A corner of Paris that will remain forever seedy

A native Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet laments the loss of charm of her old quartier 

Jacques Chirac can be blamed for the 1994 'beautification' of the Champs, when he blew a fortune on widening pavements, buying designer benches and allowing the cafés to expand Photo: Bloomberg

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:57PM BST 14 Oct 2013

With its garish shops, escort-girl bars, uncouth and drunk visitors, it is crowded, stressful, overpriced – and shunned by the French themselves. No, this isn’t the description of a nastier corner of a banlieue, but rather Hugh Schofield on Paris’s best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées. And the French are already furious. 

As a native Parisienne, born exactly 160 yards from the Champs-Élysées, who still lives round the corner, I have mixed feelings about the place. I know the crowds, because I hear their drunken arguments under my windows late at night. And it’s true that the avenue has little more to offer today than chain stores – H&M, Zara, Adidas, Nike – a few cinemas, and overpriced cafés where no Parisian would ever set foot.

True to the BBC’s default position, its Paris correspondent blames Jacques Chirac’s long tenure as mayor for the change; but he’s wrong. What changed everything was the opening of the RER train station at the Arc de Triomphe in 1973, four years before Chirac’s election. Today between 300,000 and half a million people descend every weekend.

True, Chirac can be blamed for the 1994 “beautification” of the Champs, when he blew a fortune on widening pavements, buying designer benches and allowing the cafés to expand. This brought even more people to the area, drove the rents sky-high, and completed the end of an era.

This used to be my quartier, a strange ecosystem of elegance and old-style seediness which had its own charm. I remember, aged 10 and on my way to the dentist, catching a glimpse of Marlene Dietrich walking along in full make-up, couture, gloves, and a little hat with a veil, not far from the Travellers Club (which is still there, barely, in the old palazzo built for the great Second Empire cocotte, La Païva). Metres away, the side street, Rue de Ponthieu, so offensive today, was then a row of louche bars with girls and hoodlums: indeed, several Jean Gabin and Alain Delon movies are set there.

In the post-war years, the Champs-Élysées were pure movieland. Darryl Zanuck was ensconced in the Hotel George V with his lover Juliette Gréco, from where he produced films such as The Longest Day, thanks to the Marshall Plan subsidies for European-American co-productions. Every major studio had an office on the Champs (Paramount was at No 33), and the French and American film crowd met at Le Fouquet’s long before the man who redefined it in 2007 with his infamous election party – Nicolas Sarkozy – was even born. But in 1975 the Marshall Plan ended, and everyone left, along with the money and the incentive.

Today, there’s a McDonald’s where the art bookshop used to be. The bullet holes from the August 1944 fighting have been filled in on the walls. The Hôtel de Crillon, recently bought by the Saudi royal family, was the last to sport its marks proudly, like duelling scars. It is now being refurbished.

As a child, I rode the Shetland ponies and went to the Guignol puppet show in the gardens near the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées; shopped for records at Sinfonia at No 68 and went to see old movie revivals at the Cinéac Élysées, where you can now find only a row of garish clothes shops with pop music blaring out on to the street.

Sadly, I bear some responsibility for the destruction. Back in 1932, my great-uncle Léonard started the rot when he had the first commercial building ever built on the Champs-Élysées, at No 116. It was a daring piece of Cubist architecture by an associate of Le Corbusier, the facade zig-zagging at straight angles: it created a scandal in its time, and for generations was a matter of pride in the family. No longer.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Hands off our baguettes, you half-baked Anglo-Saxons

The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:14PM BST 22 Aug 2013

The dreaded Anglo-Saxons are French-bashing again – and this time, they’re after our very bread. Stirred from their mid-August torpor, Libération and Le Figaro are shocked, shocked that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even, I’m ashamed to say, The Daily Telegraph have mistaken a perfectly reasonable campaign to encourage people to keep buying bread, of the kind that the Milk Marketing Board puts on for dairy products at regular intervals, for an admission of nothing less than the death of the proper French baguette. Cue a denunciation of the “deplorable trend in the Anglo-Saxon media to disparage France on just any old pretext”, which “seems to have intensified in recent months”.

The charges are these. French people buy far less bread than 50 years ago, because they’re richer and more diet-conscious. Even when they do, they have the gall to fork out for the wrong kind. These Anglo-Saxon “experts” tell us that une baguette pas trop cuite – as I regularly request from my excellent bakery on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré – is in fact a travesty of what your proper crusty baguette should be like. It’s not been baked enough. It’s white, doughy, soggy, tasteless. It is, as Monty Python would say, an ex-baguette.

To which I answer: “Piffle!” The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker. You patronise the one whose product you like best. And the sheer gall of trying to compare any kind of French baguette – not least the heavenly petits pains served in Michelin-rosetted restaurants such as Ducasse or Arpège – to the terrifying, sickly hued, sugared-up, watered-down, plastic-wrapped, rubber-like objects that pass for bread in Britain or America makes my temper rise like Poilâne sourdough.

Even the figures implying an inexorable decline in the baguette consumption are as cherrypicked as a political party broadcast’s. Yes, the number of bakeries has gone down from 54,000 in 1950 to 32,000 today. But the number of bakers has risen slightly, to 160,000. This isn’t attrition: it’s consolidation.

I know this because of a recent report by the French senate on l’industrie boulangère. It exists because the state of our bread is a national matter, and has been for a very long time. We French apply to breadmaking the perfectionism the Japanese put into cars.

From the first price controls and regulations as to what constitutes lawful bread – passed under Charlemagne at the very beginning of the ninth century – to the bread shortages that sparked the French Revolution, “bread” in our wheat-growing country has really meant “food”. That’s why it was so devastating when Marie-Antoinette was falsely accused of quipping: “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” When the king and his family were forced from Versailles to Paris in July 1789, the mob’s joyous cry was: “We have brought back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy.”

For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in 1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16: Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)

To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any time soon.
I wonder why that is?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

France prefers subsidy to égalité

Competition is a dirty word in France. It threatens the privileges of state employees, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Do French unions have too much power? Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates on F24.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

1:40PM BST 15 Jun 2013

217 Comments

As the French rail strike followed the French air traffic controllers’ work stoppages last week, and tens of thousands of passengers and commuters saw their plans disrupted, it became a point of perverse pride for French commentators to deny that anything was very much amiss. The government, we were told, wasn’t really unhappy with the popular message being sent to Brussels, whether on the Single Sky Initiative, or the (very slow) opening of the French railways to free competition. In fact, it was felt at the Élysée that François Hollande, a man who doesn’t come equipped with a handbag, would only find his negotiating stance against too-fast reforms strengthened by this visible expression of national hostility.

British public opinion sees the EU as a source of Byzantine regulations hampering free trade. A large cross-section of the French are incensed by what they see as the European Commission’s Anglo-Saxon-tainted liberal economists and free-marketeers attacking the myriad privileges and protections that make the life of those happy enough to benefit from them so comfortable.

Competition is often a dirty word in France: never more than when it threatens to disrupt “avantages acquis” (acquired advantages), the gold-plated benefits a group of (usually) public employees has managed to have enshrined in contractual agreements. For years, among the various bonuses that can double an SNCF railwayman’s salary, was a “prime de charbon” (coal allowance), finally cancelled long after the last steam engine was retired. Pension age starts at 50 (soon 52) for train drivers and 55 for most other personnel.

Similarly, the 300,000 employees of EDF, the nominally privatised national electricity utility (the French State still owns 85 per cent of its equity) enjoy subsidised meals, holidays, cultural events, housing, as well as huge discounts on their power bills, lifetime employment, and early retirement provided for by a pension fund separate from the cash-strapped national system. Most of these perks are managed in-house by a committee dominated by CGT, the Communist union, on a €500 million budget funded by a statutory 1 per cent contribution of the company’s turnover. As a result, EDF, a multinational corporation of recognised excellence, turns only nominal profits compared with its competitors.

It hurts to lose these benefits, which explains why the French public sector strikes so often and so fiercely. The paradox is that apart from the quarter of the French workforce employed by the bloated French state, almost no one else in France belongs to a union – only 7 per cent of the 22.3 million-strong workforce do. Yet because the role of the unions is enshrined in French labour laws, the country’s main union representatives are party to all government negotiations on social reform – with predictably intransigent results.

Since 1979, when Giscard d’Estaing’s then PM, Raymond Barre, a no-nonsense professor of economics, tried to go blood, sweat and tears on the French after the second oil crunch, and lost, the mantra in Paris has been negotiation, negotiation, negotiation. Less than two years later, Ronald Reagan broke a lockdown with striking American air-traffic controllers by firing every one of them, and replacing them by requisitioning their military counterparts. The French still haven’t recovered from such a terrifying spectacle. The only prime minister to try to hold firm against a public service general strike, Alain Juppé, had to cave in ignominiously after two months in 1995, and his boss Jacques Chirac lost a general election just 18 months later. In short, courage doesn’t pay in France.

Needless to say, François Hollande doesn’t want to consider such extremes. For one thing, all this week’s strikers are his natural constituents: the last group of socialist voters in France are government employees. Teachers will, in all likelihood, stay with him, but train or air-traffic workers could succumb to Marine Le Pen and her populist, anti-Brussels, anti-“international finance” stance –or the increasingly similar-sounding Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the extreme-Left leader.

France’s socialists have had no New Labour conversion in which they officially renounced Marxist ideology. Hollande declares himself to be a social democrat in private, or abroad; but denies it frantically in public. As a result, a strange parody of class war will continue here for the foreseeable future, defending privileges instead of fighting them, led by unions representing little more than their own apparatchiks.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Like her French, Camilla's visit was 'formidable'

The Duchess truly charmed us on her first solo trip abroad, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

A member of staff shows the Duchess of Cornwall around the Louvre Museum Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris

7:00AM BST 02 Jun 2013

There was something delightfully pre-celebrity about the Duchess of Cornwall’s visit to Paris last week. For one thing, most of us knew nothing about it. Nice middle-aged English lady takes train; goes to charity shop; has a slice or two of saucisson in the Boulevard Raspail street market; nips into Dior to be shown fairy-tale size-zero dresses into which neither she nor any of her entourage has a hope of fitting; takes in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre; looks at horses; and rounds up proceedings with a drinks do at the British Embassy and a cosy dinner with friends. This is firmly Don’t Tell Alfred territory, belonging in those earlier times when France was a kind of sunny hinterland for Mitford sisters of the not-enough-married (Nancy) or too-married (Diana, Lady Mosley) variety.

Non-Royal reporters here in France (that’s everyone except Paris Match and Gala) remained in blissful oblivion of this event: the first solo visit by the future British Queen abroad. Camilla – we call her just “Camilla”, just as France Soir in its 1960s heyday chronicled the ups and downs of “Tony et Margaret” (Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) – hopped off her Eurostar at Gare du Nord with very little fracas, and with her pared-down entourage, went largely unremarked in the streets until she was called upon to perform.

She sent off a bike expedition for Help for Heroes from the grand courtyard of the Invalides, and made a short speech in excellent but accented French at the Communauté d’Emmaüs at Bougival, West Paris. Like her mother-in-law, although perhaps more approachably, she showed perfect, smiling courtesy throughout. But you could tell she really felt in her element with the Garde Républicaine horses, their riders, even their farriers. (How many Gardes Républicains does it take to shoe a horse? Three – one to hold the horse, one to hammer the red-hot shoe, one to speak to Camilla, carefully omitting that Napoleon is buried next door.)

The visit couldn’t have been better calibrated to French sensibilities. Emmaüs UK, the charity of which the Duchess is a patron, is a 1990s-created offshoot of perhaps France’s best-loved movement, founded in the immediate post-war years by a Catholic priest and former Resistance member from Lyon, Abbé Pierre, who relinquished his MP seat to take up the defence of the homeless in a country still scarred by the war and under rationing edicts. Until his death in 2007, Abbé Pierre regularly polled at the top of a list of France’s most-liked personalities. Emmaüs, which concentrates on giving the destitute a place to live and to work, is a kind of French Oxfam, with low overheads: no glittering fundraisers or expensive headquarters.

As the Duchess visited one of the Emmaüs thrift shops, the British ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, made a point of buying her a pretty, rectangular Cartier-lookalike watch, a snip at 10 euros. This was no Chinese fake, but bore the name of the defunct Lip watchmakers, France’s only would-be workers’ commune back in the 1970s. If intended, this was an elegant historical reference and a dream diplomatic gesture, appreciated by anyone in François Hollande’s Socialist government: a Lip watch bought at Emmaüs is worth 10,000 social- conscience cred points.

In short, in terms of easing the Duchess into her next big part, you could say the visit was a real low-key success. The French, like the rest of the world, had happily gone Diana-mad in the 1980s and 1990s. Following Charles and Diana’s state visit to Paris for this newspaper in 1988, I well recall the crowds, the press photographers in their dozens, the breathless segments opening the evening news. We got Diana at the Elysée with François Mitterrand, and Diana at the Hôtel de Ville with Mayor Chirac (a presidential hopeful at the time, he was very keen on the reflected glamour), and the reception at Versailles with former president Giscard d’Estaing (who would much later write a rather silly self-insertion roman à clef in which he had an affair with the princess). It was all about the bling.

Last week’s Paris trip was pretty much the exact opposite of that (no novels in the offing, I suspect), so much in fact that no one even thought of bringing up comparisons. Characteristically, when she posed in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Duchess made sure that she wasn’t obscuring Leonardo’s picture on the photographs (“Can’t have that!”) – this wasn’t going to be a Taj Mahal photo-op.

When Sidney Toledano, the CEO of Dior – and the man who personally fired the most famous Briton in French fashion, John Galliano, two years ago – showed Camilla around the present-day ateliers and the New Look frocks of the Dior museum, nobody mentioned that Dior had named a handbag after Diana (her ubiquitous Lady D quilted bag). Instead, everyone made much of the Duchess’s charming second-hand raffia clutch, a novelty item with no pretensions to It-ness, embroidered with the word “Paris”.

Nor did French fashion writers make anything of her Anna Valentine outfits – although the online comments sections weren’t always as charitable: a floaty printed dress worn with a sharply-tailored mustard jacket passed muster; so did a classic Burberry trenchcoat; the dowdyish coat-dresses (“housecoats!”) didn’t.

This didn’t matter. In today’s depressed climate, France is nursing what feels like the mother of all Eurozone hangovers: right now, the nation can take neither overbearing First Girlfriends with a waspish line in tweets, nor size-zero princesses in 5in nude heels and look-at-me clothes. The French are notorious for being coldly, elegantly uncomfortable, but right now they are atypically amenable to a bit of cosiness – and Camilla looked cosy all right, especially as she didn’t really need a refashioned image in the first place.

We are tolerant of affaires de coeur. We never really held Charles’s infidelity against him to begin with. In fact, one of Gérard Depardieu’s best movies, Bertrand Blier’s award-winning Trop Belle Pour Toi (1989), described a rather similar set-up, with the Depardieu character neglecting his high-maintenance, beautiful wife, the former Bond girl Carole Bouquet, for the homely but warm Josiane Balasko. We gave it a slew of Césars (the French Oscars) and the Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes.

With no monarchy in our own country, the French like kings and queens abroad. And while we require a great deal of majesty from our presidents – the Fifth Republic, after all, was tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specifications; it’s one of François Hollande’s many political mistakes that he described himself as the “normal” president – we prefer, all things considered, the more relaxed type in neighbouring nations.

The one reigning French citizen is the Prince Consort of Denmark, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, husband to Queen Margrethe, and for years the Danish royal couple have spent family holidays in South-West France with minimum fuss. The French see the Queen herself as a grandmother and an animal lover (yes, we do like animals: one of the longest-running television programmes here is a much-loved show on pets called 30 Millions d’Amis), as well as a kind of monument. An extraordinary constant over the years.

On present form, Camilla seems well placed to ease herself, almost by stealth, into solid monumenthood.

Mr Normal has become the Pitiful President

One year in, François Hollande has alienated most voters, antagonised Angela Merkel, driven droves of French into exile and presided over a worsening economy. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reports.

 

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates the Cahuzac scandal rocking the Hollande presidency.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:31PM BST 02 May 2013

111 Comments

With hindsight, it seems as if François Hollande’s troubles started the day he was inaugurated, on May 15 2012. First he was drenched by a surprise storm as his open Citroën drove up the Champs-Elysées. Then, the very same day, his Falcon plane was hit by lightning on the way to Berlin, where he was scheduled to meet Angela Merkel – making it possibly the first and last time the German Chancellor has felt unreserved sympathy for him.

The new president had to turn back before travelling to Berlin in another aircraft. When he got there – in more pouring rain – he missed a turn on the airfield red carpet while reviewing German troops, and had to be steered back in the right direction by Mrs Merkel’s firm grip on his elbow, a moment that presciently symbolised their future relationship.

And everything went downhill from there.

One year later, the man who had billed himself as the “normal president” during his victorious campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy is breaking records for unpopularity. With 75 per cent against him, Hollande is scoring the lowest approval ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since the country started conducting polls. Unemployment has risen by 11.5 per cent since his election, reaching an all-time high of 3.2 million. An estimated 150,000 young people have left the country in search of better prospects abroad: the only jobs created in France have been in the public sector, usually in fields such as teaching that are solidly controlled by Socialist voters.

Despite a widely touted “austerity” drive, public spending stands at 57 per cent of GDP – the figure in Britain is 45 per cent – and the country’s public debt is about to reach 94 per cent of GDP. The largest street demonstrations since 1984 – when the country also had a Socialist president, François Mitterrand – have brought more than a million people on to the streets of Paris on two occasions (and more are planned), to protest against justice minister Christiane Taubira’s new law on gay marriage and adoption: given that France is a fairly tolerant society, these were effectively a street referendum against Hollande.

France’s very visible spat with Germany is a good example of how Hollande manages to make a bad situation worse. It is hardly new for French and German governments to disagree on economic issues; nor is it unusual that its leaders belong to different political parties. Yet, mindful of the European leverage afforded by the French-German axis, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a conservative, was excellent friends with the Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, while the Socialist Mitterrand spoke in almost Gaullian terms of his German counterpart, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. Even Jacques Chirac never clashed with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the way he did (as PM) with Margaret Thatcher.

Hollande, however, still seems to manage France the way he managed rival “currents” during his long tenure as Socialist Party leader, trying to play one against the other while trying to keep everyone happy by granting them some sort of concession. This was in evidence at last year’s European summit, where instead of sitting down with Mrs Merkel to hammer out a viable compromise, he tried to rustle up an alliance with Spain and Italy behind her back, thinking this would be enough to counter the German position.

“This may work in Corrèze [Hollande’s constituency in central France]; it doesn’t in the real world,” a French diplomat commented at the time. “At the end of the day, the Germans were annoyed, the French line was all but absent from the final communiqué – and Mrs Merkel and David Cameron found themselves in closer alliance than they’d ever been.”

Recently, a trio of ministers including the flamboyant Arnaud Montebourg, minister for industrial recovery, started making increasingly belligerent statements about “German-imposed austerity”, accusing Mrs Merkel of “egotistical intransigence” and calling for “a democratic confrontation with Germany”, without being taken to task by the president.
It didn’t take long for Mrs Merkel’s entourage, who are much savvier in the ways of French politics than the French are about Berlin affairs, to counterleak a memo – plausibly produced by the Chancellor’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats – on France being “Europe’s biggest problem child”, with a stalled economy and a “meandering” reform programme. Mrs Merkel then gave a perfunctory denial that she thought anything of the kind.

The truth is that she is incensed with Hollande, not least because of her growing conviction that the French president and his spin doctors allowed the German-bashing because they felt that it would displace domestic dissatisfaction with Hollande on to Germany.

Even the notoriously complacent French press is now giving the president a hard time. “Is 'GrandPa’ [one of Hollande’s mildest nicknames] really up to it?” asked the news magazine L’Express on a recent cover. Le Point called him “Monsieur Faible” – Mr Weak – after Hollande confessed that he hadn’t believed the economic crisis would “last so long”.

No relief was to be expected after the announcement yesterday that Arnaud Montebourg had scuppered a deal by which Yahoo had agreed to acquire 75 per cent of Dailymotion, a successful French internet video site, valuing it at $300 million. “Yahoo wants to devour Dailymotion, but we told them no and that it had to be a 50:50 split,” the avowedly anti-American Montebourg boasted to Europe 1 radio. Whereupon Yahoo called the whole thing off.

Similar grandstanding by Montebourg had already driven the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal from the Florange steelworks in Lorraine, and the American company Titan International from a floundering Goodyear tyre plant in northern France.

“The country is drowning in an ocean of discouragement,” said Christophe Barbier, the influential editor of L’Express. “It’s not just the tax-avoiding rich, artists like Gérard Depardieu, businessmen – everyone is now tempted to leave for a better life elsewhere. Young people feel they will never get a break, a job, a sign of trust. Entrepreneurs have to fend off red tape, rising costs and levies.”

In April, to add to this toxic climate, came the Cahuzac scandal: France’s budget minister, the man in charge of fighting tax fraud, was revealed to have a secret bank account in Switzerland – and in all likelihood another in Singapore – and to have lied to the president and parliament about it.

In the past week, polls have given Marine Le Pen, the far-Right National Front leader, record numbers in a hypothetical presidential election – 23 per cent, well above Hollande at 19 per cent, while Sarkozy scored 34 per cent. Were Sarkozy to stand, he would beat Le Pen easily in the second round but the talk in France has been of the dangers of Fascism, beginning with the very real distrust of all politicians and of the ruling class.

It says a lot about Hollande’s tin ear that he chose that very moment to compel ministers to disclose their personal assets, arguing for the virtues of “transparency” against corruption. This may work in the United States, where personal success is admired: but in France, a country where unregenerated Marxist thought still largely holds sway, overlaying a centuries-old Catholic mistrust of money, it prompted Claude Bartolone, the Socialist Speaker of the National Assembly, who is fighting suggestions of a similar obligation for MPs, to talk of “voyeurism and envy”.

Embattled in the Élysée Palace, where at times it seems his only remaining supporter is his partner Valérie Trierweiler – a woman so unpopular that Hollande has to fend off unpleasant remarks about her during his rare walkabouts – the president is now mulling a cabinet reshuffle as a way of signalling to the French that he has taken their displeasure on board.

But whom to choose to replace his weak prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former German language teacher? The 2007 Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, is unacceptable to Mme Trierweiler. The former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Jacques Delors’s daughter and the artisan of the rigid 35-hour working week, may be unacceptable to Mrs Merkel. François Mitterrand’s former PM, Laurent Fabius, now the foreign minister, is hampered by having just been revealed to be the richest man in the Cabinet.
Hollande’s instinct is probably to try to trundle along with the same tired team. His latest attempt to show that the presidency is doing its part to relieve the public debt has been to announce that he will sell part of its cellar of fine wines, lovingly accrued since the Vincent Auriol presidency in 1947.

On May 30 and 31, 2,200-euro bottles of 1990 Pétrus and Château d’Yquem will be auctioned off, “to be replaced by more modest vintages”, according to the president. So speaks a self-proclaimed modest man, who may be feeling that he has a lot to be modest about.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Titan boss Maurice Taylor says it's a hard job getting the French to work

A row with Maurice Taylor, the US tycoon behind Titan tyres, shows how employment and tax laws in France keep the idle in business, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

Working lunch: the boss of the US tyre firm Titan has accused the French of taking long breaks and being unproductive Photo: Getty Images

 

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:27PM GMT 21 Feb 2013

273 Comments

If Maurice “Morrie the Grizz” Taylor didn’t exist, François Hollande’s embattled socialist government would have tried to invent him. Just when the government’s bluff was being called over France’s unrealistic growth predictions by the EU (finance minister Pierre Moscovici kept promising 0.8 per cent for 2013 until Tuesday, when incontrovertible European figures forced Hollande to admit that it will be much closer to zero), here comes the textbook Ugly American from Illinois, boss of the Titan tyre firm, thwarted in his dastardly aim to lay off French workers from an ailing tyre factory he was hoping to acquire, now spitting venomous slurs at the entire French working population.

Cue, on all news channels, the perfect Two Minutes’ Hate (more like two days so far) in which everyone — union reps, party leaders, the commentariat — bemoans in touching unison the gall of this unreconstructed, boo-hiss Anglo-Saxon Reaganite, who, in a letter to Arnaud Montebourg, the minister for industrial renewal, asked: “Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tyres. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.” Taylor added: “The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!”

The letter was leaked within hours to a business daily. Montebourg, a former militant barrister whose grandstanding habit had been curtailed for a couple of months after he insulted Lakshmi Mittal for wanting to close loss-making steel furnaces in Lorraine, grabbed the opportunity to get back into the limelight. He claimed in an open response to Taylor that “the entire French population had been grievously insulted”, and listed the many American industrial investors who managed to make do with France’s 35-hour week and strict labour laws.

Morrie the Grizz has in fact given a free-spending, high-taxing government the perfect moment to bury more bad news. Intent on reversing Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms, Hollande has already rescinded the very timid pensions change in which retirement age had been pushed, with exceptions, from 60 to 62. Ditto for a mild attempt to curtail the comforts of a Socialist-voting public sector that employs a quarter of the labour force: to fight chronic absenteeism, Sarkozy had instituted a day without pay before civil servants would be paid for sick days. Civil service minister Marylise Lebranchu announced yesterday that it was reversed, in an interview with the newspaper that had published Maurice Taylor’s letter.

Consider that two of the best-selling books in the past decade were Bonjour paresse (“Hello, Laziness”) by Corinne Maier, employed by the largely state-owned utility EDF, in which she rolled out a number of clever strategies to do the least work at the office, and Absolument dé-bor-dée! (“Li-ter-al-ly Snowed Under!”) by Zoé Shepard, a civil servant who vividly described her experiences in the Aquitaine administration of “how to work 35 hours in the month”, from sick day competitions to misappropriation of expenses.

These books sold well because they rang a familiar bell. The French are used to long queues at one counter at the Post Office while three more people behind closed desks carry on private conversations. And don’t try to call someone for business between 12.45 and 2.30pm in Paris. Every time the notion of opening up Sunday trading is mooted, an alliance of family associations and unions kills off the attempt with pieties about “the family day”, no matter that Sunday sales sometimes exceed half the week’s takings in stores (like Ikea) that, with staff support, brave the law and pay the fines. As for the 25 mandatory days of paid annual vacation, no one, Left or Right, has suggested that they should be reduced.

Yet once you get them into the workplace, the French can be efficient, competent and hard-working: 2011 OECD productivity figures show them coming first in Europe at $57.70 per working hour, ahead of the Germans at $55.80, and of the British at $47.20. No wonder: labour is expensive (payroll levies amount to 65 per cent of total salary outlay) and stringent employment laws make it difficult and costly to fire anyone. A French boss will wait to breaking point before he will hire anyone – and in the meantime that production will have been automated to quasi-Japanese standards with the best robots extant: machines, unlike people, are not subject to employment taxes. The losers are the young, the over-50s, and anyone who’s had the mischance to fall off the protected ship of the full-time employed. Structural unemployment, even in boom years, has very rarely fallen below 8 per cent. It exceeds 11 per cent today, and almost all of those claiming the dole would have welcomed the opportunity to work for Morrie the Grizz.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

France warms to Gérard Depardieu, the heroic exile

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, may come to regret insulting the actor who symbolises Gallic exuberance 

Depardieu is excessive in every way, but he’s never been a hypocrite Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:31PM GMT 17 Dec 2012

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Asterix and Obelix have deserted Gaul. Or at least the two actors who played them in three blockbuster movies have. With Gérard “Obelix” Depardieu’s much-trumpeted exile to Belgium last week, following Christian “Asterix” Clavier’s move to London in October, France has lost her best-known fictional heroes, undefeated by Julius Caesar’s legions, but vanquished by François Hollande’s punitive new 75 per cent top marginal income tax rate, recently hiked capital gains tax, and reinforced wealth tax.

 The symbolism has not been lost on the French. When France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the CEO and main shareholder of the luxury behemoth LVMH, applied for Belgian citizenship last August, it was easy for Socialists to paint him as an unpatriotic, despicable fat cat. “Get lost, you rich b------” blasted a headline on the front page of Libération, the Left-wing daily, effectively capturing the national mood.

But Depardieu is a vastly different proposition from a wealthy tycoon and former asset-stripper whose children’s weddings warrant 10-page spreads in society magazines. When Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s prime minister, contemptuously called him “a pathetic loser”, Depardieu shot back with an open letter published on Sunday. “I was born in 1948,” he wrote, “I started working aged 14, as a printer, as a warehouseman, then as an actor, and I’ve always paid my taxes.” Over 45 years, Depardieu said, he had paid 145 million euros in tax, and to this day employs 80 people. Last year he paid taxes amounting to 85 per cent of his income. “I am neither worthy of pity nor admirable, but I shall not be called 'pathetic’,” he concluded, saying that he was sending back his French passport.

For a few hours, the government spin doctors thought the French, whose deep mistrust of money is rooted in a dual heritage of Catholicism and unreconstructed Marxism, would join in the public shaming. It did not happen. An online poll conducted by the popular Le Parisien tabloid showed almost 70 per cent supporting the country’s wayward son and poster boy for glorious political incorrectness.

Depardieu has lit up on Jonathan Ross’s show (and growlingly ground his cigarette stub into the studio carpet after a heated exchange); has urinated in an overflowing plastic bottle on an Air France plane after being refused permission to use the loo; has kicked the fenders off an offending car which had crowded him in a Paris street; once peed (not on purpose) on the leg of a Deauville policeman who asked for an autograph in a car park; has punched countless paparazzi on three continents; and over the years has managed to alienate many fellow stars with the kind of blunt talk no luvvie would ever utter. “She has nothing, I can’t even comprehend how she made 50 movies,” he once said of Juliette Binoche.

Depardieu is excessive in every way, but he’s never been a hypocrite: there have been no stints in rehab after one too many drunken brawls; no staged acts of contrition at any moment of his chaotic private life; no tabloid-monitored diets or fitness regimes. A working-class boy with no formal training but a miraculous gift for bringing to life the most complex nuances of almost every character he has played, he manages to make the classics as accessible as Asterix. He has made over 170 movies and given memorable stage performances – his Tartuffe, the protagonist of Molière’s eponymous play, ranks up there with Louis Jouvet’s historic 1950 performance, exposing the vulnerability and vertiginous loss of control of a devout hypocrite usually played for laughs. He makes his own wine from his own vineyards, owns two restaurants, has written cookbooks of hearty traditional French cuisine. He is, perhaps, a compendium of what the French most aspire to be, taken to epic heights.

He’s been an amnesiac Napoleonic colonel under the Bourbon kings (Le Colonel Chabert); the Provençal peasant ruined by the drought in Jean de Florette; Cyrano de Bergerac on stage and screen; Christopher Columbus for Ridley Scott; Reynaldo in Branagh’s Hamlet. He has worked with Bertolucci, Ang Lee (in Life of Pi), Godard, Resnais, Handke, Truffaut, Wajda, Weir; he’s been Jean Valjean and Rasputin. In short, he is a monument, and he is very difficult to hate.

I remember seeing him at a Cannes film festival party, more than 20 years ago, given in a villa on the hills by Premiere magazine when it was edited by the magnificent Michèle Halberstadt. It was raining violently, the music was blaring in every room of the house, and alone in the sodden garden, in the middle of a waterlogged flowerbed, drenched, his face to the starless sky, like an Easter Island statue, was Depardieu, howling at the cloud-veiled moon. Now that he is settling in an 800,000-euro Walloon house less than a mile from the French border, I can imagine him howling in just the same way at the Hollande crowd and assorted spin doctors. He won’t let them forget him.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Arnaud Montebourg: France's love-hate relationship with 'the madman on the third floor'

He is the firebrand minister who told Indian industrialist Lakshmi Mittal that he was "not welcome in France". He is also the surprising new hero of the Left, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes.

In happier times: Audrey Pulvar announced her split with the minister via the media Photo: REX FEATURES

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris

7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2012

He is the grandly-named and grandstanding "minister for productive economic recovery" - an outcome which France, and Francois Hollande's struggling Socialist government, sorely needs.

But to say that all is not well with Arnaud Montebourg, a firebrand and populist left-winger who opposes most of the features of a modern economy, would be an understatement of equally grandiose proportions.

And the fact that this weekend he remains - just - in his post indicates the confusion at the heart of the French government.

Last weekend Montebourg, 50, had almost resigned; on Wednesday he was very nearly fired by Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, who gave him a sharp dressing down in front of group of goggle-eyed Socialist MPs.

Only the previous week, he'd been dumped by his high-profile girlfriend, Audrey Pulvar, a television personality who let him know by a text message she sent Agence France Presse.

Speculation on the beautiful Miss Pulvar's reasons for deciding to end their very public affair is rife, but everyone in France is well-aware of how Montebourg ended in the political doghouse.

A former crusading lawyer who built up popular support on the left of the Socialist party, and beyond, for his anti-corruption, anti-globalisation views, Montebourg drew international ire and national dismay for his response to industrial negotiations on the possible closure of the loss-making Lorraine steelworks at Florange.

He proclaimed that their owner, the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, was "not welcome in France" – where Mittal still employs some 20,000 people in many other locations.

 Coupled with a threat - now seemingly abandoned - of "temporary" nationalisation, in a style not unlike the General Motors bailout, of the Florange steelworks, this gave out a strong echo of the last time a Socialist government took over in France: more than 30 years ago, in 1981, when President François Mitterrand's Socialist-Communist cabinet decided to nationalise banks and large industrial corporations.

This is not the impression Hollande, and especially Ayrault (who happens to have a Mittal plant in his own Loire Atlantique constituency) want to make on the financial markets.

Until now they have kept lending to France at exceptionally reasonable rates - a smidgeon under 2 per cent for 10-year bonds, despite the recent downgrade from AAA-rating by Moody's that followed a similar move from Standard & Poors in January.

In the almost seven months since he took office, Hollande has acquired a reputation for economic shilly-shallying: hefty tax increases on business were almost immediately followed by tax breaks, for instance, while an announced 60 per cent capital gains tax for start-up entrepreneurs was rescinded after a few days of furious Tea-Party style Facebook campaigning by opponents. But so far this has not been punished internationally, even though it has translated domestically into the worst poll ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since 1962.

Ayrault was of a mind to let Montebourg go, supported – even egged on – by Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, who in theory is Montebourg's boss, but in practice has been frequently outshone by the figure referred to by many at the ministry's mammoth futuristic pile on rue de Bercy as "the madman on the third floor".

Their partnership is hardly a meeting of minds: Moscovici, a former European affairs minister under Lionel Jospin 10 years ago, is of a moderate Social-Democrat bent: pro-European integration, pro-business. Montebourg, by contrast, voted No in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution and would block the import of goods from countries without social welfare provision.

"Mosco" had loathed Montebourg's ideas from the start, but things rapidly became personal as well.

After the election, but before the finance team had moved into Bercy - the name by which the ministry is known - back in May, Moscovici was forced to adjudicate on territorial disputes caused by Montebourg.

The office of the finance minister himself is traditionally on the sixth floor. Montebourg tried to dislodge the budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, from the floor below, at the same time as attempting to appropriate the parking space in the courtyard assigned to the foreign trade secretary, Nicole Bricq.

In both cases Montebourg's machinations failed and he ended up, fuming, on the third floor, even further down the building than the minister for tourism and trade secretary, Sylvia Pinel. Tempers have only deteriorated over the following seven months, while the country's economic and political governance has given an impression of endless flip-flopping.

This may sound more like Big Brother on steroids than proper political disputes, but it's emblematic of the confusion reigning under François Hollande.

France's president made a lifelong career, as regional politician and party boss, of being a master of compromise, conciliating the Socialist Party's various "currents" by granting favours and advantages according to precisely-calibrated assessment of weight within Hollande's view of the ideal political balance at any given time.

Hollande is very much aware that a majority of his Socialist base likes Montebourg's flamboyance, even his gaffes – which they see as speaking truth to powerful interests. In the Mittal crisis, some polls found up to 63 per cent of French opinion supporting Montebourg's stance.

Unlike the German SDP or Britain's New Labour, the French Socialists have never formally renounced Marxist theory, and even the name "social democrat" remains a political insult in many quarters.

And this is before taking into account the sensibilities of the myriad parties to the left of the Socialists – the Greens, three small Trostkyite parties, the rump of the once-mighty French Communist Party, and a couple more tiny splinters – whose votes, added up, ensured Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy last May.

Because of France's first-past-the-post system, the Socialists enjoy in fact a clear majority in both houses of the French parliament, but still Hollande calculates as if hamstrung by a coalition, perhaps aware that he has to keep several currents within his own party from defecting to the militants on the Left.

His resulting indecisiveness is worsened by his own nature, as well as by his single previous experience close the presidency. He was a junior aide to François Mitterrand in the 1980s, and learned much from the wily old politico - who always arrived late everywhere and famously believed that you should "give time to time". In other words, wait and see how a situation would decant.

It worked for an autocrat like Mitterrand, born in 1916, and who viewed the telephone as a cutting-edge technological device. It is far less effective in Twitter time, in a man whom neither best friend nor worst foe would ever think of calling an autocrat.

And so when Montebourg spoke of "nationalisation", Hollande crucially stayed silent for five days, even inviting the troublesome junior minister to the Elysée to assure him, Montebourg afterwards said, that "nationalising the Florange steelworks until a credible buyer [was] found" was "still a possibility".

Hollande staved off Montebourg's resignation, seemingly only to let his prime minister threaten him with the sack four days later.

Hollande had his reasons – Montebourg increasingly appears to Lakshmi Mittal as the pitbull the president releases when his concessions are seen as just not good enough – but such tactics carry their own risk.

Emboldened by Montebourg's stance, and a militant political vocabulary unheard from a cabinet minister for decades, enough Socialist defectors voted with the Communist group in the Senate to defeat the Budget and the bill funding France's state health and pensions systems last week.

This was only a warning shot: both bills will now be amended, and are likely to pass the next time they return to the upper house. But the impression of weakness remains - even as most of Hollande's campaign promises, including new civil service jobs, lowering the retirement age and more teachers, go unfulfilled.

Meanwhile Montebourg is fuming at his treatment by Hollande and Ayrault, but upbeat in one respect: amid all the publicity he has become a hero for the Left.

When he stood in the last Socialist Party primary elections for a presidential candidate, he received just 17 per cent of the vote. If Hollande's government goes on giving the impression that no-one is really at the helm, the inevitable clamour for change next time may mean there's a demand for even more grandiose promises.

In the strange world of the French Left, Montebourg may consider his own prospects of becoming president himself have just risen, from impossible to merely improbable.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012