France

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

The Vietnam War BBC4 The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that ‘some viewers may find some scenes upsetting’. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of

Thursday

Robert Tombs

Lost in translation | 19 October 2017

If Michel Barnier and David Davis, in their regular dialogue of the deaf, seem to be inhabiting different mental universes, that is because they are. The British and French have often found each other particularly difficult to negotiate with. Of course, Barnier represents not France but the EU, and he has a negotiating position, the notorious European Council Guidelines, on which the veteran British diplomat Sir Peter Marshall has recently commented that ‘I have never seen, nor heard tell of, a text as antipathetic to the principle of give and take which is generally assumed to be at the heart of negotiation among like-minded democracies’. But, as a senior German

Thursday

Paul Levy

Alice’s restaurant

Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known celebrity cook, the person who inspired the planting of Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden, the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Légion d’Honneur, vice-president of Slow Food International, the founding figure of California cuisine. She is the mentor of Sally Clarke and, claims Wikipedia, of René Redzepi and Yotam Ottolenghi. It all began in 1971 with a simple French restaurant in Berkeley, California, which she called Chez Panisse in homage to the films of Marcel Pagnol. It served a no-choice menu, costing $3.95, consisting of the traditional dishes

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 31 August 2017

I arrived for lunch a bit late and was led to the dining table. Our hostess disappeared back into the house to bring out the food, leaving me to acquaint myself with the other guests, an Englishwoman and an American. The Englishwoman said that yesterday she had fallen off the wagon after eight weeks and today she was terribly hung over. She didn’t feel guilty, however, because she had enjoyed herself very much. The American man’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses but he had a warm smile and great teeth and an easy, open manner. He introduced himself by saying that this was his first time in France, and that

Matthew Lynn

Macron’s biggest enemy is himself – not the unions

The labour market would be revolutionised. France would start growing rapidly again, leading the way in Europe. Tech entrepreneurs would flock to Paris, along with the bankers fleeing the City, while companies from around the world would be relocating to newly invigorated industrial hubs in Lyon and Toulouse. That anyway was the script when the centrist reformer Emmanuel Macron was elected to the French Presidency. Today we saw what the Macron revolution would actually amount to as his government finally unveiled his major set of labour market reforms. Predictably enough the major trade unions have already said they will oppose it, and the riot police will no doubt be standing

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Hurricane Harvey is bigger news than the bankers at Jackson Hole

In Houston last November I spent an evening at the city’s industrial-scale food bank, where I heard a presentation on the Houstonian tradition of offering hospitality to refugees, including 200,000 displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. We were also given some positive spin on the strength of co-operation, in time of crisis, between the region’s major oil companies and its state and city governments. Now Houston itself is the victim of Hurricane Harvey. With the prospect of $50 billion worth of damage, the world is watching first to see whether the combined response is more humane and effective than the Katrina shambles, in which protection of property seemed to

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The truth about Brexit? One professor’s guess is no better than another’s

Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to the UK economy’, according to Professor Patrick Minford on behalf of Economists for Free Trade — while those who claim his ideas spell economic suicide are ‘hired hands, they work for government, they work for big industry…’ Well maybe, as I frequently say: Minford talks of a 4 per cent GDP gain from free trade, 2 per cent from ‘improved regulation’ and more from reclaiming our net EU budget contribution and ‘removing the taxpayer subsidy to unskilled immigration’. All of which adds up to much more, for example, than the

Francis Wheen

Swine fever

‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch. Pía Spry-Marqués has no time for such nominative determinism. ‘Pigs,’ she points out, ‘are in fact quite clean animals.’ Wallowing in mud isn’t nostalgie de la boue, merely the only way of keeping cool if no shade or fresh water is available. God disagrees with her. ‘The swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you,’ he tells Moses and Aaron in Leviticus. While most Muslims and Jews still go along with this (as do Rastafarians, much to the

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Why western women are now the Islamists’ target of choice

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s terror threat hasn’t gone away

The latest attack in France couldn’t have come at a worse time for the government. On Tuesday night, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and his ministers dined at the Élysée Palace as the guests of their president, a “moment of conviviality” before they all head off on holidays today. It’s been a trying few weeks for them, what with Emmanuel Macron’s plummeting popularity amid a series of PR disasters for his inexperienced En Marche! party and a spot of R&R is just what everyone needs. Instead, this morning brought news of yet another outrage in the French capital. Fortunately, casualties were light. Of the six soldiers struck by a BMW outside their barracks in

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

France is getting fed up with Brigitte Macron

Having recently hosted Bono and Rihanna and taken centre stage during Donald Trump’s visit to France, Brigitte Macron now has a new role to keep herself busy. The French President’s wife was named last week as the godmother of the first baby panda born in a French zoo. Macron said she was ‘very happy’ to be asked. But, increasingly, France is not feeling her joy and there is growing resentment at her presence in the Élysée Palace. An online petition launched two weeks ago by the artist Thierry Paul Valette opposing the creation of a formal role for Brigitte Macron as First Lady has been signed by nearly 200,000 people. The petition says

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 August 2017

Five and the Red One are a German covers band. It’s probably the most uninspiring name for a rock band I’ve ever heard. Every July they come to the same French village for a one-off appearance and every year they play exactly the same set of rock classics. Young and old turn out to sing along and groove under the plane trees in the village square. The village rock concert is Catriona’s social event of the year. She starts looking forward to it around Christmas. Every year, she pushes her way to the front and dances for two hours, and every year the village postman makes a move on her.

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

Last summer, feminists defended the burkini. Will they now defend the bikini?

If there was a buzzword from last summer then it was surely ‘burkini’. The media got its swimsuit in a twist over France’s decision to ban the Islamic garment from its beaches. Slow-witted Anglophone columnists – many of whom have a curious predilection for insulting the French – lapped it up and enthusiastically portrayed Islam as the victim of Gallic oppression. Those trusty custodians of liberal values, the Guardian and the New York Times, got particularly worked up, the former declaring in an editorial that ‘women’s right to dress as they feel comfortable and fitting should be defended against those coercing them into either covering or uncovering.’ The New York Times quoted Marwan Muhammad,

Friday

Matthew Lynn

Emmanuel Macron has already given up on reforming France

Labour regulations were going to be swept aside. The euro would be reformed, tech entrepreneurs would flock to Paris, and Brexit-fleeing City bankers, flush with tax-free bonuses, would be quaffing champagne in the bars of the Latin Quarter. When Emmanuel Macron was elected President of France, there was a lot written about how he would finally reform the French economy, and restore the euro-zone to healthy growth at the same time. True, plenty of people expected some bruising battles with the unions, some tough negotiations with the bloated public sector, and some fights with Angela Merkel. Whether Macron would ultimately win those was always an unknown quantity. There was one

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Macron’s vanity fair

On this week’s episode we discuss whether Macron is losing his gloss, ask if the Brexit talks are heading in the right direction, and recommend how to get the best out of the Edinburgh festival. First, it’s been just over two months since Emmanuel Macron became President of France, and already cracks are starting to show. Swept into the Elysee Palace by a sea of young voters rejecting Marine Le Pen and the National Front, those same voters are beginning to turn on the centrist former banker who they reluctantly championed. So says Gavin Mortimer in this week’s magazine, where he laments the new President’s vanity, and he joins the podcast from Paris along

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

How cool is Macron?

For a man with a reputation as a bit of an egghead, Emmanuel Macron has acquired a sudden passion for sport. In recent weeks, he’s been seen at rugby matches and football internationals, invited the Lyon women’s football team to the Élysée Palace to celebrate their Champions League win, and found time to chat with Chris Froome during the cyclist’s ride to a fourth Tour de France title. He’s even donned boxing gloves and sparred with a young pugilist as a means of promoting Paris’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. The message from the 39-year-old Macron is clear, as crystal as Tony Blair’s when he was elected British prime

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 July 2017

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something

Thursday

Susan Hill

Diary – 6 July 2017

A trip to the supermarché at the beginning of our French month yielded many of the necessary things one also buys at home, but even washing powder acquires romance when sporting a French label, and the fresh fish, meat, veg and wine sections are far bigger than ours, with mountains of lettuce and seven different varieties of tomato. The Carrefour bookshelves also yielded Tintin books which are, like Asterix, best read in French. I bought Tintin et L’Ile Noir, Tintin et La Crabe au Pinces D’or, and my favourite, Tintin et Les Bijoux de Castefiore. The French is simple, the drawings are masterpieces, subtle, witty, full of style and character.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Cathar country

I once spent three months living in the Languedoc, writing my first novel. The highlight was the few days I allowed myself away from my monastic schedule to visit Cathar country. I’d been dying to see it because the castles and the landscape are so stark and dramatic, the history is so dark, bloody and weird, and because I wanted to try cassoulet in its proper location. I can’t remember much about the various cassoulets I tried except that, though it’s impossible to go wrong with goose, sausage and beans, none of them was quite as good as the one I laboriously recreated at home from a recipe in my

Allan Mallinson

Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command.