France

In France there is a palpable sense of administrative and political panic in how to deal with the coronavirus epidemic. As I write from Perpignan on the French-Spanish border on the morning of 24 March, France has 19,856 coronavirus cases and 860 deaths; Britain 6,650 and 335. After Italy and Spain, France is the third worst affected country in Europe (Germany has more cases because it tests more, but only 123 deaths), but it has imposed and enforced the most severe lockdown. France went into lockdown on 17 March. The administrative state immediately generated an array of bureaucratic forms: a certificate to leave your house to walk the dog or go shopping; a

‘At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words to silence.’ Albert Camus, The Plague. Faced with Covid-19, France has not yet reached that moment of silence when one gets hardened to the truth. Rhetoric still has the upper hand as President Macron’s address to the nation on Monday night revealed. Repeating six times that France was at war with the virus and that consequently she had to move

Looming behind the Frost-Barnier negotiations is a battle between London and Paris as financial centres. After the June 2016 referendum, the French failed miserably to seduce City institutions away from the UK. There was no exodus from London, and of those few relocations to the continent, most avoided Paris, preferring to scatter widely from Dublin to Frankfurt and Amsterdam.  After failing in the first instance, the French will now attempt to do so by force under the cover of the EU negotiations. The strategy of Macron and his ambitious Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, will be to ensure Europe does not recognise passporting for British banks, that Euro-denominated transactions are

Ah, Paris, the city of love, the city of light, the city of larceny. Theft, burglary, pickpocketing, assault and homophobic acts are on the up, and even the city’s Procureur, the public prosecutor Rémy Heitz, has admitted the stats ‘aren’t good’. No, they’re not. Theft, for example, increased by 15 per cent in 2019, up from 124,875 recorded incidents to 144,552. Pickpockets are also enjoying a boom period with an increase of 35 per cent in 12 months, and there were 7 per cent more burglaries last year than in 2018. True, car theft and gun crime have dropped but physical assaults have risen by 13 per cent, sexual harassment on the

It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn’t know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator ‘has never given the slightest cause for concern’, yet on Saturday afternoon France’s anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon’s ‘radical vision of Islam’. The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay. A convert to Islam more than a decade ago, Harpon first came to the attention of the authorities in 2015 when

In December 2015, Donald Trump claimed parts of the French capital were no-go zones for the police. ‘Paris is no longer the same city it was,’ said the then-Republican presidential hopeful. ‘They have sections in Paris that are radicalised… The police refuse to go in there.’ His remarks echoed a similar claim made by Fox News earlier in the year. In response the mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, was outraged, and even muttered about pursuing legal action for the ‘honour of Paris’. Trump was wrong. There aren’t any no-go zones in France for the police. There are, however, a growing number of zones that the police enter knowing their