France

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My clairvoyant GP

‘Willie or bum?’ I said to Catriona on the motorway. Everything in my recent medical career has been introduced via the former: cameras, cutters, stents. I naturally assumed it would be the same choice of pathways for exploring and snipping off three pieces of my liver. At the wheel, Catriona laughed at my idiocy and explained where my liver was and that there was not a pathway from it to either of those entrances. ‘They’ll go straight in through the side with a needle,’ she said. ‘Ow,’ I said. While I undressed in front of her, the admissions nurse scanned my written forms. ‘Anglais? I only take cash,’ she said,

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Is France losing its war on terror?

A political storm has swept France in recent days. It follows the publication of an open letter by twenty retired generals to Emmanuel Macron. In their declaration, originally published on an obscure website and then reproduced in conservative magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, the officers warned that Islamist terrorism was pushing France towards civil war. The reaction among the political class was predictable. Marine Le Pen invited the signatories (1,000 in total) to join her National Rally party, while the government condemned the letter as ‘irresponsible’. It promised action if any serving soldiers or gendarmes have put their name to to it. Some on the left want a criminal investigation launched, accusing

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

The banalisation of Islamist terror bodes badly for the West

Another day, another Islamist murder in France — this time, a 49-year-old policewoman fatally stabbed in the neck by a Tunisian man screaming ‘Allahu Akbar.’ She was murdered in her own station, in Rambouillet, 25 miles south of Magnanville, where in 2016 an Islamist stabbed a husband and wife police couple to death in front of their three-year-old child. In the intervening years there have been numerous police officers killed by men of a similar ideology, to the point now where the brutal slaying of a female officer slips down the news pecking order after just one day. Such is the acceptance in France of Islamist terrorism. C’est la vie.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Why so many millennials are backing Marine Le Pen

Many years ago I married into a family of the French working-class. They came from Aveyron, La France Profonde, and most were dyed-in-the-wool socialists. But at a barbecue in the summer of 2002 one, Fabien, admitted that he had cast his ballot for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the recent election. A quarrel ensued but the young man stood his ground. His car had been broken into three times in a matter of months and the police in Marseille had shown no interest. Voting for Le Pen was Fabien’s protest at the police indifference to petty crime. Twenty years later and it is no longer unusual to discover young people who

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s growing German scepticism

Britain’s favourite Frenchman, Michel Barnier, is in the Calais region today where he will address a conference about his part in Brexit and perhaps give a further indication as to his presidential aspirations. The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator was described in yesterday’s Le Figaro as the man who can ‘unite the right’ and in doing so present a credible alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in 2022. Barnier presides over a political initiative called Patriotes et européens and he explained its concept to Le Figaro: ‘Patriot and European, this means that I believe in the force of the nations, the respect of national identities and France as a country of

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Mon dieu! Our French residency permits have arrived

For EU nationals living in Britain and wanting to legally remain after Brexit, a letter or an email was enough to clinch it. It would have been churlish then for France not to reciprocate by relaxing its almost hallucinatory bureaucratic requirements for the British in France, allowing them to do the same. And to the astonishment of all, it did relax them. Catriona made an initial attempt to obtain a residency permit three years ago. She went for an exploratory interview at the nearest prefecture. A long wait in a squalid, packed waiting room, followed by the vituperative rudeness of the functionary traumatised her. Never again, she said. Sod that.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Starmer’s Labour is following the French Socialists into oblivion

Why does Keir Starmer seem set on following the example of the French Socialist party, and leading Labour into electoral oblivion? The sad truth is that it could all have been so different. Back in September 2019, at the height of the Brexit saga, it was obvious that Corbyn’s Labour was increasingly contemptuous of Britain’s white working-classes. But instead of reaching out to Red Wall voters, Starmer has doubled down on this misguided approach. The miserable state of the French left should serve as a warning to Labour that you betray your traditional voters at your peril. In the last few years, France’s Socialist party has imploded, reduced to such penury that they

John Keiger John Keiger

What a Le Pen win would mean for Brussels

A Marine Le Pen victory in a year’s time can no longer be ruled out. Other than opinion polls regularly pointing to her place in the second round as a certainty, a few, such as Harris Interactive on 7 March, put her on the cusp of winning the second round with 47 per cent to Macron’s 53 per cent — a dramatic improvement on her 2017 score of 34 to Macron’s 66.  The traditional republican front against the radical right is crumbling and the stigma of voting Le Pen is diminishing. More of the electorate are coming round to the Rassemblement National’s views on national sovereignty, immigration, crime and security, and — with Brussels’s

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

The real problem with Macron’s elite school

President Emmanuel Macron announced today the closure of the notorious École Nationale d’Administration, the elite finishing school for the senior civil servants and politicians who have wrecked France. Perhaps nothing could serve France better than burning down its Strasbourg campus and salting the earth, but there’s less to this than meets the eye. This is the third time he’s announced this. Statism is the religion of ENA, which explains why its brilliant graduates have conspicuously failed to create a single Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple. Its graduates have manoeuvred France, a nation that once led the world in innovation and creativity, into a cul de sac of ‘immobilisme,’ crushing innovation while

Sunday

John Keiger

Macron’s Napoleon complex

May 5th this year will be the two hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena, the tiny island in the south Atlantic where the British confined the Emperor to Longwood House after defeat at Waterloo in 1815. After much hesitation, Emmanuel Macron has decided that France will commemorate the Emperor’s place in French history. Though the most recognisable historical figure in all surveys of the French, almost no public spaces or institutions bear his name. Monarchy and Republic cancelled him. Bonaparte divides. He is at once the figure who tamed the Revolution, drastically reformed France and yet the dictator who overran Europe and reinstated slavery. President Jacques Chirac abhorred

Thursday

James Delingpole

Why I’m glad to see the back of Call My Agent!

For the past few weeks I have been binge-watching the Netflix series Call My Agent! (or Dix pour cent, as it is more satisfyingly known in France). Though it’s not quite as exquisite, multilayered and beguiling as my all-time favourite French drama Le Bureau, it has a similar appeal: strong, well-drawn characters in a distinctive setting in another country (France, obvs) where they do things differently because everyone is just so damned French. This time it’s not about foreign intelligence services but a movie talent agency which, though perpetually on its uppers (for the purposes of that TV concept known as ‘jeopardy’, I suppose), nevertheless seems to have on its

Lynn Barber

A new blossoming: David Hockney paints Normandy

In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more than 40 years. He liked its great panoramic length and the absence of shadows. But while there he found himself seduced by the scenery of Normandy, its winding lanes and orchards of blossom trees. He decided he would like to paint the arrival of spring there, as he had in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, a decade earlier. He asked his long-standing assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, known as J-P, to look into the possibility of renting a house. He was so delighted with the first one J-P showed him, La Grande

Friday

Steerpike

France accuses Britain of vaccine ‘blackmail’

In some ways you have to admire the sheer shamelessness of the French government. To spend the start of the year slagging off the AstraZeneca vaccine before threatening the seize those very same jabs showed a degree of brazenness that excelled even the usual French standards. But to accuse the UK of blackmailing Paris and her European neighbours must be the peak of Gallic gall.  The French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian spoke to a radio show this week in which he criticised the UK’s vaccine programme. He told listeners: ‘You can’t be playing like this, a bit of blackmail, just because [the UK] hurried to get people vaccinated with a first shot.’

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The tyranny of French bureaucracy

Applying for a French bank account is like trying for a permit to open a Christian bookshop in North Korea. Failing twice, I thought I’d try instead for a post office account. I went for an interview armed with passport, proofs of address, pay slips, old school reports and my inside-leg measurement. But it wasn’t enough. I was shown into a booth and sat facing a masked woman name of Maud. Maud and I were separated by a clear Perspex divide. ‘I’m listening,’ said Maud. I slid my shiny new passport through a slot in the screen. ‘I would like to open a post office current account,’ I said. Maud

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

What the British can learn from French attitudes to culture

Asked to defend France’s reputation on the global stage, a French diplomat once told the International Herald Tribune, ‘If Germany has Siemens, we have Voltaire.’ In this vision lies something very obviously French: a single-minded belief in superiority grounded not in the future but in the glorious intellectual past. Schooled in the tradition of exception culturelle or cultural superiority, the French truly believe that their cultural capital is the finest in the world. Think Diderot, Condorcet, Sartre and Camus and you can see why. Attend a French soirée and you will be asked to quote sections of Michelet’s histories and make witty repartee about Barthesian structuralism over the salad It

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron losing control of France?

There may be a touch of the Monday blues for Emmanuel Macron this morning as he scans the headlines in France. A new poll reveals that vaccine scepticism in his country has reached record levels, thanks to his recent belittling of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Sixty-one per cent of those canvassed expressed their doubts about the vaccine, up 18 per cent from last month. Only 23 per cent said they had confidence in the AstraZeneca jab. In contrast, 75 per cent of British people have faith in the vaccine. But if the French are increasingly reluctant to be vaccinated, they are determined to enjoy the arrival of spring – Covid restrictions

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Is the US to blame for the far-left takeover of France’s universities?

There is a belief in some quarters of the Anglosphere that the French are too wise to succumb to what is known across the Channel as ‘wokisme’. It’s true that in recent weeks Emmanuel Macron and his education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, have expressed their concern about what the latter described as a battle against ‘an intellectual matrix from American universities’. But the battle has already been won by the far-left in France who are largely in control of all forms of education.  The front cover of this week’s edition of the conservative magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, says it all: ‘Universities: laboratory of the lunatics’ Inside, the magazine describes how radical feminism,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My thrilling rendezvous with the sausage lady

One day last week we did a wine run up to Manosque in the foothills of the Alps, leaving early in the morning. Catriona drove, big Vernon squeezed into the back seat and made a nest for himself among a fortnight’s recycling rubbish. Along the road up to Manosque the almond trees were in blossom, and in the gardens yellow forsythia and mimosa. But last year’s dead leaves still clung about the naked branches of the forest. Manosque it was because we’re massive fans of a local red called La Blaque. But on the way we passed a Louis Latour wine outlet. Catriona likes their Viré-Clessé white so we stopped

Thursday

Lee Langley

Two for the road: We Are Not in the World, by Conor O’Callaghan, reviewed

A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This is a road trip like no other: Paddy, deracinated, footloose, divorced, taking on a temporary job for reasons that become clear later; and daughter Kitty, spiky, provocative, shaved head, grubby jeans and sweater, wrapped in an old mink coat she’s pinched from her grandmother. Occasionally she rewards her father with an ambiguous affectionate response as their edgy banter veers in and out of dangerous territory: the minefield of parenthood. The narrative is fractured; nothing told chronologically, the surface deliberately throw-away — skewed punctuation, sentences left hanging. Conor O’Callaghan is a

Bruce Anderson

Nights – and wines – to remember in Paris

Some friends claim to be making marks on the wall to count the days until liberation. Ah, the forgotten delights of restaurants and foreign travel. In one long nostalgic phone call, we kept present discontents at bay by discussing Paris. Although I have partaken of three-rosette meals in the capital of gastronomy and was never disappointed, a different experience came to mind. This restaurant has never received Michelin’s highest accolade, not that it would care. It believes itself entitled to at least four rosettes. Its name is Chez l’Ami Louis, in the Troisième, not far from the Marais. I was introduced to it by Rémy and Mathilde, a couple who