tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70410447309905944062024-03-05T16:13:04.524+00:00Anne-Elisabeth MoutetComment, despatches, musings and gratuitous offensiveness from Paris and elsewhereAnne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-55105202429312123012013-11-03T07:00:00.000+00:002013-11-03T18:39:31.580+00:00France unites against François Hollande<div class="storyHead">
<b>Even the Left is turning hostile to the president, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</b><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="caption">Francois Hollande has built his career on being a canny political manoeuvrer</span> <span class="credit">Photo: Reuters</span></span></i></div>
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></div>
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7:00AM GMT 03 Nov 2013</div>
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As he stood at a military airport last Wednesday to greet four French hostages
released by al-Qaeda militants in Niger, François Hollande could have been
forgiven for thinking his disastrous run of bad news in the past months
might finally be coming to an end. <br />
<br />
Having announced an assortment of taxes the previous week, Mr Hollande
suspended most of them over the weekend after widespread popular protests.
He had managed to unite unlikely bedfellows, more often at loggerheads
against one another, in the fiercest demonstrations seen in Brittany in a
decade.</div>
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A proposed green tax on lorry fuel that would raise transport costs by 4 per
cent had brought out farmers and supermarket owners as well as labourers and
trade unionists, brandishing the black and white Breton flag as a symbol of
their outrage against the cluelessness of Parisian technocrats, of whom Mr
Hollande is a central member. This was the face of a future French Tea
Party, a political development that seems increasingly likely.<br />
<br />
Mr Hollande
also had to “suspend” — a word that fills the French with unease, as it
promises a stealthy return of the same measures whenever the fracas dies
down — a 15.5 per cent retroactive tax on savings schemes that seemed
tailor-made to infuriated his most natural voters.<br />
<br />
A Parisian barrister, himself not a Hollande voter, told me that his
Portuguese-born cleaning lady, a single mother of five children, had sworn
never again to cast her ballot for the president, as she did last year. “You
work hard all your life, you do what’s right, and then they come after the
little bit you’ve managed to put aside for your retirement age?” she said.
“What kind of a Left-wing government is that?”<br />
<br />
Once again, the government’s
“method”, if it can be called that, seemed to be to first float the idea of
a new tax for a few days, then back down if the outcry became too loud.
“It’s probably the worst way you can run a fiscal policy,” says Erwan Le
Noan, a competition lawyer and international consultant. “The amateurism and
uncertainty alone mean businesses have no visibility, and will defer
investment — and hires — as long as they possibly can.” <br />
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An insider suggests that the ministry of finance mandarins at the Treasury and
budget departments, held in check by their previous bosses, have been trying
out all their pet tax plans, even the most outlandish, on Pierre Moscovici,
the finance minister, and Bernard Cazeneuve, the budget minister. “Moscovici
believes the tax burden is as high as it can go, but he has little
authority,” says the insider. “Cazeneuve, his junior, is a hard-working
realist, but he suffers from having been an exemplary European affairs
minister. He is convinced that France must abide by her European Treaty
obligations, which means reducing the deficit. Since the spending ministries
do not really want to make hard cuts, the only way — or so he thinks — is
through more taxes.” The Laffer curve theory (too much tax kills tax
revenue) does not seem to have made it to Bercy, the massive brutalist
fortress built 20 years go to accommodate the finance ministry’s plethoric
troops. <br />
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An unchecked French civil servant can think up some pretty outlandish tax
ideas. The French property market is under threat of a new rent control law.
This is the pet project of Cécile Duflot, the housing minister and a canny
Green ideologue who believes, against all concrete evidence to the contrary,
that it will make rents more affordable. Paris estate agents reply that
this, alongside the heap of protective regulations skewed towards renters,
has already convinced many landlords to just sell and get out, even though
the law has not yet been passed.<br />
<br />
This is, however, small beer next to an
earlier proposal, last June, by the Conseil d’Analyse Économique, the prime
minister’s office’s forward planning think tank, advising the creation of a
“virtual rent” that all property owners would pay, in order to restore more
equality between households burdened with rent and the other, rent-free
ones. After the CAE report came out, the subsequent fury caused the virtual
rent proposal to be shelved, “but that shows you how they think”, says Mr Le
Noan. “People remember this. They have no trust at all in this government.”<br />
<br />
The beginning of the week saw Mr Hollande’s ratings plunge even lower than
before, breaking records of unpopularity. Two separate polls have given him
the worst ratings of any French president. Their breakdown shows, perhaps
predictably, implacable, near-total hostility (93 per cent for one, 97 per
cent for the other) on the Right; but opinions on the Left and within his
own Socialist party are solidly negative too. He is perceived as “lacking
courage”, “indecisive”, “incompetent”, “weak”, even “incoherent”. <br />
<br />
To the French who elected him in May last year, Mr Hollande controls nothing
and has no authority anywhere. Not in his own home, not in his party, not in
his Cabinet, not in the country, and not — after Barack Obama eventually
spurned his offer of military help in Syria — in the world. <br />
<br />
The one bright spot in which he received across-the-board support was the
French intervention in Mali, back in January. In two weeks, French troops,
called by the Malian president Dioncounda Traoré to help the country fight
an Islamist invasion in the north, pushed back the rebels, liberated
Timbuktu and stabilised a country whose fall to al-Qaeda affiliates would
have been a disaster for several French allies, from Algeria to Sudan. This
was perhaps the model of a foreign expedition done well: experienced troops
knowing the region, limited and clear aims, regional and local support. Mr
Hollande, quite rightly, saw his popularity edge back up. Visiting Bamako,
the Malian capital, in early February, basking in popular adulation, he told
an enthusiastic rally that this was “the most beautiful day of his political
career”. <br />
<br />
And one he’s seemingly tried to replicate ever since — it’s probably the
reason why he was so gung-ho on a Syrian intervention, even though French
intelligence is perfectly aware of the complexity in which the Syrian
rebellion is mired. It was therefore difficult not to wonder at the
timeliness, in political terms, of the four hostages’ liberation. Questions
about a ransom were raised immediately. Mr Hollande denied any payment had
been made. <br />
<br />
For one moment, it seemed as if Mr Hollande’s luck might turn: Marine Le Pen
commented on television on the look of the head-covered and bearded
hostages, implying they might have been “Islamicised” in captivity. It was
tactless and crass — a boon, you might think, to the mainstream political
class, who duly grabbed the ball and ran with it in their hurry to
re-demonise the Front National leader. <br />
<br />
Their moment of good, clean fun lasted only for a couple of hours. That very
afternoon, Le Monde came out with an authoritative piece of reporting laying
out the different stages of the negotiations that succeeded in getting the
hostages back, complete with payment of €20 million (£16.9 million) to the
kidnappers and Malian intermediaries. Intelligence experts in Paris agree
that the article was completely accurate, “with great chunks taken under
dictation, I should say”, one jokes. <br />
<br />
They explain that Mr Hollande took the negotiations off the hands of the
French intelligence service, DGSE, to give them to a series of local
intermediaries and presidency advisers, exactly the same type of associates
that Mr Hollande, in opposition, criticised Nicolas Sarkozy for using. The
implication is that DGSE leaked the entire story to Le Monde, furious both
at this and because the ransom, of which they disapprove, seems to have been
paid out of their own budget. <br />
<br />
You can get away, in French politics, with lying, or looking extremely likely
to have lied, to the nation. Mr Hollande’s job is as safe as the Fifth
Republic constitution makes it, which is very safe indeed. But as for the
hoped-for reprieve in the polls? That is not happening. <br />
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How long can this last? Normally, until the next presidential and general
elections, which are in 2017. There are no provisions for getting rid of the
president, unless he resigns or calls for an early general election, which
will not happen. Nationwide municipal elections will take place in March,
and European Parliament elections are scheduled for May. The municipal
elections, and local deals for the second round, explain why Mr Hollande has
been pandering so much to the Greens and the Left of his party. Voting in
the European elections, on the other hand, is full proportional
representation, which makes them, in effect, a life-size poll. <br />
<br />
Ms Le Pen’s party is expected to poll somewhere between 25 per cent and 30 per
cent, and, as an MEP herself, she has already been busy making European
alliances for the day after. Her platform, in many ways, is
indistinguishable from that of the hard-Left: protectionist, anti-euro,
anti-capitalist, pro-national regulations, supportive of Bashar al-Assad’s
Syria. She is hoping to steal from Mr Hollande many of the disenchanted
voters on his Left. <br />
<br />
Mr Hollande may not be a very successful president, but he has built his
career on being a canny political manoeuvrer and, like a rabbit in a
Citroën’s headlights, he understands this, without being able to change his
essential nature. He is currently pondering a Cabinet reshuffle — from all
accounts unenthusiastically, as it means a complete rebalancing of his
majority such as it is, for less than game-changing results. He is therefore
likely to keep trudging on, earning himself a place in the Guinness Book of
Records in the chapter on unloved political leaders.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-71974415935172045332013-10-27T07:00:00.000+00:002013-11-02T00:12:34.331+00:00Why the hostile reactions to my Telegraph article highlight France's deep divisions <div class="storyHead">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Left-wing commentators are wrong to criticise my article in the Telegraph about the exodus of French entrepreneurial talent, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="caption">Criticised: Anne-Elisabeth Moutet was told: 'Stories like yours are nothing but a massive swindle’</span> <span class="credit">Photo: Lucas Schifres</span></span></i><br />
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></div>
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7:00AM GMT 27 Oct 2013</div>
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Since last week, when my Sunday Telegraph <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/10390571/france-hollande-taxes-socialist-farrage.html">report</a>
outraged <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/">France</a>
(“British propaganda!” was a recurring theme) by suggesting that my
demoralised compatriots were leaving in droves, fleeing an economy
overburdened by regulations and levies, François Hollande’s government has
added three new taxes to the 84 that had been created in the past two years.<br />
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Not only will capital gains on a series of popular savings plans be now
subject to a 15.5 per cent flat tax, but also the measure is retroactive all
the way to 1997 – coincidentally (perhaps) the last time France elected a
Socialist government before this one.<br />
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It would be unfair to say that the irony went unremarked. The dozens of
reactions I heard – as well as the thousands of internet comments and
Twitter and Facebook shares of my story – mirrored the state of deep
division in which France finds itself.<br />
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Entrepreneurs are “really hunted away from the country”, wrote one
correspondent, and specifically targeted by “many stupid decisions. One
example: I created a business seven years ago; if I sell it now, I will have
to pay 60 per cent of the value I’ve created. Unfair and discouraging.”<br />
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Another correspondent wrote: “Would not change a word: we are now in decline,
and may never be able to regain the place of fourth-largest economy in the
world.”
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“The people who really drive the French economy and keep the country afloat
are those in managerial roles or the professions, who know little or no job
security or social protection, working in those highly competitive parts of
the economy comparable to Britain or the United States,” said another
commenter. “But they are tiring of supporting the unproductive masses.”<br />
<br />
Last week, the ministry of finance, prompted by opposition MPs, released
official emigration figures for 2011 (they assure you nothing more recent is
available) showing that departures had doubled from the previous year to
nearly 40,000. Professor Jacques Régniez of the Sorbonne, himself a
statistician, predicts that these should have climbed to 60,000 by the time
we get this year’s figures.<br />
<br />
In the November-December issue of the foreign-policy journal The National
Interest, the US economist Milton Ezrati published a damning, comprehensive
study of the downfall of the French economy. “Whereas 10 years ago it
rivalled Germany’s,” he wrote, “today, France produces only half the value
added. France’s share of global exports has fallen from 7 per cent in 1999
to only 3 per cent today. During this time, its share of the eurozone’s
exports has fallen from 17 per cent to merely 12 per cent.” France, Ezrati
explains, is now outperformed even by Italy.<br />
<br />
Like others, Ezrati blamed over-regulation: there are now so many complex and
protective labour laws, the Code du travail (labour code) exceeds 3,200
pages. He also quoted a recent authoritative OECD study that identified
“French failings in almost every major category: economic regulation,
product regulation, impositions by local policies, state control of the
details of business operations and barriers to entrepreneurship”.<br />
<br />
The only area in which France didn’t blatantly underperform was,
unsurprisingly, red tape: French bureaucracy barely reaches the OECD
efficiency median.<br />
<br />
You would think something of this would filter up to Hollande in his Elysée
bunker – he might disagree on the diagnosis, yet worry on the souring of the
public mood. You would be wrong: “Perception is reality”, the mantra of spin
doctors around the Western world, leaves the President cold. Increasingly,
his entourage reports that Hollande, despite hiring a communications team
headed by a popular former France 2 prime-time news presenter, Claude
Sérillon, believes he knows best how to speak to the French. “This may have
worked for de Gaulle,” says Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, a political
communications expert. “Not for Hollande.”<br />
<br />
The beleaguered president, whose unpopularity figures scale new heights
seemingly every week, still enjoys a vocal, if ever-diminishing,
constituency, who, when they do oppose Hollande, reproach him for not being
tougher on “the rich”.<br />
<br />
Many of these work in the media, and as I defended my story on various radio
and TV panels all week, I encountered an interesting assortment of them. (I
have become something of a rent-a-reactionary in the French media, where a
“balanced” panel means three Left-wingers et moi.)<br />
<br />
There was the France Inter (think Radio 4) hour-long programme in which
Sibylle Vincendon, a senior editor of the newspaper Libération, called all
critics of the economic and political situation “grumpies”. (She has a book
out on this theme, Pour en finir avec les grincheux. By the third page of
the introduction, the despicable “Anglo-Saxons” and their “free-trade” model
have been introduced. Vincendon believes that anyone, especially an
economist forecasting France’s decline, is evidencing a deep schadenfreude
and dark motives. The French, she says, need to “share more, not less”.)<br />
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There was the debate on Arte, the French-German cultural public channel, in
which the right (by which I mean Left) kind of economist, Prof Benjamin
Coriat, explained that instead of the 75 per cent supertax hitting “only” a
few privileged citizens, national income tax should be raised well above the
current 45 per cent marginal rate, so that “everyone will pay”. Prof Coriat
is shocked that some people dare to oppose new taxes. “They’ll justify
anything not to cough up!” he thundered. He deplores the kind of movements
now emerging, such as Les Pigeons (a group of young entrepreneurs who oppose
over-taxation of start-ups), and the fact that some politicians listen to
these “bad citizens”.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, I was told that French emigration to Britain was “a myth”, the
figures “too low to even consider”. In an online chat, I was asked why I
wrote in English, implying that I was some sort of traitor. (“Because it’s
more fun?” didn’t seem to cut it as an answer.)
<br />
Many went on the attack: “Stories like yours are nothing but a massive
swindle,” a Le Monde Diplomatique editor told me. “For people leaving
France, how many come back after experiencing the lack of public services in
Britain, the inefficient Tube, the expensive, slow and badly maintained
trains, the threadbare NHS? It’s France that is bearing up best in the
crisis, not Britain: why do you think the richer of the English come to
French doctors and hospitals for proper treatment when they’re ill? Britain
has no industrial base to speak of: it only exists because of tax-rate
dumping, the City of London, and those nice, honest financiers operating
there. Britain is a terrible place to live except for the super-rich.”<br />
<br />
France has remained in a thrall to Marxism to a degree that is rarely matched
elsewhere in Europe. While Germany, Italy and, in Britain, New Labour, swore
off it, Hollande’s Socialist Party never officially renounced it, in good
part not to offend its Leftist frenemies, of which there are many, who still
Believe.<br />
<br />
In addition to the rump of its once-powerful Communist Party, France has three
Trotskyite mini-parties, a Green nebula, and one upstart radicalised
splinter from the Socialists, led by a charismatic philosophy teacher,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who ran for president against Hollande in the first 2012
round, and scored a very respectable 11 per cent, coming fourth behind
Hollande, Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen.<br />
<br />
Because, for years, any Socialist candidate has needed all of the extreme Left
votes to win, the language of economic realism has never gained traction on
the Left in France. In private, the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, will
describe himself as a social democrat. Ask him to repeat it on the record
and you are faced with a stony glare, lest you create a political crisis for
him and his boss. As a result, the political tone on the Left has remained
frozen in a kind of Seventies radical aspic, a hoary kind of time travel in
which every capitalist, every entrepreneur, every high-net-worth individual
is guilty of starving the downtrodden masses.<br />
<br />
“I left because I was tired of being considered little better than a
criminal,” says a French banker who is now happily ensconced in a Soho loft
with his family. “At a pinch, I could have paid the silly taxes; but it was
the constant sniping, the feeling that I had to apologise for everything I
achieved, the jealousy, the unremitting gloom, the guilt heaped upon you at
every turn; and the idea that my children would have to grow up in a country
where, at best, they could hope to become top civil servants, and duplicate
the system with no deviation from the norm.<br />
<br />
“This president has no idea that there is a wide world outside France; he has
hardly travelled abroad; he speaks no other language; and he has no
curiosity. Eventually, you get tired of waiting for our rulers to wake up.”<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-81803341790361028442013-10-20T07:00:00.000+01:002013-11-02T00:23:36.320+00:00Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair<div class="storyHead">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">The failing economy and harsh taxes of François Hollande's beleaguered nation
are sending thousands packing - to Britain's friendlier shores, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></div>
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7:00AM BST 20 Oct 2013</div>
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A poll on the front page of last Tuesday’s <i>Le Monde</i>, that bible
of the French Left-leaning Establishment (think a simultaneously boring and
hectoring <i>Guardian</i>), translated into stark figures the winter of
François Hollande’s discontent.<br />
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More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per
cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and
“inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu,
members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. <br />
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Worse, after decades of
living in one of the most redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per
cent of the French believe that taxes – of which there have been 84 new ones
in the past two years, rising from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per
cent this year – now widen social inequalities instead of reducing them.<br />
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This is a noteworthy departure, in a country where the much-vaunted value of
“equality” has historically been tinged with envy and resentment of the more
fortunate. Less than two years ago, the most toxic accusation levied at
Nicolas Sarkozy was of being “le président des riches”, favouring his
yacht-sailing CEO buddies with tax breaks and sweet deals. By contrast,
Hollande, the bling-free candidate, was elected on a platform of increasing
state spending by promising to create 60,000 teachers’ jobs, as well as
150,000 subsidised entry-level public-service jobs for the long-time
unemployed and the young – without providing for significant savings
elsewhere.<br />
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By 2014, France’s public expenditure will overtake Denmark’s to become the
world’s highest: 57 per cent of GDP. In effect, just to keep in the same
place, like a hamster on a wheel, and ensure that the European Central Bank
in Frankfurt isn’t too unhappy with us, Hollande now needs cash.
Technocrats, MPs and ministers have been instructed to find every euro they
can rake in – in deferred benefits, cancelled tax credits, extra levies. As
they ignore the notion of making some serious cuts (mooted at regular
intervals by the IMF, the OECD and even France’s own Cour des Comptes), the
result can be messy.<br />
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On the one hand, the lacklustre economy and finance minister Pierre Moscovici
recently admitted that he “understood” the French’s “exasperation” with
their heavy tax burden. This earned him a sharp rap on the fingers from the
president and his beleaguered PM, Jean-Marc Ayrault. On the other, new taxes
keep being announced, in chaotic fashion, nearly every week. “Announced”
doesn’t mean “implemented”: the Hollande crowd have developed a unique Wile
E Coyote-style of leaks, technical glitches, last-minute tweaks and
horse-market bargaining whereby almost nobody knows, at any given time, who
will be targeted by the taxman, and how. Unsurprisingly, this is liked by no
one except us reptiles of the press, eager to report on the longest series
of own goals in the history of government communications.<br />
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Take last year’s famous 75 per cent supertax, on individuals earning over one
million euros a month. This has still not been implemented. First, it got
struck down by France’s Constitutional Council on a technicality. Leaks
suggested the rate would fall to 66 per cent. They were confirmed, then
denied. Hollande eventually vowed that the tax would be paid by the targeted
individuals’ employers, for daring to offer such “obscenely” high salaries.
This has just been approved by the National Assembly, and must still pass
the Senate. So far, it is only supposed to apply to 2013 and 2014 income,
but no one knows if the bill will be prolonged, killed or transformed.<br />
<br />
What we do know is that this non-existent (so far) tax has been the clincher
that sent hundreds, possibly thousands of French citizens abroad: not just
“the rich”, whom Hollande, during his victorious campaign, said he
personally “disliked”, and who now are pushing up house prices in South
Kensington and fighting bitterly over the Lycée Charles de Gaulle’s 1,200
new places; but also the ambitious young, who feel that their own country
will turn on them the minute they achieve any measure of personal success.<br />
<br />
In the heart of Paris’s Right Bank, where I live, only foreigners seem to buy
flats, at prices entirely disconnected from reality. In my street, I have
spotted three new Maseratis. Even before seeing their Qatari plates, I knew
they couldn’t belong to local owners: they’re an ostentatious admission of
wealth no one wants to make in Hollande’s France. (A luxury car is one of
the “outward signs of wealth” your tax inspector has been specifically
trained to query. The lesson has been learnt: last year, Rolls-Royce sold no
cars in France.) On the Left Bank, elegant Americans buy bijoux apartments
on place de Furstenberg, at 30,000 euros per square metre, and venture into
the fine Café de Flore for elevenses.<br />
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“It’s not only that people don’t like to be treated like criminals just
because they’re successful,” says a French banker friend who has recently
moved to London. “But this uncertainty in every aspect of the tax system
means it is impossible to do business: you don’t know what your future costs
are, or your customer’s. You can’t buy, you can’t sell, you can’t hire, you
can’t fire.”<br />
<br />
While I’m still happy in Paris, I envy him his surroundings, the vibrancy of
London, the feeling that anything is possible, the sense of fun I remember
from the years I lived there in the Eighties and Nineties, and that I gladly
find again every time I zoom in on the Eurostar. Paris, my city of birth, is
an elegant museum – where any new idea, in any context, seems to be fated to
be shot down by a combination of old, structural conformism and blasé
disenchantment.<br />
<br />
Today, one out of four French university graduates wants to emigrate, “and
this rises to 80 per cent or 90 per cent in the case of marketable degrees”,
says economics professor Jacques Régniez, who teaches at both the Sorbonne
and the University of New York in Prague. “In one of my finance seminars,
every single French student intends to go abroad.”<br />
<br />
“The French workforce is now two-speed,” explains a headhunter who shuttles
between Paris and London. “Among the young, perhaps a third speak English,
are willing to relocate, and want to work. For one thing, their dream
employers are the more prosperous of the large French multinationals, almost
all those in the CAC40 index, who make over half of their profits abroad,
sometimes over 90 per cent – companies like, say, L’Oréal, Schneider or
Danone. This is why French universities have shocked the Académie française
and now teach many courses in English.<br />
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“But I’ve also seen determined young people take jobs in places like Vietnam,
with local contracts and nothing like the level of protection afforded by
French labour law, in order to gain a proper first experience of business in
a competitive environment. And then you have a large group whose ambition is
simply to stay outside the economy.”<br />
<br />
This means a trade-off with which anyone in France is familiar: young people,
and many of their parents, dream of getting any kind of state or local
administration post, usually badly paid, very often frustrating, but which
ensures complete job security, unrelated to the economic situation, the
market, or their own performance.<br />
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More than a quarter of the French workforce is employed by some public body or
other: schools, hospitals, local and regional councils, the police, the
civil service proper – or those new subsidised public-service jobs
the Hollande government is so keen on.<br />
<br />
While the young French generations were aspiring to cocoon themselves away
from the realities of the world, our nearest neighbours were following the
opposite trend. In 2000, under a socialist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder,
German businesses paid an astonishing 51.6 per cent company tax – largely to
pay for the previous decade’s reunification. Today, this is down to 29.8 per
cent, when the French equivalent, the highest in Europe, is 38 per cent. By
2003, Schroeder had embarked on a widespread reform programme, lowering
taxes and drastically slashing benefits, curtailing the influence of the
unions, and eventually reducing German unemployment from 10 per cent to 7
per cent (it’s 11 per cent in France).<br />
<br />
There are many reasons why this wouldn’t work in France, not least because the
French Socialists happen to have noticed that Schroeder and his party
reformed themselves out of a job. Another is that French unions represent
very little: less than 8 per cent of the French workforce overall is
unionised, a figure that falls to between 3 per cent and 5 per cent in the
private sector. Unions do, however, play a mandated part in a number of
negotiation and welfare net structures, the unemployment benefits system,
retraining schemes and the national health and pensions co-administration.
This, not members’ contributions, keeps them afloat. The law also provides
for legal labour dispute fines to be paid to the unions.<br />
<br />
French unions see as their main goal the preservation of the status quo: from
overprotective labour laws that make it so hard to fire employees that
French bosses will do almost anything to avoid hiring new staff (who cost
them a whopping 70 per cent in payroll taxes), to perpetuating antiquated
regulations dating back to Vichy France, banning Sunday trading and evening
shifts.<br />
<br />
Recent union legal actions have forced businesses to close on evenings and
Sundays, from the cosmetics chain Sephora – where employees protested that
they wanted to keep working their late hours – to the British-owned DIY
chain Castorama, which belongs to Kingfisher: no wonder Ian Cheshire,
Kingfisher’s chief executive, complained last Friday that this harmed the
French economy as well as his stores. “The president has said that recovery
is in sight: I’m not sure where he’s looking at the moment. The mood is
improving in the UK, not in France.”<br />
<br />
It wasn’t fated to happen. “By 2000,” says Jacques Régniez, “French
multinationals had achieved a very high level of competitiveness. Having
committed to the strong franc, in the run-up to the euro they were forced to
become lean and efficient. They rationalised production, and French workers
became some of the most productive in the world.” French utilities,
insurers, aerospace makers and luxury-goods conglomerates were up there with
the best. If you wanted the best nuclear plant, crocodile handbag,
commercial aircraft, high-speed train, you bought French.<br />
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What went wrong, says Régniez, was a bill passed by the then socialist Lionel
Jospin government reducing the working week to 35 hours. “Where our
competitors, especially the Germans, saw the need to keep prices and costs
down, France spent money she couldn’t afford.” The entire system, he
explains, tilted fatally to the side of salary hikes, perks and a lowering
of retirement age, in the face of every observable demographic trend.
Investment slowed down in the private sector, and almost stopped in the
public one. “Each year, France has missed out on four GDP points of capital
investment. By now, after a decade-and-a-half, we are not only lagging
behind, it’s not certain we can make up for it. It would cost a 4.5 per cent
hike in VAT, and other significant hikes in payroll taxes. That, quite
simply, is not realistic.”<br />
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Even France’s vaunted infrastructures – those trains, roads, telecoms cables,
the once ultra-performing electrical grid, the nuclear plants, the delayed
4G network – have taken a severe hit.<br />
<br />
A French businessman who moved to London last year and asked not to be quoted
by name, “because my tax audit would be even more retaliatory than what I’m
currently being subjected to”, compares July’s Brétigny train crash,
France’s worst rail disaster in a quarter of a century that killed six and
injured 100, to the Paddington and Potters Bar derailments. “The rolling
stock is ageing, the tracks are in a constant state of disrepair, even the
TGVs now have regular delays because of catenary failure.”<br />
<br />
Despite disputing allegations of negligence, SNCF have said they will
reinforce maintenance “without waiting for the conclusions of the inquiry”.
Criticisms have also been made that vast sums went on salaries, benefits and
pensions.<br />
<br />
But most analysts share the blame between Left- and Right-wing French
governments in the past two decades. An investment banker, who has also
moved to London recently, dates the wrong choices from the first Jacques
Chirac presidency, in 1995. Chirac and his PM Alain Juppé, both Gaullists,
decided to reform the huge French public sector’s pension system, to align
civil servants’ pay-as-you-go pensions, which were (and still are) much more
favourable, with those of the private sector.<br />
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There followed three weeks of hard strikes, shutting down the entire country,
from schools to public transport to utilities and the post office. Juppé was
ready to stick it out, but Chirac blinked. The reform was shelved, and for
the next 12 years he stayed in office, Chirac never, ever tried to clash
with vested interests again.<br />
<br />
Sarkozy had great plans after his 2007 election. He believed in business, and
good pay for hard work, and was devastatingly frank about it. It might –
perhaps – have passed in prosperous times: one year on, the financial crisis
hit, and his brusque style and love of bling clashed with both the times and
age-old French preferences. (France is an old Catholic country that, for
over a century, was influenced by unapologetic Marxism. It is atavistically
hostile to money.) The reforms Sarko managed to pass, much milder than
necessary, still ensured his unpopularity. He bet on French realism, and
lost.<br />
<br />
Realism – actual, real-life realism – is not an accusation you can levy at
Hollande. Like Chirac – who supported him both because of a deep personal
dislike for Sarkozy, and because they are in many ways very similar –
France’s unlikely seventh president of the Fifth Republic is a professional
politician, a graduate of the top government school ENA, and has never held
a job in the private sector. Both Chirac and Hollande come from Corrèze, in
central France, a region that has regularly provided French politics with a
certain type of wily opportunist. Both appear easy-going and friendly, and
both are complete cynics, with very little in the way of ideals, and an
infinite capacity to scheme in order to stay in power.<br />
<br />
Chirac, like Hollande, knew how to cultivate an array of political allies: in
the case of Hollande, this means keeping the Left of his party as well as
his Green allies happy with a number of symbolic measures, from the supertax
to the recent anti-fracking bill.<br />
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Uninterested in the impact of morale and image on politics and the economy,
Hollande believes that the economic cycle is bound to turn (he has said
several times already that the recession is behind us), and that all he’s
got to do is stay in power until things get better – thanks to the Chinese,
the Americans, it hardly matters which. He doesn’t even worry about Marine
Le Pen’s inroads in local elections: a junior aide in the Mitterrand Élysée
25 years ago, he believes the National Front, conjured up by his old boss,
is a convenient accessory designed to split the Right and help him win a
second term in 2017.<br />
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Professor Régniez believes this is very dangerous. “Sarkozy narrowly lost in
2012 for personal reasons – his style annoyed voters who could have agreed
on his policies, but who wanted to punish him: 18 per cent of them voted for
Marine Le Pen, against only 5 per cent for her father in 2007.<br />
<br />
“This should be a warning to other countries, like Britain – it’s all
very well punishing a conservative politician you’re dissatisfied with by
voting for a maverick, Le Pen here, Farage there. But it gets the likes of
Hollande elected. Think well: is ours the kind of future you want for your
country?”<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-90322195857148934052013-10-14T19:57:00.000+01:002013-11-02T02:41:29.614+00:00A corner of Paris that will remain forever seedy<div class="storyHead">
<b>A native Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet laments the loss of charm of her old quartier </b></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="caption">Jacques Chirac can be blamed for the
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></div>
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7:57PM BST 14 Oct 2013</div>
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With its garish shops, escort-girl bars, uncouth and drunk visitors, it is
crowded, stressful, overpriced – and shunned by the French themselves. No,
this isn’t the description of a nastier corner of a banlieue, but rather
Hugh Schofield on Paris’s best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées. And the
French are already furious. <br />
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As a native Parisienne, born exactly 160 yards from the Champs-Élysées, who
still lives round the corner, I have mixed feelings about the place. I know
the crowds, because I hear their drunken arguments under my windows late at
night. And it’s true that the avenue has little more to offer today than
chain stores – H&M, Zara, Adidas, Nike – a few cinemas, and
overpriced cafés where no Parisian would ever set foot.<br />
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True to the BBC’s default position, its Paris correspondent blames Jacques Chirac’s long tenure as mayor for the change;
but he’s wrong. What changed everything was the opening of the RER train
station at the Arc de Triomphe in 1973, four years before Chirac’s election.
Today between 300,000 and half a million people descend every weekend.<br />
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True, Chirac can be blamed for the 1994 “beautification” of the Champs, when
he blew a fortune on widening pavements, buying designer benches and
allowing the cafés to expand. This brought even more people to the area,
drove the rents sky-high, and completed the end of an era.<br />
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This used to be my quartier, a strange ecosystem of elegance and old-style
seediness which had its own charm. I remember, aged 10 and on my way to the
dentist, catching a glimpse of Marlene Dietrich walking along in full
make-up, couture, gloves, and a little hat with a veil, not far from the
Travellers Club (which is still there, barely, in the old palazzo built for
the great Second Empire cocotte, La Païva). Metres away, the side street,
Rue de Ponthieu, so offensive today, was then a row of louche bars with
girls and hoodlums: indeed, several Jean Gabin and Alain Delon movies are
set there.
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In the post-war years, the Champs-Élysées were pure movieland. Darryl Zanuck
was ensconced in the Hotel George V with his lover Juliette Gréco, from
where he produced films such as The Longest Day, thanks to the Marshall Plan
subsidies for European-American co-productions. Every major studio had an
office on the Champs (Paramount was at No 33), and the French and American
film crowd met at Le Fouquet’s long before the man who redefined it in 2007
with his infamous election party – Nicolas Sarkozy – was even born. But in
1975 the Marshall Plan ended, and everyone left, along with the money and
the incentive.<br />
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Today, there’s a McDonald’s where the art bookshop used to be. The bullet
holes from the August 1944 fighting have been filled in on the walls. The
Hôtel de Crillon, recently bought by the Saudi royal family, was the last to
sport its marks proudly, like duelling scars. It is now being refurbished.<br />
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As a child, I rode the Shetland ponies and went to the Guignol puppet show in
the gardens near the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées; shopped for records at
Sinfonia at No 68 and went to see old movie revivals at the Cinéac Élysées,
where you can now find only a row of garish clothes shops with pop music
blaring out on to the street.<br />
<br />
Sadly, I bear some responsibility for the destruction. Back in 1932, my
great-uncle Léonard started the rot when he had the first commercial
building ever built on the Champs-Élysées, at No 116. It was a daring piece
of Cubist architecture by an associate of Le Corbusier, the facade
zig-zagging at straight angles: it created a scandal in its time, and for
generations was a matter of pride in the family. No longer.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-51967910813192281582013-08-22T20:14:00.000+01:002013-11-02T02:44:59.016+00:00Hands off our baguettes, you half-baked Anglo-Saxons <div class="storyHead">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
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The dreaded Anglo-Saxons are French-bashing again – and this time, they’re
after our very bread. Stirred from their mid-August torpor, Libération and
Le Figaro are shocked, shocked that The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal and even, I’m ashamed to say, The Daily Telegraph have mistaken a
perfectly reasonable campaign to encourage people to keep buying bread, of
the kind that the Milk Marketing Board puts on for dairy products at regular
intervals, for an admission of nothing less than the death of the proper
French baguette. Cue a denunciation of the “deplorable trend in the
Anglo-Saxon media to disparage France on just any old pretext”, which “seems
to have intensified in recent months”.<br />
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The charges are these. French people buy far less bread than 50 years ago,
because they’re richer and more diet-conscious. Even when they do, they have
the gall to fork out for the wrong kind. These Anglo-Saxon “experts” tell us
that une baguette pas trop cuite – as I regularly request from my excellent
bakery on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré – is in fact a travesty of what your
proper crusty baguette should be like. It’s not been baked enough. It’s
white, doughy, soggy, tasteless. It is, as Monty Python would say, an
ex-baguette.<br />
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To which I answer: “Piffle!” The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all
differ depending on the baker. You patronise the one whose product you like
best. And the sheer gall of trying to compare any kind of French baguette –
not least the heavenly petits pains served in Michelin-rosetted restaurants
such as Ducasse or Arpège – to the terrifying, sickly hued, sugared-up,
watered-down, plastic-wrapped, rubber-like objects that pass for bread in
Britain or America makes my temper rise like Poilâne sourdough.<br />
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Even the figures implying an inexorable decline in the baguette consumption
are as cherrypicked as a political party broadcast’s. Yes, the number of
bakeries has gone down from 54,000 in 1950 to 32,000 today. But the number
of bakers has risen slightly, to 160,000. This isn’t attrition: it’s
consolidation.</div>
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I know this because of a recent report by the French senate on l’industrie
boulangère. It exists because the state of our bread is a national matter,
and has been for a very long time. We French apply to breadmaking the
perfectionism the Japanese put into cars.
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From the first price controls and regulations as to what constitutes lawful
bread – passed under Charlemagne at the very beginning of the ninth century
– to the bread shortages that sparked the French Revolution, “bread” in our
wheat-growing country has really meant “food”. That’s why it was so
devastating when Marie-Antoinette was falsely accused of quipping: “If they
don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” When the king and his family were
forced from Versailles to Paris in July 1789, the mob’s joyous cry was: “We
have brought back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy.”<br />
<br />
For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in
1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is
happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to
buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16:
Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)<br />
<br />
To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a
holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open
per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a
vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way
of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions
such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of
a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any
time soon.
<br />
I wonder why that is?<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span><br />
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-29731588091094147872013-06-15T13:40:00.000+01:002013-06-28T22:43:52.291+01:00France prefers subsidy to égalité<div class="storyHead">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">Competition is a dirty word in France. It threatens the privileges of state
employees, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="caption">Do French unions have too much power? Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates on F24.</span></span><br />
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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1:40PM BST 15 Jun 2013</div>
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<br />
As the French rail strike followed the French air traffic controllers’ work
stoppages last week, and tens of thousands of passengers and commuters saw
their plans disrupted, it became a point of perverse pride for French
commentators to deny that anything was very much amiss. The government, we
were told, wasn’t really unhappy with the popular message being sent to
Brussels, whether on the Single Sky Initiative, or the (very slow) opening
of the French railways to free competition. In fact, it was felt at the
Élysée that François Hollande, a man who doesn’t come equipped with a
handbag, would only find his negotiating stance against too-fast reforms
strengthened by this visible expression of national hostility.<br />
<br />
British public opinion sees the EU as a source of Byzantine regulations
hampering free trade. A large cross-section of the French are incensed by
what they see as the European Commission’s Anglo-Saxon-tainted liberal
economists and free-marketeers attacking the myriad privileges and
protections that make the life of those happy enough to benefit from them so
comfortable.<br />
<br />
Competition is often a dirty word in France: never more than when it threatens
to disrupt “avantages acquis” (acquired advantages), the gold-plated
benefits a group of (usually) public employees has managed to have enshrined
in contractual agreements. For years, among the various bonuses that can
double an SNCF railwayman’s salary, was a “prime de charbon” (coal
allowance), finally cancelled long after the last steam engine was retired.
Pension age starts at 50 (soon 52) for train drivers and 55 for most other
personnel.<br />
<br />
Similarly, the 300,000 employees of EDF, the nominally privatised national
electricity utility (the French State still owns 85 per cent of its equity)
enjoy subsidised meals, holidays, cultural events, housing, as well as huge
discounts on their power bills, lifetime employment, and early retirement
provided for by a pension fund separate from the cash-strapped national
system. Most of these perks are managed in-house by a committee dominated by
CGT, the Communist union, on a €500 million budget funded by a statutory 1
per cent contribution of the company’s turnover. As a result, EDF, a
multinational corporation of recognised excellence, turns only nominal
profits compared with its competitors.<br />
<br />
It hurts to lose these benefits, which explains why the French public sector
strikes so often and so fiercely. The paradox is that apart from the quarter
of the French workforce employed by the bloated French state, almost no one
else in France belongs to a union – only 7 per cent of the 22.3
million-strong workforce do. Yet because the role of the unions is enshrined
in French labour laws, the country’s main union representatives are party to
all government negotiations on social reform – with predictably intransigent
results.<br />
<br />
Since 1979, when Giscard d’Estaing’s then PM, Raymond Barre, a no-nonsense
professor of economics, tried to go blood, sweat and tears on the French
after the second oil crunch, and lost, the mantra in Paris has been
negotiation, negotiation, negotiation. Less than two years later, Ronald
Reagan broke a lockdown with striking American air-traffic controllers by
firing every one of them, and replacing them by requisitioning their
military counterparts. The French still haven’t recovered from such a
terrifying spectacle. The only prime minister to try to hold firm against a
public service general strike, Alain Juppé, had to cave in ignominiously
after two months in 1995, and his boss Jacques Chirac lost a general
election just 18 months later. In short, courage doesn’t pay in France.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, François Hollande doesn’t want to consider such extremes. For
one thing, all this week’s strikers are his natural constituents: the last
group of socialist voters in France are government employees. Teachers will,
in all likelihood, stay with him, but train or air-traffic workers could
succumb to Marine Le Pen and her populist, anti-Brussels,
anti-“international finance” stance –or the increasingly similar-sounding
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the extreme-Left leader.<br />
<br />
France’s socialists have had no New Labour conversion in which they officially
renounced Marxist ideology. Hollande declares himself to be a social
democrat in private, or abroad; but denies it frantically in public. As a
result, a strange parody of class war will continue here for the foreseeable
future, defending privileges instead of fighting them, led by unions
representing little more than their own apparatchiks.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-25025501000338886572013-06-02T07:00:00.000+01:002013-11-02T02:59:36.403+00:00Like her French, Camilla's visit was 'formidable'<div class="storyHead">
<b>The Duchess truly charmed us on her first solo trip
abroad, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</b></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="caption">A member of staff shows the Duchess of Cornwall around the Louvre Museum</span> <span class="credit">Photo: AFP/GETTY</span></span></i></div>
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span>, Paris</div>
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7:00AM BST 02 Jun 2013</div>
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There was something delightfully pre-celebrity about the Duchess of Cornwall’s
visit to Paris last week. For one thing, most of us knew nothing about it.
Nice middle-aged English lady takes train; goes to charity shop; has a slice
or two of saucisson in the Boulevard Raspail street market; nips into Dior
to be shown fairy-tale size-zero dresses into which neither she nor any of
her entourage has a hope of fitting; takes in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre;
looks at horses; and rounds up proceedings with a drinks do at the British
Embassy and a cosy dinner with friends. This is firmly <i>Don’t Tell Alfred</i>
territory, belonging in those earlier times when France was a kind of sunny
hinterland for Mitford sisters of the not-enough-married (Nancy) or
too-married (Diana, Lady Mosley) variety.<br />
<br />
Non-Royal reporters here in France (that’s everyone except Paris Match and
Gala) remained in blissful oblivion of this event: the first solo visit by
the future British Queen abroad. Camilla – we call her just “Camilla”, just
as France Soir in its 1960s heyday chronicled the ups and downs of “Tony et
Margaret” (Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) – hopped off her Eurostar at
Gare du Nord with very little fracas, and with her pared-down entourage,
went largely unremarked in the streets until she was called upon to perform.<br />
<br />
She sent off a bike expedition for Help for Heroes from the grand courtyard of
the Invalides, and made a short speech in excellent but accented French at
the Communauté d’Emmaüs at Bougival, West Paris. Like her mother-in-law,
although perhaps more approachably, she showed perfect, smiling courtesy
throughout. But you could tell she really felt in her element with the Garde
Républicaine horses, their riders, even their farriers. (How many Gardes
Républicains does it take to shoe a horse? Three – one to hold the horse,
one to hammer the red-hot shoe, one to speak to Camilla, carefully omitting
that Napoleon is buried next door.)<br />
<br />
The visit couldn’t have been better calibrated to French sensibilities. Emmaüs
UK, the charity of which the Duchess is a patron, is a 1990s-created
offshoot of perhaps France’s best-loved movement, founded in the immediate
post-war years by a Catholic priest and former Resistance member from Lyon,
Abbé Pierre, who relinquished his MP seat to take up the defence of the
homeless in a country still scarred by the war and under rationing edicts.
Until his death in 2007, Abbé Pierre regularly polled at the top of a list
of France’s most-liked personalities. Emmaüs, which concentrates on giving
the destitute a place to live and to work, is a kind of French Oxfam, with
low overheads: no glittering fundraisers or expensive headquarters.<br />
<br />
As the Duchess visited one of the Emmaüs thrift shops, the British ambassador,
Sir Peter Ricketts, made a point of buying her a pretty, rectangular
Cartier-lookalike watch, a snip at 10 euros. This was no Chinese fake, but
bore the name of the defunct Lip watchmakers, France’s only would-be
workers’ commune back in the 1970s. If intended, this was an elegant
historical reference and a dream diplomatic gesture, appreciated by anyone
in François Hollande’s Socialist government: a Lip watch bought at Emmaüs is
worth 10,000 social- conscience cred points.<br />
<br />
In short, in terms of easing the Duchess into her next big part, you could say
the visit was a real low-key success. The French, like the rest of the
world, had happily gone Diana-mad in the 1980s and 1990s. Following Charles
and Diana’s state visit to Paris for this newspaper in 1988, I well recall
the crowds, the press photographers in their dozens, the breathless segments
opening the evening news. We got Diana at the Elysée with François
Mitterrand, and Diana at the Hôtel de Ville with Mayor Chirac (a
presidential hopeful at the time, he was very keen on the reflected
glamour), and the reception at Versailles with former president Giscard
d’Estaing (who would much later write a rather silly self-insertion roman à
clef in which he had an affair with the princess). It was all about the
bling.<br />
<br />
Last week’s Paris trip was pretty much the exact opposite of that (no novels
in the offing, I suspect), so much in fact that no one even thought of
bringing up comparisons. Characteristically, when she posed in front of the
Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Duchess made sure that she wasn’t obscuring
Leonardo’s picture on the photographs (“Can’t have that!”) – this wasn’t
going to be a Taj Mahal photo-op.<br />
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When Sidney Toledano, the CEO of Dior – and the man who personally fired the
most famous Briton in French fashion, John Galliano, two years ago – showed
Camilla around the present-day ateliers and the New Look frocks of the Dior
museum, nobody mentioned that Dior had named a handbag after Diana (her
ubiquitous Lady D quilted bag). Instead, everyone made much of the Duchess’s
charming second-hand raffia clutch, a novelty item with no pretensions to
It-ness, embroidered with the word “Paris”.<br />
<br />
Nor did French fashion writers make anything of her Anna Valentine outfits –
although the online comments sections weren’t always as charitable: a floaty
printed dress worn with a sharply-tailored mustard jacket passed muster; so
did a classic Burberry trenchcoat; the dowdyish coat-dresses (“housecoats!”)
didn’t.<br />
<br />
This didn’t matter. In today’s depressed climate, France is nursing what feels
like the mother of all Eurozone hangovers: right now, the nation can take
neither overbearing First Girlfriends with a waspish line in tweets, nor
size-zero princesses in 5in nude heels and look-at-me clothes. The French
are notorious for being coldly, elegantly uncomfortable, but right now they
are atypically amenable to a bit of cosiness – and Camilla looked cosy all
right, especially as she didn’t really need a refashioned image in the first
place.<br />
<br />
We are tolerant of affaires de coeur. We never really held Charles’s
infidelity against him to begin with. In fact, one of Gérard Depardieu’s
best movies, Bertrand Blier’s award-winning <i>Trop Belle Pour Toi</i>
(1989), described a rather similar set-up, with the Depardieu character
neglecting his high-maintenance, beautiful wife, the former Bond girl Carole
Bouquet, for the homely but warm Josiane Balasko. We gave it a slew of
Césars (the French Oscars) and the Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes.<br />
<br />
With no monarchy in our own country, the French like kings and queens abroad.
And while we require a great deal of majesty from our presidents – the Fifth
Republic, after all, was tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specifications;
it’s one of François Hollande’s many political mistakes that he described
himself as the “normal” president – we prefer, all things considered, the
more relaxed type in neighbouring nations.<br />
<br />
The one reigning French citizen is the Prince Consort of Denmark, Henri de
Laborde de Monpezat, husband to Queen Margrethe, and for years the Danish
royal couple have spent family holidays in South-West France with minimum
fuss. The French see the Queen herself as a grandmother and an animal lover
(yes, we do like animals: one of the longest-running television programmes
here is a much-loved show on pets called 30 Millions d’Amis), as well as a
kind of monument. An extraordinary constant over the years.<br />
<br />
On present form, Camilla seems well placed to ease herself, almost by stealth,
into solid monumenthood.
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-77639087362138593772013-05-02T19:31:00.000+01:002013-06-28T22:04:52.027+01:00Mr Normal has become the Pitiful President<div class="storyHead">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">One year in, François Hollande has alienated most voters, antagonised Angela Merkel, driven droves of French into exile and presided over a worsening economy. <b>Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</b> reports.</span></i></span>
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<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="caption">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates the Cahuzac scandal rocking the Hollande presidency.</span></span></i></div>
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7:31PM BST 02 May 2013</div>
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With hindsight, it seems as if François Hollande’s troubles started the day he
was inaugurated, on May 15 2012. First he was drenched by a surprise storm
as his open Citroën drove up the Champs-Elysées. Then, the very same day,
his Falcon plane was hit by lightning on the way to Berlin, where he was
scheduled to meet Angela Merkel – making it possibly the first and last time
the German Chancellor has felt unreserved sympathy for him.<br />
<br />
The new president had to turn back before travelling to Berlin in another
aircraft. When he got there – in more pouring rain – he missed a turn on the
airfield red carpet while reviewing German troops, and had to be steered
back in the right direction by Mrs Merkel’s firm grip on his elbow, a moment
that presciently symbolised their future relationship.<br />
<br />
And everything went downhill from there.<br />
<br />
One year later, the man who had billed himself as the “normal president”
during his victorious campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy is breaking records
for unpopularity. With 75 per cent against him, Hollande is scoring the
lowest approval ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since the
country started conducting polls. Unemployment has risen by 11.5 per cent
since his election, reaching an all-time high of 3.2 million. An estimated
150,000 young people have left the country in search of better prospects
abroad: the only jobs created in France have been in the public sector,
usually in fields such as teaching that are solidly controlled by Socialist
voters.<br />
<br />
Despite a widely touted “austerity” drive, public spending stands at 57 per
cent of GDP – the figure in Britain is 45 per cent – and the country’s
public debt is about to reach 94 per cent of GDP. The largest street
demonstrations since 1984 – when the country also had a Socialist president,
François Mitterrand – have brought more than a million people on to the
streets of Paris on two occasions (and more are planned), to protest against
justice minister Christiane Taubira’s new law on gay marriage and adoption:
given that France is a fairly tolerant society, these were effectively a
street referendum against Hollande.<br />
<br />
France’s very visible spat with Germany is a good example of how Hollande
manages to make a bad situation worse. It is hardly new for French and
German governments to disagree on economic issues; nor is it unusual that
its leaders belong to different political parties. Yet, mindful of the
European leverage afforded by the French-German axis, Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing, a conservative, was excellent friends with the Social Democrat
Helmut Schmidt, while the Socialist Mitterrand spoke in almost Gaullian
terms of his German counterpart, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. Even
Jacques Chirac never clashed with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the way he
did (as PM) with Margaret Thatcher.<br />
<br />
Hollande, however, still seems to manage France the way he managed rival
“currents” during his long tenure as Socialist Party leader, trying to play
one against the other while trying to keep everyone happy by granting them
some sort of concession. This was in evidence at last year’s European
summit, where instead of sitting down with Mrs Merkel to hammer out a viable
compromise, he tried to rustle up an alliance with Spain and Italy behind
her back, thinking this would be enough to counter the German position.<br />
<br />
“This may work in Corrèze [Hollande’s constituency in central France]; it
doesn’t in the real world,” a French diplomat commented at the time. “At the
end of the day, the Germans were annoyed, the French line was all but absent
from the final communiqué – and Mrs Merkel and David Cameron found
themselves in closer alliance than they’d ever been.”<br />
<br />
Recently, a trio of ministers including the flamboyant Arnaud Montebourg,
minister for industrial recovery, started making increasingly belligerent
statements about “German-imposed austerity”, accusing Mrs Merkel of
“egotistical intransigence” and calling for “a democratic confrontation with
Germany”, without being taken to task by the president.
<br />
It didn’t take long for Mrs Merkel’s entourage, who are much savvier in the
ways of French politics than the French are about Berlin affairs, to
counterleak a memo – plausibly produced by the Chancellor’s coalition
partners, the Free Democrats – on France being “Europe’s biggest problem
child”, with a stalled economy and a “meandering” reform programme. Mrs
Merkel then gave a perfunctory denial that she thought anything of the kind.<br />
<br />
The truth is that she is incensed with Hollande, not least because of her
growing conviction that the French president and his spin doctors allowed
the German-bashing because they felt that it would displace domestic
dissatisfaction with Hollande on to Germany.<br />
<br />
Even the notoriously complacent French press is now giving the president a
hard time. “Is 'GrandPa’ [one of Hollande’s mildest nicknames] really up to
it?” asked the news magazine L’Express on a recent cover. Le Point called
him “Monsieur Faible” – Mr Weak – after Hollande confessed that he hadn’t
believed the economic crisis would “last so long”.<br />
<br />
No relief was to be expected after the announcement yesterday that Arnaud
Montebourg had scuppered a deal by which Yahoo had agreed to acquire 75 per
cent of Dailymotion, a successful French internet video site, valuing it at
$300 million. “Yahoo wants to devour Dailymotion, but we told them no and
that it had to be a 50:50 split,” the avowedly anti-American Montebourg
boasted to Europe 1 radio. Whereupon Yahoo called the whole thing off.<br />
<br />
Similar grandstanding by Montebourg had already driven the Indian tycoon
Lakshmi Mittal from the Florange steelworks in Lorraine, and the American
company Titan International from a floundering Goodyear tyre plant in
northern France.<br />
<br />
“The country is drowning in an ocean of discouragement,” said Christophe
Barbier, the influential editor of L’Express. “It’s not just the
tax-avoiding rich, artists like Gérard Depardieu, businessmen – everyone is
now tempted to leave for a better life elsewhere. Young people feel they
will never get a break, a job, a sign of trust. Entrepreneurs have to fend
off red tape, rising costs and levies.”<br />
<br />
In April, to add to this toxic climate, came the Cahuzac scandal: France’s
budget minister, the man in charge of fighting tax fraud, was revealed to
have a secret bank account in Switzerland – and in all likelihood another in
Singapore – and to have lied to the president and parliament about it.<br />
<br />
In the past week, polls have given Marine Le Pen, the far-Right National Front
leader, record numbers in a hypothetical presidential election – 23 per
cent, well above Hollande at 19 per cent, while Sarkozy scored 34 per cent.
Were Sarkozy to stand, he would beat Le Pen easily in the second round but
the talk in France has been of the dangers of Fascism, beginning with the
very real distrust of all politicians and of the ruling class.<br />
<br />
It says a lot about Hollande’s tin ear that he chose that very moment to
compel ministers to disclose their personal assets, arguing for the virtues
of “transparency” against corruption. This may work in the United States,
where personal success is admired: but in France, a country where
unregenerated Marxist thought still largely holds sway, overlaying a
centuries-old Catholic mistrust of money, it prompted Claude Bartolone, the
Socialist Speaker of the National Assembly, who is fighting suggestions of a
similar obligation for MPs, to talk of “voyeurism and envy”.<br />
<br />
Embattled in the Élysée Palace, where at times it seems his only remaining
supporter is his partner Valérie Trierweiler – a woman so unpopular that
Hollande has to fend off unpleasant remarks about her during his rare
walkabouts – the president is now mulling a cabinet reshuffle as a way of
signalling to the French that he has taken their displeasure on board.<br />
<br />
But whom to choose to replace his weak prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, a
former German language teacher? The 2007 Socialist presidential candidate,
Ségolène Royal, is unacceptable to Mme Trierweiler. The former Socialist
leader Martine Aubry, Jacques Delors’s daughter and the artisan of the rigid
35-hour working week, may be unacceptable to Mrs Merkel. François
Mitterrand’s former PM, Laurent Fabius, now the foreign minister, is
hampered by having just been revealed to be the richest man in the Cabinet.
<br />
Hollande’s instinct is probably to try to trundle along with the same tired
team. His latest attempt to show that the presidency is doing its part to
relieve the public debt has been to announce that he will sell part of its
cellar of fine wines, lovingly accrued since the Vincent Auriol presidency
in 1947.<br />
<br />
On May 30 and 31, 2,200-euro bottles of 1990 Pétrus and Château d’Yquem will
be auctioned off, “to be replaced by more modest vintages”, according to the
president. So speaks a self-proclaimed modest man, who may be feeling that
he has a lot to be modest about.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-75487984640241051502013-02-21T20:27:00.000+00:002013-02-24T21:18:19.580+00:00Titan boss Maurice Taylor says it's a hard job getting the French to work<div class="storyHead">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">A row with Maurice Taylor, the US tycoon behind Titan tyres, shows how
employment and tax laws in France keep the idle in busine<span style="font-size: small;">ss</span>, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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If Maurice “Morrie the Grizz” Taylor didn’t exist, François Hollande’s
embattled socialist government would have tried to invent him. Just when the
government’s bluff was being called over France’s unrealistic growth
predictions by the EU (finance minister Pierre Moscovici kept promising 0.8
per cent for 2013 until Tuesday, when incontrovertible European figures
forced Hollande to admit that it will be much closer to zero), here comes
the textbook Ugly American from Illinois, boss of the Titan tyre firm,
thwarted in his dastardly aim to lay off French workers from an ailing tyre
factory he was hoping to acquire, now spitting venomous slurs at the entire
French working population<span style="font-size: small;">.</span><br />
<br />
Cue, on all news channels, the perfect Two Minutes’ Hate (more like two days
so far) in which everyone — union reps, party leaders, the commentariat —
bemoans in touching unison the gall of this unreconstructed, boo-hiss
Anglo-Saxon Reaganite, who, in a letter to Arnaud Montebourg, the minister
for industrial renewal, asked: “Titan is the one with the money and the
talent to produce tyres. What does the crazy union have? It has the French
government.” Taylor added: “The French workforce gets paid high wages but
only works three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for
three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their
faces. They told me that’s the French way!”<br />
<br />
The letter was leaked within hours to a business daily. Montebourg, a former
militant barrister whose grandstanding habit had been curtailed for a couple
of months after he insulted Lakshmi Mittal for wanting to close loss-making
steel furnaces in Lorraine, grabbed the opportunity to get back into the
limelight. He claimed in an open response to Taylor that “the entire French
population had been grievously insulted”, and listed the many American
industrial investors who managed to make do with France’s 35-hour week and
strict labour laws.<br />
<br />
Morrie the Grizz has in fact given a free-spending, high-taxing government the
perfect moment to bury more bad news. Intent on reversing Nicolas Sarkozy’s
reforms, Hollande has already rescinded the very timid pensions change in
which retirement age had been pushed, with exceptions, from 60 to 62. Ditto
for a mild attempt to curtail the comforts of a Socialist-voting public
sector that employs a quarter of the labour force: to fight chronic
absenteeism, Sarkozy had instituted a day without pay before civil servants
would be paid for sick days. Civil service minister Marylise Lebranchu
announced yesterday that it was reversed, in an interview with the newspaper
that had published Maurice Taylor’s letter.<br />
<br />
Consider that two of the best-selling books in the past decade were Bonjour
paresse (“Hello, Laziness”) by Corinne Maier, employed by the largely
state-owned utility EDF, in which she rolled out a number of clever
strategies to do the least work at the office, and Absolument dé-bor-dée!
(“Li-ter-al-ly Snowed Under!”) by Zoé Shepard, a civil servant who vividly
described her experiences in the Aquitaine administration of “how to work 35
hours in the month”, from sick day competitions to misappropriation of
expenses<span style="font-size: small;"></span>.<br />
<br />
These books sold well because they rang a familiar bell. The French are used
to long queues at one counter at the Post Office while three more people
behind closed desks carry on private conversations. And don’t try to call
someone for business between 12.45 and 2.30pm in Paris. Every time the
notion of opening up Sunday trading is mooted, an alliance of family
associations and unions kills off the attempt with pieties about “the family
day”, no matter that Sunday sales sometimes exceed half the week’s takings
in stores (like Ikea) that, with staff support, brave the law and pay the
fines. As for the 25 mandatory days of paid annual vacation, no one, Left or
Right, has suggested that they should be reduced.<br />
<br />
Yet once you get them into the workplace, the French can be efficient,
competent and hard-working: 2011 OECD productivity figures show them coming
first in Europe at $57.70 per working hour, ahead of the Germans at $55.80,
and of the British at $47.20. No wonder: labour is expensive (payroll levies
amount to 65 per cent of total salary outlay) and stringent employment laws
make it difficult and costly to fire anyone. A French boss will wait to
breaking point before he will hire anyone – and in the meantime that
production will have been automated to quasi-Japanese standards with the
best robots extant: machines, unlike people, are not subject to employment
taxes. The losers are the young, the over-50s, and anyone who’s had the
mischance to fall off the protected ship of the full-time employed.
Structural unemployment, even in boom years, has very rarely fallen below 8
per cent. It exceeds 11 per cent today, and almost all of those claiming the
dole would have welcomed the opportunity to work for Morrie the Grizz.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-45617074027079296642012-12-17T20:31:00.000+00:002013-02-24T21:29:11.347+00:00France warms to Gérard Depardieu, the heroic exile<div class="storyHead">
<b>Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, may come to regret insulting the
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Asterix and Obelix have deserted Gaul. Or at least the two actors who played
them in three blockbuster movies have. With Gérard “Obelix” Depardieu’s
much-trumpeted exile to Belgium last week, following Christian “Asterix”
Clavier’s move to London in October, France has lost her best-known
fictional heroes, undefeated by Julius Caesar’s legions, but vanquished by
François Hollande’s punitive new 75 per cent top marginal income tax rate,
recently hiked capital gains tax, and reinforced wealth tax<span style="font-size: x-small;">.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span>The symbolism has not been lost on the French. When France’s richest man,
Bernard Arnault, the CEO and main shareholder of the luxury behemoth LVMH,
applied for Belgian citizenship last August, it was easy for Socialists to
paint him as an unpatriotic, despicable fat cat. “Get lost, you rich
b------” blasted a headline on the front page of Libération, the Left-wing
daily, effectively capturing the national mood.<br />
<br />
But Depardieu is a vastly different proposition from a wealthy tycoon and
former asset-stripper whose children’s weddings warrant 10-page spreads in
society magazines. When Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s prime minister,
contemptuously called him “a pathetic loser”, Depardieu shot back with an
open letter published on Sunday. “I was born in 1948,” he wrote, “I started
working aged 14, as a printer, as a warehouseman, then as an actor, and I’ve
always paid my taxes.” Over 45 years, Depardieu said, he had paid
145 million euros in tax, and to this day employs 80 people. Last year he
paid taxes amounting to 85 per cent of his income. “I am neither worthy of
pity nor admirable, but I shall not be called 'pathetic’,” he concluded,
saying that he was sending back his French passport.<br />
<br />
For a few hours, the government spin doctors thought the French, whose
deep mistrust of money is rooted in a dual heritage of Catholicism and
unreconstructed Marxism, would join in the public shaming. It did not
happen. An online poll conducted by the popular Le Parisien tabloid showed
almost 70 per cent supporting the country’s wayward son and poster boy for
glorious political incorrectness.<br />
<br />
Depardieu has lit up on Jonathan Ross’s show (and growlingly ground his
cigarette stub into the studio carpet after a heated exchange); has urinated
in an overflowing plastic bottle on an Air France plane after being refused
permission to use the loo; has kicked the fenders off an offending car which
had crowded him in a Paris street; once peed (not on purpose) on the leg of
a Deauville policeman who asked for an autograph in a car park; has punched
countless paparazzi on three continents; and over the years has managed to
alienate many fellow stars with the kind of blunt talk no luvvie would ever
utter. “She has nothing, I can’t even comprehend how she made 50 movies,” he
once said of Juliette Binoche.<br />
<br />
Depardieu is excessive in every way, but he’s never been a hypocrite: there
have been no stints in rehab after one too many drunken brawls; no staged
acts of contrition at any moment of his chaotic private life; no
tabloid-monitored diets or fitness regimes. A working-class boy with no
formal training but a miraculous gift for bringing to life the most complex
nuances of almost every character he has played, he manages to make the
classics as accessible as Asterix. He has made over 170 movies and given
memorable stage performances – his Tartuffe, the protagonist of Molière’s
eponymous play, ranks up there with Louis Jouvet’s historic 1950
performance, exposing the vulnerability and vertiginous loss of control of a
devout hypocrite usually played for laughs. He makes his own wine from his
own vineyards, owns two restaurants, has written cookbooks of hearty
traditional French cuisine. He is, perhaps, a compendium of what the French
most aspire to be, taken to epic heights.<br />
<br />
He’s been an amnesiac Napoleonic colonel under the Bourbon kings (Le Colonel
Chabert); the Provençal peasant ruined by the drought in Jean de Florette;
Cyrano de Bergerac on stage and screen; Christopher Columbus for Ridley
Scott; Reynaldo in Branagh’s Hamlet. He has worked with Bertolucci, Ang Lee
(in Life of Pi), Godard, Resnais, Handke, Truffaut, Wajda, Weir; he’s been
Jean Valjean and Rasputin. In short, he is a monument, and he is very
difficult to hate.<br />
<br />
I remember seeing him at a Cannes film festival party, more than 20 years ago,
given in a villa on the hills by Premiere magazine when it was edited by the
magnificent Michèle Halberstadt. It was raining violently, the music was
blaring in every room of the house, and alone in the sodden garden, in the
middle of a waterlogged flowerbed, drenched, his face to the starless sky,
like an Easter Island statue, was Depardieu, howling at the cloud-veiled
moon. Now that he is settling in an 800,000-euro Walloon house less than a
mile from the French border, I can imagine him howling in just the same way
at the Hollande crowd and assorted spin doctors. He won’t let them forget
him.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-52907413834954583482012-12-09T07:00:00.000+00:002013-02-24T21:51:31.421+00:00Arnaud Montebourg: France's love-hate relationship with 'the madman on the third floor' <div class="storyHead">
<b>He is the firebrand minister who told Indian industrialist Lakshmi Mittal that
he was "not welcome in France". He is also the surprising new hero
of the Left, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes.
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He is the grandly-named and grandstanding "minister for productive
economic recovery" - an outcome which France, and Francois Hollande's
struggling Socialist government, sorely needs<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>.</b></span><br />
<br />
But to say that all is not well with Arnaud Montebourg, a firebrand and
populist left-winger who opposes most of the features of a modern economy,
would be an understatement of equally grandiose proportions<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>.</b></span><br />
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And the fact that this weekend he remains - just - in his post indicates the
confusion at the heart of the French government<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>.</b></span><br />
<br />
Last weekend Montebourg, 50, had almost resigned; on Wednesday he was very
nearly fired by Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, who gave him a sharp
dressing down in front of group of goggle-eyed Socialist MPs.<br />
<br />
Only the previous week, he'd been dumped by his high-profile girlfriend,
Audrey Pulvar, a television personality who let him know by a text message
she sent Agence France Presse.<br />
<br />
Speculation on the beautiful Miss Pulvar's reasons for deciding to end their
very public affair is rife, but everyone in France is well-aware of how
Montebourg ended in the political doghouse.<br />
<br />
A former crusading lawyer who built up popular support on the left of the
Socialist party, and beyond, for his anti-corruption, anti-globalisation
views, Montebourg drew international ire and national dismay for his
response to industrial negotiations on the possible closure of the
loss-making Lorraine steelworks at Florange.<br />
<br />
He proclaimed that their owner, the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, was "not
welcome in France" – where Mittal still employs some 20,000 people in
many other locations<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>.</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b> </b></span>Coupled with a threat - now seemingly abandoned - of "temporary"
nationalisation, in a style not unlike the General Motors bailout, of the
Florange steelworks, this gave out a strong echo of the last time a
Socialist government took over in France: more than 30 years ago, in 1981,
when President François Mitterrand's Socialist-Communist cabinet decided to
nationalise banks and large industrial corporations.<br />
<br />
This is not the impression Hollande, and especially Ayrault (who happens to
have a Mittal plant in his own Loire Atlantique constituency) want to make
on the financial markets.<br />
<br />
Until now they have kept lending to France at exceptionally reasonable rates -
a smidgeon under 2 per cent for 10-year bonds, despite the recent downgrade
from AAA-rating by Moody's that followed a similar move from Standard &
Poors in January.<br />
<br />
In the almost seven months since he took office, Hollande has acquired a
reputation for economic shilly-shallying: hefty tax increases on business
were almost immediately followed by tax breaks, for instance, while an
announced 60 per cent capital gains tax for start-up entrepreneurs was
rescinded after a few days of furious Tea-Party style Facebook campaigning
by opponents. But so far this has not been punished internationally, even
though it has translated domestically into the worst poll ratings of any
president of the Fifth Republic since 1962.<br />
<br />
Ayrault was of a mind to let Montebourg go, supported – even egged on – by
Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, who in theory is Montebourg's boss,
but in practice has been frequently outshone by the figure referred to by
many at the ministry's mammoth futuristic pile on rue de Bercy as "the
madman on the third floor".<br />
<br />
Their partnership is hardly a meeting of minds: Moscovici, a former European
affairs minister under Lionel Jospin 10 years ago, is of a moderate
Social-Democrat bent: pro-European integration, pro-business. Montebourg, by
contrast, voted No in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution and
would block the import of goods from countries without social welfare
provision.<br />
<br />
"Mosco" had loathed Montebourg's ideas from the start, but things
rapidly became personal as well.<br />
<br />
After the election, but before the finance team had moved into Bercy - the
name by which the ministry is known - back in May, Moscovici was forced to
adjudicate on territorial disputes caused by Montebourg.<br />
<br />
The office of the finance minister himself is traditionally on the sixth
floor. Montebourg tried to dislodge the budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac,
from the floor below, at the same time as attempting to appropriate the
parking space in the courtyard assigned to the foreign trade secretary,
Nicole Bricq.<br />
<br />
In both cases Montebourg's machinations failed and he ended up, fuming, on the
third floor, even further down the building than the minister for tourism
and trade secretary, Sylvia Pinel. Tempers have only deteriorated over the
following seven months, while the country's economic and political
governance has given an impression of endless flip-flopping.<br />
<br />
This may sound more like<i> </i>Big Brother on steroids than proper political
disputes, but it's emblematic of the confusion reigning under François
Hollande.<br />
<br />
France's president made a lifelong career, as regional politician and party
boss, of being a master of compromise, conciliating the Socialist Party's
various "currents" by granting favours and advantages according to
precisely-calibrated assessment of weight within Hollande's view of the
ideal political balance at any given time.<br />
<br />
Hollande is very much aware that a majority of his Socialist base likes
Montebourg's flamboyance, even his gaffes – which they see as speaking truth
to powerful interests. In the Mittal crisis, some polls found up to 63 per
cent of French opinion supporting Montebourg's stance.<br />
<br />
Unlike the German SDP or Britain's New Labour, the French Socialists have
never formally renounced Marxist theory, and even the name "social
democrat" remains a political insult in many quarters.<br />
<br />
And this is before taking into account the sensibilities of the myriad parties
to the left of the Socialists – the Greens, three small Trostkyite parties,
the rump of the once-mighty French Communist Party, and a couple more tiny
splinters – whose votes, added up, ensured Hollande's victory over Nicolas
Sarkozy last May.<br />
<br />
Because of France's first-past-the-post system, the Socialists enjoy in fact a
clear majority in both houses of the French parliament, but still Hollande
calculates as if hamstrung by a coalition, perhaps aware that he has to keep
several currents within his own party from defecting to the militants on the
Left.<br />
<br />
His resulting indecisiveness is worsened by his own nature, as well as by his
single previous experience close the presidency. He was a junior aide to
François Mitterrand in the 1980s, and learned much from the wily old
politico - who always arrived late everywhere and famously believed that you
should "give time to time". In other words, wait and see how a
situation would decant.<br />
<br />
It worked for an autocrat like Mitterrand, born in 1916, and who viewed the
telephone as a cutting-edge technological device. It is far less effective
in Twitter time, in a man whom neither best friend nor worst foe would ever
think of calling an autocrat.<br />
<br />
And so when Montebourg spoke of "nationalisation", Hollande
crucially stayed silent for five days, even inviting the troublesome junior
minister to the Elysée to assure him, Montebourg afterwards said, that "nationalising
the Florange steelworks until a credible buyer [was] found" was "still
a possibility".<br />
<br />
Hollande staved off Montebourg's resignation, seemingly only to let his prime
minister threaten him with the sack four days later.<br />
<br />
Hollande had his reasons – Montebourg increasingly appears to Lakshmi Mittal
as the pitbull the president releases when his concessions are seen as just
not good enough – but such tactics carry their own risk.<br />
<br />
Emboldened by Montebourg's stance, and a militant political vocabulary unheard
from a cabinet minister for decades, enough Socialist defectors voted with
the Communist group in the Senate to defeat the Budget and the bill funding
France's state health and pensions systems last week.<br />
<br />
This was only a warning shot: both bills will now be amended, and are likely
to pass the next time they return to the upper house. But the impression of
weakness remains - even as most of Hollande's campaign promises, including
new civil service jobs, lowering the retirement age and more teachers, go
unfulfilled.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Montebourg is fuming at his treatment by Hollande and Ayrault, but
upbeat in one respect: amid all the publicity he has become a hero for the
Left.<br />
<br />
When he stood in the last Socialist Party primary elections for a presidential
candidate, he received just 17 per cent of the vote. If Hollande's
government goes on giving the impression that no-one is really at the helm,
the inevitable clamour for change next time may mean there's a demand for
even more grandiose promises.<br />
<br />
In the strange world of the French Left, Montebourg may consider his own
prospects of becoming president himself have just risen, from impossible to
merely improbable.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span></div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-39780115679274647952012-11-29T20:28:00.000+00:002013-02-24T22:02:07.309+00:00We're very fond of you eccentric Anglaises<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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8:28PM GMT 29 Nov 2012</div>
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<i> </i>French men aren’t too sure
what they think of <i>les Anglaises</i> (this includes the Welsh and the Scots in
the national perception) but, <i>pace</i> the shrewd Ms Géraldine Lepère, who
advises unrestrained use of the word “petit” to mark your approval, they are
very, very fond of <i>les petites Anglaises</i>.<br />
<br />
They know exactly whom they mean by that: Jane Birkin, <i>la petite Anglaise par
excellence</i>, reigns at the pinnacle of this pantheon, flanked by the young
Charlotte Rampling and Kristin Scott Thomas. There was even a hugely
successful 1976 rom-com, <i>À Nous Les Petites Anglaises</i>, that features a trio
of hapless young Frenchmen sent to Brighton to learn English, who fall in
love with the exotic, alluring, incomprehensible geishas of East Sussex.<br />
<br />
Naturally, French women were all set to take umbrage – until we realised that
very few <i>Anglaises</i> are, in fact, <i>petites Anglaises</i>. The rest are still
largely incomprehensible to us, but in a far less threatening way.<br />
<br />
They are – what’s the word? Bizarre. They laugh all the time. They often stay
in gaggles of women, rather than flirt with the men. (Yes, we are relieved,
of course, but this still seems unnatural.) Rather than cleaning their
homes, they garden.<br />
<br />
English women think beer is a major food group and that Pimm’s contains all
the vitamins you need. They prefer their dogs or their horses to their
boyfriends (or husbands). They don’t seem to take anything seriously,
especially those things we consider with due respect: work hierarchies,
their French husband’s friends (when they’re married), the proper way to
give a formal Parisian dinner-party, French politics, fashion.<br />
<br />
Especially fashion. The things an English woman wears would never pass the
threshold of a French woman’s closet: Ugg boots; thick opaque black tights;
lots of Bedouin-like scarves; unmatching underwear of dubious provenance;
baggy jumpers and gumboots worn in the country, even in Provence (which, as
we know, is Paris’s extended formal garden, not – shudder – farmland); or,
suddenly, a far too grand taffeta balldress, never entirely ironed, with
old-fashioned jewellery in need of cleaning.<br />
<br />
But I will admit to playing both sides against the middle in this – as a
martyred French child shipped off to a Shropshire boarding school when I was
11, I actually grew up to understand, and like, English women – in fact
(shhhh!), often more than my compatriots.
<br />
English women make far better friends than French women. The high tolerance
for eccentricity that pervades English society makes them fun, sisterly,
unconventional. They don’t care if they lose face – something that turns
your proper French Mademoiselle into a taut-skinned bore by the time she is
35. But I do sometimes wish they’d lose the Ugg boots.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-33255372366202316762012-10-14T07:00:00.000+01:002013-02-24T00:35:48.256+00:00François Hollande and the bedroom farce paralysing France<div class="storyHead">
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></h1>
<b><span style="font-size: small;">As a new book scrutinises French president François Hollande’s unique personal life, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reveals how his
inability to stand up to his love interests is now threatening his
administration
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="caption">French president Francois Hollande and his former partner Segolene Royal</span> <span class="credit">Photo: REX FEATURES</span></span></div>
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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7:00AM BST 14 Oct 2012</div>
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It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy?
France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valérie Trierweiler, may well cause the
political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch – and still
can’t get a marriage commitment from.<br />
<br />
Five months after he was elected, François Hollande’s popularity figures are
the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962
treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody
anti-colonialist war.<br />
<br />
The general consensus is that Ms Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why
the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and
vacillating – in short, not in charge.<br />
<br />
“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news
magazine <i>L’Express</i>. First on the list were the president’s partners, past
and present: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of
Hollande’s four children; and Valérie, the Paris-Match journalist who won
Hollande from Royal.<br />
<br />
The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader
Cécile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by
gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip
and conjecture these days.<br />
<br />
In this toxic environment came the revelations in <i>La Frondeuse</i> (“The
Troublemaker”), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix
Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying
Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two
decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing – or should it be
four-timing? – him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet
minister.<br />
<br />
The book also recounts how, around the same time, a spitting-mad Ségolène
accused Hollande of cheating on her with Anne Hidalgo, an elegant brunette
Socialist politician, now Deputy Mayor of Paris, and expected to run for
City Hall herself in 2015.<br />
<br />
If, by this stage, you’re getting confused, let’s take a deep breath and
plough on. Hollande and Royal meet while students at ENA, the top government
school that in France guarantees you a network and a career Oxbridge
graduates can only dream of. They became one of France’s Left-wing power
couples, seemingly unmarried because it was so un-bourgeois, so much, well,
cooler. Assigned to cover them for <i>Paris-Match</i> was a young and elegant
political reporter, Trierweiler, herself twice-married. When, in 1992,
Royal, then minister for social affairs, invited the press to the maternity
clinic where she’d just had her daughter Flora, it was Trierweiler who
covered the birth, in breathless prose. The fact that a woman minister would
admit the public to such a personal event was treated as a feminist
breakthrough.<br />
<br />
Hollande and Trierweiler didn’t get together then; but in La Frondeuse it is
alleged that they had linked up by 1997, far earlier than the official
version which dates it back to 2005. Meanwhile, Trierweiler was making a
name for herself in the old style of French women political journalists:
getting inside information with, let’s say, allure and poise.<br />
<br />
If this sounds distasteful, that is because it is. And for this (happily
receding) journalistic tradition, we have to thank one of France’s great
magazine editors, the late Françoise Giroud – later Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing’s minister for women’s rights – who, when she headed L’Express in
the Sixties and Seventies, sent out a large number of personable female
reporters to “charm” the largely male political class and get good stories.<br />
<br />
Giroud, herself a hugely gifted writer, but also the mistress of the
flamboyant politician and L’Express proprietor Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber, would teach her young reporters how to dress and give them
social deportment tips.<br />
<br />
All of her alumni were talented in their own right; most of them later became
top executives in television news or newspapers. Still, acceptance and
access was given to them because of their youth and looks rather than their
competence – and most of them had quite public affairs with (married) top
politicians.<br />
<br />
Starting out in the 1980s, I still remember how every politician I was sent to
interview seemed to assume that I would be available if they cared enough to
ask: after a couple of weeks, I asked my then employers to transfer me to
the foreign desk. Nothing untoward had happened, but I hated every single
minute it. Getting shot at in southern Lebanon was blissfully uncomplicated
by comparison.<br />
<br />
The zeitgeist moves on, even in France: while affairs still go on, the
relationship between politicians and the press has been “normal” for a
while. The Giroud world is as alien to politicians under the age of 40 as to
the reporters covering them.<br />
<br />
But Valérie Trierweiler is, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl. “She is
insecure, jittery, unable to make a choice,” wrote the authors of La
Frondeuse. “She wants it all, a career and the job of First Lady – the press
pass and the office at the Élysée Palace.”<br />
<br />
When her editors at <i>Paris-Match</i>, unwilling to antagonise the Élysée but aware
of the conflict of interest, finally summoned up the courage to ask her to
cover culture rather than politics, Trierweiler’s very first article last
June was a review of an Eleanor Roosevelt biography.<br />
<br />
“Well, well, well, a First Lady who’s also a journalist! Obviously in America
these things do not cause a scandal,” the piece began, one of many examples
of her tin ear. Another was the highly publicised tweet in support of
Ségolène Royal’s opponent in June’s general election.<br />
<br />
Trierweiler’s friends and critics both explain her many public mistakes, as
well as her well-known sudden rages – much feared by Hollande – by her
seemingly bottomless insecurity. “She dreams of getting him to marry her,
but he’s not the marrying kind,” one of them told the book’s authors, who
allege that if Trierweiler finally chose Hollande over Devedjian, at the
time a politician with a brighter future, it is because Devedjian would not
leave Corinne, his wife of 30 years.<br />
<br />
The French are notoriously more lenient on homewreckers than les Anglais – the
feeling here is that It’s All More Complicated and Not Just The Woman’s
Fault. This, however, plays against Hollande.<br />
<br />
Trierweiler is uniquely disliked (less than 29 per cent of the public have a
good opinion of her), but the President is seen as commitment-shy.
Increasingly, there’s a feeling that he applies the same aimlessness to his
management of public affairs.<br />
<br />
Political observers recall how under his 15-year stewardship of the Socialist
Party, his unique compromise style led the party’s “currents” – a fancy name
for the infighting factions more divided by personal ambitions than by
ideology – to complete gridlock. Nothing ever got done. When Martine Aubry
took over as leader from Hollande in 2008, she said the place was such a
mess in every possible way that she even had to unblock the loos herself.<br />
<br />
“He’s unable to take a decision,” says a friend of Aubry’s. “It doesn’t do
that much harm running an opposition party. But when he negotiates with
Angela Merkel, it’s a real problem.”<br />
<br />
Just as Hollande tries to hide the occasional contact he still has with the
mother of his children – prompting outbursts from Trierweiler when she finds
out – he chose recently to gang up with the Italians and the Spanish rather
than ask Merkel directly for the concessions he sought in the latest
Eurozone negotiations, to the German Chancellor’s outrage.<br />
<br />
And just as Merkel is now surprised to find herself missing Nicolas Sarkozy’s
more direct style, the French may begin to wonder whether having a
“hyper-president” in the Élysée wasn’t a better idea in difficult times than
a henpecked figure hiding from the women in his life.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span><br />
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-8599455191975668742012-10-03T21:03:00.000+01:002013-02-24T22:18:55.894+00:00The politics and sex scandal that brought some glitz back to France<div class="storyHead">
<b>Does Rachida Dati's paternity suit finally solve Paris's most tantalising
mystery?</b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="caption">Rachida Dati: opponents say she is simply stirring the pot</span> <span class="credit">Photo: Rex Features</span></span></b></div>
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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<div class="publishedDate">
9:03PM BST 03 Oct 2012</div>
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All it took was one legal injunction – and François Hollande’s depressed,
tax-burdened France was suddenly recalling the glitz of the Sarkozy years.
Rachida Dati, the Dior-clad former justice minister, now a Euro MP, had for
the past four years steadfastly refused to name the father of her daughter
Zohra. Miss Dati – always referred to in France as Rachida – has just filed
a paternity case against the hotel tycoon Dominique Desseigne, heir to one
of France’s great fortunes.<br />
<br />
Rachida’s rapier-writ seemed finally to answer one of Paris’s tantalising
mysteries: the identity of the country’s most famous single mother’s
mysterious lover. Mr Desseigne’s had been among the names bandied about, but
so was that of Spain’s former premier José-Maria Aznar. The married Mr Aznar
had to issue a denial. Also mentioned were the EDF Energy chairman, Henri
Proglio; Qatar’s attorney-general, Ali Bin Fetais al-Marri; the then
President Sarkozy’s brother François, a star paediatrician; the former
sports minister Bernard Laporte; and the actor Vincent Lindon. All hurried
to deny the rumours.<br />
<br />
All Rachida’s men are of a type: raffish, worldly, elegantly middle-aged,
either well-off or seriously rich, and close to Nicolas Sarkozy (rightly or
wrongly, the former president himself was briefly included in the tally, for
which his third wife, Carla Bruni, never forgave Rachida). I remember
thinking that for the Becky-Sharp-ambitious Rachida to keep such a close lid
on the name, it was possible that baby Zohra’s father was a complete unknown.<br />
<br />
Within 10 minutes of working my telephone yesterday, I felt thrown back into
the overheated rumour mill of the Sarkozy Noughties. Two sources had
radically opposite readings of the situation. One was a long-time friend of
Mr Desseigne’s: “He’s absolutely, positively not the father. Rachida is just
trying to stir the pot.” He’s betting on Aznar. “They were texting all the
time when she was pregnant.” No proof, of course, was given.<br />
<br />
The other – a Sarkozyste politician – was quite sure Mr Desseigne was the
father: “Rachida isn’t stupid. There will be DNA testing. She wants some
sort of child support, I expect. It also puts her back in the news at a time
when the opposition is in dire need of a strong candidate for Paris mayor in
2014.”</div>
<div class="fifthPar">
<br />
All the same, Rachida Dati, once the bright star of Sarkozy’s rainbow cabinet,
may have overplayed her hand. She was given a sinecure as mayor of Paris’s
seventh arrondissement, a district that makes Knightsbridge look depressed,
but couldn’t get chosen for a safe MP’s seat last June. She must have felt
in danger of being forgotten – but will the whiff of bling she brings back
be an asset or a liability in austerity-hit France?<br />
<br />
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<div class="body">
The former president himself suddenly seems to be everywhere. Apart from calls
for a halt to the Syrian repression, Sarkozy has kept uncharacteristically
silent since his defeat in May. He now jogs in the Bois de Boulogne, or
attends football matches or society weddings. At a time when François
Hollande’s ratings have plummeted faster than any Fifth Republic president’s
– to more than 50 per cent negative – Sarkozy is basking in a new-found
popularity: 44 per cent now say he’d tackle the economic crisis better than
the current lot.<br />
<br />
---------------
<br />
The French rarely feel that foreigners can write convincingly about their
history, but the first readers of Jo Graham’s new novel, The General’s
Mistress, say her portrait of Ida Saint-Elme, a Dutch-born courtesan loved
by Marshal Ney, gets it right. Saint-Elme rode with Napoleon’s army,
travelled from Russia to Egypt and wrote the biggest-selling memoirs of the
early 19th century, earning herself the scandalous name of “the female
Casanova”.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> <br />
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-39041136997365631552012-06-13T09:39:00.000+01:002013-02-24T00:45:08.665+00:00France's battle royal between Ségolène Royal and Valérie Trierweiler has the nation gripped<div class="storyHead">
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<span style="font-size: small;">The warring women on the frontline are giving politics a sharply feminine edge.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span class="caption">Valérie Trierweiler: giving France a delightful taste of personal strife</span> <span class="credit">Photo: AFP/Getty Images</span></b></span></div>
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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<div class="publishedDate">
9:28PM BST 13 Jun 2012</div>
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<img alt="Comments" src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/template/ver1-0/i/share/comments.gif" /><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/9329247/Frances-battle-royal-between-Segolene-Royal-and-Valerie-Trierweiler-has-the-nation-gripped.html#disqus_thread">89 Comments</a>
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The French, like most of us, love a catfight. When First Girlfriend Valérie
Trierweiler tweeted her support for the opponent of Ségolène Royal, the
rival she supplanted in the affections of President François Hollande, in
Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the entire nation sank with delight into
the bliss of watching the political become personal.<br />
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Barely a month ago, the day after her partner was elected President of the
French Republic, Trierweiler confidently told Agence France Presse how much
better suited to the job she was than her predecessor, Carla Bruni, Nicolas
Sarkozy’s third wife. “Carla Bruni comes from a world entirely alien to
politics: fashion, showbusiness. She doesn’t know its codes.” She, on the
other hand, Trierweiler explained somewhat smugly, had been a political
journalist for 20 years. “I know politics, I know the media.”<br />
<br />
The woman many of the French are calling “Rottweiler” then illustrated the
shortest way to link the words “pride”, “goeth”, “before” and “fall”.
Nicolas Sarkozy had been kicked out of office chiefly for having paraded his
private life with ostentation. Demurring that she would play “no political
part whatsoever”, Trierweiler made it difficult to forget her existence for
one minute. Whether she was bemoaning that she didn’t like the title “First
Lady” and inviting the public to think up a new one, or insisting that she
could remain a working Paris Match reporter “in all independence” while
maintaining a staff and office at the Élysée Palace, she was hardly ever out
of the news.<br />
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Scenting a rich vein, the political puppet show Les Guignols de l’info hastily
recycled the puppet they’d used for Jacques Chirac’s spin-doctor daughter
Claude, slapping on a new wig and redoing its make-up to rush their Valérie
on air. They now portray Hollande as a bumbling, henpecked husband.
Deferring to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the President is depicted fleeing to
the comforting arms of a softer, sweeter, more understanding female – Angela
Merkel.<br />
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But in real life, the woman Trierweiler has been obsessing about for nearly a
decade is Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner of 23 years and the
mother of his four children. Trierweiler admits to having started her affair
with Hollande in 2005. He was then Socialist Party leader; she had been
covering the Left as a Paris Match political correspondent for years. But
they’d met years before: it was a young Trierweiler who reported from
Royal’s maternity ward after she gave birth to her and Hollande’s last
child, Flora, in 1992. She’d remained friendly with Flora’s father ever
since.<br />
<br />
Royal, who had gradually become aware of her partner’s betrayal, kept silent
until the night of her 2007 defeat against Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, minutes
after the result, she announced that the doors of her house were “now closed
to Hollande” – who, while still officially living with her, had in fact
moved into Trierweiler’s flat. It transpired that Trierweiler had egged him
on to sabotage Royal’s presidential bid during the campaign.<br />
<br />
Having lost her bid for a second presidential try in last year’s Socialist
primaries, Royal immediately gave her support to her children’s father.
Meanwhile, Trierweiler went to absurd lengths to sideline her. In rallies,
Royal found herself seated away from other party bigwigs, and excluded from
pictures. The children, who also were involved with the campaign, tried to
intervene with Hollande, but to no effect; instead he often remonstrated
with his advisers that they should “support Valérie: she’s so insecure”.
Royal was excluded from Hollande’s Élysée swearing-in, but he did give her
his official support in her bid for the La Rochelle seat, in the region
where she has been council president for eight years.<br />
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This infuriated Trierweiler and led to this week’s tweeting extremes, igniting
the kind of nationwide ruckus which is still in full swing. She has dug her
heels in, refusing to recant her tweet. Meanwhile, several former Royal
adversaries, all women, including Socialist leader Martine Aubry and Green
leader Cécile Duflot, have very loudly sided with her. “I hope this tweet
gets [Royal] elected,” Aubry said yesterday.<br />
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Feminine solidarity is relatively new in France, in politics and elsewhere: it
was really only seen last year, at the height of the Strauss-Kahn affair,
when women politicians from Marine le Pen to a Trotskyite, including two
then Cabinet ministers, denounced casual sexism and double standards.
Earlier, Rachida Dati, Sarkozy’s glamorous justice minister, found
relatively little support when she chose to become a single mother in
office, then got sidelined partly because she’d been a friend of her boss’s
second wife. But all signs are that Trierweiler’s latest outburst may have
triggered unintended consequences. “You started missing Sarkozy, now you
will miss Carla,” Nadine Morano, a former Sarkozy minister, tweeted
yesterday.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> </div>
Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-67053664756198585842012-05-13T07:03:00.000+01:002013-02-24T01:10:41.213+00:00Valérie Trierweiler: France's feisty new first lady seizes the limelight from her rivals<div class="storyHead">
<b>France's new first lady is already ruffling feathers as she seizes the
limelight from her rivals, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris. </b></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span class="caption">Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP</span> <span class="credit">Photo: AP</span></b></span></div>
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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7:30AM BST 13 May 2012</div>
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<strong><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/">François
Hollande</a></strong> moves into the Élysée Palace this Thursday, but he is
already facing a very domestic crisis. Ever since he was declared France’s
24th president a week ago, his lover, the elegant <i>Paris Match</i>
journalist, Valérie Trierweiler, 47, has been making headlines of her own<b>.</b><br />
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For instance, <i>Le Canard enchaîné,</i> France’s answer to <i>Private
Eye</i>, published an angry text message from Trierweiler to Mariana
Grépinet, a colleague.<br />
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Grépinet had mentioned, in what would otherwise be described as a puff piece
about France’s new presidential couple, one of Hollande’s children with
Ségolène Royal, the 2007 Socialist presidential candidate and Hollande’s
former lover of 23 years.<br />
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The article did not explicitly state that the couple were no longer together. "What
game are you playing?" the text threateningly ended<br />
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Then there was Olivier Bourg, the radio presenter and stand-up comic, who
tried to pull his trademark trick of calling Trierweiler’s mobile to wheedle
careless statements from her, as he had from countless celebrities before.
Trierweiler sussed him out fast enough, and retorted on air, in a pinched
voice, "I won’t forget this", before hanging up.<br />
<br />
In case anyone hadn’t got the message, on Wednesday, Trierweiler, who a UMP
party ally of Nicolas Sarkozy once referred to as "Rottweiler",
blocked Julien Dray, an MP and one of Hollande’s key campaign managers, from
setting foot inside the victory party.<br />
<br />
His offence appears to have been to invite Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former
International Monetary Fund chief, to his birthday event days earlier.
Strauss-Kahn, Hollande’s rival for the Socialist presidential nomination
until a New York hotel maid complained of sexual assault, mingled with
Hollande’s closest advisers. Even worse, the party was held in a fashionable
new restaurant in a refurbished sex shop in Paris’s red light district.<br />
<br />
Any doubt over the political jeopardy this entailed was dispelled when Sarkozy
brought up Strauss-Kahn’s attendance, to lambast Hollande during their
heated television debate three days before the final vote.<br />
<br />
But party insiders suggest Trierweiler has "had it in for Dray" for
far longer. Since 2007, in fact, when he was Royal’s election campaign
manager. "Valérie", they will tell you feelingly, "can
certainly bear a grudge".<br />
<br />
This had been known in political circles for a long time, but is emerging only
now that media attention has turned to France’s new <i>première dame</i>.<br />
<br />
When Trierweiler, a twice-divorced history graduate who has spent almost her
entire career at the celebrity-obsessed <i>Paris Match,</i> told an
interviewer she would not be a "potiche" (a decorative nonentity),
it was widely interpreted as a swipe at her predecessor, Carla Bruni.<br />
<br />
Asked how she would cope with life in the front line of French politics, she
said, patronisingly, that she was far better equipped than Bruni for the
role: "She came from a world totally alien to that of politics. She did
not necessarily know the political codes."<br />
<br />
This is not only dismissive but ill-judged. During her four years in the
Élysée, Bruni did not put a foot wrong. She is cultured and has excellent
manners. She has a sense of humour and even made friends with the
journalists who lampooned her. When<i> Le Canard enchaîné</i> ran
a spoof column, <i>Carla B’s Diary</i>, Bruni laughed about it among
her friends and invited its author to the Élysée.<br />
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Trierweiler, by contrast, has already alienated people she ought to have been
assiduously cultivating; and much of that stems from her involvement with
Hollande and antagonism with Royal.<br />
<br />
Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old
reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP, a former Mitterrand aide and part of
the new intake.<br />
<br />
In 1992, Trierweiler covered the birth of Flora, Royal and Hollande’s fourth
child. Meanwhile, Trierweiler had three boys during her marriage to <i>Paris Match</i>
sub-editor, Denis Trierweiler.<br />
<br />
In 2005 she began her affair with Hollande, who was still living with Royal
and their four children. When news of it reached Alain Genestar, the then
editor of <i>Paris Match</i>, she refused to see any potential conflict of
interest between her private life and her job covering the Socialist Party
for the magazine. Eventually, Genestar told two journalists, he had to shift
her to the cultural section of the magazine. Trierweiler, who loves the
political scene, was said to be resentful.<br />
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By 2007 Royal had beaten Hollande to become the Socialist Party’s presidential
candidate. Despite his affair with Trierweiler, he campaigned alongside
Royal as her lover, but appeared resentful and unconvincing.<br />
<br />
Some wondered whether Trierweiler encouraged Hollande’s seemingly
passive-aggressive stance towards Royal’s candidacy. Royal would send
Hollande her speeches in advance; he’d then call her minutes before she
stepped on to the dais to say that the speech was all wrong. The night Royal
lost to Sarkozy, the fiction that she and Hollande were together was dropped
with a very public press release from Royal.<br />
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But Trierweiler’s apparent hostility towards Royal seemed to persist. One
insider recalls the time that Hollande answered a question about Royal
during a television interview in 2010, then received an angry text message
from Trierweiler. As Franz-Olivier Giesbert, his interviewer, tried to
reassure him that he had not strayed from politics in his reply, he said: "You
don’t realise, I’m going to get hell at home."<br />
<br />
In January, Hollande’s first major campaign speech as Socialist presidential
candidate was introduced by a video tracing the past 40 years of the party.
Jarringly, to many of the rank and file, it ended in 2002, the year that
Lionel Jospin came third in the first round of the election, leaving the
party without a candidate in the final run-off. Royal’s 2007 presidential
bid was omitted, a decision that was chalked up to Trierweiler’s influence<br />
<br />
Despite loyally supporting Hollande as he fought for the party’s nomination,
Royal was relegated at the campaign launch to a distant seat, while
Trierweiler stood close to her lover. Aides said Royal collapsed in tears
afterwards.<br />
<br />
Trierweiler had her own office at Hollande HQ during the campaign, but her
feminist-sounding line is that she remains a journalist and, in any case,
needs the work to support her own family. Friends say she’s writing the text
for an instant coffee-table photo book on the campaign, to be published next
month.<br />
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Yet Royal is not about to slink quietly from the Socialist scene. She is
aiming for a role as Speaker of the National Assembly, keeping her at the
forefront of French political life.<br />
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Trierweiler’s career is now under the spotlight. When the political talk show
she hosted on a cable television station was cancelled, <i>Paris Match</i>
offered to pay her to, in effect, stay at home. She is resisting that plan
angrily. In an interview with tomorrow’s <i>Elle</i> magazine, she
says she would rather interview "foreign personalities" to keep "a
proper distance" without "impeding François Hollande’s work".<br />
<br />
But she will never be far away. On election night at the Place de la Bastille,
it was she who ordered Hollande, whose style this definitely is not, to kiss
her on the mouth, thus securing the perfect picture.<br />
<br />
Trierweiler will make her international debut at next weekend’s G8 summit at
Camp David in the US. At the time of writing, there is wild speculation that
the president and his love might hastily get married this week. And live
happily ever after, of course.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> <br />
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-56554973581325468532012-05-03T20:07:00.000+01:002013-02-27T22:53:07.331+00:00French election: It’s got very bloody in the Francois Hollande-Nicolas Sarkozy slugfest
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<b>The French presidential election has turned ugly, as Nicolas Sarkozy battles
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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8:07PM BST 03 May 2012</div>
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It may have been more regulated than a Kabuki theatre performance – a set
number of cameras, of arc lights on the candidates’ carefully powdered
faces, of reaction shots – but in the end, Wednesday night’s French
presidential debate was a slugfest.<br />
<br />
Three days before the second round of the election, in their single TV
discussion, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande went at one another hammer
and tongs for three hours, trading invective and the occasional insult with
an acrimony not seen in French politics since the 1930s. “Liar!” the
candidates called one another; and “slanderer”, “dunce”, “joker”.<br />
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That was even before you took in the rolled eyes, the nervous twitches, the
role-play. “You’re not assigning and grading essays this time,” Sarkozy told
Hollande, a former economics professor at Sciences Po – a school that
flunked the French president 35 years ago. The Socialist contender kept
interrupting the man he spent the whole campaign calling “the outgoing
president”. “You’re lying!” he said. “Answer me on this. Answer me. Will you
answer me?”<br />
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The first casualty of the debate, it must be said, was François Hollande’s
reputation as a nice guy. In the end, his camp – and most Paris
establishment pundits – exulted. Their man had bloodied Sarkozy’s nose. All
Hollande needed was to preserve his comfortable lead.<br />
<br />
Nicolas Sarkozy, however, had carefully calibrated his performance – in stark
contrast to the past five years, during which he has mostly failed to do
exactly that. Having ruthlessly analysed what the French dislike in him,
Sarkozy decided that the debate was about showing that he could be calm in
the face of repeated provocation. On he went, laying out the bleak figures
of the world economic crisis and of France’s relatively good standing in the
eurozone under his stewardship. Every now and then, Sarkozy jabbed at
Hollande – the name of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was lobbed in the last half
hour, after Hollande had accused his opponent of dodgy party fundraising.<br />
<br />
You could not have imagined the aloof, imperial François Mitterrand, whom
Hollande served as economic aide in the 1980s, countenancing any hint of a
slur. (Dripping with cold contempt, he would have dismissed the offender
with a word. We all avoided examining his Vichy past because of such
techniques.) Jacques Chirac had his own bluff way of discouraging
familiarity. As for De Gaulle, the very idea is unthinkable.<br />
<br />
But the increasing polarisation of French political life is changing all this.
Over the past five years, France has been seized by an anti-Sarkozy frenzy
that can only be compared to the shrill excesses of anti-Thatcherism in
Britain, or, more recently, the heyday of Bush Derangement Syndrome in the
United States. Sarkozy, to his enraged critics, is vulgar, uncouth,
dishonest, unprincipled, and exhibiting Fascist tendencies in his
courting of the Front National vote. L’Humanité, the hard-Left daily, last
week published a front page pairing him with Marshal Pétain<span style="font-size: xx-small;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span>This is bound to leave an even more difficult situation for whoever finds
himself in the Élysée Palace on May 7, having to face hard choices and
placate nervous financial markets. Neither candidate is in fact a shoo-in.
Pundits still asserted yesterday that Sarkozy failed to make a dent in
Hollande’s advance. But polls on online news sites, in the night after the
debate, told another story. Two thirds on average thought Sarkozy more
believable than Hollande: these are the people who no longer dare speak
their mind to pollsters. It remains to be seen whether Sarkozy can pull off
the greatest comeback in French politics in the past half century, or
whether mud does stick in our brave new political landscape, and François
Hollande becomes the Fifth Republic’s seventh president.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-82055684867244242702012-04-20T20:49:00.000+01:002013-02-27T22:47:41.731+00:00Nicolas Sarkozy is a victim of his own courage<div class="storyHead">
<b>The president should be applauded for his courage, hard work, plain-speaking
and his love for France, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</b></div>
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<b>By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></b></div>
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8:49PM BST 20 Apr 2012</div>
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I shall be sorry to see Sarkozy go. His defeat, if it truly comes to that in
two weeks’ time – and nobody should entirely discount his dogged tenacity
and sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of adversity – will have been a
fiasco of style over substance.</div>
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Sarko campaigned five years ago by telling the French to their faces that he
would not cosset them. Their standard of living would rise, he said, if they
worked harder. Even before the financial crisis changed everything in 2008,
you should have heard the screams and guffaws of the people who, early on,
had decided he was an insufferable oik. It was simplistic. It was
condescending. It was ridiculous.</div>
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For 12 years, Jacques Chirac and his successive cabinets, Right and Left, had
carefully avoided any “courageous” (in the Sir Humphrey meaning of the word)
decisions that might cause the French to strike and take to the streets.
Note that by “the French”, I really mean that category of civil servants and
state employees who have tenure for life, and can bring the country to a
standstill with a handful of union members.</div>
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This was because, a couple of months after Chirac’s election in 1995, France’s
public services, and therefore the smooth running of the country, ground to
a halt for almost two months in protest at a pretty mild reform of the
country’s generous, pay-as-you-go pension system. Even though the vast
majority of privately employed citizens managed to get to their workplaces,
sometimes by dint of astonishing physical effort, Chirac fired his PM and
decided never to try to push an unpopular reform again.</div>
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It took Sarkozy to tackle, and pass, that pensions reform. He hammered on
about the unvarnished truth: in 1945, when the system was mooted, eight
workers paid for one retiree’s pension. Today it’s only two, and people live
18 years longer on average. For the past 40 years, France hasn’t known full
employment. The mandatory pension age was lowered from 65 to 60 by another
Socialist government, under François Mitterrand. The situation was
untenable. Despite the usual moaning and groaning, the reform – which <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/"><strong>François
Hollande</strong></a>, Sarkozy’s Socialist rival who’s leading in the polls, has
vowed to reverse – was accepted.</div>
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Next to this, and other necessary measures – not to mention a willingness to
act in Libya and the Ivory Coast among other places – do I truly care that
Sarkozy has a questionable taste in women, wristwatches and restaurants? It
takes the supercilious graduates of ENA, the incestuous elite government
school that gives France most of her politicians, mandarins, top bosses, and
a couple of star editors, to sniff at the “bling” appetites of an energetic
immigrant’s son made good. (The difference between the taste of the London
rioters and that of Sarko is more a question of degree than nature.) In
France, the sociology of Left and Right has switched. Most of Sarkozy’s
ministers come from humble backgrounds, which constantly get thrown in their
faces, while the irony of this coming from the Parisian Left is never
pointed out.</div>
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Although I come from a Socialist French political family, I liked and still
like Sarko. He may not be as agreeable a man as François Hollande to spend a
boozy evening with, but his values of physical and political courage, of
hard work, of plain-speaking; his love for France; his sense of duty to our
history, our allies and the values of the Resistance resonate far more with
what I was brought up to respect than Hollande’s envious, hidebound,
little-France rhetoric. But I understand I may be in a minority here.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-22351359227744773362012-02-23T20:30:00.001+00:002013-11-05T14:39:01.220+00:00It’s Mademoiselle Moutet to you, Monsieur<div class="storyHead">
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-size: 100%;">The French language must not lose the term of address favoured by Chanel and Deneuve. </span> <br />
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<span class="caption" style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic;">Mademoiselle Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span><br />
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span><br />
8:01PM GMT 23 Feb 2012</div>
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It may feel like a victory to all those new feminist groups who’d decided to campaign over it, but I for one shall be sorry to see my Mademoiselle disappear from official French forms. The agitators had been after it for some time, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want a quick media victory, you need only ask Nicolas Sarkozy when he’s running for a difficult re-election. </div>
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The issues that really matter to French women – like, say, equal salary in the workplace (women currently earn 27 per cent less than men in the same job) or the dearth of female bosses in the top corporations (current number: 0) – aren’t about to be addressed any time soon. Far too complicated. But a purely cosmetic change that few, apart from a handful of spin-savvy groups such as Les Chiennes de Garde (Guard Bitches) really cared about? A push two months before the first round of the Présidentielles will get you an administrative decision guaranteeing headlines around the world. </div>
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It’s not that I disagree with everything the brash French women’s groups have been fighting for. But was it really necessary to deprive the French language of such an interesting nuance simply because it gives an indication of one’s married status? And don’t give me the line about demoiselle meaning “a virgin” in the 16th century. Nobody remembers that any more, and even back then, it only applied to the noble 1 per cent. The others had to make do with fille or jeune fille; a spinster, until about half a century ago, was known as une vieille fille. </div>
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But Mademoiselle? It always had its own panache, from princess to Grande Cocotte to stage diva. Think Sarah Bernhardt or Miss Howard, Napoleon III’s mistress. In French history, La Grande Mademoiselle (as court protocol correctly styled her) is a true heroine: Louis XIV’s first cousin, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, led the aristocratic revolt known as the Fronde at the age of 25 against her young cousin’s project of absolute power. The Grande Mademoiselle led troops, rallied Orléans under siege, and had the Bastille cannons fired against the king’s army. At the age of 43 she married, against the wishes of the king, a nobleman who was six years her junior and whom she had freed from prison; she did eventually kick him out when he cheated (too much) on her. </div>
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By Emile Zola’s time, in his great novel of the late 19th-century department stores, The Ladies’ Paradise, Mademoiselle was being used as a class put-down. A staid bourgeois lady deploys it pointedly when addressing a shop assistant. But these days, Madame used in the same context sounds unbearably dowdy; it’s Mademoiselles who dress in Stella McCartney, Isabel Marant or Jean Paul Gaultier. Karl Lagerfeld, meanwhile – a man of variegated insults distributed with easy abandon – used the familiar “dadame” to describe to me the House of Chanel BK (Before Karl). In his mouth, it was the supreme term of abuse.<br />
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Madame was deemed an insult, too, by Coco Chanel herself. A thoroughly modern woman, she always insisted on being Mademoiselle Chanel. She had lovers, but no husband; she had an English duke, Bendor Westminster, stamp every signpost and lamp in London with her initials; she used men’s shapes and fluid jerseys to build clothes in which women could run, play, show their bodies. <br />
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Take another famous Mademoiselle-by-choice, Catherine Deneuve. Never mind that she was married to David Bailey and had high-profile affairs and children with Roger Vadim and Marcello Mastroianni. She was resolutely never Madame. Compare her with Vadim’s earlier wife, Brigitte Bardot, who did become a Madame, several times over. It’s difficult not to see Bardot, who gave up her career early on to devote much of her time to animal welfare and the cause of Marine Le Pen, as more of a victim than a feminist star. <br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7041044730990594406" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>By contrast, Deneuve, a style icon and a stunner at 68, comes off as a winner. When I interviewed Vadim, a surprisingly spiteful serial seducer of great beauties, he was still resentful of Deneuve, decades later, for never marrying him. She had dropped him! Like <span style="font-style: italic;">une tonne de briques</span>! She controlled their son’s education! She went on to have a better career after she left! As far as Deneuve was concerned, calling a woman Madame certainly meant making her walk three paces behind, metaphorically speaking. <br />
Far from indicating a kind of mere real‑woman-in-waiting status, Mademoiselle had become pretty useful to sandbag some people into realising that you are making your own way on your own terms. I plan to keep using it, and intend to encourage my independent‑minded friends to do the same. <br />
After all, now it’s no longer official, we can truly celebrate it as the ultimate rebellion.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span></div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-4010315338504622332012-02-20T04:09:00.000+00:002012-02-22T04:20:23.042+00:00Needy Nicolas Sarkozy looks to the upper class to get re-elected<div class="storyHead"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The French president has said he is going for posh, not brash, in this election, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. </span> <div class="artIntro"> <div id="storyEmbSlide"> <div class="slideshow ssIntro"> <div class="nextPrevLayer"> <div style="display: block;" class="ssImg"> <img style="width: 520px; height: 325px;" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02143/Sarkozy_2143856b.jpg" alt="Needy Nicolas looks to the upper class; Sarkozy is running for office again, despite low opinion poll ratings; Reuters" /> <div class="artImageExtras"> <div class="ingCaptionCredit"> <span class="caption" style="font-size:78%;">Sarkozy is running for office again, despite low opinion poll ratings</span><span style="font-size:78%;"> </span><span class="credit" style="font-size:78%;">Photo: Reuters</span></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="cl"> </div> <div class="bylineComments"> <div> <div class="bylineImg"> <img src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02143/anne-12_2143854j.jpg" alt="" border="0" height="60" width="60" /> </div> <p class="bylineBody"> <span style="font-weight: bold;">By </span><span style="font-weight: bold;" rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></p> </div> <p class="publishedDate"><span style="font-size:85%;">7:15AM GMT 20 Feb 2012</span></p> <div class="cl"> </div> </div> <div class="firstPar"><p> Once, as he blithely launched into his first presidential campaign five years past, Nicolas Sarkozy made a point of staffing his team with the kind of faces few were used to in the arch-homogeneous French political world. (Think white, middle-class, middle-aged, usually male, graduated from two or three elite institutions, unbearably smarmy.) Out the conservative candidate went to the country’s banlieues and tough estates, plucking French-Arab and African community organisers and entrepreneurs to help blur his Rightist image. For his spokesperson, Sarkozy picked Rachida Dati, a combative mid-level judge born of a Moroccan father and Algerian mother, who became a star, then – as the new face of diverse France – justice minister, featuring on magazine covers in Dior and Louboutin heels. </p></div><div class="secondPar"> <p> As it turned out, the hirings soon soured on Sarkozy, or he soured on them. The president has just announced he is going for posh, not brash this time. His campaign spokesperson is the arch-establishment Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the 38-year-old minister for environment, grand-daughter of a former ambassador to the US and descended from a general who fought with George Washington. </p></div><div class="thirdPar"> <p> NKM, as she is known, cultivates a pre-Raphaelite beauty – diaphanous skin, long red hair, large blue eyes – with the blunt expressions of someone who chose to do national service in the French Navy. Her style is about as far from Rachida Dati’s conventional haute-bling as possible – NKM mixes arcane Japanese designers with white silk shirts, a family signet ring with artist-designed chokers. NKM is a hard worker and a canny communicator – she has by far the most Twitter followers of the cabinet, at 110,000. She has been known to stand up to Sarkozy – at one stage he demoted her to junior minister to the digital economy, seen as the graveyard shift. She fulfils the almost impossible equation of pleasing both the traditional Right, where the president’s pollsters think that there are enough votes to claw back from the dismal figures, and the Bobos, the affluent liberal voters seduced by the Greens and the more modern wing of the Socialist party. </p></div><div class="fourthPar"> <p> What she isn’t, though, is well-liked among her own. She is seen, not without cause, as no team player. The youth employment minister, Nadine Morano, the John Prescott of the cabinet, a lorry-driver’s daughter competing for the spokeswoman job, sees NKM as a personal enemy. Not a single one of the MPs in NKM’s constituency call her an ally. They recall bitterly that as minister she used up all her subsidies budget for the one train line that reached her town, leaving not a centime for the other branch line. </p></div><div class="fifthPar"> <p> If Sarkozy scrapes by for a second term on May 6, NKM is well-placed for a major ministry, possibly even for the PM’s job. She obviously feels that it is worth ruffling a few feathers.</p></div><div class="body"> <p> ... </p> <p> <strong>I am now</strong> (sort of) famous on Twitter, after Sarah Brown elle-même retweeted my last Telegraph piece on the Merkozy duo. Obviously she felt calling Angela Merkel “Sarko’s latest arm candy” was offensive to women everywhere. I would have thought seeing Sarkozy start his presidency flaunting, as a PR stunt, a Prada-dressed trophy wife on his arm and ending it with the leader of Europe’s most powerful country at his side signalled a realigned sense of priorities. Never mind, I’m enjoying all the nice new followers. </p> <p> ... </p> <p> <strong>They used to</strong> call it Tinseltown, but it may become Glittertown now that the statuesque Nadja Swarovski, of the crystal dynasty, has set up a production company to put out a new Hollywood version of Romeo and Juliet, scripted by Julian Fellowes. No doubt we’ll finally get to know why the Capulets wouldn’t let Juliet marry Romeo. Too nouveau? Fish knives and cruet holders at the Montague dinners?<br /></p><p><span style="font-size:78%;">© </span><span style="font-size:78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size:78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span></p> </div>Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-82394280559935342152012-02-07T16:17:00.006+00:002012-02-22T04:22:08.738+00:00France falls for Nicolas Sarkozy’s new arm-candy<h1 style="font-weight: normal; font-family: verdana;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:78%;">They may seem an odd couple, but Angela Merkel is working wonders for the struggling president. </span></h1> <div id="storyEmbSlide"> <div class="slideshow ssMain"> <div class="nextPrevLayer"> <div style="display: block;" class="ssImg"> <img src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02131/sarko-merkel_2131445c.jpg" alt="Sarko-Merkel: a grudging respect has developed between these two mismatched characters - France falls for Sarkozy’s new arm-candy" height="287" width="460" /> <div class="artImageExtras"> <div class="ingCaptionCredit"> <span style="font-size:78%;"><span class="caption">Sarko-Merkel: a grudging respect has developed between these two mismatched characters</span> <span class="credit">Photo: Christopher Jones / Rex Features</span></span></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="cl"> </div> <div class="bylineComments"> <div> <p class="bylineBody"> <span style="font-weight: bold;" rel="author">By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></p> </div> <p class="publishedDate"><span style="font-size:85%;">9:08PM GMT 07 Feb 2012</span></p> <p class="comments"> <img src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/template/ver1-0/i/share/comments.gif" alt="Comments" /><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9066860/France-falls-for-Nicolas-Sarkozys-new-arm-candy.html#disqus_thread">124 Comments</a> </p> <div class="cl"> </div> </div> <div class="firstPar"><p> Back in 2007, a grinning Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated at the Élysée under the watchful gaze of his statuesque second wife, Cecilia, wrapped in Prada oyster satin. Last Monday, coming into the final straight of his 2012 re-election campaign, badly lagging in the polls with less than 80 days to run, a sobered, silver-templed Sarkozy appeared on television in the exact same place next to another woman of his age, whom he similarly expects to buttress his popularity among the French voters. </p></div><div class="secondPar"> <p> There the similarities end: Angela Merkel, the doughty German chancellor, has never attained anything approaching glamour, even when sporting a vertiginous décolletage at the opera to the vocal dismay of her compatriots (and more than a few snarky giggles from the French). </p></div><div class="thirdPar"> <p> In many ways, this was the point. Nicolas Sarkozy – once so certain that the French wanted a glittering, Kennedy-style First Family that he piled tin-eared mistake upon mistake, for which he still hasn’t been forgiven by the electorate – now aims to project a realistic image. It’s too late, he feels, for the French to start loving him. Not that they were ever going to; Sarkozy has never stopped viewing himself as the ultimate outsider: too foreign, too short, unclubbable, not an ENA graduate (the government school from which most politicians, mandarins and bosses originate), not enough enamoured of style over substance – the French elites’ besetting sin. </p></div><div class="fourthPar"> <p> Now he presents himself as the competent helmsman in a crisis, the man who fought for the euro (and prevented two out of three ratings agencies from downgrading France); the champion of tough but ultimately effective policies, ready to do what it takes to keep the country prosperous, instead of inflating the deficit sky-high by (among other spending measures) hiring 60,000 new civil servants, as the Socialist candidate, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/">François Hollande</a>, promises in his platform. </p></div><div class="fifthPar"> <p> Mrs Merkel is his last trump card – whether Sarkozy is whisking her out for a prime-time television interview, or for two rallies in the campaign he hasn’t formally declared yet (but is already planning). Poll after poll by the Élysée spin teams show that the French rate the German chancellor far higher than their own man. They see her as competent, serious, powerful. This is the new kind of arm-candy the Sarkozy of 2012 is aiming for.</p></div><div class="body"> <p> The president once believed that the French admired his 2008 speed-wooing of Carla Bruni, who fast became the third Mme Sarkozy. He now thinks winning Angela Merkel over will show how much he has matured. After all, if the financial crisis has solidified their partnership to the extent of coining the “Merkozy” tag for their duet, it wasn’t always thus. </p> <p> It is no secret that early on, Merkel could barely stand to be in the same room as the French president. He immediately took to kissing her on both cheeks – not as bad as George W Bush’s neck-and-shoulders massage at the 2006 St Petersburg G8, but still – to grabbing her arm and calling her “my dear Angela”. But this was far from making up for decisions such as the French-British military treaty, for calling her “La Boche” (The Kraut) behind her back, or joking about her longstanding battle with her weight (“she tells you she’s on this new diet, then she helps herself to cheese twice”). </p> <p> Until the appointment to the Cabinet of Bruno Le Maire, the agriculture minister, Sarkozy’s inner circle did not feature one German-speaker. “Would you spend your holidays in Germany?” the president once asked visitors in bewildered tones, a jibe that was swiftly leaked to the German press. And as late as last year, Sarkozy berated Merkel’s “pusillanimity”, saying her failure to commit early on to shoring up Greece let the debt crisis spiral out of control, “all this to keep her own voters happy”. </p> <p> Merkel, for her part, looked on Sarkozy so uncomprehendingly that her staff, many of whom have actually studied in France, prepared a “cultural package” for her. It notoriously included several movies starring the great French comic actor Louis de Funès, who specialised in playing short, outrageously unfair, irate, aggressive characters. “She had to have every joke explained to her!” a weary Merkel aide told one of his French buddies – who promptly leaked it to the French press. </p> <p> Yet a grudging respect has developed between these two mismatched characters. Merkel has made no secret of her growing respect for Sarkozy’s dogged determination during the marathon Euro-summits of the past year, even when she sometimes disagreed. She has publicly said that Germany should model its welfare net and social policies on France’s. Sarkozy, meanwhile, has been praising Germany’s handling of the economic crisis, willingness to tackle salary inflation, and, of course, its robustly positive trade balance. </p> <p> Nicolas Sarkozy counts as a major personal victory the fact that Angela Merkel is willing to support him in his campaign for re-election, even at the risk of criticism at home. Long past are the days when Élysée press officers briefed on the “non-inevitability” of the French-German axis, and explained that France and Britain had at least as many reasons to foster a new entente cordiale. When push comes to shove, even beyond hard economic realities, the old De Gaulle-Adenauer alliance wins. It was really a foregone conclusion, after Giscard d’Estaing-Schmidt, Mitterrand-Kohl and Chirac-Schröeder. After all, how else would France get to (co)lead Europe, and Germany’s power be seen as acceptable? </p> </div>Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-1020882386218844482011-11-30T20:30:00.000+00:002012-02-29T21:21:38.622+00:00Dominique Strauss-Kahn is left with only 'French maids’ for company<div class="storyHead">
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By <span rel="author">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span><br />
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It’s no fun being <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/">Dominique
Strauss-Kahn</a> these days. His long-suffering wife, the millionaire art
heiress Anne Sinclair, has decamped for the family ryad in Marrakesh,
leaving him to face the daily revelations about prostitutes being flown to
him in Washington. His Place des Vosges neighbours are up in arms as the
quiet of their beautiful, 400-year-old Parisian square is disturbed by
demonstrations against the “sexism” of the former head of the IMF. (A recent
one involved a gaggle of Ukrainian feminists, bussed in from Kiev, wearing
bikinis, “French maid” outfits, stilettos, stockings and garter belts.<br />
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His every move is followed by paparazzi. And even though the case that put his
adventurous sex life in the open was dismissed by the New York courts, the
hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo is suing him in a civil court, where she
expects to win massive damages. Once he was a shoo-in for the next president
of France; those heady days are long gone.<br />
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Now Edward Epstein has written an “investigative” piece for the New York
Review of Books, which attempts to prove that the alleged rape was a set-up
masterminded by Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP. Using footage from the
hotel’s security cameras and telephone records, presumably fed by DSK’s
defenders, Epstein constructs a ripping story of entrapment.<br />
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He makes much of a supposed “victory dance” caught on CCTV by two low-level
hotel employees after the police were brought in to hear Diallo on the day
of the alleged assault, using it to suggest that Accor, the French chain
managing the hotel, were involved in bringing Sarkozy’s most dangerous rival
down. (The employees, however, have said they were discussing sport.)<br />
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Alas for DSK, even his closest friends and political supporters aren’t buying
Epstein’s thesis. The latest one to dismiss it is Jean-Christophe
Cambadélis, a Socialist MP who was widely tipped be part of a 2012 DSK
cabinet, and who once carried the can for DSK in a party financing scandal.
But Paris is almost entirely unanimous on one point: that Epstein’s very
readable piece is predicated on an assumption of competence by the UMP dirty
tricks department that’s nothing short of fantastic. “That lot couldn’t
conspire their way out of a paper bag” is the consensus.<br />
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It’s not just the Right that’s disorganised. The team running the campaign for <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/">François
Hollande</a>, the Socialist presidential challenger, has had to assign a
minder to his gaffe-prone partner, the former Paris Match reporter Valérie
Trierweiler (nicknamed Valérie Rottweiler). Trierweiler, who covered
Hollande and his then partner of 20 years, Ségolène Royal, for Match (even
reporting from the post-delivery room after the birth of the last of the
couple’s four children in 1992) says coyly that her “relationship with
François changed in 2005”, a date that some dispute. She took to giving
embarrassing interviews in which she said that Ségolène should “learn to
step back”. Rottweiler is now being “advised” by one Nathalie Mercier, a PR
hack from the very agency which conducted the campaign to clear DSK’s name
with such alacrity. Oh for the days of Madame de Gaulle, who never said a
word.
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Is sex compulsory in France? A man who “mostly’’ stopped having sexual
relations with his wife of 21 years has just been fined 10,000 euros damages
by an Aix-en-Provence court on appeal, confirming a similar 2009 ruling. Two
sets of judges concurred in finding that the man’s wedding vows had not been
followed, even though he “occasionally” still performed, and that his wife’s
rights and expectations were not respected. The couple are now divorced in a
ruling setting the fault 100 per cent on him. Can damages for unsatisfying
performances be far behind?<br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012</span><br />
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-83780710472697254762011-11-28T20:44:00.000+00:002013-04-23T20:53:05.971+01:00EN FRANÇAIS • Pourquoi je ne retournerai pas chez Marks & Spencer (unauthorised translation by Courrier International)
<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<b>La fermeture soudaine des 18 magasins
de la marque britannique avait traumatisé les Français en 2001. Dix ans
après, la réouverture d'un premier magasin sur les Champs-Elysées est
loin de satisfaire les fans de M&S. </b><br />
<br />
<b> </b>The Daily Telegraph | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet |<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">28 novembre 2011</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span> </span><br />
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Comme toutes les Parisiennes, j'étais assez contente à
l'annonce du retour de Marks & Spencer (M&S) à Paris.
D'ailleurs, nous
n'avons jamais compris pourquoi les Britanniques étaient partis [en
2001, M&S a fermé ses 18 magasins en France]. Ils avaient ce
merveilleux magasin situé juste en face des Galeries Lafayette, dans
cette partie du boulevard Haussman dédiée au shopping, la
réponse de Paris à Oxford Street [la grande rue commercante de Londres].
<br />
Après avoir subi l'épreuve des conseillers de ventes à l'air
distant aux Galeries et au Printemps - rutilants temples des marques de
créateurs, des It-bags [sacs à la mode], des parfums renommés et des robes taille mannequin vendues à un
prix astronomique - M&S faisait figure de refuge avec ses rayons remplis de
petites culottes sages, de discrets pantalons en jersey noirs qui
allaient avec tout, et son Food Hall, le marché d'alimentation qui représentait
pour nous le comble de l'exotisme. <br />
On n'allait pas chez "Marks and Sparks" faire ses courses
pour le déjeuner dominical français normal, mais pour faire ses provisions en vue d'une
fête, du repas de Noël, de l'anniversaire d'un enfant. Ou tout simplement pour
se gâter. <br />
Pour une fois, au diable le comptage des calories. Le bacon
entrelardé grésillait allègrement en compagnie de nos <em>œufs</em>*
fermiers Label rouge. Le thé était bio (à l'époque, on n'en trouvait pas
facilement à Paris) mais les biscuits et les gâteaux étaient, semblait-il,
entièrement fabriqués avec des additifs alimentaires, du sucre raffiné et
d'improbables colorants chimiques approuvés par la commission européenne. <br />
On décorait la table du dîner avec des toffees,
des boules de gomme et des caramels de la marque M&S, encore dans leurs
emballages. Les agences publicitaires servaient des sandwiches M&S durant
leurs séances de remue-méninges - c'était tellement <em>décalé*</em>, tellement créatif. On n'essayait jamais de faire croire qu'un plat cuisiné
M&S avait été préparé à la maison si on le servait au dîner. Au contraire, on
annonçait triomphalement : "Ce soir, dîner anglais ! Je suis allée
le chercher spécialement chez Marks et Spencer* !"<br />
A l'autre extrémité de l'échelle, dans le <em>Septième</em>* et le <em>Seizième Sud</em>*, pour les familles bourgeoises lectrices de Madame
Figaro, dont les valeurs traditionnelles comprenaient une anglophilie préservée
dans un genre d'aspic bcbg des années 1950 - vague mélange de jupes à carreaux
écossais, de twin-sets en cachemire, de bons pensionnats de jeunes filles, de
Prince Charles et du thé de cinq heures -, M&S était "la" Source, le
fournisseur attitré de tout ce qui est authentiquement britannique, ayant à
peine entendu parler des marques de luxe Mulberry ou Fortnum's. <br />
Elles faisaient provision de thé, de scones, de muffins, de
sablés écossais et de chocolats à la menthe avant de filer en voiture vers la
maison de campagne, le vendredi soir. C'étaient là les gens qui écrivaient des
messages de profond désespoir sur le livre des visiteurs mis en place par les
employés licenciés du boulevard Haussmann lorsque M&S nous a abandonnés en
2001.<br />
Et maintenant, M&S est de retour. Au coin de ma rue, en
fait. Sur les Champs Elysées. Là où la boutique Esprit a mis la clé sous la
porte après moins de deux années d'existence. Tout comme le magasin qui l'avait
précédé. Et le journal dont les bureaux se trouvent au cinquième étage, le
malheureux <em>France Soir, </em>maintenant
pratiquement en redressement judiciaire. <br />
Depuis que le café Sélect a été rasé il y a belle lurette,
au coin de la rue de Berri, l'emplacement portait malheur. Je me suis également demandé ce qu'un client normal de
M&S avait en commun avec la racaille des Champs Elysées. <br />
Tous les week-ends, environ un million de personnes
envahissent l'avenue, une foule en sweat-shirts, jeans baggy, mini jupes ou
baskets Adidas (une grande boutique Adidas se trouve au numéro 22), à laquelle
se mêlent d'habiles pickpockets, des mendiants agressifs, et de supporteurs de
football (un énorme magasin du club Paris Saint Germain est situé au numéro 27), faisant la queue pour
voir le dernier film de Tom Cruise, s'acheter un Big Mac (au numéro 140)
ou acquérir les leggings tachetés à 9,95 euros de chez H&M (numéro 90). <br />
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Je connais mes Champs Elysées. J'ai vécu dans le quartier la
moitié de ma vie. De fait, je suis née à 100 mères de ce que l'Office du tourisme
de Paris aime appeler "la plus belle avenue du monde", une étiquette dûment
reprise par la publicité annonçant
le retour de M&S. Bien avant l'ouverture effective le 24 novembre, on pouvait
se demander comment l'enseigne réussirait à mettre tout M&S dans un magasin aux allures
d'appartement familial. Je m'y suis arrêtée à la sortie du bureau le lendemain. Une
longue queue s'était formée dans la fraîcheur d'un soir de novembre. Les
clients d'un certain âge étaient admis, l'air médusé, à l'intérieur deux par deux. <br />
A travers les vitrines, on apercevait les rayons de
vêtements à moitié vides. On ne pouvait s'empêcher de se demander si la queue
- dont parlaient tous les quotidiens après l'inauguration
- ne tenait pas quelque peu du coup de pub. <br />
A l'intérieur, la plupart des visiteurs faisaient de nouveau
la queue pour le rayon alimentation - qui ressemble davantage à une caverne,
reléguée au fond du magasin, pas plus grand que chez le marchand de journaux de
votre quartier. De fait, les produits alimentaires ont été ajoutés presque à la
dernière minute. A l'origine, le magasin était censé asseoir la réputation de
M&S dans la mode. Ce ne fut qu'après une sorte de campagne spontanée par
courriels, une fois la rumeur partie dans Paris, que l'enseigne a libéré de
l'espace pour l'alimentation. Laquelle représenterait d'ores et déjà 35 % du
chiffre d'affaires de la première semaine, au lieu des 10 % prévus.<br />
Les cadres débordés donnaient un coup de main aux employés
qui réassortissaient à tour de bras les rayonnages, à mesure que <em>œufs
écossais, poulet à l'indienne</em>*, sandwiches <em>au
bacon</em>* et autres scones s'envolaient au
cours de scènes dignes des temps de guerre. Je cherchais mes articles M&S préférés, les cinq petites
culottes en coton roulées, vendues au prix de 6 livres [7 euros], mais elles étaient
visiblement considérées comme trop bas de gamme pour traverser la Manche. Même
chose pour les collants noirs opaques à 8 livres [9 euros]. En tout cas, je pensais ne pas pouvoir imaginer, ni moi ni
qui que ce soit d'autre, faire la queue une demi heure sous l'œil torve d'un
agent de sécurité bâti comme une armoire à glace, pour un sandwich ou un poulet
tikka masala. Quant aux petites culottes sages, je continuerais de les acheter à Londres.</div>
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<div class="note_bas_de_page">
<i><strong>Note :</strong></i> *En français dans le texte </div>
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<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011</span> </div>
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Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-21594658829338793922011-11-27T08:30:00.000+00:002012-02-29T21:22:55.515+00:00Paris has a Marks and Spencer again, but it's the wrong size and in the wrong place<div class="storyHead">
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After years without a store in Paris, Marks and Spencer brought one back last
week. But the shop on the Champs-Elysées doesn't quite fit, says
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="caption">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet outside the Marks & Spencer's on the Champs-Elysées</span> </span><span class="credit"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo: ALASTAIR MILLER</span></span></div>
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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris</div>
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8:30AM GMT 27 Nov 2011</div>
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Like every Parisienne, I was pretty chuffed when I first heard Marks &
Spencer were coming back to Paris. We'd never understood why they'd gone
away in the first place.<br />
<br />
They used to have this wonderful huge store just opposite Galeries Lafayette,
in the shopping haven segment of Boulevard Haussmann that's Paris's answer
to Oxford Street.<br />
<br />
After going through the gauntlet of stand-offish sales counsellors at the
Galeries and Au Printemps – shiny places all about designer brands, It-bags,
big-name scents and eye-wateringly expensive size zero dresses – M&S
was a refuge with acres of sensible knickers, tactful knit black trousers
that went with everything, and the Food Hall, which to us was the height of
exoticism.<br />
<br />
You didn't go to Marks and Sparks to make your normal French Sunday lunch; you
went to stock up for a party, for Christmas dinner, for a kid's birthday,
for a treat. (Buying your Christmas cake, not the very morning from your
neighbouring boulangerie, but in September? In a <i>tin</i>? This was more
outlandish than anything they could dream up in Papua-New Guinea.)<br />
<br />
The calorie count, for once, went out the window. The streaky bacon sizzled
gloriously with our farm <i>oeufs</i> Label Rouge. The tea was organic
(which at the time wasn't readily available here) but the biscuits and cakes
were seemingly entirely made of additives, processed sugar, and improbable
chemical colourings approved by the Brussels Commission.<br />
<br />
Our kids loved it. We loved it. My friend Nadalette's twin daughters
religiously celebrated their birthdays, year after year, with the M&S
caterpillar-shaped chocolate cake, gaily sprinkled with multicoloured M&M
shavings. They cried when they were told they couldn't have it any longer.<br />
<br />
You'd decorate a sophisticated dinner table with M&S toffees, wine gums
and caramels in their wrappings. Ad agencies would serve M&S sandwiches
during their brainstorming sessions – it was so <i>décalé</i>,
so creative.</div>
<br />
You'd never try to pass off a ready-made M&S dish as your own if you
served it at dinner; on the contrary, you'd triumphantly announce "<i>Ce
soir, dîner anglais! Je suis allée le chercher spécialement chez Marks et
Spencer!"</i><br />
<br />
At the other end of the scale, in the Septième and Seixième Sud, to Madame
Figaro-reading bourgeois families, whose traditional values include an
Anglophilia preserved in a kind of ideal 1950s Sloaney aspic - a hazy mix of
tartan skirts, cashmere twin-sets, good boarding schools for girls, Prince
Charles and le five 'o clock - M&S was the Source, the Ur-provider of
The Right Stuff, when they barely knew about Mulberry or Fortnum's.<br />
<br />
They'd stock up on tea, scones, muffins, shortbread and chocolate mints before
driving off to the country on Friday afternoon. They were the people who
wrote messages of bleak despair on the visitors' book set up by the
redundant employees of Boulevard Haussmann when M&S abandoned us in 2001.<br />
<br />
And now M&S were back. Round the corner from me, in fact. On the
Champs-Elysées. Where the Esprit shop closed in under two years. And the
shop before that. And the newspaper whose offices are on the fifth floor,
the ill-fated <i>France-Soir</i>, bought by yet another Russian oligarch,
Sergei Pugachev, for his 25-year-old son, Alexander, now nearly in
receivership. (The paper, not the son.)<br />
<br />
Ever since they tore down the Sélect café yonks ago at the corner of rue de
Berri, this has been something of a jinxed location.<br />
<br />
I also wondered what your normal M&S shopper had in common with the chav
zoo the Champs have become.<br />
<br />
Every weekend there are about a quarter of a million people on the avenue, in
hoodies, baggy jeans, short skirts or Adidas trainers (big Adidas store at
number 22), dodging pickpockets, intrusive beggars, and football fans (huge
Paris Saint-Germain football club store, at number 27, complete with the odd
optimistic David Beckham picture) to queue up for the latest Tom Cruise
movie, get a Big Mac (McDonald's at number 140) or buy sprayed-on jeggings
for €9.95 at H&M (number 90).<br />
<br />
I know my Champs-Elysées: I have lived in the area half my life; and was in
fact born about 100 metres off what the Paris Tourism office likes to call "the
most beautiful avenue in the world", a tag duly picked up by the M&S
advance publicity.<br />
<br />
Long before the actual opening last Thursday, you had to question how they
would manage to fit a complete M&S into a store with the footprint of a
family flat.<br />
<br />
I dropped by on my way home on Friday. There was a long queue patiently
waiting outside in the nippy late November evening, with bewildered
middle-aged shoppers admitted one couple at a time.
<br />
Through the windows, you could see near-empty clothes aisles. You had to
wonder if the queue – spotlighted by every daily newspaper after the
opening, Blitz spirit, free tea and biscuits, so Anglais – wasn't a bit of
publicity stunt.<br />
<br />
When I put this to the store manager, she blanched and went all elf 'n safety
on me. There Were Rules, she explained. Which were Essential. It got a bit
like pulling teeth, until I managed to get out of her that only 420 people
are allowed inside the 14,000 square ft store at any time.<br />
<br />
Most of these were queuing again, inside, for the "food hall" –
which is more like a food grotto, in the back, the average size of your
local newsagent. The food was in fact added as a bit of an afterthought:
originally, the store was supposed to establish M&S as a fashion
retailer.<br />
<br />
It was only after something of a spontaneous email campaign, once the rumours
started in Paris, that some space was freed for it. It apparently already
accounts for 35 per cent of sales this first week, instead of the projected
10 per cent. "There will be Simply Food outlets in Paris soon,"
the nice publicity woman told me.<br />
<br />
It's very obvious they can't open fast enough for us. Harried shop executives
were helping the assistants continuously restocking the shelves, as the <i>oeufs
écossais</i>, the<i> poulet à l'Indienne</i>, the sandwiches <i>au
bacon</i> and the scones got grabbed in quasi-wartime scenes.<br />
<br />
When we came back on Saturday morning to take pictures, the queue was still
there, but the inside of the store was fuller. It was still the food that
attracted the most customers – very few seemed to have found their way to
the lingerie department, occupying most of the entire first floor – but the
women's clothes now also got some attention.<br />
<br />
The choice, I have to say, is very stylish and covetable. There was a €25
Autograph gold lamé tank top that looked just as good as something nearly
similar I recently bought from Max Mara at €200, scrumptious shearling
gloves in buttery suede for €62, a cashmere hoodie for €120. Not cheap by any standards – my favourite Per Una £15 nightie was €32.50 – and
certainly more than the 10 per cent mark up on London prices announced.<br />
<br />
I went looking for some of my favourite M&S items, the five rolled up
cotton knickers for £6, but they obviously had been deemed too down-market
to cross the Channel. Ditto the opaque black tights at £8.<br />
<br />
M&S Paris have gone chic on us. They should be a success – I espied on a
whiteboard, as we were dropping the photographer's heavy kit bag in a back
office, that 3,100 customers have visited it the last two days, each
spending an average basket of €36.50.<br />
<br />
If the objective was to create a buzz in advance of the normal-sized stores
scheduled to open within the next two years outside central Paris, they
probably have achieved that.<br />
<br />
All the same, as I walked home past my local supermarket, whose manager was
hugely miffed that M&S are allowed to open on Sundays while he cannot, I
thought I couldn't see myself or anyone queuing for half an hour under the
baleful eye of a basketball-player-sized security guard for a sandwich or a
Chicken Tikka Masala.<br />
<br />
As for the sensible knickers, I'll still get them in London.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">© </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Telegraph Media Group & </span><span style="font-size: 78%;">Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011</span>Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7041044730990594406.post-7021237380736713802011-10-09T07:00:00.010+01:002011-10-25T19:31:54.268+01:00An expectant nation waits for Carla to deliver<div class="storyHead"> <h2> Could the president's popular wife become Paris' first yummy mummy, asks Anne-Elisabeth Moutet </h2> </div> <div class="oneHalf gutter"> <div class="story"> <div id="storyEmbSlide"> <div class="slideshow ssMain"> <div class="nextPrevLayer"> <div style="display: block;" class="ssImg"> <img src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02007/ca_2007937a.jpg" alt="" height="342" width="546" /> <div class="artImageExtras"> <div class="ingCaptionCredit"> <span style="font-size:78%;"><span class="caption">Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has complained about not being allowed to smoke or drink during pregnancy (REUTERS)</span> </span></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="cl"> </div> <div class="bylineComments"> <div> <p class="bylineBody"> <span style="font-weight: bold;" rel="author">By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet</span></p> </div> <p class="publishedDate">7:00AM BST 09 Oct 2011</p> <div class="cl"> </div> </div> <div id="mainBodyArea"> <div class="firstPar"><p> Forget little Florence Cameron. Forget Tony and Cherie’s Leo – and those embarrassing Balmoral disclosures. Nicolas and Carla’s bébé, due to arrive imminently, promises to send France into a rarely-seen frenzy, right in time for next year’s presidential election. </p></div><div class="secondPar"> <p> Coyly alluded to for months before the obviously growing bump prompted the happy Maman to disclose her condition in a Bastille Day interview about Libya (as one does), the presidential child will, we are assured, be shielded from media intrusion. No pictures, either, at the chic Clinique de La Muette in the 16th arrondissement of Paris where she is expected to give birth (rated on the forums of auFeminin.com, France’s answer to Mumsnet, as the Parisian woman’s favourite). </p></div><div class="thirdPar"> <p> “I made a mistake early on when I allowed my son Aurélien to be photographed,” Carla told Madame Figaro magazine a few weeks ago, referring to her much-publicised first holiday in Egypt with the then-courting Sarkozy in 2008. She went on to explain that children should be “protected from the world”. </p></div><div class="fourthPar"> <p> Few in France doubt that her actual meaning was that Nicolas Sarkozy should be protected from any relapse into his early show-off antics, when the president swaggered in Ray-Ban aviator glasses with his glamorous wife du jour on his arm, seemingly measuring his success by the number of paparazzi clicking away in the immediate vicinity. This has never gone down well here, where aloofness – even cold arrogance – has, over the centuries, been the default attitude of successful monarchs and presidents alike. It is especially a no-no in times of economic hardship. </p></div><div class="fifthPar"> <p> Carla Bruni, a wealthy and successful woman in her own right, has always managed to stay far more popular than her husband by a combination of understated simplicity, precision-calibrated self-deprecation – and a shrewd instinct for discretion honed by an Italian childhood spent under the very real threat of kidnapping by the Red Brigades.</p></div><div class="body"> <p> In this she blends seamlessly with her adopted habitat, the Seizième sud, home of the discreet Parisian bourgeoisie. Her neighbours in the 75016 postcode, Nicolas Sarkozy’s natural constituency, strongly disapproved of the initial Sarko style, which included parading his three sons (by his two previous wives) and two bottle-blonde stepdaughters at his 2007 Elysée inauguration. </p> <p> The new régime, in which Carla’s instincts collude with Sarko’s spin-doctoring team, has been protesting (unconvincingly) that “no-one is interested in this private event” – there won’t even be an official Presidency communiqué for the birth – while overseeing a few strategic leaks to upmarket women’s magazines. </p> <p> Adding a light skirmishing touch to the whole setup is Sarkozy’s somewhat louche 82-year-old father, the Hungarian-born Baron Pal Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, who has become an unofficial but quite chatty source to German tabloids, on every matter from the Catholic baptism to the (inaccurate, as it turned out) date planned for the birth. There is no love lost between Nicolas Sarkozy and his four-times-married father who abandoned his wife when young Nicolas was eight; but there is a feeling here that if the president had really wanted to shut Daddy up, he would have succeeded. </p> <p> Predictably, all the celebrity websites and weeklies have been scrambling to find out every possible detail of the forthcoming birth. A picture of the baby is currently quoted at €50,000 by the main photo agencies. Clinique de La Muette, where the former justice minister Rachida Dati had her own daughter Zohra two years ago, denied that a whole floor had been booked and cordoned off to ensure Carla’s privacy, implicitly confirming the rest of the reports – that a couple of €250-a-night “ordinary rooms” on either side of Ms Bruni-Sarkozy’s modest suite will be occupied by security officers. La Muette has a controversially-high rate of C-sections, but there has been no indication that the 43-year-old Bruni thinks herself too posh to push. </p> <p> Carla herself has tried to forestall probable criticism in acknowledging herself “incredibly fortunate – I have help, staff; I don’t have to get back to a job.” (And a good thing, too, as she has indicated she will use “green” washable cloth nappies.) </p> <p> She, Sarkozy and Aurélien do not live at the Elysée but in her pretty rue Pierre Guérin townhouse, right next to the leafy Villa Montmorency gated enclave where Gérard Depardieu, Celine Dion and missile-and-media tycoon Arnaud Lagardère have homes – and just across the garden from Aurélien’s father, the philosopher and radio personality Raphaël Enthoven. Far from resenting this proximity, Sarko relishes it: an unhappy, lonely boy himself, raised by a working mother and an adored grandfather, he famously likes to gather his children and extended families, and greeted a bemused Enthoven the first time he met him, at the traditional 2008 Elysée Christmas party, with: “Now you’re a member of the tribe...” </p> <p> France doesn’t really have yummy mummies, but if anyone were to start the trend, Carla Bruni is by far the best-placed. Like famous mothers here before her – Catherine Deneuve, Inès de La Fressange, Princess Caroline – she’d bring a definite Gallic twist to it. “I can’t stand this pregnancy any longer; this baby can’t come soon enough so that I can smoke and drink again,” she moaned recently, to no outrage whatsoever. </p> <p> But it is also Bruni who put her husband on a strict training regimen with her personal trainer almost as soon as they got together. The trainer, the improbably-named Julie Imperiali, talked to the press about the “perineal exercises” she designed for the couple, to “tone up posture” and “improve their sex life”. Apart from her rounded belly, Carla seems to have gained no weight at all during her pregnancy: everyone expects her – and, indeed, this being Paris, expects of her – to be back in model shape by Christmas. (It’s not just mummies: all Frenchwomen are deeply competitive when it comes to appearance.) </p> <p> Carla Bruni breast-fed Aurélien briefly, and may well do the same this time, although enquiries on the subject are met with a stony silence at the Elysée – Frenchwomen are rarely evangelical about this, and take the transition to bottles in their stride. It is likely the baby will be dressed by Bonpoint, Jacadi, Tartine et Chocolat, possibly even receive presents from Baby Dior – although since this is all too often nicknamed “Baby Emir”, Carla might decide to steer clear of it. </p> <p> Carla won’t have a real nanny problem. She already has live-in staff (to whom she is notably generous: she once employed an ex-convict she had met begging in the streets); and her mother, the expansive concert pianist Marisa Bruni-Tedeschi, who likes her son-in-law very much, will certainly insist on baby-sitting her new grandchild. She can afford to hire the best, who need only be vetted for security reasons by the French police. </p> <p> Of course, most Frenchwomen aren’t in the same elevated circumstances, and while dreaming of the Norland graduates only employed these days by oligarchs and Gulf princes, end up with au pairs from Britain, Germany, Eastern Europe (there is a brisk network for Nice Polish Girls among traditionalist Catholic mothers), and girls from former French colonies such as Morocco and Sénégal. If you’re lucky, they have the accumulated experience of having cared for six small brothers and sisters, and become a family member, then friend, for years. If you’re unlucky, they are mostly interested in your dress cupboard and/or your husband – and everything ends up in a spectacularly messy divorce. </p> <p> The Sarkozys will not have to worry about finding a good school for their child (or the vast amounts needed for the fees). France still enjoys an overall decent public education system, and a highly-subsidised private system which must follow the national curriculum by law. While Carla should not have to resort to state-subsidised day care, she might start her child in her local state nursery school at three – the received wisdom here being that this is a good time to start socialising children. </p> <p> Frenchwomen also have a far less dogmatic attitude to child-rearing than their British middle-class counterparts. Their priorities are different – parents will pay vast premiums to move to the catchment area of a top-rate collège or lycée, but they will not, as a rule, interfere much with the teachers. Both Sarkozys attended private but not especially-distinguished schools, Carla in Switzerland and Sarkozy as a day pupil in Paris, after flunking out of Lycée Chaptal. If their child manages, down the line, to find a place in the infinitely more prestigious State-run Lycées Louis le Grand, Henri IV or Saint Louis in Paris, he or she will be considered to have done better than them. </p> <p> It is worth noting that in this process, nobody here seems to be interested in a child’s self-esteem: the psychoanalyst Pascal Baudry has estimated that by the time he or she reaches the age of 18, a French child has been criticised 100,000 times – mostly with little kindness in mind. Schools are expected to produce academically-able children, not well-rounded characters. (This occasionally helps explain the humourless tone of public debate in the country.) </p> <p> But this is still far in the future, when, no matter how next May’s election pans out, Baby Sarkozy will be the child of a former, not a sitting chief of State. Meanwhile the nation awaits l’enfant, the first legitimate baby to be born to a French president in history. However she decides to play things, Carla Bruni will be blazing a trail. </p> </div> </div></div> </div> <div class="oneSixth"> <style>.at15t_email { display: none ! important; }ul li.email span.at300bs { display: none ! important; }</style> <div class="shareFunctions" id="shareSide" style="height: 162px;"> <div class="storyFunc"> <span></span> </div> <div class="storyFunc"> <div class="retweet"> </div> </div> <div class="storyFunc nobord googlePlusOneButton"> </div> <div id="diggPermaUrl" class="hidden"> <span class="IN-widget" style="line-height: 1; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block; text-align: center;"><span style="padding: 0pt ! important; margin: 0pt ! important; text-indent: 0pt ! important; display: inline-block ! important; vertical-align: baseline ! important;font-size:1px ! important;" ><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0"><a id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0-link"><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0-logo"></span><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0-title"><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0-mark"></span><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128914_0-title-text"></span></span></a></span></span><span style="padding: 0pt ! important; margin: 0pt ! important; text-indent: 0pt ! important; display: inline-block ! important; vertical-align: baseline ! important;font-size:1px ! important;" ><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128981_1-container" class="IN-right"><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128981_1" class="IN-right"><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128981_1-inner" class="IN-right"><span id="li_ui_li_gen_1319555128981_1-content" class="IN-right"></span></span></span></span></span></span>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8815590/An-expectant-nation-waits-for-Carla-to-deliver.html<br /><p><span style="font-size:85%;">© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet </span><span style="font-size:85%;">2011</span></p><br /></div><br /></div><div class="related_links"> </div> </div>Anne-Elisabeth Moutethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15793046312494312739noreply@blogger.com0