Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

French teachers strike again

We're enduring another day of the old French civil war today. About 45 percent of the country's 800,000 state school teachers have gone on strike, along with a smaller proportion of the five million civil service. Tens of thousands of high-school pupils are out marching with them [picture is from Nantes this afternoon].

This means that millions of parents have once again been forced to find someone to take care of their kids so they can go to work. Town councils allied to the government are offering basic supervision at schools but the majority with leftwing mayors -- including Paris -- are refusing to do so. Providing this minimum service amounts to strike-breaking, they say.

The cause of the "mobilisation", as the strikers and media call the stoppage, is the noble one of defending public service. President Sarkozy is accused of dismantling France's cherished services with cuts to teaching staff and civil service posts. Schools are to lose 11,000 teaching posts in the autumn. One in three civil servants is not being replaced on retirement from this year.

The classic battle lines have been drawn up. From the moral high ground, the left applauds resistance to the destruction of the national heritage and depicts its opponents as stooges of a brutal rightwing Government. Those on the other side, branded "rightwing" by the left, lament the obstructive, conservative reflexes of the state functionaries.

France elected Super Sarko to perform a radical cure a year ago, but on days like this you get the impression that nothing has changed.

Chatting up the revolution, French style

 

We saw the other day that the French Socialists, the main opposition party, are giving up their hope for revolution. But don't throw away the red flag yet. The past couple of days have seen the consecration of a new hero who has won millions of fans with his struggle to overthrow capitalism.

The star of the moment is Olivier Besancenot, the baby-faced Trotskyite who scored over four percent of the vote in last year's presidential election. Besancenot, 34, who works as a postman in the rich suburb of Neuilly, has made news with an appearance on French television's most consensual talk show, Vivement Dimanche. This is a Sunday ritual in which Michel Drucker, the dean of celebrity interviewers, sketches the life of his guest with soft questions and the help of musicians and friends of the subject. The media fuss was prompted by the supposed incongruity of the cosy talk host inviting a fire-breathing Trotskyite onto his red sofa for the ritual three-hour chat [video below]. 

In reality, there was nothing surprising. As we have noted here before, Besancenot is quite a standard French product: the loveable revolutionary. He was not even the first popular Trotskyite to be invited by Drucker. Arlette Laguiller, his grandmotherly rival, made it onto the show a decade ago. 

France enjoys the lazy, hazy days of May.

It feels like an August weekend in Paris today. The sun is blazing, as it has for the past week. The streets are largely empty except for tourists. Much of France is enjoying a fifth successive day off work.

President Sarkozy may preach the doctrine of "working more to earn more", but his country has seized the chance to enjoy what the headline in le Parisien newspaper called "Five days of happiness".  The long spring break has been made possible by the lucky timing of two public holidays for the nation that already enjoys more vacation days than any other. Last Thursday, May 8, was the holiday marking victory in World War Two and today is Pentecost (Whitsun in Britain). Friday was supposed to be a working day but schools in the Paris area and many other regions stayed shut  -- so people took the day off, enjoying what is known as le pont, or bridge.

Many even managed nearly 10 days because there was another unofficial pont on Friday May 2, after the May Day holiday fell on a Thursday. Half of France either took that Friday or last Friday or both, according to a poll.

French "news babe" gets married

One of the most popular posts on this blog featured Melissa Theuriau, the French television journalist whose good looks turned her into a global internet celebrity. So I feel it my duty to advise her fans that they may wish to adjust their fantasies. She got married yesterday.    

Theuriau, 29, who hosts a weekly news programme on the M6 channel, wed Jamel Debbouze, 33, a popular comedian-producer. in a village south of Versailles. They flew with showbusiness guests to Morocco to continue the party in Marrakesh.

Debbouze, the pint-sized French-Moroccan star of two Astérix films, Amélie and other hits, is by far the greater celebrity in France. Theuriau is barely a household name, but abroad the union will disappoint the multitude who have swooned over videos of her since she achieved cyber-fame.

"The beautiful French news anchor" as she is known to her American admirers, rocketed to celebrity after clips of her turned up on Youtube. She was not doing anything risqué, simply reading routine items on the pre-dawn news on the LCI cable channel.  Her "perfect beauty" won her the title of "TV's sexiest news anchor" in the online edition of the US Maxim magazine. The feat was impressive given that she was running against America's TV superstars and readers would have understood little that she said. Melissa-mania has led millions to click on her 150 videos on Youtube and she features on countless screensavers.

Theuriau, from Grenoble, has sought to retain an image as a serious journalist as host of "Forbidden Zone", her investigative show. She also presents "Two or three days with me", an M6 programme in which she invites a celebrity to visit a favourite city. In January, Gérard Depardieu broadcast with here from Tel Aviv.

Laments on the internet over her marriage have focused on her choice of groom. Debbouze, a subversive comedian from the ethnic estates (projects), plays the underdog. He is helped by his disadvantaged physique, which includes a paralysed arm. "With all the hot guys there are in France, she had to fall for this clown," Jorge, a reader grumbled on one celebrity site. "She wouldn't look at him if he wasn't loaded with money."

French state decorates Kylie Minogue, culture star

In the picture, you see the French Minister of Culture awarding a top state honour to an illustrious artist for high achievement and for enhancing the reach of the French creative arts. That's right, the decoration is being pinned on Kylie Minogue, the Australian pop singer.

The ceremony yesterday at the Ministry's headquarters in the sublime Palais Royal, beside the Louvre, is not as odd as it seems. Official France has long taken a paradoxical approach to "Anglo-Saxon" pop culture. It spends hundreds of millions of euros a year promoting the Gallic arts against the "commercial steamroller" of English-language entertainment. At the same time, it confers high-brow status on Anglo-Saxon stars and showers them with honours.

A stop by the Ministry of Culture, or even the Presidential Palace, has become almost routine for big names from Hollywood and showbiz when they drop into Paris or the Cannes festival. This is not a product  of the arrival last year of Nicolas Sarkozy, the pro-American President who prides himself on his friendship with Tom Cruise. It began around 1983, when the Socialist administration of François Mitterrand awarded Jerry Lewis, the comic, the Légion d'Honneur.

France revels in nostalgia for magic May '68

It is a little sad, but inevitable, that France's last revolt in the name of liberty should be reduced to a tin of expensive tea. Here it is, "May 68 -- a tea with the flavour of revolution" from Fauchon, the most luxurious food store in Paris

Forty years ago this weekend, the students of the Sorbonne university staged their joyous insurrection on the Paris Left Bank. Their carnival of slogans and barricades helped trigger the country's biggest general strike and briefly rattled the government of President Charles de Gaulle. The confused rebellion soon fizzled but "the events of May '68" marked a middle-class generation. Since they were the baby-boomers, no-one is allowed to forget it.

Now passing on power to their juniors, la génération de soixante-huit are enjoying a last hurrah, an orgy of nostalgia for the glorious upheaval in which, for a moment, it seemed they could remake the world. They may have given up Fidel Castro for Fauchon, but they are proud of their youthful ideals.

France celebrates its little old Citroen

Since it's spring in Paris and I'm taking a few days off, let me indulge in some four-wheeled nostalgia. You see it in the picture --  the Citroen Deux Chevaux.

It's 60 years since the rustic, quirky "deudeuche" was offered to an initially unimpressed public and it's 18 years since the last of five million left the assembly line. You don't see many around any more but the intrepid little 2CV is the object of fond memory for anyone lived those decades. If you're one of them and around Paris, it's worth a visit to the show that the Cité des Sciences has just opened in homage to the little car.

In the post-war years, Italy had its Fiat 500, Germany its VW Beetle and Britain, a little later, its Mini. The Gallic motoring icon was la deudeuche, or the deux-pattes (two paws), as the two-horse car was also nicknamed.  The 2CV Expo Show offers a parade of deudeuches through the decades, from the austere, grey-only 1948 model to the retro-chic "Charleston" of the 1980s. 

How not to end an affair, Paris-style.

Here is some advice to any man contemplating a love affair with a Parisian writer or artist: Don't.

You may find yourself held up to public ridicule and crucified in the name of art. It happened a couple of years ago to a banker who enjoyed a liaison with Christine Angot, a popular writer. She demolished him by recounting every gory detail of his performance in a book that became a best-seller. The unfortunate financier was not named, but everyone in his milieu knew who it was.

Now, Sophie Calle, a successful photographer and "installation artist", has gone one better by making a spectacular fool of a lover who dumped her with a callous, convoluted  e-mail. It ended with a breezy, "prenez soin de vous". This comes from the English "take care of yourself" and sounds odd in French and even colder with the distant "vous" rather than intimate "tu".

To sooth her pain and exact revenge, Calle, 54, took the pompous "mail de rupture" to 107 women in fields ranging from marriage counselling and anthropology to the police and the state intelligence service. She filmed and photographed their reactions and turned their funny and vitriolic verdicts into a show that became France's entry to the Venice Biennale of contemporary art last year. An expanded version has just opened to acclaim in the old reading room room of the National Library in Paris.

The experts include celebrities, such as Jeanne Moreau, the actress, Leila Shaheed, the Palestinian ambassador, and a bevy of performers and writers, including Christine Angot of course. Most at the time did not know the identity of "G", the apparently married lover, says Calle. But of course everyone in the intello-artsy world knows that he is a certain writer. He dedicated a new novel to Calle on the day that he broke up with her. Angot's contribution says: "The chorus that you have created around this letter is the chorus of death." Not every commentary is so serious. On one video screen, a (female) parrot eats a print-out of the e-mail.

When you enter the magnificent vaulted chamber and see a big projected video of a woman firing a sniper's rifle that you are in for an uncomfortable time.

Adieu to the revolution, says French left.

They took their time. Two decades since the collapse of Soviet communism, the French Socialist party has finally decided that it no longer wants a revolution. 

The main opposition party has put aside its feuding to agree on a new charter that for the first time commits it firmly to the market economy. It abandons the "hopes of revolution" that the Socialists proclaimed in their  last version -- drafted in 1990 after the Berlin wall had already disappeared.

Of course there are conditions, but they are shared by the centre-left across continental Europe. "Socialists support a market economy that is socially and environmentally responsible, a market economy that is regulated by public authority and through labour and management groups," it says.

Unusually, almost all the Socialists agree with the charter, which is the fifth since 1905, when the fledgling party committed itself to class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. It should be passed with no trouble at a June convention, ahead of blood-letting over a new leader next autumn.

The new mission statement is important because the party has clung, at least emotionally, to its old Marxist dogma.

Paris was not so bad under the Nazis, photos show

They thrust a piece of paper with a warning into your hand when you enter the latest photo exhibition at the Paris Historical Library. It tells you not to be fooled by the 270 images on display.

They are issuing the notice on the mayor's orders because the show has upset some visitors and media. No sex, violence or religion is involved. Its offence is showing Paris in world war two as a sunny place, where people got on happily with life along with their sympathique Nazi occupiers.

In the collective memory, Paris from 1940-44 was a grim, black-and-white place of hunger, roundups, humiliation and resistance. Films and books have in recent decades modified that cliché, which was promoted in the aftermath of the war. The picture series by André Zucca, a well-regarded French photographer, is breathtaking because it offers, as never before, a panorama of a Paris that was not suffering great hardship. The quantity and quality of the pictures has stirred old ghosts. The warning says that Zucca, a collaborator who worked for Signal, the Germany military magazine, avoided the "reality of occupation and its tragic aspects."

Paris looks eerily familiar in Zucca's chronicle of life under the Germans, which he shot for his own interest, not for publication.

French justice on trial over murder

France is about to be shaken by another gross miscarriage of justice. The so-called Neuilly Bridge murder is the latest in a series of cases that highlight flaws in the inquisitorial French justice system.  .

I have sat through many trials conducted under the modified Roman law system which prevails in much of Europe and the adversarial system of the English-speaking world. Both have merits and I am no expert, but this is a chance to look at the problems of the French version.

The case involves Marc Machin, who is serving an 18-year sentence for killing a woman in 2001 at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western side of Paris. Machin, now 25, was convicted in two trials five years ago on the basis of a confession which he quickly retracted, and shaky testimony from a witness. The murder made news because Marie-Agnès Bedot, the 45-year-old victim, was stabbed to death by the busy bridge in the morning rush hour as she was on her way to her gym (the same one that I frequent, as it happens).

A month ago, another man walked into a police station and said that he killed Bedot and also another woman at the same spot five months later. David Sagno, 35, a drifter with multiple convictions for violence, gave precise details. Police have now found his DNA on the clothes of the first victim. So by all account the wrong man has been has been jailed for the past seven years.

Rachida Dati, the Justice Minister, has ordered a review but police and prosecutors are still reluctant to accept that they got it wrong. With hindsight it seems obvious that Machin should never have been convicted. Here's why.

Popster joins France's grand academy

King Louis XIII and Napoleon Bonaparte must be turning in their graves. The Académie Française, France's oldest and grandest cultural institution, has just elected to its midst a writer of pop lyrics.

Jean-Loup Dabadie, 69, a wordsmith who has penned hits for two generations of singers and written successful screenplays, is the first humble saltimbanque (entertainer) to join the hallowed institution that guards the French language and soul. For four centuries, only literary worthies and distinguished elders of the establishment have been elevated to the status of "immortal", as the 40 members are known.

In the last try, decades ago, the academy rejected Charles Trenet, the top crooner of the World War Two era. Four years ago, die-hards made a vain attempt to block the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former President, on the grounds that he had produced only one second-rate novel.

Be famous for your initials in France

Here's a test of your knowledge of modern France and its passion for abbreviation. Explain the following headline which appeared in a newspaper today

OGM + NKM + UMP = COCKTAIL EXPLOSIF

To anyone following the news, the line in La Charente Libre made complete sense. OGM stands for genetically modified organism; NKM is the Minister for the Environment, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet; UMP is President Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement. The minister had just caused a furore by accusing her own party of cowardice over genetically modified crops.

Like other Latin and bureaucratic countries, France shortens many long titles into every-day initials. Un smicard is someone who receives le SMIC, or minimum wage. Few bother saying jeux olympiques. The games are usually just les JO. This is not to be confused with a GO, or gentil organisateur, a host at the old Club Med resorts, thus any boy-scoutish organiser. The 35-hour working week has given France the joys of the RTT (pronounce errtété) or time off (Récuperation du Temps de Travail). You can use it for a spot of VTT  (mountain biking)

Abbreviating names is especially French. All right, America had JFK first, but say JFK in Paris and people will understand Jean-François Kahn, a veteran journalist and commentator. You know you have made the big time when your initials replace your name. NKM (the environment minister, in picture), who is only 34, earned the rank this week with her feisty defiance of her bosses.

She only apologised after a threat of dismissal from Sarkozy, who is known as NS only to his staff and the tailor who monograms the left chest of his custom-made shirts. MKM is, however, dangerously close to NTM, a notorious rap group which has just been relaunched. Their initials stand for "F...Your Mother" in urban slang).

To be fair to Sarko, few earn two-initial celebrity. The last was probably BB, the film star-turned animal lover whose initials became a pop music hit in the hands of the great Serge Gainsbourg, her lover at the time (any excuse for another Gainsbourg video, see below).

France makes law to fight eating disorder

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

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

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

Paris makes a point with Olympic fiasco

The Olympic flame's day in Paris was a mess. I spent a few hours in the midst of yesterday's demonstrations, beginning with the sinister start below the Eiffel tower under the guard of hundreds of police and Chinese security.

Yet, despite the débâcle which ended with the Chinese rushing the flame out of town on a bus, it is impossible not to detect a little satisfaction in the air. The relay was a chaotic fiasco, marred by jeering crowds and scuffles with the militant pro-Tibetans. The torch-bearers, mainly French former champions, had a miserable time between hostile crowds and the strong-arm tactics of their Chinese handlers. President Sarkozy's government had reason to be embarrassed. But there is a feeling today that, even if it was futile, France at least made a gesture by venting its discontent over the Beijing games and human rights. I say France because the demonstrators enjoyed quite broad support. France prides itself on being "the home of human rights" and it likes a bit of rebellion and creative disorder in the name of a cause. The Beijing torch relay from the Eiffel tower down the Champs Elysées and on to Notre Dame cathedral offered the right moment and symbols. By the end of the afternoon yesterday, the demonstrations had become a festive occasion, joined by teenagers and office-workers.

Laurent Joffrin, Editor of Libération, was for once happy this morning. "Paris rediscovered its sense of revolt for the occasion. It took it upon itself to remind the world that hypocrisy has a limit," he wrote. "The Olympic flame has turned into a shameful candle-end."

Naturally the leftwing world was fully behind the la manif. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, a Socialist, hung a rights banner across the front of the City Hall. Green councillors added a more aggressive one so the Chinese cancelled the ceremony there and the torch convoy sped past the Mayor without stopping. He shrugged and said: "The cohabitation of the Olympics and human rights disturbs them. That's their problem. We were ready to receive them but not to sacrifice our principles."

But there was also quiet support from President Sarkozy's conservative political camp. Half a dozen members of parliament for his Union for a Popular Movement joined a protest by mainly leftwing legislators outside the National Assembly. The organisers ordered the convoy to cancel a stop there.

On one level, the chaotic day made a mockery of the crowd control skills of the well equipped French police. They had said that the torch would be protected by an inviolable 200-metre long "security bubble". This burst within minutes. In the thick of it, however, I got the impression that they were not trying very hard. There were a few punch-ups but little of the brute force usually employed by the CRS riot police. Most of them were not wearing helmets and body armour. The feeling was confirmed this morning by Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, who is national police chief.

She essentially blamed the Chinese embassy for the mess. They had controlled the day's events and the police had been there to help keep order for them. "We had to balance this with the right of people to demonstrate," she said on Europe 1 radio.

Sarkozy watched events on television as the torch ran past the Elysée Palace. His people hope that the public excitement will cool because there is not much that they can do to satisfy public discontent over China. Sarko is maintaining his threat to stay away from the opening ceremony in Beijing in August but few imagine him doing so.

[Headline: China: the slap in the face]

Save our semi-colon, say French campaigners

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

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

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

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

Serious money for comic strip heroes in France

The English-speaking world can never fathom the French and continental passion for comic strips.  That disparaging expression does not do justice to the Bande Dessinée, the genre more respectfully known in English as the graphic novel. In the French-speaking countries and beyond, the BD, with its heroes from Belgium's Tintin to Switzerland's modern Titeuf, are not just for kids. They are revered and treated as a serious, ninth art of a kind that mixes the novel and cinema.

La BD (pronounced bédé) is big business. Last year 34 million albums were sold in France. As further proof, a Paris sale of original comic art broke world records last weekend. A cover illustration for a Tintin album went for 764,200 euros (1.22 million dollars). The indian ink and gouache, bought by an anonymous French collector, was drawn in 1932 by Hergé for Tintin en Amerique, the third adventure of his intrepid boy reporter [picture above]. The previous BD record was 177,000 euros, paid a year ago for a drawing by Enki Bilal, one of the titans of the French BD [picture below]

The ecstatic Artcurial saleroom said the auction of 653 items earned 3.4 million euros. "This marks the veritable consecration of the bande dessinée," said Eric Leroy, the house's expert. "People are no long ashamed to say that they collect BDs. The market is expanding fast."

As an honorary Gaul, I have long been a Tintinophile. The nostalgia-inducing tales have a certain magic. Like many French, I recognise lines from his adventures that have passed into the language. For example, everyone knew what le Monde meant the other day when it noted that the bad reputation of one of President Sarkozy's ministers "clings to him like Captain Haddock's Band-Aid" (Le sparadrap du capitaine Haddock). This refers to a running gag involving the whisky-soaked mariner in Tintin's Affaire Tournesol and Vol 714 pour Sydney. On a flight to Beijing with a French Prime Minister a few years ago, I noticed that his staff were briefing up by reading Le Lotus Bleu, Tintin's tale of late 1930s China.

I can also understand the attraction of some of the masters like Bilal, who created post-apocalyptic world that draws heavily on old Soviet bloc life.  And yes, Art Spiegelman has shown in the USA how the comic strip can be used to high brow ends. Yet... I still find it hard to take the bande dessinée as serious art, with its high-brown criticism, annual festival at Angoulême and venerated stars. In the past week, the media have feted the publication of the latest adventure of Blake and Mortimer, a pair of old world military Englishmen who exclaim "by Jove" on every second page. Le Monde's literary supplement on Friday ran a cover on a new BD version of Dickens' Oliver Twist.

A lot of creative work goes into the art and plot of a BD album. They have come a long way from the American comic strips for kids that inspired them in the early 20th century. It's also fair to note that the thriving genre is accessible to young creative talent in a way that the movie industry and classical publishing are not. But I still see them as fast food beside entertainment that takes more mental effort to consume. I'm happy to be contradicted by my French regulars and anyone else, so fire away....

PS: I see that Steven Spielberg is likely to cast Thomas Sangster, a 17-year-old English actor as Tintin when he makes a long-awaited movie version of the cartoon hero this year. Movies of comic strip heroes are rarely as good as the original.  I'll stick to the cardboard and paper version.

[Blake and Mortimer's latest]

Bilal's Bleu Sang sold for record price in 2007]

Eiffel Tower hit by fantasy

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

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

Sarkozy's royal visit to the Queen

France and Britain are engaging in an ancient exercise this week: dazzling one-another. The occasion is Nicolas Sarkozy's first state visit to Britain. The current monarch of the Fifth Republic arrives on Wednesday with Carla Bruni and a glittering retinue to stay with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, west of London.

For nearly 800 years, the English and French took out their rivalry on battlefields in Europe and then around the world. But admiration was always part of the old enmity, with each side envying the other's superior qualities. The frogs had more style, refinement and dash. Seen from the other side, the perfidious rosbifs were a  stodgy bunch with an infuriating habit of getting their way.

The feuding cousins last fought at Waterloo in 1815 and they officially became friends with the Entente Cordiale accord in 1904, but the rivalry and admiration never faded. State visits -- meaning the full pomp with military salutes and palace banquets -- are an excellent occasion for staging the old contest and both sides are again out to impress the other, in a friendly way of course.

Just like French kings before him, Sarko wants to dazzle the down-to-earth Anglais.

Sarkozy's eyes on the internet

Nicolas Princen, l'oeil de Nicolas Sarkozy sur Internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help save the French language

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

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

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

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

Sarkozy season II: back to basics

Le Sarko nouveau has arrived. Nicolas Sarkozy is out being presidential today, officiating at the grand funeral of France's last world war one veteran. This is the kind of statesmanlike image that he wants to project now that the French have slapped down his administration in nationwide local elections.

French voters are as fickle as those anywhere so it was no surprise that they swung against Super Sarko in the voting that ended yesterday. Here briefly is the fallout and a few lessons as we wonder how long the impulsive, slightly manic, president can stick to a new script in which he does dignified and distant.

The expected vague rose -- pink wave -- enabled the Socialist opposition to take 15 big cities from centre-right control, including Toulouse and Strasbourg, but not Marseille as they had hoped. One of the left's more impressive victories was the capture of the eastern city of Metz, which had been under rightwing control since 1848. The left now run a handsome majority of large towns. They comfortably held on to Paris and Lyon, the two biggest.

François Bayrou, the centrist who made such a strong run for the presidency last year, is consigned to history after failing to take the Pyrenean city of Pau for himself and letting his MoDem party self-destruct.

Of historical note was the fall of three Communist bastions -- the channel port of Calais and Montreuil and Aubvervilliers, on the eastern edge of Paris. Montreuil was won by Dominique Voynet, a veteran Green party figure who becomes the first écologiste to run a big city. On the other fringe, Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National got nowhere. With the old bogeyman nearing 80, it is unlikely that his movement will survive.

So what conclusions are to be drawn from the battering of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement ?

France flocks back to good old days on TV

After camembert and the decision to redraw the map of champagne country, it is time to take a look at another  highly successful celebration of France's terroir, or its rich rural roots.

What does it take for a television network to beat a big football match in prime time ? Manchester United was knocking Olympique Lyonnais, France's top side, out of the European Champions' League the other night, but the French preferred to watch a yarn about a bigoted 19th century widow and her search for virtue.

Seven million people tuned in to the episode from Chez Maupassant, a costume drama that has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of drawing a mass audience to high-quality television. At the start of its second season, the setting of Victorian-era short stories by Guy de Maupassant, is such a hit that President Sarkozy is using it as an argument to convince broadcasting bosses that the French will watch high-brow television if they do it right (Unfamiliar with modern Britain, he usually cites UK television as his model).

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Paris book fair opens with row over Israel

Riot police are out in force today for the opening of the annual Paris book fair. They are not there to calm the latest French literary spat but to prevent trouble when President Shimon Peres opens the show, which this year is hosting Israeli writers as guests of honour. This may be more a news item than a blog post, but I want to record it, in the absence of much media attention.

About 10 Arab states and Iran have cancelled their attendance at the annual showcase of the French publishing industry. The Hebrew-language theme of this year's fair, which coincides with the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel, has upset the Muslim world and drawn criticism from some leftwing French writers and rights organisations. 

Writers' unions in usually Francophile Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Lebanon have refused to take part in the event because they say that it condones a country that violates the rights of Palestinians. The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called on its 50 member-states to stay away because of Israel's "atrocities, oppression and imposed starvation and siege against the Palestinian people."

Some French commentators have also joined in deploring the invitation, especially the failure to invite Israeli Arab-language writers.

Arab boycotts of Israeli events are hardly new. What is surprising about this one, near the heart of Paris, is the lack of indignation from the usually vocal French literary establishment.

Claude François grooves beyond the grave

Thirty years ago today, Claude François was taking an afternoon bath at his home outside Paris to wash off suntan oil. Standing in the water, he tried to straighten a metal light fixture and the electric shock killed him.

Cloclo, as he was known, was 39 years old and France's biggest star of the pop-disco style. He was a slightly-built, light-voiced singer with a huge following of girl fans. Thanks to an alchemy that takes a little explaining, his death turned him from teen idol into a cult. His albums and DVDs are still selling at a rate of nearly 400,000 a year, making about 10 million euros for Claude junior, his son and the other heirs. Half his 60 million albums have been sold since his death, helping a younger generation ape his kitschy ballads and jaunty tunes in karaoke bars. Provincial clubs are full of professional Cloclo impersonators wearing copies of the 500 sequined suits that he left behind. 

But don't laugh yet, François' best-known composition was the most popular song played at British funerals until it recently gave way to James Blunt's dirge Goodbye My Lover. I am talking about Comme d'Habitude, which François wrote in collaboration with Jacques Revaux. Paul Anka gave it English lyrics in 1969 and sold it to Frank Sinatra with the title My Way. [François' version in video at end of post] 

Sarkozy's stars go local

A couple of days ago, I spent the morning following Rachida Dati around the Left Bank district where she hopes to become a town councillor. Dati is Justice Minister and one of the stars of Nicolas Sarkozy's executive, so what is she doing handing out leaflets and chatting with shop-keepers in the chic VIIth arrondissement  -- and bothering to spend time over a drink with me ? Here's the story from today's paper. 

Beyond Dati and Sarko's other debutant politicians, it's worth a look at the way that France clings to a tradition that allows -- even encourages -- politicians to hold two or more elected jobs at a time. This promotes baronies, especially when city bosses hold parliamentary seats. Jean-Claude Gaudin, the conservative Mayor of Marseille, for example, is also a Senator (He might be out of the city job in a couple of weeks though). Defenders of the system say that it ensures that national politicians keep close to le terrain, or life on the ground. France likes its mayors so much that it has 36,000 of them. That's not a typo. There are 36,000 town and village councils and they are all up for election over the next two Sundays.   

The great majority of députés, or members of parliament, sit on county, regional or municipal councils and many of them are mayors of cities. It is not surprising that the National Assembly has one of the lowest attendance rates of any parliament. Its members are busy in their other jobs.

Keith Richards sells French luggage

You remember the uncomfortable appearance of Mikhael Gorbachev in those glossy advertisements for Louis Vuitton, the French leathergoods brand. The picture of the Soviet elder statesman was not just selling luggage, Vuitton told us. It was celebrating the company's corporate "core values" and projecting the notion of "travel as a personal journey".

One wonders what kind of trip the company is trying to celebrate with its latest recruit to its "exceptional journey" campaign: Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. "Keef", now pushing 65, has lent his well-worn features to the camera of Annie Leibowitz in a New York hotel room. His pirate-look is enhanced with black make-up. A skull sits on the night table and death's heads adorn the black scarves draped on the lamps. Keith's guitar case is a custom Vuitton item. A book lies open with a magnifying glass of the kind that such senior citizens use to relieve elderly eyes. Physical sustenance is suggested by a coffee or tea-cup and pot, biscuits and orange juice. There is no hint of the more exotic substances which helped Richards rock through the ages.

The caption says: Some journeys cannot be put into words. New York. 3 am. Blues in C

According to Antoine Arnault, communications chief at Louis Vuitton, Richards is "a world icon, an inspiration for millions". In Le Monde, Arnault also managed a delicate allusion to Richards' more exotic journeys. "He has travelled in lands which I do not personally know," he said. 

I wonder why Richards needed to sign up for the luxury goods campaign,  produced by Ogilvy and Mather. Unlike Mikhael Gorbachev he surely does not need the money.  I apologise for two Vuitton posts in a week, but I wanted to use the great picture.

Why France is grand, by writer-patriot

Let me balance the slightly caustic tone of some recent postings with praise for a book that sums up everything we love about France.

Dictionnaire Amoureux de la France is a love-letter to his country by Denis Tillinac, a prolific writer whose novels mainly celebrate la France profonde, especially his native Corrèze. Tillinac, 60, is an unabashed patriot. I know that he is seen as at bit "reactionary" and a friend of Jacques Chirac, the last and not greatly lamented president.

But Tillinac, a puckish, twinkling-eyed chain-smoker, has a sense of fun and an eye for the quirky side of the French character that is so endearing -- and exasperating. I have got to know him on a TV show that we take part in and I appreciate his eloquent, self-mocking manner.

His book is part of a series from the Plon publishing house, in which famous writers celebrate their passions. It is a collection of sharp little essays on the things and people that for him are the essence of France.  His country, he says, is about flair and panache plus despair and pathos. "I love France in body and soul, as a transfixed admirer and a fulfilled lover," he writes.

 

Run through the index and you get an idea....d'Artagnan.. Bovary... le Coq Gaulois...Cyrano de Bergerac... les Départementales (country roads)... Deux Chevaux (Citroens)... Gares (railway stations), Grandeur.... May 68...  Maigret... le Panache... Paris...la Province...Sub-prefectures...Ricard (pastis)... Zidane..le Zinc (local cafe)

Take le Zinc -- the corner bistrot:

"Le zinc offers the godsend of conviviality, silent or garrulous...It is very French, this decompression chamber. We like to linger in the bistrot. The atmosphere is not like a Viennese cafe, an English pub, a German tavern or even an Italian bar. In the Zinc, once you have your elbows on the counter, you are more than a customer. You become owner of a little part of the establishment...A mysterious connivence brings you close to your neighbour, to the neighbourhood... Whether it's in the countryside, in the provinces or in Paris, le bistrot français is the temple of inexpensive fraternity, of the meditative break, the road to the stars for solitary hearts, or lacking that, their oasis.   
 
On la Grandeur, Tillinac tries to put his finger on why France thinks it is so special. France excelled in no single field, he notes. Great western painting was Italian and Flemish. The music was Italian and German. The great philosophers were German and the three major western writers of the modern west were Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. France had no Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud or Einstein, he says. France's pride in its innate superiority is completely unreasonable, he says: "It is as if we only had this alternative:  pride in being French, or grating, sneering morosity."

To justify this pride, France throughout history has striven to achieve unrealistic ambitions "far beyond its apparent capacity", from Joan of Arc through Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. "France offers an exemplary and muddled irrationality, a mixture of dashing bravoura and missionary zeal which no sporting or economic victory really conveys."

France could not be France without la grandeur, whether we are the seventh or second last economic power in the world. French genius has to astonish the world. I think it is still alive, smouldering like an ember of the spirit under the cinder of mercantilism: this naive faith is one of the well-springs of my patriotism."

Tillinac's model of the French spirit at its best -- generous and reckless -- is D'Artagnan, the musketeer of Alexandre Dumas.

D'Artagnan is the older brother who I never had... At an age when my friends were seeking a cause between Jean-Paul Sartre and Che Guevara, I had read the Three Musketeers. My cause was that boisterous camp where the four jolly fellows served up their knightly heroism with epicurian pleasure. 

It's a lovely book, a perceptive, easy study of Frenchness by an insider, not one of the Brits or other foreigners who presume to know the country.   

Cotillard's Oscar lifts France

It is extremely rare for the French morning news to start in English. That happened today when they all opened with Marion Cotillard's euphoric acceptance speech for her best actress Oscar in Hollywood.  "It's true there is some angels in this city," she said.

Cotillard's success gave France a reason to feel proud on a grey Monday full of gloomy news.  Only one French actress had ever won such an Oscar, if you don't count Claudette Colbert in 1938. She grew up in America and was a US citizen.  Simone Signoret won in 1960 for her role in Room at the Top. What pleases France so much is that La Môme (The Kid, but released in English as La Vie en Rose) is a French-language film. Only once before has the best actress gone to a non-English speaking role. That was Sophia Loren in La Ciociara in 1962.  Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her part in The English Patient in 1997 -- but that was English-speaking too.

France did pretty well this year. The make-up artists of La Môme won a second Oscar for the film and the prize for best short film went to Philippe Pollet-Villard for Le Mozart des pick-pockets." Cotillard also scored a quadruple triumph, winning a Golden Globe, BAFTA award and the French César for her role as well as the Oscar.

Everyone recognises that La Môme/Vie en Rose had everything to please America -- a rags-to-riches biography picture featuring Edith Piaf,  a singer who was a star in the United States in the 1950s.  Elle magazine points out today that Cotillard is, like Piaf,  the quintessence of what the world likes about Parisiennes -- elegant and sexy but spirited and fun, not a haughty beauty.  She is also a superb actress who worked in the style of the Anglo-Saxon theatre not just to play Piaf but to turn herself into the singer.  Her Piaf is jouée à l'Americaine, one French critic noted this morning.   

Cotillard, who is 32 and the daughter of actors,  said that she did not know much about Piaf when she took the role in Olivier Dahan's film.  She immersed herself in the singer, "leaving only a little room to be me", she said.  Though she had not yet become one of France's biggest domestic stars, Cotillard now seems destined for a Hollywood career.