Nicolas Sarkozy should leave Albert Camus alone to rest in peace. That sums up the reaction among much of the thinking class and of the late writer's own son to a plan by the President to transfer Camus' remains to the Panthéon, the secular temple where the France inters its greatest men and women.
The country is about to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the author of L'Etranger and La Peste. He died along with Michel Gallimard, his publisher, in a car accident in January 1960 near Sens, just south of Paris. Camus, a Nobel prize winner, has never been more popular in France and the world at large. Controversial in his life-time, he has emerged in recent decades as a towering figure. While the reputation of Jean-Paul Sartre, his colleague and rival, has sunk, Camus is revered as a humanist who twigged early to the evils of totalitarian ideas, whether of left or right. The problem is not Camus, it is Sarkozy.
The President is merely following a tradition of honouring the nation's heroes. Jacques Chirac, his predecessor, had the remains of Alexandre Dumas and André Malraux, the Gaullist hero and post-war writer, shifted to the Left Bank necropolis which houses Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Jean Moulin, Marie Curie, Louis Braille and many less-known heroes.
But the operation looks too much like another stunt by Super Sarko and his slick staff to win public favour while his stock is low (down two points to 36 percent approval according to today's Ifop rating). The literary world and the left are always suspicious of Sarkozy's literary excursions. They also sense that he is using Camus as part of his dubious campaign on national identity.
They claim that Camus, author ofl'Homme Révolté and advocate of the individual over authority, would have been appalled. Olivier Todd, one of the most eminent of Camus' biographers, said "This is a gimmick. It's part of his technique of hijacking the intellectual milieu. It flies absolutely in the face of everything that Camus stood for.... Camus does not need Sarkozy. Sarkozy needs a little intellectual glitter."
Catherine Camus, one of his two surviving children, has mixed feelings [Sarkozy with her in 2007 picture]. On one hand, she approved because "this would be a symbol for people for whom life is very hard." But her father was a man who detested great honours, she noted. "That is why it is not a simple question."
Jean, her twin brother and co-heir to her father's very lucrative legacy, told le Monde via intermediaries yesterday that he is opposed. Moving his remains from his grave in Lourmarin, near Avignon, would be be a "counter-sense" for a man who abhorred pomp and state honours. He also suspects that Sarkozy is trying to cash in on his father, according to le Monde.
The Elysée has twice sent Catherine Pégard, a former journalist who is now a Sarkozy adviser, to try to change Jean's mind.
I have always found something a little macabre in the practice of panthéonisation. I would agree with Alain Finkielkraut (the football-loving philosopher) who says in today's JDD newspaper that he has nothing much against the honour. It would help show that a poor pied-noir-- a north African colonial -- was a component in Sarkozy's famous national identity. But, he said: "I have the feeling, perhaps superstitious, that he should not be extracted from his last resting place."
A small footnote. L'Etranger was the first book I read in French. As a 16-year-old British immigrant in a South Australian high school, I identified with Meursault, the anti-hero, as teenagers have done ever since. That book was for me the beginning of a long affair.
Paris receives more visitors than any other town in the world, but nightlife in the City of Light is not much to write home about. That has been the story for decades. For all the glories of Paris, its rivals New York, London, Berlin and Barcelona offer more excitement for night-clubbers and other fans of the small hours.
Things have got so bad recently, with clampdowns on noise and police closures of celebrated spots, that club, discothèque and bar owners are petitioning the Culture Ministry to save the Paris night scene from disaster. And today, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and 330 venue owners have launched a bilingual internet site called Paris Night Life to promote the hottest spots.
The petition, which has gathered more than 12,000 signatures in less than three weeks, says Paris is on the verge of becoming the "European capital of sleep" because of bureaucracy and the intolerance of the increasingly bourgeois population of the capital. Nightlife is becoming so tepid that Paris area residents are heading elsewhere for their fun, says the petition, organised by a group from the techno and electronic music scene.
"It is now well established that Paris has abandoned all kind of European leadership to the benefit of towns such as London, Barcelona, Prague and Berlin, to which more and more French professional artistes are departing for exile."
The group complain of police harassment and new enforcement of antique regulations, such as a ban on dancing in premises licensed as bars or concert halls. Several well-known establishments have had their licenses suspended for infringing the rules. They include the Batofar, a former lightship moored on the Seine, and la Flèche d'Or, an indie music club. This week saw the closure in bankruptcy of La Locomotive, a celebrated boîte de nuit in Pigalle. The neighbouring Moulin-Rouge, a tourist factory, is taking it over to convert it into a shop-restaurant.
The petition wants the city to create "tolerance zones" in nightlife quarters such as the Bastille, the Marais and Oberkampf. [Petition poster in picture says: Closed due to dead city. Please apply to the neighbouring capital]
Jean-Bernard Bros, Mayor Delanoe's deputy in charge of tourism, said the new internet site was the first non-commercial venture of its kind in Europe. "We want to regild the image of the Paris night," he said. The idea is to demystify the scene by listing clubs and other venues according to the type of music, ambiance and tribes who they appeal to.
As usual, it's a very French idea, centralising information on something as spontaneous as the after-hours music scene, but they need all the help they can get. Mayor Delanoe has also been doing his bit, with the creation of his Nuit Blanche, an annual all-night art festival, and other schemes. So far his efforts have not succeeded in making nocturnal Paris hip again. A study on "night-time competitiveness", commissioned for the site, ranked Paris fifth, behind Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and London. "Paris does not stand out," said the report, by EGE. It suffers from "an image as a museum city, the weakness of night transport, the cultural vacuum in certain districts.... and numerous closures of establishments" by the police.
As an occasional night owl, I would put the lack of transport at the top. It is almost impossible to find a taxi after one am, by which time the Métro has stopped and only a few bus services operate. And since the police have started alcohol-testing cyclists, that rules out Vélib self service bikes, leaving no alternative to walking.
France has been awash with nostalgic, sentimental comedy films for quite a few years. Many of them have fallen flat because the mechanism is too creaky. Feel-good films require you to suspend disbelief, so the audience has to be hooked quickly. I've just seen two of the latest. Both feature fine actors. Both are fairy tales about revenge by modest victims against powerful institutions. One flops while the other soars, for me at least.
The first is Mic Macs à Tire Larigot, [trailer here] from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the creater of Amélie, or Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, to give it its original title. I don't know how they will translate this one. The title could be roughly conveyed in British English as Carry On Capering (any suggestions?). More literally, it means Funny business like there's no tomorrow. The film uses the same tricks as Amélie, turning modern Paris into a magical by-gone place full of loveable eccentrics.
 Dany Boon, the biggest comedy star of the moment, leads a band of vagabond chineurs -- junk dealers, rag-and-bone merchants -- in an outlandish scheme to bring down two arms manufacturers. The film feels like an Amélie sequel without the charm -- despite Boon and the estimable André Dusollier, who plays one of the bad guys.
The other is Le Concert [trailer here], by the Romanian-French director Radu Mihaileanu. It's a mix of romantic comedy, political satire and farce featuring a cast of excellent Russian actors and French stars including Miou Miou, François Berléand and Mélanie Laurent [top picture] -- who made an international début this year in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
The plot is preposterous but fun -- especially if you know Russia and France. Andrei Filipov, played by Alexei Guskov, is a former conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra who was dismissed on Leonid Brezhnev's orders in 1980 for refusing to fire his Jewish musicians. Working now as a janitor at the theatre, he intercepts a fax inviting the Bolshoi to perform at the Châtelet theatre in Paris. He puts together an orchestra from out-of-work musicians and takes them to Paris to play Tchaikovsky's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. The soloist is a celebrated French violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet, played by Laurent.
The film runs through the gamut of clichés about loveable chaotic Slavs and haughty Parisians and it is a little long on Jewish jokes and gypsies. But it works because Mihaileanu has a delicate, humane touch and a fine understanding of the two national characters. The funniest part, shot in Moscow in Russian, makes fun of Putin's Russia, with its nouveaux riches and ordinary people struggling to survive in a shabby city. One of the funniest moments is a shoot-out at an oligarch's wedding. The fake orchestra hires as its manager the still-loyal Soviet communist party official who fired the conductor. Like all good Soviets, he dreams of visiting Paris and when he gets here, heads straight for a session with the comrades at the Communist Party's much reduced headquarters on the Place Colonel Fabien. The gags are sometimes predictable, but they are transcended by a beautiful, emotional ending of the kind that everyone expects in feel-good movies.
Despite its big budget, stars and brand name, I don't see the Jeunet film exporting well. It lacks Audrey Tautou and the romantic appeal of Amélie. Even in France it is not scoring very well. Le Concert, on the other hand, is number two at the French box-office -- despite subtitled Russian for about half the film. It should do very well around Europe and beyond.
 Clint Eastwood brings down the curtain on a busy foreign policy week for Nicolas Sarkozy tonight. The President is decorating the Hollywood star with the order of Commander of the Legion of Honour [Picture left from after the event]. Eastwood, 79, is rising from officer grade, awarded to him by President Chirac, to almost the highest distinction that France bestows on anyone. What is the service that Eastwood has rendered ? Sarkozy's office says the honour is deserved because Eastwood "is a global star who is very fond of France."
Eastwood is one of France's -- and Sarkozy's -- favourite Americans. The President's love-hate relationship with the United States has turned out to be little different from that of his predecessors. Sarkozy began in 2007 almost by throwing himself into the arms of the United States. He took his first summer holiday as President in New England, not far from the Bushes. He has cooled off in a big way. Obama's refusal to take up his offer of special complicity has been taken as a personal affront by the French President. On Monday, he tore a strip off Obama over his failure to come to Berlin for the Wall celebrations, according to a leak of his remarks in le Canard Enchaîné.
"Obama is very disappointing in foreign policy. He doesn't just have difficult relations with me," he was quoted as saying. "It's the same with (Chancellor) Merkel and (Prime Minister) Brown. Europe does not excite him. As for the rest of the world, it's a disappointment too. The language has changed. There has been an opening up. The hand is outstretched but it is grasped by no-one."
A few days earlier Sarkozy launched into an anti-Obama tirade at the weekly cabinet meeting, comparing himself highly favourably with the US president, who, he said, had only managed to produce a single reform so far.(Le Canard is usually quite accurate with its Sarkozy quotes. Ministers read it closely to find out what the boss is thinking)
A colleague from the New York Times has just sent me this interesting quote from Obama's book “Dreams From My Father” . It explains his coolness to Europe. Talking of an early visit, he writes:
By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass…”
The image of the rejected suitor also applies to Sarkozy's big event this week -- the presence of Angela Merkel at the Armistice Day ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. Two days after the Berlin ceremonies, it was moving to see a German leader, surrounded by German uniforms, taking part for the first time in France's remembrance of Germany's 1918 capitulation. Sarkozy's aim was to emulate the gesture of reconciliation by the late President Mitterrand when he held hands with Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Verdun battlefield in 1984.
 The ceremony was part of Sarkozy's push to revive the Franco-German axis that was traditionally the core of the European Union. He has returned to the safety of the old European locomotive after giving up on a new cosy relationship with Britain.Merkel has warmed to Sarkozy of late but she is wary of his grand schemes for unity. These include the permanent exchange of Cabinet Ministers. While Sarkozy's Arc de Triomphe speech was long on poetry, the German Chancellor used hers to ask for substance -- closer coordination on the economy, the environment and so on. Berlin deplores France's profligacy while Germany is trying to rein in its public deficits.
It was easy to see that the rekindled Franco-German affair is still much warmer on the French side."France looks a little like the rejected lover in this couple de raison,"le Monde said on Wednesday..
Sarkozy confirmed his conversion to the Franco-German cause in a remark quoted by le Parisien yesterday. Everything in Europe, he said, is finally decided à deux, between France and Germany. We'll see if that is the case when the 27 leaders thrash out their choice for the new President of Europe at a summit next Thursday. Merkel and Sarkozy are reported to be behind Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister.
In the meantime, Sarkozy found a moment to promote his domestic theme of the moment: the nature of the national soul. On the site of a World War Two Resistance monument in the Vercors, he revived a speech from his election campaign on patriotic pride. "One builds nothing on self-hatred, on hatred for one's own kind and detestation for one's own country. That is why we must talk about our national identity. It is a noble debate... not dangerous," he said. In passing, he repeated his view that Muslim women with covered faces "have no place in France".
Down in the polls half way through his term of office, Sarkozy is getting good mileage with his great debate on national identity. The government has circulated a list of topics for public meetings organised by its local officers (Read here). But two days after his hymn to Europe in Paris, Sarkozy neglected in his patriotic speech to make a single reference to Europe or any other country.
It seemed for a while that this year's Goncourt literary prize came and went without the usual row or scandal. Now we have one, of a sort.
There was general approval last week when France's most prestigious book award went to Marie NDiaye, 42, a Senegalese-French novelist. No woman had won the Goncourt for a decade, she is the first female black laureate and her winning book Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women) was a best-seller.
But then the media dug up her less than glowing views on President Sarkozy. NDiaye went to live in Berlin in 2007 "in large part because of Sarkozy," she told les Inrockuptibles, an arts magazine, last August. "I find the police state, vulgar atmosphere detestable. I find Besson, Hortefeux, those people, monstruous. That refers to Eric Besson, Sarkozy's Minister for Immigration and National Identity, and Brice Hortefeux, the Interior Minister and close Sarkozy friend.
That was too much for Eric Raoult, a prominent MP for Sarko's Union for a Popular Movement. He tabled a parliamentary question to Frédérick Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, asking whether "the duty of a person who defends the literary colours of France should not be to show a certain respect towards its institutions." Her remarks insulted ministers of the Republic and the head of state, he said. A Goncourt laureate should observe un devoir de réserve, the obligation of discretion that is required of servants of the state.
The Goncourt crew hit back today, saying their prize winners have never been bound by a duty of respect for the state and its leader. Christian Paul, a Socialist MP, weighed in, accusing Raoult of "ignoble intimidation... an execrable form of censorship."
But now NDiaye has spoilt the fun by trying to soften her words. On Europe 1 radio today she said she did not mean to cause offence. "I don't like saying things like that. It was very excessive. I do not want to look like I was fleeing some kind of unbearable tyranny," she said. "For a while, I have found the atmosphere in France to be quite depressing, rather morose. It seemed that Berlin is more exciting."
We are waiting for a response from Frédo Mitterrand, who has not said much in public since the media last month dug up his adventures as a sex tourist in Thailand. In the meantime, Sarkozy has been brushing up on his Goncourt winners. He has just finished "re-reading" A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There was a big row in 1919 when Proust won the prize because he had not fought in the Great War.
Thursday update: Mitterrand has entered the fray, not very courageously. He has refused to take sides. "Writers who receive the Prix Goncourt have the right to say what they like," he said. "Eric Raoult, a friend and a very estimable man, has the right as a citizen and a parliamentarian to say what he thinks."
PS, on the subject of the Great War, did anyone notice that Carla Bruni seemed to be wearing high-than-usual heels and really towered over the President at today's Armistice Day ceremony with Angela Merkel ? And why wasn't she wearing a hat:
If you wanted to parody a Carla Bruni website it would be hard to do better than the real thing which has just opened. The new showcase for the chanteuse-supermodel looks like a caricature of the persona which President Sarkozy's image minders have shaped for the new première dame since their marriage early last year.
Opened yesterday to great fanfare, carlabrunisarkosy.org has been unable to keep up with demand. It froze for much of the day, but now works in sticky fashion.
In impeccable pastel tones, Bruni is cast as a caring, free-spirited but demure artiste and patroness of noble causes. Portraits of Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suukyi, the Burmese opposition leader, are among the heros in Carla's gallery. Her other acquaintances, such as the Obamas and Sarah Brown, the wife of the British Prime Minister, appear in rather odd line drawings. The home page is topped by an interview with Jean-Paul Gaultier, the fashion designer.
A gushing Paris Match-style biography notes that the single name Carla now suffices to identify the French first lady the world over.
"Born at the beginning of the women’s liberation movement, she questions the contradictions that afflict all self-assured people in this period," it says.(What does that that mean ? She lives with one of the world's most self-assured men). Then they drag in that good old tabloid invention, "a close friend", who notes: “She may not have been a suffragette or invented the miniskirt, but she is the very epitome of the modern woman in the way she approaches the world”,
The first lady's hectic first two years with the President are sketched thus:
What memories will France’s current First Lady take away with her? Her state visit to the UK making her title official? Her trip to Burkina Faso after taking up her functions as ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS? The shot fired just a few metres away at Tel-Aviv airport on leaving Israel? This exposure to the cameras in life and death situations is unavoidable for anyone who has to face history with a cool head and a smile on their lips.
The site -- much slicker than Ségolène Royal's disastrous new internet base -- is meant to publicise Bruni's charity work in France and her post as ambassador for the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
It comes in French and English versions -- with a few adjustments in the translation. For example, Bruni was "born into a wealthy family of Italian industrialists" in the English one, but "into a rich family" in the French. Bruni's showbiz friends get a mention. There are links to Bob Dylan, Cindy Lauper and the Rolling Stones, to whose leader she was once especially close.
An "A to Z" of Carla mixes causes and first lady-like pursuits with some light nods to themes that have not helped her husband. For example, "Bling bling", the showy style which Sarkozy brought to the presidency, is dismissed as an invention of the media. It gets a mention above Sarah Brown, wife of Britain's Prime Minister.
The delicate, sugary site, with its emphasis on fashion and hip causes, fits the mission that the Elysée Palace has conferred on Bruni -- that of antidote to her brash, combative husband. Occasional web visitors may find it pleasant enough. The trouble is that bland corporate-style communication of this type does not work in a medium which prizes spontaneity and sharpness. Reaction on the French web to the Bruni site today has been contempt. "Nauseating...propaganda...they take us for fools..." was one of the more caustic lines.
Those wishing to visit Carla Bruni the singer can always go to her old site, carlabruni.com .
Super Sarko is also benefiting from a web remake. Under the direction of Nicolas Princen, its 25-year-old manager, the presidential site has loosened up a little. This week they are featuring a "making of" video from behind the scenes of a television interview with Sarkozy in New York last month. It neglected to include the scene in which Sarkozy tore a strip off Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, in front of the television crews. Sarkozy's official Facebook entry is being freshened and a Twitter account has been opened for the President's visit to the Copenhagen environment summit in December. Twittering is still not deemed presidential activity, so staff will be pecking out the copy.
America had Marilyn. France had BB. The two blonde stars symbolised the post-war era before they disappeared from the scene decades ago. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 but Brigitte Bardot lives on. She notched up her 75th birthday on Monday and tonight they are opening a big exhibition devoted to her at Boulogne Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris.
It's unusual to celebrate a living icon, especially when the current version is so far removed from the legend. Bardot's was that of the carefree child-woman and pioneer of sexual liberation. But younger people know her as a misanthropic recluse who fled the cinema at only 39 and devoted her life to the welfare of animals. She makes the news with attacks on Muslim practices that have earned her a conviction for racism. Older people know her as BB, the beautiful, feral girl in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu Créa La Femme (And God Created Woman). That is the version on show in Brigitte Bardot, less années 'insouciance' (the carefree years).
Bardot's face later came to symbolise France but it is hard to imagine the scandal when she burst onto the scene in the early 1950s in the prudish post-war Fourth Republic. "It was a very tranquil, sleepy, conformist France that was getting over the war and the Occupation," Henry-Jean Servat, the exhibition's curator, told the press. "She blew all of that up completely. Compared with the stars of the time -- made-up, smoothed over -- she was fresh, natural and modern. On the screen, she was just what she was in life."
The raw sexiness of the 18-year-old Bardot in Vadim's film created an even bigger shock in America. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: "In fact, it isn't what Mademoiselle Bardot does in bed but what she might do that drives the three principal male characters into an erotic frenzy. She is a thing of mobile contours – a phenomenon you have to see to believe."
As well as making 48 films, Bardot was, like Marilyn, a pretty good singer. Most people outside France do not know that Serge Gainsbourg wrote the heavy-breathing "Je t'aime, moi non plus" for BB when they were together. In the interest of protecting her image, they did not release her version until after Jane Birkin's one became a hit. The Bardot-Gainsbourg tune that everyone knows is the Harley Davidson song, "I don't need anyone", in the video below. The motorcycle is in the exhibition.
Bardot is not attending the show and has said little lately in public. She was on Europe 1 radio this morning, sounding bitter and a little wistful. She had paid dear for her celebrity, she said "as you always pay for the luck that you have in life." She mused on the "trente glorieuses", the three prosperous post-war decades of her youth:
"It was a fantastic time. Nowadays is hell in comparison. In those days it was freedom and joie-de-vivre. We had the right to do anything we liked, to have fun and drive cars however you wanted. We didn't have to put on seat-belts and be stopped every three minutes. We had cars that could do 200 (kilometres) an hour. We could enjoy ourselves, make love, we weren't afraid of Aids. We didn't have any drugs but we enjoyed a good drink..."
Bardot has used the occasion to send a public message to her Italian equivalent, Sophia Loren, who celebrated her 75th birthday earlier this month. "I wish a happy birthday to Sophia Loren, my splendid twin, and I ask her to stop wearing fur -- that is the best gift she could offer me," said BB.
I don't want to be cruel and compare the different ways the pair have aged.
The radio offered a familiar song today as I was driving down from the Channel: the French intellectual classes and government were in full cry against the United States.
The cause this time is Roman Polanski. His arrest in Switzerland has dominated the news for 24 hours in France and Poland -- ahead of the election of a new German government -- and it has been big elsewhere.
[See Wednesday update below*]
Like everyone, I feel sorry for Polanski. Aged 76, a naturalized French citizen and one of the star directors of his generation, he was arrested while on his way to a Swiss film festival held in his honour. California wants him extradited over a 1977 offence. But he is not helped by the explosion of outrage from the intello-celebrities and the way the French Government has succumbed to its anti-American reflex.
C'est normal that Bernard Henry-Lévy, the Left Bank's star thinker and auto-publicist, should be raging on the radio as I write this. It's fairly normal that France's Society of Film Directors should warn that the arrest "could have disastrous consequences for freedom of expression across the world".
It is more difficult to take the intemperate response of President Sarkozy and his government. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister and friend of the stars, used the logic that Polanski's high artistic achievement should protect him from ordinary justice. "This affair is frankly a bit sinister. Here is a man of such talent, recognised worldwide, recognised especially in the country where he was arrested. This is not nice at all,"Kouchner said on France-Inter radio.
Frédéric Mitterrand, Sarkozy's Culture Minister and big film fan, went right over the top, calling Polanski's arrest "absolutely horrifying. Polanski had been thrown to the lions, he said. "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also an America that frightens us and that one has just shown its face," said Mitterrand.
It is true that Frédo, as they call him, and Kouchner, are from the leftish wing of the government, but Sarko himself took Polanski's side, in more diplomatic language.
There are mitigating factors. Polanski has suffered terrible events in his life -- his mother's death at Nazi hands and the murder of Sharon Tate, his pregnant wife, in 1969. The Los Angeles judge and prosecutor in 1977 appear to have reneged on a deal for a guilty plea to sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl. But some perspective would help. Polanski is not a victim of monstrous injustice -- or persecution by Hollywood, as Le Monde suggests this afternoon by comparing his case to that of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s.
Since fleeing to France in 1978, Polanski has refused return to Los Angeles to end the case (He did not collect his 2003 Best Director Oscar for fear of arrest). After his LA lawyers asked last year for the case to be quashed, the judge indicated sympathy with his arguments. But Polanski still did not turn up in court for the hearing in May this year so the judge rejected the request.
You can argue about Switzerland's role. Polanski spends time there every year in his house at Gstaad and had never been molested. There are suspicions that Berne acted to extradite him this time because it wants to redeem itself with the United States after the affair of tax-evading bank accounts and other scandals.
But Polanski is in his predicament simply because the justice system, especially in the United States, is relentless once the wheels are in motion. The outpouring of sympathy from France's high and mighty is playing right into the hands of their populist opponents. Marine Le Pen, heir apparent to her father's National Front party, took an easy swipe today. "Does belonging to the super-protected show-biz caste exonerate you for 30 years from judicial pursuit?" she asked. Sarkozy's administration is setting a bad example for people fighting against sexual violence towards children, she said. For once, it difficult to disagree with Madame Le Pen.
------------
*Update Wednesday: Since I posted this on Monday, the pendulum has swung back in France. The Socialist opposition finally came down against the government for criticising the Polanski arrest. Several eminent figures in Sarkozy's UMP party are also unhappy with the way Mitterrand and Kouchner jumped to take sides against the USA. A few from the film world, including Luc Besson, are also unhappy with the rush to defend Polanski.
Few nations have cultivated beauty and its attendant artifice as much as France. Now it could become the first country to impose health-warnings on all published photographs that have been retouched.
A parliamentarian from President Sarkozy's UMP party has tabled a bill that would require a "photo retouched" label on every improved picture that appears in advertising, the media or product-wrapping. Failure to signal Photoshopping or other enhancement would be punished with a 37,500 euro fine.
The idea is to end the "erroneous representation of the human body", says Valérie Boyer, an MP for the Marseilles area, who is behind the proposed law. The perfect images of women and also men in advertising and magazine portraits can drive people to despair and anorexia, says Boyer, who is a longtime campaigner in this field.
"These pictures can lead people to believe in realities which very often do not exist... There is a form of indecency in making people believe that only a certain category of humanity can attain perfection, without yellow teeth or love handles."
It's uncertain whether Boyer's bill, which has the signature of 50 other members, will reach a vote in parliament, but she has won applause from mental health advocates and drawn attention to the fact that most photographs -- except on news pages -- have been doctored. Celebrities expect electronic flattery whenever they sit for a picture. Elle Macpherson is said to travel with her own retouch artist.
The fashion world says that Boyer's law is laughable. Improving on nature has been part of the beauty business since time immemorial, they say. Michèle Fitoussi, a journalist on Elle magazine, joked on RTL radio: "While we're at it, why not write 'They have had their breasts redone and had a rib removed'."
France witnessed an egregious case this summer when Paris Match produced a feature on Sharon Stone. Under the headline "I'm 50 and so what!", the actress (who's actually 51) posed topless on the cover and across several pages, flaunting a flawless physique that a 20-year-old could barely dream of. The magazine cover, on all news stands in France, was pure provocation unless you knew that you were not looking at reality.
For men, the recent Vuitton adverts starring Sean Connery had a similar effect. It is very hard to believe that that is really the waistline of the 79-year-old former Bond.
Match was mocked a couple of years ago for tightening up Sarkozy's midriff in shots of the bare-topped President (This summer he did the job for the paparazzi by sucking in his stomach when they showed up).
Retouching of course remains taboo in the serious news business. There have been scandals when the rules have been broken. Photographers have been dismissed from news agencies for giving a little electronic tweak to shots of war and disasters. But given the ease of electronic fiddling I wonder how long the news industry can resist the temptation.
Below: a video which shows the wizardry of today's glamour trade
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Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and author of the stillborn European Constitution, likes to be thought of as a bit of a charmer. He set out to enhance this image today with a novel which all but claims that he had a love affair with the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
[September 23 update: He says today that it is pure fiction -- see end note]
Giscard, 83, is having fun, of a dubious kind. His book, The Princess and the President, recounts the "violent passion" between a serving French president in the mid 1980s, and Patricia,"Princess of Cardiff" (capital of Wales, geddit?..), who is unhappily married to an unfaithful heir to the throne.
"Fiction or reality ?" asks today's Figaro, which has an exclusive on the book. "Only the former President has the key to this troubling story." The paper says the president gives very elaborate detail of the fictional couple's encounters in the palaces of France and Britain.
His descriptions of Princess Pat leave no doubt that she is Diana. "I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate-grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward," the presidential narrator recounts. Like Diana, the unhappy Princess Pat throws her herself into charitable work while indulging in flings with other men.
In the book, President Jacques-Henri Lambertye meets Princess Pat at a G7 summit banquet at Buckingham Palace. He then holds her hand under the table on the train back from the 1984 D-Day landing anniversary in Normandy. That would have been three years after the royal wedding and Diana Spencer was 23. Giscard was 58 and bitter about losing the presidency to François Mitterrand three years earlier.
It has been known for some time that Giscard, who is known as l'Ex, was charmed by the young princess -- along with everyone else. In 1995, after spending the evening with her (picture above) at Versailles, he gushed over her eyes in a French magazine and called her Princess Charming. "I discovered she was also a cat, a feline. She moves without noise," he said. Giscard, who was and is married, had a reputation as a ladies' man when he was in the presidency. There was a report in the late 1970s that he crashed his car while driving home to the Elysée Palace in the early morning from un rendez-vous galant.
The cerebral and patrician ex-president likes to see himself as a literary figure. He was admitted to the Académie Francaise in 2003 though his only venture into fiction was an embarrassing and widely mocked 1994 romance called Le Passage. It sounds as though the new book is in similar breathless vein. Figaro, which is kind to Giscard, defends his right to scribble sentimental prose with lines such as "this sword of absolute love, whistling as it turns over our heads".
The Figaro plays Giscard's game, teasing the reader. "Discovering this incredible modern story, one can never for a moment forget who is the narrator," writes Etienne Montety, its literary critic. "One muses, amazed, about his stature in international public life."
On the matter of verisimilitude, Giscard might have been advised to proof-read his English. His narrator-president writes "I can still hear her saying in English... 'I wish that you love me'." That doesn't sound right.
Giscard is refusing to say whether this yarn has any truth or is just self-flattering fiction. There is no doubt that he wants readers to believe it. The title page carries the line: "Promise kept". The book ends. "'You asked me for permission for you to write your story,' she told me. 'I give you it, but you must make me a promise ...'."
Jean-Pierre Corcelette, a biographer of Giscard d'Estaing, told us this afternoon: "We know that VGE is a ladies' man...Anything is possible, but I think this is really the fantasmagoria of an old geezer."
Fact or fiction, either way, the operation sounds like another chapter in the posthumous Diana industry. The book may sell but it won't win any prizes unless there is an award for bad taste.
----------------
Wednesday update:
The storm of publicity seems to have taken Giscard by surprise. Today he has come clean and says the tale is fiction. "I knew her a little, in a relationship of confidence. She needed to communicate... I wanted to pay homage to her... Her inner feelings were disappointment and a need to be loved." He had promised Diana to write a book on "love stories between leaders of great countries," he said.
[Top picture, Giscard and the Princess at a charity event in Versailles in November 1994]
Back on the eternal theme of franglais, here is the latest effort by the French state to fight off the American-English invasion from le web, or rather...la toile.
The Ministry of Culture's language agency, or police as we Anglo-Saxons usually call them, have issued a glossary of indigenous terms to replace the jargon that French IT people and civilian internautes are so quick to embrace. All employees of the state -- which means over a quarter of the work force -- are legally obliged to use these terms at work and in public communications rather than the English original.
You must say un fouineur (and presumably also une fouineuse) and not hacker. You are put on hold by un numéro d’assistance or d'urgence and not un hotline. "These new French terms are not yet widespread," says the DGLF, the language directorate. "The more people use them, the more easily they will enter usage and the quicker they will become familiar and seem always to have existed."
That may sound a little Orwellian but, as we have seen before, the rear-guard language campaign of recent decades has had some success. Over the years, clever French coinages have driven out some English terms and even improved on them. Ordinateur, invented by an IBM engineer in the 1950s, prevented France joining the computer bandwagon. Ordinateur was good because it contains the Latin religious sense of Creator (someone who ordains).
Informatique covers computing and Information Technology more succinctly than anything in English. Logiciel is more elegant than software, though I've noticed people reverting to the English because it sounds cooler. However the state-ordered courriel has not replaced email (known just as mail or even mèl) despite its use in state radio and television and media such as Le Monde.
The language guardians are up against fashion. The English (usually American) terms sound more hip even when there are perfectly good old French words for the same thing. Worm is used though ver is the same thing. The French, with its more abstract -- and elegant -- construction, comes over as a little quaint. It is also usually longer, which is the killer. There is little chance that people will adopt logiciel espion instead of spyware, message incendiaire instead of flame or canular instead of hoax.
The language authority reminded its civil service audience that failure to use French risks widening the fracture numérique (digital divide) which separates the initiated from the less privileged. "Let us not forget: equal rights and opportunity are a function of language [passent par la langue]."
The morale of the language troops was somewhat undermined earlier this month by their own boss, Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister. Talking at a political gathering, Mitterrand said that it was "time to stop this ridiculous anti-Americanism". "It is not because one eats Big Macs and wears jeans, that one cannot read Paul Valéry." Maybe, but I wish they would ban the latest vogue import -- le buzz. It is impossible to switch on any media without hearing someone going on about le dernier buzz, usually involving un pipole* of some kind.
-----------------
* a celebrity, derived originally from People magazine
Complete glossary from the language agency (.pdf) here
Think of post-war Paris and chances are that this is one of the images that spring to mind. The little boy with the baguette was one of the immortal shots by Willy Ronis, who died yesterday at the age of 99.
Ronis was the last of the band of photographers, known as the humanist school, who snapped everyday Parisian life in the two decades after 1945, usually in black and white and in the poorer quarters. The period now seems like a golden age. The work of Ronis and his friends Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai became poster clichés in the 1980s but they were recognised as masters earlier than most realise. As early as 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored them with an exhibition. They influenced all photographers of the era. I remember my father, a keen amateur photographer, taking slice-of-life pictures in the style of Cartier-Bresson and Ronis in the north of Scotland.
Ronis, the son of Jewish immigrants from east Europe, began as a photographer in the late 1930s using an old Rolleiflex. He was very ill in his final years but remained lucid to the end. In July he drew a big crowd when he appeared at the annual photographic exhibition in Arles.
Ronis, like his colleagues and all self-respecting thinkers in the post-war years, was a leftist. He mainly chronicled the lives of the labouring classes. He was by all accounts an extraordinarily gentle man. "I never took a mean photo," he said when he was given a Paris show in 2005. "I never wanted to make people look ridiculous. I always had a lot of respect for the people I photographed." In Arles, this summer, he said he had always felt empathy with his subjects. "I met very few bastards."
President Sarkozy paid tribute to Ronis as the "chronicler of postwar social aspirations and the poet of a simple and joyous life." Frédéric Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, said Ronis immortalized "for each of us the poetry of our daily lives and saved it from lost time."
The work of some of the humanists has been slightly discredited in recent years with the discovery that they posed some of their seemingly spontaneous snaps of street life. Robert Doisneau admitted late in life that he used paid drama students to stage the kiss in the celebrated "Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville". He confessed only after he was sued by a couple who falsely claimed to be the pair in his picture. I talked to Doisneau at the time and he told me that he regretted the picture because so many couples claimed over the years to have been its subject.
Ronis said he arranged only one of his shots. He came across the little boy with the baguette and asked him to run past the baker's shop two or three times. One of his other great photos, "Les Amoureux de la Bastille" [below], was just luck he said. He was on top of the monument to take views of Paris. "I didn't see anyone and thought I'd be left in peace. I turned round and saw two lovers ...looking at the view. I loaded the camera, the young man kissed the temple of his girlfiend. They didn't notice that I had photographed them."
Nowadays of course that would be impossible in France. Although almost everyone carries a telephone camera it is illegal to publish the photograph of anyone without their permission. The couple would now be able to sue Ronis for a fortune.
France is talking about the sleeper hit of the summer movie season. Neuilly Sa Mere is a fish-out-of water comedy about a kid from the rough ethnic banlieue who goes to live with a rich family in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Nicolas Sarkozy's very opulent home town on the western edge of Paris.
The low-budget film was released in the mid-August doldrums. The critics damned it with faint praise but it leapt to second box office place by the end of its first week (after Up). Almost a million people have seen it and it's on the way to becoming a smash, with its catch-lines doing the rounds among young fans. The title of the film is a play on 'Nique-ta-Mère!' (F___ your mother!) a ghetto insult that is the name of a notorious rap group that is more politely known as NTM.
I saw the film with my teenage son and found it a bit facile with its caricatures of stuck-up bourgeois Neuilly and warm-hearted Arab and black kids of the rough estates. It also draws heavily on La Vie est Une Longue Fleuve Tranquille,a 1989 classic on a similar theme. But it is redeemed by a very funny running gag, thought up by Djamel Bensalah, its writer-producer.
This turns on the character of an insufferable teenage version of Nicolas Sarkozy, complete with platform heels, slick slogans, and permanent Ray Bans. Audiences cannot get enough of Charles de Chazelle, the appalling clone of the young Sarko, played by 15-year-old Jérémy Denisty, a Belgian actor.
Samy, the hero, played by Samy Seghir, 14, has to share a room with Charles, who idolises Sarkozy and is aiming for presidency as Sarko did from his own teenage years. Sarkozy posters cover the walls along with portraits of Rachida Dati, the disgraced former cabinet star, and of Jean, the 22-year-old son of the President who is being groomed to take over Sarkoland, as Neuilly and the Hauts-de-Seine département are known. The bully at Samy's posh new Catholic school is played by a lookalike of the long blonde-haired Jean Sarkozy. Carla Bruni's music fills the Chazelle house. Samy wears an NYPD t-shirt when he jogs, just like Sarko.
[Top picture, the Chazelles, with Charles on right. Below: Denisty/Charles with Seghir/Samy]
Audiences hoot as Charles spouts Sarkozy lines, dismissing the Arab and black youths of the "cités" (estates) as "racaille" (thugs) who should be "Karcherisé" -- cleaned out. "My room, you love it or leave it," Charles tells Samy. The allusion to Sarkozy's patriotic campaign quip about France has become the catch)phrase of the film. Charles runs for a school election on promises of "la rupture" (a clean break) and the school's motto is "Work more to succeed more", a version of the Sarkozy motto "Work more to earn more". When Charles loses the school election, he moans: "Je suis loser, comme Balladur". The aristocratic Edouard Balladur lost the 1995 presidential election to Jacques Chirac, leading to seven years in the wilderness for Sarkozy, his chief supporter.
In another funny touch, Michel Galabru, a veteran movie star, plays Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist baron who was Sarkozy's mentor. Sitting in le Racing Club, the exclusive country club in the Bois de Boulogne, he advises young Charles on how to become a killer politician just like Sarko.
The only cinema in Neuilly declined to show the film at first. Jean-Christophe Fromantin, the Mayor, said he had feared a crude caricature of his town, a national byword for both the ancien and nouveau riche. This week they put the film on and Fromantin enjoyed it. "It's rather sympathique. It's very much a caricature but the traits of the characters he been taken to such an extreme that it's quite funny," he said. "The actors are good but they do not embody the reality of the banlieues nor that of Neuilly." Not all his citizens agree. Some older Neuilly film-goers said the comedy ridiculed the town and made the drug-dealing ghetto denizens to be nice guys.
Critics have revised their views. It became a sleeper hit because it touches the pulse of young France, shows the immigrant kids in a sympathetic light and makes clever fun of "Super Sarko" and his universe, they say. "The film has an alchemy that has hit the mark," said le Parisien.
Bensalah, an up-and-coming film maker aged 33, said that he had drawn on his own experience in his depiction of France's two opposite worlds. His eyes had been opened when he was a 10-year-old ball-boy at Roland Garros, the French open tennis championship, played on the edge of Neuilly. "In the same day, I went from the most rotten Parisian cites to this incredible place with girls and boys with double-barreled first names -- when my friends were all called Mamadou," he said.
Sarkozy, who is usually sensitive to mockery of his person, says that he plans to see the film. Pierre, his eldest son who is a Neuilly-based pop music producer and is imitated in the film, saw it an apparently liked it.
Get ready for some Anglo-Saxon gloating. We hear today that France is giving up its four-year struggle to keep the barbarians of Google from Gallic gates, at least in their literary form.
"Google has won", said the headline in La Tribune, a business daily. It reported that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) -- the national library -- is on the verge of a deal under which Google will add its stocks to its controversial digital library.
The pact will mark a big climb-down because the BNF led the counter-attack that was noisily launched by President Chirac in early 2005 against what France saw as a dangerous new American imperialism. That spring, Paris mustered continental backing for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
According to Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the BNF chief at the time, Europe's literary and cultural heritage was under digital threat from les Anglo-Saxons. France faced the prospect of being force-fed with such things as the biased English-language version of its revolution in which "valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man", said Jeanneney (he has since lost his job).
Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender today: "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Some readers joined the lament. "The harm is done, now that the European mountain gave birth to a mouse," wrote a patriotic book-lover called Thierry. However the main reaction from France has not been shock and horror, just a virtual shrug.
Economics explain the shift, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the BNF, which joins 29 other major world libraries in opening its shelves to Google's project (including Oxford's Bodleian). France provides only five million euros a year for digitizing books. This is done by Gallica, the national digital library. Yet the BNF needs up to 80 million euros just for its works from the Third Republic era (1870 to 1940), said Bruckmann. "We will not stop our own digitizing programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?"
Google scans almost free and it has so far added some 10 million works to its Books search base, the great majority of them out of copyright. These can be read free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
After a long battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues, especially in Europe. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several grounds, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.
In France, publishers and booksellers are worried about the forthcoming e-book revolution. Strict laws on pricing have helped 12,000 bookshops survive while small sellers in many countries have been driven out by the big chains. It is doubtful whether the French protection rules can be applied to electronically-delivered books.Amazon isn’t launching its Kindle in France until next year and Google's pay book service is still some way off. Before the Americans move in, the French industry wants to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the number two national publisher, called in la Tribune today for the circling of French wagons before Amazon and Google come galloping over the horizon.
[Top picture, the Richelieu reading room in the old National Library.]
Old television commercials are a big trigger for nostalgia. This is just one of 200,000 French ones which went on-line free today on the new site of the INA, the national broadcasting archives.
The site is a little slow this morning because everyone is clicking on to watch the adverts they grew up with, starting the the first one, for Boursin cheese, in 1968. French TV advertising does not play so much on sentiment and emotion as the Americans or situation comedy like the British. It can be as silly and annoying as everywhere else but the more creative commercials are a mix of stylish production, humour and often, eroticism. The ice-cream advert above from 1999 is an example. Some of the most fondly-remembered commercials are those of Perrier water (see below) and Orangina soda.
The INA site is fun to browse. France does these things exceedingly well. I mentioned the site when it first opened three years ago, offering a free trip down memory lane with thousands of hours of old tv shows, news footage and entertainment. The INA -- l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel -- has the task of storing and cataloguing France's broadcasting heritage. It is half way through putting decades of TV on-line and the new site makes it more accessible.
Emmanuel Hogg, the INA boss, says he is offering France and anyone who knows the country the equivalent of Proust's Madeleine -- the frisson of a flash into your past. "We are the first generation to be able to see our past in images. When you look at an old show, you see two things: the broadcast and your (younger) self watching it...We are a guarantee that everything is broadcast on radio and television will be kept, from yesterday today or tomorrow." The INA had a lively internal debate on whether old TV commercials were really part of the national heritage and it decided that they were. No other country has such a publicly accessible memory trove, adds Hogg. Yes of course this costs the taxpayer, but no-one contests such spending.
[Housekeeping note. I'm off for three days. Comments will be moderated. Next post on Monday. CB]
[Below: Perrier cavemen]
![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]
Free music fans and internet libertarians are cheering today after France's highest court shot down President Sarkozy's pioneering scheme for policing the the web.
The decision by the Constitutional Council has broken ground in declaring access to the internet to be a basic human right. This is a big blow to Sarkozy and Christine Albanel, his hapless Culture Minister, because their law was supposed to lead the world in combating entertainment piracy. Instead of doing that, their operation has backfired and ended up defending the free-for-all, help-yourself culture of the web.
You will recall the struggle that Sarkozy had to push his law through parliament this spring. It innovated by equipping France with the world's first internet "police" agency, called HADOPI. This would trace pirates who were identified by entertainment firms. It would cut off net access to anyone who continued to download copyright material after two warnings.
The law was supported by the industry and many artists. They saw it as a model for the USA and Europe in the fight to keep earning a living from their music and film. Net libertarians saw it as the creation of a sinister Big Brother. Many called it technically unworkable. Some artists saw it as hostile to the young consumers who are their main customers.
The Socialist opposition appealed to the council on the grounds that the constitution was breached by the creation of an extra-judicial agency with powers to punish internet offenders. The council, which includes two former Presidents and is usually seen as a bunch of elderly fuddy-duddies, gave the left more than it was hoping for.
Les sages -- the wise men -- as the council is known, took the teeth out of the law. They ruled that "free access to public communication services online" is a right laid down in the Declaration of Human Rights, which is in the preamble to the French constitution. It also said the law breached privacy by enabling the HADOPI agency to monitor citizens' internet activity. It agreed that the law breached the separation of powers because if gave an administrative authority power to impose justice. And to boot, it violated the presumption of innocence because alleged pirates would be assumed to be guilty and cut off without being able to defend themselves, the council said.
I felt sorry for Albanel [below], a loyal Sarkozy soldier, as she tried to make the best of the defeat on the radio this morning. The HADOPI agency would go ahead and send its warnings to abusers, she said (though it's not clear how it will track them). Then it would be up to prosecutors and the courts to take action, she said. But that is the situation that exists and does not work in France and most other countries. Courts don't have time to haul in the millions of ordinary users who filch copyright material online.
Sarkozy had promised Carla Bruni, his singer wife, and their showbiz friends that he would have the law in force this year. It is now effectively dead. I would not bet on Albanel staying in her job when Sarkozy reshuffles his government in the next few days.
The affair has left a bad taste by dividing the entertainment world. Young musicians opposed the law as a weapon designed to protect the big recording companies. Old-school leftists like Juliette Greco, the grande dame of Left Bank song in the 1950s, strongly supported the crackdown and reproached the Socialists for betraying artists with their opposition to the law. Patrick Bruel, a middle-aged popular singer who prides himself on being engagé (leftist) railed against the council decision this morning. Downloading a song free is like walking out of the bakers' with a baguette and refusing to pay for it, he said.
[Below: Christine Albanel, Culture Minister, in parliament]. Top picture from Rue89.fr site which has a good account of the "crucifiction" of the HADOPI law]
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 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 ]
It's that time of the year again when a French artiste goes to the Eurovision song contest and gets hammered by the Croats, Turks, Estonians and other entrants in the world championship of kitsch. But hold on. Tomorrow night's final might be different. France is fielding a real star: Patricia Kaas.
English-speakers may never have heard of her, but Kaas, 42, is a fine pop singer with a gutsy cabaret style who has a big following on the continent and especially in Germany and eastern Europe. Picking Kaas was clever because she is very popular in Russia. Moscow is hosting the show after walking away with last year's prize thanks to the telephone vote from the former Soviet republics. Listen above to her entry, S'il Fallait le Faire, from her latest album Kabaret. The 1930s cabaret mood, fits the current depressed climate too.
Kaas [right] is running about fifth in the British betting odds, well behind the favourite, Norway's Alexander Rybak, a 22-year-old whose song Fairytale is accompanied by a folk dance group. But the French singer has President Sarkozy's government rooting for her. Alain Joyandet, Minister for Overseas Cooperation and the French language, is going to Moscow to cheer her on. You might remember that the government disowned last year's French entrant, Sébastien Tellier, because he sang in English -- like most of the other contestants. The language wheeze didn't work for him. He came in at 18th out of 25. France has not won since 1977.
We all know that the Eurovision contest, founded in 1956 to promote postwar fraternity, is a festival of novelty acts and low-grade Europop. In 1974, though, it did manage to launch the career of a Swedish act called Abba. Yes the contest is only taken seriously by small or neurotic nations. But 42 countries have entered this year and up to 150 million people will watch the final live. I have to confess to enjoying the show, with all its silliness, awful music and patriotic emotion. Perhaps it's because as a teenager I had a crush on Sandie Shaw, a barefoot popster who won with Puppet on a String [in picture]. 
Britain is also making more of an effort this year after coming bottom last May. The venerable Andrew Lloyd Webber is accompanying Jade Ewen in one of his own songs. And juries have been re-introduced in order to make the voting a little less political than it has been from the TV viewers.
Kaas, whose mother was German and hails from the frontier region of Lorraine, says she does not see Eurovision as a joke. "I'm going there to win, but if I manage to be in the first five that's fine," she told Libération. "At the beginning the idea surprised me. It's usually beginners who go to Eurovision... but I said why not. I see it like a sporting event like the Olympic games." If Kaas cannot do well, there's no hope for the Eurovision contest.
On the subject of great pop artists, Johnny Hallyday, France's eternal rocker, has just started his farewell tour. And I take him seriously too. Here's my story from the paper.
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]
The personal drivers of the past two French Presidents have caused a stir in recent years with indiscreet memoirs that reported on their master's lurid private lives. The latest exercise in the drive-and-tell genre is by Carla Bruni's chauffeur-assistant.
But Franck Demules, known as Franky, offers a reversal of the usual sensation. While the civil servant chauffeurs of Presidents Miterrand and Chirac spilled the beans on their bosses' amorous antics, Demules describes life in the showbiz world of sex, drugs and rock n'roll while making France's première dame sound like a saint.
Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, both former lovers, feature among the stars in the biography of Demules, who has worked for the past decade as confidant, driver, personal assistant and fixer for Bruni. In Un Petit Tour en Enfer (A Little Trip in Hell) Demules, 43, a former actor and cocaine addict who spent time in prison for fraud, reveals no secrets but he offers a glimpse of life in a world far removed from the decorum of the Elysée palace. Bruni and Sarkozy, whom she met and married over the winter of 2007-8, emerge as saviours of the man who describes himself as "the queen's devoted musketeer".
Sarkozy called in Demules when he returned from a rehabilitation course in Canada last February and "in a kind way told me to think of the future." The President advised him to throw himself into work: "If you knew, Franck, how much effort I had to put in in order to get here," said Sarkozy.
Demules returned to the bottle and suffered depression last year after Bruni's marriage sidelined him as her minder-in-chief. Bruni signed him into a clinic near Paris on the recommendation of her friend Marianne Faithful, the British singer. She then proposed a New Year's stay in "her friend Eric Clapton's (rehab) centre in the Caribbean." His English was not good enough so he went to Quebec.
Demules, the victim of long-term sexual abuse as a child, describes how Carla and Valéeria, her actress sister, gave him lodging and work in the mid-1990s after his young wife had died of Aids. Soon Bruni had entrusted him with her credit card and her secrets, he writes. Among other things, the Brunis paid for the schooling of his daughter, now 19 and Carla helped him overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
Demules writes with affection for Raphael Enthoven, the philosopher who was Bruni's last partner and father of their son. He describes Endhoven's "ballsy" courage in a brawl which they had with two strangers in an underground car park. Bruni's entourage has a list of friends classed by order of importance. "Mick Jagger is God," says Demules. The chief Rolling Stone behaves like a perfect gentleman at Bruni's concerts, he says. He contrasts him with Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, who sweeps up with an entourage and demands movie-star treatment.
Serving Bruni has its tough moments, he says. One was taking Naomi Campbell shopping. On a visit to Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, the former supermodel was so fierce that no-one dared talk to her, he writes.
Demules describes the shock and disapproval among friends in the leftwing entourage when Bruni began her romance with France's defiantly rightwing president. "It was violent. You would have thought I was a traitor to the cause," he writes. Since then, former anti-Sarkozy members of the circle have been asking him to intervene for presidential favours.
Franky organised the President's first birthday party after his marriage. He says that he still feels uncomfortable working with the presidential body guards, all police officers. "At the beginning it stressed me. Even if you have nothing to feel guilty about, you are always a bit scared that you might have forgotten something," he writes.
Demules realised that his boss and the President were in love when he dropped her off in the rain at the Elysée one rainy afternoon in the zinter last year. The President telephoned him and invited him to drive in with his battered car and dog. "I was impressed. The president received me divinely, offering me sausage that he had brought back from Corsica."
Bruni has redeemed him, writes Demules. "Without Carla, some people would not have talked to me. I would have stayed the former junky whose wife died of Aids, the crazy, uncontrollable guy."
Bruni has given her blessing to the book, but warned him "they'll try to make it about me, but don't be pushed around." The premiere dame talked in the latest Paris Match about her attachment to her Franky. "When I got married I never imagined for a second that I would let him go. Even if I am now very protected, there is a heap of personal and intimate things that I do not dare ask of the palace personnel or the security officers."
 After Audrey Tautou's appointment as the new face of Chanel, Dior have come up with a new male ambassador. He's the one in the picture, a 31-year-old actor who is known as sublimely handsome. Younger readers, don't worry if you've never heard of Alain Delon (like some of my colleagues in London today). The picture of him posing in Saint Tropez was taken in 1966.
Dior are about to use the image of the moody Delon at the height of his seductive power to sell Eau Sauvage, the men's cologne which it launched that year. "The picture has not aged and it will enable us to reach men who remember Delon at that period and a younger clientèle which will be charmed by his rebel, irrevent look," Dior told le Figaro.
Delon, a monstre sacré who is in his 74th year; is still going strong after 88 films. He made fun of his notorious self-importance a couple of years ago playing Julius Caesar in the mega-euro comedy Astérix and the Olympic Games. He replied in the film to "Hail Caesar" with the salute: "Avé moi!" [picture]
Known for this mégalo character, Delon likes referring to himself in the third person. He cried scandal last year when he dropped out of the Journal du Dimanche ranking of the 50 most admired French people. The pollsters had failed to include him in the list of candidates, he said. "There were names there that should not have been there if Delon was not there."
Dior's photo; taken by Jean-Marie Périer, is meant to evoke the golden days when Delon largely played himself starring as the smouldering, dangerous hero in movies by René Clément, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, 1963), Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Deray, Henri Verneuil and other directors. He was romantically involved with a string of beautiful actresses, including Jane Fonda, Romy Schneider, Monica Vitti and Mireille Darc. Always a star more than an actor, he missed out on the nouvelle vague film movement of the early 1960s. In 1966, when the photo was taken, he was co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer and Leslie Caron in Clement's wartime classic Is Paris Burning?
Unlike other actors whose style moved with the times as they aged, Delon seems to have stayed in those pre-1968 years when, as a global hearthrob, he stood for Gallic insouciance, dash and danger. The nostalgia picture will work in France, but I wonder how it will play in the world beyond.
[Picture: Delon now]
President Sarkozy is unveiling his vision of a grand new metropolitan Paris today. The idea is to break the barrier of the périphérique ring-road and sew together the dozens of separate towns that surround the relatively small capital city. Here's my preview in today's newspaper and I'll come back to Greater Paris after he announces it. In the meantime, let's salute the Louvre pyramid.
Paris is marking the 20th birthday of the high-tech glass and steel contraption that President Mitterrand planted in the courtyard of the world's most visited art museum. Back in the mid-1980s there was quite a shock when the Socialist president announced his scheme, designed by I.M.Pei, the Chinese-American architect. The idea was to use a car park as a startling new underground entrance that contrasted with old royal palace.
"You don't approach a palace by the basement," said Michel Guy, a former Culture minister who led the protests at the time. The press compared it to a Métro train entrance, a cheese cover and an upside-down funnel. Similar complaints greeted the new-fangled Eiffel tower in 1889. But the pyramid went on to become a monument in its own right.
Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's curator, said this week that his visitors cite three reasons for coming to the museum -- La Joconde (The Mona Lisa), the Venus de Milo and the pyramid. "The pyramid has become the only entrance, it marks a rite of passage, an initiation," said Loyrette. The only problem is that it needs to be expanded because it was designed for 4.5 million visitors a year and the museum is now receiving 8.5 million.
Loyrette indicated to le Parisien that he was a little dismayed that his customers are so obsessed by the Mona Lisa when there is so much else to see in his vast museum. Eighty percent of the 8.5 million troop straight to Leonardo's fragile glass-covered portrait. Visitors stay in the Louvre on average between two and four hours.
He also said that the art in the Louvre, which stops at 1850, is increasingly hard for people to understand -- compared with the impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay and other more modern work. "Visitors know less and less about mythology and history -- including those from wealthiest classes," he said.
The pyramid has stood up to time much better than most other recent architectural grands projets in the capital. The most loathed is the Montparnasse Tower, the black 600-feet tall obelisk that President Pompidou stuck in the middle of the low-rise capital in the early 1970s [picture below].
The online version of Le Figaro found that 35 percent of Parisians want to demolish the eyesore. The paper's readers are on the conservative and older side, but their hate list is roughly shared by many Parisians. Second most unpopular is the Beaugrenelle development, a collection of mid-rise towers and concrete that was thrown up on the Seine in the left-bank 15th arrondissement in the 1960s. The 1970s Pompidou modern art centre came third on the demolition list, which is a little surprising that its oil refinery look has lost its jarring novelty.
President Mitterrand's 1980s projects came next, starting with the bunker-like Bastille opera and the twin-slab National Library. Most Parisians I know would agree with that. But further down the demolition list came... the Louvre Pyramid. It is detested by 8.9 percent of the Figaro's 15,000 respondents. But I said they are conservative.
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]
Within a few months, Big Brother will be watching your internet habits when you go online in France -- and he might decide to cut you off.
[Thursday update: surprise defeat for Sarko]
This seems sure now that both houses of parliament have approved President Sarkozy's novel scheme for punishing people who habitually grab copyright music, video and films from the web. A new state High Authority (yet another) will run a three-strikes-and-you're-out system against pirates. Illicit downloaders will receive two e-mail warnings. If they persist, the service provider will be ordered to cut access to the net for the offenders (and their families) for up to a year.
Officials start tomorrow producing the final version of the so-called "Creation and Internet Law" after a lower house session attended by only 16 members voted through the bill last Thursday. The new law should be adopted in a month or two. Many artists and all the entertainment industry are delighted to see France blazing an innovative trail that will help stem the piracy that is endangering their trade. Sarkozy, who has been advised by Carla Bruni, his singer wife, will claim victory in what he calls the battle against "the High-Tech Wild West... where outlaws pillage creative work without limits."
Needless to say, others see the law as a threat to liberty. Internet user groups, civil liberties monitors, bloggers, the European Parliament, the French left and others are calling foul and saying the law is unworkable. In the words of Christian Vanneste, a Sarkozy MP who opposes the law, "legislating over downloading is as presumptuous as trying to chase the horizon... A solution exists, but it is for the market to find it, not the lawmaker."
On the face of it, the new law sounds sensible. It replaces failed attempts to deter illicit downloaders by prosecution and, as the government says, it is gradual. A poll reported that one in three of France's 30 million web users admits downloading music, films or video games without paying -- one of the world's highest rates of piracy. One billion files are estimated to have been illegally shared in France in 2006.
Here's what will happen once the law is in place. Music and film companies will monitor file-sharers on the net and turn them in to the new authority, called HADOPI from the mouthful of its initials -- Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights on the internet). Service providers will be required to name the owner of the IP address and the agency will send its warnings or cut-off order. A blacklist of offenders will be circulated to prevent them signing up with other operators during their suspension.
You don't need much knowledge of the net or the law to see the flaws in the scheme, which is expected to lead to hundreds of people being blacklisted daily. One campaign group called Quadrature du Net says the law breaches the French constitution in 50 different ways.
For a start, it will be hard to identify offenders. Someone parked outside your window with a laptop could be hooking onto your WiFi, whether protected or not. How about people at work, visiting teenagers or copyright abuses who are simply using public WiFi? It's also apparently quite simple to pirate IP addresses.
Jacques Attali, the economist and thinker who has advised successive governments, has joined the blog assault on the law, saying it "paves the way for blanket surveillance" of the web. "It is absurd, because people no longer download, they stream audio and video ... absurd because it would deprive entire families of internet access ... because real artists have nothing to lose by letting people know their work."
The service providers are also unhappy because -- contrary to what the government originally promised -- they will have to strip out the internet from bundled TV-net-phone contracts without any compensation. The system will cost an estimated 70 million euros a year, with no money going to the holders of violated copyright, they estimate.
France, which loves big regulation, sees itself setting a trend for a new more orderly internet. Google -- which is not free from Big Brother charges itself -- is upset because the government aims to introduce a "label of quality for legal downloading sites". Search engines will be obliged to give them priority in their results, which Google says contradicts its policies.
The Hadopi is also expected to use secret codes to track banned offenders. Apart from the breach of privacy, this will create problems for users of Linux and other open systems, according to the experts.
The American and European industry hopes that the French law, which goes much further than experiments already tried in Ireland and New Zealand, will inspire similar action in other countries.
And before you think this is all about the French devotion to regulation, the law was enthusiastically praised today by Paul McGuinness, manager of the band U2. France has become "a pole of resistance to the blight of piracy. The (new) law is the right solution... It is equitable and balanced and will work in practice," he wrote in le Figaro.
In my humble opinion, the new scheme sounds like une usine à gaz -- a complicated, unworkable contraption. It means more bureaucracy and seems unlikely to fulfill the worthy aim of helping a troubled industry. But I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.
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."
We're celebrating the anniversary of a piece of France's musical heritage: the song best known as My Way.
Frank Sinatra's anthem may be one of the world's most reprised songs and an all-time hit in karaoke bars and at funerals, but the tune is 100 percent French. Sinatra's swansong was originally Comme d'Habitude, a melancholy pop dirge by Claude François, who might be described as a Gallic version of Rod Stewart but more camp. Ol' Blue Eyes recorded it with new lyrics in March 1969 and the 40th anniversary is being honoured by Radio France this week.
France has never stopped loving Comme d'Habitude (As Usual) since the single reached number one in the summer of 1968. The gloomy words had nothing to do with Sinatra's defiant, "few regrets" lyrics, written for him by Paul Anka. The Canadian lounge lizard bought the French song from François and Jacques Revaux, its composer, after hearing it on the radio on a Riviera holiday
François, whose final curtain came when he electrocuted himself in his bath in 1978, mopes in his ditty about the demise of a love affair with France Gall, a singer who is still around [Both in picture from the time above]. French grandparents now shuffle into a nostalgic slow dance when they hear the immortal opening: "I get up/ I shake you/ You Don't Wake Up/ As usual. The song closes: "We will make love/ As usual/ We will pretend/ As usual.
Here it is:
France enjoys the glory earned by Sinatra's version of the tune that Revaux originally composed with Petula Clark and Sasha Distel in mind (they declined it). It is France's biggest-earning number, bringing in royalties of a million euros a year, ahead of such golden grooves as Ravel's Bolero, Edith Piaf's La Vie en Rose, and Joseph Kosma's setting of the Jacques Prévert's poem Les Feuilles Mortes (thought by some Americans to be a home-grown standard called Autumn Leaves).
"Comme d'Habitude is an all-generations song that follows its public throughout their lives," Nicolas Varenne, head of music for Radio France Bleu, told us today. On Monday, the network played Comme d'Habitude/My Way once an hour all day. The covers included Nina Simone, Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin they but missed the John Cleese version or the Sex Pistols' send-up with Sid Vicious imitating Kermit the Frog.
"The song is so successful in France because people identify with it, it's the story of Mr and Mrs Average," Varenne said. "Then later, Sinatra and Presley taking on a French song made us proud."
Recorded in dozens of languages and massacred by amateurs the world over, My Way is also said to be the top request by the deceased for their own funerals. In Britain, it was overtaken three years ago by James Blunt's Goodbye My Lover.
Sinatra, who died in 1998, came to loathe the song because of its sentimental boasting and he complained that it stuck to him like an old piece of chewing gum. But French critics have a high regard for both versions. "Comme d'habitude -- and even more My Way -- is the perfect musical vehicle for the crooner -- for whom solitude is the main fuel," le Monde said a couple of years ago. "The crooner is alone and that's the show. His solitude erotizes the crowd. The crooner is in love with love perhaps even more than with the loved-one. He feeds on the toxic certainty of despair."
Revaux and Anka are proud of the tune that some have dubbed "graveside cabaret." Revaux, 69, who lives in Geneva, recalled this week how in 1967 he had given up finding a taker for his song, which he wrote on a rainy night in Mégève, the Alpine resort. He originally gave it English lyrics with the title For Me and recorded a sample version in London.
[picture: Revaux with Charles Aznavour in 1960s]
He offered it to François, who found that it matched his blue mood and words that he had sketched about his break-up with Gall. "It happened just like that. It fitted perfectly. We worked on it for an hour and it became Comme d'Habitude," Revaux told France Bleu.
He also claimed for the first time that the music was all his own. François shared the credit because of his lyrics -- which were polished up by another professional -- and because he had supposedly contributed the bridge section -- the refrain -- of the melody. Revaux said he had merely offered an earlier version of his own refrain after Francois objected to what he had heard. "When you see my original music you see that Comme d'Habitude/My Way was 98 percent my work," he said.
Anka recently also recalled that the song almost never appeared in English. He had forgotten it in a drawer until a rainy night in Las Vegas when Sinatra, who was in a down period, called him and told him: "Kid I'm quitting the business"
"He said he was going to do one more album and I went home and put that song on the piano." After writing the lyrics in 90 minutes, Anka took it to the Chairman of the Board. "I said, 'Frank, what are you doing, now the end is near, yadda yadda'."
The rest is history
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
Regulars here need no introduction to Nicolas Canteloup, the humourist who draws two million listeners on Europe 1 radio every morning with impersonations of politicians and celebrities. Improvising on the day's news Canteloup has a great talent for skewering, not always gently, President Sarkozy and the other big egos who crowd the public stage.
Canteloup gave me an hour of his time today in the Train Bleu, the Belle Epoque brasserie at the Gare de Lyon. He was on his way to the next leg of a sold-out two-year touring show. It was good to get a chance to sound out the man behind the famous pastiches of Super Sarko, sanctimonious Ségolène Royal and the inaudible goody-goody Carla Bruni. Canteloup had come from exercising the horses which are his escape from his day job of mocking France's rulers (a life-long equestrian and former riding instructor, he says his big ambition is to enter England's Badminton trials).
As often with comics off-stage, he is rather diffident, a little austere and modest about what he does. He claims to have no great skill at imitating voices but rather a gift for picking up people's tics and traits and turning them into caricature. He discovered his talent as an amuser when he was a child but only went professional after failing to make it into a police college while a law student at Bordeaux and then working at Club Med resorts.
"I rather fancied the idea of gendarmes and robbers. I suppose that's what I still do in a way," he said. Canteloup, who does not drink or smoke, says he is blessed with political "clients" you couldn't make up. "Sarkozy, with his hyperactivity, is a comic strip character who gives us a lot to work with. He's a gift." The trick is to latch onto the detail. "Every character has their mask, like the commedia dell' arte. For Sarko it's heavy wrist-watches, for Rachida Dati [disgraced Justice Minister] it's beautiful dresses. Carla Bruni, its the little voice and 'everyone is nice'. Bruni is difficult because she is a real pro, in complete control of herself in public -- unlike Sarko-- he says.
Canteloup tries not to meet the targets of his sketches and refuses invitations from politicians. He says that he avoids vulgarity and draws the line at mocking physique -- though his jokes about Sarkozy's short stature are a running gag. He recognises that some of his material skirts the edge of the acceptable. One example was a sketch in January on Israel's bombardment of the Gaza strip.
Most of his victims take the humour in good spirit, even when it verges on the cruel, he says. An exception was Ségolène Royal, who Canteloup sends up as a perpetually indignant victim. "When she lost the presidency, she tried to find the reasons. She said that I was one of them. I was wounded by that because I did not set out to make Segolene lose. I don't take political sides. My aim is to try to find what is funny."
Another who was wounded at first was Gérard Schivardi, a village mayor with a slurred southwestern accent who ran for the presidency in 2007 as candidate for an obscure Trotskyite party. Canteloup's Schivardi is permanently drunk as he offers his views from the supposed village cafe. This has turned the fictional Schivardi into a familiar character. "It has been a jackpot for Schivardi," says Canteloup. "He has gone from a near unknown to a celebrity. I hope he'll stand again for president." Canteloup does Schivardi well because, he says, the south-western twang is his own "native language."
Canteloup agrees that he and his colleagues -- Laurent Gerra, Stéphane Guillon and others -- are benefiting from the economic crisis. "We are in a September 11 atmosphere. There is a kind of world malaise, economic insecurity. People want release."
Taking my leave, Canteloup was curious to know why Times readers would be interested in him since he is not known in the English-speaking world and humour does not translate easily. My answer was that the current French comedy boom is a phenomenon that merits attention and he is one of the leading exponents. Now I have to make it work for the readers who, unlike those on the blog, have not gone looking for something to read about France.
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[Below: Canteloup performing Sarkozy and his other characters on Michel Drucker's TV show. Unusually, he is impersonating one of them to his face: Bernard Kouchner, the perpetually breathless Foreign Minister. Canteloup caricatures Kouchner's emotional, old-fashioned rhetoric, complete with language mistakes. CB]
Canteloup et Kouchner chez Drucker le 26-10-08
This is the March page in a calendar on the theme of "The Tribes of Paris". Produced by ActUp, the gay campaign organisation, it would not normally cause a stir except that the gentleman on the left, in the wrestler's mask, is a state dignitary, the Chairman of Radio France, the public broadcasting corporation.
Jean-Paul Cluzel, 61, a senior civil servant and former director of the Paris Opera, was already in President Sarkozy's bad books. His exotic picture has now given the president an extra reason for sacking him when his mandate comes up for renewal in May. "This is not worthy of the boss of a public service," Sarko told his advisers, according to today's Canard Enchaîné. "This guy is mad. He thinks he can do anything. His private life is whatever he wants but he can't display himself like that."
Sarko, who recently awarded himself the job of appointing the heads of the public TV and radio services, really wants to dump Cluzel because he dislikes the impertinent output of France Inter, the biggest and most popular of the seven stations in the national radio group.
Inter is the direct equivalent to Britain's BBC Radio 4. It offers solid current affairs and entertainment with a leftish, public sector streak. It holds its own well against the big commercial networks RTL and Europe 1 thanks to a lively, impertinent tone that it has sharpened further since Cluzel took over in 2004. Auntie Beeb's stolid Radio 4 would be unlikely to go in for some of the antics recently heard on Inter.
[Picture below: Cluzel in civilian dress]
Sarkozy is especially incensed by Stéphane Guillon, Inter's new court jester, who delivers a vitriolic black humour commentary on the political news of the day in the peak-audience 7.50am slot. Guillon lacerates everyone, pulling no punches on the grounds that "bad taste is sometimes necessary." It's meant to be taken in the spirit of knock-about grand guignol but for some, including me, he goes over the top. The other day, for example, he mocked Martine Aubry, the Socialist party leader, as a "fat tobacco jar".
His worst offence, in the eyes of Sarko, was a vicious job last month on the supposedly predatory sexual habits of Domnique Strauss-Kahn, the French Socialist who runs the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn, who landed in trouble last year over a one-night stand with a subordinate, was in the studio for an interview when Guillon announced that all female staff at the station had been ordered to wear demure clothes in order not to excite "the beast Strauss-Kahn". A siren would be sounded to evacuate all women if the bromide in his coffee failed, he said. A camera had been placed under the table to ensure correct behaviour by DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is known.. and so on. DSK, who is regarded as a potential presidential candidate for 2012, blew a fuse and complained about Guillon's méchanceté -- nastiness.
The incident turned Guillon into an internet sensation thanks to the studio webcam. Watch him below. Cluzel defended his satirist, saying that spicy, irreverent humour was an old French tradition and it brightened up the day.
Sarkozy did not agree. He sounded off against Guillon and France Inter to journalists and also at a palace meeting. "It's insulting, it's vulgar, it's nasty. Do you realise what he said, at prime listening time, about the private life of Strauss-Kahn or the physique of Martine Aubry," Sarko fumed. "What's this country coming to?" [Mais dans quel pays vit-on]
Cluzel, who describes himself as "gay, catholic and liberal" has a strong argument for resisting Sarkozy, though it probably will not do him much good. France Inter is scoring high ratings and Guillon is very popular. All of Cluzel's stations are doing well, with the exception of France Musique. If and when Cluzel is dismissed, Sarko will be attacked yet again for ruling the state air waves like a monarch, or at least like the late President Charles de Gaulle.
As we've noted here before, France is enjoying a boom in political satire. This is being interpreted as a reflection of the need to lighten up in grim times. Over on Europe 1, Guillon's rival is the brilliant Nicolas Canteloup. But Canteloup's daily impersonations of a manic and Napoleonic Sarko are much gentler than Guillon's
 Michelin published the 100th edition of its Red Guide today. That prompted the annual ritual of bashing the celebrated bible of French gastronomy. The guide, first published in 1900 but halted during world wars, has lost touch with modern taste and rewards "museum-cuisine" in the stuffy old French tradition, say the critics.
The only addition to the élite three-star category, Eric Fréchon of the Hotel Bristol in Paris [below], is coming in for his own share of sniping. The Bristol, across the street from the Elysée Palace, is President Sarkozy's favourite "cantine", so Fréchon's promotion is being called a marketing stunt. In an amusing video, the ferocious François Simon of le Figaro visits the Bristol and calls his cooking overdone, too expensive and not very original. Simon's bill for a meal for two came to 531 euros.
For the British, the other noteworthy promotion was the two-star rating awarded to Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, for the restaurant which he took over at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles a year ago. Simon of course had a put-down for the upstart Britannique. Ramsay's cooking is not bad though déjà vu and unoriginal, said Simon.
But for an institution that is so often proclaimed passé, Michelin is not doing badly. The 2,000-page Red Guide sells 1.3 million copies a year worldwide. In France it sold 370,000 in 2008 -- ten times more than its nearest competitor, the Gault et Millau guide. That's impressive for a publication that sticks to its tradition of packing a single volume with tiny print, minimalist description and no pictures.
A series of great chefs have withdrawn in recent years from the struggle of meeting Michelin's exacting standards in order to keep their stars. The latest of these was Marc Veyrat, one of the super-stars of the culinary world, who said last week that he is giving up his restaurant at Annecy, in the Alps.
But for thousands of aspiring chefs, Michelin and its feared but small team of anonymous inspectors, remains the ultimate arbiter. In a sign of the times, the French guide is now under the command of Juliane Caspar, 38, a German from Cologne. Jean-Luc Naret, director of all the guides, has been making his case for the superiority of the Guide Rouge. "We have no competitor in France or internationally," he said. Michelin went intercontinental in 2005 with a New York edition and has since opened in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The tyre-making Michelin brothers put out their first guide free to help travellers and their chauffeurs in the new-fangled automobiles to find mechanics and places to sleep and eat [1920 version in picture was first paid edition]. With its maps, guides and recently GPS brand, the firm has remained a reliable source of information for travellers in France. The Red Guide is now available on the internet and as an iPhone application. The next step is a GPS service that will list nearby Michelin recommendations automatically on your sat-nav mobile phone.
![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.
People are lining up to see two great shows which opened in Paris this morning. One is the Salon de l'Agriculture, the big annual farm exhibition. This popular fixture of the late winter, opened by the President, brings a taste of rural life to the capital and reminds city dwellers of their country roots, real or imagined.
Nicolas Sarkozy, born and brought up in Paris and suburban Neuilly, is the first president in modern times to claim no rural background. He is ill at ease among the show cattle and other beasts that he is called on to admire. Jacques Chirac, his predecessor, was in his element slapping cows' rears, knocking back wine and chewing on saucisson with the farmers at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre. The Salon is a way in which Paris and France in general celebrates its bond with le terroir -- the land and its produce. The media cover in this year of angoisse sounds especially soothing. Financial crises may come and go, but France has its feet on its ancient ground
Sarkozy will be much more at ease during his private tour of the other show, at the Grand Palais in central Paris, but this one seems out of sync with the times. The great iron and glass hall that was built for the 1900 Universal Exposition is being used for the auction of one of the most sumptuous private collections of art of modern times.
Christie's, the auction house, has spent over a million euros fitting the palais to display and sell the collection of the late Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his impresario and longtime partner in life [both in last picture below]. Crisis or no crisis, the rich and famous have landed in Paris this weekend for a banquet tonight and the three-day sale, starting on Monday, which is expected to raise up to 300 million euros. A great deal is at stake.
Critics and collectors have run out of superlatives for the trove of Modern, Impressionist, classical, antique and oriental paintings, sculpture, furniture and other works that Bergé, 79, is selling “without regret, without nostalgia”.
[Above: tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones that is being donated to the Musée d'Orsay]
Up to 50,000 people are expected over the weekend to gaze at works by a roll call of masters including Picasso, Mondrian, Cézanne, Lautrec, Manet, Léger and Goya. After a private preview, Béatrice de Rochebouet, the art critic of Le Figaro, wrote yesterday: “It is a total marvel.”
The auction house has worked hard to stir excitement in its “sale. With the art world on the edge of its own slump, adrenalin is pumping before an event that will test the market. A strong sale will show that high art is deemed a refuge in troubled times; a flop could kick the world market into a dive.
The event is part of a lavish build-up that has included private tours of Saint Laurent's apartment [above] in the Rue Babylone on the Left Bank for 300 favoured clients. The home of the reclusive couturier was so stuffed with art that he hung a Matisse on the back of a door.
The five-volume catalogue for the sale has 1,800 pages and weighs 10kg (22lb). The most highly valued item, at €25-30 million, is Picasso's 1914 Cubist still life Instruments de musique sur un guéridon. Controversy has arisen over two items, 18th-century bronze heads of a rat and a hare that once adorned the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. China is demanding the return of the sculptures, which were plundered by British and French armies in the Second Opium War in 1860.
Some experts are sceptical about the prospects of a sale that smacks of the extravagent recent past but Christie's says that the magical aura of Saint Laurent has bestowed a special value on his collection.
Bergé, who began collecting seriously with his partner in the early 1970s when they struck rich with their Opium perfume, is optimistic. “In a time of crisis, people no longer want to buy shares. Art can be a refuge for value,” he said yesterday. “But I never bought for that reason. Yves Saint Laurent and I were absolutely mad about art in general, so we bought, without ever talking about the price.”
A final note: Christie's and other fine art auction houses are laying off staff under the pressure of recession. French farms, on the other hand, are suffering a big labour shortage. Unemployment is painfully high and rising further in France, but people do not want to work on the land.
We have been given more evidence that France, despite its reputation for rigorous schooling, is no exception to the decline of literacy.
A teachers' campaign group gave a 1976 spelling and grammar test to a sample of 1,348 kids who began lycée -- high-school -- last autumn. Only 14 percent of the 15-year-olds could scrape beyond the 50 percent mark. Fifty-eight percent scored zero. When they set the identical 1976 test in 2000, 30 percent passed.
As a father of two teenagers who have done all their schooling in the French system, my first reaction was to blame the harsh marking methods. My daughter, who starts lycée next autumn, has often come home with copies of the dreaded dictée (dictation) in which she has 0/20. A few forgotten accents quickly pull down the marks. The children are also held to high standards on the rules of grammar. But I took a closer look and found that the dictation text and the related questions were not really very tough in the 1976 test, which was from the brevet -- the certificate needed to qualify for the lycée. [See dictation text below]
Commenting on the findings, the Sauvez-les-lettres group said the results showed a disastrous collapse in comprehension and grasp of the language. It is not just a case of the notoriously tricky spelling of French, with all those accents and unpronounced letters. After eight years of school, half the 15-year-olds could not recognize a simple adverb or the direct object of a verb. That might sound complicated in countries where grammar is not taught, but these things are dinned into French children from from the start.
President Sarkozy's government is trying, like its predecessors, to stem the slide in basic skills. Its reforms to the huge centrally-controlled education system are largely opposed by teachers' unions, a group that have fought just about every change for the past 30 years. School hours have recently been cut for primary schools, with most pupils doing a four-day week and special remedial classes for the poorest performers.
The Sauvez-les-lettres group says that this will not help. The answer is to go back to teaching French in the old fashioned way and for as many hours as it was taught in 1976, they say. That seems unlikely to happen.
The decline in language skills is worrying France as much as anywhere else. Employers say that job applications from university graduates are often riddled with basic language mistakes. Another depressing account of the problem has just been produced by Danièle Sallenave, a novelist. She spent time in two collèges -- junior secondary schools -- and wrote up her experience in Nous, on n'aime pas lire (We don't like reading).
Even parents with good education read few books, so it is not surprising that their children do not, she says. "There are even people from the elite classes who boast that they don't read," she told le Monde. "If you don't read regularly, you forget how to...The word 'culture' nowadays, has come to mean the national heritage and its use for commercial and tourist ends. That is not what people need."
After spending time in the schools, one private and affluent and the other poor, she concludes that "our schools exist in a society which no longer believes in the power of art or words."
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Here's the dictée of 1976. Note: there are no subjunctives or pesky participles with avoir. For the subsequent questions go here.
L’atelier 76.
Gilles ouvrit le battant d’une lourde porte et me laissa le passage. Je m’arrêtai et le regardai. Il dit quelque chose, mais je ne pouvais plus l’entendre, j’étais dans l’atelier 76.
Les machines, les marteaux, les outils, les moteurs de la chaîne, les scies mêlaient leurs bruits infernaux et ce vacarme insupportable, fait de grondements, de sifflements, de sons aigus, déchirants pour l’oreille, me sembla tellement inhumain que je crus qu’il s’agissait d’un accident, que ces bruits ne s’accordant pas ensemble, certains allaient cesser. Gilles vit mon étonnement.
- C’est le bruit, cria-t-il dans mon oreille.
Il n’en paraissait pas gêné. L’atelier 76 était immense. Nous avançâmes, enjambant des chariots et des caisses, et quand nous arrivâmes devant les rangées des machines où travaillaient un grand nombre d’hommes, un hurlement s’éleva, se prolongea, repris, me sembla-t-il, par tous les ouvriers de l’atelier.
Gilles sourit et se pencha vers moi.
- N’ayez pas peur. C’est pour vous. Chaque fois qu’une femme rentre ici, c’est comme ça.
Je baissai la tête et marchai, accompagnée par cette espèce de “ Ah ! ” rugissant qui s’élevait maintenant de partout.
A ma droite, un serpent de voitures avançait lentement, mais je n’osais regarder.
Claire Etcherelli, Elise ou la vraie vie.
![Dutronc_hardy[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011278d61e3528a4-400wi)
Nostalgists and fans of French music should have a look at a feature just offered by the INA, the excellent national radio and television archives, in honour of St Valentine's day.
February 14 was not a commercial festival in France until it arrived from the United States and Britain in the late 1940s. It took off after being promoted by florists in 1947. Observed with outings, messages and presents, le Saint Valentin is now almost as much an obligation as in the Anglo-Saxon world though the exchange of cards is still not so common and people do not call one-another their Valentines.
The INA have put up a batch of hit love songs by stars of recent decades, as well as old interviews in which they talk on the subject. The singers include the young Francis Cabrel, still at the top over three decades later, France Gall and the late popster Claude François. I wonder why there is no Serge Gainsbourg, one of the all-time best singer-composers of love songs
It's fun to watch Françoise Hardy, the melancholic young hearthrob of the sixties, insisting in her 1991 interview that love is une saloperie -- roughly crap -- and by definition always ends badly. "It's synonymous with suffering,"she says. She is talking about her relationship with Jacques Dutronc, the singer with whom she has had a long and bumpy existence. They were married in 1981 and are still more or less together [that's them in the 1990s in the picture]. Dutronc talks in another interview about their difficult courtship. "At the start I couldn't listen to her records because they were so down, they gave me the blues," he says. Their son Thomas, born in 1973, is a very successful jazz-inflected pop singer and musician [post last month].
Then watch the great Edith Piaf, a tragic figure, talk of her devotion to the state of being in love. "To write a love song the composer has to be in love. ...I am always in love," she says. "Love is the greatest joy.." Or look at Sacha Distel, the late elegant crooner, warbling "Love is four letters written by two."
The INA has an excellent site that now contains on-line half of the last 60 years of French television and radio. To watch the whole Valentine's material you have to pay a little, but clips of the songs, interviews and old TV films, and are free.
And all that without mentioning France's most famous lovebirds (last post).
And for those who would like to get away from soft themes, here's a commentary on the French model that I did for today's paper:
As we suspected, the new version of the Citroen DS is a dud -- just the name for a car with nothing that evokes the original [picture at end of this post]. But this really is the season for motoring nostalgia. I have just spent an intriguing morning at Retromobile, Europe's main exhibition of classic and vintage cars.
This most elegant of annual shows is a feast if you enjoy looking at the beautiful cars of the last century, especially the roadsters, cabriolets and limousines of the pre-war era. The place is full of sumptuous Delages, Bugattis, Hispano-Suizas, Jaguars and other magic machines from what was the golden age of motoring -- for those who had the money.
This year's Retromobile (open till February 15), has come up with a modern angle -- alternative energy. They are displaying vehicles that ran comfortably on electricity, steam and even compressed air -- over a century ago.
These ancient green vehicles show that the present rush to dump internal combustion is truly a trip back to the future. The most impressive is an electric hot-rod that in 1899 became the first automobile to break the 100 kilometres-per-hour (62.5 mph) barrier.
Camille Jenatzy, a Belgian racing driver known as the Red Devil, set the record when he took the car, called the Jamais Contente (Never Satisfied), down a three-kilometre straight just south of Paris. The version on show is an exact replica of the original, which is at a museum in Compiègne. Thierry Farges, the Retromobile media man unplugged it and put it through its paces, silently zipping around the car-park. With its heavy batteries and almost no brakes, the thing is a beast to handle, but its concept is no different from the high-tech electromobiles that are being rushed to market now.
"All this technology existed already a hundred years ago," Farges told me. "Electricity was reliable, quiet and clean and thriving in Paris at the start of the 20th century. Internal combustion was in its infancy and none of those things."
[Click to read on and find out how the Belgian racer met his end]
Continue reading "Vintage green cars on show in Paris" »
It's encouraging for those of us no longer in the bloom of youth that the average age of the 10 most successful French singers last year was 45 and only two are under 30.
Also worth noting is that seven of the top 10, starting with Francis Cabrel [above], a southern folk-singer who is in first place, are also writer-composers and mainly in the tradition of the witty and wordy chanson française. Only one is a woman. Mylène Farmer [below], 47, who is seventh, is better known for her exotic, baroque stage shows and sexy act than for her musical qualities. About half of the 10 are classy, thinking artists. There are no groups.
![Mylene_farmer[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e20111683c243f970c-200wi) [Mylène Farmer]
About half are spiritual heirs of the late great Georges Brassens, the sardonic, lefty bard of the post-war years. The younger ones were also influenced by Alain Souchon, 64, a clever observer of human foibles. Souchon, whose best song is probably his 1993 lament to mass culture, Foule Sentimentale (Sentimental Crowd) [video clip] is holding his own in eighth place.
None of the 10 earn big sums by Anglo-American standards and few are known outside the French-speaking world. Since French CD sales have dropped by 60 percent since 2002 and legal downloading has not yet taken off, they make up their earnings touring and increasingly from merchandising.
Cabrel made four million euros last year largely from the success of a quite beautiful album, Des Roses et des Orties (Roses and Nettles).[Watch Des Hommes Pareils, the hit single from the album]. Like many successful French guitarist-singers, he can be unfairly dismissed as a wannabe American. His model was Bob Dylan and he sings a bluesy folk style. But Cabrel's earthy, bitter-sweet songs, delivered in a southwestern twang, are pure French -- sometimes with a hint of Spanish. Cabrel is also a wine-grower.
In second place is Bénabar (real name Bruno Nicolini), 39. His lyrics are fun social commentary. His current album is called Infréquentable but he is best known for Le Dîner, a song in which a bored young urbanite cannot be bothered to go to a dinner party.
Here's a sample verse in translation:
We don't care a hoot, we're not going, we can just hide under the sheets, we'll order pizzas, you, the telly and me
We'll ring, we'll make excuses, we'll improvise, we'll find something, we can just tell your friends that we don't like them and too bad.
On s’en fout, on n’y va pas, on n’a qu’à se cacher sous les draps, on commandera des pizzas, toi la télé et moi, on appelle, on s’excuse, on improvise, on trouve quelque chose, on n’a qu’à dire à tes amis qu’on les aime pas et puis tant pis.
Johnny Hallyday, 65, the immortal dinosaur of French rock 'n roll, holds his own in third place. Le Johnny National is a great stage performer but ever since he first imitated Elvis Presley in the late 1950s, his act has been little more than ersatz American.
Here are the 10 highest earners as compiled by le Figaro with notes on those not mentioned above. Carla Bruni, the folk-singing French First Lady, is not among them.
1 Francis Cabrel
2 Bénabar
3 Johnny Hallyday
4 Christophe Maé -- 33, reggae-influenced singer-guitarist
5 Bernard Lavilliers -- 62, muscular anarchist songwriter and world traveller
6 Thomas Dutronc -- 35, gypsy-style jazz singer-guitarist-composer, son of singer-actor Jacques Dutronc and Françoise Hardy, sixties pop queen.
7 Mylène Farmer
8 Alain Souchon
9 Renan Luce -- 26 Breton singer-songwriter heavily influenced by Brassens
10 Christophe Willem -- 25, willowy former teen hearthrob
[below: Bénabar, Hallyday, Maé, Lavilliers]
This imposing 20-foot tall hunk of steel is drawing curious glances on the Champs Elysées. It's not sculpture or a bit of a movie set. It's the original top of the bow of the SS France, the great 1960s ocean liner.
The four-ton slice of maritime history, which inevitably brings to mind the Titanic film, is the biggest item in an auction of relics from the liner that was once the pride of the nation. Most of the collectible items from the France were sold off years ago, but world-wide enthusiasm for old French design has opened a new market for unlikely memorabilia.
Jacques Dvorczak, a nautical enthusiast, went to the Indian shipyard where the former France is in the last stages of being broken up. They cut up the bow and he shipped it along with 445 other pieces for the sale at the Artcurial house on February 8 and 9. The items, which range from a captain's chair and deck stools to portholes and railings, are being estimated at between 10,000 to 80,000 euros each. Among the odder objects are children's nursery decorations and a control panel from the engine room of the 57,000 tonne vessel that was the rival to the Queen Elizabeth and the USS United States.
[TUESDAY UPDATE: see item on new DS Citroen at end of this post]
The SS France was the ultimate in ocean-going elegance but entered service late, when the jet airliner was putting an end to the old New York-Europe liners. It was sold off in the late 1970s and ended its days as a cruise liner called The Norway. It's demise as the flagship of the nation was mourned in a famous lachrimose pop-song by Michel Sardou, "Ne m'appelez plus jamais France" [Never call me France again"]. (watch video here)
"The buyers are people who want to take away a little bit of one of the great works of French industrial history," François Tajan, the auctioneer in charge of the sale, told us. "A sale like this is like a final homage. In these days of economic crisis, these sales are very far from financial speculation. They are tangible, real, human objects from an age of progress... They symbolise both technical success and un art de vivre. Today everything is different, all about zapping."
[Below: the France]
Despite the slump, the sellers hope that they will follow other recent auctions which have scored unexpected millions for remnants of France's stylish industrial past. In October 2007, the auction of 1,000 parts from Concorde supersonic jets -- a Franco-British technical triumph of the 1960s -- brought in a million euros, four times the estimate.
Several slices of a dismantled iron staircase from the Eiffel tower (left, with Gustave Eiffel) have been sold off for hundreds of thousands of pounds the past two years. Two of them grace restaurants in New York and New Orleans.
Excitement is also building around the imminent sale of the rusting, eight-trumpet siren [below] that graced the historic Renault car factory at Billancourt, on the edge of Paris. Installed in the 1930s and used in the war to warn of British bombing raids, the siren is an emblem of France's heroic industrial age. Described by le Nouvel Observateur magazine as an "icon of the working class", it is expected to raise over 30,000 euros.
![Sirene_renault[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201116836ec68970c-150wi)
In similar vein serious sums are being paid for the few surviving black and white Renault 4CV cars of the Paris police in the 1950s. Also being auctioned are the gaily decorated advertising cars [below] that followed Tour de France cycle race in the 1950s distributing free sweets and product samples.
![Voitures_pub_tour_de_France[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201116836ef0e970c-200wi "Voitures_pub_tour_de_France[1]") Another piece of retro nostalgia now on sale is a DS Citroen [below] that was custom made in 1973 for Philippe Bouvard, a star radio journalist who is still going strong. The DS was one of the great design monuments of the age. Roland Barthes, the semiologist and author of Mythologies, famously dubbed it the French cathedral of the 20th century. Bouvard's version, with coachwork by Henri Chapron, was equipped as a mobile office and radio studio, with a double walnut desk in the back.
All these are symbols of a time when France and its design had a much more distinctive flavour. "They are the symbol of a history that has come to an end," said Hubert Delobette, author of "Crazily French", a book on great French objects, such as the Bic ballpoint and the Solex mo-ped (celebrated here last month). "We are afraid of tomorrow," said Delobette. "These familiar objects are reassuring. There is nothing like that today. There is the grandeur of French luxury products, but they do not move people like the SS France and the Eiffel tower."
UPDATE: Citroen cars have just announced that they are about to relaunch the great DS model. The original ended production in 1975 after 20 years. They are to unveil the prototype later in the week. Like the new Mini, Beatle and Fiat 500, it will be an attempt to revive the design in modern form, keeping a flavour of what made it so special. I'll post on it when there is a picture available in a couple of days. The car will be marketed from next year, they say.
[Bouvard's Citroen DS 1973]
![Ds_bouvard_1[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011168390bfd970c-320wi)
Anyone who doubts that Ségolène Royal is a little nutty should take a look at a new book in which she settles scores in a vindictive way with her friends and foes and notably Nicolas Sarkozy.
In "Femme Debout" (Woman Standing or Upright Woman) the Socialist party star paints a venomous portrait of Sarkozy, who beat her in the 2007 presidential election. She calls him a childish, greedy, lying, cynical exhibitionist.
Judging from excerpts, Royal's book, a series of conversations with a journalist, suggests that France was lucky to have escaped the rule of a rather strange politician. The former presidential candidate is convinced that she is the target of systematic persecution. She does not believe that she lost the narrow vote for the party leadership to Martine Aubry last month. . "I continue to think that I hold the majority," she says. She fell victim, she says, to a plot by party elders that was "a form of absolute perversion."
Royal is convinced that she has been anointed by some mystical force and that she is the best candidate to lead the party into 2012 presidential election. "If there was a better one than me, let him or her stand up...For the moment, I see none."
She claims that she is the victim of hatred and jealousy in the party. She quotes the view of the rest of the leadership. "I am completely awful...Mon Dieu, quelle horreur, cette femme est dangereuse, c'est une sorcière... (...that woman is dangerous, she's a witch)."
Her portrait of Sarkozy contains some true touches, especially on his child-like, exhibitionist side. But it is so excessive that you can understand why the President hopes that she will come back for a rematch in 2012. Here's a taste:
What bothers me most about him is his immorality. ..He does not hide his greed, his bulimia for money, for sensuality and pleasure. He has a form of extreme cynicism, like a teenager who wants to dazzle the entire planet.
He has the talent of of a liar. ... If it had been an American campaign, everything would have come out, all his lack of morality...Sarkozy is an immense lie, an impostor.
When Sarkozy received me at the Elysée Palace just after the defeat, I found him quite mediocre in his behaviour. There was no hauteur, élan or fair play. ... He just stood there, shuffling around, offering me chocolates, trying to get me to talk about my separation from François Hollande (her former partner and party leader), trashing journalists, showing off his watch and telling me that he could have been making loads of cash if he had another job.
He is a lot more dull that you would think. His energy is impressive but it's all showing off. .. He is a little boy thrilled with his new toys. With his little sheriff's star and his plastic gun, his cowboy outfit, he is the kid who won the prize on the merry-go-round.
The book, put together by Françoise Degois of radio France-Inter, is out next week and excerpted in today's Nouvel Observateur. Given the vitriol that she dumps on her colleagues, it is just as well that Royal has taken off to Brazil for the week. She decided to stay away from today's big anti-Sarkozy marches, in which France's biggest leftwing party is trying to win back some credibility with the working classes who deserted it. More on that later...
 The economy is down, yet the French are flocking in near record numbers to entertainment, or culture as they prefer to call it.
Theatres, concerts, art shows, museums and festivals have been packed over the past year. The biggest success has been the movie industry. Cinema attendance jumped 6.2 percent in 2008 and, for only the second time in 22 years, French films took more than American ones (45.7 percent of the market compared with 44.5 for the Americans). None of the other big film markets in Europe saw such an overall box office rise last year.
I'll sketch the detail below, but news of the good year has coincided with an emotional moment for cinéphiles and France at large: the return to the screen of the much-loved Jean-Paul Belmondo, 75. Seven years after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage that initially paralysed him, "Bébel" is to appear this week, with diminished capacities but all his old charm, in a tear-jerker called Un Homme et son Chien (A man and his dog). It is clearly a multi-Kleenex movie since people cried during the trailer when I saw it the other day. Television also showed customers emerging in tears from previews in Lille last week.
A tall, physical, larger-than-life character with a rumpled face, Belmondo broke onto the scene as a star of the Nouvelle Vague, the golden age of postwar French cinema. It's hard not to apply the over-used "icon" word to his role in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless)(1960), with Jean Seaberg (picture)
He gave up artier films and became a big comedy and action star in the 1970s and 80s, playing in classics, such as Borsalino -- with Alain Delon. He was above all an action-man, performing his own stunts in films such as Le Professionel, Flic ou Voyou, Peur sur la Ville and L'As des As. While Delon was known as a difficult and vain character, Belmondo was a chic type, a nice guy.
In his first TV interview since his illness yesterday, Belmondo was frail and his speech was slurred but he was perfectly lucid. Michel Drucker, France's favourite celebrity host, treated him like royalty and brought in big cinema names to pay tribute to his courage in going back onto a movie set. Philip Labro, a journalist-writer and film producer, summed up the effect of seeing Bebel again. "Belmondo is sunshine when he smiles. His face is a landscape whose every wrinkle is a life."
Francis Huster directed the new film, a remake of a Vittorio De Sica 1951 classic Umberto D about an old man who loses his home and only has his dog left. The reviews have been reverent. Figaro called it "troubling, moving, even shocking because we don't know where the broken star ends and where the great actor begins." But foreign reviewers have not been so kind. One Swiss critic trashed it as "indecent" and "disgusting" because it shows a star who is a shadow of his former self.
Belmondo's popularity will guarantee a good audience for A Man and his Dog in 2009. Last year, French-made films got a big push from "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis", the Dany Boon feel-good comedy about northern bumpkins which became the most successful French film ever (Will Smith is to make an Americanised version) . Most of the top 10 were still American blockbusters, but the French industry is taking heart from the strong performance of 18 other domestic films which each sold more than one million tickets. They were mainly popular comedies or thrillers and included the hopeless Astérix and the Olympic Games, but their popularity testified to the strength of the French industry.
Just after I posted this, they announced the death of Claude Berri, one of the biggest producer-directors of recent decades. His last production was Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Here's Le Figaro's news item
Top 10 French Box office Hits 2008
1 Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks)
2 Astérix et les Jeux Olympiques
3 Madagascar 2 (USA)
4 Indiana Jones and the kingdom...(USA)
5 Quantum of Solace (USA)
6 Kung Fu Panda (USA)
7 Wall-E (USA)
8 The World of Narnia 2 (USA)
9 Hancock (USA)
10 Batman, the Dark Knight (USA)
[Below: Enfin Veuve (A widow at last) , one of the big French hits of 2008. Dogs seem to be popular these days]
p
Tintin, the eternal boy reporter, celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow. Europe's most venerated comic strip hero is being feted across the continent and, thanks to an imminent Steven Spielberg movie, he is at last about to be introduced to Americans.
France has long adored Tintin as one of its own although his creator, Georges Rémy, known as Hergé, was a Brussels-based French-speaking Belgian. That may explain the indignation over the past couple of days over an amusing column by my Times colleague Matthew Parris. Matthew had the effrontery to recite a longstanding assumption in the gay world that the intrepid little foreign correspondent is homosexual.
"What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way?," asked Parris [his article]. "A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier, whose other closest pals are an inseparable couple of detectives in bowler hats, and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva. And you're telling me Tintin isn't gay?"
It's always fun to interpret innocent-sounding yarns in this way. Alice in Wonderland has been psychoanalysed to death and I remember a tongue-in-cheek US book subjecting Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne's version, not the Disney travesty) to psycho-sexual literary criticism. But French pride has been needled by the Anglais who has used Tintin's 80th birthday to depict the brave reporter as all-out gay.
"At this age, the hormones are usually asleep," sniffed Les Echos, the business daily. "But for Matthew Parris, it is never too late to wake up the houppette of the nice Belgian hero." Houppette means both quiff and powder puff. What next, wondered les Echos ? Astérix and Obélix as lovers ? "That's perhaps the next subject for a column by Matthew Parris."
Le Figaro hammered Matthew for "reviving this old fable". It hauled in Serge Tisseron, a celebrity psychiatrist, to explain that claiming the hero as gay "is a lovely revenge for a homosexual". "The problem is that the sexual dimension is totally absent. Tintin is a creature whose sex is never defined. Beware of launching into a sexual reading of Herge's works... In reality all the characters in Tintin are children."
Figaro's article produced a torrent of mainly conservative internet comments pointing out that Hergé was drawing and writing at a time when boys' adventure stories were allowed to be violent (as Tintin was) but steered well clear of romance or sex. France Info, the public news radio network, even got in on the subject this morning, pointing out that Hergé, who died in 1983, scoffed at the gay Tintin theory after it was aired by studies in the 1970s.
The French defensiveness over Matthew's piece seems a bit overdone. The same protective reaction appears when people investigate Hergé's work during the Nazi occupation of Belgium in the early 1940s and when Tintin is nailed as a proto-fascist.
I agree with Hervé Gattegno, a Tintin fan and well-known Paris investigative journalist, when he said a couple of years ago that it did not matter whether his hero might be gay or not. Born in the Catholic pre-war culture, sex and love were kept out of the stories, he noted. "The values which are defended in the Tintin adventures are those of comradeship, friendship, solidarity and fraternity."
I have been a lifelong Tintinophile. The play with those old-fashioned virtues are what makes Tintin enjoyable -- along with the stunning draughtsmanship of Hergé. His comedy, movie-like scenes and the loving detail of the period machinery, architecture and dress, are wonderfully atmospheric.
Most loyalists are worried about how Spielberg will turn the clean-cut Boy's Own lad into a global movie hero. But the producer need not worry about the Tintin being outed. Hollywood has never had a problem with Superman, Batman and the other clingy-suited, all-bulging, all-American super-heroes.
This little jingle from 1986 has been used almost unchanged for the past 22 years to announce the commercials on France 2, the main public television network. At 8pm tonight it disappears, as President Sarkozy's reform in state TV takes effect. [see TV Sarko post]
All advertising is to be halted in the evening and commercials will be dropped entirely from 2011. As we've seen, it's part of Sarkozy's attempt -- decreed without warning or consultation last January -- to create a quality state broadcaster modelled on the BBC. His idea is that the public channels will no longer have to chase ratings with low-grade fare.
Sarko's most questionable act was to anoint himself the effective chief of state broadcasting. He did this by scrapping the procedure in which public TV and radio bosses are appointed by the supposedly neutral broadcasting authority. He has also amalgamated all the state TV channels into a single company.
All this has created an upheaval for the broadcasting world and the row shows no sign of subsiding. News staff at France 2 and France 3 are striking today and tomorrow over what they see as a threat to their editorial independence and incomes. The opposition is accusing Sarko of shovelling advertising money towards his friends who own TF1, the main commercial network... and so on.
The story today is the little revolution in French habits that may be wrought by the monarch's decree. Since the beginning of time, or so it seems, the main networks have opened their prime time entertainment at the same moment at 8.50 pm. This comes after a long "tunnel" of commercials following the ritual 35-minute 8pm news. Forty percent of the French still eat dinner while watching the 8pm Journal Télévisé on one of the main channels. The 15 minutes of advertising and programme trailers are used for clearing the table, going to the lavatory and so on. Now France 2 gets the jump on the others and is starting its entertainment at 8.35. It has even been advertising the change with jokey spots warning people to relieve themselves before 8.35.
For the moment, the main rivals are sticking to their later slot in the belief that France will resist changing an ancient habit. Nonce Paolini, the chairman of TF1, says the French do not want their 'biorhythms' disrupted. The media are full of arguments in both directions today. The behaviour of over 20 million viewers is at stake.
The fuss is obviously overdone. People are much less set in their television ways than they were a decade or two ago, before cable, satellite, digital TV and the internet. It will be interesting to see if commercial-free public television becomes any better than its mediocre predecessor. They are making an attempt to go up market tonight. France 2's new prime time opens with a documentary on the fascinating world of the Dogon people in the African nation of Mali. That will please Sarkozy, but I have a feeling that many people will wait for Avalanche, the sentimental thriller that is being offered by TF1.
For nostalgists, here is a medley of more recent versions of the quirky France 2 commercial jingle:
 France enjoys opinion polls more than most countries. I even remember seeing a survey on the value of opinion polling. One six-monthly poll acts as a sort of barometer of popular culture. This records France's top 50 favourite people. Perhaps the oddest point to note in the latest ranking is the domination of men. Only 10 women are rated among the best-loved 50.
For the fifth time since July 2005, the most admired person is Yannick Noah, the former tennis champion of Cameroonian background who became a pop singer and humanitarian activist. Noah is seen as modest, humble and a generally good person, said Frederic Dabi, polling director for the Ifop agency.
The Journal du Dimanche has been running the poll for the past 20 years. Ifop draws up a list of about 60 personalities and asks a sample of over 1,000 people to "name the 10 who count most for you or which you like best."
Entertainers, sportsmen and TV personalities have always dominated the list. In the past, though, there were quite a few politicians and the most admired were often elderly figures engaged in humanitarian causes. This January, the entertainers, sportsmen and TV personalities occupy 45 of the top 50 places. Politicians have been relegated to the end, led by Nicolas Sarkozy in 42nd place. Olivier Besancenot, leader of the Trotskyite New Anti-Capitalist Party, comes 46th, a step ahead of Ségolène Royal, the Socialist star.
I wonder why women rank so low. There have never been so few in the top 50 since the poll started in 1989. The only one in the top 10 is Mimie Mathy, an actress-comedian who is four feet five inches tall. She was the overall number one choice for women who were questioned. Next, at 11th, is Simone Veil, 81, an elder stateswoman and Nazi death-camp survivor who made her name as the minister who legalised abortion in the 1970s (she is not an active politician). Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant, two film actresses, are among the women who have fallen from the top 50.
Here's the full list on the JDD site
If you need a little background, here's the top 10:
1) Yannick Noah, 48, former tennis champion turned pop singer
2) Dany Boon, 42, actor-comedian, on a high from 2008 filim smash Les Ch'tis
3) Zinedine Zidane, 36, retired footballer, former captain of France
4) Gad Elmaleh, 37, Moroccan-Jewish actor-comedian with popular one-man show
5) Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, 61, news presenter who lost his TF1 network job last June.
6) Charles Aznavour, 84, veteran singer-composer
7) Nicolas Hulot, 53, reporter-writer, television guru on the environment
8) Mimie Mathy, 51, actress
9) Djamel Debbouze, 33, actor-comedian who specialises in subversive humour from immigrant ghetto
10) Michel Sardou, 62, popular singer with rightwing views
Two items in a row about nudity are pure coincidence. This one is in the name of art.
Paris has just witnessed an odd demonstration. The life models who pose at the city's beaux arts schools went on strike and, despite freezing temperatures, demonstrated nude outside the municipal culture department [picture].
The 15 models, supported by teachers and trade union officials, were protesting against the end of the tradition of le cornet -- a rolled up paper in which generations of students have left a tip after their session. They are also demanding official recognition of a craft which they say is central to European art, with its devotion to the human form.
"We are as important as the teacher and the painter because without us they could not teach or paint," said Salvatori, one of the protesters. "Without Gabrielle, who would Renoir have been?. (Gabrielle Renard, the nanny of the child Jean Renoir, was father Auguste's favourite model)
Marianne, 50, another demonstrator, ran through a list of celebrated models who were their artist's muses. These included Lee Miller, who inspired Man Ray and Picasso, and Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray's companion and model, as well as Dina Vierny, the muse of Aristide Maillol, the sculptor ( Vierny, a fascinating woman, is still very much alive at the age of 89. I interviewed her a few years ago).
Although there are no qualifications for becoming a model at the ateliers (studios) of the Beaux Arts, most of them have studied art or dance. About 30 work full-time and 60 more part time. They are paid the minimum wage for the hours worked but with no benefits like holidays and special retirement funds. They say they can't manage without the tips, which added up to 20-30 euros after a three-hour session.
Christophe Girard, Deputy-Mayor in charge of culture, was sympathetic to the demonstrators, who put their clothes back on to talk to him. The city banned the tips because students were complaining and because it's against French law to tip public servants, which is what the models technically are. Girard was nevertheless sympathetic to their cause and promised to seek a ruling from Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, on a statute for them. The Deputy Mayor was himself once a model. He posed for pocket money when he was an art student in Angers.
[picture: Henri Matisse at work]
As if to underline the importance of the models, a show called "Figures of the body, an anatomy lesson at the Beaux Arts" has just opened at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts," the top fine arts school.
Le Figaro wondered this morning: Without the models what would be left of what we admire here: the drawings and engravings of Leonardo, Durer, Géricault.. the sculptures and mouldings of Michael Angelo. Without getting on to the photographs. Just white pages?
Footnote: Artists have always painted from the life in Europe. But 19th century modesty required women to drape their faces when they posed nude. European arts academies did not allow women to study the nude until the early 20th century.
Here's a delightful story that takes us far from the ambient gloom. With snow falling outside, I spent the afternoon yesterday in a salon in the Palais Garnier -- the Opéra -- enjoying an eery trip back in time.
They were playing for the first time a trove of recordings that had been sealed for posterity a century ago. And -- I'm not making this up -- they were extracted from the exact spot deep in the Opera vaults where, in the novel, they found the remains of the dead Phantom.
We heard Nellie Melba, the Australian soprano and Enrico Caruso, the tenor, and other long-dead stars crackling from 36 pristine Gramophone records that had been locked away for posterity.[listen to Melba's Verdi here].
The tale of the Opera's "buried voices", as they are known, began on Christmas Eve 1907 with a strange and solemn ceremony. In the deep labyrinth below the Garnier, Aristide Briand, a statesman of the era, dedicated two leaden urns in which 24 records were packed in glass and asbestos [top picture].
"This will teach men (100 years from now) about the state of our talking machines and the voices of the principal singers of our times," said the message with the urns. The idea of leaving voices in a time capsule came from Alfred Clark, the American head of the French branch of Gramophone, the British company that became His Master's Voice and later EMI.
According to Gaston Leroux, who wrote Le Fantôme de l'Opéra in 1909, workers unearthed the skeleton of Erik, his disfigured "angel of music", as they were installing the buried voices. Leroux's story opens and closes at the sound vault. "I prayed beside his body the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the living voices," says the epilogue
The voices, with their rather fruity period renditions of Wagner, Beethoven, Verdi, Bizet and lesser known composers, were kept under seal for the prescribed century. They were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale for safe-keeping in 1989 but only opened last Christmas. Also opened were two more urns which were deposited in 1912. One of these was damaged beyond repair. Technicians of the National Library spent the year extracting the fragile records from the glass plates and asbestos inside which they had been packed.
[Picture: Nellie Melba, the great Australian diva and dessert fan]
The collection was put on the internet yesterday. We heard extracts at a conference that included readings from the Phantom and a lecture on the dark legends around Napoleon III's epic pile on the Right Bank (like the secret lake deep below, the ghosts of dead workmen and the passages where government troops executed communards in 1871).
Most of the recordings were commercial and have survived in less fine condition elsewhere, but the choice of repertoire and performers offers an unmatched window on the sound-track of the Belle Epoque. François Le Roux, a baritone and teacher, explained why the old opera technique grates on modern ears. Singers belted it out, indulging in showy flourishes and fast vibrato that sound odd now, he said. "The sopranos were generally nasal. The timbre is pinched. Most of them would not get past the quarter-finals in a contest nowadays," he said. "Our ears have really changed."
"The bass voices are clear and relatively high," said Le Roux as he played Pol Planson singing Gounod's Faust in 1906 and then José Van Dam on the same song in 1991. He also noted the way that singers in those pre-microphone days focused on projecting their voices and enunciating the words in a way that even in opera they no longer do. "The point was to be understood. They didn't make much effort to dramatise the characters they were playing."
Maybe Le Roux (apparently no relation to the Phantom's author) was being a little unfair. The odd sound of the old singers was partly a function of the primitive recording equipment. You can get a clearer idea of Melba's voice from a revived master disc from 1904 which, coincidentally, was released this month in Melbourne (her home down, from which she took her stage name).
Le Roux joked about the astonishing tempo of some of the singers, a feature imposed by the brief 78 RPM record. "They sang fast, sometimes really fast. Sometimes you get the impression that the orchestra is struggling to follow the singer."
The urns include some big names of the time who are long forgotten, such as Adolphe Adam and his opera, le Chalet. But it is remarkable that this showcase repertoire of 1907 and 1912 is so similar to the Verdi, Mozart and Wagner that pulls in the crowds in 2008.
Vintage recording experts marvelled not only at the sound, but at the colourful, perfectly preserved labels of the discs from what are known as Gramphone's "pre-dog" period -- before the logo of the listening dog. EMI is bringing out a CD from the contents of the urns in January. The Opera also plans to install a new time capsule with the best early 21st century music. That choice should prove interesting.
Perhaps the eeriest of all the old records was not a song. It was the 1912 disc in which Firmin Gemier, an actor-director, can be heard at the ceremony dedicating "this fatal urn from the catacombs of the Opera.". The records were "a miracle in which we preserve for our great grand-children the most fugitive thing in the world... the voice of the master." he said. "Like the painter and the writer... the lyrical artist will henceforward leave other testimony to his talent that the memory of his reputation."
A footnote: Leroux's Phantom is less famous in France than in the Anglo-Saxon world where it has been staged as theatre and film from the 1920s through to Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980s musical. His Mystère de la Chambre Jaune is probably better known in France.
Your writer
Charles Bremner is Paris Correspondent for The Times. He started out as a journalist in Russia and then moved to the United States. He has reported from all the continents but most enjoys observing the exotic tribe on Britain's doorstep. Though France is home, he avoids going native by offering what the locals call an "Anglo-Saxon" eye on their country.
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Dot
I see what you mean. I feel much better. I take your compliments in my feel-good box, many thanks.
Sweet story, do you know what happened to the boy?
Lex
Thanks.
Azloon
Thanks
Hope you are not still digesting Thanksgiving dinner .
Can you be Felidae if you are being pursued?
Johnny Foreigner
They obviously feel strongly about this one.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 27 Nov 2009 19:47:20
Oh la la Charles
It’s Annie get this your gun this weekend. You are going to be busy.
There is the Swiss front and now it’s “ who is the prettiest of them all?”, choose between Carla’s poise and Michelle’s arms. I am with my Belle, I like women who pack a punch.
I don’t understand how Carla didn’t get the prize of Elle, it’s another snub cause she always seem to be in the mag, photo shopped to death and selling her mission statement, like a heroine of a reality show.
I love the first picture, can’t decide if it’s “ stay close a little longer but why oh why can’t you like me like I like you” or “ I will have you”.
The eyes seem a tad cruel or is it me?
Posted by: do-re-mi | 27 Nov 2009 19:27:20
"The Americans have been consoling the French"
Mighty grand of them, but no need really - we're laughing as hard as they are.
Posted by: Dominique II | 27 Nov 2009 19:10:05
["I would not want anyone to be discourteous towards the Danish Prime Minister, who has organised the conference."]
I seem to recall that Chou-chou was discourteous to his British hosts when he declared he'd rather sleep in his own bed and fled London. And wasn't he discourteous to a whole lot of people when he changed his mind about attending a summit in Evian? I guess discourtesy something done by others.
["Politics is more than form and glamour, it is about issues," Sarko was quoted as saying. ]
Chou-chou should remember that and focus on his reforms at home instead of trying to win Obama's affection.
[I have won two parliamentary elections (French and European)."]
Ummm, against what opposition?
Posted by: Daisy | 27 Nov 2009 18:44:28
MIMI47
I am not sure Michelle Obama is a toad, but for sure, Sarkozy is a frog.
Posted by: Leo | 27 Nov 2009 18:30:29
"Bank perfidy" was assumed by one side to its own benefit despite all evidence to the contrary. Shameful as a beginning to any discussion and yet, it's assumed by you. That's your starting point, but on what evidence? No one saw Meili here as anything but the pawn that he was.
Howbout reading the facts as a rather powerful businessman extorting in the name of Jews, rather than "Jewish" extortion? I think that's how Israeli government officials asked for their views saw it.
You've assumed "bank perfidy" on the basis of nothing but questionable Wiki entries. The Swiss banks, did I forget to mention, had already years before scoured their accounts without any foreign prompting. That's precisely why most were resolved and closed. Christoph Meili was a conveniently timely "witness" of such perfidy. Ahem. Yes, documents were finally discarded as duefully noted already. Meanwhile, you seem startled to learn that Swiss businesses in a neutral situation did business with all parties in the war, couldn't in fact refuse without ruining their own defence against an invasion--that they were neutral and useful to all sides. The alternative I've already sited. We had Germans inside Switzerland as spies, many executied, we had Dulles busy for the OSS, we had the military attaches of all armies by 43-44, we had exports which went unpaid to both sides, but you seem to assume "perfidy" unproven and I suspect won't read serious historical accounts. Conspiracy novels and "Wiki" history?
Try
1. Between the Alps and a Hard Place by Angelo Codilla explaining how Switzerland survived economically during the war. The Swiss banks' response to the Bronfman initiative. What happened during and afterwards. The whole concept of Swiss neutrality and its dilemma seems to have escaped your "conspiracy" addled brain.
2. The Schellenberg Connection, Secret Channel to Berlin by Pierre Brauschweig, in which the history of
Swiss intelligence during the war is set as the background of the determination of General Guisan to prevent an invasion by Nazi forces by reiterating til he was blue in the face, even jeopardizing his standing and safety, that Switzerland would defend itself to the death and was truly neutral, despite the discovery by German occupying France of Switzerland's previous deals to ally its interests with the French.
Come back to me when you can read more than Wikipedia entries.
More offensive still is " I can't get it out of my head that most people have to 'buy' their way."
Get it out of your head, and try to remember there is an entire country here outside of Genevan tax exile neighbours.
I became a Swiss citizen without buying anything or anyone. I am contented here, my kids have received a great education in the public schools and gone on to top universities. I'm grateful for a safe environment and an intellectually and culturally stimulating city nearby.
As someone wrote above, your commune of residence decides on your application. Subsequently, I then have personally been petitioned by Kosovar refugees and others in my neighbours, notably a Welsh family too, who wanted to become Swiss and I signed their papers.. I knew them, their kids and their hard-working determination to become good citizens.
Posted by: Fred Schiller | 27 Nov 2009 18:13:56
Vista has auto-correction that is brilliant and voila, your English gets better.
DRM
OK, so I'll allow that Vista allows you to cheat a little, but believe me, if you typed in a truly dyslexia-hampered spelling, the spell-checker might not be able to pick up the word you meant - and if you were dyslexic, you wouldn't notice.
Anyway as you like writing and we like it that you like writing and you have a blog written-word fan club, I rest my case :)
Just for fun, here is a piece of writing done by a 12-year-old who wasn't dyslexic, but had severe reading difficulties. Once I'd done some diagnosis work and developed a strategy to help him read with more ease (he'd helpfully told me that he could read words in a list, but not in a line), I decided to see if he could apply the same strategy to getting his writing under control. (I have lots of transcribed interviews with him about writing - they're hilarious in places.)
You have to start somewhere, so I asked him to write about something that had happened in his life, perhaps something frightening. His working title was: "The day I nearly drowned".
The piece of writing, by the time it arrived after 2 and a half weeks of writer's block, was titled:
"Why to lean to swim" (I am now typing it exactly as he wrote it).
"I was sailing my boat when I was about 7 year of age my mum got it me for a treat so we whet to skipton cannl I sailed it they and I had a rod to hock it backin so it would not sail a way from me and I whet to the hege of the bankin and I fell in and my mum dived in after in me and saved me has you can tell by this looky it was a hot day and I dry qwick and my sister let me us her junper"
Plenty of "nonstandard spellings" to be going on with!
But you can tell he's of normal intelligence as he can apply moral judgement - his title goes from "The day I nearly drowned" to "Why to lean to swim" which shows a certain level of reflection even with his nonstandard "lean" for "learn". He also shows awareness of others - his mum, his sister, awareness of pleasure - a treat - some humour in "saved me has you can tell by this" and his luck in being saved on a warm rather than a cool day - for "looky" read "lucky".
In other words, a thoroughly nice, quite bright and funny boy who had changed schools a lot between 5 and 7, just at the time when he should have been learning to read and write . . .
Sorry, I seem to be on a nostalgia trip here . . . :)
Posted by: dot king | 27 Nov 2009 18:04:12
"Get off of our social network!"
ROCKET, this seems to be a clear demonstration of the "esprit de tolérance" :) shown by a sizable part of our friends of the left. On the right, there are also plain idiots, of course. Competition left - right is fierce in these matters, especially on Internet :). However, in my modest opinion, the left is still leading the field :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 27 Nov 2009 18:02:26
Michelle Obama is a toad! She is the tackiest 'First Lady' ever!!!
Posted by: mimi47 | 27 Nov 2009 17:57:26
"I have never known a Swiss immigrant to the U.S. in my six decades" -- Azloon
I have only met three in my travels. I went to boarding school with the children of a Swiss Neuro Surgeon, I've met a Swiss woman who lives in Flagstaff, and I have a customer who is married to an American.
I've met many Swiss tourists in Spain, though they are difficult to pick out; they speak English better than the Dutch.
Your point about Bronfman is well taken. The Nazis exterminated people of Jewish descent, even if they had been Christian for several generations. Jews were viewed as a race, not as a religious group. Ligthing candles on Friday night had nothing to do with it.
BTW the 'bronfman' in Yiddish is the 'whiskey man.'
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 27 Nov 2009 17:47:01
It's astonishing when they come out of the woodwork like that, you don't realise how many silent readers of the blog there are...
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 27 Nov 2009 17:42:02
Respecting local laws and customs like those Brits who were arrested for lewd behaviour in public in The Emirates, or drinking alcohol etc. We westerners are in no way hypocritical :-)
We even believe that only we should be allowed to have double standards.
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 27 Nov 2009 17:31:18
I wonder if foreign Muslims, presented with a similar referendum, would vote to allow church steeples erected in Middle Eastern countries?
Posted by: The Admiral | 27 Nov 2009 17:06:36
DAVE
I think it was General I Zayshans which made the comment about Hijabs, Pierre was actually one of the other brigade.
Not sure how many instruction manuals you can fit in a hat, more than weapons, but maybe less than "whatevers"
Slightly disingenuous to pretend the current generation of feckless Brits made the contributions, it was their parents and grandparents who understood what hard work was.
Nowadays it's "They come over here, DOING our jobs", not taking.
By the way, I can also prove that 100% of Jedi Knights are claiming benefits, so let's ban selling lightsabres in Toys R Us as it might lead to small children turning to the Dark Side.
Posted by: Ray Sister Neutral | 27 Nov 2009 16:58:34
FLF (Frédérick Lefebvre)
ROCKET
That's very nearly Fluffy - suits him ;D
Posted by: dot king | 27 Nov 2009 16:41:34
When you move to another country you are expected to behave and abide by the rules of that country not try to impose your own
JOHNY
So, if I understand that, say you went to live in Saudi, you'd go to a mosque rather than a church, or temple or synagogue or whatever and you expect those of Muslim faith to attend church just because they live in Europe?? Or Palestinians living in Israël to attend synagogue, or vice versa depending on whose country you think it is?
(I use "you" because you did, up to you (or "you") whether it's used in the same way or not. Au choix.)
RICK, No, I won't. It's my opinion and that's as far as it goes, and yes, I knew the Libya story. Ta :)
Posted by: dot king | 27 Nov 2009 16:34:28
I wonder if any of this could be a backlash to the foolishness started by Moamer Gaddafi after the the Swiss arresting his son and daughter-in-law.
Posted by: dhb101 | 27 Nov 2009 15:56:37
@PIERRE LEOUF
Hijabs do bite: they conceal terrorist instruction manual, weapons, whatever.
Perhaps you've not had chance to check the government statistics in the UK, but proportionally there are three times as many immigrants on benefits than those you term the 'feckless British'.
It is the the contributions of the 'feckless British' over the past fifty years that the immigrants are stealing.
Posted by: Dave | 27 Nov 2009 15:53:46
What a wonderfully enlightened demonstration of democracy in action. Just compare the Swiss way the the British system of ignoring the voters wishes (Europe, wars, immigration).
At least the Swiss live in a democracy.
Posted by: Dave | 27 Nov 2009 15:49:35
Fred S.
Your mention of Bronfman as as not being a practicing Jew, implying an invalidation his interest and claims, is unappealing, to say the least. Really, what does that have to do with anything. Would relatives of a Jew who died in a gas chamber be entitled to less grief and pain because that Jew had not 'practiced' his or her faith before perishing? Your argument contains some true statements but it would be slightly more persuasive, and palatable, if you left Bronfman's so-called religious 'practice' out of it.
As for the strong-arm aspect to the claims and their resolution, where the money went, who supported the suit, etc., none of it disputes the basic fact of the bankers' perfidy, the prime event in this matter. And with lawyers involved, would you expect something less than the use of maximum, if questionable, tactics and leverage?
It's a sad chapter in Swiss history, no matter how it got resolved. Trying to cast it as Jewish extortion is distasteful at best.
Mention of political asylum in the U.S. for a Swiss national, reminds me how few Swiss emigrate. I have never known a Swiss immigrant to the U.S. in my six decades, though I understand it was more common in the 19th century, probably a religious persecution thing. Everyone seems to wants in, no one wants out. For all its claims to being a model democracy, I can't get it out of my head that most people have to 'buy' their way in (not totally dissimilar to New Zealand, but worse). It offends my inclusive. democratic soul.
I won't bother to mention the major problems caused by Muslim assimilation in Europe, only to note that on the whole it is less of a problem in the U.S. where religion is more generally tolerated (while religious 'nutjobs' abound), and where religious Muslims are viewed as less 'out of the mainstream.'
And, lest I should be shown as painting an overly rosy picture of this side of the ocean, I should mention the exclusionary anti-Semitism of the mid-19th century here (I grew up with it) which regrettably, at least in the early phases of the Holocaust, greatly hindered Jewish emigration to the U.S.
Posted by: azloon | 27 Nov 2009 15:03:41
Dot,
I like writing.
Thank you clearing things out. And the kind and thoughtful comments. I feel much better.
Mild spatial confusion, I like that.
Vista has auto-correction that is brilliant and voila, your English gets better.
Johnny Foreigner
It’s chilled on this particular blog yes.
Fear reigns on the Swiss blog.
Don’t know if you have seen Moon by Duncan Jones, a brilliant little inventive movie done with no money and with quite a performance (s) by Sam Rockwell.
Watch the last comments at the end and it sums up the mood of the times.
Nasty? Take a look at the comments on "Fear stalks global markets on Dubai debt crisis".
Posted by: do-re-mi | 27 Nov 2009 14:57:29
Of Hugues Hiltpold, a Radical party MP from French-speaking Geneva: "He allowed that there was widespread disquiet over the presence of relatively large numbers of Muslim immigrants, but the answer to that lies in education and better integration, he said."
Therein lies the problem as the koran quite clearly FORBIDS muslims to integrate with the unbeliever.
Qur'an (5:51) - "O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people."
Qur'an (3:28) - "Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah..."
...and so on. A clear impediment to any form of integration.
Posted by: Philip Smith | 27 Nov 2009 13:57:43
People's names have been used for many years on cars. This is far from the first instance:
Clio
Dino
Octavia
Fabia
Enzo
Flavia
Giulia
etc.
Why the uproar this time? Because the name is popular? So what?
Posted by: Massimo Pini | 27 Nov 2009 13:56:36
I think Renault's revival of the Gordini name is another example of poor brand management:
http://www.newcarnet.co.uk/blog/massimo/will-renaults-gordini-revival-be-the-real-deal/419/
Posted by: Massimo Pini | 27 Nov 2009 12:26:26
@JOHNNY FOREIGNER
Yes, those controversial subjects bring out the worst in folks and the worst of folks. I thought it was interesting when it was mostly Europeans, since they tend not to express opinions like that too often here. Now that the nasty Americans (and probably some Brits as well) are showing up, it is starting to get a little ugly.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 27 Nov 2009 12:18:14
CHRIS
Roman Catholic church in yet another child-abuse cover up. Much nicer religion than those scary brown folk eh?
Ever heard of Adolf Hitler? Sometimes a violent man (violence is sometimes necessary, as police will agree), he is one of the most influential people in western civilization.
Posted by: General I Zayshuns | 27 Nov 2009 12:11:00
Rick
I'm not dealing with a question of character here. Surely there are skeletons in the closet. My point was to bring up a "temoignage" which I will qualify as appearing to be truthful concerning activities in Swiss banks at the time in question.
Posted by: rocket | 27 Nov 2009 11:21:29
I definitely dont think that being tolerant means being stupid-and accepting everything in all amounts. Swiss should preserve their tolerancy protecting them from untolerant societies and their strong influences. I'm sure that western countries wish they were wiser before it was late.
Posted by: No Name | 27 Nov 2009 10:39:28
I meant 'hibernation'
Posted by: edmund | 27 Nov 2009 10:38:58
In this anti-Islamic epoch, it appears that the West is finally rousing from its deep hiberation of 'hypocrisy'.
hypocrites
Posted by: edmund | 27 Nov 2009 10:38:34
"General I. Zayshuns", Muslims are foreigners, a culturallyexistential threat wherever they are immigrants.
"Radical Christians" are the foundation for Switzerland, they are what made Switzerland great. Ever heard of John Calvin? Sometimes a violent man (violence is sometimes necessary, as police will agree), he is one of the most influential people in western civilization.
Unfortunately, people like you are ignorant of history.
Posted by: Chris | 27 Nov 2009 10:25:49
http://tinyurl.com/ykkfhqp
I'm lovin' it!
As Harrison Ford said in the movie Air Force one
Get off of my plane!
So French internautes have said to FLF (Frédérick Lefebvre)
Get off of our social network!
Posted by: rocket | 27 Nov 2009 10:21:31
"diversity", "multiculturalism" and "tolerance", a little xenophobia is necessary to battle this vile, Marxist filth that will ruin western culture.
The one positive aspect of future Muslim dominance of Europe is that Marxism will be destroyed.
This is an existential battle, for western culture. Perhaps another John Calvin will rise up to rile feeble, head-in-the-sand Europeans.
Posted by: Chris | 27 Nov 2009 10:17:38
ROCKET, according to the Zürich newspaper, ‘Tages Anzeiger’ of 26 June this year: ‘The American (Ed Fagan) who once initiated the legal actions of Holocaust survivors against Swiss big banks, is no longer allowed to practise in New York. He’d embezzled money from clients’.
According to the German Wikipedia entry, Meili’s life seems to have fallen apart in the United States, where he had got political asylum. Judge for yourself by looking at his brother’s and his You Tube productions. Strangely, they both seem to have some difficulty with English. Judge for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVj94PoQuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oyJGNxisfk&feature=related
Posted by: Rick | 27 Nov 2009 09:59:47
"populist", "rear-guard", "educated elite", it's readily apparent which side the writer is on.
Yes, disregard the hoi polloi, the "educated elite" know better than the dirty masses who have to live with the elites' decisions.
Fortunately for the Swiss, they have a real democracy.
And Muslims are "only" 4% of the population? In Germany, Muslims are "only" 5% of the population.
Muslim birth rates are through the roof, while lazy, hedonistic Europeans are refusing to have children which is the only way to prevent their societies from becoming Muslim dominant in a couple of generations.
Europeans deserve the "tolerance" Muslims will mete out when they are the dominant group.
Posted by: Chris | 27 Nov 2009 09:52:27
minurets today , sharia law tommorrow, good luck to the swiss for trying to hold back the tide of islam , and the end of a liberal democratic sociaty such as the swiss have , with referendum on matters ,not just a nod every five years, we are already with islam hands round our throats,and we do nothing, its the end of europe as we know it.
Posted by: londoner432 | 27 Nov 2009 09:48:13
What a nicer, gentler blog this is compared to the Swiss one. Some pretty nasty people out there..
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 27 Nov 2009 09:14:45
Leopold Schonbach
Welcome.
Jeez guys, how many Swiss and tax exiled have bought apartments in Palm Islands? The luxury buy-to let market seemed so solid there. Wonder if Beckham is going to do another campaign in his underwear to pay the bills.
A friend went there for a week £5000 to stay in a luxury hotel “well there’s nothing to see is there everything is in construction” and shop. I feel sorry for all the Modern slaves shipped home with nothing to show for their trouble but debts.
In the great words of Yip Harburg
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Posted by: do-re-mi | 27 Nov 2009 09:11:48
Peter Kennedy
You're a bigot.
Posted by: General I. Zayshuns | 27 Nov 2009 08:38:09
Fred
Your research is certainly thorough and I am sure well documented. But when I hunt around on the internet, I come up with all kinds of information which conflicts with what you say.
For example does the name Christoph Meili ring a bell?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Meili
and I quote from the article
"He discovered that officials at UBS were destroying documents about orphaned assets, i.e., credit balances of deceased Jewish clients whose heirs' whereabouts were unknown. Also in the shredding room were books from the German Reichsbank.[2] They listed stock accounts for companies involved in the holocaust, including BASF, DeGussa, and Degesch.[3] They also listed real-estate records for Berlin property that had been forcibly taken by the Nazis, placed in Swiss accounts, and then claimed to be owned by UBS.[4] Destruction of such documents was a violation of Swiss laws.[5]"
I further quote
"The authorities of Zürich opened a judicial investigation against Meili[8] for suspected violation of the Swiss laws on banking secrecy,[9] which is an offense to be prosecuted ex officio in Switzerland.[10] After charges were filed against him, Ed Fagan approached him and convinced him to move to the United States, where he was granted political asylum.[11][12] According to news reports, Christoph Meili and his family are the only Swiss nationals in history ever to have been granted political asylum in the United States.[13] On January 13, 1998, Fagan filed suit on behalf of Meili against UBS, demanding a sum of 2.56 billion U.S. dollars. The settlement between the Swiss banks and the plaintiffs on the order of US $1.25 billion on August 13, 1998 also covered Meili's law suit and thus ended it.[14]"
I am open to your comments.
Posted by: rocket | 27 Nov 2009 08:01:33
What a Ridiculous and Absurd statement by Mutalip Karaademi,when he states "We are normal people. We just have a different religion". When anyone knows that Islam is very much more that a Religion and Muslim people are the least able to integrate into western society and to be quite honest I cannot imagine carrying on a discussion with my neighbor who is clad head to toe in a Burka please Mutalip give me a break. To be honest with you I don't want Burka clad Muslim people in my community or society as they are, if that makes me a Bigot then so be it,I come by it honestly.
Posted by: Peter Kennedy | 27 Nov 2009 06:24:49
The problem I have with Islam is they want their Religion accepted tolerated etc everywhere they go on the globe but they are so unaccepting and intolerant of other peoples beliefs in countries where they are in the majority and having worked in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries and read every day accounts of Christians being assaulted and murdered in Pakistan, and countries with Sharia laws even making it a capital offense to practice or conscript people into Christianity for example, Until Muslims lose this Bigotry and intolerance they cannot expect to build Minarets everywhere they decide to settle.
Posted by: Peter Kennedy | 27 Nov 2009 06:07:11
Rocket if you will read thoroughly, you'll find that these allegations grew with the telling. The Swiss applied fewer requirements on claimants than US banks and others. In the end, they simply didn't hand out money to people who had no creditable story at all, and these include some of the claimants asking for money on the basis of a father who promised he's put some unspecified money in an unspecified bank at an unspecified time. Examine the cases and you'll see that no banker would have just met those demands.
The Volcker committee checked the Swiss records of accounts opened between '35 and '45. That's 6.8 million.They excluded domestic accounts and the ones for which they had no more records because of bank mergers and authorized disposal or domants opened earlier, including Lenin's. They matched the remaining 2.2 million against the names of known Holocaust victims, 5.5 million. 356,000 names matched more or less of which 300,000 had been closed properly, unmatched chronologically or turned out to be domestic.
That left 53,000 with "possible" relationship to Nazi persecution. It turned out that more than half of these had been closed for various reasons and most of the rest paid out in some way, That left, Rocket, only 2726 classified as open and dormant. And most had little value.
Then guess what? Bronfman's WJC, having got their money, asked the claimants for documents they couldn't produce as proof, any more than they could for the Swiss bankers. For this, the WJC and its litigants got their 1.25 billion US dollars. A year after the shakedown of the Swiss was done, the WJC had disbursed only 10% of the money received, leaving their claimants, betrayed or deluded, in any case very aggrieved.
It was an unbelievable case of American litigious practice of using class action suits to blackmail industries into protection against further lawsuits being exported and misapplied to foreign policy.
The WJC under Bronfman with the help of the NY courts then pursued Germany, (not a neutral victim like Switzerland) and France and Austria. But these governments turned out to be less compliant than the Swiss, and didn't roll over but asked for written guarantees. There too, banking licences in New York were involved as "hostages." So the Swiss got screwed by the Axis powers that surrounded them, "buying" their goods without paying for them, then by a powerful lobbyist (and not a religious representative or even a practicing Jew) on "behalf" of the people the Swiss population helped as best they could.
Notice the government of Israel did not support the WJC campaign against Switzerland. Doesn't that tell you something?
Anti-Americanism has grown as a result.
Posted by: Fred Schiller | 27 Nov 2009 05:45:28
I just realized how my previous comments could be seen as intolerant vs the swiss. I was mostly talking about other "accepted wisdoms" in my family, that might as well be exaggerated - as they left the country long time ago, although coming back for visit from time to time. And I have some very good fiends from there, happy to be from there, and who wouldn't recognize themselves in the "intolerant and secluded" part.
But Blocher is still a clown.
Posted by: Scotian | 27 Nov 2009 01:20:12
Part of my family come from Switzerland, and many left in 70's to live somewhere else (many left in the 1870 to 1900, but it was to find a living from very poor valleys of the country - things have changed).
And they told me about how crazily isolated and close minded this country was in the 60's. They remember that the accepted wisdom was that every one of their neighbours (Germans, Italians, Austrians, Italian and,even worse, Yougoslavs) were a bunch of wild beasts dreaming to destroy the good ol' peaceful way of life of swiss valleys. They say that themselves were to think like that as kids.
So things have not changed. Or maybe they have for the better, as Switzerland might be now a litte less secluded and intolerant than it used to be. But it's still crazy how a clown like Blocher can be so successful in a supposedly advanced country.
Actually, contrary to some in this thread, who dream of having the swiss citizenship, I'm technically able to get it - without paying ;) - but I never even thought about it.
Posted by: Scotian | 27 Nov 2009 01:10:28
My car's name is up there with the best.
Toyota Town Ace Royal Lounge...
Posted by: Pyan | 27 Nov 2009 00:02:55
My car's name is up there with the best.
Toyota Town Ace Royal Lounge...
Posted by: Pyan | 27 Nov 2009 00:02:54
Naughty brown men stole my Christmas pwesents
Posted by: General I. Zayshuns | 26 Nov 2009 22:05:03
Inigo, 25Nov2009 13.19.03 - try telling that to our head-in-sand goverment, which appears to be terrified of upsetting our Moslems...riots & threats of bloodletting in the streets, plus the fear that Moslem countries would strangle our oil supply!
We need immigrants who will INTEGRATE!
Posted by: bob at Bill | 26 Nov 2009 21:58:05
When you move to another country you are expected to behave and abide by the rules of that country not try to impose your own.If you do, your out, or as in Saudi Arabia probably locked up.
If all European countries had adopted this simple policy,then immigration would be considerably less of a problem as it is now.
Posted by: johny | 26 Nov 2009 20:47:12