France

The feel-good factor Emmanuel Macron hoped would surge through France following their World Cup win has failed to materialise. The president milked the success for all it was worth but he has been swiftly brought down to earth with a bump. It was actually more of a thump, administered by his now ex-chief bodyguard Alexandre Benalla, who was caught on camera beating a protestor while dressed as a policeman during a May Day march earlier this year. Since the story broke eight days ago, it has dominated the French media. Had the president’s people come clean the day the footage was first broadcast by Le Monde, the story wouldn’t have developed in

It’s not surprising that so many Frenchmen and women partied in Paris last Sunday to celebrate their country’s World Cup success. The French side played with style and panache and deserved their victory; there’s also the fact that France hasn’t had much to cheer about in recent years when it comes to sport so they’re entitled to bask in the glory of Les Bleus. As well as cheers last week there were also some jeers – and spits and slaps – all of them aimed at the British cyclist Chris Froome as he peddled up and down mountains in the Tour de France. These are more than just surly reactions to the recent

Jean-Marie Le Pen turned 90 last month and to celebrate he threw a party on Saturday for 350 guests. His three daughters were present, including Marine, whose attendance signalled the end of two years of hostility. The pair fell out when she expelled him from the National Front for repeating his belief that the Holocaust was “a detail of history”. The rapprochement between father and daughter is also a political move on her part. Marine Le Pen knows she messed up in last year’s presidential campaign by focusing on Frexit when the National Front’s strategy should have centred on mass immigration and Islamic extremism. Ahead of next May’s European elections, she is

Emmanuel Macron is becoming quite the curmudgeon in attacking those who don’t conform to his view of the migrant crisis. The French president has said the Italian government is “cynical and irresponsible”, likened populism to “leprosy” and demanded fines be levied against EU states that don’t take their share of migrants. The Italians, increasingly exasperated with the French president, have hit back – labelling him a “chatterbox”. There is a subject, however, on which Macron has gone uncharacteristically quiet in recent months: Islam. During last year’s presidential campaign it was the one issue on which he appeared uncomfortable when challenged by Marine Le Pen. His response was not to offer a

These are challenging times for Emmanuel Macron. Kim Jong-Un has supplanted him as Donald Trump’s Best Friend Forever and he’s angered the Italians with clumsy comments about their handling of the migrant crisis. Thank goodness, then, that Kylian Mbappé has recovered from an ankle injury and is fit for France’s World Cup opener today against Australia. Every president and prime minister would love their boys to win the World Cup but for Macron a victory inspired by Mbappé would be particularly timely. What political capital! Endless photo opportunities and references about the football team mirroring the new diverse, dynamic and blossoming France. Mbappé is, for Macron, the figurehead of this

For the last four months, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan has been rotting in a French jail, like Jean Valjean. He stands accused of rape by several women who came forward during the #MeToo scandal. One says that in a hotel room in Paris in the spring of 2012, the world-renowned Swiss scholar of Islam “choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die”. Another has reportedly described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on”. If Ramadan is guilty of these despicable acts, he must face the full weight

The man who brought France’s Socialist Party to the brink of ruin has no sense of shame. In recent weeks, François Hollande has been plugging his memoirs all over the media and even hinting at a political comeback, much to the “exasperation” of his party, who wish the former president would go quietly into the night. The book, The lessons of Power, is rumoured to have been written with the help of a well-known left-wing journalist, but the delusions are all Hollande’s. His bitterness towards Emmanuel Macron seeps through the prose, and for every swipe at his successor there is also a claim that France’s gradual economic upturn is down

Two video clips did the rounds in the French media at the weekend. One went global, that of the heart-warming heroism of Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant who rescued a small boy dangling from a balcony in Paris; the other, being more feel-fear than feel-good, didn’t capture the world’s attention in quite the same way. This film was shot in the south of France, in a suburb of Avignon, and showed a group of men surrounding a newspaper kiosk. They were there to protest at a large poster advertising the latest edition of the current affairs magazine, Le Point, the front cover of which was adorned with a photograph of the Turkish president