Forget the Oscars, the Cannes critics are the best in the world

Tony Curtis & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Cannes Film Festival, 1985

France's film critics are the country's gift to world cinema. And at the Cannes Film Festival, they have their time in the spotlight, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 8:17PM BST 13 May 2011

If it's May on the Riviera, it must be time for the Cannes Film Festival – and for another whine about how commercial everything has become. How could a festival meant to celebrate the art of cinema sell its soul to Hollywood's increasingly over-inflated blockbusters?

Rather than parading up and down the Croisette, getting photographed on the beach in skimpy bikinis, and generally doing the right thing by their fans, stars and jury members remain incarcerated in a soulless concrete bunker that looks and feels like the venue for a trade fair (which it is for the other 350 days of the year). Once inside, they're protected by a phalanx of press officers, a regiment of Navy Seals, and stricter retinal scans and background checks than for marrying into the Royal family.

Why do the French put up with it? Why demonstrate an entirely atypical flair for crass commerce by superimposing on to the main event – as well as elevated competitions like Semaine de la Critique – the Cannes Film Market, a roaring convention taking up the cavernous basement of the Palais des Festivals, where hawkers from around the globe will cheerfully sell you the rights to direct-to-video gems such as Combat Girls, Turn me on, Goddammit and The Godfathers of Ganja?

The answer is simple. Yes, Cannes might be a bit tasteless. But for the French, the whole affair still preserves the ultimate in filmic fiction: that it's our opinion that matters. Sure, we might not have been able to sell any of our television series between Inspector Gadget and Spiral. Sure, our last Oscar-winner may have been March of the Penguins. But by Guillaume, we're going to be the arbiters of cool in all things cinema. To that end, we happily bring the world's biggest stars to Cannes to run the gauntlet of a gang of critics wielding Derrida like a semi-automatic, and slather it in enough Gallic glamour to make Oscar night look like The Sarah-Jane Adventures.

There is none of that nonsense that afflicts the Oscars about voting by members of the Academy: the process of jury selection, as well as the ultimate choice of competing entries, is shrouded in opacity. Gilles Jacob, the president-for-life of the festival committee, has even, in Hosni Mubarak fashion, appointed his son to the four-person body that picks the 12 foreign entries in the Sélection Officielle from some 4,000 hopefuls.

The actual jury, picked with a canny eye for the best mix of star power and intellectual cred, changes every year. This time round, it includes Uma Thurman, Robert De Niro (as the chair), "Norwegian critic Linn Ullmann", as well as directors from France, China, Chad, an Argentinian "producer-actress", a Chinese producer, and Jude Law.

If this seems to be taking inclusiveness slightly too far, it is entirely intended. After the post-war years, when the French government supported the Festival as a way to rebuild the country's film industry, it gradually evolved into the magical meeting place of the movie world: Hollywood, Cinecittà, Ealing. And when François Truffaut deservedly snatched the Palme d'Or in 1959 for The 400 Blows, he and his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critics turned Nouvelle Vague auteurs provided France with a cachet on which we have been trading ever since.

France has, admittedly, always been the best place in the world to see films. In those remote times before VHS, the 500-plus arthouses of Paris far exceeded in number and variety the choices available in New York, let alone the wastelands of London. After school, I picked up an invaluable crash course in the film culture of the past 70 years, ranging from Glauber Rocha to D W Griffith, from Billy Wilder to Antonioni, from John Ford to Karel Reisz, from Busby Berkeley to Ingmar Bergman.

And at the end of the day, the Cahiers crowd did make sense with their auteur theory, which maintains that a director is, in fact, the author of a unique work, not a hack standing behind the camera shouting directions. They were right about the distinctiveness of a film directed by Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Ophüls, Carné or Visconti. (They also had a sort of point about Jerry Lewis – it was, in a way, unique in its sheer godawfulness.)

Perhaps, then, our critics, as much as our films, are our gift to world cinema. The history of the Nouvelle Vague is largely one of backseat drivers who turned filmmakers, with a sometimes astonishing degree of success. When a fanboy named Steven Spielberg cast Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was acknowledging an intellectual ascendancy which the French have been careful to perpetuate.

It was we, too, who were the first to lionise Clint Eastwood as an auteur in the 1980s. The process was masterminded by a single, not particularly successful journalist, Pierre Rissient, who decided to remake this B-movie star into a cultural icon. (He also championed Quentin Tarantino, as well as Aki Kaurismäki, proof of his singular eye.)

So yes, we French can be infuriating. But every now and then, we get it right.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Sarkozy’s six wars will make or break him

The French president has public support, but if things go wrong that will fast disappear, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Mr Sarkozy once enjoyed a cordial relationship with Col Gaddafi Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 8:58PM BST 06 Apr 2011

66 Comments

Not even George W Bush could have hoped to get away with six simultaneous wars. Yet Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be thriving on them. We French have troops in Mali, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Somalia – and, most visibly, over Libya and in Ivory Coast.

Cynics will argue that Sarkozy is a gambler, staking his re-election next year on the throw of the military dice. But even though he’s wildly unpopular, and a political calculator nonpareil, the truth is that Sarko is also showing his own peculiar brand of sincerity. He genuinely believes, for instance, that France’s failure to stop the Rwandan genocide was dishonourable (as a junior minister, he argued in favour of intervention). And he has form: a couple of years ago, he authorised a raid against Somali pirates, resulting in the rescue of our hostages and the pirates being showily taken back to France for trial.

Any image of the French as pacifists is misleading. We hate losing wars, but we believe in both la gloire and in hard-nosed choices that we sell to ourselves as idealism. We have forgiven Sarko a botched (and fatal) attempt to free two hostages from an al Qaeda affiliate in Mali, and are remarkably quiet about our 10-year presence in Afghanistan. French troops have also been an almost constant presence in Ivory Coast over the past decade, more than once stepping in to prevent a Liberian-style civil war – and to protect French nationals and interests.

But what makes the current outbreak of muscular interventionism so delightful for Sarko is that he seemed to have missed his opportunity. When the Tunisian revolt began, the foreign secretary, Michèle Alliot-Marie, suggested that French police could help quell the unrest (for which she later lost her job). Events in Egypt, too, seemed to pass France by, not least because a host of presidents have been the grateful recipients of Hosni Mubarak’s hospitality: Sarkozy even went there to woo Carla Bruni in the winter of 2008.

What saved Sarko’s blushes was Col Gaddafi’s bloody repression of the Libyan revolt. This offered Sarkozy – and France – an overdue opportunity to take a principled stance. And the operation’s unlikely mastermind was one of France’s unique contributions to both fashion and global politics: Bernard-Henri Lévy, the battling philosopher with a line in human rights advocacy and designer shirts.

In February, the 62-year-old author of such slight but best-selling volumes as Barbarism with a Human Face (Communism: bad), Left in Dark Times (politically correct toleration of totalitarianism: very bad) and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (LSE-graduate Islamists beheading US reporters: uniquely bad) found himself in Cairo. The situation was unbearable: he was but one of an indiscriminate mass of reporters, all after the same story. So when he heard the rumbles of revolt in Libya, he hitched a ride to Benghazi in a fruit-seller’s van, made his way to rebel HQ, told them he could arrange for them to get diplomatic recognition from France, borrowed an old satellite phone – and did just that.

Lévy sees himself as the reincarnation of André Malraux (Nobel-winning novelist, hero of the Spanish Civil War, wartime acolyte of de Gaulle and former culture minister). In truth, he is a far more buffoonish figure, but he certainly has connections: it was in his palazzo in Marrakesh that his daughter’s husband left her for Carla Bruni, and his godfather is the impeccably connected Gucci tycoon François Pinault. Although Lévy supported the socialists in the last election, and won’t vote for Sarko next year, the pair have dined together regularly for years. So, after he called Sarko, the president arranged for the rebel leaders to be spirited to Paris. The visit, and formal recognition of the rebels as the lawful government in exile, was kept so secret that the new foreign secretary, Alain Juppé, only heard about it when asked by reporters in Brussels.

So far, the gamble seems to have paid off. After France initiated the first air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces, the news was full of rebels waving tricolours and vowing that their firstborn would be named “Sarkozy”. Even warnings that some are former al‑Qaeda militants have failed to dent the popular support. As in Ivory Coast, French initiative is seen as preventing a bloodbath – and having a good conscience has always played well in Paris.

Of course, Sarko knows that things could turn sour at any moment. Loyalist counter-attacks mean that operations in Libya could last longer, and reports of massacres in Ivory Coast by supporters of the new president have cast a pall over events. All of which could transform what seemed clear-cut – supporting the good guys, preventing bloodshed, upholding France’s ideals – into a protracted, bloody mess. In Paris, as elsewhere, foreign adventures have often been the last resort of the battered politician. If the missions fail, Sarkozy’s presidency will surely fail with them.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Fisticuffs with a French robber left me bruised but not beaten

Not everyone who opens their door in a quiet street off the Champs-Elysées is a little-old-lady pushover, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

The Champs-Elysées on a safer day Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 7:08AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

35 Comments

It took about five minutes to turn me into a Victim. I opened the door one afternoon to find a slim woman in biker leathers on my landing, perhaps two inches taller than my 5ft 3in. She said she had a package for me, and was carrying a cardboard box complete with a sheaf of documents.

The next thing I knew, I was shrieking blue murder while she repeatedly butted me with her full-face helmet. "Au secours! Au secours!" I bellowed while she tried to muzzle me, simultaneously punching me in the ribs and shoving me back into my flat.

My overriding feeling was of flabbergasted surprise, a sensation of nightmarish unreality mixed with fury that this cow thought she could get away with knocking me out and helping herself to my things. I knew I had to keep screaming – as for fighting back, that was sheer instinct.

I think it was mostly the noise that made her flee, and perhaps the unpleasant surprise that not everyone who opens their door in a quiet street off the Champs-Elysées is a little-old-lady pushover. Shaken and shaking, I got back inside and called the police, who duly showed up 20 minutes later. When I told them I was quite unscathed, they suggested I sit down, have "a little glass of something strong" (we are Parisian, after all) and wait for the adrenalin to ebb away.

Running a hand through my hair, I found half a dozen bumps. Meanwhile, my ribs started complaining, too. "Do you need an ambulance?" the flics asked. Surely I didn't. I made my way to the police station in a taxi, to file a formal complaint, and was told to report to the Médecine Judiciaire's Special Victims Unit at Hôpital de l'Hôtel-Dieu near Notre Dame, the only place officially mandated to assess the damage.

The strange thing was that at the unit, my injuries were treated almost as an afterthought (in fact, the doctor I saw missed a hairline crack in my eighth right rib, which was later caught by my private GP). What seemed to be everyone's overriding concern was the deep psychological damage that I had to be suffering. I was urged no fewer than four times by various people in white coats to go and receive counselling from the shrinks.

It was no use objecting that I was fine, really. "But I won the round!" I protested. I could see on their faces that this was only proof of how disturbed I was. "You can get compensation from the state," I was advised. Compensation for what? That nice Sécurité Sociale is already picking up my medical bills, nothing was stolen, and while my rib does hurt, especially at night, I can still bask in a mild sense of achievement at having driven off the invading horde of one.

...

The prize for the oddest French burglars must go to the team who recently robbed a funeral parlour in the small town of Valadon, making off with a couple of coffins, some cash and the village's only hearse. Even stranger, this is the fourth time the place has been burgled in as many years. It certainly gives the lie to "You can't take it with you."

...

The fiscal rigourists attacking Britain's high-speed rail link, such as the Telegraph's own Simon Heffer, have got it completely wrong. We French always knew that the TGV infrastructure would be loss-making. But economists calculated that the benefit to the economy at large was well worth the red ink on SNCF's balance sheet.

This is known as the externalities theory. SNCF did not directly profit from the development of former rust-belt cities such as Lille, or subsequent falls in the local crime rate, or the sharp increase in property prices along the tracks, or the added mobility in the workforce. But eventually, we all did. I suspect that British northerners, like the French ones, would rather find jobs in their region than come south. So give them trains.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Jacques Chirac's trial holds little fear for the ultimate bon vivant

Jacques Chirac's long-awaited corruption trial will begin in Paris this week. But, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes, he can go to court on Tuesday with serenity.

Jacques Chirac - Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris 7:00AM GMT 06 Mar 2011

When Jacques Chirac finally shows up for his corruption trial, on Tuesday, in the Première Chambre Civile of the Paris Law Courts – the same where Queen Marie-Antoinette was once judged – he will sit on a special upholstered chair instead of the usual wooden bench in the dock.

There will be an extra lectern for the former French President's notes and documents, requested by his barristers; and a secured room within the historic Law Courts building will be made available to him to rest any time he "feels tired."

The court will already have sat for a full day; but Chirac, who is now aged 78 and in questionable health, has exceptionally been allowed to show up only on specific dates, the ones on which he is scheduled to be questioned by the judges.

Otherwise, we are asked to believe, the former president, now "a private citizen" after enjoying immunity from prosecution during his two consecutive terms from 1995 to 2007, will be tried like any other French politician accused of confusing official and party funds.

The case goes back to the early 1990s, when Chirac was Mayor of Paris.

On the city payroll were, it turned out, dozens of full-time employees who never did a stitch of work for the city. They were instead detailed to the right-wing RPR Gaullist party, there to help Mr Chirac's eventual, and successful, 1995 bid for the presidency.

The facts are not in dispute: other Chirac associates have already been sentenced for them, most notably former PM (and current Foreign Minister) Alain Juppé, who at the time was – conveniently – both Secretary General of the RPR and Paris Deputy Mayor for Finances.

Finally tried in 2004, Juppé was given a 12-month suspended jail sentence, and was declared ineligible for office for one year: he had to take a visiting professor's job in Canada for two years, before he could resume his political career.

The question is whether Chirac knew of his party's financial arrangements.

Although he denies it, he signed last year an out-of-court agreement with the capital's authorities whereby he and his party would refund them to the tune of €2.2 million. In exchange, the City relinquished its suit – to see it taken up by a group of Parisian taxpayers, outraged at what they see as a sweet deal for "less than half the true outlay".

As the case stands, Chirac, while theoretically facing up to 10 years in jail, a €150,000 fine and a five-year voting ban, wouldn't seem to be in really hot water.

For one thing, the state prosecution office – which operates under the direct authority of the justice ministry – has already said it was pushing for a dismissal, "because there isn't enough proof."

Only cynics, perhaps, will observe that we stand barely a year from the next presidential election, and Nicolas Sarkozy will need the entirety of the Gaullist party, nostalgic Chiraquiens and all, squarely behind him in what will be a tight race.

For another, the 6'3" beer-drinking, calf's head scoffing, larger-than-life bon vivant the French always had a soft spot for is suddenly rumoured to be "frail", "ailing", and suffering from Alzheimer's – rumours which Chirac and his high-profile wife, Bernadette, have carefully denied in targeted public statements. (That's officially what the special chair and lectern and side room near the courthouse are all about.)

This should be enough to ensure, in the worst-case scenario, a suspended sentence.

Never mind that only two weeks ago Chirac couldn't bear to miss the Paris yearly Agricultural Show, which he has faithfully visited on opening day for the past four decades, whether in office or out.

There he was mobbed by the crowds, basking in the admiration and love of tens of thousands of his favourite constituents, French farmers, who feel nobody has or will ever fight their corner as fiercely again. Nicolas Sarkozy is usually booed at the Salon de l'Agriculture.

It is ironic that the trial should take place barely one week after one of Chirac's protégés, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was sacked from her job as foreign minister merely for having accepted free flights from a relative of Tunisia's just-deposed strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. (It is even more amusing that she should be replaced by none other than Alain Juppé, who at the time of his sentencing, for the same facts Jacques Chirac is now being tried for, was said to be bitter at having to carry the can for persons unnamed.)

In the last a couple of years, the climate in France has become starkly intolerant of corruption, extra perks, dodgy political financing and the like.

The public used not bat an eyelid at secret second families housed and guarded at the Republic's expense (François Mitterrand's), lavish holidays paid by exotic tycoons in five-star palaces (Mitterrand, Chirac), gifts of diamonds by megalomaniac African tyrants (Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), secret state funds re-routed to political campaigns (everyone's, even staid, Calvinist Socialist PM Lionel Jospin), not to mention a comfortable blurring of the private and public use of what must surely be the loveliest official real estate in the world, all the aristocratic palaces of France's nobility, complete with their furniture and artworks, turned into ministerial offices and grace-and-favour homes.

No longer.

A combination of the economic crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy's perceived love of bling, and the globalisation of political sensitivities has made French politicians' life less comfortable of late.

One minister was recently sacked because he charged his office for €12,000 worth of Cuban cigars. (And he had to pay for the cigars.)

Another was a victim of an early reshuffle because she'd lent her grace-and-favour flat to her unemployed brother for one month. Yet another lost his job after favouring private planes over scheduled flights.

Besides the ousting of various strongmen, the Arab spring claims as collateral damage the reputation of a number of French politicos, as week after week their holidays with this or that tyrant are being made public.

What is perhaps surprising is the Teflon-like popularity of Jacques Chirac even today.

The French are largely aware that in or out of office, Chirac never paid for a luxury holiday in his life (in Morocco, in Oman, at the luxurious Hôtel du Cap-Eden Roc on the Riviera, as guest of the luxury tycoon and Gucci owner François Pinault in his St Tropez compound.)

They know Chirac was proven to have spent some €4,000 a day in "entertaining and food expenses" when he was Paris Mayor. They know the Chiracs have been living rent-free since they left the Elysée palace in 2007 in a luxurious 4,300 square foot Paris flat on the Seine, 3 Quai Voltaire, just opposite the Louvre, "loaned" by the family of Lebanon's slain PM, Rafik Hariri. But apparently, they don't care.

However strange it may seen, Chirac, who is the scion of a provincial industrialist, married to the aristocratic daughter of an early De Gaulle supporter, and whose constituency home is a 17th century château he had listed in the early 70s to make its maintenance tax-deductible, is seen as having the common touch, being one of the people.

His second term as president was marked by strikes and rising unpopularity, but now that Nicolas Sarkozy's poll numbers have sunk even lower than his ever did, he is considered fondly by Right and Left alike.

The former regret his more consensual style. The latter give him credit for opposing the Iraq war from the start.

All things considered, he can go to court on Tuesday with serenity – nothing, not even a judicial rap on the fingers, can seemingly change his reputation.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Marine Le Pen becomes Front National leader: A pivotal moment for French politics?

The election of Marine Le Pen as leader of the far-Right Front National could mark a watershed moment for French politics, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Marine Le Pen with her father, Jean-Marie Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris
7:30AM GMT 16 Jan 2011

14 Comments

It's a measure of the inroads Marine Le Pen has already made in the French political debate that she now splits opinion among the rarefied world of Parisian intellectuals.

On the one hand, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy still thinks she reeks of sulphur: according to him, the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, 82, the longstanding Front National leader, is "even more dangerous than her father".

Yet on the other Elisabeth Lévy, the shrewd editor of Causeur magazine, the French answer to The Spectator, considers not only that Marine Le Pen "says nothing scandalous or morally unacceptable", but also that she might well "be truly breaking away from the old French extreme-Right, to create something new."

Sunday marks an extraordinary moment for Marine Le Pen, and a potentially pivotal moment for the politics of France.

On Sunday afternoon at a party conference in Tours she will be formally declared the comfortable winner of a postal ballot to elect a new leader of the Front National, the party created by her father and reviled for decades even among some of the most conservative of the French.

He is bowing out and giving way to his daughter, a twice-divorced single mother with an infectious laugh and a no-nonsense manner mitigated by charm, who represents a younger, more open-minded and more politically fleet of foot generation - and thus a far greater challenge to France's two main and traditional parties.

"I've taken risks to draw the Front National out of its old rut," she says. "I could have tried to pander to all the small groups who wanted no change at all. Instead, I have made my case that I was a secular republican and a democrat. Over 90 per cent of our members are with me."

Even though she kept to a gruelling schedule, criss-crossing France 51 times in the past few months to campaign for the leadership, she is in fine shape and cracking good humour. She favours tailored jeans which she wears with high-heeled boots, silk shirts and strict blazers, and told Paris Match she follows the high-protein Dukan diet.

Now the FN's undisputed leader, she has her sights firmly on the 2012 presidential election, in which she could prove as dangerous for Nicolas Sarkozy as her father was for the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in 2002: she firmly believes she can come in second, and slug it out in the runoff with whoever gets finally picked by the Socialist Party.

"Nicolas Sarkozy took many right-wing voters for a ride," she says. "He stole our slogans on security and order, promised a lot and delivered little. We won't be taken in twice."

Yet the latest polls show that her anti-globalisation, anti-Europe and anti-capitalist speeches make more inroads in the Left-wing electorate that on the Right.

It was in 1972 that her father created the Front National out of several even smaller right-wing factions, but the first-past-the-post system ensured that it remained outside parliamentary politics for its first 12 years.

Then came the first European elections of 1984, and a decision by the embattled Socialist president, François Mitterrand, to revert to the system of proportional representation that General de Gaulle had previously repudiated.

That year, when Ms Le Pen was just 15, the Front National celebrated the election of 10 MEPs - and two years later, with a similar electoral system introduced in national elections, 35 Front députés were elected. That split the Right enough to help keep the Socialists in power - and gave the party a new legitimacy.

It was a wily manoeuvre by Mitterrand: no alliances were possible on the Right with the toxic Front, seen, not entirely without reason, as a motley alliance of Vichy nostalgics, football hooligans, Algérie française colonial carryovers, and dyed-in-the-surplice Traditionalist Catholics. Yet without their number, the Right could not attain a majority.

Since then, PR has been again excised from the electoral system, but the Front National has never returned to complete obscurity.

It is difficult to overstate the weight of France's historical past in her present political life. The scars left by the French Revolution, the great original sin of the Occupation, and the bitter Algerian war of decolonisation still fester, just under the surface of almost any debate.

Le Pen, an orphaned Breton fisherman's son, tried to join the Résistance in 1944, and later fought in Algeria and in the Suez expedition.

But he made his indelible mark in French politics by obsessively picking at the scabs of the country's dark past. He boasted of using torture in Algeria to combat terrorism; called the gas chambers "a point of detail" of the Second World War; used time-and-motion calculations to dispute the number of Auschwitz victims; and described France's German occupiers as "very civilised".

He was several times condemned under French incitement laws - all of which he used to paint himself as a larger-than-life pariah in the too-tame, self-referential world of French politics.

This history, of which she is acutely aware, Marine Le Pen has actively tried to put behind her. She has disavowed her father on several points, not least in references to the Second World War. She goes further in private, say her friends, "but she doesn't want to attack her father in public."

At 42, a handsome, single working mother of three, she presents herself as the young, modern face of the Front National, in sharp contrast to her defeated opponent in the Party leadership contest, the 60-year-old academic Bruno Gollnisch, under whose banner the Party's residual hardliners had sought an increasingly exiguous shelter.

In the Gollnisch camp gather the "tradis", the traditionalist Catholics who are horrified by Marine's support of gay rights - short of gay marriage - and refusal to support abolition of the 1975 law permitting abortion. (She says she only wants all provisions of the law strictly applied, so that women are first offered "alternatives" such as pre-natal adoption.)

No-one in France will admit to anti-Semitism, which is actionable by law, but campaign rumours from the Gollnisch camp included descriptions of Marine's entourage as "full of Jews, queers and Arabs".

It's an exaggeration, but it's true that her inner circle includes types not hitherto much seen at Le Paquebot, the old FN headquarters in Saint Cloud, West Paris.

But mostly, her appeal is her undeniable charisma. Photographs don't entirely do her justice: she is tall, broad-shouldered but slender, with an easy self-deprecating manner that is especially unusual in France. A barrister, she is a good public speaker, capable like her father of delivering a structured speech for an hour without notes.

If she feels her instinctive pugnacious style, modelled on her father, is making the wrong impression on her audience, she is capable of stopping in mid-sentence to address a contradictor with a smile and a joke.

She was far mellower when I asked her last week if, being divorced and raising her three children alone, she had become a new, unlikely emblem of French feminism. She gave a spontaneous belly laugh.

"Well, I'm not especially proud of this failure, you know, but I've had to deal with it and it's taught me a lot," she replied.

She supports a parental salary for young mothers and a number of Scandinavian-type measures to help women work and raise children.

"I wouldn't call myself a feminist, because I don't think relations between men and women should necessarily be confrontational; and I don't want to be reduced to my gender; and yes, I think we should find other solutions than affirmative action to break the glass ceiling. You never know if you were hired because of your competence or because a woman had to take the job, do you?"

It is interesting that two personalities she quoted positively during a half-hour conversation were two Jews: Simone Veil, the former health minister and European Parliament president, who first introduced the abortion bill, and Elisabeth Badinter, the left-wing feminist author.

On television, she is a redoubtable debater, having honed her bruiser's skills in numerous panels in which most of the other participants seemed to gang up against her. This, of course, has helped her: the Front National always made a meal of representing the citizens left without a voice.

The thrust of her political discourse is a mix of protectionism, almost Leftist social welfare economics and French nationalism that seems tailored to the present post-crisis Zeitgeist in France.

Following her father, she has built a strong nationwide support by opposing unchecked immigration, but insists this has nothing to do with racism and is only about proper assimilation into the French culture.

Almost alone of the French political class, she has jumped on the European anti-Islamist bandwagon, and makes approving reference to Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and Oskar Freysiger of Switzerland.

The latest polls give her good reason to look forward to the coming year.

In recent weeks, Le Monde and Marianne, the news weekly, published figures showing that close to one quarter of the Gaullist electorate sympathises with her views; and that almost half of all French voters agree with her on insecurity and crime.

One third agree on immigration, one third on "secularism" - code in France for disagreeing with the encroachment of Islam on society - and one quarter on leaving the euro.

Fascinatingly, 74 per cent of the French would describe her as "courageous". (Meanwhile 59 per cent consider her "racist", 47 per cent "modern" and 42 per cent "close to people's concerns.")

Such figures would make her France's most electable politician if she weren't called Le Pen.

But if she weren't called Le Pen, would she be where she is now?

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

French men want us to diet to make them look good

Having managed to lose three stone in the past year, I am happy to boast that none of it was done at the behest of one of my male compatriots, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

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No more foie gras sandwiches for French women Photo: Reuters

7:09AM GMT 10 Jan 2011

58 Comments

Back from their holiday blowouts, the French – by which I mean we Frenchwomen – are eagerly embracing diets, workouts and health plans, in order to lose the pounds accumulated from foie gras, champers and Bûche de Noël.

To the outside observer, our menfolk can seem incredibly supportive in such times. You'll hear them mention their wives' and girlfriends' regimes at restaurants, in stores, and in casual conversation. Should they try to snatch a nibble at a drinks party, fingers will be wagged at the Wags: "C'est mauvais pour ton régime, chérie!"

And yet January is also the moment when one more such nail-on-the-blackboard quip might well lead me to murder. This is because Frenchmen don't want their women to lose weight to help their health, or their self-esteem: all they care about is that their arm candy should make them look good.

In other words, you – the woman – are only an accessory. Gain a couple of kilos, and the gloves will be off: if you don't shed the flab, your man will walk out.

This is no empty threat. As Charles Aznavour sings in his terrifying chart-topper from 1960, Tu te laisses aller ("You're Letting Yourself Go"): "How could you ever please me / How could I ever make love to you / If only you'd make an effort / Lose weight, do a little sport / Look at yourself in the mirror…"

In the run-up to their wedding, the Comte de Chambrun, Countess Raine Spencer's third husband, put her on a diet – when she was over 60. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher, has just ditched his wife of 18 years for a younger, richer, even slenderer model.

Having managed to lose three stone in the past year, and planning to keep it off, I am happy to boast that none of it was done at the behest of one of my male compatriots. (In fact, they'd have driven me to suicide-by-larder.) And even if you make the effort, your Left-Bank lover, with his Hedi Slimane suits and second-hand quotes from Bernard-Henri, is usually so preoccupied with his own image that you will always come a poor second.

Practically all the men in my life have been either English or American – un Français, jamais.

What do you think happens when French MPs are left to discuss a Bill to make their financial situation more transparent? A touching unanimity on all sides – to kill off any provision that might hold any of them publicly accountable for conflict of interest, misrepresentation of outside income or tax evasion.Just before Christmas, an innocent soul tabled the Bill, which included a proposed two-year jail sentence for corruption. This was reduced to a mere fine by a Gaullist three-line-whip at 3am, just before the holiday break – to not a peep from the Socialist opposition. Similarly, the Committee for Financial Transparency in Political Life, an independent quango of nine respected magistrates, was promptly de-fanged, and will only give "consultative" advice. I know you've had problems with your MPs. But honestly, count yourselves lucky.

When Renault decided to suspend three of its executives for industrial espionage (they worked on its 4 billion euro electric vehicles programme), the consensus was that French technology was at risk from "copycat" developing countries, which needed to steal our R&D to compete in the hi-tech fields. If so, it looks like a case of the biter bit. A diplomatic cable on Wikileaks quotes a German industrialist complaining of France as the "Empire of Evil" in terms of industrial property theft, having cost his country's firms untold billions. No fewer than three former Secret Service chiefs were wheeled out here to refute the claims – not entirely convincingly.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Calm down, mes amis, it's only a treaty

While proposed joint military action between British and French forces has been greeted with harrumphing on this side of the Channel, in Paris there has been only shrugging, laced with smug satisfaction, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

2:38AM GMT 03 Nov 2010

152 Comments

If proof were still needed of the essential asymmetry in French-British relations, you need only compare reactions on either side of the Channel to the Sarkozy-Cameron agreement, which proposes that the French and the British military co‑operate to form a joint expeditionary force. Beneath the diplomatic veneer, les Anglais are up in arms: the names Napoleon, Pétain, Exocet and Jacques Chirac are fiercely lobbed about.

To sum it up, the French are unreliable, devious, and let others actually win their wars for them, while making a lot of noise on the sidelines. And that’s only in the last century or so; before that, they were the Hereditary Enemy.

Meanwhile, we French, frankly, couldn’t be less bovvered. It’s a clear case of “you obsess about us; we hardly think about you”. Yes, of course, you can find historians and admirals to recall the infamous Mers-el-Kebir incident, when, on July 3, 1940, most of the French fleet was sunk by the British Navy rather than run the risk of seeing it join Nazi forces, at the cost of 1,297 French lives.

In a typical instance of mutual incomprehension, easily recognisable to this day to everyone who has ever worked in any kind of French-British corporate situation, the British ultimatum asking the French fleet commander, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, to surrender the ships under his command to Allied control for the duration of hostilities was delivered not by his hierarchical counterpart, Admiral James Somerville, but by Somerville’s best French-speaking officer, a Captain Cedric Holland.

English pragmatism predictably came up against the touchy French sense of precedence: Gensoul deemed himself insulted to be sent a subaltern, and delegated a junior lieutenant in his place. The resulting confusion was ended by Somerville’s fleet guns.

And while we, of course, always enjoy a bit of Rosbif-bashing – no, you have not been forgiven for Joan of Arc, or Trafalgar, or Waterloo (the gall of housing the first Eurostar terminal in its namesake train station!), or for Mrs Thatcher’s European contribution rebate – the truth is that we’ve spared next to no front-page headlines for the Traité de Défense Commune. We’re more interested in the US mid-term elections, and the announced defeat of this nice Monsieur Obama; or in the new terrorist threats; and naturally in the tail-end of the strikes against pension reform.

Yesterday’s military agreement is seen as a reasonable compromise for the sake of necessary budget cuts, in a country where “austerity” is political poison, and the population has only recently shown how it responds to calls for fiscal sacrifices. Whatever savings are made here will at least not involve our tax bills.

To be fair, there is also a not inconsiderable feeling here that France is gaining from today’s agreement. Perhaps it’s the kind of smugness that comes from providing most of the running water in the UK, a sizeable part of your electricity, and running hourly a high-speed train to Paris that shows your rail companies how Things Are Done. We sense that when Britain sacrifices perhaps the most original post-war aeroplane technology, the VTOL Harrier jet, for the sake of landing on our benighted excuse for an aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, a lemon that has spent more time in dry dock being fixed than on the high seas, Sarkozy must have pulled a fast one indeed.

There is also the simple reality that the French and the British regard their national military symbols in very different ways. To you, the Royal Navy is the Senior Service. A major naval history of Britain, such as N. A. M. Rodger’s superb endeavour, amounts pretty much to a history of your country. But the French navy, while respected, is by contrast peripheral enough to our national debate that it can get away, to this day and after two Revolutions, with the familiar name of La Royale (as in La Marine Royale.) What we’ve always believed in is might, Realpolitik, and prestige. This, as De Gaulle impressed on us, spells nuclear power, military and civilian.

“The French have become pragmatic, less history-obsessed,” explains the affable Dominique Moïsi, France’s leading geostrategy expert, chief adviser of the IFRI think tank, and a member of the Bilderberg Conference.

“We realise that David Cameron is completely committed to deficit reduction, so that it is not unthinkable that France would find herself the single nuclear power in Europe. That would make for a very uncomfortable position, under pressure from Germany, for instance, to give up on our nuclear deterrent.

“But if France and Britain share the costs of nuclear defence, then the whole concept is preserved. This is well worth an amount of compromise.”

Left unsaid are the potential gains for the French civilian nuclear industry, a direct inheritor of our Fifties and Sixties military programmes, which today produces 80 per cent of French electricity. In times where CO₂ is seen as more dangerous than depleted uranium, French nuclear technology has benefited from a broad national consensus that it was a Good Thing: “Le nucléaire, non, merci!” bumper stickers never caught on in France.

But perhaps such cynicism is uncalled for. At any rate, everyone in Paris officialdom is on message. Ministère de la Défense and Elysée flacks have been briefing assiduously on how complementary the French and British military are. Both armies deploy about the same numbers overseas – some 15,000 men – but in different theatres; the French mostly active in western and central Africa, while until recently the thrust of British military action lay in Iraq, and still does in Afghanistan.

The French-British Rapid Reaction Force is also welcome in French military circles, where the demise of the short-lived FAR, la Force d’Action Rapide, has been mourned. There is little bad history between French and British Special Forces, who share a healthy, mutual admiration for each other. The SAS have seen the French “Marsouins” (the nickname for the Commandos de Marine) at work, most recently in Afghanistan, “in situations where you mostly needed a parachute, night goggles, and a serviceable knife”, in the words of one Marsouin colonel, and were reportedly impressed.

One of France’s eldest special forces veterans, 92-year-old Brigadier Paul Aussaresses, active in the Jedburgh teams between June and December 1944, when the Resistance co-operated with Allied forces on guerrilla operations, recalled yesterday for the Telegraph his training and operation days with British commandos. “You could absolutely rely on them,” he said. “They were fantastic fighters, and they had your back. It’s good to know we’ll be fighting together again, French and English.”

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

Nobody expected this French revolution

The pensions row has turned into a referendum on Sarkozy, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Riot police officers during clashes with youths in Lyon Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris
8:51AM BST 21 Oct 2010

82 Comments

As the French Autumn of Discontent morphs into its second week (more trains, fewer planes, long lines at petrol stations, banlieues kids indulging in a bit of self-administered wealth redistribution in the streets), no one can predict how things will turn out for Nicolas Sarkozy and his embattled government. And yet this should have been the easiest reform of his first term.

The government was looking to score points for realism and for shoring up the pay-as-you-go pensions system. Instead, they have boxed themselves into the kind of standoff the French always used to call, scathingly, la politique à la Thatcher.

The Socialist opposition, hoping to energise grassroots support for their 2012 presidential campaign, encouraged their natural constituents, the teachers' and students' unions, to stoke up anti-Sarkozy resentment in schools and universities. Now they find themselves watching in dismay as the student revolt spirals out of control. If there is a single fatality in these heated confrontations, they will be branded irresponsible, and the same parents who encouraged their children to demonstrate will withdraw every ounce of goodwill and support.

Both sides were taken by surprise. Over the past months, in negotiations quietly undertaken at the Elysée Palace, union leaders had indicated that they understood the pensions quandary. On paper, simple arithmetic sums it up: in 1945, when the scheme was established, eight workers paid for the pension of one retiree. By 1960, they were down to four. Today, it's 1.8, and if nothing changes, in 15 years' time, 1.2 French workers will bear the burden of one pensioner.

The unions were prepared for the usual French face-saving social kabuki: after some pre-planned tactical retreats, a bit of symbolic give and take on implementation, a few exceptions made for women and manual labourers, the bill would have been accepted. Instead, they have been pushed into a hard line stance by their members. The CGT union's Charles Foulard, the oil-and-gas industries' answer to Arthur Scargill, is leading the blockage of Total's oil refineries; he's constantly on radio and television exclaiming that reform is unfair because the French have it too hard already.

One of the great no-nos in France is criticising the right to strike. Worker solidarity is professed with Young Pioneer unanimity. You can complain about anything else – but there's a logical disconnect that obtains before you can suggest that the three hours you spent commuting home, packed into the train like a sardine, are actually due to the collective irresponsibility of unsackable public sector workers. And so what is emerging is a kind of surly Gallic Blitz spirit, with morning radio news giving tips on petrol stations still open, and the SNCF iPhone app showing cancelled trains in real time.

Politicians always learn too late, to their cost, that perception is reality. By all practical measures, we French actually live a pretty good life. The social welfare system works, with generous unemployment benefits and tax rebates; the national health system is the one thing no French citizen complains about (this translates into Europe's longest life expectancy and the World Health Organisation's highest score); and public infrastructure spending ensures good services even in problem areas. This we take for granted.

All the same, the strikes have turned into a referendum on Nicolas Sarkozy – not his actual policies, so much as his style. The perception is that he panders to the rich, an unfair one when you consider his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who never paid for any holiday he took in or out of office (Chirac still relies on an array of benefactors, from luxury goods tycoon François Pinault, to the family of the late Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, who pay for his splendid flat by the Louvre).

Sarkozy (whose fortune is the product of selling his family flat for £1.6 million when he was elected in 2007) earned himself, early on, the "bling bling president" tag. Nothing he has done since has shifted the impression that he wants the French to make efforts he will not subject himself and his rich friends to.

The fact is, if the pensions reform fails (for now, the government intends to stand firm, and a parliament vote is expected next week), it won't have been seen off by the unions, but by the Bettencourt scandal. The fight between the l'Oréal heiress and her daughter uncovered casual tax evasion on a large scale, and illegal contributions made to Sarkozy's presidential campaign. The sheer amounts quoted as the saga unfolded – a Seychelles island here, pictures by Matisse and Picasso there – awakened revolutionary feelings not felt in two and a half centuries. Against the spirit of Robespierre, no amount of reason can prevail.

The only hope for the government is an especially French one: at the end of next week, All Saint's Day marks the start of the half-term holidays. It is expected that most young demonstrators will choose to break their revolt to go and enjoy that other French inalienable right, and the fires will dwindle and die.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010