Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.
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Emmanuel Macron spent Monday morning in the presence of the French rugby team and for once he spoke without ambiguity. ‘You are the best prepared team in the world,’ he told them at their training camp south of Paris. ‘You’ll be brothers in arms, fighting from the first minute to the last. The team is
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Rental e-scooters have been banned from Paris since Friday after residents of the French capital were asked to decide their fate in a referendum. The vote, held in April, attracted a low turnout, with only 103,000 of the city’s 1.38 million men and women bothering to cast their ballot. Of those that did, however, 90 per
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The intellectual infirmity that has laid low much of Europe’s left this century had been painfully exposed this week in France. On Monday, the country’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced that when pupils return to the classroom next week none will be permitted to wear the abaya, a conservative form of Islamic dress that
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In a curious way the decline of English rugby mirrors that of the Conservative party. Four years ago there was a spring in the step of both. England had trounced the All Blacks in the semi-final of the World Cup in Japan, and although they lost to South Africa in the final a week later
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It’s been a brutal month in France but one would barely know it from the reaction of much of the political and media class. Their attention has been focused on a rapper called Médine, who was invited at the start of August to appear at the Green party’s summer conference, which opened in the Channel
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The timing could not have been worse for Rishi Sunak. Just days after it was confirmed by Downing Street that the Prime Minister would host Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in the autumn, a human rights organisation published an extensive report accusing Saudi Arabia of the ‘mass killing’ of migrants at its border with Yemen. The
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Rishi Sunak has failed in his pledge to ‘Stop the Boats’, and the £480 million deal he signed with France in March is nothing more than a gargantuan waste of money. In fact, the French have intercepted fewer migrants in the Channel this year than they did in 2022. If the Prime Minister is truly committed
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The British government is reportedly ‘frustrated’ with France for its failure to stem the numbers of migrants making their way illegally across the Channel. What’s new? It’s a gripe going back years and the solution has always been the same: to throw more money to France in return for a solemn promise from Paris that
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The first time Mohamed Bazoum came to the attention of the European media was in the aftermath of the Great Migrant Crisis of 2015. The man who was, until a fortnight ago, the president of Niger, was at that time the minister of the interior. The shockwaves of a war in Niger would be
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Emmanuel Macron was the recipient of a letter on Monday from nearly 100 senators from across France’s political spectrum. The signatories lamented the ‘failures and setbacks’ of the Republic’s policy in Africa in recent years and called on the president to rethink French strategy on the continent. Listing some of these failures – the rejection
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In the last three years, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger have all undergone coup d’états. The most recent regime change was last week in the west African nation of Niger, where Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by the elements of the presidential guard. The coup’s leader is Colonel-Major Amadou Abdramane. Last Wednesday he
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France is preparing to evacuate its citizens from Niger following the coup d’état in the west African country on 26 July. The French embassy in Niamey – the capital of Niger – said in a statement that the air evacuation ‘will take place very soon and over a very short period of time’. Last week’s
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Emmanuel Macron broke his silence about the recent riots in France at the start of this week. In a speech in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, the president of the Republic declared that the country required a ‘return to authority at every level’. He added: ‘The lesson I draw from this is order, order, order.’
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Geoffroy Lejeune knows how Nigel Farage feels. Like the former Ukip leader turned TV host, Lejeune’s ‘values’ have made him persona non grata among France’s progressive elite. The 34-year-old journalist was last month appointed editor-in-chief of Journal du Dimanche (JDD), France’s only dedicated Sunday newspaper with a circulation of 140,000. Newspaper staff were outraged. They
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Emmanuel Macron has spoken of his fear of France’s ‘fragmentation’ and of the nation’s ‘division’ following the riots that reduced parts of the Republic to rubble earlier this month. The truth, as the president well knows, is that France is already deeply divided, and the fractures are numerous. As well as the topical one, that of
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Apart from the 96 arrests and 255 burned cars, Bastille Day passed off without a hitch in France. A bullish Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, expressed his satisfaction in a tweet, thanking the 45,000 policemen and women who had been deployed across the country. It says much for the state of France that avoiding a riot on
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It is Bastille day in France but few people are in the mood for festivities. The riots of a fortnight ago have left physical and psychological scars that won’t heal anytime soon. It is Emmanuel Macron’s seventh Bastille day as president, and his special guest this year is Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India,
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In March 2012 a French Algerian called Mohammed Merah murdered three soldiers and shot dead three Jewish children and a rabbi in southern France; three years later two French Algerian brothers murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo and later in the year men of Algerian heritage were among the terror cell that slaughtered 130 people
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It wasn’t president Macron who brought six days of rioting in France to an end, nor the brave bands of mothers who called for calm in some of the inner-city estates. It wasn’t even the presence of 45,000 police and gendarmes on the streets that persuaded the rioters, arsonists, vandals and looters to stand down. Instead,
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There is a myth of France, specifically of its banlieues, that has been frequently repeated in recent days. Descriptions of ‘marginalised suburbs’, ‘ghetto-like suburban estates’ and of ethnic minorities ‘shunted away into suburban housing projects…out of sight and out of mind’ have emerged in the international media. It’s even been suggested in one British publication that
