France

Thursday

John Laurenson

Death watch | 19 November 2015

At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene set in and by 1 September he was dead. He’d been on the throne for 72 of his 77 years. A new exhibition at Versailles looks at the elaborate rituals that followed. The Sun King died as he had lived — in public. Despite his illness, he carried on his daily routine until two days before his death, a decision made easier perhaps by the fact that he’d always conducted a good part of the affairs of France from his bedroom. It was no ordinary bedroom, and what went on

The Spectator

How they tried (and failed) to make ‘La Marseillaise’ nicer

Friendly words England football fans sang ‘La Marseillaise’ in a friendly match at Wembley. The anthem has not always been so popular. In 1992 a Committee for a Marseillaise of Fraternity was founded to campaign for a change to the words, written as a war hymn by an army captain while French troops were besieged by Prussians at Strasbourg 200 years earlier. The campaign failed, despite the support of Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the then president. The suggested new lyrics began: Arise you children of the Motherland Let’s sing together for Liberty Liberty, oh dearest liberty Your bloody ramparts have fallen The brothel demographic Cynthia Payne, who was jailed for

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 November 2015

The car: a ’06 rosso red Seat Ibiza 1.9 TDI Sport, bought three weeks ago from a man who had bought the car from the Stig’s mum. If the Stig, with all his motoring experience, had carefully chosen the car for his dear old mum, it was an inspired choice. For an inexpensive, inoffensive-looking little two-door saloon, it is wonderfully quick. The route: from the north-western French port of Roscoff, in the socialist department of Finistère, down to Brignoles, the far-right, pied-noir capital of Provence; a 1,300-kilometre diagonal from the top left of the country to the bottom right. The in-car entertainment: ten CDs of smoky-voiced US southern-belle actress Elizabeth

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 November 2015

Home After the killings in Paris, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that seven terrorist attacks on Britain had been prevented in the past six months. He met President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a G20 meeting at Antalya in Turkey. Mr Putin said: ‘We should join efforts in preventing terror. Unfortunately our bilateral relations are not of the best.’ Mr Cameron said in the Commons: ‘Raqqa, if you like, is the head of the snake… we need to deal with it not just in Iraq but in Syria too.’ He said funds from maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP would go to special forces, drones and

Jason Walsh

The politics of terror | 19 November 2015

 Paris Unfortunately, like most things the president does, his big speech fell flat The terror attacks on Friday have given President François Hollande an opportunity to be statesmanlike, and he has tried his best. He quickly declared a state of emergency and summoned a special congress of the Senate and the National Assembly so that he could deliver a powerful address. ‘Terrorism will not destroy France, because France will destroy it,’ he said. Unfortunately, like most things the president does, the speech fell flat. Pictured on the front page of Monday’s Le Figaro, France’s conservative daily (as well as inside the left-leaning Le Monde), he looked a small man, flanked

Douglas Murray

France’s civil war…

In the wake of the massacre in Paris, President François Hollande said that France was ‘at war’ — and that it must be fought both inside his country and outside in the Middle East. As the French air force began dropping bombs on Raqqa in Syria, another operation was under way in towns and cities across France: 168 raids in two days. A battle on two fronts has begun. Chartres cathedral is one of the great monuments of western civilisation, but Chartres was also home to one of the Bataclan theatre suicide bombers. A man from the same area died last summer in Syria, fighting for Isis. In Lyon, theraids

Wednesday

Maurice Mcleod

Why I didn’t sing La Marseillaise last night

When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer solidarity and what help we can. And, yes, to hit back. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were Isis strongholds in Syria. And at home, an extra 115,000 gendarmes were deployed across France, leading to hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests.  In the days following attacks on the West,

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Michel Houellebecq’s vision of a France ruled by an Islamist regime is all too plausible

No question about the book of the year: it’s Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Heinemann, £18.99) in Lorin Stein’s fluent translation. It’s France, 2022, when a moderate Muslim Brotherhood government takes charge. While the narrator submits to the new low-key Islamic regime, the liberal left collapses for want of coherence before an ideology intent on winning the battle of ideas through demography. ‘To them it’s simple — whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate and does the best job of transmitting its values, wins.’ Following its publication, the Guardian asked brightly: ‘Does Houellebecq really hate women and Muslims, or is he just a twisted provocateur?’ But the book is more

Saturday

Freddy Gray

The strange relationship between Islam, violence and French football

It is not so surprising if the jihadists in Paris were targeting an international football match. There has for years been a strange relationship between football, Islam and violence in France. The French football team, les bleus, have long been held up as an emblem of harmony and hope in an otherwise bleak multicultural landscape. The world cup winning team of 1998 consisted largely of the children of African immigrants and was celebrated as a great symbol of how the modern multicultural fifth republic could work. Zinedine Zidane, a Muslim boy from Marseilles, was the star of that tournament. Eight years later, when he was sent off for headbutting Marco

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

France’s new reactionaries

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence. They look back on a golden age that started with the French revolution and continued for nearly 200 years as France —

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Heathrow’s third runway could still be halted – here’s how

The Great British Runway final between Heathrow and Gatwick is beginning to look like a game of two halves. The visit of China’s President Xi Jinping is a bonus for the west London team, who can claim that Chinese investors with bulging wallets are more likely to be impressed by landing at an urban mega-airport than an expanded flying club in Sussex. But the Volkswagen emissions scandal has been a gift for Gatwick, because as chief executive Stewart Wingate said: ‘Heathrow’s poor air quality already breaches legal limits and it’s difficult to see how expansion could legally go ahead with the millions of extra car journeys an expanded Heathrow would

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Europe’s ever-looser union

Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different spectre has crept up on their other flank: which is that even if the UK votes to stay in the EU in 2017, we might be one of the only countries left. It’s a radical thought, but if they’d like to consider it, the Europhiles should look at what is happening across the continent. Pro-EU countries are proving harder and harder to find. The eastern European countries may still be financial net receivers, but they are now having to weigh up their honey pot against the demands that come with

Thursday

James Forsyth

Merkel’s folly

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Holly Baxter debate Merkel’s offer to Syrian refugees” startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Of all the irresponsible decisions taken in recent years by European politicians, few will cause as much human misery as Angela Merkel’s plan to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany. Hailed as enlightened moral leadership, it is in fact the result of panic and muddled thinking. Her pronouncements will lure thousands more into the hands of unscrupulous people-traffickers. Her insistence that the rest of the continent should share the burden will add political instability to the mix. Merkel has made a dire situation worse. On Tuesday last week, Germany declared that any Syrian who reaches the

Patrick Marnham

France’s fight on the right

A year has passed since Nicolas Sarkozy announced his return to frontline politics, and the political landscape in France is still recovering from the shock. His rivals for the leadership of the French right have watched while their cordially disliked ex-leader consistently outmanoeuvred them. They had made the mistake of believing in the sincerity of Sarko’s farewell speech in May 2012 when, following his defeat in the presidential election by François Hollande, he said: ‘From now on I will seek to serve my country in other spheres.’ Delighted by his departure, his colleagues seized the opportunity to reform the UMP, a coalition of the Gaullist and the anti-Gaullist right devised

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Liberating Marianne

In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed. Confining his research to three departments in the Loire valley, Gildea also suggested that for most people most of the time the Resistance was a dangerous irrelevance, to be avoided wherever possible. These conclusions were presented at a conference in Tours where they caused a minor uproar among French specialists. Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford University, now turns

Thursday

Taki

High life | 20 August 2015

These are the languid, sensuous days of summer, and I’ve had another birthday, which is the bad news. But it’s the silly season, so I’m going to be silly yet again and tell you about Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, a couple who got into trouble last week in the land of cheese. I don’t know them, but I had the bad luck to run into the wife about 20 years ago in Rolle, Switzerland, where the Rosey school is located. It was September, the first day back at school, and my son J.T. was miserable at the prospect of going to boarding school for the first time. He had tried

The Spectator

Letters | 20 August 2015

The morality of the A bomb Sir: In questioning whether we should celebrate VJ Day (Diary, 15 August), A.N. Wilson is confusing ‘why’ with ‘how’. The debate on the rights or wrongs of the nuclear attack will continue probably until long after the grandchildren of the last survivors have passed on. What should not be forgotten is the necessity to defeat the cruel, expansionist, militaristic regime that arose in Japan between the wars. Something happened to Japan during that period. The treatment of Allied prisoners of war and the atrocities in China during the second world war are well documented. What is less well known is the Japanese treatment of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The clock that stopped: the victory of nuclear arms and defeat of nuclear power

‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock retrieved intact from the rubble with its bent hands recording the precise time of day when the city was obliterated: 11.02 a.m. I was glad to be alone, because I could not have spoken.’ Published here 20 years ago, that was my memory of Nagasaki, the target on 9 August 1945 of the second and last nuclear weapon ever deployed. The subsequent seven decades of non-use of nuclear arms — deterred by that most chilling of threats, ‘mutually assured destruction’ — is one of the miracles of modern history, given the

Friday

John McTernan

The Calais crisis needs a better response than fences and dogs, Prime Minister

David Cameron should be in real trouble over Calais. It goes to the heart of two of the central issues by which British voters judge governments: are you competent and can you control immigration. Judging by the unstoppable growth of the chaotic ‘Jungle‘, the increasing number of assaults on Eurotunnel staff and the rising number of tragic and needless deaths, we know the answer to the competence question. To paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, there are two words for the government: incompetent. Every time a minister comes on the radio or TV to explain what the government is doing, I immediately think ‘who is that useless Lib Dem junior minister? No 10

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Is David Aaronovitch taking the piss out of himself?

This job is getting harder and harder, because it is no longer possible to parody or satirise the blithe stupidity of the liberal London middle class. It now exists in a place beyond the reach of such mocking. Take a peep at David Aaronovitch’s piece today on the problems in Calais. Just have a look, and tell me you don’t think he’s actually taking the piss out of himself. David believes we should let all the asylum seekers in. He thinks that they would make excellent ‘electrical engineers’. Yup, that’s why they’re there, Dave. Itching to get their hands on a junction box, the lot of them. Not a single penny