France

There is something fundamentally rotten at the heart of the European far-left. In Britain it manifests itself in institutional anti-Semitism, whereas in France the loathing is aimed at the police. On Saturday, hours after Arnaud Beltrame lost his fight for life following his heroic gesture during the Islamist attack in Trebes, a gentleman called Stéphane Poussier tweeted his pleasure at the news of the police officer’s passing. Poussier isn’t just any old troll eaten up with hate; last year he stood as a candidate for the far-left’s La France Insoumise party in the parliamentary elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Insoumise, moved swiftly to distance himself and the party from Poussier’s

There’s one word you may not hear in connection with the death of Lt-Col Beltrame who died last night, the fourth victim of the 25-year-old Islamist gunman, Redouane Lakdim. And that word is chivalry. The reason why the police officer died from wounds he sustained in the shootout, in which Lakdim was killed, was that he volunteered to take the place of a woman hostage. When the gunman took over the Super-U supermarket in Carcassonne, he held one woman back to use as a human shield. And remarkably, Lt-Col Beltrame offered to take the woman’s place. Surprisingly, the gunman allowed him to do so. He left his mobile phone with an

Islamist terror returned to France this morning with at least three people reportedly killed when a Moroccan man, reportedly claiming allegiance to Isis, opened fire on police and then ran into a supermarket in Trebes, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ and vowing to avenge his “brothers in Syria”. The gunman is now believed to have been killed by police, but there were media claims that the terrorist, apparently known to intelligence services for radicalisation, had asked for the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor from the Islamist cell that killed 130 Parisians in November 2015. The attack, the first against French civilians since the murder of two young women outside Marseille

President Emmanuel Macron has offered his full support to Theresa May and said that France may take its own action against Russia after the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. On a visit to Touraine on Thursday morning, the president was asked about the incident and he replied: “Everything leads us to believe that responsibility is in fact attributable to Russia. I will announce in the coming days the measures that we intend to take.” Macron is hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris on Friday and it’s expected that the pair will make a joint announcement in which they reiterate their support for Britain. The president’s intervention came

In January 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy was honoured by British Jews at a ceremony in London. The former French president was thanked by Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldsmith for his support during a decade that had seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism across France. ‘France right now is the main battleground between hope and fear for the future of Europe, especially for the Jewish community’, said Goldsmith. Two years on, and Britain has also become a battleground for Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks are now at record levels in the UK, according to a report released this week, with 2017 witnessing a 34 per cent rise in violent assaults against Jewish people. Holland and Belgium have also

Why the big fuss about the 100 eminent Frenchwomen, including Catherine Deneuve, who have criticised the #Metoo movement as a puritan backlash? Their viewpoint, expressed in a letter to Le Monde, is little different to the one expressed by their president in November, when Emmanuel Macron spoke out against sexual violence and harassment but warned against a culture of ‘denunciation’ where ‘each relationship between men and women is suspicious.’ In reminding France that they are ‘not a puritan society,’ Mr. Macron was tacitly drawing comparisons with the Anglo-Saxon world, long seen by the French (and other Latin countries) as prudish in sexual relations. Macron was subsequently criticised by some French