Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Sarkozy insult returns as French rap hit

You might remember the singer who made a splash by setting to music the "come back" text message that Nicolas Sarkozy may have sent to Cécilia, his ex-wife. Now a young musician from Lorraine has scored with a video in which he raps to Sarko's notorious insult: Casse Toi Pauvre Con

The President used the line in February to put down a man who refused to shake his hand at the Paris agriculture show. We had an argument here about the English equivalent, which is something like "Piss off, jerk" or "Get lost, wanker".

Sarko would prefer to forget it, but his flash of unpresidential temper became one of the milestones of his first year. As well as being repeated often on television, it has been watched over five million times on video sites.

This spoof song, by a 25-year-old video technician who uses the name Tum Sally, is crude, but it has created such a buzz that the mainstream media have picked it up and a Paris record label his given him a contract.

Frenchman to sing in English against Irish turkey

Nothing tickles les Anglo-Saxons more than stories about the French surrendering to the English language. The latest version springs from France Television's decision to enter a song with English lyrics in the Eurovision contest for the first time.

Skip this paragraph if you are European: The Eurovision contest started in 1956 to promote fraternity among the recently warring nations. It turned long ago into an orgy of kitsch. Along the way it launched ABBA, a bunch of unknown Swedes who won in 1974 with Waterloo. The annual final, broadcast live to an audience well over 100 million, gives little nations a patriotic moment; the big ones treat the whole thing as a joke. Over half now sing in English and the next contest takes place in Belgrade on May 24. The Serbians won last time. The Irish, who speak a sort of English, have won most (see Ireland's Turkey at end). The French have not won since 1977.

This year, the state tv network decided to go with the flow, sending Sébastien Tellier, an eccentric singer-composer with a big beard, to Belgrade to perform a catchy track from his new all English album Sexuality [video below]. "Big deal" has been the general reaction. English  has been successfully embraced by many French artists in the past few years and the choice of Tellier was so uncontroversial that it went unnoticed at first.   

The lack of protest has been the real sign of the times. France3 television  anointed Tellier on March 7 and it took five weeks for anyone to complain. A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

The original Concours Eurovision de la Chanson was begun when French was the common language of the continent. The state still spends hundreds of millions of euros a year on the rearguard language campaign and President Sarkozy is one of the chief defenders, so objections were inevitable. They have now appeared, led by a junior parliamentarian from President Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement. 

François-Michel Gonnot, 59, demanded that Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister given an account to Parliament. "This shocks a lot of citizens who do not understand why France is giving up the defence of its language before hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world," he said.

Albanel, who was apparently unaware of the shocking choice, has responded by calling it a pity and saying that she would tell France television to make a more linguistically correct decision next time.

France makes law to fight eating disorder

France's fondness for inventing odd laws to change human behaviour entered new territory today. A criminal offence is to be created to punish the act of promoting excessive thinness. Those found guilty will face up to three years in jail and 45,000 euros fine.   

This is not a laughing matter. The offence is defined in a government-backed bill that has just been tabled as part of the campaign to combat anorexia nervosa. The first use of prosecutors to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement.

While many of these are support groups, others promote starvation as a "life-style choice", with girls and young women posting their wasting images as "thinspiration" for others. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry and you get the point. It reads as though it has been written by a pro-ana convert.

Save our semi-colon, say French campaigners

A humble punctuation mark is the latest cause in the fight to preserve the elegance of French in the face of lazy habits from the English-speaking world.

Writers and linguistic patriots have thrown their weight behind a push to save le point-virgule -- the semi-colon. It is threatened with extinction because the media, authors and the people at large no longer understand its use. They prefer chopping their prose into short sentences with full stops (periods).

Fans of the semi-colon were pleased today by a topical April Fool's joke on the influential Rue89 news site. This reported that President Sarkozy had created a state commission to save the semi-colon. The device would have to be used at least three times in all official correspondence, it said.

The article, which included a bogus mission letter on Elysée Palace stationary, initially took in readers because it was only a slight exaggeration of reality. Sarkozy has a mania for intervention and the media have lately been reporting the threat to the semi-colon.

Eiffel Tower hit by fantasy

You may already have seen this picture of the stunning observation deck that is to be built around the top of the Eiffel Tower to mark the 120th anniversary of the Paris monument next year. The photographs flashed around the world after a Paris architectural firm won a contest staged by the tower's management. The New York Times and the London Guardian have already reported the story.

The trouble is that the tale is false. It was just a publicity stunt but it does offer a nice lesson in the power of the internet to disseminate nonsense and the danger that this poses for traditional media. In our business dog is not suppposed to eat dog. We don't like criticising one-another. But I'll make an exception. None of my Paris colleagues were involved.

Carla Sarkozy's naked portrait goes on sale

One of the most common French searches on the internet lately has been "Carla Bruni nue".  The former super-model posed in her previous life for numerous nude sessions with well-known photographers. By now sets of their work must have done the rounds of just about every French office. Next month, Christie's saleroom in New York is offering the chance to buy an original, at an estimated 4,000 dollars.

The snap, taken by Michel Comte, dates from 1993. The photographer made the future première dame de France, then 25, mime a famous painting by Georges Seurat called les Poseuses (below).

Christies said that it had no qualms about exposing the French president's wife to the public gaze. She was, they said "one of the most beautiful women in the world" and the picture is a work of art. "It was taken when Mademoiselle Bruni was a model and it is a naked portrait in good taste taken by a well known and respectable artist," the Christie's spokeswoman told Agence France-Presse.

The photograph comes from a collection which includes works by Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon et Leni Riefenstahl. Other nudes in the collection include Kate Moss et Naomi Campbell. The sale is to be staged on April 10 -- unless Sarko's image-minders pre-empt it. In the meantime France has spent the day clicking onto the Nouvel Observateur site which is showing the picture. This, you may remember, was the site that incurred Sarko and Bruni's wrath by publishing the text message in which the president was supposed to have asked Cécilia, his last wife, to come back a week before he married Bruni. They seem to be asking for trouble.

 

Sarkozy's eyes on the internet

Nicolas Princen, l'oeil de Nicolas Sarkozy sur Internet

Meet the young man they are calling Monsieur Buzz. Nicolas Princen, aged 24, has just been given a job at the Elysée Palace in which he will monitor the internet to keep tabs on what is being said about President Sarkozy.

In three days, Princen, a graduate of the ENS and HEC, two of the grandest universities, has gone from nobody to a figure of cyber-mockery as the blogosphere has laid into him. He is being called "Sarko's spy", "the Sheriff", "Little Brother", "Cyber-cop" and so on. Three Facebook groups have already assembled around him, one of them called Nicolas Princen est sexy. 

Princen's newly-created job is a response to the damage that Sarko has suffered from stories, parodies and videos that have blazed on the net and then reached the main media. In the past month, the president has been zapped hard by two such items: the notorious "pauvre con" video of his outburst at the farm show and the affair of the text message. We've already been through both here. 

Sarko yesterday dropped the charges against Airy Routier, the Nouvel Observateur reporter who posted the text item claiming that the president tried to get Cécilia, his former wife back, only a week before marrying Carla Bruni on February 2. At the same time, Bruni signed an article in le Monde denouncing le Nouvel Obs for pedalling scurrilous gossip unworthy of "real journalism" [my story here]

The Elysée says there is nothing sinister in Princen's appointment. The president's staff is just catching up with the new media. "He will be a sort of monitor of the internet, watching everything that is making a buzz about the President," the Elysée explained. "He will be keeping under surveillance... less-known sites, blogs etc. Everything that is moving on the net. [The presidency was breaking a few linguistic rules there (last post), since they said le buzz and le net in French]

The presidency may insist that his only job is to "observe and alert", but the heavily anti-Sarko blogosphere does not like the idea that this clean-cut young man who worked on the president's election campaign last year (video above) will be sniffing them out and reporting them. There are too many sinister precedents in France, from anonymous informing in the wartime occupation to the late President Mitterrand's secret phone surveillance unit at the Elysée in the 1980s. The sarcasm has been flying thick and fast, with bloggers saying they will report themselves to him with RSS feeds and so on. "Turn your pals in... and help your new friend", said one quoted by le Monde this afternoon.

Luc Mandret, who runs a successful site called Ma vie en Narcisse, addressed Princen with the familliar tu, to offer his welcome: "I wish you courage. If you know a minimum about the world of blogs, you must know that there are several thousand blogs in which you will find unpleasant things about Nicolas Sarkozy."

This of course is not one of them. And I would also add a warm bienvenue to our new reader.   

Help save the French language

Now you can do your bit to save the French language. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister [above] has just opened a site on la toile (better known as le web) which seeks French equivalents for the American-English jargon that has invaded the language. Featured words today are coach, gender and podcasting.

Franceterme.culture.fr is a new weapon in an ancient battle. Les Anglo-Saxons, whose own vocabulary has been part Gallic since the 12th century, are always amused by the attempts of the French state and its language police to defend the purity of the tongue.  Why, wonder smug foreigners, don't the French just laissez faire like the Anglophone nations and allow people to use foreign terms if they think they sounds more chic.

After living for some time on the front line in this war, let me defend France's rear-guard campaign. Yes, I share "Anglo-saxon" antipathy to the idea of policing language. It's silly, smacks of oppressive regimes and it costs a fortune -- hundreds of millions of euros a year are spent on the language bureaucracy and promoting the French language abroad.

Yet... why shouldn't a country seek ways to resist pressure from more powerful cultures -- in this case the USA? Sometimes it works.  In honour of tomorrow's International Day of the French-speaking World, I shall explain:

French judges ban internet teacher ratings

A Paris court has just added a new ban to the long list of prohibitions in France. School pupils and university students are now forbidden to comment on their teachers on the internet.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance issued the order after teachers' unions sought the closure of note2be.com, a site that allows pupils to rate their teachers. Opened in January by Stéphane Cola, an entrepreneur, the site has been a big success, receiving up to 150,000 visits a day, with 50,000 teachers so far rated. It was modelled on the American ratemyteachers.com and similar sites which have sprung up around Europe.      

Teachers have been upset by ratings sites around the world but none had been banned. Last year a German court rejected an attempt to have a local site  spickmich.de closed. Provided that they were not defamatory, ratings were acceptable under the principle of freedom of expression, the German court ruled (more on that here).

No-one imagined that the French court would take that line. The whole French education world plus the government had piled in to denounce note2be.com as a gross breach of privacy and an "incitement to public disorder".

Marion Cotillard buys the other version of 9/11

There is nothing new about film stars who spout political nonsense or subscribe to wacky religions. But it is still worth a mention when the French winner of the new Oscar for best actress says that the World Trade Center was not attacked by terrorists but was blown up by its owners on 9/11 -- and that the Americans may never have landed on the moon in 1969.             

Marion Cotillard made these points in a French television interview that was broadcast a year ago, before she achieved fame with her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.  The video has just been revived by Marianne2, the site of a leading leftwing news magazine. I'm posting it here with the English text (below) because it is a useful glimpse of an outlook that remains widespread, especially in hip leftwing circles in France. I run into people quite often who tell me that they do not believe in the conspiracy theories but "of course" everyone knows that there was much more to the 9/11 attacks than "they" tell us.

French support for the idea that 9/11 was engineered by the US government was fed by the success of a 2002 book by Thierry Meyssan. This argued that no airliner crashed into the Pentagon. The book was ridiculed after a while but it reached the best-seller lists in France and several other countries. As Cotillard shows, the conspiracy theory lingers.

Marianne has attracted a torrent of abuse from conspiracy believers since it posted Cotillard's remarks on its site on Friday. It explained why it revived her views: 

Our logic is simple. The remarks of Marion Cotillard are typical of a kind of excess which has affected the ranks of the left for several years.... The words of Marion Cotillard did not provoke the slightest reaction from the journalist who was interviewing her, nor from any of the television critics whose output fills our media.    

Here in English is what Cotillard told Xavier de Moulins, her interviewer.  The session took place in the Paris Catacombs. She mentions Coluche, a much-loved subversive comedian who was killed in a motorcycle crash in 1986.

Marion Cotillard: I tend rather often to take the side of the conspiracy theory.... I'm not paranoid. It's not paranoid because I think that they lie to us about an awful lot of things: Coluche, 9/11. You can see on the internet all the films of September 11 on the conspiracy theory. It's fascinating, even addictive.

They show other towers of the same type that aeroplanes have run into and which burnt. There is a tower, in Spain I think, which burnt for 24 hours... It never collapsed. None of these towers collapse. But there (in New York), the thing collapses. Then afterwards you can talk about it for a long time. The towers of September 11 were stuffed with gold. And they were swallowing up cash because they were built, I gather, in 1973. And to re-cable all that, to modernise the technology and all of that, it was much more expensive to carry out the work than to destroy them.

.... Did man ever walk on the moon ? I have seen a lot of documentaries on that and really, I wonder. In any case, I do not believe everything they tell me. That's for sure.

MONDAY UPDATE:

With the storm over Cotillard raging in the USA, we got the following explanation today from Bastien Duval, her agent:

Marion's reaction is that this video was filmed in special circumstances after a broadcast on Coluche (popular comedian killed in 86 motorcycle accident) and she was being asked to react to this broadcast. Marion then simply expressed the view that she wanted to form her own opinion (on 911) from watching various reports, but she never wished to call into question the events of 11 September.

This reportage has been taken out of context and one can only condemn such practises.  Marion deplores that. She is currently filming in Chicago and has a lot of work. She is in an ocean of happiness and voila, this row blows up. It's rather strange. It's an old report, not at all current. Why bring it out now ?

I talked three times to Marion overnight. This is worrying her. She is still in shock and does not really know how to react. She doesn't have to apologise for a badly presented and badly interpreted reportage.... She hopes that the Americans will have enough distance to understand, but her career is not just American. She can make films everywhere.

   

Sarkozy bags a Vuitton for Carla

Here is a clip of yet another gaffe by President Sarkozy.  Topic number one in France this week is the difficulty of making ends meet. Sarko and François Fillon, the Prime Minister, have proclaimed war on what the country sees as a conspiracy by manufacturers and retailers to raise prices out of all proportion to costs.  The sense of collapsing purchasing power is credited more than anything else for Sarko's deep unpopularity. The sense of urgency was created by a survey this week that showed that some supermarket food items had jumped by between 25 and nearly 50 percent over recent months, among them a leading mass market camembert which rose by 30 percent.

Fresh from the fiasco of his "pauvre con" exchange at the farm show, Sarko descended on deep rural France yesterday to show his concern for the struggle to pay the daily bills.  At Saint-Pourçain in the Allier département he told the crowd that there was obviously a "fiddle" going on when pork producers were being paid peanuts while the price of ham had exploded. The government will investigate and "strike where it hurts", he said.

But then he blew the concerned image at the local workshop of Louis Vuitton, maker of the luxury leathergoods that are especially prized by Asian, Russian and American women. He was handed a handsome LV bag. "You can guess who I am going to give it to," he said. "This will please her. This morning she told me 'you bring me back something'." Heads of state always receive presents, but given Sarko's need to shed the bling-bling aura,  a leg of ham might have been a better gift.

The President is off today to Chad and South Africa, taking Bruni for her first foreign trip as première dame. He will be glad to escape after a rough week. But the gaffe-prone team at the Elysée Palace will no doubt keep us entertained in his absence.

To follow up on our debate this week on bad language, here's another taste of Sarko's rough tongue. According to today's Canard Enchaîné, which is usually well informed, the president blew his top with his staff after a string of goofs last Wednesday. He was, he told them, surrounded by a bunch of cons et de branleurs. The latter word in British English translates directly as wankers. Con, as we noted earlier has lost its sexual sense and just means fool, idiot or clown.      
               

Sarkozy's phantom words are set to music

That Sarkozy text message just won't go away.

A couple of weeks ago, the French president unleashed his lawyers and prosecutors against le Nouvel Observateur for allegedly inventing his "come home" plea to Cécilia, his ex-wife. The magazine had reported that, one week before marrying Carla Bruni this month, he texted to Cécilia: "If you come back, I will cancel everything". In the aftermath, the president's staff and ministers have been denouncing all journalists as vultures for picking up the story. We heard today that the investigating judges have summoned Cécilia to ask her if the message existed or not. But now France's most famous message has taken on new life as a song by Jeanne Cherhal, a rising singer-composer.

The ditty (listen here), is wistful rather than satirical. In 24 hours it has become a hit. Lifted from Cherhal's MySpace site, it has the main media buzzing and has been playing on radio and television news. They must be hopping mad at the Elysée Palace.

Cherhal's refrain goes:  "Si tu reviens, j'annule tout, nos écarts de langage, nos colères, nos passions de passage." (If you come back, I will cancel everything, our bad language, our spats, our passing passions)

Cherhal, one of the leaders of the young genre called nouvelle chanson française, said that Sarko's supposed SMS appeal turned into a song in her sleep.  "You never know what causes inspiration. It comes from everywhere, and especially from the last place you think -- a noise on the pavement, anything," she told Libération. "I woke up in the morning with that sentence on the brain. The music came along with it."

Libération joked that the RG, the police intelligence service, must be on to Cherhal by now. Their criminal investigation colleagues have already seized mobile phone records to prove the message never existed. Indeed, the singer appears a little embarassed about the text-song's runaway success. Her manager, Héloïse Martins, said: "She just wanted to have fun on her MySpace site. It was a joke between friends, not to promote herself," she said. "The song does not allude to the presidential couple. It is a general song about breaking up. We do not want to be at the centre of a row." 

There is a lot to be said for the clever words and pretty tunes of the nouvelle chanson genre, even if they can be nombriliste or self-absorbed, at times. One of the leading nouvelle chanson exponents with those tendencies is of course Carla Bruni, la première dame de France and victim if the text message was by any chance genuine. Many of the lyrics in her hit album "Quelqu'un m'a dit" are about herself and her past and present lovers. We are all waiting to find out if there will be a song to Nicolas in the new album, which she is just about to release.  Perhaps even a track on texting. 

 

Is Colonel Gaddafi a Frenchman?

If Colonel Gaddafi was so eager to linger in Paris when he came last December, it was perhaps because the Libyan leader is half French. His father was an air force pilot from Corsica. That's him in the picture on the left. 

This extraordinary claim has surfaced over the past few days after a report by Bakchich, a French investigative news site. They looked into a legend which has long circulated in Vezzani, a village of 600 people in eastern Corsica. According to this, a Vezzani gendarme's son called Albert Preziosi was stationed in the Libyan desert with the Free French air force in 1941-42. He is said to have had an affair with a local woman at about the time that young Muammar would have been conceived.

Preziosi was killed when his aeroplane was shot down over Russia in 1943. As a member of the famous Normandy-Niemen squadron, he has been celebrated as a hero in his home village ever since. An air force base near the town of Solenzara, is named after him. Not a shred of evidence exists to stand up the Gaddafi legend but the physical resemblance is so strong that it has persisted.

A Paris Christmas Thank You

This is the main Sunday when France breaks its working-time rules and the stores are packed with last minute Christmas shoppers. I could hardly get to the office door on the Place de l'Opéra.

[Picture:Galeries Lafayette department store around the corner from here]

It's also the start of the Trêve des Confiseurs, the "confectioners' truce", or seasonal break when the politicians head for the sunshine or ski slopes. After a visit to French troops in Afghanistan yesterday, President Sarkozy is off to cruise the Nile with Ms Bruni in tow, at least according to the rumours.

So it's a good moment to wish everyone here a Joyeux Noel and to say a big thank you for the contributions to this blog over the past year.

The comments are much more than that. Their flow turns posts into conversation and debate. I don't want to overdo it, but after two years, the blog has become quite a little community.

Le jogging n'est pas français, Monsieur le Président

As a correspondent, you try to avoid reinforcing national stereotypes but sometimes the French don't let us. Where else, for example, would people argue that jogging is a capitalist pastime that is designed to undermine serious thought and democracy? 

The matter has been burning up blog space on the internet and the mainstream media since Nicolas Sarkozy brought his running habit to the Elysée Palace and used it to hone his image as a new-style dynamic president. "Is jogging rightwing?" asked a headline in Libération last Thursday.

On television, Alain Finkielkraut, one of the big philosophers from the 1968 generation, begged Sarko to stop jogging and start walking. "Western civilisation, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation," said Finkielkraut [video clip].

[Philosopher denounces Sarkozy jogging]

Jogging leaders have been common since President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, but until Speedy Sarko won office, French heads of state shunned physical exertion in public. Imagine Charles de Gaulle in running shorts.  The late Francois Mitterrand was partial to a round of golf, but the reflective stroll was his public recreation. The film on his final days last year was titled Le promeneur du Champs de Mars. Jacques Chirac was famous for his energy, but in public he moved at walking pace, always in suit and tie.

French BlackBerry fear

A few years ago the Americans panicked about supposed French spying on their business secrets. Executives were advised to be silent in French hotel rooms and avoid sensitive subjects on Air France jets because the seat-backs were bugged. Now the paranoia is on the other side, with a French government ban on BlackBerries.

Le Monde reported yesterday on the unhappiness of staff in President Sarkozy's new administration over the no-BlackBerry rule, which stems from fear of US spying.

The problem arises because all of BlackBerry's push e-mail transits through servers in the United Kingdom and United States.

Sarko sloshed shock

Just about everyone here with an interest in France must have seen this video by now. It features President Sarkozy's hilarious, apparently drunken, performance after a session with Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit in Germany last week. The first clip, broadcast by Belgian television, hit the internet on Sunday, creating a global phenomenon. It has become number one topic of gossip in France, but the main French television channels have yet to mention it and the press has barely touched it.

Is this French censorship and fear of offending the hyper-touchy head of state ? Or is it good sense in the face of internet-madness?

Here are the facts: