France

Thursday

James Forsyth

Theresa May gets a warmer than expected reception in Paris, and a pledge on the border

Paris was meant to be the more difficult leg of Theresa May’s first European tour as Prime Minister. But May’s press conference with Francois Hollande was far more cordial than expected. The French President was at pains to stress all the forms of cooperation that would continue between the two countries after the UK  left the EU. He continued to back the Le Touquet agreement which keeps the UK border at Calais.  However, he still wants Article 50 served quickly; ‘the sooner, the better’ was how he put it. There was, though, a tiny bit of softening on the question of talking about things before then. May, for her part,

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

France is fed up with terror – and bureaucracy

Living in France is a lottery. The chances of getting a losing ticket are very slim, but a chance it is all the same. Twenty four hours before the slaughter in Nice, I took my daughter to the Bastille celebrations in the southern suburb of Paris in which we live. The centrepiece of the celebration was a parade through the town centre finishing in the town square. On arrival the kids in the parade leapt up on stage and sang La Marseillaise before trooping off into the embrace of their parents. Next up on stage was a pop band, and as they launched into their first number my 11-year-old daughter

Friday

Alan Mendoza

It is easy to say there’s nothing we can do to prevent lone-wolf attacks. It is also wrong

For the third time in the last 18 months – twice in Paris and now in Nice – France has been left reeling from the effects of a mass casualty terrorist attack on its soil. With pictures of the dead and injured circulating freely on social media, an understandable reaction is to express solidarity with those who have suffered through well-meaning slogans like #JeSuisNice. But solidarity is no longer enough for it has not delivered security. We must face the fact that terrorists respect actions not words. If we do not rise to the challenge being brought to our shores in Europe, then the result can only be further death

Douglas Murray

We need to tackle attacks like the one in Nice from the root

The BBC headline says it all: ‘The killing of 84 people celebrating Bastille Day is the worst attack on France since the 13 November attacks.’ These day in Europe you don’t have to reach back many months to find carnage even exceeding that in Nice last night. We still don’t have many details about last night’s attacker. But we know that the man driving the truck was called Mohammed. Of course that doesn’t mean there is any connection to Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Merah, Mohammed Bouyeri, Mohammed Sadiq Khan, Mohammed Abrini or the most famous Mohammed of all – Mohammed. On the contrary, the striking prevalence of people called Mohammed going

Ed West Ed West

After the Nice attack, Michel Houllebecq’s nightmare vision edges closer

I only got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission last month, a darkly amusing book about how France destabilises as it is caught between Islamic and nativist violence. It is, even by French standards, extremely pessimistic, but then who can blame them? When I visited France last summer, I noted just how many heavily armed police there were, even in the obscure western region we were staying at; more than I’d seen in any European country apart from Northern Ireland. The owner of the campsite, who was also a local official, explained that they were expecting something terrible to happen. Which it has done, twice now, this latter atrocity worse in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Nice attack: Quiet shock reigns on the city’s streets

Nice is quiet today, moving a little slower than it was yesterday, but it still moves. There is a strange disconnect between the way a city that has fallen victim to an horrific terror attack looks on television, and how it feels to those moving around it. Even somewhere that has seen such a terrible number of deaths in the middle of a lovely, gentle family event which had been filled with smiles and the oohs and ahhs of a firework display then looks surprisingly normal the following day. People were of course still going to work and buying coffee this morning, just with slightly blank expressions on their faces,

Philip Sime

‘Horror, once again’: French press reacts to Nice terror attack

Once again, France is waking up to a massacre on its streets. In Nice, as people gathered on the seafront promenade to celebrate their national holiday, Bastille Day, a terrorist drove a 25-ton lorry at high speed through the jubilant crowd, leaving at least 84 dead. ‘Once more horror has struck France’, said President Hollande, linking the killings to Islamist terrorism. Last night’s incident is the third major terrorist attack in France since the Charlie Hebdo assault in January 2015. As a result, the French press reacted with a sense of familiarity. Here’s what they said: Le Figaro: ‘Horror, once again’, reads the front page of Le Figaro. The newspaper

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The tragic timing of the Nice terror attack

The death toll from last night’s Nice terror attack has now topped more than 80. It also looks as though some 50 people were injured when a truck driven by a 31-year-old man, who was known to police but not to the intelligence services, tore through the crowd of people celebrating Bastille day. Isabel Hardman, who was in Nice at the time of the attack, has reported on the aftermath. In the hours following the devastating incident, the analysis has also started. What seems particularly tragic about this horrendous incident is that it strikes a France which was on the mend after last year’s attacks in Paris in November, which left

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 July 2016

Bonjour mes amis! Cydney spaniel ici, en France! Well, the Eurotunnel was very nice, although the dog departure lounge could have been grassier. I’m not a fan of AstroTurf. Doesn’t hold a scent very well. No one checked my passport either. Mummy passed it through the window with hers and his as we went through, but the French police laughed and said they didn’t want it. What a cheek. Mummy was cross because it cost over a hundred pounds. Hopefully they will check it on the way back so we can get our money’s worth. The other passengers were friendly. There were a few dachshunds and a Hungarian vizsla in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

At least 80 dead in Nice after lorry crashes into crowds

A lorry has ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day by the beach in Nice;  there are reports of at least 80 people killed. I am currently in the city, having watched the fireworks in the crowd on La Promenade des Anglais near the sea, where the attack took place. I was just walking home when the screaming began, and people started running from the main square. The streets were full of people running in panic and sirens ringing: no one, at present, knows what happened. At first there were reports of a dozen dead; now it’s several dozen. One of the papers here, Nice Matin, has published a photograph of a

Philip Sime

Theresa May’s first day and Boris at the Foreign Office: How the foreign press reacted

A new British Prime Minister is always big news on the continent and around the world. This time around, with Mrs May tasked with redefining Britain’s relationship with the EU, the foreign press has taken a special interest in recent events in Downing Street. One of the big stories aside from Britain’s new Prime Minister taking up her role is Theresa May’s decision to make Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. Here’s how the press around the world reacted to the news: France: With France bracing itself for a protracted period of arduous negotiations with the UK, Britain’s new Prime Minister is big news across the Channel. Le Figaro goes as far

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Frexit – oui ou non?

In France, Brexit has provoked resentment and shock. For many years-Britain has been seen in both Paris and-Brussels as the European ‘bad boy’, out for what it can get and intending to give as little as possible in return. The first news was greeted with headlines such as ‘Can Europe-survive?’ but there was also a note of relief: ‘End of 40 years of love-hate’. Even before the referendum, Emmanuel Macron, the finance minister, had denounced the British record in Europe, claiming that the-United Kingdom had hijacked the great project and diverted the Union from its political destiny in order to reduce it to a single market. Last week, as hostilities

Thursday

Jeff Noon

A choice of crime novels | 30 June 2016

Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into reason’, and finds it in the form of Étienne, a man who helps her when her car breaks down. She invites him into her lonely home, and her life. When her neighbour’s son is killed in a road accident, it becomes obvious that her new lover is linked to this tragedy in some way, and

Monday

Philip Sime

Frexit and Italexit? Support for the EU dwindles in France and Italy

Various freak political events—the unexpected Tory election victory, the rise of Ukip—have conspired to allow Britain to hold its referendum on the EU this week. But if the rest of Europe were asked, what would they say? The Berlin-based Bertelsmann Foundation commissioned a study of 11,000 people in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland to find out their attitudes towards Brexit and to the EU. Just 41 per cent of French and 54 per cent of Germans want us to stay. The Spanish are most keen for Britain to Remain, with 64 per cent opposing Brexit, followed by Poland with 61 per cent. But the survey also revealed that French and Italian referendums

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 June 2016

‘This EU passport is an outrage. I want a British one!’ Not my words, Cydney’s. The spaniel is coming round to my way of thinking on the EU referendum after visiting the vet’s to get the necessary paperwork for her forthcoming trip to the Dordogne — or Dor-DOG-ne, as she prefers to call it. After spending a small fortune on her bed and board at the dogsitter the last time I went away, I decided she would come on holiday with me this summer. As soon as I have cast my Leave vote on 23 June, I shall be packing us into the Volvo and heading for the Eurotunnel and

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 June 2016

Michel is one of those Frenchmen one encounters now and again whose shining saintliness is beyond rational understanding. This great bear of a man, with heavy silver rings on his fingers and thumbs, is always cheerful, always kind, always puts others before himself. Whenever he speaks with me, it is always under the pathetic delusion that he might learn something from me that he did not already know. The only thing that makes him in any way contemptuous is my pointing out his goodness to him. Michel was a teacher. For many years, he taught English at a private school in Somerset. Now retired to his native Provence, he has

Thursday

James Woodall

Spellbound | 2 June 2016

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling. Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions. Ninety minutes after our meeting, she will be on stage. I sense she wants this interview over fast. But at the start she makes me, I must report, comatose with wonder. I have adored Mme Huppert on screen for three

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 2 June 2016

Hours before boarding the cross-Channel car ferry, I received a text message from the company warning of severe fuel shortages on the other side of the Channel. Nevertheless, it went on to say, for safety reasons the transporting in vehicles of fuel-filled jerry cans was strictly forbidden. Bugger that. I went out and bought two five-gallon second world war-style green steel jerrycans, filled them to the brim with diesel, and concealed them in suitcases. As we queued to board, I looked around at the lines of vehicles, many with trailers and roof boxes, and hoped and trusted that every one of them was packed to the gunnels with fuel containers

The Spectator

Continental drift | 2 June 2016

It is a long time since the term ‘sick man of Europe’ could be applied to Britain. France is now a worthier candidate for the accolade — it -increasingly resembles a tribute act to 1970s Britain. A package of modest labour-market reforms presented by a socialist president has provoked national strikes on the railways and Air France. This week, the streets of Paris resembled one big Grunwick or Saltley Gate — the trials of strength between employer and union in which so many of Britain’s most bolshy trade unionists cut their teeth. This week is not a one-off: in recent years France has had a strike rate more than twice

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Hollande equals Thatcher? Not quite, Monsieur le President, but keep trying

Have you ever tried discussing the merits of gun control with a Texan, or of deregulated labour markets with a Frenchman and his Belgian cousin? The prejudices involved are much the same. Many Americans believe that guns in the home and the pick-up truck are their best protection against violent attack, and that the 13,286 US gunshot deaths last year would have hit an even higher number if gun ownership was more restricted. Likewise, French trade unionists believe a 35-hour working week combined with laws restricting any company that is a going concern from making redundancies are the best protection of their economic wellbeing, rather than a root cause of