Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

France revels in nostalgia for magic May '68

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

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

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

Super Sarkozy greets hostages after pirate triumph

France is pleased with the stylish way that its navy and special forces handled the seizure of the Ponant, the big French superyacht that was boarded by pirates off Somalia 10 days ago. Six of the 20 or so pirates were captured by helicopter-borne French commandos as they made an overland getaway with part of the ransom.

The operation, directed by President Sarkozy, was well run and it shows how France can put well-equipped forces into action on the high seas at long distance. The 30 crew, most of them young French citizens, were released on Friday and are flying back to Paris tonight on a military Airbus. Sarkozy is going to the airport to greet them. There were no passengers. The captured Somali bandits -- said to be former fishermen -- are being brought back to Paris to stand trial.

The armed forces have been putting out their story and le Figaro today has details of their intrepid exploit. The pirates, for example, brought two goats on board for milk but they spent a lot of their time draining the ship's copious bars. One pirate disappeared overboard in the night, apparently drunk.

I don't want to dampen the good news, but no-one is asking how much the whole thing cost or wondering about the ransom, said to be 2.5 million dollars, that was paid for the crew's freedom.

[le Ponant (an old word for west)]

Paris makes a point with Olympic fiasco

The Olympic flame's day in Paris was a mess. I spent a few hours in the midst of yesterday's demonstrations, beginning with the sinister start below the Eiffel tower under the guard of hundreds of police and Chinese security.

Yet, despite the débâcle which ended with the Chinese rushing the flame out of town on a bus, it is impossible not to detect a little satisfaction in the air. The relay was a chaotic fiasco, marred by jeering crowds and scuffles with the militant pro-Tibetans. The torch-bearers, mainly French former champions, had a miserable time between hostile crowds and the strong-arm tactics of their Chinese handlers. President Sarkozy's government had reason to be embarrassed. But there is a feeling today that, even if it was futile, France at least made a gesture by venting its discontent over the Beijing games and human rights. I say France because the demonstrators enjoyed quite broad support. France prides itself on being "the home of human rights" and it likes a bit of rebellion and creative disorder in the name of a cause. The Beijing torch relay from the Eiffel tower down the Champs Elysées and on to Notre Dame cathedral offered the right moment and symbols. By the end of the afternoon yesterday, the demonstrations had become a festive occasion, joined by teenagers and office-workers.

Laurent Joffrin, Editor of Libération, was for once happy this morning. "Paris rediscovered its sense of revolt for the occasion. It took it upon itself to remind the world that hypocrisy has a limit," he wrote. "The Olympic flame has turned into a shameful candle-end."

Naturally the leftwing world was fully behind the la manif. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, a Socialist, hung a rights banner across the front of the City Hall. Green councillors added a more aggressive one so the Chinese cancelled the ceremony there and the torch convoy sped past the Mayor without stopping. He shrugged and said: "The cohabitation of the Olympics and human rights disturbs them. That's their problem. We were ready to receive them but not to sacrifice our principles."

But there was also quiet support from President Sarkozy's conservative political camp. Half a dozen members of parliament for his Union for a Popular Movement joined a protest by mainly leftwing legislators outside the National Assembly. The organisers ordered the convoy to cancel a stop there.

On one level, the chaotic day made a mockery of the crowd control skills of the well equipped French police. They had said that the torch would be protected by an inviolable 200-metre long "security bubble". This burst within minutes. In the thick of it, however, I got the impression that they were not trying very hard. There were a few punch-ups but little of the brute force usually employed by the CRS riot police. Most of them were not wearing helmets and body armour. The feeling was confirmed this morning by Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, who is national police chief.

She essentially blamed the Chinese embassy for the mess. They had controlled the day's events and the police had been there to help keep order for them. "We had to balance this with the right of people to demonstrate," she said on Europe 1 radio.

Sarkozy watched events on television as the torch ran past the Elysée Palace. His people hope that the public excitement will cool because there is not much that they can do to satisfy public discontent over China. Sarko is maintaining his threat to stay away from the opening ceremony in Beijing in August but few imagine him doing so.

[Headline: China: the slap in the face]

Sarkozy fumbles French Afghan force

Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be regaining favour after crashing to  unpopularity over the winter. A BVA poll today shows his approval climbing four points to 40 percent over the past month. This is the first rise since he went off the deep end with his autumn divorce and his speed courtship of Carla Bruni.

Heeding everyone's advice, Sarko has calmed the frenetic side of his nature and started acting presidential. He has pushed François Fillon, his Prime  Minister, onto the front line to catch the flak in the way that French premiers are supposed to.

Yet he has just made a new bungle. He has mishandled the dispatch of new French combat troops to Afghanistan

France and Britain clash over Beijing Olympics

Europe is in a tangle over this summer's Olympic games in Beijing.  Foreign Ministers of the Union are trying to reach a consensus today in Slovenia over the matter of using them to apply pressure on China. They will not manage because opinion is divided. This is a good moment to find out what readers of this blog think.

France and Britain have taken opposite sides, as President Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, made clear in London on Thursday. For Brown there is no question of even thinking about a boycott or staying away from the opening ceremony. The Olympics are purely about sport and London wants the best games possible, not least because it fears trouble when it hosts them in 2012. Sarkozy, however, is threatening to cancel his trip to the opening ceremony unless Beijing mends its ways, towards Tibet in particular.

There are other European approaches. In Poland, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister, has canceled his trip to Beijing and he urged other democratic politicians to do the same. Germany's Angela Merkel said that she is not going to the ceremony but had never intended to.

It's all a bit of a mess. The subject produced lively argument in a French TV show in which I took part today (Canal+ here. Click on 'L'émission de la semaine). In France, a country that prides itself on its sensitivity to human rights, the political world, media and public favour some gesture of disapproval towards Beijing's conduct in Tibet and to register distaste over the nature of the Chinese regime. They do not support a sporting boycott but a CSA opinion poll this week showed that 53 percent want national leaders to stay away from the opening ceremony. Sarkozy's threat was the least he could do after two weeks of public pressure. Despite the posturing, it is obvious that he will turn up in Beijing in August because he is as reluctant to incur Chinese displeasure as other leaders with heavy commercial interests at stake. A campaign for boycotting French goods is already under way at a site on SOHU.com, one of the big Chinese internet portals.

For the moment, though, France will make a little trouble. When French-led protesters flashed a banner at the lighting of the Olympic torch in Athens, the act was largely cheered here. It was seen as a grain of sand in the Chinese propaganda machine and there will be a lot more protests when the torch reaches Paris. Leading politicians from the Socialist opposition will take part. 

The same incident was treated quite differently in the British media. They talked of "anti-China protesters" disrupting the Athens ceremony and they ran headlines on "fears" for the torch's passage through London. 

The Times delivered an unequivocal endorsement of the games in an editorial today: "The newspaper ardently opposes any suggestion of a boycott, which would be unfair to the athletes ... self-defeating for those who want to see greater freedom in China and malicious towards a country and a people who have traveled so far to celebrate their achievements as a nation and their re-engagement with the world." 

Our editorial was a response to an internet campaign in China against Jane Macartney, our Beijing correspondent. She reports today that she has become the most hated person in the country after the Government cited a Times commentator (not her) who had compared the Beijing Olympics to Nazi Germany's 1936 games.

In her report, Macartney, a Mandarin speaker who knows the country well,  makes a strong anti-boycott case: The Chinese see the games as "a moment when they want to celebrate, with the world, their achievements, development and prosperity of the past three decades." 

As no expert on China I bow to those with knowledge, but I recall that similar arguments were used about the Moscow Olympics of 1980. President Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher, the US and British leaders of the time, led a sporting boycott that caused misery for the sportsmen and turned the games into a fiasco. That prompted a less effective retaliation by the Soviet bloc against the 1984 Los Angeles games. The Russians were understandably angry in 1980, but the message of international disapproval struck home. I was in Moscow in the run-up to those games and then for three years in the aftermath. The boycott -- ostensibly over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan --  added to the pressure that eventually unraveled the Soviet Union and ended the cold war.

Those were other times. China is a whole different story and I am not naive. But there is a similarity. Moscow's ruling communist party regarded the 1980 games primarily as a vehicle for political propaganda. They invested in them massively as a showcase for the Soviet state. Beijing's communist government is doing the same for its system.

I read in the US media today that Coca Cola and the other big Beijing games sponsors are now worried about possible damage to their image from their association with China's great event. It's odd that they did not see this coming a long time ago. 

Sarkozy's royal visit to the Queen

France and Britain are engaging in an ancient exercise this week: dazzling one-another. The occasion is Nicolas Sarkozy's first state visit to Britain. The current monarch of the Fifth Republic arrives on Wednesday with Carla Bruni and a glittering retinue to stay with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, west of London.

For nearly 800 years, the English and French took out their rivalry on battlefields in Europe and then around the world. But admiration was always part of the old enmity, with each side envying the other's superior qualities. The frogs had more style, refinement and dash. Seen from the other side, the perfidious rosbifs were a  stodgy bunch with an infuriating habit of getting their way.

The feuding cousins last fought at Waterloo in 1815 and they officially became friends with the Entente Cordiale accord in 1904, but the rivalry and admiration never faded. State visits -- meaning the full pomp with military salutes and palace banquets -- are an excellent occasion for staging the old contest and both sides are again out to impress the other, in a friendly way of course.

Just like French kings before him, Sarko wants to dazzle the down-to-earth Anglais.

Help save the French language

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

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

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

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

Sarkozy season II: back to basics

Le Sarko nouveau has arrived. Nicolas Sarkozy is out being presidential today, officiating at the grand funeral of France's last world war one veteran. This is the kind of statesmanlike image that he wants to project now that the French have slapped down his administration in nationwide local elections.

French voters are as fickle as those anywhere so it was no surprise that they swung against Super Sarko in the voting that ended yesterday. Here briefly is the fallout and a few lessons as we wonder how long the impulsive, slightly manic, president can stick to a new script in which he does dignified and distant.

The expected vague rose -- pink wave -- enabled the Socialist opposition to take 15 big cities from centre-right control, including Toulouse and Strasbourg, but not Marseille as they had hoped. One of the left's more impressive victories was the capture of the eastern city of Metz, which had been under rightwing control since 1848. The left now run a handsome majority of large towns. They comfortably held on to Paris and Lyon, the two biggest.

François Bayrou, the centrist who made such a strong run for the presidency last year, is consigned to history after failing to take the Pyrenean city of Pau for himself and letting his MoDem party self-destruct.

Of historical note was the fall of three Communist bastions -- the channel port of Calais and Montreuil and Aubvervilliers, on the eastern edge of Paris. Montreuil was won by Dominique Voynet, a veteran Green party figure who becomes the first écologiste to run a big city. On the other fringe, Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National got nowhere. With the old bogeyman nearing 80, it is unlikely that his movement will survive.

So what conclusions are to be drawn from the battering of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement ?

Paris book fair opens with row over Israel

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

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

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

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

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

Sarkozy's dubious glory in American Airbus deal

Nicolas Sarkozy has been taking credit for the extraordinary decision by the US Defense Department to buy a fleet of Air Force refuelling tankers worth at least 35 billion dollars from EADS, parent of the the European Airbus company, rather than from Boeing.

The French president said that the deal, which has sparked a political storm in the USA, would have been unimaginable if he had not repaired the damage to relations with Washington that had been inflicted by President Chirac's opposition to the Iraq invasion.

"Could one think for a minute that the contract which EADS has magnificently won... would have been signed in the climate of tension that existed between the Americans and French?" Sarko asked in le Figaro.

Sarkozy is right that his warmth towards the US has eased the chill that prevailed under Chirac. This undoubtedly helped the deal with the European Aeronautic, Defense and Space company. But he could be a little more modest. EADS' American contract was the fruit of years of effort, most of it before he won office last May. On top of that, the US order conflicts with his own doctrine of "economic patriotism".   

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Ten top topics for France this week

It's not surprising that the French are gloomy these days if you look at the news items that are getting their attention. Paris Match offers a regular glimpse with an Ifop poll on the top subjects of conversation at home and in the work place. 

Here are this week's top 10 and an interesting detail from Ifop. Ninety-one percent of people with university degrees said they had discussed President Sarkozy's verbal assault on the man who would not shake his hand at the farm show but only 65 percent of those without higher education did so. Only one topic (Cotillard's Oscar) is straight good news.  It's also worth noting how little sport or entertainment makes the list. The performance of the national rugby team ranked 15th.

1 -- Rising prices and (falling) purchasing power (discussed by 87 percent)

2 -- Sarkozy's exchange with the man at the farm show (77)

3 -- The campaign for local government elections (68)

4 -- The sixth anniversary of capture of Ingrid Betancourt, half-French hostage of Colombian rebels (65)

5 -- The Oscar for best actress won by Marion Cotillard (61)

6 -- The debate over how children should be taught about French Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. (57)   

7 -- Racist behaviour by supporters during football matches (53)

8 -- Sarkozy's decision to end advertising on public television (49)

9 -- Sarkozy's law allowing certain dangerous criminals to be detained indefinitely (delayed for 15 years by the Constitutional Council) (36)

10 -- The Obama-Clinton duel for the US Democratic nomination (36)    

Marion Cotillard buys the other version of 9/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY UPDATE:

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

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

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

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

   

Is Colonel Gaddafi a Frenchman?

If Colonel Gaddafi was so eager to linger in Paris when he came last December, it was perhaps because the Libyan leader is half French. His father was an air force pilot from Corsica. That's him in the picture on the left. 

This extraordinary claim has surfaced over the past few days after a report by Bakchich, a French investigative news site. They looked into a legend which has long circulated in Vezzani, a village of 600 people in eastern Corsica. According to this, a Vezzani gendarme's son called Albert Preziosi was stationed in the Libyan desert with the Free French air force in 1941-42. He is said to have had an affair with a local woman at about the time that young Muammar would have been conceived.

Preziosi was killed when his aeroplane was shot down over Russia in 1943. As a member of the famous Normandy-Niemen squadron, he has been celebrated as a hero in his home village ever since. An air force base near the town of Solenzara, is named after him. Not a shred of evidence exists to stand up the Gaddafi legend but the physical resemblance is so strong that it has persisted.

Obama wants to see Sarkozy

Barack Obama has delivered his thoughts on Nicolas Sarkozy to tomorrow's Paris Match. He's diplomatic but since it's his first foray into what could be a new US-French relationship, here's what he says. I have translated it back into English:

Sarkozy came to visit me in my office in Washington. It was before his election in France. He is an energetic man with a lot of talent. I am impressed by his way of looking at problems that are specific to France, with a new approach.

He is not tied down by the weight of tradition or dogma. He is an example for many leaders. In politics today, you have to look at things with a new vision. I want to go to France and meet him as soon as I win the nomination. I want to see with him how we can strengthen Franco-American relations further.

He also plans to go to London and Berlin. Obama tells Match that his first step to improve the image of the US abroad will be to finish the Iraq war and close the Guantanamo prison camp. As soon as he is elected, he will organise a summit with the world's Muslim leaders "to discuss with them frankly how to narrow the gap which is widening every day between Muslims and the west." 

We don't know Sarko's view of the Democratic contest, but there is no doubt that the French media and political world want a President Obama. As Jack Lang, the old Socialist showman, says: "He stands for  the America that we like." Hillary Clinton does not enjoy such a French fan club though Bill is widely admired.  Some leftish organs, such Libération and le Nouvel Observateur, are taking their wishes for reality and sometimes sound as though the Obama White House is almost here.

Jérôme Kerviel, world hero

The lawyers for Jérôme Kerviel, France's super-trader, say that he is stunned by his unwanted celebrity. If he takes a look at the internet he may be relieved to find that, mockery aside, he has become a world hero.

Over the past few days fan clubs and tribute sites have sprouted across the net: They include Facebook, dedicated sites such as Jeromekerviel.com,   and Wikipedia, Youtube and Dailymotion.

After half a million Google searches yesterday, JK's admirers are singing his praises as "The Che Guevara of Finance", the "James Bond of the Soc Gen". The real JK may have lost his Facebook friends on the day of his arrest, but 11 new Jérôme Kerviels are on Facebook at the moment, with 30 groups in French and English. On one he has over 900 fans, many of whom proclaim their love for  the clean-cut Breton whose pals called him Tom Cruise.

The T-shirt above, for sale at 17.99 dollars, features on the "Jérôme Kerviel Should Win the Nobel Prize for Economics" entry.

JK's new stardom comes in two flavours. There is mockery, much of it anti-French, apparently from professionals in the Anglo-American financial world. Within hours of the scandal breaking last Thursday, this lot was circulating the spoof news story about Kerviel being stressed out with his 30-hour working week.

Then there are the real admirers, who are voicing the widespread glee in France at the idea of a young provincial making fools of the capitalist establishment.

Trust us, say French bankers

You could hear the closing of ranks across the Paris establishment this morning as the enarques -- old boys from ENA, the high civil service school -- reassured France that everything is just fine in the French banking world.

They are rallying around Daniel Bouton, the former ENA civil servant who still heads Société Générale a day after announcing that one of his junior employees had fiddled away five billion (7.2 billion dollars) euros without anyone noticing.

Here's Friday night's latest on Jérôme Kerviel, 31, perpetrator of la fraude gigantesque, the man who lost the equivalent to the GNP of Senegal or a year's worth of the French RMI, the basic benefit of the long-term unemployed.

We were too busy yesterday tracking down this lowly trader fou (rogue) that there was no time to blog. The bank refused to divulge Kerviel's name, but it was circulating by mid-day and his Facebook entry led us straight to his friends, most of whom swiftly left his list.

We are told to believe that Kerviel was an amazing whiz with computers who simply managed to outsmart the bank that was supposed to have one of the world's most rigorous systems for managing risk.

Bad time for French market lessons

The anguish in the financial world has made this week a poor moment for convincing France of the joys of the free market. In a piece of unlucky timing, President Sarkozy will be expected to do that tomorrow when he is presented with a radical remedy for France's economic ills.

The cure is a batch of ideas devised over the past eight months at Sarkozy's request by Jacques Attali, the famous Paris economic strategist, and 40 lesser eminences. They could be entitled "300 ways to save France".

Sarko asked Attali, who remains best-known as economics guru to François Mitterrand, the late Socialist president,  to suggest ways of helping the French economy break free of the bonds that stifle growth. Even Sarko, with his fondness for la rupture, was not bargaining on how far Attali would go down the "Anglo-Saxon road".

We visited this last autumn when Attali's ideas for shop-keepers were emerging. In the final version, which is circulating in draft, he proposes removing or loosening most of the restrictions on trades and professions, from hair dressers and supermarkets to lawyers and taxi drivers. He also proposes opening the frontiers to worker immigrants, letting people work beyond retirement age and even the assessment of school teachers performance by their pupils. Read on in today's newspaper.

French reverence for old lefties

I was amused by the coincidence of three news items that tell you about France's nostalgic fondness for old-style communism.   

Down in Montpellier, Georges Frêche, the local political baron, is trying to buy a seven-ton statue of Vladimir Lenin and put it in a prominent place in the Mediterranean city.

In Paris, the media are full of respectful, even affectionate, tributes to Pierre Lambert, an "historic" French Trotskyite leader who has just died.

Also in Paris, Danièlle Mitterrand, the 84-year-old widow of the late president, is about to sell at auction his clothes and souvenirs. A prime item is a bizarre bag made from a whole baby crocodile that was a gift from Fidel Castro. 

Frêche, who is president of the Languedoc Roussillon region and also of the Montpellier area council, wants to spend between 150,000 and 250,000 tax-payers' dollars on the  statue of the founding hero of the Soviet Union. He spotted the bronze likeness of the late dictator in a street in Seattle, Washington, on a recent visit (picture above).

"Lenin stands among the greatest men of the 20th century, in the same way as Mao Tse Tung or General de Gaulle," says Frêche, an old provocateur who was kicked out of the Socialist party last year for making racist remarks.

Electric flight over France

As we know, the French did more than any other nation to pioneer aviation a century ago. Now they have scored another flying first. Little noticed by the outside world, on December 23, a pilot took off from an Alpine airfield and flew for 48 minutes in the first light aircraft to be powered by electricity.   

With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d'Argencon, have just achieved.

Their "Electra", a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. "This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It's a machine built for anyone with a pilot's license."

Dining high on Eiffel's Tower

 

It's impossible to write this post without making an obvious pun about haute cuisine. Paris cooking doesn't get any more elevated than the restaurant that has re-opened today 410 feet (125m) up on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.

The setting of the old Jules Verne restaurant has always been superb, perched inside the iron girders of the tower. What makes it special now is the new boss,  Alain Ducasse, the super-chef and businessman who has 27 restaurants with 15 Michelin stars around the world.   

Ducasse [above] won the tower catering concession a couple of years ago after the old management let the restaurant slide into expensive mediocrity. Doing the promotional rounds this week, Ducasse has said that he aims to lure Parisians back onto a site that was long left to tourists, with fine, all-French cooking. 

"There won't be any nems (Vietnamese spring rolls), only French products, beef, scallops, turbot, Saint Pierre, langoustines, Limousin lamb, Landes farmer's chicken with crayfish... Even the whisky will be French," he said.

The tight confines of the tower and the need for reasonable prices has led Ducasse to aim for less majestic fare than his Paris Plaza Athénée and his other high culinary temples. They are haute couture while the Jules Verne, one of two eateries on the tower, will be "luxury ready-to-wear," he said. 

The Gaddafi circus leaves Paris in a mess

Nicolas Sarkozy is counting down the hours until his unwelcome guest, Muammar Gaddafi, finally pulls out of Paris. For the French president and many Parisians, the five-day official visit by the Libyan leader has seemed endless.

My post on Gaddafi's arrival on Monday drew some interest, so here's an update, drafted for tomorrow's paper. The Colonel has spent the week playing to his fans like an old rock idol, revelling in provocation, insulting his hosts, snarling up traffic and indulging his whims. The last of these was pheasant shooting on the presidential estate at Rambouillet and then a tour of Versailles. "His excellency is a great admirer of King Louis XIV", said an aide. The Supreme Guide of the Revolution, who was initially invited for two days, first asked to go fox-hunting at Fontainebleau, but he was dissuaded.

Gaddafi has also shown off his expertise in recent French history, lecturing his hosts for abusing the human rights of north African immigrants. He put himself in the skin of the kids in the rioting banlieue and said: "They brought us here like cattle to do hard and dirty work, and then they throw us to live on the outskirts of towns, and when we claim our rights, the police beat us." He was talking there to an audience of admirers -- mainly African -- at the headquarters of Unesco. Unlike France, Libya has an impeccable rights record, he added.

The Colonel has been holding court in the Bedouin tent next to the Elysée Palace that was erected at his request in the garden of the Marigny guest mansion. Embarrassed French officials banned photographs, so Gaddafi invited in Paris Match to do a glossy spread on him in prayer and relaxing there. Le Monde's television critic, my old friend Dominique Dhombres, came up with a wonderful comparison. The Libyan leader has been behaving just like Abdullah, the insufferable little boy who taunts Captain Haddock in the Tintin tales, said Dhombres.

Gaddafi lands in French storm

Muammar Gaddafi is landing about now at Orly airport. But the arrival of the Libyan leader in Paris for the first time since 1973 has already stirred up a hornet's nest. It may even cost the job of Rama Yade, President Sarkozy's young Minister for Human Rights [picture below]. 

Yade, 31, has joined in a chorus of indignation over Sarko's invitation to "The Tyrant of the Desert", as the papers are calling Gaddafi. Everyone is piling joyously into Sarko for conferring the royal treatment on the former international pariah.  The Presidency has erected a huge Bedouin tent for Gaddafi in a garden alongside the Elysée Palace. The Guide, as he likes to be called, has booked himself six fun days in Paris, including meetings with "leading women" and Renault factory workers and outings to the Chateau de Versailles and a spot of mounted fox-hunting. His whims are sending the protocol people spare. The visit was supposed to last three days. Gaddafi announced that he would prefer two weeks. He is now going to leave after five days in and around the French capital.   

There is a strong whiff of humbug  in the outcry from the leftwing opposition and most of the media. France, they note, is a country of high moral principles. After cosying up to Presidents Putin of Russia, Hu Jintao of China, and now Gaddafi, Sarkozy is breaching his election promises to put human rights before business, they say.   

That is all fair game for the opposition, who are happy to forget the shady regimes befriended by the late President Mitterrand and the, shall we say, pragmatic conduct of  foreign policy by all French leaders since Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.

But there has not in my memory been a case of a President coming under such public attack from his own team.

Marry me Sarkozy, says Chinese star

Nicolas Sarkozy did not just bring back billions of euros of contracts from his state visit to China. He also received a proposal of marriage. Namu, a well-known Chinese writer and singer, delivered her declaration of longstanding love for the recently divorced Sarko on a video that made the French media this morning.

"I want to say to the President of France: 'Choose me. I will be a perfect wife for you and I will love you like the way I love, my love'," she says. (The video here has French voicing over English and Chinese, but you can pick up enough of the English to get the idea).

"I know that he had a wife who did not help him at all. I think that I suit him much better," she says. "In diplomatic affairs, the wife is important. I find that he especially needs a girl like me to accompany him, who can bring him romance and sing and dance for him," explans Namu.

The 41-year-old singer, who has turned into a writer and television personality in China, also loves Sarko's skin and is "certain that he must be a great kisser", according to the French translation.    

Namu, whose full name is Yang Erche Namu comes from the region neighbouring Tibet. She is enitled to make the marriage proposal because she is of  the Himalayan Mosuo minority, a matriarchal and matrilinear people.  She wrote about them in a 2004 US-published book that reached the New York Times best-seller list: Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World.

Here's the book's description of "the place the Chinese call 'the country of daughters'...a society in which women rule men."

According to local tradition, marriage is considered a foreign practice; property is passed from mother to daughter; a matriarch oversees each family's customs, rituals, and economies. In this culture a young girl enjoys extraordinary freedoms—but the impulsive, restless Namu is driven to leave her mother's house, to venture out into the larger world, defying the tradition that holds Mosuo culture together.

The video has disappeared from the French Dailymotion site, so perhaps Sarko's people are not pleased by Namu's offer and her suggestion that "the private life of the French president needs innovation."

It is interesting to note that one of the smart moves that Sarko made on his trip to China was to take along Andrée, 81-year-old mother. After he presented Andrée to President Hu Jintao and he gave her a shawl, Chinese officials told the media that Sarko must be a good man, taking such care of his mother.

Since then, Nicolas Canteloup has a new running gag, in which Sarko is constantly interrupted by his mother asking if he's done his homework, cleaned his teeth and so on.   

Sarko did not meet Namu on the visit.

   

Sarkozy flies to rescue, lands in French-African mess

Super Sarko is riding to the rescue once again today, flying to Africa to bring back French journalists and Spanish flight crew who were caught up in the fiasco of Zoe's Ark in Chad.

For those new to the story, catch up here. What's fascinating about the affair is the way that a bunch of over-zealous charity cowboys from the northern Paris suburbs have dragged President Sarkozy into just the kind of traditional French-African mess that he wants to avoid. France is once again cosying up to one of its African clients and it has tripped over its own humanitarian doctrines, as propounded by Bernard Kouchner, the dashing activist whom Sarko appointed Foreign Minister last May.

The arrest of the Zoe's Ark crew was a windfall for Idriss Déby, the Chadian president, because it has given him leverage at a time when Sarko wanted to distance France from its history of propping up unsavoury leaders in its former colonies. The French military helped install Déby in power in 1990 and on the orders of President Chirac the French contingent of 1,200 men plus Mirage jets saved his skin from an imminent revolt last year.  With his power under threat from armed opponents, Déby needs France more than ever.

Sarkozy's Midnight in Moscow

We know that Nicolas Sarkozy does not touch a drop of alcohol, so something else explained why his spirits were so high when he regaled us late last night on his dinner with Vladimir Putin.

Sarko was unstoppable as he held forth in a little room in the National,  the old Soviet hostelry, now transformed into luxury hotel, which is opposite the Kremlin and Red Square. In three hours at Putin's dacha, two minds had met as they surveyed the world and Russia's resurgence as a power, Sarko said. "It was a long, very long discussion. Enthralling, very intimate. I felt a real desire to exchange ideas and to understand."

Something seems to happen to Sarko when he meets Putin. It was after their first meeting, at the G8 sumit in Germany last June, that he acted like such an excited schoolboy that the video of "Drunk Sarko" became a Youtube hit.  The French president arrived in Moscow talking of Putin's "brutality" with Russian natural gas and warning how tough he would be with the uncooperative Kremlin.The cosy old Franco-Russian days were over and we would see what we would see, as the French say. Yet there he was overflowing with admiration for the soon-to-resign Tsar -- and claiming that he had won a big concession from him over policy on Iran's nuclear programme. Here's the newspaper story I wrote up after a long day and night in Moscow.

It seemed once again that Sarko was incredulous that he was playing world statesman, accepted as one of the big-boys, dans la cour des grands. Putin, he said, had confided in him his possible plans for staying on in power by becoming prime minister once he stands down as President next year. He had sounded him out on his own ideas for putting a two-term limit on France's five-year presidency. Putin is weighing the pros and cons of continuing power and he is extraordinarily lucid on the matter, said Sarkozy.

Sarko also said that he had been frank about his misgivings on Russia's treatment with internal dissent and its intolerance for homosexuals. Putin did not react badly, Sarko told me, because he had framed his remarks by stressing the world's admiration for Russia's revived power, saying that this could only be tarnished by less than impeccable conduct at home.

It is always fascinating to see Sarkozy up close like this. He was even joking that he had something in common with Putin because he had been chief of the French secret servie for four years -- as Interior Minister under Jacques Chirac. "What makes you think I'm an ordinary president?" he quipped to the group of reporters who had come from Paris to sit at his feet.  Chirac would never have made a crack like that. Nor would he have chatted so openly after a session with his good friend Vladimir. Sarko is really different.

Today, he has a chance to go public on his misgivings on human rights when he meets university students and then holds a press conference with Putin before lunch in the Kremlin. We shall see if the tone changes.

On a personal note, it's great to be back in the USSR... err, Russia, after all these years. For an old hand who lived here before the end of communism, it's still amazing to see the glitzy new, back-to-the-future Russia.  The new towers of Moscow, its showrooms of Bentley and Mercedes cars, its garish advertising, its commercial radio stations are still a novelty. Getting off the French Air Force Airbus at Vnukovo aerodrome, you are greeted by airline insignia with the Tsar's double-headed eagle. Someone who remembered only the hammers and sickles of Aeroflot has to pinch himself.

But things have not changed so much. They still stopped all the traffic on the motorway, pulling the mud-spattered cars and trucks to the side, to let our minivan convoy cruise into the city. And that was just for the media. Sarko arrived three hours later.   

   

Sarkozy is too friendly for the Germans

 

This is not a shot from a romantic movie or a new Singin' in the Rain. It's a glimpse of the Franco-German couple in action and part of why Nicolas Sarkozy gets on Angela Merkel's nerves.

In the picture, the French President is giving the German Chancellor his usual warm embrace when he arrived in Berlin for one of their regular summits on Monday. Sarko is a physical guy. He comes in close. Grabs, hugs and back-slaps are his tools for connecting with people -- like Bill Clinton. Presidents Bush and Putin have both been subjected lately to the Sarko hand-pump with arm around the shoulders.

When you receive the Sarko treatment, you sense the desire to dominate as well as the friendliness. I experienced it backstage in a TV studio after interviewing him in May. The slight menace and Sarko's small stature inevitably bring Hollywood gangsters to mind. With women, there is a patronising side.

[Sarko welcomes yachtswoman Maude Fontenoy]

Merkel feels that Sarkozy has been pushing her around since he won the presidency in May and began trying to impose himself as boss of Europe. She has now had enough of his Tigger-like antics and her people are making it known that she resents the excessive greetings.

Young Gaddafi becomes Libya's Al Gore

   

Taking time out from France, I have just spent a couple of days as a guest of the Gaddafi family, sleeping in a tent in eastern Libya.

This was not a retreat for reflection -- although a jump from Paris into the burnt ochre brushland of Cyrenaica puts perspective on our Euro-centric life. We were part of a slightly surreal operation which would have been unthinkable a few years back, when Muammar Gaddafi and his rogue state was the bogey of the western world.

[Picture: Seif Gaddafi announces new green Libya]

The object was the launch of a grand -- or maybe grandiose -- project to convert a few hundred miles of wild Mediterranean coastline and its hinterland into a world-class destination for well-heeled eco-tourists and a model for sustainable development. Driving the so-called Green Mountain scheme is Seif al-Islam, the European-educated son of Muammar Gaddafi, the eccentric ruler who has just celebrated 38 years of power.  Here's the story in today's paper.

"Surreal" sprang to mind with as the sun went down on Sunday evening by the spectacular temple of Zeus, built by the Greeks 2,600 years ago.  There we were, journalists plus investors, eco-experts, architects, heritage officials, lawyers and archeologists, all feasting -- alcohol free -- to music in a tent village in a field. Outside the fence, vehicles with dozens of police and soldiers kept guard as sightseers from mud brick shacks stared at the aliens within.

    [our  green accommodations beside Temple of Zeus]

[The camp guards]

Les Vacances, Sarko-style

 

For my first post back in Paris, I was going to talk about the red deer which was grazing with her fawn outside my window in the Cévennes. I'll cut it short though, because I had better get onto the topic that has been stirring up France and exchanges on this blog -- President Sarkozy's US vacation (today's newspaper story).

In the Cévennes dawn on Saturday, a mystery was solved. We had risen to hit the road early for one of those black traffic days, when millions of French join the north Europeans for their annual treks to and from the sun. For two weeks, we had been occasionally woken by a deep barking sound, like that of a big dog,  coming from the woods. We usually hear the wild boar grunting and scuffling but this was different. As we were leaving on Saturday, the source emerged 20 yards away in the meadow:  a magnificent doe with her fawn. La biche was grazing off the chestnut trees and doing the dog-like bark.