France

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Is this the reason Macron avoided a third Covid lockdown?

In these dreary days one of my few remaining distractions is perusing the readers’ comments at the foot of online articles about Covid in French newspapers. It’s like being ringside at a ferocious boxing bout. In the blue corner the Millennials, and in the red corner, the Soixante-Huitards, the 68ers, the French term for Baby Boomers. Neither generation is pulling their punches. The Millennials are fed up with their sterile existence in which bars, restaurants, cinemas and theatres have been closed since October. Liberte! they cry. They’ve seen the stats, that of France’s 76,000 Covid deaths, the overwhelming majority are aged 65 or above; only 0.5 per cent are from the 15

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

A small French town and the betrayal of Samuel Paty

There is a council meeting in the southern French town of Ollioules tomorrow but one item has been removed from the agenda. The mayor, Robert Beneventi, will not now propose renaming the area’s Eucalyptus College after Samuel Paty. You’ll recall the fate of Monsieur Paty, beheaded just beyond the gates of his Parisian suburb school last October by a young Islamist enraged that the teacher had shown a caricature of the Prophet during a lesson discussing freedom of expression. Paty’s brutal death sparked revulsion around the world – save in Pakistan and Turkey – and in France there was a large rally in Paris. There were numerous placards proclaiming ‘Je

Thursday

John Keiger

This pandemic has shown the best and worst of France

France is having a torrid pandemic with a succession of failures, from PPE equipment to vaccine invention, a stalled vaccination programme and now interminable and frustrating hesitation over a third lockdown. But we, and the French, should focus on the many things they do get right. Traducing Mark Antony’s speech to the Romans, it is time to praise France not to bury her. The ninth French-organised Vendée Globe – the world’s most gruelling 80-day, round the world solo yacht race – drew to a close in the small hours last night at Sables d’Olonne in the Vendée in western France. Its competitors, overwhelmingly French, have provided a dazzling example of

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

#MeTooInceste: has France’s code of silence finally been broken?

Montpellier Accusations of child abuse against Olivier Duhamel, now 70, ex-vice-president of Sciences Po university and of the secretive Siècle (Century) club of Parisian movers and shakers, have cast a dark shadow on the legacy of the soixante-huitards, the baby boomers who occupied the Sorbonne in 1968 and went on to rule (and ruin) France. Duhamel’s disgrace is long delayed. Only now has his stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner, published a book accusing him of sexually abusing her twin brother 30 years ago — and doing so within a culture in which his fashionable friends knew about the abuse but kept quiet. It’s an accusation Duhamel characterises as a ‘personal attack’ but

Lisse Garnett

How Argentina conquered Malbec

When Napoleon III proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1852, he unwittingly kickstarted quality wine production in Chile and Argentina. A mass exodus of republicans ensued, one of whom happened to be a skilled agronomist from Tours named Michel Aimé Pouget. Pouget carried with him a cache of French grape cuttings that were to change the course of wine history and formed the basis for Argentina’s wine industry today. Because of the phylloxera plague, French wine production fell by 75 per cent between 1875 and 1889. Today the vines of Europe are still grafted on to phylloxera-resistant American root stock. In Argentina and Chile, which have no phylloxera, old ungrafted

Monday

Matthew Lynn

Matt Hancock is right: we are in a vaccine race with France

There are plenty of different ways in which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, can be criticised for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Track and trace didn’t work, lockdowns were sporadic and probably too late, and the messaging wobbled all over the place. But comparing the British vaccination drive to France and the rest of the EU? That was completely right. When Hancock remarked on Sky News yesterday that the UK had vaccinated more people in just three days than France had managed in total, his critics on social media went into a predictable meltdown. It’s not a competition or a race lectured the finger-waggers. We have only done one

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My message to the log police

Here, as in Britain, everyone is a log expert. The woodman leaves a heap at the bottom of the drive and almost everyone subsequently walking past it stops to tell you’ve been conned, that that’s never a stère, it’s half more like. (A measure of logged wood in France was set in 1793 at one cubic metre and is called a stère. It’s about 12 wheelbarrow loads.) The woodman fastened his nose on my Barbour and inhaled fanatically. ‘Barbour,’ he said. ‘Oh-la-la-la-la’ How much did you pay for that, they say? So you tell them and they laugh in your face at your inadmissible complacency. High-ranking log police might then

Saturday

John Keiger

France’s vaccine problem

France is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council not to have developed a coronavirus vaccine, and it hurts. USA: two; UK: one; Russia: one; China: one, France nul points. To make matters worse, France also has an embarrassing international ranking in the number of its citizens it has vaccinated.  ‘France is the laughing stock of Europe’, cry a range of politicians and media. How is this possible in the land of Louis Pasteur, the French ask themselves? Even discounting Edward Jenner a century before Pasteur (whom France’s health minister graciously acknowledged), the French see this as the continuation of the country’s ‘déclassement’, a relentless historical decline from better days.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My future hangs on the result of this blood test

A new year and another round of medical treatments in the French health system. On Saturday morning, needing a blood test pronto, I drove to the local branch of a chain of commercial laboratories, arriving before daylight. I joined a queue of the worried and unwell that had already spilled out of the door and into the icy car park. Except for a old chap behind me trying to cough up a lungful of warm porridge, and someone else’s lilting accordion ringtone, we were a silent, stricken field. After shuffling forward for 20 minutes, I celebrated the achievement of reaching the outer door and passing through into the interior warmth

Fredrik Erixon

Orban and Macron, Europe’s new power couple

After Brexit, the general assumption was that France and Germany would take their place as the two rulers of Europe. But Angela Merkel’s influence has been waning and Germany is often an absent power — preoccupied as it is by redefining its own politics after 15 years of her rule. This suits Emmanuel Macron, who was never satisfied with sharing the stage with her. He has found himself another ally, one who is far more influential than people give him credit for — Viktor Orban. Macron and Orban have a monastic attitude to power: they both rule on the basis of there being a single orthodoxy that everyone must observe.

Thursday

Keith Sutherland and Alex Kovner

Macron’s vaccine ‘citizen panel’ is doomed to fail

France has a problem when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has so far only given out around 5,000 vaccines, and France has one of the lowest levels of trust in the coronavirus vaccine in the world, with only 40 per cent of the public saying they want to be inoculated. Faced with this trust deficit, Macron has proposed a 35-member ‘citizen panel’ to oversee France’s vaccination programme. The body, made up of a random selection of French citizens, will be responsible for monitoring and advising the government when it comes to the vaccine roll-out. Vaccines are the perfect storm for distrust of public authorities. Each recipient

Jeremy Clarke

In praise of nuns

Although I was ten minutes early, Vernon was there ahead of me, framed in the ancient chapel doorway, chatting up what is by general agreement the prettiest of the nunnery’s seven sisters. Vernon is a great bear of a man, raised in poverty in the Appalachian mountains, now wealthy, whose speaking voice is Jack Nicholson’s. A new friend, Vernon excites me because having endured real poverty he fiercely repudiates the glorification of anything that might be categorised under the heading of low life and calls me to order if I err in that direction conversationally. Vernon had brought the nuns three bottles of his homemade olive oil in a carrier

Tuesday

Steerpike

Brexit causes food shortages – in France

Since leaving the EU on 31 December, Britain seems to have somehow avoided the apocalyptic scenarios outlined by those most opposed to Brexit last year. There have been, so far, no long queues of lorries at Dover; the lights have stayed on; and the nation’s supermarket shelves have remained full of food. It appears that Brexit has caused food shortages in one country though. Mr S was surprised to spot today, after all the dire prognostications about Britain’s own food supply, that one shop in France is struggling to get hold of essential grub. According to the news agency Reuters, Marks & Spencer has struggled to fill the shelves of

Monday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron’s desperate New Year wishes

Emmanuel Macron was not quite his cock-a-doodle-do self in his New Year’s Eve broadcast to the French people. This, the fourth presidential broadcast of the plague year, saw Macron, in black suit and black tie, resembling a small-town funeral director attempting to conjure optimism. Macron promised a France on the comeback by the spring, with new economy jobs and a European recovery fostered by an ever more ambitious European Union. The reality is that much of the country is under a 6pm curfew. Everywhere, bars, restaurants and ski resorts are shut. Pension reform has gone. Unemployment, deficit and debt are massively up. There’s been close to a 10 per cent

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

France couldn’t care less about Boris’s Brexit deal

The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been a subject central to French political discourse and since Covid it has shrunk further as a preoccupation of the country. The news channels with their skeleton holiday crews have been unable to mount a full-blown orgy of live remotes from Europe’s capitals and have resorted to more marginal regional figures, focusing on the fishing ports.

Friday

Gwythian Prins

Britain is wise to prepare for a new Cod war

Is it ‘irresponsible’ for the Royal Navy to plan to protect the fisheries of the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) when the Brexit transition period ends? The chairman of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee thinks so. The BBC made much of it. But Tobias Ellwood is wrong: it would be irresponsible not to talk now of a deterrent credible in the eyes of prospective trespassers. And who might they be? Given the importance which France attaches to our punishment on leaving the EU for reasons which have nothing to do with fish, but with much bigger psycho-dramatic issues that Robert Tombs and ‘Caroline Bell’ have recently explained, French

Monday

Robert Tombs

Emmanuel Macron’s great Brexit gamble

There is an intriguing pattern in our relationship with European integration. A Frenchman vetoed our attempt to join. A Frenchman threatens to veto our attempt to leave – or at least to leave with an agreement. General de Gaulle said we were too remote from Europe to join. Emmanuel Macron says we are too close to Europe to leave. I think de Gaulle got it right. I hope Macron doesn’t turn out to be right too, so that we end up stuck half in and half out, neither ‘at the heart of Europe’ nor ‘global Britain’. How individuals and nations react to the project of European federalism is determined not

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

What French women want

Considering the subject of compatibility, experienced British expats in France maintain that a French man and an English woman might work, but rarely the other way around. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. The English chap, for example, who came to look at the septic tank has a long-term French partner who once broke his arm during a domestic dispute. This mildest, most liberal-minded of men lives alone in a mountain refuge whenever feasible. He also has a part-time job as a tour guide in the Far East. I am currently transitioning to a woman for urgent medical reasons. Force of habit, however, leads me to consider the French women I

Saturday

Anthony Browne

Only France would try to blow up the Brexit talks

That France was the country to throw a grenade threatening to blow up the UK-EU trade talks just as they were about to pass the finish line, does not come as a surprise to seasoned euro-watchers. No other EU member would so brazenly promote its own domestic self-interest at the cost to other EU members such as Germany and Ireland. To the British it has echoes of de Gaulle saying ‘non’, when vetoing the UK’s first attempts to join the Common Market. Many of the EU’s problems and (in my view) the ultimate reason Brexit happened, is down to a fundamental cause that is little remarked on in the UK.

Friday

John Keiger

France would be foolish to veto a Brexit deal

Britain and France are heading for an almighty bust-up over Brexit. This morning the French junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, specifically confirmed that if France was unhappy with the final Brexit deal — notably on fishing — it would use its veto. France would carry out ‘her own evaluation’ of the deal and act accordingly, he told radio Europe 1. Whether there is a deal or not, a blame game is about to be unleashed. Given this late stage, if there is a deal then the French cannot possibly get all they want on fishing. The French Prime Minister said so yesterday to French fishermen at France’s largest