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It was the burkini that brought Monday night’s debate to life between the five main presidential candidates for next month’s French election. For the first hour of the televised debate there had been much posturing and postulating but no sharp exchanges. That changed when Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of turning a blind eye to the burkini, the Islamic swimwear that last summer caused such controversy in France. Macron rejected the charge, telling Le Pen in a forceful exchange she was a dangerous provocateur. The centrist candidate, who claims to be ‘neither left nor right’, then went on the counter-attack, accusing the National Front leader of sowing divisions within

‘One cannot govern France,’ declared François Fillon last November, ‘if one is not irreproachable.’ A little over three months later, however, and the centre-right candidate for next month’s French presidential candidate has had a change of heart. The 62-year-old has today announced that he will be placed under formal investigation over allegations that during a period of several years he fictitiously employed three members of his family on lucrative salaries. François Fillon and his Welsh wife Penelope have been summoned by magistrates to answer the charges on 15 March, two days before the registration deadline for presidential candidates. Fillon says it is clearly a politically-motivated decision. ‘From the start, I have not been treated like

As Emmanuel Macron stood on the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday urging Britain’s ‘banks, talents, researchers, academics’ to move across the Channel after Brexit, security services in France were dismantling yet another Islamic terror cell preparing to launch a terrorist attack. That makes three this month, a clear indication that the Islamists are itching to carry out a major attack in the run-up to April’s presidential election. Tuesday’s police raid targeted addresses in Clermont, Marseille and the Paris area. ‘The suspects had a plot that was sufficiently advanced for the police to decide to arrest them’, said a police spokesman. According to the French media, police had been monitoring the suspects’ text

On this week’s episode, we consider Marine Le Pen’s path to power in France, whether we allow posh people to bluff their way to success, and why men aren’t ‘lunging’ at women in Ubers. The first round of the French presidential election will be held at the end of April, and, after a turbulent couple of months that has seen establishment candidates dropping like, well, establishment candidates, the polls favour a run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron, a 39-year-old independent candidate seen as another ‘heir to Blair’, is all that stands between the Front National and government, a terrifying prospect for liberal France. In this week’s magazine, Professor Robert

Friday morning’s attack in Paris in which a machete-wielding man was shot and wounded in the stomach by a French soldier after he injured another soldier near the Louvre museum is the first terrorist incident in France since July. Then two teenagers murdered an elderly priest in his Normandy church, an attack that shocked and repulsed in equal measure. While the full details of Friday’s incident are still to emerge, it hasn’t the hallmarks of a determined and well-organised attack. There were no explosives in the two backpacks recovered at the scene and launching oneself at two armed soldiers holding just a machete is frightening but foolhardy. Nonetheless, interior minister

The reaction in Europe to Donald Trump’s recent remarks critical of the continent was all too predictable. It was an echo of the response when, following the Islamic terror attacks in November 2015 that left 130 Parisians dead, Trump said: ‘Paris is no longer the same city it was….they have sections in Paris that are radicalised, where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified.’ On that occasion the liberal media and the French Establishment reacted with outrage, rejecting the idea that the Republic had lost control of parts of Paris. The mayor, Anne Hidalgo, even threatened legal action against Fox News when they repeated Trump’s assertion. Now it’s Angela Merkel

It strikes me that it’s not much fun being a Catholic in France these days. Strolling back to my apartment in Paris on Christmas Eve, for example, I passed my local church. Inside a midnight Mass was in progress; outside a policeman stood guard. It was the same across France, an army of gun-toting men and women protecting the nation’s cathedrals and churches. They’ll be back at Easter, and on the Ascension and the Assumption. For how long? Who knows how long the country that is known as ‘the eldest daughter of the church’ because of its Christian heritage will need to protect its flock. There’s been just one fatal attack

When Christine Lagarde stood before the Court of Justice of the Republic last week to defend herself against charges of criminal negligence in her handling of a long-running fraud case in France, the head of the IMF concluded: ‘I have acted in conscience, in confidence and guided by the general interest.’ But today, the court decided otherwise and announced a guilty verdict. The 60-year-old need not worry about going to prison or even paying a fine – and she won’t even receive a criminal record. Yet nonetheless the verdict is a serious blow for Lagarde, and the IMF. After all, Lagarde was supposed to be the much-needed steady pair of hands

Yassine was one of the most popular teaching assistants at his primary school in Strasbourg. What is known in the French school system as an ‘animateur’, Yassine supervised the kids during their lunchbreak and in after-school activities. ‘Nice,’ ‘sociable’ and ‘attentive’ have been some of the words used by parents this week to describe the 37-year-old. Yassine had worked part-time at the school for a decade before he was taken on permanently in 2014 because of his popularity with the kids. Last weekend Yassine B [his surname hasn’t been disclosed] was arrested by the French security services after an eight-month surveillance operation. When police raided his flat they allegedly discovered

In September, Marine Le Pen travelled to Brachay, a microscopic right-wing commune in northeastern France. Despite its diminutive size, this French locality has the greatest percentage of Front National voters – 72 per cent – so its politicians consider it emblematic. With her raucous gusto, produced thanks to decades of smoking, Le Pen regaled the local, mainly middle-aged assembly with a Trump-like speech, claiming she was there to listen to ‘les oubliés de la France’, the forgotten voices of this country, all 59 of them. There she was, in an outfit the French media appropriately described as ‘Madame Tout Le Monde’. In other words, Madame Everybody (if not quite Anybody) — a

Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy has gone ‘beyond the limits of decency’. Cue an atmosphere that’s almost medieval, which basically tells Sarkozy, and by extension everyone, that you cannot say things like that. You probably shouldn’t even think them. The swiftness and ugliness of the response to Sarkozy’s comments confirm that questioning climate change is to the 21st century what

My daughter started secondary school on 1 September. She was very excited. I wish I could report that she skipped through the gates on her first day, but this is France, and no child skips through school gates in 2016. Instead she stood in a queue outside the entrance, as one by one she and her new classmates had their satchels searched by a pair of security guards. Not that I’m complaining. In fact if I did have a gripe it was that the security was too light. According to Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, 50m euros has been provided to tighten security at schools and colleges, and more than 3,000

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has announced that the French police and intelligence services have identified 15,000 people across France who are either ‘radicalised’ or in the process of becoming radical. In response to this Nicolas Sarkozy (who is of course in campaigning mode) has given an interview to Journal du Dimanche in which he has said that anybody who ‘regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must be pre-emptively placed in a detention centre.’ This is an interesting step-up in rhetoric from the former President, but very far from being a policy.  Not least

French politicians have been busying themselves recently offering solutions to Calais’s crowded ‘jungle’ camp – and it’s good news that the Home Office has said their suggestions are all ‘non-starters’. Quite right, too. Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to set up a system for displaced people living in France to apply for asylum in the UK might sound humane. In fact, it’s a recipe for even more misery. Why? Because offering the faint hope of sanctuary to those who have suffered unimaginable terror would encourage more vulnerable people to set out on a tragic journey which has already claimed far too many lives.  Displaced people from the Middle East, in particular, have been through enough. Working for a humanitarian NGO, I spent much of

I’ve always hated the beach. The water? Great. The sunshine? Terrible. It starts with the hot trek across the sands to find a square of free ground – loaded up with factor 60, several books, a comedy floppy hat, two towels, three bottles of water and the rusty family parasol. Then there’s the bodily anxiety. Find me a woman who doesn’t fret about her body on the beach, and I’ll find you a liar. Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for The Spectator about my own fraught history with my body on the beach. I still don’t understand how it ever became acceptable to wear an itsy bitsy bikini around

May I interrupt, for a moment, the howls of anguish from those liberals in uproar at the news that authorities in France are banning burkinis on their beaches? I’d like to relate an incident that occurred earlier this month in France. It involved my girlfriend, who was on her way from Paris to visit her grandmother in eastern France. An hour into her journey she pulled into a service station to fill up with petrol. On returning to her car she made a small sign of the cross as she slid into her seat. Navigating one’s way on a French motorway during the height of summer can be a fraught experience,

At the beginning of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France’ and its ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. It was not only an abstract concept: the picture in his mind was of ‘the Madonna in mural frescoes’. Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq discuss Europe’s summer of terror: What is President Hollande’s certain idea of France? Presumably it cannot be the Madonna, since Hollande is the child of French laïcité, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between religion and the republic. But what happens when, in the name of one religion, men in France enter the temple of another and slit

Today’s attack was the 7th Islamist terrorist atrocity in France since January 2015. Two hundred and thirty six people have been killed by Islamist terrorism there in the last 18 months. This attack might only have killed one innocent person but it was a particularly brutal event: an 84-year-old priest had his throat slit while celebrating Mass. It was an attack that was designed to shock and to divide, to make it impossible to ignore the religious element of this act of terrorism. Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq discuss Europe’s summer of terror: The two terrorists were shot dead by police before they could kill their other hostages, two nuns and