French election: It’s got very bloody in the Francois Hollande-Nicolas Sarkozy slugfest

The French presidential election has turned ugly, as Nicolas Sarkozy battles to fend off Francois Hollande.

 

Hardened image: one casualty of the bruising French presidential debate was Francois Hollande's reputation as a nice guy Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:07PM BST 03 May 2012

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.

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”.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Nicolas Sarkozy is a victim of his own courage

The president should be applauded for his courage, hard work, plain-speaking and his love for France, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

A brave face: Nicolas Sarkozy faces an uncertain future at the hands of the French electorate Photo: Reuters

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:49PM BST 20 Apr 2012

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 François Hollande, Sarkozy’s Socialist rival who’s leading in the polls, has vowed to reverse – was accepted.

 

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.

 

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.

 

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

It’s Mademoiselle Moutet to you, Monsieur

The French language must not lose the term of address favoured by Chanel and Deneuve.

Mademoiselle Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
8:01PM GMT 23 Feb 2012

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 une tonne de briques! 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.
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.
After all, now it’s no longer official, we can truly celebrate it as the ultimate rebellion.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Needy Nicolas Sarkozy looks to the upper class to get re-elected

The French president has said he is going for posh, not brash, in this election, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Sarkozy is running for office again, despite low opinion poll ratings Photo: Reuters

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:15AM GMT 20 Feb 2012

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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I am now (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.

...

They used to 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?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

France falls for Nicolas Sarkozy’s new arm-candy

They may seem an odd couple, but Angela Merkel is working wonders for the struggling president.

Sarko-Merkel: a grudging respect has developed between these two mismatched characters Photo: Christopher Jones / Rex Features

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

9:08PM GMT 07 Feb 2012

124 Comments

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.

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).

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.

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, François Hollande, promises in his platform.

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.

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.

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”).

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”.

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.

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.

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?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is left with only 'French maids’ for company

Once Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a shoo-in for the next president of France - but those heady days are long gone.

Dominique Strauss-Khan's wife has decamped to Morocco, and demonstrators and the media follow his every move Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:30PM GMT 30 Nov 2011

114 Comments
 

It’s no fun being Dominique Strauss-Kahn 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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It’s not just the Right that’s disorganised. The team running the campaign for François Hollande, 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?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

EN FRANÇAIS • Pourquoi je ne retournerai pas chez Marks & Spencer (unauthorised translation by Courrier International)

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. 

 The Daily Telegraph | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet |
28 novembre 2011
  

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].
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.
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.
Pour une fois, au diable le comptage des calories. Le bacon entrelardé grésillait allègrement en compagnie de nos œufs*  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.
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 décalé*, 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* !"
A l'autre extrémité de l'échelle, dans le Septième* et le Seizième Sud*, 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.
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.
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 France Soir, maintenant pratiquement en redressement judiciaire.
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. 
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).

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.
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.
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.
Les cadres débordés donnaient un coup de main aux employés qui réassortissaient à tour de bras les rayonnages, à mesure que œufs écossais, poulet à l'indienne*, sandwiches au bacon* 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.

Note : *En français dans le texte 

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011

Paris has a Marks and Spencer again, but it's the wrong size and in the wrong place

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

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet outside the Marks & Spencer's on the Champs-Elysées Photo: ALASTAIR MILLER

 

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris

8:30AM GMT 27 Nov 2011

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.

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.

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.

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 tin? This was more outlandish than anything they could dream up in Papua-New Guinea.)

The calorie count, for once, went out the window. The streaky bacon sizzled gloriously with our farm oeufs 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.

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.

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 décalé, so creative.

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 "Ce soir, dîner anglais! Je suis allée le chercher spécialement chez Marks et Spencer!"

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.

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.

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 France-Soir, bought by yet another Russian oligarch, Sergei Pugachev, for his 25-year-old son, Alexander, now nearly in receivership. (The paper, not the son.)

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.

I also wondered what your normal M&S shopper had in common with the chav zoo the Champs have become.

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).

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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 oeufs écossais, the poulet à l'Indienne, the sandwiches au bacon and the scones got grabbed in quasi-wartime scenes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As for the sensible knickers, I'll still get them in London.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011