France

People protest during France’s second nationwide strike in two months, to demand a boost to wages and greater protection form the crisis, on March 19, 2009, in Marseille, southern France. Photo: GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images It’s springtime which means that even if there weren’t an econmic crisis our friends in France would be taking to the streets. This is as it should be. My one year old godson, I’m pleased to say, is already a veteran of street action, having been wheeled out to protest against proposals for primary school reforms. Even rites of passage happen earlier these days. Anyway, the good news for Sarkozy is that the Socialists are in

Things you never thought you would see: the French government advising against wine consumption… In the midst of the winter gloom, President Sarkozy’s administration  has chosen this moment to tell its people to stop drinking wine. You are hearing right. The Ministry of Health has issued rules for reducing the risk of cancer and one of the main ones is never drink alcohol.  “The consumption of alcohol, and especially wine, is discouraged,” say guidelines that are drawn from the findings of the National Cancer Institute (INCA). A single glass of wine per day will raise your chance of contracting cancer by up to 168 percent, it says. A you might expect, the

This account of how Nicolas Sarkozy wooed Carla Bruni is both amusing and gruesome. For instance: “My reputation is no worse than yours,” he told her. “I know you well without ever meeting you. I understand everything about you … You make love because no one makes love to you. I know everything about you because I am so much you.” With a hush around the table, Mr Sarkozy promised to be in the front row of a forthcoming Bruni concert. “We will announce our engagement. You will see, we will do better than Marilyn and Kennedy,” he told her. Given how matters ended for Kennedy and Monroe, you would

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images Once upon a time Citroen produced the DS – driven here by Lord Hailsham –  as revolutionary and beautiful a car as anyone has produced in the last 50 years. More importantly, it was cool. So, what better way for the marque to make a statement than by reviving the old DS brand? After all, the success of the new retro-styled Mini Cooper and Fiat’s Cinquecento have shown that there’s a demand for cars that look fun and pay homage to the best of their makers’ histories. So how has Citroen fared? Answer: about as badly as could be imagined. I mean, look at this monstrosity, this

There’s something splendid about this. Brent Whelan, an American in Paris, runs, as you do, into yet another demonstration. There was the… sound truck and chants, flags and banderoles, a regular labor action. But I missed the front of the cortège where the leafleters and signs were, so I couldn’t tell what it was about. So I asked a guy on the corner, who told me, “It’s the archaeologists.”  And that’s just who it was: several hundred archaeologists marching down the street, shouting and chanting, demanding that the government withdraw plans to disperse the headquarters of its national archaeological service from Paris. Only, I think, in Paris. And long may this

Whatever one might say about Sarah Palin, this photograph is disturbing on many, many levels… And, for the people who pay attention to these things, it’s a blunder too. Because, you know, seeing Sarah Palin perched on a sofa chattering away with Henry Kissinger emphasises rather than reduces the validity of concerns about her experience and knowledge. Daft. [Plundered shamelessly from Mike Crowley]

Visiting friends or family with small children? Stuck for a present (toy drums and trumpets are not, I believe, generally considered thoughtful)? Well, my default gift is a collection of Jean de Brunhoff’s wonderful Babar books. You cannot, in my view, and that of most tiny children, go wrong with Babar. So, amidst all the sturm und drang on Wall St and the hurly-burly of the American presidential campaign, it was a relief to be able to turn to Adam Gopnik’s lovely essay on Babar in this week’s edition of the New Yorker. It’s a fine, perceptive piece, not just on Babar, but on French culture, colonialism, the bourgeoisie and

More baby news: Rachida Dati, the 42 year old French Justice Minister, is, like Bristol Palin, pregnant. As Art Goldhammer says, however, they do things differently in France. Dati says she has no intention of revealing the father’s identity and offers this marvellous comment: “I have a very complicated private life, and that’s where I draw the line with the press. I won’t have anything to say on that subject.” Meanwhile, the Times’ Charles Bremner has a pop at French hypocrisy vis a vis privacy and the coverage of the Sarkozy administration: The complete silence on the identify of Dati’s partner looks more like old-fashioned deference to the governing class.

Art Goldhammer looks at the Democratic convention in Denver and lets loose his imagination… I got to thinking about what would have happened had a comparable scene been staged in France. Just try to imagine Carla Bruni rattling on about her first meeting with Sarkozy at a posh Parisian dinner party. And the family vetting? Would she have brought “Nick” home to meet her sister Valeria, an actress rather than a basketball coach like Michelle’s brother, and would Valeria have offered an opinion on Nick’s prowess as a persuasive public speaker? And how about the kids? Might Jean Sarkozy have motored on stage aboard his scooter, patted Carla on the

Via Cato, comes this report from The Times: They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls. They are drawn by a love of American culture – although definitely not American politics – and a passion for line dancing… Now country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control. The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training

Are Paris Saint-Germain the worst football team in Europe? This obviously depends upon how one measures or defines “worst”. PSG, despite another appalling season, would (thankfully) still be expected to defeat, say, Shamrock Rovers. But in a pound-for-pound sense is there a more pathetic club in europe? I’s not just that they only narrowly avoided relegation this season, it’s that they continue to squander resources. Even when they were owned by Canal Plus, PSG under-performed. Indeed, since the club was formed in 1970 they’ve only won the French championship twice (in 1986 and 1994), despite being one of the richest clubs in France and the only major club in Paris.

As an addition to this post on wartime France, Clive Davis directs one to this Max Hastings op-ed from a couple of years ago that makes similar points: Hearing a recent conversation about collaboration, I made myself unpopular by suggesting that, if Britain had succumbed to Nazi rule, our own people would have behaved pretty much as the French did. Anthony Eden is seldom quoted with respect these days. Yet the former foreign secretary made an impressive contribution to Marcel Ophüls’ great film on wartime France, Le Chagrin et la Pitié. He said, in impeccable French: “It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass

Marty Peretz links to this Daily Mail account of an exhibition of photographs taken in wartime Paris which is, for obvious reasons, a matter of some debate in France. And yes, the photographs are shocking. Just not in the way in which either Peretz or the Mail seem to think they are. The Mail headline, subtle as ever, is “Oh what a lovely war! The dazzling photos of innocent Parisian fun that make the French so ashamed” while Marty titles his post, “What the Nazi Occupation of France was Really Like”. Here, for instance, is a photograph of three mademoiselles relaxing in the Luxembourg, circa 1942. How, the Mail wants