 It's time again for the summer beach in central Paris. They laughed back in 2002 when Bertrand Delanoe unveiled his scheme for an urban riviera in the City of Light. The first Socialist mayor of Paris was said to be trying a camp stunt with his vision for a fiesta on the Seine. The mockery soon stopped. Paris Plage was an immediate hit, drawing residents and tourists to the retro delights of the sand, potted palms, parasols and deck-chairs that replaced the Right Bank expressway for a month.
Seven years on, the scheme is an annual fixture, imitated by cities worldwide. On the continent, Delanoe's beach was copied in Brussels, Berlin, Budapest, Zurich and Rome among other places and towns in America and Japan have followed suit. The latest version is being opened this week, to the amusement of the British media, in the land-locked English city of Nottingham. Earlier this year, the Melbourne council rejected a scheme to plant a plage on the Yarra river. It did not make much sense there, since the city is right on the real beaches of the Southern Ocean.
The sand barges and palm-carrying trucks are hard at work this weekend preparing the 2009 edition of an event that will attract some four million visitors by the time it closes on August 20. This year's poster captures the old-fashioned feeling of the project (demure single-piece swimsuits are the fashion this year, but I'm not sure what's the tower is doing there). City tax-payers fork out about a million pounds while sponsors pick up the rest of the cost of a month-long play space that runs from the Louvre to the Port de la Gare at the foot of the National Library. There is a swimming pool and a water-sports centre has been added at the Bassin de la Villette on the canal system in northern Paris. As well as enjoying dancing, sports, gym classes, massage and tai chi, visitors will be able to stretch their minds with literary groups and concerts.
The theme this year is, fashionably, green. Visitors will be counselled "in a playful way" on the theme of sustainable development. Delanoe is counting on even more Parisians turning up than usual because the recession has cut into holiday budgets. Only about 15 percent of the plage visitors are tourists, which underlines the emptiness of the cliché about Parisians all leaving town in August.
The idea of Paris Plage is of course more attractive than the reality. City sunbathing has its limits. The tone remains urban grit rather than coastal charm. Finding a deck-chair or a hammock often means scrambling through crowds in the heat. There is the usual amount of big city thieving, but thanks to armed police, polo-shirted security guards and France's moderate drinking habits, Mayor Delanoe manages to keep up the civilised atmosphere.
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.
It's almost Bastille day and Paris has started the holiday shutdown so it's a good time for a few tips on being cool in the French capital this summer.
The style of the season is called nouveau modeste
Le look for women: retro and slightly ethnic. The Sarouel (left picture) is tendance again this year, along with white everything and creole loop earrings. Footwear: espadrilles Castaner [below]. My teenage daughter and her western Paris friends also carry big hand-bags permanently on the crook of their elbows [picture: Parisienne teen look]
Sunglasses (men and women). Persol only. Classic Italian marque long ago adopted by French. Never, of course, to be perched on top of the head
 
Men: Anything as long as it does not include any of the following offences: sneakers/trainers, sandals, shorts, trousers with big appliqué pockets, t-shirts with logos or slogans, back-packs, shoulder bags, or, heaven forbid, man capris [criminal offender on Champs Elysées in picture below]. Simple rule: Paris is an elegant northern city not a Med package resort 
Dog: English bulldog, known as le bouledogue anglais. The Jack Russell terrier is ending its reign as favoured four-legged accessory. 
Car: Toyota IQ. Replaced the Smart as chic Paris wheels. Do not be seen near any 4x4 (SUV).
Parking: give your keys to one of the hundreds of voituriers (valet parking attendants) who have multiplied around hip cafes and restaurants. You don't have to be a customer, just tip well.
Top transport: bicycle. Le Vélib, the city's self-service bikes are great but very 2007. An electric Solex is chic but a fixie [below] is better. The fixed-gear bicyclette is now fashionable even for women.
Public transport: The municipal autobus is to be preferred to the smelly Métro, especially in light summer traffic. It's a more pleasant conveyance and you see the city.
Films: Any with late comedy stars Louis de Funès, Jacques Tati or Bourvil [Picture: de Funès and Bourvil in le Corniaud] 
Places to be seen: La Réserve (rare book collection) at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The terrace of Le Café de l'Alma on the avenue de la Bourdonnais [those two cited as top snob spots in Figaroscope] Sunday brunch at the Neuilly-sur-Seine market.
Places not to be seen: The Champs Elysées, the Eiffel tower, the Fifth arrondissement, Paris Plage or anywhere along the central Seine banks. Any cafés and brasseries that display English-language menus or claim to have English-speaking waiters.
Where Parisians holiday this year: Inland rural regions like Picardy, Lorraine, Ardèche and the Cévennes. Provence and the Mediterranean coast are to be avoided like la peste.
Parisian pastimes on holiday: Fishing, bicycling, jeux de société (board games), listening to vinyl records, barbecue.
 France has kept its Sunday rituals more than most places. You think of morning street markets, church bells, long family lunches and strolls in the park or by the river. Well, forget that. Nicolas Sarkozy now wants to scrap Sunday.
That at least is the view from the left, the Church, the trades unions and some of the President's own parliamentarians of his plan to allow shops to open on the Lord's day. Parliament is about to pass a law that will, in the eyes of its many opponents, destroy le dimanche, jour de repos, as France has known it for the past century.
Things are of course not so simple. Sarkozy promised in his 2007 election campaign to lift the 1906 law against trading on Sundays. Markets and food shops had always been an exception on Sunday mornings. Trading has also been allowed since 1993 for shops catering to recreational activities in certain areas.
Last year Sarkozy abandoned a first Sunday opening scheme in the face of opposition from a mainly conservative, Catholic section of his own Union for a Popular Movement. The watered down version now before Parliament is so hedged with restrictions and vague definitions that it may well fall foul of the Constitutional Council, like the recent botched law against internet piracy.
Simplifying, shops in designated tourist and frontier areas and special commercial zones will be able open on Sunday but staff must volunteer for duty and be paid double normal rates. This means, for example, that the grands magasins like Galéries Lafayette and the fashion boutiques on the Champs Elysées will be able to do business. The rest of France will observe the sancrosanct traditional Sunday, which means leisure since very few people attend church any more.
Sarkozy has a bee in his bonnet over France's Sunday habits. One of his favourite lines is to mock the local by-law that, he says, allows stores on the north side of the Champs Elysées to open while those on the south side must keep their doors shut. There is in fact no such by-law. He has also been talking about his embarrassment when Michelle Obama wanted to go shopping in Paris on a Sunday last month and he had to arrange a special opening for one children's clothes store. "How are we supposed to explain to them that we are the only country where shops are closed on Sunday?" he asked after that.
As is often the case, Sarkozy is exaggerating. Germany and several other European states have greater restrictions on Sunday trading. And in reality, with its existing local exceptions, big leisure industry and 24/7 public services, France already works more on Sundays than most other parts of Europe. Look at the Eurostat table below.
But both sides of the Battle for Sunday cling to their stereotypes. Take Bertrand Delanoe, the leftwing Mayor of Paris. His city receives more visitors than any other in the world and thousands of people already work on Sundays to satisfy them. "Sunday is a day of rest respected by most citizens and it must not be sacrificed by this vision of a deregulated economy that does not take into account the family and personal lives of workers," he said.
The public is also attached to the sanctity of Sunday, though by how much depends on the question. A poll for Libération on Monday found 55 percent opposed to Sarkozy's new law and 42 percent in favour. A majority does not believe that Sunday opening will help the economy. Eighty-six percent agree with the statement that "Sunday is a fundamental day for family, sporting or spiritual life." Other polls, though, show that a majority would appreciate being able to shop on Sunday.
I won't be sorry if the new law falters -- though I have nearly always worked on Sundays. Perhaps wider Sunday opening will be more convenient for everyone, including the 70 million tourists who visit the country every year. But it's worth remembering that one of the reasons people flock here is the traditional peace of le dimanche en France.
[Below: European statistics for Sunday work. Green is percentage of population that never works on Sunday, orange work occasionally and red regularly.]
The schools have closed, France is heading for the summer holidays and Lance Armstrong is back on the Tour. That summed up the news today * at the start of the 96th edition of the Tour de France. The three-week, 2000-mile ordeal is of course not just the world's greatest cycle race. Under the headline "A La Vie, A l'Amour," L'Equipe, the sports daily, waxed poetic yesterday, calling the Tour a "unifying force... that possesses us and bewitches us beyond the flaws of humankind."
For France, those human failings are at the heart of the matter with Lance Armstrong. The Texan wonder-cyclist, who won the tour an astonishing seven times in a row, has returned from retirement and is aiming for an eighth victory in the tour that opens in Monaco today. Armstrong's comeback in his 38th year stirred dismay back in the winter. He may be worshiped as a hero at home in the States, but in France he was the object of suspicion. "Good riddance" was the feeling when he left in 2005.
Unlike dozens of others in a dope-plagued sport, Armstrong had never been caught using any performance-enhancing drugs. As he explained: "For France, my story was just too good to be true." He had survived a grave bout with cancer in the mid-1990s to become the biggest champion of all time, breaking the previous record of five wins, shared by the legends Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil.
Armstrong was an American at the time that France had fallen out with George Bush. He alienated the Tour crowd with what was deemed to be an arrogant, hard professionalism. He kept to himself and surrounded himself with bodyguards. In public, he refused to play the plucky regular guy, the traditional cycling hero. He barely spoke French despite five years in residence. Crowds even booed him as he led the pack through the mountain passes.
But this year, things have changed. It's not le grand amour, but Armstrong is enjoying new respect and it's not just because France has forgiven the United States. Armstrong is recognised as a star who brought glamour to a sport that is little known in much of the world. For the young cyclists, Lance is the boss but they have a chance of beating him. Andy Schleck, a Luxembourg Tour racer, said today: "It's good for cycling to have un Monsieur like him. He inspires a lot of people. Hat's off!."
Armstrong is enjoying gentler treatment from the media. Michel Drucker, France's favourite TV host, treated him to a gushing interview last Sunday. People are not scoffing at his argument that he has returned to promote his cancer foundation Livestrong. Armstrong, who broke a collarbone earlier this year, is now benefiting from the old Tour phenomenon of sympathy for the underdog. He is not even squad boss of Astana, the Kazakhstan-owned team for which he is pedalling. First place is held by Alberto Contador, the Spaniard who won in 2007. The first week will see a battle between the two for the real leadership. Armstrong says he will ride loyal back-up to Contador if he does not make the Yellow Jersey early on. The Texan cyclist is, by the way, one of the most active celebrity Twitterers. He has well over one million followers on http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
In the meantime, the tour is holding on to its magic despite the decade of seemingly endless doping scandals. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, says that the all-out testing is making cycling the cleanest sport. No other sport employs such stringent methods to track new ways of cheating, he says.
And to wrap it up, Nicolas Sarkozy has got into the act. The President, who is an amateur cyclist and an Armstrong fan, told the Cabinet this week that it is time to stop knocking the Tour. "It is the victim of dopage, and not the perpetrator," he said. "You must support this great popular event as well as its management," he told Rama Yade, his new Sports Minister. [*Since writing this, a train crash has joined today's headlines]
For over a century, when The Times' Paris bureau has needed an English-language book in a hurry, someone has walked a couple of hundred yards down the Avenue de l'Opéra to buy it at Brentano's. Sadly, the habit came to an end 10 days ago with the demise of the American bookstore that has been a Paris fixture since 1895.
The old shop at 37 Avenue de L'Opéra, whose customers included Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was shut after its landlord, the BNP Parisbas bank, won a liquidation order for non-payment of rent. For some time, the store was locally owned, no longer part of the historic New York-based company which is now a brand in the Borders Group.
Brentano's was a Paris American institution like the Herald Tribune newspaper. It supplied reading on the old trans-Atlantic steamers and it was appreciated by US expatriates. The Nazi invaders shut down the shop when they arrived in June 1940 and turned it into the film and camera supply centre for the Wehrmacht. At the start of the occupation, a German official walked in and ordered 6,000 books, including 349 assorted titles in Everyman's Library, a variety of art books, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and some expensive erotica (The tale comes from the Brentano's site, which is still open).
During the occupation, the Brentano parent company published French writers such as André Maurois and André Gide and the books were smuggled into France via the Free French forces in north Africa.
Like many other bookshop owners, Chantal and Jean-Marc Bodez, Brentano's last proprietors, could not keep up with soaring inner-city rent. The BNP had raised it from 75,000 euros a year to 200,000.
Independent bookshops have been closing everywhere in the world, but they are better protected in France than most places because the law does not allow price discounting. Brentano's suffered from the lower prices for English-languages books on the big internet chains.
And almost no-one sells books in the prized retail zone between the Louvre and the Opéra. A nearby exception remains WH Smiths', the branch of the UK chain on the rue de Rivoli opposite the Tuileries gardens. Another is Galignani, an historic shop also on the Rue de Rivoli. And of course there is always Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank. Here's a list of English-language bookstores in Paris
And it's not just Brentano's who are pulling out of the Opéra quartier. The Times is about to do so too -- after an extraordinary two centuries. We're not closing, just moving, but that's another story to which I shall return.
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 set itself a troublesome real-life question that could have come from this week's baccalauréat philosophy test: should society dictate how people dress ?
The matter arises because parliamentarians are calling for measures to stop Muslim women wearing full veils in public. Niqabs and burqas -- the head-to-toe costumes that cover all or most of the face -- are said to be spreading as fundamentalist doctrines gain hold among a small minority of France's five million Muslims. President Sarkozy is going to address the issue in a speech on Monday and a string of public figures have come out largely in support of restrictions in order to protect women from oppression. Ministers in Sarkozy's government hold conflicting views on the question.
[Tuesday update: Sarkozy has come out firmly against the niqab and burqa but stopped short of calling for a law. See today's story here. ]
This new debate over Muslim dress is reviving the passions that surrounded France's 2004 law prohibiting religious head-cover and other symbols of faith in state schools. The justification was the enforcement of laicité, France's tradition that keeps religious expression away from institutions of the strictly secular republic. The measure was mainly intended to ensure the equality of Muslim girls and it has worked smoothly.
The subject goes to the heart of France's ideal of itself as a culturally integrated republic and it creates misunderstanding abroad, obviously in the Muslim world but also in the "Anglo-Saxon" and north European countries which emphasise what they see as religious freedom. First-time French visitors to Britain are often shocked when they come across female police and immigration officers wearing Muslim head-gear, or male officers in Sikh turbans. The French are also taken aback by the constant references to God in the discourse of US politicians. In turn, British and Americans are often unable to understand the positive, egalitarian intentions of the French secular approach. Foreign correspondents here found their home media editing out the fact that the school veil ban was supported by Muslims. It didn't fit the Anglo-Saxon preconception that it was an undemocratic act of discrimination (The degree of support from Muslims was open to dispute, with some polls showing about 60 percent approval and others only a minority).
Only two weeks ago Sarkozy and Barack Obama crossed swords over the existing headscarf ban after the US president took a swipe at it in his speech in Cairo. He said the United States prized freedom of religion and "we are not going to tell people what to wear." To many French ears, that sounded naive. In Normandy on June 6, Sarkozy told Obama that French principles of equality meant that people should not display religious affiliation in state institutions. "It is not a problem that young girls may choose to wear a veil or a headscarf as long as they have actually chosen to do so, as opposed to this being imposed upon them, be it by their families or by their environment."
That is of course the crux of the problem. Who decides whether they have made a free choice? Extending the ban from schools and some state agencies to an all-out prohibition on any face-covering raises big questions. Veiled women who have been questioned over the past few days by the media have generally said that the choice was their own.
Critics, including some government ministers, say a ban on the burqa and niqab would be unworkable and would only force greater isolation on the victims, as the wearers are seen. Gilbert Collard, a celebrity lawyer, made the point today in France Soir newspaper:
"These caged women show the power of the fundamentalists to indoctrinate. They testify also to an odious idea of woman as an object of submission to an all-powerful master who is the exclusive proprietor of her face. But... forbidding this provocation by shadows in the streets would only reinforce their provocation."
The call for a parliamentary inquiry is led by André Gerin, a Communist MP and Mayor of a suburb of Lyons, who calls the burqa and the niqab "a moving prison for women." He has been supported by two young Muslim-born women ministers, Fadel Amara and Rama Yade.
Amara, a rights campaigner who is Housing Minister, said she is alarmed by the number of women wearing veils. "We must do everything to stop burqas from spreading, in the name of democracy, of the republic, of respect for women." Yade, Minister for Human Rights in the Foreign Ministry, said today that she supported a prohibition in the name of women's equality and human dignity. The wearing of veils "is a phenomenon which is visibly spreading," she said.
Muslim leaders have mixed views. Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, supported an inquiry, saying that face-covering for women was a fundamentalist practice that is not prescribed by Islam. But the national Muslim Council, which is less tied to the establishment, accused lawmakers of wasting time on a fringe phenomenon. "To raise the subject like this...is a way of stigmatising Islam and the Muslims of France," said Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the Council.
I suspect that Sarkozy will not favour a new law. He was not enthusiastic about the school headscarf ban, which was introduced by his predecessor President Chirac. Sarkozy sees the clothing bans as a form of discrimination and he tries to promote policies that bring Muslims, many or most of whom were born in France, into the mainstream community. From that point of view, the President is on the same ground as the activists in the banlieue immigrant estates who see him as the devil.
I've made some sweeping statements and this is touchy territory. Feel free to fire away.
And as a footnote, it's worth noting that the government yesterday published its decree banning facial cover during demonstrations. Anyone who wears a mask or other cover will face a 1,500 euro fine on the first offence and double on the second. Police unions are worried that they will be unable to enforce this law which is intended to make life harder for the casseurs, the violent extreme-left protesters who try to turn demonstrations into riots. .
France has a rich tradition of dictionaries and encyclopedias and the publishers are not giving up in the face of the competition from the internet. Tomorrow sees the publication of the latest Petit Larousse, a dictionary-reference book which has been part of French family life since Pierre Larousse invented it in 1905.
The Petit Larousse is serious and known for its fine illustrations but it is not set in stone like the dictionary of the august Académie Française, the official guardian of the language. It keeps pace with trends and mirrors the prevailing culture. So it's always interesting to note the new expressions and the people whom it adds to its new editions. The arrivals this year include Audrey Tautou, Barack Obama and George Clooney.
The inclusion of show-biz personalities is part of "la pipolisation" of French life. That word, which means celebrity culture and originated in the 1990s from the US People magazine, is one of 150 new terms in the Larousse dictionary section. There are a few from Belgium, Quebec and other parts, and some, like barré (crazy, eccentric) are current French slang but many, inevitably, have been adopted from American
They include buzz, burn-out, geek, fantasy (in the sense of Tolkien-style, nordic mythology entertainment), peer-to-peer, caster (meaning to cast in the theatre sense), blacklister (to blacklist), clubbeur/clubbeuse and toxique, in the sense of waste or loans. The new toxique is one of many examples of English usage being overlaid on old French words. A typical classic example is réaliser, which took on the English sense of to realize as well as its French meaning of to carry out. (The shift took place in the 1920s, according learned commentators below)
This may drop out of the language as fashion passes. Larousse is not sanctifying language like the Académie, whose dictionary is a safe half century or so behind the times. It just tries to reflect current use.
You can understand why French embraces American jargon when it encapsulates a sense for which nothing native has been invented. English has done that with dozens of French words (chic, chagrin, nuance, frisson...) over the past couple of centuries. Le buzz sounds ugly in French but it is a single syllable which French takes a mouthful to render as "rumeur, retentissement médiatique, notamment autour de ce qui est perçu comme étant à la pointe de la mode" as Larousse puts it.
But a lot of the English borrowing is superfluous or silly. Gilles Vigneault, a venerable Quebec singer-poet, was making the point on Europe1 radio this morning. Why say burn-out when there is a perfectly good French word for it, épuisement (exhaustion), he said. My list of recent silly franglais would include relooker (to make over), le fooding (a restaurant fashion involving modern cuisine and trendy décor) and sur-booké (booked out). All have been registered by Larousse.
To get back to less topical matters, this edition marks the 120th anniversary of La Semeuse (the sower), the illustration of a woman blowing dandelion seeds in the wind, which Larousse adopted for his publishing house in 1890 [Dandelion, an English borrowing from the French dent-de-lion, or lion's tooth]. And here is one of the famous nature illustrations: from le Petit Larousse.
Free music fans and internet libertarians are cheering today after France's highest court shot down President Sarkozy's pioneering scheme for policing the the web.
The decision by the Constitutional Council has broken ground in declaring access to the internet to be a basic human right. This is a big blow to Sarkozy and Christine Albanel, his hapless Culture Minister, because their law was supposed to lead the world in combating entertainment piracy. Instead of doing that, their operation has backfired and ended up defending the free-for-all, help-yourself culture of the web.
You will recall the struggle that Sarkozy had to push his law through parliament this spring. It innovated by equipping France with the world's first internet "police" agency, called HADOPI. This would trace pirates who were identified by entertainment firms. It would cut off net access to anyone who continued to download copyright material after two warnings.
The law was supported by the industry and many artists. They saw it as a model for the USA and Europe in the fight to keep earning a living from their music and film. Net libertarians saw it as the creation of a sinister Big Brother. Many called it technically unworkable. Some artists saw it as hostile to the young consumers who are their main customers.
The Socialist opposition appealed to the council on the grounds that the constitution was breached by the creation of an extra-judicial agency with powers to punish internet offenders. The council, which includes two former Presidents and is usually seen as a bunch of elderly fuddy-duddies, gave the left more than it was hoping for.
Les sages -- the wise men -- as the council is known, took the teeth out of the law. They ruled that "free access to public communication services online" is a right laid down in the Declaration of Human Rights, which is in the preamble to the French constitution. It also said the law breached privacy by enabling the HADOPI agency to monitor citizens' internet activity. It agreed that the law breached the separation of powers because if gave an administrative authority power to impose justice. And to boot, it violated the presumption of innocence because alleged pirates would be assumed to be guilty and cut off without being able to defend themselves, the council said.
I felt sorry for Albanel [below], a loyal Sarkozy soldier, as she tried to make the best of the defeat on the radio this morning. The HADOPI agency would go ahead and send its warnings to abusers, she said (though it's not clear how it will track them). Then it would be up to prosecutors and the courts to take action, she said. But that is the situation that exists and does not work in France and most other countries. Courts don't have time to haul in the millions of ordinary users who filch copyright material online.
Sarkozy had promised Carla Bruni, his singer wife, and their showbiz friends that he would have the law in force this year. It is now effectively dead. I would not bet on Albanel staying in her job when Sarkozy reshuffles his government in the next few days.
The affair has left a bad taste by dividing the entertainment world. Young musicians opposed the law as a weapon designed to protect the big recording companies. Old-school leftists like Juliette Greco, the grande dame of Left Bank song in the 1950s, strongly supported the crackdown and reproached the Socialists for betraying artists with their opposition to the law. Patrick Bruel, a middle-aged popular singer who prides himself on being engagé (leftist) railed against the council decision this morning. Downloading a song free is like walking out of the bakers' with a baguette and refusing to pay for it, he said.
[Below: Christine Albanel, Culture Minister, in parliament]. Top picture from Rue89.fr site which has a good account of the "crucifiction" of the HADOPI law]
We try to avoid poking fun at Nicolas Sarkozy for his short stature, but sometimes the French President sets himself up for a little mockery. Here's a classic example, taken at Saturday's D-Day commemoration in Normandy.
Speaking from the same podium as Barack Obama, Sarkozy added about six inches to his five feet five by standing on a little stool. Added to his custom-crafted elevator shoes, this took him up to the same altitude as the six-feet-two US president.
Sarkozy is naturally sensitive about his lack of height and it may not be fair to focus on it. For centuries, sneering about small Frenchmen has been a standard in the anti-French armoury of the English and later the "Anglo-Saxon" world. Try Googling "little Frenchmen", and you get the point -- or look at the comments that land on this blog -- mainly from the United States -- when we get into French-bashing territory.
Napoleon Bonaparte measured five feet six inches in his stockings, which was not small for the late 18th century. But Boney was diminished by English propaganda, which depicted him as a power-mad midget. It's interesting to note that Bonaparte's nick-name, le petit caporal, the little corporal, was an affectionate term coined by the soldiers under his early command.
Jump ahead two centuries and the British are still at it. Here is Stephen Glover, a serious journalist, venting on Sarkozy in the mid-market Daily Mail two weeks ago: "This diminutive egomaniac is increasingly becoming an embarrassment to his countrymen, and a laughing stock to the rest of Europe..." If you dig back to 1805, I'm sure you will find similar words written about Bonaparte.
The Mail article, which depicted the French as collaborationist cowards, was a rant of a kind that would be deemed crude and racist if it had been written about just about any other nation. No French newspaper would indulge in verbal abuse about a foreign leader like that, but mocking the ancestral enemy is a time-honoured sport in Britain.
Sarkozy is something of an exception among recent French leaders. For 30 of the past 50 years, they have been quite tall. Charles de Gaulle stood six feet four inches tall and Jacques Chirac is six feet two.
Having said that, Sarkozy's petite taille is a talking point and subject of mockery in France too (see cartoon from le Canard Enchaîné below). Everyone from serious biographers like Catherine Nay to the man in the local bistrot will tell you that it's important to understanding his psychology. He has spent his life compensating, goes the cliché.
It's part of his view of himself as a scrappy outsider who had to fight harder than anyone to reach the top. During his 2007 election campaign he took pride in describing himself as "un petit Français de sang mêlé" -- a little Frenchman of mixed blood. Petit in this sense also means ordinary, but is still carries the image of height. Sarkozy likes to surround himself with small lieutenants, men such as Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, and Jean-Louis Borloo, who heads a super-ministry covering the environment and transport. His arch enemies, Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, Chirac's former Prime Minister, are of tall, aristocratic build. Sarkozy always chooses tall women. All three of his wives have been taller than him. The latest one, Carla Bruni, a former super-model, wears flat-soled ballerina shoes and stoops in order to minimise her superior five-inches. In the cartoon, she is saying: "You've grown again, pussycat." Sarkozy, in elevator shoes and standing on a classic French novel, says: "I make figures say what I want."
The physical mockery of first families is not all one-way. French comedians and commentators have been having fun with Michelle Obama, focusing on her considerable size. Nicolas Canteloup, the very popular satirist on Europe 1 radio, imagined her the other day as a rugby player knocking over Sarko.
Here they all are in Caen this week
Nicolas Sarkozy has good reason for congratulating himself today. Despite his unpopularity, his UMP party arrived far ahead of the opposition in yesterday's voting for the European parliament.
The President's side certainly won but another star emerged as the surprise moral victor of the voting: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 64, the impish German leftist and hero of the 1968 Paris student revolt. His green group, called Ecologie Europe, almost beat the opposition Socialist party.
It's true that only 40 percent of voters bothered to turn out yesterday and that the left was fragmented by a proliferation of little parties, but it was still the first time for decades that France's governing party came so far ahead in a Euro-election.
The Socialists, the main opposition, were routed, winning only 17 percent compared with Sarkozy's 28 percent. "We are not yet credible," said Martine Aubry, the recently-appointed party leader, who was struggling to hold back her tears. "The Socialists need a major renovation." François Bayrou, the centrist would-be president, was humiliated with a mere 8 percent for his MoDem party.
Cohn-Bendit is the man of the day because of the surprise 16 percent third place of his green group. "Danny the Red" gave up revolution long ago, but his cheeky, subversive style charmed voters into supporting his motley band of green personalities. These included Eva Joly, a Norwegian-born French anti-corruption judge and José Bové, the anti-capitalist campaigner who became a celebrity when he demolished a McDonald's outlet in 1999. The Ecologists won 16 percent, which took them within a hair's breadth of beating the venerable Socialists. In Paris they demolished the Socialists, taking 27 percent, only two points behind Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement.
[Picture: Danny the Red in 1968]
![Cohn_bendit[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570d62bf4970b-300wi)
The greens benefited from the Socialists' collapse and Bayrou's manic vendetta against the person of Sarkozy. Bayrou helped Cohn-Bendit at the last minute with a personal attack on television in which he accused him of paedophile behaviour. The charge arose from an old controversy about a 1975 book in which Cohn-Bendit appeared to excuse sexual relationships between adults and children. That might have sunk a politician in another country, but French voters told pollsters that Bayrou damaged himself by looking vindictive.
The greens benefited from an energetic campaign and also from l'air du temps -- the positive mood over saving the planet. The greens are in tune with the idealism that drives politics more in France than, say, the Anglo-Saxon world. And they got an extraordinary election-eve boost from a sumptuous film on the plight of the planet that was shown on state television and released in cinemas on Friday night.
Called Home, the film is a 12-million euro homage to the earth that was shot over two years by Yann Arthus-Bertrand [below], a photographer who has made his name with spectacular nature reportage taken from helicopters and other aircraft. He is an admired celebrity in France and the film, financed by the PPR luxury fashion and retail group, was given huge publicity.
Likened by the media to Al Gore's film on climate change, Home was watched by eight million on television and by many more in open-air projections in Paris, London, New York and other cities. An edited version is online free here. It's worth watching for its beauty, though it has been criticised an over-aesthetic exercise in consciousness-raising. The spirit of the film was certainly well suited to Paris, with its big lefty bourgeois population.
Green voters said that they had been swayed by the film and Cohn-Bendit welcomed that this morning. "There is an environmentalist sensibility in France. It's possible that this sensibility was activated or re-activated by a film like Home," he said.
Others are crying foul. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader whose National Front managed a lowly 6 percent, said: "I want to stress the extravagant, scandalous film Home, which was made to support the candidacy of Cohn-Bendit and José Bové."
European elections do not change much and the environmentalists usually do better in them than in national polls. But Cohn-Bendit's green shock has badly shaken the Socialists and possibly set the scene for big change on the French left ahead of the next presidential vote in 2012. François Bayrou, who styles himself Sarkozy's chief opponent in 2012, may never recover.
[Below: scene from Home]
Barack Obama is not doing anything to help Nicolas Sarkozy. Three days from the US leader's arrival for his D-Day weekend, he is keeping his distance from the French president who was so eager to welcome him.
The White House's coolness has added to embarrassment at the Elysée Palace over the way they have bungled what Sarkozy wanted to be a supreme Franco-American moment in Paris and especially Normandy. The final straw for Paris was the White House's undiplomatic public reproach this week to Sarkozy for failing to invite the British Queen to the 6th of June ceremony.
Obama is turning up in Paris on Friday evening, but spending the evening privately with Michelle and his entourage. He is not due to see Sarkozy and Carla Bruni at the Elysée. Their only tête-à-tête will be in the Normandy town of Caen on Saturday. The Americans have refused a French request for the two men to hold a joint press conference. The D-Day ceremony at the US cemetery at Colleville, by Omaha beach, has now been widened to include Britain's Gordon Brown and Prince Charles and Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister. Then Michelle Obama is staying on in Paris on a private visit for several days.
The Elysée is exasperated with the Americans, Europe 1 radio reported this morning. "Barack Obama has truly done nothing to give value to his relations with Nicolas Sarkozy," said their breakfast news.
The trouble began, not because Sarkozy did not invite the Queen, but because of the off-hand way that his team reacted when a couple of British newspapers kicked up the "royal snub" fuss last week. This D-Day was a Franco-American celebration, the government's spokesman said. The Queen could come another year.
The leftwing media and opposition have been laying into Sarkozy, saying he had behaved like an oaf [goujat -- see comments below], as the Canard Enchaîné did today, in failing to invite the British. François Bayrou, Sarkozy's chief opponent from the centre, said he had been "crude and ungrateful" and "damaged the image of France".
Le Canard summed it up: "Sarkozy has managed a double hit: insulting Queen Elizabeth and exasperating Obama."
We know about Michelle Obama's French plans because her husband announced them in his first interview for French TV last night. Talking to Canal+, he rather damned Sarkozy with faint praise."Your President Sarkozy I think has been very courageous in some of the decisions he has made".The two examples he cited were Sarkozy's support for the US in Afghanistan and over Iran.
Asked what he loved about France, Obama replied: "Let's see. We have the food. We have Paris. We got the south of France -- Provence. The wine." Obama said that he had travelled in the south when he was at college. He also admitted forgetting all his high school French. "Michelle I think speaks a little."
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.
This video is causing a stir in France because it shows a side of Nicolas Sarkozy that people don't usually see: the doting husband at home. We learn that Carla Bruni's term of endearment for him is "mon chou chou". An English equivalent of this quite proletarian phrase might be my sweetie, sweetie-pie, sweetheart, luv, darling and so on.
The video was taken during a session between Bruni and a group of readers invited by Femme Actuelle magazine. The President drops in on the women in their private quarters in the Elysée Palace. He and Carla make a great show of affection. Sarko says that he has just received the Iraqi prime minister and taken a shower after working out. They point out that they only live in those apartments at weekends. Their dogs are called Clara and Dumbledore, by the way.
On a related subject, Sarkozy could soon be joining British parliamentarians in the field of embarrassing expense claims. A magazine called Challenges reports today that the state auditors have caught him out charging an undisclosed amount of private items to his official expense account. No details have emerged yet but watch this space.
Mocking President Sarkozy can land you in trouble. The French law is being deployed with vigour against citizens who take the President's name in vain.
The latest case is a 47-year-old philosophy teacher from Marseilles university who was tried in the city's police court today for shouting in a supposedly jocular way "Sarkozy, je te vois" ('Sarkozy, I can see you' -- using the familiar singular).
The prosecutor called for conviction and a 100 euro fine against Patrick X, the lecturer, for the quaintly defined offence of "disturbance of the peace with insults, during the daytime". The lecturer, who is witholding his surname from the media, has become a bit of a celebrity over the past couple of days. Recounting his misadventure on the radio, he said that he was walking through Saint Charles station, the Marseilles rail terminus, in the evening rush-hour and came across police officers who were aggressively checking the identity of two youths. To "lighten the atmosphere", he called out "Sarkozy I can see you" and the surrounding crowd burst into laughter. The police took offence and hustled him off to the station for booking.
It was an easy hit since the name Sarkozy is synonymous with law-and-order and our professor, though wearing a suit and tie at the time, is obviously one of those leftwingers who worry about "police repression". "It was an attempt to defuse the atmosphere, a teacher's technique to relax the mood," Patrick explained on France-Inter radio today. "People laughed a lot. The police must answer the question: 'does laughter disturb the peace ? Is laughter subversive ?'"
The prosecutor said Patrick's conduct was no laughing matter. The incident had lasted for five minutes, during which, the police calculated, he could have said "Sarkozy, I can see you" up to 62 times.
The lecturer's lawyer demanded a re-enactment of the alleged offence with a technical expert to measure how much peace would have been disturbed in the noisy rail station. The judges refused and said they will deliver a verdict in July -- which is about average speed for French lower-court cases.
People are only half-laughing at the "case of the rowdy professor" because it reflects increasingly heavy-handed behaviour by the French police in all manner of affairs. Accounts of pointless and abusive arrests are surfacing in the media almost daily.. Sarkozy is accused by civil rights groups and the left of creating a climate of repression with his anti-crime crusade. Jean-Pierre Dubois, head of the Human Rights League, said today's case "reveals once again the slide into police and judicial excess." The League is campaigning against a surge around the country in prosecutions for the offence of insulting a police officer.
The other famous case involving the president's person was the conviction by an appeals court in March of a demonstrator who carried a small placard that was deemed to insult the head of state. This simply read "Casse-toi pauvre con" ('get lost, jerk' or equivalent), the insult that Sarko himself made famous when he was caught on video shouting it at an unfriendly bystander early last year. Hervé Eon, an environment campaigner, was prosecuted under the rarely used presidential insult law after he had held his placard in sight of the presidential limousine in the town of Laval. On appeal, he was fined a mere 30 euros but he now has a criminal record.
Sarkozy is very sensitive over his dignity and he has already used the law more than any of his recent predecessors to pursue those who impugn his honour. He is notoriously harsh-tongued towards his subordinates, but he has a thin skin when he is mocked. This partly explained his initial refusal to attend the national football cup at the stade de France the Saturday before last. "J'en ai marre de me faire siffler par des cons," [I'm sick of being booed by a__holes] Sarko told aides, according to le Canard Enchaîné weekly. Football crowds have recently whistled and jeered his appearance in the stadium.
When Sarkozy did turn up for the final between two Breton teams [top picture], the Stade de France had orders not to mention the presidential presence or show his face on any big screen. When it was time to present the cup, the announcer avoided inciting jeers by announcing simply that the "high authority of state" would hand over the trophy. It was over before anyone had time to boo, which must have been a relief to the police. It would have taken hundreds to charge everyone with insulting the head of state.
[Picture: the law checking for insults in Marseilles station]
This is a post about posts -- 335,000 of them to be precise. That's the total of these annoying little brown pikes that now disfigure nearly every street in the French capital.
Paris has a lot of pretty street furniture, like the Métro entrances, the Morris advertising columns [picture below] and the old water fountains that still grace some avenues. These posts are not among them. The city always had a few potelets, as they are known. Napoleon Bonaparte decreed a standard design in 1807, with a bobble on top for gendarmes to chain law-breakers (I do the same with my dog when I go into the baker's shop). But they began sprouting everywhere in the 1990s and Bertrand Delanoe, the present mayor, has gone, well, postal, since he took office in 2001.
To enforce his campaign to keep cars off the pavements (sidewalks), he has sown the city with 185,000 new potelets and replaced 85,000 defective ones. Le Parisien reports today that the forest of new posts has cost the city hall 15 million euros (which of course means the tax-payer) since 2001. The city has also invested in 16 machines designed to straighten the three dozen posts that are bent crooked daily.
I'm all for curbing the traffic and for the mayor's removal of thousands of street-parking spaces, but the posts are an eyesore. They seem superfluous and their density suggests that they are more about hemming in pedestrians and creating order -- like a French garden. People with children's push-chairs curse them. Many are defaced with advertising stickers and people use them to chain their motor scooters, adding to one of the current Paris blights: the parking -- and riding -- of motorcycles on the pavements.
The posts drew fierce criticism as an affront to civilised living in an internet debate started by the Pompidou modern art centre in 2007. "The post domesticates in an almost subliminal way the path of passers-by. They create a veritable frontier between pavement and street...The walker moves in an open prison, separated from the street by barriers of bar-like potelets..." and so on.
The council defended itself in the Parisien, saying that the potelet remains the best barrier against the incivisme of the city's drivers, who still blithely leave their vehicles on the trottoir if they can. And of course my dog appreciates them for the usual reason. There's no such thing as a quick walk when he can leave his signature on each potelet.
[below: One of a series of artificial before and after shots on a Paris blog. They are digitally done but make the point well ]
There's no simple English word for dépaysement, the sense of disorientation when you arrive in another place or another country. You feel it most crossing continents and time zones, but after all these years I'm still struck by how much it hits you after a quick train trip under the Channel.
A couple of days in England have been a reminder that the big island off the western continent still feels separate despite everything that has harmonised and homogenised Europe -- football, the single market, the internet, the Eurovision song contest (Norway won, France came eighth on Saturday). Here are some random notes.
Emerging from Paris into the London morning rush-hour, I feel like the country mouse arriving in the city -- le rat des champs who has come to town. It's big, fast and noisy. Paris transport is sometimes crowded but it's like the village bus compared with the Underground with its masses sweeping you along while loudspeakers bark orders and announcements.
But the jostling is good humoured. There's give-and-take in the crowd, which is more multicoloured and scruffy than on the French side. The once discreet English are now the noise-makers of Europe. English pubs are one of the country's big attractions, but the din surprises continentals. On suburban trains people talk loudly on mobile phones sharing their lives with the whole carriage.
There's more bustle in London. The city feels more alive, even if bankers and foreign billionaires have dwindled. Paper sellers shout the news. In cafes, pubs and on transport, people carry and read newspapers in a way you do not see in Paris. Another difference is service. In Britain, like the US, it is friendlier and faster because there are more personnel. In France, with high payroll charges and heavy job protection, proprietors hire the minimum so assistants and serving staff are in short supply and over-stretched.
The media talk of quite different subjects. Putting aside Hollywood stars, rock idols and supermodels, the celebrity cast is completely different. France worries about Jenifer. In Britain it's Jade. And away from posters for fashion chains and car brands, British and French advertising are still oceans apart. The British turns on urban humour and social status. The French plays on old-fashioned glamour, romance and also the absurd, with such things as dancing insurance agents.
The recession and unemployment have hit both sides of the Channel, but preoccupations are not in phase. France is worried about social conflict, street revolt and disruption in hospitals and universities. It has a strong, hyper-active leader whose exploits are a source of both fascination and infuriation.
In England, there is a sense of political collapse and drift, with a discredited government stumbling through a long fin de régime. A certain sadistic glee has greeted the drawn-out revelations of mass expense-fiddling by members of parliament. In France they would be shrugging this off with a "tous pourris" -- they're all rotten. Politicans' morality is not an issue here at the moment [post last week].
Sport is often seen as the area in which Europe has converged most. But that's really only because of football, a pastime now dominated by English clubs who depend on French players. France takes seriously such things as volleyball and handball. England has cricket. On Saturday, my French companion gave up after I tried to explain the point as 13 men in white performed the ritual on wet grass in a west Sussex village.
The cost of living is worrying France, but with the cushion of the welfare state, people do not talk money as much as the British. The English middle classes obsess about house prices, schools and health care in a way that you do not hear in France. Yet you get the impression that there is still more money for spending in England. Shops are full and in the southeast, at least, the cars are still flashier than in France.
There is one big change. Britain no longer feels like the most expensive place in Europe. The crash of sterling over the past year makes London affordable. This makes a visit to London especially welcome to continent-dwellers who are paid in pounds and have suffered a 30 percent drop in euro income. But even with the devalued currency, Britain retains the crown for Europe's most expensive rail transport. I'm still smarting from the 16 pounds (17.6 euros) that I was charged at the luggage depot at Victoria station for leaving two small bags for seven hours.
[Below: an island ritual which has never quite taken off on the continent]
It's that time of the year again when a French artiste goes to the Eurovision song contest and gets hammered by the Croats, Turks, Estonians and other entrants in the world championship of kitsch. But hold on. Tomorrow night's final might be different. France is fielding a real star: Patricia Kaas.
English-speakers may never have heard of her, but Kaas, 42, is a fine pop singer with a gutsy cabaret style who has a big following on the continent and especially in Germany and eastern Europe. Picking Kaas was clever because she is very popular in Russia. Moscow is hosting the show after walking away with last year's prize thanks to the telephone vote from the former Soviet republics. Listen above to her entry, S'il Fallait le Faire, from her latest album Kabaret. The 1930s cabaret mood, fits the current depressed climate too.
Kaas [right] is running about fifth in the British betting odds, well behind the favourite, Norway's Alexander Rybak, a 22-year-old whose song Fairytale is accompanied by a folk dance group. But the French singer has President Sarkozy's government rooting for her. Alain Joyandet, Minister for Overseas Cooperation and the French language, is going to Moscow to cheer her on. You might remember that the government disowned last year's French entrant, Sébastien Tellier, because he sang in English -- like most of the other contestants. The language wheeze didn't work for him. He came in at 18th out of 25. France has not won since 1977.
We all know that the Eurovision contest, founded in 1956 to promote postwar fraternity, is a festival of novelty acts and low-grade Europop. In 1974, though, it did manage to launch the career of a Swedish act called Abba. Yes the contest is only taken seriously by small or neurotic nations. But 42 countries have entered this year and up to 150 million people will watch the final live. I have to confess to enjoying the show, with all its silliness, awful music and patriotic emotion. Perhaps it's because as a teenager I had a crush on Sandie Shaw, a barefoot popster who won with Puppet on a String [in picture]. 
Britain is also making more of an effort this year after coming bottom last May. The venerable Andrew Lloyd Webber is accompanying Jade Ewen in one of his own songs. And juries have been re-introduced in order to make the voting a little less political than it has been from the TV viewers.
Kaas, whose mother was German and hails from the frontier region of Lorraine, says she does not see Eurovision as a joke. "I'm going there to win, but if I manage to be in the first five that's fine," she told Libération. "At the beginning the idea surprised me. It's usually beginners who go to Eurovision... but I said why not. I see it like a sporting event like the Olympic games." If Kaas cannot do well, there's no hope for the Eurovision contest.
On the subject of great pop artists, Johnny Hallyday, France's eternal rocker, has just started his farewell tour. And I take him seriously too. Here's my story from the paper.
Here's an item that is more gossip than news. Carla Bruni and her husband are house-hunting and they have taken a tour of the celebrated apartment of the late Yves Saint Laurent on the rue Babylone in the 7th arrondissement on the Left Bank. What makes it piquant is that Mick Jagger, Bruni's old flame, owns a flat in the same building.
Bruni is an heiress and former supermodel who is worth about 20 million euros, according to the popular estimate. Sarkozy has much less. It seems unlikely, though, that he would move into such a sumptuous pad when he is trying to shed his bling-bling image. But they did inspect the premises recently as part of their search for a new abode, an informed friend tells me.
The Rolling Stones singer has a flat two floors up from Saint Laurent's vast garden duplex, refurbished in Art Deco style, which was home to the spectacular art trove which he collected with Pierre Bergé, his partner. The works were sold for 373 million euros at auction in February [picture above before the sale]. The apartment is not officially on the market yet, but it is estimated at up to 10 million euros.
The couple have been looking for lodgings more suitable than the town house that Bruni rents in the Villa Montmorency, an ultra-chic private street in the 16th arrondissement. Sarkozy moved in there after their marriage 15 months ago. Neighbours in the millionaires' ghetto off the Avenue Mozart are displeased by the security personnel and official vehicles which have disturb their quiet existence around the clock.
The couple are reported over the past month to have inspected other properties, including a former Carmelite monastery nearby in the 16th. The YSL flat would suit Sarkozy better because it is in an open street in the 7th district which is home to Parliament and ministries and is just across the Seine from to the palace.
The Saint Laurent apartment would have special appeal to Bruni because she was a friend and one of the couturier's favourite models. On his death last year the new Première Dame de France said that he had "made sublime not just the beauty but also the strength of women."
On his election in 2007, Sarkozy declared assets of 2.153 million euros, but he lost a big chunk of that in his divorce settlement with Cécilia Ciganer, who left him for another man six months after his election. Sarkozy and Bruni signed a wedding contract under which each retained the title to their their existing assets while sharing those acquired after their marriage.
According to various memoirs of the time, the young Bruni enjoyed a lengthy liaison with Jagger from the early 1990s when he was married to Jerry Hall. The couple have kept in touch. Sir Mick has attended Bruni's concerts and Franck Demules, her personal assistant, wrote in a biography published last week that the British singer occupies the rank of "God" in her list of friends.
Jagger figured in Bruni's opening flirt with Sarkozy when whey were introduced for the first time at the house of Jacques Séguéla, a mutual friend, in November 2007. According to the account by Séguéla, a veteran advertising man, Bruni taunted Sarko, saying: “When it comes to the celebrity press, you are an amateur. My time with Mick was secret for eight years. We went to all the world capitals and we were never photographed once." The President riposted with the now immortal line: "How could you have stayed eight years with a man who has such ridiculous legs?"
[below: the presidential couple in the Elysée palace posing for Vanity Fair magazine last year]
France is amused, along with everyone else, by the fuss over the fanciful expenses of British members of parliament. All those claims for castle repairs and tennis court maintenance are good for a laugh. No-one could imagine such a scandal occurring in France for a simple reason: members of the government and parliament don't have to account for their expenses.
Unlike parliamentarians in northern Europe, French députés and senators do not have to hand in receipts or explain how they dispose of the fixed 70,000 euros that they receive annually to cover their their spending on housing, offices and transport. The European Parliament still uses largely the same method, to the disgust of the northerners and delight of Eurosceptics. Luxurious style and lavish perks are expected by French ministers and other high servants of the state and few see anything wrong with this.
Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, tried to explain on the radio this morning why France tolerates and even rather approves of the regal life-style of its ruling class. "There are two reasons: we have a culture of secrecy about money and also a reverence towards people in power," he said. "The Anglo-Saxons and Nordic states have a quite different culture. They don't have our delicacy about money."
Joffrin traced the attitude back to revolutionary days when the rulers of the young Republic sought to impose their legitimacy by looking like the old caste of the monarchy and aristocracy. "Napoleon said the prefect's (local governor's) house had to be as impressive as that of the nobleman." he said.
In the same debate, on France-Info, Michel Colomès, a magazine journalist, said people do not expect high dignitaries to live like ordinary people. "I don't think the French would want to see our prime minister living with the same life-style as the premiers in northern Europe," he said.
The subject came up because, parallel to the British scandal, an unusual glimpse of French ministerial spending has emerged this week. It came from René Dosière, a leftwing parliamentarian who has for years been trying to pierce the secrecy that surrounds the state aristocracy. It was Dosière who, a few years ago, exposed the way that French Presidents enjoyed an unlimited, secret budget, drawn from a number of ministries. President Sarkozy reformed this up to a point. He still lives like a king -- though that is probably the wrong expression since some of Europe's royal houses live modestly in comparison.
This time, Dosière used his parliamentary rights to force reluctant ministries to produce their running expenses. He got the figures after eight months but only one, the Justice Ministry, gave much detail. Among other things, we learn that Rachida Dati, the Minister, has put a fleet of 20 cars with 19 drivers at the permanent service of her 20 personal staff. Madame Dati [pictured above in her office] and her ministry on the Place Vendôme spent 270,000 euros last year on receptions and meals. She clocked up 416,370 euros on air travel for herself and advisers. Much or perhaps all of that was legitimate, but there's no way of knowing. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister (see last post) beat Dati on the travel front, spending 562,346 euros on flights.
Dati, who is about to leave office, does not live in the official residence which is provided for her, unlike many other ministers. Scandals occasionally break when ministers go too far on that front. Hervé Gaymard, a Finance Minister under President Chirac, was forced to resign after only a few weeks in 2005 after it was revealed that the state was renting a palatial apartment for his family because he considered that his official residence was not grand enough. As a result of this, ministers are now expected to pay some of the running charges of their mansions. That is a change from the days when President Mitterrand managed to house his secret second family at state expense in a sumptuous apartment for over a decade and no-one raised an eye-brow when the news came out in the mid 90s.
Dosière, who is regarded by fellow parliamentarians as something of an eccentric, commented drily in Le Monde today: "The culture of monitoring public spending is not very developed in France, at least it's not much liked in the ministries.... Our administration is not yet used to transparency."
A jinx seems to have latched onto President Sarkozy's scheme to make France the first democracy with an internet police agency. A furore is raging in the French blogosphere over the sacking of a television executive because he criticised Sarkozy's imminent three-strikes-and-you're-out law against illegal downloading.
The episode tells you about the cosy ties between Sarkozy and TF1, France's dominant -- commercial -- television network. Here's what happened:
Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, 33, TF1's chief of technical innovation, voiced his disagreement with the internet law -- known as Hadopi -- in a private e-mail to Françoise de Panafieu, the member of parliament for his home district in western Paris. Panafieu is a one-time minister and veteran member of Sarkozy's UMP party (She's also my MP and her office is opposite my apartent). Her assistant forwarded the e-mail to the office of Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister [above], requesting points to make in response to Bourreau.
The deputy-chief of Albanel's staff then zapped a copy of the e-mail straight to TF1. Bourreau's boss called him in, read out his e-mail and told him he was fired because it betrayed the network's policy in favour of the internet law. When the story broke in Libération, Albanel dismissed it as absurd and indignantly denied before parliament that her office had forwarded the e-mail. Over the weekend, she reversed her story and admitted that the dirty work had been done by Christophe Tardieu, her staffer. He has been suspended for a month.
Albanel says she regrets the incident but is pointing out that nothing in the e-mail said that it was confidential. Bourreau (the name means hangman or executioner) is suing TF1 for wrongful dismissal, citing a law which employees' rights to voice political opinions.
At this stage I would argue that an executive in a sensitive post should be more careful about airing opinions in contradiction with an important company policy. But that's not really the point here. The scandal comes from the Culture Ministry ratting on Bourreau to the private company that it is involved in regulating.
This is being taken as proof of the incestuous network of friends and interests through which Sarkozy influences -- some would say controls -- the media. TF1 is owned by the billionaire Martin Bouygues, a Sarkozy friend who is is godfather to his youngest son. As we saw here before, Sarkozy last year got rid of advertising from public television -- a huge gift to TF1 -- on the suggestion of Bouygues. TF1's second-ranking executive is Laurent Solly, who was deputy director of Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign. And so on.
Bourreau is being hailed as a hero, admired with dedicated Facebook groups and a special song "Qui a tué (Who Killed) Bourreau-Guggenhem ?" He has been called the first "internet martyr" in the cause of resisting what is seen as Sarkozy's Big Brother Hadopi scheme.
Much of the emotion is over-blown, but the Hadopi law is beginning to look like a loser before it has even finished its tortuous passage through parliament. It is supported not just by the big corporations of the entertainment industry but also by many artists as the only way to stop their work being pillaged. But its foes have done a good job painting it as an out-of-date plot by the establishment to punish the young and poor who download music and films.
That case was put today by a group of 90 independent record labels which have signed a declaration attacking the Hadopi law (which takes its name from the acronym for the new High Authority which will track down and punish illegal downloaders). The independents, who say they represent 90 percent of French musical artists, attacked the majors for impoverishing them and supporting a policy "which designates the public as potential thieves rather than music-lovers."
The anti-Hadopi crowd could not have wished for better ammunition than the case of the unfortunate Mr Bourreau.
[Picture at top is Albanel in parliament last month after a first attempt to pass the Hadopi law was unexpectedly defeated. It's back for a new vote later this month and will very likely pass]
Say the word France and the images that flash to mind will probably include Paris and some sunny, lavender-tinted scene from Provence. Since 1976, the Provence area is part of the entity known as Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and there lies a problem.
Since the name is a mouthful, everyone uses the acronym PACA for the administrative region which encompasses some of Europe's most sublime geography. As a word, Paca is ugly and the source of jokes, such as pacapable -- a pun on pas capable or incapable. Michelle Vauzelle, the leftwing President of the Paca, wants to ditch the embarrassing name, which he calls an insult to the history of his region of five million people. "We have a name that has deeply handicapped us," said Vauzelle. "I was welcomed in Algeria the other day as President of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Agneau (lamb chop)."
Vauzelle [below] is planning a referendum but he may find that he has stirred up more trouble than he bargained for.
Previous efforts to change the name have fallen foul of local sensitivities -- in particular of the pride of Nice. The old port city, hometown of Guiseppe Garibaldi, was Italian until the king of Sardinia gave it to France in 1860. It is an ancestral rival to Marseilles, the Provençal port to the west. Les Niçois do not like being lumped in with les Provençaux. If it were not for them, Vauzelle would probably get everyone to plump for just Provence, an historic name with global brand recognition. This has worked for the Auvergne, Alsace, Brittany and the other modern regions which re-adopted old provincial names. The people in the high Alps -- historically linked to the Dauphiné region -- would also like to be recognised in the name, but passions there are not as high as down on the coast.
To accommodate the Niçois, the name Provence-Méditerrannée is being touted. The trouble with that is that it does not answer one of the main complaints about Paca -- what you call the inhabitants. The current Pacaiens sounds bizarre and too close to paiens, or pagans. The point is important because French politicians like to address their people by the place name. Starting a speech or a letter "Chers Auvergnates et auvergnats" works. So to a lesser extent does "Chers Françiliens" -- the recent coinage for the Ile-de-France, or Paris region. They need something snappy like that to replace Paca. People in Nice will certainly not accept Chers Provençaux.
One exemple not to follow is the thankfully vain name-change that was attempted a few years ago by Georges Frêche, the longtime Socialist godfather of the Languedoc-Roussillon, just west of the Paca. He wanted to rebaptise the region Septimanie. That comes from its Roman name Septimania, but sounds more like a disease. [below: PACA logo]
Vauzelle is asking for suggestions which he would like to put to a popular vote. La Provence, a Marseilles newspaper, is also running a debate on the subject. Some ideas, such as Région Soleil, are pretty lame. People there have also pointed out that Cote d'Azur is a fairly corny name, bestowed on the Riviera for marketing purposes in the 1890s. l'Unioun Prouvençalo, a regionalist movement, is insisting on straight Provence. "The name is an economic and historic asset," it says. Some opponents of Vauzelle want him to leave the subject alone. Jean-Claude Gaudin, rightwing Mayor of Marseilles and a former Paca president, says the exercise will just lead to trouble.
Maybe we can come up with some suggestions for Vauzelle (whom I used to know when he was spokesman for President Mitterrand). I'll forward them to him.
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PACA consists of six departements: Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Alpes-Maritimes, Bouches-du-Rhone, Hautes-Alpes, Var and Vaucluse.
[Below: Marseilles]
The personal drivers of the past two French Presidents have caused a stir in recent years with indiscreet memoirs that reported on their master's lurid private lives. The latest exercise in the drive-and-tell genre is by Carla Bruni's chauffeur-assistant.
But Franck Demules, known as Franky, offers a reversal of the usual sensation. While the civil servant chauffeurs of Presidents Miterrand and Chirac spilled the beans on their bosses' amorous antics, Demules describes life in the showbiz world of sex, drugs and rock n'roll while making France's première dame sound like a saint.
Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, both former lovers, feature among the stars in the biography of Demules, who has worked for the past decade as confidant, driver, personal assistant and fixer for Bruni. In Un Petit Tour en Enfer (A Little Trip in Hell) Demules, 43, a former actor and cocaine addict who spent time in prison for fraud, reveals no secrets but he offers a glimpse of life in a world far removed from the decorum of the Elysée palace. Bruni and Sarkozy, whom she met and married over the winter of 2007-8, emerge as saviours of the man who describes himself as "the queen's devoted musketeer".
Sarkozy called in Demules when he returned from a rehabilitation course in Canada last February and "in a kind way told me to think of the future." The President advised him to throw himself into work: "If you knew, Franck, how much effort I had to put in in order to get here," said Sarkozy.
Demules returned to the bottle and suffered depression last year after Bruni's marriage sidelined him as her minder-in-chief. Bruni signed him into a clinic near Paris on the recommendation of her friend Marianne Faithful, the British singer. She then proposed a New Year's stay in "her friend Eric Clapton's (rehab) centre in the Caribbean." His English was not good enough so he went to Quebec.
Demules, the victim of long-term sexual abuse as a child, describes how Carla and Valéeria, her actress sister, gave him lodging and work in the mid-1990s after his young wife had died of Aids. Soon Bruni had entrusted him with her credit card and her secrets, he writes. Among other things, the Brunis paid for the schooling of his daughter, now 19 and Carla helped him overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
Demules writes with affection for Raphael Enthoven, the philosopher who was Bruni's last partner and father of their son. He describes Endhoven's "ballsy" courage in a brawl which they had with two strangers in an underground car park. Bruni's entourage has a list of friends classed by order of importance. "Mick Jagger is God," says Demules. The chief Rolling Stone behaves like a perfect gentleman at Bruni's concerts, he says. He contrasts him with Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, who sweeps up with an entourage and demands movie-star treatment.
Serving Bruni has its tough moments, he says. One was taking Naomi Campbell shopping. On a visit to Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, the former supermodel was so fierce that no-one dared talk to her, he writes.
Demules describes the shock and disapproval among friends in the leftwing entourage when Bruni began her romance with France's defiantly rightwing president. "It was violent. You would have thought I was a traitor to the cause," he writes. Since then, former anti-Sarkozy members of the circle have been asking him to intervene for presidential favours.
Franky organised the President's first birthday party after his marriage. He says that he still feels uncomfortable working with the presidential body guards, all police officers. "At the beginning it stressed me. Even if you have nothing to feel guilty about, you are always a bit scared that you might have forgotten something," he writes.
Demules realised that his boss and the President were in love when he dropped her off in the rain at the Elysée one rainy afternoon in the zinter last year. The President telephoned him and invited him to drive in with his battered car and dog. "I was impressed. The president received me divinely, offering me sausage that he had brought back from Corsica."
Bruni has redeemed him, writes Demules. "Without Carla, some people would not have talked to me. I would have stayed the former junky whose wife died of Aids, the crazy, uncontrollable guy."
Bruni has given her blessing to the book, but warned him "they'll try to make it about me, but don't be pushed around." The premiere dame talked in the latest Paris Match about her attachment to her Franky. "When I got married I never imagined for a second that I would let him go. Even if I am now very protected, there is a heap of personal and intimate things that I do not dare ask of the palace personnel or the security officers."
 After Audrey Tautou's appointment as the new face of Chanel, Dior have come up with a new male ambassador. He's the one in the picture, a 31-year-old actor who is known as sublimely handsome. Younger readers, don't worry if you've never heard of Alain Delon (like some of my colleagues in London today). The picture of him posing in Saint Tropez was taken in 1966.
Dior are about to use the image of the moody Delon at the height of his seductive power to sell Eau Sauvage, the men's cologne which it launched that year. "The picture has not aged and it will enable us to reach men who remember Delon at that period and a younger clientèle which will be charmed by his rebel, irrevent look," Dior told le Figaro.
Delon, a monstre sacré who is in his 74th year; is still going strong after 88 films. He made fun of his notorious self-importance a couple of years ago playing Julius Caesar in the mega-euro comedy Astérix and the Olympic Games. He replied in the film to "Hail Caesar" with the salute: "Avé moi!" [picture]
Known for this mégalo character, Delon likes referring to himself in the third person. He cried scandal last year when he dropped out of the Journal du Dimanche ranking of the 50 most admired French people. The pollsters had failed to include him in the list of candidates, he said. "There were names there that should not have been there if Delon was not there."
Dior's photo; taken by Jean-Marie Périer, is meant to evoke the golden days when Delon largely played himself starring as the smouldering, dangerous hero in movies by René Clément, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, 1963), Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Deray, Henri Verneuil and other directors. He was romantically involved with a string of beautiful actresses, including Jane Fonda, Romy Schneider, Monica Vitti and Mireille Darc. Always a star more than an actor, he missed out on the nouvelle vague film movement of the early 1960s. In 1966, when the photo was taken, he was co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer and Leslie Caron in Clement's wartime classic Is Paris Burning?
Unlike other actors whose style moved with the times as they aged, Delon seems to have stayed in those pre-1968 years when, as a global hearthrob, he stood for Gallic insouciance, dash and danger. The nostalgia picture will work in France, but I wonder how it will play in the world beyond.
[Picture: Delon now]
President Sarkozy is unveiling his vision of a grand new metropolitan Paris today. The idea is to break the barrier of the périphérique ring-road and sew together the dozens of separate towns that surround the relatively small capital city. Here's my preview in today's newspaper and I'll come back to Greater Paris after he announces it. In the meantime, let's salute the Louvre pyramid.
Paris is marking the 20th birthday of the high-tech glass and steel contraption that President Mitterrand planted in the courtyard of the world's most visited art museum. Back in the mid-1980s there was quite a shock when the Socialist president announced his scheme, designed by I.M.Pei, the Chinese-American architect. The idea was to use a car park as a startling new underground entrance that contrasted with old royal palace.
"You don't approach a palace by the basement," said Michel Guy, a former Culture minister who led the protests at the time. The press compared it to a Métro train entrance, a cheese cover and an upside-down funnel. Similar complaints greeted the new-fangled Eiffel tower in 1889. But the pyramid went on to become a monument in its own right.
Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's curator, said this week that his visitors cite three reasons for coming to the museum -- La Joconde (The Mona Lisa), the Venus de Milo and the pyramid. "The pyramid has become the only entrance, it marks a rite of passage, an initiation," said Loyrette. The only problem is that it needs to be expanded because it was designed for 4.5 million visitors a year and the museum is now receiving 8.5 million.
Loyrette indicated to le Parisien that he was a little dismayed that his customers are so obsessed by the Mona Lisa when there is so much else to see in his vast museum. Eighty percent of the 8.5 million troop straight to Leonardo's fragile glass-covered portrait. Visitors stay in the Louvre on average between two and four hours.
He also said that the art in the Louvre, which stops at 1850, is increasingly hard for people to understand -- compared with the impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay and other more modern work. "Visitors know less and less about mythology and history -- including those from wealthiest classes," he said.
The pyramid has stood up to time much better than most other recent architectural grands projets in the capital. The most loathed is the Montparnasse Tower, the black 600-feet tall obelisk that President Pompidou stuck in the middle of the low-rise capital in the early 1970s [picture below].
The online version of Le Figaro found that 35 percent of Parisians want to demolish the eyesore. The paper's readers are on the conservative and older side, but their hate list is roughly shared by many Parisians. Second most unpopular is the Beaugrenelle development, a collection of mid-rise towers and concrete that was thrown up on the Seine in the left-bank 15th arrondissement in the 1960s. The 1970s Pompidou modern art centre came third on the demolition list, which is a little surprising that its oil refinery look has lost its jarring novelty.
President Mitterrand's 1980s projects came next, starting with the bunker-like Bastille opera and the twin-slab National Library. Most Parisians I know would agree with that. But further down the demolition list came... the Louvre Pyramid. It is detested by 8.9 percent of the Figaro's 15,000 respondents. But I said they are conservative.
Here's a little good news for Britons, Americans and other nouveau pauvre visitors to France. Restaurant owners are going to promise the government today that they will trim their prices -- by up to 10 percent on some menus.
The deal, made in return for a hefty cut in value-added (sales) tax, should soften the blow in time for summer visitors who are not blessed with the strong euro currency. But don't expect too much. Many restaurateurs say that they need the two billion euro gift from the state just to survive the recession. Restaurants and bistros lost between 20 and 50 per cent of their income from January to March and many have already introduced more modest "crisis menus" to lure back patrons.
At Taillevent, a high temple of Parisien gastronomy, they are refusing any drop in the charge for their langoustine royales, golden frogs' legs and other items on their Michelin-starred menu. "I'm not dropping my prices because that would imply that they were not right to begin with, which is not the case and because the cost of the ingredients has risen steeply," Valérie Vrinat, the owner, told us.
President Sarkozy ordered the country's 200,000 eating establishments to pass on part of a drop from 19.6 percent to 5.5 percent in VAT which he won from the European Union last month. He secured the cut, expected to take effect from July 1, after Germany lifted a seven-year veto against a pledge originally made to the restaurant industry by President Chirac.
The tax bonus does not cover wine -- which accounts for 20 percent of restaurant income -- and the universal 15 percent service charge will continue to be applied -- along with the usual expectation of a tip beyond that.
Under pressure from the Government, the catering trade is to come up with a list of a dozen everyday items which will benefit from the full VAT cut. This should include the plat du jour, basic entrées (appetizers for Americans) and desserts plus coffee. "A customer should be able to order a meal which is entirely subject to the full VAT reduction," said Hervé Novelli, the Trade Minister. An ordinary Parisian dish of the day such as a steak-frites or pavé de saumon should drop from about 15 euros to 13.20.
Restaurant owners are also expected to use the tax benefit to recruit more staff and invest in their establishments. They will in return lose some earlier tax breaks. I'll certainly welcome more staff. One of the drawbacks eating out in France -- other than in grand establishments -- is the slow service that stems from over-worked personnel. That, of course, springs from the employers' burden of huge payroll charges and strict labour contracts (but let's not divert into the usual argument here).
At the small Bistrot d'Henri in the Saint-Germain-des-Près quarter, David Poulat, the owner, told us that he welcomed the scheme though he thought many in the trade would need the benefit simply to keep their heads above water in the recession. He expects to cut his plats du jour such as blanquette de veau and gigot et gratin de courgette from 14 to 12 euros. "But at the same time I might reduce the portions a little," he said. Lowering the price of à la carte items would be difficult. "I am not sure that it would attract customers anyway. People will not be swayed much by a difference of one or two euros."
He may not be right. plenty of people, not just sterling-earners like us, think twice before dining out modestly in Paris these days because l'addition will come in at about 80 euros for two with a bottle of basic wine. Between 60 and 70 euros changes the picture. And in case anyone is wondering, expense accounts are a fading memory in our business.
[Below, the other end of the scale: 564 euros for lunch for two at the three-star restaurant of the hotel Bristol, President Sarkozy's favourite eating place, opposite the Elysée palace. From chrisoscope.com, a Paris food critic's site.]
The future belongs to those who rise early. The English version of that French saying holds that the early bird catches the worm. The Spanish say a quien madruga Dios le ayuda (God helps the early riser). The virtue of a quick start on the day idea is pretty universal and Nicolas Sarkozy preached it in his 2007 presidential campaign along with "work more to earn more".
Well, everyone is wrong, according a group of Belgian, French and Swiss researchers. People who find it hard to get up in the morning perform better for longer than the virtuous early birds who leap from the nest to claim the future, say the team based at the University of Liège.
Led by Christina Schmidt, a neuroscientist, they pitted a volunteer group of 16 young early risers against a gaggle of 15 natural night owls to find out who could perform complicated tasks for longest. For two days in laboratory conditions, the early risers started the day around 7 am and would be ready for bed by 10 or 11 pm. Late starters got up as late as 11 am and went to bed up to 3 am. The results, just published in the journal Science, were conclusive. The night owls stayed alert for longer periods before flagging mentally. After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention.
The late risers have more stamina because they are less affected by a mechanism that tells the brain that it needs sleep as their circadian day cycle progresses, the researchers reported.
"We thought that the early morning subjects would perform better in the morning and vice versa," Professor Philippe Peigneux of the Université Libre of Brussels, co-author of the study, told Le Figaro. "In fact, after an hour and a half of sleep there's no difference between the early and late risers. However at the end of the day, the late risers are less tired and have improved their alertness," he said.
The researchers point out the obvious fact that there is a draw-back to being a late riser: your higher efficiency is reduced by being out of phase with the world around you. I'll use that argument in the daily struggle to get my teenage son out of bed and off to school. But I suppose the new European research may have invalidated Benjamin Franklin's dictum 'Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.'
An old but fairly accurate cliché holds that France is a conservative nation that advances through periodic upheaval. A lot of people would like us to believe that we may be entering one of those moments.
There is even a touch of 1789 in the way that the strongest prophesy of insurrection has come this week not from a ragged sans-culotte, but from an outcast aristocrat who wants to bring down the king. Dominique de Villepin, the last Prime Minister and bitter foe of his former subordinate Nicolas Sarkozy, has pronounced that "France faces a risk of revolution". He did not say whether he had in mind something like 1789, 1848, the Commune of 1871 or May 1968.
Here's the case: The economic slump is destroying jobs by the thousand. Over 20 percent of the under 25s are out of work. The sense of injustice is being fed by the golden incomes still enjoyed by disgraced bosses; dismissed workers are kidnapping managers and one lot last week sacked government offices in the town of Compiègne; about a third of the universities are "blocked" by students protesting against President Sarkozy's higher education reforms. Electricity workers are pursuing a pay claim by cutting off the current from tens of thousands of people.
Next Friday, the labour unions are joining in rare May Day unity in mass marches to alert Sarkozy to the anger and plight of the working classes. Today's Journal du Dimanche, a conservative national newspaper owned by a friend of Sarkozy, is asking dramatically on its front: "Is a 'May 2009' possible in France?'. In other words, could we be about to live a replay of May 1968, the student uprising that ignited strikes and briefly shook the rule of President de Gaulle.
I will take the risk of answering the newspaper's question in the negative. There is a lot of anger around and insurrection is certainly desired by the usual crowd on the utopian far left -- Olivier Besancenot, the Trotskyite leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, students and the hardline labour unions such as the Trotskyite Sud federation.
But history is unlikely to repeat itself. May 1968 came as a surprise to a country that was enjoying unprecedented prosperity and high employment. It was also a time of cultural revolt and dreams of other worlds. It was followed by a period of industrial turbulence in the 1970s with far more strikes and factory sit-ins than now.
Revolution is being talked up by people in the Establishment with their own ambitions at heart. Villepin is the most glaring example. He is a never-elected diplomat who owed all his government appointments to his mentor President Jacques Chirac. He is to stand trial later this year on charges of trying to smear Sarkozy in the so-called Clearstream affair. Last Sunday he talked of possible revolution saying he feared that public despair would lead to "collective behaviour that we might not be able to control". On Friday, he announced that he hoped to stand against Sarkozy in the next presidential election in 2012.
That prompted a little mirth and jokes about his mental balance. The same response has greeted the utterances of Ségolène Royal, another member of the elite who is hell-bent on bringing down the elected monarch. Royal, the Socialist who was defeated in the 2007 presidential election and failed to win her party leadership last December, is waging a manic personal campaign against Sarko. She is issuing public "apologies" in the name of France for his imagined sins and she is all but preaching revolution, siding with the workers in every violent episode. Relations between workers and employers in France "remain in the Middle Ages", she said this weekend. Like Villepin, Royal is out for revenge against Sarkozy in 2012.
So, when you hear of unrest in France, add a pinch of salt. The mood is definitely dark, as it is in Britain, Spain, Ireland and the United States among other places. The work-place violence and street and student protests may increase, but we are far from revolution. People are not ready to risk their jobs, as some were in 1968. The French welfare safety net protects the unemployed and low-paid to a degree unimaginable to Americans or even the British. Revolution is not really in the air when the leader of the French Socialist Party complains that the French president should do more to follow the example of the president of the United States. Martine Aubry, the party leader, has just done that. And on the anecdotal side, many people are not suffering too much, judging by the traffic jams around the suburban shopping centres at weekends.
Sarkozy must have been comforted by an Ifop poll just published by Sud Ouest Dimanche newspaper. This found that despite all his unpopularity, if the 2007 election were staged again today Sarkozy would still beat Royal and all the other candidates who stood in the first round that year.
[Below: The struggle of 'les Contis', northern France workers demonstrating against their factory closure by German tyre company. Their case has become symbol of immoral action by rogue employers]
Get ready for a deluge of Chanel. In an astute bit of marketing, the Paris fashion and perfume company is about to relaunch its No.5 scent with a new muse: Audrey Tautou.
The actress with the girl-next-door looks replaces Nicole Kidman, who has been Chanel's ambassador-model since 2004. There have been only four or five such égéries, or muses, since 1921 when Coco Chanel invented the heady scent that became the world's best-seller. Marilyn Monroe [below], the first after Chanel herself, ensured its fortunes in the United States in 1954 when she was asked what she wore in bed: "Why, Chanel No.5, of course."
Tautou's role as Amélie (In France known as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) in 2001 made her the world's most famous young French actress. Chanel's move is clever because Tautou is about to star as the company's founder and the perfume's inventor in a would-be block-buster film which opens this week.
Coco Avant Chanel, directed by Anne Fontaine, is the most lavish among recent films and mini-series on the woman who was fashion's version of Picasso or Stravinsky. The new movie focuses on the young Gabrielle Chanel [Top picture]. It is the latest in a trail of French biopics trying to match La Môme, the Edith Piaf film that won last year's best actress Oscar for Marion Cotillard. [Coco trailer here]
Chanel hired Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed Tautou in Amélie and Un long Dimanche de Fiançailles, to shoot a commercial. Ridley Scott, Luc Besson and Baz Luhrmann did the same for previous Chanel muses.
[Kidman]
Jeunet said Chanel's brief consisted of only three words: mystère, frisson, émotion. He scripted a sepia-tinted, atmospheric yarn about an encounter between travelling strangers. From those words you know that we are talking about the Orient Express or an ocean steamer. For Jeunet it was the Express. He filmed for three weeks with a crew of 250 on locations from Paris to Istanbul. Luxury goods, it seems, cannot get enough of steam(y) romance. Only last year Catherine Deneuve perched on a suitcase beside the same train for Louis Vuitton.
In the Jeunet advert, a whiff of Chanel 5 enables Travis Davenport, an an American model, to find the mysterious reporter (Tautou) who was on the express to Istanbul. The couple finally embrace to the strains of Billy Holiday's I'm a Fool to Want You. The idea of tracing a woman by scent is apt for Chanel No.5 because it was one of the first "parfums à sillage", perfumes that leave a wake. Unlike the floral-based scents of the time, Chanel's product contained chemical aldehydes that gave the jasmin-based essence its lingering effect. Only three people know the formula, according to Chanel.
[Bouquet]
Both Fontaine and Jeunet have been saying that Tautou is the very incarnation of Mademoislle Chanel and the actress agrees. She told L'Express this week that she had always identified with the pioneering couturière. They had similar rural backgrounds and physique. Chanel believed in independence for women, said Tautou. "That's a view that I share."
In the trade, they say that Chanel has made a smart move cashing on the big movie and using a star whose approachable style will attract younger women to its venerable scent. The Coco film opens in France on Wednesday and the commercial airs on May 5. And note: I managed to write the above without using the icon word.
The Paris transport authority has made a fool of itself by doctoring an innocent poster featuring Jacques Tati, the late film-maker and actor who played the beloved eccentric Monsieur Hulot.
Tati has been treated to an acclaimed show at the national Cinémathèque, which I mentioned last week. They chose for their poster an archetypal shot of Tati/Hulot from his 1958 classic Mon Oncle. The pipe was Hulot's trademark, along with the raincoat, and it is part of the collective memory for everyone who was around in the 50s and 60s. But it proved too much for the RATP, the transit authority, which refused to show it in the Métro and on its buses. The pipe might, they feared, appear to be an incitement to smoke and a breach of the anti-tobacco laws. [Watch the scene in trailer below - pure nostalgia for a vanished France],
Negotiations ensued with Macha Makeieff, the curator of the exhibition. She refused to let Metrobus, the RATP's advertising arm, erase the pipe. She suggested adding a notice that "This is not a pipe" -- a wink at René Magritte. The yellow child's windmill was a compromise. It still looks ridiculous though. Tati, who loved mocking the follies of modern life, would have been the first to laugh.
Tampering with art and free speech is taken seriously in France. The League of Human Rights is circulating a petition, according to Rue89 news. "It is necessary to mobilise people in the face of spreading political correctness which does not hesitate to deform works of national heritage," says the petition. "We demand that the SNCF (railways) and the RATP withdraw the posters... and that Monsieur Hulot's pipe appears.."
The transit authority obviously failed to correct other dangerous images in the Tati poster, as the media have been pointing out. Tati is riding a Solex moped (another icon, see December post) but not wearing a crash helmet and neither is the little boy. The old Solex breaches anti-pollution laws. The child is also not in an approved safety seat. And of course there is a worrying suggestion of pedophilia that should not be tolerated. Both Le Monde and Liberation have picked up that angle in their mockery of the RATP
Tati, who died in 1982, made only nine films but he left an impressive legacy. It's impossible to think of post-war France without Hulot, an old-world character baffled by modern fads and technology. Also, we are told that Tati never smoked the pipe. He just used it as a prop.
And note the moulinettes (windmills) in the opening of the film below.
The slump does not appear to have lessened Europe's taste for Easter in Paris. The city has been full of visitors over the weekend and many of them are choosing to wait for hours in the queues outside the big museums and galleries. The French capital and other cities are in the midst of an art bonanza on a scale never seen before, according to curators and enthusiastic reports in the media.
The consensus says that the boom is a reflection of imaginative special shows, economic hard times and a trend amplified by the internet and other media. It's worth wondering why the phenomenon appears stronger in Paris than any other world city, at least judging by anecdotal evidence.
After a winter that saw people staying up all night to visit Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais, the new Andy Warhol show at the same site is such a hit that they are planning 24-hour opening to cope with the crowds. De Chirico is packing them in at the Paris City Modern Art Museum. The Pompidou Centre has just scored a smash with a new mega-show of Kandinsky. William Blake is drawing crowds at the Petit Palais. 
The Quai Branly, the ethnic art museum founded by President Chirac, is enjoying its biggest success so far with a show on the cultural impact of jazz. In four weeks about 50,000 have toured the show.
Photography is also enjoying good times. There are two interesting exhibitions -- without such queues as the art expos. One is Controverses, a collection of shock photos from history at the wonderful old reading room in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The other, closing this week, is a fascinating collection of 19th and early 20th century photochromes -- the first type of colour photography -- in the Bibliothèque Forney in the Marais. The show is an eye-opener if you imagine the 19th century in black and white (see Victorian Alpine clmibers below).
Many of the foreign visitors are happy to stick to the permanent exhibitions. The Louvre, the world's most visited art museum, is breaking new records. It drew 8.5 milion people in 2008, well ahead of the 5.93 who went to the British Museum in London. The National Gallery in Washington DC came third with 4.96.
And the boom is not just affecting the beaux arts. Opera is flourishing, along with pop concerts, the cinema and the state-subsidized national theatres. "La culture is showing insolent good health" le Monde concluded, the other day.
So why the rush for culture? The standard view is that, at a time of anxiety and shrinking assets, the French are reverting to old-fashioned valeurs sûres. "The crisis incites people to turn towards preserved spaces," says Marie-Christine Labourdette, Director of the Museums of France. "The world is changing and the future is worrying ? They are reassured by the intangible in art works and the stability of museums," she explained in le Figaro. The experts cite the example of the Hollywood boom of the 1930s Depression years.
Sometimes the explanation can be a little abstract. Le Monde found a curator who explained: "In times of crisis, people need the emotional compensation of nearness". [Les gens ont besoin d'une compensation affective de proximité...]. That's not so easy to convey in Anglo-Saxon.
The phenomenon also confirms France's tradition -- eclipsed in recent decades -- as the world's cultural capital. Thomas Grenon, Administrator of the Union of National Museums, says that "the richness of French collections explain the success. France is historically a land of art. And then there is the deep taste of the French for art."
The same travelling exhibitions draw about 30 percent more visitors in Paris than London, he told us. This applied to recent Turner, Whistler and Monet shows at the Grand Palais and the Tate in London, he said. "It's linked to our education and to a form of French taste," he said. And yes, many of the current shows feature British, American, Russian, Italian and other nationals, but Paris excels in the art of presenting them.
[Below, the waiting line for Warhol]
To end the week on a lighter note, listen to these commercials just aired on French radio stations by Eurostar, the cross-Channel rail service.
The company has a tradition of tongue-in-cheek advertising that makes fun of French and British national stereotypes (above: typical London 'Spice' girls in previous campaign). The latest one, to promote a low-price ticket, goes quite far:
We hear Brits appalled by an "invasion of frogs" that is being inflicted on them by "Bloody Eurostar". One angry man in a pub raises a posse to beat them up. "Come on lads!. Let's go frog hunting!." The cry goes up: "Yeah. Com'on guys!." The joke is in the translation which politely reverses the sense. "Quelle super nouvelle... Je suis impatient d'acceuillir nos amis français." [What great news... I can't wait to welcome our French friends.]
Or try this one, in which women complain about French chicks coming to steal their boyfriends. "There is only one thing for it girls... Throw them in the Thames." That is mis-translated as "Organisons un truc.... Une petite fête par exemple" (Let's organise something... a little party for example.)
Here's another in similar vein.
Without a sense of humour, I suppose this could be depicted as incitement to violence (see last two posts). The comic translation is certainly a technical breach of the law that requires foreign expressions in advertising to be explained in French. But Eurostar is confident that its customers get the joke and no-one is shocked.
We rang Gabriel Gaultier, Director of Leg, the agency which made the adverts. It's just "second degree" humour -- tongue in cheek -- he said. "If we said 'London's nice, go there', it wouldn't work. We are playing on the myth of animosity between the French and the English... It's folklore, part of the game of advertising and everyone knows it's not serious. It's a wink based on the ancestral rivalry.
"In reality, our cultures have become so close now and so many people go backwards and forwards between London and Paris that we can allow ourselves to go in for this." He's right and let no-body say the French don't have a sense of humour about themselves -- or the British.
So Happy Easter, Joyeuses Pâques à tout le monde.
[Below: recent Eurostar London icons -- faux Tony Blair and Freddy Mercury]
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.
We did not need an opinion poll to confirm that much of France supports workers who kidnap their bosses. This ploy, long a French speciality, has been used about five times in recent weeks by employees of firms that are laying off workers.
A survey by CSA for today's Parisien reports that 45 percent of France "finds this method of action acceptable". Fifty percent do not. A cynic might be surprised that only 45 percent approve of sequestration, as boss-napping is politely called. Even President Sarkozy, the champion of law-and-order, has sympathy for workers who practice it though he said today that it must stop.
Unions have won concessions and sympathy by detaining senior executives at Japan's Sony Corp, the American firms Caterpillar [picture above] and 3M, Michelin tyres and Préciturn, an engineering group. In the usual routine, detained executives are shut in their offices overnight. The workers order in pizza but do not always share it with them. The police keep a polite distance and in in the morning, the tired bosses give ground.
At Caterpillar's plant in the Alps, where 700 jobs are to go, four executives were kept from sleep by harassment. They were released after Sarkozy promised that he would "save" their factory. They were even given to understand that he would bring up their plight with Barack Obama.
Politicians of the centre and left have been competing to voice their understanding for the boss-nappers. Les patrons have never been popular in France, but their name is blacker than ever with fear of unemployment and the media full of fat cats awarding themselves bonuses and golden payoffs. Cashing in on the mood, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, said that while it was illegal to deprive someone of their liberty, there were times when "workers must smash the barriers of absolute injustice."
Sarkozy's government is worried that locking up bosses could presage greater violence as the sense of injustice grows with rising unemployment. François Fillon, the Prime Minister, says that he will not tolerate more "hostage taking".
But in France, there is violence and violence, as all students of history know. Two years ago exactly, a certain presidential candidate took the side of angry fishermen who had smashed up their port. "When you resort to violence it is because you are desperate, because you feel condemned to economic death," he told them. "I will never put the anger of fishermen who do not want to die on the same level as the gratuitous violence of thugs." That was N. Sarkozy.
[Below: cartoon by Cabu in Le Canard Enchaîné. Caption: The boss: Never without my sleeping bag.
He says to his wife: I'm practising in case I am held in the office by discontented workers.
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.
Sarko's moment finally came. After months of frustration during which the White House stayed cool to the entreaties of the French President, Barack Obama stood alongside Nicolas Sarkozy today and showered him with praise.
You could feel the joy radiating from Sarko as the pair proclaimed a new era of Franco-American unity on the steps of the Palais des Rohan, the old bishop's palace in Strasbourg. Obama listed the qualities of his friend 'Nicolas'. "Thanks to the great leadership of President Sarkozy, courageous on so many fronts at once that it's sometimes hard to keep up with him...." .
He thanked Sarko "for France's outstanding leadership with regard to Afghanistan" and he praised him again for his "extraordinary leadership role in NATO". The London G20 summit could not have succeeded without the problem-solving leadership of the French President, Obama added. "I am personally grateful for his friendship". Obama also announced that he will be back to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the allied landing in Normandy on D-Day.
This was all sweet music for Sarko, who had rolled out maximum military and civilian pomp to welcome the Obamas to France ahead of tonight's Nato summit. Only this morning, French media were noting Obama's apparent indifference to Sarko at the London summit. Sarkozy's offensive against Les Anglo-Saxons before the G20 summit also chilled the atmosphere.
After an hour's tête-à-tête, his first with the new US President, Sarkozy struck an unusually solemn and statesmanlike tone as he opened their joint press conference referring to "The President of the United States" and addressing "President Obama" with the formal 'vous'. But Sarko's excitable nature got the better of him and he closed trembling with emotion, using the the intimate "tu" and calling him "une sacrée bonne nouvelle" -- bloody good news -- for the world.
Sarko being Sarko, he could also not resist chucking a couple of stones in the direction of his former great friend George W. Bush. He contrasted, without naming him, Bush's closed, America-centric outlook with Obama's open-minded model and talked about the "terrorist methods" which the Bush team had used on the detainees of Guantanamo Bay
It was fascinating watching the pair: Obama grave, measured and still alongside the much shorter, energetic and punchy French leader. The monolingual Sarkozy also ventured timidly into English, saying "okay" to US journalists several times.
On the substance, Sarkozy and Obama of course agreed on everything, from emergency treatment for the world economy to Russia, Afghanistan and Iran. But the differences were there. Obama, for instance, wished that Europe would take on a bigger share of its own defence
Obama later talked bluntly about the rift in Transatlantic relations in recent years. Both sides were to blame, he said. America had failed to treat Europe with respect. "There have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." But anti-American feeling in Europe often seemed unfair, casual and insidious, he said. "On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common. They are not wise."
Obama was greeted like a hero by the crowds that were allowed to get close to him as the French security forces locked down the deserted centre of Strasbourg. While their husbands were doing business, Carla Bruni lunched with Michelle Obama and showed her around town. Bruni stayed away from London as the US First Lady took the spotlight, but the Elysée Palace is deploying her in Strasbourg as a sure bet for enhancing Sarko's moment in the sun.
To end, the Elysée is delighted by the Francophiles in Obama's entourage. General James Jones, his National Security Adviser, grew up in France as the son of a US marine officer and attended a lycée in the Paris suburb of Saint Germain-en-Laye. He always talks in French with Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy's foreign affairs director. Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser to Vice-President Biden, also studied at a Paris Lycée and Sciences-Po, the top political science college. Philip Gordon, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, is an academic France expert who translated the US edition of Testimony, the manifesto-memoir that Sarkozy's published during his 2007 campaign.
![Ferrari_paris_match[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201156ec67651970c-250wi)
Paris Match today offered a good example of the hypocrisy in the way that celebrities use France's laws that protect the sanctity of private life. On its cover and six inside pages, Match featured a romance between Laurence Ferrari, the star TV news presenter, and Renaud Capuçon, a leading classical violinist. The article is the usual stuff, with carefully staged pictures and purple prose about the "duet at tempo appassionato" between the two stars "who fell head over heels in love a year ago."
Nothing wrong with that. Match, which has just celebrated its 60th birthday, leads the field with its mix of celebrity gush and good reporting and pictures. But we also learned today that Ferrari, who anchors the TF1 evening news -- the most watched in Europe -- came top of the league of French public figures who have won damages over the past year against the media for breaching their privacy.
Ferrari, 42, scored 144,000 euros in five separate suits that she brought against publications which mentioned her romantic life or published pictures of her without permission. Her last court case, in February, ended with 15,000 euros in damages against Voici, another celeb magazine, for reporting her liaison with the violinist.
The law is strict. You are committing an offence if you report on the private life of anyone or publish a picture of them without authorisation. President Sarkozy has used it successfully over the years and, as we saw in February, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, has a case pending against Match for a picture of her in the street with her new boyfriend. Yes, you can argue that the key word is "unauthorised". But if celebrities and political figures market their private lives in self-serving magazine spreads, it's a bit rich that they can use the law to rake in damages from others who report on them.
Ferrari is, by the way, continuing to lose her audience to the competition, mainly France2's Journal Télévisé, which is broadcast at the same 8pm.
The Eiffel Tower celebrates its 120th birthday today and its present is a new coat of paint.
It's the 19th time that the laticed iron tower, which opened on March 31 1889, has been treated to a new layer. It will take over a year, beginning today, for 25 men to brush on 60 tonnes of the water-based paint in the brown that looks like bronze when lit at night.
When Gustave Eiffel handed over his 300 metre (990 feet) contraption, built for a universal fair, it was just coated with a red anti-rust chemical. The colour must have added to the awe that was inspired by a structure that was far higher than the existing record-holder, the Monument in Washington DC. The tower kept the height record until 1930 when the Chrysler Building, just a few feet taller, opened in Manhattan.
Three years after the inauguration of his temporary exhibit, Eiffel had it covered in brownish orange. For the 1900 Universal Exposition, he jazzed it up in yellow, which gave new ammunition to the detractors who saw it as a blight on the cityscape.
In the early 1900s, Eiffel managed to persuade Paris not to dismantle his handiwork at the end of its scheduled 20-year life. In the 1920s, artists such as Dufy and Chagall painted it in pictures as red and blue and in the 1930s it sported a huge advertisement for Citroen cars. The Académie Française, guardian of the French language, even tried to get into the paint act, recommending that the tower be painted blue-grey.
A couple of other Eiffel paint facts from Le Figaro: No painter has ever been killed while at work on its aerial girders. They all wear harnesses now. They start at the top and work downwards, using round brushes, not rollers or sprays. They do not strip old layers. The weather wears off much of the prevous layer over seven years. The paint comes in three shades, with the lightest at the top. This gives an illusion of greater height when seen from the ground. The job is being done by a Greek company that paints ships and smokestacks and has its French base in Saint Nazaire, the Atlantic port.
Celebrations for the world's most visited paying monument (6.9 million last year) include an exhibition that opens at the Paris city hall on May 6, called "Gustave Eiffel, Le Magicien de fer" and a show in the tower itself from May 15. Marc Riboud, a photographer, took the picture at the top in 1950. It features in a new exhibition of his work at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Architecture students have just presented imaginary and, in some cases far-fetched, projects for monuments to match the tower [example below].
It was fashionable a few years ago to dismiss Paris as a creative backwater. The real avant-garde was to be found in the happening cities of New York and London. The art pendulum has been swinging back for some time and it has been given another shove this weekend.
The venue is the Grand Palais, the monumental exhibition hall just off the Champs Elysées that is home to one of the top state galleries and where the Yves Saint Laurent art collection was auctioned last month. The new show is one of the world's most ambitious exhibitions of graffiti.
This is another case of French paradox since the state that is staging the exhibition is the same one that spends tens of millions of tax euros a year prosecuting and cleaning up after vandals who deface public property with their art.
Of course the contemporary art world has long seen the creative side of daubing trains and public spaces. A few stars of the underground, such as the late New Yorkers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are revered as geniuses. Since the 1980s, the French Culture Ministry has also flirted with the graffiti, rap and dances of the hip-hop underground.
But eyebrows, including some artistic ones, have been raised by the consecration that the state has bestowed on the genre with its show of 300 specially commissioned oeuvres by international maîtres de l'art de la rue.
In Tag au Grand Palais, canvases by Snake131, a New York veteran, Nasty of Switzerland, Psyckoze of Paris and other eminent taggeurs, are hanging in a long-disused, tunnel-like gallery that runs along the side of the palace's great steel dome. The show is impressive in its scale. Some of the canvases are obviously clever and of quality, but to my sceptical eye, much of it looks like the daubing that pollutes urban life.
I had an interesting chat there with Toxic, a Bronx-born master of the genre, but first the complaints. Some in the artistic establishment say that l'Etat Français has gone too far this time by endorsing the American-inspired vandalism which blights the Métro trains, railways and housing estates of France.
"The state is punishing these people on one side and welcoming them on the other," Jean-Philippe Domecq, a writer and contemporary art specialist, told Le Point magazine. "This is subsidizing subversion." The state is so afraid of "missing another Van Gogh" that it throws money at every fad, he added.
Barbed praise for the show came from Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, a leading auctioneer and President of the Association of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art centre opposite the Eiffel Tower. "Ninety-nine percent of taggers are cretins who only want to foul walls," he said. He lamented the graffiti that adorned his museum's outdoor statues and hoped that the Grand Palais show would at least "distinguish between the artists and les cons (a___holes in American)."
The irony of the show is not lost on the distinguished spray-can bandits who were invited by Alain Dominique Galliz, an architect-collector [picture below], to come to his workshop in the Paris suburb of Boulogne from 2006-8. They were each paid to produce two panels, resembling the side of an underground train, one with their signature tags, or initials, and the other on the theme of love. In return, Galliz agreed not to sell their works and to show them together.
Bando, one of big French names, said that he was amused by the invitation to the Grand Palais. "Our work is usually on monuments, not inside them," he told Libération. RCF1, a Paris artist, said that Cornette de Saint Cyr knew nothing about graffiti since he had never been on the Métro. The artist knew this because he had been sentenced to community service work as a guard at Cornette de Saint Cyr's art centre after being convicted for committing graffiti.
Toxic, 43, whose work sells for large sums, told me that he admired Galliz for assembling artists who represent the four decades since modern graffiti first appeared in the US urban ghettos. He was amazed that his fellow practitioners had agreed to the French invitation. "It's not easy dealing with these guys. There have been a lot of fights. Like when someone else paints on your tag. Grudges are held forever."
It is not clear whether the police would be visiting the show to help them with their aggressive campaign against the graff-artists who cost so much in what might be considered a sort of "subsidy". For the past eight years, prosecutors have been pursuing not just perpetrators, but also taking action against internet sites and art magazines for aiding and abetting criminals.
Toxic, who now lives in Italy, recalled that British police had visited a London gallery where he had shown his work. "They were there to see your face and arrest you." He recognised an ethical dilemma but said that he continued to keep his hand in on subway trains and tunnels, leaving his fresh oeuvres with other initials. "I try not to do it too much because I visit schools. I tell the kids to be careful because they could be arrested."
Gallizia has been defending his project. "This is not about ugly scribbling, but well and truly genuine works of illumination and calligraphy," he said. "Even if this form of expression is sometimes violent and aggressive, there is a fraternity behind it."
The show is worth a visit if you're in Paris, if only for the novelty of its setting.
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Lyon is one of Europe's most delightful big cities. I've often thought it would be a fine place to live, with its sunshine, history, cuisine, the Rhone river and nearby Alps. But you have to wonder a little about the judgment of the city's managers. They decided the other day that French was not good enough for the company known as Aéroports de Lyon and renamed it Lyon Airports.
The rebranding followed a successful English-language project to promote the region called "Only Lyon". It was designed to "give a new identity, a new, more international image" to Lyon Saint-Exupéry airport, its international hub, and the smaller aerodrome called Lyon-Bron. It was pretty obvious that Anglicizing something as symbolic as an airport would run into trouble. What next, wondered a local friend of mine, "perhaps they'll call it Lyon-Wright-Brothers airport ?"
Inevitably, the heavy hand of the state has come down on the scheme, which has cost up to half a million euros to implement. The prefect of the Rhone-Alps -- the state official in command of the region -- has dispatched an angry letter to the airports company demanding that it revert to French immediately.
Jacques Gérault, 57, whose past jobs included a stint on Nicolas Sarkozy's senior staff, fulminated against the folly of "copying les codes anglo-saxons" to promote one of France's most important regions. He chose last Friday's "Day of the French Language" to launch his attack.
"It is inadmissible that certain institutions underestimate to such an extent the economic and cultural weight of the French language and the values that it carries," he said.
Since the state holds 60 percent of the company, we can expect that it will soon be Goodbye Lyon Airports and rebonjour Aéroports de Lyon. And as le Progrès de Lyon, the local newspaper, pointed out today, even Anglo-Saxons can probably figure out what Aéroports de Lyon means. And a final note. The traditional English name for the city is Lyons, which is still the official style for The Times. If I write Lyon for the paper, it is corrected. But then we called Mumbai Bombay until a couple of months ago.
Borders have melted in Europe and the modern media have created global celebrities but one frontier stands as high as ever: the cultural one. France has just lost a superstar whom President Sarkozy called "a prince... an immense artist who will mark the history of music". Yet very few outside the French-speaking world will ever have heard of the man whom he was talking about, Alain Bashung, the most revered of French rock singers.
Those last three words partly explain why the work of Bashung, who died at 61, didn't travel. To many, the notion of French rock'n roll prompts sniggering and cracks about Johnny Hallyday. Le Johnny national is indeed a bit of a joke and it is true that the rock idiom does not lend itself easily to French, but there have been plenty of good French pop-rock acts.
Bashung was exceptional, a composer-performer who remained original and who combined commercial success with high esteem from the serious arts world [Top picture from March 2008]. The nearest comparison was the late Serge Gainsbourg, who was known beyond France if only because of one erotic song, the 1969 Je t'aime, moi non plus.
Language is obviously the main reason that Bashung, Gainsbourg and other Gallic greats do not export well. The world does not understand French like it used to and the tradition known as chanson française depends more on the lyrics than melody. The only French-language singer-composers to cross the frontier in recent decades have been Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel.
That's a pity, because Bashung, the son of a Breton mother and an Algerian whom he never saw, adapted rock brilliantly to the French spirit. He heard his first records as a child visiting an American base in Alsace, where he grew up. He brought to the genre the melancholy and dark humour of a French tradition that goes back to François Villon, the poet-vagabond of the 15th century. Libération, which dedicated its whole edition today to Bashung, saluted him as a modern Villon. [Watch Libé's videos of him]
The morbid, brooding side of Bashung and lesser French singers can be a little hard to take. But the Montreal Gazette, which knows Bashung because of Quebec's French side, gave him credit last year for doing it well. "Carrying the weight of the world, not to mention amour, on one's shoulders is difficult stuff to pull off without sounding like a portentous ogre. But Bashung is a world-class moper whose gravitas makes Morrissey seem like a pipsqueak."
Bashung was of course respectably engagé and on the side of the oppressed -- which raises questions about Sarkozy's real appreciation of the artist. But he was not just a lefty poseur like many of the current young stars of la chanson française. The very conservative Le Figaro called him today "the greatest artist of French song to have appeared since Serge Gainsbourg."
Everyone is remembering Bashung's grace and elegance -- exemplified by his brave farewell appearance only two weeks to receive three Victoires de la musique awards (watch here). Jane Birkin, the English actress-singer who was Gainsbourg's muse and partner, agreed with Sarkozy today, calling Bashung a baroque prince. "I always said to the British: 'You don't have a Bashung chez vous'," she said.
Below: La nuit, je mens, (At night, I lie) a hit from Bashung's 1998 album Fantaisie Militaire
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Spring has arrived in Paris. Daffodils are out in the gardens, overcoats are disappearing and the sun is showing up the winter grime on the windows and on the ugly Porsche Cayenne that is parked in my street. Non-smokers are taking seats on the café terraces (les fumeurs frequented them all winter because of the new indoor smoking ban). The trout fishing season opened today. It's even possible to scent a hint of hope in the air despite the gloom and grumbling all around.
As the winter lifts, the French are not at all as depressed as they make out, according to a poll by le Parisien. Two out of three say they are optimistic about the future. There were other surprises from the mood survey which I'll get back to below.
One of the reasons for optimism may be the overdose of crisis. The news continued to be bleak this week, with factory closures every day, including a Sony plant where the desperate workers took the company's French boss hostage. But some of the media think that it's time to change the tune and have started putting out stories on making the most of the down-turn -- lower house prices and rediscovering simple pleasures such as home cooking, the cinema, holidays in France and so on.
And some of the news is reassuringly familiar. The Paris book fair has opened -- with a Mexican theme this year -- the fashion week was a hit as usual and Nicolas Sarkozy was caught out once again indulging his love of luxury.
The President disappeared with Carla Bruni three days before a one-day official visit to Mexico City last Monday. No-one was supposed to know where he was, but the Mexican press tracked the French royal couple to El Tamarindo Beach and Golf Resort, a very expensive enclave in Jalisco state on the Pacific Coast [picture]. This did not look good for Sarko's efforts to rid himself of the bling-bling that tainted his early months in the presidency. All that turquoise and palm trees hardly helped his new image as close to his suffering people.
Things got worse when it emerged that the presidential pair occupied their 3,500 dollars-a-day suite as guests of Roberto Hernandez, one of Mexico's richest bankers and owner of the resort.
It didn't take long for the media to recycle 1990s allegations from the United States that Hernandez was involved in the cocaine industry. The Elysée Palace kept an embarrassed silence, directing queries to the Mexican presidency who, it claims, organised Sarko's long weekend on the beach. Today the Mexicans have said that "a group of businessmen" paid for the beach weekend.
Talk of the Jalisco jaunt has eclipsed Sarkozy's two very substantial acts in foreign policy this week -- his announcement of France's return to full Nato membership (last post) and a realignment with Germany at a session with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday. Like all his predecessors, Sarkozy seems to have accepted that French power works best in Europe as part of the axis with Berlin.
Sarko has also been lecturing his government on the need for what's known in French as la positive attitude. He has given them orders to talk up his and their achievements.
Which brings us back to the spring survey, carried out by the CSA polling firm. It found that the French draw their greatest satisfaction and pleasure from leisure time with their friends and family. The best moment of the day is "meeting up with the family in the evening". Second after that came "waking up alongside the person you love".
Asked what contributes most to make their lives positive, 61 percent answered their children, 33 percent said friends, 23 percent said leisure activities and only 20 percent said that it was their work or studies.
Asked what activity gave them most pleasure, 40 percent said an evening with their partner or with friends. Thirty-nine percent said sports, listening to music or cooking. Only 13 percent cited love-making as their most pleasurable activity. That statistic is not great for France's reputation as le pays de l'amour.
At least sex got a mention. Religion appeared nowhere in the poll, not even under the question of the most important values that society should observe. First came respect for others, then "solidarity", followed by the family. The value of work came next, followed by money.
And a final question: What moments are you most looking forward to in 2009? The answers were pretty modest, in keeping with diminished times.
1) The first sunshine of springtime
2) The summer holidays
3) The birthday of your children or parents
4) A party, wedding or other social event with friends [A spring day at a café in Lille]
President Sarkozy takes the plunge today and and explains why, 43 years since General de Gaulle threw American forces out of France, he is taking his country back into the core of the US-led Atlantic alliance. France's return to the military command will be formally proclaimed at the NATO summit in Strasbourg on April 3.
It's a big step, politically and symbolically because it reverses the act which defined France's sense of special destiny, independent from US power and not quite part of the Western camp during the Cold War. Sarkozy's opponents in the Socialist opposition and his own Gaullist camp are piling in on him, accusing him of betraying the sovereignty that de Gaulle reclaimed when he wrote a curt letter to President Johnson in March 1966. The general told LBJ that he wanted Nato headquarters out of the Paris suburbs and all American military personnel out of France.
François Bayrou, the centrist who is Sarkozy's most consistent opponent, flayed him this morning for "amputating" France, diminishing the nation and getting nothing in return. Martine Aubry, the Socialist leader, said that nothing justifies Sarkozy's "embrace of Atlanticism". Dominique de Villepin, Gaullist former Prime Minister, foe of Sarko and fan of Napoleon Bonaparte, denounced the President for "shrinking our country and renouncing our diplomatic calling."
With so much at stake -- French pride and the prickly relationship with Washington -- you would think that Sarkozy is risking big trouble. In reality, it is only the politicians who are making the fuss. Sarkozy's move is supported by 58 percent of the public, according to an IFOP poll today, with 37 percent opposed.
That suggests two things: Sarkozy has done a good job at explaining why it makes sense to rejoin the command and that, with the economic crisis and the new Franco-American detente, foreign relations are not stirring much emotion.
IFOP recalled that in 1966, 38 percent opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal and only 22 percent approved. The common factor then and now is that the presidents acted without public debate or political consultation. Sarkozy, who now runs de Gaulle's party, indicated his intentions to rejoin after his election in 2007. He will now stifle dissent on his own side by forcing through the move with a parliamentary confidence vote on March 17. The Gaullist die-hards will not risk voting 'no'.
Sarkozy's arguments are simple. France has remained an active member of the political alliance and in recent years its armed forces have taken part in in most Nato operations from Kosovo to Afghanistan -- run from Nato's post-France Belgian base. So it makes sense to have French generals back sharing the command. In addition, the return to full membership will allay suspicions of French efforts to promote an autonomous European defence system, says Sarkozy.
The last two French presidents -- François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac -- also wanted to get back into the command. Mitterrand, a Socialist who opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal, negotiated secretly with the Americans while Chirac did it publicly in 1995, withdrawing when Washington refused his conditions. Sarkozy has imposed no conditions.
France will acquire more influence and lose no military or diplomatic independence, says Sarkozy. Hervé Morin, his Defence Minister, explained this morning: "I hear people saying that joining the command will put our independence in doubt. Saying that is either dishonesty or incompetence."
The commanders of France's substantial and well-respected armed forces are pleased and the Americans and British are also grateful to have the French fully back in the fold, even if they can be difficult.
I can't help feeling that if I were French I would be feeling a pang of doubt. The idea of separateness that de Gaulle created has served France well, even if it was largely an illusion. Membership of the Nato high command means renouncing an important symbol without much in return from the US. But maybe that's just nostalgia.
Older French have mixed memories of the US military presence in France. Unimaginable for the younger generation, American forces were part of the landscape from 1944 to 1967 [A US serviceman with local resident in top picture]. They drew admiration, envy and annoyance, especially in the 29 base towns where they cruised around in exotic cars -- known at the time as belles américaines. They lived affluently and taught the locals how to dance rock'n roll. At Châteauroux [US base pictured below], 10 percent of all marriages between 1951 and 1967 were between US servicemen and French women. Gérard Depardieu, the film star, has fond memories of a black American girlfriend during his teenage years at Châteauroux.
I doubt that Johnny Hallyday -- France's imitation American rocker-- would have been such a big hit back in the early 1960s if the country had not already absorbed a bit of America from its resident armed forces (Daniel Strohl can advise us here).
American forces won't be coming back to live in France. But Sarkozy is hoping to persuade Barack Obama to stage a symbolic act of Franco-American reunion on April 2, on the eve of the Nato summit. This is to take the form of meeting in Normandy at one of the beaches where US, British, Canadian -- and French -- forces landed from England on June 6, 1944.
[Below: the young Johnny -- real name Jean-Philippe Smet]
Regulars here need no introduction to Nicolas Canteloup, the humourist who draws two million listeners on Europe 1 radio every morning with impersonations of politicians and celebrities. Improvising on the day's news Canteloup has a great talent for skewering, not always gently, President Sarkozy and the other big egos who crowd the public stage.
Canteloup gave me an hour of his time today in the Train Bleu, the Belle Epoque brasserie at the Gare de Lyon. He was on his way to the next leg of a sold-out two-year touring show. It was good to get a chance to sound out the man behind the famous pastiches of Super Sarko, sanctimonious Ségolène Royal and the inaudible goody-goody Carla Bruni. Canteloup had come from exercising the horses which are his escape from his day job of mocking France's rulers (a life-long equestrian and former riding instructor, he says his big ambition is to enter England's Badminton trials).
As often with comics off-stage, he is rather diffident, a little austere and modest about what he does. He claims to have no great skill at imitating voices but rather a gift for picking up people's tics and traits and turning them into caricature. He discovered his talent as an amuser when he was a child but only went professional after failing to make it into a police college while a law student at Bordeaux and then working at Club Med resorts.
"I rather fancied the idea of gendarmes and robbers. I suppose that's what I still do in a way," he said. Canteloup, who does not drink or smoke, says he is blessed with political "clients" you couldn't make up. "Sarkozy, with his hyperactivity, is a comic strip character who gives us a lot to work with. He's a gift." The trick is to latch onto the detail. "Every character has their mask, like the commedia dell' arte. For Sarko it's heavy wrist-watches, for Rachida Dati [disgraced Justice Minister] it's beautiful dresses. Carla Bruni, its the little voice and 'everyone is nice'. Bruni is difficult because she is a real pro, in complete control of herself in public -- unlike Sarko-- he says.
Canteloup tries not to meet the targets of his sketches and refuses invitations from politicians. He says that he avoids vulgarity and draws the line at mocking physique -- though his jokes about Sarkozy's short stature are a running gag. He recognises that some of his material skirts the edge of the acceptable. One example was a sketch in January on Israel's bombardment of the Gaza strip.
Most of his victims take the humour in good spirit, even when it verges on the cruel, he says. An exception was Ségolène Royal, who Canteloup sends up as a perpetually indignant victim. "When she lost the presidency, she tried to find the reasons. She said that I was one of them. I was wounded by that because I did not set out to make Segolene lose. I don't take political sides. My aim is to try to find what is funny."
Another who was wounded at first was Gérard Schivardi, a village mayor with a slurred southwestern accent who ran for the presidency in 2007 as candidate for an obscure Trotskyite party. Canteloup's Schivardi is permanently drunk as he offers his views from the supposed village cafe. This has turned the fictional Schivardi into a familiar character. "It has been a jackpot for Schivardi," says Canteloup. "He has gone from a near unknown to a celebrity. I hope he'll stand again for president." Canteloup does Schivardi well because, he says, the south-western twang is his own "native language."
Canteloup agrees that he and his colleagues -- Laurent Gerra, Stéphane Guillon and others -- are benefiting from the economic crisis. "We are in a September 11 atmosphere. There is a kind of world malaise, economic insecurity. People want release."
Taking my leave, Canteloup was curious to know why Times readers would be interested in him since he is not known in the English-speaking world and humour does not translate easily. My answer was that the current French comedy boom is a phenomenon that merits attention and he is one of the leading exponents. Now I have to make it work for the readers who, unlike those on the blog, have not gone looking for something to read about France.
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[Below: Canteloup performing Sarkozy and his other characters on Michel Drucker's TV show. Unusually, he is impersonating one of them to his face: Bernard Kouchner, the perpetually breathless Foreign Minister. Canteloup caricatures Kouchner's emotional, old-fashioned rhetoric, complete with language mistakes. CB]
Canteloup et Kouchner chez Drucker le 26-10-08
 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. ]
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.
|
Second I am afraid you are really tired right now
DANIEL S
That's my impression too - I think his "outside the envelope" tax bill has arrived ;D
Posted by: dot king | 18 Jul 2009 18:45:51
ROCKET,
"No wonder you are always "curieux" to know people's real names"
LOL ! I wasn't alluding to you at all in my statement. The reason being that I am now perfectly "mithridatisé" by your rather constant anti-French humour :).
PS: regarding the somewhat stupid Youtube sequence, I draw your attention to the fact that the Nazi cap worn by one of the gentlemen :) is a very bad copy. I am some sort of a specialist in the matter, since in winter 1944/45, we lodged in our house two American Army intelligence officers - one was of German descent (therefore, he spoke German perfectly), the second was of Ukrainian descent - he spoke perfectly German and French and possibly other languages as well.
Their job was to interrogate war prisoners (this did not happen in our house). The first mentioned officer was a collector - he had quite a collection of Nazi caps (SS, SA, Wehrmacht...). He showed me everything - we made a few snow ball battles together. He had also a nice big dog he called "Dingo". We were also friends :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 18 Jul 2009 17:01:37
ROCKET,
First of all the roïgabrageldi humourous "rant" was written by your old friend Dominique and not by Pierre, who is perfectly innocent in the story
Second I am afraid you are really tired right now - may be you should take a couple of weeks leave from the blog and a corresponding rest on a (real) "plage" :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 18 Jul 2009 16:27:06
Hello Charles,
I guess you are aware of the scandal of polls manipulations by Sarkozy.
We do need the help of foreign journalists to spread the word about this scandal.
The world got to know that Sarkozy is the Madoff of the french politics.
Posted by: Antoine | 18 Jul 2009 16:10:31
["la bouche" in my nav system] Roquet
as far as i am aware, this 'interesting' feature is only available on vehicles sold in France. Figures.
I'll have to do with 'voice only.' and a good imagination.
Posted by: azloon | 18 Jul 2009 15:01:43
[What about "Rick" and "Dominique II" and their endless contived squabbles?] A (timid) Reader
As you might expect, I enjoy them, but think footnoting might make their erudition a little more accessible.
Posted by: azloon | 18 Jul 2009 14:48:35
In other words [John],you were trolling....Dom2
Dominique, you are getting carried away, in the spirit of Jay and Rene, inappropriately throwing around the term 'troll' as though you actually know what it means.
Let's don't degrade the meaning of a legitimate blogging descriptor just because we are a little annoyed with another poster. John is obviously not a 'troll' (and 'it takes one to know one' :))
Posted by: azloon | 18 Jul 2009 14:35:20
"Sociologists have been explaining."
Asking a sociologist to explain vélib vandalism is a bit like asking the fox for his recommendations on security for hen-houses!
Their motivations lie elsewhere, as the comment by Bruno Martzloff indicates. (Perhaps he is playing for funding to investigate the "reaction against the problems of mobility")
Indeed it is entirely possible that sociological counsel (to a dimwitted political class) is a factor in the impunity, which seems to characterize much of the present-day violent vandalism.
The obvious eludes them.
So, is their a common factor between Paris and Norway (Oslo?)?
Your numbers add up to a problem, 16000 out of 23000 vélibs stolen or damaged may have an effect on any Insurance cover involved. Or does their replacement come directly out of local taxes?
Posted by: john gregory flinn | 18 Jul 2009 14:34:18
[let us not give Azloon too much importance, since he positively basks in it. Clearly,he has severe problems with intercultural and international dialogue - please see his wretched attempt to be funny by caricaturing my name. He is retarded and perverse at the same time, which is certainly a difficult feat] Jay Bhattacharjee
Robert M. is correct. As someone who self-describes as a 'loon,' 'buffoon' is almost a promotion. Merci.
"Retarded' is another matter entirely. we over here dropped the use of that approbation because it was offensive to persons with developmental disabilities. but, if i could be as sweet and good-natured as some of the 'retarded' citizens I encounter here, it would be a big improvement for me, and appreciated by all who know me. Remember, you're not the only one who has to 'suffer' me.
As for 'perverse,' i think you may be onto something. but a 'good perverse,' n'est-ce pas?
'Basking in importance?' Some people take their blankets to La Plage sur Le Seine to bask in le plein soleil. Others of us sit in darkened computer spaces and bask in the 'self-importance' of blogging. Human vanity, either way. and i recognize that my fifteen minutes of fame is not 'writ large.'
btw, being me is not a 'difficult feat' as you suggest. I just have to wake up in the morning, which, thanks to a cosmic grace 'which surpatheth all understanding,' i did again today. Bonjour, mon ami.
Posted by: azloon | 18 Jul 2009 14:23:44
Jay Bhattacharjee
"this Arizona buffoon takes a huge toll on our patience and tolerance."
What about "Rick" and "Dominique II" and their endless contived squabbles?
Posted by: A Reader | 18 Jul 2009 14:01:28
John, a single character has to be a given colour. A poster with one character has to has a 100% white, black, red, brown or yellow content, and all the other skin nuances are then entitled to whine like you did? Some Paris Plage posters show a smiling black kid, should whites and others scream blue murder?
I think you care nothing about the fate of minorities in France or elsewhere and were merely trying to be outrageous. In other words,you were trolling.
Posted by: Dominique II | 18 Jul 2009 13:52:43
Totally unreal woman in a swimsuit. She would get skin cancer at Paris Plage which is indeed meant for a coloured population. Totally unfair to criticize Delanoe on that account. What is wrong is the cost of the whole show.
Posted by: thomasine | 18 Jul 2009 13:42:53
[since old hand posters like myself and others know your name and address] Daniel
That stinks of 1940's denunciation. No wonder you are always "curieux" to know people's real names.
Achtung!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIZtG13C2P8
Posted by: rocket | 18 Jul 2009 12:02:26
Pierre wrote
Daniel Strohl,
Your "repas marcaires" and "roïgabrageldi" are such a denial the ethnic diversity of the french population!
Your "whity-white Aryan" food is pure scandale! You cling to a long gone whity-white Alsace!
Of course, you understand i was writing to....John,
__________________________________
to that you should have added.
"I would never allow myself to criticize a fellow compatriot"
Posted by: rocket | 18 Jul 2009 11:56:33
AZLOON
"Speaking of attractive French females, I have a new-used car with a nav-sat in both French and English (my car brand is popular in Francophone Canada). I like to set a destination with the French option because I enjoy being spoken to by this lovely French female voice (is there one better?), even if I don't always know where she's telling me to go (to her house?)"
Did you get the extendable -retractable air suction mouth that comes as an accessory to the French voice chipand connects to the nav box.? It certainly makes those long rides through the desert much more pleasant and it is extractable so you can take it with you.
I also would like to inform you that you can get a French female voice chip for your Nav system (reasonably priced)that talks dirty to you in French while you drive and all you have to do is push the button to activate the "roving" mouth at the same time and your life will be complete.
I've go both the chip and "la bouche" in my nav system and it certainly is better than watching the scenery. However my wife gets a little upset when we travel and I use it.
I have been pulled over by the police a few times but what the hell, I let them use it and they let me go without giving me a moving violation.
Posted by: rocket | 18 Jul 2009 11:46:00
Jay : I'm not sure Azloon would be offended by your characterisation of him as the Arizona buffoon. Watch his alias.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 18 Jul 2009 11:40:52
"They lost the olympics? For good!" (DOMINIQUE)
This is also my opinion. I am not quite sure whether the Londonians are really happy to have to foot the probably rather huge bill :).
PS:
Dominique, per pure coincidence, the repas marcaire was really "whity-white" :). There were may be 50 persons, many of them with a "charming" accent...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 18 Jul 2009 11:11:25
Daniel Strohl,
Your "repas marcaires" and "roïgabrageldi" are such a denial the ethnic diversity of the french population!
Your "whity-white Aryan" food is pure scandale! You cling to a long gone whity-white Alsace!
Of course, you understand i was writing to....John,
John,
Concidering your writings, you obviously either don't live in Paris, or have problems with skin colors. Heralding the "Aryan" qualification for the white woman of the 30's tells more about your complex than about so called "ethnic minorities" needs for recognition. Maybe a white complex of yours? This is more and more common nowadays.
Please note that one can face discrimination and be white. See report of the HALDE regarding this subject. 0nly 1/4 of complaints are releted to origin (witch is not skin color).
http://www.halde.fr/rapport-annuel/2008/rapport_annuel_2008.html?page=31
You write : "I just can't imagine that cities like London, Amsterdam or Hong Kong would communicate in that way about themselves. Paris City Hall doesn't seem to have a clue about communication in this globalized world. "
I hope it will remain that way and that Paris will never become one more "global english speaking city" that the world doesn't need. It has already too many of them. How boring to fly from London to Amsterdam, HongKong, now Paris, and have to speak english in order to have a coffe at Starbucks.
More, so called "globalized world" is just an other word for "globalized bourgeoisie". Socially discriminated people don't belong to this "happy world" of yours you describe. They are usually stuck in their own place with no passport nor visa.
They lost the olympics? For good!
Posted by: Dominique | 18 Jul 2009 10:25:14
Les amies / amis comme Dominique, Stephane, Daniel Strohl, Rene C Moya et al : I know it is difficult to ignore a person like Azloon who re-surfaces on every post and spouts his garbage.
For normal readers...this Arizona buffoon takes a huge toll on our patience and tolerance. However, it is impossible for CB to edit every...response.
A suggestion - let us not give Azloon too much importance, since he positively basks in it. Clearly,he has severe problems with intercultural and international dialogue - please see his wretched attempt to be funny by caricaturing my name. He is retarded and perverse at the same time, which is certainly a difficult feat.
Why not put him down as an associated (and unavoidable)cost of reading CB's column ?
Posted by: Jay Bhattacharjee | 18 Jul 2009 09:29:18
Up here in the 10th and 19th arrondissements, we don't get treated to the bathing beauty poster. Instead it's "un été solidaire".
Posted by: tf | 17 Jul 2009 23:54:58
DOMINIQUE,
Je suis heureux de vous voir de retour sur le blog. Ceci dit, vous me prêtez de bien noirs desseins !- Je n'ai effectivement pas une estime débordante pour certains bobos (ceux avec le coeur à gauche et le portefeuille à droite), mais il ne me viendrait pas à l'idée de vous classer dans cette catégorie.
Vivez en paix dans votre biotope tel qu'il vous convient !
A propos de biotope et d'accent "charmant" :), nous avons déjeuné hier dans une ferme auberge au fond de la vallée de Munster, près d'un petit lac (l. du Forlet). Ces fermes auberges servent ce qu'on appelle des repas marcaires - en général, on a droit à une tranche de tourte (pâté de viande chaud) et/ou potage suivi du plat principal (dans notre cas, deux tranches - par personne - largement dimensionnées de rôti de porc fumé accompagnées de "roïgabrageldi", c'est-à-dire de pommes de terre bien assaisonnées cuites à l'étouffée avec de petits lardons, le tout accompagné d'une salade). Ensuite, fromage et/ou dessert - dans notre cas, un fromage blanc à la crème parfumé d'un (mince :) filet de kirsch pour mon épouse et une portion de Munster pour moi. Ce type de repas est plutôt du genre roboratif :).
PS:
LEX, if you are around : - a contribution to our beloved cheesology - Munster cheese can be rather smelly :) when it is over-matured. Otherwise, it is quite good. I remember that a former American business friend (who worked in Carson City at the time :) told me that Munster cheese is also available in the US, but that its taste is somewhat different from the original.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 23:29:23
[I know: René's post contained no arguments. That's your standard and rather tiresome summary of anything that riles. Find something else... it's especially ludicrous in that case. René certainly held an opinion, but he made his points with clarity, supported them with fact] Dominique II
Dom, you can do better than this, please. Rene's post was an attack on me, and god bless him for it. I respect frontal assaults, particularly articulate ones, instead of 'whining.' And French here don't exhibit the 'killer instinct' often enough. So I understand your perceived and expressed connection with him. He doesn't take any shit, and you don't either. Good for him, and you. But his diatribe was hardly worthy of your high praise, though perhaps his methods are.
You say 'he made his points with clarity and supported them with fact.'' Well if there is such a thing as an 'inaccurate fact,' then I might agree with you. As i often say about myself, 'seldom right, but never in doubt.' I would apply that description to Rene as well. He was mistaken about points he was convinced he was making.
btw, sorry for referring to Rene as "Ms." in a previous post -- I just can get used to Rene as a man's name, being a child of The Left Banke's' 'Walk Away Rene(e)," eons ago.
http://vodpod.com/watch/116223-video-the-left-banke-walk-away-rene-the-left-banke-60s-video-dailymotion-share-your-videos
Speaking of attractive French females, I have a new-used car with a nav-sat in both French and English (my car brand is popular in Francophone Canada). I like to set a destination with the French option because I enjoy being spoken to by this lovely French female voice (is there one better?), even if I don't always know where she's telling me to go (to her house?). i actually have a friend whose wife was a a bit piqued when she thought he was being 'seduced' by his nav-sat's female voice. There has to be a 'story idea' here for a movie gag. And it probably only happened during her menses.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 23:05:11
I'm sure Nottingham has done this before, years ago. I was a student there and left in 1992 and it was being discussed not long afterwards. Maybe Paris didn't start this trend...
Posted by: Ruth | 17 Jul 2009 22:43:39
JOHN
This was a retro style picture showing how things used to be. OK things have changed and there is now more ethnic diversity in Paris and France as a whole, but France is still a predominantly white European country. This cannot be hidden and denied. So why is it wrong to show this. An African, or Asian girl for instance would not be typical of the population. Added to this is the fact that many of the ethnic minority female population would not want to be depicted in a swimsuit. Should we also deny that this is part of European culture?
Posted by: Gill | 17 Jul 2009 22:36:39
"Also, note the downright stupidity of the poster's argument : don't attack Vélibs, because they can't defend themselves."
It's bon enfant like everything in france
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmmYDbALnxBeZ1Ht3-Ewbvawocqg
And God forbid you should touch the hair of a union member.
The advertisement should have read. If you destroy a Velib you will go to prison for 6 months. But of course that is not possible here.
Il ne faut pas affoler les français!
Posted by: rocket | 17 Jul 2009 22:14:27
Calling a white woman an "Aryan" is like calling a black one a "negress".
Posted by: Pierre | 17 Jul 2009 20:42:53
Dominique wrote: "Sorry for still having some white people around. Are we still allowed to display old postcards, pictures of our grand-parents, see our former kings queens eventhough they were all white?"
This is typical denial of the discrimination suffered by non-White people in our society. Instead of embracing the diversity of this city, and making it more inclusive, the bobo elites cling to a long gone whity-white Paris of old. FYI, White people don't need to have their faces on posters or on TV, they already dominate this society, they don't suffer discrimination, so they have no need to feel recognized or accepted. Non-White people, on the other hand, are at the bottom of this society, they suffer daily discrimination (I can see it everyday in the street in the way the police is always on their back), so a Paris poster with a non-White face would be more important to them than for a White person, it would make them feel more accepted, and it would show that Paris is an all-embracing city.
But beyond that 'ethnic' aspect, I find this Paris Plage poster shocking in its display of an Amélie-like Paris frozen in time at some point in the 1930s, a sort of quaint old museum city for tourists. I just can't imagine that cities like London, Amsterdam or Hong Kong would communicate in that way about themselves. The Paris City Hall doesn't seem to have a clue about communication in this globalized world. That's how they lost the Olympic Games in 2004 already, with their idiotic video presentation of a whity-white quaint old Paris, complete with Catherine Deneuve and accordion, totally ignoring the vibrant multi-ethnic youth of this great metropolis, which would like to live in the 2000s and not in the 1930s or in a Jacques Tati movie.
Posted by: John | 17 Jul 2009 19:54:10
Interesting to notice that the Tour Eiffel, the largest erection in Paris dangerously approaches her bourgeois mouth.
Much like the RATP symbol which is a women with her face in an upward submissive position.
http://www.communic-art.com/main/concours/img/ratp.gif
Well as they say. We're lovers not fighters!(meaning the French of course!)
Posted by: rocket | 17 Jul 2009 19:27:55
John,
Sorry for still having some white people around.Are we still allowed to display old postcards, pictures of our grand-parents, see our former kings queens eventhough they were all white? If you have a problem with Europe being mainly white, Africa being mainly black, China being mainly asian, then i am afraid you'll have to deal with it and... suffer...Maybe you have a problem with skin colours?
You remind me some politicians claiming after loosing an election "We are right, the people is wrong, let's change the people!"
Daniel Strohl,
Et pourquoi voulez vous me changer mon biotope à moi que j'ai? Vais-je me plaindre des concerts, des bateaux sur les canaux, ou de l'accent charmant des habitants de Strasbourg en des termes aussi violents? Je pense que vos mots ont dépassé votre pensée. Les parisiens ont-ils encore le droit d'organiser des évènements sur Paris ou bien n'est-ce réservé qu'aux provinciaux en province? Les parisiens vous semblent "rances"? Je ne n'aventurerai pas sur ce terrain là...
Posted by: Dominique | 17 Jul 2009 18:17:21
"Touché" (DOMINIQUE II)
LOL !
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 17:11:22
DOMINIQUE II,
Per pure coincidence, we watched a "retransmission" of Dr.Knock on TV may be 3 or 4 days ago (on cable TV - can't remember the channel).
A perfect complement to an article about (the well and purposely organised) waste of money in our Sécurité Sociale system :
http://www.lefigaro.fr/sante/2009/07/18/01004-20090718ARTFIG00001-medicaments-des-milliards-d-euros-gaspilles-.php
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 17:04:54
"and France's moderate drinking habits" (CHARLES)
LOL - reminds of some recent poster comments on various more or less exotic drinking habits :).
"which will throw all these central Paris bobos and their stale view ..." (JOHN)
Let us hope so - mais ils vont essayer de s'accrocher :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Jul 2009 16:51:29
(demure single-piece swimsuits are the fashion this year, but I'm not sure what's the tower is doing there).
Surtout qu'elle est agressivement placée sous le menton de l'ondine volante.
Posted by: DODO | 17 Jul 2009 16:40:30
.....I'm sure Cabu will have a nice pension until his last quiet days drawing such rubbish. I'm not so sure about the rest of us.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 17 Jul 2009 12:41:42
Excellent comment Robert! Délicieusement politiquement incorrect. A chaque action répond la réaction. Loi physique implacable qui fait que le jeune révolutionnaire (Paix-au-Vietnam) devienne généralement un vieux conservateur (Bobo)
Posted by: DODO | 17 Jul 2009 16:30:09
RM
you've explained the lack of comment on countering the vandalism, and the dismissive tone of remarks about 'hard to discover in the middle of the night,' other excuses for not pursuing perpetrators.it almost excuses the abuse, the price society pays for pissing off various societal sub-groups because of lack of opportunity, gross inequity of wealth, etc.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 15:12:58
What's shocking in this picture is the whity-white Aryan woman that they chose. It completely negates the ethnic diversity of the Parisian population. But then it's typical of Delanoë's municipality, which has unfortunately ruled this city since 2001. Their waspish and Amélie-clichéesque boboism is sickening. I can't wait for Nicolas Sarkozy to finally create a Greater Paris including the ethnic and working-class suburbs which will throw all these central Paris bobos and their stale view of the city into the dustbin of history.
Posted by: John | 17 Jul 2009 15:05:38
[demure single-piece swimsuits are the fashion this year] CB
is 'poster woman' flying or diving? no matter, esther williams 'lives.'
the only good thing i can think of about one-piece suits is not having to look at navel rings/studs, or those defiling, small 'gremlin,' or rose, tattoos peeking out above the suit line.
how do you do 'topless' in a one piece suit? the upper portion of the suit hanging down at the waist? hmmmm, not the 'look' you'd want to emphasize.
Paris Plage: cool idea. CB, will you be taking your pastey-white (i presume) British form, and sandwiches, over there from time to time? Take SPF 30 or above.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 14:51:49
RICK my anecdote on the U-Boot (which I can substantiate on request) was not meant as random entertainment nor as a profound view of potential parallel histories. It was to be read in the same breath as the previous sentences: "I wouldn't have posted the pics but you were fair game. Enough with the posturing." (said pics being HRH the Duke of Edimburgh and the Missus on the best of terms with the distinguished Chancellor of the Third Kingdom).
My point, which was clear to anybody with average command of standard English, was that you do not, and should not, enjoy immunity from taunts about appeasement and ill-placed sympathies, because only a very thin hull or a leaking gasket spared you the dire straits we floundered in.
We were not a weak, cowardly populace as opposed to you, a proudly fighting nation; we were very similar human beings in slightly different circumstances. And Sir Winston, who perfectly perceived this, had the genius and the unique ability to mold the circumstances so the English had no choice but to stand proud. In so doing, he took the only path to the good side's victory and I am unreservedly thankful to him.
(Layman's summary: I was not delving in non-realized theoretic possibilities, but in historical fact, ie the status of opinion and political tendencies in Britain before and at the beginning of the war).
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:51:44
ROCKET "Whereas in the case of French soldiers, both men and women no hygienic products necessary. (very wide grin)"
LOL it is clear Daniel had opened himself to your well prepared and well delivered broadside. Touché.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:14:56
RICK "persecution fantasies, (...) xenophobia, ‘esprit de clocher’, localism, infantilism, and so on"
Are you morphing into the blog's Dr Knock, head shrink variety?
(I won't insult you by explaining to you who Dr. Knock is).
It's so much easier to slap pathological-sounding labels on arguments than to address them...
I know, I know: René's post contained no arguments. That's your standard and rather tiresome summary of anything that riles. Find something else... it's especially ludicrous in that case. René certainly held an opinion, but he made his points with clarity, supported them with fact and remained courteous throughout. (The last one is why I'm not promoting him to honorary Frenchman).
Meeting his post with such undeserved contempt may help you vent your bile, a laudable end per se, but your own credibility isn't enhanced a single bit.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Jul 2009 14:04:25
Thanks Azloon - yes you are right in principle: Democracy is to be valued. But my problem is that France has a long history of extreme division and when the figures are that close it leaves a lot of people disgruntled as we have seen lately. It would have been better if they had been more like 60% - 40% something decisive even though I still wouldnt have liked the outcome (smile). Anyway we shall see at the next parliamentary and presidential elections. I just hope by then that the *Socialist* party has got itself together so there are real differences of policy. Democracy is about choice and if there is no real difference (look at Con servative and New Labour policies over the last 20 years broadly speaking) then there is no real choice. Anyway as you say keep hoping!
Posted by: thinknoworpaylater | 17 Jul 2009 14:02:25
[since old hand posters like myself and others know your name and address] Daniel
Thanks for reminding me. Just knowing this helps keep me from going completely overboard. and we 'old salts' don't want to become 'all wet.' :)
Rick, indeed.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 13:54:18
"consistently monochromous' -- Dom2
i love it when you talk that way to me.....
'probably sincere'
faint praise, indeed. but better than a stick in the eye. :)
Posted by: azloon | 17 Jul 2009 13:34:27
As Charles Bremner has hinted, the official poster campaign purporting to dissuade vandalism on Vélibs is woefully inadequate. In fact, it encompasses the contradictions of modern-day political thinking on multiple levels.
Cabu, who drew the poster, is one of the French icons of May-68 rebelliousness. He spent decades using his (real) talent to depict, in his cartoons, long-haired youngsters making fun of old farts : teachers, army officers, priests, bosses and politicians.
Unfettered freedom was good ; authority was bad.
Cabu's character "mon beauf" acquired such celebrity that he coined a new word into the French language.
Cabu's "beauf" was the brother-in-law ("beau-frère") of the young, cool and leftist narrator.
His "beauf" was the anti-hero : middle-aged, working-class, ugly, vulgar, loud-mouthed, and, especially, right-wing and racist.
"Mon beauf" spent hours at the bistro du coin drinking Ricard, ranting about law and order and criticising excessive immigration.
Cabu's young, easy-going and likeable hero (presumably himself) seemed constantly appalled by his beauf's dreadful inclinations. The cute, blonde young things with short skirts and pointing tits who always seemed to surround the hero helped ram the message home : racist right-wingers don't get laid.
(How do I know they were blonde, since the cartoons are black and white ? Don't ask. That's obvious.)
Now, everybody in France understands what "un beauf" means : a middle-aged reactionary, pleased with himself, disparaging the young and ranting about law and order.
The irony is even greater, since Cabu's character evolved into a second-generation "beauf", more in line with modern times. This born-again, upmarket beauf' sports a ponytail and flashes his wealth around.
He's dangerously close to the "bobo", the bourgeois-bohême who, surprise, suprise, is the prime user of Vélibs.
Now Cabu seems to be on the Paris mayoral payroll : he has a regular column in the free municipal magazine, drawing cartoons as tame and unfunny as the Vélib poster.
Of course, the Paris mayor is socialist. I suppose that might be viewed as an excuse.
Also, note the downright stupidity of the poster's argument : don't attack Vélibs, because they can't defend themselves.
This shows how deeply out of touch our elites are with modern-day reality. If anything, such an argument will encourage vandals, not the other way round.
Haven't they noticed that the traditional, Western, French, Christian sense of honor, borne out of Middle-Ages chivalry, that this poster is appealing to, has completely disappeared ?
When was the last time hoodlum violence followed those time-honoured rules : you will fight one-on-one, you won't attack from behind, you won't hit a man on the ground, you won't hurt the weak, the old, the handicapped, or, God forbid, the women ?
Did not those snotty intellectuals and politicians notice that the rules for street violence have been turned on their head ?
Did not they notice that the rules now are : you will attack ten to one, you will hit from behind, you will make your victim fall, you will kick him in the head when he's on the ground, you will jump on his head with both feet, you will preferrably target the weak, hit the women, hit the old, hit and torture the handicapped ?
Did they not notice that the rules of chivalry have been replaced by the rules of Muslim warfare and African barbary, thanks to 40 years of uninterrupted immigration, of "anti-racist" propaganda and policy ?
If those rules stopped at Vélib vandalism, we'd be very fortunate.
Now that those old leftists are beginning to fathom the consequences of the hostile and deadly immigration they have foisted upon us, all they manage to do in order to repair their mistakes is use our money, from our taxes, to distribute to their friends who'll draw some lame propaganda posters.
I'm sure Cabu will have a nice pension until his last quiet days drawing such rubbish. I'm not so sure about the rest of us.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 17 Jul 2009 12:41:42
Oh la la - quelle belle phrase - vraiment formidable - "est-ce que le pays a les moyens de ses ambitions"? Really, when you come to think about it, it could apply to practically any other European country and European leader, and to Gordon and New Lab more than most. Helas, trois fois helas, l'Angleterre n'a plus les moyens des ambitions de New Lab. Cher Premier Ministre, que vous le vouliez ou non, vous devrez tres bientot couper les defences publiques, et tout le monde le sait- ca a deja commence- sauf vous. Cher Monsieur Brown, le pays n'a plus les moyens de vos ambitions. Excusez, je vous prie, le manque d'accents - mon PC est plutot New Lab et n'a pas les moyens de ses ambitions- graves, aigues ou petit chapeau circonflexe.
Posted by: Marguerite | 17 Jul 2009 12:24:20
They tried this too in Dublin's docklands for the last couple of years, but being typical Irish summers it rained every day and was a washout
Posted by: Evening Herault | 17 Jul 2009 11:42:27
"No, DOMINIQUE 2, to stop France looking foolish - something her friends DON'T want!" [RICK]
Gardez moi de mes amis. Quant à mes ennemis, je m'en charge.
("Protect me from my friends. I'll take care of my enemies").
Yes, ho ho, but unfunny, undignified too. The sheer capacity some French bloggers have for making for making fools of themselves is a source of constant wonderment.... and great disappointment.
Elsewhere, I wrote two long pieces to YOU. You quote for one (above). They were written in a sense of earnest seriousness. In return I get a snide aside.
Please understand this, PIERRE, I wrote “to stop France looking foolish”. That fact stands, no matter how often you scoff. In the big wide world out there, a lot of people don’t have much time for the French. Undeceive yourself. And recognise a friend.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Jul 2009 10:18:43
The Paris scheme is truly excellent and its a shame so many bikes are being lost. To be honest its not really a French phonnomeon if you put schemes things like this in big cities where people with huge degrees of wealth live side by side your always going to get people inclined to steal or vandalise such things, its just the way it is whethet in London, New York Paris or wherever. I'm suprised there's been such problems in Norway though can't account for that.
Posted by: sct | 17 Jul 2009 10:17:24
RH OMEA
2. And the idea that any American, where most every violent crime rate far exceeds that in France
If you are speaking about violent crime your appreciation is erroneous and this since the early 2000s
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/266umtwb.asp
en français
http://laurent.mucchielli.free.fr/france-usa.htm
which goes deeper into the phenomenon of criminality. So your remarks about criminality should really be checked before you are certain that you hold the absolute truth (stereotyped of course)
A few years back Le Figaro did a long piece on this subject.
But as DOM2 said
We laugh at ourselves much more, and much more cruelly, than you could even dream. I suppose that he also meant that France's own offer a critical eye also.
But lest one of "sang impur" dare raise their voice in opposition to the "esprit de corps" and "pensé unique" of "il ne faut pas affoler les français" then we hear many crying foul.
Posted by: rocket | 17 Jul 2009 09:36:21
"No, DOMINIQUE 2, to stop France looking foolish - something her friends DON'T want!" RICK
Gardez moi de mes amis. Quant à mes ennemis, je m'en charge.
("Protect me from my friends. I'll take care of my enemies")
Posted by: Pierre | 17 Jul 2009 09:35:34