For over a year now, a popular topic at Paris dinner parties has been whether France could elect as president Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The Socialist heavyweight is top of the opinion polls, but he is dogged by a reputation as a serious Don Juan.
An active interest in the opposite sex has almost been a job requirement for recent presidents, from Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s through François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in the 80s and 90s to Nicolas Sarkozy. But the gossip holds that the case of Strauss-Kahn is different because he may have left a lurid trail. According to the rumour mill, someone has a video or pictures that could prove too much even for unshockable French voters. [Picture above: with wife Anne Sinclair, a TV news star]
You will recall that DSK, as he is known, is chief of the International Monetary Fund and that last year, he had a brush with scandal when a female IMF subordinate accused him of taking her to bed for a night at the Davos World Forum. An official inquiry cleared him of abusing his power but reprimanded him for a serious error of judgment in conducting the relationship. Current polls show DSK, 60, a senior Socialist, to be the only potential candidate who could beat Sarkozy in a presidential vote. Charming and reassuring, DSK exudes an image of competent statesmanship. Ségolène Royal and the younger bloods in own party want to stop him muscling in on the election. The former Finance Minister and would-be candidate in 2007 has been working hard from his perch in Washington to position himself for the 2012 race. His own Socialist rivals have just as much interest as Sarkozy in sinking his candidacy.
DSK's Lothario image is the stuff of comedy acts and media sketches [March post]. This week, it aquired more weight when le Point news magazine reported that he had tackled Sarkozy and accused his staff of dirty tricks against him. According to le Point, he buttonholed Sarkozy in the men's room at the Pittsburgh G20 summit last September and told him: "I have had more than enough of the gossip going around about my private life and supposed dossiers and photos which could emerge against me. I know that it all comes from the Elysée Palace. So tell your guys to stop or I'll take them to court."
DSK was particularly upset that a recent book had quoted Frédéric Lefebvre, a gunslinging spokesman for Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), as saying that a DSK presidential campaign would derail within days because "we have photographs".
Lefebvre, a sharp-tongued political bruiser, has since denied saying this.His remark, if made, may just have been drawn from the Paris rumour mill. Everyone has heard of supposed "DSK videos" but there has not been the slightest sighting of one on the internet or anywhere else. Sarkozy is likely to stop his Elysée team spreading rumours since he himself has suffered in the past from smear campaigns involving women.
There remains the question of whether the tale could dampen DSK's run to unseat Sarkozy in 2012. When the topic came up a couple of weeks ago, a senior elder of the establishment told me that a sex tape, even if one existed, would have absolutely no effect on voters. "The French just don't care about les aventures of their leaders," he said. A younger public figure at the table disagreed, saying the internet had changed old assumptions. A lurid video would blow up a candidate nowadays, not for moral reasons, but because it would expose him or her to ridicule. This remains hypothetical of course, but I would agree that even in imperturbable France, internet exposure woul finish off a presidential candidate.
We know that Americans are falling out of love with Barack Obama, but it is hard to believe that he is now less popular there than... Tony Blair. That is among the findings in the latest Harris Interactive survey of global leaders for France24, the state external news channel.
[Note December 5: I have rectified the link, which went to the previous survey. It now goes to the current one]
The survey has been tracking leaders' standing in five European countries and the United States since late 2008. Obama is slipping, but he still comes a distant first overall, with a 76 percent rating. Inside the United States he scores only 53 percent, compared with 65 percent for the former British Prime Minister and US ally in Iraq [Blair gets only 27 from his own people]. Second overall comes the Dalai-Lama, followed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose stock has risen sharply to 59 percent. Blair is next, with 49 percent and Pope Benedict XVI follows with 43 percent.
Nicolas Sarkozy will be disappointed to find that he has sunk to sixth, at 39 percent, barely ahead of José-Luis Zapatero of Spain and Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General. Poor Gordon Brown of Britain follows at 36 percent, edging out José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. Last of the 21 names that were polled comes President Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's interesting that he still gets the support of five percent of the 6,182 respondents in France, Germany, Spain, Britain, Italy and the United States. The Italians and Spanish rate the Iranian leader the highest.
In a separate ranking on leaders' global influence, Obama soars over all others, followed by Vladimir Putin, who is just Prime Minister of Russia, not its President. Merkel comes next, then Sarkozy, ahead of Hu Jintao of China. President Karzai of Afghanistan rates as the least influential. It's not clear how much can be read into this survey, at least from the US side, because I would guess that not many Americans have heard of Europeans such as Barroso or Zapatero.
The scores are the arithmetic average of the rankings in each country polled. Click here for pdf report, Or click on graphic below to see popularity index
Popularity ranking:
Barack Obama 78 percent
Dalai Lama 71
Angela Merkel 59
Tony Blair 49
Benedict XVI 43
Nicolas Sarkozy 39
Jose-Luis Zapatero 38
Ban Ki-moon 37
Gordon Brown 36
José Manuel Barroso 34
L I Lula da Silva 29
Benyamin Netanyahou 22
Vladimir Putin 20
Hugo Chavez 17
Fidel Castro 17
Silvio Berlusconi 16
Dmitri Medvedev 15
Hu Jintao 12
Hamid Karzai 11
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 5
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A groan of disappointment went up from the commentating classes of old Europe today. After the long and painful birth of the Lisbon treaty, the Union has, they say, anointed nonentities to its two new supreme posts.
The word may be unkind for Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who has become first President of the European Council, and Baroness Ashton of Upholland, its first "Foreign Minister" [both in picture]. But it is fair if you subscribed to the pitch that was sold to the people.
The Union would finally equip itself with a face who would stand equal to the US and Chinese Presidents. And the US Secretary of State would at last have a phone number for her opposite number in Europe — that of the new High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy.
Now these heavy-hitting posts have been bestowed on a kindly Christian Democrat who is known only in Flanders and Wallonia and to a Labour Party stalwart ... with zero experience running foreign affairs. The word heavyweight does not spring to mind.
For the establishment of French, German and other subscribers to the old "European Project", these choices make a mockery of the dream of a robust new Union. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former President who drafted the defunct Constitution of 2004, noted drily: “The Europeans have not picked a George Washington”. My friend Jean Quatremer, Libération's Brussels correspondent, talked of catastrophic choices today and demolished Van Rompuy with a nice French flourish: "Plus simple et plus cliché belge, tu meurs* [Any simpler and more Belgian cliché than him, you die*] Michel Rocard, a former French Socialist Prime Minister, made his case this morning. "This is a bad decision. I deeply regret it. Political Europe is dead," he said on France-Inter radio. But Rocard, a master of old-style backroom politics, knows that there was no chance that the Union would endow anyone with serious power to act in its name. It is not just that the national leaders do not want a rival big-shot, as Tony Blair might have been if he had been given the presidency. The matter is that the 27-member Union is far from a coherent political entity and does not want to be.
Despite British fixations about federalists, the species has long been endangered. France and Germany, the two big powers, have no interest in pooling more sovereignty. President Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel are the least Euro-enthusiastic leaders of their countries for decades. The smaller states to the north and east do not share the lingering federalism of the Benelux nations and the sections of the European Parliament.
The Union does many fine things. It ended Franco-German conflict and has bred prosperity. It runs a single market, harmonises regulations and keeps playing fields level, but its members never planned to stand back while Brussels-based supremos took over the show.
You can even argue that the creation of the new posts and the appointment of minor players have diluted further the notion of centralised power. In answer to Henry Kissinger's famous quip about Europe having no phone number, it now has four: José Manuel Barroso, President of the Commission, Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, Cathy Ashton, the "Foreign Minister" and the member state that continues to rotate every six months chairing the Council of Ministers. From January, that will be Spain.
[* The expression alludes to the title of a popular 1982 comedy starring Aldo Maccione, "Plus beau que moi, tu meurs" -- More handsome than me, you die]
It's rare to be really moved by a television programme. That happened for me this week with a show on France 2 in which Hubert Védrine, a former Foreign Minister, interviewed Mikhael Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. Old Gorby stirred some strong memories.
Védrine, a Socialist, was diplomatic adviser and spokesman for the late President Mitterrand at the end of the cold war. In the Thursday night programme, he took Gorbachev through the events that led to the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the nation that he headed.Gorbachev (pictured with Védrine below) has said a lot about the period. But Védrine's authority and gentle touch helped him open up and give a few insights. They went over the story of how this boy from the southern Russian farmland managed to rise to the top of the sclerotic Soviet state, then let it unravel, along with its empire. He remains bitter over what he sees as the west's betrayal of the emerging democratic Russia.
Back in 1985, when Gorbachev was picked by the Politburo (the Communist Party body that governed the USSR), we had not the tiniest inkling that the nuclear super-power was about to collapse peacefully.
By 'we', I mean the journalists and diplomats who were based in Moscow. I was Moscow bureau chief for Reuters news agency at the time. We cheered Gorbachev's arrival after the chain of sickly old men who had been running the country. He was different. He was 54,charming, spoke directly and had the touch of a western politician. But he had still come up the totalitarian machine and we never imagined that the grey apparatus and its KGB security arm would promote a man who would close them down. We knew the Soviet state was a sham, the economy was hollow and that the long-suffering people had no time for their rulers. But it did not seem anywhere near collapsing.We were too close to the story, living the odd life in that parallel universe where black was officially white. Though under KGB surveillance 24 hours a day, we were oddly attached to the place. We had a love-hate feeling for the country that Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire.
Gorbachev of course did not intend to scrap the USSR and was aiming for a more democratic version with his project for glasnost -- openness or transparency. He was caught up in the tide when the flood-gates opened in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
He told Védrine that he came to understand very early as a young Communist official that the system was doomed. He described paying a "fraternal" visit to a Czech factory after Soviet tanks had put down the Prague Spring uprising of 1968. "The workers turned their backs to us. I understood why," he said. As an illustration of how things are not simple in Russia, he spoke highly of Yuri Andropov, the longserving boss of the KGB, who was his mentor. (My closest contact with Andropov, apart from seeing him in his open coffin, was when his Kremlin invited my daughter to a children's New Year party with kids from the high Soviet nomenklatura).
Gorbachev said that his first step to reform was at the funeral for Konstantin Chernenko, Andropov's short-lived successor. Newly appointed as Kremlin boss, Gorbachev summoned the heads of the satellite states of central Europe (known at the time as 'people's socialist republics'). He said he told the puppet leaders bluntly that they were on their own and that Moscow would not impede their people's desire for freedom.
Gorbachev recalled his first meeting with Reagan in November 1985. "My immediate impression was that I was facing a dinosaur," he told Védrine. Hearing that, I thought Wow, that was my impression too. I was in the room at the time, one of three pool reporters in the cottage in woods near Geneva. There was a fire crackling by their two arm-chairs. Gorby and Reagan made small-talk via their interpreters before we were ushered out to recount the event to the rest of the media [that's the moment in the picture. The interpreters were behind the chairs]. 
You have to remember that only a year or two before, Moscow and Washington were accusing one-another of planning nuclear war. I had never been with Reagan before and was struck by how unfocused he seemed alongside the sharp new Soviet leader. The next autumn, as a Washington correspondent, I went to Reykjavik to report on the second summit. Gorbachev, to the horror of Reagan's advisers, almost persuaded the US president to sign away all nuclear weapons.
This week, we had confirmation from Jacques Chirac of western worries about Reagan's state at the time. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister and friend of Reagan, told Chirac ahead of the following year's Washington summit that she did not believe that the US leader was up to facing Gorbachev.
Gorbachev talked sadly of western suspicions towards him and what he said was the cold refusal of the first President Bush to give Moscow a hand in its time of need. Prodded by Védrine, who was at Mitterrand's side in his meetings with the Soviet leader, Gorbachev said France was the most helpful of the westerners. Mitterrand still opposed the re-unification of Germany, along with Thatcher, and went to Moscow (with Védrine in tow) to ask Gorbachev to stop it.
By selfishing turning their back on Russia, under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the west helped foment chaos and created a new European divide, pushing the western frontier eastwards, Gorbachev said. But he has no regrets about his attempt to recast the Soviet Union. "I lost as a man. But from the point of view of history, perestroika won," he told Védrine.
Gorbachev is not much loved in modern Russia. He is blamed for the mess that succeeded him. And as they salute the Berlin anniversary this week, the younger generation of western leaders may, I feel, not all realise how huge was the role of this single visionary man in ensuring the near bloodless end of the cold war.
Below, a picture that I took of Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв (Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev) with Raissa, his late wife and a little girl voting in Soviet "election" near our office just before his rise to power in 1985.
While the world has marked a year since the financial crash this week, President Sarkozy has adopted for France a line from the US declaration of independence. Progress in the pursuit of happiness is to be factored into the nation's economic performance. I mentioned this earlier in the week, but for anyone interested, here's a look -- written today for the paper -- at the way that Sarkozy is positioning France ahead of next week's G20 session in Pennsylvania.
The idea of quantifying the quality of life, proposed to Sarkozy by Joseph Stiglitz, the US Nobel economics laureate, has drawn some mockery; with its long holidays, short working hours and early retirement, France will surely emerge as the new superpower, said the comedians.
But Sarkozy’s index for sustainable contentment was a clever move. It fits with the desire in developed nations to shun overconsumption;it raids ideas from France’s popular green movement; it nods to the recent fashion for definingle bonheur [happy French couple in picture]. More widely, it enhances Sarkozy’s claim to the mantle of world statesman. On this front it was a follow-up to his creation last week of a carbon tax, a levy on the use of fossil-fuel.
“Super Sarko” has never been known to miss an opportunity and he is seizing a big one now. As the world begins to pull itself out of recession he believes that he is well placed to play visionary and power broker. This has meant abandoning the reformist, free-market doctrines that won him election in 2007 and recasting himself as apostle of the good old French model of state dirigisme. Reborn a year ago as foe of unbridled capitalism, Sarkozy has proclaimed the “death of the all-powerful market which is always right”.
Sarkozy is preparing his next turn on the stage, starting on Tuesday in New York and moving on to Pittsburgh on Thursday. This week, he threatened to walk out of the G20 if he does not get his way — a repeat of his brinkmanship at the last session, in London in April, which he claims won a breakthrough over tax havens. This time he wants to strongarm President Obama and Gordon Brown into agreeing on a fixed, legally enforced cap on bankers’ pay. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is already onboard.
France has a strong hand, Sarkozy believes, because it has suffered much less than Britain and the United States and its recession is ending faster than the others’ — though it wallows deep in debt.
In time-honoured French fashion, Sarkozy is happy to make himself a nuisance to les Anglo-Saxons as he preaches his doctrine of “remoralised capitalism”. He calculates that with elections facing Brown and Merkel, he is the pre-eminent European, at least for the moment. He is busy cultivating Latin America and the East. He may have rejoined Nato but France is back to playing its old Gaullist game of middleman between Russia and the US. On Iran and its nuclear programme he is talking tougher than almost anyone outside Israel.
The French President is attempting a little one-upmanship over Obama. He has made no secret of his frustration over the US leader’s failure to respond to his overtures of friendship. Privately, he sees Obama as overrated, indecisive and now politically weakened. He is said to have given him “9 out of 20” for his speech on healthcare the other day.
Sarkozy’s international crusade goes down well at home. While his approval ratings have edged back up towards 50 per cent he consistently scores over 70 per cent for defending French interests abroad. However, some old hands worry that he is putting up backs with his world evangelism.
Alain Duhamel, an old-school political commentator, said on RTL radio that Sarkozy’s France was playing an old part. On one hand it was serving as an "extremely sympathique" guide for the big economic powers. “It is also playing an extremely irritating role, that of professor of virtue, the lesson-giver who breaks the rules that it lays down for others.” France is half Le Cid and half Tartuffe, he added -- models of heroism and hypocrisy from the 17th century dramatists Corneille and Molière. .
Here we go again. Another G20 summit and another threat by Nicolas Sarkozy to slam the door.
The last time, in April, Super Sarko huffed and puffed in the days leading up to the 20-nation economic summit in London. If he did not win consent to his demands, he would be out in a flash, he said. He stayed to the end and claimed that he won a breakthrough on tax havens.
This time, the venue is the gathering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 24-25. Sarko will march out if the other nations fail to agree on curbs bankers' bonuses, the Elysée Palace said today.
Claude Guéant, Sarkozy's chief-of-staff, made clear that he is staging another bout of brinkmanship, this time in the role of scourge of high-paid bankers. His demands for a legal cap on financial sector remuneration have run into opposition, notably from Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, and President Obama's team.
“There must absolutely be an agreement to make things change and the president is absolutely determined on that score,” Guéant said on RTL radio. Asked if that meant a walk-out, he replied: "This possibility must be taken seriously." Sarkozy was also quoted in today's Figaro as saying:"If there is no concrete decision [at Pittsburgh], I will leave."
Sarkozy believes that his walk-out threats ahead of the April meeting in London won the agreement to black-list tax havens. His strong-arm tactics went down fairly well domestically, but were seen by fellow leaders as silly grandstanding.
After summoning French banking chiefs and lecturing them on the dangers of rewarding risk-taking, Sarkozy has won their consent to a system of limits and delayed payment of bonuses. He has the support of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for an absolute cap on bonuses and sanctions for companies that break it. Brown, the only leftist in the the trio of Europe's big power leaders, agreed to sign a joint European pre-G20 letter only after it was diluted to a commitment to "explore ways" of limiting bonuses.
The G20 Finance ministers backed away from the idea of a cap in their meeting to prepare the G20 earlier this month. The focus of the Pittsburgh session has shifted from bankers' pay to the need to impose higher capital requirements on banks, as Brown and Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, want.
Sarkozy knows that he has strong public support for his crusade against bankers and traders, species which have been relegated in France to a rung somewhere below serial killers and child molesters. One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the consensus holds that the financial world has done rather well out of the crisis and changed little. Sarkozy has been quoting Talleyrand's famous line on the aristocrats who came back to France after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte: 'They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.'
A national poll for Libération showed today that a majority of the country thinks that the main beneficiaries of Sarkozy's anti-recession policies are big corporations and banks. Only seven percent rated ordinary workers as benefiting. The Viavoice poll found that 58 percent had a negative view of Sarkozy's handling of la crise over the past year, with 40 percent positive. That's actually remarkably favourable for Sarko, given the general level of grumbling about him.
Sarkozy came up with a new wheeze today for getting the French out of their grim mood. He announced that he is adding happiness as a factor to the usual measure of economic performance. The idea, which is part of the new Green Sarko, is to shift emphasis away from gross domestic product (GDP) towards quality of life matters such as well-being and sustainability.
A couple of years ago, Sarkozy commissioned the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen to come up with proposals. They made them public today at the Sorbonne university. Sarkozy said there that GDP gives a false reading because people have for years (until recently) been told that the economy was growing yet they saw that their living standards were declining. "In the whole world, people think that they are being lied to, that the (GDP) figures are false, or worse, manipulated," he said. "Nothing is more destructive to democracy".
The President called for a revolution. New factors in national performance should include such things as "the services which are rendered inside the family", the quality of public services and access to leisure activities. He has a point, as we are always arguing here. Sarkozy wants to factor in the quality of life. If everyone did the same, France would likely top the world performance charts.
France has a long tradition of taxing its citizens in exotic ways but you might think that now would not be the best time for hitting them with a new wheeze. President Sarkozy has done that today with the announcement of a carbon tax -- a levy on oil, gas and coal used by households and business.
In full statesman-like mode, Sarkozy talked of an historic "fiscal revolution" as he appeared on television from a heat-pump plant [in picture] to present his scheme. Earlier this week, he said his carbon tax would turn out to be a milestone like General de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of Algeria and President Mitterrand's abolition of the death penalty in 1981. Both of those were initially unpopular. Two-thirds of the public do not want the carbon tax, according to polls. But with a rise in his approval ratings, Sarkozy is prepared to put up with some unhappiness. He sees this as a chance to blaze a green trail that others will follow -- starting at a big UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December.
The carbon idea has been operating successfully over the past decade in Finland, Sweden and Denmark and in parts of Canada. This is the first time that it is to be applied in a major economy.
The scheme has been stirring a furore in the political world for the past couple of weeks. Its unpopularity is upsetting sections of Sarkozy's own camp.
The point is to encourage people to use less fossil fuel. Electricity is exempt because most in France comes from renewable nuclear power. The main feature, Sarkozy insisted, is that the tax of 17 euros per tonne of carbon gas will create no overall new burden. Revenues will be put back into taxpayers' pockets through other tax cuts and "green cheques" to the lower-earning classes. This smacks of one of those over-complicated bureaucratic arrangements known, appropriately, as une usine à gaz -- a gasworks. The immediate impact -- from next year -- will be about four cents per litre on fuel and a five percent rise in household gas costs.
As usual, Sarkozy has been astute, wrongfooting the left and the green opposition by embracing one of their themes. He employed Michel Rocard, a former Socialist Prime Minister, to draw up plans for the tax. While the party has quibbled over the detail, Ségolène Royal, the dissident Socialist star, has used it as a weapon to accuse Sarkozy of robbing the poor. The Greens have been reduced to complaining that the President has climbed onto their bandwagon with a watered-down version of what they always wanted.
Sarkozy called on the United States and Asia to follow Europe's lead on climate change. He was too modest to say it, but of course he meant Presidnet Sarkozy's lead.
At the risk of being called a carbon hypocrite myself, it's worth noting that France's new green president is not frugal with his fossil fuel. He jets around the world in the presidential Airbuses more than any of his predecessors. He took two of them to fly for his one-day visit to Brazil last weekend. His brief public outings, such as today's jaunt to the east, require lavish deployment of police, often bused in from a distance. He has just expanded the limousine fleet at the Elysée Palace and when he drives himself it is in his gas-guzzling BMW 4x4 (SUV to Americans).
PS. The Times has done its bit for cutting the carbon in Paris. Yesterday, we moved out of the elegant building on the Place de l'Opéra which has been our home for decades -- with the exception of 1940-44. We are now in much less grand, but still pleasant, premises in the 17th arrondissement. And I promise to get away from Sarkozy in the next post.
President Sarkozy appears to have pulled off a true feat of salesmanship. On a one-day visit to Brazil, he has secured President Lula's agreement in principle to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets. If it comes off, the five billion euro deal is more than a business story. It is a political and strategic breakthrough for France and Sarkozy.
The Rafale has suffered something of a jinx since Dassault aviation began developing it in the 1980s. Though highly agile, technologically advanced and beautiful from the pilot's point of view, the plane has so far failed to win a single customer outside France. Potential clients have found it too expensive or succumbed to rivals' political pressure -- notably from the United States. The Rafale was launched when France decided to go it alone and stay out of the Eurofighter project of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain.
It entered service with the air force and navy from 2000 and a squadron is on duty in Afghanistan.
The failure to sell was a big frustration. The French tax-payer forked out most of the 30 billion euros it took to build the beast and supply it to the forces. Before Sarkozy, President Chirac flew thousands of miles to press France's traditional customers such as Morocco and India to buy the successor to Dassault's legendary Mirage -- which did well abroad. Talks advanced but the orders never came. Chirac's interest was personal as well as patriotic. His father was employed in the 1940s by Marcel Bloch, who changed his name to Dassault and founded the great plane-making firm. It is still family run. I recently sat beside Olivier Dassault, Marcel's grandson, as he landed one of the family Falcons on a visit the Rafale factory near Bordeaux. Serge, his father and current chief, was in the back. He told me that Dassault had not lost money despite the export failure because the state had financed the project.
Last week, Paris even sent two Rafales (the word means 'gust' in English) to take part in Muammar Gaddafi's anniversary festivities in Libya. The Colonel has been toying with the idea of buying a few of the planes, which so far have cost about 138 million euros a piece.
Sarkozy has applied his usual determination to pulling off a first order for the hitherto unwanted plane. In Brazil, the Rafale was in competition with the Saab Gripen NG and Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet. The deal is part of Lula's plans for turning Brazil into "one of the great powers of the 21st century." Sarkozy's clincher was agreement to share all the Rafale technology with Brazil and let the Brazilians assemble many themselves. US bars on exporting military technology meant that neither Boeing nor Saab (which uses US systems) could do this.
"The relationship between Brazil and France is not one of supplier and client, but of partners," Sarkozy said in Brazil. "We want to act together because we share the same values and a same vision on the big international goals."
Brazil is already buying five French submarines - including one that will be modified to run on nuclear power - and 50 military transport helicopters, for a value of around 10 billion dollars. As part of the Rafale deal, Sarkozy agreed to buy 10 KC-390 transport aircraft to be built by Brazil's Embraer.
No contract has been signed yet and there are reports that the Brazilian Air Force feels that it has been strong-armed in a contest that is not officially to be decided until October. Optimistic French officials hope that the final Rafale contract will be announced on October 23. That is the 103rd anniversary of the pioneering flight by Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, in the Bois de Boulogne in west Paris. The American Wright brothers took off three years earlier, but, as we have seen here before, Santos-Dumont was officially recorded as making the first powered flight because the Aero Club de France was on hand to certify it.
President Sarkozy's team is alarmed by a familiar French mess in Gabon, the former west African colony. Crowds have rioted against Ali Bongo, the newly elected president, and attacked a French consulate and oil facilities.
Paris faces the old scenario: President Bongo telephones Sarkozy to send troops to rescue him from a popular revolt while French paratroops evacuate the 10,000 French nationals. The scene was last played out in February 2008 when the paratroops saved President Déby of Chad from insurgents and escorted expatriates out of his country.
It was not supposed to be like this. When he took office in May 2007, Sarkozy promised a clean break with "FrançAfrique", the old system in which Paris propped up African leaders, no matter how corrupt, provided they served French interests. Sarkozy has switched strategic focus to the Gulf, cut troop levels to 900 in the Ivory Coast and he plans to close one of two garrisons in Senegal or Gabon. France, he says, has ended the "complicity of a bygone era" and it will no longer play the gendarme of Africa. In 2007, he caused offence with a speech in Senegal in which he said Africans had "not sufficiently entered history." He also exonerated the colonial powers from some of their legacy. They were "not responsible for the bloody wars that the Africans have waged among themselves, for the genocide, the dictators, the fanaticism and corruption," he said.
But the trouble in loyal and lucrative Gabon shows how hard it is for France to break with ways that long have ensured rich returns. The rioters who attacked the consulate in Gabon's Port Gentil were angry over over the presidential victory of Ali Ben Bongo, son of Omar Bongo, who ruled from 1967 to his death last June [pictured with Sarkozy above]. "France imposed its new Bongo," says Bruno Moubamba, a defeated candidate.
Bongo senior was the epitome of the old system. He kept dozens of mansions and fat bank accounts in France, according to investigators. He allegedly helped funded the campaigns of President Chirac. In the 1980s and 1990s, he corrupted the bosses of the Elf-Aquitaine oil giant and the son of the late President Mitterrand, who were all sentenced by Paris courts. "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver," Bongo senior used to say. "France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel."
Bernard Kouchner, Sarkozy's Foreign Minister and human rights symbol, was embarrassed earlier this year when it was disclosed that before taking office in 2007, Bongo had paid him hundreds of thousands of euros for consultancy.
Despite Sarkozy's promises of change, it is business of usual for much of 'France-Afrique'. Total oil and other French firms need all the help they can get as they struggl to keep their share of trade in the face of Chinese and American competition. Paris laid on the honours at Bongo's funeral in June. Sarkozy attended along with Chirac, Kouchner and a platoon of present and former ministers. Sarkozy was booed by crowds after proclaiming that Bongo was France's "great and loyal friend".
With performances like that, it is not surprising that France finds itself once again as a player in the thick of upheaval in one of its old African possessions. This evening's Le Monde reaches this conclusion: "France worked to obtain the (Gabonese) election result that was proclaimed on Thursday... A chance to put into action President Sarkozy's promised new relationship with Africa has been missed. The Gabonese regime, which symbolises the caricature of "Françafrique" will thus live on."
Nicolas Sarkozy had extra reason to enjoy his splash in the Mediterranean with Carla Bruni today. He must have been savouring la divine surprise announced by Christine Lagarde his Finance Minister. Against most expectations, France pulled out of recession in the second quarter, producing 0.3 percent growth as consumers and industry stirred back to life after a year on the floor.
The news was music to a President who believes he is cruising towards a second term, weathering the storms of his own and the world's making. Even le malaise de juillet, Sarkozy's collapse after a jogging session, has rebounded in his favour. Sympathy for the stricken "hyper-president" kicked up his ratings, with one poll (CSA) showing a 12-point rise in approval.
This suggests that, in his third year, France is getting used to Super Sarko, a President whose brash, frenetic style and boundless self-promotion was unlike anything since the two Napoleonic emperors of the 19th century.
Sarkozy stirs deep antipathy in wide stretches of the population. He is demonised by much of the left, trade unions, and the educational establishment, who can barely say his name without a sneer. As they do every year, experts are predicting une rentrée chaude -- another round in France's eternal civil war when the summer truce ends next month. Unemployment is rising to a painful level but strikes and protests seem unlikely because Sarkozy has defeated the public sector unions and the rest are too frightened for their jobs.
Super Sarko's pushy style still draws groans in many quarters but he is also winning grudging admiration. People who wrote him off after the tempest of his first months are coming round to admiring his forceful methods. Thanks in part to Bruni, he has softened his image as a harsh pro-market crusader with little feeling for the common citizen. His stimulus package -- mainly invested in industry and infrastructure -- is bearing fruit, though the experts expect growth to drop back again. He appears to have been right that French consumers did not need tax cuts like the British.
In one field, according to the polls, France strongly approves of Sarkozy: his defence of the country's interests abroad. His hyper-active performance in Europe and in the G20 summits on the global economy have honed his image as a world leader. He has also made himself a nuisance to the US President in time-honoured French fashion.
Sarkozy is already positioning himself for re-election in the spring of 2012. There is even a silly rumour that he is planning a 2011 baby with Bruni to boost the campaign. Barring scandal or economic collapse, he seems likely to win. The forecast is premature, but it can be made because he faces no real opposition and he wields direct or indirect power over much of the media.
The Socialists, who ruled for much of the 1980s and 90s, have sunk into a coma. Despite Sarkozy's poor ratings, the polls show that the majority do not believe that the leftwing party would do a better job at running the country. According to Bernard Henri-Lévy, the grandee penseur, the party is already dead. Manuel Valls, one of its young Turks, wants to change its name. The party's most plausible présidentiable is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a baron whom Sarkozy deftly exiled to Washington as head of the International Monetary Fund. Sarkozy's recruitment of leftwing luminaries to his government may turn out to have been the coup de grace for the Socialists.
I heard the other day that Sarkozy had been told about TINA, a term coined by Margaret Thatcher in her Iron Lady days of the 1980s. It stood for "There Is No Alternative". It is certainly how Sarkozy views his position as the new political season approaches.
[Pictures: The first couple at play last week on Cap Nègre, Bruni's family villa near Toulon]
After Barack Obama's two days in France and Germany, Europe is getting a clearer idea of the way the new US president operates. Lesson number one: he keeps his distance.
In Germany on Friday Chancellor Angela Merkel was put out by Obama's decision to steer clear of Berlin during his flying visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In France, Obama's way of imposing his own schedule has been more striking -- to the embarrassment of President Sarkozy.
As I write on Sunday morning, the US imperial cavalcade (30 vehicles), has just driven up to the Pompidou Centre. The Obama family are visiting the modern art museum before the President flies home and leaves Michelle and the children to lunch with Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy and their four offspring at the Elysée Palace (There's an echo of Sarkozy's 2007 barbecue with George W Bush at Kennebunkport, when Cecilia Sarkozy, the President's then wife, failed to turn up.)
In 39 hours in France, staying in Paris a one-minute walk from the presidential palace, Obama was unable to find a moment to accept Sarkozy's repeated invitations to drop by. They had a 20 minute working lunch with their advisers yesterday in Normandy but Obama has also had time to take his family to Notre Dame cathedral and to dinner at La Fontaine de Mars, a good brasserie near the Eiffel tower (230 euros for their dinner in a private upstairs room, with water, no wine).
Sarkozy could not hide his disappointment when they appeared yesterday in Caen, but he has clearly got the message. Theirs is a good working relationship but Obama is not out to play buddy-buddy with Sarko or any other European leader (Gordon Brown of Britain included).
Obama was tackled on the coolness in Caen. He insisted, of course, that he was excellent friends with "President Sarkozy" (who called him Barack). They also performed a high-five handshake for the cameras [top picture]. "I have a very tough schedule and I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg Gardens," he replied. "I think it's very important to understand that good friends don't worry about the symbols and the conventions and the protocols."
Note that his leisure wish-list did not include the socialising with Carla and Nicolas that the French President had longed for. The Obama froideur was the top story in Le Journal du Dimanche this morning, above reports on yesterday's moving ceremonies at Omaha beach (which Gordon Brown pathetically mis-called 'Obama Beach' in his speech).
The Sarkozy administration is suffering from the unpleasant feeling of having been taken for a ride, reported the JDD. "Obama did not snub the French president in particular, but he refuses to play the game of familiarity with his peers," it said.
There is also the question of opposing personalities. "The American president is a man of reflection who turned himself into a man of action while Nicolas Sarkozy is above all famous for his spontaneity," said Simon Serfaty of the Washington International Institute for Strategic Studies.
[picture: The Obamas visit Notre Dame cathedral]
Watching the ceremonies yesterday, you got the impression that Obama was the host and Sarkozy the guest. That was certainly true in the commemoration in the Colleville US cemetery, by Omaha beach, which is US territory in perpetuity. But it also seemed to be the case in the prefecture (government headquarters) in Caen, where Sarkozy deferred to Obama. The US President led the press conference which, incidentially, the Americans did not want but the French insisted on.
I don't want to play the indignant Briton, but there was an impression of excessive American power, as usual in these events. There was of course the huge deployment in Paris and Normandy of manpower and carbon-gushing hardware -- jumbo jets, helicopters and the motorcade of behemoths -- much of it built by bankrupt General Motors. There was also the familiar impression in the ceremonies and media cover that the D-Day landings were an American affair in which Britain played a small supporting role (Brown's Obama beach didn't help). The France 2 main evening news last night referred to "the US landing in Normandy" and spent an inordinate amount of time covering Tom Hanks and his role in D-Day.
The impression of a purely Franco-American event was nicely summed up by Didier Porte, a humourist on France-Inter, the main public radio network. "The British just can't stop interfering with their disinformation. This is especially the case when they spread the rumour that they somehow took part in the Normandy landings in 1944. That's nonsense!"
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]
Spot the common factor among the following:
-- A train crash that paralyzed rail service between Paris and Bordeaux all day on Wednesday.
-- Plans this week to introduce guilty pleas in French criminal courts
-- The anguish of thousands of university students who are not prepared for end-of-year examinations next month.
The answer is not Nicolas Sarkozy. The common thread is the free market, or more precisely France's reflexive suspicion and fear of "Anglo-Saxon liberalism". Sarkozy is behind two of the three items. The case of the universities is the most immediately damaging, but first, in order:
The unions and left are blaming the train crash in the western Charente département on the opening of rail freight to commercial operators. No-one was injured but the accident was spectacular. A load of tractor diggers on a German-operated train ripped the side off a passing state railways locomotive.
According to the unions and leftwing parties, the accident was the consequence of the deregulation of rail freight that the European Union supposedly forced on France. Britain's disastrous privatised system is always held up as the example of how not to run a railroad.
In reality, the crash had nothing to do with the new rules -- introduced in 2006 before Sarkozy was elected. "Privatisation" is limited to allowing some competition for freight services. France reluctantly agreed to this to conform to EU single market rules. Dominique Bussereau, the transport minister, pointed out that the badly-loaded goods wagon was being hauled by German state railways and that foreign trains have been using French rails for over a century.
On the law courts, the traditionalists and the left are up in arms over a supposed attempt by President Sarkozy to sell out France's Republican criminal court system and replace it with Anglo-Saxon rough justice.
We've visited Sarkozy's court reforms before. What's new are the proposals this week for revamping the assizes, the jury courts which try the most serious crimes. The judicial unions are upset over two items. One is the introduction of guilty pleas, in the style of English law.
The idea is to free-up the hugely overloaded courts. In France, assize cases are given a full court trial with all the witnesses and evidence even when the defendant admits guilt. The reform, say the critics, will create cut-price "American-style" justice with plea-bargaining and pressure on those who cannot afford lawyers to plead guilty. Sarkozy has already introduced the system in lower courts.
Judges and prosecutors (who are also judges) are also resisting Sarkozy's plans to reform the court structure. He wants judges to become referees, in the English-law style, rather than super-prosecutors, as they are under France's Napoleonic law system. Prosecutors would then plead their cases as adversaries of the defence lawyers rather than high accusers. This, according to the unions and traditionalists, boils down to "privatising" criminal justice.
On the Universities, the academic year has been disrupted and, in some establishments, ruined, by a campaign of strikes and "blocages" by staff and students in protest against Sarkozy's reforms. The protesters at the Sorbonne in Paris and most of the remaining hotbeds of strife caved in this week and went back to work, but months of disruption by a militant minority has wasted a year for many students around France -- and the parents and tax-payers who finance them.
The protesters accuse Sarkozy of "privatising" the state university system. This, they say, is his secret agenda though all he has done is grant limited autonomy to university directors and encouraged competition among establishments. The protesters are also resisting changes to teaching duties by research staff but it is not clear what their objection is.
French universities have long been neglected. They are starved of resources compared with the well-endowed grandes écoles which educate the higher achievers. The waste is colossal. A third of the 741,000 undergraduates leave without a degree. Sarkozy's reform, which has already been watered down, is supported by most university chiefs as a move to help France catch up with the rest of the world. It is absurd to claim that the system is being privatised.
The conclusion from all this is that Sarkozy is still pushing on with reforms that he promised in 2007 despite his unpopularity and resistance from the left and traditionalists. He has been giving ground on some fronts, like health, where he hit resistance against plans to put managers rather than doctors in charge of hospitals. But his persistence is remarkable at a time when the old dirigiste République has been given new legitimacy by the financial crisis.
Sarkozy is no free marketeer in the Anglo-American sense. He is the first to use his formidable presidential power to shore up the old interventionist system and he has dropped the free market rhetoric that took him to office in 2007. But he is pragmatic and is largely sticking to his project for fixing what does not work in France.
As a follow-up to the last post on Sarkozy's new French model for Europe, have a look at the cover of the latest edition of The Economist. Sarkozy towers over Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany while Britain's Gordon Brown wallows in a hole with the Anglo-Saxon model.
The editorial neatly summarises the ideas behind the debate that we're always having here. Naturally it's on the Anglo-Saxon side, but it admits the merits of the continental approach. Their report from inside France, by Sophie Pedder, the Economist's Paris correspondent, is excellent.
France has been cooing along with everyone else over the arrival of Bo Obama at the White House, but the master of America's new First Dog is no longer in such good odour with Nicolas Sarkozy.
[Friday Update: Here's Sarkozy's latest outburst over Obama and European leaders.]
The French presidency is pouring cold water on President Obama's efforts to recast American leadership in the world, depicting them as unoriginal, unsubstantial and over-rated. Behind leaks and briefings from the Elysée Palace lies Super Sarko's irritation at the the rock-star welcome that Europe gave Obama on his Europan tour the other day.
The American President's call "to free the world of the menace of a nuclear nightmare" was hot air, said a report to Sarkozy by his staff. "It was rhetoric, not a speech on American security policy but an export model aimed at improving the image of the United States," they said. Most of Obama's proposals had already been made by the Bush administration and Washington was dragging its feet on disarmament and treaties against nuclear proliferation, said the report, leaked to le Figaro.
Personal pique and French politics are also behind the souring of Sarkozy's self-promoted honeymoon with the United States. On the personal side, the French President is needled by the adulation for an unproven US leader whose stardom has eclipsed what he sees as his established record as a world troubleshooter. "The President is annoyed by what he sees as the naiveté and the herd mentality of the media," wrote Claude Askolovitch, a commentator with good Elysée sources.
Sarkozy has put out a version of the London G20 economic summit which casts him as hero, in the classic French role of intransigent defender of principle in the face of the American steamroller. This recolours last week's account of Obama saving the day by persuading President Hu of China to accept Sarkozy's demand for naming tax havens. According to the leaks, Sarkozy shamed Obama into intervening: "You were elected to build a new world. Tax havens are the embodiment of the old world," he lectured the younger President. He also reprimanded Obama on setting US goals for climate change that were inferior to Europe's, according to his staff.
Again, according to the Sarkozy version, at the Nato summit in Strasbourg, Obama was meekly yielding to Turkey's refusal to endorse Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance's new Secretary-General. It took pressure from Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to stiffen him up and change his mind, say the French.
Obama's favour for Ankara has irked but also helped Sarkozy as his Union for a Popular Movement campaigns for European Parliament elections in June. Sarkozy slapped down the US President on French TV after he publicly encouraged Turkish entry to the European Union. Permanent refusal of Turkish membership is a popular Sarkozy policy plank. Obama's venture into EU affairs has enabled Sarkozy to score political capital. It shows that France can still stand up to the United States despite rejoining the full Nato command last week after four decades' absence.
It was good old Franco-American business as usual this morning when Bruno Le Maire, Sarkozy's young Europe Minister, accused Washington of backing the northern and Eastern EU members who want to turn the Union into a mere free-trade zone. France and Germany are sticking to their vision of the "political" Europe that "others" do not want, he said in a radio interview.
Behind the policy argument, it is easy to detect disappointment over Obama's failure to reciprocate the Sarkozy charm offensive that began when he befriended the junior Senator on a visit to Washington in 2006. Obama showered compliments on France's "hyper-president" in Strasbourg, but the one that has stuck was double-edged: "He is courageous on so many fronts, it's sometimes hard to keep up with him."
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Nicolas Canteloup footnote: You might have heard the impersonator's rather cruel gag on Sarkozy's dog rivalry with Obama on Europe radio this morning. Canteloup's Sarko said that he had a pet long before Obama -- François Fillon, his Prime Minister.
Sarko's moment finally came. After months of frustration during which the White House stayed cool to the entreaties of the French President, Barack Obama stood alongside Nicolas Sarkozy today and showered him with praise.
You could feel the joy radiating from Sarko as the pair proclaimed a new era of Franco-American unity on the steps of the Palais des Rohan, the old bishop's palace in Strasbourg. Obama listed the qualities of his friend 'Nicolas'. "Thanks to the great leadership of President Sarkozy, courageous on so many fronts at once that it's sometimes hard to keep up with him...." .
He thanked Sarko "for France's outstanding leadership with regard to Afghanistan" and he praised him again for his "extraordinary leadership role in NATO". The London G20 summit could not have succeeded without the problem-solving leadership of the French President, Obama added. "I am personally grateful for his friendship". Obama also announced that he will be back to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the allied landing in Normandy on D-Day.
This was all sweet music for Sarko, who had rolled out maximum military and civilian pomp to welcome the Obamas to France ahead of tonight's Nato summit. Only this morning, French media were noting Obama's apparent indifference to Sarko at the London summit. Sarkozy's offensive against Les Anglo-Saxons before the G20 summit also chilled the atmosphere.
After an hour's tête-à-tête, his first with the new US President, Sarkozy struck an unusually solemn and statesmanlike tone as he opened their joint press conference referring to "The President of the United States" and addressing "President Obama" with the formal 'vous'. But Sarko's excitable nature got the better of him and he closed trembling with emotion, using the the intimate "tu" and calling him "une sacrée bonne nouvelle" -- bloody good news -- for the world.
Sarko being Sarko, he could also not resist chucking a couple of stones in the direction of his former great friend George W. Bush. He contrasted, without naming him, Bush's closed, America-centric outlook with Obama's open-minded model and talked about the "terrorist methods" which the Bush team had used on the detainees of Guantanamo Bay
It was fascinating watching the pair: Obama grave, measured and still alongside the much shorter, energetic and punchy French leader. The monolingual Sarkozy also ventured timidly into English, saying "okay" to US journalists several times.
On the substance, Sarkozy and Obama of course agreed on everything, from emergency treatment for the world economy to Russia, Afghanistan and Iran. But the differences were there. Obama, for instance, wished that Europe would take on a bigger share of its own defence
Obama later talked bluntly about the rift in Transatlantic relations in recent years. Both sides were to blame, he said. America had failed to treat Europe with respect. "There have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." But anti-American feeling in Europe often seemed unfair, casual and insidious, he said. "On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common. They are not wise."
Obama was greeted like a hero by the crowds that were allowed to get close to him as the French security forces locked down the deserted centre of Strasbourg. While their husbands were doing business, Carla Bruni lunched with Michelle Obama and showed her around town. Bruni stayed away from London as the US First Lady took the spotlight, but the Elysée Palace is deploying her in Strasbourg as a sure bet for enhancing Sarko's moment in the sun.
To end, the Elysée is delighted by the Francophiles in Obama's entourage. General James Jones, his National Security Adviser, grew up in France as the son of a US marine officer and attended a lycée in the Paris suburb of Saint Germain-en-Laye. He always talks in French with Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy's foreign affairs director. Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser to Vice-President Biden, also studied at a Paris Lycée and Sciences-Po, the top political science college. Philip Gordon, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, is an academic France expert who translated the US edition of Testimony, the manifesto-memoir that Sarkozy's published during his 2007 campaign.
If location is everything in real estate, timing is everything in the news business. As we saw last week, President Sarkozy has been threatening to block the G20 economic summit in London if he does not win agreement to French demands for new global regulation. No-one beyond France took much notice.
The message was mainly aimed at the home market but today it got the attention of les Anglo-Saxons, the ancient foil for French leaders in search of a cause. The spur was a briefing yesterday afternoon in the Hotel Marigny, the majestic annex across the street from the Elysée Palace (Colonel Gaddaffi used its garden for his Bedouin tent in 2007). Xavier Musca, Sarkozy's new economic adviser, told us that Sarkozy would prefer "a failure to a false success full of generous declarations without consequence." Musca confirmed that Sarko might walk out of the London summit. He described this as a nuclear weapon that France is keeping ready. Musca, who is new to the job, also obligingly used the Anglo-Saxon word, lumping the British and the Americans together in the same intransigent camp when it comes to clamping down on hedge funds, tax havens and the other items that Sarkozy wants regulated by a new global police.
Coming on the eve of the summit, Sarko's hard line, which he has co-ordinated with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, has finally made headlines outside France. We put it on our front page today.
It has achieved Sarko's aim of casting France as vigorous champion of the new morality that Sarko wants to impose on world finance. Of course this is part of the theatrical stake-raising that preceeds summits and Sarkozy knows that Barack Obama is not about to embrace French-style ideas for a new world financial police.
But it has shown France that Super Sarkozy is making a mark with his demands for the "refoundation of capitalism". This plays to his image as statesman, the game that has served him best since he crashed in opinion polls after winning office in May 2007. In the midst of the economic gloom, fewer than 40 percent of the public approve of Sarkozy's performance as President but when pollsters ask how he represents France abroad, he scores up to 70 percent.
"Super-Sarko" is admired for the vigour with which he charges around world capitals and especially for what was seen as his deft handling of his six months' turn in the EU's rotating presidency last year. He was given credit for persuading President Bush to stage the first G20 summit in Washington last November and he is claiming the paternity of its follow-up this week London.
But there is a paradox in Sarkozy's classical ploy of picking a fight with les Anglo-Saxons. Things are different now and not just because the Anglo-Saxon-in-chief is black. Obama is also more popular in France than the local president. Libération, the leftwing newspaper, yesterday contrasted Sarkozy negatively with the US President. "With his efforts against the crisis, Barack Obama is far ahead of his counterparts on the Old Continent," wrote Laurent Joffrin, the editor. Sarkozy and the rest of Europe's leaders are showing dangerous divisions and reverting to old-fashioned conservative policies, he added.
The French President finds himself in a tricky position. Until the spat ahead of the G20, he performed an intense charm offensive towards Obama. By returning France to the core of the Nato alliance he is trying to win new credibility with Washington and its allies. Before election, he called France's traditional anti-Americanism "that cultural cancer which prevents French diplomacy from working".
But things are not going well with the Americans. Obama has so far been unmoved by Sarkozy's campagne de séduction while the French President has risked looking over-eager to please him. That explains Sarko's reversion to the old Gaullist posture ahead of the G20. The mood will lift again on Friday when the Obama show reaches the French city of Strasbourg for the Nato summit. Sarkozy will hold his first tête-à-tête with the new President and no doubt declare a new era of Franco-American friendship.
Nicolas Sarkozy finally got his chance to talk to Barack Obama today. Phone calls between leaders may be routine, but so eager was the French President to get time with "My friend Barack", that the Elysée Palace cast the video conference via interpreters as a virtual summit. Take a look at the silly photomontage on the front of yesterday's Figaro, the pro-Sarko newspaper, below. The conversation lasted just half an hour, the Elysée tells us. [Top picture: anti-Sarkozy demonstrator in Nice last week]
The coolness of the US President towards the overtures from Paris is embarrassing Sarkozy. It has dampened his hopes of finding a kindred dynamic soul in Washington and founding a new Paris-Washington axis. It is leading him to realise that he may find few takers for his ambitious plans for "refounding capitalism" at the April 2 G20 summit in London.
China is certainly out. After making waves over Tibet and human rights last year, France is in Beijing's doghouse and Sarkozy is the only leader known so far to have been refused a session in London with President Hu Jintao. Sarkozy irritated President Calderon of Mexico with his behaviour on a visit there this month, so he does not have an ally there. Turkey abhors Sarko because of his promise of a permanent veto against its entry to the European Union. Relations with his European neighbours, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel of Germany, are are not much better than "cordial", which is diplomatic speak for bumpy. President Medvedev of Russia may prove to be one of Sarko's main allies.
But it is Obama's resistance to the persuasive charms of Super Sarko that is causing angoisse at the Elysée. "Sarkozy l'Américain" as he was once proud to be called, has pulled out all the stops since the night of the US election, when he mis-spelt a congratulatory fax to "Dear Barak".
French lobbying failed to win an early invitation to the White House. While Brown was being fêted in Washington, Paris made it known that Obama would meet Sarkozy on a Normandy beach on April 3 on his way to the Nato anniversary summit in Strasbourg. US advance parties checked the local security and accommodation but Washington dropped the idea. It is now not even certain that Obama will give Sarkozy private time in Strasbourg.
Sarkozy was gratified last week when Obama welcomed his historic decision to take France back into the military command of the US-led Nato alliance. But the glow vanished when it became known on Friday that Obama had sent an effusive letter to -- of all people -- Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy's bête noire, who did everything to stop his younger colleague succeeding him in the presidency in 2007.
"I am certain that over the coming four years, we will be able to work togetyher in a spirit of peace and friendship in order to build a better world," Obama wrote. Chirac stuck it hard to his successor, saying in public how "sympathique" he had found Obama's letter. It provided obvious fodder for the comedians, who wondered whether Obama might be under the impression that the chief international opponent to President Bush's war in Iraq was still running France.
Nicolas Canteloup, the breakfast radio impersonator, today performed an hilarious sketch on the President's imagined phone-call with Obama. "Allô Barack, this is Nicolas... you know, Little Big Man," said Canteloup-Sarkozy. "You know me, the husband of Carla Bruni, you know, the bombshell."
Sensing the differences with Washington ahead of the London summit, Sarkozy has toughened his rhetoric this week while François Fillon, his Prime Minister, was dispatched to lobby in Washington. Sarkozy is determined at least to get a commitment from the reluctant Americans to start work on new world financial regulations.
In a speech in Saint Quentin on Tuesday night, he warned Washington and other foot-draggers that the G20 must take action to "put morality back into financial capitalism". He added: "I will not associate myself with a world summit which decides to decide nothing." It's not clear what he meant by that.
[UPDATE March 8. Sarkozy has apparently persuaded Obama to meet him for a quick session at a Normandy beach between the London and Strasbourg summits, on April 3 -- according to le Figaro.] ---------- For a French leader who has often seemed dazzled by the United States, Nicolas Sarkozy has not been helping his case for new friendship with Washington. But you can also understand that he is needled by today's White House visit by Gordon Brown, the first European leader to be invited by President Obama.
Sarkozy had pulled out the diplomatic stops to woo the Obama team before and after his November victory. As Europe's new strongman, as he saw it, Sarko was hoping to make France the new "go to" country for Washington in its relations with the EU. He began, though, with a little spelling mistake, sending a congratulatory note within minutes of the election result in which he wrote by hand "Dear Barak".
The Elysée lobbied hard for a quick Washington invitation and, US diplomat friends tell me, the White House hesitated before falling back on the old relationship with London -- which is really only seen as special on the UK side. "This is obviously a serious diplomatic reverse for President Sarkozy," said Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-leaning weekly that likes to play up the President's difficulties. "He was hoping to be designated by the Obama administration as the privileged interlocutor of the United States in Europe, as the de facto leader of the Old Continent," it said. Le Parisien says today that Washington is snubbing Sarkozy.
The President asked Obama to drop in for at least a photo-opp at the Elysée around the Nato summit in the French city of Strasbourg on April 3. That was refused too. Sarkozy now says that he will "receive" the US leader on the sideliness of the Strasbourg session. Yesterday he had a few minutes with Hilary Clinton at the Gaza aid meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. A few weeks ago, he was saying that meeting the Secretary of State was the job of his Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, not the President of France.
So why the relative cold shoulder from the Americans? Sarkozy is after all about to take a big step towards Washington -- much more than a gesture -- by bringing France back into the military structure of the Nato alliance after a 43-year break? Part of the reason is Sarko's big mouth. Since the financial crisis began in earnest last October, he has sought to score points at home at the expense of the Americans and the British, blaming them for starting the mess. The new administration is not greatly impressed by his messianic demands for "refounding" the international economic system. It has also been annoyed by his public refusal to send more French forces to join the Nato operation in Afghanistan. New French criticism of Israel is another factor. None of this has helped the atmosphere.
In private, Sarkozy is now saying that he has few illusions that the Obama administration will be much more open to Europe than its predecessor. He is said to be irritated by the global adulation of a US president who has eclipsed his own stardom. "It is difficult not to see a little jealousy on the part of a President who so loves to be on the front page -- a little annoyance towards someone who is more a media darling and more powerful than him," said Sud-Ouest newspaper.
That may just be atmospherics and Obama has yet to land in Europe. I suspect that Sarkozy l'Américain,as he once proudly called himself, has not lost the fascination for the United States that he has so often shown. Don't forget the compliments that he paid his last and current wives. Cécilia was the new Jackie Kennedy when he won the presidency in May 2007 and a few months later, he was calling Carla Bruni, her successor, his Marilyn Monroe.
[Picture: Carla and Nicolas taking Manhattan last September. Top picture:Sarkozy playing cowboy on election-eve 2007]
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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.
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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.
A day out in Iraq must be relaxing for Nicolas Sarkozy, given the troubles that are stacking up for him at home. It's time for a run through his formidable list of headaches and I will respond to a false allegation from his office today that we British media misreported him.
First the news: Sarko dropped into Iraq this morning, becoming the first French president to visit the country. His arrival turns the page on the Franco-American spat over the 2003 invasion. It is a step towards restoring the diplomatic and commercial interests that France used to have in Iraq. Before the first Gulf war, Paris was one of the chief arms suppliers to the late President Saddam Hussein. And before the 2003 war, France's Total company had obtained Iraqi oil rights in anticipation of the end of the embargo applied to Saddam at the time.
Meeting President Talabani and Noori al Maliki, the Prime Minister, Sarkozy said: "France believes in the unity of Iraq. The world needs a united, democratic, sovereign and strong Iraq. France wishes your complete integration in the Middle East and in the world." France is ready to give Iraq unlimited cooperation, he said, adding: "We say to French companies that the time has come to return to Iraq.”
And here is what is not going right for the French President:
His TV talk last week failed to quell unrest over the crisis. The unions have called for another day of national strikes, on March 19 although that is in part a lever ahead of negotiations with the Government next week.
Sarkozy's ratings have slumped again after months of recovery. Approval for the President has sunk between five and 10 points over the past month to the mid-30s, according to several polls in the past week.
His bail-out for the car industry has started a fight with Brussels and Prague over protectionism. He obliged the two big car-makers to promise to stop off shoring production in return for the state's six billion euros. He singled out French car production in the Czech Republic in his TV talk. The Czech government, which now holds the EU presidency, has called an urgent summit to deal with this.
In a reversal of roles, the formerly free-market Sarko was attacked this morning by François Chérèque, leader of the big CFDT labour union, for indulging in protectionism. "Blocking the market economy in order to make the French buy French means going back to the level of debate of the 1970s," Chérèque said on France-Inter radio. Of course the same alarm is being sounded in Britain, the US and elsewhere.
A strike is spreading in the universities. Valery Pécresse, the Higher Education Minister, is trying to defuse a revolt by teacher-researchers. Sarkozy seems to fear a wild-fire uprising by teachers and students more than anything else.
Resistance is growing from both the opposition and Sarkozy's own camp against his plan to take France fully back into the Nato alliance in April, 43 years after President de Gaulle withdrew in the name of national independence. Sarkozy is being accused of selling out French sovereignty. He is worried that Parliament, in which his party holds a strong majority, may not support the Nato move.
Guadeloupe, the French-owned Caribbean island, is in insurrection [right] over high living costs and Sarkozy is worried that the unrest will spread back to France.
He is in a quandary. If he appeases the three-week revolt by giving in to demands for subsidising higher incomes, he will further disrupt the local economy and contradict his strategy for handling the crisis in France. So today, Sarkozy refused the wage rise demanded by the group leading the mutiny. It goes by the colourful Creole name Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon" (In French, Collectif contre l'exploitation outrancière or Collective Against Extreme Exploitation).
The Caribbean strike, which has now spread to neighbouring Martinique, underlines the impossible costs of subsidising poor colonies on the other side of oceans while treating them as almost ordinary French départements (counties) with welfare protection and seats in the national parliament.
Perhaps the most minor of Sarkozy's problems has been the fall-out from his swipe at Britain in his TV appearance. It seemed gratuitous and it has lost him the goodwill of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister.
I don't like wasting time on cross-Channel rivalry, but will make an exception because the Elysée Palace blamed us for the row today. Sarkozy's office tried to weasel out of the affair by accusing us of mis-representing what he said. "President Sarkozy deplores the way in which his comments on the British economy were reported in the United Kingdom," their statement said.
That is shameless. There was no misreporting. As we saw here already, Sarkozy chose to bring up Britain as the counter-example of what he wants for France. Gordon Brown had cut taxes to re-start the economy and it had not worked, he said. Britain was suffering because it was so tied into the US financial sector, he said. "England no longer has industry, unlike France. That is because England, 25 years ago, made the choice of services and notably, financial services," he said.
This was accurately reported, though we did fail to point out that Sarkozy got his facts wrong. Le Monde made amends today, explaining that Britain still has more industry than France.
--------------------
Footnote: My use of the term Anglo-Saxon last week has stirred some argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with the French using it as short hand for the developed English-speaking nations that originated with immigration from the UK. For France and the rest of the continent this has a clear sense. Simply saying "English-speaking countries" does not cover the same thing. I'm hybrid Scottish-Australian but am not offended when Britons are collectively known as les anglais, los ingleses, англичане (Anglichanye - in Russian) or whatever. It's just custom that's all. And I also fail to see what's patronising in using Gallic as a variant for French in the broad sense, even if it offends Bretons, Basques, Ch'tis and residents of le neuf-trois -- the Seine Saint Denis département on the poor northeastern edge of Paris. I don't call the French Gauls -- although Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, has always done so [example here].
President Sarkozy pulled off a smooth performance in his long television audience with his restive nation last night. It was a strange show -- a regal lecture from the Elysée Palace in answer to soft questions from four journalists, one of whom he romanced a couple of years ago.
More on the behaviour of the journalists below, but first the summmary. Over 15 million people tuned in to one of the three main television channels whose prime time Sarko had commandeered for his pep talk. For 90 minutes, he held the stage, exuding his usual self-confidence as he explained that he understood people's anguish -- which was due not to his policies but to a world crisis caused by the Anglo-Saxons.
Sarkozy gave a little ground, promising corporate tax cuts, some welfare benefits and talks with the trade unions. Otherwise, he refused to follow demands that he cut taxes and raise the minimum wage to boost consumer spending. The British have tried that and it did not work, he said. France would stick with his 26 billion euro plan for investing in infrastructure and industry.
"The English have chosen to follow the strategy of stimulus through consumption, notably by lowering VAT (sales tax) by two points. It has done absolutely nothing," he said.
The British and the Americans came in for harsh treatment. The USA and the UK had been hit far harder than France in this "worst crisis for a century", said Sarkozy. "When you see the situation in the United States and the United Kingdom, we don't want to look like them."
Sarkozy also said he would refuse to "pay America's debt" and he demanded US agreement to radical reforms of the world financial system. "They're not going to get away with explaining that everything is going to go on as before."
You hear the same points about the US and Britain all over Europe, but not usually from heads of state. Sarkozy's relations with Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are clearly not as rosy as we thought. On the other hand, he went out of his way to praise Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, with whom he has really does not get on. Downing Street seethed as the British media and opposition had fun with Sarkozy's words today.
Predictably the unions and the Socialist opposition gave Sarkozy a low grade. "He is fobbing us off with talks and negotiations," said Martine Aubry, the Socialist leader. "He has no problem ramming decisions through when he wants to cut taxes for the super rich, or to make people work on Sundays," she said.
The unions are not satisfied and are talking of another day of strikes and protests. I have a feeling that they will happen.
The Sarko-show has generated another story today -- the meek behaviour of the star TV journalists who were invited by the palace to question the President.
There is not much new in this because France's political boss is also the head of state, unlike most other European countries. That makes an interview more ceremonial than with a Prime Minister. Since General de Gaulle in the 1950s, journalists have always deferred heavily to French Presidents. One exception was Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, who became an ex star presenter last year after telling Sarkozy in an interview that he had been acting like a little boy.
But Sarkozy does more than his predecessors to bully and influence the media and he can be intimidating in an interview, as I have found out first hand. As president, he loads his evening broadcasts in his favour by summoning the TV to his turf -- a studio set up in the palace ballroom. Last night there was a visible studio audience of palace staff.
He was given an exceptionally easy time by Laurence Ferrari of TF1, David Pujadas of France 2, Alain Duhamel of RTL and Guy Lagache of M6. Mediapart, a serious leftwing news site, poured scorn on them today. "Nicolas Sarkozy offered the pitiful spectacle of an idle king... revelling in vague but gilded questions."
The SNJ, the main -- and leftwing -- journalists' union, condemned the interviewers in a statement. "They perfectly played their role as court jesters... In no other so-called democratic country do politicians choose their interlocutors like that," it said.
No-one has publicly mentioned what many people knew as they watched Ferrari lobbing her questions to Monsieur le Président, that she went out with with him in the short period after his divorce in October 2007. He is said in the business to have played a role in her promotion Poivre d'Arvor's job.
When he was elected, Sarkozy promised to hold open US-style presidential news conferences. The only time he tried, in January last year, the result was so disastrous for him that he forgot about the idea.
[below: Ferrari and Pujadas not grilling Sarkozy]
President Sarkozy is going on television tonight to try to convince a sceptical country that he is doing enough to handle the economic crisis. He is not expected to shift course or announce anything. But for some in the political world, the main point may be what he says about Bernard Kouchner.
Sarkozy's Foreign Minister, who made his name decades ago as a crusading activist for human rights, is at the centre of a storm over allegations of sleazy behaviour. The fuss has been created by a book that takes an axe to Dr Kouchner's reputation as a dashing apostle of noble causes. It depicts him as an agent of US interests and a France-hater. The allegation of sleaze stems from details of work that Kouchner performed as a consultant for Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon for the last 40 years [picture below] and other less-than-savoury African leaders. That was before Sarkozy recruited him to his new government in 2007 as his prize catch from the left. [My Kouchner profile here]
Kouchner, 69, says that the "The World According to K"by Pierre Péan, is a a pile of nauseating nonsense. He denies any conflicts of interest or impropriety and depicts himself as the victim of a malicious attempt to destroy his name. He says that his consulting work was legitimate and led to a big improvement in health services for poor Africans. François Fillon, the Prime Minister, has rallied to his side, but so far Sarkozy has said nothing. The President does not get along well with his ageing rock star of a Foreign Minister and there are suggestions that his staff may even have had a hand in the book.
Here's the story from today's Times, but it's worth expanding on its seamy side. So far we have only seen extracts from the book, but they are enough to raise questions about the intent of Pierre Péan. His attack on Kouchner carries a whiff of anti-semitism and a poisonous tone that reminds one of the xenophobia of the old French far right.
Péan has made a career as a hard-hitting investigative journalist. He has delivered some scoops, such as the revelation in 1994 that the then President Mitterrand had held a senior job in the wartime Vichy régime.Le Monde newspaper has not yet recovered from a damaging investigation of its methods that he co-wrote five years ago.
Péan's pedigree explains why his Kouchner book carries weight. But Pean writes in an opinionated, often brutal way. He has hobby horses, one of which is the Rwanda. His last book turned history on its head, arguing that Tutsi leaders and not the French-backed Hutu were behind the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis.
Péan discredits his indictment of Kouchner by painting him as a money-mad outsider whose primary motivation springs from his Jewish origins. Kouchner is driven, he says, by "hatred for the values of the French Revolution, of the wartime Resistance, of a national independence that is loathed in the name of an Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism...". The Foreign Minister is guilty of "selling out French interests" to the United States and of hating himself as well as France.
That is odious stuff, the kind of language that was used against Jews and other supposed enemies of France in the Dreyfus affair of the late 1890s and by the hard right in the years up to 1945. Even Jean-Marie Le Pen, the sulphurous boss of the far-right National Front, would think twice before using the old anti-semitic codeword "cosmopolitan".
Kouchner was right to call this sickening and I'm pleased to see that a few commentators have come round to the same view.Le Monde has just denounced Péan's language as a loathsome "cocktail of qualifiers used by a certain French right wing". Jean-Michel Aphatie, one of the sharpest political commentators, has written a blog post pointing out Péan's apparent anti-semitism.
The minister may be helped by the sinister tone of Péan's book because it distracts attention from his consulting work for regimes with records far removed from the moral causes that he has always promoted. Everyone knows that Kouchner is a bit of a showman with a prima donna side. Péan's book does not seem to reveal any facts that were not already known about the minister. He will no doubt survive in his job, for a while at least.
 After air crashes, everyone usually jumps to conclusions and gets the story wrong. This is unlikely to be the case with US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus which ditched in the Hudson River just off Manhattan's west side. The facts seem straightforward and the credit goes to extraordinary old-fashioned airmanship.
The flying world is full of admiration for the pilots who put a big, all-electronic airliner, down so softly on water that it stayed in one piece. Bored passengers are used to briefings on the "unlikely event of water landings", but in reality, big planes more often break up and sink quickly, killing many of their occupants.
Along with his first officer, Captain Chesley Sullenberger achieved a text-book 'dead stick' landing only three minutes after hitting a flock of birds as their Airbus A320 was was climbing low over northern New York City. I can imagine the picture well because I used to pilot light aircraft along the same low path over the George Washington Bridge and down the Hudson beside Manhattan.
Praise is also going to the three cabin crew who organised the evacuation of the 150 passengers. And there is credit for the French-based European Airbus firm for building a tough airliner. Among other things, unlike Boeings, the Airbus has an emergency "Ditch button", which closes vents and makes the fuselage more watertight. Airbus pilots have always been sceptical about the button, on the overhead panel. Today, they are saying today "Oh, so that's what it's for."
Here is what is known about an episode that will go down in flying lore. We do not know if Sullenberger or his co-pilot was flying the leg when the the Airbus left La Guardia, a difficult airport on the water's edge inside the borough of Queens. They were at 3,200 feet in the climb when they reported hitting large birds. These stopped one engine and severely dropped the power or killed the other one. When that happens, there is no-where to go but down.
At that moment, the aeroplane driver is no longer a systems manager. He or she has to forget the electronics and call on the most old-fashioned aviator's skills. A Dutch airline captain called Denkraai decribed it on the PRUNE pilots' network this morning: "What a nightmare. We sit there in our cockpits for years and years and nothing goes wrong. Then all of a sudden you have seconds to decide. I salute you sir, and your crew." 
Continue reading "Airmanship, not miracle, saved US Airways jet in New York" »
Here's another reason for France to cheer up. The country is enjoying its biggest baby boom for three decades.
In 2008, 800,000 babies were born in continental France, a figure not achieved since 1981, according to figures today from the National Statistical Institute. The fertility rate rose in 2008 from 1.97 to 2.02 children per woman, consolidating France's lead over the rest of Europe.
The Europeans have lately produced on average 1.5 children per woman. The EU's 2008 figures are not out yet, but Ireland was second behind France in 2007 and Slovakia was bottom at 1.25.
The rising birth figures are testimony to the success of France's long-standing effort, following long population decline, to encourage people to have children. I don't need to run through all the generous (expensive) state-provided child care benefits, the free nursery schools, travel subsidiess and the family allowances than can reach 500 euros a month.
The return to work last week of Rachida Dati, the Justice Minister, five days after giving birth, was an exception to the tradition of long, paid maternity leave. One of Dati's Cabinet colleagues has just suggested making the 16 weeks' paid leave compulsory for all working women.
If recent trends continue, France will overtake Germany as Europe's most populous nation around the middle of this century. The new year began with 64.3 million inhabitants, 366,500 more than in 2008. Germany has 82.4 million but has long suffered from a low fertility rate of below 1.4. Russia, with its big demographic problem, managed to get back to that level in 2007 from 1.2 in 2000. The United Kingdom, with a population of just under 61 million, has been doing better lately with a 1.85 fertility rate and it could also overtake Germany.
France is approaching the fertility of the United States, which, with its influx of young immigrants, is usually held up as the model for ageing Europe. The expected US rate for 2008 is 2.1. The very healthy French birth rate is certainly helped by the fairly large and young part of the population of recent immigrant origin -- as in Britain and Germany. Public discussion of the role of immigrants in the population growth is still largely taboo in France, though this is changing.
The French figures are impressive because the population is ageing faster than that of the USA and other regions outside Europe. The number of women of child-bearing age -- mainly born in the 1970s and 80s -- has been shrinking by two percent a year for the past two years. The average age of motherhood has now risen to nearly 30. Another big change from the old days is that 52 percent of children were born to unmarried parents. The figure was only six percent in 1970.
That's a big load of statistics, but they tell a story. The good population news is an example of the intelligent long-term policies in which France has excelled in recent decades. It was echoed, in the economic domain this week in a Newsweek magazine column headlined: The Last Model Standing is France.
[Wednesday update on latest rescue here]
To get away from wondering what trouble 2009 might bring, let's pause to salute the epic adventure of a band of men and women on the other side of the world.
I'm talking about the skippers of the Vendée Globe, the only single-handed, non-stop around-the-world yacht race. The "Everest of sailing" as it is known, is staged every four years. It's a test of physical and spiritual endurance like no other. Breakages and injury have forced half the fleet of 30 to abandon the race which began at les Sables d'Olonne on November 9. The surviving 15 are this week blasting down the Southern Ocean in permanent gales, dodging icebergs on their way to Cape Horn.
The boats are pure racing machines of the 60 Foot Open class and their skippers push them hard, snatching sleep in small doses for the three months that it takes to sprint down the Atlantic, around Africa, below Australia, around Cape Horn and back to France. They are not allowed to touch land or another boat or receive help or supplies apart from weather information.
That's Samantha Davies in the picture. She's one of five Britons still left in the fleet. The only other woman is also from the UK -- Dee Caffari. In her latest report, Davies says that one of her new year's resolutions is to stop eating Nutella with her fingers. Her boat Roxy is in sixth place, 2,000 miles behind Michel Desjoyeaux, the leader. Sam Davies is also reporting for The Times (video here)
Desjoyeaux is a mere 60 or so miles ahead of Roland Jourdain, who has been duelling with him for weeks, each covering up to 400 miles a day. (Jourdan's Véolia pictured below).
The precision of those figures is, I suspect, part of the reason that the world has grown a little blasé about solo ocean racing. The technology of satellite positioning and high-speed data connections brings the sailors so close that their venture seems less superhuman than it once did. (see their real-time positions here)
As well as fighting giant seas, changing sails and navigating, the skippers are expected to chat and blog and send video of themselves. It wasn't like that in the pioneering days of the late 1960s when round-the-world yachtsmen such as Francis Chichester became national heroes simply for achieving the voyage. In the first race, organised by the (London) Sunday Times in 1968, contestants would disappear for weeks at a time, sending positions over crackly high frequency radio. One, named Donald Crowhurst, tried to win by faking his route. He went mad and disappeared at sea.
The Vendée Globe is a national event in France. It has always been won by Frenchmen. It doesn't attract much media attention elsewhere except when things go wrong or when a foreign star does well. That was the case for Britain in the 2000-1 race, when Ellen MacArthur came second, only one day behind Michel Desjoyeaux. In the last race Vincent Riou made the 25,000 mile voyage in an amazing 87 days. That compares with 312 days by Robin Knox-Johnston, the winner -- and only finisher -- of the first round-the-world race in 1968.
Modern communications greatly help the sailors mentally, but they do little to diminish the perils of sailing alone on the high seas. Masts have been falling like match-sticks and rigging, keels and rudders have been ripped apart by unusually severe weather this time.
Derek Hatfield, a Canadian skipper who was forced to abandon last Sunday, reported his shock. "This morning the seas were huge, maybe 25 feet and confused, but nothing we couldn't handle normally. I was exhausted and lying in my bunk and 'crash', the boat went over and I ended up on the ceiling with all kinds of articles whizzing past me. The boat came upright immediately and the carnage inside was immediate.
I rushed on deck and my heart sank to see two of the spreaders dangling limp on the shrouds. The shock hits you quickly that this is not fixable and the end of the race is here already. I started to cry and it was uncontrollable.
Most of the defeated skippers are managing to limp to port despite their damage. The exception was Yann Elies who broke a leg 600 miles south of Australia and was rescued by a naval frigate. The HMAS Arunta steamed flat out for two days to reach him and save his life in appalling weather. His yacht has since been lost.
Although the race is about the most extreme sporting event imaginable, only three skippers have lost their lives in six contests so far. Denis Horeau, the race director, defended its safety record today in le Figaro. "Unlike other human activities like mountain sports, we have had very few fatal accidents," he said.
The latest Vendée Globe has produced an odd spin-off. Some 300,000 people are racing in a game version on the internet called Virtual Regatta. Some players are said to have become so addicted that they are neglecting their normal lives to change sails, adjust their courses and outwit their rivals as the weather and sea conditions change. Many are e-mailing the real skippers seeking advice. In mid Southern Ocean, Roland Jourdain said last week that he found it incredible that so many people had been hooked on the game. "It would be really nice if they could tele-port these people onto the boat for 24 hours....just so they could see what it is really like," he said.
The first boats are expected to cross the finishing line back at Sables d'Olonne in early to mid-February.
There's a useful Wikipedia briefing on the race here
Continue reading "A tribute to a magnificent ocean race " »
Before getting onto the usual subject, let me wish everyone a Happy New Year and thank you for the messages by way of the blog and e-mail.
Nicolas Sarkozy has launched 2009 true to energetic form. In his traditional address to the nation (video below), he opened by saying that "2008 has been a rough year". He promised blood, sweat and tears to get France through a new year in which "the difficulties will be great". Under Sarko's guidance, France will emerge from the crisis stronger and a new world will be born, he said. "We have to prepare ourselves by working more."
It was no surprise to learn that Sarko plans to continue as de facto leader of Europe although at midnight France ended its six-month turn in the Union's rotating presidency and handed over to the Czech Republic. He announced that his latest mission is to bring peace to the Middle East. He is off to trouble-shoot in Jerusalem and the West Bank on Monday, with no mandate beyond his enthusiasm for crisis management and France's historic weight in the Arab world.
Sarkozy's intervention over the Gaza strip confirms that he has no intention of taking a back seat after what he sees as the most dynamic turn by any leader in the Union's rotating chair. With his usual chutzpah -- and contorted syntax -- he boasted that he has shaped not just France but the whole world since he has been "President of Europe".
"The initiatives which I have undertaken in the name of the French Presidency of the Union -- coordinating the action of all the Europeans and bringing the heads of state of the 20 biggest world powers to Washington -- have enabled the world to avoid sliding down the slope of 'everyone for themselves', which would have been fatal." That's quite a claim.
In Sarko's view, the leadership of Europe cannot be left to the Czechs, a small, recent member state with a Eurosceptic Government. The Union needs a powerful figure from a founder state to steer the Union through dangerous times, he believes. "Of course I will be taking initiatives," he told the European Parliament the other day after a triumphant review of his management of the financial turmoil and his peace-brokering in the Caucasus war.
To bolster his claim to senior statesmanship, Sarkozy has invited Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, to chair a grand two-day conference from next Thursday on the theme of "A new world, new capitalism". Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who does not get on with Sarkozy, has agreed to attend the closing speeches. The star speakers include a batch of American Nobel economics prize winners and Francis Fukuyama, the economist who is remembered for predicting the end of history in 1989.
Super Sarko is reported to be telling colleagues that he is worried that France will feel small after he has been commander of Europe. "He has one fear -- becoming again the President of an average country, disarmed in the face of recession and confronted by soaring unemployment," said Le Monde.
Sarkozy was reported yesterday to be persisting in a plan -- rejected by Germany -- to appoint himself leader of a new governing council of the single currency states for 2009. The justification is that the Union is chaired by two non-euro nations this year -- the Czechs and Sweden.
According to le Canard Enchaîné, Sarkozy has persuaded Jose Luis Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, to co-chair the new group with him. Spain takes the EU presidency in January 2010. Sarkozy argues that the euro needs an economic government at a time of upheaval and that the existing "euro-group" of finance ministers does not have the power for the job.
Sarkozy is banking on the support of Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, with whom he has good relations. The pair share a common scorn for the European Commission, which Sarkozy believes he has cut down to size by asserting the power of the council of national leaders.
Despite his boasting, it should be recorded that quite a few of Sarkozy's political foes have admired his energetic tour of European duty. Michel Rocard, a former Socialist Prime Minister, praised his courage today. Europe, said Rocard, had weathered the financial crisis because it had the luck to be chaired by Nicolas Sarkozy, "who is impulsive, courageous and has culot". That last word translates as nerve or chutzpah.
Others have tried to cut Sarko down to size. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, dismissed his Euro-Presidency with a typical sneer. "The half-year of Mr Sarkozy will be forgotten in two weeks time," he predicted. For all his poisonous side, Le Pen is often a sharp observer of the political scene. In this case I think he's wrong. Sarko is going to do his best to make Europe -- and President Obama -- think that he is still in charge of the continent.
 It's been a good Christmas week in Paris, with freezing weather but sunshine every day. Shops and restaurants have been doing roaring trade and just about everywhere is booked up for the New Year's celebrations.
President Sarkozy will be back from his beach holiday in Brazil to deliver his seasonal pep talk on Wednesday night. He aims to look on the bright side -- or positiver, to use the vogue word.
Sarko is said to be telling colleagues that he is worried about the impact of recession on the national mood. He thinks that fast-rising unemployment -- especially among the already very under-employed young -- could trigger one of the uprisings that punctuate French history. "La France n'est pas fragile mais elle est éruptive," Sarko told visitors the other day -- France is not fragile, but it has a tendency to erupt. Fear of protesters explained his retreat a couple of weeks ago over Sunday shop opening and on a promised high-school reform.
As we've often noted here, it's always hard to gauge France's mood because the default mode is pessimism, whatever is going on in the economy. France has believed itself to be en crise for the four decades that I have known it. The news media do not help. Over Christmas the top domestic story was the accidental death in hospital of a three-year-old boy. Close behind was the suicide of a teacher in her school and a sleeping pill overdose by a former minister who was France's first woman astronaut. The need to sound gloomy, at least in public, is just part of the national character. Where else would a performer make a good career with a name like Grand Corps Malade -- literally big sick body? That's the nom de scène used by Fabien Marsaud, a 31-year-old slam music star (picture above). A clinical-sounding word is used to convey the obsession with looking at the dark side -- la sinistrose, or sinistrosis.
There will no doubt be a lot of groans if Sarkozy sounds too up-beat on New Year's Eve. France is not yet officially in recession, but it is entering what is expected to be the worst one since at least 1993, according to the experts. Yet, as we've seen here recently, there are quite a few factors that suggest that the slump will not hit France as hard as other places.
One is France's failure in the past decade to capitalise, like Britain, Spain and elsewhere, on the boom in banking, financial services and real estate. Another is the much-decried and very expensive welfare state.
Elie Cohen, a prominent economist, looked on the bright side in le Parisien on Friday: "As a country with little economic specialisation and average growth, France is drawing benefit from its past failing. Add to that the fact that we have a state that redistributes wealth and which is acting as a formidable shock-absorber. We are rolling quite well with the punches."
Just listening to the middle class chatter in Paris, you hear grumbling but it's clear that people are not hurting as much as they are in Britain, Spain, Ireland, or the USA. The property boom arrived relatively late and France still has a relatively low level of home ownership. People put fewer savings in the stock market and they do not live on credit to anything like the degree of the US or Britain. I don't know anyone who has taken out a second mortgage on their flat or house.
And the French save much more of their income than the European average. In recent years they have been putting aside 15 percent, in third place after the Germans and Italians, at 16.5 and 15.8 percent. The Spanish save only 10.6 percent and the British 5.5 percent.
These are just a few elements and many point the other way -- such as France's high national debt and budget deficit compared with Germany. But Sarkozy will be entitled to sound a positive note on Wednesday.
This could be a picture of any tropical island, but it's one with a terrifying past. l'Ile du Diable -- Devil's Island -- is the loneliest part of the South American penal colony to which France sent convicts for a century.
I took the picture at lunch yesterday on Ile Royale, one of the two other Salvation Islands eight miles off French Guiana. The fish and wine were excellent and the place is beautiful but it was hard to escape the mournful mood of islands where thousands of men laboured, mouldered and, in many cases, died.
We were dining at the neat stone building -- now an inn -- that was the officer's mess on Royale, the island that was used for administering this corner of "the green hell". That's what prisoners called le bagne -- the penal settlements that included Cayenne, the capital, Kourou and points inland. Down the hill was the quay where the commandant greeted new prison boats with the warning that "no-one escapes from the Salvation Islands."
The last convict left only 60 years ago but the solitary confinement cells, guards' houses and acres of force-labour stonework are still there. Rusting bolts and fetters still hang from some walls. Some of the buildings are restored but much of it is overgrown by the vegetation which is home to squirrel monkeys and agoutis, rabbit-sized rodents with orange bottoms.
There is a cemetery where personnel and their families were buried but no inmates' graves because when they died -- of disease, exhaustion or executed on the guillotine -- their corpses were just thrown to the sharks. The fish were alerted by the tolling bell at the little stone chapel, according to Henri Charrière, the prisoner known as Papillon, who wrote a fanciful memoir of his time here in the 1930s and 40s.
As brutal as they were, thanks to books and films, the triangle of little islands known in English collectively as Devil's Island stirs a bit of romance for the "Anglo-Saxon" world. The most recent film was the 1973 Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. It was largely shot on Caribbean islands and was even more fictional than Charrière's highly embroidered tale. Papillon never escaped from the islands in a home-made boat as he claimed. He just walked out of a semi-open jail in Cayenne in the wartime chaos of 1944.
 [cell on Royale]
For the French, le bagne still stirs a chill -- as memories of the cruel British 18th and 19th century deportations still do in parts of Australia. Locals say the French got the idea from the British colony of New South Wales. The most famous of its victims was Alfred Dreyfus. The Jewish army captain who was wrongly convicted of spying for the Germans, spent nearly five years in the late 1890s as the lone prisoner on Devil's island. The smallest island was kept for a handful of celebrated or political offenders. A dozen guards kept a permanent eye on Dreyfus. In a cruel touch, they built a wall around his house so he could not see the sea. The building is in the picture above but now overgrown. In the days of the bagne, the convicts were made to clear all trees, leaving the islands barren. Dreyfus's letters to his family make sad reading in the little museum.
Serge Colin, who guided us around Ile Royale, ran through the horrors of the islands in matter-of-fact way, reeling off statistics on the 75,000 prisoners who were shipped off to the Guiana prisons from 1863 to the late 1940s. No more than 30,000 survived. "Many were just the kind of small-time repeat offenders with whom President Sarkozy is so tough," said Colin.
The islands lie low on the horizon when you set out for them by boat from Kourou. They belong to the French space authority, which fires its satellite launchers from the mainland. We were taken there on a catamaran by our hosts from the Arianespace firm (watch not very great video of our arrival here). A poster at the dock says: Venez vivre vos vacances aux îles du Salut -- come and spend your holidays at the Salvation Islands.
 [Picture: Sailing towards the islands. The boy is a Swiss 12-year-old who won a competition with first prize a trip to watch the Ariane launch.]
A small number of tourists visit and some stay over, camping and at the inn on Royale. US cruise liners put passengers ashore on quick visits. They are usually taken by sea for a look at Devil's Island, which is closed to all visitors. It's hard to imagine such a haunted place ever becoming a holiday resort.
[Below: At the island, members of the Paris fire brigade who are stationed on the space range. Not exactly hard labour]
[Update: here's my related story on Ariane launch Saturday night]
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It's difficult to avoid describing the scene this morning without thinking of clichés from James Bond films. The sun was beating down on the equatorial jungle when we emerged by the Atlantic Ocean and came across a new Russian space base. Towers and cranes loomed over a launch-pad for Soyuz rockets, exactly the type that took the first Soviet cosmonauts into space all those decades ago.
And adding to the atmosphere, the Russians were labouring away a few miles from the dreaded Devil's island and the rest of the pestilential penal colony off Guiana where, for a century, France sent its prisoners to be broken.
But this wasn't the cold war or the secret lair of SPECTRE. The Russians are the latest addition to an extraordinary European success story. The 100-strong team of engineers from the Baikonur space base in Central Asia are here to build and operate their rockets to reinforce the French-run outfit that has become the world's leading launcher of commercial satellites.
Sometimes it's healthy to get a little perspective away from Paris. I'm 4,500 miles away but still in France, at least technically. I am in French Guiana, on the northeast side of Brazil, to watch the latest launch of an Ariane 5 [Picture above and launch below]. This is the 20-storey tall rocket which deposits bus-sized satellites in stationary orbit half a dozen times a year (That's Ariane waiting for launch in the picture). The project, which France began in the mid-1970s, has benefited from persistence, skill and good luck to overtake the Americans and Russians in the business of commercial space launching. Now, 185 flights since the first small Ariane, they have bought Russian service. A dozen Soyuz rockets -- smaller than the French heavy lifter -- will hoist television, internet and communications satellites into orbit from the French base.
This is all done from a site of a few dozen square miles carved out of the jungle swamps at Kourou, north of Cayenne, the Guiana capital.
Continue reading "Reaching for space from French jungle" »
What words do the French find the most reassuring in this winter of economic doom? It's not Sarkozy, Santa Claus or Social Security. It's Barack Obama.
This comes from a survey on the language of crisis performed by the Médiascopie institute at the request of Euro RSCG, the advertising firm. And before any Americans get too smug, the word that most frightens the French is Bush.
Bernard Sananes the head of Euro RSCG, C&O division, said he had the idea of sounding out the impact of words after realising that the financial and economic slide did not have a human face. Médiascopie drew up a list of 100 expressions and names that have been used most frequently with reference to the crisis in the media, including the internet. They asked a sample of 200 people to rate the words on two scales: worrying/reassuring and local/global.
The incoming US President scored highest in reassuring and global. That shows the expectations awaiting Obama. I would guess that the French response represents general European feeling. George Bush scored top in worrying and global, reflecting the irrevocable demonisation that he underwent with the Iraq invasion of 2003 and its aftermath. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's own leader, came only mid-way on the worry/reassurance axis.
As might be expected in France, the state is deemed very reassuring but what is surprising is the return to favour of Europe. For about 15 years, the Union has been a scapegoat, taking the blame for everything that is wrong, including rampant capitalism. Sarkozy is being given credit for the reversal with his energetic conduct of his six month turn in in the EU Presidency. The single currency, long seen as negative, gets credit for holding up so well while the pound and the dollar have gone south. "The crisis has brought the French closer to the euro and Europe as well as to Nicolas Sarkozy," said Sananes. The winners are....
The most worrying:
Bush
job redundancy
market crash
madness of the financial world
financial tsunami
subprimes,
traders,
virus of crisis,
golden parachutes
toxic products,
contamination
The most reassuring:
Obama
Europe
the euro
livret A (state-regulated standard savings account)
moralisation of the economy
transparent transactions
protection
state intervention
stimulus plan
European Central Bank
The most global:
World governance
new world financial order (a goal of Sarkozy)
International Monetary Fund
Closest to home:
Livret A
French savings
Nicolas Sarkozy
state guarantee
the real economy
rigour (which corresponds to austerity in English)
nationalisation
President Sarkozy is chairing his last summit as temporary boss of the European Union today. The story in France is Sarko's struggle to get a reluctant Germany to spend more on relaunching the EU economy and to overcome German and Polish resistance to an ambitious climate control pact.
Whatever the outcome in Brussels, Sarkozy is basking in French praise for his skillful handling of the country's storm-racked six months in the EU presidency. Super Sarko has had such a 'good crisis' that he hopes to reign on as Europe's de facto leader after the lowly, and Eurosceptic, Czech Republic takes over on January 1.
France will have an advantage next year because because Germany will be focused on elections and Britain will be mired in a more painful recession than the countries of the eurozone, the Elysée Palace believes. The Elysée also thinks that Britain will soon abandon its qualms and join the euro to save itself from the collapse of the pound.
The hyper-active President is convinced that he has galvanised Europe and given it new power in the world with deft management of the financial crash and the other emergencies, such as the Russia-Georgia war in August. Close partnership with Britain's Gordon Brown is part of the new European power balance, says Sarkozy.
The President, who does not claim modesty among his qualities, is telling colleagues that he has restored a sense of political purpose to the moribund Union. He has also cut down to size the Brussels Commission -- the supranational executive bureaucracy. Power is back where it should be, in the hands of the elected governments who run the member states -- and especially the big ones, he says.
Sarkozy's team have been talking up their boss at the official end of his term as President of Europe, as he like to call it. "Europe will never be the same again," Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Sarkozy's Minister for Europe, told Libération. "There will be the before Sarkozy and the after Sarkozy." Jouyet, a respected Europe expert, has just resigned. He told me that he was exhausted with the never-ending crisis management that engulfed the French turn in the chair.
Continue reading "France hails Sarkozy, European saviour -- Germany doesn't" »
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 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.
We heard a little drama on France Inter's breakfast radio this morning. Mikhail Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, was making a passionate case against Russia when they read out to him the following exchange between Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Sarkozy.
The scene was the Kremlin on August 12, when Sarkozy flew in to persuade Moscow to call off its invasion of Georgia.
Putin: "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls."
Sarkozy: "Hang him?"
Putin: "Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein."
Sarkozy "Yes but do you want to end up like Bush?"
Putin, after a long pause: "Ah, you have scored a point there."
Saakashvili laughed nervously when he heard this today. "I knew about this scene, but not all the details. It's funny, all the same," he said. He went on to argue that Europe had capitulated to Russia over Georgia in the same way that it had surrendered to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 when it let Germany occupy Czechoslovakia. That's how Saakashvili talks. He is seeing Sarko at the Elysée today and tomorrow President Medvedev is meeting him in Nice for a Russian-European summit.
The Kremlin conversation was recounted by Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy's chief of diplomacy, to le Nouvel Observateur magazine which printed it today. Last August, I was down the corridor in the Kremlin with other reporters during the Sarkozy-Putin chat. Sarko was tense and shaky when he came out, announcing the deal to stop the war. The price was letting Russia keep the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Assuming that it's accurate, the exchange tells you a few things. It confirms that Russia aimed to to depose the hot-headed Georgian president. It confirms that Putin, the Prime Minister, was calling the shots, not President Medvedev. It also shows how Sarko has ingratiated himself with the Russians. Using the familiar "tu" with Putin, Sarko allowed himself a cheap shot against President Bush.
Levitte recounted the conversation presumably to make Sarkozy look good and bolster the claim that he really did save Goergia. It also underlines the striking U-turn performed by Sarkozy since he ran for election last year promising to get tough with Moscow over human rights.
Sarkozy said in the campaign that he preferred "to shake the hand of Bush than Putin" and promised to end the cosy ties that President Chirac had enjoyed with the Kremlin. Yet as soon as he was elected, he rushed off to cultivate first-name friendship with Putin. Levitte and Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, are close to their Russian counterparts. Sarkozy and his advisers say that the goal is to engage the Kremlin and treat Moscow with the respect which it is due as an old power. Paris wants to be Moscow's advocate in Europe.
Putin has not reciprocated the chumminess, but Moscow is pleased by the way that Sarkozy is pushing the European Union back to normal relations after the Georgian chill. "I want to pay tribute to President Sarkozy's efforts to reinforce relations between the EU and Russia in all areas," Medvedev told le Figaro today.
Sarko has turned a deaf ear to warnings from old hands about the way that Russia operates. He was briefed by Vladimir Bukovski, one of the leading dissidents of the Soviet era. Bukovski, a veteran of the Soviet era labour camp, told the Nouvel Observateur that he warned Sarkozy about the former KGB clan that runs the Kremlin.
"For an hour, I told him that it was dangerous to play matey-matey with those people and that there was nothing to gain from it except their contempt and that he risked being taken for a ride.... It did not serve any purpose."
Sarkozy has been defending himself today, attacking Bush for weakness over the Georgian conflict. Bush telephoned him and urged him not to go to Moscow to try to stop the Russians, he said. "Don't go," Bush told him. "The Russians want to go to Tbilisi. They are 40 kilometres away. Don't go. Just condemn them."
Sarkozy insisted that he had done more for human rights by persuading the Russians to stop their advance than Bush who stayed in Washington and did nothing. Sarko was speaking after receiving an annual prize for "political courage", awarded by France's Politique Internationale review.
(below:Saakashvili)
 [update: Sarkozy ceremony story here]
The Prince of Wales is dining with President Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace tonight ahead of tomorrow's 90th anniversary of Armistice Day. We are taking a train in the early morning to watch them mark the event at Verdun, site of one of the most terrible battles, along with Peter Müller, President of the German upper house. Sarkozy is breaking with tradition by visiting the battlefield rather than just presiding over the ceremony at the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe [Picture above updated after Tuesday ceremony]
Nine decades on from 1918, older people have been voicing surprise at the lack of concern among the young for la der des ders -- the war to end all wars. A large village in Brittany could not raise enough young volunteers to represent symbolically the 699 dead whose names are inscribed on the local memorial. Nothing brings home the butchery of the Great War than those sad lists on the monuments aux morts in the villages and towns across France.
The last French poilu -- Great War soldier -- died last February. There are two surviving veterans in Britain. As Sarkozy has said, the war is passing from memory into history. My 17-year-old son asked over breakfast what was the point of the ceremonies, since it was was a long time ago and those who took part are nearly all gone. It was hard not to express surprise at the question because the Great War was so much part of our lives, even though we were born after the Second World War. My grandfather drove a tank on the western front with the Seaforth Highlanders and survived. His brother James was killed at Ypres. We grew up knowing survivors. They didn't talk much about it but we were aware of the horror of the shells, machine-guns and gas.
Like all French lycée pupils, my son has studied the la Grande Guerre. My 15-year-old daughter reels off the basic facts. In France, as in Britain, there has been a literary fascination over the past two decades for the war. But it is understandable that the emotion has faded.
Britain tries to keep the memory alive, mainly with the ritual of wearing Flanders poppies. In France, November 11 is a public holiday and every town and village has its wreath-laying. Most people are just happy to have the day off and do some early Christmas shopping, le Monde noted today. "Very few people could tell you exactly what happened on that marvellous November 11," it said. "The majority celebrate the beauty of autumn, the pleasure of going to the cinema and lying in late...". Le Monde's commentator concluded that even if people knew little about it, the war was inescapable. It had left an indelible mark on the collective conscience of France. He used a quoted from William Faulkner that Barack Obama cited during his campaign: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
There is a little row going on today because a government-appointed expert has concluded that France has too many memorial days, including an excessive number covering World War Two. André Kaspy, an historian, recommended down-grading annual days commemorating such things as the world war two deportations, the abolition of slavery, the dead of the Algerian war and six other historic events. He wants to keep as national events just November 11, May 8 -- the Victory over Nazi Germany -- and the July 14 celebration of the 1789 revolution.
Downgrading the days linked with past shame -- slavery, deportation and Algeria and so on -- is in keeping with Sarkozy's belief that France repents too much for past sins. But Sarkozy is also enthusiastic about keeping wartime memory alive.
Kaspy's proposal has prompted anger from those involved in the lesser commemorations and the Government appears to be ready to back down. It has also abandoned a reported plan to end the national holiday on May 8 and turn it into a simple Europe day. That is not such a revolutionary idea since General de Gaulle got rid of the VE day holiday in 1959 in the name of reconciliation with Germany. President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing revived it in 1975 -- at about the time that France was beginning to examine its record under the occupation.
In Sarcelles, a northern suburb, I walked through a crowd of black children yesterday who were arguing about which of them was "le plus Obama" -- the most like Obama.
As it has done all over Europe, the election of a US president called Barack Hussein has given a lift to minorities who feel marooned outside the mainstream.
This weekend, the imminent arrival in the White House of someone with an African Muslim name has prompted a new campaign for racial integration, supported by Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy's wife.
Yazid Zabeg, an Algerian-born millionaire and the JDD Sunday newspaper have produced a "manifesto for real equality". Under the Obama slogan "Oui, nous pouvons" (Yes we can), the manifesto points to the "cruel contrast" between France's racially divided society and the lesson of inclusion that came from the United States. Bruni says in the JDD that she loves multi-ethnic France and that it is time to "help the elite to change".
This is a touchy subject because of France's policy of assimilating immigrants into the mainstream society of la République without much tolerance for other ethnic and religous communities.
The Obama election is in tune with a new assertiveness among non-white French over the matter of their names. Increasingly, young descendants of immigrants are seeking to drop their Christian names and claim new ones -- and identities -- from their Arab and African backgrounds.
The trend in which Louis, Laurent or Marie want to become Abdel, Said or Rachida has made the media recently, so, along with Marie Tourres, our Paris reporter, I looked into it. We found that the requests from immigrants' children for name changes are mounting in the law-courts and worrying a state that lays store on melding a single national culture. Most of the applications are coming from people with families from Algeria, Tunisia and Moroco, the three former Maghreb colonies.
Continue reading "The Obama effect and why François becomes Mohammed" »
It's been a while since France went so crazy over the United States. Decades at least and perhaps not since John Kennedy's days in the early 1960s.
The pleasure and admiration today over the election of Barack Obama is genuine. It's coming from all sides -- not just the editorialists, politicians and philosophers who have been spouting in the media.
President Sarkozy was so enthused that he dashed off an effusive note at 5am Paris time, about an hour after the result appeared. However, he didn't get the name right and scribbled "Cher Barak".
The man at the newspaper kiosk congratulated me with a broad smile. He knows I'm not American but Anglo-Saxon is close enough. Like quite a few people, he had stayed up very late watching the results.
The picture above gives a flavour. It's from Rue89, a popular leftwing news site. The headline reads: This time the world says thank you to America. Le Monde, also on the left, was breathless about Obama's campaign. "What intelligence, what mastery, what sang-froid..." it said this afternoon.
Or take the response of Jack Lang, a senior Socialist and long-serving culture minister under the late President Mitterrand: "The America that we love is back. This election will have the effect of an electric shock and will bring about a spiritual revolution."
The goodwill is just as strong from Sarkozy's centre-right party. "The Americans have voted for the American dream," gushed Patrick Devedjian, a Sarkozy friend and leader of the president's UMP party.
As well as sending high-speed congratulations, Sarkozy is talking to Obama by phone tonight. Super Sarko is losing no time in seizing glory from Obama's victory, to the point of suggesting that the Democrat copied him. "America last night made the choice of la rupture", the President told the weekly Cabinet meeting today. La rupture -- a clean break or fresh start -- was the formula that won Sarko the presidency in the spring of 2007.
Sarkozy is pointing out to everyone that he spotted Obama early on, holding talks with him in Washington in 2006 when he was Interior Minister. Sarko's people say that Obama's team sought tips from them -- as John McCain's did too -- after his blitzkrieg election campaign last year. In Paris last July (picture below), Obama joked that he asked France's hyper-president what he was on. "He's constantly in motion -- but that's the way to be," said the Senator.
Obama has been tickled by the French passion for his candidacy. "It's strange that I am so popular in France," he told a group of tourists in Florida on Monday. "I hear that you have problems in the banlieues (ethnic estates) and that the blacks are demonstrating. yet I hear that all the French, even the whites, would vote for me" (Today's Canard Enchaîné reported the exchange).
Obama then joked about the way that McCain was accusing him of being that most un-American animal, a socialist. "You have socialists in France. Tell me, is it a serious disease?" he asked.
The euphoria, which is partly driven by the imminent farewell to George W Bush, will soon subside. Some commentators are trying to calm the near hysteria, reminding France that Obama is still an American, not a Frenchman, and that there will be inevitable disappointment. But rekindled love affair with les Etats Unis is enjoyable while it lasts. 
Thursday update: As French Obamania rages on, we learned today that the President-elect is part French and a descendant of royalty, no less. Le Parisien reports that one of his ancestors was Marin Duval, a protestant who fled to Maryland from Nantes during the religious persecution of the 17th century. Another was the 14th century King Jean le Bon.
Listening to the crackly radio in the Cévennes hills this morning, I heard President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela congratulating Nicolas Sarkozy on his enlightened leadership.
It seems that Sarkozy's recent self-appointment as the strongman of a new protective Europe has won the approval of the Latin American populist. You can see why.
The financial mess of the past month has opened a boulevard for the French president to do what he believes he does best: rushing into the breach to take charge. In so doing, he has cast himself as the scourge of international capitalism.
It has been a good autumn for Super Sarko. Before the banking drama, he had already ridden to the rescue to halt the Russian advance on Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, last August. Then he got his chance to use France's six-month turn in the presidency of the European Union to rescue the continental economy.
After a shaky start, he persuaded the reluctant Germans to sign up to his co-ordinated bail-out of the euro-zone. Britain's Gordon Brown was the first to come up with the idea of injecting capital to prop up the banks, but Sarko claimed the glory for the pan-European plan which was endorsed in Brussels under his chairmanship.
Sarkozy then went on the warpath, attacking the greed of a banking and business world that had brought the global economy to its knees. He went to America as Mr Europe and made the case for a new Bretton Woods conference that would do no less than "refound capitalism" and create a new international order. President Bush was not in such a rush, but eventually agreed to call a G20 world summit next month to start drawing lessons from the crisis.
Sarko's latest act has been to propose that Europe set up sovereign funds to protect its industry from foreign predators -- presumably Americans, Russians, Asians and Arabs. To set an example, Sarkozy has created a multi-billion euro strategic investment fund that will mount an aggressive defence of national assets. "I will not be the French president who wakes up in six months' time to find that French industrial groups have passed into others' hands," he said.
Sarko has in effect reverted to old French custom of strong intervention by the state. Its rulers, from King Louis XIV through to the post-war Republic of Charles de Gaulle, practised the tradition that l'état knows best. Some of the time, they have been right. The USA and Britain have taken this road in the crisis, intervening to save collapsing markets, so it is no surprise that France is reverting to form with a vengeance. Sarko has been adding a redistributive, leftwing flavour to his rhetoric of volontarisme, or forcing initiatives into action by will power. This has the effect of cutting the grass under the feet of the hapless Socialist party, the main opposition, which is paralysed by a battle for leadership.
The President is reported by visitors to be delighted with his crisis. "Imagine if I wasn't in the European chair and the union was being led by someone else," he is telling people. From there it has been only a short step to offering his services on a more permanent basis than the rotating presidency. His team has come up with the answer. Sarko, they say, should stay in charge of the euro-zone, the 16 countries that will be sharing the currency when the Czech Republic takes its turn in the presidency on December 31. He could keep the job till at least January 2010. In this way, he could create the "economic government" that France has long demanded. "In stormy times, the Union needs a strong hand at the helm," say his entourage. They invite us to imagine Czech leaders going on behalf of Europe to sort out the world head to head with the new US President, the Russians and Chinese.
There is of course a snag. No other state of importance likes the idea. The Germans are amused by the presumption of the "Napoleon of Neuilly", as some of their commentators call Sarko, referring to his base in the posh western suburb. Chancellor Angela Merkel is weakened by the start of an election campaign against the other half of her coalition but she is saying that she has had enough of Sarkozy taking himself for Europe's natural leader. There is no prize for guessing the British reaction to the idea of Sarko as a sort of permanent European chief, even if the UK is not in the euro zone.
In reality the crisis has exposed some of the weakness of the Union rather than its ability to pull together in crisis. The rescue has been run by national governments, not by the Union's supranational institutions -- the executive Commission, the court and parliament. Germany, the biggest power, has been especially reluctant to get involved on any cross-border salvage. Sarkozy's initiatives look more like good old French-style protectionism than an insurance policy for the union. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi has seized the moment to promote state capitalism of the old kind. The same sort of reflex seems to be happening everywhere, and not just in Europe.
Sarkozy is perfectly aware that his volontarisme -- a polite way of saying cheek and bullying -- irritates his fellow leaders, but he is using a method that has often worked for him at home. You wear down opposition by sheer force of will. You may not get your way completely but you can carry the day.
We shall see how long Sarkozy can keep up his momentum. We will get an idea no doubt when the American-chaired review of world financial regulation gets into its stride under, presumably, President Obama. Sarkozy's emotional, in-your-face style may not be ideally suited to the more cool and cerebral former Senator.
The United States has been forced to recognize that Europe's mix of state and market is not so out-of-date as it thought. Keynes is back and American leadership of the world is more in doubt than it has been at any time since the 1940s. Sarkozy believes that with les Anglo-Saxons discredited, it's time for the old continent to seize the moment and he wants to be the one in front. The next year will be interesting.
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PS: I'm taking a few days off in the southern hills. Posting this means dodging the wild boar hunters to get within telephone coverage. Normal service resumes next week, but please keep up the flow.
"Quel con" translates into polite English as 'what a fool'. That's the expression that many in France are applying to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the talented and popular Socialist who has made his mark lately in Washington as boss of the International Monetary Fund.
Strauss-Kahn, 59, as you will probably know, is in trouble over a one-night fling that he enjoyed with a married subordinate last January at the Davos international forum in Switzerland. It seems pretty likely that "DSK" , who is married, will be cleared later this month of allegations that he abused his authority when he seduced Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born banking expert who worked in the IMF Africa department.
When he heard of the matter a few weeks ago, Sarkozy was furious that DSK, one of the most admired French politicians and a likely Socialist candidate for the next presidency, had risked his chance to restart his career and help France. But the Elysée Palace had been hoping that no news would break until Strauss-Kahn had been cleared by the Washington DC legal firm which was brought in last August to investigate.
DSK is a likeable man with a reputation for enjoying the company of women (the flattering picture above was used when he was trying to win the Socialist presidential nomination last year). One newspaper today called him un grand séducteur. Last year, a Libération journalist caused a fuss by wondering on his blog how long it would take for Strauss-Kahn's wandering eye to land him in trouble in Washington.
We got the answer last spring when Mario Blejer, a senior Argentine economist who is Nagy's husband, began campaigning to have him investigated for abusing his power. We were tipped off along with other journalists in Paris. Mr Blejer discovered the episode via the classic route of stumbling on an incriminating e-mail. His wife confessed and the couple were both very upset and blamed Strauss-Kahn for pursuing her aggressively, IMF colleagues said at the time.
The investigation was made public by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday with timing that could hardly have been worse for Sarkozy's attempts to put a French stamp on a new world financial order. Sarko has teamed up with DSK in an attempt to shape a new "Bretton Woods" pact on financial regulation. Sarkozy put the French-led European case to President Bush at Camp David, Maryland, yesterday, and got a frosty reception.
So you can guess the response from some sections of the French political and media world: The IMF affair is another absurd case of American hysteria over sex, like the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. DSK's private life is nobody's business and he has obviously been stitched up in a plot to undermine France. That charge was laid, for example, by Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of Sarko's UMP party.
But the view is by no means universal. Even allies of DSK are privately calling him idiotic for letting his taste for dalliance get the better of his judgment.
In a well-informed piece today, Claude Askolovitch, Editor of Le Journal du Dimanche, wrote that "Dominique le Magnifique" had caused a French farce by breaking well-understood rules.
"The affair may well be ridiculous compared with the destiny of the world but it touches the heart of the culture of the American government and the IMF," he said. "It is less about sexual puritanism.. than a deep horror of lies and conflict of interest. The absolute sin is not fornication, but denial, in which private life is mixed with public behaviour."
His newspaper carried its usual Washington political column by Anne Sinclair, DSK's glamorous wife, a celebrity television journalist. Sinclair, who is a tough cookie, is publicly standing by her man. She has written on her blog today that she has forgiven "cette aventure d'une nuit" -- this one-night adventure. "We love each other just as much as at our beginning," she said.
For the record, Nagy left Washington in the summer and now works in London at the Bank for Economic Reconstruction and Development (BERD). Strauss-Kahn has confirmed the "incident in my private life in January 2008" and denies that he abused his position as managing director of the fund. The BERD said that there was nothing irregular about Ms Nagy's recruitment and it is not investigating.
People who have talked to DSK say that he is confident that the affair will blow oved once the investigation has cleared him. If that is the case it will not have any impact on his chances of running as the Socialist candidate in the 2012 president election. At lunch today the (French) majority around my table argued that affairs at work are nobody's business if coercion is not involved. A woman who has une aventure with her boss should take responsibility and not seek to have him punished and pilloried, it was said. And before people pile in here, we all know the counter argument to this.
Strauss-Kahn, incidentally, ranked in a poll yesterday as France's second most political figure, behind Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist Mayor of Paris.
With capitalism near the rocks -- at least in a widespread French view -- it seemed a good time to check in with France's leading advocate of old-style revolution.
Olivier Besancenot, the popular young Trotskyite and former presidential candidate, has been in the news this week, not just because many are looking to his anti-capitalist movement for salvation. He has also been the victim of a bizarre plot.
Besancenot kindly received me along with a colleague at his little office, on the first floor in the printing works of the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR) at Montreuil, the borough that adjoins Paris on the east. Fittingly, the nearest Métro stop is Robespierre, named after the leader of the revolutionary Terror of the early 1790s.
Besancenot, a part time postman in the posh western suburb of Neuilly, is only 34. In other lands, he would be dismissed as an oddity. In France, with its historic love of insurrection, he is a star. He and his fans believe that his time has come.
"We are at the end of a cycle. We are at a major turning point in the course of the world economy," Besancenot said as he surveyed the "crisis of capitalism" that was forecast all those years ago by Karl Marx and his successors.
In black sweater and jeans, the baby-faced Besancenot looks more like Tintin, the boy reporter, than political heavyweight. But his mix of eloquence and cheek have turned the "the red postman" into a serious player, a leftwing populist who needles the established parties from factory floors and tv chat shows. He won 1.6 million votes as the LCR candidate in last year's presidential election; he enjoys a 56 percent approval rating -- well ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy. An August survey ranked him second most effective opponent of the President -- after Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist Mayor of Paris. On Thursday, Le Monde gave him half a page to pronounce on the crisis. "The system is ending by drowning in its own blood," he said.
With the wind in his sails, the timing could not be better for Besancenot to launch his New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). He has been anointed as leader by most factions of the far left, except the fading Communist Party. Support is flowing in from the young, green activists, anti-globalisation types and from traditional leftists who are turned off by the Socialists' embrace of the free market and attracted by the romance of revolt. "If the Socialists have completely discredited themselves, it's not my fault. Holding power drove them crazy, made them giddy," he said.
But this week we glimpsed the darker of young Olivier when a judge revoked the parole of a leader of Action Directe, a 1980s revolutionary group, who was serving life for murder. Rouillan broke the terms of his release by publicly backing Besancenot and giving an interview in which he refused to voice remorse for the 1986 killing of the chairman of the Renault company. Besancenot has refused to disown Rouillan.
He has also hit the headlines after the head of the French distributers of Taser stun guns and six private detectives, police officers and a customs official were arrested and charged with spying on him and his family. They targeted him apparently to smear or blackmail him after he campaigned against the use of Tasers by French police.
The Socialists -- and the old trade unions -- dismiss Besancenot as a trouble-maker who has no plans for governing. He is seen as useful to Sarkozy because his cause undermines the mainstream opposition just as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader, was long the bane of the Gaullist movement. Many commentators also see Besancenot as a charismatic magnet for discontent with little prospect of power, like Le Pen.
Besancenot's new party may be aiming for the barricades, but it is starting humble with candidates for the European Parliament in next June's elections. "We are proposing a change of software," said Besancenot, who took his proletarian job after earning a history degree at Nanterre university, Sarko's alma mater.
The world has only known capitalism and the bureaucratic communism founded by the Soviet Union, he said. "The only model that has not been tried is the one where the majority decides for itself." One of Mr Besancenot's ideas -- nationalising the banks -- no longer seems as extreme as it did a month ago. He is trying to link his party with anti-capitalist movements across Europe, including Britain's Respect coalition, in which his frend Ken Loach, the film director, is involved. [watch video of Loach endorsing Besancenot]
Besancenot is a fan of Che Guevara and other Latin American revolutionaries but his ideal, he says, is the Paris Commune of 1871. That brief exercise in people power ended with thousands dead, mainly at the hands of government troops who retook the city.
The young militant talks an ambiguous line on violence of the kind that has accompanied France's periodic upheavals since 1789. "For us, revolution is not terrorism," he said. "It is a majority of the population breaking onto the public stage to change society. It is counter revolution that is violent".
Besancenot softens such talk with jokes and assurances that his internet-age revolution will welcome a free press and multi-party democracy -- provided of course that they do not conflict with the will of the people.
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[Watch video of Besancenot in talk show action against class enemy Charles Beigbeder, businessman and capitalist champion]
Various barometers can be used to track the world's economic mood, from hamburger consumption (up when times are hard) to women's hemlines (down). Champagne sales must be one of the more reliable indicators, so it's no surprise that the producers of France's most famous fizzy wine have just reported their first downturn this century.
The big story is the United States, where sales are expected to slump by over 30 percent in volume this year. The slide began in March 2007, several months before the sub-primes crisis erupted. Britain, which went champaigne crazy in the boom years, is buying four percent less. Cognac is also suffering in the Americas, where it became fashionable in recent years. Sales in North America dropped seven percent over the past year.
The global champagne boom has been a constant story from Paris for eight years as demand exploded in Britain, the USA and more recently Russia and China. Sales had risen steadily since 1999. Up in the Champagne region, they are not panicking since the overall volume fall is expected to reach only three percent this year and exports will slide only about one percent thanks to demand from the east. Rich Russians are still loading up on the very high-end brands such as Cristal and sales to China are expected to rise by about 15 percent this year after 30 percent in 2007.
At Moet & Chandon, they say that that they have weathered war and revolutions, so they are not worried about a slide. Benoît Gouez, chief vintner at Moet, came up with a dubious argument for continued consumption. "It's probably when times are hard that people really like or need to dream more and luxury products are never more necessary as in the tough periods." he told the Associated Press.
Have a look at the video below. If you love birds, flying or mountains, it's impossible not to be moved.
It's a report from France 2 television on a flight last Friday by Sherkan, an American bald eagle from the summit of Mont Blanc, Europe's higest mountain. The eagle, which has a two-metre (6'6") wingspan, flew with Jacques-Olivier Travers, a professional falconer. He specialises in teaching flight to big birds born in captivity.
Travers, who runs the Eagles of Leman park on Lake Geneva had been training Sherkan, a 14-year-old bird born in Germany, the art of aviation for the past 18 months. When he was ready, he took him by helicopter along with paraglider pilots to the top of the mountain, which is at 4,800 metres (15,800 feet) altitude. The result was this film, shot partly from the escorting paragliders, of Sherkan making the 40-minute flight down to the Chamonix valley over 12,000 feel below. The thin air at altitude meant that the bird tired quickly and came back to his instructor mid-air to rest. He enjoyed himself more in the lower air, Travers says on the video. [Thanks, Dot King, for posting the link yesterday]
Jacques-Olivier Travers
France and much of Europe is saluting Nicolas Sarkozy today. Gordon Brown, the unloved British Prime Minister, is also winning praise.
Even François Hollande, the Socialist opposition leader, paid the French hyper-president compliments today on the energy with which he orchestrated last night's co-ordinated bail-out by the 15 states of the euro currency zone.
We hung around until after nine pm at the Elysée palace as Sarko, Angela Merkel of Germany and the rest of the euroland bosses settled the details of their package. So far, the decision to inject billions into their banks and guarantee their lending, has had the desired effect. The stock markets have bounced back from their Friday slump. This afternoon, Sarkozy, Merkel and the others are to announce at the same moment the numbers of euros that they will pump into the system.
It's of course too early to declare success, but we can note a few things about a novel situation. First, it would be uncharitable not to give Sarkozy credit for the way that he has banged heads together -- albeit a week after his first attempt -- as the current chairman of the European Union. Sarkozy is often criticised for making splashy announcements and failing to follow through, but this time, he seems to have managed. This was an example of le volontarisme -- getting hard things done by sheer force of will, a skill in which Sarko prides himself.
At the cost of bad feeling between them, Sarkozy brought Merkel into a joint operation which she had refused only a week earlier on the grounds that each EU state should clean up its own mess. The Chancellor had been extremely reluctant to offer a blanket guarantee to all banks. For their part, the Germans did their own bit of arm-twisting, persuading the reluctant French to go along with the British idea of guaranteeing loans between banks.
Another novelty was the reversal of roles. We are in strange times when a British Prime Minister comes to Paris to counsel the single currency bloc on the merits of nationalising banks and intervening in the markets. Brown's UK rescue plan served as the model for the euro-zone action. The former British finance minister, politically discredited at home, has emerged in European eyes as something of an inspiration in troubled times.
Paris and its supporters are noting another silver lining from the black cloud that has descended on global markets. This is the ability of the European nations to act in political concert in the interests of the single currency. The French right and the left have long complained that the euro, launched in 1999 under the control of a federal central bank, needed to have political steering. Germany was opposed. Thanks to the crisis, the eurozone states have joined in their first act of "political government" -- at least according to optimistic French politicians today. The argument may not comfort Germans who are worried by the way that Sarkozy has flouted the debt rules that underpin the currency.
The European leaders feel a certain pride in operating independently of the United States, which has been the moving force in just about all crisis management of the global economy since 1945. It has not gone un-noticed that, in Washington, the International Monetary Fund is asserting itself with a voice of its own, in the shape of its boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French Socialist whose appointment Sarkozy secured last year.
While the dust may not even have begun to settle, it's worth noting that Sarkozy's domestic approval rating is holding up. A Viavoice survey in today's Libération reports that 53 percent of those polled approve of the way that he is handling the crisis, compared with 32 percent against. Only 40 percent approve of his presidency though. Of comfort to Sarko, the poll found that only 21 percent believe that the Socialists would do better than Sarko if they were in power.
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.
This might be an exercise in what the French call "shooting at the ambulance", or kicking someone when they are down. But here's a look at the French reaction to Sarah Palin.
Like the Gallic adoration of Barack Obama, the French view of John McCain's vice-presidential choice has been simplified by the cultural filter. The personnage of Palin and the initial enthusiasm she generated were puzzling for a country that disdains displays of faith and moral certainty. Her convention joke about hockey moms being pitbulls with lipstick took a lot of explanation.
In le Monde, the elegant Dominique Dhombres explained that Palin was an elemental type from l'Amérique profonde. "She is a go-getter, almost an assault tank. A virago ? That's for you to decide... She believes in God, America, the family and firearms. She defines herself as 'une maman hockey'."
On France-Inter, the main state-run radio station, a commentator this morning described Palin as une sacrée bigote -- a really sanctimonious woman (literally 'a holy bigot', though the words are softer in French).
French feminists have had the biggest trouble with Palin. They have come round to the conclusion that she is a dangerous agent of anti-feminism. "The exhibition of this fundamentalist version of femininity and maternity in the American presidential election concerns all of us," wrote Julia Kristeva in Libération. "Whether she represents the banality of evil or tragic caricature, can this strangling of women's emancipation... be reversed?"
Elle, the thinking Parisienne's fashion weekly, denounced Palin on Monday as "the incarnation of a new femininism, as dangerous as the 'Islamic feminism', which has recently been invented by the Muslim fundamentalists." Marie-Françoise Colombani, Elle's editorial columnist, concluded that Palin was proof that the "worst enemy of woman is often a woman."
Palin's self-undoing with her inept interviews has been greeted with relief and a little gloating. Headlines today called her "Sarah la gaffeuse" and McCain's Achilles Heel. Libération had fun filling a page with her confused answers to questions from Katie Couric and others. Her words about Vladimir Putin "raising his head" and flying over Alaska and her incoherent views on the Wall Street bail-out have been prompting widespread mirth.
Below, from today's le Nouvel Observateur, McCain says: "There's only one solution left." Palin replies: "Bomb Wall Street".
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's ambassador in Kabul, has a reputation for holding strong opinions and making them heard. He may not, however, have wanted his views on the state of the allied effort in Afghanistan to be published in a French newspaper.
This nightmare for any diplomat appears to have happened today. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly that often publishes embarrassing leaks, has printed extracts from a cable from the French deputy ambassador after a meeting with Sir Sherard.
The French Foreign Ministry tells us that it deplores the publication but does not deny the existence of the cable. According to François Fitou, the French deputy ambassador to Kabul, Cowper-Coles, 53, thinks that the war is lost and the allies should leave the country to a dictator. That is hardly the view of the British government -- or of President Sarkozy.
The French Socialist opposition holds about the same dim view on the Afghan campaign, in which France has some 3,000 troops. French military officers have been arguing the same points privately.
In his cable to President Sarkozy's office and Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, Fitou summarised Sir Sherard's thinking thus, according to le Canard.
The British ambassador and his deputy have in turn contacted me to pass on their analysis of the situation before the Franco-British meeting on Afghanistan. These were their main points:
-- The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.
-- The presence -- especially the military presence -- of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic.
Ambassador Cowper was also quoted as telling the French the following:
The reinforcement of the military presence would have a perverse effect: it would identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and it would multiply the number of targets (for the insurgents).
We have no alternative to supporting the United States in Afghanistan... but we should tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.
"Within five or ten years from now... (it would be positive) if Afghanistan were governed by an acceptable dictator... This outlook is the only realistic one and we should prepare our public opinion to accept it... In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan.... The American strategy is destined to fail.
Since posting this, we have heard from British sources that the meeting with Fitou took place but that the ambassador's quoted remarks represented a "parody" of what he said. Our sources take particular exception to the line about installing a dictator, which the ambassador never uttered, they say.
How do you run a military campaign in the age of cell phones, the internet and media emotion ? The difficulty of doing so is being illustrated in France as the Parliament votes today on the continuing deployment of French forces in Afghanistan.
There is little doubt that President Sarkozy will win the endorsement but the government is embarrassed by the anger that has followed the deaths of 10 soldiers in a Taleban ambush
France heard immediately that the August 18 battle at Sarobi, 30 miles east of Kabul was a disaster. Survivors phoned home to their families the night afterwards and they also talked to reporters about the failures that allowed the Taleban to overpower them. As well as the dead, 21 were wounded in the all-night fighting. Reinforcements arrived late, no reconnaissance had been carried out in a dangerous zone, air cover did not work and ammunition ran out.
Bereaved parents and partners of the young paratroopers then went on television and radio attacking the army for getting them into the mess and Sarkozy for keeping France in Afghanistan. The President flew to Kabul to comfort the troops and the families were flown out to visit to the site of the ambush "to help them in their mourning".
Wives of soldiers in the French contingent were on the radio this morning complaining that they could not stand the strain of knowing their men were in possible combat. "If he doesn't phone by 8 pm I start worrying myself sick," said one. Others called for Sarkozy to bring the boys home from a mistaken war. Wives also reported that their husbands were poorly equipped to fight. One soldier has to take off his body armour to shoot because it is too big, his wife said. Another wife reported that morale in the Kabul detachment was very low.
The latest fuss is over the leaking of an American report on the French bungling of the hillside battle. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, which published extracts, the French paratroopers ran out of bullets and did not have proper communication equipment, forcing them to stop fighting after 90 minutes. The Taleban were better equipped and trained and used incendiary bullets to punch holes in the French armoured vehicles, and so on. The army denied that this was a Nato analysis, saying that it was just an ill-informed e-mail from an officer with American special forces who had taken part in the French patrol. But the damage has been done.
Not surprisingly, a poll after the ambush showed that 55 percent want Sarkozy to pull France's 2,700 troops out of the Nato operation in Afghanistan. With few exceptions today, the media are calling for a rethink and some for a French withdrawal. A serving soldier's mother wrote a plea in L'Humanité, the communist daily, calling Sarkozy and the generals liars at the service of Uncle Sam and ending: "Give us back our children".
Sarkozy and his government are committed to staying in Afghanistan, where France has been part of the Nato force since 2001. But they are hard on the defensive with a public opinion and military and political experts in a defeatist consensus that the war can never be won.
Of course democracies need public support to send troops into danger and the media are there to expose failures. But discussion of the merits of French engagement in Afghanistan is being drowned out by emotion over what in earlier ages would have been deemed a skirmish. This is by no means typically French. It happens everywhere now that we all expect instant information and video to go with it.
 For once Nicolas Sarkozy had some good news to announce this morning -- the release by French naval commandos of two hostages who had been held aboard their yacht off Somalia for the past two weeks (story here).
Sarko was in his best commander-in-chief mode -- with the Prime Minister and Armed Forces chief at his sides -- when he staged a 10am news conference to take the credit. He had been up all night running the operation, he said. He ordered the assault when it became clear that the pirates were taking le Carré d'As, the yacht, to the Somali mainland. Let this be a lesson to pirates everywhere, he said, that France would not allow crime to pay. "Whenever any French person is in danger in the world, the state will use all means to save them."
Sarko deserves praise. He took the risk of ordering the assault and he would have been immediately blamed if it had gone wrong. This is the kind of action that he does well. His talents as a tough enforcer made his reputation when he was Interior Minister and police chief from most of 2002-2007.
In an earlier existence, in 1993, I watched Sarko's courage close up when he negotiated with a dangerous hostage taker. A man calling himself "Human Bomb" had taken a class of kindergarten children hostage in Neuilly. Younger Sarko, then Mayor of Neuilly and a junior government minister, went in to negotiate with the man and persuaded him to release some children. We were waiting outside behind a police line. Human Bomb was eventually shot dead by officers from the RAID, the police intervention unit, and all the children rescued.
It is fair game to note, however, the brazen way that Sarko goes about maximising the credit. His performance this morning would have been worthy of George W Bush or Vladimir Putin at their most macho. Every citizen could count on Sheriff Sarko, he said. "For me two French hostages on the Carré d'As were the same as 30 on the Ponant." Le Ponant was the big cruising yacht whose crew and passengers were released after the payment of a ransom last spring. French forces seized six of the pirates and some of the ransom immediately afterwards. Today's action brings to a total of 12 the Somali pirates now enjoying the hospitality of French mainland jails.
The past few months have shown that the unpopular President has benefited from his exploits outside France. His aproval ratings have climbed about seven points from their high 30s or low 40s of the late spring, according to polls. The pollsters say this comes from his deft crisis management abroad in recent weeks: notably his brokering of a Russian ceasefire in Georgia on behalf of the European Union. France also reacted well to his handling of the deaths of 10 soldiers in Afghanistan, despite the unpopularity of his decision to send troops there.
Speedy Sarko, the micro-managing "hyper-president", may even be giving way to the classical kind of head of state that France has known since the creation of the Vth Republic 50 years ago next month. In this model, set by Charles de Gaulle, the president runs foreign policy while staying in the background as his Prime Minister takes the domestic political heat. Another sign of this is a sudden slide in the ratings of François Fillon, the Prime Minister, who until recently was much more popular than his boss.
Sarkozy was determined to let nothing spoil his glory today. He refused to say a word about the international financial crisis which is compounding French unhappiness over rising prices.
The French government has just invented another good reason to use china, glasses and cutlery when you eat outdoors. It's going to put a substantial tax on cardboard plates and plastic bags, glasses and eating implements.
The so-called taxe pique-nique is to be modelled on a Belgian law which came into effect a year ago. This applies a 20 percent levy on plastic bags, wrap, disposable dishes and cutlery. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the Ecology Secretary, confirmed the tax this morning after it was disclosed by Le Journal du Dimanche. She did not say how big it would be.
President Sarkozy's government has been seriously smitten by the green bug. The picnic tax is part of an imminent big expansion of its "bonus-malus" scheme, which adds a penalty to the price of high-polluting cars and rewards those who buy green- friendly vehicles.
Starting from next January, the green bonus-malus system will be applied to about 20 products, including refrigerators, television, computers, mobile phones, wooden furniture, lightbulbs, paint, detergent, tyres and perhaps even new apartments and houses. The Ecology Secretary added a new item today: disposable nappies (diapers). "We could arrange it so that all maternity hospitals teach you how to use reuseable nappies," she said.
France already puts up with more taxes of different types than most places but the beauty of the scheme, in the eyes of Jean-Louis Borloo, the superminister for the Environment, is that the money will be given back to people who choose the most environmentally virtuous products. The system has worked well with cars. Buyers of small vehicles get up to 1,000 euros back. Completely electric vehicles will get 5,000 euros. Borloo is working on items and the levies ahead of the 2009 budget later this month. But the Finance Ministry is said to be unhappy over the complexity of a system that will need a whole new buraucracy to operate and which could dent consumption when the economy is already struggling.
Maybe they should just ban all produits jetables -- disposable products -- for picnics. French food and drink deserves more than cardboard and plastic. Here's the correct setting for un pique-nique (except for the paper napkins).
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"And in which way precisely, mind you, "working more to earn more" would contradict fighting financial capitalism gone mad ?
Supporting what we call entrepreneurial capitalism is one thing, and it does mean working more, as a necessary condition to earn more. And it also opposes financial capitalism."
This is patently false. The current economic crisis was NOT caused by "financial capitalism gone mad" or any other kind of capitalism. The crisis was created by Big Government policies and worsened by successive Big Government policies.
It was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (signed by Jimmy Carter), which created government-owned mortgage banks and ordered all banks in the US to lend money to people who were known as NINJA people (no jobs, no income, no assets), i.e. to people who were unable to repay them.
During the years 2001-2008, Pres. Bush and Alan Greenspan REPEATEDLY called for a reform of that law and of federal mortgage banks. Such reforms were all stalled by Congressional Democrats.
The Fed was worsening the situation by continually reducing interest rates and keeping them at an artificially low level.
Eventually, American banks - including federal mortgage banks - accumulated so many unrepaid loans that the entire banking system collapsed.
Only capitalist policies can solve this crisis.
Posted by: Zbigniew Mazurak | 18 Dec 2009 13:25:50
DO RE MI
One of the things that struck me when I first came to live in France was how long young people stayed at home with their families.
In the UK those who left school at 16 used easily (I left 18 years ago - allowing for things to have changed) to become independent. Those who went to college or university went to live on campus or in the university town and left home more gradually by only spending holidays en famille.
By 22 or 23 at best, most young people would have left home and have an independent working life (add a year now as I think "a year out" is obligatory).
In France students go to the uni in the town nearest the family home, in most cases, and spend weekends at home, bringing washing etc with them.
My former boss' daughter was 27 before she finished her studies and got a job in another town (with papa's help of course) and while she was at uni, they had bought her a flat in Toulouse where she stayed from Mon-Fri in term time.
Considering that the number of years you have to be in full-time work to be eligible for a full retirement pension is 40, it made me wonder if they really expected someone who only went on to the work scene at 27 to work until 67.
Of course it depends what kind of work you do and in what sort of conditions, but I couldn't have stood another minute with my former boss' daughter's father !
Posted by: dot king | 18 Dec 2009 13:24:10
Oh la la. Le pauvre!
This only cements my intractable problem with professional football. And I was just coming out of rehab after being rounded on about my comments on Mr Va-Va-Voom.
Shouldn't Anelka have said "I will never return to France because they don't welcome toss-pots"?
But now I live there, it's clear that they do! :-)
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 18 Dec 2009 13:21:32
Maybe no one's told him he'll be paying 50% next year in England anyway.
Posted by: John Hill | 18 Dec 2009 13:18:44
‘I'd like to point out that the Afghans he is sending back are on a plane chartered by Gordon Brown's government, and that no-one in the UK seems to give a damn. / What is the position of the Times on that?’ [QWERTY]
Oh, QWERTY, you really should get out more... prick the bubble and join the real world. You’ve nothing to lose but your comforting pre-conceptions!
Posted by: Rick | 18 Dec 2009 09:34:06
Here’s an offering for you, RICHARD JONES: ‘They’ll be dancing in the streets of Hawick/Selkirk/wherever tonight.’ - ‘He plays like a runaway bullet’ (description of New Zealand wing Grant Batty) - ‘His sidestep was marvellous – like a shaft of lightning’ (description of Welsh wing Gerald Davies) - ‘I look at Colin Meads and see a great big sheep farmer who carried the ball in his hands as though it was an orange pip.’
That said, William Pollock "Bill" McLaren – I love the middle name! – was a poor parody of his former self, as I recall him, convinced that the viewer had to be informed about the point value of each score, and the village, town, team of each player. Today the coverage offered by Sky Sports (!) is second to none: loads of cameras, though Stuart Barnes is out-classed in my estimation by Eddie Butler, while Will Greenwood is up and coming. The prize for the commentator showing least self-control goes to Brian Moore who, for a solicitor, shows a rare disregard for sense, syntax, and spittle.
Posted by: Rick | 18 Dec 2009 09:20:26
And the fact that Sarkozy made a "U-turn" can be attributed to the socialists whom he hired (Lang, Mitterrand, etc.) and to his wife, who is a polluting influence on others.
Some people claimed that by hiring those socialists, Sarkozy would degrade the Socialist Party, but that's not what happened. Instead, these socialist saboteurs - poisoning influences on other people - socialized the UMP and the government and converted Sarkozy to socialism. The guy who campaigned as the French counterpart of Reagan is now a socialist who says everyday that capitalism is evil.
Posted by: Zbigniew Mazurak | 18 Dec 2009 09:06:38
Daniel, i wasn't finding excuses for Besson's policy of repatriation of Aghans, but underlining certain hypocrisies of media and public in not mentioning that the UK has an even harder policy. I know this blog is about France, not the UK, but no one seems to be questioning the attitude of the British government and the British public (the first charter flight got no media attention in Britain and the British seem to be totally indifferent to the plight of these refugee Afghans). Britain, the land of habeas corpus (unrelated, i know)? The Britons, who point their finger at French collaborationist attitudes during the war???
Posted by: qwerty | 18 Dec 2009 09:00:40
"First, N.S. has never been "freemarket", let alone ultraliberal (or neocon - someone French will have to explain to me why these notions seem to be interchangeable)."
This is a false statement. Sarkozy was never an u"ltracapitalist" of the same kind as Balcerowicz, Donald Tusk, Ron Paul or Sarah Palin, but during the 2007 campaign and during his first year as President, he DID promise capitalist reforms and DID promise to institute the Anglo-Saxon model. He DID present himself as the French counterpart of Ronald Reagan (though he isn't one). He called for the abolition of special retirement privileges, the raising of the retirement age, abolition of CAP subsidies, abolition of the 35h-week and tax reductions.
And he DID initially try to implement capitalist reforms - and even managed to implement some of them (e.g. a tax reduction implemented in 2007).
Unfortunately, last year, he changed his economic ideology, and now, he's a socialist, just like DSK, Mitterrand and Jospin. Now he talks everyday about how capitalism is supposedly bad and why the Anglo-Saxon model is supposedly bad, and implementing socialist policies, while the French economy is collapsing.
Sarkozy promised capitalist reforms. He lied.
Posted by: Zbigniew Mazurak | 18 Dec 2009 08:59:09
VALENTIN
Je suis tout à fait d'accord. Renvoyons-les en Angleterre, avec leurs "Cornish Pasties" et leurs "Chips and Fish" et leurs petits tasses de thé avec du lait bordel! Et c'est quoi ce Cricket dont parlent Rick et al? Un jeux pour les filles à mon avis.
Ils viennent chez nous, ils prennent nos emplois, ils volent nos femmes et leur cuisine épouvantable, quoi dire!
Posted by: Gormless Doink | 18 Dec 2009 08:42:38
Besson has one act to his credit. He resigned as economic adviser to Segolene Royal just after she released her totally irresponsible 100 point election plan. That would surely have been enough to drive most economists to immediate resignation.
Posted by: Judith | 18 Dec 2009 05:00:49
"that sounds remarkably close to the clichéd response "
So you mean that even if it is true, I should not saying, because you decided I would be after the anglo race, right. Well no. Lots of 'em are actually fine people, but many just feel like they come into conquered land when they go sun holidaying.
Posted by: Valentin | 18 Dec 2009 01:58:27
AZLOON:
"One minute it was roll up your sleeves like the Americans, work longer, bitch (and think) less, die earlier (but richer).
The next it was we have to get rid of the evil A-S financial model.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds are blowin.'"
No, you only need to apply a tiny bit of logic in your general thinking before uttering such enormities, Mr. Arizona loon. That is, unless you actually intend to give your name that negative connotation.
The worst part of it is that I have read the same argument in a rightwing paper like Time Magazine last week.
Still, one ought to be blind not to see the stupidity in such statements.
And in which way precisely, mind you, "working more to earn more" would contradict fighting financial capitalism gone mad ?
Supporting what we call entrepreneurial capitalism is one thing, and it does mean working more, as a necessary condition to earn more. And it also opposes financial capitalism. No contradiction in there, just more anglo B*T.
Posted by: Valentin | 18 Dec 2009 01:51:24
"When Besson produced his pamplet, Sarkozy "was" a firm free-market fundie, and even pledged to introduce France to the joys of unfettered mortgaging, aka subprimes, if he was elected ...
Lest we forget his "louanges d'antin" for the system Britannique."
(ROCKET & DOMINIQUE 2)
These are a mere bunch of misrepresentations - to be polite and netiquette-observant. Otherwise I would have to call them both by that word starting with B and ending in T.
First, N.S. has never been "freemarket", let alone ultraliberal (or neocon - someone French will have to explain to me why these notions seem to be interchangeable).
He supported more flexibility in the French job market (objectively famous for its rigidity) - and showed Britain and Denmark as examples; for a more nuanced take on pecuniary gain, traditionaly a mortal sin in France. He never promoted ultraliberal policies. He promised to protect France in the new globalized economy, not to make it an ultraliberal heaven. Finally, he spoke about making France a nation of homeowners, but never by means of uncovered, unpayable loans, which the subprimes are. And he always, way before the electoral campaign in 2007, warned against the dangers of financial capitalism, as our favorite journalist here :) can testify.
Posted by: Valentin | 18 Dec 2009 01:42:06
http://tinyurl.com/yg64rn5
The above is why Air France is my most hated airline in the world. Has been for 25 years.
Posted by: rocket | 17 Dec 2009 23:45:07
I heard Paris has lots of graffiti. Now I know this is true.
Posted by: celebrity tube | 17 Dec 2009 21:55:25
[Just noticed Charles' résumé has changed in the "Your Writer" box. Hope he's not brushing up for a career move!] Johnny Foreigner
Or that the Times is planning to send him back to Mexico to cover the drug wars (when were you there CB?).
I am hazarding a guess that someone at the Times, perhaps our own blogger-in-chief, thought better of the description of the French as the 'exotic species' (or whatever the bio said) across the Channel.
[I just thought the old bio line was a bit stale and put in a more factual one. CB]
Posted by: azloon | 17 Dec 2009 19:42:44
Rick/Richard
‘AND THE GASOMETER PRIMPS AND PUCKERS FOR A HALF-HEARTED SUNBEAM.’
Thank god for google. I was able to figure out what a gasometer was, then fully appreciate the 'color/colour' of the cricket banter. It's hilarious.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Dec 2009 19:19:23
TO RICK,
John Arlott I crossed because he was 1/2 of the party that arrested a REME Staff Sergeant who acted occasionally as my driver in 1944, after Market Garden, for Intelligence liaison conferences with the Americans and the newly constituted French forces, wherein image was vital.
The sergeant, on one of his leaves near Southhampton, was accused of murder and I was asked by his wife if a) the crime could be tried under military law - I never understood her thinking behind this question, and b) If I would appear as a character witness for the defence. Thus I met J. Arlott (Police Sgt)around Christmas 1944 and again around 1955 at a jazz concert, perhaps the only one of that epoch, in the Wigmore Hall.
Footballers I avoid both in the UK and Argentina and have never voluntarily been to a professional football game - the only sport in the world in which a player may be expelled from the field of play for acting badly and bad acting.
Posted by: richard jones | 17 Dec 2009 18:36:11
I admit to the occasional profanity, LEO, but you’ll have to spell out the rest. Are you telling me that your rustics are above suspicion? I’d like to agree with you, but you’d only think me naive.
AZLOON, this is sheer poetry:
‘‘Talbot’s stance reminds me so much of the great J.C.B. Hanley the Worcestershire and England player of the mid-twenties’, when there was some microscopic change in the weather. ‘AND THE GASOMETER PRIMPS AND PUCKERS FOR A HALF-HEARTED SUNBEAM.’
RICHARD, as I understand things, the first test match series after the War was played against South Africa, starting on 11 June 1947. According to David Kynaston, this was Denis Compton’s annus mirabilis for he scored 18 centuries during the season. And can you remember 10 May that year when at Hampden Park 134,000 spectators watched Great Britain walloped the Rest of Europe at the other game, 6-1? BTW, if you tell me Stanley Matthews and Tommy Lawton were pals of yours I won’t bat an eyelid. Now I’ll make myself a cup of cocoa(!*?*)... no, Barbera cough mixture, I think, and read the rest of what you and DOT wrote.
Posted by: Rick | 17 Dec 2009 17:18:03
“In reality, I think that there are social and economic aspects of the age and under what conditions children leave home. I don't think it possible to generalize on the subject”. Lex
No you can’t generalise. It depends on your nature as well.
In some culture, the group and family matter more than the indivual. I have a Greek friend with an extended family who can’t stand time on her own. Every endeavour involves members of her family she drags around, using sugar or spice to get her way. She gets panicky, her son wants to leave ( 32) but she has found pretext after pretext to have him by her side. She has no desire to stand on her own. All his girlfriend are vetted and only the ones supple enough (to bend to her will) pass the mustard. He no longer introduce girlfriends. Nothing that threaten the group homogeneity is allowed, despite the fact that stories of old hurts gets dragged out all the time. The gay boy has been ostracised, nobody challenges the status quo. My mother who has no family to speak of really felt may years as the “pièce rapportée “ in my father’s clan. I could have had a nice house bought for me by my parents and would have lived a nice cosy life, strangely I wanted adventure and stand on my own 2 feet. Some people feel strength and security in a group and others ( me after a while) feel smothered and trapped. If everything stays as it is, and no tension is allowed, is there any progress? Not that all progress is good. Saying that I go home 3 times a year and could not see myself not spending Christmas with my parents or my family.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 17 Dec 2009 16:27:46
ROMAIN,
French government since 2007 are a festival of comic peaople, remember the former Culture and Communication Christine Albanel and her firewall in OpenOffice!
Posted by: WilliamB | 17 Dec 2009 15:26:51
Dot
From the looks of him (above), Ridly apparently has thrown his full support behind the viniculturists.
He's got that pastey, sallow, hang-dog British look with a hint of hangover.
He really doesn't look like a 'five daily fruits and vegetables' sort of guy, does he?
.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Dec 2009 15:00:40
Dot "Perhaps Mr Scott and his ilk could bear that in mind from time to time."
Mr Scott and his ilk are the least of the problem... people want cheaper food and Carrefour or Tesco are only too happy to provide it. If the majority are willing to trade quality for price then the Pierres of this world will struggle.
Posted by: FC | 17 Dec 2009 14:23:40
DRM
My son lives in the midst of the large, extended Italian-American family of his wife in the Chicago area. They are forever in each other's houses, lives, businesses. It is a comfort to them, but annoying sometimes for interlopers like my son. He has had to 'draw his boundaries' firmly so as not to have ten family events to attend each weekend (slight exaggeration). And they all talk to each other on the phone several times a day, each time someone goes to the bathroom, I think.
He jokes that every living relative shows up at every single family party, which seem to occur at least once every two weeks or so, and that they cheerfully enter the house, back-slapping and joking, but then get the hell out quite early, clearly suffering from over-exposure to their clan. I mean there's only so much you can talk about when you work with each other, see each other several times a week, then try to socialize weekly as a group.
Posted by: azloon | 17 Dec 2009 13:47:31
When I moved to Boston, I was surprised to see that children stayed at home until they married. It is also common for people to marry closer to thirty than not, which evidently has something to do with our low divorce rate.
In a history I read about the British Navy, it said that the English had the tradition of turning children into the street when the house got full, regardless of their age. This lead to an unstable and dangerous society, to say the least.
In reality, I think that there are social and economic aspects of the age and under what conditions children leave home. I don't think it possible to generalize on the subject.
A friend from El Salvador tells this story: after he and his mother had lived in the US for several years, one day he says to her, "I am going to go to my room now. It isn't that I don't love you, it's just that I want to be alone."
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 17 Dec 2009 13:39:48
Dom2
No, I clearly recall Sarko's chameleonic 're-positioning.'.
One minute it was roll up your sleeves like the Americans, work longer, bitch (and think) less, die earlier (but richer).
The next it was we have to get rid of the evil A-S financial model.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds are blowin.'
Posted by: azloon | 17 Dec 2009 13:31:27
Oh, Dan Brown fans are PLENTY gullible enough. They simply don't have the money to spend on this stuff.
Posted by: Gleno | 17 Dec 2009 13:30:40
Just noticed Charles' résumé has changed in the "Your Writer" box. Hope he's not brushing up for a career move!
[No, just replacing the old one because it was a bit stale. CB]
Posted by: Johnny Foreigner | 17 Dec 2009 13:27:25
Nice one, DOMINIQUE II! Have you ever played cricket?
(The above was intended as a compliment)
Posted by: Rick | 17 Dec 2009 12:10:13
While he must have been worn out after a number of concerts, being he is no spring chicken
JOHNY
You're right - and a few days ago we had news of two doctors being flown out from France to check on Johnny and one is left wondering why they don't think the American doctors can handle things.
But then it transpires that the doctors are medical experts for the company insuring the Route 66 concert tour and are only there to see whether he'd be up to carrying on or whether his condition justified cancelling until further notice.
Which just goes to show that in his performer context JH is a property, nothing more - let all those wannabe stars of telly reality heed the warning . . .
Posted by: dot king | 17 Dec 2009 12:02:20
DANIEL - you watched Canal +? Are you OK? Maybe a little double-schnapps and a nice lie-down. :)
Ah, but aren't you forgetting to say that the Tsarko dodged rather a lot of questions whilst managing to be holier-than-thou on saving the planet.
Michel Denisot (who after all, as Didier Porte once said "n'est pas le dernier des kamikazes") asked him how he was going to cut down his own CO2 output (we assume he already cycles everywhere and doesn't leave the tap running while brushing toothypegs) and he attacked "What? You think I should stay in my office with my arms folded? If I hadn't gone to Trinidad and . . . somewhere else where it's nice and warm in November . . . then what would I have achieved?" And all the while, things are deteriorating by the minute in Copehnagen - which is a barrel of laughs if you can be bothered.
He didn't really answer any questions, he said his set pieces and was aggressive when he didn't care for the question - business as usual, quoi.
Hmm, article's about Besson - beneath contempt.
Hortefeu - beneath contempt.
Nadine Morano - beneath contempt.
Valérie Pécresse - pretty damn stupid.
Patrick Devidjian (aka Cassius) - cunning, lying in wait, knows more than he's letting on, a lean and hungry man - such men are dangerous . . .
It isn't b--ls these people have, it's a platform from which to belch out verbal pollution.
Posted by: dot king | 17 Dec 2009 11:48:22
Identity crisis Besson may be close to cracking but his boss has never been in better form. His 'how I'm going to save the world at Copenhagen' interview last night was absolutely priceless. Example -
challenged by an otherwise cowed Denisot about his frequent flights and consequently massive carbon footprint, he says that he has to run around otherwise nothing would budge on climate change and anyway, and this is the killer, maybe French planes pollute less than others!!! And then at the end there was a marvelously mellow sequence when he spoke touchingly about his precious Carla and her affection for him, in spite of which he might have to seek a second term out of duty to the nation!!!.
Canal+ should rush out the DVD in time for Christmas. It would provide endless hours of holiday mirth and wonder.
Posted by: John O'D | 17 Dec 2009 11:45:43
This is something Mr Ridley Scott should hear - I hope some bloggers who don't listen to Inter will take the time to listen to the "Interactive" part of the "Sept-Dix" this morning. The Agriculture Minister replies to questions from the journalists and specialists in the studio and a representative from Les Jeunes Agriculteurs.
Towards the end of the clip linked below, came a call from one Pierre, fruit farmer in Provence.
For those who have difficulty with fully understanding the French, this is the summary of his intervention: I'm a Provence fruit farmer, this year at the end of the picking season when I'd sold all my harvest, I was €15.000 down on last year and hadn't any money to pay my workers' salaries. I'm not a beggar, I work all year round and I've nothing to show for it, people talk all the time of "the market", but before harvest, for farmers, there is no market. (At this point he broke down so completely that he could no longer speak.)
The minister was asked for a reply to give Pierre time to pull himself together again. Naturally he spoke of aids, grants, loans, admitted that the cost of employing workers was too high and they were investigating the problems.
Then Nicolas Demoran asked Pierre whether he was getting all these benefits, grants and loans. Pierre replied that he didn't want aid, grants and loans - these, he said, are the leash that attaches you by the neck. He added that paysans are accused of all the ills - pollution, pesticides - (he mentioned others which I can't recall) that it was time to recognise and value their work and to realise that when a farmer goes broke, it's several families who lose work; His son has already left and will not farm, and if he has another year like this, it'll be the end.
Anyway, his call starts at 13m 28s of the link, slide the cursor along unless the whole 20 mins are of interest as well - during Pierre's call the atmosphere in the studio was very charged - you have to hear him to get the full weight of what he's saying.
http://sites.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/em/septdix/
Bearing in mind too that the Ministry of Health has radio and TV campaigns encouraging everyone to eat 5 fruits and vegetables every day and 3 dairy products. Presumably they want them imported, not home-grown.
The world isn't just made up of bankers, traders and politicians. Perhaps Mr Scott and his ilk could bear that in mind from time to time.
Posted by: dot king | 17 Dec 2009 11:24:45
Azloon,
I know in then” Individuality society” children get out of the house. In Europe it’s a bit different, you live with your parents until you get married or shack up. In the US you tend to move for work, in Europe you don’t do it too much, moving away from your family is not a cultural thing, that is changing a bit now. When I went to Italy I couldn’t believe how young people looked so good ( if lacking in imagination) and could afford so much stuff, when you have seen an Armani outfit you have seen them all ( ok I exaggerate). They all live with mum and dad and didn’t have rent to pay, also they worked and mummy had cooked dinner and watched their clothes as well.
Here it might change as the housing bubble and crisis have made it impossible to rent and save for a deposit at the same time. Finding your feet and becoming independent is looking like a bad financial decision if character building. Also the money in the bank is not earning any money right now.
By some coincidence Halliday’s wife is on the cover of the French Elle, she looks very childlike, making him look even more ancient.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 17 Dec 2009 11:05:35
WILLIAMB,
Don't forget Nadine Morano who was castigating young muslims in a political meeting.
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Posted by: ibrahimali | 17 Dec 2009 10:44:09
Since Sarkozy's election, France weeks pass by with the rhythm of our government proof of stupidity.
Another one just for the fun, which happen yesterday : after Besson sent the nine Afghan refugees back to Kabul, Lefebvre (the Spokesman of the Union for a Popular Movement, and one of the best stupidity supplier of the country) and Mariani (an UMP deputee who tried to make a law which establish an DNA test for every migrant who try to come in France to reunite with family here), said that is fair that Afghans refugees was sent back to Afghanistan, because as French soldier are fighting there, Afghan people must stay there and fight the talibans instead of trying to find a place far of violence!
Just hopeless, and thinking we have tree more years with this government (if Sarkozy is re-elected, I leave France, I just hope that other countries don't make me come back in order to fight against Sarkozy...)
Posted by: WilliamB | 17 Dec 2009 10:27:43
RICK Dylan Thomas was in Italy in 1947 – notably Elba but this won’t work for reasons already ascribed. However 1951 would, when Dylan was there for the last time.
DOT
I once had a delightful young lady working for me in the late 40’s called Wendy Wimbush who left banking and went into the Bill Frindall cricket stats (from the French états?) world. She became quite renowned in that domain for inventing a thing called ‘wagon wheels’ that diagrammatically showed where in the outfield a batsman scored his runs.
Commentating on cricket – a serious art form. I used to love it when at 11:30 (they start at silly times now – complete disrespect for pig’s bladder repletion recovery) and play was delayed, but with an inspection by the umpires perhaps an hour away. I would suppose most people switched the wireless (which it wasn’t) off and rejoined when play started, and this is perhaps why John Arlott’s greatest (IMO) quote is never – well – quoted.
It was a dialogue with Rex Alston. The ground (t’was the Oval), the spectators – enrobed in these new plastic macintoshes - the circling ornithology had been discussed at length, as had the likelihood of play after the inspection. The duo were just starting to compare various players in that wonderful formal style of the time ‘Talbot’s stance reminds me so much of the great J.C.B. Hanley the Worcestershire and England player of the mid-twenties’, when there was some microscopic change in the weather. ‘AND THE GASOMETER PRIMPS AND PUCKERS FOR A HALF-HEARTED SUNBEAM.’
Brian Johnston, of course, has the absolute quote ‘The batsman’s Holding the bowlers Willey’.
Eddie Waring – that kinda rugby – the purloiner of great Welsh talent in the amateur days of Rugby Union. ‘Up and under’ or ‘Garryowen (a Irish rugby union club)’, is not used much in League until the late fifties. Before that date, to encourage a passing rather than kicking game, any kick fielded on the full meant a set scrum back where it was kicked and with the catcher’s side’s to put in.
And, finally, having totally kidnapped the thread topic, the best Rugby Union commentator was Bill McClaren.
Posted by: richard jones | 17 Dec 2009 10:11:47
ROMAIN,
Je serais curieux de soumettre nos phrases test respectives à un logiciel de reconnaissance vocale, pour voir ce qu'il recracherait :).
Il y a un certain nombre d'années, j'avais fait des essais avec Via Voice d'IBM. Ca marchait pas mal pour l'époque (processeurs lents, mémoire vive réduite).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Dec 2009 10:08:13
DOMINIQUE II,
"that Sarkozy's opinions are fickle, to say the least"
:))
Sarkozy tries to adapt his opinions to the changing world and to the changing economy. Most of his opponents try to persuade the electors that they are able to change the world and the economy to adapt it to fit the perfect society they say they will built for their electors :).
Unfortunately (or may be fortunately :) they failed to persuade 53% of the electors in 2007.
If they want to win the elections in 2012, "ils ont du pain sur la planche" :). The first thing would be "d'accorder leurs violons pour limiter la cacophonie assourdissante"; the second, to find a credible candidate. The third, to send back to Germany Cohn-Bendit, accompanied by Bové and Mamère as a gift :). Our German friends would no doubt appreciate...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 17 Dec 2009 10:03:18
TO VALENTIN,
Let me assure you that your lot are as nasty,invidious, separatist and above all arrogant as anything I've ever seen or heard of from 'anglos' in France.
My little finger is in excellent shape, thank you, although my shoulder is playing up from phoning all I can to get rid of this invasion - mostly from Paris - as you'd expect.
Posted by: richard jones | 17 Dec 2009 09:52:36
There is always one guy in an office who nobody trust , the Iznogood type. They are very useful to their bosses, they get all the ugly tasks done and people are on their best behaviour or leaning against the wall to avoid backstabbing. These types hate human beings anyway and don’t even like themselves. Sarkosi and Besson obviously wants to stick it to their daddy, and they have. Everybody knows their name and like algae they thrive in acid condition. Hate from other people is nothing compared to their self-loathing anyhow. Obscurity and an attention blackout brings them in a tailspin that is not funny to watch.
Besson’s wife was an idiot anyway, if a man on your wedding day in front of the priest he is not going to be faitfull, going ahead with the wedding and sticking with the man for 30 years should qualify you for the straight jacket not for the wronged-wife badge or our sympathy.
His chin does not help and surrounding jowls neither.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 17 Dec 2009 09:43:11
Valentin "Many anglos are fine people, met more than a few of those actually, in real life as well as online"...
that sounds remarkably close to the clichéd response of your regular homophobe/racist or in this case anglophobe... "some of my best friends are gay/black/anglo!"... it doesn't really work.
Posted by: FC | 17 Dec 2009 09:25:56
"Ganelon, Ganelon... now why do my thoughts take wing to the Hindu Kush?"
That's harsh on Karzai, an enlightened opportunist at worst.
Posted by: Dominique II | 17 Dec 2009 09:19:15
RICK, you vicious misquoter, you. / I said "as long as" in this context here: [VALENTIN]
Yummy, do I get a second bite at the cherry?
Posted by: Rick | 17 Dec 2009 08:33:38
Ganelon, Ganelon... now why do my thoughts take wing to the Hindu Kush?
Posted by: Rick | 17 Dec 2009 08:20:48
Dom2
When Besson produced his pamplet, Sarkozy "was" a firm free-market fundie, and even pledged to introduce France to the joys of unfettered mortgaging, aka subprimes, if he was elected - yet another forgotten promise, thank Gods.
Lest we forget his "louanges d'antin" for the system Britannique.
Posted by: rocket | 17 Dec 2009 08:14:10
Johny Halliday was never really a rock singer, but he is a great ballad singer; It's not the be all and end all; he never made it in England anyway.
That country has no class in music now for sure. Just look at that nonsense manufactured talent show the masses get hysterical about; the X factor, tells you everything.
Orchestrated by that smug faced mother of cheap thrills; Simon Cowell.
Concerning Halliday"s after effects from his operation, everybody is quickly blaming the French Doctor; but who in their right mind would jet off to the States, just 4 days after a spinal operation. It's known that pressure in long distance air travel is never good after an operation or illness. Halliday was asking for trouble. But like everything else in France somebody always has to be responsible, when something goes wrong, except the real culprit.
While he must have been worn out after a number of concerts, being he is no spring chicken.
Not everybody can run around for ever, and come up regularily smiling, with perhaps one exception Tiger Woods. Perhaps the secret was in the "Gatorade" drink.
Posted by: johny | 17 Dec 2009 08:12:45
RICK
"What a pity Ridley Scott wasn’t called Roman Polanski. Welcome to France, home of Human Rights, applied with discrimination, of course."
As Rocket would day: What's thee point of your post?
Posted by: Leo | 17 Dec 2009 06:10:14