It seemed for a while that this year's Goncourt literary prize came and went without the usual row or scandal. Now we have one, of a sort.
There was general approval last week when France's most prestigious book award went to Marie NDiaye, 42, a Senegalese-French novelist. No woman had won the Goncourt for a decade, she is the first female black laureate and her winning book Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women) was a best-seller.
But then the media dug up her less than glowing views on President Sarkozy. NDiaye went to live in Berlin in 2007 "in large part because of Sarkozy," she told les Inrockuptibles, an arts magazine, last August. "I find the police state, vulgar atmosphere detestable. I find Besson, Hortefeux, those people, monstruous. That refers to Eric Besson, Sarkozy's Minister for Immigration and National Identity, and Brice Hortefeux, the Interior Minister and close Sarkozy friend.
That was too much for Eric Raoult, a prominent MP for Sarko's Union for a Popular Movement. He tabled a parliamentary question to Frédérick Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, asking whether "the duty of a person who defends the literary colours of France should not be to show a certain respect towards its institutions." Her remarks insulted ministers of the Republic and the head of state, he said. A Goncourt laureate should observe un devoir de réserve, the obligation of discretion that is required of servants of the state.
The Goncourt crew hit back today, saying their prize winners have never been bound by a duty of respect for the state and its leader. Christian Paul, a Socialist MP, weighed in, accusing Raoult of "ignoble intimidation... an execrable form of censorship."
But now NDiaye has spoilt the fun by trying to soften her words. On Europe 1 radio today she said she did not mean to cause offence. "I don't like saying things like that. It was very excessive. I do not want to look like I was fleeing some kind of unbearable tyranny," she said. "For a while, I have found the atmosphere in France to be quite depressing, rather morose. It seemed that Berlin is more exciting."
We are waiting for a response from Frédo Mitterrand, who has not said much in public since the media last month dug up his adventures as a sex tourist in Thailand. In the meantime, Sarkozy has been brushing up on his Goncourt winners. He has just finished "re-reading" A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There was a big row in 1919 when Proust won the prize because he had not fought in the Great War.
Thursday update: Mitterrand has entered the fray, not very courageously. He has refused to take sides. "Writers who receive the Prix Goncourt have the right to say what they like," he said. "Eric Raoult, a friend and a very estimable man, has the right as a citizen and a parliamentarian to say what he thinks."
PS, on the subject of the Great War, did anyone notice that Carla Bruni seemed to be wearing high-than-usual heels and really towered over the President at today's Armistice Day ceremony with Angela Merkel ? And why wasn't she wearing a hat:
Nicolas Sarkozy must be annoyed. Jacques Chirac, his former mentor and predecessor, has been snatching the headlines for nearly a week.. Hard on the heels of his indictment on ancient corruption charges,old Jacques has made a splash with his first volume of memoirs.
Usually quite private about his thoughts, Chirac unbuttons himself to some extent and settles scores with old rivals. The book, Chaque pas doit être un but [Every step must be a goal] has a terrible title. He says nothing about the sleaze around the Paris city hall during his 18 years tenure as mayor, but he provides a good glimpse into his four decades at the top of the French political pile.
A whizz through all 500 pages throws up a few nuggets. One of them involves Margaret Thatcher, the tough British Prime Minister with whom he did business while serving as President Mitterrand's premier from 1986-88.. I'm writing this from London today, so I'll start with her. The legend that Thatcher fought tooth and nail with Paris over EU spending takes a knock. Chirac says that he was a big admirer of the former "Iron Lady" and their closeness even made the late Mitterrand envious.
She was a fierce and stylish defender of British interests in her battles over EU spending and its farm policy, but she was always fair, Chirac writes. "Her inflexible, intransigent positions made her one of the most redoubtable personalities on the international scene...Her grandeur, in my eyes, stemmed first from the force of her conviction. She did not try to impose the authority of her point of view, but used all her energy to convince..." Under his premiership, Britain and France enjoyed a honeymoon, he said. "Our complicity even irritated Francois Mitterrand, who took umbrage in November 1986 at a Franco-British summit."
The former Gaullist leader, said his views on Europe were closer to those of Thatcher than of Mitterrand, a Socialist. In 1988, in the midst of her "handbagging" over EU spending, Thatcher agreed to "kick the matter into touch" to help Chirac's campaign -- ultimately unsuccessful -- for the presidency that spring, he writes. (Thatcher dealt directly with Chirac because he was the elected head of Government in "cohabitation" with the President, not appointed by him).
In November 1987, Thatcher told him of her fears for President Reagan on the eve of the Washington summit at which the USSR and the United States agreed to limit their intermediate nuclear forces (INF). "Ronald Reagan did not appear to her to be either intellectually or physically up to handling a long bout of negotiation," he writes. (I covered that summit and can testify to Reagan's shakiness).
The disclosure of the complicity between the pair undermines one of Chirac's most famous quotes of the period. After a heavy negotiating round with Mrs Thatcher in 1986, he asked aides: "What more does this housewife want from me ? My balls on a plate?"
Chirac writes for the first time of Laurence, 51, his elder daughter, who has made repeated suicide attempts and has been in psychiatric care with anorexia for three decades. He blames himself for neglecting his two daughters and wonders if this caused her illness. He makes no mention of his famous love life and talks of his devotion to Bernadette, his long-suffering wife, though she can be "too blunt" for him sometimes. His sexual initiation came while serving as a crewman on a merchant vessel at 18. In Algiers, the boatswain asked if he was a virgin. "It was very nice of him. It had to be done. He took me to the famous Casbah quarter... In the morning, I was no longer the same man."
Chirac writes with sadness and bitterness over his betrayal by two subordinates -- Sarkozy and Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister who ran against him for the presidency in 1995. He writes off Balladur as scheming and out of touch. He is harsher with Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the President whom he served as Prime Minister in the mid-1970s. Giscard d'Estaing is vindictive, arrogant and self-obsessed he says.
He is gentler with Sarkozy, his former protege. "He had an iron will, which has not changed, to make himself indispensable, to always be visible. He was nervous, he would fuss over me, he was impatient to act and undeniably had a talent for generating publicity," he writes.Stronger stuff will come in the next volume, which covers his 12-year presidency.
Another surprise in the book is Chirac's high esteem for Mitterrand, the Machiavellian opponent who ran rings round the impetuous Gaullist when he was Prime Minister. He salutes Mitterrand as a political artist.
"The man I got to know during our meetings had excellent judgment and a tactical intelligence that I have rarely encountered in political circles,"
Chirac will hear tomorrow whether the Paris prosecutors are going to appeal against the examining judge's decision to send him for trial. They may bear in mind that over 70 percent of the country believe that the legal process must go on, despite the fact that he is France's most popular politician.
When the judge comes calling, French politicians always declare themselves "serene" because they are not guilty of anything. Today it was finally the turn of Jacques Chirac. From his luxury hotel in Morocco, he had his spokesman issue the traditional serene statement as France pondered on the prospect of putting its last president on trial. The charges that have caught up with Chirac, 76, are a trifle compared with the shenanigans that went on at the city hall during his 18-year-reign as the first Mayor of Paris since the 19th century. Against the wishes of the prosecutor -- an old friend -- the examining judge wants Chirac to stand trial over a couple of dozen allegedly fraudulent jobs on the city payroll when he was Mayor, from 1977-1995. Back in his 1980s and early 90s, when Chirac used the baronial city hall as his power base and seat for his Gaullist party, the mayoral machine was celebrated for this kind of largesse. Generous to a fault, Chirac commanded a grace and favour system that benefited friends, supporters and their associates. If you had the connections, someone in the Mayor's big private office could help your children with jobs or fix you up with a handsome Paris apartment at council-house prices. The son of Alain Juppé, Chirac's first Prime Minister, was among beneficiaries of such cut-price accommodation -- until he was exposed and forced to leave in 1996. Two of the charges facing the former President now involve the provision of chauffeurs on the mayoral payroll to a former prefect and a former trade union leader. Money was no object for the Chirac family, according to accounts from former insiders and judicial investigators. When Bertrand Delanoe, a Socialist, followed Jean Tiberi, Chirac's successor, as Mayor in 2001, his inspectors found that the city's tax payers had been funding 600 euros a day in food and drink for Jacques, Bernadette and Claude, their daughter. The funds did not even cover entertainment expenses, which were separate. Until today, the former President has escaped the legal fall-out from a period when the city hall was raking in millions of pounds a year in kickbacks from building contractors and other businesses. Several of Chirac's former lieutenants and about four dozen businessmen and former officials have been convicted in recent years for their role in the illicit payments and use of public money for financing the Rassemblement pour la République, the Mayor's party. The most prominent among them was Juppé, who received a suspended sentence and a brief ban on holding elected office in 2004 for corruption while he served as Mayor Chirac's deputy in the 1980s and 1990s. The fall-out from the case forced him to resign a cabinet post from President Sarkozy's first Government but he has bounced back as Mayor of Bordeaux. It is acknowledged in the political world that Juppé carried the can for his boss, who as president enjoyed immunity from prosecution for 12 years until Sarkozy succeeded him in 2007. But it was not always plain sailing. The cloud of sleaze dogged Chirac for much of his presidency, as it became ever clearer that the city administration had been a money machine. Until appeal courts confirmed a judicial ruling on his immunity in 2001, Chirac skirted disaster after the publication of a posthumous video tape made by Jean-Claude Méry, one of the RPR's clandestine financiers in the 1980s and early 90s. Méry depicted Chirac as the instigator and controller of the biggest kickback schemes. He claimed to have regularly collected suitcases of cash from donors and deposited them with the Mayor. At the same time, investigators found that Chirac, his family and friends, including a woman journalist, had recently made expensive trips to Indian Ocean resorts and the United States, with expenses paid in cash. The President's staff explained -- with difficulty -- that the money came from cash which he had legally accumulated when he had served as Prime Minister under President Mitterrand from 1986-88. Chirac shook off the brewing scandal by deploying his charm and an obscure word in a celebrated television appearance in September 2001. The sleaze allegations were "abracadabradantesque" -- pure fantasy -- he said. Nevertheless, the government of the time, under Lionel Jospin, put an end to the so-called "special funds". These were bundles of cash which were traditionally distributed to cabinet ministers once a month for use at their discretion. The money was supposed to be used to top up staff pay, but no records were kept. Chirac, who now enjoys his country's affection as its genial elder statesman, has always succeeded in 'passing between the raindrops', or staying dry, as the handy French expression puts it [passer entre les gouttes]. He has escaped serious scrutiny in other matters, such as persistent reports that he had held secret bank accounts in Japan, and may have had a second family there. This month, he was an invisible presence in the court in the so-called Clearstream trial. Dominique de Villepin, his former Prime Minister, was accused of plotting to smear Sarkozy and witnesses said that President Chirac had been involved. But the former President was not asked to testify. In yet another case, Charles Pasqua, a former Interior Minister and old Gaullist colleague, claimed this week that Chirac was implicated in bribery over arms sales to Angola in the 1990s. Pasqua was sentenced to 12 months' prison. The sentence was very stiff by the standards of French political corruption cases. Pasqua may never serve it but it is just possible that Chirac's alleged role will be investigated. Few people expect that case or yesterday's corruption charges to go far. Even if he is tried and convicted on the new city hall charges, the most Chirac can expect is a fine or suspended sentence. There is a lot of sympathy for the old man. His presidency achieved little and will probably be remembered by historians as an uneventful 12 years. His chief act in public memory was his opposition to George Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003. But he now enjoys the rank of most popular politician in France, according to polls. Even old foes think they should just leave him in peace.
France Television prefaced its Jean Sarkozy interview (last post) with a report on funny flash-mob demonstrations in which young people wielded bananas like mobile phones (video). At the risk of trumpet-blowing, this blog can claim a little credit here.
I made the banana republic comparison in a slightly cheeky post the other day which was picked up by French media and the net.(Last week's Paris Match: De toutes parts, les critiques fusent. Charles Bremner, le chroniqueur du très sérieux « Times », parle même de « Banana république » dans son blog.)
The fruity image was taken up by Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, a former TV executive and reader of this blog, who set up a site www.bananarepublique.org. Several hundred people signed up for instructions to appear at 1.13 pm yesterday in about 20 towns around France in a mobilisation éclair (official French for flash-mob). The idea was to gather bananas, which become 'magic telephones' for calling the Elysée Palace and asking for a job at La Défense. A few dozen people made a splash in front of the TV cameras under the great Arch of la Defense yesterday afternoon (top picture).
Jérôme told me today: "The flashmob bananarépublique is a citizen's initative which I organised spontaneously with Olivier Auber and Gilles Misrahi after a chat on Twitter. I had read on your blog that you had revived the term 'banana république' and it's with that Twitter tag that we mobilised the internet. Part of this success naturally is due to you. Thanks to you, and the foreign press, our regime now has a few fewer bananas."
It was quite a coup for Bourreau-Guggenheim and friends to land up as the intro to Jean Sarko's big moment on the TV [watch here]. It is a little revenge for him. Regulars here may remember that last year he lost his job as chief of technical innnovation at TF1, the biggest network, for the offence of lèse-Sarkozy. He had written to his parliamentarian to criticise the president's new law against internet piracy. The e-mail was passed to the government and TF1, owned by a friend of Sarkozy, dismissed its employee.
And no, The Times is certainly not attempting to foment unrest. I'm just reporting this because I was rather tickled to have contributed to a French buzz.
Nicolas Sarkozy finally called a halt to the massacre. Assailed by world-wide ridicule, he pulled the plug on the scheme to catapault Prince Jean, his 23-year-old student son, to the head of La Défense business district.
Jean announced his withdrawal in one of those only-in-France moments, interviewed with reverence live on the evening TV news. Coached by Dad's aces from the Elysée Palace, Sarko Junior did quite a good job -- at imitating his father. His self-assurance and rhetorical touches were pure Sarko. Was it an error to claim such an august post at his tender age? "One never makes an error by being candidate in an election. It is not a fault to commit oneself," said Monsieur Fils. "My passion for political engagement is unaltered because it is unalterable," he concluded. He has got the language down with all that noble talk about 'combat' in service of the public
The suave, self-confident mini-Sarko is still on the very fast track, despite his lack of work experience and his struggle to finish his second year of university studies.
This is not even a pause in his fabulous destiny. He is still being elected today to a seat on the board of the Epad, the development agency of la Défense which commands a budget of 115 million euros a year. He is just not going to grab its chairmanship for the time being, as Dad had planned for December. He is also still being lined up by the President and his local barons to take over the Hauts-de-Seine département council in 2011.
But the affair has left a stain on Sarko senior. His breathtaking act of nepotism will not be forgotten, no matter how much he and his team blame the media. The final straw was a flash-mob demonstration at la Défense yesterday -- shown on TV -- in which people turned up holding bananas to their ears, mocking Sarkozy's republic [see later post].
Sarkozy's troops, having been forced to sacrifice their dignity in the impossible defense of the royal appointment, have been humiliated. Today, ministers and spokesmen are dutifully praising Junior's courage and congratulating him on his wise decision, which was the right thing to do, his great maturity and so on. If it was so right, one wonders why no member of the government or parliament said so before the presidential order to retreat ? I feel sorry for François Fillon, the Prime Minister, but at least he kept his head well down throughout the storm.
In a crowded field of flatterers, the prize for best courtier goes to... Brice Hortefeux, the Interior Minister and lifelong friend of le Président. He came on TV right after Jean and attacked "the lies, the contempt, the arrogance, the stupidity" of the opposition and media in the affair. He then saluted brave Jean -- who is his godson. ""This is a difficult moment for the son of the President. It is a moment that inspires respect," he said. Not -- as my teenage children say.
Have Parisians finally got the green message and stopped buying cars ? There has been an extraordinary 60 percent drop in vehicles registered with '75' plates that denote Paris since a new licensing system came in last April. Even more spectacular, nearly 80 percent fewer new cars have been registered with plates from the Seine-Saint-Denis, the rough northeastern suburbs that go under the number 93.
The explanation is simple. The locals are buying cars the same as usual, but taking advantage of the new system to hide their place of residence. Regular readers will recall the fuss which led to a hybrid system, in which people are allowed to pick the département and surrounding region of their choice for the car plates.
So Parisians are simply choosing other localities for their wheels to spare themselves the stigma of being city slickers from the arrogant capital. Le neuf-trois, 93, -- with its image of lawless ghettos -- is such a burden that people there prefer to claim motorised allegiance to just about anywhere else.
The government came up with these figures in a review of the first six months of the new registration system. The national top choice of département for people living elsewhere is 69, or the Rhone, which encompasses Lyon. Then follows 59 (Nord), 13 (Bouches-du-Rhône -- Marseille), 31 (Haute-Garonne -- Toulouse) and le 33 (Gironde -- Bordeaux).
These choices reflect regional loyalties. People want to boast with their plates that they belong to Toulouse or Lille, but no-one wants to crow about being Parisian. With the fierce attachment that they inspire, Corsica and Brittany are also enjoying a license-plate boom beyond their shores.
This all upholds the tradition that Parisians, even those who have been Parigots for generations, cling to their provincial roots. Those without any just pick places that they like, such as the location of their holiday homes (Young Jean Sarkozy should note that this applies even inhabitants of the Hauts-de-Seine, the rich western suburbs where he is striving to become the political boss. Registrations with the département's tell-tale "92" are also withering away.)
The lesson is that the geographical system is now pointless. The old département numbers told you where the car owner lived so, if a 75 roared through town, the locals could swear at the bloody Parisians. Now the road hogs from the capital can quite legally disguise themselves as humble villagers.
Over 10 days have passed since the eruption of l'affaire du Prince Jean. Here's a quick look at the fallout from the catapaulting of the 23-year old undergraduate to the chairmanship of La Défense, France's premier business district.
It's possible that the public outrage will prevent the President's chums and appointees from hoisting Jean Sarkozy into the post on December 4. Signs of a withdrawl have begun appearing. But the episode -- which ignited interest in the foreign media before the French -- offers a lesson. It has shown how an otherwise consummate politician can inflict long-term damage on himself by persisting in a blunder over a minor matter.
The mess has been compounded by Sarkozy's dogged determination to force through the promotion, dragging his government with him in support of the indefensible. Ministers have been humiliated by having to line up behind Sarkozy's argument that young Jean is the victim of a campaign aimed at his dad.
"Who is the target?" Sarkozy asked in a rambling Q and A interview that was dutifully printed by Le Figaro, his house newspaper, on Friday. "It is not my son. It is me. Those who have never got over my election and who have nothing to say of substance are trying to attack me on all fronts with a bad faith and malice which will not deceive the French."
He was wrong on that point. The same day, Le Parisien published a poll that showed that 64 percent of the country disapproved of the imminent elevation of Sarko fils. I was surprised that it was not more, given the mockery we are hearing on all fronts.
Sarkozy's camp are appalled. They recognise in private that there is no argument to justify this act of nepotism. Sarko junior, who is taking a second crack at his second year university studies, is no doubt a genial fellow, but he has no credentials beyond a year on the county council that is run by his father's pals. His future post, albeit supervisory, involves decisions involving billions of euros and a mission to promote La Défense in the face of competition from the City of London, Frankfurt and other big corporate and financial centres. Never could he be in line for it if Dad was not the monarch.
Le Monde tried to explain the phenomenon yesterday. Sarkozy has, it said, fallen victim to the "reflexes of the court", the phenomenon that has afflicted all French presidents in the 51-year-old Fifth Republic. The courtiers do not dare tell the emperor that he is naked.
The affair has left its mark on Sarkozy's approval rating, which has sunk back to 38 percent from 45 percent in August in the Ifop version published today by Le Journal du Dimanche. Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Majority, is concerned because the absurd gift to his son is largely deplored by their electoral base.
Whatever happens in coming weeks, Sarkozy will be damaged by the episode. Even if Jean withdraws or fails to win the appointment, the President loses face.
The term banana republic has been used by a couple of French friends in reaction to the news from Paris this week. They were referring to the high-handed way that France's ruler and his caste have been behaving in two or three current matters.The latest involves an astonishing act of nepotism by Nicolas Sarkozy. His barons are about to elevate Jean Sarkozy, the President's 23-year-old, undergraduate son, to a powerful and prized executive post.
More below, but first the other items. We have already visited the Clearstream trial here. As the case grinds on, at great expense to the people, it looks more than ever like a revenge play staged by President Sarkozy to demolish Dominique de Villepin, his erstwhile rival.
Royal revenge is more civilised than in the old days. When King Louis XIV decided, in similar fashion, to punish the noble Nicolas Fouquet, the Villepin of his day, he threw him into jail and let him rot. Villepin is not in jail. He is cocking a snook at Sarko by running in the Paris 20 kilometres foot-race today. His alleged crime -- abetting an amateurish and ineffective scheme to smear Sarkozy -- should never have been sent to a court. That's not just my opinion. It came today from Eva Joly, a formidable former investigating judge who specialised in corruption in high places. "The conflict between Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin should be settled on the political field and not in a court," she told le Parisien. Huge resources had been wasted in indulging the president's whim, including the full-time work of two judges and teams of investigators for five years, she said.
Then there is l'affaire Mitterrand [last post]. Sarkozy and the Paris thinking class has decreed the matter closed, a case of circulez, il n'y a rien à voir ['Move along, there's nothing to see' -- an old police expression]. Frédo submitted to his television grilling on Thursday night. He denied that he had ever paid for under-age prostitutes. All the "boys" he bought on visits to Bangkok were consenting adults, he said. He also condemned sex-tourism. That's that then, it's over, said the Sarkozy camp.
The serious media have sided with them, depicting Mitterrand as the victim of a witch-hunt by scurrilous muck-raisers. But the affair has left a bad taste. The fact remains that Sarkozy appointed a senior minister who, he knew at the time, had written about his exploits as a Bangkok sex tourist. People outside le microcosme, as the Paris chattering classes are known, are not impressed and they are telling their members of parliament. Paris gay activists are also angry, they told today's JDD newspaper, because Mitterrand has tarnished homosexuality by at least appearing to associate it with paedophilia and prostitution
And then to Prince Jean, Sarko's second son. He is to be appointed chairman of the Epad, the public agency which runs La Défense, the big business district on the west side of Paris. La Défense, an island of corporate towers that is seeking to rival the City of London, is in the heart of Sarkoland, the Hauts-de-Seine département which includes Neuilly, the President's fiefdom. Sarko Junior, who is repeating his second year of undergraduate law at the Sorbonne, was elected to a Neuilly seat on the notoriously sleaze-ridden departement council last year. He was immediately given the job of heading Dad's Union for a Popular Movement on the body.
Even Sarkozy stalwarts are embarrassed by the decision to catapault le Dauphin to the head of Epad, which oversees a billion euros of annual spending.Patrick Devedjian,a cabinet minister and retiring Epad boss, is bitter. To avoid lèse majesté, he voiced his thoughts with a quotation from Corneille, the 17th century dramatist. "For souls nobly born, valour does not await the passing of years."
The opposition are talking about dynasty-building. Putting Jean in charge of la Défense is part of Sarkozy's scheme for taking control of a new Greater Paris, say the Socialists who run both the city and the regional council. Sarkozy senior was boss of the Epad right up to his election in 2007. Young Jean says that he is qualified for the job "because I know all the issues" (see video below of FR3 tv news report) and he dismisses criticism as "pointless and frankly facile".
An internet petition is calling on Jean to do the decent thing and get his degree and some experience in life before rising to high responsibility. But we are told that Sarkozy père is determined to put the lad in the job. He will get the post in December at about the same as the dynasty enlarges. Jean's heiress wife is expecting the President's first grandchild in the same month.
The Clearstream trial has opened with the expected theatre at the Palais de Justice. The spectacle yesterday afternoon was not in the court, where the lawyers argued over procedure. It came from the melodramatic performance outside by Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister and star defendant.
Villepin, a man who has never been accused of modesty, swept up with his wife and three children and delivered a grandiloquent speech in which he cast himself as the victim of epic injustice. He was, he told the cameras, the target of a political prosecution that has been staged by a vindictive ruler. Here, in English, is a taste of the amazingly inflated rhetoric which Villepin uses about himself. Don't forget that he is accused of complicity in dirty tricks, including forgery, to discredit Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the last presidential campaign.
"It is September 21. This is the anniversary of the creation of the French Republic. It is also the day dedicated by the United Nations to peace in the world.... I am here because of the will of one man and the relentlessness of one man - Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also President of the French Republic. I will come out of this a free man, exonerated in the name of the French people.
"Some would have us believe that there is in our country no such thing as a political trial. I would like to believe that too, yet here we are in 2009 and we are in France. I wish to restate that my combat is not personal. It is the combat of all those men and women who have fought against injustrice. It is the combat of all men and women who are victims of abuse of power. Justice is a very precious commodity and it is also very fragile. It requires the engagement of everyone. I know that the truth will triumph."
In French, his language does not sound quite so much like ham Shakespeare. It landed him, as planned, the opening slot of the evening news. But Villepin is taking a risk in claiming the high ground. When the trial gets down to the detail, he will face rough cross-examination on what he was doing when he allegedly colluded in, or perhaps instigated, the plot to blacken Sarkozy. Noble, Dantonesque speech-making will not help when he is up against the prosecutor and especially Thierry Herzog, Sarkozy's redoubtable lawyer (In French criminal trials, plaintiffs lawyers take part in the proceedings).
Sarkozy's riposte to Villepin came in today. Pierre Charon, one of the president's advisers, said the former Prime Minister appeared to think the law court was a Club Med resort. "You can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose.... It's what happens inside the courtroom that counts."
Villepin is right to depict the affair as a duel between himself and Super Sarko. The president's determination to put his fomer colleague on trial has led to a new title for the case: "Kill Vill". Some in Sarkozy's own camp are worried that his pursuit of his former rival in the courts is not quite presidential.
The spectacle is good material for the comedians. On France-Inter today, Stéphane Guillon, the court jester of the state-run radio station, described the Clearstream trial as a fight for territory between two dogs -- an excitable little terrier (Sarkozy) and a languid Afghan hound. Watch below.
Think of post-war Paris and chances are that this is one of the images that spring to mind. The little boy with the baguette was one of the immortal shots by Willy Ronis, who died yesterday at the age of 99.
Ronis was the last of the band of photographers, known as the humanist school, who snapped everyday Parisian life in the two decades after 1945, usually in black and white and in the poorer quarters. The period now seems like a golden age. The work of Ronis and his friends Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai became poster clichés in the 1980s but they were recognised as masters earlier than most realise. As early as 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored them with an exhibition. They influenced all photographers of the era. I remember my father, a keen amateur photographer, taking slice-of-life pictures in the style of Cartier-Bresson and Ronis in the north of Scotland.
Ronis, the son of Jewish immigrants from east Europe, began as a photographer in the late 1930s using an old Rolleiflex. He was very ill in his final years but remained lucid to the end. In July he drew a big crowd when he appeared at the annual photographic exhibition in Arles.
Ronis, like his colleagues and all self-respecting thinkers in the post-war years, was a leftist. He mainly chronicled the lives of the labouring classes. He was by all accounts an extraordinarily gentle man. "I never took a mean photo," he said when he was given a Paris show in 2005. "I never wanted to make people look ridiculous. I always had a lot of respect for the people I photographed." In Arles, this summer, he said he had always felt empathy with his subjects. "I met very few bastards."
President Sarkozy paid tribute to Ronis as the "chronicler of postwar social aspirations and the poet of a simple and joyous life." Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, said Ronis immortalized "for each of us the poetry of our daily lives and saved it from lost time."
The work of some of the humanists has been slightly discredited in recent years with the discovery that they posed some of their seemingly spontaneous snaps of street life. Robert Doisneau admitted late in life that he used paid drama students to stage the kiss in the celebrated "Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville". He confessed only after he was sued by a couple who falsely claimed to be the pair in his picture. I talked to Doisneau at the time and he told me that he regretted the picture because so many couples claimed over the years to have been its subject.
Ronis said he arranged only one of his shots. He came across the little boy with the baguette and asked him to run past the baker's shop two or three times. One of his other great photos, "Les Amoureux de la Bastille" [below], was just luck he said. He was on top of the monument to take views of Paris. "I didn't see anyone and thought I'd be left in peace. I turned round and saw two lovers ...looking at the view. I loaded the camera, the young man kissed the temple of his girlfiend. They didn't notice that I had photographed them."
Nowadays of course that would be impossible in France. Although almost everyone carries a telephone camera it is illegal to publish the photograph of anyone without their permission. The couple would now be able to sue Ronis for a fortune.
French children went back to school today after the long summer break. The event was accorded the usual fanfare, with television and radio reporters at the school gates. My 15-year-old daughter is starting Lycée at a weekly boarding school near Paris tomorrow. What follows is a slightly expanded column that I wrote for the newspaper today --
Late this month, my son will be among thousands of British teenagers who are starting university. His arrival at Exeter would not justify a mention, except that James is fairly unusual. In his 18 years, he has spent only a few weeks in Britain. Born in New York, he has lived mostly in France and Belgium so his English sounds like Inspecteur Clouseau. I am taking him across the Channel for his first visit to a pub. He is worried about the food but he has heard that les petites anglaises are fun. This idea that English girls are charming and rather naughty lingers from the 1970s when the young Jane Birkin and other cross-Channel starlets appeared in French comedy films.
James is excited and anxious about making contact with a nearby home country that he hardly knows. We never planned it like this, but a chain of postings outside Britain has meant that the children have grown up in a slight no-man’s land. If they had to define themselves, they would say they are Franco-American Britons with a Scottish-Australian father and an Iranian-American mother.
For kids, the territory of the long-term expatriate is an odd place, even in the age of Facebook and Google. They have the privilege of enjoying a wider world but also the drawback of not really belonging anywhere. British families traditionally avoided this by packing off their young to board in the home country. [click below to read on]
Continue reading "Bringing up French Anglo-Saxons" »
France is talking about the sleeper hit of the summer movie season. Neuilly Sa Mere is a fish-out-of water comedy about a kid from the rough ethnic banlieue who goes to live with a rich family in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Nicolas Sarkozy's very opulent home town on the western edge of Paris.
The low-budget film was released in the mid-August doldrums. The critics damned it with faint praise but it leapt to second box office place by the end of its first week (after Up). Almost a million people have seen it and it's on the way to becoming a smash, with its catch-lines doing the rounds among young fans. The title of the film is a play on 'Nique-ta-Mère!' (F___ your mother!) a ghetto insult that is the name of a notorious rap group that is more politely known as NTM.
I saw the film with my teenage son and found it a bit facile with its caricatures of stuck-up bourgeois Neuilly and warm-hearted Arab and black kids of the rough estates. It also draws heavily on La Vie est Une Longue Fleuve Tranquille,a 1989 classic on a similar theme. But it is redeemed by a very funny running gag, thought up by Djamel Bensalah, its writer-producer.
This turns on the character of an insufferable teenage version of Nicolas Sarkozy, complete with platform heels, slick slogans, and permanent Ray Bans. Audiences cannot get enough of Charles de Chazelle, the appalling clone of the young Sarko, played by 15-year-old Jérémy Denisty, a Belgian actor.
Samy, the hero, played by Samy Seghir, 14, has to share a room with Charles, who idolises Sarkozy and is aiming for presidency as Sarko did from his own teenage years. Sarkozy posters cover the walls along with portraits of Rachida Dati, the disgraced former cabinet star, and of Jean, the 22-year-old son of the President who is being groomed to take over Sarkoland, as Neuilly and the Hauts-de-Seine département are known. The bully at Samy's posh new Catholic school is played by a lookalike of the long blonde-haired Jean Sarkozy. Carla Bruni's music fills the Chazelle house. Samy wears an NYPD t-shirt when he jogs, just like Sarko.
[Top picture, the Chazelles, with Charles on right. Below: Denisty/Charles with Seghir/Samy]
Audiences hoot as Charles spouts Sarkozy lines, dismissing the Arab and black youths of the "cités" (estates) as "racaille" (thugs) who should be "Karcherisé" -- cleaned out. "My room, you love it or leave it," Charles tells Samy. The allusion to Sarkozy's patriotic campaign quip about France has become the catch)phrase of the film. Charles runs for a school election on promises of "la rupture" (a clean break) and the school's motto is "Work more to succeed more", a version of the Sarkozy motto "Work more to earn more". When Charles loses the school election, he moans: "Je suis loser, comme Balladur". The aristocratic Edouard Balladur lost the 1995 presidential election to Jacques Chirac, leading to seven years in the wilderness for Sarkozy, his chief supporter.
In another funny touch, Michel Galabru, a veteran movie star, plays Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist baron who was Sarkozy's mentor. Sitting in le Racing Club, the exclusive country club in the Bois de Boulogne, he advises young Charles on how to become a killer politician just like Sarko.
The only cinema in Neuilly declined to show the film at first. Jean-Christophe Fromantin, the Mayor, said he had feared a crude caricature of his town, a national byword for both the ancien and nouveau riche. This week they put the film on and Fromantin enjoyed it. "It's rather sympathique. It's very much a caricature but the traits of the characters he been taken to such an extreme that it's quite funny," he said. "The actors are good but they do not embody the reality of the banlieues nor that of Neuilly." Not all his citizens agree. Some older Neuilly film-goers said the comedy ridiculed the town and made the drug-dealing ghetto denizens to be nice guys.
Critics have revised their views. It became a sleeper hit because it touches the pulse of young France, shows the immigrant kids in a sympathetic light and makes clever fun of "Super Sarko" and his universe, they say. "The film has an alchemy that has hit the mark," said le Parisien.
Bensalah, an up-and-coming film maker aged 33, said that he had drawn on his own experience in his depiction of France's two opposite worlds. His eyes had been opened when he was a 10-year-old ball-boy at Roland Garros, the French open tennis championship, played on the edge of Neuilly. "In the same day, I went from the most rotten Parisian cites to this incredible place with girls and boys with double-barreled first names -- when my friends were all called Mamadou," he said.
Sarkozy, who is usually sensitive to mockery of his person, says that he plans to see the film. Pierre, his eldest son who is a Neuilly-based pop music producer and is imitated in the film, saw it an apparently liked it.
There is nothing that Nicolas Sarkozy likes more than putting his own lyrical twist on recent French history. He was at it again today as he marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. After the financial crisis, the world must now be reborn as it was after the fall of German Paris, said the President. The heroic liberation of Paris set an example for France and the world to follow as a new economic order is created.
That's heady stuff. Sarkozy delivered it at a ceremony at the Prefecture of Police before going off to tell the bosses of the main French banks that he would not tolerate a return to big annual bonuses. I'll put the full quote below, but first a little background.
The liberation of Paris was hugely important in France's redemption from wartime defeat and collaboration. While the allied forces were aiming to bypass the heavily garrisoned capital in their eastward pursuit of the Germans, resistance fighters in the city rose up against the occupiers. The city's police joined the insurrection. Charles de Gaulle persuaded General Eisenhower, the allied commander, to divert General Philippe Leclerc's Second Armoured Division to Paris, backed up by the 4th US infantry division. Leclerc's men fought their way into the capital to a rapturous welcome [top picture]. Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander, disobeyed Hitler's orders to destroy Paris and surrendered to Leclerc at the Hotel Meurice. Thus France was able to take pride in liberating its capital.
Sarkozy warmed to one of his regular themes -- that France must stop lacerating itself over its wartime record. It was not sufficiently remembered that under the Vichy puppet regime, there had been police officers in the resistance, at huge risk and cost, he said.
"The liberation of Paris was truly the victory of the national will, guided by the political conviction that a united, determined France had in herself the resources to force the course of destiny," said Sarkozy. Modern France was in debt to this feat, he went on.
"At a moment in which the world, and Europe and France along with it, must again rise to considerable challenges -- to re-found world governance, to renew in depth an economic and financial system that has been disqualified by an unprecedented crisis -- we have no other choice but to show ourselves worthy of the heritage that is represented by the Liberation of Paris." [French text below]"
This is a good example of how, to use the French expression, Sarkozy "recuperates" history, grabbing symbols to cast himself as a man of destiny. Henri Guaino, the special adviser and speech-writer who puts the poetry into Sarkozy's ideas, certainly had in mind de Gaulle's historic speech on the day of the German surrender. "Paris insulted ! Paris broken ! Paris martyrised! But Paris liberated. Liberated by herself."
Sarkozy was setting the scene for next month's G20 summit in Pittsburg where he will again cast himself as the uncompromising advocate of a new world moral order, as he did in London last April. The trouble is that de Gaulle's mantle is rather too big for him.
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Read the speech here. The following is the key quote:
Au moment où le monde, et avec lui l’Europe et la France, doivent à nouveau relever des défis considérables, pour refonder la gouvernance mondiale, pour rénover en profondeur un système économique et financier disqualifié par une crise sans précédent, pour jeter les bases d’un développement respectueux des équilibres écologiques vitaux pour la planète.
Eh bien, nous n’avons pas d’autres choix que de nous montrer dignes de cet héritage que représente la Libération de Paris. Une nouvelle fois, la préparation de l’avenir ne peut plus se satisfaire des principes et des règles de l’ordre ancien. Chaque nation, chaque gouvernement est aujourd’hui face à ses responsabilités. La France est plus que jamais déterminée à assumer les siennes pour favoriser l’avènement en lien avec ses partenaires de ce monde nouveau que la France appelle de ses vœux.
Get ready for some Anglo-Saxon gloating. We hear today that France is giving up its four-year struggle to keep the barbarians of Google from Gallic gates, at least in their literary form.
"Google has won", said the headline in La Tribune, a business daily. It reported that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) -- the national library -- is on the verge of a deal under which Google will add its stocks to its controversial digital library.
The pact will mark a big climb-down because the BNF led the counter-attack that was noisily launched by President Chirac in early 2005 against what France saw as a dangerous new American imperialism. That spring, Paris mustered continental backing for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
According to Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the BNF chief at the time, Europe's literary and cultural heritage was under digital threat from les Anglo-Saxons. France faced the prospect of being force-fed with such things as the biased English-language version of its revolution in which "valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man", said Jeanneney (he has since lost his job).
Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender today: "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Some readers joined the lament. "The harm is done, now that the European mountain gave birth to a mouse," wrote a patriotic book-lover called Thierry. However the main reaction from France has not been shock and horror, just a virtual shrug.
Economics explain the shift, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the BNF, which joins 29 other major world libraries in opening its shelves to Google's project (including Oxford's Bodleian). France provides only five million euros a year for digitizing books. This is done by Gallica, the national digital library. Yet the BNF needs up to 80 million euros just for its works from the Third Republic era (1870 to 1940), said Bruckmann. "We will not stop our own digitizing programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?"
Google scans almost free and it has so far added some 10 million works to its Books search base, the great majority of them out of copyright. These can be read free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
After a long battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues, especially in Europe. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several grounds, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.
In France, publishers and booksellers are worried about the forthcoming e-book revolution. Strict laws on pricing have helped 12,000 bookshops survive while small sellers in many countries have been driven out by the big chains. It is doubtful whether the French protection rules can be applied to electronically-delivered books.Amazon isn’t launching its Kindle in France until next year and Google's pay book service is still some way off. Before the Americans move in, the French industry wants to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the number two national publisher, called in la Tribune today for the circling of French wagons before Amazon and Google come galloping over the horizon.
[Top picture, the Richelieu reading room in the old National Library.]
Tourists were not the only species swarming on the Champs Elysées over this mid-August holiday weekend. Squadrons of bees were also enjoying the sunshine, part of a fast-multiplying population that are making honey a new Paris industry.
The Tuileries, Luxembourg and lesser gardens of central Paris are home to hundreds of thousands of bees which, like those in other urban areas, are said to be far more productive than their chemically-stricken country cousins.
"There is a huge quantity of flowers in Paris," Yves Védrenne, General-Secretary of the National Apiculture Union, said the other day. As well as the flower beds of the parks and gardens, the boulevards and edges of motorways offer bee-friendly pollen such as acacias, limes and chestnuts, he said. Not only is the city largely free from the pesticides and fertilisers that are killing the countryside bees, the extra warmth of the urban area promotes earlier breeding.
Some Paris honey-producers are claiming record productivity, with up to 100 annual kilogrammes (220 pounds) of honey per hive, compared with a quarter of that from typical hives on the cereal-producing plains of the Ile-de-France, the surrounding region.
There are some 300 registered hives in the French capital, with more believed to be undeclared as area residents try their hand at an art which can be learnt on two-day courses. The total output is estimated at several tonnes a year. The main legal requirements are that hives be no less less than 25 metres from hospitals or schools and they must have a two-metre (6.5 feet) screen if they are not on a high building.
Until last May, the grandest hives were those of the venerable colony on the roof of the Opéra. They were joined that month by some 140,000 bees installed high on the glass and steel dome of the Grand Palais, the 1900 exhibition hall off the Champs Elysées [top picture].
"The bees are very happy in the city. They have everything they need," Sébastien de Gasquet, director of the Grand Palais, told the media. The Tuileries are nearby and "there is enough for them in the grounds of the Grand Palais alone, he said.
Nicolas Géant, the beekeeper behind the Grand Palais scheme, said the abeilles de ville could produce up to five times the output of insects in the great rural expanses where there are no hedgerows, no flowers and single crops. "There are myriad little flowers in the gardens, on terraces and on balconies. Bees live better in the town than the country because of the biodiversity."
The Champs Elyseés honey is to be sold under the Grand Palais label, joining other luxury miel de Paris brands which cost a steep 15 euros for a 125 gramme (4.4 ounce) pot at Fauchon and other grand food outlets.
The honey flavour is described by the experts as sweet and subtle, lacking any trace of exhaust fumes or the Métro underground smell that is a Paris signature.
The national bee-keeping body recently reported especially high mortality in the country near corn, sunflower and rapeseed fields. Apart from suffering from chemicals and predators, rural bees often die because they cannot fly the distances across big crop fields to find pollen, it said.. Bee deaths across Europe have been 30 to 35 percent higher than average since the 1980s, because of pesticides and other factors.
French national figures show that bees in urban areas produce on average about twice the honey as rural ones. Similar comparisons are reported from New York and other cities. French conurbations such as Lille and Lyons have also joined the bee rush. Lille has even created a post of deputy-mayor for bee-keeping.
So far no swarms have been known to attack the population but the Paris bee-boom has led to wild settlements in odd places. Jean Paucton, bee-master at the Opéra, recently reported colonies in Père Lachaise cemetery, a hospital and in the directors' room at the headquarters of the Société Générale bank.
Here we go with a summer episode in the saga of France versus Muslim dress. This one involves a 35-year-old French convert to Islam called Carole who was thrown out of a suburban swimming pool for wearing the head-to-toe swimsuit known as the "burkini".
Carole was on her third burkini outing to the town pool at Emerainville, in the eastern outskirts, when the chief lifeguard ordered her to leave. She was said to be breaking hygiene rules but everyone is casting the incident as another clash between fundamentalist Muslims and a state that has banned head-cover from schools and wants to curb face-covering.
Carole accused the pool of illegal discrimination and went straight to the police and the media. "Quite simply, this is segregation," she said. "I will fight to try to change things. And if I see that the battle is lost, I cannot rule out leaving France," she said [To watch her explanation, click on video picture here].
The police refused to accept the complaint on the grounds that the lifeguard was just enforcing the rules that apply in all French public pools. Women must wear swimsuits and men must wear brief trunks -- Speedos -- rather than shorts, which are said to be more likely to harbour bacteria. (American men are always uncomfortable with this longstanding regulation).
Carole, who was born in a traditional French family and converted to Islam at 17, said she had bought her attire on holiday in Dubai. The burkini, designed by Aheda Zanetti, a Lebanese-Australian, has lately become a hit in the Gulf and caused trouble in public pools in Europe and North America.
Despite the allusion to the Afghan burqa, with its mask, the swimsuit leaves the face uncovered. The body is clad in a track-suit-like tunic and coat and the head and neck are covered in a hijab in the form of a diver's helmet. "I thought that it could enable me to enjoy the pleasure of bathing without uncovering myself, as Islam recommends," she told le Parisien. "I just wanted to be able to swim in the pool with my children. I understand that it might shock people, but I am annoyed because I have been told that it is a political matter."
She also made the point that her outfit was no different from the Olympic swimmers who wear the new wrist-to-ankle slick suits. Pool officials say these are not allowed either.
The local authorities say no politics were involved. "The lady was almost fully dressed," Daniel Guillaume, head of local sports facilities, said on France-Inter radio today. "You wear a bathing suit and take a shower before entering the water."
Carole's incident was certainly viewed as political by the lawmakers who want new measures against face-covering by Muslim women and demands for gender-segregated sessions at pools and other sports facilities.
"Maybe you can see the woman's face in this ridiculous swim-suit, but it is obviously a provocation by a militant," said André Gerin, a Communist MP from the Rhone area. "These women wearing their camisoles in public want to mark their difference... Going straight to the police station is clear proof that there is a political project behind this outfit."
Gerin heads a 32-member parliamentary enquiry that opened last month amid great publicity to review ways of dealing with Muslim women who wear the face-covering burka or niqab in public. President Sarkozy stirred fundamentalist anger when he sided with the review, saying that such dress was not a symbol of faith but a sign of women's subservience and that it had "no place in France".
This drew the expected response from the extremists. "Yesterday it was the hijab and today, it is the niqab," said Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, leader of "Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" -- north Africa. "We will take revenge for the honour of our daughters and sisters against France and against its interests by every means at our disposal." That rather reinforced the French point that the body-covering dress is a male-enforced symbol of oppression.
The burkini has been making news around the world. Last year a Dutch swimming pool banned it on hygiene grounds, but it was accepted after intervention by the government. In Calgary, Canada, they approved the burkini and other long swimming gear, but only in the shallow end to ensure that it does not catch in vents.
France's mainstream Muslim leaders have not yet made any comment on the affair.
Diners in Paris may soon have the chance to taste a new local delicacy: le pavé de saumon Notre Dame.
The prospect of eating Parisian salmon has come closer with scientific findings that the fish that packed the Seine until the Middle Ages has made a healthy return to the capital after the clean-up of its water.
"There are more and more fish swimming up the Seine. This year the numbers have exceeded anything we could have imagined," Bernard Breton, Secretary-General the National Federation for Fishing, told Agence France-Presse. "I would not be surprised if we had passed the 1,000 mark."
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's office claimed a triumph for the Seine clean-up after the INRA, the state agricultural research institute, issued its new study on the Atlantic salmon which began appearing a few years ago. "Without any project to reintroduce fish, we see that several species of migratory fish, including salmon, have come back up the Seine," it said. "This is a sign of a very clear improvement in the quality of water in the river."
But Delanoe is not yet convinced that his stretch of Seine is ready for human consumption. Back in the 1980s, Jacques Chirac, the Mayor at the time, promised to take a plunge himself but there are there are still no plans for lifting the ban on human bathing. The levels of pesticide, lead and bacteria remain too high.
While the salmon frolic, patrons of Paris Plage, the summer "beach" on the Right Bank, are warned to stay clear of the waters in which King Louis XIV used to take his mistress for moonlight dips. The lawbreakers who jump into the dangerous currents of the Seine on hot nights are taken to hospital when fished out by police.
The return of up to 30 species of fish in the past three decades has encouraged a fishing boom in mid-Paris. The world angling championship was staged in central Paris in 2001. At weekends on the Ile Saint Louis, opposite Notre Dame [top picture: in 1935], and the Left Bank by the Eiffel tower, crowds of anglers cast for bream, carp, pikeperch, catfish, sea-trout and other types. Common sense rather than any legal ban discourages any thought of cooking the cacth. "They do not eat them," Stephanie Hofer of the fishing federation told me. "They throw them back, but that's what 80 percent of the anglers in France do."
Very few salmon have been hooked by the registered 7,000 Paris area fishermen and uncounted free-lance "street anglers". The return of salmon was spectacularly illustrated last October by the catch of a seven kilogramme (15.4 pounds) salmon at Suresnes on the western, downstream, edge of the capital [picture below]. But that was a shrimp beside the two-metre, 63 kilogramme silurus, or giant catfish, that was recently caught near the Eiffel Tower. 
The INRA reported the biographies of seven salmon which it sampled from the river that was not long ago connected to the sewers that Victor Hugo called in les Miserables "a world of slime without human form".
From genetic samples and age measurements, all the Atlantic salmon were found to have swum up, or back up, the Seine via the Channel estuary at le Havre after months or years in the sea. Some were born in French rivers and others farther afield. The researchers said the return of salmon was significant because the fish are "bio-indicators" -- creatures whose choice of habitat indicated a healthy environment.
Big efforts have been made since the 1970s to end the fouling of the Seine with organic pollution and chemical run-off from industry and agriculture that had evicted most fish species by the 1920s. Fish have been given routes around dams and canal locks, the surface is routinely cleaned and there is a system that pumps oxygen into fish-friendly stretches when flood waters run off into the river.
But the modern Seine remains a far cry from the Mediaeval days when witnesses described dolphins and even whales making their way up to Paris from Rouen. As late as the Victorian era, a standard joke to Seine anglers was: "Have you seen the whale?"
That line was quoted in a New York Times article from November 1875 that I found while looking at this story today. Its correspondent described thousands of amateur and professional fishermen "from all classes of society" thronging the banks, bridges and boats using rods and nets to hoist their catch. Parisians in those days ate the fish in the belief that the sewers, brand new at the time, did a good job at keeping them clean.
While everyone has been commemorating the moon landing this month, aviators in France and Britain have been remembering another epic feat -- the world's first air journey. It was 100 years ago today that Louis Blériot flew his flimsy flying machine across the English from Calais to Dover.
A flotilla of ancient and modern planes began crossing the Dover Strait at dawn today in salute to the great pioneer. The fleet today includes original monoplanes built by Blériot and replicas as well as some 130 microlight aircraft and the Red Arrows and la Patrouille de France display teams. Watch Blériot's historic take-off at the end of this post.
The festivities, which include a postage stamp issue in France and exhibitions in Paris, Calais, Dover and Cambrai, the pilot's birthplace, are reminding younger generations how sensational at the time was the landing of the frail wood and fabric 'Blériot XI'. Among other things, it shocked Britain into realizing that foreign invaders could just hop over its glorious navy. [below: a Bleriot XI in flight]
"Flying machines are no longer toys and dreams, they are established fact," said David Lloyd George, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, after reading The Times' breathless cover of the historic flight. "The possibilities of this new system of locomotion are infinite, I feel as a Britisher, rather ashamed that we are so completely out of it." [Read the original Times reports here]
Lord Northcliffe, the press baron who had offered a 1,000 pound prize for the first Channel flight, told his Daily Mail to proclaim: "Britain is no longer an island".
The secretive Wright Brothers had achieved the first aeroplane flight in North Carolina in 1903, but aviation was seen as an eccentric pastime pursued mainly by French sportsmen until Blériot, a 37-year-old engineer, crash-landed on the Northfall meadow by Dover Castle. Four years later, the Royal Navy bought Blériots to found Britain's first military squadron and his SPAD biplanes became the favourite mount for the allied aces of the Great War.
"The crossing was the starting point of modern aviation," Louis Blériot, the pioneer's 64-year-old grandson, said this week. "He was an exceptional character whose trail is still being followed. Today's aircraft are still handled the same way: a rudder bar under the pilot’s feet, and a stick to control the aircraft."
The shy and mournful-looking Blériot, was an unlikely hero. He was an unglamorous business-man inventor. The Belle Epoque playboy-aviators mocked him for crashing 38 times as he developed his machine through trial and error. At one point he even called in the aging Gustave Eiffel, who knew little of aeronautics, to design him a steel propellor -- which he abandoned.
Blériot's triumph was so unexpected that The Times man who reported his daybreak take-off suspected foul play against Hubert Latham, his rival and hot favourite for the prize. Latham, a languid playboy with a British grandfather, had ditched in an attempt earlier in the week and was to try again that dawn. His mechanic failed to wake him, "robbing" him of his triumph, wrote The Times' correspondent. "Incredible as it may sound, M. Levavasseur allowed M Latham to sleep on. ...and the thing ended in M Latham's not being aroused until 5 o'clock, 20 minutes after M Blériot had actually left the coast of France."
Monsieur Blériot did not make things easy for himself. He was a non-swimmer, he was on crutches because of a recent crash and he had no compass. He reluctantly took his chance and limped out before the crowd as dawn came up. "I admit it, I absolutely did not feel like doing it," he said after his 37-minute journey. You can clearly see his unhappy expression in the film.
Everything went well until he ran into fog and lost sight of the Kent coast. "The flight continued for about 10 minutes with nothing in sight but sea and sky," he told another Times man, who claimed to be the first reporter to greet him at Dover. "It was the most anxious part of the flight... I had no fear for the machine, which was travelling beautifully. At last I sighted the outline of the land, but I was then going in the direction of Deal."
Arriving by Dover, he spotted a French journalist waving a big tricolor to mark the landing spot, cut his motor at 60 feet and thudded onto the hillside, breaking his undercarriage and propellor. When the customs officer arrived, he only had forms for boats, so Blériot was registered as the master of a yacht. Land and wireless telegraph splashed the news around the world, Blériot was feted in London and Paris and his monoplane went on show in Selfridges department store.
The aviator received the world's first pilot's licence from the Aéroclub de France. He retreated from the limelight and went on to mass-produce his invention. The Blériot XI, of which some 900 were sold, became the standard aerial runabout.
Blériot's original cross-Channel plane has been at the Paris Musée des Arts et Metiers since 1909 and it is the heart of a special exhibition which runs until October. Elegant and fragile but a little forlorn-looking, it hangs from the ceiling of the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, on the museum grounds. They have even built a simulator on which you can try to fly a Bleriot XI. I had a go and found it not at all easy. The plane is very unstable. Like the Wright Brothers' Flyer, the plane is banked by pulling on a cable that warps the wings, rather than moving ailerons.
Bleriot took 37 minutes for his flight. My little plane does the same short crossing in about 10, but it is still pulled along by a single wooden propellor, like his was. If it stops, you swim. Flying out over the coast, I always think of old Louis and his magnificent achievement.
The Paris Plage people knew what they were doing when they put that retro bathing-beauty on this year's beach poster. Body-covering, single-piece swimsuits are indeed the fashion, but for want of real news, le Parisien decided to fill a page yesterday under the headline: "Le monokini, c'est fini!."
Le Parisien's story was over a decade out of date, but that did not prevent foreign media from lifting it as a suitable silly season item. Topless bathing in reality ceased to be fashionable well before the fin of the last siècle and for years few young women have been venturing onto a beach in just their bikini bottom -- like their mothers did and sometimes still do. A sunbather called Nathalie at Bornes-les-Mimosas, a very touristy spot on the Mediterranean, knowledgably informed le Parisien that only two percent of women now went topless there.
A tiny band of feminists still campaigns for the right to go topless in city pools but their cause seems more like 1970s-80s nostalgia. They are competing with Muslim campaigners demanding women's only swimming sessions. Most topless beach-goers nowadays are their 40s, 50s and 60s. An Ifop poll on nudity last April found that French women between 50 and 64 were by far the least pudique -- modest -- about their bodies (The survey was commissioned by Tena, a company that makes products for urinary incontinence.)
The topless phenomenon, which France pioneered in the late 1960s, was always about female equality and women's freedom to be natural. The fashion was bitterly resisted at first by the guardians of morality. There is an amusing account of the period in a new history of France's bathing culture by Christophe Granger, a sociologist.
Newspaper editorialists said children were shocked by naked breasts. "People were hostile and treated the monokini bathers as prostitutes while their advocates called the critics prudes...After a decade of discord, L'Express Magazine closed the debate [in the late 1970s] with a definitive survey under the headline: "Naked breasts: the French are for them!" Granger says.
Granger's book, Les Corps d'Ete, is largely about the furious fight in the 1920s and 30s between the authorities and bathers over the right to show their bare limbs at all. "The old Christian bouregoisie led a moral crusade against these new summer practices. The conflicts were sometimes very violent, with the beating and stoning of women bathers. They accused them of holding public orgies" he says.
I suspect that many women were never comfortable with the topless fashion even though they practised it. As a man, I always found it unnerving. The pretense was that the monokini was not a sexual display. You were supposed to act as thought you didn't notice that the mother of your son's friend, with whom you usually shook hands politely at the school gate, just happened to be naked from the waist up (to mention an episode I remember from the 1990s).
Jean-Claude Kauffman, a sociologist, defined this the other day: "The male on the beach was required to have a completely blank expression, a display of lack of interest, navigating around the beachscape without avoiding the naked breasts nor staring at them."
The demise of the monokini fashion was put down to a return to modesty. I'd say it was more a return to common sense.
France is deep in recession and national debt stands at 21,000 euros per citizen, so it was good to hear that President Sarkozy has cut his spending on flowers by 17 percent. Before you cheer, his palace (where he does not live) still managed to spend 706 euros every day last year freshening up his floral arrangements.
Light was shed on the high-spending ways of the Elysée Palace a few days ago when Philippe Séguin, the chief state auditor, returned the first ever public account of the spending of a French ruler. Sarkozy asked for the inspection as part of the "transparency" that he advocates in public life. That was quite a shift from the tradition until 2007 under which money was no object for the monarch and his entourage.
Séguin gave Sarkozy credit for the effort. The President has even repaid 14,000 euros of personal expenses that were mistakenly paid by the tax-payer. There is no chance that we will learn what was bought because that remains secret. Séguin said that Sarkozy, whose presidential establishment costs more than 112 million euros a year, could nevertheless do better. The palace still wastes tons of tax-payer's money.
The flowers are among many items that should be trimmed, said Séguin, who heads the Court of Accounts. The palace pays a fortune on food and drink, buying from faithful suppliers rather than seeking competitive bids. The palace, which employs 950 staff, even paid 3,000 euros last year in penalties for failing to pay electricity bills on time. Then there are the million or two spent annually on keeping up presidential chateaux like Rambouillet, Marly-le-Roi and Souzy-le-Briche -- that the Sarkozys never use.
The auditors also put their finger on another oddity -- the hidden cost of Sarkozy's much-reported cost-cutting gesture of taking scheduled airlines on private trips. He took Air France to New York last weekend, for example, for Carla Bruni's appearance at the Mandela concert. When Sarkozy does this, the state pays for his entourage of about 10 to travel with him in first or business class. Then on top of that a presidential jet flies empty to the destination to stand by in case the President needs to return in emergency.
The auditors say Sarkozy should save public money by taking his holidays on the state planes. He has just spend millions expanding the fleet to include two of the latest three-engined Dassault Falcon business jets and -- his new pride and joy -- an A330 Airbus. 
As soon as he saw George W. Bush's big blue Air Force One, a Boeing 747 jumbo, Sarkozy decided that his elderly A-319 Airbus airliner did not match his standing. Air Sarko, as it's called, is actually an 11-year-old former airliner [pictured left in its earlier life], but it is now being fitted out in total secrecy in Toulouse. There are rumours of onboard swimming pools, gyms, a studio for Carla, cinemas and so on, but I gather that the flying Elysée will just be equipped with ordinary conference rooms, presidential apartments, bathrooms, a hospital and so on. At 20,000 euros per flying hour, the cost will be double that of the plane that it is replacing (at least it will have new pitot tubes). There is an additional snag with Air Sarko. The plane, which in normal form can carry 250 passengers, is too heavy for the runway at Villacoublay, the Air Force base which is home to the government fleet. It will have to live at Orly or Roissy (CDG) airports.
Lavish transport is by no means a presidential preserve. As we've mentioned here before, a chauffeured limousine is a standard perk right across the ruling class, from ministers and high functionaries to provincial mayors and county bosses. There is a nice little exposé out today on the waste that goes into keeping up the fleet of big Peugeots, Citroens and Renaults.
Auto Plus, a motoring weekly, did a bit of spying. It found, for example, that the National Assembly -- or rather the tax payer -- keeps a fleet of 65 big top-of-the-line cars with drivers at the disposal of its members 24 hours a day. They sit idle for much of the time. It also found that ministry drivers wash their masters' cars daily at commercial sites -- even if they are not dirty -- because they earn free gifts with loyalty points.
Earlier this month when Sarkozy appointed his friend Brice Hortefeux Interior Minister, the new man ordered two new luxury Citroen C6s for himself at a cost of 100,000 euros. He did not care to be driven around in the existing pair of identical Citroen C6s that were used by his predecessor, Michèle Alliot-Marie. It's only too easy to go on citing examples. As we've often noted, such tales of excess cause few waves in France. A certain train de vie -- style of life -- is deemed normal for those in power.
 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.
Paris is at its most glorious on the July 14 holiday when France displays its military might, with the forces marching, driving and flying down the Champs Elysées to salute President Sarkozy on the Place de la Concorde.
No other nation puts on such a splendid display any more. The setting is sumptuous -- helped today by summer sunshine. From the breastplates and plumes of the mounted Garde Républicaine to the slow-marching Légion Etrangère, you get a sense of the pride that Napoleon must have felt watching his Grande Armée.
Memories of empire were surely in Sarkozy's mind as he surveyed the ceremony, which felt all the more old-world this year because 400 dress-uniformed Indian troops led the procession, their arms swinging in British style.
The President's quest for grandeur is the talk of the town after an astonishingly servile TV broadcast in his honour last night. When Sarkozy took over two years ago, he did away with what he called the stuffy ritual of the Bastille Day lunchtime interview. Presidents Chirac and Mitterrand used the moment to commune in a regal way with their citizens from the Elysée Palace terrace.
Last night we were offered a supposed intimate portrait of Sarkozy, in which the monarch deigned to talk about his life and ambitions. The recorded programme, part of a celebrity profile series called A visage découvert, was so uncritically fulsome in its depiction of the great man, that we thought at first that it was a joke by France TV. The state network has fallen foul of the President lately for lack of respect, so perhaps this was a satire in the manner of North Korean television.
Watch the start of the show below. Two France Television journalists stroll in the Elysée garden, reviewing the destiny of a French sovereign who has dazzled the world with his vision, energy and statesmanship. Tony Blair, Angela Merkel and Gordon Brown, were among those hauled in to pay tribute to his noble person.
As a young man, Nicolas Sarkozy sensed that he was destined to lead France and he set high goals for himself and his country, we learnt. His talents amazed all those whose paths crossed with his. He inspires those around him them with his energy and "the high demands he imposes on himself." He single-handedly restored faith in Europe with his Presidency of the Union last year. "I think in six months Nicolas Sarkozy aquired a veritable international dimension. And the situation was not an easy one," said one of the two obsequious presenters. The other retorted: "As the proverb says, it is in difficult times that men reveal themselves." It was how Soviet television used to describe Leonid Brezhnev -- or how BBC commentators talk of the Queen on state occasions.
A "biopic worthy of Lady Diana," one blogging TV critic calls it today. Telerama:fr, the site of the leftish entertainment weekly, imagined questions that Sarkozy's interviewers would have liked to put. "Sublime President, your most Serene Highness, I love your tie. May I touch it with my finger tips?"
The Socialist Party has denounced the show as proof that Sarkozy has turned the state TV channels into his personal tool. Not even the late President de Gaulle got away with such stuff, it said. Benoît Hamon, the party spokesman, called it "hagiography worthy of a banana republic." "Democratic debate was totally abandoned in favour of a pile of worship that used, word-for-word, the political propaganda of the President."
All good fun. Back to the fête nationale. The traditional fireman's ball is enjoying a big revival. There have been over a dozen around Paris last night and tonight. People were dancing at the caserne des pompiers near my place until about four this morning.
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.
The trial of the "gang of barbarians" has finally ended, leaving the victim's family bitter. This, you may recall, was the case of the anti-semitic kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old assistant in a mobile phone store. The affair was so revolting that it was barely done justice by the usual media clichés about the 'banality of evil' and a 'horrific crime that shocked France'.
Halimi was held for three weeks in 2006 on an ethnic suburban housing estate by a loose gang headed by Youssouf Fofana, a swaggering young thug who claims to be a devout Muslim and who styles himself "the brain of the barbarians" [trial sketch above from LePoint.fr]. Halimi was found dying by a railway track after he had been dumped there alive and set alight. As expected, Fofana, 28, who was born in the Ivory Coast, received a life sentence with 22 years minimum before release. He expressed no remorse and displayed contempt for the court throughout the proceedings. He smirked at Halimi's mother Ruth and repeatedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and at one point threw shoes at lawyers.
What was so appalling was that people on the estate at Bagneux, in the Hauts-de-Seine, knew that Halimi was being held for ransom in a vacant apartment and did nothing to stop it. The young man had been abducted after being lured on a date by a 17-year-old girl who was working for Fofana. Six previous targets had escaped his kidnap attempts. His idea was to "capture a Jew" and demand ransom because they supposedly had money and closeknit families who would pay. The horror was in the casual way that so many youngsters took part. This was seen to reflected the anti-semitism that prevails in the ghetto estates.
Twenty-four accomplices were convicted after a trial that was held with no media present because two of them had been under age at the time of the crime. The family and supporters are angry because of the relatively lenient sentences, ranging from six months' suspended to 18 years, against the supporting cast. They included the building caretaker who let Fofana use the flat and teenagers who took it in turn to guard the young prisoner, some of them torturing him. Yalda, the bait who charmed the shop-assistant into a date that doomed him, was given nine years, which means probable release in about two years. The father of one of the youths was given eight months prison for advising his son during Halimi's ordeal to keep quiet.
The jury, which in France includes the judge and two assistants, took 48 hours to set sentences that reflected the role of each of the young participants. Ruth Halimi has today called on the Justice Ministry to appeal against the sentences. If it does so, that will automatically mean a full retrial. "I regret that the court showed particular indulgence towards the people who aided and abetted Youssouf Fofana," said Francis Szpiner, the Halimi lawyer. He said the family was pleased that the jury had found the murder to have been anti-Semitic. "It was because he was Jewish that Ilan Halimi was killed and tortured. Noone can challenge this judicial truth."
The prosecution is unlikely to appeal because the sentences broadly followed the demands of Philippe Bilger, the chief assize court prosecutor. Bilger largely accepted the defence claims that many of Fofana's hired gaolers were kids who had acted under his influence without full awareness of the evil they were doing. Bilger is, by the way, an interesting character. He writes a well-read blog in which he talks in a surprisingly open and often critical way on current affairs, court cases, and the doings of the Sarkozy government.
 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.]
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.
![Frederic mitterrand[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201157147e63f970b-300wi "Frederic mitterrand[1]") We were right to expect Nicolas Sarkozy to dismiss Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister who was responsible for the President's ill-fated law against internet piracy. Sarkozy is about to stage one of his splashy personnel coups by replacing Albanel with a well-known character by the name of Mitterrand
The new Monsieur Culture is to be Frédéric Mitterrand, a versatile arts personality, gay activist and television presenter who was a nephew of the late President François Mitterrand. The younger Mitterrand, 61, has just made his first big mistake: he announced his elevation 24 hours before its proclamation by the palace. Sarkozy, who is recasting his government tomorrow, abhors subordinates who jump the gun.
[Wednesday update: Mitterrand's announcement forced the Elysée to name the new government last night. Here's the news from today's paper -- written five minutes after the announcement so it's a little sketchy.]
Because of the family name, Mitterrand's appointment to a plum Cabinet post has been depicted by some as a new ouverture, Sarkozy's term for his recruitment of people from the left. Mitterrand, whose late father Robert was the elder brother of the Socialist president, supported his uncle in the 1980s, when he was rising on state television as an arts presenter and commentator on European royalty. But in 1995, Frédéric threw in his lot with the then presidential candidate Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy's party boss who succeeded François Mitterrand that year. The new minister is seen by the lefty Paris cultural establishment as something of a dilettante and courtier. However Pierre Bergé, the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and senior figure in the left-leaning gay establishment applauded his appointment.
Sarkozy had already promoted Mitterrand and put many cultural noses out of joint only last year when he made him boss of Villa Médicis, the French cultural academy in Rome. The post is one of the jewels distributed by Republican monarchs to those who enjoy their favour. On TV today, Mitterrand called his new job "an exhilarating task and an honour." The Elysée Palace refused to confirm it. Asked if his late uncle would have approved his decision to join Sarkozy's government, he said: "Certainly!"
Mitterrand has enjoyed moderate success as a writer and film director and producer but he is a household face, at least for the older generation, from his television days in the 1980s and '90s. He is admired as one of the first campaigners for gay rights. His creation in 1977 of a Festival of Homosexual Film was brave for the times. In recent years he has been one of the bosses of Pink TV, France's first gay cable channel.
Mitterrand's gayness will not be a first in the Culture post, a job which in France commands much greater money (2.8 billion euros) and power than arts officials in other democracies. But his background as a homosexual rights campaigner is useful for Sarkozy's goal of diversity in his administration.
The President has been hinting at surprises in what he says will be his "second government". Among these will be the identify of the one or more new ethnic personalities who will inherit the diversity role played by Rachida Dati, the outgoing Justice Minister. It is assumed that François Fillon is staying on as Prime Minister, although Sarkozy's direct management of the state has cut the function down to a sort of chief of staff.
Sarkozy laid out his aims for this second phase of his presidency before a solemn ceremonial session of both houses of parliament in the Château de Versailles yesterday. Among other things, he condemned face-covering by Islamic women (see last post).
The grandiose exercise in self-promotion, made possible by Sarkozy's changes to the constitution last year, played into the hands of the left and media critics who depict him as a would-be successor to Louis XIV and France's other absolute monarchs. They might have a point, given that he is appointing as guardian of the Republic's culture a man who is a famous admirer of European monarchy and its rituals.
[Below: Sarkozy arriving at Versailles for his speech]
A hundred years ago, Louis Blériot, Louis Bréguet and other pioneers decided that aviation was more than a branch of the rising automobile industry. To boost their fledgling pastime, they staged the first 'International Exposition of Aerial Locomotion' at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Their successors opened the 100th anniversary edition of the Paris Air Show today at Le Bourget, the historic airport in the northern outskirts, but there is not much celebrating. Today's heavy rain is in tune with the glum mood at le Bourget, which alternates years with Farnborough, England, as the world's main industry gathering. Gleaming military and civilian jets, helicopters and other flying machines are all on show as usual, but spirits have been dampened by three factors -- the global slump, unease over the crash of Air France Flight 447 and the swine 'flu epidemic
Since airlines are expected to suffer a 12 percent drop in revenue this year, many are cancelling orders already placed with Airbus, Boeing and the other makers. The possible global 'flu pandemic is also raising doubts about the prospects for short-term recovery.
Also worrying the industry is the unexplained catastrophe that hit the Air France A330 Airbus with 228 souls on board over the Atlantic on its flight from Rio to Paris on June 1. No airline disaster for decades has had such implications for an industry that thought that it had licked the technical side of Blériot's sport.
A century since Blériot coaxed his flimsy 'flying motor cycle' across the sea from Calais to Dover [picture above], man has mastered the mechanics. With modern construction and infallible computers, modern airliners are not supposed to vanish in the night. "It is safe to say that the aviation community is still in some shock," Tom Enders, the Airbus chief executive, said last week.
David Learmount, safety editor of Flight International, said in today's Financial Times: "An event like this is the kind the aviation world hoped it would not see again because it involves a world-class carrier flying the latest generation of airliner and it occurred en route, not during take-off of landing in difficult weather."
The speculation over Flight 447 rages on as new shreds of evidence emerge. The original theory seems to hold. The jet broke up at altitude after suffering a rapid but not instantaneous, emergency. Debris was scattered over a very wide radius. Brazilian autopsies on the 44 bodies recovered so far show that the passengers and crew were not prepared for trouble and died either in the shock of the break-up and depressurization or on hitting the water. None drowned.
Suspicion still points at the mix of factors that emerged immediately after the accident. Speed readings (from the pitot tubes) were faulty, there was a problem with the electronic flight system and the aircraft went out of control, possibly stalling or overspeeding.
A US airline pilot and accident expert who reads this blog has sent me a copy of an Airbus bulletin to airlines issued after the Qantas A330 episode last October. It describes a sequence of electronic failures very similar to what AF447 appears to have suffered. The Australian crew were able to pull their jet out of its dive. Stewarts Law, a London-based aviation law firm dealing with the Qantas case, told me that there are parallels with AF447.
A new element in AF 447 is speculation over the vertical stabiliser (tail) which was found by the Brazilians last week [picture above]. Some engineers and other specialists are wondering if the tail might have sheered off because of a structural flaw as the plane was struggling for control in heavy turbulence. American Airlines Flight 557, an Airbus A300, crashed in Queens, New York, in 2001 after its tail broke off and fell into Jamaica bay. Excessive control inputs by a pilot were blamed.
If they don't find the black box flight recorders, the BEA, the French accident investigation bureau, may never be able to do more than conclude with a supposition. Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the BEA -- which is based at le Bourget -- warned last week that this might be the case. Either way, confidence in the Airbus and all high-tech airliners will be shaken.
You could sense the public anxiety at my humble level of flying this weekend. It was open day at Enghien-Moisselles, our little aerodrome which is two minutes flight north of Le Bourget. The Cessnas, Robins and other small planes were out on display on the grass. Visitors kept asking about pitot tubes. I showed the pitot on my old Robin Aiglon and explained that the plane can take off and fly even with the tube blocked and no airspeed registering. That's the advantage of having no computer. We have a few electronics though. The air force has stationed two uniformed air controllers in our club house to make sure, via radar transponder codes, that none of us strays into Le Bourget's space.
The public displays at le Bourget start this weekend. There is a lot to see, including a flying Blériot plane and a breathtaking performance by la Patrouille de France, the air force display team [below]. The Patrouille, which now includes one female pilot, has been absent from le Bourget since the 1970s
Nicolas Sarkozy has good reason for congratulating himself today. Despite his unpopularity, his UMP party arrived far ahead of the opposition in yesterday's voting for the European parliament.
The President's side certainly won but another star emerged as the surprise moral victor of the voting: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 64, the impish German leftist and hero of the 1968 Paris student revolt. His green group, called Ecologie Europe, almost beat the opposition Socialist party.
It's true that only 40 percent of voters bothered to turn out yesterday and that the left was fragmented by a proliferation of little parties, but it was still the first time for decades that France's governing party came so far ahead in a Euro-election.
The Socialists, the main opposition, were routed, winning only 17 percent compared with Sarkozy's 28 percent. "We are not yet credible," said Martine Aubry, the recently-appointed party leader, who was struggling to hold back her tears. "The Socialists need a major renovation." François Bayrou, the centrist would-be president, was humiliated with a mere 8 percent for his MoDem party.
Cohn-Bendit is the man of the day because of the surprise 16 percent third place of his green group. "Danny the Red" gave up revolution long ago, but his cheeky, subversive style charmed voters into supporting his motley band of green personalities. These included Eva Joly, a Norwegian-born French anti-corruption judge and José Bové, the anti-capitalist campaigner who became a celebrity when he demolished a McDonald's outlet in 1999. The Ecologists won 16 percent, which took them within a hair's breadth of beating the venerable Socialists. In Paris they demolished the Socialists, taking 27 percent, only two points behind Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement.
[Picture: Danny the Red in 1968]
![Cohn_bendit[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570d62bf4970b-300wi)
The greens benefited from the Socialists' collapse and Bayrou's manic vendetta against the person of Sarkozy. Bayrou helped Cohn-Bendit at the last minute with a personal attack on television in which he accused him of paedophile behaviour. The charge arose from an old controversy about a 1975 book in which Cohn-Bendit appeared to excuse sexual relationships between adults and children. That might have sunk a politician in another country, but French voters told pollsters that Bayrou damaged himself by looking vindictive.
The greens benefited from an energetic campaign and also from l'air du temps -- the positive mood over saving the planet. The greens are in tune with the idealism that drives politics more in France than, say, the Anglo-Saxon world. And they got an extraordinary election-eve boost from a sumptuous film on the plight of the planet that was shown on state television and released in cinemas on Friday night.
Called Home, the film is a 12-million euro homage to the earth that was shot over two years by Yann Arthus-Bertrand [below], a photographer who has made his name with spectacular nature reportage taken from helicopters and other aircraft. He is an admired celebrity in France and the film, financed by the PPR luxury fashion and retail group, was given huge publicity.
Likened by the media to Al Gore's film on climate change, Home was watched by eight million on television and by many more in open-air projections in Paris, London, New York and other cities. An edited version is online free here. It's worth watching for its beauty, though it has been criticised an over-aesthetic exercise in consciousness-raising. The spirit of the film was certainly well suited to Paris, with its big lefty bourgeois population.
Green voters said that they had been swayed by the film and Cohn-Bendit welcomed that this morning. "There is an environmentalist sensibility in France. It's possible that this sensibility was activated or re-activated by a film like Home," he said.
Others are crying foul. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader whose National Front managed a lowly 6 percent, said: "I want to stress the extravagant, scandalous film Home, which was made to support the candidacy of Cohn-Bendit and José Bové."
European elections do not change much and the environmentalists usually do better in them than in national polls. But Cohn-Bendit's green shock has badly shaken the Socialists and possibly set the scene for big change on the French left ahead of the next presidential vote in 2012. François Bayrou, who styles himself Sarkozy's chief opponent in 2012, may never recover.
[Below: scene from Home]
After Barack Obama's two days in France and Germany, Europe is getting a clearer idea of the way the new US president operates. Lesson number one: he keeps his distance.
In Germany on Friday Chancellor Angela Merkel was put out by Obama's decision to steer clear of Berlin during his flying visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In France, Obama's way of imposing his own schedule has been more striking -- to the embarrassment of President Sarkozy.
As I write on Sunday morning, the US imperial cavalcade (30 vehicles), has just driven up to the Pompidou Centre. The Obama family are visiting the modern art museum before the President flies home and leaves Michelle and the children to lunch with Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy and their four offspring at the Elysée Palace (There's an echo of Sarkozy's 2007 barbecue with George W Bush at Kennebunkport, when Cecilia Sarkozy, the President's then wife, failed to turn up.)
In 39 hours in France, staying in Paris a one-minute walk from the presidential palace, Obama was unable to find a moment to accept Sarkozy's repeated invitations to drop by. They had a 20 minute working lunch with their advisers yesterday in Normandy but Obama has also had time to take his family to Notre Dame cathedral and to dinner at La Fontaine de Mars, a good brasserie near the Eiffel tower (230 euros for their dinner in a private upstairs room, with water, no wine).
Sarkozy could not hide his disappointment when they appeared yesterday in Caen, but he has clearly got the message. Theirs is a good working relationship but Obama is not out to play buddy-buddy with Sarko or any other European leader (Gordon Brown of Britain included).
Obama was tackled on the coolness in Caen. He insisted, of course, that he was excellent friends with "President Sarkozy" (who called him Barack). They also performed a high-five handshake for the cameras [top picture]. "I have a very tough schedule and I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg Gardens," he replied. "I think it's very important to understand that good friends don't worry about the symbols and the conventions and the protocols."
Note that his leisure wish-list did not include the socialising with Carla and Nicolas that the French President had longed for. The Obama froideur was the top story in Le Journal du Dimanche this morning, above reports on yesterday's moving ceremonies at Omaha beach (which Gordon Brown pathetically mis-called 'Obama Beach' in his speech).
The Sarkozy administration is suffering from the unpleasant feeling of having been taken for a ride, reported the JDD. "Obama did not snub the French president in particular, but he refuses to play the game of familiarity with his peers," it said.
There is also the question of opposing personalities. "The American president is a man of reflection who turned himself into a man of action while Nicolas Sarkozy is above all famous for his spontaneity," said Simon Serfaty of the Washington International Institute for Strategic Studies.
[picture: The Obamas visit Notre Dame cathedral]
Watching the ceremonies yesterday, you got the impression that Obama was the host and Sarkozy the guest. That was certainly true in the commemoration in the Colleville US cemetery, by Omaha beach, which is US territory in perpetuity. But it also seemed to be the case in the prefecture (government headquarters) in Caen, where Sarkozy deferred to Obama. The US President led the press conference which, incidentially, the Americans did not want but the French insisted on.
I don't want to play the indignant Briton, but there was an impression of excessive American power, as usual in these events. There was of course the huge deployment in Paris and Normandy of manpower and carbon-gushing hardware -- jumbo jets, helicopters and the motorcade of behemoths -- much of it built by bankrupt General Motors. There was also the familiar impression in the ceremonies and media cover that the D-Day landings were an American affair in which Britain played a small supporting role (Brown's Obama beach didn't help). The France 2 main evening news last night referred to "the US landing in Normandy" and spent an inordinate amount of time covering Tom Hanks and his role in D-Day.
The impression of a purely Franco-American event was nicely summed up by Didier Porte, a humourist on France-Inter, the main public radio network. "The British just can't stop interfering with their disinformation. This is especially the case when they spread the rumour that they somehow took part in the Normandy landings in 1944. That's nonsense!"
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:
Come to Abu Dhabi, visit the Louvre and take a degree at the Sorbonne. That seemingly odd idea comes closer to reality tomorrow when President Sarkozy starts the construction of a Gulf branch of the Paris art museum.
The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo are not leaving town, but the world's biggest art museum and other leading state galleries are to lend hundreds of works to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The venture has already earned 400 million euros just for use of the brand name.
The franchising of the Louvre is part of a push to extend French influence and power in the Gulf region. Since 2006, the Sorbonne, the ancient university in the Paris Latin quarter, has been offering law and human sciences degrees at its own campus in Abu Dhabi.
The "Louvre of the Sands" as it has been dubbed, will be housed in a sumptuous, marble-domed palace, designed by Jean Nouvel, on Saadiyat Island [picture above]. Nearby, work is already under way on a 200 million dollar branch of the Guggenheim. New York's modern art museum, whose affliliate is to open in 2011, a year ahead of the local Louvre, is said to have charged only 60 million dollars for use of its name.
The French cultural drive, started under President Chirac, is being matched by a new strategic effort in the Gulf. Tomorrow, Sarkozy is also opening a naval and air force base in Abu Dhabi, which is France's first new military outpost overseas in half a century. The step follows the new defence doctrine that focuses on the "Mediterranean, Arab-Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean strategic axis." Paris wants to signal to Iran its defence alliance with the emirates. "If Iran were to attack, we would effectively be attacked also," said an Elysée Palace official.
On his second Abu Dhabi trip in just over a year, Sarkozy is desperately hoping to convince Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan to buy the Rafale jet fighter. The very expensive new-generation aircraft, built by Dassault and in service with the French military, has so far failed to win a single export order.
France's entry into the culture export business ran into resistance when it was announced two years ago. Luminaries of the state art world staged a campaign called "Museums are not for sale" and charged Henri Loyrette, the Louvre director, with betraying the national heritage.
But the complaints have subsided as the state museums realised the windfall that is coming their way from the 30-year deal which Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, estimates will eventually earn over a billion euros.
A new agency has been set up to coordinate loans for the first 10 years from many state museums, including the Versailles palace, the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou Modern Art centre and the new Quai Branly museum of primitive art. As well as going to the Louvre, the income will be spread around the state museums.
The Abu Dhabi affiliate is already starting its own collection. One of the first items is thought to be Piet Mondrian's 1922 "Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir", which sold for 21.7 million euros at sale of the collection of the late Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris in February. The Gulf museum is also said to have bought European mediaeval figures and tapestries.
Loyrette is being congratulated for his pioneering work raising commercial funding for the Louvre, which with over eight million annual visitors is by far the worlds most frequented museum. Though heavily subsidised, the Louvre was until recently short of cash for new works. Loyrette is also opening a Louvre branch in the northern French city of Lens and a Louvre section has been on show in an Atlanta museum.
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the last Culture Minister, said the break with the old, conservative habits of the Louvre was an unmitigated success. "No principle in our museum policy has been abandoned," he wrote on his blog. "The inalienable caracter of our national collections has even been reconfirmed. We have given a new impetus to our ability to make France shine in the world," he said. Actually, he was even more gushing in French. There's no real English translation for rayonnement... shining out to the world, as France likes to think it does.
To close on Abu Dhabi, here's a nice bit of French rayonnement: The Helicopter by Hermès. The Paris leathergoods house teamed up with Eurocopter, the French-based European helicopter makers, to produce this luxurious flying machine. The first one has just been delivered to Falcon Aviation Services of Abu Dhabi. Perfect for taking you out to the Louvre of the Sands. And at only six million euros, it's less than a third of the price of the Mondrian and a fraction of one Rafale.
AUSTRALIAN NOTE:
President Sarkozy, who travels more than any of his predecessors, is to make history in early August by dropping in on Australia, a nation never before visited by French leader. Sarko and Carla Bruni can expect a boisterous welcome on their 36-hour trip to Sydney after a Pacific summit in New Caledonia. "Bonjour mate, allez down under", said the not quite French headline in the Melbourne Age.
Australia enjoys a fine reputation in France as a distant home to exotic animals and people, rugby players and Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Mel Gibson. However France's image is not so good in Australia thanks to disputes over farm exports, the Iraq war and, most of all the nuclear tests that President Chirac carried out in the mid-1990s in the French Pacific. Before that, in 1985, President Mitterrand poisoned relations with the antipodes when French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. 
Australian anger has cooled in recent years. Australians have even come to France to teach the locals how to make "modern" wine and how to play rugby. At the weekend, one Australian newspaper chain described the Sarkozys as "the world's undisputed glamour political couple" -- a rank that neglects the Obamas and which I have never seen any French media bestow on them. My Adelaide sources tell me that Bruni's latest album of songs, a flop in France, has even been given a serious airing on a local radio station.
[Note for French readers, Oz is Australia]
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]
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]
![Bongo-sarkozy[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e20115707bdb46970b-400wi "Bongo-sarkozy[1]")
Here's a case that shows why President Sarkozy will be happy when he enacts his plan to get rid of the institution of the investigating judge. Françoise Desset, the senior juge d'instruction in the fraud division of the Paris courts, has just embarrassed the government by ordering an inquiry into the alleged corruption of three African leaders who are close to Paris.
Desset defied the request of the state prosecutor to halt proceedings and approved a case in which police investigators have already tracked tens of millions of euros of French-based assets belonging to the leaders of Gabon, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Equatorial Guinea. These include mansions, châteaux, Paris apartments, dozens of bank accounts and stables of Ferraris, Porsches and other luxury transport.
The three are Omar Bongo, president of Gabon since 1967, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, and Teodoro Obiang, ruler of Equatorial Guinea. Gabon and the Congo are former French colonies and Bongo, the doyen of African leaders, is an old acquaintance of Sarkozy and a valuable French asset. All three states are part of France-Afrique, the little club of states with close ties to Paris.
When Sarkozy won office in 2007, he promised an end to the cosy relations with unsavoury African clients and sketched a new era "free of the dross of the past." But the President soon found that he could not do without the favours of Bongo, France's oldest African fixer, and it was back to business as usual in France-Afrique.
Some of Gabon's oil wealth has been spread around French ruling circles for decades. Dr Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, was embarrassed in January when it was revealed that Bongo had recently paid him handsomely as a consultant on his health system. It is not just about money. For example, when Nelson Mandela was reluctant to grant a request by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for a meeting, Bongo stepped in and organised it. And if France needs to evacuate its citizens from the civil war in Chad, another France-Afrique nation, they will do it through Libreville, the Gabon capital.
The "case of the ill-gotten goods" was brought by the French branch of the anti-corruption watch-dog Transparency International. The group said that the three presidents’ holdings far surpassed their salaries and that corruption has deprived millions of education and medical care. "Every luxury apartment acquired in France means one hospital or school less in Libreville," said William Bourdon, the lawyer for Transparency. The group brought a suit against the three under the French offences of embezzlement of stolen public funds, money-laundering and breach of trust.
According to the police, Bongo and his family own 39 properties, including a villa near the Champs-Élysées, and they hold 70 bank accounts in France. The Sassou-Nguessos have 24 properties and 112 bank accounts. The Obiangs spent more than €4 million on four limousines in Paris.
The judge's decision has infuriated the Elysée Palace and the Foreign Ministry because it has shone a strong light on the continuing seamy side of France's African affairs. On the orders of the Justice Ministry, still run by Sarkozy's protegée Rachida Dati, the prosecutors have filed an appeal. This has halted the inquiry for the time being.
The affair may end there, but damage has been done. In trying to kill the investigation, Sarkozy is certainly behaving no diffferently than pragmatic leaders in other democracies when realpolitik prevails over commitments to ethical foreign policy. But his action conflicts with his promise of a break with the sleazy old ways in Africa. The Transparency lawyer rubbed in the point. “An appeal aimed at putting a lid on this investigation would make a mockery of President Sarkozy’s commitments at the G20 against tax havens, financial crime and international fraud," he said.
Lawyers for the African leaders say that they are victims of a vendetta and that their affairs have nothing to do with French justice. They wonder why investigators are not bothering with the Gulf families which have been buying up chunks of the Champs Elysées and mansions in western Paris.
My point about investigating judges is that this type of inquiry would never have opened under the new system that Sarkozy aims to introduce. This will abolish the juges d'instruction, the independent investigators founded two centuries ago under Napoleon Bonaparte. Some of the judges have in recent decades made life difficult for the ruling classes, exposing corruption in the political and business elite. Sarkozy plans to put investigation in the hands of prosecutors. They report directly to the Justice Ministry and its political master.
[Below: Sarkozy making his case to sceptial juges d'instruction]
The personal drivers of the past two French Presidents have caused a stir in recent years with indiscreet memoirs that reported on their master's lurid private lives. The latest exercise in the drive-and-tell genre is by Carla Bruni's chauffeur-assistant.
But Franck Demules, known as Franky, offers a reversal of the usual sensation. While the civil servant chauffeurs of Presidents Miterrand and Chirac spilled the beans on their bosses' amorous antics, Demules describes life in the showbiz world of sex, drugs and rock n'roll while making France's première dame sound like a saint.
Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, both former lovers, feature among the stars in the biography of Demules, who has worked for the past decade as confidant, driver, personal assistant and fixer for Bruni. In Un Petit Tour en Enfer (A Little Trip in Hell) Demules, 43, a former actor and cocaine addict who spent time in prison for fraud, reveals no secrets but he offers a glimpse of life in a world far removed from the decorum of the Elysée palace. Bruni and Sarkozy, whom she met and married over the winter of 2007-8, emerge as saviours of the man who describes himself as "the queen's devoted musketeer".
Sarkozy called in Demules when he returned from a rehabilitation course in Canada last February and "in a kind way told me to think of the future." The President advised him to throw himself into work: "If you knew, Franck, how much effort I had to put in in order to get here," said Sarkozy.
Demules returned to the bottle and suffered depression last year after Bruni's marriage sidelined him as her minder-in-chief. Bruni signed him into a clinic near Paris on the recommendation of her friend Marianne Faithful, the British singer. She then proposed a New Year's stay in "her friend Eric Clapton's (rehab) centre in the Caribbean." His English was not good enough so he went to Quebec.
Demules, the victim of long-term sexual abuse as a child, describes how Carla and Valéeria, her actress sister, gave him lodging and work in the mid-1990s after his young wife had died of Aids. Soon Bruni had entrusted him with her credit card and her secrets, he writes. Among other things, the Brunis paid for the schooling of his daughter, now 19 and Carla helped him overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
Demules writes with affection for Raphael Enthoven, the philosopher who was Bruni's last partner and father of their son. He describes Endhoven's "ballsy" courage in a brawl which they had with two strangers in an underground car park. Bruni's entourage has a list of friends classed by order of importance. "Mick Jagger is God," says Demules. The chief Rolling Stone behaves like a perfect gentleman at Bruni's concerts, he says. He contrasts him with Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, who sweeps up with an entourage and demands movie-star treatment.
Serving Bruni has its tough moments, he says. One was taking Naomi Campbell shopping. On a visit to Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, the former supermodel was so fierce that no-one dared talk to her, he writes.
Demules describes the shock and disapproval among friends in the leftwing entourage when Bruni began her romance with France's defiantly rightwing president. "It was violent. You would have thought I was a traitor to the cause," he writes. Since then, former anti-Sarkozy members of the circle have been asking him to intervene for presidential favours.
Franky organised the President's first birthday party after his marriage. He says that he still feels uncomfortable working with the presidential body guards, all police officers. "At the beginning it stressed me. Even if you have nothing to feel guilty about, you are always a bit scared that you might have forgotten something," he writes.
Demules realised that his boss and the President were in love when he dropped her off in the rain at the Elysée one rainy afternoon in the zinter last year. The President telephoned him and invited him to drive in with his battered car and dog. "I was impressed. The president received me divinely, offering me sausage that he had brought back from Corsica."
Bruni has redeemed him, writes Demules. "Without Carla, some people would not have talked to me. I would have stayed the former junky whose wife died of Aids, the crazy, uncontrollable guy."
Bruni has given her blessing to the book, but warned him "they'll try to make it about me, but don't be pushed around." The premiere dame talked in the latest Paris Match about her attachment to her Franky. "When I got married I never imagined for a second that I would let him go. Even if I am now very protected, there is a heap of personal and intimate things that I do not dare ask of the palace personnel or the security officers."
![Lagarde_stewart[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201156f69fe95970c-400wi)
Paris is talking about the fine performance by Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show (Watch the Monday evening interview below). If you have only seen Lagarde inside France, it's an eye-opener. She is at ease, bantering in near perfect English, drawing applause when she says she had fired a few bankers because "they did a crappy job". Her advisers were initially nervous about exposing her to one of Stewart's comic grillings but she did well, batting off questions such as "Is America now more Socialist than France" and on France's debt to the US from the war.
Inside France, Lagarde, 53, has proved a liability to President Sarkozy. She is politically inept. Publicly, she seems stiff and out of touch and she is known as Christine Lagaffe because of her many verbal blunders. These have included telling the French last year that if motor fuel was too expensive they should just ride bicycles. As an outsider from the elite technocracy, she is flanked by junior ministers who run the financial machine. Lagarde is a non-politician who was brought into the government in 2005. She was humiliated last year by colleagues who said publicly that France needed a heavyweight Finance Minister. But a lot has changed since the slump set in last autumn. She has become an international star.
[May 4 update: Lagarde has just been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Read Tim Geithner's tribute to her in Time. Sarkozy is the only other French person on the list. Lagarde's nomination is ascribed in France entirely to the fact that she speaks good English]
Lagarde is the only member of the government who is at home in the Anglo-Saxon world. As such, she is invaluable to a President who, though an Americophile, is unable to construct a sentence in English. A former member of the French synchronized swimming team, Lagarde worked for 20 years in the USA as a lawyer with Baker & McKenzie, the Chicago-based firm. She was its international chairwoman when President Chirac recruited her as Trade Minister in 2005.
Lagarde does not just give a good impression in English, charming TV viewers. She is in her element in the world of internationl business and finance. When Lehman Brothers was collapsing last September, she was the only European Finance Minister called by Henry Paulson, the then Treasury Secretary. She knew him from his days with Goldman Sachs in Chicago.
Le Figaro, the newspaper closest to the Sarkozy court, carried a double-edged profile of her today, praising her for her new role as France's international face but noting her continuing low reputation with the Elysée Palace. A palace staffer told the paper: "She scores 100 percent for international relations. In explaining the economy she scores 30. That makes an average of 65."
While on the France-America theme, le Monde reported yesterday that Barack Obama has riposted over Sarkozy's claim that he was not up to speed on climate change. Obama pulled aside Jean-Louis Borloo, the Environment Minister, at a Washington conference and told him to tell Sarko that he was doing his homework and the next time they meet he will beat him on the subject.
[Click to watch Lagarde interview. For French readers here, Jon Stewart's satirical nightly news show is roughly equivalent to the Canal+ Grand Journal with a bit of Laurent Ruquier and Nicolas Canteloup thrown in.]
President Sarkozy is unveiling his vision of a grand new metropolitan Paris today. The idea is to break the barrier of the périphérique ring-road and sew together the dozens of separate towns that surround the relatively small capital city. Here's my preview in today's newspaper and I'll come back to Greater Paris after he announces it. In the meantime, let's salute the Louvre pyramid.
Paris is marking the 20th birthday of the high-tech glass and steel contraption that President Mitterrand planted in the courtyard of the world's most visited art museum. Back in the mid-1980s there was quite a shock when the Socialist president announced his scheme, designed by I.M.Pei, the Chinese-American architect. The idea was to use a car park as a startling new underground entrance that contrasted with old royal palace.
"You don't approach a palace by the basement," said Michel Guy, a former Culture minister who led the protests at the time. The press compared it to a Métro train entrance, a cheese cover and an upside-down funnel. Similar complaints greeted the new-fangled Eiffel tower in 1889. But the pyramid went on to become a monument in its own right.
Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's curator, said this week that his visitors cite three reasons for coming to the museum -- La Joconde (The Mona Lisa), the Venus de Milo and the pyramid. "The pyramid has become the only entrance, it marks a rite of passage, an initiation," said Loyrette. The only problem is that it needs to be expanded because it was designed for 4.5 million visitors a year and the museum is now receiving 8.5 million.
Loyrette indicated to le Parisien that he was a little dismayed that his customers are so obsessed by the Mona Lisa when there is so much else to see in his vast museum. Eighty percent of the 8.5 million troop straight to Leonardo's fragile glass-covered portrait. Visitors stay in the Louvre on average between two and four hours.
He also said that the art in the Louvre, which stops at 1850, is increasingly hard for people to understand -- compared with the impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay and other more modern work. "Visitors know less and less about mythology and history -- including those from wealthiest classes," he said.
The pyramid has stood up to time much better than most other recent architectural grands projets in the capital. The most loathed is the Montparnasse Tower, the black 600-feet tall obelisk that President Pompidou stuck in the middle of the low-rise capital in the early 1970s [picture below].
The online version of Le Figaro found that 35 percent of Parisians want to demolish the eyesore. The paper's readers are on the conservative and older side, but their hate list is roughly shared by many Parisians. Second most unpopular is the Beaugrenelle development, a collection of mid-rise towers and concrete that was thrown up on the Seine in the left-bank 15th arrondissement in the 1960s. The 1970s Pompidou modern art centre came third on the demolition list, which is a little surprising that its oil refinery look has lost its jarring novelty.
President Mitterrand's 1980s projects came next, starting with the bunker-like Bastille opera and the twin-slab National Library. Most Parisians I know would agree with that. But further down the demolition list came... the Louvre Pyramid. It is detested by 8.9 percent of the Figaro's 15,000 respondents. But I said they are conservative.
Here's a little good news for Britons, Americans and other nouveau pauvre visitors to France. Restaurant owners are going to promise the government today that they will trim their prices -- by up to 10 percent on some menus.
The deal, made in return for a hefty cut in value-added (sales) tax, should soften the blow in time for summer visitors who are not blessed with the strong euro currency. But don't expect too much. Many restaurateurs say that they need the two billion euro gift from the state just to survive the recession. Restaurants and bistros lost between 20 and 50 per cent of their income from January to March and many have already introduced more modest "crisis menus" to lure back patrons.
At Taillevent, a high temple of Parisien gastronomy, they are refusing any drop in the charge for their langoustine royales, golden frogs' legs and other items on their Michelin-starred menu. "I'm not dropping my prices because that would imply that they were not right to begin with, which is not the case and because the cost of the ingredients has risen steeply," Valérie Vrinat, the owner, told us.
President Sarkozy ordered the country's 200,000 eating establishments to pass on part of a drop from 19.6 percent to 5.5 percent in VAT which he won from the European Union last month. He secured the cut, expected to take effect from July 1, after Germany lifted a seven-year veto against a pledge originally made to the restaurant industry by President Chirac.
The tax bonus does not cover wine -- which accounts for 20 percent of restaurant income -- and the universal 15 percent service charge will continue to be applied -- along with the usual expectation of a tip beyond that.
Under pressure from the Government, the catering trade is to come up with a list of a dozen everyday items which will benefit from the full VAT cut. This should include the plat du jour, basic entrées (appetizers for Americans) and desserts plus coffee. "A customer should be able to order a meal which is entirely subject to the full VAT reduction," said Hervé Novelli, the Trade Minister. An ordinary Parisian dish of the day such as a steak-frites or pavé de saumon should drop from about 15 euros to 13.20.
Restaurant owners are also expected to use the tax benefit to recruit more staff and invest in their establishments. They will in return lose some earlier tax breaks. I'll certainly welcome more staff. One of the drawbacks eating out in France -- other than in grand establishments -- is the slow service that stems from over-worked personnel. That, of course, springs from the employers' burden of huge payroll charges and strict labour contracts (but let's not divert into the usual argument here).
At the small Bistrot d'Henri in the Saint-Germain-des-Près quarter, David Poulat, the owner, told us that he welcomed the scheme though he thought many in the trade would need the benefit simply to keep their heads above water in the recession. He expects to cut his plats du jour such as blanquette de veau and gigot et gratin de courgette from 14 to 12 euros. "But at the same time I might reduce the portions a little," he said. Lowering the price of à la carte items would be difficult. "I am not sure that it would attract customers anyway. People will not be swayed much by a difference of one or two euros."
He may not be right. plenty of people, not just sterling-earners like us, think twice before dining out modestly in Paris these days because l'addition will come in at about 80 euros for two with a bottle of basic wine. Between 60 and 70 euros changes the picture. And in case anyone is wondering, expense accounts are a fading memory in our business.
[Below, the other end of the scale: 564 euros for lunch for two at the three-star restaurant of the hotel Bristol, President Sarkozy's favourite eating place, opposite the Elysée palace. From chrisoscope.com, a Paris food critic's site.]
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 words 'grand old man' and 'larger than life' are often overused but they apply to Maurice Druon, a writer, historian, war hero and defender-in-chief of the French language, who has died just short of his 91st birthday.
Druon's name does not mean much to the younger French generation, except perhaps as a bit of a reactionary and champion of linguistic purity at home and abroad. One of his last public acts was a quixotic campaign in 2007 to have the European Union adopt French as its supreme language in official documents.
But Druon is remembered by older people as a dashing man of action and letters and a patriot who packed more into his life than most can imagine. Le Figaro headlined its report today Un Seigneur des Lettres - A Lord of Letters. Druon's old-fashioned views infuriated the leftwing artistic world. As President Pompidou's Culture Minister after the 1968 uprising, he told theatre directors that they had to "choose between subsidies and petrol bombs."
Like many journalists, I knew Druon and found him charming, feisty and funny. Right up to this year he would come to the phone to chat about his pet causes. It was fascinating to hear his accounts -- sometimes in fluent old-fashioned English -- of working for General de Gaulle in London in the early 1940s.
He had fought the invading Germans in 1940 as a young cavalry officer before joining de Gaulle's Free French headquarters. In London he broadcast to the Resistance on the BBC's French service. He also penned, with his uncle, the words to the Chant des Partisans, the song that became the anthem for the internal Resistance against the Nazis and which lives on in the collective memory [listen to Yves Montand's version below]. It began "Friend, do you hear the crows' black flight over our plains?." This morning, Luc Chatel, the minister who acts as government spokesman said: "Like all French people, I get a kind of shiver when I hear the 'Chant des Partisans,''. Druon marked the second half of the 20th century, he marked the history of France."
Druon managed to win the Goncourt prize -- the top literary award -- at the age of 30 in 1948 and in the 1950s wrote a best-selling seven-volume romantic history called Les Rois Maudits. It was turned into a popular television series. He was elected the youngest member of the Académie Francaise -- the official guardian of the language -- in 1966 and went on to serve two decades as its "perpetual secretary", its boss.
He stuck to tradition and enjoyed provocation. In 1980, he deplored the election of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar as the first woman in the 374-year-old Académie, imagining female members "knitting during meetings on the dictionary." He conducted a cheeky but vain campaign five years ago to block the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former President and would-be literary figure, to the Academy.
In late 2007, Druon led the charge when Time magazine published a notorious article that proclaimed French culture to be dead. His defence of French as a world language was good-natured. He was no narrow-minded nationalist. As an Anglophile, he was appreciated as a raconteur at British embassy dinners. "I love English," he said recently, "though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power."
In his campaign to persuade Brussels to adopt French as its senior language, he argued that the tongue of Montesquieu was the supreme vehicle for civilised discourse. "Italian is the language of song, German is good for philosophy and English for poetry, French is best at precision, it has a rigour to it," he said.
President Sarkozy, whose liberties with the French language must have appalled Druon, paid tribute to him as "a great writer, a great resistant, a great political figure, a great wordsmith and a great spirit." Libération, the leftwing paper, paid him a typical back-handed compliment. "It's the death of an old reactionary who was, at heart, very respectable."
Your writer
Charles Bremner is Paris Correspondent for The Times. He started out as a journalist in Russia and then moved to the United States. He has reported from all the continents but most enjoys observing the exotic tribe on Britain's doorstep. Though France is home, he avoids going native by offering what the locals call an "Anglo-Saxon" eye on their country.
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Don
do you have a publisher?
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:29:18
"They were rather brilliant though, weren't they? ..." Dot
Rather....
or as we'd say, very.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:28:34
"...a definite enhancement of their freedom to continue putting on weird plays reviling the System and the Guignol/Mr Punch who rules us at present...
....some of the actors were so manic they’d probably have performed for two drunks and the theatre mice.
With your sense of humor, I am releasing the subject of 'sex ponies' to you for further development.
Your description of the French arts subsidy scene sounds weirdly familiar.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:24:03
re various comment about Obama's writing, his absence from 20th anniversary ceremony, 'vast' cultural divide between Europe and U.S.
The Ceremony at the Wall made official what was known years ago: Europe is no longer the center of modern history as a focus of global ideological conflict. That ended with the fall of communism and the Wall.
So Obama, with roots in other cultures and aware of hegemonic aspirations to the East is focusing elsewhere.
Europe doesn't need "Daddy' U.S. anymore, so why should Obama try to hog the limelight at what was essentially a European event. The President of China wasn't there either.
Europe is a better, more stable place now as a result of that conflict and resolution. Now they must move on, seek cohesion, and protect themselves. In other words, be grown-ups.
Obama isn't unaware of the historic importance of European culture, and our debt to it. But it isn't all-important. The world is changing, immigrant by immigrant, and Euro-American cultural influence will wane. Obama knows this better than Europe. Just read today's headlines.
Europeans are so used to courting U.S. favor that anything Obama does that suggests he doesn't love them is blown way out of proportion. Get used to it, I'm afraid.
CalGirl has it right -- CB exaggerates language differences between U.S. and Britain.
Brits, though, can't understand certain Scottish and Irish dialects, and neither can we.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Nov 2009 19:04:17
They have, I read 30,000,000 un-insured an mostly unable to get adequate health cover.
The 30 million uninsured is a debated number. According to research, some of those uninsured are young people who do not want to spend the money on health insurance and illegal immigrants. I will agree that healthcare in the U.S. is expensive and some type of reform needs to be done. The fear is that what the Obama Administration and a Democratic controlled Congress will make health insurance so expensive to the point where a country of 300 million citizens will end up on government rolls. The only way to keep the budget under control with healthcare reform would be to levy taxes and when politicians start talking about paying taxes, there is a huge revolt amongst Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters. This is where the huge problem comes in for Obama when he promised not to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or less and also rein in the budget deficit during his campaign last year. There is no way either one of those things will happen if the healthcare reforms which are currently being discussed are passed.
Posted by: Yvonne | 14 Nov 2009 18:58:36
Sorry, fell asleep there. This debate is clearly not a trivial matter, but then I haven't been to Darfur yet
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 14 Nov 2009 17:37:41
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 14 Nov 2009 17:32:50
Badinter too. He was great as usual. (CB)
He was one of my idols before I became blasé. Someone once wrote about him: "la passion de la raison quand elle s'exaspère jusqu'aux déraisons de la passion."
which i'd twist into: thin as a twig, he burned with a passion for abstract reason that went beyond reason. His combat (death penalty) was not for the men he defended, but for the cause, only the cause.
Posted by: qwerty | 14 Nov 2009 17:32:03
DOT,
"there is a HUGE difference between Roger Hanin and Robert Badinter"
Thanks for the info - however, this rather obvious fact didn't escape me totally! :).
What they have in common with for instance Giscard and Pasqua and a few others less conspicuous is their age, i.e. over 80 (I am myself "only" 74 :). Therefore, I spoke of "putting on grass" :). Some of them are not able and/or willing to leave the limelight...
Regarding specifically Badinter, if you read again my first post, you will see that it was not at all derogatory.
However, as ROMAIN said, Badinter was Mitterrand's liege man - i.e. a politician, like a Sarkozy's liege man is also a politician, no more, no less...
I feel free to give my opinion about politics and politicians. However, doing so, I do not feel free "de taper sur la vie privée des hommes politiques", as this was exercised here on the blog regarding Sarkozy and his wife.
Regarding Simone Weil, I have the highest opinion of her - however NOT because she is "de droite". When she boxed the law about abortion and so on through parliament, she was submitted to much more abuse (sexist one of course included, not to say predominant) than Badinter with his "anti-head chopping" :) law.
BTW, Mme Weil wrote a few days ago a very convincing article (I think it was in Le Monde) to propose the candidature to the Presidency of Europe of Mrs. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former Latvian president. I think this is an excellent idea. First because if one believes Mme Weil - and I believe her :), the lady has all the required prerequisites. Second, because she is a woman - I am fed up with all the muscle flexing and chest drumming of male politicians. Third, the "small" European countries will understandably not endorse a British, French or German candidate. Fortunately, as far as I know, there are no French or German candidates :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Nov 2009 17:15:56
CB
"I'm not so clear on what he meant by destiny."
Mais le grand destin de la france bien sûr!
More seriously, I have had many French people speak to me about destiny. It's a very convenient argument as it cannot be controlled.
Posted by: rocket | 14 Nov 2009 17:08:15
Sorry, meant Lex, not Len. Still early here at the end of the world. Need coffee...
Posted by: calgirl | 14 Nov 2009 15:56:23
[Why do you always jump on insignificant details like this, and ignore big details like Gorbachev saying in 1985 that he would not impede the Eastern Europeans' desire for freedom? Posted by: Maggie | 12 Nov 2009 09:43:58 ]
Thanks Maggie for your “insight”.
Are you so naïve that when a politician says he will not impede some group’s desire for “freedom”, that is like a politician saying he/she believes in apple pie and motherhood? What politician is going to say, no matter how totalitarian they may be, that they are against “freedom”? NAME ONE ! (Of course you can’t.)
(1) You provide NO references (as I have done for you on ALL major points I have raised) that Gorbachev ever said in 1985 what you wrote he said. Give a reference!
(2) Even if he did, show me ONE action that Gorbachev believed in what he supposedly said. Actions speak louder than words (have you heard that expression before?).
Gorbachev was the Communist Party Secretary of the USSR in 1991, saying (IN FRONT OF AN INTERNATIONAL PRESS CONFERENCE in Moscow after the coup in 1991), that there could be only one political party in the Soviet Union and that party was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and quoting LENIN - documented mass murderer and founder of the Cheka - to justify it!). Does this sound like a man who believes in “freedom” for anyone if he is not interested in allowing his own people basic human rights like a multiparty system or non-collectivized farms? Gorbachev could hardly approve of multi-party systems in Eastern Europe and then turn around and not give it to his own people and he was clearly not interested in having it in the USSR. So WHY DO YOU BELIEVE HIM when he supposedly said [no proof given] he would not impede freedom in Eastern Europe???!!!
And, in any case, if he stood by passively as you have implied and Merkel has said, how does that make the man a “visionary” which was my MAIN point on this subject (along with the idea that Reagan fits the bill of “visionary” a lot more than Gorbachev does)?
Please (1) give me proof Gorbachev said what you say he did in 1985 and (2) why do you believe him? Thanks.
Posted by: Don | 14 Nov 2009 15:38:48
You're right David. The United States is a much more foreign place for Britons than they commonly think. It's not till you live there that you realise how different the mentality and culture is. I've always thought that the British islanders, despite their sense of family with the English-speaking world and familarity with US entertainment, are in many ways closer to the European continentals than the Americans. And as you no doubt know, as a Brit you have to change you way of speaking if you want to be understood in the States -- unless you want to be a charming oddity like Hugh Grant. CB]
Hmm, as a Brit with an Irish heritage living in France I'm caught between the two. In the US I find people who look like me, have names like mine and who share many interests and attitudes thus I'm very comfortable in that environment although I often find myself slipping into transatlantic language mode over there.
I was chastened to discover my cousins in NYC have a nickname for me - Austin Powers.
Posted by: John O'D | 14 Nov 2009 15:03:38
Badinter ... his "authorised" opinion... is nothing but crap.
Are you inhaling regression fumes?
Is everybody de Gauche a moron on law by definition? Only repression works. Only the right is right on Law?
The non-French people who come to France and have read any French writer from the Age of Enlightenment and see France as living Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité get a shock.
Sarkosi tickling the NF monster for vote is not disturbing and short-sighted.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 14 Nov 2009 14:38:25
Len, just a dispatch from here "at the end of the world"...
Traveled to Europe six times so far, I'm pretty sure I can even find it on a map, (on a good day, at least..
Not sure exactly what is meant by "intellectual influence from Asia" but there is certainly a large population of Asian peoples in California, and that influence can be seen and felt in any number of ways...
And for Charles - actually, I had the pleasure just yesterday afternoon of participating in an online webinar with an instructor who was most definitely a Brit. The class participants were a very diverse group of Americans from across the U.S. - including a few who were non-native speakers and still learning English. None of us had any trouble understanding our instructor, who did an excellent job of presenting the material. I will admit, however, to being momentarily confused by the way he pronounced the words 'status' and 'contribute', although by using context I quickly understood what he had said.
Posted by: calgirl | 14 Nov 2009 14:37:44
RICK:
[“Some of us would say that you don’t accept gold without becoming just a little more careful not to offend.”]
Certain rules of politeness do have to be respected, and are, scrupulously. For example, in your publicity material, interviews and programmes you absolutely have to mention and fulsomely thank the municipality/conseil général/region/ministry or whatever for their generous support. Funny how back-scratching can reach across political boundaries.
[“Besides isn’t the subsidised challenging of authority an odd concept?”]
I find it rather an appealing one! Revenge for parking tickets.
[“a reasonable solution: choose to perform exam set-texts.”]
Actually that’s an important part of the activities of the companies I mentioned, and of many others. They do a lot of performing and “animation” in schools, and in theatres for school audiences, and this tends inevitably to be safe, inoffensive material related to the syllabus, or to classic French authors (for example, check which author has the anniversary of his birth or death coming up, and do a play around him which you tout around the schools). Schools are seen as an important source of revenue (and at the same time, the funds received in the form of subsidies allow the company to charge the kids a very modest price for a ticket). The arty, anti-establishment stuff can be kept for festivals, tours and so on.
[“Do you in France have the gloomy tradition of not performing a play if the cast outnumbers the audience? Je parle en connaissance de cause.”]
I was once one of the six audience members present at a Paris theatre when exactly that happened. I don’t recall it ever actually happening with the companies I was involved with in the past, but then again, some of the actors were so manic they’d probably have performed for two drunks and the theatre mice.
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 14:32:43
Let me rephrase that last sentence.
They will abandon the veil and wrap themselves in the French flag only when the French flag has positive meaning for them, and that will not happen until it works for them.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 13:27:14
"I was taken aback when I read this paragraph in "Dreams from my Father". -- Judith
I was a little surprised as well, but I do understand what he is saying. I think it is a matter of the education that he had and that he went to high school in Hawaii.
I think that unless an American receives what is often referred to as a 'classical education,' is educated by Jesuits, or studies the traditional Liberal Arts in university, the gap between Europe and the US widens. I have never been to Hawaii, but I have noticed that when one gets as far west as California, Europe is but a dim memory, and there is no intellectual influence from Asia. The end of the world syndrome, I call it.
"Sarkozy repeated his view that Muslim women with covered faces have no place in France" -- CB
How exactly was that said in French? Sarkozy would be wise to separate the veil from the person, to attack the object itself, and not the person bearing the object. I think that 'Hate the sin, love the sinner' is the distinction that needs to be made, and he needs to explain -- in more abstract terms -- why the veil goes against everything that France stands for. Muslims in France will continue to embrace their traditions so long as those traditions work for them. They will abandon the veil and wrap themselves in the French flag only when the French flag actually has some meaning for them, and it will never have any meaning until it works for them.
In reality, I don't think Sarkozy is capable of that. He is using Muslims as pawns in his appeal to the FN and their sympathizers for his political ends. It is just too easy for the average politician to forgo
the 'enemy at the gate' to win votes.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 13:15:37
She hates France, then I'm sincerely happy she's living a better life in Germany or wherever else she thinks is better.
Posted by: Laurent | 14 Nov 2009 11:46:31
AZLOON:
If Katie Price did decide to "write" a book about sex ponies (great concept) she'd probably get a record-breaking advance.
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 10:55:06
"By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass…"
I have read this too, and I am astonished that so many Europeans are so astonished because when I go to the USA I find them so different. They speak the same language, they listen to the same music, see the same films, and I have seen so much of them in my life. In films, on television, on newsreels, I felt I knew them.
But I don’t.
And whether talking to them in Denver or by the Grand Canyon or in bars or restaurants what struck me most is how different they are, not how similar.
And, despite my imperfect French, my struggles with the bureaucracy, and all that goes with being British and living in France I am much more comfortable here than in the States.
Despite the Daily Mail et al we Europeans share a long, if troubled history, and somehow this history defines us differently and the American history defines them, again differently.
For example, I recently read a speech by an American DEMOCRATIC Senator worried that Obama’s Health bill might mean the government was competing with Private Insurance companies.
They have, I read 30,000,000 un-insured an mostly unable to get adequate health cover.
Now, I cannot imagine a European politician looking at it that way, can you?
[You're right David. The United States is a much more foreign place for Britons than they commonly think. It's not till you live there that you realise how different the mentality and culture is. I've always thought that the British islanders, despite their sense of family with the English-speaking world and familarity with US entertainment, are in many ways closer to the European continentals than the Americans. And as you no doubt know, as a Brit you have to change you way of speaking if you want to be understood in the States -- unless you want to be a charming oddity like Hugh Grant. CB]
Posted by: David Powell | 14 Nov 2009 10:42:10
DANIEL - there is a HUGE difference between Roger Hanin and Robert Badinter - the former is losing his marbles if recent TV appearances are anything to go by - and anyway he's hardly someone one consults on matters legal or poltical - the latter is as sharp and as clear (and as humane) a mind as you will find in France - however, he's "de gauche" (do I hear the click of a scratched record stuck in the same old blinkered groove somewhere?) and you cannot let pass an opportunity to lessen either his contribution to France's progress as a civilised society (yes, chopping heads off until 1981), or his talent in persuading the French OF THAT TIME (no easy task) that change was necessary.
BTW I hold Simone Weil in the same respect and admiration and she's "de droite" unless I'm very much mistaken.
Posted by: dot king | 14 Nov 2009 10:41:12
Thanks, LEO. Can you understand that I still have difficulties with the Republic’s all-embracing nature? Here is a perverse example: what right has the State to define ‘religions’ as opposed to ‘sects’? By all means, crush Scientology – but not by laying claim to theological competence (in either sense).
SEBASTIEN, may I remind you that France’s lynchpin ‘demi de mêlée’ went to finishing-school in England? Frankly, I couldn’t be more pleased and prouder. As for your response, you’ve outdone yourself. Fascinating!
If I permitted myself the slightest eyebrow twitch, it’d be over the theatre groups’ grants. Some of us would say that you don’t accept gold without becoming just a little more careful not to offend. Besides isn’t the subsidised challenging of authority an odd concept? Personally, I’d prefer ‘bums on seats’, and bank-loans, as well as grants... and found a reasonable solution: choose to perform exam set-texts. There’s a kind of theatre-making that comes close to vanity-publishing. Do you in France have the gloomy tradition of not performing a play if the cast outnumbers the audience? Je parle en connaissance de cause.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Nov 2009 10:33:08
"since I'm sure they consider that a hole is no place to keep your ass." -- ;D
LOL Thank you for your keen observations Ms. Milne.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 14 Nov 2009 04:55:31
"By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass…"
I was taken aback when I read this paragraph in "Dreams from my Father". I guess I had assumed that anyone who was studying law and, presumably even then planning a political career, would have felt a deep affinity for Europe because of the ideas and philosophy that came from there.
Surely Greece as the foundational location of democracy and Rome and England as the source of law would have meant something to such a person on an intellectual level. Also I would have expected him to cherish Europe for the political ideas of the Enlightenment which fed straight into the founding documents of the USA.
BTW I did enjoy the footage of the joint Sarkozy/Merkel wreath laying, particularly the visual sense of balance there was between the two. The really nice touch was the matching blue tie and necklace.
Posted by: Judith | 14 Nov 2009 03:05:16
Officer to Commander is the right progression in the Order of the legion of Honour. Eastwood isn't jumping a rank.
Posted by: Clemence de Roch | 14 Nov 2009 01:18:09
RICK:
["wouldn’t you agree that the State is much more involved in ‘la vie associative’ of France – clubs, societies, associations – than is the case in other countries?"]
'State' is perhaps a misleading term in this connection. Most Loi 1901 associations (and as you know, there are a vast number of them in France) have relatively little to do with central government and administration (the "state"). Such public aid as your average small association may be lucky enough to receive will most likely consist of a small grant from the local Mairie, or help in kind (the use of an office, a meeting room, the municipal printer, a storage facility etc). And that's as far as the ambitions of 90% of associations will extend. If they're more active and ambitious than that, they might move up a notch and also get some kind of subsidy from the Conseil général (the département); they'll feel they've really hit the big time if in addition they can extort something from the Conseil régional (the region). By that stage they might also have squeezed a few euros out of the Préfecture (which of course is the arm of central government), particularly if they're (say) organizing a festival or similar event with more than local appeal. Finally (jackpot!) a very small minority will get a subsidy from the relevant Ministry. The point is that all these different levels of financing come from sometimes competing entities which can be of quite different political complexions, and different again from the central government. It's not one vast oppressive apparatus single-mindedly bent on enslaving the local chess club. There are over 35000 elected mayors in France (far more than anywhere else in Europe), and they're not just answerable to the Préfet, but to their electorate.
[" Second, that this doesn’t raise an eyebrow?"]
Why should it? It's perceived as a desirable bridge between the various public powers and the different components of civil society. The former hand back tax money, and the latter complain that it wasn't enough.
["Third, that such intrusiveness by the State is a considerable restriction of the freedom of the individual?"]
Frankly, no. The Comité de salut public is definitely not involved. For instance, I can think of three rather left-wing theatre companies I know, who feel that the grants they've received after years of trying (and in two cases out of the three, they're grants from right-wing municipalities) are a definite enhancement of their freedom to continue putting on weird plays reviling the System and the Guignol/Mr Punch who rules us at present.
["forth, that this is an enduring feature of the corporatist state?"]
I suppose so. But as corporatist states go, France is some way behind such iron-fisted regimes as the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Austria, and so on. I see no very negative connotations here. One man's corporatism is another's solidarity, and la solidarité is still a quaintly important concept here (though it pales into insignificance compared to France's win against South Africa this evening).
Posted by: sebastien | 14 Nov 2009 00:35:32
Much as I welcomed Obama's great powers of oratory, recently I found myself easily distracted while listening to him. It could be that he is repeating himself too often. Until he decides firmly on troop numbers for Afghanistan, many will begin to wonder if the modern-day workload of a US president is beyond the capacity of any human being.
Posted by: christopher muir | 14 Nov 2009 00:15:51
DAISY,
In addition to crème brûlée, we have crème renversée, crème fouettée and last but not least, crème anglaise :). Of course, we have also many "crèmes de beauté anti-rides, anti-vieillissement" and so on :).
More seriously:
"Angie would be left out in the cold". No, I don't think so. As far as I know, France is still the first customer and the first supplier of Germany. Nobody on both sides of the river Rhine does want to get in serious trouble because of possible ego problems :).
PS:
Daisy, do you know what Voltaire wrote about Canada? "Le Canada, pays couvert de neiges et de glaces huit mois de l'année, habité par des barbares, des ours et des castors" :). Et toc! :)
(Source: Wikipedia and partly, memory :)
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 23:27:00
CHARLES,
I just heard a few words of Badinter's interview, i.e. the bit with féal and férule.
Communauté de culture: difficult to achieve with people hardly speaking French, and wanting to keep their own superior culture...
Of course, and fortunately, the latter is not always the case.
ROMAIN,
If I understand you well (I am afraid it is the case :), Badinter should also be "put on grass" - may be along with another elderly gentleman de gauche (the actor Roger Hanin, a brother-in-law of Mitterrand), still playing the role of a "fringant" :) commissaire de police although he is well over 80 years old (la retraite à 60 ans, tu parles! :). I just read that he made his last (?) film in February 2009.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 22:54:43
Using la Chapelle-en-Vercors for a sermon on national identity, or celebrating Armistice Day with the erstwhile adversary – each is symbolically incoherent. There are too many ironies for either venue to work.
Posted by: Rick | 13 Nov 2009 21:15:18
RICK,
Sebastien will probably respond but since your question was public let me give you my point of view:
First: Yes
Second: Yes
Third: No
Fo(u)rth: No
Posted by: Leo | 13 Nov 2009 21:15:00
RICK,
Sebastien will probably respond but since your question was public let me give you my point of view:
First: Yes
Second: Yes
Third: No
Fo(u)rth: No
Posted by: Leo | 13 Nov 2009 21:14:59
Badinter was nothing but Mitterand's liege man. And his "authorised" opinion, like that of his wife, is nothing but crap.
Posted by: Romain | 13 Nov 2009 20:44:27
SEBASTIEN, what a lovely piece you wrote on the State’s role as patron of the arts. All the same, wouldn’t you agree that the State is much more involved in ‘la vie associative’ of France – clubs, societies, associations – than is the case in other countries? Second, that this doesn’t raise an eyebrow? Third, that such intrusiveness by the State is a considerable restriction of the freedom of the individual? And forth, that this is an enduring feature of the corporatist state?
Posted by: Rick | 13 Nov 2009 20:34:52
DANIEL STROHL: as a general rule, perfumes aren't considered accessories, but I like those too. I also like french pastries, I don't drink but I heard the wines are great and brûlée the crème and I'm a happy girl. As the saying goes: Everyone loves France, no one likes the French :)
Posted by: Daisy | 13 Nov 2009 19:57:11
DAISY,
And perfume, I presume :).
Regarding scarves: if I remember well, CHARLES is an expert on expensive scarves :).
SURCOUF,
"on ne peut que se féliciter de la réconciliation"
Personne (moi le premier :) n'aurait osé imaginer cette cérémonie il y a quarante ans!
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 18:29:12
"by its local officers" (CHARLES)
I don't want to diminish your merits, Charles :), but Robert Badinter used this morning on TV a more pregnant word ("féal") than your neutral "officer". He used also the expression "sous la férule".
Unfortunately, I didn't hear distinctly the whole sentence; but he probably meant "les préfets étant les féaux sous la férule de Sarkozy, le suzerain" :). The word suzerain or souverain is of my own invention...
PS:
Les socialistes font donner la Vieille Garde :). En effet, M. Badinter est né en 1928, si j'en crois sa biographie que j'ai "googlée" ce matin.
Mr.Badinter is a highly respected former law professor. He was also for a few years "Garde des Sceaux" (Minister of Justice) under Mitterrand. He contributed strongly to the abolition of the death penalty in France.
[I listened to Badinter too. He was great as usual. He said that there was no need for Sarkozy's 200 questions on national identity because there were just three points. La communauté de culture, de valeurs et de destin. By valeurs, he meant la République and singled out laicité. On culture, he mentioned literature in particular and cited Proust and la Princesse de Clèves, Sarkozy's bête noire. I'm not so clear on what he meant by destiny. But his sagesse and élégance is very far removed from the style of our dear president. CB]
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 13 Nov 2009 18:20:24
L'idée de dissoudre une victoire qui nous a coûté si cher dans une commémoration très politiquement correcte et pleine de bons sentiments (Europe et compagnie) ne me plaisait pas trop. Mais je suis allé assister à la cérémonie à l'Arc de Triomphe et, quand même, c'était beau.
Quand je pense qu'il y a 70 ans la présence des Allemands sur cette même place était une chose terrible pour la France, et qu'aujourd'hui (enfin, avant hier) la foule a acclamé Angela Merkel... on ne peut que se féliciter de la réconciliation.
Qui ne doit cependant pas signifier faire servilement la cour aux Allemands pour mener des politiques communes et coopérer plus étroitement dans n'importe quel domaine.
Posted by: Surcouf | 13 Nov 2009 17:29:24
ROCKET: oh all the good kinds....handbags, scarves, shoes...
Posted by: Daisy | 13 Nov 2009 17:23:42
Arse may have also derived from the German Arsch as in Arschloch.
JOHNNY F
That's interesting too - trilingual similarities.
I forgot to mention that "ass" is also used to call someone a fool in English English, eg (to whom it may concern) "You stupid ass!"
An asshole would be, in English English, just a hole where you might keep your donkey - and I think that would be frowned upon and you'd have the RSPCA breathing down your neck, since I'm sure they consider that a hole is no place to keep your ass.
;D
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 17:06:00
AZLOON that is indeed the young Hugh Laurie, now famous as Dr House - the young Stephen Fry has been stateside too and has played the British psychologist in "Bones", not Sweets, the other one.
They were both a lot younger in that sketch, but still easily recognisable - I suppose it's easier if you see them younger first, working backwards means taking off wrinkles, kilos, grey hair etc . . .
They were rather brilliant though, weren't they?
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 16:58:26
Qwert
"Don't quite get why he's so cool toward Europe either. He couldn't spare 24 hours for Berlin but managed to find a week in his agenda for Asia. Pragmatic, I suppose. Shifting poles."
He pushed back Asia a couple of days because of the Ft. Hood shootings. He was in Texas honoring fallen soldiers while France and Germany were partying at the wall. Priorities non?
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:47:32
AZ
"Sack up, and stop your petulant whining Nicky. Why don't you make yourself that 'somebody' that others wish they hadn't fu*ked with? But do it Eastwood-style -- eyes open, mouth shut. Now that would be a noble 'Identity' France could emulate."
He's missing some inches to be a bad ass!
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:44:40
Daisy
"I'm an international nobody who is très fond of french accessories, can I get an award? "
What kind of French acessories?
Posted by: rocket | 13 Nov 2009 16:43:22
National Identity : bring le Tome de Rochefort out.
Do Re Mi
It'll do nicely to stand on to pin that decoration on Clint!
Posted by: dot king | 13 Nov 2009 16:39:00
I don't quite get why Obama didn't come to Berlin. The destruction of the Berlin wall was not just a European event, it symbolised the breaking up of communist totalitarianism.
Don't quite get why he's so cool toward Europe either. He couldn't spare 24 hours for Berlin but managed to find a week in his agenda for Asia. Pragmatic, I suppose. Shifting poles.
Posted by: qwerty | 13 Nov 2009 16:00:31
JF
I agree, you contribute well at this level. :) And happily join some of us who dwell permanently here.
On another string, I posted the term 'ass whuppin;' which is an Southern expression (Alabama Ass-Whuppin) which was/is generally used by parents toward children about the possible consequence of misbehavior, or general failure to comply. Or by the kids eux-memes after getting a 'good' one, e.g. "I am gonna give you a good ass-whuppin' or "I got a good ass-whuppin."
'Can of whoopass' is an adapted form of this older expression, preferred by the young.
The Laurie and Fry bit is tres drole, or very funny if you prefer the unaffected version. Is that the Laurie of House? He somehow doesn't look like that character. He must quite have quite un visage plastique.
Posted by: azloon | 13 Nov 2009 15:47:24
"Sarkozy repeated his view that Muslim women with covered faces have no place in France"...
...Thus implying that Muslim women with covered heads do.
That's like saying : it's outrageous that Nazis are able to walk down our streets waving large flags with svastikas.
While not mentioning the much larger numbers of Nazis already walking down the streets with a svastika pinned on their lapel.
You can't win a rational battle against islam (*). Either you crush it, or it crushes you.
____
(*) Assuming that Sarkozy is trying, which is highly doubtful when you see how hard his minister of Finance is working to ram "islamic finance" down France's throat).
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 13 Nov 2009 14:46:02
Sebastien
I was starting to get excited about the Katie Price book thinking I might find out more about 'sex ponies,' but then realized i'd missed your comma.
I did notice she'd written a book series called "Perfect Ponies' which again my twisted mind had turned into a possible prurient matter, i.e. her 'perfect' breast implants, but alas, again I was disappointed to discover this "pipol' person actually writes children's books, hopefully which don't deal with the subject of breast augmentation. (How to make your Barbie Doll a 36D using Play Dough).
Posted by: azloon | 13 Nov 2009 14:27:07