Jonathan Miller, who lives near Montpellier, is the author of ‘France, a Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (Gibson Square). His Twitter handle is: @lefoudubaron
I popped down to the Salle du Peuple on Sunday to see how the voting was going in the departmental and regional elections. Although I’m no longer a municipal councillor – à cause de Brexit – and am no longer required to help invigilate the polling, I thought I’d take the temperature. Which was frosty. The French
Boris Johnson is more popular in France than Emmanuel Macron, which might not be a high hurdle to overcome, since Macron is rather generally unloved. Except Johnson is not just marginally more popular, but massively so. Indeed, the French seem to like him even more than the British. And he’s popular right across the French
Fifty years ago, the food in Britain was comically terrible. The Wimpy Bar was the place for a date, fish and chips was the limit of takeaway and if you were lucky you might get a packet of crisps at the pub. Everything French was better. French bread. French cheese. French wine. French restaurants, bistros,
Let me go out on a limb here and predict that Michel Barnier, who is trying to rekindle his modest and largely forgotten political career on the back of his notoriety as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is not going to be the next president of France. Barnier is currently famous (but only, I suspect,
I didn’t make it down to Valencia, Spain, for the weekend Formula E electric car grand prix. Long trips are more or less out of the question now in my Kona electric car, since Hyundai crippled the range of the battery pack to stop the car from bursting into flames. Not that I missed much.
I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t. It seemed a good idea at the time, albeit a costly way of proclaiming my environmental virtuousness. The car cost €44,000, less a €6,000 subsidy courtesy of French taxpayers, the overwhelming majority poorer than me. Fellow villagers are driving those 20-year-old diesel vans that look like
President Emmanuel Macron announced today the closure of the notorious École Nationale d’Administration, the elite finishing school for the senior civil servants and politicians who have wrecked France. Perhaps nothing could serve France better than burning down its Strasbourg campus and salting the earth, but there’s less to this than meets the eye. This is
On New Year’s Eve, Emmanuel Macron promised France an economic revival by the Spring. Cancel that. Instead, as the intensive care units are saturated by a third wave of Covid, we have a new lockdown light and a new message from the president: ‘Don’t panic.’ More than a year after Macron the general took personal
Montpellier The French ‘grand’ journalist Éric Zemmour is among the most watched, provocative and frequently prosecuted writers in the country. He is now contemplating a piratical presidential challenge that could blow open next year’s presidential election. A poll last month conducted for the news magazine Valeurs Actuelles says that Zemmour could win 13 per cent
Nicolas Sarkozy, 66, President of France from 2007 to 2012, currently a valued member of Emmanuel Macron’s informal council of advisors, was today sentenced to a year in prison for bribery and corruption in a case with roots in his murky relationship with the late Muammar Gaddafi, the not much missed brotherly leader of Libya.
39 min listen
Why has the vaccine rollout turned nasty? (00:45) What’s the sex abuse scandal rocking France’s elite? (16:55) Have artists run out of new ideas? (28:35) With Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Lynn; science journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 Laura Spinney; Spectator contributor Jonathan Miller; journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet; Dean Kissick, New York
Montpellier Accusations of child abuse against Olivier Duhamel, now 70, ex-vice-president of Sciences Po university and of the secretive Siècle (Century) club of Parisian movers and shakers, have cast a dark shadow on the legacy of the soixante-huitards, the baby boomers who occupied the Sorbonne in 1968 and went on to rule (and ruin) France.
Emmanuel Macron was not quite his cock-a-doodle-do self in his New Year’s Eve broadcast to the French people. This, the fourth presidential broadcast of the plague year, saw Macron, in black suit and black tie, resembling a small-town funeral director attempting to conjure optimism. Macron promised a France on the comeback by the spring, with
The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been
Politicians whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make ridiculous. On Tuesday evening, as the deaths attributed to Covid-19 reached 50,000, Emmanuel Macron, president of the Republic, again commandeered French television channels to announce his latest strategy to end the national lockdown. He claimed to be making himself perfectly clear as his timetable for
Montpellier France is under attack. Two weeks ago, Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, was decapitated in a leafy suburb of Paris after showing his students cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Last week, there were three killings at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, and after that, an Orthodox
President Macron’s first lockdown turns out to have been a failure. So, now there is to be a second lockdown. Macron’s announcement last night of a new ‘confinement’ on ‘the whole national territory’ until 1 December ‘at a minimum’ is bitter medicine for the French, and for Macron himself. Three difficult weeks are forecast for
The decapitation of middle school teacher Samuel Paty, 47, by an Islamist in a suburb of Paris yesterday is not just another tragedy and blow to French morale — it is also a reminder of why Emmanuel Macron feels exposed on the issue of what he calls ‘Muslim separatism’. Channelling the Spanish civil war slogan
I spent Saturday night with a dozen French blue bloods, hautes bourgeoises and banquiers at a hunting chateau on the banks of the Hérault river. It was an enchanting autumn evening. We finished pre-dinner apéros and as we were called to table by the ancient retainer (the last servant remaining, after decades of Republican depredations),
Will the presidency of Emmanuel Macron open the door to a political dynasty in France? He has no children, so that’s a problem. But wait. There’s Brigitte Macron, who has three. Albeit, all from the union she abandoned to marry Emmanuel, her pupil. Meet the youngest of Mme Macron’s three children, Tiphaine Auzière, 36, a
