France

Thursday

Adam Zamoyski

The men who invented Napoleon

Writing about Napoleon is a risky business. It exposes the author to the brickbats of the blind worshippers for whom he is a numinous hero and the equally challenged detractors who see in him only the petty tyrant. By the same token, most historians find themselves negotiating a slippery path between approval and censure of this most controversial and somehow still very relevant figure. It is one of Philip Dwyer’s great merits that he remains so detached from his subject that he makes the reader forget his own prejudices. He approaches it with the discipline of a chemist in his laboratory: he is understanding of his protagonist but not sympathetic.

Thursday

Bérénice Lee Roseau

Liberté, égalité, pornographie

Bravo Melanie McDonagh. Your stand against the coarsening of society’s sexual sensibilities is very welcome. But it is not just in Britain that porn has gone mainstream. We French now have our share of outrageously lewd tastes, too. Long gone are the days when the French could hide their perversions behind a veneer of sophistication, as if sex was somehow something that the French did in a classier – plus distingué – way. Our revolutionary ancestors would roll in over in their graves if they knew how unenlightened and childish we have become when it comes to pleasures of the flesh. Crude, cheap sexual material, whether it is on TV

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Going off-piste in Val D’Isere

First things first. Yes, Val d’Isère does have a reputation for being expensive — and it is, especially if you’re planning on eating out and embracing the après ski every night. But no matter what anyone says, you can’t argue with the fact that the skiing is fantastic. Combined with its neighbour, Tignes, there’s a total of 330km of piste to explore, with plenty of steep red and blue runs that are perfect for intermediate and advanced skiers. One of the most frequent complaints about skiing in Val is getting home at the end of the day. Almost every route down to the main town is a challenge, even if

Tuesday

Bérénice Lee Roseau

It’s tempting to compare France’s National Front with Ukip — but wrong

There is today only one united French political party, and it is the National Front. The FN has been profiting from a split French right, a hopeless French left and from the general disenchantment with the political class. It is tempting then to compare, as Agnes Poirier did in the Times, the FN’s recent success with that of Ukip in Britain. Tempting, but wrong. The National Front is 30 years older than Ukip, and a very different beast. It supports protectionist policies, while Ukip promotes a more libertarian and democratic approach. The FN’s ‘progressive tax’ – a rising income tax – clearly contrasts with the flat tax advocated by Ukip. Some

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

The World According to Karl, edited by Jean-Christophe Napias – review

Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on to the outside that there is no longer any membrane between what he is, what he does and what he looks like: a macabre dandy for the electronic age, a Zen businessman as effective as Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or David Bowie in propagating product and persona as one. ‘I enjoy the luxury of being at the centre of this complete universe that’s mine,’ he says with the concentrated generosity of a narcissist who wants to thrill the whole world in order to make it his pool. The eternal

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: The day I walked into a postcard

This time last year the postman delivered a picture postcard depicting a village square in Provence. The photograph on the front of that postcard was contemporary, but the colours were digitally manipulated to invest the image with a nostalgic, hand-tinted, vintage air. The square was eerily deserted. No customers were seated at the tables under the gay sunshades set out under the trees. Time stood still. I’d never been there. I hadn’t even heard of the place. And yet the square and its forsaken tables seemed oddly familiar. The photograph transmitted a nostalgic sweetness which was almost sinister. An invitation was implied. ‘Come!’ the picture seemed to be saying. ‘Life!

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A windfall tax on monster basements could solve London’s housing problem

The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American hedge-fund manager who has received planning permission for a vast basement extension to his house that will take many months to excavate. Fellow residents of Kensington and Chelsea, other than those wealthy enough to have similar schemes in mind, will probably think it serves him right that he has been charged an £825,000 ‘Section 106’

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke’s joy at a two-speed oscilating fan in la chaleur TGV

Hotel Trepaner, St Raphael, French Riviera: I have read all ten reviews on this site. The overall rating (given by five of the ten reviewers) is ‘terrible’. ‘Disastreux!’ says Kimi. ‘Affreux!’ moans M Lanie. ‘A frightful hotel run by a slum landlord,’ claims Juliet45. After staying at the Hotel Trepaner for a week at the beginning of August, my opinion is that the majority of these reviews are snobbish and unfair. What, may I ask, were you people expecting for that price? A chocolate medallion on your pillow every night? It’s the cheapest hotel on the French Riviera, for goodness sake! Up the road in Nice, 60 quid a day

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Whisper it, but the big banks are finally getting their houses in order

By and large it was a good week for the big banks — underpinned by encouraging news from the wider economy, in which every little uptick brings a few more zombie borrowers back to the land of the living. Lloyds returned to profit, promised to start paying decent dividends again and declared itself oven-ready for return to the private sector, with the market anticipating an immediate sale to institutions of a first tranche of the taxpayers’ 39 per cent stake. HSBC reported varied performance around the world but still clocked up a fat result for the half-year — and asked the Vatican to close its account as part of a

Thursday

James Delingpole

Notes on…Normandy

There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if, like me, you’re more of a three B person — beaches, bocage and the Bayeux tapestry — then the place from which to assault all three is the relatively unknown fishing village of Port-en-Bessin. Everyone visits the spectacular US cemetery of dazzling white marble and the pillboxes at Omaha beach, and rightly so, for together with the similarly well-preserved clifftop battery taken by the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Pointe du Hoc, it’s the perfect Saving Private Ryan experience. What everyone also does, I hope, is visit the beaches where our

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Fête de la Musique: Couldn’t we just get over ourselves, risk a bit of foreign and join

One of the many cultural initiatives to have come out of France in the past 50 years — and therefore by definition to have been viewed with suspicion by the British establishment — is the Fête de la Musique. One need look no further than Margaret Thatcher and Unesco to get the flavour of what follows; but so complete has been the disinterest in the Fête around here that even I, Europhile to the core and anyway booked to perform in Paris on 21 June, had no idea what I was contributing to. This Fête began life in 1982 when Jack Lang, then minister of culture in Paris, framed a

Philip Delves-Broughton

Watch out France: Nicolas Sarkozy is back, and he wants revenge

Nicolas Sarkozy is angry — a ‘caged lion’, one of his closest friends told Le Monde last week. He is angry about the state of France, the state of his party, his perceived persecution by the courts, but perhaps most of all about the fact that he isn’t in the Élysée Palace to clean the mess up. If the French were to clamour for his return, he is reported to have told a Goldman Sachs conference in London this month, he would come back ‘for duty’s sake’. But Sarkozy is no Cincinnatus. He would not be treading wearily back from his plough to assume office for the good of France.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Chronicle of a Summer: Reality TV decades before it had a name

Here’s a documentary called Chronicle of a Summer. Which summer? Why, the summer of 1960, in Paris, when fag-end colonial struggles were burning away in Algeria and other parts of Africa. And how is it chronicled? An anthropologist and a sociologist, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, put cameras on the streets and ask questions of the people they find. Who are you? Are you happy? The usual French existential stuff. The results are gripping, even from a distance of more than 50 years. Rouch and Morin focus on the personal; the everyday lives of factory workers, artists, immigrants, models and students. But when France’s present and recent past break into

Tuesday

Shiraz Maher

Countering Terrorism in Britain and France, by Frank Foley – review

Have you ever wondered why we’re stuck with the radical cleric Abu Qatada? It’s a question the last four Home Secretaries will have asked as they battled, and failed, to deport him. Now Theresa May is learning just how stubborn the old curmudgeon can be. Indeed, the whole issue of deporting terror suspects is a difficult one. In the nine years that followed the 9/11 attacks, France deported 129 individuals considered to be threats to national security, while we removed just nine. The intransigence of British judges is not new. Long before the ‘War on Terror’ brought matters of international security to public attention, the French had been pursuing Rachid

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The lesson of France and Italy – the worse the country, the better the wine

Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the Italian political system has suffered a steady haemorrhage of authority and prestige, with the partial exception of the Mussolini era. By the 1950s, the serious people in Italy had come to one of three conclusions. The first lot decided that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves. This explains the Euro-enthusiasm of the Montis,

Monday

Alex Massie

UKIP, Pierre Poujade and a political class that’s seen to be “out-of-touch”.

Parliament is a “brothel”. The state is an enterprise of “thieves” engaged in a conspiracy against “the good little people” and the “humble housewife”. Time, then, for a party that will stand up for “the little man, the downtrodden, the trashed, the ripped off, the humiliated”. Not, as you might suspect, the most recent UKIP manifesto but, rather, the sentiments expressed by Pierre Poujade during the run-in to the 1954 elections to the French National Assembly. Poujade’s party, the Union to Defend Shopkeepers and Artisans,  shocked France’s political elite by winning 2.5 million votes and sending 55 deputies to Paris. Charles de Gaulle sniffed that “In my day, grocers voted for

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

Don’t believe the hype: the French still live better than Americans

In recent months I’ve read at least ten articles about French malaise — all of it apparently due to some mysterious Gallic trait that makes the world’s luckiest people unable to make the best of things. Granted, unemployment is over 10 per cent, the Germans are again running Europe, and François Hollande’s ‘socialist’ government is coming apart at its hypocritical seams. But I don’t buy the thesis that the French are generally ‘miserable’, as Paris School of Economics professor Claudia Senik argued last month in the Financial Times. Indeed, I felt almost defiant as my wife and I boarded the Eurostar in London two weeks ago and headed off to

Lewis Jones

Eleven Days in August, by Matthew Cobb – review

It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book by announcing that he is not. Richard Cobb wrote books about France — where he was known as l’étonnant Cobb and, according to his obituary in the Independent, ‘once greeted the dawn nude, in the company of a dozen similarly unattired men and women, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde’ — and he had a son called Matthew; and Matthew Cobb’s father was called Richard, so the question is understandable. It must also be annoying, though, because

Saturday

Clarissa Tan

François Hollande’s great haul of China

François Hollande has just completed his visit to China. The two great socialist nations more or less embraced: ‘I look forward to… working with you to make our relationship closer, healthier and more vibrant,’ said Chinese president Xi Jinping. ‘When China and France agree on a position, we can drive the world,’ Hollande cooed back. Both countries agreed they wanted a ‘multipolar world’ rather than a ‘superpower’ one — meaning they’re not comfortable with America’s dominant position. While the French president’s two-day tour of Beijing and Shanghai was probably hectic, it must have been positively Elysian compared to the troubles he’s facing back home, where ministerial scandals abound and unemployment is at its

Thursday

John Laughland

Why France’s gay marriage debate has started to look like a revolution

Paris: Revolutions are often sparked by an unexpected shock to an already weakened regime. As commentators in France remark not only on the crisis engulfing François Hollande’s government but also on the apparent death-rattle of the country’s entire political system, it could be that his flagship policy of legalising gay marriage — or rather, the gigantic public reaction against it, unique in Europe — will be the last straw that breaks the Fifth -Republic’s back. Opposition to the bill has electrified the middle classes, the young and much of provincial France. On Sunday 24 March, in the freezing cold, the 4km stretch from the Arche de la Défense to the Arc