Roman Polanski has spoken. For the first time since his arrest in Switzerland in September, the French-Polish film-maker has made a public statement, thanking his fans for their support in his ordeal. He has done this via a letter to his fan number one, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a commentator-celebrity who made a name in the 1970s as a philosopher [picture].
At Polanski's request, BHL, as he is known, has put the letter of gratitude on La Règle du Jeu the online culture journal that he runs. From his chalet in Gstaad, where he was consigned to await his possible extradition to Los Angeles, Polanski writes to his supporters:
"I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning mail. In the darkest moments, each of their notes has been a source of comfort and hope, and they continue to be so in my current situation."
I'm not sure that Polanski is doing himself a service with his recourse to the dashing personality from the Left Bank. In Los Angeles, where the director is wanted for taking a 13-year-old girl to bed in 1977, BHL's over-blown indignation cannot be helping. His diatribes against the Swiss are not making friends there. I suspect that his campaign is not doing much good in France either, despite the platform that the media always offer the star penseur to pronounce on moral matters of the moment. 
BHL has mounted two petitions for Polanski's release. Here he was in full flow last week reporting in his column in Le Point on his pre-Christmas visit to Polanski in Gstaad. The cinéaste is putting the finishing touches to Ghost, his latest film, while suffering from the media siege around his chalet, BHL tells us. "Prisoner of his gaolers and now of the entertainment society...Harassed by the pack as few of our contemporaries have been. This must stop. Roman Polanski and the world must wake up from this nightmare."
In arresting Polanski on behalf of the California authorities, Switzerland has lastingly sullied its national honour, insulted its own tradition as a haven with this "hallucinating manhunt".... and so he went on.
BHL struck a similar theme in Le Parisien last week, calling on public figures to come forward "to say how mad, surrealist, unthinkable it is that in countries where a murderer leaves prison after 20 years, they can put back in prison someone for a sex act with a minor more than 30 years ago."
Lévy gets away with his imprecision and logical fallacies because of France's enduring respect for intellectuals. This kind of stuff does not come over so well in English as he found in 2006 when he published his observations on the United States in 'American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville'. The book was incinerated by US critics. On the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Garrison Keillor said Lévy had “the grandiosity of a college sophomore, a student padding out a term paper." He added: "There’s no reason for [the book] to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening."For a summary of the American case against BHL read here
Last week, appeal judges in Los Angeles threw out an attempt to quash the proceedings against Polanski. They have been in abeyance since he fled in 1978. But they held out the possibility that he might not face prison time for his old offence. It seems counter-productive for Lévy to be dumping on US and Swiss law and depicting Polanski as a victim of monstrous injustice. It might be better to counsel his friend to get on a plane and go and face the music.
One story has dominated the French news for the past five days but you may not have heard about it. The matter gripping the nation is the poor health of Johnny Hallyday.
The veteran rocker is emerging from an an induced coma in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Television crews have staked out the place for days, leading bulletins with sketchy, fact-free reports. Family and friends have flown to his bedside. Meanwhile in Paris, two hooded men have beaten up the celebrity surgeon who allegedly bungled an operation on Johnny for a slipped disk two weeks ago. There are mysteries around the whole affair. The tale of the ailing star, pushy managers and shady doctors is prompting comparisons with the Michael Jackson saga. [Here's how the LA Times reports the scene]
For beginners here, Hallyday, 66, is a former teen idol who has been France's native rock 'n roll hero for half a century. Jean-Philippe Smet, to use his real name, is a hard-living showman. Since the late 1950s, he has inhabited a pseudo-American persona that he invented as a youngster to cover US hits. "Le Johnny national" is a bit of a joke to the thinking classes and the young see him as a kitschy dinosaur. To President Sarkozy and legions of middle-aged fans, he is a cherished national treasure.
For people over 40, the idea of the l'inoxydable (rustproof) Johnnie in intensive care has been a sharp reminder of their own mortality. Sarkozy explained Johnny's role in the French collective memory to foreigners in Brussels last Friday. He told an EU summit press conference that he was relieved to hear that the singer was recovering from what we are told was an infected spine. His illness "provokes great emotion in France because he's a much-loved man and, for each of us, he represents a bit of our personal history: memories, feelings, songs, music," Sarkozy said.
The Hallyday health story is in keeping with the larger-than-life persona. He has exhausted himself this year with a gruelling seven-month "farewell" tour which he is still supposed to resume on January 8. He went into the Parc Monceau clinic in Paris for an operation on a slipped disk late last month and flew only four days later to Los Angeles. He collapsed soon after landing. Jean-Claude Camus, his impresario, accused Stéphane Delajoux, a young show-biz surgeon who operated on his disk, of "massacring" Hallyday. Within hours, Delajoux was beaten up. His lawyer accused the media of effectively having him lynched.
Like much around the Hallyday story, we have no idea what the attack was about. Secrecy has surrounded his hospital stay, with not a single medical communiqué on his condition. Internet rumours say of course that he is dead. News has trickled out via Camus, Laeticia, his latest young wife [above], and celebrity friends who have visited him. The latest to fly out was Nathalie Baye, the actress, with whom he had a daughter.
Fingers are pointing at Camus, a tough businessman, for pushing Hallyday too hard. Despite his lifetime sale of over 100 million records, Hallyday is said to need the money to pay past bills and keep his entourage in the luxury to which they are accustomed. Like many stars before him, Hallyday has a reputation for being manipulated by the people around him. He is said to have lost a lot of money over the years. The public is also not told why France's national institution divides his non-working time between homes in LA, Saint Barts' in the Caribbean and Gstaad, Switzerland. The reason is that he needs to stay out of France to retain non-resident status to avoid income tax. He has been domiciled in Switzerland for the past three years.
 [Picture: France was shocked to see the mighty Johnny in a wheelchair at LAX]
Johnny said recently that he was weary of his role as the guitar-slinging, Harley-driving rebel. "I have had enough playing Johnny Hallyday," he said at the outset of his tour last May. "I want more and more to be Jean-Philippe Smet."
Franck Nouchi, a Le Monde columnist, made a good point this afternoon. The "sacred union" of the nation at Johnny's bedside says more about France than all Sarkozy's great debate over the country's identity, Nouchi wrote.
The insurance experts and lawyers are now preparing for battle over the big losses expected from the likely cancellation of the next stretch of his booked-out farewell tour. Will the surgeon be blamed or will Johnny be deemed irresponsible for taking a Los Angeles flight straight after an operation?
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
------------
The Simpsons offer clever satire on American culture but they often fall flat when they take on foreigners. Here's a new example, a brief parody of Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy. This clip has taken off in France since it appeared on the internet at the end of the week.
The episode, called The Devil Wears Nada, went out in the US on November 15. Homer is accompanying Carl Carlson on a visit to Paris. They bump into the Bruni character, a femme fatale who throws herself at Carl. Note Sarkozy's office, with camembert on his desk and Bruni with a glass of wine. The President answers the phone: "You're getting cosy with Sarkozy."
French commentators have been noting the obvious. The episode is about American clichés and not about France or the Sarkozys. Don't forget that The Simpsons invented the taunt Cheese-eating surrender monkey. The Elysée Palace had nothing to say about the episode. Perhaps the producers should have asked the Sarkozys to do their own voices. When Tony Blair played himself on The Simpsons, the jokes were gentle in comparison.
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.
This has not been a good week for airline pilots. Four American ones -- all employed by Delta, have been suspended for two blunders. Now we hear that Air France, the national carrier, has accused its pilots of dangerously sloppy flying.
The charge arises from a dispute between pilots and management over the Flight 447 disaster which killed 228 people off Brazil last June 1. There is a common thread in these three cases. It is the reminder that aircraft depend on human beings to pilot tham.
On Monday, a pair from Delta got muddled and put their Boeing down on a taxi-way at Atlanta instead of the runway. The other two, flying a Northwest Airlines Airbus from San Diego, failed to notice that they had flown past Minneapolis, their destination. That incident, which passengers did not even notice, has sparked a furore while the more dangerous Atlanta bungle has been largely ignored.
People imagine that jets these days are guided to their destination by a web of computers, satellites and other high technology. In reality, the automation is simply there to help the pilots, who use their judgment to keep everything the right side up. New technology is on the way, but airline crew still take "turn left, turn right" instructions from controllers over old-fashioned radio, as they have since the 1920s. They put the plane down on the runway by hand -- after making sure that it is the right one. Airliners have even landed at completely wrong airports quite recently. Fatigue, boredom, emotions and many other things can get in the way. It's surprising that they do not cause damage more often. Flying near Paris airport in a small plane I sometimes have to correct incoming airliners who have called our aeroclub frequency by mistake because it is only a few digits on the dial from the Charles de Gaulle tower.
No-one was hurt in the two US incidents. Old airline pilots recall getting away with worse. The Delta crew made their error after being asked to switch, at the end of a tiring night flight, from one runway to a parallel one. It was not fully lit for the approach and its instrument landing beacon was off. They were rushing to disembark a third pilot who had fallen ill. They were very lucky that nothing was on the long taxi-way that they mistook for the runway. The Northwest pilots (whose airline is now owned by Delta) have not said publicly what was going on when they flew past their destination. Initially they talked of being distracted by a heated discussion. They were initially suspected of having fallen asleep -- something which has befallen many pilots but usually not both at once. [November 1 update: The pilots have told investigators that they were were distracted by a discussion in which they had opened their laptop computers. They seem likely to lose their jobs.]
In the case of Air France, the story is complicated. The airline management is reacting to unrest among pilots over the way they have been blamed for recent incidents and accidents and especially the AF 447 crash. On Tuesday, the management sent all crew a memo headed: "Enough argument and false debate on flight safety." They accused "over-confident" crew of ignoring standard procedures and risking their aircraft. Too many foolishly believe that they have "mastered elementary risk" -- according to the text leaked today.
The management said it was especially unhappy with the way that pilots have blamed the AF 447 disaster on the Airbus A330 and on faulty airline practices. "There are no procedures to correct, no new ones to create," it said. The Unions are furious. "The bond of confidence between pilots and management is totally broken," said the SNPL, the moderate main union. The more radical minority unions are in open war, accusing Air France and the state accident investigators of trying to cover up serious flaws in the Airbus A330 by blaming the dead crew for the Flight 447 crash [previous post].
None of these three episodes do much to inspire the confidence of passengers who travel on these major world airlines. But they are nothing new. Flying stirs special emotion. People put up with carnage on the roads but are outraged by every mishap in the much safer air. When you think of the thousands of airliners aloft 24 hours a day, it is a huge achievement that human error does not lead to more trouble.
It will still be fascinating to find out what the crew on Northwest Flight 188 were up to on Wednesday evening as they forgot to land.
[Top photo from Air France advertising]
Ireland's 'yes' to the EU Lisbon treaty clears the way for Nicolas Sarkozy to stage his next big splash on the diplomatic front. This will take the form of a grand proposal to Chancellor Angela Merkel to renew the marriage vows that have bound Germany and France since 1963.
Europe (don't yawn, British and American readers), is now about to enter a new political phase after a decade of paralysis and self-absorption. It is to get a voice, in the person of a permanent President and Foreign Minister. The new boss might be Tony Blair, but I wouldn't bet on it yet -- see below.
Paris ministries have been under orders since the late spring to come up with ideas for putting Europe's famed Franco-German locomotive back on the rails. These include the possible assignment by each of a minister to the other's government and alignment of energy and industrial policy. Other ideas, outlined by the Institut Montaigne think tank, include co-ordinating budgetary and fiscal policies and merging the Paris and Frankfurt stock markets.
In a symbol of reconciliation, Merkel is expected to become the first German leader to attend world war one Armistice Day ceremonies at the Arc de Triomphe on November 11. That's just after the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Sarkozy aims to use to relaunch new Franco-German friendship. This was first formally enshrined in the 1963 Treaty of the Elysée, signed by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer . Pierre Lellouche, the French Europe Minister, hinted this morning that we should expect something special on the Berlin wall day.
Sarkozy is taking a well-trodden path. Every new French president for decades has strayed from the Franco-German core and flirted with other partners before reverting to it. François Mitterrand, for example, fell out with Helmut Kohl in 1989 when he joined Margaret Thatcher in trying to stop Germany reuniting. They made up and launched monetary union in the early 1990s.
Sarkozy took France back into the heart of Nato but his shine for Britain and its big Anglo-Saxon brother across the Atlantic has faded. He blames them for the financial crisis and is frustrated by their failure to back his plans for "remoralising capitalism" -- which Merkel has supported. Sarkozy is said to be bitter over President Obama's rejection of his attempts to forge complicity between them [See a new account of Sarkozy's Obama envy by my old friend Chris Dickey of Newsweek]. Britain will become Europe's main troublemaker again if, as expected, David Cameron wins power at the head of a Conservative government next spring.
Merkel's enthusiasm for a new 'Franceallemagne' (note which country comes first in the French coinage) is not as hot as Sarkozy's. The chemistry has improved between the pair since their early friction. But Germany still sees France as hopelessly profligate and it is suspicious of Sarkozy's return to state dirigisme of the kind that they do not like across the Rhine. The French are, on their side, unhappy with Berlin's intervention last month to save the German operations of the Opel car firm. Sarkozy has been trying to sweeten the Germans by putting Germanophiles in high places. Chief among them is Bruno Le Maire, his new German-speaking Agriculture Minister.
Wishful thinking may be part of the new romance. Enjeux des Echos, a business magazine, gave this impression last week when it said: "There is a common will in Paris and Berlin to break with the ultra-liberalism of a Brussels Commission that has fallen into the hands of the English. Now that the Anglo-Saxon model is on its way out, the future is once again focused on an economy regulated by states." I'm not sure that Germany goes along with that.
An important factor in the Franco-German relaunch will be the carve-up of new jobs. Sarkozy would, we gather, be quite happy if Blair took over as president and the 'Foreign Minister' job went to France, possibly to Hubert Vedrine, a former Socialist French Foreign Minister who is well thought-of around Europe. But Merkel, strengthened by her re-election last month, does not want a Blair presidency. Germany will need something big in return and there is the small matter of winning the consent of all the 27 member states. Blair is broadly accepted because he is the only heavyweight in the running, apart from Felipe Gonzalez, the former Spanish Socialist premier. But there is little enthusiasm for him. Expect a heavy bout of old-fashioned EU horse-trading at the late October leaders' summit in Brussels.
In the meantime, Sarkozy has been taking the credit this weekend for the success of the Irish referendum. It was he, we are reminded, who insisted in the face of widespread opposition that the Irish should be asked to think again after they refused the Lisbon treaty the first time around.
And to close, my slightly bleak view of European politics should not be put down to hostility to the Union. Okay, the machine is bureaucratic, elitist and all the rest of it, but it has succeeded in uniting former enemies, reinforcing democracy and spreading prosperity across the whole continent. It is hard to fathom the hostility that still prevails in Britain, 36 years since it joined. The EU has been of enormous benefit to Britain, whatever its drawbacks. I see that Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and a former Brussels colleague of mine, has been ranting against the Union this weekend, demanding a British referendum on the ratified Lisbon treaty. And the Daily Mail, the Little England newspaper, has a ludicrous lament today, headlined So Our 1,000 Years of History Ends Like This.
The Russian navy has its eyes on a new helicopter-carrying warship. The impressive model that they want to buy could have let Russia drive Georgian forces from the north Caucausus last year in a flash,says Admiral Vladimir Vysotski, the navy chief.
And who makes this great vessel ? France. In Moscow yesterday, two ministers -- Bernard Kouchner of Foreign Affairs and Hervé Morin of Defence -- settled the outline of a deal to sell a 700 million euro Mistral-class helicopter-carrier to the Russians.This would be the first sale of a major western weapon to Russia since World War Two, so President Sarkozy will have some explaining to do with Washington and the Nato allies.
Paris is optimistic. Kouchner, a lifelong human rights activist, waxed enthusiastic about the imminent sale. "This political agreement should be reached, I think, but it's not up to me to decide ... concerning this wonderful warship," he told Moscow Echo radio station.
Moscow is aiming to order one or two Mistrals from the French naval dockyards, plus the technology to put together their own versions. The ship, which is France's second biggest after the Charles de Gaulle nuclear-powered carrier, is capable of carrying more than a dozen helicopters and 470 infantry along with dozens of tanks and other armoured vehicles.
Moscow wants the ship to supplement its antique surface-fleet. It is just the thing to project Russian power around the world -- and close to home. Russia's Black Sea neighbours are appalled and Admiral Vysotski helpfully spelt out why. Talking about Russia's ejection of Georgian troops from the rebel province of South Ossetia last August, he said that a Mistral "would have meant that our Black Sea Fleet could have accomplished its mission in 40 minutes instead of 26 hours by road."
France, you may recall, claims credit for stopping that conflict. Sarkozy flew to Moscow and Tbilisi and brokered a ceasefire after three days of fighting in August last year.
Dutch and Spanish firms are also bidding for the Russian deal but the French are confident that they have it sewn up. But there are obvious hurdles. The United States jealously guards the export of its technology, especially of a military kind. It is pretty likely that despite French expertise, the Mistral class carries a load of US patents. So if France is determined to go ahead, Washington will become involved.
The Obama administration would have to decide whether it will accept what would in Cold War times have been an unthinkable deal in the interest of the famous US-Russian reset button. Washington is unlikely to be happy about a western ally giving a helping hand to the Kremlin to flex Russian muscles on the high seas. Whatever happens, Moscow has a good chance of driving a wedge into the Nato alliance over the affair.
The sale would be a nice boost to the French arms business after last month's provisional agreement by Brazil to buy 36 Rafale fighters plus the technology to build them.
But before everyone piles in against French "merchants of death", here is last year's table of suppliers. The USA was top with 49 percent of the world military export market. Britain was second with a 15 percent share. Russia scored eight percent and France seven percent.
The radio offered a familiar song today as I was driving down from the Channel: the French intellectual classes and government were in full cry against the United States.
The cause this time is Roman Polanski. His arrest in Switzerland has dominated the news for 24 hours in France and Poland -- ahead of the election of a new German government -- and it has been big elsewhere.
[See Wednesday update below*]
Like everyone, I feel sorry for Polanski. Aged 76, a naturalized French citizen and one of the star directors of his generation, he was arrested while on his way to a Swiss film festival held in his honour. California wants him extradited over a 1977 offence. But he is not helped by the explosion of outrage from the intello-celebrities and the way the French Government has succumbed to its anti-American reflex.
C'est normal that Bernard Henry-Lévy, the Left Bank's star thinker and auto-publicist, should be raging on the radio as I write this. It's fairly normal that France's Society of Film Directors should warn that the arrest "could have disastrous consequences for freedom of expression across the world".
It is more difficult to take the intemperate response of President Sarkozy and his government. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister and friend of the stars, used the logic that Polanski's high artistic achievement should protect him from ordinary justice. "This affair is frankly a bit sinister. Here is a man of such talent, recognised worldwide, recognised especially in the country where he was arrested. This is not nice at all,"Kouchner said on France-Inter radio.
Frédéric Mitterrand, Sarkozy's Culture Minister and big film fan, went right over the top, calling Polanski's arrest "absolutely horrifying. Polanski had been thrown to the lions, he said. "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also an America that frightens us and that one has just shown its face," said Mitterrand.
It is true that Frédo, as they call him, and Kouchner, are from the leftish wing of the government, but Sarko himself took Polanski's side, in more diplomatic language.
There are mitigating factors. Polanski has suffered terrible events in his life -- his mother's death at Nazi hands and the murder of Sharon Tate, his pregnant wife, in 1969. The Los Angeles judge and prosecutor in 1977 appear to have reneged on a deal for a guilty plea to sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl. But some perspective would help. Polanski is not a victim of monstrous injustice -- or persecution by Hollywood, as Le Monde suggests this afternoon by comparing his case to that of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s.
Since fleeing to France in 1978, Polanski has refused return to Los Angeles to end the case (He did not collect his 2003 Best Director Oscar for fear of arrest). After his LA lawyers asked last year for the case to be quashed, the judge indicated sympathy with his arguments. But Polanski still did not turn up in court for the hearing in May this year so the judge rejected the request.
You can argue about Switzerland's role. Polanski spends time there every year in his house at Gstaad and had never been molested. There are suspicions that Berne acted to extradite him this time because it wants to redeem itself with the United States after the affair of tax-evading bank accounts and other scandals.
But Polanski is in his predicament simply because the justice system, especially in the United States, is relentless once the wheels are in motion. The outpouring of sympathy from France's high and mighty is playing right into the hands of their populist opponents. Marine Le Pen, heir apparent to her father's National Front party, took an easy swipe today. "Does belonging to the super-protected show-biz caste exonerate you for 30 years from judicial pursuit?" she asked. Sarkozy's administration is setting a bad example for people fighting against sexual violence towards children, she said. For once, it difficult to disagree with Madame Le Pen.
------------
*Update Wednesday: Since I posted this on Monday, the pendulum has swung back in France. The Socialist opposition finally came down against the government for criticising the Polanski arrest. Several eminent figures in Sarkozy's UMP party are also unhappy with the way Mitterrand and Kouchner jumped to take sides against the USA. A few from the film world, including Luc Besson, are also unhappy with the rush to defend Polanski.
The disaster of Air France Flight 447 was the result of a preventable mix of human and technical failures, according to a London law firm that is representing families of the victims.
Stewarts Law, which is pressing claims for relatives of over 50 of the 228 dead, presented its argument in Paris today after its experts replicated in a simulator the conditions that were experienced by the crew of the Airbus A330 off Brazil on June 1.
Their findings reflect the consensus in the aviation industry -- and which we have covered here before -- over what went wrong in one of the most worrying air disasters in recent decades.
The official investigation, carried out by the French BEA accident bureau, is far from a conclusion and the black box flight recorders have not been found. Air France and Airbus are on the defensive and saying little. But enough data was transmitted by satellite from the stricken plane to identify with certainty four factors that led to the crash, said John Mahon, an Airbus and Boeing training captain.
-- The aircraft flew into an area of storms which other aircraft avoided by steering around them.
-- The pitot tubes (speed sensors on the front of the plane) suffered faults
-- There was a malfunction in the ADIRU, the three air data computers which feed information to the flight system and the pilots.
-- The pilots may not have had sufficient training to retain control of the malfunctioning aircraft.
"It any one of these issues had not happened to AF 447, the accident would not have happened," said Mahon, who is advising the law firm.
In the A330 simulator exercise, Mahon said pilots retained control of the handicapped aircraft, but they all knew that there was a malfunction. The pilots at the AF447 controls, who are thought to have been the two juniors on the three-man crew, would have been confused by conflicting information from the plane. They were also being thrown around in heavy turbulence at night. The simulator cannot replicate that faithfully any more than the fear that must quickly have gripped the crew.
James Healey-Pratt, the firm's chief aviation lawyer and also a pilot, said: "It is too simplistic to blame the pilots. They are not here to defend themselves. They did the best job they could."
Mahon said the pilots would have lost control of their handicapped plane in one of two situations.
If they entered a climb, the instruments would have erroneously shown increasing speed -- because of the blocked sensors. They would have tried to slow down and that could have led to a low-speed stall. If they were descending, the blocked sensors would have interpreted a decrease in speed. To compensate, the pilots would have increased the descent or added thrust. That could have caused the aircraft to over-speed and lose control.
Since the crash, Air France has signalled concern over its crew's ability to handle high altitude upsets of this kind. It has ordered special training for A330 pilots and called in outside experts to conduct a full-scale audit on its safety procedures. Some Air France pilots are accusing the airline, Airbus and the accident investigators of trying to put all the blame on the crew.
A separate judicial investigation is under way in France. Air France and Airbus will be asked to explain why no action was taken to replace faulty pitot tubes on the A330 series although they had suffered multiple failures over a decade.
The law firm, which has its own priorities, accused Air France of trying to settle with victims families "quickly, cheaply and quietly" in order to avoid having to pay the large sums that they deserved. Healey-Pratt estimated that if settled under European law, the final bill for Air France and Airbus would by about 450 million euros. He suggested that the two companies put one billion euros into a pot to be divided among the families. A similar method was used to avoid litigation after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001.
The saga over faulty the pitot tubes continues. The European Aviation Safety Agency today issued a new safety warning. It told airlines to check Airbus sensors from the US Goodrich company. Only two months ago, the same agency ordered airlines to install the Goodrich pitots instead of the ones made by the French company Thales which were the ones involved in all the incidents.
It's worth noting that Captain Mahon - who trains pilots in both Airbus and Boeings -- told me that he does not share the misgivings that some pilots have over the very automated flight systems of the Airbus family. He also pointed out that pitot and air data failures have caused accidents on Boeings in the past.
For an alternative view of AF447 and the plane that some pilots call the Scarebus, I would point you to the latest from John T. Halliday [no relation of our Johnny the rock idol] the well-informed expert on Huffington Post
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.
An Air France jet diverted to Corsica on its way from Tunisia to Paris today because the crew found an MP3 player and were unable to find its owner. That example of excessive precaution is not quite as crazy as the case of a Paris region engineer who has just fallen foul of the hysteria that prevails among the crew and passengers on US airlines.
Patrick Minot, 53, was flying on American Airlines from Paris to an automotive show in Boston on August 15 to demonstrate a fun gadget that he had developed for his company called an EcoGyzer [in picture above]. This is a combined pocket GPS, accelerometer and calculator that tracks movement and estimates energy consumption and efficiency. Also available as an iPhone application, it has made the French media as a clever idea for teaching drivers to go easy on the accelerator (gas pedal) and brakes.
During the flight in economy class, Minot decided to try out the EcoGyzer. He stuck it to the arm-rest with a little a blob of Patafix, a putty-like adhesive used everywhere. That was a bad move. Terrified passengers reported him to the crew as a potential terrorist. First they took away his mobile phone then, when he visited the lavatory, the stewardesses grabbed the EcoGyzer. Minot explained to the crew what it was, to no avail. The captain announced that they were diverting to Gander, Newfoundland, for technical reasons. On arrival, police boarded, arrested Minot and threw him into jail.
"I didn't understand. I thought it was a bad dream," Minot said. After three days, he was released on bail and advised by a court-appointed lawyer to plead guilty to causing mischief on an aircraft. He was ordered to pay 32,000 US dollars (23,000 euros) in fines and costs to American airlines and sentenced to seven days in jail. Then he could not find an airline willing to take the risk of flying him back to France. American eventually gave him a seat with a stop-over in New York. Landing there, he was handcuffed and detained as a dangerous felon until he was put aboard the Paris-bound flight.
Okay, Minot should have known of the fear that any odd device inspires in travellers and cabin crew since 2001, but this was a case of absurd over-reaction. From the court accounts, the middle-aged engineer was not aggressive or threatening. He told the crew what his gadget was. I'm ready to be corrected if anyone has other information. As usual in anything involving aviation, media reporting was ludicrous. The Canadian Press news agency reported: "A French national who forced an international flight to divert to Newfoundland last weekend has been fined more than $30,000." Others talked of him brandishing "a GPS device" and, gulp, failing to switch off his mobile phone.
Everyone has forgotten to switch off a cell phone and besides there is no evidence that active phones or GPS receivers have any effect on aircraft electronics, despite what they tell you. Many phones come equipped with "GPS devices" as Minot's suspected weapon was termed. No-one has tried to hijack or blow up a US airliner or any other US aircraft for nearly eight years.
Minot, a mild-mannered family man, has featured in the French media as a victim of American -- and Canadian -- excès de zèle. At least the publicity should help the EcoGyzer. And France is certainly not innocent in this field. I have been told at French airports recently to remove my shoes and empty my pockets going through security -- although they knew that I was the pilot and only person aboard the plane. That makes absolutely no sense but we know what happens when you argue with the security people.
Get ready for some Anglo-Saxon gloating. We hear today that France is giving up its four-year struggle to keep the barbarians of Google from Gallic gates, at least in their literary form.
"Google has won", said the headline in La Tribune, a business daily. It reported that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) -- the national library -- is on the verge of a deal under which Google will add its stocks to its controversial digital library.
The pact will mark a big climb-down because the BNF led the counter-attack that was noisily launched by President Chirac in early 2005 against what France saw as a dangerous new American imperialism. That spring, Paris mustered continental backing for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
According to Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the BNF chief at the time, Europe's literary and cultural heritage was under digital threat from les Anglo-Saxons. France faced the prospect of being force-fed with such things as the biased English-language version of its revolution in which "valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man", said Jeanneney (he has since lost his job).
Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender today: "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Some readers joined the lament. "The harm is done, now that the European mountain gave birth to a mouse," wrote a patriotic book-lover called Thierry. However the main reaction from France has not been shock and horror, just a virtual shrug.
Economics explain the shift, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the BNF, which joins 29 other major world libraries in opening its shelves to Google's project (including Oxford's Bodleian). France provides only five million euros a year for digitizing books. This is done by Gallica, the national digital library. Yet the BNF needs up to 80 million euros just for its works from the Third Republic era (1870 to 1940), said Bruckmann. "We will not stop our own digitizing programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?"
Google scans almost free and it has so far added some 10 million works to its Books search base, the great majority of them out of copyright. These can be read free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
After a long battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues, especially in Europe. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several grounds, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.
In France, publishers and booksellers are worried about the forthcoming e-book revolution. Strict laws on pricing have helped 12,000 bookshops survive while small sellers in many countries have been driven out by the big chains. It is doubtful whether the French protection rules can be applied to electronically-delivered books.Amazon isn’t launching its Kindle in France until next year and Google's pay book service is still some way off. Before the Americans move in, the French industry wants to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the number two national publisher, called in la Tribune today for the circling of French wagons before Amazon and Google come galloping over the horizon.
[Top picture, the Richelieu reading room in the old National Library.]
The schools have closed, France is heading for the summer holidays and Lance Armstrong is back on the Tour. That summed up the news today * at the start of the 96th edition of the Tour de France. The three-week, 2000-mile ordeal is of course not just the world's greatest cycle race. Under the headline "A La Vie, A l'Amour," L'Equipe, the sports daily, waxed poetic yesterday, calling the Tour a "unifying force... that possesses us and bewitches us beyond the flaws of humankind."
For France, those human failings are at the heart of the matter with Lance Armstrong. The Texan wonder-cyclist, who won the tour an astonishing seven times in a row, has returned from retirement and is aiming for an eighth victory in the tour that opens in Monaco today. Armstrong's comeback in his 38th year stirred dismay back in the winter. He may be worshiped as a hero at home in the States, but in France he was the object of suspicion. "Good riddance" was the feeling when he left in 2005.
Unlike dozens of others in a dope-plagued sport, Armstrong had never been caught using any performance-enhancing drugs. As he explained: "For France, my story was just too good to be true." He had survived a grave bout with cancer in the mid-1990s to become the biggest champion of all time, breaking the previous record of five wins, shared by the legends Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil.
Armstrong was an American at the time that France had fallen out with George Bush. He alienated the Tour crowd with what was deemed to be an arrogant, hard professionalism. He kept to himself and surrounded himself with bodyguards. In public, he refused to play the plucky regular guy, the traditional cycling hero. He barely spoke French despite five years in residence. Crowds even booed him as he led the pack through the mountain passes.
But this year, things have changed. It's not le grand amour, but Armstrong is enjoying new respect and it's not just because France has forgiven the United States. Armstrong is recognised as a star who brought glamour to a sport that is little known in much of the world. For the young cyclists, Lance is the boss but they have a chance of beating him. Andy Schleck, a Luxembourg Tour racer, said today: "It's good for cycling to have un Monsieur like him. He inspires a lot of people. Hat's off!."
Armstrong is enjoying gentler treatment from the media. Michel Drucker, France's favourite TV host, treated him to a gushing interview last Sunday. People are not scoffing at his argument that he has returned to promote his cancer foundation Livestrong. Armstrong, who broke a collarbone earlier this year, is now benefiting from the old Tour phenomenon of sympathy for the underdog. He is not even squad boss of Astana, the Kazakhstan-owned team for which he is pedalling. First place is held by Alberto Contador, the Spaniard who won in 2007. The first week will see a battle between the two for the real leadership. Armstrong says he will ride loyal back-up to Contador if he does not make the Yellow Jersey early on. The Texan cyclist is, by the way, one of the most active celebrity Twitterers. He has well over one million followers on http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
In the meantime, the tour is holding on to its magic despite the decade of seemingly endless doping scandals. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, says that the all-out testing is making cycling the cleanest sport. No other sport employs such stringent methods to track new ways of cheating, he says.
And to wrap it up, Nicolas Sarkozy has got into the act. The President, who is an amateur cyclist and an Armstrong fan, told the Cabinet this week that it is time to stop knocking the Tour. "It is the victim of dopage, and not the perpetrator," he said. "You must support this great popular event as well as its management," he told Rama Yade, his new Sports Minister. [*Since writing this, a train crash has joined today's headlines]
We try to avoid poking fun at Nicolas Sarkozy for his short stature, but sometimes the French President sets himself up for a little mockery. Here's a classic example, taken at Saturday's D-Day commemoration in Normandy.
Speaking from the same podium as Barack Obama, Sarkozy added about six inches to his five feet five by standing on a little stool. Added to his custom-crafted elevator shoes, this took him up to the same altitude as the six-feet-two US president.
Sarkozy is naturally sensitive about his lack of height and it may not be fair to focus on it. For centuries, sneering about small Frenchmen has been a standard in the anti-French armoury of the English and later the "Anglo-Saxon" world. Try Googling "little Frenchmen", and you get the point -- or look at the comments that land on this blog -- mainly from the United States -- when we get into French-bashing territory.
Napoleon Bonaparte measured five feet six inches in his stockings, which was not small for the late 18th century. But Boney was diminished by English propaganda, which depicted him as a power-mad midget. It's interesting to note that Bonaparte's nick-name, le petit caporal, the little corporal, was an affectionate term coined by the soldiers under his early command.
Jump ahead two centuries and the British are still at it. Here is Stephen Glover, a serious journalist, venting on Sarkozy in the mid-market Daily Mail two weeks ago: "This diminutive egomaniac is increasingly becoming an embarrassment to his countrymen, and a laughing stock to the rest of Europe..." If you dig back to 1805, I'm sure you will find similar words written about Bonaparte.
The Mail article, which depicted the French as collaborationist cowards, was a rant of a kind that would be deemed crude and racist if it had been written about just about any other nation. No French newspaper would indulge in verbal abuse about a foreign leader like that, but mocking the ancestral enemy is a time-honoured sport in Britain.
Sarkozy is something of an exception among recent French leaders. For 30 of the past 50 years, they have been quite tall. Charles de Gaulle stood six feet four inches tall and Jacques Chirac is six feet two.
Having said that, Sarkozy's petite taille is a talking point and subject of mockery in France too (see cartoon from le Canard Enchaîné below). Everyone from serious biographers like Catherine Nay to the man in the local bistrot will tell you that it's important to understanding his psychology. He has spent his life compensating, goes the cliché.
It's part of his view of himself as a scrappy outsider who had to fight harder than anyone to reach the top. During his 2007 election campaign he took pride in describing himself as "un petit Français de sang mêlé" -- a little Frenchman of mixed blood. Petit in this sense also means ordinary, but is still carries the image of height. Sarkozy likes to surround himself with small lieutenants, men such as Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, and Jean-Louis Borloo, who heads a super-ministry covering the environment and transport. His arch enemies, Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, Chirac's former Prime Minister, are of tall, aristocratic build. Sarkozy always chooses tall women. All three of his wives have been taller than him. The latest one, Carla Bruni, a former super-model, wears flat-soled ballerina shoes and stoops in order to minimise her superior five-inches. In the cartoon, she is saying: "You've grown again, pussycat." Sarkozy, in elevator shoes and standing on a classic French novel, says: "I make figures say what I want."
The physical mockery of first families is not all one-way. French comedians and commentators have been having fun with Michelle Obama, focusing on her considerable size. Nicolas Canteloup, the very popular satirist on Europe 1 radio, imagined her the other day as a rugby player knocking over Sarko.
Here they all are in Caen this week
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!"
Barack Obama is not doing anything to help Nicolas Sarkozy. Three days from the US leader's arrival for his D-Day weekend, he is keeping his distance from the French president who was so eager to welcome him.
The White House's coolness has added to embarrassment at the Elysée Palace over the way they have bungled what Sarkozy wanted to be a supreme Franco-American moment in Paris and especially Normandy. The final straw for Paris was the White House's undiplomatic public reproach this week to Sarkozy for failing to invite the British Queen to the 6th of June ceremony.
Obama is turning up in Paris on Friday evening, but spending the evening privately with Michelle and his entourage. He is not due to see Sarkozy and Carla Bruni at the Elysée. Their only tête-à-tête will be in the Normandy town of Caen on Saturday. The Americans have refused a French request for the two men to hold a joint press conference. The D-Day ceremony at the US cemetery at Colleville, by Omaha beach, has now been widened to include Britain's Gordon Brown and Prince Charles and Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister. Then Michelle Obama is staying on in Paris on a private visit for several days.
The Elysée is exasperated with the Americans, Europe 1 radio reported this morning. "Barack Obama has truly done nothing to give value to his relations with Nicolas Sarkozy," said their breakfast news.
The trouble began, not because Sarkozy did not invite the Queen, but because of the off-hand way that his team reacted when a couple of British newspapers kicked up the "royal snub" fuss last week. This D-Day was a Franco-American celebration, the government's spokesman said. The Queen could come another year.
The leftwing media and opposition have been laying into Sarkozy, saying he had behaved like an oaf [goujat -- see comments below], as the Canard Enchaîné did today, in failing to invite the British. François Bayrou, Sarkozy's chief opponent from the centre, said he had been "crude and ungrateful" and "damaged the image of France".
Le Canard summed it up: "Sarkozy has managed a double hit: insulting Queen Elizabeth and exasperating Obama."
We know about Michelle Obama's French plans because her husband announced them in his first interview for French TV last night. Talking to Canal+, he rather damned Sarkozy with faint praise."Your President Sarkozy I think has been very courageous in some of the decisions he has made".The two examples he cited were Sarkozy's support for the US in Afghanistan and over Iran.
Asked what he loved about France, Obama replied: "Let's see. We have the food. We have Paris. We got the south of France -- Provence. The wine." Obama said that he had travelled in the south when he was at college. He also admitted forgetting all his high school French. "Michelle I think speaks a little."
 Trust the British to spoil Nicolas Sarkozy's plan for a dream day with Barack Obama. The French president managed after much arm-twisting last month to persuade the US leader to drop in on the Normandy beaches on June 6 to commemorate the D-Day landings of 1944 and celebrate Franco-American ties.
Sarkozy's big moment began to sour when the British, then the Canadians, Poles and other wartime allies wondered why they had not been asked to join the two presidents at the US cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, by Omaha beach. Sarkozy was annoyed at the idea of sharing his golden photo-opportunity but invitations went out. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, agreed to attend along with other allied officials.
But the Elysée Palace failed to factor in British emotion over the war, ancient suspicion of France and the skill of the British media at whipping the two together. So today the Daily Mail, a mass-market paper, reported "fury" in Buckingham palace over Sarkozy's failure to invite the Queen.
In reality, we are told that there is no anger and no perceived snub. The Royal family had not expected to be invited and had not put out feelers, a senior British official told me. The Queen attended ceremonies in Normandy for the 50th and 60th anniversaries, but the 65th was not planned as an international event.
[Thursday update: for French tv viewers. Canal+ have asked me to talk about this on Le Grand Journal this evening, after 7pm]
The French are annoyed by the snub story. Luc Chatel, the Minister who acts as government spokesman, said that Her Majesty was absolutely welcome if she wanted to come. It was not up to Paris to designate who represented Britain. "Our interlocutors are members of the British Government who wanted to associate themselves with a ceremony that was Franco-American at the outset," said Chatel. This year's event is about the US-French relationship and there will be other D-Days, he added.
You can hear the irritation there. It's also evident in the confusion over what Gordon Brown and the other allied officials will do on June 6. Sarkozy is still hoping to be alone at least part of the time as the guest of Obama at the Colleville cemetery (which is US territory in perpetuity). The French plan a Sarkozy-Obama tête-à-tête and and there will be a three-way meeting with Brown. The Elysée Palace and Downing Street have still not settled on a programme.
In other words, this looks like a mess, another case of Sarkozy over-reaching and putting up backs with his self-promotion.
Past US Presidents have attended purely bilateral ceremonies with French leaders at Omaha beach, but never on June 6 itself. Sarkozy should have known that D-Day, in which 73,000 British forces came ashore, is as sacred to the British as the Americans. Some might have told him that he would court trouble by trying to mark the 65th anniversary without them. That is especially the case as the dwindling British veterans' organisations say that this will be their last Normandy commemoration.
The criticism is not just British. It came with force today from Jean-Michel Aphatie, a commentator who is feared in the political world. Sarkozy's attempt to stage an epic lone appearance with Obama was a huge mistake, Aphatie wrote on the internet. "It is impossible to honour the memory of the dead without associating the leaders of the countries which took part in the sacrifice...French diplomacy has landed itself in a glorious mess."
"This episode illustrates an obsession of French leaders: forever measuring themselves against American power. We live in the illusion of a tête-à-tête with America..."
[Picture: Colleville cemetery, Normandy, where over 9,000 US servicement are buried]
Nicolas Sarkozy has just done a favour to British Conservatives and other sceptics who like to see the European Union as a plot for putting a French face on Europe.
Super Sarko used his second anniversary in office to sketch a vision for the Union which fell somewhere between that of the late Charles de Gaulle and the pro-European French leaders of the 1970s and 80s. If Europe follows his recipe, it will be able to pull out of the "deep intellectual and moral crisis" from which it is suffering, he said.
Sarkozy wants a Union with a new "economic government" -- run by the member states not the supranational Brussels Commission. He wants a centralised industrial policy, new tight financial regulations, a closed door to "predators from the world at large". He wants a curb on the free market laws that are policed by Brussels. He also reaffirmed his pledge to stop Turkey ever joining the Union.
Sarko was speaking in Nîmes to kick off the campaign for next month's European Parliament elections but the assembly -- the other supranational pillar of the Union -- got barely a mention in his manifesto for a continent run by the Council of member governments. He shares ground with the British sceptics on that front, but not on much else.
Sarkozy sees the economic slump as a chance to assert France-friendly regulation in the Union after two decades in which, in French eyes, Europe has worshipped at the "liberal" -- meaning free market -- altar. He wants an end to competition among states on tax rates and an end to market rules that block mergers between big European companies, he said. A "European preference" must also be applied to favour the goods and services of the Union over those from outside. That was a Sarkozy campaign promise in 2007, but we had not heard about it since then.
Looking to the outside, Sarkozy said Europe "must cease diluting itself in an endless enlargement. Europe must have frontiers." Turkey could never become a member but should have a special partnership. Russia should have the same, he said. That goes down well in France and Germany but not with Britain -- nor the United States, as we saw when Barack Obama called last month for Turkish EU entry. Sarkozy has not been so tough in practice as in his rhetoric. He has not attempted to stop Ankara's accession negotiations, which began in 2005.
Sarkozy took a few swipes at Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, for not being cooperative enough and he floated another idea: a central agency to purchase the Union's gas supplies. This would prevent the Russians from playing states off against one-another. "Europe must fight to build a true energy policy, which doesn't just involve competition," he said
And French farmers were relieved to hear Sarkozy's pledge to maintain forever the Common Agriculture Policy -- the multi-billion euro subsidy mechanism that distorts the world food market and benefits France more than any other of the 27 member states. Previously, farmers had worried that the city-slicker President might yield to pressure from Britain and other northern states to dismantle their sacred system.
Sarkozy is of course telling voters what they want to hear ahead of an election which will serve as a referendum on his two years in power. He is echoing the public mood. The Socialist opposition wants roughly the same though it disagrees with Sarko's hostility to the Commission and Parliament. Northern Europeans do not generally realise it, but Europe has been widely seen in France for the past 15 years as a British-backed plot to undermine the French welfare state and way of life. Sarkozy is posing as its saviour. Or, in the gushing words of Luc Chatel, the Government spokesman, today: Sarkozy's vigorous leadership has revived in Europe "la pensée universelle française".
The French are smiling over a survey which finds that they sleep more and spend longer eating than the people of other developed nations. They also manage to remain among the thinnest and they report enjoying life more than the average.
This is no surprise since the picture fits France's reputation for quality of life and, despite the national fondness for protests and complaining, polls regularly show its citizens to be reasonably content with their lives.
The survey of 18 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the economic club of rich nations, confirms some stereotypes but knocks down others. The serious-minded Norwegians, for example, spend more time at play than anyone. The hard-working Americans sleep more than 8.5 hours a night, second only to the French. The siesta-loving Spanish rank third in the sleep stakes. Those healthy, outdoor-loving New Zealanders turn out to practise the least sport and rank among the fattest.
[Click on graphic for sleeping hours]
It's no surprise that Les Anglo-Saxons top the obesity table in the following order: USA (30 percent), UK, Australia and New Zealand. The Japanese are the thinnest and the French weigh in at fifth slimmest -- after the Italians, which is a little surprising. Young British girls drink the most for their age. The French devote nearly double the time to meals than Americans, Britons or Mexicans (but they don't snack).
Norwegians lead the pack when it comes to leisure activity, spending nearly a quarter of their time on it. The Mexicans spend least time unwinding.
France comes in slightly above average for enjoying life. Have a look at the table, but note that it comes from 2006, when few people had heard the term sub-prime.
In reporting this survey, some of the media are quoting the old saying: qui dort dine, or he who sleeps is dining. That means you don't feel hungry when you are asleep, so you can skip dinner. But France enjoys its evening meal as well as the long sleep, so the saying doesn't really apply.
[Top picture: 1856 Gustave Courbet - Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine]
[Click below: Men have more fun than women everywhere except Norway, Sweden and New Zealand]
![Lagarde_stewart[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e201156f69fe95970c-400wi)
Paris is talking about the fine performance by Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show (Watch the Monday evening interview below). If you have only seen Lagarde inside France, it's an eye-opener. She is at ease, bantering in near perfect English, drawing applause when she says she had fired a few bankers because "they did a crappy job". Her advisers were initially nervous about exposing her to one of Stewart's comic grillings but she did well, batting off questions such as "Is America now more Socialist than France" and on France's debt to the US from the war.
Inside France, Lagarde, 53, has proved a liability to President Sarkozy. She is politically inept. Publicly, she seems stiff and out of touch and she is known as Christine Lagaffe because of her many verbal blunders. These have included telling the French last year that if motor fuel was too expensive they should just ride bicycles. As an outsider from the elite technocracy, she is flanked by junior ministers who run the financial machine. Lagarde is a non-politician who was brought into the government in 2005. She was humiliated last year by colleagues who said publicly that France needed a heavyweight Finance Minister. But a lot has changed since the slump set in last autumn. She has become an international star.
[May 4 update: Lagarde has just been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Read Tim Geithner's tribute to her in Time. Sarkozy is the only other French person on the list. Lagarde's nomination is ascribed in France entirely to the fact that she speaks good English]
Lagarde is the only member of the government who is at home in the Anglo-Saxon world. As such, she is invaluable to a President who, though an Americophile, is unable to construct a sentence in English. A former member of the French synchronized swimming team, Lagarde worked for 20 years in the USA as a lawyer with Baker & McKenzie, the Chicago-based firm. She was its international chairwoman when President Chirac recruited her as Trade Minister in 2005.
Lagarde does not just give a good impression in English, charming TV viewers. She is in her element in the world of internationl business and finance. When Lehman Brothers was collapsing last September, she was the only European Finance Minister called by Henry Paulson, the then Treasury Secretary. She knew him from his days with Goldman Sachs in Chicago.
Le Figaro, the newspaper closest to the Sarkozy court, carried a double-edged profile of her today, praising her for her new role as France's international face but noting her continuing low reputation with the Elysée Palace. A palace staffer told the paper: "She scores 100 percent for international relations. In explaining the economy she scores 30. That makes an average of 65."
While on the France-America theme, le Monde reported yesterday that Barack Obama has riposted over Sarkozy's claim that he was not up to speed on climate change. Obama pulled aside Jean-Louis Borloo, the Environment Minister, at a Washington conference and told him to tell Sarko that he was doing his homework and the next time they meet he will beat him on the subject.
[Click to watch Lagarde interview. For French readers here, Jon Stewart's satirical nightly news show is roughly equivalent to the Canal+ Grand Journal with a bit of Laurent Ruquier and Nicolas Canteloup thrown in.]
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."
--------
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.
It was fashionable a few years ago to dismiss Paris as a creative backwater. The real avant-garde was to be found in the happening cities of New York and London. The art pendulum has been swinging back for some time and it has been given another shove this weekend.
The venue is the Grand Palais, the monumental exhibition hall just off the Champs Elysées that is home to one of the top state galleries and where the Yves Saint Laurent art collection was auctioned last month. The new show is one of the world's most ambitious exhibitions of graffiti.
This is another case of French paradox since the state that is staging the exhibition is the same one that spends tens of millions of tax euros a year prosecuting and cleaning up after vandals who deface public property with their art.
Of course the contemporary art world has long seen the creative side of daubing trains and public spaces. A few stars of the underground, such as the late New Yorkers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are revered as geniuses. Since the 1980s, the French Culture Ministry has also flirted with the graffiti, rap and dances of the hip-hop underground.
But eyebrows, including some artistic ones, have been raised by the consecration that the state has bestowed on the genre with its show of 300 specially commissioned oeuvres by international maîtres de l'art de la rue.
In Tag au Grand Palais, canvases by Snake131, a New York veteran, Nasty of Switzerland, Psyckoze of Paris and other eminent taggeurs, are hanging in a long-disused, tunnel-like gallery that runs along the side of the palace's great steel dome. The show is impressive in its scale. Some of the canvases are obviously clever and of quality, but to my sceptical eye, much of it looks like the daubing that pollutes urban life.
I had an interesting chat there with Toxic, a Bronx-born master of the genre, but first the complaints. Some in the artistic establishment say that l'Etat Français has gone too far this time by endorsing the American-inspired vandalism which blights the Métro trains, railways and housing estates of France.
"The state is punishing these people on one side and welcoming them on the other," Jean-Philippe Domecq, a writer and contemporary art specialist, told Le Point magazine. "This is subsidizing subversion." The state is so afraid of "missing another Van Gogh" that it throws money at every fad, he added.
Barbed praise for the show came from Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, a leading auctioneer and President of the Association of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art centre opposite the Eiffel Tower. "Ninety-nine percent of taggers are cretins who only want to foul walls," he said. He lamented the graffiti that adorned his museum's outdoor statues and hoped that the Grand Palais show would at least "distinguish between the artists and les cons (a___holes in American)."
The irony of the show is not lost on the distinguished spray-can bandits who were invited by Alain Dominique Galliz, an architect-collector [picture below], to come to his workshop in the Paris suburb of Boulogne from 2006-8. They were each paid to produce two panels, resembling the side of an underground train, one with their signature tags, or initials, and the other on the theme of love. In return, Galliz agreed not to sell their works and to show them together.
Bando, one of big French names, said that he was amused by the invitation to the Grand Palais. "Our work is usually on monuments, not inside them," he told Libération. RCF1, a Paris artist, said that Cornette de Saint Cyr knew nothing about graffiti since he had never been on the Métro. The artist knew this because he had been sentenced to community service work as a guard at Cornette de Saint Cyr's art centre after being convicted for committing graffiti.
Toxic, 43, whose work sells for large sums, told me that he admired Galliz for assembling artists who represent the four decades since modern graffiti first appeared in the US urban ghettos. He was amazed that his fellow practitioners had agreed to the French invitation. "It's not easy dealing with these guys. There have been a lot of fights. Like when someone else paints on your tag. Grudges are held forever."
It is not clear whether the police would be visiting the show to help them with their aggressive campaign against the graff-artists who cost so much in what might be considered a sort of "subsidy". For the past eight years, prosecutors have been pursuing not just perpetrators, but also taking action against internet sites and art magazines for aiding and abetting criminals.
Toxic, who now lives in Italy, recalled that British police had visited a London gallery where he had shown his work. "They were there to see your face and arrest you." He recognised an ethical dilemma but said that he continued to keep his hand in on subway trains and tunnels, leaving his fresh oeuvres with other initials. "I try not to do it too much because I visit schools. I tell the kids to be careful because they could be arrested."
Gallizia has been defending his project. "This is not about ugly scribbling, but well and truly genuine works of illumination and calligraphy," he said. "Even if this form of expression is sometimes violent and aggressive, there is a fraternity behind it."
The show is worth a visit if you're in Paris, if only for the novelty of its setting.
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.
We're celebrating the anniversary of a piece of France's musical heritage: the song best known as My Way.
Frank Sinatra's anthem may be one of the world's most reprised songs and an all-time hit in karaoke bars and at funerals, but the tune is 100 percent French. Sinatra's swansong was originally Comme d'Habitude, a melancholy pop dirge by Claude François, who might be described as a Gallic version of Rod Stewart but more camp. Ol' Blue Eyes recorded it with new lyrics in March 1969 and the 40th anniversary is being honoured by Radio France this week.
France has never stopped loving Comme d'Habitude (As Usual) since the single reached number one in the summer of 1968. The gloomy words had nothing to do with Sinatra's defiant, "few regrets" lyrics, written for him by Paul Anka. The Canadian lounge lizard bought the French song from François and Jacques Revaux, its composer, after hearing it on the radio on a Riviera holiday
François, whose final curtain came when he electrocuted himself in his bath in 1978, mopes in his ditty about the demise of a love affair with France Gall, a singer who is still around [Both in picture from the time above]. French grandparents now shuffle into a nostalgic slow dance when they hear the immortal opening: "I get up/ I shake you/ You Don't Wake Up/ As usual. The song closes: "We will make love/ As usual/ We will pretend/ As usual.
Here it is:
France enjoys the glory earned by Sinatra's version of the tune that Revaux originally composed with Petula Clark and Sasha Distel in mind (they declined it). It is France's biggest-earning number, bringing in royalties of a million euros a year, ahead of such golden grooves as Ravel's Bolero, Edith Piaf's La Vie en Rose, and Joseph Kosma's setting of the Jacques Prévert's poem Les Feuilles Mortes (thought by some Americans to be a home-grown standard called Autumn Leaves).
"Comme d'Habitude is an all-generations song that follows its public throughout their lives," Nicolas Varenne, head of music for Radio France Bleu, told us today. On Monday, the network played Comme d'Habitude/My Way once an hour all day. The covers included Nina Simone, Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin they but missed the John Cleese version or the Sex Pistols' send-up with Sid Vicious imitating Kermit the Frog.
"The song is so successful in France because people identify with it, it's the story of Mr and Mrs Average," Varenne said. "Then later, Sinatra and Presley taking on a French song made us proud."
Recorded in dozens of languages and massacred by amateurs the world over, My Way is also said to be the top request by the deceased for their own funerals. In Britain, it was overtaken three years ago by James Blunt's Goodbye My Lover.
Sinatra, who died in 1998, came to loathe the song because of its sentimental boasting and he complained that it stuck to him like an old piece of chewing gum. But French critics have a high regard for both versions. "Comme d'habitude -- and even more My Way -- is the perfect musical vehicle for the crooner -- for whom solitude is the main fuel," le Monde said a couple of years ago. "The crooner is alone and that's the show. His solitude erotizes the crowd. The crooner is in love with love perhaps even more than with the loved-one. He feeds on the toxic certainty of despair."
Revaux and Anka are proud of the tune that some have dubbed "graveside cabaret." Revaux, 69, who lives in Geneva, recalled this week how in 1967 he had given up finding a taker for his song, which he wrote on a rainy night in Mégève, the Alpine resort. He originally gave it English lyrics with the title For Me and recorded a sample version in London.
[picture: Revaux with Charles Aznavour in 1960s]
He offered it to François, who found that it matched his blue mood and words that he had sketched about his break-up with Gall. "It happened just like that. It fitted perfectly. We worked on it for an hour and it became Comme d'Habitude," Revaux told France Bleu.
He also claimed for the first time that the music was all his own. François shared the credit because of his lyrics -- which were polished up by another professional -- and because he had supposedly contributed the bridge section -- the refrain -- of the melody. Revaux said he had merely offered an earlier version of his own refrain after Francois objected to what he had heard. "When you see my original music you see that Comme d'Habitude/My Way was 98 percent my work," he said.
Anka recently also recalled that the song almost never appeared in English. He had forgotten it in a drawer until a rainy night in Las Vegas when Sinatra, who was in a down period, called him and told him: "Kid I'm quitting the business"
"He said he was going to do one more album and I went home and put that song on the piano." After writing the lyrics in 90 minutes, Anka took it to the Chairman of the Board. "I said, 'Frank, what are you doing, now the end is near, yadda yadda'."
The rest is history
President Sarkozy takes the plunge today and and explains why, 43 years since General de Gaulle threw American forces out of France, he is taking his country back into the core of the US-led Atlantic alliance. France's return to the military command will be formally proclaimed at the NATO summit in Strasbourg on April 3.
It's a big step, politically and symbolically because it reverses the act which defined France's sense of special destiny, independent from US power and not quite part of the Western camp during the Cold War. Sarkozy's opponents in the Socialist opposition and his own Gaullist camp are piling in on him, accusing him of betraying the sovereignty that de Gaulle reclaimed when he wrote a curt letter to President Johnson in March 1966. The general told LBJ that he wanted Nato headquarters out of the Paris suburbs and all American military personnel out of France.
François Bayrou, the centrist who is Sarkozy's most consistent opponent, flayed him this morning for "amputating" France, diminishing the nation and getting nothing in return. Martine Aubry, the Socialist leader, said that nothing justifies Sarkozy's "embrace of Atlanticism". Dominique de Villepin, Gaullist former Prime Minister, foe of Sarko and fan of Napoleon Bonaparte, denounced the President for "shrinking our country and renouncing our diplomatic calling."
With so much at stake -- French pride and the prickly relationship with Washington -- you would think that Sarkozy is risking big trouble. In reality, it is only the politicians who are making the fuss. Sarkozy's move is supported by 58 percent of the public, according to an IFOP poll today, with 37 percent opposed.
That suggests two things: Sarkozy has done a good job at explaining why it makes sense to rejoin the command and that, with the economic crisis and the new Franco-American detente, foreign relations are not stirring much emotion.
IFOP recalled that in 1966, 38 percent opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal and only 22 percent approved. The common factor then and now is that the presidents acted without public debate or political consultation. Sarkozy, who now runs de Gaulle's party, indicated his intentions to rejoin after his election in 2007. He will now stifle dissent on his own side by forcing through the move with a parliamentary confidence vote on March 17. The Gaullist die-hards will not risk voting 'no'.
Sarkozy's arguments are simple. France has remained an active member of the political alliance and in recent years its armed forces have taken part in in most Nato operations from Kosovo to Afghanistan -- run from Nato's post-France Belgian base. So it makes sense to have French generals back sharing the command. In addition, the return to full membership will allay suspicions of French efforts to promote an autonomous European defence system, says Sarkozy.
The last two French presidents -- François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac -- also wanted to get back into the command. Mitterrand, a Socialist who opposed de Gaulle's withdrawal, negotiated secretly with the Americans while Chirac did it publicly in 1995, withdrawing when Washington refused his conditions. Sarkozy has imposed no conditions.
France will acquire more influence and lose no military or diplomatic independence, says Sarkozy. Hervé Morin, his Defence Minister, explained this morning: "I hear people saying that joining the command will put our independence in doubt. Saying that is either dishonesty or incompetence."
The commanders of France's substantial and well-respected armed forces are pleased and the Americans and British are also grateful to have the French fully back in the fold, even if they can be difficult.
I can't help feeling that if I were French I would be feeling a pang of doubt. The idea of separateness that de Gaulle created has served France well, even if it was largely an illusion. Membership of the Nato high command means renouncing an important symbol without much in return from the US. But maybe that's just nostalgia.
Older French have mixed memories of the US military presence in France. Unimaginable for the younger generation, American forces were part of the landscape from 1944 to 1967 [A US serviceman with local resident in top picture]. They drew admiration, envy and annoyance, especially in the 29 base towns where they cruised around in exotic cars -- known at the time as belles américaines. They lived affluently and taught the locals how to dance rock'n roll. At Châteauroux [US base pictured below], 10 percent of all marriages between 1951 and 1967 were between US servicemen and French women. Gérard Depardieu, the film star, has fond memories of a black American girlfriend during his teenage years at Châteauroux.
I doubt that Johnny Hallyday -- France's imitation American rocker-- would have been such a big hit back in the early 1960s if the country had not already absorbed a bit of America from its resident armed forces (Daniel Strohl can advise us here).
American forces won't be coming back to live in France. But Sarkozy is hoping to persuade Barack Obama to stage a symbolic act of Franco-American reunion on April 2, on the eve of the Nato summit. This is to take the form of meeting in Normandy at one of the beaches where US, British, Canadian -- and French -- forces landed from England on June 6, 1944.
[Below: the young Johnny -- real name Jean-Philippe Smet]
 The French rather enjoy wallowing in gloom while Americans often seem impossibly cheerful, at least in European eyes. That old stereotype contains a degree of truth but here's a sign that the Americans might be becoming more French.
Americans are flocking to a new French-made internet site where people lament their misfortunes and recount the big and little disasters that ruined their day. FMyLife.com is simply an English-language version of VieDeMerde.fr, a wildly successful site that was started in January last year by two young Paris entrepreneurs, Guillaume Passaglia and Maxime Valette. VDM, which could be translated as Life Sucks, is now in the top 10 in Google's French search list and after only six weeks, FML is receiving a million visits a day, mainly from New York City and the Los Angeles area.
The idea of VDM and now FML, is simple. Losers tell their sob story in a few words, for the amusement or commiseration of others. The darker, bleaker and more humiliating the better. The episode must start Aujourd'hui or Today and end with the curse VDM or FML.
Two examples: "Today, my boss fired me via text message. I don't have a text messaging plan. I paid $0.25 to get fired. FML."
"Today, I received two text messages from my girlfriend. The first to tell me that it was all over. The second to tell me that she had sent it to the wrong person. VDM".
Most involve failure at work or in love and sex but some are just domestic, such as: "Today my little sister got a hamster. After four deaths, we hoped that this one would live a long time. The new rodent broke a record: 20. That's the number of minutes until it died of a heart attack after seeing the cat. VDM."
Passaglia and Valette are surprised by the way that Americans have taken to their site to unload their woes. "This sort of humour is quite specifically French but nevertheless it has worked in the USA straight away," Passaglia told us by phone.
The sites have been helped by the economic crisis, he says. "It favours this type of mentality. You have even more need to distance yourself from the difficulties of the world by laughing at your daily problems." Passaglia, whose site produced the material for a book last December, said that his team rejects the great majority of the 20,000 stories they receive every day on the French version and they only publish the best. They attempt to weed out the exaggerated and the outright false and they produce rankings of the most impressive failures. An American team does the same on FML.
The success of VDM in France has spawned half a dozen other self-pity sites, on which self-styled "serial losers" (now adopted as a French expression) can lament their shabby lot. These include include Jaipasdechance.com (I've no luck) and JobDeMerde.com (Sh--tty Job). The latest opened to instant success last Monday under the name RaterSaVie (FailingYourLife).
The spur for the site was an ill-advised remark last month by Jacques Séguéla, the veteran advertising man and friend of President Sarkozy, that "anyone who doesn't have a Rolex watch by the age of 50 has failed his life." The idea is to come up with joke things to do by a certain age that are even more preposterous than Séguéla's defence of Sarko.
With their sense of sardonic self-mockery, the hard-luck sites reflect the pessimistic streak in the French character and also illustrate Voltaire's remark that "the misfortunes of some make for the happiness of others". Some have described the sites as Twitter for losers.
Danielle Rapoport, a well-known psychologist, thinks that the sites reflect a very French mixture of defiance and anxiety. "The French are champions of depression and pessimism because they have a culture of comfortable status quo and life in fear of losing something," she told us. "At the same time they have a sense of rebellion which pushes them to act."
Some experts think that too much negativity is bad for the character. Pierre Mannoni, a sociologist who wrote a book called "Social Bad Luck" said that there was a danger in falling victim to what is known in French as "le miserablisme". "Even if it's done with humour, it can be dangerous to
describe oneself endlessly as a loser," he said in a Swiss newspaper. "It can prevent you from succeeding."
To end on a lighter note, Libération is leading today with four pages on the positive side of le marasme ambiant and la sinistrose, two good expressions for the prevailing sense of depression. It points out that "in Europe, the French are always more afflited by anxiety than their neighbours by bad economic times". Yet, it says, there is a sense that people are making do with less and even rather enjoying the latest trend, which goes by the name of la nouvelle frugalité.
[Below: A recent book, How to be a failure in life in 11 lessons. ]
[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]
UPDATE Wednesday 3/3: The accident investigation confirmed today that apparent inattention by the pilots led to the Amsterdam crash after one of the two radio altimeters malfunctioned.
---------------
Why do airliners seem to be falling out of the sky these days ? The question is worth looking at after the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam this week added to what looks like a series.
Part of the answer in some cases could be that the sophisticated systems on modern airliners are lulling some pilots into a false sense of security. In other words, they might be rusty on the stick-and-rudder skills of basic flying. This is dangerous territory. I am not a professional, just an amateur pilot, but the matter is being discussed by the pros.
I won't speculate about what caused the Turkish Boeing 737 to come down short of the runway at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, but let's look at the recent pattern. In the past 13 months in west Europe and the USA at least five airliners have crashed after suffering stalls or apparent stalls and two have safely crash-landed after losing all power.
First, to clear up a common misunderstanding, an aerodynamic stall -- to use it's full namel -- happens when the wings suddenly stop producing lift [see picture below]. They do not stall because engines stop. It happens because the plane is flying too slowly or performs an abrupt manoeuvre. If the engines fail -- or "stall" in media parlance -- a plane becomes a glider. It remains controllable -- as Captain Sullenberger showed masterfully when he ditched his Airbus in the Hudson river last month. The pilot's first action must be to push the nose down, turning height into speed. That obviously has limits if the plane is already very near the ground, as with the Boeing 737 at Amsterdam .
There are common patterns in the recent incidents:
In August, 154 were killed when a Spanair MD 80 stalled after take-off. The pilots failed to set the take-off flaps so the plane was unable to climb out of ground effect, the air cushion near the surface. That accident arose from apparent negligence.
In November, an Air New Zealand Airbus with two pilots from a German airline hit the Mediterranean, killing all seven aboard as it approached the French city of Perpignan. The accident investigators reported this week that the plane stalled after the crew took the risky decision to test its slow flying performance while they were at a dangerously low altutude. Technical factors may have contributed, but the pilots' unwise action led to the crash.
On February 12, a Continental airlines Dash 8 turboprop crashed on the approach to Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 on board and one on the ground. Though the inquiry is far from over, the investigators have found that the plane stalled and the crew apparently failed to take the right emergency action -- according to media leaks. Rather than gliding, it fell like a stone.
The latest was the Amsterdam crash on Wednesday. What is known so far is that the engines appear to have lost power a couple of miles from the runway and the plane flopped into a field. Passengers and witnesses described what the investigators have said was an apparent stall, from which the pilots may have been unable to recover. The sudden gyrations of the plane could have been caused by a number of events, including possibly the turbulence left in the air by a heavy airliner that preceded it.
The two successful powerless landings involved airliners that suddenly lost engine thrust but were under control until they made contact with the earth. A British Airways Boeing came down short of a runway at Heathrow on a flight from China in January last year. And Captain Sullenberger glided his Airbus A320 onto the Hudson last month after birds stopped the engines just after take-off. In both cases no lives were lost, thanks to good airmanship.
All pilots practise stalls in order to avoid them. You learn on the first day that no matter what, you fly the aeroplane right down to the ground. Airline pilots practice in simulators handling potential emergencies on approach. Airliners are equipped with systems that shake the control columns or sticks and provide aural warnings if their flying speed decays and they are approaching the danger zone. Some, such as the Airbus, have computers that do not let the plane stall -- unless they are over-ridden by the crew as they were in the case of the Air New Zealand plane in November.
The theory that is doing the rounds is far from new. Ever since the Wright brothers took off in 1903, complacency has been the biggest killer and pilots are trained to fight it. But, some are wondering whether the advanced electronics of the modern plane lead pilots to lose the edge? Landing a modern jet is usually a matter of monitoring the system until the pilot hand-flies the touch-down. With the autothrottle on and the electronics guiding the plane down the glide-slope, it is conceivable that pilots might not realise that they are approaching a stall.
Here for example is a pilot's remark on PPRUNE.org (Professional Pilots Rumour Network) after the Amsterdam crash this week. "We've not seen the end of this type of accident. Forget birdstrikes - in this instance. Inattention may be the real enemy". PPRUNE, by the way, has a lot of uninformed people contributing, but you can tell the difference.
 [Image of wing stalling]
[Footnote: the confusion by the media over engines "stalling" and aeroplanes stalling is avoided entirely in French, and I assume many other languages, because the words are different for each. An aerodynamic stall is un décrochage. A plane stalls = un avion décroche. If the engine stops, as in a road vehicle, the verb is caler. The engine stalled = Le moteur a calé. Décrocher is also much better than stall because it literally means unhooking, which is what the wing does from the air when it stalls. CB]
Do we really need to know all about the rather cheesy chat-up that Nicolas Sarkozy performed on the night that he met Carla Bruni? The French media apparently think that we, or at least the French people, do not.
A lurid and fascinating account of the famous dinner party of November 2007 has just been published by its host, Jacques Séguéla. If we are to believe Séguéla, the doyen of the French advertising world, Sarko went for Bruni like a boastful teenager on speed. He proposed marriage that night, mocked Mick Jagger, one of her former lovers, and bragged that he would make her Marilyn Monroe to his Jack Kennedy.
Click here for the full account from today's Times. My point here is the near silence so far in the French media. Séguéla, 77, has been interviewed on the radio about his book, called Autobiographie Non Autorisée, a series of portraits of people he knows. But very little has so far surfaced on the extraordinary mating dance performed by Sarko and the woman who became France's first lady seven weeks later. Almost the only French-speaking media to report the tale until now are the Swiss and Belgian. In her excellent press review on RTL radio -- the top-rated station -- Pascale Clark advised listeners to go to a Swiss newspaper site if they wanted to know about Séguéla's yarn.
The silence reflects the usual reluctance by the media -- reinforced by the law -- to touch matters of private life and especially of those in power. But Séguéla has published his account and presumably did so with some consent from the two friends whom he invited on a blind date in his home.
You can argue that conversations between the President and the woman for whom he fell are of no public concern. Perhaps Séguéla is betraying confidences -- or reporting inaccurately. But once he published his transcript of the less than witty badinage between the pair, it's impossible to deny the interest.
Séguéla calls the encounter a meeting of two mighty Shakespearian characters. The Great Dinner Romance does not quite sound like that but it gives intriguing insight into the psychology of Europe's most powerful leader (in the sense that no other is head of state and absolute chief executive). Sarkozy comes over as impetuous and thrilled with himself -- qualities with which France is well acquainted. The dinner party was originally planned as an attempt to reconcile Sarko with Cécilia, his restive wife. Bruni was invited to meet Sarko after Cécilia walked out and divorced him. Without venturing into amateur psychology, Sarkozy's behaviour looks like a classic case of rebound.
There was no room in the news article for an angle that emerges from Séguéla's account of the evening: the confirmation of Sarkozy's obsession with the United States. His desire to see himself as JFK is a constant. When he was elected, he saw the Elysée Palace as a new Kennedy Camelot, telling journalists that Cécilia looked like Jackie Kennedy.
Sarkozy has lately turned against the Americans, blaming them, or at least their bankers, for corrupting capitalism and bringing down the world economy. But in November 2007, Sarkozy had just come back from a visit to the White House and the love affair was in full bloom.
Here is what Sarkozy told the dinner guests about his state banquet at President Bush's place, according to Seguela.
It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. My entrance up the steps of the White House, surrounded by three women who are symbols of a France that America was not expecting: what pride! I took care of every detail. I told Rama Yade (young, black Minister for Human Rights) that she was too beautiful to put on one of those dresses with fussy frills that she goes in for. I told Rachida (Dati, Justice Minister, of Arab origin) to stick with her usual Dior elegance. I told Christine (Lagarde, Finance Minister) to leave her jewels in the safe. A Minister of Finance does not greet the American President in a pearl necklace.
A final point: The failure of the French media to pick up this tale is part of the same taboo that was applied last month to my interview with Julie Imperiali, Sarkozy and Bruni's fitness coach. Her account of working out with Sarko was replayed -- and usually distorted -- everywhere else, but not in France. There are some things that the people do not need to know about the President of the Republic.
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]
The in-tray of Barack Obama may be piled high, but he might like to put aside the banks, the Middle East and health care to focus on a truly urgent matter: the French cheese emergency.
The new President could blow the great goodwill that he enjoys in France if he fails to reverse a parting shot by George W. Bush against that symbol of Gallic gastronomy -- roquefort cheese. We could even face a new round in the war against Yankee junk food, with Coca Cola and MacDonald's in the firing line.
The story began last Thursday when Washington suddenly tripled an already heavy duty on the pungent blue cheese from the southern Massif Central. The idea was to punish Europe for maintaining a longstanding ban on beef from US cattle that had been administered with growth hormones.[background here] Roquefort had been under a 100 percent retaliatory duty since 1999.
Some in France have been quick to see the new Washington measure as petty, belated revenge against the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for their opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Americans slapped new duty on an array of other EU food imports, including fruit, chocolate and chewing gum, but none was subject to the 300 percent reserved for roquefort.
Michel Barnier, the Agriculture Minister, has urged Obama to reverse the roquefort decision and head off another French campaign against the symbols of US fast food. "I hope that he will avoid mediocre little measures like the one just taken against roquefort," Barnier said. France is to protest to the World Trade Organisation.
Philippe Folliot, a centrist MP for the Tarn, near Roquefort village, called for a super-tax against Coca Cola. "I find it especially shocking that the Bush administration, at the end of its term, should take roquefort hostage again," he said.
Jose Bové [left], France's most famous campaigning sheep farmer, threatened a follow-up to his 1999 destruction of a McDonald's outlet in the name of roquefort. His bulldozer assault that year on a restaurant under construction at Millau turned the mustachioed Bové into a celebrity and anti-capitalist hero. "If Obama maintains the supertax, then we will find a new symbolic target," said Bové, who was a roquefort milk producer at the time of his 1999 stunt.
The producers of the ancient cheese -- a favourite of the ancient Romans -- have kept their foothold in the US market despite the 100 percent tax over the past decade. Only 400 tonnes a year -- two percent of their production -- goes to the US, where it is treated as a luxury food. Their hopes of expanding will be scuttled if the new administration confirms the duty, which is to take effect in March.
Some say that they have few illusions since a Democratic administration -- under Bill Clinton -- imposed the first roquefort tax. Speaking of Obama, Béatrice Weinrich of the regional Union of Ewe Farmers said: "The boy must have a lot of other priorities."
Paris is insisting, however, that the prohibition on US hormone-fed beef will remain in force for health reasons, as will another EU measure contested by Washington: the use of chlorine to disinfect chicken carcasses.
 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" »
 The economy is down, yet the French are flocking in near record numbers to entertainment, or culture as they prefer to call it.
Theatres, concerts, art shows, museums and festivals have been packed over the past year. The biggest success has been the movie industry. Cinema attendance jumped 6.2 percent in 2008 and, for only the second time in 22 years, French films took more than American ones (45.7 percent of the market compared with 44.5 for the Americans). None of the other big film markets in Europe saw such an overall box office rise last year.
I'll sketch the detail below, but news of the good year has coincided with an emotional moment for cinéphiles and France at large: the return to the screen of the much-loved Jean-Paul Belmondo, 75. Seven years after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage that initially paralysed him, "Bébel" is to appear this week, with diminished capacities but all his old charm, in a tear-jerker called Un Homme et son Chien (A man and his dog). It is clearly a multi-Kleenex movie since people cried during the trailer when I saw it the other day. Television also showed customers emerging in tears from previews in Lille last week.
A tall, physical, larger-than-life character with a rumpled face, Belmondo broke onto the scene as a star of the Nouvelle Vague, the golden age of postwar French cinema. It's hard not to apply the over-used "icon" word to his role in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless)(1960), with Jean Seaberg (picture)
He gave up artier films and became a big comedy and action star in the 1970s and 80s, playing in classics, such as Borsalino -- with Alain Delon. He was above all an action-man, performing his own stunts in films such as Le Professionel, Flic ou Voyou, Peur sur la Ville and L'As des As. While Delon was known as a difficult and vain character, Belmondo was a chic type, a nice guy.
In his first TV interview since his illness yesterday, Belmondo was frail and his speech was slurred but he was perfectly lucid. Michel Drucker, France's favourite celebrity host, treated him like royalty and brought in big cinema names to pay tribute to his courage in going back onto a movie set. Philip Labro, a journalist-writer and film producer, summed up the effect of seeing Bebel again. "Belmondo is sunshine when he smiles. His face is a landscape whose every wrinkle is a life."
Francis Huster directed the new film, a remake of a Vittorio De Sica 1951 classic Umberto D about an old man who loses his home and only has his dog left. The reviews have been reverent. Figaro called it "troubling, moving, even shocking because we don't know where the broken star ends and where the great actor begins." But foreign reviewers have not been so kind. One Swiss critic trashed it as "indecent" and "disgusting" because it shows a star who is a shadow of his former self.
Belmondo's popularity will guarantee a good audience for A Man and his Dog in 2009. Last year, French-made films got a big push from "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis", the Dany Boon feel-good comedy about northern bumpkins which became the most successful French film ever (Will Smith is to make an Americanised version) . Most of the top 10 were still American blockbusters, but the French industry is taking heart from the strong performance of 18 other domestic films which each sold more than one million tickets. They were mainly popular comedies or thrillers and included the hopeless Astérix and the Olympic Games, but their popularity testified to the strength of the French industry.
Just after I posted this, they announced the death of Claude Berri, one of the biggest producer-directors of recent decades. His last production was Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Here's Le Figaro's news item
Top 10 French Box office Hits 2008
1 Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks)
2 Astérix et les Jeux Olympiques
3 Madagascar 2 (USA)
4 Indiana Jones and the kingdom...(USA)
5 Quantum of Solace (USA)
6 Kung Fu Panda (USA)
7 Wall-E (USA)
8 The World of Narnia 2 (USA)
9 Hancock (USA)
10 Batman, the Dark Knight (USA)
[Below: Enfin Veuve (A widow at last) , one of the big French hits of 2008. Dogs seem to be popular these days]
The European Parliament has just voted to end Britain's exemption from the maximum 48-hour working week. The usual horse-trading with member governments should water this down, but on this side of the Channel they are wondering why Britain bothers. France is reversing a question that has long come from Britain: Vous n'avez toujours pas pigé? -- haven't you got it yet?
Since the early 1980s, les Anglais have been lecturing Europe on the virtue of hard work as the path to prosperity. While the grasshopper French were awarding themselves a 35-hour week in the 1990s, the British fought for the right to sweat away in the name of competing with emerging the ants of Asia. Britain has closely guarded its 1993 opt-out from the EU's working-time directive which set the maximum at 48 hours. France's short week, which is applied to most wage-earners, has kept incomes lower but enabled people to enjoy non-working life more.
Now the shoe has switched foot. There is no French word for schadenfreude but there is a lot of it around. No-one is saying "we told you so" too openly, yet it is impossible to escape the smugness over the failure of the virtuous modèle Anglo-Saxon. The media are regaling us with tales of misery in Britain, from the collapse of Woolworths to the plight of the unemployed legions of the City. This morning a radio network featured a Sunday Times investigation that exposed allegedly Dickensian practises at Amazon UK, where employees work seven days a week and are fined for sick leave. "Even working like that, they still don't make it," said the commentator.
Of course France is suffering from the slump too. Lay-offs are multiplying, money is tight and the housing market is in retreat. But the pain is nowhere near as bad as in Britain and the United States. America's slide began with the dollar a couple of years ago, but the belittling of Britain has come as a shock.
British prosperity, flaunted by pound-rich house buyers and Eurostar weekenders, was until lately the envy of stuck-in-the-mud France even if people sneered that it came with Victorian working conditions and stone-age services. Only last year, Nicolas Sarkozy won election on the slogan "Work more to earn more". He also encouraged people to retire later. That seems a long time ago.
Since even George Bush has now temporarily abandoned the free market, "Sarko l'Américain" has switched camps and has started talking like a lefty. On Monday, he dumped a long-standing promise to allow Sunday opening for all shops.
Seen from Paris, there is little to be gained from emulating les Anglo-Saxons and their brilliant institutions if it ends in tears. The Gallic model was right all along, or so it seems to many in France. You can actually have your butter and keep the money for the butter -- French for the cake-eating concept. Super-Sarko has been rubbing it in, pointing sorrowfully across the Channel and saying that he would never give up a manufacturing industry in favour of financial services.
France has been profligate. It has piled up national debt and keeps a heavy trade deficit. Labour taxes are extraordinarily high, even by European standards, and red tape stifles entrepreneurs. But it has been helped by the conservative institutions and attitudes that looked so old-fashioned to the outside world. It has especially been protected by the strong euro -- albeit kept that way with the help of German austerity.
Against all the prevailing doctrines, France resisted investment-funded pensions, kept its big car industry, its generous welfare state, its 80 percent nuclear-generated electricity and expensive high-speed trains. And it has managed this while working the world's shortest week. Writing as a new-poor Brit in Paris, there may be a lesson here, or perhaps this is just another exception française.
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" »
 A lump of lead from a dusty drawer in a Paris museum has enabled French experts to solve a long-standing mystery.
The size of a pigeon's egg, the piece turned out to be a casting of the legendary Blue Diamond, the centre-piece of the crown jewels of pre-revolutionary France. The diamond, bought by Louis XIV in the 17th century, vanished when looters stole King Louis XVI's treasures in the heat of the revolution in 1792. The find in the Paris Museum of Natural History has in turn enabled researchers to prove that the long-lost blue diamond is one and the same as the Hope Diamond, a star exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC [in picture]
It had long been suspected that the Hope, which was given to the Smithsonian in 1958 by the jeweller Harry Winston and which is said to carry a fatal curse, came from the Diamant Bleu that was looted in Paris in 1792. This has now been confirmed by François Farges, the chief mineralogist with the Paris museum. He has concluded that the Hope is the cut-down heart of the 69-carat Indian diamond that the Sun King bought in the mid-17th century.
[The lead casting of Blue Diamond]
The breakthrough came when Farges and his team were rummaging through thousands of ancient items in the museum. They were intrigued by lot number 50,165, the lead casting. It was tagged as "replica of a blue diamond belonging to Monsieur Hoppe of London". Jewellers used to keep lead castings of stones that they cut.
The replica matched period pictures of the long-lost royal gem. The French team compared it to computer measurements of the Hope sent from Washington and found that the US stone fitted perfectly inside the Blue Diamond. "It is more than a hypothesis," said Farges. "We have carried out analyses by scanner and laser, which have been validated by experts in gemology."
Suspicions were first aroused in 1812, when a massive blue stone of 45.54 carats turned up in London in the hands of Daniel Eliason, a diamond merchant. Until now, Henry Philip Hope, a City banker, only appeared as the diamond's owner in 1839.
The lead casting now links Hope to the plundered diamond, which was originally bought in the 17th century by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, an adventurer, from the ruler of Golconda, in what is now the Indian state of Hyderabad.
Farges says that he did not sleep for two weeks after the discovery of the casting. He pieced together what he believes was the trail of the gem, which in the early 18th century had become part of the Order of the Golden Fleece, a concoction of gold, diamonds and rubies that was made for Louis XV [Pictured here].
The diamond, reputed to have been the most dazzling ever seen, was smuggled to London where it was acquired by Hope and crudely recut, shearing off 23.5 carats as well as its original lustre, says Farges. Eliason was just a front for Hope, says the mineralogist. He has just published his findings in the peer-review journal Revue de Gemmologie.
The Hope diamond changed hands many times after the banker's death. It came to Paris and was owned for a time by Pierre Cartier, the jeweller, before reaching the United States in 1911. The tale of a curse arose from the real or imagined sticky ends of some of its owners, including Louis XVI and Tavernier. The king ended up of course on the guillotine. The adventurer who brought it to France was said to have stolen it from a statue of the goddess Sita. He was later torn to pieces by wolves in Russia, according to the legend.
The Paris museum has made a replica of the royal diamond out of zirconium. It is hoping that a wealthy patron might pay for a synthetic diamond version. Farges does not expect France to ask for its stone back. Napoleon Bonaparte delared crimes of the revolutionary period exempt from prosecution in 1804.
"The diamond has been recut, which means that the one in Smithsonian is in effect a completely different stone," Farges adds.
[below: how the Hope was cut from the King's Blue Diamond]
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)
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.
Categories
Select from the dropdown
Times Online blogs
More from Times Online
|
There. I actually found a post with (nearly) no comments.
Preuve that no one wants to talk hotels.
Please Charles, MORE SARKO !
Posted by: Valentin | 5 Jan 2010 21:28:16
Thank you Daniel.
Vous êtes un monsieur!
Posted by: rocket | 3 Jan 2010 22:04:08
And I apologize to you Blendi.
Posted by: rocket | 4 Jan 2010 11:36:26
MY
GOODNESS
Something HAPPENED to this man.
In fact I am quite annoyed by his total lack of remorse about calling me a socialist. Come on Rocket, thrice won't hurt. Give us a reason to propose you for the pantheon. When the time comes, that is.
:)
Posted by: Valentin | 5 Jan 2010 21:24:42
JULIO,
It is also interesting to read some :) of the reader comments to the article you linked.
Basing on these peculiar comments, one may possibly assume that there is a market in the UK for the type of prose featured in the article :).
However, other commentators were obviously (and understandably) not at ease with the background tone of the article...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 5 Jan 2010 21:21:06
This has nothing to do with the "principe de précaution", which simply states that when an envisioned move carries potentially high, if unproven, risk, then it is better to abstain. Of course that principle, having been invoked against the Holy GMOs, has a bad press throughout certain circles, but that is no reason for "le mettre à toutes les sauces" (yet another cliché for your collection).
The issue here is preparedness for a possibly major health event. The one real precedent is the heat wave, where lack of preparation and resources certainly played a part in the casualties. Like military General Staff officers, Ministries of health are supposed to churn out contingency plans by the dozen and have one ready for any emergency. It turns out they are not even close, and barn doors are always locked shut after the horses have made their escape.
The other precedent quoted in the article - the HIV scandal - was completely different in its very nature - it was a criminal conspiracy by a few renegade doctors and high civil servants to make money out of the stock of infested blood products, the hazards of which they perfectly knew about, by rushing their sale and blocking the adoption of adequate screening. The Socialist Govt of the time was hopelessly inept, but at last, when it was informed, it put its foot down. Not sure the thousands of casualties feel suitably grateful.
Posted by: Dominique II | 5 Jan 2010 21:06:49
[So, are you saying that Peter died to spite us? I wouldn't put it past him. Lex]
Indeed, he might have : )
Though I wouldn’t’ t venture as far as to say: he may be back anytime soon, posting as if nothing happened.
One never knows, according to the paradoxes of Q. Mechanics,
that cuddly Schroedinger's Cat, one can be dead/ alive at the same time.
So there’s hope for us all. I like to try it, and one day I will…lets wait…: ) Maybe there’s something beyond D.
Harry Hud, dying words were [an authority on comebacks] :
If there’s an afterlife, and anyone can come back it will be me.
As for me I can safely say;
If theres an afterlife I would eternaly sell my soul.
Azloon that’s nice of Mormons, but they wont come to UK. Something similar did though, once in my home [I used to lived near the Regents Pk. mosque] three bearded, polite guys with neat turbans came knoocking; spreading good will into the neighborhood.
Hearing I was an Atheist, they smiled politely and went, in fact I closed the door, so they had too.
On serious note, some Muslims in UK, have quite a few wives and live by their own rules. Government also has given tacit approval and treat them as a family and they live in separate homes and get entitled to full state benefits-as reported by media. Theres no law to recognize this, but maybe I think common sense prevailed…most Government ministers [men] thinking manly- decided to allow it, as long as the poor-guy keeps the noise down and doesn’t make a mess of it…
Them –bi-tri-tetra [?] gamist may know things we don’t, they rarely get prosecuted. :)
and when they do I never hear of prosecution for women married to same man!
Only men have to suffer. : (
I seen an American movie [based on true story] and American pilot with three wives all over the place, three separate families unown to each other. When he ends up in the hospital all three of them show up.
Piloting is a stressful Job.
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 5 Jan 2010 21:05:38
"There are differences and similarities between the ways languages grasp the world." (French linguist Claude Hagège)
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/q-and-a-the-death-of-languages/
Posted by: Tas | 5 Jan 2010 20:57:28
JOHN,
Thanks for your interesting link, which "puts things in perspective" as the cliché goes :).
I wonder why Mme Bachelot (who was on TF1 yesterday evening) did not mention these enligthening figures. She was probably not aware of them.
There is also a strange coincidence : today, there was a strike at Le Monde (organised of course by the battling "intellectuals" of le Syndicat du Livre CGT :) which hindered the delivery of the paper version of Le Monde. Many elderly people rely solely on the paper versions of their dailies - therefore only a part of Le Monde readers will be duly informed of the whole facts regarding the vaccines :).
What troubled me personally in the whole influenza story was the time it took to launch the procurement and complete the manufacturing process of the vaccines. Had a big pandemic started say beginning of November, we would possibly have been in big troubles. I am wondering if the procurement process was any faster in other countries, for instance in Switzerland or Sweden ?
PS:
If the 1 B masks were manufactured in France or in Europe instead of the Far East, this is may be not a big catastrophe, since they could be used in other circumstances. Regarding the anti-viral drugs, they possibly have a longer life span than the vaccines.
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 5 Jan 2010 20:50:39
Come, come JULIO and CHARLES.
First, CHARLES ventured ‘Without wishing to criticise colleagues...’ and proceeded to do just that: ‘the Millard article on the Dom-Toms tells you a lot about the Anglo-Saxon view of the French. You don't often read French articles on the British written in that tone.’
And then, no wonder, JULIO damn near burst a blood vessel leaping upon such manna from above: ‘Just one article in the french press as vile as this one would astonish me./Too bad she didn't managed to squeeze the "cheese-eating surrenders monkeys" line’.
This is too wonderful for words and so I now find myself facing the impossible task of proving the non-existence of God... oops, I meant ‘vileness’ by dear old Rosie.
Posted by: Rick | 5 Jan 2010 20:41:35
Mr Bremner : [Without wishing to criticise colleagues, I would note en passant that the Millard article on the Dom-Toms tells you a lot about the Anglo-Saxon view of the French. You don't often read French articles on the British written in that tone. CB]
I couldn't have said it better.
Just one article in the french press as vile as this one would astonish me.
Too bad she didn't managed to squeeze the "cheese-eating surrenders monkeys" line.
Posted by: Julio | 5 Jan 2010 16:59:26
What an ungrateful lot the French are: paranoid supposition upon cynical observation, out they all tumble. How does that thumbnail character reference of the Great Nation go? Ah yes, ‘rouspéteurs, méfiants, et vaniteux’, something like that. Of course, if the lady with the man’s voice has been paying over the odds...
Posted by: Rick | 5 Jan 2010 16:44:55
The utterly most horrible French word, not even a cliché, is this barbarous anglicisme :
pin's
Whether it is in the singular or in the plural (un pin's, deux pin's)
AFFREUX !
Académie française, please do something!
Posted by: Benjamin | 5 Jan 2010 16:41:51
DOT,
"Said of hard-drinkers, I believe"
:))
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 5 Jan 2010 16:25:35
In the supermarket this afternoon, since I posted above, I have met a person who has received a vaccination voucher and was going to get his shot after doing the shopping. Neither his wife nor myself have received a voucher, boy, were we envious!
I didn't think to ask if I could look at it . . damn!
If I ever get one, I might have it framed . . .
ROBERT M Happy New Year! you're on form, I see . ..
"sign a discharge saying, basically, that the shot might give you cancer, make you impotent and induce you to vote Socialist,"
Perish the thought! ;D
Posted by: dot king | 5 Jan 2010 16:21:23
Charles McKay ("Extrordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) and Gustav Le Bon ("The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind") are all one needs to read to understand this endless replay of mass hysterics (as Romain has also pointed out).
A billion masks ?? Enough for at least a century's worth of French demonstrations. Sold on-the-spot by the unemployed at half a euro each, this could end up being a successful social program.
Once again, my skepticism has saved me from standing in a queue, a needle prick, and then the possibility of getting the goddam flu from the vaccination.
Posted by: azloon | 5 Jan 2010 16:08:35
Robert
"Ces commandes n'avaient été ni livrées ni payées, elles sont donc résiliées."
Quite predictably she panicked (as do most of the loose canons in this administration including the President himself) yesterday by making this damage control statement in order to put out the fire. IMHO The news this morning (Tuesday Jan 5) is that they are WORKING to "resilier" the orders rather than this being a done deal. And will the pharmas just lie down and roll over to this administrations will. She has been described as a liar all over France Info this morning by a generalist doctors. First with the generalists doctors not being competent enough in the eyes of this govt to vaccinate people and now it is ok. Another example of taking the voting (thank god I don't vote) population for "des cons" as this administration has done since it's inception.
Initially I had thought that overprotection was a good idea even though I will not get the shot. After listening to the news for the last few days I realize that there was some funny business going on which can only translate into this administrations favoritism once again for big business over the general population. This time under the guise of "principle of precaution" See economic bailout, See Carbon Tax, see this one.
I guess these ministers are making sure they will have jobs once their "corvée" in this administration is finished.
She needs to go and quickly but that will never happen. The only strong messages sent by this administration are to the general public. As far as the ministers etc are concerned it's business as usual since the days of the Kings.
PS - Not to worry we also have a man in our White House who is a weakling and cannot decide. Heads need to roll in our security apparatus.
Posted by: rocket | 5 Jan 2010 16:04:50
May I point out that:
France purchased 96 million vaccins at an average price of 7.5 euros a piece (fr 6.5 to 10 according to the lab that provided it).
UK purchased 26 million vaccins at an average of 6.5 euros per unit.
UK ordered 4 times less units and got a discount of 15% per unit.
Sounds odd?
Posted by: ronan | 5 Jan 2010 15:42:07
Funny how the the refrain of the Alain Bashung "ma petite entreprise 'connait pas la crise" is used.
Do the people using it are aware that Bashung was talking about his hum "pee-pee" (ie penis) and the fact that he was still "capable of" despite his age?...
Posted by: Zackatoustra | 5 Jan 2010 15:24:41
Charles Bremner wrote: "No other nation went as far."
I'm sorry but that is misinformation. France bought a number of vaccine doses equivalent to 145% of its populaiton. Some European countries have bought even more. In Switzerland for instance, authorities bought vaccine doses equivalent to 169% of the population. In Sweden they bought vaccine doses equivalent to 193% of the population, and in the Netherlands 206% of the population, which is a European record.
[Perhaps, but they didn't buy a billion masks and corner the world market in Tamiflu like France did. CB]
You've got all the figures in Le Monde today: http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/infographie/2010/01/05/h1n1-les-stocks-de-vaccins-en-europe_1287803_3244.html#ens_id=1185166
Posted by: John | 5 Jan 2010 15:22:42
According to Le Figaro, the Health minister Roselyne Bachelot said :
"Ces commandes n'avaient été ni livrées ni payées, elles sont donc résiliées."
"Those orders have neither been delivered nor paid for, therefore they are cancelled."
What ? What did you say ? A contract ? A business agreement binding for both parties ? Good faith in commercial dealings ? The value of word given ? Confidence in the signature of the French state ? Wazzat ? What are you talking about ?
The French state gives, the French state takes back.
The King's representative has spoken. Now say thank you, scramble off and shut up. If you behave and if We please, there might be another contract for you down the road. Maybe.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 5 Jan 2010 14:48:59
You forgot the infamous "le Grenelle de...". Makes me cringe every time I hear it. It really is used "à toutes les sauces" here in France, and I imagine it must be pretty indecipherable for foreigners.
Posted by: Zool | 5 Jan 2010 14:23:53
Charles,
Why do you write it all comes down to a "principe de précaution"?
Other papers/blogs have mentioned the Health Minister's background (comes from the drugs industry) and the many links between her staff and that industry...
There even was a compliance report. It listed potential conflicts of interest, guaranteed there would be no abuse, and withheld the names of those concerned "to protect their privacy".
So much bollocks, a huge financial fiasco (and hence a profit for someone) and you write nothing sharp about it ?
[I forgot to mention her pharma background. I'll stick in a ref. CB]
Posted by: Stephane | 5 Jan 2010 14:03:32
I was planning to get the shot, but have not received the voucher yet. The Health minister said that you do not need one. However, I'm ready to bet that if I check into a vaccination center without it, they'll kick me out and tell me they don't care what the minister says. As is customary with French civil servants.
Also, it seems that people who do volunteer to be vaccinated are required to sign a discharge saying, basically, that the shot might give you cancer, make you impotent and induce you to vote Socialist, but don't you dare complain if that ever happens to you.
94 million doses is not unreasonable for a 65 million population (assuming of course mass vaccination was needed and two shots per person were required), but one billion masks ? Is that really one billion, with a B as in highway roBBery ?
A contract for one billion masks can certainly generate some nice kickbacks for politicians and their friends.
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | 5 Jan 2010 14:01:35
A friend of mine who works for GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium told me before Christmas they were making a lot of money on the French orders.
GSK might be worth a punt, but timing is everything; for example, this news "Swine flu: France wants its money back" should depress the price!
And it is down today, from 1338p close last night to 1307p currently.
Congratulations Charles, your news moves markets!! http://www.selftrade.co.uk/intraday-charts.php?symbole=1uGSK.L
Posted by: john gregory flinn | 5 Jan 2010 13:59:54
Dear M. Bremner. The best for you and yours in 2010.
Your article illustrates the fact that you can never win, especially if you're a politician.
Just imagine the outcry if the country had been caught unprepared, and the nightly news had kept a morbid scoreboard of the number of people (especially infants and children)lost to the flu...
In any case, people should realize how lucky they are. Only rich countries can afford to be faced with such a situation...
Furthermore, for once, I believe you can really say that it's only "un problème d'argent".
Lessons will no doubt be learned, future medical emergencies handled with greater professionalism...
In conclusion, trying to score political points, and engaging in vulgar "querelles politiciennes" in this case, seems undignified and the epitome of hypocrisy.
Unfortunately not beneath most of the political class in France, especially as local elections are looming.
Bonne santé à tous en 2010.
afd
Posted by: afd | 5 Jan 2010 13:54:55
DOT, the vouchers have been sent in a phased mode: children first. I received them, as well as all the people I know.
The WHO initially advised that 2 shots would be necessary then changed its mind a few months later. Hence the huge number of shots ordered...
Posted by: Tocquevil | 5 Jan 2010 13:53:13
Damn if you do, dam if you don’t. But who ever sold so many shots of Tamiflu and Relenza is getting a promotion.
Call Dr guillotin, Roselyne is for the chop.
Got to say that I had the best Christmas clothes wise this year, after visiting many sniffing relatives this year ( who thinks that dinner guests like watching children fight with their medicine and puree de carottes instead of being given copious amount of anti-viral-alcoholic beverages - the Antibiotic loving - AA section of my family) Nil by mouth from a week, brilliant, from the neck down.
it's another story. As my realtives said, nobody trusts the state with their health, but they still buy lots of medecine.Go figure.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 5 Jan 2010 13:42:49
Another world class scam of the Y2K bug amplitude. Reassuring that tax payers don't gulp everything anymore ; Mad Cow, Y2K bug, WMD, Carbon tax, etc.
Posted by: Romain | 5 Jan 2010 13:00:59
LEX: I think I misquoted the motto - it's even more staunch than that:
"Hope for the best, expect the worst and take what comes."
The WI is an old-fashioned institution, but the motto, like all good ones, is timeless.
It might have been a wartime coining - I don't really know how far back it goes.
Posted by: dot king | 5 Jan 2010 12:55:55
DANIEL: "Le matin, il est presque bien."
Said of hard-drinkers, I believe.
Posted by: dot king | 5 Jan 2010 12:49:46
As I understand it, it isn't a case of "getting money back" but not being penalised on debts for stocks ordered and fabricated, then the order being cancelled.
While I can agree with a case for a "principe de précaution", after all, if half the population had been wiped out (or even a smaller fraction) by this flu, then the outcry would have been deafening and another jour férié would have gone down the toilet; but why 95 million doses for a population of 63 million? Surely this can't be completely accounted for in the first assumption that children would need two shots?
The organisation has been costly too.
Setting up vaccination centres staffed by nurses, doctors and administrators requisitioned from their usual workstations and paid weekend and night rates, was IMO a mistake. It made the whole thing seem like a wartime measure and/or had the ring of soupkitchens or Soviet potatoe-queues about it, complete with interminable hours of waiting.
The whole scenario seemed more like one where the disease would spread rather than be prevented.
And what, oh yes, under 6 million people have been vaccinated after a campaign of 2 months - more? How long, under the current organisation, will it take to vaccinate 63 million?
I don't know a single person who has received a vaccination voucher - I certainly haven't. I know only one person who has had the flu, a 9-year old who slept for 3 days almost non-stop, went back to school after 5 days, and didn't infect anyone else in the family.
Now they're saying that we can be vaccinated by our own GP, but we still need that voucher.
Chaos really, and absurd. I think a lot of people just didn't want to participate in it.
Posted by: dot king | 5 Jan 2010 12:47:58
"Hope for the best, plan for the worst and take what comes."
Is it just me, or does that phrase sound a little old fashioned? Of course, after a decade of doing anything but that, it also sounds wise.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 5 Jan 2010 12:26:15
MAGGIE,
A few other funny expressions to add to your collection :
"Il n'a pas les yeux en face des trous" - is said of somebody who was asleep and has big difficulties to wake up, i.e. to put his eyes in alignment with the eye-sockets
"Il a les portugaises ensablées" (slang). He has hearing problems due to sand in his ears (portugaises stands for "Portuguese oysters" which look like ears)
"Il n'ouvre pas de bonne heure" - shop keeper slang - he does not open (his shop) early in the morning i.e. he does not understand fast :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 5 Jan 2010 11:07:36
Thanks, JULIO, for your ‘gem’:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6971605.ece
I particularly appreciated Rosie Millard’s lines:
‘The French love having their Francophone world, even if some of the inhabitants are less keen. I was told at least a dozen times that the Dom-Toms give France the honour of being the “world’s second maritime power”, whatever that means.’ (Ho, ho, ho)
[Without wishing to criticise colleagues, I would note en passant that the Millard article on the Dom-Toms tells you a lot about the Anglo-Saxon view of the French. You don't often read French articles on the British written in that tone. CB]
Posted by: Rick | 5 Jan 2010 10:42:17
AZLOON,
"Answer: Two wives"
In French judiciary jargon, this is called "une double peine" (peine = penalty).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 5 Jan 2010 10:10:18
Hope for the best, plan for the worst
DO RE MI
I don't want to worry you, but I think what you quote there is two thirds of the WI (Women's Institute - a venerable association, like an embroidering, quilting and scone-baking version of Daughters of America) motto.
In full, it reads: "Hope for the best, plan for the worst and take what comes."
Posted by: dot king | 5 Jan 2010 10:09:26
In the 1970's or 80's, some conference interpreters invented 'Bullshit Bingo', a little game to be played in their soundproof interpreters' booth.
The rules went as follows:
1) Print out an empty matrix of 5 rectangular boxes horizontally and 5 vertically.
2) Before the start of the conference, fill out each box with a cliché, buzz-word or phrase, from the source language, related to the subject matter under discussion. This worked particulary well with business conferences where speakers tended to use incessant jargon - eg: 'to think outside the box' ; 'to touch base' ; 'ball-park figure' ; 'out of the loop' (and 21 other hip-phrases).
3) HOW TO PLAY:
For the interpreter who is off-mike (but who is still listening to what is being said), check off each box when you hear these words or phrases used during a presentation. When you get 5 boxes Horizontally, Vertically or Diagonally, then stand up and shout ....... ‘BULLSHIT’.
Of course, no-one ever did stand up or shout out loud, but it left a tangible record of the influence that the vocabulary used in business books ('Getting to Yes'; 'Competitive Strategy' etc) has on the speakers at such meetings.
Posted by: Peter Athey | 5 Jan 2010 08:49:54
Two big football "clichés"
- "on prend/joue les matchs les uns après les autres" (we play games one after another" (oh sure ? I thought you'd play the 2nd one, then the 5th....)
- and the famous "l'important c'est les trois points" (bad trad : the important it's the three points)
Maybe one day, we'll have to study more precisely the "à partir de là"... Probably the best thing ever invented in french
Posted by: Billy Montoya | 5 Jan 2010 08:03:51
The cliché I hate the most is "le risque zéro n'existe pas". A sorry excuse for the people in charge, telling us they won't invest more in safety management.
Posted by: Romain | 5 Jan 2010 08:03:19
Valentin
Hello Rocket, and a very happy New Year to you!
:)
and a very Happy New Year to U2.
Posted by: rocket | 5 Jan 2010 07:58:35
DRM
Have a Happy New Decade !!
The last one sucked, big time.
Posted by: azloon | 5 Jan 2010 05:31:08
[I wish I had three (wives).
[no, not in that sense] i mean three in 3 different houses.] Blendi
Well, then, when the Morman missionaries coming knocking on your door (which they surely will at some point), tell them you're not interested. :)
Joke (such as it is):
Question: Do you know the penalty for bigamy?
Answer: Two wives.
Posted by: azloon | 5 Jan 2010 05:28:37
[Phrases such as l'Hexagone or Outre-Rhin really are substitutions which are rendered necessary by a strong rule against repetitions when writing in French. Whereas in English we seem perfectly content to use the word France several times in the same paragraph when referring to, well, France (or should I say 'the Gallic republic'? Shudder!), this would be considered unacceptable in written French.] Michael Irwin
Michael, I doubt you are the cocaine-snorting U.S. professional footballer of the same name, tho, no matter, you are not quite correct about repetitions in English, at least American English. My English teachers, back quite a few years, used to discourage repetition of the same nouns in close proximity, preferring a synonym.
Broadcasters, who also must have heard the same from their English teachers, took this unnecessary advice to heart and as a result a weather person, for instance, might use the term 'the white stuff' to mean snow if they had said 'snow' immediately proceeding.
The effect was absurd since calling snow 'the white stuff,' simply to avoid using 'snow' a second time leaves one wondering exactly what the problem is with the obviously preferable, less awkward, word or expression. The avoidance simply highlights the silliness of such a convention. It's a vanity, really.
I seriously doubt anyone would use 'the white stuff' as a synonym for snow in any context other than avoiding a repetition of the word 'snow.'
(Actually, now that I think of it, having brought up our cocaine-snorting footballer, 'the white stuff' would more likely be used here, by many at least, as a slang euphemism for cocaine.)
Posted by: azloon | 5 Jan 2010 05:21:35
I have to share this gem
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6971605.ece
And I had no idea France still had an empire !
Sacrés Anglais !
Posted by: Julio | 5 Jan 2010 04:35:32
"This 2010 feels already weird" -- DO-RE-MI
I'm with you on that. In my life there are dozens of little things all out of wack. I feel more like Jackie Chan when he is faced with an endless stream of attackers.
Oh well, first things first, right thinking follows right action, it is what it is. Oops, wrong thread. :0)
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 5 Jan 2010 03:48:14
" but one cannot smile after a whole page of examples that illustrate the very same idea." -- RUMPO
Eh bien, continuons...
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 5 Jan 2010 03:33:57
i could help your family. i would buy you a home, pay for jani to get the help, wh
i could help your family. i would buy you a home, pay for jani to get the help, whatever help she needs - research, constant care and attention, all of it.ugg stores the most frustrating thing i find in all of your writings is the glaring, horrifying fact that healthcare is a privledge in this country. those that need it the most, ugg storescan't have it. no matter how desperate and dire their situation. can MHA (Mental Health America of LA) help you in anyway?discount ugg your situtation is SO unique that there most be some work around whatever "rules" are in place. i'm sure you've researched every angle - it must exhaust you to have people throw out ideas.
Posted by: ugg stores | 5 Jan 2010 01:43:20
"We'll find out when he finishes his six week winter vacation and try to catch him before he leaves on his two week vacation in Spring"
Hello Rocket, and a very happy New Year to you!
:)
(about half way into my vacation and starting to get real bored with so much time to spare!)
Posted by: Valentin | 4 Jan 2010 23:34:44
"but one cannot smile after a whole page of examples that illustrate the very same idea."
I disagree!
"a couple of cherries short of a clafoutis."
"two sandwiches short of a picnic"
"il lui manque toujours 19 sous pour faire un franc"
"il n'a pas la lumière à tous les étages"
"il lui manque neuf pour faire dix"
"il n'a pas inventé la fil à couper la beurre"
All refer to a person who is not too bright.
I hadn't heard ANY of them before, and I love them ALL!
I copied them all down and have been pestering the family with them.
I find them all delightful!
More, please!
Posted by: Maggie | 4 Jan 2010 23:17:25
About "un silence assoudissanr", which is quoted above: it may have become a cliché, but technically it's an oxymoron. Another famous one in French is : "Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles".
Posted by: JP Gratias | 4 Jan 2010 22:59:56
"I did that with Peter, was told Sorry but Peter decided to quit this blog in protest and is very dead." - Blendi
So, are you saying that Peter died to spite us? I wouldn't put it past him.
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 4 Jan 2010 22:36:19