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]
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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.
In some places -- including Britain and the USA -- beauty pageants are no longer deemed suitable for prime time on main networks. Happily -- or I should probably say unfortunately -- that's not the case for France.
On Saturday night eight million people -- that's 13 percent of the population -- watched the Miss France contest, a jamboree that makes few concessions to feminist principles and is strong on soap opera. The young women parade in high heels in both one and two-piece swim-suits as the commentator praises their charms and talents [bottom picture]. The contestants tell us of their ambitions. Miss Pays de Loire, for example, hoped to "invest myself in humanitarian charities as a representative of elegance."
It's supposed to be family fun and there is usually a feud to keep up the interest. Tensions are soothed by Jean-Pierre Foucault, the oily compère, but the whole thing is ruled by Geneviève de Fontenay, a dragon who is known as "the lady with the hat" [right in the top picture].
De Fontenay, 76, has managed Miss France since 1953 and has been its boss since 1981. Without her, it's likely that the whole kitschy exercise would collapse. This year's drama arose from de Fontenay's banishment of Valérie Bègue, the 2008 Miss France after a former boyfriend circulated photographs of her in less than chaste poses. 
The unfortunate Bègue, from the French island of La Réunion, had kept her title, but she was exiled to los Angeles last Thursday to keep her away from the show where she was supposed to crown her successor. TF1, the host network, wanted her there but de Fontenay over-ruled them. They got their own back when Foucault announced on air that de Fontenay had vetoed the popular Bègue and the crowd booed the lady with the hat.
The winner this year, picked by judges and popular telephone vote, was Chloé Mortaud, a 19-year-old student from the southwestern Ariège département. Like some previous Miss Frances (It's Miss France, not Mademoiselle) she is of mixed race. She is also the first to hold dual French and US citizenship. Her African-American Mother came from Mississippi. Mortaud, who is studying business and had already been crowned Miss Albigeois-Midi Pyrénées, said she deserved the national crown because "with a smile I will transmit happiness to people." She also seized l'air du temps and made the most of her mixed race in her pre-decision pitch. "This polyvalency is an advantage," she said.
As the press talked about the Obama effect yesterday, Mortaud said she would be an ambassadress for racial tolerance. "I want to go to people and explain to them that fear of the other is unfounded. I want to incarnate today’s French diversity".
While Mortaud starts her year of glory, de Fontenay has moved on to another battle. She is fighting rebellion by Guadeloupe, the French Caribbean territory. The island has had the effrontery to send a dissident Miss Guadeloupe to the Miss World pageant in South Africa next week. "She is illegitimate", says de Fontenay. Guadeloupe is part of her Miss France empire and France is to be represented in Johannesbourg by the second runner-up to the banished Ms Bègue from 2008.
De Fontenay usually gets her way, so I hope the insurgent from Guadeloupe is watching her back. Yes this is all frivolous stuff -- despite the millions of euros tied up in the exercise. It's taken with a pinch of salt here, although France has fewer qualms than some other places when it comes to patronising women. As an example of that, I just heard Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a recent Prime Minister, defend Rachida Dati, 41, the embattled Justice Minister, on the radio, calling her "une fille exceptionnelle" -- an exceptional girl.
The Miss World contest, launched in London in 1951, has become an off-shore exercise in recent years, being staged in China, Africa and so on. But don't forget that about 2.5 billion people are expected to watch it next week. To close on a memory, one of my first assignments as a journalist was to report backstage from a Miss World contest in the Albert Hall. It was a morally confusing mission of course.
[Below: swimsuits for Miss France 2009]
Here's some good news for anyone applying to be a Gardien de la Paix -- an ordinary French police officer. You will no longer be expected to know the imperfect subjunctive or name the author of les Fleurs du Mal. And if you are aiming to be a Garde Champêtre -- park warden -- you can forget about defining the Jurassic era.
On the orders of President Sarkozy, France's vast civil service is greatly lightening the tests of general knowledge that are compulsory for entrants to all its branches. New tests and interview methods are to replace the old-style "concours de culture générale".
Sarkozy is no doubt right when he says that the competitive tests discriminate against poorer applicants and those from immigrant backgrounds. The critics of course see the new Charter Against Discrimination in the Civil Service as another act of dumbing down by a President who has had a bee in his bonnet over culture for years.
One of his set-pieces as candidate was to mock a question from a civil service promotion test that asked clerical workers who wrote La Princesse de Clèves, a 17th century novel. Sarkozy's secretary at the time had failed the test. "I don't know if you have often had to ask the woman at the reception desk what she thinks of the Princesse de Clèves," Sarkozy joked in 2006.
The competitive culture quizzes have long been a rite of passage into the haven of a lifetime job in the police, ministries, post office and other branches of a fonction publique that employs over 20 percent of all workers. With vastly over-subscribed demand, the 3,000 different tests have been used to whittle down the candidates.
Last year, 65,000 people, many with university degrees, sat the test for 1,000 posts as junior clerks. The goal is the lifetime guarantee that comes with being a servant of the state, however humble. I have a friend, a double bass player with a music degree, who is thrilled to have scored a post as a uniformed maintenance man at the Senate. He spends his day changing the lightbulbs but says he values the short hours and great retirement benefits waiting for him in about 25 years time.
As a sample of questions, candidates for fonctionnaire catégorie C, the lowest level, at the Finance Ministry, were this year asked which divinity was not Egyptian: Anubis, Isis, Hathor or Thor?
They were also expected to know whether "the artiste Arthur H (a pop singer) is the brother of M (another pop singer), the son of Jacques Higelin (an older pop singer), the son of Françoise Hardy or the grandson of Jimi Hendrix" (He's Higelin's son).
André Santini, the Civil Service Minister, sounded off against the general knowledge tests in le Figaro. "What is the point of a history examination for firemen or police constables with university degrees? We have reached the limit of sterile elitism," he said. Santini, who does not hail from the caste of hauts fonctionnaires, said the general knowledge tests were "being used as a form of invisible discrimination". (On the police, France recruits a superior officer class with university degrees and much tougher entrance tests)
He added: "The applicants are being asked questions that are too academic and ridiculously difficult and which indicate nothing about their real aptitude for filling a post." From now on, questions would be aimed at testing common sense and aptitude for the job, he said.
Here are recent questions from a recent Culture Générale entrance test for Gardiens de la Paix. Candidates have to hold the baccalauréat high-school leaving certificate.
Into which sea does the Danube flow ? Aral, Azov, Caspian or Black. (Black)
Who sculpted the Statue of Liberty ? Maillol, Buren, Rodin, Bartoli (Bartholdi)
Which country does not have a frontier with Iraq? Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt (Egypt)
In what year was Israel founded 1940, 48, 58, 61 ? (48)
Harpagon is a character from a play by Corneille, Racine, Molière, Beaumarchais ? (Molière)
Inevitably, the reform is being seen as another step away from the educational rigour upon which France used to pride itself. Ivan Rioufol, who is news editor at le Figaro and an author, tore into Sarkozy on his blog for dumbing down France.
A basic knowledge of history and the culture is vital for civil servants to be capable of civilised communication, he said. "It's appalling to see the government trying to accelerate this mutation into a world with no differentiation."
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PS: Charles Baudelaire wrote les Fleurs du Mal, a collection of poems. La Princesse de Clèves, regarded as the first French novel, by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, was published anonymously in 1678
 A lump of lead from a dusty drawer in a Paris museum has enabled French experts to solve a long-standing mystery.
The size of a pigeon's egg, the piece turned out to be a casting of the legendary Blue Diamond, the centre-piece of the crown jewels of pre-revolutionary France. The diamond, bought by Louis XIV in the 17th century, vanished when looters stole King Louis XVI's treasures in the heat of the revolution in 1792. The find in the Paris Museum of Natural History has in turn enabled researchers to prove that the long-lost blue diamond is one and the same as the Hope Diamond, a star exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC [in picture]
It had long been suspected that the Hope, which was given to the Smithsonian in 1958 by the jeweller Harry Winston and which is said to carry a fatal curse, came from the Diamant Bleu that was looted in Paris in 1792. This has now been confirmed by François Farges, the chief mineralogist with the Paris museum. He has concluded that the Hope is the cut-down heart of the 69-carat Indian diamond that the Sun King bought in the mid-17th century.
[The lead casting of Blue Diamond]
The breakthrough came when Farges and his team were rummaging through thousands of ancient items in the museum. They were intrigued by lot number 50,165, the lead casting. It was tagged as "replica of a blue diamond belonging to Monsieur Hoppe of London". Jewellers used to keep lead castings of stones that they cut.
The replica matched period pictures of the long-lost royal gem. The French team compared it to computer measurements of the Hope sent from Washington and found that the US stone fitted perfectly inside the Blue Diamond. "It is more than a hypothesis," said Farges. "We have carried out analyses by scanner and laser, which have been validated by experts in gemology."
Suspicions were first aroused in 1812, when a massive blue stone of 45.54 carats turned up in London in the hands of Daniel Eliason, a diamond merchant. Until now, Henry Philip Hope, a City banker, only appeared as the diamond's owner in 1839.
The lead casting now links Hope to the plundered diamond, which was originally bought in the 17th century by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, an adventurer, from the ruler of Golconda, in what is now the Indian state of Hyderabad.
Farges says that he did not sleep for two weeks after the discovery of the casting. He pieced together what he believes was the trail of the gem, which in the early 18th century had become part of the Order of the Golden Fleece, a concoction of gold, diamonds and rubies that was made for Louis XV [Pictured here].
The diamond, reputed to have been the most dazzling ever seen, was smuggled to London where it was acquired by Hope and crudely recut, shearing off 23.5 carats as well as its original lustre, says Farges. Eliason was just a front for Hope, says the mineralogist. He has just published his findings in the peer-review journal Revue de Gemmologie.
The Hope diamond changed hands many times after the banker's death. It came to Paris and was owned for a time by Pierre Cartier, the jeweller, before reaching the United States in 1911. The tale of a curse arose from the real or imagined sticky ends of some of its owners, including Louis XVI and Tavernier. The king ended up of course on the guillotine. The adventurer who brought it to France was said to have stolen it from a statue of the goddess Sita. He was later torn to pieces by wolves in Russia, according to the legend.
The Paris museum has made a replica of the royal diamond out of zirconium. It is hoping that a wealthy patron might pay for a synthetic diamond version. Farges does not expect France to ask for its stone back. Napoleon Bonaparte delared crimes of the revolutionary period exempt from prosecution in 1804.
"The diamond has been recut, which means that the one in Smithsonian is in effect a completely different stone," Farges adds.
[below: how the Hope was cut from the King's Blue Diamond]
Since the post on Vichy France is still stirring debate here, it's worth reporting a little ceremony in Paris today that showed how France has not forgotten the war.
This painting by Henri Matisse was handed over by Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, to the London-based heirs of a Jewish family whose goods were seized by the Nazis in Germany in 1941.
It took 60 years to find the rightful owners of the le Mur Rose de l'Hôpital d'Ajaccio, painted by the young Matisse in 1898 and found near Tubingen in the French-occupied zone of Germany in 1948.
The little canvas was part of a stash of art owned by Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who is remembered for his attempts in 1944 to alert Pope Pius XII to what was going on in the death camps. You know who he is if you have seen Rolf Hochhuth's the Vicar, or Amen, the 2002 film that Constantin Costa-Gavras adapted from the play. Gerstein was a devout Lutheran and a chemical engineer who helped supply Zyklon B gas to Auschwitz and other camps. He hanged himself in a French jail in 1946. He was posthumously convicted of war crimes but rehabilitated in 1965 when witnesses reported his efforts to expose the Holocaust.
 [SS Lieutenant Gerstein played by Ulrich Tukur in Amen]
The painting was taken to Paris and added to the National Museums Recovery collection while its owner was sought. In recent years it has been part of the collection of the Pompidou modern art centre. There were no clues about its history except a French customs stamp that showed that it had been bought in a famous Paris sale in 1914 on the eve of the Great War. Its provenance was established after it was sent by France to Israel earlier this year as part of a show called: "Who owns this picture?".
German and French experts confirmed that it had belonged to Harry Fuld, a Frankfurt collector who had built Germany's first big telephone company. His son, Harry Fuld Jr, left the collection in Germany when he fled to London in 1937 to escape persecution.
In 1942, Hans Lang, a Berlin dealer, bought the Matisse when he organised a sale of Jewish-owned art. Lang was a childhood friend of Gerstein and passed the painting on to him. After 1945, Fuld tried to track down his Matisse but never found it, although it was on display in the 1950s in the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris. That could happen before computers and Google.
Fuld died in 1963 and his estate eventually went to the London branch of the Magen David Adom, the Israeli charity, equivalent to the Red Cross, which received the painting today. The French Minister said the return "testifies to the long labour of memory and justice which has been achieved." She credited the effort undertaken by France since 1997 to publicise information on stolen wartime art whose owners could not be traced. The "Who owns this picture?" exhibition was part of this.
Stewart Glyn, Chairman of the London-based charity, said the painting would be put on show in Berlin and then in the Frankfurt home of its late owners. They then hope that a benefactor will buy it for an Israeli museum. The painting is said to be worth up to about 150,000 dollars in today's sagging market. "It’s a remarkable and in some ways slightly creepy story,” said Glyn.
Back in President de Gaulle's days, France's only television channel sent its news scripts to the Information Minister for clearance before broadcast. Memories of the old ORTF, the 1960s state broadcaster, are stirring today as staff at France Télévisions have gone on strike. Forty percent of of the personnel at the public tv and radio networks have stopped work for the day and programmes have been suspended.
The cause is a revolution by President Sarkozy that will bring the public broadcaster under closer state control. As well as de Gaulle, Sarkozy's other model may be Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister and media magnate who controls public and private TV in Italy.
The story began last January when Sarkozy decided out of the blue to end advertising on the state television channels (It was during his slightly unhinged period between wives when he announced a torrent of odd projects, most of which have evaporated). Commercials produce a third of the state TV revenue, with license fees making up most of the rest. In Napoleonic form, Sarko also decreed that henceforward he would appoint the boss of France Télévisions and the public radio networks. For the past two decades the jobs have been the gift of an independent supervisory body, the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel).
The President said that he was acting in the noble cause of relieving France2 and the other channels from the need to attract audience ratings with low-grade programming. The state would make up for the 450 million euro drop in income from advertising, he promised. They would now be free to start producing high quality programmes "just like the BBC". The British public broadcaster is Sarkozy's model, although it has an independent charter that makes it very different from the politically-controlled entity that he is creating for France.
Sarko's lieutenants say that presidential appointment of the TV chief will merely simplify things because everyone knew that the Elysée palace had the ultimate say on the matter even though the CSA is notionally independent.
 [The ORTF in May 1968 poster]
Few beyond Sarkozy's camp bought these arguments. He was accused of giving an advertising windfall to the private networks and mainly Martin Bouygues, his friend who owns TF1, the biggest channel. The president's entourage also fanned worry about the arrival of a de Gaulle-style "TV Sarko" with instructions on the type of programming that they expect from the new France2. This includes slots to "explain" government policies. Frédéric Lefebvre, a parliamentarian and spokesman for Sarkozy's UMP party, listed the presenters and formats that they want to see in prime time [watch him here].
 [Demonstrator from France Television today]
The Parliament has started to debate the television bill today. Commercials will disappear from prime time from January and completely by December 2011. The promise to guarantee the gap in funding has yet to be fulfilled. The money is supposed to come from new taxes on the commercial networks and mobile phone companies but the TV companies have just had their levy halved to take account of the economic slump -- and the new digital channels that are eating into their revenues.
The reform will take effect despite the opposition's promises to fight it in parliament. Among one of the more shameless amendments by the Sarkozy camp is a rule designed to protect TF1 when it runs 10 straight minutes of advertising at the end of the 8pm evening news. At present, both TF1 and France2 broadcast commercials in this slot after their parallel half-hour news shows. To deter viewers from zapping to France2, the state broadcaster will in future have to fill the parallel slot with public service messages on education, health and social matters -- a real flash-back to de Gaulle's days. .
Some of Sarkozy's criticism of France Télévisions is justified. The company suffers from over-staffing, bureaucracy and aggressive labour unions. Their programming is less diverse than that of the far richer BBC but it is still of a higher quality than the more crowd-pleasing output of TF1.
The presidential interference has stirred hostility on a broad front, including much of today's print media. Of course you would expect Libération to dump on TV Sarko with glee, but it's worth quoting Laurent Joffrin, its editor. "Nicolas Sarkozy will have managed to put under his influence almost the entire broadcasting landscape of France... After one year we are returning to the belle epoque of the ORTF."
Sarko is far from finished with the media. He has now set out to rescue the printed press from its steady decline -- what he sees as largely self-inflicted. More on that later.
Here is Carla Bruni doing her bit on David Letterman's show in New York on Tuesday night. She also appeared on the NBC Today breakfast show (watch here). Madame Sarkozy is promoting her latest song album but she is more than earning her keep as goodwill ambassador for France.
As in all her interviews, she gave an excellent performance as beautiful and bland royal consort. But she also managed a couple of undiplomatic slaps at President Bush. Letterman asks her if Sarko and Bush got on together. "They have to, you know. There's no choice," she replies. Then, asked about Barack Obama's election, she says: "France is thrilled, delighted. I think the whole world is delighted."
The remarks in part reflect Bruni's own anti-Bush views as a leading member of the Parisian engagé, artsy crowd. She has been making herself heard on the leftwing front lately. She persuaded her husband last month to exempt a former Red Brigades activist from extradition to Italy on old murder charges. She also fired a round at Silvio Berlusconi, over his bad joke on Obama's sun-tan and she signed a manifesto for affirmative action to combat what she called France's entrenched racial discrimination. And don't forget that Sarko sent Bruni on his behalf to talk to the Dalai Lama last August.
Le Nouvel Observateur notes today how Bruni has acquired power of her own. It puts her among what it calls "the real government of France". These are the palace advisers and political and business chums who wield more clout than the Prime Minister and Cabinet, according to the Nouvel Obs. It dubs Carla the Minister for Diversity, Humanitarian Causes and the Presidential Image.
But Bruni's swipe at Bush also reflects Sarkozy's recent renewal of France's old antagonism towards Washington. This is part of Sarko's move to use the economic crisis to stake out European leadership for France and a even a world role for himself. Talking like a good old leftist, he has been blaming the United States for starting the slump and castigating the greed of its financial world.
His latest act has been to call a private summit in Paris in early January to push his project for "refounding capitalism". The Americans were annoyed when Sarkozy announced his gathering -- to be co-hosted by his friend Tony Blair -- as soon as he got back from the G20 summit in Washington last weekend. Obama is supposed to chair the follow-up to the Washington summit in April. As Mark Landler of the New York Times says today: "The dispute epitomizes what has become an increasingly tense trans-Atlantic contest over summitry and the global economy."
While officially delighted by Obama's election, Sarkozy is said by people close to him to be worried that he will be eclipsed by the new US President. He wants to make a maximum impact before the January inauguration. In so doing Sarkozy has become an advocate for strict new international regulation.
One of Sarkozy's staff told me that he expects the Obama administration to play tough with Europe despite all the good vibrations. Sarko is irked by Obama's refusal to meet him last weekend. He was keen to be the first foreign leader to see the President-elect and he offered to make the hop to Chicago for the session with his "copain" (pal), as he calls Obama.
Sarkozy's strategy on world affairs has evolved. He subscribes to a new doctrine of "relative powers", devised by Jean-David Levitte, his diplomatic adviser (who is called the real Foreign Minister by the Nouvel Obs). This means that France can enhance its power by being close to all the big players, whatever their governing regime. We have seen this in action with Sarko's overtures to Moscow and Beijing.
In reality the policy is not very new. "Sarko l'Américain" as he was once proud to be known, is just reverting to classical French mode, performed by all leaders from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac. Keeping a distance from America helps give traction to French foreign policy. But Sarko remains in awe of the wounded super-power and must be thrilled with the gushing admiration that his latest wife receives from the likes of David Letterman.
If you are weary with lists that rank Titanic or Harry Potter among the highest works of art, you may be comforted by a league table of great films that came out in France this week.
A jury of 76 French film makers, critics and historians were polled on their favourites and the results have been published as Les cent plus beaux films du monde (The World's 100 Most Beautiful Films).
And no, the number one was not French and only four French films reached the top 15. First was Citizen Kane. Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece was followed in equal second place by Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter and Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu, made in 1939.
F.W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise, a silent film, came next, followed by Jean Vigo's Atalante (1933), Fritz Lang's 1931 M, starring Peter Lorre, and Stanley Donen's 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain.
That gives a flavour. It is a serious list with no concession to fashion. Some critics are calling it boringly conventional. The top 15 are below and click here for the whole lot, including trailers. The ranking is heavy with black-and-white and there are a few silent movies. The most recent entrant is Pedro Almodovar's 2002 Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her), preceded by David Lynch's 2001 Mulholland Drive. The most recent French film to make the grade was the 1991 Van Gogh, directed by Maurice Pialat and starring Jacques Dutronc, the popular singer-actor.
Surprisingly, Claude Chabrol and Louis Malle, two of the biggest auteurs who emerged from the 1960s nouvelle vague, fail to make the grade.
The exercise was organised by Claude-Jean Philippe, a veteran critic and historian. The idea was to define the ideal cinémathèque -- film library.
Le Figaro, hardly an avant-garde newspaper, grumbled this morning that the experts picked the usual French-favoured classics. Only three of the French-language directors on the list are still alive -- Resnais, aged, 86, Godard (77), and Rohmer (88). Did Charlie Chaplin really deserve five entries, wondered Eric Neuhoff, Figaro's critic. And why did the cinéastes forget such high-brow regulars as Wim Wenders and Britain's Peter Greenaway ?
At least the exercise offers a chance to catch up on these golden oldies. All 100 films are being shown at the Reflet Médicis movie theatre in the Latin quarter from today until next summer and they are listed in a book published by Cahiers du Cinema, the old bible of the nouvelle vague era.
1 : Citizen Kane, Orson Welles.
2 The Night Hunter, Charles Laughton ; La Règle du jeu, Jean Renoir.
4 : Sunrise, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.
5 : L'Atalante, Jean Vigo.
6 : M, Fritz Lang.
7 : Singin' in the Rain, Stanley Donen et Gene Kelly.
8 : Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock.
9 : Les Enfants du paradis, Marcel Carné ; The Searchers, John Ford ; Greed, Eric von Stroheim.
12: Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks ; To be or not to be, Ernst Lubitsch .
14 : Tokyo Story, Yasujiro Ozu.
15 : Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard.
Purists here have jumped on my headline "la belle France" over the post on wind farms. The French don't say that, I was told. So let's be pedantic and look at the odd things that happen when one language borrows from the other.
I used la belle France advisedly. The expression is old but it is used internationally and it conveys a whiff of Frenchness, like Zut alors! which no-one says much either. It is one of a long list of French words and expressions that are current in English but not in France. The same happens the other way round, or lycée de Versailles, as the kids here say [footnote*].
A friend was complaining the other day that her job requires her to 'faire du phoning' -- making prospective sales calls. She had just had her brushing and was talking about a new restaurant fad called le fooding. These coinages can be useful. I find myself talking about 'un best of' because it's a good term for selected hits. We'll soon have le best of de Sarko 2008. Le smoking (tuxedo to Americans) has long been more concise than the British dinner jacket or black tie. The French media have become très people lately. The word, meaning celebrity culture, presumably came from People, the doyen of US celeb magazines.
In the other direction, a recent Times editorial was headlined Plus ça change. A Parisian colleague asked me what that meant. The proverb plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, is standard in English but has fallen out of common use here. The same goes for déjà vu and crème de la crème (You say le gratin -- the grilled cheese topping a dish -- for crème de la crème)
Then there are the errors. When I write bon vivant in an article , it is "corrected" in the newspaper to read bon viveur, conforming to the English usage. Educated Brits say "chacun a son goût" (each has his/her taste) although the French expression is "(à) chacun son goût" (to each, his/her taste).
The Eurovision song contest has added a Gallic joke to the English language: nul points. It's not French. Here, when a contestant scores nil, they say "zero pointé".
Many meanings have changed over the years. In France, une entrée is now the starter or appetizer, while Americans use it to mean main dish. The entrée originally came between the two when people ate more courses.
People stopped saying sacré bleu! around world war two, but the exclamation lives on in British newspapers and entertainment, along with zut alors! In similar manner, Englishmen in French cartoons always exclaim Damned! and greet their friends by saying "how do you do".
French gave a lot of food words to the world but doesn't use all of them itself. A Napoleon is an item of pâtisserie in some English-speaking places as well as Russia and parts of Europe. In France it's a mille-feuille (thousand leaves). Unlike the English-speaking world, France has no restauranteurs. It has only restaurateurs, which literally means restorers.
Clothes are an old field for linguistic confusion. Un slip are men's underpants (shorts). A brassière is un soutien-gorge. And there's no space to go into all the dangerous faux-amis like préservatif meaning condom. The New York Times committed a howler not long ago when it quoted Nicolas Sarkozy as saying that he had been deceived by someone. He had talked about his déception -- which means disappointment.
The two languages have been borrowing from one-another for a thousand years. Sometimes the same word gets imported twice. Vanguard, meaning the front of an army, came from avant-garde long ago. In the late 19th century it was re-imported as avant-garde, with an arty sense. English tends to mangle French words when it absorbs them. Une discothèque is still called that in its homeland while it became a disco in English.
And then, for enthusiasts who are still with me, there is the way that imported words change the sense of the original language. To the anger of the Académie Française this has been pretty much one-way lately, with French-rooted English words re-crossing the Channel and devouring their ancestors.
The verb supporter in French (to bear or put up with) has acquired the additional English meaning of backing a team or a cause. Réaliser (to fulfill or carry out) is being used instead of se rendre compte, as in "je n'ai pas réalise que j'étais un loser (I didn't realise I was a loser).
There is an embarras du choix for scoring points in the language business. Or should that be embarras de choix? Please add the words that I've missed from this résumé.
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* Lycée de Versailles is an old rhyming substitute for vice-versa (pronounced veesay-versa) .
Update: In response to comments below, this is une clef anglaise -- an English key -- which is monkey wrench in American and adjustable spanner in Britain.
It's pure coincidence that I'm coming back to the matter of age. Look at these before-and-after shots of the makeover of Laurence Ferrari. She is the news presenter who holds the star slot at Tf1, the leading French channel. The first picture was a month ago and the second last week.
Ferrari, 42, was brought in last summer to replace Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, 60, the long-serving anchorman (picture below) who is affectionately known as PPDA. Her blonde youthfulness was supposed to win viewers back to the nightly Journal de 20h, the most-watched TV news in Europe. It failed to achieve this. So her bosses at Tf1 decided that she looked too young and sexy and instructed her to add gravitas by ageing.
Her hair was restyled to the sober anchor-woman look; she was taken out of her clingy tops and dressed in sensible dark jackets; her lipstick and tint were toned down and a few lines appeared around her eyes.
That was 10 days ago, but Ferrari's slide continues. Tf1 went to town with her US election coverage, live from New York this week, but last night her share of the audience dipped to 29 percent -- an historic low for the network. That compares with 40 percent when she started and the 36 percent held by her predecessor this time last year. Worse still, France 2, the rival, but less powerful, state network is fast catching up and risks overtaking la Ferrari.
The word in the trade is that Nonce Paoli, le big boss de Tf1, is beginning to panic. "Perhaps we miscalculated. We did not completely assess the impact of PPDA's departure," he told a meeting on October 21, according to le Canard Enchaîné weekly.
Ferrari's supporters see her as a victim of prejudice against blondes. Older viewers do not think that she has the necessary weight and seriousness. Meanwhile, PPDA is reveling in the difficulties of the woman who he believes usurped his television throne. The ex-anchor is haunting rival television studios "like the ghost son of Lady Macbeth, saying 'I was betrayed. I was stabbed'," said a column in today's Nouvel Observateur.
Footnote: Ferrari opened her news last night with the report that the French are happiest in their sixties (last post).
If you brave the tourist crowd to visit Montmartre, you can get the impression that there is not much real art around the legendary painters' quarter of Paris.
The lanes are full of kitschy prints and hawkers peddle cheap drawings in the hillside district that was long ago the haunt of Lautrec, Renoir and Picasso.
Montmartre has been that way for decades, yet a band of about 300 officially licensed painters have managed until now to earn a living selling to visitors on the Place du Tertre, behind the Sacré Coeur basilica.
I dropped in on them yesterday for the newspaper because they are unhappy. They say they are being driven out by computer-produced oils and water-colours that are shipped in from China, Romania and other low-cost places.
These realistic-looking oeuvres cover the walls of pseudo-galleries which have mushroomed around the Place du Tertre as the digital giclée technique has been perfected over the past decade. Giclée printing has boomed everywhere as an inexpensive way of reproducing fine art and turning photographs into "paintings" on canvas. In Montmartre, it is being used to palm off reproductions to unsuspecting visitors for much lower prices than the local painters charge.
The stakes are high because some 10 million tourists are now making the trek annually to the home of Belle Epoque Bohemia up the hill from the Moulin Rouge cabaret. The site is about level as a tourist favourite with Notre Dame cathedral and the Eiffel tower.
Dorothée Dabrou, President of one of the three associations that group the city-certified painters, told me: "We can't survive because we can't compete with the low cost of the prints -- which is what they are. People don't realise they are being sold a reproduction. They think they have scored a bargain. We have to paint ever smaller and even miniature to sell our work."
The mass-produced canvases, often finished with genuine-looking, hand-touches, range from classical kitsch of the Eiffel Tower and street life to imitation Cézannes and Fauvists. Most use giclée, in which layers of paint are sprayed onto the canvas in a way that looks like hand-painting.
Continue reading "Chinese art drives painters from Montmartre " »
France is flocking to the delightful tale of a seductive charmer who takes on two young mistresses and lands in a tangle with his beautiful wife.
I'm not talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, though the exploits of le French lover of Washington have some similarities. This is about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the new film by Woody Allen which has topped the French box office for the past two weeks [video trailer below].
Almost a million people have now paid to see Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall in Allen's baroque ode to Spain and the lightness of being in the Catalan capital. Vicky Cristina is a bit of a fantasy about two young American women who are simultaneously seduced by a roguish painter who has a tempestuous on-off marriage with the Penelope Cruz character. It finishes up with a ménage-à-trois.
Allen is adored in France. Annie Hall, Manhattan and the other masterpieces of his oeuvre were a cult in the 1970s but his name is barely known to younger Americans. He has gone on turning out his essays on love and mortality but US film-goers turned their backs on his more recent efforts. That has been Europe's gain, with three European-financed films set in London and now his brilliant Spanish outing.
Allen, now 72, is revered here as un grand auteur. His charm, neurosis and sense of humour touch a Gallic (yes) nerve. The reviewers have mainly raved over Allen's Spanish opera, calling it dazzling, clever and sublimely melancholic. I agree with them -- and also with James Christopher in today's Times who calls it a "vintage summer dream".
In the USA, Vicky Cristina has not done badly for an Allen film since it opened on limited release in mid-August. It ranks as 81st in US box office so far this year. The New York Times, Allen's home-town paper, damned it with mild praise, concluding that "though not claustrophobic is is another cloyingly needy dispatch from a ravenous id."
How is it that an American movie is regarded as a minor art film in its own country but manages to beat out all the native comedies and US blockbusters at the French box-office?
Obviously Allen is a prophet more appreciated outside his country, where he became ringard -- annoyingly old-fashioned -- a couple of decades ago. But the Gallic Allen-mania is another example of the way that France appreciates the American sensibility that has more deuxième degré -- second degree, or irony -- than US mainstream entertainment. I don't want to exaggerate. CSI (known as Les Experts) is the top TV show in France.
You are not supposed to take the plot of Vicky Cristina too seriously and certainly not apply moral views of the kind we have seen in the DSK case. Censorious talk of "inappropriate conduct" and apologies for "regrettable lapses of judgment" do not apply.
In other words, Allen's film, like much of his oeuvre, are very European, quite Latin. Many French directors try but fail to pull off his tone. I'd mention in this category the latest effort from Agnès Jaoui, called Parlez-Moi de la Pluie (Talk to me about the rain). It's a social-romantic comedy, in which Jaoui stars, about her usual targets: the foibles of the Bohemian intellectual class. I enjoyed it a lot, but it could have done with the pace and tight editing of the veteran Allen.
Another big new film, a thriller biopic on Jacques Mesrine, the 1970s bank robber, starring Vincent Cassel, opened today to strong reviews (below). I'll report when I've seen it.
Nicolas Sarkozy is an ace lawyer but you have to wonder why he is so quick to sue in defence of his dignity. Last week, Sarko started proceedings against the former chief of the police intelligence service for circulating tales about his sex and financial life (more below). Today it's voodoo.
Thierry Herzog, the Presidential lawyer, has told a publishing firm that it must halt sales of a joke voodoo manual with a Sarko doll and a set of pins. If it fails to withdraw the 20,000 copies already in the shops, the K&B firm will be sued for usurping Sarkozy's image.
The manual and the doll are supposed to be funny. "Thanks to spells concocted by Yael Rolognese, a witchcraft specialist, you can put the evil eye on Sarkozy and stop him causing more damage," says the advertising for the manual, which also includes a satirical biography.
The presidential lawyer told K&B: "Nicolas Sarkozy has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image,"
Famous quotes form the Hyperpresident are printed on various parts of the doll's anatomy with the invitation to plant one of the 12 pins in them. They include work more to earn more and casse-toi, pauvre con (get lost, loser) -- his words to a bystander who refused to shake his hand last year.
The doll, issued 10 days ago, is matched by another set featuring Ségolène Royal, the Socialist whom he defeated in last year's presidential election. The voodoo kits had scored only a mild media interest until Sarkozy unleashed the legal artillery. The Sarkozy one at least is now likely to be a hit.
K&B have refused to obey the presidential order to remove their voodoo sets from the bookshops. "It is totally disproportionate given the humorous aspect of the project and the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal are political, public figures," they said.
Royal's lawyer told le Monde that her voodoo effigy was an "insult to her human diginity" and that she is contemplating legal action too.
Sarkozy is breaking with a long tradition with his quick finger on the legal trigger. Other presidents -- the late François Mitterrand in particular -- have used dirty tricks such as tax audits and illegal phone-tapping to exact revenge against media trouble-makers but they have eschewed litigation. In January, Sarkozy sued Ryanair for using his image in a jocular advertisement. He sued Le Nouvel Observateur magazine last spring over a mobile phone text message that he purportedly sent his former wife Cécilia. He later dropped the case.
Last week, he started an action for breach of privacy and other offences against Yves Bertrand [in picture], the former boss of the Renseignments Généraux, the police spy agency which we have often visited on this blog. The president sued after Le Point magazine leaked diaries in which Bertrand had recorded damaging tittle-tattle and intelligence about him and other politicians and public figures.
The diaries, which were seized by investigating judges and leaked to the press, reported on an alleged affair that Sarko was said to be having in 2002 with the wife of a colleague, who is now one of his senior ministers. They also included claims about adultery, partner-swapping, drug abuse and corruption in the high political world. Sarkozy's lawyer said "Bertrand allowed 'news' on private life to be made public with an undeniable intention to damage". [original news story here]
I'll come back later with a fuller post on the sleazy diaries of the secret policeman who kept his masters in the know for 12 years until 2004. The affair, very much in the tradition of French police snooping, seems unlikely to fade -- especially since Sarko is taking Bertrand to court.
Two major Nobel prizes in one week is not bad for a country that is anguishing about its cultural decline.
France has just pulled it off with the literature award for its novelist JMG le Clézio after Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barre-Sinouss (below) shared the medicine prize with Germany's Harald zur Hausen for their discovery of the HIV virus.
It was only the third time that a French writer has won the Literature Nobel since Jean-Paul Sartre was anointed but refused the honour in 1964. Not since 1952 had it won two prizes. They went that year to Albert Schweitzer for Peace and François Mauriac for literature. There was even an outside chance that this week could have produced a hat trick. Ingrid Betancourt, the Franco-Colombian former hostage, was thought to have been in the running for the peace prize and had even tempted fate by reserving a hotel room for a victory news conference.
Here's my story from today's newspaper. One of the first conclusions is that Le Clézio, 68, was well qualified for a Nobel. His style may be avant garde, but he is not one of the navel-gazing introverts who have given a bad name to the modern French novel (see last month's post on Christine Angot). He is seen as a big picture writer, dealing in universal human themes in the tradition of Hugo and Zola. He is also an apostle of the environment and specialist in endangered cultures -- qualities that play well with the Stockholm committee.
Le Clézio, whose father had British nationality, is a polyglot globe-trotter who lives mainly in New Mexico after a life travelling in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He was one of the signatories of a proposal by a group of authors last year to save the Gallic novel by uncoupling the language from France and turning French literature into "world literature" written in French.
An enigmatic character with the looks of a handsome adventurer, JMG le Clézio had been tipped for a Nobel for the past two decades and he was favourite yesterday. He is quite familiar in France from his television appearances and he has a devoted following but he has a reputation for being difficult and never been really fashionable. Most of his 48 novels have been translated, but he is far from a celebrity in the English-speaking world. Newsrooms scrambled yesterday to find background and commentary on him. I had to confess that I had never read him -- a shameful admission for a long-serving Paris journalist. All that will change as his work, ranging from his 1963 Procès Verbal (The Interrogation) to Ritournelle de la Faim (Same old Story About Hunger), published last week, reach global bookshops.
Here are some excerpts in English from Clézio's texts, in today's NYT
President Sarkozy was naturally quick to hail Le Clézio for bringing honour on his country. "He embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalized world," said the President's statement. "A child in Mauritius and Nigeria, a teenager in Nice, a nomad of the American and African deserts, Jean-Marie Le Clézio is a citizen of the world, the son of all continents and cultures." I would guess that Sarko, who is no great lover of fiction, may be among those inculte people who have not read him yet.
In the eternal contest of France versus les Anglo-Saxons, it has been a pretty good month for Gallic pride. As well as the Nobels, many in France have been saluting what is seen as the end of the "Anglo-Saxon" creed of deregulation and free markets which has held sway since the early 1980s.
There is an excuse today for some musical nostalgia. Jacques Brel died exactly 30 years ago. Most people reading this blog will need no introduction. But I'll provide a little since some otherwise well-educated colleagues in London told me that they had never heard of the man who is probably the most widely revered French-language singer-poet of modern times.
Brel was a Belgian who wrote and sang passionate, bitter, sardonic ballads in the 1950s and 1960s before retiring young to the south Pacific and dying of lung cancer at the age of 49. He was a magnetic performer and an admired actor and film director. For people who lived those years, his anthems -- Madeleine, Les Bourgeois, Le Plat Pays, La Valse à Quatre Temps, Le Port d'Amsterdam -- are as much part of the soul as Beatles tunes are for English-speakers of that generation. Non-Francophones certainly know Ne Me Quitte Pas, which was reprised by Sinatra, Nina Simone, David Bowie and many others as If You Go Away.
The air is full of those tunes today and not just for the oldies. Abd Al Malik, a rap artist, has just had a hit with Brel's Ces gens-là. Brel's records still sell over 200,000 a year in France, more than those of any dead artist, including Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg.
Last night an anonymous Belgian paid 108,000 euros (150,000 dollars) for the little notebook in which Brel composed Amsterdam [picture below and video]. The item was one of 94 of Brel's possessions that were auctioned by Sotheby's in Paris. The whole lot, including guitars, assorted other manuscripts and papers, brought in over a million euros (1.4 million dollars).
The first such sale of a popular entertainer's memorabilia in France was preceded by a spat between the owners and Brel's widow and daughters who claimed that they had no right to them. This is because they were passed down to relatives by Sylvie Rivet, the mistress with whom Brel lived for most of the 1960s. France Brel, 55, one of the daughters, said: "It is odious and mean. We have tried all kinds of ways to stop the sale...These things are unuseable because we are the only ones who have the rights to have them."
Brel, a politically engagé satirist, would certainly have been amused at the unseemly squabble and the rush to buy his things.
The singer is regarded more than ever as a Gallic treasure and monument to the tradition of chanson française. President Sarkozy carries his songs in his iPod, according to Carla Bruni. But he is worshipped in Belgium as one of the country's immortals. Brel, born in a comfortable Brussels family, had a love-hate tie to the country that he left as a young man. "I am attached to my country but it stirs in me great anger," he said. He had no time for the quarrel, greater now than ever, between the Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French speakers of the southern half. Anyone trying to get a feel for Belgium should listen to Brel singing Le Plat Pays, his melancholic ode to Belgium, in both French and Dutch.
"Miche", as Brel called his wife, is visiting his grave in the Marquesas Islands today. He is buried there near the tomb of Gauguin. In Tahiti yesterday, she said: "Jacques would never have imagined that 30 years on, they would be still be commemorating him year after year, from one generation to another."
Brel became a passionate aviator and was running his own air service in the islands at the time of his death. His pilot's licence and other flying souvenirs sold at Sotheby's for 34,350 euros (see the photo of his plane on my last post).
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Think Now,
I think that I have read that book, or read through it.
I assumed that CB gathered his information while listening to his children and their friends. My son and his friends were always going on about Gramsci and Marx. They dressed a certain way, hung out in certain places, listened to certain music, and eschewed those who didn't. Such is youth.
An earnest defense of Juche Idea or why one wouldn't be caught dead in the Fifth. Tough choice, though both would elicit peals of laughter from me.
A little frivolity is okay, and laughter is good for the soul.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 15 Jul 2009 04:29:45
Rocket
you ran with the bulls?
i have always known you were a crazy bastard.
the best kind. for me, this trumps any political differences we might have
keep it up.
:)
Posted by: azloon | 15 Jul 2009 01:17:46
This is both ludicrous and revolting. Our national day that should only be a popular and national "fête" has become a pompous and ridiculous international show.
There should not be any foreign armies on the French soil.
Posted by: A French national | 15 Jul 2009 00:04:15
Rick, damn ed it, de Gaulle had no choice, but to comply, he was hosted by Churchill, & even not acknoledged as the "true" representant of "France Libre", some preferred former Vichy generals to him, follow my finger LMAO
Posted by: the frog | 15 Jul 2009 00:00:39
SUSAN,
"to see how many troops they have who are non combatant, albeit, sans doutes, tres braves?"
The TF1 commentator of the "défilé" said today that in the (US)-American army, they have eight persons in logistics to support one man in combat. In the French army, said the same commentator (assisted by high ranking brass), there are three persons in logistics to support one man in combat.
This is may be one of the reasons why American presidents, albeit the much heralded "surges", are so eager to get more European troops to Afghanistan (and the Europeans in Afghanistan to get more support from American helicopters to transport them and their supplies :).
"albeit, sans doutes, tres braves?"
A somewhat watered down version of the well known surrendering monkeys story - of course as usual courageously anonymous :).
PS:
Susan, for your information, "sans doute" is usually in singular.
Furthermore, it is "nouvelle république" and not "nouveau république" :). In return, you are welcome to correct my English which is unfortunately not perfect either...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Jul 2009 23:22:51
Daniel
"BTW, our lady cycling champion Jeannie Longo won a couple of weeks ago a new championship - right now, she is 50 years (young) and will turn 51 end of October ! Anybody interested should have a look at her Wiki biography (unfortunately in French):"
Yes. An exeptional woman she is but no one ever ever ever in France questioned here sincerity.
Why. Because the french are CLEAN!
Posted by: rocket | 14 Jul 2009 23:08:27
Better late than nver
"ROCKET ran like a bull on the muleta and his « f » word deserve a special mention, though as usual it lets him exposed for what he might be."
Just call me cappuchino!
http://www.sanfermin.com/index.php/en/sf09/encierros/10-de-julio
Posted by: rocket | 14 Jul 2009 23:04:41
Gill
"Nous" was probably a bad choice of word on a French blog but in colloquial English it means intelligence or common sense. It rhymes with mouse.
Sorry but I had my French mojo on when I saw the word!
definition
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Nous
You and about 6 other people in the world know this definition. Can you keep it simple for those of us whose brains are starting to deteriorate like myself and Herr Strohl. Achtung!
Thank you
Posted by: rocket | 14 Jul 2009 23:01:17
The ship can't be saved, it can't be simply sunk, get rid of it as cheeply as possible! Use the money saved towards building a new state-of-the-art warship, name it after Jeanne and have it run up and down the Channel.
Let's all just try and get along, OK, folks.
Posted by: Fred | 14 Jul 2009 21:42:42
Why not Daisy?
I think this défilé is the occasion to bring the french and their army back together. The army and the Nation are so distant nowadays that this kind of celebration with an army parade permits to get them nearer.
Posted by: Yoann | 14 Jul 2009 21:31:45
'What does this mean ?
August 18th 2008, ten French soldiers are killed in Afghanistan... you're not the only nation to fight in Afghanistan , figure-toi.'
Let's not go down that road. DOMINIQUE has already pointed out how wrong it is.
I thought it apt to draw attention to the glorification of warfare on one channel and the ghastly human price on the other channel.
I remind you that CHARLES pointed out that most nations (exceptions Russia, China, N Korea) don't go in for such grand military processions as you have in Paris - with full TV coverage.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 21:24:45
'If the Americans think we are so bad fighters...' [SURCOUF]
Not said.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 21:16:10
France! Stop singing the Marseillaise, you frighten the children with those gory lyrics! France! Stop showing your missiles, that's just not done!
Hey guys. The world is not a schoolyard... and definitely not YOUR schoolyard.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 21:14:13
‘French monocle-ism ? « Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye ». [PIERRE]
‘And the Brits – surely a statistical blip? – were runners-up, behind the exemplary Japanese! (Shhh, they’d been 30th last year!)’ [RICK]
‘Yes, AZLOON, some Brits drink – and the soldiery better than most . . . Now, answer me this, who are there, under equipped, ever reliable, if not always allowed to be as effective as some yanks might like? . . . Maybe they’re not always the brightest. Certainly they get drunk... and fellated’ [RICK]
‘I feel very indignant, in this instance, on behalf of the TWENTY-SIX other nations surveyed who fail to make an appearance on the journalist’s horizon.’ [RICK]
‘SURCOUF, if you are trying to say that this situation is not fair -- I JOLLY WELL AGREE WITH YOU!!’ [RICK]
‘I have t listen to young Brits proudly announce they've gone on a world trip. Yet these monoglot clots' foreign language competence is nil.’ [RICK]
The above come from THIS PAGE. I find the ‘hypocrite’ suggestion unfair, therefore.
PS ; No, not Nivelle, I’d forgotten all about him. But it was the policing of that match. Knowing about my French connections he gave me a detailed report. Take it from me, the guy’s a pillar of the community.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 21:11:58
These parades are so very Russian. Why does France persist in doing it? You can still have a national day celebration without missiles going up the main thoroughfare.
Posted by: Daisy | 14 Jul 2009 20:25:55
"Over on BBC24, a transport aircraft was shown flying into RAF Lyneham. It was returning the bodies of 8 British soldiers. ‘The bodies of eight British soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a single 24-hour period have been flown back home to Britain."RICK
What does this mean ?
August 18th 2008, ten French soldiers are killed in Afghanistan... you're not the only nation to fight in Afghanistan , figure-toi.
"Later there was a Professor Jolyon Something-or-other explaining for viewers’ benefit that the ‘heavy fighting’ in Afghanistan was being done in the south by the Americans, the Canadians, the Netherlands and the Brits."
If the Americans think we are so bad fighters, why did they make such a fuss when they refused to go to the Iraq war ? They can do the job alone with the Brits if they are so strong.
Posted by: Surcouf | 14 Jul 2009 20:20:33
“So French: all pose, not much attitude “
Go ahead and show it to her mum and dad, DODO. They'll laugh.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 20:17:24
'However, as a sign of good will (even if answering a different post of yours but still related to the navy and military) let me here add that your points a) to k) on Mers el Kebir made real sense.'
Thanks, PIERRE, but why the grudging ‘However, as a sign of good will’? Please, don’t misunderstand me: I’m NOT trying to score a point. I’m intrigued.
Tomorrow, I will read your postings with the attention they deserve.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 20:07:56
"As a young man, Nicolas Sarkozy sensed that he was destined to lead France and he set high goals for himself and his country,"
My God, he's plagiarizing De Gaulle !! "un appel venu du fond des âges"... "toute ma vie je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France"... I'm afraid we're gonna be disillusioned. Sarkozy ne tient pas la comparaison face au grand Charles.
Posted by: Surcouf | 14 Jul 2009 20:06:09
Yes but-----what is France doing parading up its' main parisian boulevard like some nouveau republic when they are so say supporting a war in Afghanistan, not to mention interventions in parts of Africa - how much is this worth in taxes for us to see how many troops they have who are non combatant, albeit, sans doutes, tres braves?
Posted by: Susan | 14 Jul 2009 19:46:11
@daisy. "a president who is short, wears stacked heels, has a serious case of megalomania and encourages fawning press coverage...." Lets not forget the corporatism displayed by his patronage of the "HADOPI" law which proposes that consumers can be cut off from the Internet on the mere say so of vested interests. Oddly, Mr Bremner supports Sarko in this.
Posted by: joe | 14 Jul 2009 19:00:49
Rick
You let me draw my conclusions; so did I, judging by your words.
1/CB tells us of the french navy's reluctance to let a vessel named Jeanne d'Arc be broken up in England. Actually quite a "light" issue, at that stage...
2/ You react with one of your delicately balanced views "All French: all pose etc..." I send back the same kind of generalisation you provided (avoidable indeed but not yet a spitting contest though Dom2).
3/Then you bring on british casualties in Afghanistan and people's support to the troops.
What link betwin the three points if not implying the French are, militarily, fearful of acting (pose vs attitude)? What next if not the monkey thing?
You didn't say it, no.
Intellectual dishonesty on my part or implicit hypocrisy on yours?
Forgive the "tu" and the french but: Tu te vois plus beau que tes mots ne te peignent parfois, Rick.
Surely you do not mean to be "biased", or "bashing". But you should realise some of your comments are, at least, dangerously close.
However, as a sign of good will (even if answering a different post of yours but still related to the navy and military) let me here add that your points a) to k) on Mers el Kebir made real sense.
I'd only add we could think of a few others l) m) n)... adding Churchill's motivations, alternative options not considered, british critics of the operation, and collateral damages to the resistance spirit in France. Mais avec des si...
Posted by: Pierre | 14 Jul 2009 18:51:00
AZLOON
I just think you know when you're beaten :)
PS How was that then? The content and the insult in the first and only sentence - apart from this PS which is even longer than the post.
I astound myself sometimes :)
PPS I understand my every word ;D
Posted by: dot king | 14 Jul 2009 18:50:27
but Tiberi is still our Mayor -----
ROS
OMG! My sympathies! I thought he was in clink with suspended and had lost his right to stand for election. Does this mean he is still in office despite all the mud that stuck, or have I got it all wrong?
Posted by: dot king | 14 Jul 2009 18:44:00
I heard Sarkozy ordered a plane on the taxpayers dime that he named Carla One.
http://www.avionews.com/index.php?corpo=see_news_home.php&news_id=1106964&pagina_chiamante=corpo%3Dindex.php
I think it would be appropriate to write on the tail of the aircraft as Continental Airlines once did.
"We really move our tail for you"
Substituting I for we and our for my.
And I even have my doubts about that.
Posted by: rocket | 14 Jul 2009 18:39:27
Concerning CB's video clip
Start - intro Official Presidential photo with potato sack suit jacket.
Cut to a bush apparently in the Elysee garden
Cut to two journalists walking in the Elysée garden and one of them says
"Il veut une france puissante et influente dans le monde."
Yeh! so what has changed since the 8 May 1945 when France booted the Germans out of the country?
"Il a multiplié les reformes depuis deux ans avec les réussites et les échecs on ne va pas revenir la dessus"
As Beavis and Butthead would say --- OK!
"Est ce que le pays a les moyens de ses ambitions?"
"ca c'est un autre histoire"
The reality hits home!
cut to a regal stone rail
cut to the President in his office.
Two journalists are gesticulating in front of the back of the head of what seems to be the President of the Repubique de la France.
Fade out!
We are waiting for the rest of the interview and also to have news on the health of Kim Jung Il who seems to be ill.
PS - Since Spain visit I noticed that Carlita has no more problems about appearing taller than her "mari" Today he looked like a shrimp next to her. Was there a contract signed which allowed her to appear taller? In any other country this would be insignificant but in France it is newsworthy as appearance is everything. Is all well in the house of Sarkozy and when is that child coming?
Posted by: rocket | 14 Jul 2009 18:28:12
Shouldn’t you add something to the discussion, RICK
Et bien je pourrais dire que je préfère mille fois lire les commentaires très instructifs de DOMI2 et Julie gcl .
Cette rivalité Anglo Française qui a aidé à souder le peuple et l'inconscient de chacune de ces deux grandes nations se place aujourd'hui à un autre niveau.
Français et Anglais aiment s'envoyer des piques mais ils en sourient, et ils ont bien raison.
Nous sommes au XXI siècle : des centaines de milliers de Français vivent heureux en Angleterre et des centaines de milliers d'Anglais vivent heureux en France.
Mon fils (Brésilien de naissance) fréquente une jeune Anglaise venue en Corrèze avec ses parents il y a six ans. Je leur souhaite tout le bonheur du monde et s'ils avaient lu votre commentaire stupide et à l'emporte pièce : “So French: all pose, not much attitude “ ils auraient haussé les épaules.
Les temps changent, vous ne l'avez pas compris.
Posted by: DODO | 14 Jul 2009 18:23:19
"When those dangerously unpredictable Russians start to nibble at Euroland’s frontiers.... That means now! And I’m nervous for Europe, DOMINIQUE II. Can’t you see that?"
It's not quite obvious, RICK, seeing how you seem to have no problem with NATO, a regional defense treaty, being used as an overseas suppletive force in a non-defensive operation - cheaper than Blackwater, is all.
If you're hinting at some Brown Peril with the Pushtun horses drinking in the Seine... you're more of a poet than I thought.
But you are right, we are laying open our Eastern flank with gayish abandon, and may reap what we deserve.
As for Pakistan, I spent three months in the South FATA, but that is not the source of my standpoint - it merely factors in.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 18:03:48
‘The one-in-thirty-six thing, some paper’s dubious calculation of becoming a casualty in Helmand, was bollocks anyway. It raised eyebrows, but not nearly as much as the infuriating government response. The panicked bastards read the World War Two comparison headlines, and quickly calculated our casualty statistics as a percentage of the whole ISAF mission – as if they were getting shot at in the cappuccino bars of Kabul. You couldn’t compare what 7,000 Brits in Helmand were doing with the Germans loafing up in Herat who weren’t even allowed out at night.’
[‘The Junior Officers’ Reading Club’, Patrick Hennessy, Allen Lane, 2009]
‘I've been to a couple of NATO social events and I can assure you that French and British Navy officers are working hand in hand but also very humourously refer to their traditional enmity in all goo[d] spirit from times to times.’ [JULIE GCL]
My informant at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) informed me that France’s military forces were looked on with ‘contempt’ by the British military. That was the word, ‘contempt’. I argued, he insisted. Fact. The German military, on the other hand, were regarded with respect, strangely enough.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 18:00:17
"why Indian troops marching British style? would think this wouldn't go over well" (AZLOON)
However, it went over quite well, since they were acclaimed almost as much as the Légion Etrangère and the "pompiers", who are usually the favourites of the Parisians. German troops participated also in the défilé - no problem.
Nobody bothered because of the above mentioned (British :) style - in these matters, normal French are usually less retarded than (a very few :) hard core Brits.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Jul 2009 17:54:26
"Wake up PS at least give some support to a President who is trying to raise France out of the doldrums"
AKA, la mouche du coche...
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 17:52:43
PIERRE,
Sincere compliments for your sensible post above! If more people would be a little bit more tolerant (à la Montaigne) and a little bit less full of their sense of (supposed :) superiority, things would work much better.
PS:
Regarding the almost lethal aggression of the gendarme Nivelle by German hooligans (i.e. "supporters"), at least a part of the German press showed their sympathy or apologized. As far as I remember, even money collects were organised at the time in Germany for Nivelle's family. A German friend phoned me to express his shame.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Jul 2009 17:34:14
PIERRE, when you have explained the following, then I'll think about answering you:
'I won’t blame you for wrongly referring to the study based on a survey ( let’s cut it short). But how did you like your « Sic », sir ?'
Now, please, please, please don't go into 'denial' mode, but I simply do not understand.
I explained myself fully. My comments were based upon 'Le Fig' (see above). There is zero prestidigitation (hope I've spelt that right!): my case is clear-cut and honest. That is more than we can say for the first three lines of yours,
Perhaps we can judge our respective contributions on the basis of obfuscation?
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 17:22:34
Regal! The NO party(PS), NO strategy,NO policies,NO thinking,NO France in 21st century and so they continue their carping about nothing. Sartre had said, nothing comes from nothing.Wake up PS at least give some support to a President who is trying to raise France out of the doldrums and into an energetic Nation, at home and internationally. Times, 'what has happened to quality analytical reporting?
Posted by: RolandC | 14 Jul 2009 17:15:36
Dear Dominique II, I apologise for my feeble attempt at humour.
Of course enmity is far too strong a word. But as a daughter and grand-daughter of French Navy officers, and living in London, I thought I could joke about it all. I've been to a couple of NATO social events and I can assure you that French and British Navy officers are working hand in hand but also very humourously refer to their traditional enmity in all goog spirit from times to times.
Posted by: Julie gcl | 14 Jul 2009 17:13:29
When those dangerously unpredictable Russians start to nibble at Euroland’s frontiers.... That means now! And I’m nervous for Europe, DOMINIQUE II. Can’t you see that? There are two half-way serious military powers in the EU, as you know. Do I have to spell it out?
‘RICK you seem to have entered into a spitting contest with PIERRE about our armies' manly vigour, based on the number of casualties in Afghanistan.’ [DOM2] I’m trying hard to avoid just that.
Besides, it’s demeaning. And there are more than enough ‘cheap shots’ coming from the supporters of France. I don’t think you’ll find me descending to that level: you know, ‘French-bashing’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘bias’.
As for your strategic evaluation of the Afghanistan running sore, please have then mental flexibility to conceive that somebody else might know more about it than you do. How long were you in Pakistan, by the way?
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 17:06:31
AZLOON,
It is raining (a few droplets only :) today also. Temp.
25° C. At the time of my school years, Colmar was said to be "la ville de France où il pleut le moins". Then came the climatic change...
Schnapsville - LOL !
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 14 Jul 2009 16:46:23
'So French: all pose, not much attitude.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 08:50:11
Genre d'affirmation et de généralisation stupide, un tantinet xénophobe, bien digne de vous.' [DODO]
DODO, how much do you understand, anyway? How about the difference between a ‘pose’ and ‘attitude’?
Shouldn’t you add something to the discussion, rather than calling people names?
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 16:42:13
GILL "nous" is one of those words, like "mien", which look French but aren't, sound Chinese but aren't, and therefore are, of necessity, English.
On a related subject, Charles tells us Gordon Brown has difficulty mouthing "Evian". (Exactly like it is spelled, Mr. Prime Minister). Shall we test him on "Laphroaig"? We French gave up long ago.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 16:35:03
'So what, Rick? The "surrender monkeys" piece again?'[PIERRE]
Don't you realise that such a taunt is intellectually dishonest? For shame.
Posted by: Rick | 14 Jul 2009 16:30:03
Hmmmm, a president who is short, wears stacked heels, has a serious case of megalomania and encourages fawning press coverage....where have I seen this before? When do the mass games begin?
Posted by: Daisy | 14 Jul 2009 16:28:21
JULIE GCL I've had the privilege of knowing French seamen from rating to flag rank, and I think the one and only manifestation of Anglophobia I ever heard is a jolly (and mandated by tradition)stressing of some well-known words in the refrain of "au trente et un du mois d'Août".
Distinct from Anglophobia, the rivalry certainly is still there, like when the French sent the carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Trafalgar celebrations - easily dwarfing any British ship in the parade. I cannot see that as enmity.
Remember that purported French naval Anglophobia has been put to good use before... let's not get into this again.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 16:19:21
p.s. Dot maybe your prose is not as crystal clear as you imagine.
Posted by: azloon | 14 Jul 2009 16:15:01
[That's not what I said, learn to READ] Dot
i can't bring myself to read your posts when you start them out with such an insulting comment.
if you care to be read, please insult me in the final sentence. :)
Posted by: azloon | 14 Jul 2009 16:13:42
" Evoquer les « Droits de l'homme » alors que Notre Président n'a libéré que des femmes…"
TELERAMA article link
Ah, that will be because yesterday 13th July was an important date in the French Women's Liberation Calendar (this doesn't really exist - of course not sillies - I just made it up), because on 13th July 1965, French women were allowed to possess their very own cheque-book for the first time.
In this village we have a former Figaro journalist, Résistante, writer, aged about 90, who brought this to the notice of the Council and the anniversary was duly celebrated yesterday with an exhibition, a book-signing by Rosamunde Pujol, the above-named in question. And a street was renamed in her honour.
Some might remember the appearance of Mme Pujol on Le Grand Journal on publication of her last-but-one book all about - Le Clitoris - no, I'm not making this up.
Her latest book is called "Le vingtième sexe" which smacks not a little of plagiarism, but she was pals with Ms de Beauvoir.
And the renamed street is to be "la rue des orchidées".
Pourquoi, do I hear from around the globe?
Well, it's because that lumpy thing in the centre of an orchid resembles - I quote: "le clitoris d'une femme".
OK step forward all the men who have one - carefully now :)
http://www.actualitedulivre.com/auteur.php?nom=Pujol
Posted by: dot king | 14 Jul 2009 16:07:15
I love this dude! Go Sarko! LOL!!!! I'm Serious here, I really like this guy! He is just what is needed in a country like that, Vive le Sarko! Vive La France!
Posted by: krv | 14 Jul 2009 15:55:07
You're right Dominique II, Jeanne d'Arc didn't, but the French Navy does. :)
Posted by: Julie gcl | 14 Jul 2009 15:52:02
RICK you seem to have entered into a spitting contest with PIERRE about our armies' manly vigour, based on the number of casualties in Afghanistan.
That is a whole new can of worms you're opening, or is it maggots? Namely, whether we should be in Afghanistan at all.
Allied presence there lost all legitimacy the day GWB stated finding OBL was not a priority any more. There is more sadness than glory in dying in an ill-conceived and doomed neo-colonial "happy little war". French reluctance to re-join the fray is not due to some shyness about using armed force - only armchair ignoramuses would claim that - but to deep misgivings about war objectives and developments.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 15:50:34
"seediness can be remedied.", DOT: you're SO right, but Tiberi is still our Mayor -----
Posted by: ros | 14 Jul 2009 15:47:23
JULIE GCL Jeanne d'Arc did not see the English as her "archetype enemy". (her Scottish archers may have been more sanguine about it).
What she stated is that her Christian love fully extended to the English - in England; but that as long as they sought to occupy France (a strangely modern concept for a time when feudal allegiance trumped everything else) they should only expect her visit, and rue its day. (her own terms).
Otherwise thanks for the info re Adm. Forissier.
Posted by: Dominique II | 14 Jul 2009 15:30:19