France

Thursday

Deborah Ross

A matter of life and death | 20 September 2018

Faces Places is a documentary directed by Agnès Varda in collaboration with JR, the famous Parisian photographer and muralist (although, if you’re as shallow as I am, your first thought may also have been: how is this possible now that Larry Hagman is dead?). The pair visit small towns in France, meeting ordinary people, taking their photograph, blowing the photographs up huge, and pasting them outdoors on buildings and barns and trains. It sounds arty-farty, and I suppose it is, but it is also a mesmerising meditation on lives lived, friendship, ageing and mortality. Plus it throws in this fact for good measure: Jean-Luc Godard can be a total bastard.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron is quick to take on nationalism. What about Islamism?

On Sunday, I reached the summit of the col de Riou in the Pyrénées to find a shepherd tending his flock. He asked if I’d seen a bear on my way up through the forest. One of his sheep was missing and he suspected a bear was responsible. I’d seen no sign of one but that got us talking, and I asked what he thought about the government repopulating the Pyrénées with bears. He shrugged and said the time for protesting was past. The bears are here to stay and that was that. One could say the same about Salafists, I reflected that evening, as I read Le Journal du Dimanche.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 September 2018

The long table was set out under four beautifully pollarded plane trees festooned with coloured lanterns and red balloons. Twenty party guests. Above us the clear night sky was brightly peppered with stars. Three and a half years ago, Catriona fled to France with a broken heart and shattered confidence. She returned to the village where she had spent family holidays in happier years; an expat family friend had offered his empty villa as a refuge. In that lonely time she used to stand at the bedroom window and look out at those pollarded planes, bare and dripping in the rain, and wonder what was going to become of her.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Why Britain’s Jews look to France with fear

The Jewish New Year begins on Sunday and to mark the festival of Rosh Hashanah, Emmanuel Macron visited the Grand Synagogue in Paris on Tuesday. It was the first time that a president of France has attended and although he didn’t give an address (that would breach the laïcité protocol) Macron’s gesture was appreciated by the chief rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia. “You are like the Wailing Wall,” Korsia told the president. “We confide in you our hopes and our sorrows and although we get no response we know that somebody hears us”. Joël Mergui, the president of the Israelite central consistory of France, was more forthright when he spoke.

Monday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron holds Britain’s Brexit fate in his hands | 3 September 2018

C.S. Forester, creator of Hornblower, a great student of Anglo-French relations, wrote a now often overlooked exhortative novel titled Death to the French. Contemporary readers might consider it triggering if not racist, yet it captures well a traditional British reaction when angry Frenchmen start throwing missiles at us. Here in the south of France we are some distance from the troubled waters of the Guerre de Coquilles Saint Jacques. On the shores of the Mediterranean, oysters are favoured and war fever muted, although nobody at Chez Trini’s café doubts that the perfidious English are up to their usual conneries. I tend to agree, but then I’m applying for an Irish

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The record bull run must end soon. So is it time for a return to gold?

All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index of US stocks has risen by more than 300 per cent — and that rise has continued throughout Donald Trump’s reign, despite his trade war threats and other follies. But it has not been reflected in major European markets, which have drifted sideways, and has been increasingly sustained by a small number of top tech

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

How Macron is reviving Marine Le Pen’s fortunes

It says much about Europe’s political establishment that Marine Le Pen has been charged over photographs she tweeted in 2015 to illustrate the barbarity of Isis. It was a stupid stunt of Le Pen’s, but not one worthy of prosecution and the political martyrdom that will ensue if she is convicted. Le Pen is facing the possibility of three years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (£66,000) because last year the European Parliament voted to strip her of immunity, thereby allowing a French judge to charge her with distributing “violent messages that incite terrorism or…seriously harm human dignity”. Meanwhile, as politicians and lawmakers conspire to send Le Pen down for

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 August 2018

The entire Alpine village, contemptuously dismissed recently in an online tourist guide as a nondescript centre of old peasants and old dogs, was gathered under an awning in the single street for a festive lunch. Oscar and I squeezed along between long rows of perhaps 100 bent backs to the only pair of empty chairs remaining. The tables were covered with disposable paper covers; everyone had brought their own plate and knife. As we sat, our immediate neighbours greeted us with vinous geniality. They were a matriarchal middle-aged woman, a mournful girl aged about 13 with thick lenses in her spectacles, and two young men with comically drunk faces. Everyone

Jasper Rees

An artist’s eye

There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame all but freezes, and the film seems to have taken a left turn into an exhibition of fetching French landscapes and interiors from the early 20th century. The camera hovers over the harrowed earth, admires the sturdy sunlit front of a farmhouse, lingers thoughtfully on a face. The running time of 138 minutes could easily have been slashed to 100 by a heartless editor. But this is un film de Xavier Beauvois, a specialist in painterly exactitude. The writer-director’s greatest success came in 2010 with Of Gods and Men. This,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 August 2018

Me in a black polo-neck jumper looking sour; Oscar wearing a floppy hat; her youngest daughter nude and stooping to dry her feet with a towel; a mountain profile at dusk; a labourer’s stone hut in a vineyard; a copy of Augustus John’s ‘Robin’. Strangely inspired by John’s ‘Robin’, Catriona first picked up a paintbrush 18 months ago, and these pictures, collected and hung on the wall of the local bar, comprised her first public exhibition. They will hang there for the month of August and she held a vernissage to celebrate the occasion. About 50 people turned up from six o’clock onwards and mingled with about an equal number

Rupert Wright

Beyond the pale | 9 August 2018

When we first moved to the Languedoc, the less poncey part of the south of France nearly 20 years ago, there were two kinds of rosé. The first, piscine rosé as the French dubbed it, was thin, pale and uninteresting. It was best served in a large glass full of ice cubes, preferably around a swimming pool by a tanned French girl in a bikini. The second, darker in hue and fuller of flavour, carried the scent of the garrigue, thyme, lavender and rosemary. It went well by the pool, of course, served by anyone in a bikini, but was equally good with merguez sausages and pork chops grilled over

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Forced marriage is the MeToo generation’s ‘no go’ subject

By now you’ve probably heard of Marie Laguerre. The 22-year-old student was punched in the face last week by a passer-by, a sickening attack that was caught on CCTV and has since gone viral. It’s caused uproar around the world, and is being seen as evidence of the physical and verbal abuse with which Frenchwomen have to contend all too often. Laguerre was struck because she gave short shrift to the obscene comments of a man who crossed her path on a busy Parisian street. Marlène Schiappa, France’s gender equality minister, described the incident as an assault on the “freedom of women”; Schiappa deserves much praise for her dominant role in

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

What the Benalla scandal reveals about Macron’s failing presidency

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

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Can France’s World Cup success help in the fight against Islamists?

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

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Jean-Marie Le Pen the patriarch of European populism?

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

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Meet Macron’s nemesis: the ‘Malcolm X of French Muslims’

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

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Tariq Ramadan and the integrity of French justice

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

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Emmanuel Macron was right to scold his over-friendly fan

Obviously, one mocks little President Macron for telling a teenager to call him ‘Monsieur le President’. How long before the French will have to say ‘Vive l’Empereur!’? But I do have a sneaking sympathy for the man one must not call ‘Manu’. The presumption of modern culture that everyone is on first-name terms makes people confused because they come to believe they really are friends with ‘Harry and Meghan’, or whoever it may be. The famous people thus addressed are also unhappy, because they cannot remember who they do and don’t know, and because they feel that people are trying to own them. Full, formal modes of address provide a

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron is restoring France’s dignity

Has there ever been a time when the leaders of France and Great Britain are so diametrically opposed in character and style? One is weak and indecisive, a Prime Minister who avoids confrontation, the other is forthright and forceful, a president who relishes a fight. Emmanuel Macron seems to take a perverse delight in upsetting his compatriots; one can detect in his behaviour a healthy contempt for a section of French society. These are the slackers to whom he referred in a speech last year, the coasters, the self-entitled, the people he believes have grown up believing the state will look after them, whatever. Last week he railed against a social

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer

For France, the World Cup is about more than just football

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