The French state has a long history of spying on its citizens, as we have seen here before. There has never been much fuss over the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence service which snoops in cafes, work places and housing estates and currently holds files on some 20 million people. A vetting by an RG officer used to be the first the step to a press card for foreign correspondents in Paris.
France barely noticed when President Sarkozy, a long serving Interior Minister and law-and-order champion, beefed up the internal spy services earlier this year by combining the RG with the DST, the counter-espionage and anti-terrorist agency that equates to Britain's MI5. The new super-agency is called the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur.
In the past couple of weeks, however, a revolt has broken out. The spur was the revelation of a new data base that will track the lives, opinions and even sexual habits of what could be a big slice of the population.
Called EDVIGE* -- an acronym and also old-fashioned woman's name -- the system is authorised to store data on anyone aged 13 upwards who is thought "likely to breach public order". "Big sister", as it has been dubbed, will also track everyone active in politics or trade unions and or in a significant role in economic, social or religious institutions. Listed people will have only a very limited right to consult their files.
Insiders are pointing out that this is what the police RG and its predecessors have done for centuries. "EDVIGE is just a cut and paste of the 1991 decree on the RG data base," said Alain Bauer, a criminologist.
The opposition has taken off because Sarkozy's government was forced by the National Commission on Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL) to publish last July 1 the hitherto secret decree that created EDVIGE. This alerted rights groups to the potentially vast scope of the new network.
"With just a few clicks of the mouse, any government official or civil servant will have access to intimate data," said François Bayrou, a centrist politician and fierce opponent of Sarkozy.
Michel Pezet, a lawyer and former member of the CNIL agency, wrote in le Monde: "The EDVIGE database has no place in a democracy. There is nothing in the decree that sets limits or a framework. Whether the database is used with or without moderation depends only on orders from up high."
The main judges' union, civil liberties defenders, gay rights groups and leftwing lawyers have joined the mutiny against what the opponents are calling a new "electronic Bastille". Several suits against it have been filed at the Conseil d'Etat, the highest civil court, and an online petition has gathered over 103,700 signatures (http://nonaedvige.ras.eu.org).
Leading newspapers -- at least those which do not support Sarkozy -- have joined the anti-EDVIGE campaign this week. Le Monde said that it was legitimate for a state to defend its security with an intelligence base "but the defence of public order cannot justify such a threat to individual liberties."
Of course France is not alone. "Homeland Security" in the USA and the fight against Islamic terrorism in Britain have brought new, extra-judicial surveillance of the population. Defenders of EDVIGE are also pointing out that everyone is electronically tracked these days and that people volunteer their biographies and private details on Facebook and other networking sites.
That's true, but it is impossible not to see as sinister a police system that lists 13-year-olds who are deemed potential trouble-makers and keeps tabs on everyone anyone with a remotely public role -- including journalists of course.
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*EDVIGE stands for a mouthful of bureaucratese: Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale. Here's the full government decree setting it up. Note that it authorises the agency to record "data relative to the environment of the person, notably including people who have or had a direct, but not accidental, relationship with him or her".
Sarkozy's internal spooks have another even more secret system called CRISTINA (Centralisation du Renseignement Intérieur pour la Sécurité du Territoire et les Intérêts Nationaux).
The French love affair with mineral water is waning as high prices and concern for the environment have made tap water attractive again.
A five-year slide in sales of bottled water deepened in the first half of the year with a 6.1 percent drop from the previous summer in supermarket sales according to figures from Iri France.
Over two thirds of the French now say that they regularly drink tap water while only 56 percent imbibe still bottled water at least once a week. That compares with 73 percent in 2003, the peak of a two-decade boom in which French brands led a world-wide flight from the public water supply (from Sofres 2008 study here).
In a sign of the times, Evian, the world's top brand, shut its Alpine bottling plant for a week in mid-August to reduce its stock. Sparkling water is suffering a similar decline. The rest of the world has not lost its thirst for the bottled version, but the makers are worried that the backlash in France heralds a global trend.
Evian, Volvic, Contrex, Badoit and the other brands are suffering from the financial pinch that is causing the French to shun designer water. Cheaper brands are benefiting. Everyone now knows that municipal water is supposed to be just as healthy as most bottled brands but they do not agree with the official line that it tastes as good. They are aware, though, that the bottled version costs about a couple of hundred times more per litre. The French are still spending an average of 130 euros a year on portable water, the government says. They were overtaken by the Italians several years ago as the biggest drinkers of the stuff.
People are increasingly influenced by the environmental argument. Even in restaurants, where the bottles are glass, it is no longer quite so chic to drink water that has dumped a load of carbon on the planet during production and shipping. "Drinking bottled water creates 10 to 20 million cubic feet of waste per year in France," the Ministry of Ecology said in a recent campaign. Yet another blow to the bottle has been widespread publicity in France for a study at the University of Pennsylvania last spring that knocked down the longstanding belief that you must glug water all day to lose weight and stay healthy.
The industry is fighting back with lavish campaigns that trumpet health benefits, however fanciful. Evian, one of the water brands of the Danone group, is said to be the "declared source of youth by the body". That reminds me of a joke when imported water took off in the USA in the 1980s: Evian is just naive spelt backwards. Franck Riboud, Danone's chairman, says the makers must market their message better. "Our trade is not transporting bottles of water a a euro each in lorries. It is selling brands with a specific origin and taste," he told La Tribune newspaper.
Below: a recent cheeky advert for Cristaline, a low-price bottled water, mocking the claims that tap water is just as pure. Nitrates, lead and chlorine are coming out of the tap. The caption says "I don't save on the water I drink"
The French have finally been told that Rachida Dati, President Sarkozy's Justice Minister, is expecting a baby. The story is a chance to look at the way that France is tangled up between modern celebrity culture and the old taboos that protect privacy -- and especially its ruling class. [See Wednesday update at end. Thursday update: Aznar says he's not the Daddy]
As I mentioned here on Monday, Dati's condition has been the talk of the internet and Paris newsrooms for a month. Palace officials have now given the nod to the media to break the news. They have also been warned against intrusion into the life of the glamorous, 42-year-old whose rise from immigrant ghetto to Cabinet star is one of the feel-good tales of the Sarkozy administration.
Dati's condition is front page today in the celebrity magazines. What none offers, of course, is the identity of the father. The unmarried Dati, for whom this is a first child, has projected her Cinderella life story in the media, appearing on chat shows with her Moroccan-Algerian parents. But she brooks no other reporting of her life.
As Renaud Revel, a commentator on France-Inter radio, says on his blog: "The German or Anglo-Saxon press would have x-rayed Rachida Dati's pregnancy, to the point of producing the father's ID papers and his DNA. The French media are kept at a distance.... The father has been known to all the newsrooms for weeks. But not a line, not a name...not the slightest allusion has appeared, even on the net."
VSD magazine, which features the minister on its cover, writes coyly today: "She was seen for a time close to a French business leader. His entourage talks of a passionate and stormy relationship, doubtless now over. She was seen last December sunning herself on an island with another CEO who is a friend of the president."
What are readers supposed to make of that ? To satisfy curiosity here, the first companion was Henri Proglio, boss of Veolia Environment, and the man on the beach was Dominique Desseigne,chief of the Barrière casino and hotel empire.
You can argue that France's legally-enforced respect for privacy is healthy. Why should the public know who is a minister's partner? Media stars such as television news presenters, are after all happy to use the privacy law to protect themselves from gossip.
There is a simple answer to that. It is the same one that is applied to Sarkozy's private life. Dati, like Sarkozy, has long played the celebrity game, mixing her personal life with professional. She invites curiosity by appearing on chat shows and posing clad in Chanel in glamour shots for glossy magazines.
French media bosses defend their respect for public figures' private lives, contrasting it with the voyeuristic excesses of the "Anglo-Saxons". But they also relay every juicy detail that comes across the frontier. Sarah Palin's "baby-gate" has received full play here, though she would never have been troubled about her daughter if she were a French politician. And the distinction is fast fading at home, now that the politicians and media have gone so far down the celebrity track together. The complete silence on the identify of Dati's partner looks more like old-fashioned deference to the governing class.
Update: Dati has given an interview to selected French journalists to announce her happy event. She says that she will not speak about the father. "I have a complicated private life and this is the limit that I fix for myself with regard to the media. I will say nothing about this," she said.
There was another, related, example of the deference phenomenon today. Most of the media were having fun with Sarkozy's Corsican blunder (last post), reporting the political row and deploring his devotion to his show-biz cronies. But the story was not deemed fit for readers of Le Figaro, a venerable national daily. The newspaper, which is owned by Serge Dassault, a big Sarkozy supporter, can rarely bring itself to report anything embarrassing to the President. So it reduced the Corsica yarn to a few brief lines with no allusion to a row.
President Sarkozy has stirred up a fuss today by dismissing the senior police official on Corsica.
Dominique Rossi, coordinator of the island's internal security, was removed because he had taken no steps to prevent nationalist protesters from briefly occupying a villa at Porto Vecchio that is owned by Christian Clavier, the comedy actor.
Since Clavier is one of Sarkozy's close friends, everyone assumes that Rossi was removed on orders of the President. "It says a lot about the regime we are in," said François Bayrou, leader of the small MoDem centrist opposition party. "It's a ruling by the Prince. These are arbitrary and disproportionate decisions which show where you get to when all powers are concentrated in the same hands."
François Hollande, the Socialist leader, called for an explanation. "I want to believe that it was not because it was the home of Christian Clavier that he was punished," he said.
The Interior Ministry said that Rossi, who ran the police and Gendarmerie on the island, had been reassigned to Paris on the orders of Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Minister. He had made an error of judgment in failing to send police to block the protest last Saturday after being tipped off in advance, it said.
The main police union has sided with Rossi, saying he is a highly respected and experienced officer who had acted appropriately. "There was no mistake, there was no damage, the demonstration was peaceful," it said.
The action by about 50 nationalists was standard Corsican stuff. They strung out banners denouncing the "colonisation" of the island and the supposed plundering of its beauty by mainland property speculators. Clavier, who was not there, apparently gave orders to his staff to let the demonstrators into his garden and given them a drink.
Sarkozy loathes the hardline nationalists, with their banditry and lack of respect for the law of "le continent", as they call mainland France. The President cherishes his friendship with Clavier, a popular star who is known to the outside world for playing Astérix in the first two movies about the cartoon Gaul. Unless there is more to the story than appears, it is very unlikely that the police chief would have been removed without an order from Sarko. The episode does not make him look good.
[Below: the demonstration that got the police chief fired]
Carla Bruni was on the radio this morning sounding defensive about the sales of her new album, Comme si de rien n'était (titled Simply in English).
President Sarkozy's new wife enjoyed spectacular worldwide publicity on the album's release in July and Naive, her label, insists that the record is doing well. Over 300,000 copies have been sold, they say, 140,000 of them outside France. The CD reached the number one spot for French albums for a week in mid-August but is now back down at ninth.
There have been rumours in the trade that the record is not exactly flying out of the shops, even taking the morose market into account. The official figures correspond to CDs shipped to stores. Le Parisien newspaper got hold of the actual sales yesterday. A total of 80,657 have been bought by French customers in the first seven weeks of release, not the official 160,000, and sales are slowing.
Given the novelty effect of the first lady's record and the huge promotion by French and international media, that figure is quite modest. "The artist would have been entitled to expect better for both good and bad reasons," said le Parisien. "No record has ever been so talked about, or fed so much speculation and shaped firm opinions before it was heard." Patrick Zelnik, chief executive of Naive, calls the record "not a triumph but a success."
Bruni's long interview on Europe 1 radio was part of an attempt to restart sales with a fresh round of promotion. This includes a singing appearance in Britain on September 16 on the BBC TV show Later ... with Jools Holland.
Here's what she told Marc-Olivier Fogiel on Europe 1 radio this morning: "I don't get involved in figures much. ... In one month you don't know the figures for an album. And it's already quite something to manage to release an album these days, whoever you are. ... Whatever the number of people who have had the kindness or curiosity to go and buy it, it's a miracle. Then, summer is a doomed season for everything that's music etcetera... You have to know that an album takes months and months to reach the ears and hearts of people."
Bruni also said that she recognised that giving the disc to every member of her husband's council of ministers for their summer listening might have been a little questionable. The gift raised media eyebrows, as did her use of the Elysée Palace roof for a cover portrait of her for Vanity Fair (above). Annie Leibowitz took the shot for an article timed for the record release.
Bruni may be smash hit for the celebrity press, but her image as a sensitive leftwing singer-composer has suffered from her over-exposure. The public and critics who enjoyed the first album of the Franco-Italian super-model are not generally fans of her rightwing husband. The critics have been quite rude about the third album, sung in the breathy mumbling tones that are her trademark. Bakchich, an irreverent news site, has just called it flabby, old-fashioned and "the ideal gift for the next grandmothers' day."
Nicolas Canteloup, the best current comic impersonator, has a running gag in which he imitates her as near inaudible. He mocked Bruni to her face on Europe 1 this morning, with a sketch claiming that she had won an award for boosting the sales of hearing aids. Bruni gave a cool performance, managing to brush off Fogiel's cheeky questions, such as "Would you have fallen in love with Nicolas Sarkozy if he wasn't president of France?"
While I'm at it, Bruni, 40, also said that she and Sarkozy are hoping to produce a baby. Since I'm already guilty of writing a bit of froth today, I might as well mention another piece of unconfirmed gossip that has been doing the rounds and even made it into Libération this morning. They say that Rachida Dati, 42, the Justice Minister, and glamour figure among Sarkozy's ministers, has a first baby on the way.
The Paris publishing season has just kicked off with the release of 500 new French novels and once again we see that sex sells -- in its most literary form of course.
Two women are making a splash above the mass of competing authors because both are famous -- or notorious -- for the lurid reporting of their own love lives. Catherine Millet and Christine Angot are especially fascinating in a voyeuristic way for the Paris chattering classes because they write about the real life antics of their own tribe. Identities are barely, if at all, disguised.
Millet, 60, the editor-in-chief of Artpress, a high brow review, has produced a sequel to her world-wide best-seller of 2001, La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. Ostensibly a novel, that book was a clinical account of Millet's life as a voracious libertine and habituée of the more exotic sexual pursuits that France has to offer.
The follow-up, Jour de Souffrance (Day of Suffering), has prompted some satifaction among the envious because it describes the jealousy that suddenly engulfs the orgy-loving Millet. After tolerating one-another's dalliances, she becomes tormented over les aventures of Jacques Henric, the photographer-writer who is her longstanding partner. As Bernard Pivot, the popular critic, says in today's Journal du Dimanche, "The heart suddenly comes into play for this grande libertine and she panics." Millet's lucid, rigorous book is getting good reviews but it's hard-going unless you are keen on the chronicles of introspection that have been a French speciality since the 1980s -- or maybe that should read the 1780s.
Christine Angot, 49, is another matter. She has been the shock chick of Saint Germain-des-Près since writing L'Inceste, about a relationship with her father, in 1999 [and before the regulars here jump in to point out that Angot lives on the Right Bank, I'm using the Left Bank term in the figurative sense]. Her stock in trade, as we have seen here before, is recounting her latest love affair in brutal and often excruciating detail.
Continue reading "Sex works for Parisienne writers" »
Paris is missing its Americans. Visitors from the United States stayed 20 percent fewer nights in the French capital in the first six months of the year. It's nothing personal says the Tourist Office. The high euro and US economic trouble is being blamed.
But politics were clearly behind the 6.7 percent fall in Chinese visitors [table below]. Beijing travel agencies took France off their brochures in April in an anti-French boycott after the hostile reception in Paris for the Olympic torch.
The Japanese were also down eight percent, contributing to a an overall 2.6 percent drop in nights spent by foreign travellers in the French capital. Paris remains the world's most visited city and and tourists from the French provinces more than compensated for the first slide in foreign stays for years.
The owners of the expanding supply of ultra-luxury hotels are gleeful over the 14 percent rise of rich visitors from the Gulf states. Hotels in the "golden triangle", between the Avenue Montaigne and the Champs Elysées, are making a special effort to meet their late night and late-rising habits. A couple of cinemas in the district are doing well from showing Arabic films late at night. A Saudi prince paid 15,000 euros to have the Elysées-Biarritz theatre ship in a new film and show it to his friends at three am, according to Hugues Piketty, the cinema director.
Jean-Bertrand Bros, the Deputy Mayor for tourism, says that the outlook is rosy. The flow from traditional tourist nations may slow further, but they are being replaced by a surge from the BRIC powers -- Brazil, Russia, India and China. Wherever they come from, they all want to see the three top monuments: the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur basilica and the Louvre.
Students of the Paris mentality should have a have a look at an internet site which collects amusing snippets of conversations heard around town. It's called Entendu à Paris (Heard in Paris) and is modelled on the popular Overheard in New York. It does not yet have anything like quantity of entries on that site, but there are a few funny glimpses of the Paris mentality.
Take for example the line heard between two fifty-something women in the posh Bois de Boulogne at 12.37 pm on August 4. "How can you admire Marie-Claude? She has made a complete mess of her life. She lives in the provinces." People do still talk like that.
Here's the league table of main visiting countries. The Russians, who number about 200,000 a year, were counted in "other Europeans" which are not on this summary from the Tourist Office. The British have long been the biggest visitors, especially since the Eurostar tunnel express brought London closer in 1994.
French drivers are speed-mad road hogs while the British are cool and careful at the wheel. That old cliché is being turned on its head by a remarkable change in French driving culture in the past few years.
Roadside cameras and police traps have done a lot to tame the ancestral French mania for speed while British drivers have become a menace, barging aside the natives as they blast down the autoroutes from the Channel.
This behaviour, shared to a lesser extent by the Belgians, Dutch and Germans, is spurred by the knowledge that foreigners are are immune from French speed camera tickets -- for the time being. There is also the old Brits abroad reflex that once across the Channel, anything goes.
In the north so far this year, British speed merchants have committed half of the most serious speeding offences -- those over 200 kph (125 mph). The motorway maximum is 130 kph (80 mph). Among those banned from driving in France was Lewis Hamilton, the Formula 1 ace, who was stopped last December on the northern A26 motorway doing 122 mph. Everyone has a tale. Adam Sage, my Paris colleague, tells me that he watched the other day as a British driver floored his Mercedes so hard on reaching the open road at Calais that the car went into a spin.
The most flagrant British offenders are the types in luxury sports cars who stage races across France at extremely high speed. Quite a few of them (we don't have the figure) have been surprised this year when the gendarmes confiscated their cars and licenses on the spot. They get the license back later, but the courts decide when, if ever, to release the vehicles.
Most of the 650 speeding offences in the area of last June's Le Mans 24-hour race were committed by British drivers. Police suspended the licenses of 31 Britons on the spot, compared with those of only 10 French drivers.
Last weekend, the Calais area, where half the serious speeding offenders are British, deployed a useful weapon against les chauffards anglais. They brought over two traffic police officers from Kent to help enforce the French law. British speed merchants were surprised to be pulled over, not by exotic Gendarmes but by familiar-looking British coppers.
Lieutenant Patrick Vanderstaerten of the Pas-de-Calais police gave us a run-down on the British speedsters in his zone. "Often when we stop them, they pretend they do not understand and they think that the French police have it in for them. It's an old cliché from the old Anglo-French quarrel. We hope that the message is getting through with the British officers here and that mentality will greatly change," he said. "France is beautitul. Don't make it a cemetery."
Further testimony comes from Dr François Douchain, chief pediatrician at the Arras city hospital, near the Channel ports. François, a regular on this blog, alerted me to the Anglo-French police operation. His hospital receives accident victims from a long stretch of the A26 autoroute and there are plenty of Britons among them, he says. "One of the most painful memories in my career is when I had to tell young English children that their parents had been killed on the motorway -- probably because of sleepiness."
The excès de vitesse seem worse in the south-north direction because people rush to catch ferries or the tunnel shuttle, often over long distances, says François. "People come up from the Mediterranean or the Alps in a single day and they arrive tired, creating a danger for the last stretch."
Of course there are plenty of British drivers who obey the French law. The gap in fatal accident rates has narrowed, but British roads are still safer. But I wonder how much this is now due to the slow traffic on Britain's jammed roads compared with the wide open French network.
And, starting next year, European states are supposed to enforce cross-frontier speeding tickets, so British drivers will be getting a lot of mail from French speed cameras -- or radars, as they are called here.
Here's the standard procès verbal demanding payment for a speeding offence 
France began the new year today. The children don't go back to school until September 1, but for most others, the last Monday in August is la rentrée. The summer is almost over, the government is back and the big event is the debut tonight of la Ferrari.
Laurence Ferrari, 42 (below), is taking over as presenter of the TF1 Journal Télévisé, Europe's the most watched TV news programme. The firing last June of Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, the "Pope" of the JT for the past two decades, was something of a national trauma, as you may recall. 'PPDA' got on many people's nerves but his daily communion with the nation has been missed. Ferrari, a friend of Sarkozy, has to prove quickly that she can fill his shoes.
The new season also means year two for President Sarkozy. Not that the hyper-president has taken much of a break, with August trips to the Beijing Olympics, to Moscow and Georgia to negotiate a ceasefire and to Afghanistan to comfort French troops after they lost 10 men (video below). Here's a quick view of Sarkozia at the opening of season II:
France felt different 12 months ago. Hopes for change were high and the newly elected Super Sarko was basking in 69 percent approval but suffering from the breakdown of his marriage. A year on, a slightly more humble Sarko has a new super-model wife, the economy is down, his promises appear unfulfilled and 59 percent disapprove of him.
For some, Sarko has become a hate figure, a self-obsessed showman who tricked voters with promises of prosperity, threw money at the rich and unleashed a whirlwind of reforms that has torn through cherished institutions. These include the hospital system, the 35-hour working week, unemployment and retirement benefits, the law courts, the universities and so on.
As François Hollande, leader of the moribund Socialist opposition, put it: "He is not reforming France. He is shaking it up, creating mayhem, unbalancing it. Sarkozy divides, stigmatizes and then destroys." Sarko's sin, Hollande told Le Parisien, is that he is trying to make France 'Anglo-Saxon'. "His project is to individualise social relations: everyone must now take care of themselves all alone."
The latest embarrassment for Sarko is this clip from his visit to Kabul last Wednesday. It drew little comment on the TV news last week but it has taken on a life of its own, feeding the Sarkophobes of the internet who say he is sneering with a misplaced joke.
Sarkozy's words to the comrades of the fallen soldiers were not especially striking. People are irked because he seems to make light of the Taleban ambush that befell the French paratroop patrol near Kabul. "If it had to be done again, I would do it," says the president, adding with an awkward smirk "Not the patrol..."
I disagree with the criticism. This video shows Sarkozy's awkward side, not contempt for the soldiers. The little smirk is one of his many nervous tics.
Continue reading "Sombre Sarkozy opens tough new season" »
Another weekend back in the Cévennes, thanks to Carla Bruni, Nicolas Sarkozy and the Dalai Lama. The Lerab Ling sanctuary, home of Europe's biggest Tibetan temple, is on the edge of the high Larzac plain, just across the hills from here. It was there that Sarko despatched his supermodel wife to meet the Dalai Lama.
We tagged along to what was one of the more exotic events of the Sarkozy reign so far -- a mixture of religious service, safron diplomacy and Woodstock-like happening. It certainly made for great pictures, with Carla joining the Tibetan spiritual leader at the head of a procession around the sumptuous hillside temple before they cut an inaugural ribbon at its door. Outside hundreds of faithful joined in communion as the monks chanted, horns sounded and cymbals clashed. Inside, arrayed before a 25-feet high golden Buddha, were a gathering of Parisian beautiful people and senior figures from Europe's thriving Buddhist movement. Among them were Juliette Binoche, the film star, and Inès de la Fressange, the former Chanel égérie
The idea was to show that the President was ready -- up to a point -- to defy stark warnings from China and show support for Tibet during the Olympic Games. You will remember that Sarkozy cancelled a plan to meet the Dalai Lama last month after the Chinese ambassador to Paris warned him that there would be "serious consequences" for France if he went ahead. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister and Rama Yade, the Secretary for Human Rights, were also on hand yesterday to make the point that Sarko cares.
Bruni, whose new pop album is near the top of the hit parade, carried off her mission flawlessly. Elegant in her white khata scarf -- bestowed on honoured guests -- , she smiled gracefully, clasped her hands reverently and said nothing in public. Kouchner, a lifelong humanitarian campaigner, was clearly more embarrassed by the delicate exercise of minimising the ire of China.
Beijing warned Paris again on Thursday that it took a dim view of Sarko's "operation karma". His Holiness did his own bit to raise the stakes the same day. He dropped the pretense that his French trip was purely religious and publicly denounced Chinese repression in Tibet. After a 20-minute meeting yesterday, the normally voluble Kouchner would only tell us: "I told the Dalai Lama that he was always welcome in France." The Tibetan leader did not mince words. He told Kouchner that "a certain form of extremely brutal repression is continuing to reign in Tibet in parallel with the Olympics." We heard that from Matthieu Ricard, the French monk who is the Dalai Lama's spokesman here, as well as his biographer.
 [Lerab Ling temple, near Lodève, Hérault]
Meanwhile, the Socialist opposition continued to mock Sarko for his "pseudo-diplomacy" and wobbly policy in which he talked tough to Beijing over human rights and then backtracked under Chinese pressure. The President will glad to see the end of the Olympics and the back of the Dalai Lama.
Away from the politics, it was impressive to watch the "Ocean of Tranquility" in action. Under his leadership, you can see why Buddhism, with its relaxed, tolerant view of the world has so many acolytes in Europe. Six million French say they feel drawn by the religion, according to polls, though only 600,000 are practitioners. About 2,000 people turned out for yesterday's ceremonies, including many who had driven far across Europe to get there.
The Dalai Lama's sermon, delivered cross-legged atop a high dais after 45 minutes of chanting and prayer, could not have been more different from a homily by the Pope or England's Archbishop of Canterbury. It was improvised and chatty and punctuated by a self-mocking laugh.
The message was simple: since even billionaires could be unhappy, material comfort was not the way to a good life. "We should strive for inner peace in the concert of God.... We also have responsibility to take care of the planet. The trees and all beautiful things are part of creation ... Harmony is very very essential." He blessed all religions and then broke off, saying: "I won't go on because our most important item today is lunch."
 Watching the mess in Georgia, we should not get too smug about breakaway provinces on the fringe of central Asia. An ugly struggle for ethnic separation is brewing only an hour's train trip north from Paris.
I'm talking about Belgium. The divorce between northern Flanders and Wallonia, the southern French-speaking half, has been anticipated for so long that people in France do not give it much thought. "Are the Belgians mad?", France-Inter, a state radio station, asked its listeners in a jokey poll this month.
France takes a condescending, affectionate approach to its small neighbour. The butt of jokes, Belgians are seen as slow-witted frites (chips/French fries) eaters with a creative genius that produced Art Nouveau, Hergé, the father of Tintin, and entertainers who move to France when they make it. The latest of these is Cécile de France, one of the cinema's hottest young stars [picture below]. Otherwise, Belgium is Brussels, the French-speaking seat of the European bureacracy and source of many French ills.
This cosy view may be in for a jolt if the six million Dutch-speakers succeed in what seems like an unstoppable push to extract rich Flanders from its unhappy 178-year marriage to Wallonia.
France has just had a wake-up with an opinion poll that found that 49 percent of Walloons would like to be annexed by France if Flanders splits off. An extraordinary 60 percent of the French said that would be fine by them.
Continue reading "Will France move into Belgium?" »
I'm back in Paris from Moscow but the news is still Russian. President Sarkozy has warned the Kremlin of the dire consequences that will ensue if it fails to pull its troops out of Georgia. If it does not, he will... call a special meeting of the European Union council. That will give Vladimir Putin pause for thought.
And we have confirmation today that a spectacular Belle Epoque villa on the Riviera is being bought by a Russian billionaire for the astonishing sum of 496 million euros (731 million dollars).
The two events can be linked. The Russian purchase of the Leopolda villa [above] is an in-your-face display of the power enjoyed by the oligarchs who have amassed fortunes with the indulgence of Russia's governing caste. We do not yet know who is behind the world record real estate deal. The French media reported that it was Mikhael Prokhorov, 42, [picture below], a nickel baron, who was humiliated by French prosecutors when he was detained him at Courchevel, the glitzy ski resort 18 months ago. He was held for four days on suspicion of bringing dozens of prostitutes from Moscow to entertain his Alpine party guests but no charges were brought. The episode was seen in Moscow as a French plot to humiliate a leading Russian. Prokhorov's office in Moscow has denied that he is the purchaser and added that he will not set foot in France until the French apologise for the way he was treated.
Whichever oligarch splashed out on the Leopolda, the deal symbolises the new Russians' taste for flaunting their power in a west which in recent decades gave their country little respect. The rush by the Moscow rich on London and French playgrounds, is part of the renaissance of Russian confidence and muscle that we have seen applied to Georgia over the past 10 days.
The hammering of Georgia has ended western illusions that Putin's Russia was still a tame, diminished version of the former super power. You can argue about who should be blamed for what, as a couple of hundred people have done so far on the last posting here. In my humble view, after last week in Moscow and watching Russia since the Cold War, the west sowed trouble and missed a big opportunity with its triumphalism after the collapse of communism and its condescending approach during the chaotic years of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
After that, the west was naive towards the authoritarian, reviving Russia of Vladimir Putin. The Americans should have realised that pushing Nato into the Caucasus and Ukraine would sooner or later goad the Kremlin into action. Georgia's unwise attack on its separatist, Russian-defended, province provided the occasion. At the same time, Europe's western continental states have been over-indulgent towards the Kremlin, allowing themselves to become dependent on Russian energy.
Everyone has woken up now that the empire has struck back. The calendar seems to have been unwound by a quarter of a century as the west wonders what to do about Russia's assertion of power beyond its frontiers.
No doubt the answer is a modern version of the formula that worked before -- firmness along with a willingness to engage. But things are different this time. For all its need for Russian resources, the west has levers that it did not have with the Soviet Union. Think of that 496 million euro villa on the Riviera. Russia is now part of the global financial and economic system and it is eager to become a full member of the club. The west should make this, and the respect which Putin craves for Russia, conditional on good behaviour. At stake are Moscow's applicatoin for membership of the World Trade Organisation and its continuing presence in the club of rich nations, known as G8 since it was admitted to the G7 in 1997.
A more personal argument was set out to me in Moscow last week by Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst who is critical of the Kremlin. "It's not like the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan or Stalin's days," he said. "The men in the Politburo weren't businessmen. In crises, they weren't worried about losing billions of their personal funds if things went wrong." Sections of the current leadership with big interests in the outside world are very worried about being ostracized by the west, he said.
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PS: Apologies to those who want me to get back into Franco-French matters. Next time, I hope, though there may be an incursion into Belgium first.
As the sun rose over a hot Moscow this morning, it was hard not to imagine that we are in the remake of an old movie. I was criticized by some here yesterday for making the cold war comparison, but it’s difficult to escape.
The radio I was listening to was not the old Radio Moscow of Soviet days. But Vesti FM, all jingles and sizzle, opened the morning news with an attack on the United States for fanning the flames of cold war via the Caucasus. The Georgian attack on South Ossetia was part of a plot masterminded by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, we were told. The war-mongering neo-conservatives are using it to get the Republican John McCain elected to the White House in November. The Washington plot line, widespread in Moscow commentary this week, was last heard in the days of Presidents Andropov and Reagan.
The world is a different place since those times a quarter of a century ago, but the plot is familiar. The Russians are using military power to assert their authority over troublesome small neighbours in their “near abroad”. The Americans are flexing their muscles and trying push the frontiers of the Atlantic alliance eastward – this time into the Caucasus, a region which Russia has for centuries deemed to be its back yard.
As President Bush ordered the US military to take humanitarian relief into Georgia, Condaleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, made a direct comparison:
“This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbours, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” Just like the old days, the tough stance in Washington is making the Europeans nervous.
The old-style language is all over the Russian media, voicing defensiveness and anger over what is seen as bullying by what used to be the other super-power. “The West has spent a lot of time, energy and money to teach Georgia the tricks of the trade … to make the country look like a democracy,” said Vasily Mikhachev, a former Russian ambassador to the EU. “We and many other nations see through this deceit. We understand that the seditious tactics of the so-called colour revolutions are a real threat to international law and the source of global legal nihilism.”
Last night, Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, a blustering but suave type, said Washington had been playing a "dangerous game" .
This time around, the Russians have more ammunition for the war of words since the Washington administration has put raw ideology high in its own public communications effort for years – especially over Iraq, as Russian friends keep pointing out. One friend made a sharp point: "In the old days under Soviet rule we didn't believe a word of our own propaganda but we thought that information was free in the west. We admired that and wanted to be like that. But we have learned since that you have your own propaganda and in some ways it is more powerful because people believe it. "
So how does this play out ? While most outsiders agree that Russia reacted with calculated brutality to Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia last week, there is disagreement on the way the west should respond.
It’s the old hawks and doves argument again. The old Soviet bloc states of Europe are behind Washington and pushing for a hard line against their old master. Other Europeans and some Americans believe that Washington’s drive for Georgia’s Nato membership and a US s anti-missile shield have needled Moscow too much. I was talking to Carlo Gallo, a Russia specialist at Control Risk yesterday. The US would be making a mistake to revert to a policy of containment – the old cold war policy, he said. “It would backfire and play into the hands of hardliners who argue that the west is always conspiring against Russia.” You hear the same from the French, who are trying to play the role of honest broker.
Meanwhile, down in the Caucasus, the hot part of the little war is not yet over. The Russians are reported to be starting to pull out of the Georgian town of Gori – - meeting one of President Bush’s demands yesterday. And Condoleezza Rice is about to arrive in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to bolster a government that President Medvedev of Russia calls barbaric and a perpetrator of genocide.
Russia is back. Simplifying a little, that was the line that President Medvedev conveyed as he lectured us in the Kremlin about the new situation in the Caucasus after Russia’s lightning war with Georgia.
It felt like old times for someone who lived in Moscow in the days of the old Soviet bear. As the headline of this post, I almost wrote "Back in the USSR"
We had hung around for five hours under the splendid white and blue dome of the Catherine Hall of as President Nicolas Sarkozy of France huddled with Medvedev and, more importantly, Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister. The outcome was a cease-fire that restacks the Caucasian cards in Russian favour (story here) after Georgia’s ill-advised attack on South Ossetia. Putin, who remains the boss despite leaving the presidency, disappeared after the talks, leaving Medvedev to savour in public the fruit of what amounts to a short, sharp military lesson by Russia towards one of its upstart former Republics – which happens to be a protégé of the USA. “When crazy people scent blood, you have to use surgery halt them,” Medvedev said of Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, US-educated president.
Breaking off his holidays on the Riviera, Sarko had come with Bernard Kouchner, his Foreign Minister, to mediate as current chairman of the European Union. (We had to pile onto the French Air Force Airbus at 4.30 am yesterday).
Usually the French president loves to grab the limelight as trouble-shooter, but he was on the defensive and a little sheepish when he emerged.
Continue reading "Russia calls the shots with Sarkozy" »
As Nicolas Sarkozy flies to the Olympics opening, he is being hammered in France for flip-flop behaviour that has let Beijing humilitate him.
China has got Sarkozy's number, le Monde said this afternoon. "He has lost on all fronts: whether human rights or the international image of France or its relations with the Chinese authorities."
Sarko's unfortunate Chinese gambit began in the spring when, under domestic pressure, he threatened to boycott the Olympics opening ceremony unless Beijing resumed dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Other leaders voiced criticism over Tibet and human rights, but none made the Olympics link. Britain's Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel of Germany was never planning to go to the opening.
The Chinese were also upset by the very rough passage of the Olympic torch through Paris and French establishment sympathy for the protestors. China retaliated with an anti-French boycott. Then Sarko sent three emissaries to Beijing to apologize and announced that he would go to the Beijing ceremony in his capacity as current president of the European Union. But, he said, he would meet the Dalai Lama in Paris on his return.
Beijing then took the extraordinary step of having its Paris ambassador publicly warn Sarkozy that there would be serious consequences if he did any such thing. The ambassador -- a graduate of the ENA, the French high civil service school -- was hauled into the French Foreign Ministry and reprimanded for interfering in French affairs. Sarko himself told the European parliament that Beijing could not push him around and would never dictate his diary.
On Wednesday, before leaving for China, Sarko caved in and called off the meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader. Carla Bruni -- Mrs Sarkozy -- will instead meet him at a Buddhist ceremony in the south of France in late August.
Sarkozy says that the meeting was postponed by agreement with the Dalai Lama in order to avoid raising tension with Beijing at a delicate time. His office has announced today that he has transmitted to the Chinese authorities a list of dissidents about whom French campaigners are concerned. At the same time, he has given an interview to Chinese media in which he celebrates "the historic, indestructible, unshakable friendship" between Paris and Beijing.
Super Sarko has come out of this episode looking foolish. Brown and Merkel have both held talks with the Dalai Lama and spoken out on rights in recent months and neither are attending the opening, but Beijing did not punish them. Sarkozy showed weakness by blowing hot and cold. "It would have been better to have refrained from puffing up his chest for a few weeks before travelling to Canossa," said le Monde. In China, anti-French bloggers are jeering at Sarko, calling him a "paper tiger".
Pierre Haski, Editor of the Rue89 news site, calls it "the most serious diplomatic failure by Sarkozy since his election." Those are views from Sarko's usual critics, but few outside his own political camp are defending his bungled China venture. A French diplomat friend summed it up to me as "Beijing 1, Sarkozy 0".
One of the less lovely features of the French deep south is the passion for la corrida, or bull-fighting. The bloody pastime, though disliked by most French, enjoys devotion in a stretch of the country that runs from the Rhone delta to the Atlantic shore.
A 10-year-old Franco-Mexican boy is the centre of this summer's annual battle between les aficionados and the anti-corrida campaigners. Last week, Michelito, a child star in Latin America, was twice banned by local authorities from performing non-lethal shows in central southern towns. In Arles, the bull-fighting Mecca, gendarmes acting on government orders halted his appearance at the last minute although the aficionado mayor was a big supporter. The child was being put in danger, said the local prefect.
Last night, Michelito [video below] finally made his French debut to great acclaim in Hagetmau, a town in the southwestern Landes, and he is due to try again in Arles this evening. Flowers rained down on the young torrero after he exhausted an 80 kilogramme calf called Bastonsito. The event was a "becerrada", a fight for beginners in which the animal is not wounded.
So what's wrong with a gifted boy practising his favourite sport in public?
Continue reading "French fans adore bullfighter boy" »
Here's a glimpse of the other French way of life -- far from Paris in the Cévennes, the sunny southern foothills of the Massif Central. The goats belong to the neighbours. After their evening graze in front of my house, they walk home about two miles to be milked. Their cheese is sold in the local markets. Click here for more on Saint Germain de Calberte, our village, which is six miles by road and about one by the crow's flight.
Of course there is a huge lot more to the Cévennes than goats and Stevenson and his donkey. The area was always a refuge for rebels and dissenters. The "Camisard" Protestants held out against the Catholic king's troops in religious wars 300 years ago. In World War Two they were a stronghold for Resistance fighters. In the 1970s, after the 1968 upheaval, young town dwellers dropped out for the simple life, trying to raise goats and live off the land. Many are still there and still struggling.
I'll be picking up as usual back in Paris later in the week.
When Napoleon III built the great mansion on the Quai d'Orsay, the idea was to impress foreign dignitaries with the majesty of his empire. A century and a half later, the home of the French Foreign Ministry still oozes grandeur.
They usher you down an endless gallery with portraits of past statesmen. Everything is outsize, from the gilt-encrusted moldings to the huge chandeliers. When you enter the Rotunda, the minister's magnificent office, the reaction is supposed to be awe. The place is vast, big enough for a couple of Oval Offices, bigger than President Sarkozy's office at the Elysée Palace. In this chamber, the dashing Bernard Kouchner cuts a slight figure as he greets you, tie-less and in shirt sleeves.
But what Kouchner lacks in stature -- he is about the same diminutive height as Sarkozy -- he makes up with energy and passion for a job that is one of the toughest in Sarko's government. A veteran rights campaigner, showman and one of France's most popular political figures, Kouchner is foreign minister for a president who likes to do the job himself and does not share the stage.
Kouchner, 68, was typically forthright about the problems of working for Sarko when he led me and four European colleagues into the sumptuous garden for a chat about the revolution that he and Sarko have wrought in French foreign policy (This was last weekend, before the holiday).
Continue reading "At home with Bernard Kouchner, Sarkozy's musketeer" »
This is one of the big weekend for leaving town, so I'm joining the southward exodus. July14 is past and Paris Plage is opening along the Seine at the start of the week. The Tour de France is winding into its final week, blighted by the traditional doping scandal but still loved nevertheless (my story in today's paper). President Sarkozy is working for a few days more. He's off on Monday to twist the arms of the Irish over the European Union's Lisbon Treaty. On that subject, I just had a fascinating hour with Bernard Kouchner, Sarko's flamboyant foreign minister. I'll post on him in a day or two.
I've said the rest in this short video (click here if it's not working). It was done with my pocket camera, an extraordinarily simple thing called a Flip. That explains the grainy image. I'll upgrade the technology soon. Posting will be intermittent over the next couple of weeks, especially since we still do not have broadband internet in the Cévennes hills -- or mobile phone cover. That's a help and a hindrance. It means that you cut off more from the outside world since it takes about a minute to load every web page via the phone modem. But it's a drag when you do want to search for something or read mail. But I shall be putting through comments a couple of times a day, so please keep them coming.
President Sarkozy appears in this painting with his Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour hanging from his ear. It might appear too irreverent and garish to grace the Elysée Palace. But Sarko has it on the wall because it was painted by his dad.
Pal Sarkozy de Nagy Bocsa, a Hungarian aristocrat who arrived in Paris without a penny in 1948, offered it to his son after his election last year. The picture, along with others that have been on show in Madrid this month, tells you a little about the socialite father who was absent for much of Sarko's childhood.
Sarko's consuming ambition is often put down to his unhappiness after Pal [pictured below] left Andrée Mallah and their three boys when Nicolas was three. Mrs Sarkozy qualified as a lawyer to earn her sons' keep in the absence of much help from the father. The President, 53, once recalled suffering in his childhood but said: "The need to fight for ourselves, which all three of us had to, proved to be a powerful boost in the end."
Sarko senior, an elegant charmer, pursued a successful career in advertising doing campaigns for Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden and others. He re-built a relationship with his sons when Nicolas was in his 20s and an apprentice politician.
Nicolas' elevation has boosted to his father's late-blooming career as an artist. He has been selling his work quietly for years but he has just enjoyed wide publicity for his show of surrealist painting and computer-aided montage, produced jointly with Werner Hornung, a German artist and advertising colleague. After Madrid, the collection, full of erotic images of women, is due to open in Paris later this year, possibly at the Espace Cardin, behind the Elysée.
Continue reading "Sarkozy, his father and beautiful women" »
Charles Bremner is Paris Correspondent for The Times and has previously reported from New York and Brussels.
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