati is a Cinderella who was elevated from obscurity as the prince's favourite and became a force in her own right. (She talked her way into Sarkozy's staff when he was Interior Minister and she was serving as a junior investigating judge in the suburbs.)
She has flouted decorum -- indulging a taste for showing off in luxury brands and posing for fashion shoots at the same time as imposing Sarko's harsh new sentencing rules and a painful overhaul of the justice system. She is deeply unpopular among her judges and civil servants whom she commands. For a while she was Sarko's social escort. Now he is said to regard her as incompetent but is unable to bring himself to remove her, if only because she is such a symbol. After having the baby and loyally come back to work, she is almost unsackable.
On the matter of le père, the media have been mainly silent this week, while the internet has been full of a picture of François Sarkozy, the President's younger brother. He visited Dati in the maternity clinic over the weekend. Today, Paris Match magazine confirmed that Dati had spent Christmas eve at the home of Andrée Sarkozy, the President's mother. It also published a picture of Madame Sarkozy visiting Dati's clinic. No further explanation was given.
The names of other possible fathers are still circulating. José-Maria Aznar, the former Spanish Prime Minister, is first among them despite his public denials last autumn. Then there is a suggestion that Dati, who was very keen to have a first child and in her 43rd year, simply chose an anonymous donor.
[Wednesday update on latest rescue here]
To get away from wondering what trouble 2009 might bring, let's pause to salute the epic adventure of a band of men and women on the other side of the world.
I'm talking about the skippers of the Vendée Globe, the only single-handed, non-stop around-the-world yacht race. The "Everest of sailing" as it is known, is staged every four years. It's a test of physical and spiritual endurance like no other. Breakages and injury have forced half the fleet of 30 to abandon the race which began at les Sables d'Olonne on November 9. The surviving 15 are this week blasting down the Southern Ocean in permanent gales, dodging icebergs on their way to Cape Horn.
The boats are pure racing machines of the 60 Foot Open class and their skippers push them hard, snatching sleep in small doses for the three months that it takes to sprint down the Atlantic, around Africa, below Australia, around Cape Horn and back to France. They are not allowed to touch land or another boat or receive help or supplies apart from weather information.
That's Samantha Davies in the picture. She's one of five Britons still left in the fleet. The only other woman is also from the UK -- Dee Caffari. In her latest report, Davies says that one of her new year's resolutions is to stop eating Nutella with her fingers. Her boat Roxy is in sixth place, 2,000 miles behind Michel Desjoyeaux, the leader. Sam Davies is also reporting for The Times (video here)
Desjoyeaux is a mere 60 or so miles ahead of Roland Jourdain, who has been duelling with him for weeks, each covering up to 400 miles a day. (Jourdan's Véolia pictured below).
The precision of those figures is, I suspect, part of the reason that the world has grown a little blasé about solo ocean racing. The technology of satellite positioning and high-speed data connections brings the sailors so close that their venture seems less superhuman than it once did. (see their real-time positions here)
As well as fighting giant seas, changing sails and navigating, the skippers are expected to chat and blog and send video of themselves. It wasn't like that in the pioneering days of the late 1960s when round-the-world yachtsmen such as Francis Chichester became national heroes simply for achieving the voyage. In the first race, organised by the (London) Sunday Times in 1968, contestants would disappear for weeks at a time, sending positions over crackly high frequency radio. One, named Donald Crowhurst, tried to win by faking his route. He went mad and disappeared at sea.
The Vendée Globe is a national event in France. It has always been won by Frenchmen. It doesn't attract much media attention elsewhere except when things go wrong or when a foreign star does well. That was the case for Britain in the 2000-1 race, when Ellen MacArthur came second, only one day behind Michel Desjoyeaux. In the last race Vincent Riou made the 25,000 mile voyage in an amazing 87 days. That compares with 312 days by Robin Knox-Johnston, the winner -- and only finisher -- of the first round-the-world race in 1968.
Modern communications greatly help the sailors mentally, but they do little to diminish the perils of sailing alone on the high seas. Masts have been falling like match-sticks and rigging, keels and rudders have been ripped apart by unusually severe weather this time.
Derek Hatfield, a Canadian skipper who was forced to abandon last Sunday, reported his shock. "This morning the seas were huge, maybe 25 feet and confused, but nothing we couldn't handle normally. I was exhausted and lying in my bunk and 'crash', the boat went over and I ended up on the ceiling with all kinds of articles whizzing past me. The boat came upright immediately and the carnage inside was immediate.
I rushed on deck and my heart sank to see two of the spreaders dangling limp on the shrouds. The shock hits you quickly that this is not fixable and the end of the race is here already. I started to cry and it was uncontrollable.
Most of the defeated skippers are managing to limp to port despite their damage. The exception was Yann Elies who broke a leg 600 miles south of Australia and was rescued by a naval frigate. The HMAS Arunta steamed flat out for two days to reach him and save his life in appalling weather. His yacht has since been lost.
Although the race is about the most extreme sporting event imaginable, only three skippers have lost their lives in six contests so far. Denis Horeau, the race director, defended its safety record today in le Figaro. "Unlike other human activities like mountain sports, we have had very few fatal accidents," he said.
The latest Vendée Globe has produced an odd spin-off. Some 300,000 people are racing in a game version on the internet called Virtual Regatta. Some players are said to have become so addicted that they are neglecting their normal lives to change sails, adjust their courses and outwit their rivals as the weather and sea conditions change. Many are e-mailing the real skippers seeking advice. In mid Southern Ocean, Roland Jourdain said last week that he found it incredible that so many people had been hooked on the game. "It would be really nice if they could tele-port these people onto the boat for 24 hours....just so they could see what it is really like," he said.
The first boats are expected to cross the finishing line back at Sables d'Olonne in early to mid-February.
There's a useful Wikipedia briefing on the race here
Continue reading "A tribute to a magnificent ocean race " »
What words do the French find the most reassuring in this winter of economic doom? It's not Sarkozy, Santa Claus or Social Security. It's Barack Obama.
This comes from a survey on the language of crisis performed by the Médiascopie institute at the request of Euro RSCG, the advertising firm. And before any Americans get too smug, the word that most frightens the French is Bush.
Bernard Sananes the head of Euro RSCG, C&O division, said he had the idea of sounding out the impact of words after realising that the financial and economic slide did not have a human face. Médiascopie drew up a list of 100 expressions and names that have been used most frequently with reference to the crisis in the media, including the internet. They asked a sample of 200 people to rate the words on two scales: worrying/reassuring and local/global.
The incoming US President scored highest in reassuring and global. That shows the expectations awaiting Obama. I would guess that the French response represents general European feeling. George Bush scored top in worrying and global, reflecting the irrevocable demonisation that he underwent with the Iraq invasion of 2003 and its aftermath. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's own leader, came only mid-way on the worry/reassurance axis.
As might be expected in France, the state is deemed very reassuring but what is surprising is the return to favour of Europe. For about 15 years, the Union has been a scapegoat, taking the blame for everything that is wrong, including rampant capitalism. Sarkozy is being given credit for the reversal with his energetic conduct of his six month turn in in the EU Presidency. The single currency, long seen as negative, gets credit for holding up so well while the pound and the dollar have gone south. "The crisis has brought the French closer to the euro and Europe as well as to Nicolas Sarkozy," said Sananes. The winners are....
The most worrying:
Bush
job redundancy
market crash
madness of the financial world
financial tsunami
subprimes,
traders,
virus of crisis,
golden parachutes
toxic products,
contamination
The most reassuring:
Obama
Europe
the euro
livret A (state-regulated standard savings account)
moralisation of the economy
transparent transactions
protection
state intervention
stimulus plan
European Central Bank
The most global:
World governance
new world financial order (a goal of Sarkozy)
International Monetary Fund
Closest to home:
Livret A
French savings
Nicolas Sarkozy
state guarantee
the real economy
rigour (which corresponds to austerity in English)
nationalisation
Here's a delightful story that takes us far from the ambient gloom. With snow falling outside, I spent the afternoon yesterday in a salon in the Palais Garnier -- the Opéra -- enjoying an eery trip back in time.
They were playing for the first time a trove of recordings that had been sealed for posterity a century ago. And -- I'm not making this up -- they were extracted from the exact spot deep in the Opera vaults where, in the novel, they found the remains of the dead Phantom.
We heard Nellie Melba, the Australian soprano and Enrico Caruso, the tenor, and other long-dead stars crackling from 36 pristine Gramophone records that had been locked away for posterity.[listen to Melba's Verdi here].
The tale of the Opera's "buried voices", as they are known, began on Christmas Eve 1907 with a strange and solemn ceremony. In the deep labyrinth below the Garnier, Aristide Briand, a statesman of the era, dedicated two leaden urns in which 24 records were packed in glass and asbestos [top picture].
"This will teach men (100 years from now) about the state of our talking machines and the voices of the principal singers of our times," said the message with the urns. The idea of leaving voices in a time capsule came from Alfred Clark, the American head of the French branch of Gramophone, the British company that became His Master's Voice and later EMI.
According to Gaston Leroux, who wrote Le Fantôme de l'Opéra in 1909, workers unearthed the skeleton of Erik, his disfigured "angel of music", as they were installing the buried voices. Leroux's story opens and closes at the sound vault. "I prayed beside his body the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the living voices," says the epilogue
The voices, with their rather fruity period renditions of Wagner, Beethoven, Verdi, Bizet and lesser known composers, were kept under seal for the prescribed century. They were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale for safe-keeping in 1989 but only opened last Christmas. Also opened were two more urns which were deposited in 1912. One of these was damaged beyond repair. Technicians of the National Library spent the year extracting the fragile records from the glass plates and asbestos inside which they had been packed.
[Picture: Nellie Melba, the great Australian diva and dessert fan]
The collection was put on the internet yesterday. We heard extracts at a conference that included readings from the Phantom and a lecture on the dark legends around Napoleon III's epic pile on the Right Bank (like the secret lake deep below, the ghosts of dead workmen and the passages where government troops executed communards in 1871).
Most of the recordings were commercial and have survived in less fine condition elsewhere, but the choice of repertoire and performers offers an unmatched window on the sound-track of the Belle Epoque. François Le Roux, a baritone and teacher, explained why the old opera technique grates on modern ears. Singers belted it out, indulging in showy flourishes and fast vibrato that sound odd now, he said. "The sopranos were generally nasal. The timbre is pinched. Most of them would not get past the quarter-finals in a contest nowadays," he said. "Our ears have really changed."
"The bass voices are clear and relatively high," said Le Roux as he played Pol Planson singing Gounod's Faust in 1906 and then José Van Dam on the same song in 1991. He also noted the way that singers in those pre-microphone days focused on projecting their voices and enunciating the words in a way that even in opera they no longer do. "The point was to be understood. They didn't make much effort to dramatise the characters they were playing."
Maybe Le Roux (apparently no relation to the Phantom's author) was being a little unfair. The odd sound of the old singers was partly a function of the primitive recording equipment. You can get a clearer idea of Melba's voice from a revived master disc from 1904 which, coincidentally, was released this month in Melbourne (her home down, from which she took her stage name).
Le Roux joked about the astonishing tempo of some of the singers, a feature imposed by the brief 78 RPM record. "They sang fast, sometimes really fast. Sometimes you get the impression that the orchestra is struggling to follow the singer."
The urns include some big names of the time who are long forgotten, such as Adolphe Adam and his opera, le Chalet. But it is remarkable that this showcase repertoire of 1907 and 1912 is so similar to the Verdi, Mozart and Wagner that pulls in the crowds in 2008.
Vintage recording experts marvelled not only at the sound, but at the colourful, perfectly preserved labels of the discs from what are known as Gramphone's "pre-dog" period -- before the logo of the listening dog. EMI is bringing out a CD from the contents of the urns in January. The Opera also plans to install a new time capsule with the best early 21st century music. That choice should prove interesting.
Perhaps the eeriest of all the old records was not a song. It was the 1912 disc in which Firmin Gemier, an actor-director, can be heard at the ceremony dedicating "this fatal urn from the catacombs of the Opera.". The records were "a miracle in which we preserve for our great grand-children the most fugitive thing in the world... the voice of the master." he said. "Like the painter and the writer... the lyrical artist will henceforward leave other testimony to his talent that the memory of his reputation."
A footnote: Leroux's Phantom is less famous in France than in the Anglo-Saxon world where it has been staged as theatre and film from the 1920s through to Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980s musical. His Mystère de la Chambre Jaune is probably better known in France.
It's always impressive how quickly France adopts a fashion. One day no-one is wearing ballerine shoes, then everyone is (à la Carla Bruni). We are now in the midst of a new sartorial craze -- le gilet jaune, or the high-visibility vest.
You may remember how the state ran a tongue-in-cheek campaign that used Karl Lagerfeld to publicise a new law requiring fluorescent safety vests to be carried inside all vehicles. "It's yellow, it's ugly and it goes with nothing, but it can save your life," said Karl.
The fashion icon did the trick. Suddenly Day-Glo is everywhere. Paris cyclists, who had always eschewed safety gear as un-chic still don't wear helmets much, but yellow is their new black. The same applies to scooter riders, protest marchers and people handing out leaflets.
That's obviously commendable. More cyclists can now be seen in the winter gloom. But the really odd manifestation of the gilet jaune is a fashion for draping them around front car seats.
It seems to have started because people believed that the new law requires them to be visible, not stashed in the glove-box or seat pocket. Some mistakenly thought that this would prevent police from stopping them to check their compliance (They are still stopped because they have to carry a triangle as well). Now, somewhere about one in ten cars are sporting the yellow vest look, according to quick surveys around the country. They are more prevalent in the provinces than Paris. The gilet jaune around the seat has become the new version of the nodding dog on the rear shelf or the furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.
The fad is annoying many people and it is now seen as a joke. It has become a defining symbol of "beaufitude" -- naffness in UK English -- like Bluetooth earpieces or wearing mobile phones on the belt or the tourists who carry bottles of water around Paris.
The gilet-on-display fashion is so irritating that there are now about 200 groups on Facebook devoted to fighting it. There are 70,000 members in the biggest one, called Contre les cons qui foutent leur gilet jaune fluo sur le siège auto [Against the plonkers who stick their yellow fluorescent vest on the car seat]. Watch an anti-gilet jaune squad in street action here.
Some newspapers have studied the phenomenon. La Charente Libre, based in the west, found that drivers thought the vest was fun on the seat because it "brightens things up". Other were doing it "because everyone else is doing it." Their prize went to the man in a green Citroen Xsara who had equipped both front seats with yellow vests and had two more on the back seat on top of a Johnnny Hallyday towel.
Hallyday, France's rock'n roll monument, is himself a high-grade symbol of beaufitude. Nicolas Sarkozy is a big Hallyday fan but we don't know yet if the President has fitted a yellow vest on the seat of the black Mercedes 4x4 (SUV) which he drives about town. Black SUVs are of course another symbol of heavy-duty beaufitude, but I'm getting off the point.
 [Below: fashionable chien parisien]
The subject today is the abuse of power by French police and judges. Two lurid examples have made the headlines for different reasons. One involves a journalist and the other a recreational pilot. Since I am both, I of course feel extra indignation.
Journalists do not usually get sympathy when they complain about mistreatment, but the tale of Vittorio de Filippis [in picture], a manager with Libération, has caused an outcry. It tells you about the heavy-handed methods of a system which has extensive power to arrest and hold people.
Plainclothes officers hammered on de Filippis' door at 6.40 am last Friday. He was arrested in front of his two young sons and insulted. An officer called him "worse than garbage". He was taken in handcuffs to a holding cell and twice subjected to an intimate body search. He was questioned without access to a lawyer and released five hours later.
The police carried out their raid on the orders of Muriel Josié, an examining judge. De Filippis' alleged offence is that he was liable as publisher of Libération for a defamatory comment left by a reader on its internet site. In France, when you sue for libel, the case is prosecuted as a criminal one. In this instance, the victim of the supposed libel, an internet businessman, has already lost two cases against the newspaper.
In other words, a judge ordered a newspaper executive to be dragged from his home and abused over an internet comment. "I barely had time to reassure my son that I was not a crook and that this had to do with the newspaper," said de Filippis.
Continue reading "Rough justice for French journalist and pilot" »
As we have seen, President Sarkozy has been winning praise in France for what is seen as his masterful handling of the banking crisis. But his promise to guarantee the deposits of his citizens, has not extended to his own current account.
The Elysée palace has confirmed with a little embarrassment that internet thieves have gained access to Sarko's account at his branch at Neuilly, his suburban home, and helped themselves. (see Tuesday update at end)
There have been a series of debits of minor amounts -- in keeping with the phishing technique in which the crooks sneak out sums under about 200 euros in the hope of escaping detection. Sarko noticed the mysterious debits while going through his monthly statement. That must have been about the same time that he was arranging to pump billions into the banks on behalf of the tax-payer.
The authors of the swindle may not have realised whom they were dealing with and they may now wish that they had chosen a less distinguished target. "The swindlers will be punished," Luc Chatel, the secretary of state for consumer affairs, said as the fraud police put their finest sleuths onto the case. Once they nail the offenders, the Presidents' men may go after the bank --the Société Générale -- and bring charges of misuse of personal data. Sarko, Mr Zero Tolerance in matters of law-and-order, cannot have taken lightly to being phished.
Chatel said the pilfering of Sarko's account showed that more needed to be done to tighten internet banking security. Fraud has risen by 9% this year. "This proves that the system of checking via the internet isn't infallible," he said.
France is suffering from about the same level of internet fraud as other European countries. In the field of payment cards that are used physically, it has had more security than most places because it introduced chips with PIN numbers in the early 1990s. Britain only did that with its credit cards a couple of years ago. About four years ago, someone stole my wallet with three credit cards when they picked my pocket. They did not manage to take anything off the French PIN-protected card but they spent several thousand euros on the two US-based cards within half an hour of the theft (all was immediately refunded by courteous Amex and Citibank customer service).
They were making fun of Sarko's hacking on the radio this morning. Nicolas Canteloup, who does a great daily impersonation of the President on Europe 1, did Sarkozy discovering that a certain "DSK" had debited his account to buy sex toys at an outlet in the Place Pigalle (see last post).
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Tuesday update from Agence France-Presse: French police arrested two suspects today as part of a probe to find computer hackers who broke into President Nicolas Sarkozy's bank account and made withdrawals, a source close to the enquiry said.
Sarkozy filed complaints last month about the theft, which involved small amounts of money taken from his account in a bank in the Neuilly suburb of the capital, which were used to set up several mobile phone subscriptions.
The source said the pair were detained in the Paris region but gave no further details.
"Quel con" translates into polite English as 'what a fool'. That's the expression that many in France are applying to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the talented and popular Socialist who has made his mark lately in Washington as boss of the International Monetary Fund.
Strauss-Kahn, 59, as you will probably know, is in trouble over a one-night fling that he enjoyed with a married subordinate last January at the Davos international forum in Switzerland. It seems pretty likely that "DSK" , who is married, will be cleared later this month of allegations that he abused his authority when he seduced Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born banking expert who worked in the IMF Africa department.
When he heard of the matter a few weeks ago, Sarkozy was furious that DSK, one of the most admired French politicians and a likely Socialist candidate for the next presidency, had risked his chance to restart his career and help France. But the Elysée Palace had been hoping that no news would break until Strauss-Kahn had been cleared by the Washington DC legal firm which was brought in last August to investigate.
DSK is a likeable man with a reputation for enjoying the company of women (the flattering picture above was used when he was trying to win the Socialist presidential nomination last year). One newspaper today called him un grand séducteur. Last year, a Libération journalist caused a fuss by wondering on his blog how long it would take for Strauss-Kahn's wandering eye to land him in trouble in Washington.
We got the answer last spring when Mario Blejer, a senior Argentine economist who is Nagy's husband, began campaigning to have him investigated for abusing his power. We were tipped off along with other journalists in Paris. Mr Blejer discovered the episode via the classic route of stumbling on an incriminating e-mail. His wife confessed and the couple were both very upset and blamed Strauss-Kahn for pursuing her aggressively, IMF colleagues said at the time.
The investigation was made public by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday with timing that could hardly have been worse for Sarkozy's attempts to put a French stamp on a new world financial order. Sarko has teamed up with DSK in an attempt to shape a new "Bretton Woods" pact on financial regulation. Sarkozy put the French-led European case to President Bush at Camp David, Maryland, yesterday, and got a frosty reception.
So you can guess the response from some sections of the French political and media world: The IMF affair is another absurd case of American hysteria over sex, like the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. DSK's private life is nobody's business and he has obviously been stitched up in a plot to undermine France. That charge was laid, for example, by Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of Sarko's UMP party.
But the view is by no means universal. Even allies of DSK are privately calling him idiotic for letting his taste for dalliance get the better of his judgment.
In a well-informed piece today, Claude Askolovitch, Editor of Le Journal du Dimanche, wrote that "Dominique le Magnifique" had caused a French farce by breaking well-understood rules.
"The affair may well be ridiculous compared with the destiny of the world but it touches the heart of the culture of the American government and the IMF," he said. "It is less about sexual puritanism.. than a deep horror of lies and conflict of interest. The absolute sin is not fornication, but denial, in which private life is mixed with public behaviour."
His newspaper carried its usual Washington political column by Anne Sinclair, DSK's glamorous wife, a celebrity television journalist. Sinclair, who is a tough cookie, is publicly standing by her man. She has written on her blog today that she has forgiven "cette aventure d'une nuit" -- this one-night adventure. "We love each other just as much as at our beginning," she said.
For the record, Nagy left Washington in the summer and now works in London at the Bank for Economic Reconstruction and Development (BERD). Strauss-Kahn has confirmed the "incident in my private life in January 2008" and denies that he abused his position as managing director of the fund. The BERD said that there was nothing irregular about Ms Nagy's recruitment and it is not investigating.
People who have talked to DSK say that he is confident that the affair will blow oved once the investigation has cleared him. If that is the case it will not have any impact on his chances of running as the Socialist candidate in the 2012 president election. At lunch today the (French) majority around my table argued that affairs at work are nobody's business if coercion is not involved. A woman who has une aventure with her boss should take responsibility and not seek to have him punished and pilloried, it was said. And before people pile in here, we all know the counter argument to this.
Strauss-Kahn, incidentally, ranked in a poll yesterday as France's second most political figure, behind Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist Mayor of Paris.
Perhaps it's the onset of autumn, but sometimes it seems that France almost enjoys bringing itself down. But the gloom should be taken with a pinch of salt. The French enjoy life more than they let on; being negative is just a national trait.
The struggle to survive in hard economic times is daily news. Rubbing it in today was word of a 25 percent jump in bankruptcies among cafes and restaurants. And we heard from a state outfit today that 5.5 million people -- nearly nine percent of the population -- have suffered a Major Depressive Episode over the past year. [Report with English translation here]. It's difficult to find comparisons but about 12 percent of Americans are said to experience an MDE in their lifetimes (ok, according to Wikipedia).
To help understand, radio stations hauled out depresssed people this morning to explain what it was like to have le blues permanent. And then there was an item on two young women in eastern France who killed themselves under a train after an internet suicide pact.
We have also been reminded that the French rank themselves among the least happy people of the developed world. Libération yesterday hauled out British research to wonder why the Danes, Swiss and Austrians rate themselves the happiest people in the world, while the French brood in 64th place, behind such jolly nations as Guyana, Argentina, Mongolia and El Salvador. You get an idea from the world map of global happiness from Leicester University below.
Eva Joly, a Norwegian (19th place) who became a famous investigating judge in Paris, said on the radio that Nordic states were happy because their societies did not exclude categories of the population like France -- the unemployed, immigrants and so on.
The closest correlation to well-being is national wealth, the Leicester researchers note. With the exception of a few countries such as Mongolia, the richer countries are the happiest. But it's also clear though that people rate their "underlying state of happiness" against differing scales. It's perhaps surprising that the supposedly gloomy Scandiwegians, with their cold, dark winters, are so cheery while the Americans, with their official pursuit of happiness since 1776, are only 23rd (Britons are 41st and Australians 26th).
So why do the French rate themselves so low in the bonheur league ? The stock answer includes the malaise bred by two decades of high unemployment and relative economic decline. This has generated a tide of nostalgia for the good old days. The latest case is Faubourg 36, an atmospheric feel-good film, which opened today to good reviews (poster above).
Yet France knows that it is the envy of the world for the quality of its life. It has space, beauty and a good climate. For centuries it cultivated wit, lightness and the art of living. In the 18th century the Germans, Dutch and Swedes coined the expression "to live like God in France" and they still say it. Despite the unemployment, France has done a lot right in recent decades -- spending on public services and infrastructure that has been allowed to decay in the UK, the USA and elsewhere. As Time magazine has just noted in an hilarious column, the collapse of the financial markets have converted the United States into a wannabe France.
France just does not like to admit its relative good fortune, I suspect out of old fears of tempting the devil, the neighbours or tax inspectors. And I wouldn't believe those figures on depression. Franck Chaumont, a Paris hospital psychiatrist, says that the malady has become the latest health fixation. "Do I see many more depressed people in my practice than before? I would say no," he told Libération. "But I see a lot more people who say that they are depressed."
Footnote: There is some argument about the origin of the German "living like God in France" saying. Some claim that it was a reference to the rejection of religion by French enlightenment philosophers. Nobody bothered God in France. It's interesting that France deems itself the unhappiest nation in western Europe by far. It also ranks as one of the least religious. No connection, I suppose.
How do you run a military campaign in the age of cell phones, the internet and media emotion ? The difficulty of doing so is being illustrated in France as the Parliament votes today on the continuing deployment of French forces in Afghanistan.
There is little doubt that President Sarkozy will win the endorsement but the government is embarrassed by the anger that has followed the deaths of 10 soldiers in a Taleban ambush
France heard immediately that the August 18 battle at Sarobi, 30 miles east of Kabul was a disaster. Survivors phoned home to their families the night afterwards and they also talked to reporters about the failures that allowed the Taleban to overpower them. As well as the dead, 21 were wounded in the all-night fighting. Reinforcements arrived late, no reconnaissance had been carried out in a dangerous zone, air cover did not work and ammunition ran out.
Bereaved parents and partners of the young paratroopers then went on television and radio attacking the army for getting them into the mess and Sarkozy for keeping France in Afghanistan. The President flew to Kabul to comfort the troops and the families were flown out to visit to the site of the ambush "to help them in their mourning".
Wives of soldiers in the French contingent were on the radio this morning complaining that they could not stand the strain of knowing their men were in possible combat. "If he doesn't phone by 8 pm I start worrying myself sick," said one. Others called for Sarkozy to bring the boys home from a mistaken war. Wives also reported that their husbands were poorly equipped to fight. One soldier has to take off his body armour to shoot because it is too big, his wife said. Another wife reported that morale in the Kabul detachment was very low.
The latest fuss is over the leaking of an American report on the French bungling of the hillside battle. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, which published extracts, the French paratroopers ran out of bullets and did not have proper communication equipment, forcing them to stop fighting after 90 minutes. The Taleban were better equipped and trained and used incendiary bullets to punch holes in the French armoured vehicles, and so on. The army denied that this was a Nato analysis, saying that it was just an ill-informed e-mail from an officer with American special forces who had taken part in the French patrol. But the damage has been done.
Not surprisingly, a poll after the ambush showed that 55 percent want Sarkozy to pull France's 2,700 troops out of the Nato operation in Afghanistan. With few exceptions today, the media are calling for a rethink and some for a French withdrawal. A serving soldier's mother wrote a plea in L'Humanité, the communist daily, calling Sarkozy and the generals liars at the service of Uncle Sam and ending: "Give us back our children".
Sarkozy and his government are committed to staying in Afghanistan, where France has been part of the Nato force since 2001. But they are hard on the defensive with a public opinion and military and political experts in a defeatist consensus that the war can never be won.
Of course democracies need public support to send troops into danger and the media are there to expose failures. But discussion of the merits of French engagement in Afghanistan is being drowned out by emotion over what in earlier ages would have been deemed a skirmish. This is by no means typically French. It happens everywhere now that we all expect instant information and video to go with it.
Take a good look. Henri Matisse's painting and many like it could soon be banned from the internet, at least in France. That might sound like a joke, but if the health lobby has its way, images of wine or any promotion of alcohol consumption on the web will be deemed to infringe France's strict laws on drink advertising.
[Matisse: la Désserte/ The Dinner Table]
This has arisen from a court decision which forced the Heineken company to block French access to its corporate web site. The case was brought last February by the National Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Addiction (ANPAA) on the grounds that France's 1991 law on alcohol promotion does not permit it on the internet. The worldwide web was in embryo when the so-called Evin law was passed, but, say the campaigners, that is no excuse for breaking the law.
Since the Heineken ruling, some of the biggest brands have shut out French visitors for fear of prosecution over what is a legal grey area. A click from France on the Courvoisier site down in Cognac country, for example, elicits the message: "Sorry, the regulations of your country do not authorise us to give you access to our site."
Internet visitors who identify themselves as French are even banned from dropping in on Orlando wines in South Australia -- because they are owned by France's Pernod Ricard drinks giant. The site will let you in if you say you are from almost anywhere else, including Kuweit and the United Arab Emirates.
"We are not inciting people to crime. We are sensitive to the risks of alcohol," said Frédéric Delesque, Marketing Director of Camus Cognac, which also bowed to the law and blocks French visitors. "There are three countries in the world which ban the discussion of alcohol: Iran, Afghanistan and France. It is a pity for the image of our products," he told us.
The government is preparing to draft a law to bring the internet into the Evin law, which defines the way that alcoholic drinks may be advertised and limits this only to the press, the radio and on posters. The health lobby want a complete purge of alcohol images and promotion from the internet, though the government is unlikely to go as far as that. Vineyards will no doubt be allowed to keep the sites that are one of their strongest marketing tools but there may be restrictions such as limiting advertising to certain hours of the French night.
In the meantime, the winemakers, merchants and drinks companies are fighting back, pointing out the absurdity of restricting alcohol on a medium which tolerates everything. "Today in France, the sight of a bottle of wine has become as offensive as a picture of war or pornography," said Daniel Lorson, a spokesman for CIVC , the industry body of champagne producers.
Nicolas Sarkozy promised to help the wine industry over the internet during his election campaign in early 2007, but his government has been taking a tough line, introducing measures to combat binge-drinking and under-age consumption and alcohol-related diseases.
The industry complains that it is being demonised and that an internet ban would hugely penalise one of the glories of the French economy and the national heritage. Among the recent successes of the anti-alcohol lobby has been the conviction last winter of le Parisien newspaper for breaching with Evin law with an editorial supplement on champagne. The newspaper argued in vain that its articles were not promoting alcohol.
Even the alcohol-fuelled world of sport has not been left unscathed. When Liverpool played Marseille in this week's Champions League football match, the logo of Carlsberg, the team's main sponsor, was absent from their shirts. Rugby union's Heineken Cup is simply called the European Rugby trophy in France.
The campaign to hide drink in the world's biggest wine-consuming country is inevitably producing jokes. According to one, the state is to ban dozens of place-names because they illicitly promote alcohol consumption. First to go will be Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and Cognac.
This clip from the Monday night news is an amusing glimpse of the bumpy debut of Laurence Ferrari, the blonde star who was elevated this summer to the news throne of TF1, France's dominant television channel.
Ferrari was trying to interview Al Pacino and Robert de Niro from the studio about Righteous Kill, their new film. The translation fell apart and the two US stars, who were standing outside a cinema on the Champs Elysées, made fun of her in a bored way. The embarrassment turned into farce when a familiar lanky figure strolled into the picture -- Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, or PPDA, the popular presenter who was sacked to make way for her.
Ferrari, 42, was supposed to revive the flagging fortunes of le Journal de 20 Heures, the half-hour weeknight news that is watched more than any other in Europe. You may remember how the 60-year-old PPDA was dumped at the suggestion of President Sarkozy, who disliked him and was romancing Ferrari for a time after his divorce last year.
Ferrari, a respected journalist, made a solid start on August 25 with a 40 percent rating, or over eight million viewers. But her audience has dwindled ever since, hitting 32 percent at the end of last week. She comes over as bland and a little unsure of herself and she has has failed to show the punchy interview style that was supposed to be her hallmark. On Monday she gave a shamefully free ride to Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who wants to take over the party in November. Viewers -- especially older ones -- have been switching over to France 2, TF1's state-owned lesser rival.
TF1, which is owned by Martin Bouygues, a close Sarkozy friend, is standing by Ferrari -- for the moment. I don't want to exaggerate, but the stakes are high with millions of euros riding on her success. The channel's prime time advertising revenue depends on the pull of the news show that long served as nightly communion for France's lower orders. The television landscape may be fragmenting with competition from multiple channels, but TF1 will not let an under-performing Ferrari slow it down for long.
France has just notched up two royal weddings within eight months and you might say that speed was an element of both. Jean Sarkozy, 22, second son of the President, exchanged vows at his local town hall late yesterday with Jessica Sebaoun, 20, his long-time girlfriend.
An ugly episode involving French anti-semitism preceeded the wedding, of which more below.
Sarko senior was at the Neuilly mairie for the simple civil ceremony along with Carla Bruni, his third wife, whom he married last February. There were 100 guests, many from the money, politics and show-biz set that Jean and his dad frequent. Among them was Doc Gynéco, the louche rap singer and Sarkozy supporter who starred in a post here the other day.
Sarko senior married Bruni in haste, three months after meeting her. In contrast, his glamorous son has known his bride, heiress to the Darty retail fortune, since schooldays in Neuilly, his dad's political fiefdom. "I promised you at 16 that I would marry you before I was 26," Jean told Jessica at the ceremony. "Well, I have done it sooner." To quash rumours, Paris Match magazine was authorised to tell readers today that the new Madame Sarkozy is not expecting a baby.
In Jean's case, the speed applies to his meteoric leap to stardom in his own right over the past year. Pierre Sarkozy, 23, his brother, leads a quiet life as a rap music producer (I'm not making this up) but Jean is in a big rush, just like his father was.
Jean is known sometimes as Monsieur Fils -- a play on the title held by the king's brother (the previous king's second son) in royal days. But the prince insists that he is working his way up the ladder as a humble commoner.
Continue reading "Sarkozy's golden boy gets married " »
The French state has a long history of spying on its citizens, as we have seen here before. There has never been much fuss over the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence service which snoops in cafes, work places and housing estates and currently holds files on some 20 million people. A vetting by an RG officer used to be the first the step to a press card for foreign correspondents in Paris.
France barely noticed when President Sarkozy, a long serving Interior Minister and law-and-order champion, beefed up the internal spy services earlier this year by combining the RG with the DST, the counter-espionage and anti-terrorist agency that equates to Britain's MI5. The new super-agency is called the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur.
In the past couple of weeks, however, a revolt has broken out. The spur was the revelation of a new data base that will track the lives, opinions and even sexual habits of what could be a big slice of the population.
Called EDVIGE* -- an acronym and also old-fashioned woman's name -- the system is authorised to store data on anyone aged 13 upwards who is thought "likely to breach public order". "Big sister", as it has been dubbed, will also track everyone active in politics or trade unions and or in a significant role in economic, social or religious institutions. Listed people will have only a very limited right to consult their files.
Insiders are pointing out that this is what the police RG and its predecessors have done for centuries. "EDVIGE is just a cut and paste of the 1991 decree on the RG data base," said Alain Bauer, a criminologist.
The opposition has taken off because Sarkozy's government was forced by the National Commission on Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL) to publish last July 1 the hitherto secret decree that created EDVIGE. This alerted rights groups to the potentially vast scope of the new network.
"With just a few clicks of the mouse, any government official or civil servant will have access to intimate data," said François Bayrou, a centrist politician and fierce opponent of Sarkozy.
Michel Pezet, a lawyer and former member of the CNIL agency, wrote in le Monde: "The EDVIGE database has no place in a democracy. There is nothing in the decree that sets limits or a framework. Whether the database is used with or without moderation depends only on orders from up high."
The main judges' union, civil liberties defenders, gay rights groups and leftwing lawyers have joined the mutiny against what the opponents are calling a new "electronic Bastille". Several suits against it have been filed at the Conseil d'Etat, the highest civil court, and an online petition has gathered over 103,700 signatures (http://nonaedvige.ras.eu.org).
Leading newspapers -- at least those which do not support Sarkozy -- have joined the anti-EDVIGE campaign this week. Le Monde said that it was legitimate for a state to defend its security with an intelligence base "but the defence of public order cannot justify such a threat to individual liberties."
Of course France is not alone. "Homeland Security" in the USA and the fight against Islamic terrorism in Britain have brought new, extra-judicial surveillance of the population. Defenders of EDVIGE are also pointing out that everyone is electronically tracked these days and that people volunteer their biographies and private details on Facebook and other networking sites.
That's true, but it is impossible not to see as sinister a police system that lists 13-year-olds who are deemed potential trouble-makers and keeps tabs on everyone anyone with a remotely public role -- including journalists of course.
-------
*EDVIGE stands for a mouthful of bureaucratese: Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale. Here's the full government decree setting it up. Note that it authorises the agency to record "data relative to the environment of the person, notably including people who have or had a direct, but not accidental, relationship with him or her".
Sarkozy's internal spooks have another even more secret system called CRISTINA (Centralisation du Renseignement Intérieur pour la Sécurité du Territoire et les Intérêts Nationaux).
The French have finally been told that Rachida Dati, President Sarkozy's Justice Minister, is expecting a baby. The story is a chance to look at the way that France is tangled up between modern celebrity culture and the old taboos that protect privacy -- and especially its ruling class. [See Wednesday update at end. Thursday update: Aznar says he's not the Daddy]
As I mentioned here on Monday, Dati's condition has been the talk of the internet and Paris newsrooms for a month. Palace officials have now given the nod to the media to break the news. They have also been warned against intrusion into the life of the glamorous, 42-year-old whose rise from immigrant ghetto to Cabinet star is one of the feel-good tales of the Sarkozy administration.
Dati's condition is front page today in the celebrity magazines. What none offers, of course, is the identity of the father. The unmarried Dati, for whom this is a first child, has projected her Cinderella life story in the media, appearing on chat shows with her Moroccan-Algerian parents. But she brooks no other reporting of her life.
As Renaud Revel, a commentator on France-Inter radio, says on his blog: "The German or Anglo-Saxon press would have x-rayed Rachida Dati's pregnancy, to the point of producing the father's ID papers and his DNA. The French media are kept at a distance.... The father has been known to all the newsrooms for weeks. But not a line, not a name...not the slightest allusion has appeared, even on the net."
VSD magazine, which features the minister on its cover, writes coyly today: "She was seen for a time close to a French business leader. His entourage talks of a passionate and stormy relationship, doubtless now over. She was seen last December sunning herself on an island with another CEO who is a friend of the president."
What are readers supposed to make of that ? To satisfy curiosity here, the first companion was Henri Proglio, boss of Veolia Environment, and the man on the beach was Dominique Desseigne,chief of the Barrière casino and hotel empire.
You can argue that France's legally-enforced respect for privacy is healthy. Why should the public know who is a minister's partner? Media stars such as television news presenters, are after all happy to use the privacy law to protect themselves from gossip.
There is a simple answer to that. It is the same one that is applied to Sarkozy's private life. Dati, like Sarkozy, has long played the celebrity game, mixing her personal life with professional. She invites curiosity by appearing on chat shows and posing clad in Chanel in glamour shots for glossy magazines.
French media bosses defend their respect for public figures' private lives, contrasting it with the voyeuristic excesses of the "Anglo-Saxons". But they also relay every juicy detail that comes across the frontier. Sarah Palin's "baby-gate" has received full play here, though she would never have been troubled about her daughter if she were a French politician. And the distinction is fast fading at home, now that the politicians and media have gone so far down the celebrity track together. The complete silence on the identify of Dati's partner looks more like old-fashioned deference to the governing class.
Update: Dati has given an interview to selected French journalists to announce her happy event. She says that she will not speak about the father. "I have a complicated private life and this is the limit that I fix for myself with regard to the media. I will say nothing about this," she said.
There was another, related, example of the deference phenomenon today. Most of the media were having fun with Sarkozy's Corsican blunder (last post), reporting the political row and deploring his devotion to his show-biz cronies. But the story was not deemed fit for readers of Le Figaro, a venerable national daily. The newspaper, which is owned by Serge Dassault, a big Sarkozy supporter, can rarely bring itself to report anything embarrassing to the President. So it reduced the Corsica yarn to a few brief lines with no allusion to a row.
France began the new year today. The children don't go back to school until September 1, but for most others, the last Monday in August is la rentrée. The summer is almost over, the government is back and the big event is the debut tonight of la Ferrari.
Laurence Ferrari, 42 (below), is taking over as presenter of the TF1 Journal Télévisé, Europe's the most watched TV news programme. The firing last June of Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, the "Pope" of the JT for the past two decades, was something of a national trauma, as you may recall. 'PPDA' got on many people's nerves but his daily communion with the nation has been missed. Ferrari, a friend of Sarkozy, has to prove quickly that she can fill his shoes.
The new season also means year two for President Sarkozy. Not that the hyper-president has taken much of a break, with August trips to the Beijing Olympics, to Moscow and Georgia to negotiate a ceasefire and to Afghanistan to comfort French troops after they lost 10 men (video below). Here's a quick view of Sarkozia at the opening of season II:
France felt different 12 months ago. Hopes for change were high and the newly elected Super Sarko was basking in 69 percent approval but suffering from the breakdown of his marriage. A year on, a slightly more humble Sarko has a new super-model wife, the economy is down, his promises appear unfulfilled and 59 percent disapprove of him.
For some, Sarko has become a hate figure, a self-obsessed showman who tricked voters with promises of prosperity, threw money at the rich and unleashed a whirlwind of reforms that has torn through cherished institutions. These include the hospital system, the 35-hour working week, unemployment and retirement benefits, the law courts, the universities and so on.
As François Hollande, leader of the moribund Socialist opposition, put it: "He is not reforming France. He is shaking it up, creating mayhem, unbalancing it. Sarkozy divides, stigmatizes and then destroys." Sarko's sin, Hollande told Le Parisien, is that he is trying to make France 'Anglo-Saxon'. "His project is to individualise social relations: everyone must now take care of themselves all alone."
The latest embarrassment for Sarko is this clip from his visit to Kabul last Wednesday. It drew little comment on the TV news last week but it has taken on a life of its own, feeding the Sarkophobes of the internet who say he is sneering with a misplaced joke.
Sarkozy's words to the comrades of the fallen soldiers were not especially striking. People are irked because he seems to make light of the Taleban ambush that befell the French paratroop patrol near Kabul. "If it had to be done again, I would do it," says the president, adding with an awkward smirk "Not the patrol..."
I disagree with the criticism. This video shows Sarkozy's awkward side, not contempt for the soldiers. The little smirk is one of his many nervous tics.
Continue reading "Sombre Sarkozy opens tough new season" »
Here's a glimpse of the other French way of life -- far from Paris in the Cévennes, the sunny southern foothills of the Massif Central. The goats belong to the neighbours. After their evening graze in front of my house, they walk home about two miles to be milked. Their cheese is sold in the local markets. Click here for more on Saint Germain de Calberte, our village, which is six miles by road and about one by the crow's flight.
Of course there is a huge lot more to the Cévennes than goats and Stevenson and his donkey. The area was always a refuge for rebels and dissenters. The "Camisard" Protestants held out against the Catholic king's troops in religious wars 300 years ago. In World War Two they were a stronghold for Resistance fighters. In the 1970s, after the 1968 upheaval, young town dwellers dropped out for the simple life, trying to raise goats and live off the land. Many are still there and still struggling.
I'll be picking up as usual back in Paris later in the week.
Here's your chance to listen to the new musical oeuvre from Carla Bruni. In a marketing build-up worthy of Madonna or a Stones release, Mrs Sarkozy's record company has put Comme si de rien n'était (As if nothing happened) on the internet for free listening.
This must be the first time that the presidency of a leading nation has promoted a pop album. The Elysée Palace has been working closely with Naive records to maximise the launch of breathy love songs by the first lady. The repercussions have even gone as far as Japan, which was miffed by Bruni's decision not to join the other spouses at this week's G8 summit. She decided to stay in Paris to advance the release date. Today, she was on France-Inter radio doing the first of a series of promotional interviews which culminate with a long live session on TF1 television news -- the most watched show -- on Friday evening.
We've touched on the songs here already. They include Ma Came (My junk), the now famous drug song which caused an official complaint from the Bogota government last month. Bruni sings of an amorous high with the effects of Colombian cocaine. Most of the songs were written before her romance with Sarkozy last winter but one song, Ta Tienne (Yours) is a declaration of passion for the president, whom she calls her "orgy" and her "prince charming".
Here are some of it's lyrics:
Continue reading "Carla Bruni's new album and the love song for Sarko" »
 Nicolas Sarkozy prides himself on giving it straight. His refusal to talk "wooden language", as the French say, is an attractive quality that helped get him elected. But his sharp tongue can get him into trouble as it has done this week.
In the past two days, while taking up the French presidency of the European Union, he has picked fights with Peter Mandelson, the British EU Commissioner, Bruno Cuche, chief of the French army, Lech Kaczynski, the President of Poland and Patrick Carolis, the boss of France Télévisions, the state broadcasting service.
Why does Sarkozy do it ? Lets take the Mandelson case. Everyone who has watched Sarkozy and chatted with him knows that he is a fierce opponent in debate. He mixes charm with a verbal right hook. Like the good court lawyer that he is, he boils the case down to a single simple point that he hammers as irrefutable.
He loves personalising the argument, fingering the villain to help the jury latch onto his logic. He can be a bully but he enjoys it when his opponent punches back.
That is what he has done with Mandelson, a former government minister and henchman of Tony Blair. He has invested in him all the evils that France sees in the Brussels EU Commission. It's not really personal, although the commissioner's unctuous, high-handed style puts his back up. As Trade Commissioner and a Briton, Mandy usefully stands for everything that France hates in the EU -- l'ultra-libéralisme anglo-saxon, or devotion to the free market.
Continue reading "Why Sarkozy hammers Mandelson, the British villain" »
Keen watchers of Nicolas Sarkozy may be interested in this video. Recorded without his knowledge last night by staff at French public television, it shows Super Sarko's nervous and rough side.
The President was waiting to go on air at France 3 to explain how he aimed to rescue the European Union during his six month turn in the EU chair which opened today. He was tense because he had just driven past a mini protest by staff who are upset over his moves to take control of public television. France 3, the channel that covers the regions, is especially alarmed and two of the journalists questioning the head of state signed a protest last week.
The video shows Sarko in his usual impatient form. He snaps at a technician who he believes has failed to return his "bonjour" as he clipped on his microphone. "It's a matter of upbringing," he lectures the man. "When you're a guest you have the right to expect a bonjour... Or we're not in the public service here, we are at a demonstration... Incredible... and serious...That's going to change."
Then he addresses Gérard Leclerc, one of the interviewers, using the informal -- and disrespectful -- "tu" and asks him: "How long did you spend in Siberia?". The reference (in the cupboard in French) was apparently to the journalist's recent assignment to off camera duties. "I wasn't in favour," he adds. The exchange shows Sarko's menacing mateyness with journalists.
Sarko gets irritated about the wait and asks if the clock is wrong, fiddling with his Patek Philippe watch, a wedding gift from Carla Bruni. He tells the interviewers to make sure to mention his morning dash to Carcassonne to commiserate with people wounded in an army base shooting.
This is minor stuff and I apologise to non French speakers, but it shows the unvarnished Sarko that journalists see. It last went public on a video of him putting down a heckler at the Paris farm show. Today's video was released with obviously mischievous intent by France 3 staff to Rue89, a popular leftwing news site. As I write, some 180,000 people have already watched it and it is spreading fast.
Sarkozy spent some of the interview criticising the output of France Televisions, the public broadcasting company, saying it was too commercial. He wants more theatre and other cultural fare, he said. Last week he caused a furore by announcing that he would in future appoint the France Televisions boss rather than the supposedly independent broadcasting authority. France Televisions is unhappy over a Sarkozy decision to stop it broadcasting commercials in the evening without guarantees of alternative funding.
To be fair to the President, Sarkozy's second studio interview was only the second time that a French president has deigned to go to the TV rather than commanding its cameras to the Elysée palace.
Your writer
Charles Bremner is Paris Correspondent for The Times. He started out as a journalist in Russia and then moved to the United States. He has reported from all the continents but most enjoys observing the exotic tribe on Britain's doorstep. Though France is home, he avoids going native by offering what the locals call an "Anglo-Saxon" eye on their country.
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Don
do you have a publisher?
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:29:18
"They were rather brilliant though, weren't they? ..." Dot
Rather....
or as we'd say, very.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:28:34
"...a definite enhancement of their freedom to continue putting on weird plays reviling the System and the Guignol/Mr Punch who rules us at present...
....some of the actors were so manic they’d probably have performed for two drunks and the theatre mice.
With your sense of humor, I am releasing the subject of 'sex ponies' to you for further development.
Your description of the French arts subsidy scene sounds weirdly familiar.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:24:03
re various comment about Obama's writing, his absence from 20th anniversary ceremony, 'vast' cultural divide between Europe and U.S.
The Ceremony at the Wall made official what was known years ago: Europe is no longer the center of modern history as a focus of global ideological conflict. That ended with the fall of communism and the Wall.
So Obama, with roots in other cultures and aware of hegemonic aspirations to the East is focusing elsewhere.
Europe doesn't need "Daddy' U.S. anymore, so why should Obama try to hog the limelight at what was essentially a European event. The President of China wasn't there either.
Europe is a better, more stable place now as a result of that conflict and resolution. Now they must move on, seek cohesion, and protect themselves. In other words, be grown-ups.
Obama isn't unaware of the historic importance of European culture, and our debt to it. But it isn't all-important. The world is changing, immigrant by immigrant, and Euro-American cultural influence will wane. Obama knows this better than Europe. Just read today's headlines.
Europeans are so used to courting U.S. favor that anything Obama does that suggests he doesn't love them is blown way out of proportion. Get used to it, I'm afraid.
CalGirl has it right -- CB exaggerates language differences between U.S. and Britain.
Brits, though, can't understand certain Scottish and Irish dialects, and neither can we.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:04:17
They have, I read 30,000,000 un-insured an mostly unable to get adequate health cover.
The 30 million uninsured is a debated number. According to research, some of those uninsured are young people who do not want to spend the money on health insurance and illegal immigrants. I will agree that healthcare in the U.S. is expensive and some type of reform needs to be done. The fear is that what the Obama Administration and a Democratic controlled Congress will make health insurance so expensive to the point where a country of 300 million citizens will end up on government rolls. The only way to keep the budget under control with healthcare reform would be to levy taxes and when politicians start talking about paying taxes, there is a huge revolt amongst Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters. This is where the huge problem comes in for Obama when he promised not to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or less and also rein in the budget deficit during his campaign last year. There is no way either one of those things will happen if the healthcare reforms which are currently being discussed are passed.
Posted by: Yvonne | 14 Nov 2009 18:58:36
Sorry, fell asleep there. This debate is clearly not a trivial matter, but then I haven't been to Darfur yet
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 14 Nov 2009 17:37:41
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 14 Nov 2009 17:32:50
Badinter too. He was great as usual. (CB)
He was one of my idols before I became blasé. Someone once wrote about him: "la passion de la raison quand elle s'exaspère jusqu'aux déraisons de la passion."
which i'd twist into: thin as a twig, he burned with a passion for abstract reason that went beyond reason. His combat (death penalty) was not for the men he defended, but for the cause, only the cause.
Posted by: qwerty | 14 Nov 2009 17:32:03
DOT,
"there is a HUGE difference between Roger Hanin and Robert Badinter"
Thanks for the info - however, this rather obvious fact didn't escape me totally! :).
What they have in common with for instance Giscard and Pasqua and a few others less conspicuous is their age, i.e. over 80 (I am myself "only" 74 :). Therefore, I spoke of "putting on grass" :). Some of them are not able and/or willing to leave the limelight...
Regarding specifically Badinter, if you read again my first post, you will see that it was not at all derogatory.
However, as ROMAIN said, Badinter was Mitterrand's liege man - i.e. a politician, like a Sarkozy's liege man is also a politician, no more, no less...
I feel free to give my opinion about politics and politicians. However, doing so, I do not feel free "de taper sur la vie privée des hommes politiques", as this was exercised here on the blog regarding Sarkozy and his wife.
Regarding Simone Weil, I have the highest opinion of her - however NOT because she is "de droite". When she boxed the law about abortion and so on through parliament, she was submitted to much more abuse (sexist one of course included, not to say predominant) than Badinter with his "anti-head chopping" :) law.
BTW, Mme Weil wrote a few days ago a very convincing article (I think it was in Le Monde) to propose the candidature to the Presidency of Europe of Mrs. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former Latvian president. I think this is an excellent idea. First because if one believes Mme Weil - and I believe her :), the lady has all the required prerequisites. Second, because she is a woman - I am fed up with all the muscle flexing and chest drumming of male politicians. Third, the "small" European countries will understandably not endorse a British, French or German candidate. Fortunately, as far as I know, there are no French or German candidates :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Nov 2009 17:15:56
CB
"I'm not so clear on what he meant by destiny."
Mais le grand destin de la france bien sûr!
More seriously, I have had many French people speak to me about destiny. It's a very convenient argument as it cannot be controlled.
Posted by: rocket | 14 Nov 2009 17:08:15
Sorry, meant Lex, not Len. Still early here at the end of the world. Need coffee...
Posted by: calgirl | 14 Nov 2009 15:56:23
[Why do you always jump on insignificant details like this, and ignore big details like Gorbachev saying in 1985 that he would not impede the Eastern Europeans' desire for freedom? Posted by: Maggie | 12 Nov 2009 09:43:58 ]
Thanks Maggie for your “insight”.
Are you so naïve that when a politician says he will not impede some group’s desire for “freedom”, that is like a politician saying he/she believes in apple pie and motherhood? What politician is going to say, no matter how totalitarian they may be, that they are against “freedom”? NAME ONE ! (Of course you can’t.)
(1) You provide NO references (as I have done for you on ALL major points I have raised) that Gorbachev ever said in 1985 what you wrote he said. Give a reference!
(2) Even if he did, show me ONE action that Gorbachev believed in what he supposedly said. Actions speak louder than words (have you heard that expression before?).
Gorbachev was the Communist Party Secretary of the USSR in 1991, saying (IN FRONT OF AN INTERNATIONAL PRESS CONFERENCE in Moscow after the coup in 1991), that there could be only one political party in the Soviet Union and that party was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and quoting LENIN - documented mass murderer and founder of the Cheka - to justify it!). Does this sound like a man who believes in “freedom” for anyone if he is not interested in allowing his own people basic human rights like a multiparty system or non-collectivized farms? Gorbachev could hardly approve of multi-party systems in Eastern Europe and then turn around and not give it to his own people and he was clearly not interested in having it in the USSR. So WHY DO YOU BELIEVE HIM when he supposedly said [no proof given] he would not impede freedom in Eastern Europe???!!!
And, in any case, if he stood by passively as you have implied and Merkel has said, how does that make the man a “visionary” which was my MAIN point on this subject (along with the idea that Reagan fits the bill of “visionary” a lot more than Gorbachev does)?
Please (1) give me proof Gorbachev said what you say he did in 1985 and (2) why do you believe him? Thanks.
Posted by: Don | 14 Nov 2009 15:38:48
You're right David. The United States is a much more foreign place for Britons than they commonly think. It's not till you live there that you realise how different the mentality and culture is. I've always thought that the British islanders, despite their sense of family with the English-speaking world and familarity with US entertainment, are in many ways closer to the European continentals than the Americans. And as you no doubt know, as a Brit you have to change you way of speaking if you want to be understood in the States -- unless you want to be a charming oddity like Hugh Grant. CB]
Hmm, as a Brit with an Irish heritage living in France I'm caught between the two. In the US I find people who look like me, have names like mine and who share many interests and attitudes thus I'm very comfortable in that environment although I often find myself slipping into transatlantic language mode over there.
I was chastened to discover my cousins in NYC have a nickname for me - Austin Powers.
Posted by: John O'D | 14 Nov 2009 15:03:38
Badinter ... his "authorised" opinion... is nothing but crap.
Are you inhaling regression fumes?
Is everybody de Gauche a moron on law by definition? Only repression works. Only the right is right on Law?
The non-French people who come to France and have read any French writer from the Age of Enlightenment and see France as living Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité get a shock.
Sarkosi tickling the NF monster for vote is not disturbing and short-sighted.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 14 Nov 2009 14:38:25
Len, just a dispatch from here "at the end of the world"...
Traveled to Europe six times so far, I'm pretty sure I can even find it on a map, (on a good day, at least..
Not sure exactly what is meant by "intellectual influence from Asia" but there is certainly a large population of Asian peoples in California, and that influence can be seen and felt in any number of ways...
And for Charles - actually, I had the pleasure just yesterday afternoon of participating in an online webinar with an instructor who was most definitely a Brit. The class participants were a very diverse group of Americans from across the U.S. - including a few who were non-native speakers and still learning English. None of us had any trouble understanding our instructor, who did an excellent job of presenting the material. I will admit, however, to being momentarily confused by the way he pronounced the words 'status' and 'contribute', although by using context I quickly understood what he had said.
Posted by: calgirl | 14 Nov 2009 14:37:44
RICK:
[“Some of us would say that you don’t accept gold without becoming just a little more careful not to offend.”]
Certain rules of politeness do have to be respected, and are, scrupulously. For example, in your publicity material, interviews and programmes you absolutely have to mention and fulsomely thank the municipality/conseil général/region/ministry or whatever for their generous support. Funny how back-scratching can reach across political boundaries.
[“Besides isn’t the subsidised challenging of authority an odd concept?”]
I find it rather an appealing one! Revenge for parking tickets.
[“a reasonable solution: choose to perform exam set-texts.”]
Actually that’s an important part of the activities of the companies I mentioned, and of many others. They do a lot of performing and “animation” in schools, and in theatres for school audiences, and this tends inevitably to be safe, inoffensive material related to the syllabus, or to classic French authors (for example, check which author has the anniversary of his birth or death coming up, and do a play around him which you tout around the schools). Schools are seen as an important source of revenue (and at the same time, the funds received in the form of subsidies allow the company to charge the kids a very modest price for a ticket). The arty, anti-establishment stuff can be kept for festivals, tours and so on.
[“Do you in France have the gloomy tradition of not performing a play if the cast outnumbers the audience? Je parle en connaissance de cause.”]
I was once one of the six audience members present at a Paris theatre when exactly that happened. I don’t recall it ever actually happening with the companies I was involved with in the past, but then again, some of the actors were so manic they’d probably have performed for two drunks and the theatre mice.
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 14:32:43
Let me rephrase that last sentence.
They will abandon the veil and wrap themselves in the French flag only when the French flag has positive meaning for them, and that will not happen until it works for them.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 13:27:14
"I was taken aback when I read this paragraph in "Dreams from my Father". -- Judith
I was a little surprised as well, but I do understand what he is saying. I think it is a matter of the education that he had and that he went to high school in Hawaii.
I think that unless an American receives what is often referred to as a 'classical education,' is educated by Jesuits, or studies the traditional Liberal Arts in university, the gap between Europe and the US widens. I have never been to Hawaii, but I have noticed that when one gets as far west as California, Europe is but a dim memory, and there is no intellectual influence from Asia. The end of the world syndrome, I call it.
"Sarkozy repeated his view that Muslim women with covered faces have no place in France" -- CB
How exactly was that said in French? Sarkozy would be wise to separate the veil from the person, to attack the object itself, and not the person bearing the object. I think that 'Hate the sin, love the sinner' is the distinction that needs to be made, and he needs to explain -- in more abstract terms -- why the veil goes against everything that France stands for. Muslims in France will continue to embrace their traditions so long as those traditions work for them. They will abandon the veil and wrap themselves in the French flag only when the French flag actually has some meaning for them, and it will never have any meaning until it works for them.
In reality, I don't think Sarkozy is capable of that. He is using Muslims as pawns in his appeal to the FN and their sympathizers for his political ends. It is just too easy for the average politician to forgo
the 'enemy at the gate' to win votes.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 13:15:37
She hates France, then I'm sincerely happy she's living a better life in Germany or wherever else she thinks is better.
Posted by: Laurent | 14 Nov 2009 11:46:31
AZLOON:
If Katie Price did decide to "write" a book about sex ponies (great concept) she'd probably get a record-breaking advance.
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 10:55:06
"By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass…"
I have read this too, and I am astonished that so many Europeans are so astonished because when I go to the USA I find them so different. They speak the same language, they listen to the same music, see the same films, and I have seen so much of them in my life. In films, on television, on newsreels, I felt I knew them.
But I don’t.
And whether talking to them in Denver or by the Grand Canyon or in bars or restaurants what struck me most is how different they are, not how similar.
And, despite my imperfect French, my struggles with the bureaucracy, and all that goes with being British and living in France I am much more comfortable here than in the States.
Despite the Daily Mail et al we Europeans share a long, if troubled history, and somehow this history defines us differently and the American history defines them, again differently.
For example, I recently read a speech by an American DEMOCRATIC Senator worried that Obama’s Health bill might mean the government was competing with Private Insurance companies.
They have, I read 30,000,000 un-insured an mostly unable to get adequate health cover.
Now, I cannot imagine a European politician looking at it that way, can you?
[You're right David. The United States is a much more foreign place for Britons than they commonly think. It's not till you live there that you realise how different the mentality and culture is. I've always thought that the British islanders, despite their sense of family with the English-speaking world and familarity with US entertainment, are in many ways closer to the European continentals than the Americans. And as you no doubt know, as a Brit you have to change you way of speaking if you want to be understood in the States -- unless you want to be a charming oddity like Hugh Grant. CB]
Posted by: David Powell | 14 Nov 2009 10:42:10
DANIEL - there is a HUGE difference between Roger Hanin and Robert Badinter - the former is losing his marbles if recent TV appearances are anything to go by - and anyway he's hardly someone one consults on matters legal or poltical - the latter is as sharp and as clear (and as humane) a mind as you will find in France - however, he's "de gauche" (do I hear the click of a scratched record stuck in the same old blinkered groove somewhere?) and you cannot let pass an opportunity to lessen either his contribution to France's progress as a civilised society (yes, chopping heads off until 1981), or his talent in persuading the French OF THAT TIME (no easy task) that change was necessary.
BTW I hold Simone Weil in the same respect and admiration and she's "de droite" unless I'm very much mistaken.
Posted by: dot king | 14 Nov 2009 10:41:12
Thanks, LEO. Can you understand that I still have difficulties with the Republic’s all-embracing nature? Here is a perverse example: what right has the State to define ‘religions’ as opposed to ‘sects’? By all means, crush Scientology – but not by laying claim to theological competence (in either sense).
SEBASTIEN, may I remind you that France’s lynchpin ‘demi de mêlée’ went to finishing-school in England? Frankly, I couldn’t be more pleased and prouder. As for your response, you’ve outdone yourself. Fascinating!
If I permitted myself the slightest eyebrow twitch, it’d be over the theatre groups’ grants. Some of us would say that you don’t accept gold without becoming just a little more careful not to offend. Besides isn’t the subsidised challenging of authority an odd concept? Personally, I’d prefer ‘bums on seats’, and bank-loans, as well as grants... and found a reasonable solution: choose to perform exam set-texts. There’s a kind of theatre-making that comes close to vanity-publishing. Do you in France have the gloomy tradition of not performing a play if the cast outnumbers the audience? Je parle en connaissance de cause.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Nov 2009 10:33:08
"since I'm sure they consider that a hole is no place to keep your ass." -- ;D
LOL Thank you for your keen observations Ms. Milne.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 04:55:31
"By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass…"
I was taken aback when I read this paragraph in "Dreams from my Father". I guess I had assumed that anyone who was studying law and, presumably even then planning a political career, would have felt a deep affinity for Europe because of the ideas and philosophy that came from there.
Surely Greece as the foundational location of democracy and Rome and England as the source of law would have meant something to such a person on an intellectual level. Also I would have expected him to cherish Europe for the political ideas of the Enlightenment which fed straight into the founding documents of the USA.
BTW I did enjoy the footage of the joint Sarkozy/Merkel wreath laying, particularly the visual sense of balance there was between the two. The really nice touch was the matching blue tie and necklace.
Posted by: Judith | 14 Nov 2009 03:05:16
Officer to Commander is the right progression in the Order of the legion of Honour. Eastwood isn't jumping a rank.
Posted by: Clemence de Roch | 14 Nov 2009 01:18:09
RICK:
["wouldn’t you agree that the State is much more involved in ‘la vie associative’ of France – clubs, societies, associations – than is the case in other countries?"]
'State' is perhaps a misleading term in this connection. Most Loi 1901 associations (and as you know, there are a vast number of them in France) have relatively little to do with central government and administration (the "state"). Such public aid as your average small association may be lucky enough to receive will most likely consist of a small grant from the local Mairie, or help in kind (the use of an office, a meeting room, the municipal printer, a storage facility etc). And that's as far as the ambitions of 90% of associations will extend. If they're more active and ambitious than that, they might move up a notch and also get some kind of subsidy from the Conseil général (the département); they'll feel they've really hit the big time if in addition they can extort something from the Conseil régional (the region). By that stage they might also have squeezed a few euros out of the Préfecture (which of course is the arm of central government), particularly if they're (say) organizing a festival or similar event with more than local appeal. Finally (jackpot!) a very small minority will get a subsidy from the relevant Ministry. The point is that all these different levels of financing come from sometimes competing entities which can be of quite different political complexions, and different again from the central government. It's not one vast oppressive apparatus single-mindedly bent on enslaving the local chess club. There are over 35000 elected mayors in France (far more than anywhere else in Europe), and they're not just answerable to the Préfet, but to their electorate.
[" Second, that this doesn’t raise an eyebrow?"]
Why should it? It's perceived as a desirable bridge between the various public powers and the different components of civil society. The former hand back tax money, and the latter complain that it wasn't enough.
["Third, that such intrusiveness by the State is a considerable restriction of the freedom of the individual?"]
Frankly, no. The Comité de salut public is definitely not involved. For instance, I can think of three rather left-wing theatre companies I know, who feel that the grants they've received after years of trying (and in two cases out of the three, they're grants from right-wing municipalities) are a definite enhancement of their freedom to continue putting on weird plays reviling the System and the Guignol/Mr Punch who rules us at present.
["forth, that this is an enduring feature of the corporatist state?"]
I suppose so. But as corporatist states go, France is some way behind such iron-fisted regimes as the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Austria, and so on. I see no very negative connotations here. One man's corporatism is another's solidarity, and la solidarité is still a quaintly important concept here (though it pales into insignificance compared to France's win against South Africa this evening).
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 00:35:32
Much as I welcomed Obama's great powers of oratory, recently I found myself easily distracted while listening to him. It could be that he is repeating himself too often. Until he decides firmly on troop numbers for Afghanistan, many will begin to wonder if the modern-day workload of a US president is beyond the capacity of any human being.
Posted by: christopher muir | 14 Nov 2009 00:15:51
DAISY,
In addition to crème brûlée, we have crème renversée, crème fouettée and last but not least, crème anglaise :). Of course, we have also many "crèmes de beauté anti-rides, anti-vieillissement" and so on :).
More seriously:
"Angie would be left out in the cold". No, I don't think so. As far as I know, France is still the first customer and the first supplier of Germany. Nobody on both sides of the river Rhine does want to get in serious trouble because of possible ego problems :).
PS:
Daisy, do you know what Voltaire wrote about Canada? "Le Canada, pays couvert de neiges et de glaces huit mois de l'année, habité par des barbares, des ours et des castors" :). Et toc! :)
(Source: Wikipedia and partly, memory :)
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 23:27:00
CHARLES,
I just heard a few words of Badinter's interview, i.e. the bit with féal and férule.
Communauté de culture: difficult to achieve with people hardly speaking French, and wanting to keep their own superior culture...
Of course, and fortunately, the latter is not always the case.
ROMAIN,
If I understand you well (I am afraid it is the case :), Badinter should also be "put on grass" - may be along with another elderly gentleman de gauche (the actor Roger Hanin, a brother-in-law of Mitterrand), still playing the role of a "fringant" :) commissaire de police although he is well over 80 years old (la retraite à 60 ans, tu parles! :). I just read that he made his last (?) film in February 2009.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 22:54:43
Using la Chapelle-en-Vercors for a sermon on national identity, or celebrating Armistice Day with the erstwhile adversary – each is symbolically incoherent. There are too many ironies for either venue to work.
Posted by: Rick | 13 Nov 2009 21:15:18
RICK,
Sebastien will probably respond but since your question was public let me give you my point of view:
First: Yes
Second: Yes
Third: No
Fo(u)rth: No
Posted by: Leo | 13 Nov 2009 21:15:00
RICK,
Sebastien will probably respond but since your question was public let me give you my point of view:
First: Yes
Second: Yes
Third: No
Fo(u)rth: No
Posted by: Leo | 13 Nov 2009 21:14:59
Badinter was nothing but Mitterand's liege man. And his "authorised" opinion, like that of his wife, is nothing but crap.
Posted by: Romain | 13 Nov 2009 20:44:27
SEBASTIEN, what a lovely piece you wrote on the State’s role as patron of the arts. All the same, wouldn’t you agree that the State is much more involved in ‘la vie associative’ of France – clubs, societies, associations – than is the case in other countries? Second, that this doesn’t raise an eyebrow? Third, that such intrusiveness by the State is a considerable restriction of the freedom of the individual? And forth, that this is an enduring feature of the corporatist state?
Posted by: Rick | 13 Nov 2009 20:34:52
DANIEL STROHL: as a general rule, perfumes aren't considered accessories, but I like those too. I also like french pastries, I don't drink but I heard the wines are great and brûlée the crème and I'm a happy girl. As the saying goes: Everyone loves France, no one likes the French :)
Posted by: Daisy | 13 Nov 2009 19:57:11
DAISY,
And perfume, I presume :).
Regarding scarves: if I remember well, CHARLES is an expert on expensive scarves :).
SURCOUF,
"on ne peut que se féliciter de la réconciliation"
Personne (moi le premier :) n'aurait osé imaginer cette cérémonie il y a quarante ans!
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 18:29:12
"by its local officers" (CHARLES)
I don't want to diminish your merits, Charles :), but Robert Badinter used this morning on TV a more pregnant word ("féal") than your neutral "officer". He used also the expression "sous la férule".
Unfortunately, I didn't hear distinctly the whole sentence; but he probably meant "les préfets étant les féaux sous la férule de Sarkozy, le suzerain" :). The word suzerain or souverain is of my own invention...
PS:
Les socialistes font donner la Vieille Garde :). En effet, M. Badinter est né en 1928, si j'en crois sa biographie que j'ai "googlée" ce matin.
Mr.Badinter is a highly respected former law professor. He was also for a few years "Garde des Sceaux" (Minister of Justice) under Mitterrand. He contributed strongly to the abolition of the death penalty in France.
[I listened to Badinter too. He was great as usual. He said that there was no need for Sarkozy's 200 questions on national identity because there were just three points. La communauté de culture, de valeurs et de destin. By valeurs, he meant la République and singled out laicité. On culture, he mentioned literature in particular and cited Proust and la Princesse de Clèves, Sarkozy's bête noire. I'm not so clear on what he meant by destiny. But his sagesse and élégance is very far removed from the style of our dear president. CB]
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 18:20:24
L'idée de dissoudre une victoire qui nous a coûté si cher dans une commémoration très politiquement correcte et pleine de bons sentiments (Europe et compagnie) ne me plaisait pas trop. Mais je suis allé assister à la cérémonie à l'Arc de Triomphe et, quand même, c'était beau.
Quand je pense qu'il y a 70 ans la présence des Allemands sur cette même place était une chose terrible pour la France, et qu'aujourd'hui (enfin, avant hier) la foule a acclamé Angela Merkel... on ne peut que se féliciter de la réconciliation.
Qui ne doit cependant pas signifier faire servilement la cour aux Allemands pour mener des politiques communes et coopérer plus étroitement dans n'importe quel domaine.
Posted by: Surcouf | 13 Nov 2009 17:29:24
ROCKET: oh all the good kinds....handbags, scarves, shoes...
Posted by: Daisy | 13 Nov 2009 17:23:42
Arse may have also derived from the German Arsch as in Arschloch.
JOHNNY F
That's interesting too - trilingual similarities.
I forgot to mention that "ass" is also used to call someone a fool in English English, eg (to whom it may concern) "You stupid ass!"
An asshole would be, in English English, just a hole where you might keep your donkey - and I think that would be frowned upon and you'd have the RSPCA breathing down your neck, since I'm sure they consider that a hole is no place to keep your ass.
;D
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 17:06:00
AZLOON that is indeed the young Hugh Laurie, now famous as Dr House - the young Stephen Fry has been stateside too and has played the British psychologist in "Bones", not Sweets, the other one.
They were both a lot younger in that sketch, but still easily recognisable - I suppose it's easier if you see them younger first, working backwards means taking off wrinkles, kilos, grey hair etc . . .
They were rather brilliant though, weren't they?
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 16:58:26
Qwert
"Don't quite get why he's so cool toward Europe either. He couldn't spare 24 hours for Berlin but managed to find a week in his agenda for Asia. Pragmatic, I suppose. Shifting poles."
He pushed back Asia a couple of days because of the Ft. Hood shootings. He was in Texas honoring fallen soldiers while France and Germany were partying at the wall. Priorities non?
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:47:32
AZ
"Sack up, and stop your petulant whining Nicky. Why don't you make yourself that 'somebody' that others wish they hadn't fu*ked with? But do it Eastwood-style -- eyes open, mouth shut. Now that would be a noble 'Identity' France could emulate."
He's missing some inches to be a bad ass!
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:44:40
Daisy
"I'm an international nobody who is très fond of french accessories, can I get an award? "
What kind of French acessories?
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:43:22
National Identity : bring le Tome de Rochefort out.
Do Re Mi
It'll do nicely to stand on to pin that decoration on Clint!
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 16:39:00
I don't quite get why Obama didn't come to Berlin. The destruction of the Berlin wall was not just a European event, it symbolised the breaking up of communist totalitarianism.
Don't quite get why he's so cool toward Europe either. He couldn't spare 24 hours for Berlin but managed to find a week in his agenda for Asia. Pragmatic, I suppose. Shifting poles.
Posted by: qwerty | 13 Nov 2009 16:00:31
JF
I agree, you contribute well at this level. :) And happily join some of us who dwell permanently here.
On another string, I posted the term 'ass whuppin;' which is an Southern expression (Alabama Ass-Whuppin) which was/is generally used by parents toward children about the possible consequence of misbehavior, or general failure to comply. Or by the kids eux-memes after getting a 'good' one, e.g. "I am gonna give you a good ass-whuppin' or "I got a good ass-whuppin."
'Can of whoopass' is an adapted form of this older expression, preferred by the young.
The Laurie and Fry bit is tres drole, or very funny if you prefer the unaffected version. Is that the Laurie of House? He somehow doesn't look like that character. He must quite have quite un visage plastique.
Posted by: azloon | 13 Nov 2009 15:47:24
"Sarkozy repeated his view that Muslim women with covered faces have no place in France"...
...Thus implying that Muslim women with covered heads do.
That's like saying : it's outrageous that Nazis are able to walk down our streets waving large flags with svastikas.
While not mentioning the much larger numbers of Nazis already walking down the streets with a svastika pinned on their lapel.
You can't win a rational battle against islam (*). Either you crush it, or it crushes you.
____
(*) Assuming that Sarkozy is trying, which is highly doubtful when you see how hard his minister of Finance is working to ram "islamic finance" down France's throat).
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 13 Nov 2009 14:46:02
Sebastien
I was starting to get excited about the Katie Price book thinking I might find out more about 'sex ponies,' but then realized i'd missed your comma.
I did notice she'd written a book series called "Perfect Ponies' which again my twisted mind had turned into a possible prurient matter, i.e. her 'perfect' breast implants, but alas, again I was disappointed to discover this "pipol' person actually writes children's books, hopefully which don't deal with the subject of breast augmentation. (How to make your Barbie Doll a 36D using Play Dough).
Posted by: azloon | 13 Nov 2009 14:27:07