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."
The slump does not appear to have lessened Europe's taste for Easter in Paris. The city has been full of visitors over the weekend and many of them are choosing to wait for hours in the queues outside the big museums and galleries. The French capital and other cities are in the midst of an art bonanza on a scale never seen before, according to curators and enthusiastic reports in the media.
The consensus says that the boom is a reflection of imaginative special shows, economic hard times and a trend amplified by the internet and other media. It's worth wondering why the phenomenon appears stronger in Paris than any other world city, at least judging by anecdotal evidence.
After a winter that saw people staying up all night to visit Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais, the new Andy Warhol show at the same site is such a hit that they are planning 24-hour opening to cope with the crowds. De Chirico is packing them in at the Paris City Modern Art Museum. The Pompidou Centre has just scored a smash with a new mega-show of Kandinsky. William Blake is drawing crowds at the Petit Palais. 
The Quai Branly, the ethnic art museum founded by President Chirac, is enjoying its biggest success so far with a show on the cultural impact of jazz. In four weeks about 50,000 have toured the show.
Photography is also enjoying good times. There are two interesting exhibitions -- without such queues as the art expos. One is Controverses, a collection of shock photos from history at the wonderful old reading room in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The other, closing this week, is a fascinating collection of 19th and early 20th century photochromes -- the first type of colour photography -- in the Bibliothèque Forney in the Marais. The show is an eye-opener if you imagine the 19th century in black and white (see Victorian Alpine clmibers below).
Many of the foreign visitors are happy to stick to the permanent exhibitions. The Louvre, the world's most visited art museum, is breaking new records. It drew 8.5 milion people in 2008, well ahead of the 5.93 who went to the British Museum in London. The National Gallery in Washington DC came third with 4.96.
And the boom is not just affecting the beaux arts. Opera is flourishing, along with pop concerts, the cinema and the state-subsidized national theatres. "La culture is showing insolent good health" le Monde concluded, the other day.
So why the rush for culture? The standard view is that, at a time of anxiety and shrinking assets, the French are reverting to old-fashioned valeurs sûres. "The crisis incites people to turn towards preserved spaces," says Marie-Christine Labourdette, Director of the Museums of France. "The world is changing and the future is worrying ? They are reassured by the intangible in art works and the stability of museums," she explained in le Figaro. The experts cite the example of the Hollywood boom of the 1930s Depression years.
Sometimes the explanation can be a little abstract. Le Monde found a curator who explained: "In times of crisis, people need the emotional compensation of nearness". [Les gens ont besoin d'une compensation affective de proximité...]. That's not so easy to convey in Anglo-Saxon.
The phenomenon also confirms France's tradition -- eclipsed in recent decades -- as the world's cultural capital. Thomas Grenon, Administrator of the Union of National Museums, says that "the richness of French collections explain the success. France is historically a land of art. And then there is the deep taste of the French for art."
The same travelling exhibitions draw about 30 percent more visitors in Paris than London, he told us. This applied to recent Turner, Whistler and Monet shows at the Grand Palais and the Tate in London, he said. "It's linked to our education and to a form of French taste," he said. And yes, many of the current shows feature British, American, Russian, Italian and other nationals, but Paris excels in the art of presenting them.
[Below, the waiting line for Warhol]
To end the week on a lighter note, listen to these commercials just aired on French radio stations by Eurostar, the cross-Channel rail service.
The company has a tradition of tongue-in-cheek advertising that makes fun of French and British national stereotypes (above: typical London 'Spice' girls in previous campaign). The latest one, to promote a low-price ticket, goes quite far:
We hear Brits appalled by an "invasion of frogs" that is being inflicted on them by "Bloody Eurostar". One angry man in a pub raises a posse to beat them up. "Come on lads!. Let's go frog hunting!." The cry goes up: "Yeah. Com'on guys!." The joke is in the translation which politely reverses the sense. "Quelle super nouvelle... Je suis impatient d'acceuillir nos amis français." [What great news... I can't wait to welcome our French friends.]
Or try this one, in which women complain about French chicks coming to steal their boyfriends. "There is only one thing for it girls... Throw them in the Thames." That is mis-translated as "Organisons un truc.... Une petite fête par exemple" (Let's organise something... a little party for example.)
Here's another in similar vein.
Without a sense of humour, I suppose this could be depicted as incitement to violence (see last two posts). The comic translation is certainly a technical breach of the law that requires foreign expressions in advertising to be explained in French. But Eurostar is confident that its customers get the joke and no-one is shocked.
We rang Gabriel Gaultier, Director of Leg, the agency which made the adverts. It's just "second degree" humour -- tongue in cheek -- he said. "If we said 'London's nice, go there', it wouldn't work. We are playing on the myth of animosity between the French and the English... It's folklore, part of the game of advertising and everyone knows it's not serious. It's a wink based on the ancestral rivalry.
"In reality, our cultures have become so close now and so many people go backwards and forwards between London and Paris that we can allow ourselves to go in for this." He's right and let no-body say the French don't have a sense of humour about themselves -- or the British.
So Happy Easter, Joyeuses Pâques à tout le monde.
[Below: recent Eurostar London icons -- faux Tony Blair and Freddy Mercury]
Violence is in the air in France thanks to a coincidence of news events. They are not particularly related but, magnified by the media, they are anxiogène, to use a useful French word -- they breed anxiety. They are also cause for political discomfort.
The "boss-napping" I wrote about on Tuesday is an element. Since then, the overnight detention yesterday of four executives -- three of them British -- at a plant owned by a British firm has strengthened worries in the government over the spread of physical coercion against employers.
Setting the tone for the week were the ugly riots at the weekend -- led by demonstrators against the Nato summit in Strasbourg [below] and by Corsican nationalists in the port city of Bastia. In both there was serious arson as well as fierce battles between les casseurs -- smashers -- and the Robo-Cop-style officers of France's CRS and Gendarmerie riot police. Seventy policemen were injured in the Bastia fighting, three seriously.
As a result, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, wants to ban hoods and masks from demonstrations. These, she said, are always worn by the thugs who are intent on violence, never peaceful protesters. The proposal prompted predictable indignation this morning over interference with the right to demonstrate. Alliot-Marie was also mocked for trying to dictate people's dress. Germany outlawed head cover in demonstrations some time ago.
Hoods were in evidence in the week's most shocking episode: a six-minute video of four youths robbing and badly beating a young man in a bus in north-central Paris [picture at top. Victim with scarf just before attack]. They punched passengers who intervened, while the driver sat impassive throughout . The security camera video, from an incident last December, was put on Facebook by a police officer, and picked up by all the media. Extracts made the TV news but the police are trying to remove it from the net. You can still watch it here but beware, it's disturbing.
The police officer is likely to be charged for disseminating the video, which is circulating on far-right sites as an example of the ultra-violence committed by kids from the immigrant ghettos. The non-white attackers insult their victim as "sale français" -- dirty Frenchman.
The police say two of the youths were arrested on the spot after the driver called for help and a third has since been detained. The RATP tranport authority says that its bus drivers have orders not to intervene in defence of passengers but to stay at the wheel and press a silent alarm button. RATP drivers say that such attacks are fairly common on the all-night buses. "If you do not have money for a taxi on Saturday night, it's better to stay in the disco and wait for the morning," a driver said in today's le Parisien.
The sense of violence running out of control is also being fed by reports of an explosion of corner-shop (convenience store) hold-ups in Paris and other cities by teenage robbers. Armed robbery by minors jumped 44 percent in 2008. The police say they are being overwhelmed by casual stick-ups in which groups of baby bandits with airguns or fake pistols or knives help themselves to the takings of small shops. A bébé braqueur describes the fun in Le Point news magazine, out today: "When you arrive, you scream straight away. Just the sight of your hood and they start trembling."
And while on the subject of the immigrant estates and violence, I'll throw in a rap video which has upset women's groups and led to the withdrawal of a regional government subsidy for its performer, a Normandy artiste named Orelsan. In Sale Pute (Dirty Slut), he plays a man who discovers his girl-friend's infidelity and threatens her with grievous harm in obscene and graphic language [Watch here, but be warned]. Orelsan has apologised and explained that he was playing a role, but his act sounds painfully plausible. The bad treatment of young women in the estates has been a running news story for several years and it is the subject of a new Isabelle Adjani film, The Day of the Skirt. And of course there is nothing new in getting indignant over rap lyrics.
As I said, there's no common thread though reaction to these events splits down political lines. The left and nearly half of France excuses the boss-nappers -- for reasons that are understandable in the current climate. The hard left excuses the violent anti-Nato and Corsican demonstrators. Olivier Besancenot, the charismatic and very influential leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, blamed the police for the Strasbourg mayhem, in which rioters burnt down a large hotel. "The authorities did everything to make the situation degenerate," he said.
On the other side of the political fence, the bus thugs and baby bandits play to fears and prejudices over the anti-social and criminal behaviour of youths who are assumed to be of Arab or black origin.
There is no conclusion to draw except to note the unpleasant climate and the fact that President Sarkozy is said to be worried that unrest on the left and among students over the economy and his government could lead to a broader break-down of law-and-order of the kind that erupted in Paris in May 1968.
Yes, Sarkozy again. But I'm not going to wrap up the discord over Turkey between Presidents Obama and Sarkozy that soured the end of their weekend honeymoon. Today's subject is a rare glimpse into the life of Pal Sarkozy, the father of the French President.
Sarkozy père, 80, the son of an impoverished Hungarian aristocrat, gave a half-hour interview to OmegaTV, an internet channel.[watch full interview here or click on extract below] He talks of his arrival in Paris as a penniless 20-year-old refugee via Vienna in 1948. His mother had advised him to head west because the Russian occupiers were about to send him to do compulsory labour in Russia
"On my first night I slept in a Métro entrance." He worked first delivering films to cinemas on foot because he had no money for public transport and had to borrow a pair of shoes. He married Dadu, Sarkozy's mother, at the young age of 22 partly because the war had deprived him of his youth, he says. He found his feet on the creative side of advertising at the age of 27. He still paints actively
Pal split up with Dadu when their three boys were little, enjoyed a reputation as a bit of a playboy and remarried three times. He says in the interview that he is wounded by the standard line in his son's biography which casts him as an absent father. "I never abandoned them. I saw the children two or three times a week and took them on holiday," he says. He acknowledges his reputation as a ladies' man but says that he never married for money. "I always married for love". He claims to be close to Nicolas against and also to Dadu, his first wife, with whom he lunches once a week.
The interview has made news because Pal declares: "I hope that there is going to be a Sarkozy dynasty in France. It takes three generations of success to achieve this and the grandsons are well on the way," he says.
That was taken as an allusion to the immense ambition of young Jean, who, at 22, is climbing fast up the ladder of Dad's Union for a Popular Majority (UMP). As a second year undergraduate student, he is already party chief in the Hauts-de-Seine, the UMP's bastion département on the western side of Paris. This week there have been reports that he could be given a safe seat in parliament for the town of Neuilly, otherwise known as Sarkoville, after he turns 23 -- the minimum age -- next September. If he achieves that, he will have beaten his own father, who made it to Mayor of Neuilly at 28 and member of parliament at 33.
![Ferrari_paris_match[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201156ec67651970c-250wi)
Paris Match today offered a good example of the hypocrisy in the way that celebrities use France's laws that protect the sanctity of private life. On its cover and six inside pages, Match featured a romance between Laurence Ferrari, the star TV news presenter, and Renaud Capuçon, a leading classical violinist. The article is the usual stuff, with carefully staged pictures and purple prose about the "duet at tempo appassionato" between the two stars "who fell head over heels in love a year ago."
Nothing wrong with that. Match, which has just celebrated its 60th birthday, leads the field with its mix of celebrity gush and good reporting and pictures. But we also learned today that Ferrari, who anchors the TF1 evening news -- the most watched in Europe -- came top of the league of French public figures who have won damages over the past year against the media for breaching their privacy.
Ferrari, 42, scored 144,000 euros in five separate suits that she brought against publications which mentioned her romantic life or published pictures of her without permission. Her last court case, in February, ended with 15,000 euros in damages against Voici, another celeb magazine, for reporting her liaison with the violinist.
The law is strict. You are committing an offence if you report on the private life of anyone or publish a picture of them without authorisation. President Sarkozy has used it successfully over the years and, as we saw in February, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, has a case pending against Match for a picture of her in the street with her new boyfriend. Yes, you can argue that the key word is "unauthorised". But if celebrities and political figures market their private lives in self-serving magazine spreads, it's a bit rich that they can use the law to rake in damages from others who report on them.
Ferrari is, by the way, continuing to lose her audience to the competition, mainly France2's Journal Télévisé, which is broadcast at the same 8pm.
The Eiffel Tower celebrates its 120th birthday today and its present is a new coat of paint.
It's the 19th time that the laticed iron tower, which opened on March 31 1889, has been treated to a new layer. It will take over a year, beginning today, for 25 men to brush on 60 tonnes of the water-based paint in the brown that looks like bronze when lit at night.
When Gustave Eiffel handed over his 300 metre (990 feet) contraption, built for a universal fair, it was just coated with a red anti-rust chemical. The colour must have added to the awe that was inspired by a structure that was far higher than the existing record-holder, the Monument in Washington DC. The tower kept the height record until 1930 when the Chrysler Building, just a few feet taller, opened in Manhattan.
Three years after the inauguration of his temporary exhibit, Eiffel had it covered in brownish orange. For the 1900 Universal Exposition, he jazzed it up in yellow, which gave new ammunition to the detractors who saw it as a blight on the cityscape.
In the early 1900s, Eiffel managed to persuade Paris not to dismantle his handiwork at the end of its scheduled 20-year life. In the 1920s, artists such as Dufy and Chagall painted it in pictures as red and blue and in the 1930s it sported a huge advertisement for Citroen cars. The Académie Française, guardian of the French language, even tried to get into the paint act, recommending that the tower be painted blue-grey.
A couple of other Eiffel paint facts from Le Figaro: No painter has ever been killed while at work on its aerial girders. They all wear harnesses now. They start at the top and work downwards, using round brushes, not rollers or sprays. They do not strip old layers. The weather wears off much of the prevous layer over seven years. The paint comes in three shades, with the lightest at the top. This gives an illusion of greater height when seen from the ground. The job is being done by a Greek company that paints ships and smokestacks and has its French base in Saint Nazaire, the Atlantic port.
Celebrations for the world's most visited paying monument (6.9 million last year) include an exhibition that opens at the Paris city hall on May 6, called "Gustave Eiffel, Le Magicien de fer" and a show in the tower itself from May 15. Marc Riboud, a photographer, took the picture at the top in 1950. It features in a new exhibition of his work at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Architecture students have just presented imaginary and, in some cases far-fetched, projects for monuments to match the tower [example below].
It was fashionable a few years ago to dismiss Paris as a creative backwater. The real avant-garde was to be found in the happening cities of New York and London. The art pendulum has been swinging back for some time and it has been given another shove this weekend.
The venue is the Grand Palais, the monumental exhibition hall just off the Champs Elysées that is home to one of the top state galleries and where the Yves Saint Laurent art collection was auctioned last month. The new show is one of the world's most ambitious exhibitions of graffiti.
This is another case of French paradox since the state that is staging the exhibition is the same one that spends tens of millions of tax euros a year prosecuting and cleaning up after vandals who deface public property with their art.
Of course the contemporary art world has long seen the creative side of daubing trains and public spaces. A few stars of the underground, such as the late New Yorkers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are revered as geniuses. Since the 1980s, the French Culture Ministry has also flirted with the graffiti, rap and dances of the hip-hop underground.
But eyebrows, including some artistic ones, have been raised by the consecration that the state has bestowed on the genre with its show of 300 specially commissioned oeuvres by international maîtres de l'art de la rue.
In Tag au Grand Palais, canvases by Snake131, a New York veteran, Nasty of Switzerland, Psyckoze of Paris and other eminent taggeurs, are hanging in a long-disused, tunnel-like gallery that runs along the side of the palace's great steel dome. The show is impressive in its scale. Some of the canvases are obviously clever and of quality, but to my sceptical eye, much of it looks like the daubing that pollutes urban life.
I had an interesting chat there with Toxic, a Bronx-born master of the genre, but first the complaints. Some in the artistic establishment say that l'Etat Français has gone too far this time by endorsing the American-inspired vandalism which blights the Métro trains, railways and housing estates of France.
"The state is punishing these people on one side and welcoming them on the other," Jean-Philippe Domecq, a writer and contemporary art specialist, told Le Point magazine. "This is subsidizing subversion." The state is so afraid of "missing another Van Gogh" that it throws money at every fad, he added.
Barbed praise for the show came from Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, a leading auctioneer and President of the Association of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art centre opposite the Eiffel Tower. "Ninety-nine percent of taggers are cretins who only want to foul walls," he said. He lamented the graffiti that adorned his museum's outdoor statues and hoped that the Grand Palais show would at least "distinguish between the artists and les cons (a___holes in American)."
The irony of the show is not lost on the distinguished spray-can bandits who were invited by Alain Dominique Galliz, an architect-collector [picture below], to come to his workshop in the Paris suburb of Boulogne from 2006-8. They were each paid to produce two panels, resembling the side of an underground train, one with their signature tags, or initials, and the other on the theme of love. In return, Galliz agreed not to sell their works and to show them together.
Bando, one of big French names, said that he was amused by the invitation to the Grand Palais. "Our work is usually on monuments, not inside them," he told Libération. RCF1, a Paris artist, said that Cornette de Saint Cyr knew nothing about graffiti since he had never been on the Métro. The artist knew this because he had been sentenced to community service work as a guard at Cornette de Saint Cyr's art centre after being convicted for committing graffiti.
Toxic, 43, whose work sells for large sums, told me that he admired Galliz for assembling artists who represent the four decades since modern graffiti first appeared in the US urban ghettos. He was amazed that his fellow practitioners had agreed to the French invitation. "It's not easy dealing with these guys. There have been a lot of fights. Like when someone else paints on your tag. Grudges are held forever."
It is not clear whether the police would be visiting the show to help them with their aggressive campaign against the graff-artists who cost so much in what might be considered a sort of "subsidy". For the past eight years, prosecutors have been pursuing not just perpetrators, but also taking action against internet sites and art magazines for aiding and abetting criminals.
Toxic, who now lives in Italy, recalled that British police had visited a London gallery where he had shown his work. "They were there to see your face and arrest you." He recognised an ethical dilemma but said that he continued to keep his hand in on subway trains and tunnels, leaving his fresh oeuvres with other initials. "I try not to do it too much because I visit schools. I tell the kids to be careful because they could be arrested."
Gallizia has been defending his project. "This is not about ugly scribbling, but well and truly genuine works of illumination and calligraphy," he said. "Even if this form of expression is sometimes violent and aggressive, there is a fraternity behind it."
The show is worth a visit if you're in Paris, if only for the novelty of its setting.
President Sarkozy has been at war with much of the intellectual world since he began running for the presidency so it is not surprising that anti-Sarko thinkers and teachers seize every chance to get at him. As France has celebrated its annual Week of the French Language, he has come under fire for verbal sloppiness and his fondness for talking like a regular guy.
Presidents of the French Republic are not supposed to start speeches by saying: "To everyone who's important here, bonjour."They also supposed to conjugate their verbs and use pronouns correctly. Sarkozy won the 2007 election playing fast and loose with the rigorous rules of the language but his failure to slip into the verbal mantle of the monarch is helping those who cast him as a Philistine.
The trouble, everyone will recall, began last year with "Casse-toi pauv'con" [Get lost, jerk], his admonition to a hostile bystander. It sounded coarse and unpresidential.
"Molière must be turning in his grave," le Parisien said on Sunday, reporting on the fuss over the latest Sarkozysmes, as his syntactical abuses are called. Fanny Capel, head of a campaign group called Sauvez les Lettres (Save Letters), told us: "We have un beauf at the head of the state." (Un beauf, or brother-in-law, stands for ordinary, opinionated and ignorant).
Sarkozy jangles purist nerves with colloquial tics such as dropping the "ne" between pronoun and verb in negative sentences. "J'écoute mais je tiens pas compte," he said the other day. (I listen but I don't take account.. It should have been je NE tiens pas...) He often uses the slangy "ch'ais pas" for "je ne sais pas" and "ch'uis" instead of "je suis" and he throws the intimate "tu" around with abandon. It's not just friendliness. Eschewing the formal vous is a way of intimidating people, say those have had dealings with Sarko.
Defending an income tax ceiling last week, he told factory workers: "Si y en a que ça les démange d'augmenter les impôts..." A London equivalent might be be "If there's anyone 'ere that's itching to put up taxes..." [I'm sure people can suggest better versions]
Like Tony Blair and his pseudo estuary-speak, Sarkozy is a lawyer and rhetorical ace who uses low-class tones as a way of sounding like an ordinary bloke. The style grates because of France's attachment to language as a unifying symbol of the Republic. Most previous leaders have cultivated a literary side, including military ones such as Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte. The President is being accused of setting a poor example when he is trying to stem the decline in literacy. Jean-Marie Rouart, a distinguished writer and member of the Académie Française, accused Sarkozy of pandering to youth "by apeing their vulgarity".
Jean Veronis, who wrote a study called "The Words of Nicolas Sarkozy," said that the President's speech was natural to him. "He is not very cultivated and does not read much. Usually politicians correct themselves when they arrive at a certain level, but Sarkozy does not give a hoot. It's his nouveau riche attitude," Veronis told us.
Capel says that Sarkozy's "virile and brutal" language "shocks the working classes most of all because they still believe that they can rise in the world through education." In Le Monde this month, Barbara Cassin, a philosopher and philologist, accused Sarkozy of undermining democracy with his loose grammar. "Every time that President Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs agree," she said. "That is the best, and only respectful way..." Cassin was shocked "by the spelling mistakes which litter the website of the Elysée palace." These would be amusing "if they did not testify to a worrying off-handed attitude towards culture," she said.
 [Left: Sarkozy chose the palace library for his first official portrait]
Sarkozy's image as a Philistine has not been diminished by recent attempts by Carla Bruni to depict him as a closet lover of belles lettres and fan of antique philosophers. The President has published his memoirs and political texts as well as a biography but, a little like George W. Bush, he plays up his uncultivated side.
One of his favourite targets, as we've seen here before, is a 17th century novel called The Princess of Cleves. He suffered from the book, by Madame de Lafayette, in his school years and loves mocking it as an example of cultural baggage that is irrelevant for most people in modern France. He joked recently that only a "sadist or an idiot" could have inserted questions on the book into an entrance examination for civil servants. (Sarkozy has removed the culture test from that exam). The book has now sold out. Protesters are staging public readings and visitors at the Paris book fair last week were wearing badges saying "I am reading the Princess of Cleves."
It's a beautiful spring Thursday all over France and several million people are taking the day off. It's another "day of mobilisation", a strike for the public sector and a general venting for others who are joining in mass protests against President Sarkozy, la crise and injustice in general. Paris is almost as quiet as a weekend since many commuters in the region are using their allotted rest days and staying at home.
No matter how often you have watched this ritual, it's always impressive to see the degree to which public opinion and the media approve of the widescale disruption and mass protest. Radio and TV are out this morning with busloads of protesters as they make their way to the demos like supporters ahead of big matches. The state radio stations -- whose staff are on strike -- are broadcasting up-beat music like Soviet radio used to do on May Day mornings.
One poll, by the Ifop institute, found that 78 percent of the public support today's "social movement". It's ironic that the boss of Ifop is Laurence Parisot, who is also the head of Medef, the employers' federation. Parisot has earned widespread contempt for deploring the French habit of taking to the streets to protest against economic hard times. She accused the unions of populism and creating false expectations.
This was deemed such a provocation that Alain Juppé, a former conservative prime minister who was driven from office by the street in the mid-90s, slapped down Parisot in public today. "It's not with arrogance or a form of ignorance of people's concerns that we will get out of the crisis," Juppé said of Parisot's remarks.
The unions, who are organising the marches and strikes, say that Sarkozy will have no choice but to respond to the deep discontent and give way on their demands: These include a higher minimum wage, more taxes on the well-off and an end to his shrinkage of the civil service.
Sarkozy says that he will not offer more than 2.65 billion euros of additional aid for vulnerable households that he promised after the last day of protest, on January 29. The President is said, however, to be seriously worried that alarm over private sector job losses and the economic gloom will feed into the long-simmering revolt by the hardline public sector unions and students. Unemployment has surged past eight percent with an expected loss of a further 350,000 jobs this year. The picture at the top comes from angry protests at a French plant of the German Continental tyre firm which is to close. The "Contis", as the workers there have become known, are the new symbol of abusive business practices.
Sarkozy is not helped by the near absence of the usual opposition, the Socialist party, which is still enfeebled by internal feuding. The Socialist leaders have not even been invited to march with the unions. Polls show the most effective opponent of Sarkozy to be Olivier Besancenot, the young Trotskyite chief of the recently-founded New Anticapitalist Party. Besancenot and his substantial band of followers are bent on the destruction of the system and have no intention of seeking any office. They dream of a brave new dictatorship of the proletariat.
For these people as well as the moderate left, Sarkozy stands as a useful hate figure, for his policies and his personality. I don't usually agree with Figaro, which acts as obedient cheer leader for the President, but it makes a good point on this Sarkophobia today. "In the economic crisis, anti-Sarkozism has become for many a new humanism, a moral posture which suspects everything that touches on money, business, bosses or le pouvoir (the ruling powers).
There is excited talk of a hot spring and even another May '68 but old hands are pointing out that the revolt that year and a rash of violent strikes in the 1970s happened in benign economic times. In 2009, people are too worried about losing their jobs to risk them by joining in revolt. Also, as Sarkozy points out, the majority may approve of the strikes and demonstrations but they do not take part in them.
But you never know with France. Insurrection against le pouvoir is such an old habit.
Borders have melted in Europe and the modern media have created global celebrities but one frontier stands as high as ever: the cultural one. France has just lost a superstar whom President Sarkozy called "a prince... an immense artist who will mark the history of music". Yet very few outside the French-speaking world will ever have heard of the man whom he was talking about, Alain Bashung, the most revered of French rock singers.
Those last three words partly explain why the work of Bashung, who died at 61, didn't travel. To many, the notion of French rock'n roll prompts sniggering and cracks about Johnny Hallyday. Le Johnny national is indeed a bit of a joke and it is true that the rock idiom does not lend itself easily to French, but there have been plenty of good French pop-rock acts.
Bashung was exceptional, a composer-performer who remained original and who combined commercial success with high esteem from the serious arts world [Top picture from March 2008]. The nearest comparison was the late Serge Gainsbourg, who was known beyond France if only because of one erotic song, the 1969 Je t'aime, moi non plus.
Language is obviously the main reason that Bashung, Gainsbourg and other Gallic greats do not export well. The world does not understand French like it used to and the tradition known as chanson française depends more on the lyrics than melody. The only French-language singer-composers to cross the frontier in recent decades have been Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel.
That's a pity, because Bashung, the son of a Breton mother and an Algerian whom he never saw, adapted rock brilliantly to the French spirit. He heard his first records as a child visiting an American base in Alsace, where he grew up. He brought to the genre the melancholy and dark humour of a French tradition that goes back to François Villon, the poet-vagabond of the 15th century. Libération, which dedicated its whole edition today to Bashung, saluted him as a modern Villon. [Watch Libé's videos of him]
The morbid, brooding side of Bashung and lesser French singers can be a little hard to take. But the Montreal Gazette, which knows Bashung because of Quebec's French side, gave him credit last year for doing it well. "Carrying the weight of the world, not to mention amour, on one's shoulders is difficult stuff to pull off without sounding like a portentous ogre. But Bashung is a world-class moper whose gravitas makes Morrissey seem like a pipsqueak."
Bashung was of course respectably engagé and on the side of the oppressed -- which raises questions about Sarkozy's real appreciation of the artist. But he was not just a lefty poseur like many of the current young stars of la chanson française. The very conservative Le Figaro called him today "the greatest artist of French song to have appeared since Serge Gainsbourg."
Everyone is remembering Bashung's grace and elegance -- exemplified by his brave farewell appearance only two weeks to receive three Victoires de la musique awards (watch here). Jane Birkin, the English actress-singer who was Gainsbourg's muse and partner, agreed with Sarkozy today, calling Bashung a baroque prince. "I always said to the British: 'You don't have a Bashung chez vous'," she said.
Below: La nuit, je mens, (At night, I lie) a hit from Bashung's 1998 album Fantaisie Militaire
dssdds
Spring has arrived in Paris. Daffodils are out in the gardens, overcoats are disappearing and the sun is showing up the winter grime on the windows and on the ugly Porsche Cayenne that is parked in my street. Non-smokers are taking seats on the café terraces (les fumeurs frequented them all winter because of the new indoor smoking ban). The trout fishing season opened today. It's even possible to scent a hint of hope in the air despite the gloom and grumbling all around.
As the winter lifts, the French are not at all as depressed as they make out, according to a poll by le Parisien. Two out of three say they are optimistic about the future. There were other surprises from the mood survey which I'll get back to below.
One of the reasons for optimism may be the overdose of crisis. The news continued to be bleak this week, with factory closures every day, including a Sony plant where the desperate workers took the company's French boss hostage. But some of the media think that it's time to change the tune and have started putting out stories on making the most of the down-turn -- lower house prices and rediscovering simple pleasures such as home cooking, the cinema, holidays in France and so on.
And some of the news is reassuringly familiar. The Paris book fair has opened -- with a Mexican theme this year -- the fashion week was a hit as usual and Nicolas Sarkozy was caught out once again indulging his love of luxury.
The President disappeared with Carla Bruni three days before a one-day official visit to Mexico City last Monday. No-one was supposed to know where he was, but the Mexican press tracked the French royal couple to El Tamarindo Beach and Golf Resort, a very expensive enclave in Jalisco state on the Pacific Coast [picture]. This did not look good for Sarko's efforts to rid himself of the bling-bling that tainted his early months in the presidency. All that turquoise and palm trees hardly helped his new image as close to his suffering people.
Things got worse when it emerged that the presidential pair occupied their 3,500 dollars-a-day suite as guests of Roberto Hernandez, one of Mexico's richest bankers and owner of the resort.
It didn't take long for the media to recycle 1990s allegations from the United States that Hernandez was involved in the cocaine industry. The Elysée Palace kept an embarrassed silence, directing queries to the Mexican presidency who, it claims, organised Sarko's long weekend on the beach. Today the Mexicans have said that "a group of businessmen" paid for the beach weekend.
Talk of the Jalisco jaunt has eclipsed Sarkozy's two very substantial acts in foreign policy this week -- his announcement of France's return to full Nato membership (last post) and a realignment with Germany at a session with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday. Like all his predecessors, Sarkozy seems to have accepted that French power works best in Europe as part of the axis with Berlin.
Sarko has also been lecturing his government on the need for what's known in French as la positive attitude. He has given them orders to talk up his and their achievements.
Which brings us back to the spring survey, carried out by the CSA polling firm. It found that the French draw their greatest satisfaction and pleasure from leisure time with their friends and family. The best moment of the day is "meeting up with the family in the evening". Second after that came "waking up alongside the person you love".
Asked what contributes most to make their lives positive, 61 percent answered their children, 33 percent said friends, 23 percent said leisure activities and only 20 percent said that it was their work or studies.
Asked what activity gave them most pleasure, 40 percent said an evening with their partner or with friends. Thirty-nine percent said sports, listening to music or cooking. Only 13 percent cited love-making as their most pleasurable activity. That statistic is not great for France's reputation as le pays de l'amour.
At least sex got a mention. Religion appeared nowhere in the poll, not even under the question of the most important values that society should observe. First came respect for others, then "solidarity", followed by the family. The value of work came next, followed by money.
And a final question: What moments are you most looking forward to in 2009? The answers were pretty modest, in keeping with diminished times.
1) The first sunshine of springtime
2) The summer holidays
3) The birthday of your children or parents
4) A party, wedding or other social event with friends [A spring day at a café in Lille]
President Sarkozy takes the plunge today and and explains why, 43 years since General de Gaulle threw American forces out of France, he is taking his country back into the core of the US-led Atlantic alliance. France's return to the military command will be formally proclaimed at the NATO summit in Strasbourg on April 3.
It's a big step, politically and symbolically because it reverses the act which defined France's sense of special destiny, independent from US power and not quite part of the Western camp during the Cold War. Sarkozy's opponents in the Socialist opposition and his own Gaullist camp are piling in on him, accusing him of betraying the sovereignty that de Gaulle reclaimed when he wrote a curt letter to President Johnson in March 1966. The general told LBJ that he wanted Nato headquarters out of the Paris suburbs and all American military personnel out of France.
François Bayrou, the centrist who is Sarkozy's most consistent opponent, flayed him this morning for "amputating" France, diminishing the nation and getting nothing in return. Martine Aubry, the Socialist leader, said that nothing justifies Sarkozy's "embrace of Atlanticism". Dominique de Villepin, Gaullist former Prime Minister, foe of Sarko and fan of Napoleon Bonaparte, denounced the President for "shrinking our country and renouncing our diplomatic calling."
With so much at stake -- French pride and the prickly relationship with Washington -- you would think that Sarkozy is risking big trouble. In reality, it is only the politicians who are making the fuss. Sarkozy's move is supported by 58 percent of the public, according to an IFOP poll today, with 37 percent opposed.
That suggests two things: Sarkozy has done a good job at explaining why it makes sense to rejoin the command and that, with the economic crisis and the new Franco-American detente, foreign relations are not stirring much emotion.
IFOP recalled that in 1966, 38 percent opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal and only 22 percent approved. The common factor then and now is that the presidents acted without public debate or political consultation. Sarkozy, who now runs de Gaulle's party, indicated his intentions to rejoin after his election in 2007. He will now stifle dissent on his own side by forcing through the move with a parliamentary confidence vote on March 17. The Gaullist die-hards will not risk voting 'no'.
Sarkozy's arguments are simple. France has remained an active member of the political alliance and in recent years its armed forces have taken part in in most Nato operations from Kosovo to Afghanistan -- run from Nato's post-France Belgian base. So it makes sense to have French generals back sharing the command. In addition, the return to full membership will allay suspicions of French efforts to promote an autonomous European defence system, says Sarkozy.
The last two French presidents -- François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac -- also wanted to get back into the command. Mitterrand, a Socialist who opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal, negotiated secretly with the Americans while Chirac did it publicly in 1995, withdrawing when Washington refused his conditions. Sarkozy has imposed no conditions.
France will acquire more influence and lose no military or diplomatic independence, says Sarkozy. Hervé Morin, his Defence Minister, explained this morning: "I hear people saying that joining the command will put our independence in doubt. Saying that is either dishonesty or incompetence."
The commanders of France's substantial and well-respected armed forces are pleased and the Americans and British are also grateful to have the French fully back in the fold, even if they can be difficult.
I can't help feeling that if I were French I would be feeling a pang of doubt. The idea of separateness that de Gaulle created has served France well, even if it was largely an illusion. Membership of the Nato high command means renouncing an important symbol without much in return from the US. But maybe that's just nostalgia.
Older French have mixed memories of the US military presence in France. Unimaginable for the younger generation, American forces were part of the landscape from 1944 to 1967 [A US serviceman with local resident in top picture]. They drew admiration, envy and annoyance, especially in the 29 base towns where they cruised around in exotic cars -- known at the time as belles américaines. They lived affluently and taught the locals how to dance rock'n roll. At Châteauroux [US base pictured below], 10 percent of all marriages between 1951 and 1967 were between US servicemen and French women. Gérard Depardieu, the film star, has fond memories of a black American girlfriend during his teenage years at Châteauroux.
I doubt that Johnny Hallyday -- France's imitation American rocker-- would have been such a big hit back in the early 1960s if the country had not already absorbed a bit of America from its resident armed forces (Daniel Strohl can advise us here).
American forces won't be coming back to live in France. But Sarkozy is hoping to persuade Barack Obama to stage a symbolic act of Franco-American reunion on April 2, on the eve of the Nato summit. This is to take the form of meeting in Normandy at one of the beaches where US, British, Canadian -- and French -- forces landed from England on June 6, 1944.
[Below: the young Johnny -- real name Jean-Philippe Smet]
A row over a new French film gives me a chance to mention a routine but always troubling job for British correspondents in France. This is the trip to Calais. You always leave the Channel port feeling hopeless after observing the wretched lot of the refugees who gather on its outskirts with the hope of smuggling themselves into England.
Despite the fortress-like protection of the ports and attempts by London to diminish the attractions of the supposed British Eldorado, the flow to the Channel continues. The closure by (Interior Minister) Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003 of the Sangatte Red Cross centre, near the Channel tunnel entrance, did not end the affair. Hundreds of young asylum seekers, mainly from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey, are living rough on the edge of Calais and other Channel ports. They are cared for by individuals and small charities, refused shelter by the local authorities and harassed by police who have orders to keep them on the move. They inhabit a legal no-man's land because most cannot be expelled to their homelands yet they have no right to stay in France.
The British media have over the years whipped up unjustified indignation over supposed French laxness towards the refugees but French public opinion has never focused much on les miserables of the ports. The domestic army of clandestins in the big cities draw more emotion -- both sympathy and hostility -- than the ones who are trying to transit through France to Britain.
That has changed for a while with the release tomorrow of Welcome, a movie by Philippe Lioret and starring Vincent Lindon, one of France's biggest stars, which seeks to expose the brutal treatment of the Calais refugees.[Trailer here] The story involves Simon, a depressed local swimming instructor, who befriends Bilal, a young Iraqi Kurd, and helps train him for a highly dangerous project to swim the Channel to England, where he wants to find his girlfriend and play for Manchester United. In helping the lad, Simon learns of the savage existence of the asylum seekers and falls foul of the police.
Both Lioret and Lindon have scored pre-release publicity and incurred the wrath of the Sarkozy government by accusing the state of inhumanity towards the asylum-seekers. The pair are denouncing a law which makes it an offence to help an illegal resident. Lioret stirred special trouble by invoking the spectre of wartime Vichy France and comparing the harassment of the Calais clandestins to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
"If tomorrow you help a guy who has no papers, you're guilty under the offence of 'helping a person whose papers are not in order'," Lioret told La Voix du Nord newspaper. "What country are we living in? I have the impression that we're in 1943 and that we've hidden a Jew in the cellar," he said.
That spurred a riposte from Eric Besson, the former Socialist who has just become Sarkozy's new Immigration Minister. "To suggest that the French police are like the police of Vichy, and that Afghans are hunted down, are the target of roundups ... is intolerable," said Eric Besson.
Lindon, who plays Simon, said that the "illegals are sometimes treated worse than dogs." With its dense barbed wire fences, Calais was "a town in a state of siege," he said.
Lindon, who has spent his career playing sensitive, flawed heroes, vowed on television at the weekend to stop frequenting posh Paris restaurants because he was so appalled by the suffering at Calais. The promise did not last long, according to today's Figaro. Lindon was spotted lunching yesterday at the Brasserie Lipp, the famed eating place on the Boulevard Saint Germain.
Regulars here need no introduction to Nicolas Canteloup, the humourist who draws two million listeners on Europe 1 radio every morning with impersonations of politicians and celebrities. Improvising on the day's news Canteloup has a great talent for skewering, not always gently, President Sarkozy and the other big egos who crowd the public stage.
Canteloup gave me an hour of his time today in the Train Bleu, the Belle Epoque brasserie at the Gare de Lyon. He was on his way to the next leg of a sold-out two-year touring show. It was good to get a chance to sound out the man behind the famous pastiches of Super Sarko, sanctimonious Ségolène Royal and the inaudible goody-goody Carla Bruni. Canteloup had come from exercising the horses which are his escape from his day job of mocking France's rulers (a life-long equestrian and former riding instructor, he says his big ambition is to enter England's Badminton trials).
As often with comics off-stage, he is rather diffident, a little austere and modest about what he does. He claims to have no great skill at imitating voices but rather a gift for picking up people's tics and traits and turning them into caricature. He discovered his talent as an amuser when he was a child but only went professional after failing to make it into a police college while a law student at Bordeaux and then working at Club Med resorts.
"I rather fancied the idea of gendarmes and robbers. I suppose that's what I still do in a way," he said. Canteloup, who does not drink or smoke, says he is blessed with political "clients" you couldn't make up. "Sarkozy, with his hyperactivity, is a comic strip character who gives us a lot to work with. He's a gift." The trick is to latch onto the detail. "Every character has their mask, like the commedia dell' arte. For Sarko it's heavy wrist-watches, for Rachida Dati [disgraced Justice Minister] it's beautiful dresses. Carla Bruni, its the little voice and 'everyone is nice'. Bruni is difficult because she is a real pro, in complete control of herself in public -- unlike Sarko-- he says.
Canteloup tries not to meet the targets of his sketches and refuses invitations from politicians. He says that he avoids vulgarity and draws the line at mocking physique -- though his jokes about Sarkozy's short stature are a running gag. He recognises that some of his material skirts the edge of the acceptable. One example was a sketch in January on Israel's bombardment of the Gaza strip.
Most of his victims take the humour in good spirit, even when it verges on the cruel, he says. An exception was Ségolène Royal, who Canteloup sends up as a perpetually indignant victim. "When she lost the presidency, she tried to find the reasons. She said that I was one of them. I was wounded by that because I did not set out to make Segolene lose. I don't take political sides. My aim is to try to find what is funny."
Another who was wounded at first was Gérard Schivardi, a village mayor with a slurred southwestern accent who ran for the presidency in 2007 as candidate for an obscure Trotskyite party. Canteloup's Schivardi is permanently drunk as he offers his views from the supposed village cafe. This has turned the fictional Schivardi into a familiar character. "It has been a jackpot for Schivardi," says Canteloup. "He has gone from a near unknown to a celebrity. I hope he'll stand again for president." Canteloup does Schivardi well because, he says, the south-western twang is his own "native language."
Canteloup agrees that he and his colleagues -- Laurent Gerra, Stéphane Guillon and others -- are benefiting from the economic crisis. "We are in a September 11 atmosphere. There is a kind of world malaise, economic insecurity. People want release."
Taking my leave, Canteloup was curious to know why Times readers would be interested in him since he is not known in the English-speaking world and humour does not translate easily. My answer was that the current French comedy boom is a phenomenon that merits attention and he is one of the leading exponents. Now I have to make it work for the readers who, unlike those on the blog, have not gone looking for something to read about France.
------
[Below: Canteloup performing Sarkozy and his other characters on Michel Drucker's TV show. Unusually, he is impersonating one of them to his face: Bernard Kouchner, the perpetually breathless Foreign Minister. Canteloup caricatures Kouchner's emotional, old-fashioned rhetoric, complete with language mistakes. CB]
Canteloup et Kouchner chez Drucker le 26-10-08
![93_rue_lauriston[2]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201127936bc4e28a4-200wi)
Jewish groups and surviving Resistance members are upset over a rather daft plan to erase the street number of a building in western Paris because its address is synonymous with wartime horrors.
The council in the posh 16th arrondissement has just voted to change 93 rue Lauriston to 91a because of the taint of having been headquarters for the "French Gestapo", a notorious gang of collaborators during the Nazi occupation. For some of the critics this even smacks of Holocaust revisionism.
Between 1941 and 1944, dozens died at 93 rue Lauriston at the hands of the gang led by Pierre Bonny, a former police officer, and Henri Lafont, a gangster. Serving the German police, they looted Jewish homes and rounded up hundreds of people for torture in the cellars and often imprisonment, deportation or death. They ran a lucrative sideline of blackmail and black-market dealing until the Liberation and their subsequent execution.
The address is still sinister for Parisians who lived through the war and the story was revived in 2004 with a film starring Michel Blanc called 93 rue Lauriston. Because of the blighted name, property prices are still lower in la rue Lauriston than elsewhere in the very expensive 16th district. It's a rather gloomy narrow street which also happens to be home to the garage that services our car.
Hervé de Charette, a former Foreign Minister, requested the change last autumn after he became director of the Franco-Arab Chamber of Commerce, which occupies the building. "The past history of the address embarrassed me immediately, especially since I am responsible for a Franco-Arab organisation," de Charette told le Parisien. "My request sprang from a good intention: to make the address of shame disappear".
The initiative has caused offence and the Arab connection has not helped. To some it looks like an attempt to rewrite history. "This is ridiculous and pathetic. It's a form of revisionism," said Ariel Goldman, spokesman for the CRIF, the national council of Jewish organisations. "It's a really strange way of erasing bad memories... What counts is not the number but the place itself," he told us.
Suzanne Teboul, 85, a former resistance fighter, recalled in Le Parisien her comrades' fear that they would fall into the hands of the dreaded Lauriston gang. "Amongst ourselves we called it the street of horrors," she said. "It is a powerful place for those who fought for Free France. The people who want to rename it are making a mistake. It is not by changing a number that you erase the past."
Maurice Rafsjus, an historian who specialises in the wartime Vichy regime, said that no-one knew the total of killings that took place in the Laurston cellars. Changing the number "proves that France is still not at peace with its Vichy past," he said.
The Paris city council has to approve the change. Given the fuss, it may not do so. In case anyone is wondering, the street is named after Marshal Jacques Law de Lauriston, a military companion of Napoleon Bonaparte who was born in India of Scottish descent. As a general, he covered the Emperor's retreat from Moscow in 1812.
This is the March page in a calendar on the theme of "The Tribes of Paris". Produced by ActUp, the gay campaign organisation, it would not normally cause a stir except that the gentleman on the left, in the wrestler's mask, is a state dignitary, the Chairman of Radio France, the public broadcasting corporation.
Jean-Paul Cluzel, 61, a senior civil servant and former director of the Paris Opera, was already in President Sarkozy's bad books. His exotic picture has now given the president an extra reason for sacking him when his mandate comes up for renewal in May. "This is not worthy of the boss of a public service," Sarko told his advisers, according to today's Canard Enchaîné. "This guy is mad. He thinks he can do anything. His private life is whatever he wants but he can't display himself like that."
Sarko, who recently awarded himself the job of appointing the heads of the public TV and radio services, really wants to dump Cluzel because he dislikes the impertinent output of France Inter, the biggest and most popular of the seven stations in the national radio group.
Inter is the direct equivalent to Britain's BBC Radio 4. It offers solid current affairs and entertainment with a leftish, public sector streak. It holds its own well against the big commercial networks RTL and Europe 1 thanks to a lively, impertinent tone that it has sharpened further since Cluzel took over in 2004. Auntie Beeb's stolid Radio 4 would be unlikely to go in for some of the antics recently heard on Inter.
[Picture below: Cluzel in civilian dress]
Sarkozy is especially incensed by Stéphane Guillon, Inter's new court jester, who delivers a vitriolic black humour commentary on the political news of the day in the peak-audience 7.50am slot. Guillon lacerates everyone, pulling no punches on the grounds that "bad taste is sometimes necessary." It's meant to be taken in the spirit of knock-about grand guignol but for some, including me, he goes over the top. The other day, for example, he mocked Martine Aubry, the Socialist party leader, as a "fat tobacco jar".
His worst offence, in the eyes of Sarko, was a vicious job last month on the supposedly predatory sexual habits of Domnique Strauss-Kahn, the French Socialist who runs the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn, who landed in trouble last year over a one-night stand with a subordinate, was in the studio for an interview when Guillon announced that all female staff at the station had been ordered to wear demure clothes in order not to excite "the beast Strauss-Kahn". A siren would be sounded to evacuate all women if the bromide in his coffee failed, he said. A camera had been placed under the table to ensure correct behaviour by DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is known.. and so on. DSK, who is regarded as a potential presidential candidate for 2012, blew a fuse and complained about Guillon's méchanceté -- nastiness.
The incident turned Guillon into an internet sensation thanks to the studio webcam. Watch him below. Cluzel defended his satirist, saying that spicy, irreverent humour was an old French tradition and it brightened up the day.
Sarkozy did not agree. He sounded off against Guillon and France Inter to journalists and also at a palace meeting. "It's insulting, it's vulgar, it's nasty. Do you realise what he said, at prime listening time, about the private life of Strauss-Kahn or the physique of Martine Aubry," Sarko fumed. "What's this country coming to?" [Mais dans quel pays vit-on]
Cluzel, who describes himself as "gay, catholic and liberal" has a strong argument for resisting Sarkozy, though it probably will not do him much good. France Inter is scoring high ratings and Guillon is very popular. All of Cluzel's stations are doing well, with the exception of France Musique. If and when Cluzel is dismissed, Sarko will be attacked yet again for ruling the state air waves like a monarch, or at least like the late President Charles de Gaulle.
As we've noted here before, France is enjoying a boom in political satire. This is being interpreted as a reflection of the need to lighten up in grim times. Over on Europe 1, Guillon's rival is the brilliant Nicolas Canteloup. But Canteloup's daily impersonations of a manic and Napoleonic Sarko are much gentler than Guillon's
[UPDATE March 8. Sarkozy has apparently persuaded Obama to meet him for a quick session at a Normandy beach between the London and Strasbourg summits, on April 3 -- according to le Figaro.] ---------- For a French leader who has often seemed dazzled by the United States, Nicolas Sarkozy has not been helping his case for new friendship with Washington. But you can also understand that he is needled by today's White House visit by Gordon Brown, the first European leader to be invited by President Obama.
Sarkozy had pulled out the diplomatic stops to woo the Obama team before and after his November victory. As Europe's new strongman, as he saw it, Sarko was hoping to make France the new "go to" country for Washington in its relations with the EU. He began, though, with a little spelling mistake, sending a congratulatory note within minutes of the election result in which he wrote by hand "Dear Barak".
The Elysée lobbied hard for a quick Washington invitation and, US diplomat friends tell me, the White House hesitated before falling back on the old relationship with London -- which is really only seen as special on the UK side. "This is obviously a serious diplomatic reverse for President Sarkozy," said Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-leaning weekly that likes to play up the President's difficulties. "He was hoping to be designated by the Obama administration as the privileged interlocutor of the United States in Europe, as the de facto leader of the Old Continent," it said. Le Parisien says today that Washington is snubbing Sarkozy.
The President asked Obama to drop in for at least a photo-opp at the Elysée around the Nato summit in the French city of Strasbourg on April 3. That was refused too. Sarkozy now says that he will "receive" the US leader on the sideliness of the Strasbourg session. Yesterday he had a few minutes with Hilary Clinton at the Gaza aid meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. A few weeks ago, he was saying that meeting the Secretary of State was the job of his Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, not the President of France.
So why the relative cold shoulder from the Americans? Sarkozy is after all about to take a big step towards Washington -- much more than a gesture -- by bringing France back into the military structure of the Nato alliance after a 43-year break? Part of the reason is Sarko's big mouth. Since the financial crisis began in earnest last October, he has sought to score points at home at the expense of the Americans and the British, blaming them for starting the mess. The new administration is not greatly impressed by his messianic demands for "refounding" the international economic system. It has also been annoyed by his public refusal to send more French forces to join the Nato operation in Afghanistan. New French criticism of Israel is another factor. None of this has helped the atmosphere.
In private, Sarkozy is now saying that he has few illusions that the Obama administration will be much more open to Europe than its predecessor. He is said to be irritated by the global adulation of a US president who has eclipsed his own stardom. "It is difficult not to see a little jealousy on the part of a President who so loves to be on the front page -- a little annoyance towards someone who is more a media darling and more powerful than him," said Sud-Ouest newspaper.
That may just be atmospherics and Obama has yet to land in Europe. I suspect that Sarkozy l'Américain,as he once proudly called himself, has not lost the fascination for the United States that he has so often shown. Don't forget the compliments that he paid his last and current wives. Cécilia was the new Jackie Kennedy when he won the presidency in May 2007 and a few months later, he was calling Carla Bruni, her successor, his Marilyn Monroe.
[Picture: Carla and Nicolas taking Manhattan last September. Top picture:Sarkozy playing cowboy on election-eve 2007]
 Michelin published the 100th edition of its Red Guide today. That prompted the annual ritual of bashing the celebrated bible of French gastronomy. The guide, first published in 1900 but halted during world wars, has lost touch with modern taste and rewards "museum-cuisine" in the stuffy old French tradition, say the critics.
The only addition to the élite three-star category, Eric Fréchon of the Hotel Bristol in Paris [below], is coming in for his own share of sniping. The Bristol, across the street from the Elysée Palace, is President Sarkozy's favourite "cantine", so Fréchon's promotion is being called a marketing stunt. In an amusing video, the ferocious François Simon of le Figaro visits the Bristol and calls his cooking overdone, too expensive and not very original. Simon's bill for a meal for two came to 531 euros.
For the British, the other noteworthy promotion was the two-star rating awarded to Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, for the restaurant which he took over at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles a year ago. Simon of course had a put-down for the upstart Britannique. Ramsay's cooking is not bad though déjà vu and unoriginal, said Simon.
But for an institution that is so often proclaimed passé, Michelin is not doing badly. The 2,000-page Red Guide sells 1.3 million copies a year worldwide. In France it sold 370,000 in 2008 -- ten times more than its nearest competitor, the Gault et Millau guide. That's impressive for a publication that sticks to its tradition of packing a single volume with tiny print, minimalist description and no pictures.
A series of great chefs have withdrawn in recent years from the struggle of meeting Michelin's exacting standards in order to keep their stars. The latest of these was Marc Veyrat, one of the super-stars of the culinary world, who said last week that he is giving up his restaurant at Annecy, in the Alps.
But for thousands of aspiring chefs, Michelin and its feared but small team of anonymous inspectors, remains the ultimate arbiter. In a sign of the times, the French guide is now under the command of Juliane Caspar, 38, a German from Cologne. Jean-Luc Naret, director of all the guides, has been making his case for the superiority of the Guide Rouge. "We have no competitor in France or internationally," he said. Michelin went intercontinental in 2005 with a New York edition and has since opened in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The tyre-making Michelin brothers put out their first guide free to help travellers and their chauffeurs in the new-fangled automobiles to find mechanics and places to sleep and eat [1920 version in picture was first paid edition]. With its maps, guides and recently GPS brand, the firm has remained a reliable source of information for travellers in France. The Red Guide is now available on the internet and as an iPhone application. The next step is a GPS service that will list nearby Michelin recommendations automatically on your sat-nav mobile phone.
We saw a few months ago that Nicolas Sarkozy was having a good crisis. Like Britain's Gordon Brown at the time he appeared to be on top of the financial turmoil. His boss-of-everything style suited the moment. Now, Super Sarko is coming a little unstuck.
The "hyper-president" has hit trouble with his mania for running France from his palace and reducing his government and parliament to simple executants and spectators. His leadership is looking arbitrary and even autocratic. Members of his cabinet are talking about their doubts. Comparisons with Napoleon Bonaparte and Vladimir Putin are coming not just from the Socialist opposition, but from within Sarkozy's own rightwing camp.
That is exaggerating, but this week a couple of cases have added to doubts about his judgment. One is his appointment of Francois Pérol, his deputy chief of staff and closest economic adviser, to the post of chief of a big new banking group. Pérol had himself put together the now state-aided group -- a union of the Caisse d'Epargne and Banque Populaire -- from the Elysée palace. This brought howls of conflict of interest. Sarkozy then said that the appointment had been cleared bythe state Ethics Commission. That turned out to be false. The head of the commission had merely given a personal opinion in private. Even Edouard Balladur, the former Prime Minister who was Sarkozy's mentor, said this was too much. The Socialists want criminal charges brought if the appointment goes ahead.
Balladur was the source of Sarkozy's other trouble. Appointed by the President to suggest administrative reforms, he came up with a new map of France. The historic regions of Picardy and the Auvergne would simply vanish, Brittany would reclaim its lost region around Nantes, Normandy would be united and Paris would be expanded to engulf the surrounding region. In a nice political touch, Poitou-Charentes would also be eradicated. That region happens to be the power base of its president, Ségolène Royal.
You don't need to know much about French attachment to le terroir to guess the reaction. The regions may only have been political entities since the early 1980s, but the attachment to the historic provinces, such as Auvergne and Picardy, runs deep (we saw this with the car license plates last month). The Balladur scheme may fizzlebut Sarko is being accused of trying to recast France with the whim of an absolute monarch.
Sarkozy's critics, including some in his own Cabinet, say that his system of forcing la rupture by riding rough-shod over tradition and institutions has reached its limit. In a time of unrest and upheaval, he should stop behaving like a monarch and delegate power to his Prime Minister, François Fillon. He should appoint ministers with authority in their own right. His present cabinet is full of indebted courtiers who take orders from the palace advisers who run their sectors. A good example is Christine Lagarde, the Finance Minister, a lawyer with no political background who is struggling out of her depth while Sarkozy and his staff run the economy.
An un-named minister told le Monde: A real government has to be established, with a screen between the President and events. Nicolas Sarkozy must do what he does not know how to do: work in a team and confer value on his ministers. The question is whether he can put into question his two years in power so far.
That remark, albeit anonymous, has caused a stir since it appeared yesterday. Criticism also came on the record from Jean-Francois Copé, the parliamentary leader of Sarkozy's UMP party, who has turned into a dissident. "The challenge is to create a hyper-parliament opposite the hyper-president from which ministers can draw support," he said.
Sarko is a pragmatist, but few see him retreating from the pilot's seat and becoming a lofty chairman like his recent predecessors and especially Jacques Chirac, the last incumbent. French presidents have enjoyed near absolute power most of the time since the job was invented for Charles de Gaulle in 1958. The exception has been nine years of cohabition with opposition governments. Until Sarkozy, recent presidents have followed de Gaulle's precedent of delegating management of the country to their Prime Minister. Sarkozy is telling people that he is aware of the discontent -- which is reflected in rock bottom approval ratings -- but he says the mood is the result of the economic slump, not his leadership. In other words, Europe's modern Bonaparte will march on, heedless of the storm around him.
[Top picture is from the cover of a recent edition of Le Point news magazine. ]
What is it about Moroccan-born French businessmen in their fifties? First Cécilia Sarkozy ran off with one and today we learn that Ségolène Royal has fallen for another.
Royal, the slightly flaky Socialist who lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election, has been shoving herself into the headlines for months in a campaign to eclipse Martine Aubry, the stolid party leader. This week, in full Joan of Arc mode, she rushed off with a media posse to Guadeloupe to side with strikers who have paralysed the Caribbean island for a month. But today Royal, 55, is furious because Paris Match magazine had the effrontery to report on her new companion.
Match splashed Royal on its front and inside pages walking arm-in-arm in the Spanish resort of Marbella with André Hadjez, who, we were told, is a property manager and board-game entrepreneur. In its usual fawning celebrity style, Match talked of the "romantic Andalusian escapade" and the "amorous gestures" of Royal, the "free woman", and her consort.
In time-honoured French fashion, Royal is crying foul and has set her lawyers on Match for violating her privacy -- a criminal offence though the law is increasingly breached. "These are stolen pictures. Why can't they leave me in peace," she said. Their publication was part of a dark plot to discredit her by treating her as un people -- a celebrity -- said her entourage.
"This is obviously an attempt to undermine her. It's the method of vultures," said Jean-Louis Bianco, a senior Socialist ally. "It's politics via the keyhole. They are trying to mix the private woman and her public acts as a politician."
Rather than taking cover and waiting for the law-suits, Match has for once hit back. "Why were the photographers welcome to cover her presence in Guadeloupe but not in the streets of a Spanish seaside resort? Let us stop the hypocrisy," it said.
Whatever you think about Match, the argument is surely right. Royal has devoted great energy in recent months to projecting the image she has of herself: courageous, charismatic, stylish champion of the people's cause. She is hell-bent on taking another crack at the presidency in 2012 after being robbed last November, as she sees it, of the chance to lead the party. She is financially backed by Pierre Bergé, the fashion magnate who has just become a lot richer (see last post).
Royal's private life has been the subject of books and media cover since she split in 2007 from François Hollande, the father of her four children and the party leader while she was running for the presidency. She has talked in print about her vie de femme. So why should a magazine not show pictures of her walking down the street with her friend ?
Mr Hadjez is unknown to the public.He once made a Trivial Pursuit-style game based on Paris Match. The first thing that people have noticed is the resemblance to Richard Attias, the events organiser who married the former Cécilia Sarkozy last year. The men have similar backgrounds. The last editor of Match was fired for publishing a cover picture [above] of Cécilia with Attias -- but she was married to Sarkozy at the time. And it should be mentioned that Match's owner is Arnaud Lagardère, a good friend of the President.
![Bronzes_chinois[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e20112790e45ab28a4-400wi)
France often quotes a 1995 pop song by Alain Bashung called Ma petite entreprise ne connais pas la crise -- The crisis isn't touching my little business.
The title could be sung by the art market today after the spectacular sale of theYves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé collection. The three-day auction at the Grand Palais has defied the economic gloom and brought in 373 million euros, breaking several world records.
The song does not apply to the petite entreprise of Franco-Chinese relations. Beijing is using the sale of those two little Chinese animal heads to further its punishment of President Sarkozy for his antics last year around Tibet and the Beijing Olympics. The hare and the rat, stolen when the British and French sacked Beijing in 1860, went for 14 million euros each to anonymous bidders despite China's attempts to block the sale. Jackie Chan, the Kung Fu actor, jumped in on Beijing's side today. Here is my story.
Back to the rest of the art. The sight of all those bidders flush with their millions has not cheered France much as the bleak times hit home but it is being greeted as as a triumph by Sarkozy's government. Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, called the auction in the Grand Palais a "a world success which shows that Paris is one of the major centres for the international art market."
In a market that is apparently withstanding the slump, you would expect works by Matisse, de Chirico and Degas to notch up records. For example, Matisse's 1911 oil "Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose" [right], fetched 32 million euros, the sale's highest price and a record for the painter whose collages inspired Saint Laurent's designs.
![YSL-fauteuil-dragon_large[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e20112790e83fe28a4-300wi)
But how about this elephant-like arm-chair from the early 20th century Art Deco era? The squat, very worn, brown leather seat by the Irish designer Eileen Gray sold for 21.9 million euros. Souren Melikian, the veteran expert at the International Herald Tribune, said today that this was "a price that was until now utterly unimaginable for any piece of Art Deco furniture."
Crisis or no crisis, the Paris auction had shown that there had been no change since the days of bubbling optimism, he said. "The prodigious vitality of the art market across the board cannot be doubted for a second. If the goods are there, the prices rise higher than ever before."
To close, we can admire this piece by Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor. It was made from stacked wood blocks between 1914-1917 and entitled "Madame L.R.". It sold for 26 million euros -- 33 million US dollars.
|
Gauleiter von der See (DOMINIQUE II)
LOL !
More seriously: I wasn't aware of the above mentioned German torpedo incident. On apprend tous les jours...
It looks like as if some of our AS counterparts (always the same very few I mentioned in another post :) turn really touchy as soon as somebody dares to be not absolutely overwhelmed at once by their intellectual, physical and especially manly superiority :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 16 Jul 2009 16:21:05
For Paris streetstyle:
www.badaude.typepad.com
ibid
Posted by: badaude | 16 Jul 2009 16:11:52
Wow, sounds like 2/3rds of the number of bikes on the street have been stolen or destroyed (16,000/24,000). harsh.
The general tone of you piece, CB, makes it sound like the whole project is a disaster. Have you had times when you couldn't find a bike in good repair?
The idea of the French treating the bikes as their own property? Good luck. Like convincing them that money spent on social programs is actually their money. That isn't easy in any society, but maybe particularly hard in entitlement-oriented France.
You didn't mention prosecutions for bike crimes. too touchy a subject to bring up, or it simply doesn't occur to people that strict enforcement of the law can act as a deterrent? but, oh yeah, we're talking about a population that thinks taking your boss prisoner is just fine. so forget it.
[No it's not a disaster. It's hugely successful, as I thought I mentioned. The vandalism is an unfortunate aspect. I didn't get into the financing but the city has agreed to pay JC Decaux for every destroyed/stolen bike from now on when more than four percent disappear. I agree those huge theft and vandalism figures sound steep, but they insist they are accurate. The factory (in Hungary I think) that churns out the bikes is doing very will. CB]
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 15:53:23
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 (CB)
That's not the point. The point is that from now on, kind people, say, Louis Vuitton (or those supermarket owners), will not be bothered anymore with silly lawsuits by leftwing unions. That's all.
Posted by: D.V. | 16 Jul 2009 15:47:56
These Sarouel pants are terrbile. The two girls look very good and modern.
I lived in Germany (I'm actionally from Brazil) and even the germans find Paris expensive.
Posted by: Christine Garcia Barbosa | 16 Jul 2009 15:43:20
Robert Marchenoir | 16 Jul 2009 01:51:42
"by Arab and black youngsters"
"UN GROUPE DE JEUNES", s'il vous plaît !
(feel free to add: "poussés à la révolte par une société raciste"!)
"a posse of black African youths living in a social housing enclave"
NON ! C'est de la "MIXITE SOCIALE" ! You racist!!!
"the police backed down and did nothing."
CRS - SS !
" The barbarians are already inside the gates, looting and burning"
No wonder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRrPVfXeytc
Posted by: D.V. | 16 Jul 2009 15:29:00
Can't you read, RICK? of course he doesn't embarrass me. I wouldn't have posted the pics but you were fair game. Enough with the posturing.
There was a German U-Boote commander who had to be promoted to a land-based posting after he underwent a deep nervous breakdown: a torpedo he launched was one of the many pieces of defective ordnance the Kriegsmarine had in its arsenals... and the target was a dreadnought with Churchill onboard. But for a rusty gasket or a leaking joint, you might now be in thrall of Lord Halifax, Prince of Peace and Gauleiter von der See.
Posted by: Dominique II | 16 Jul 2009 15:24:55
You used the word "man" to describe troops. There are also women in the fighting forces. Why didn't you say each man and woman?
Posted by: rocket | 15 Jul 2009 21:27:46
Read and Weep, Rocket, you wicked man:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/man
man (mn)
n. pl. men (mn)
2. A human regardless of sex or age; a person.
3. A human or an adult male human belonging to a specific occupation, group, nationality, or other category. Often used in combination: a milkman; a congressman; a freeman.
So typical Anglosaxon to nitpick over each and every word about some gender discrimination. Last time I looked, it was called political correctness. I think it still is.
Posted by: D.V. | 16 Jul 2009 15:11:30
Something weird is happening. Wherever bikes and water coexist, bikes get thrown into the water with much higher frequency than, say, schoolgirls or French poodles. Only wrought iron garden chairs get anything like similar persecution from the sloshing crowd. A yearly horror vision is the regular dredging of Amsterdam's canals... but my peaceful Breton island was also home to watery bike-nappings.
The only explanation is that some aquatic creatures (crayfish?) like the bikes as pre-built nesting structures, and exert telepathic control over a handful of inebriated wretches (unless those are crayfish in disguise, which is a possibility not to be sniffed at).
Posted by: Dominique II | 16 Jul 2009 15:09:18
Rick
I am reacting to Jay's attack on me. Undeserved, IMO. He used a harmless comment of mine, not derogatory in the least, to attack me. Screw him, I say.
I feel no misgiving whatsoever in characterizing the entire Indian nation based on his asinine reaction to me. He should pay closer attention to what he's reading. If he has another problem with me, then he ought to tell me.
Otherwise, he should to keep his ignorant, twitty nonsense to himself.
Except for this, I think he's a great guy.
:)
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 15:08:50
["They convey a reaction against the problems of mobility in general." I don't really know what that means. -CB]
I assume it means that perceived lack of social mobility causes anger which is expressed through this vandalism.
[I don't think they meant social mobility, but maybe. CB]
Posted by: Don | 16 Jul 2009 15:02:49
ROS - that's one of those occasions when it seems there is no justice.
Give my love to Xavière - isn't she just your sort of woman? She is mine -
;D
Posted by: dot king | 16 Jul 2009 13:31:19
Dom2
"So count me out of your jurisdiction..."
Oh, I am slain!
Posted by: rocket | 16 Jul 2009 12:47:21
‘The reason why the American army deems it necessary to have more personnel in logistics than for instance the French army is now fully clear for me: they have to transport all the extra stuff needed by their lady warriors - creams, powders, mirrors, combs, mobile showers with huge water reserves, hair dryers with powerful generators to feed them adequately in the desert and so on :). I am not sure whether the yield is optimum...’ [DANIEL STOHL]
There was a time when your average Alsatian wouldn’t have been so dismissive of the American army. How much did the FFI contribute to reducing the Colmar Pocket? And how much the Americans?
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 11:25:23
So what's the difference in the way French soldiers and British soldiers march? Is it to do with swinging the arms?
Someone please tell me.
[I'm not an expert, but the British march faster and swing their arms high on parade. CB]
Posted by: Maggie | 16 Jul 2009 10:31:54
Rocket,
http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/photography/american_girl_in_italy/01/american_girl_in_italy800.jpg
Ah those Latin Men,
as usual, looks like Obama is cooler and a tad more discreet than our Prez.
If I am not a fan of my Prez or his ability to get a badly needed new wife in a nick of time, no need to get on your high horse. He just looked, find me a guy who doesn't look…
Treating women like meat is not exclusive to Latin Men.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 16 Jul 2009 09:30:16
DOT: "or have I got it all wrong?"
Yes, indeed you have - he's managed to make an "appel" which is going to last a long time - probably enough for him to stand again - well, well ----
Posted by: ros | 16 Jul 2009 09:11:23
‘In French, "homme" can mean either "member of the male sex of the human species" or "member of the human species".’ [DOM2]
Plus the occasional mouse, apparently.
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 08:29:27
'I am wondering if the reason Indians are invited to the Bastille Day parade is because India is the only nation on earth with as many hyper-sensitives as France, if you're typical.' [AZLOON]
Not fair, these guys are seriously brave and martial. You better believe it!
Sorry, JAY.
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 08:26:12
The article in ‘The Independent’ appeared without byline which, considering the ragbag of unsubstantiated assertion and misspelling, is hardly surprising. Small wonder no self-respecting journalist was willing to attach his or her name. Perhaps Mr Strohl should study his sources.
Oh, and ‘The Independent’ had an ulterior motive: ‘No newspaper replied to Mr Hodge except The Independent . . . As a result, 800 British veterans, plus many helpers, will attend ceremonies on the D-Day beaches this weekend’.
Posted by: Rick | 16 Jul 2009 07:10:41
[Azloon shoots off about the Indian soldiers and their "British" marching style and that it wouldn't go down well with the spectators. This comment of his comes out of thin air, since you did not mention the Indian contingent in your piece] M. JAY BHATTACHARJEE
Hey, Jay, you reactive, humourless twit, please chill out !!
'Out of thin air,' you say? Did you read Charles piece? I wouldn't have mentioned the Indian contingent if Charles hadn't written of it ["400 dress-uniformed Indian troops led the procession, their arms swinging in British style"]. I think you must simply have noticed my post, without reading CB's text, and "shot off" yourself (my, that's a graphic expression).
I remarked about it in my entry because of the 'british style' mention, which, as we well know from the ongoing debate here on CB's blog, is something that might ever so rarely :) draw unfavorable notice from certain French. But apparently not. Pas de probleme. My question is answered, but with no help from you.
I am wondering if the reason Indians are invited to the Bastille Day parade is because India is the only nation on earth with as many hyper-sensitives as France, if you're typical.
Btw, your reference to me as 'puerile' is priceless. I used to use that word frequently with my former wife and she accused my of gratuitous pedantry. That amused me, but didn't deter me. so i feel a certain kindred spiritedness with you. do you have a wife you want to get rid of?
as for other readers for 'putting Azloon in his place,' that's what we do here. You can do it too, and don't have to wait for others to do it for you. But you'll have to be quick to beat Dot. :)
Mon ami Indien, i think you need to get a few things about me off your chest. You could either bring it up in your next therapy session, or confront me directly here.
Pax Vobiscum.
oh, and btw, while we're doing Latin, it is:
puer, pueri, M1 (masculine, first declension). But, of course, you knew that.
Posted by: azloon | 16 Jul 2009 04:33:10
"So it's a perfectly omnipresent English word with very respectable origins." -- Dot
I think 'omnipresent' is a bit of a stretch, though it is indeed a very respectable word. (Best of families, donchaknow.) I would venture to say that, at least in the US, it is obscure, though maybe not in the hallowed halls of academia. Don't know about Blighty.
I think the word has two problems. If it is pronounced 'noos' it is easily confused with 'noose'. (Not that one hears that word much. But if you overheard just that one word in a room full of people, would you feel compelled to clutch your throat?) If it is pronounced 'naus' there is a bit of a spelling issue. 'Nouse' would be a better indication of proper pronunciation in English, even though it looks somewhat odd. 'Naus' should be the preffered pronunciation in English, because there is no homophone.
One thing is certain: it should never be written where it might be confused with the French first person plural.
Maybe this is one for William Safire.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 16 Jul 2009 03:54:44
"And incidentally, the USA does not stage military parades on July 4 or any other day. CB"
That's true, we don't, but I don't know why that is. A cursory google turns up a few military parades here and there, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion around the time of WWI. There was a victory parade in New York in 1946. I imagine that there are National Guard regiments in larger July 4th parades, but never anything on the grand scale that is seen in Europe or Asia.
The US military is prohibited from being used to enforce domestic law -- more or less -- as determined by the Posse Comitatus Act. (An interesting moment in US history.) I don't think that has anything to do with it, though.
I just now learned that, for the last several years, the Bastille Day Military parade has been led by military units visiting from other countries.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 16 Jul 2009 02:35:59
And now for the darker side of July 14th.
More than 500 cars were torched throughout France by Arab and black youngsters. It's an established tradition by now. That's how those nominally French citizens express their love for the country on Bastille day. (Give me Azloon any time.)
The police did not disclose the exact figure. It's markedly higher than last year.
In the 15th arrondissement of Paris, a rather wealthy and residential district, a posse of black African youths living in a social housing enclave used firework mortars as weapons, aiming them at windows and balconies, as they have taken to doing for some time now across the country.
The police were called. The "youths" taunted them, asking : "And now what ? What are you going to do to us ?"
They were right : the police backed down and did nothing.
This last item from a local blogger. It probably wasn't even mentioned by any media. It's routine stuff by now.
Oh, and while I'm at it : two people were stabbed and seriously wounded during a gang war episode on avenue Foch. This is about the most exclusive street in Paris. Only Saudi princes and business tycoons can afford to live there.
Avenue Foch meets with Champs-Elysées at the place de l'Etoile. Champs-Elysées is supposed to be the Paris area most heavily patrolled by police.
The country is crumbling. The barbarians are already inside the gates, looting and burning. Meanwhile, the official media try to keep us entertained with folkloric vignettes of firemen's balls.
Military might is lavishly displayed on the Champs-Elysées, but it's obviously missing from the war zones that the immigrant enclaves have become.
The telly has delivered you the nice bedside story we'd promised you. Now you be a good girl and go to sleep. Sweet dreams.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 16 Jul 2009 01:51:42
ROSBIF,
Vous avez de saines lectures !
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 16 Jul 2009 00:31:01
JAY BHATTACHARJEE,
I don't think that AZLOON intented at all to offend the Indian army. He wanted to pull the leg of the froggies as he sometimes does :), but this time it unfortunately misfired.
Regarding the parades: the people who don't like them are of course perfectly free to watch their beloved soap operas and meanwhile keep their comments for themselves :).
A propos opera: this evening, on French TV (FR2), we had a representation of La Traviata de Verdi in the ancient Roman amphitheatre of Orange in southern France. It was impressing - I am not a fan of opera, but my wife is.
PS:
On French TV, preceding yesterday's parade, we saw a few musicians of the Maratha Regiment making fun with their instruments and dancing. Everybody close-by laughed heartily - we too! May be this sequence was not shown on Indian TV. If not, it is a pity!
ROCKET,
Cela m'arrive d'avoir la comprenoire difficile (en alsacien, on dit "avoir une longue ligne" - it takes time for the current to get up to the end of the line :).
The reason why the American army deems it necessary to have more personnel in logistics than for instance the French army is now fully clear for me: they have to transport all the extra stuff needed by their lady warriors - creams, powders, mirrors, combs, mobile showers with huge water reserves, hair dryers with powerful generators to feed them adequately in the desert and so on :). I am not sure whether the yield is optimum...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 16 Jul 2009 00:14:47
ROCKET are you assuming the heavy mantle of pcspeak policeperson on this blog?
In French, "homme" can mean either "member of the male sex of the human species" or "member of the human species". In English, grammatically accepted wisdom claims it is not the case, but it is clear that, for example, the endless debate about man's descent from apes, even though it does not mention woman, does not exonerate the female part of humanity of this affront to an intelligently creative deity.
I therefore support, and will emulate if needed, DANIEL's generic use of "men" to designate members of the armed forces, irrespective of their reproductive gear. And I will resist the pc intimation to write "and women" when the meaning is perfectly clear and such writing is only needless pandering to the new high priests of herstory.
So count me out of your jurisdiction...
Posted by: Dominique II | 15 Jul 2009 23:31:17
ROCKET,
You asked if I could keep it simple but I thought I was already one of the most simple people on the blog :) Nous is in fact quite common in colloquial English in the UK and I am pleased to help you increase your vocabulary :) Perhaps Monsieur Strohl already knew what it meant as his command of English is so good.
If you were to do the Times cryptic crossword you would be bound to come across it in one of the easier clues as compilers like to use it as a play on words with the French nous.
Posted by: Gill | 15 Jul 2009 22:51:57
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8049121
How utterly macho. How utterly latin male. Yes Mr. President of France, women should have the right to move freely in public without having every latin male checking out their ass.
Posted by: rocket | 15 Jul 2009 22:46:55
Dot*
"Make that seven - every British English-speaker knows what "nous" is - or at least has a member of their family who knows.
Geordies, Yorkshire and Lancashire people especially."
Sorry I'm not a British English speaker. By the way? What's a Geordie? Where's Yorkshire? Does that have something to do with a small dog?
I do know however know about Lancashire especially the four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire. I counted them all.
So I do know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I'm not completely stupid. Duh!
* This reply is for native English speakers only. All non native English speakers are advised to move on to the next post and to not try to understand this response as it will only bring on frustration through non comprehension.
Merci de votre compréhension.
Posted by: rocket | 15 Jul 2009 22:14:32
DOM2, I asked a simple question: '"Does ROSBIF embarrass you or not?"
Don't avoid the question.
He sure as hell embarrasses me - on behalf of a lot of decent French people I know who WOULD be ashamed of him.
Answer the bloody question.
Or are you a mouse?
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 22:06:09
'C'est promis, la prochaine fois ils vous invitent à Dunkerque ;) [DODO]
'The documented number I saw lifted from Dunkerque was 139,463 French soldiers and 199,631 British and Canadian (around 1,600 men out of a short brigade of 2,500) troops: thus roughly a Brit to French ratio of 10:7.' [RICHARD JONES, on this blog]
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 21:36:54
Daniel
"Please note that the US and I beleive Britain also have women in combat"
"Yes, but this doesn't change anything with the logistics numbers. If the numbers are false, they will no doubt be corrected."
T'as toujours pas pigé!
You said
they have eight persons in logistics to support one man in combat.
You used the word "man" to describe troops. There are also women in the fighting forces. Why didn't you say each man and woman?
Posted by: rocket | 15 Jul 2009 21:27:46
"The times have not changed so much that the President of France did not try to keep the British out of the Normandy ceremony this past June. Shows a profound disrespect to the Brits who died trying to liberate France. Shameful on the part of the French."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/why-truth-is-a-casualty-of-war-in-the-battle-of-obama-beach-1694529.html
Doh!
Posted by: rosbif | 15 Jul 2009 21:26:22
"You are leaving out a big part of the story. German and French forces refuse to fight in the southern part of Afghanistan along the Pakistan border where the Taliban infiltrate into the country and where most of the fighting occurs. It is the Canadians, Brits and Americans who are doing most of the fignting. The French once more want to be integrated into NATO again, but only if they don’t have to bear the same burdens as other NATO forces. This is a fact today on the ground in Afghanistan."
Yup.
You're right.
http://www.thestar.com/World/Columnist/article/301987
Not!!
Posted by: rosbif | 15 Jul 2009 21:19:46
"Whoever you are, you are a twit. DISHONEST, too."
Touched a nerve, have I?
Posted by: rosbif | 15 Jul 2009 21:17:42
'C'est promis, la prochaine fois ils vous invitent à Dunkerque ;)'
And DODO = SADDO.
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 21:06:17
RICK:
"Does ROSBIF embarrass you or not?"
En amour comme à la guerre, tout est permis.
I'll let you decide which of the two applies.
I've seen enough posted photos of our own bad memories to take in stride a few not quite useless reminders.
Yes, there was a large and well positioned appeaser and/or sympathizer segment of the British population before the war and in its early stages, and one of Churchill's overarching priorities at that time, along with dragging Roosevelt into the war, was to silence them for good.
Guess how he killed both birds with one stone, by signalling in a deliberately ruthless manner Britain's dogged will to fight on. And I do admire him for it.
Posted by: Dominique II | 15 Jul 2009 20:36:35
"informed me that France’s military forces were looked on with ‘contempt’ by the British military." -- Rosbif
That's all fine and dandy. Any particular reason? Or just because.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 15 Jul 2009 20:33:40
I do find parts of the article completely irrespectuous to the French nation regardeless of your support or your non support for Mr Sarkozy.The display of various armies on the 14th of July is no more ridiculous than Independence day in the USA or some of the events that the British monarchy
displays( how much costs the monarchy to England ,if we want to talk about it?).For having British friends.
if there is one thing that is not done is to mock the Queen. Please ,respect the fact that French people might equally not appreciate your display of unsensitivity regarding the traditional 14th of July...
[Thank you Lyse, but there is a huge difference. The British Queen is not an elected politician. If you read what I wrote, you will see that it is full of respect and admiration for the French nation. My complaint is about the manipulation of the state media by the elected political leader. And incidentally, the USA does not stage military parades on July 4 or any other day. CB]
Posted by: Lyse | 15 Jul 2009 20:28:05
"there are a few serial offenders like Azloon who are perpetually out to lunch." -- Jay
And here Azloon, I thought that you had been behaving yourself lately. Oh well, can't win for losing.
Daniel,
The cheddar cheeses from Wisconsin are considered to be the best in the US. Very orange in color. I am also partial to the aged, white cheddar from Vermont. It is sharp.
Stilton you either like or you don't. I LOVE it! The smellier the better. It goes great with Port.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 15 Jul 2009 20:24:06
Thanks, DON.
Now, watch out for the 'denialist' hordes. They'll accuse you of everything imaginable; that'll be your reward. Anything at all to kick up dust and obscure the issues. Our poster-shooters are so martial when it comes to shooting the messenger.
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 20:06:31
Think Now,
I do get your point that there are more important things that need to be discussed.
I was thinking again yesterday about the evenly split elections in the US the past several times, and what are the implications for a populace that seems to be ideologically split. I haven't come to any new conclusions.
As as American, I am well aware of the results of several (or many) years of neglect of pressing matters in the governing of a country.
Sarkozy seems to me to be problematic in many areas, but I have not followed his administration closely enough to offer any valid observations.
One commonality that France, the UK and the US seem to have at the moment is a bureaucracy that is weighing too heavily on the public purse, and is so entrenched that it is almost impossible to bring about any reform. Then there are the issues with the labor elite, the financial sector, and our elected, 'representative' bodies.
It seems obvious to me that all these parties are at an impasse, and that the rest of their (our) nations (societies) are being held hostage. It has become impossible to have a dialogue about what needs to be done to move forward, if for no other reason than people are barricaded behind their respective ideologies throwing stones at the others.
Last night over dinner, we were discussing the decline of American culture. I tend to shy away from conversations such as those, for it is all too simple. I do think that the neglect of public education in the US over the past thirty years has given rise to an increase in religiosity, anti-intellectualism, anti-feminism and increased xenophobia. All this at a difficult time in our history, when what we need is some critical thinking to navigate our way forward.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 15 Jul 2009 19:59:59
'BTW RICK SHAPE was... when???'
I know. And how many readers would have understood ACO?
I'm also starting to realise what a one-dimensional twit you are.
For crying out loud, stop trying to score debating points!
It gives the impression that you're incurably superficial...
Is this the real you, DOMINIQUE II?
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 19:47:57
The times have not changed so much that the President of France did not try to keep the British out of the Normandy ceremony this past June. Shows a profound disrespect to the Brits who died trying to liberate France. Shameful on the part of the French.
Posted by: Don | 15 Jul 2009 18:01:23
C'est promis, la prochaine fois ils vous invitent à Dunkerque ;)
Posted by: DODO | 15 Jul 2009 19:28:59
DOMINIQUE II, have you seen ROSBIF's link to pics of Guernsey/Jersey in wartime and Duke of Windsor with Hitler.
Does ROSBIF embarrass you or not?
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 18:29:34
‘Wow ! The French can send you some helicopter also ;)’ [DODO]
‘I would remind you though that there’s a whole cluster of your compatriots who are forever giving vent to ‘girlie’ (‘Gubernator’-style), snide, sneering, sneaky remarks.’ [RICK]
Come on DODO, take a bow!
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 18:11:55
Thanks Lex. Of course you right - humour is great and good for the soul(smile). But I started blogging here 2 years ago at the time of the ewlection of Sarko. Everyone trumpeted it as a great victory but it was actually it was 6% difference - with only 2 canditates really only 3% - i.e. 3% difference would have made them equal and the voters only had two choices (mind you I must say she (Royal) didnt strike me as that positive . But nearly half the voters voted against Sarko (However remember the Bush elections - damn close and disputed ). So nearly half the voters voted against Sarko and conditions arent getting any better for people here in France (pace Charles). Not that Sarko is responsible for the New Depression but what he does and can do does matter and though laughter is healthy the more intransigent facts of life here arent going away soon and may last to the next presidential election. At least Royal might have behaved with more dignity as President and might have blocked some of the more reactionary propositions from the U.M.P. majority. Thanks anyway.
Posted by: thinknoworpaylater | 15 Jul 2009 18:02:52
[I would like to remind everybody that France (and Germany) are also fighting in Afghanistan and losing soldiers. It's in Irak they abstained from participating.
Posted by: Julie gcl]
You are leaving out a big part of the story. German and French forces refuse to fight in the southern part of Afghanistan along the Pakistan border where the Taliban infiltrate into the country and where most of the fighting occurs. It is the Canadians, Brits and Americans who are doing most of the fignting. The French once more want to be integrated into NATO again, but only if they don’t have to bear the same burdens as other NATO forces. This is a fact today on the ground in Afghanistan.
[Les temps changent, vous ne l'avez pas compris. Posted by: DODO]
The times have not changed so much that the President of France did not try to keep the British out of the Normandy ceremony this past June. Shows a profound disrespect to the Brits who died trying to liberate France. Shameful on the part of the French.
Posted by: Don | 15 Jul 2009 18:01:23
'Les Chinois de France trouvent que les Anglais sont des "emm...eurs". Regards.'
How Confucian.
Posted by: Rick | 15 Jul 2009 17:59:09