Emmanuel macron

If there’s one country that knows how Britain feels in the wake of last week’s suicide bombing in Manchester, it’s France. Similar horror has been visited on the French several times in the past five years with nearly 250 slaughtered at the hands of Islamic extremists, so the French are all too familiar with the grief, the rage and the shock still being felt across the Channel. But not Britain’s incomprehension. At first, maybe, when Mohammed Merah shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren in a Toulouse playground five years ago, but since the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered in January 2015 the French have understood what is going on. The Islamists are

Every politician in France is on manoeuvres. Vast chasms have opened up in the anti-Le Pen coalition and the country faces another two-round election for the National Assembly in June. It’s likely that a fractured and dysfunctional legislature will emerge, complicating or even making impossible the program proposed by president-elect Emmanuel Macron. Nonetheless, Macron will still be hoping that amidst this electoral entropy he can push his own slate to the forefront. This is a big ask. Possibly only about 20 per cent of voters supported him for the presidency for any reason other than he was not Marine Le Pen. His program is either not understood or not supported by the vast

There is perhaps some remote mathematical chance that France’s new elected monarch will be struck down by a meteorite before he is officially inaugurated in a grand parade on the Champs Elysée on May 14th, amidst a 21-gun salute, helicopters flying overhead, the Garde Républicaine in full-dress uniform on shining horses, generals posed upright in their ceremonial 4x4s, bands playing, bunting flapping. Barring that, Mr President, you appear to have played a blinder, winning the keys to the Elysée in what appears to have been a stunning political insurgency, and you have done so promising to reform an immobilised French economy. Your victory will be hailed as evidence that Europe

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye’s career has encompassed everything from fiction to prose poetry, but he will best be remembered for his contribution to political science: Horseshoe Theory. This maxim holds that the far left and far right, rather than being at opposite ends of a linear political spectrum, in fact closely resemble each other. This is because the political spectrum is not linear but instead curves like a horseshoe, the right and left extremes of which almost meet. Faye’s theory has often been derided for being simplistic, so he could be forgiven for feeling a quiet sense of vindication after a recent survey of supporters of the defeated far

Bad weather swept across southern France over the May Day holiday but summer is just around the corner and with it will come the burkini. Last week, a call was issued to burkini-wearers to gather at the Cannes film festival later this month, with the organiser saying it will be the perfect moment ‘to celebrate together this freedom in the town that was the first to ban the burkini’. The burkini brouhaha of last August made headlines around the world but it soon blew over like a summer storm. A handful of beaches on the Cote d’Azur banned young women from wearing the Islamic swimsuit, citing concerns over public disorder,