Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Sarkozy insult returns as French rap hit

You might remember the singer who made a splash by setting to music the "come back" text message that Nicolas Sarkozy may have sent to Cécilia, his ex-wife. Now a young musician from Lorraine has scored with a video in which he raps to Sarko's notorious insult: Casse Toi Pauvre Con

The President used the line in February to put down a man who refused to shake his hand at the Paris agriculture show. We had an argument here about the English equivalent, which is something like "Piss off, jerk" or "Get lost, wanker".

Sarko would prefer to forget it, but his flash of unpresidential temper became one of the milestones of his first year. As well as being repeated often on television, it has been watched over five million times on video sites.

This spoof song, by a 25-year-old video technician who uses the name Tum Sally, is crude, but it has created such a buzz that the mainstream media have picked it up and a Paris record label his given him a contract.

Sarkozy revises the last war

World War Two ended 63 years ago but it sometimes seems that Nicolas Sarkozy does not want France to emerge from its shadow. The President used Thursday's celebration of victory day to try once again to revise the history of France's four-year occupation by the Nazis.

Sarko went to the spot on the Normandy coast where 177 French commandos landed with British forces on D-Day to celebrate what he said was the true story of France's war. "Real France was not at Vichy. It was not collaborating," said the President. "Real France, eternal France, had the voice of General de Gaulle. Its face was that of the resistance." 

"We are not celebrating a military victory, we are above all celebrating a moral victory," he added, with military flags snapping in the breeze on the landing beach at Ouistreham.

Sarko's speech at his first VE day ceremony was in line with his doctrine that France as a nation has no guilt to bear over the years when the puppet government based at Vichy collaborated with the Nazis and sent thousands of Jews to their deaths. France must shed its "culture of repentance", Sarkozy argued in his election campaign last year. "France never committed a crime against humanity" during the occupation, he said.

Sarko wants to restore the healing fiction that was adopted by de Gaulle in the aftermath of war and followed by every president until Jacques Chirac in 1995.This held that "real France" resisted the occupation and that the Vichy state was a criminal aberration. That's why there has been such a fuss over the current Paris exhibition of wartime photography, including on this blog.

French "news babe" gets married

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

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

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

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

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

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

French state decorates Kylie Minogue, culture star

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

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

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

France revels in nostalgia for magic May '68

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

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

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

France celebrates its little old Citroen

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

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

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

How not to end an affair, Paris-style.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris was not so bad under the Nazis, photos show

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

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

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

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

Frenchman to sing in English against Irish turkey

Nothing tickles les Anglo-Saxons more than stories about the French surrendering to the English language. The latest version springs from France Television's decision to enter a song with English lyrics in the Eurovision contest for the first time.

Skip this paragraph if you are European: The Eurovision contest started in 1956 to promote fraternity among the recently warring nations. It turned long ago into an orgy of kitsch. Along the way it launched ABBA, a bunch of unknown Swedes who won in 1974 with Waterloo. The annual final, broadcast live to an audience well over 100 million, gives little nations a patriotic moment; the big ones treat the whole thing as a joke. Over half now sing in English and the next contest takes place in Belgrade on May 24. The Serbians won last time. The Irish, who speak a sort of English, have won most (see Ireland's Turkey at end). The French have not won since 1977.

This year, the state tv network decided to go with the flow, sending Sébastien Tellier, an eccentric singer-composer with a big beard, to Belgrade to perform a catchy track from his new all English album Sexuality [video below]. "Big deal" has been the general reaction. English  has been successfully embraced by many French artists in the past few years and the choice of Tellier was so uncontroversial that it went unnoticed at first.   

The lack of protest has been the real sign of the times. France3 television  anointed Tellier on March 7 and it took five weeks for anyone to complain. A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

The original Concours Eurovision de la Chanson was begun when French was the common language of the continent. The state still spends hundreds of millions of euros a year on the rearguard language campaign and President Sarkozy is one of the chief defenders, so objections were inevitable. They have now appeared, led by a junior parliamentarian from President Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement. 

François-Michel Gonnot, 59, demanded that Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister given an account to Parliament. "This shocks a lot of citizens who do not understand why France is giving up the defence of its language before hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world," he said.

Albanel, who was apparently unaware of the shocking choice, has responded by calling it a pity and saying that she would tell France television to make a more linguistically correct decision next time.

Popster joins France's grand academy

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

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

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

Be famous for your initials in France

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

OGM + NKM + UMP = COCKTAIL EXPLOSIF

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

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

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

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

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

France makes law to fight eating disorder

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

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

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

Save our semi-colon, say French campaigners

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

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

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

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

Serious money for comic strip heroes in France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Blake and Mortimer's latest]

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

Eiffel Tower hit by fantasy

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

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

Carla Sarkozy's naked portrait goes on sale

One of the most common French searches on the internet lately has been "Carla Bruni nue".  The former super-model posed in her previous life for numerous nude sessions with well-known photographers. By now sets of their work must have done the rounds of just about every French office. Next month, Christie's saleroom in New York is offering the chance to buy an original, at an estimated 4,000 dollars.

The snap, taken by Michel Comte, dates from 1993. The photographer made the future première dame de France, then 25, mime a famous painting by Georges Seurat called les Poseuses (below).

Christies said that it had no qualms about exposing the French president's wife to the public gaze. She was, they said "one of the most beautiful women in the world" and the picture is a work of art. "It was taken when Mademoiselle Bruni was a model and it is a naked portrait in good taste taken by a well known and respectable artist," the Christie's spokeswoman told Agence France-Presse.

The photograph comes from a collection which includes works by Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon et Leni Riefenstahl. Other nudes in the collection include Kate Moss et Naomi Campbell. The sale is to be staged on April 10 -- unless Sarko's image-minders pre-empt it. In the meantime France has spent the day clicking onto the Nouvel Observateur site which is showing the picture. This, you may remember, was the site that incurred Sarko and Bruni's wrath by publishing the text message in which the president was supposed to have asked Cécilia, his last wife, to come back a week before he married Bruni. They seem to be asking for trouble.

 

Help save the French language

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

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

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

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

"I shot down Saint Exupéry" says German ex-pilot

I 

Some news scoops are too good to be true. I hope that this one is not false because it will solve one of the great mysteries of aviation -- and wartime history. A former German fighter pilot has claimed to French researchers that he shot down Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of Le Petit Prince and legendary French pilot-author.

Horst Rippert, 88, who lives in Wiesbaden, said that he had suffered remorse all his life after discovering that Saint Exupéry was the pilot of a P-38 Lightning of the Free French Air Force that he blew from the Mediterranean sky on July 31 1944. "If I had known that it was him, I would never have fired," Rippert told the authors who traced him and have produced a book.

[Saint-Ex at the controls of his Lightning, 1944]

France flocks back to good old days on TV

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

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

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

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Paris book fair opens with row over Israel

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

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

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

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

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

Claude François grooves beyond the grave

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

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

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

Keith Richards sells French luggage

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

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

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

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

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

Why France is grand, by writer-patriot

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

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

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

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

 

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

Take le Zinc -- the corner bistrot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marion Cotillard buys the other version of 9/11

There is nothing new about film stars who spout political nonsense or subscribe to wacky religions. But it is still worth a mention when the French winner of the new Oscar for best actress says that the World Trade Center was not attacked by terrorists but was blown up by its owners on 9/11 -- and that the Americans may never have landed on the moon in 1969.             

Marion Cotillard made these points in a French television interview that was broadcast a year ago, before she achieved fame with her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.  The video has just been revived by Marianne2, the site of a leading leftwing news magazine. I'm posting it here with the English text (below) because it is a useful glimpse of an outlook that remains widespread, especially in hip leftwing circles in France. I run into people quite often who tell me that they do not believe in the conspiracy theories but "of course" everyone knows that there was much more to the 9/11 attacks than "they" tell us.

French support for the idea that 9/11 was engineered by the US government was fed by the success of a 2002 book by Thierry Meyssan. This argued that no airliner crashed into the Pentagon. The book was ridiculed after a while but it reached the best-seller lists in France and several other countries. As Cotillard shows, the conspiracy theory lingers.

Marianne has attracted a torrent of abuse from conspiracy believers since it posted Cotillard's remarks on its site on Friday. It explained why it revived her views: 

Our logic is simple. The remarks of Marion Cotillard are typical of a kind of excess which has affected the ranks of the left for several years.... The words of Marion Cotillard did not provoke the slightest reaction from the journalist who was interviewing her, nor from any of the television critics whose output fills our media.    

Here in English is what Cotillard told Xavier de Moulins, her interviewer.  The session took place in the Paris Catacombs. She mentions Coluche, a much-loved subversive comedian who was killed in a motorcycle crash in 1986.

Marion Cotillard: I tend rather often to take the side of the conspiracy theory.... I'm not paranoid. It's not paranoid because I think that they lie to us about an awful lot of things: Coluche, 9/11. You can see on the internet all the films of September 11 on the conspiracy theory. It's fascinating, even addictive.

They show other towers of the same type that aeroplanes have run into and which burnt. There is a tower, in Spain I think, which burnt for 24 hours... It never collapsed. None of these towers collapse. But there (in New York), the thing collapses. Then afterwards you can talk about it for a long time. The towers of September 11 were stuffed with gold. And they were swallowing up cash because they were built, I gather, in 1973. And to re-cable all that, to modernise the technology and all of that, it was much more expensive to carry out the work than to destroy them.

.... Did man ever walk on the moon ? I have seen a lot of documentaries on that and really, I wonder. In any case, I do not believe everything they tell me. That's for sure.

MONDAY UPDATE:

With the storm over Cotillard raging in the USA, we got the following explanation today from Bastien Duval, her agent:

Marion's reaction is that this video was filmed in special circumstances after a broadcast on Coluche (popular comedian killed in 86 motorcycle accident) and she was being asked to react to this broadcast. Marion then simply expressed the view that she wanted to form her own opinion (on 911) from watching various reports, but she never wished to call into question the events of 11 September.

This reportage has been taken out of context and one can only condemn such practises.  Marion deplores that. She is currently filming in Chicago and has a lot of work. She is in an ocean of happiness and voila, this row blows up. It's rather strange. It's an old report, not at all current. Why bring it out now ?

I talked three times to Marion overnight. This is worrying her. She is still in shock and does not really know how to react. She doesn't have to apologise for a badly presented and badly interpreted reportage.... She hopes that the Americans will have enough distance to understand, but her career is not just American. She can make films everywhere.

   

Cotillard's Oscar lifts France

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

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

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

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

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

    

Sarkozy's phantom words are set to music

That Sarkozy text message just won't go away.

A couple of weeks ago, the French president unleashed his lawyers and prosecutors against le Nouvel Observateur for allegedly inventing his "come home" plea to Cécilia, his ex-wife. The magazine had reported that, one week before marrying Carla Bruni this month, he texted to Cécilia: "If you come back, I will cancel everything". In the aftermath, the president's staff and ministers have been denouncing all journalists as vultures for picking up the story. We heard today that the investigating judges have summoned Cécilia to ask her if the message existed or not. But now France's most famous message has taken on new life as a song by Jeanne Cherhal, a rising singer-composer.

The ditty (listen here), is wistful rather than satirical. In 24 hours it has become a hit. Lifted from Cherhal's MySpace site, it has the main media buzzing and has been playing on radio and television news. They must be hopping mad at the Elysée Palace.

Cherhal's refrain goes:  "Si tu reviens, j'annule tout, nos écarts de langage, nos colères, nos passions de passage." (If you come back, I will cancel everything, our bad language, our spats, our passing passions)

Cherhal, one of the leaders of the young genre called nouvelle chanson française, said that Sarko's supposed SMS appeal turned into a song in her sleep.  "You never know what causes inspiration. It comes from everywhere, and especially from the last place you think -- a noise on the pavement, anything," she told Libération. "I woke up in the morning with that sentence on the brain. The music came along with it."

Libération joked that the RG, the police intelligence service, must be on to Cherhal by now. Their criminal investigation colleagues have already seized mobile phone records to prove the message never existed. Indeed, the singer appears a little embarassed about the text-song's runaway success. Her manager, Héloïse Martins, said: "She just wanted to have fun on her MySpace site. It was a joke between friends, not to promote herself," she said. "The song does not allude to the presidential couple. It is a general song about breaking up. We do not want to be at the centre of a row." 

There is a lot to be said for the clever words and pretty tunes of the nouvelle chanson genre, even if they can be nombriliste or self-absorbed, at times. One of the leading nouvelle chanson exponents with those tendencies is of course Carla Bruni, la première dame de France and victim if the text message was by any chance genuine. Many of the lyrics in her hit album "Quelqu'un m'a dit" are about herself and her past and present lovers. We are all waiting to find out if there will be a song to Nicolas in the new album, which she is just about to release.  Perhaps even a track on texting. 

 

Self-mockery in France's unlovely north

Much of the world thinks of France as a sunny Latin place with vineyards, windows with shutters and a fine art de vivre. Many French also prefer that image and look down on the bits that do not fit the picture, especially those along the northern fringe next to England and Belgium.

This week, the far northerners -- a tribe that calls itself Ch'tis -- are celebrating a chance to shake off their uncouth image as potato-guzzling beer-drinkers who dwell in a rain-soaked rust-belt.

The excuse is the opening in Lille yesterday of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a film that makes fun of the region's unflattering stereotype in order to show the people as warmer and generally nicer than those in the sunny south.

Starring and directed by Dany Boon, the film has won critical praise and seems destined to become a hit. So it should boost the much-maligned Ch'ti country, the old port and mining area which runs from Calais eastwards to about Maubeuge (I have a fondness for this area of red-brick terrace houses and tall bell towers from four years living in nearby Brussels in the late 1990s).

Dany Boon is a popular stand-up comedian and actor who is a native Ch'ti or Ch'timi. The name comes from Picardy patois. Like comedies about England's "Geordie" northeast, much of the film's fun stems from a working class dialect so impenetrable that it needs subtitles. In Ch'ti, "ch" replaces "s" and it includes expressions from old Picard and Flemish as well from the Italian, Polish and other migrants of a century ago. The Ch'ti language splash in yesterday's Voix du Nord was: Dany Boon, Bienvenue à s'baraque!" ('welcome home'). Instead of a "chortie nachional" (sortie national-- national release) the film has started with a "chortie ch'timi". Have a look at the promotion site, with the CNN parody "ChtiNN, une chaîne qui ne perd pas le nord".

An exotic hotel night in Paris

The most sought-after hotel room in Paris is a shoe-box perched on a roof in the opulent 16th arrondissement.  There is no room service except for breakfast. The furniture is made of plastic and there is no television. Yet every day, 40,000 people are trying to book a night there.

The word novelty comes in here. The Hotel Everland is a room with adjoining bathroom which costs at least 333 euros a night but it's not really a hotel.

It is a 10-tonne art installation that has been perched since last November on top of the Palais de Tokyo, the Art Deco home of the contemporary art museum on the Right Bank. For its creators, the Swiss artist-designers Sabrina Lang and Daniel Baumann, Everland makes the guests part of the art.

Top 10 golden oldies of France

French pop music is rubbish. One of my colleagues wrote those words the other day in a piece on saving the world's pop heritage. So let me try again to demolish the old cliché, wh