France

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 March 2017

My joints were aching suddenly and unaccountably — fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, toes — so I cried off the dinner invitation, volunteering instead to pick up Catriona and her lovely daughter, who was staying for a week, at around 11 p.m. At ten, Catriona rang. Had I forgotten? She sounded a bit squiffy. No, I hadn’t forgotten, I said. We’d said 11, hadn’t we? Well, they were ready to be picked up now, she said. When I arrived, the front door was open and I let myself in. The four of them were still seated at the dining table, chatting and drinking over the remains of the meal. I accepted

Bruce Anderson

The fall of Paris

Paris used to be the most self-confident city in the world. Brash, assertive, boastful: Manhattan claimed to be the best. Cool, elegant, sophisticated, supercilious: Paris knew that it was the best. This is no longer true. Paris has lost its élan, and that has created a love-hate relationship with the UK. Everyone seems to know someone who is working in London. The ones left in Paris cannot decide whether to punish us or join us: to hope that Brexit fails — or to fear that Brexit might fail, and keep able young Frenchmen from job opportunities in London. Flics everywhere, tattiness, tension: one is reluctant to acknowledge the successes of

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron and Le Pen both fail to dazzle in first French Presidential debate

It was the burkini that brought Monday night’s debate to life between the five main presidential candidates for next month’s French election. For the first hour of the televised debate there had been much posturing and postulating but no sharp exchanges. That changed when Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of turning a blind eye to the burkini, the Islamic swimwear that last summer caused such controversy in France. Macron rejected the charge, telling Le Pen in a forceful exchange she was a dangerous provocateur. The centrist candidate, who claims to be ‘neither left nor right’, then went on the counter-attack, accusing the National Front leader of sowing divisions within

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 March 2017

After circuiting Spain by train, I went east to Italy, stopping on the way at the French border town of Menton. Until the first world war, Menton hosted an English colony of 5,000 residents, two Anglican churches, a lending library and an English-language newspaper, the Monaco and Menton News. The dry, sheltered climate also attracted writers, artists, valetudinarians and the tubercular. Cannes is for living (so the saying went), Monte Carlo for gambling, and Menton for dying. The Yellow Book illustrator Aubrey Beardsley breathed his last at the Hotel Cosmopolitan and is buried in the atmospheric cemetery overlooking the town, and W.B. Yeats passed through the veil up the road

Tobias Grey

His dark materials | 16 March 2017

The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint. That was in 1988 and it was interesting later on to read several newspaper articles accusing Verhoeven of having made a fascistic screed in favour of zero-tolerance law enforcement. This was not something any of us had considered up to that point, but satire, yes, even back then we had an inkling of what that was and RoboCop seemed to fit the bill nicely.

Thursday

Ed West

Why do so many French youngsters support Marine Le Pen?

I’m very sceptical of the idea that the younger generation are more conservative than their elders, and that this makes conservatism somehow cool, which it isn’t. There have been times where the kids are more reactionary than their parents but generally only as a result of religious movements – and Britain is as atheistic as can be. Young Brits are very liberal and cosmopolitan, even compared to their peers in other European countries. In polls they express low levels of pride in their country and an unwillingness to fight in any theoretical war. The Brexit vote, and the big gap between old and young, showed just how liberal the young are.

Clare Mulley

Carve their names with pride

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing as much suspicion as able-bodied men. But lonely courage was an essential virtue for the female agents, who had to face long weeks of keeping a low profile, with very little support, in between hours of terrifying activity. Most of them only met each other during training or, in several cases, in detention after capture.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen will gain the most if Francois Fillon is forced to stand down

Marine Le Pen must be struggling to contain her glee at the implosion of the centre-right Républicains party. An extraordinary 24 hours began on Sunday when François Fillon assembled his supporters in the torrential Parisian rain to reaffirm his intention to stand as their candidate in next month’s election. The former Prime Minister then appeared on TV yesterday evening to confess to his errors but reiterate that he is best placed in his party to defeat Le Pen’s National Front. Lurking in the background, however, as Fillon spoke live on television, was Alain Juppé, who many expected to present himself on Monday as the  Républicains’ Plan B. Instead, the 72-year-old declared he would not accede to

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

François Fillon needs forgiveness from French conservatives

‘One cannot govern France,’ declared François Fillon last November, ‘if one is not irreproachable.’ A little over three months later, however, and the centre-right candidate for next month’s French presidential candidate has had a change of heart. The 62-year-old has today announced that he will be placed under formal investigation over allegations that during a period of several years he fictitiously employed three members of his family on lucrative salaries. François Fillon and his Welsh wife Penelope have been summoned by magistrates to answer the charges on 15 March, two days before the registration deadline for presidential candidates. Fillon says it is clearly a politically-motivated decision. ‘From the start, I have not been treated like

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Francois Fillon limps on despite ‘fake job’ probe

Francois Fillon had previously said he would drop out of the French Presidential race if corruption allegations against him resulted in him being placed under formal investigation. But the candidate of the Republican party has just held a press conference to declare that yes, he is being placed under formal investigation over payments to his family but no, he is not dropping out of the race. He has accused the judiciary and the press of attempting a ‘political assassination’. Fillon’s decision to stay in the race increases the likelihood of a Macron/ Le Pen run off round. The latest polls show Le Pen in the lead in the first with

Thursday

Ed West

Brexit isn’t to blame for the Polish exodus

I guess the hate crime epidemic that gripped Britain after Brexit hasn’t put that many people off, with new figures showing net migration of 273,000 in the three months to September 2016. That represents a decline of 49,000, of which 12,000 is due to an increase in eastern Europeans heading home (39,000, as opposed to 27,000 the previous year), which I imagine is less to do with any hostile atmosphere in Britain than the booming economy in Poland. No doubt that’s the way it will be presented, though – ‘Poles fleeing the Brexit terror’. In my view, the Government is doing a lot of things wrong at the moment, chiefly

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

L’anti-Trump

If you believe the hype, Emmanuel Macron is l’anti-Trump. He is what the inter-national centre-left, reeling from the shocks of Brexit and the US election and fearful of a victory for Marine Le Pen in France, is crying out for: a politician who can win again. He is only 39 years old, handsome and radical sounding. He’s not a career politico; he used to work as a banker for the Rothschilds (every-body loves them). He wears sharp suits and he’s written a book called Révolution. Better still, he has a buzzing movement behind him: his ‘En Marche!’ (Let’s go!) campaign has excited trendy progressives. He is not bogged down with

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron’s idyllic vision of France is a myth

As Emmanuel Macron stood on the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday urging Britain’s ‘banks, talents, researchers, academics’ to move across the Channel after Brexit, security services in France were dismantling yet another Islamic terror cell preparing to launch a terrorist attack. That makes three this month, a clear indication that the Islamists are itching to carry out a major attack in the run-up to April’s presidential election. Tuesday’s police raid targeted addresses in Clermont, Marseille and the Paris area. ‘The suspects had a plot that was sufficiently advanced for the police to decide to arrest them’, said a police spokesman. According to the French media, police had been monitoring the suspects’ text

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 February 2017

A deep frost in the winter of 1821–22 killed the orange trees in Nice. The Anglican minister to the English colony, the Reverend Lewis Way, appealed to his congregation for relief funds to provide work for redundant orange-pickers. The money raised was spent on the construction of six miles of coast road, the redundant orange-pickers were employed as navvies, and the completed road became known as the Promenade des Anglais. On 14 July 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian bisexual gym bunny, drove a 19-tonne truck into a crowd assembled on the Promenade des Anglais to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, killing 86 and injuring 450. On 13 February 2017,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Rodin at 100

The girl who posed for Auguste Rodin’s figure of Eve on the ‘Gates of Hell’ was, the sculptor said, a ‘panther’. She was a young Italian, pregnant, but barely showing. Not a professional artist’s model. He found the girls who modelled for the Academy painters too affected. He liked stretchers, yawners, fidgeters, jitterbug girls who couldn’t sit still. His figures in plaster, bronze and marble have a pretzel suppleness. They do the splits, lie curled and foetal, fold at the waist, and crouch doubled like Atlas. His sibyls hold yoga poses. His prodigal son has a six-pack. A sketch might take only three, four, five charcoal or gouache strokes. Then:

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: The great French collapse

On this week’s episode, we consider Marine Le Pen’s path to power in France, whether we allow posh people to bluff their way to success, and why men aren’t ‘lunging’ at women in Ubers. The first round of the French presidential election will be held at the end of April, and, after a turbulent couple of months that has seen establishment candidates dropping like, well, establishment candidates, the polls favour a run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron, a 39-year-old independent candidate seen as another ‘heir to Blair’, is all that stands between the Front National and government, a terrifying prospect for liberal France. In this week’s magazine, Professor Robert

Robert Tombs

A choice of revolutions

Is France on the brink of a political revolution? Already, four established candidates for the presidency — two former presidents and two former prime ministers — have backed out or been rejected by the voters, and another, François Fillon, is on the ropes. The campaign is being taken over by outsiders, principally the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and a youthful former banker, Emmanuel Macron, while the Socialists have chosen an eccentric radical, Benoît Hamon. Should we welcome a shake-up in the cradle of European revolutions? What kind of shake-up might it be — socialist (the least likely), liberal with Macron or nationalist with Le Pen? Or can the outsiders

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Emmanuel Macron the doomed heir to Blair?

I have a friend who lost three members of his family when an Islamic extremist drove a truck down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Bastille Day. When we saw each other at Christmas he said he had yet to decide whether to cast his vote for François Fillon or Marine Le Pen in the election, the two presidential candidates he considered best placed to restore law and order to France. When I asked what he thought of Emmanuel Macron he laughed. It was a cold contemptuous laugh. In the weeks since, I’ve conducted my ‘Macron Test’ on a number of occasions, throwing his name into the conversation with

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The Louvre attack is a reminder that Islamic extremism hasn’t disappeared

Friday morning’s attack in Paris in which a machete-wielding man was shot and wounded in the stomach by a French soldier after he injured another soldier near the Louvre museum is the first terrorist incident in France since July. Then two teenagers murdered an elderly priest in his Normandy church, an attack that shocked and repulsed in equal measure. While the full details of Friday’s incident are still to emerge, it hasn’t the hallmarks of a determined and well-organised attack. There were no explosives in the two backpacks recovered at the scene and launching oneself at two armed soldiers holding just a machete is frightening but foolhardy. Nonetheless, interior minister

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Terror returns to Paris in Louvre attack

A man armed with a machete has been shot by a soldier outside the Louvre in Paris this morning. French police said the attacker – who is fighting for his life in hospital – yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he tried to gain access to the world-famous museum. Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has described the attack as ‘terrorist in nature’ and the French foreign minister has said the man involved was armed with several knives. One of the things to say about the incident this morning was that it was over before it started. While the motivations behind the attack – and the identity of the man involved – will now