France

Tuesday

Calla Jones Corner

Is French still the language of love?

There are so many ways to express love in French that it’s easy to make faux pas. My faux pas over the five decades I’ve been speaking French are legend – at least in the family. Best to keep them there. Most people know that ‘Je vous aime’ means ‘I love you’ and covers one or more people. If you say ‘Je t’aime’, the informal expression of love for one person, you’ve got to be careful. Especially in today’s world where ‘hooking up’ is more common than rabbits breeding.  We speak a lot of Franglais in our family – we’re creative and lazy when it comes to language. With bilingual grandchildren it’s inevitable. A few

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s protestors are just getting started

There was another protest in Paris on Saturday. According to the organisers, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise, 150,000 turned out on a crisp winter’s afternoon to opposeEmmanuel Macron’s pension reform. The French President wants to lower the retirement age from 64 to 62. But independent analysis put the numer at the protest at 14,045. It was the latter. I was there. I’m now something of a seasoned observer of the French street protest. From Yellow Vests to Covid Passports, and from the far right to the far left, I’ve rubbed shoulder with all manner of disgruntled French citizen. Yesterday’s protest was one of the jollier. I wouldn’t go so far as

Tuesday

Rachael Phillips

The Christmas when Parisians ate the zoo

Even if you don’t like Christmas, it’s hard to deny that Christmas dinner is one of the best meals of the year. But for Parisians in 1870, the Christmas meal took an unexpected and macabre turn. While we may think of Paris as being the city of light, good food and fine wine, it’s also the city that once produced a Christmas Day menu of stuffed donkey head, elephant consommé and roasted camel – all courtesy of the Jardin des Plantes zoo. In the late stages of the Franco-Prussian war, Paris found itself surrounded by enemy forces. The Germans aligned themselves with Prussia with a plan to bombard and starve

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

The murder of Lola and the failure of Macronism

Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that she was Algerian and was in an ‘irregular situation’ in France. And then that other Algerian migrants had also been arrested. As far as can be determined, on the day of the killing, ‘Dahbia B’ apparently waited for Lola to return home from school, seized her and took her to her sister’s apartment. The killing

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Samuel Paty’s murder has still not been reckoned with

Two years ago on Sunday Samuel Paty was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old outside his school in a Parisian suburb. The teacher’s crime was to have shown an image of the prophet Mohammed during a class discussion on the freedom of expression.   Paty’s killer was a Chechen, and it’s noteworthy that the two other major Islamist terror attacks in France in recent years – the murder of three worshippers in a Nice church and the killing of a policewoman in Rambouillet – were also the work of foreign-born terrorists.   Homegrown Islamic terrorists are now a rarity in France. They were responsible for most of the horrific attacks that

Kara Kennedy

How to live like a Parisian

I wanted to hate it. In the weeks leading up to my trip to Paris, I was told incessantly about how much of a dump it was, about how I’d be faced with overflowing bins and skilled pickpockets. I was even warned against drinking the tap water.  According to some, to be properly British means hating the French. And there’s plenty to take against: rude waiters, deliberate incompetence in maintaining their side of the Channel crossing, awkward double-cheek kissing, obsessiveness about cheese, astounding corruption in farming subsidies. My trip to France had one rule: do not enjoy it. Do not let them win. But I have a confession to make. It

Wednesday

Jeremy Clarke

My battle with an ant

At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away and amuse myself for three hours. The metal chairs in the waiting room were uncomfortable and there was nothing to rest my head against. So I wandered outside the 19-storey hospital to look for somewhere to lie down. Every outside space was taken up with parked cars, thousands of them everywhere you looked, some of them jammed in opportunistically at fantastic angles. Eventually I found a patch of rough grass between two car parks. The grass was strewn with stones, rubble and litter but I lay down gratefully, resting my

Esther Watson

Dress like Macron to cut your energy bills

The French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has urged civil servants to trade shirts and ties for woollen polo necks under their suits. It’s part of a drive to heat ministries to no warmer than 19°C – a policy that is compulsory in all government buildings except hospitals and care homes. French petit fonctionnaires can take inspiration from President Emmanuel Macron, who has been leading by example in a classic black polo neck. Ca chauffe! Le Maire’s suggestion has been criticised right and left. The leader of the opposition, Marine Le Pen, tweeted ‘Don’t have enough heating? Let them wear cashmere’, and Gaspard Gantzer, a former adviser to the socialist

Wednesday

Jeremy Clarke

My three-night retreat with the nuns

We were four round the little table in the nunnery kitchen: a 90-year-old German lady and her man; a nun called Sister Mary of the Angels; and me. We had just come in from the early morning mass. The German lady’s man was a Spaniard of about 35. It was impossible to tell but interesting to speculate on the nature of their relationship. Was he an unusually devoted carer? A manservant? A lover? The German lady was cross-examining me. She was deeply sceptical about a Protestant presence in the nunnery, about my being alone, about my claim to have advanced cancer, and she wanted answers. She had a powerful, commanding

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen wants France to become the next Sweden

While Emmanuel Macron spent Sunday in London honouring the memory of the late Queen Elizabeth, Marine Le Pen marked her return from a summer break with an address to the party faithful in the south of France. Buoyed by the success of the Swedish right in last week’s election, and anticipating a similar result on Sunday when the Italians go to the polls, Le Pen attributed what she called a ‘patriotic wave’ sweeping the continent to the EU’s failure to tackle mass immigration in the last decade. In the opinion of Le Pen no one embodies this failure more than Macron. Last Thursday the president told an assembly of prefects

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The inconvenient truth about France’s forest fires

Montpellier Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires. It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’. Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two. Last week the

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Zemmour is his own worst enemy

Eric Zemmour is back. The bogeyman of French politics spent the summer licking his wounds after his far-right Reconquest party was wiped out in June’s parliamentary elections, but on Sunday he addressed several thousand supporters at a rally in the south of France. It is, hopes Zemmour, an opportunity to relaunch his political career and judging by his recent media appearances he won’t be watering down his right-wing rhetoric. Railing against immigration, environmental extremists and the sanctions on Russia, Zemmour picked up from where he left off in the spring. When it was put to him by one interviewer that he had paid the price electorally for focusing too much

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller

What kompromat does Trump have on Macron?

Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior. Early in his presidency, Macron himself weirdly volunteered that his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was ‘not my boyfriend’ Maybe the spooks of the CIA are

Friday

Ross Clark

Could Macron trigger British blackouts?

‘We are living the end of an era of abundance,’ according to Emmanuel Macron, ‘the end of the abundance of products and technologies, the end of the abundance of land and materials, including water.’ It is hard to see how water has become less abundant, being the ultimate renewable resource, which evaporates before falling back to Earth as rain. Rewind a year and people in parts of Europe, you may remember, were complaining about a super-abundance of water – in the form of the Rhineland floods. But let’s leave that aside and assume that Macron’s remarks were more immediately prompted by a shortage of energy. France, in common with other

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

Europe’s new migrant crisis

Earlier this month I spent a week in Sicily, driving south from Palermo to Agrigento and then east to Syracuse and Messina. It was my first visit to Sicily in 17 years and, given the media reports, I had expected to find the island crowded with migrants from Africa. In fact, I saw none, other than those I glimpsed in a fenced-off processing centre at the quayside in Agrigento, the first port of call for many migrants who arrive in Sicily. Last week the local paper in Agrigento drew on official government figures to reveal that so far in 2022, 45,664 migrants have landed on Italian territory, an increase of

Thursday

Anna Keay

Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a sensational discovery. Amid the corpses and musket balls, dismembered limbs and severed swords there nestled a carrying case of personal letters and papers. It was nothing less than the king’s private correspondence. The cache included letters between Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria – his always opened ‘My deare harte’ – which discussed in detail the tactics and strategies of the war. Never ones to miss a PR opportunity, the Parliamentary high command ordered that a selection should be published with a guiding commentary. The first editorial note got

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Liberté, égalité, nudité: France’s new sexual politics

Montpellier France is going through a sexual civil war. After the great carnal outburst of the free-loving soixante-huitards, some have reverted to abstinence and prudishness, while others are pushing sexuality to new extremes. The crisis in French sexuality has exposed itself this summer as the clothes have come off. It’s not always a pretty sight, and not just because it isn’t true that French people don’t get fat. Major confusion on the shifting boundaries of corporal and sexual expression has grown into a peculiar conflict, exposing a national sexual neurosis. On one side of this conflict is France’s army of traditional naturists: a largely aging clan who revel in the

Sarah Vine

What’s the point of the NHS if it doesn’t work?

We left prepared. Bottles of water, protein snacks, phone chargers, portable Scrabble (even the teenagers can look at the internet for only so long). And we left early: our crossing was at 2 p.m., and by 9 a.m. we were already on the M25. Six-hour queues, we’d been warned. Armageddon on the M2. Somewhere around Maidstone, I got a text. P&O Ferries: ‘We regret our sailings are delayed by up to 45 minutes.’ Uh-oh. But as we descended into Dover, zero sign of trouble. We sailed through check-in. ‘So sorry there’s a bit of a delay,’ said the man in the booth. No worries, said we, pathetically grateful not to

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Europe’s looming energy wars

This summer marks a truce. But if, as expected, Liz Truss becomes prime minister, it is almost inevitable that tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol will resurface. Britain has been threatened with trade barriers if it tears up the protocol, with implications for import and export industries. But one possible consequence has been largely overlooked, in spite of the gathering energy crisis: the trade in gas and electricity. Imported power via undersea interconnectors is the forgotten but fast-growing element of our electricity system. In 2019, 6.1 per cent of our electricity was imported. Undersea power interconnectors, which have been a feature of the UK electricity system since 1986 when the first one plugged

Thursday

Will Self

My debt to Boris Johnson

Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him. Anyway, leaving the country last week, and with it a Tory party as self-obsessed and self-deluding as any junkie, it occurred to me it was time