France

Thursday

Keith Sutherland and Alex Kovner

Macron’s vaccine ‘citizen panel’ is doomed to fail

France has a problem when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has so far only given out around 5,000 vaccines, and France has one of the lowest levels of trust in the coronavirus vaccine in the world, with only 40 per cent of the public saying they want to be inoculated. Faced with this trust deficit, Macron has proposed a 35-member ‘citizen panel’ to oversee France’s vaccination programme. The body, made up of a random selection of French citizens, will be responsible for monitoring and advising the government when it comes to the vaccine roll-out. Vaccines are the perfect storm for distrust of public authorities. Each recipient

Jeremy Clarke

In praise of nuns

Although I was ten minutes early, Vernon was there ahead of me, framed in the ancient chapel doorway, chatting up what is by general agreement the prettiest of the nunnery’s seven sisters. Vernon is a great bear of a man, raised in poverty in the Appalachian mountains, now wealthy, whose speaking voice is Jack Nicholson’s. A new friend, Vernon excites me because having endured real poverty he fiercely repudiates the glorification of anything that might be categorised under the heading of low life and calls me to order if I err in that direction conversationally. Vernon had brought the nuns three bottles of his homemade olive oil in a carrier

Tuesday

Steerpike

Brexit causes food shortages – in France

Since leaving the EU on 31 December, Britain seems to have somehow avoided the apocalyptic scenarios outlined by those most opposed to Brexit last year. There have been, so far, no long queues of lorries at Dover; the lights have stayed on; and the nation’s supermarket shelves have remained full of food. It appears that Brexit has caused food shortages in one country though. Mr S was surprised to spot today, after all the dire prognostications about Britain’s own food supply, that one shop in France is struggling to get hold of essential grub. According to the news agency Reuters, Marks & Spencer has struggled to fill the shelves of

Monday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron’s desperate New Year wishes

Emmanuel Macron was not quite his cock-a-doodle-do self in his New Year’s Eve broadcast to the French people. This, the fourth presidential broadcast of the plague year, saw Macron, in black suit and black tie, resembling a small-town funeral director attempting to conjure optimism. Macron promised a France on the comeback by the spring, with new economy jobs and a European recovery fostered by an ever more ambitious European Union. The reality is that much of the country is under a 6pm curfew. Everywhere, bars, restaurants and ski resorts are shut. Pension reform has gone. Unemployment, deficit and debt are massively up. There’s been close to a 10 per cent

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

France couldn’t care less about Boris’s Brexit deal

The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been a subject central to French political discourse and since Covid it has shrunk further as a preoccupation of the country. The news channels with their skeleton holiday crews have been unable to mount a full-blown orgy of live remotes from Europe’s capitals and have resorted to more marginal regional figures, focusing on the fishing ports.

Friday

Gwythian Prins

Britain is wise to prepare for a new Cod war

Is it ‘irresponsible’ for the Royal Navy to plan to protect the fisheries of the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) when the Brexit transition period ends? The chairman of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee thinks so. The BBC made much of it. But Tobias Ellwood is wrong: it would be irresponsible not to talk now of a deterrent credible in the eyes of prospective trespassers. And who might they be? Given the importance which France attaches to our punishment on leaving the EU for reasons which have nothing to do with fish, but with much bigger psycho-dramatic issues that Robert Tombs and ‘Caroline Bell’ have recently explained, French

Monday

Robert Tombs

Emmanuel Macron’s great Brexit gamble

There is an intriguing pattern in our relationship with European integration. A Frenchman vetoed our attempt to join. A Frenchman threatens to veto our attempt to leave – or at least to leave with an agreement. General de Gaulle said we were too remote from Europe to join. Emmanuel Macron says we are too close to Europe to leave. I think de Gaulle got it right. I hope Macron doesn’t turn out to be right too, so that we end up stuck half in and half out, neither ‘at the heart of Europe’ nor ‘global Britain’. How individuals and nations react to the project of European federalism is determined not

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

What French women want

Considering the subject of compatibility, experienced British expats in France maintain that a French man and an English woman might work, but rarely the other way around. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. The English chap, for example, who came to look at the septic tank has a long-term French partner who once broke his arm during a domestic dispute. This mildest, most liberal-minded of men lives alone in a mountain refuge whenever feasible. He also has a part-time job as a tour guide in the Far East. I am currently transitioning to a woman for urgent medical reasons. Force of habit, however, leads me to consider the French women I

Saturday

Anthony Browne

Only France would try to blow up the Brexit talks

That France was the country to throw a grenade threatening to blow up the UK-EU trade talks just as they were about to pass the finish line, does not come as a surprise to seasoned euro-watchers. No other EU member would so brazenly promote its own domestic self-interest at the cost to other EU members such as Germany and Ireland. To the British it has echoes of de Gaulle saying ‘non’, when vetoing the UK’s first attempts to join the Common Market. Many of the EU’s problems and (in my view) the ultimate reason Brexit happened, is down to a fundamental cause that is little remarked on in the UK.

Friday

John Keiger

France would be foolish to veto a Brexit deal

Britain and France are heading for an almighty bust-up over Brexit. This morning the French junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, specifically confirmed that if France was unhappy with the final Brexit deal — notably on fishing — it would use its veto. France would carry out ‘her own evaluation’ of the deal and act accordingly, he told radio Europe 1. Whether there is a deal or not, a blame game is about to be unleashed. Given this late stage, if there is a deal then the French cannot possibly get all they want on fishing. The French Prime Minister said so yesterday to French fishermen at France’s largest

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

I found a confused elderly man in my bedroom

There are several cave houses built into the cliff. Ours is the highest and can be reached only by a precipitous footpath with a lot of puffing and panting. The postbox is at the foot of the path, but occasionally the postman carries up something or other that needs to be signed for. When you go to the door to answer his knock, you find him doubled over, his hands on his knees, pouring with sweat, gasping pitifully, unable to speak. Guests likewise. The path up to the house is a public footpath that is part of a tourist trail called ‘Visit the Grottos’. One pays €2 at the tourist

Friday

Stephen Daisley

French republicanism confounds American progressives

Can an entire country sue for libel? If so, France would have a strong suit against swathes of the American left. The US progressive movement, including the New York Times and Washington Post, has turned on la Republique over its citizens’ habit of getting themselves murdered by Islamists. Most recently, this has included Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and three people murdered in a church in Nice. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed stricter regulations for mosque-financing and an end to home-schooling. And in response to this, much of the American left has lost its mind.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

‘Bonjour, monsieur! Douleur?’: My night in a French hospital

I regained consciousness on a trolley in a recovery ward. A masked porter wheeled me from there back to my two-bed room on the fifth floor. When I’d left the room earlier, the bed next to the window was vacant. Now it was occupied. Lying on his back under a blanket, his face half covered by a surgical mask, was an old man. On the floor under his bed was a pair of Adidas ‘Superstar’ tennis shoes. The word ‘Superstar’ was in gold lettering. The old man lay rigid, as if bearing pain or discomfort patiently. Through the window the sky above Marseille continued a resolute blue, as though cloud

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Covid war goes from bad to worse

Politicians whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make ridiculous. On Tuesday evening, as the deaths attributed to Covid-19 reached 50,000, Emmanuel Macron, president of the Republic, again commandeered French television channels to announce his latest strategy to end the national lockdown. He claimed to be making himself perfectly clear as his timetable for ending lockdown was conditioned by the subjunctive. The big give was that from Saturday, we are to be allowed to spend three hours daily outside, and to venture 20km (no more) from our front doors. (This will be a relief to a friend in the Dordogne who was ‘verbalisé’ by the flics last week when

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My neighbour’s dinner party was a near-death experience

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken from my arm. I was then handed a plastic jar and a refreshing wipe and directed to the nearest unisex lavatory to give a urine sample (mid-stream). Then a nurse stuck a long cotton bud up my nose as far as it would go and twiddled it this way and that. Blood, urine and Covid tests were preparatory to a hospital admission for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. Then I drove home and ate a kipper for breakfast. While I was eating, Catriona stuck a hypodermic needle in my

Wednesday

Steerpike

Macron vs the New York Times

Fresh from sparking protests around the world with his comments on Islam, Emmanuel Macron now has a new adversary to add to the list: the New York Times. ‘The president has some bones to pick with the American media,’ read a piece by the NYT‘s media editor Ben Smith, published this week. ‘So president Emmanuel Macron of France called me on Thursday afternoon from his gilded office in the Élysée Palace to drive home a complaint’. The interview made it sound as though Macron, infuriated by the hostility of the Gray Lady, had taken it upon himself to suddenly phone Smith up out of the blue to give him a piece of his

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

I was the only Trump supporter among the olive-pickers

We bums find ourselves sought after at this time of year to lend a hand with the olive harvest. So this week I’ve been standing on a tarpaulin in a sunny field combing olives off olive branches. It’s a good year for olives. The trees are laden and the work is pleasantly monotonous. The minimal level of thought needed to accomplish the task shuts down the internal Red Army choir of negative thoughts that normally drowns out the competition, offering the mind a holiday. In the mornings we combed to the sound of birds twittering in the trees; after lunch to Fip music radio, state-financed, eclectic. On Thursday the smoky-voiced

Douglas Murray

Macron alone: where are France’s allies in the fight against Islamism?

A few years ago, in a Lords debate on the treatment of Christians in the Middle East, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded his peers of some famous words of Martin Luther King: ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.’ That reflection may now be going through the head of the French President, Emmanuel Macron. In recent weeks he has been left alone on one of the most dangerous and delicate ledges of our time: that of Islamic extremism. And while he has already incurred the wrath of much of the so-called Muslim world — with French goods disappearing

Thursday

Charles Moore

Churches are more Covid-secure than trains or takeaways

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true,

Jonathan Miller

France vs Islamism: how does Macron hope to prosecute his war?

Montpellier France is under attack. Two weeks ago, Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, was decapitated in a leafy suburb of Paris after showing his students cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Last week, there were three killings at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, and after that, an Orthodox priest in Lyon was shot and gravely wounded. ‘Tell my children I love them,’ were the dying words of Simone Barreto Silva, a 44-year-old mother of three and herself an immigrant, killed in Nice. France has gone to ‘war’ with Islamic ‘separatists’, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has claimed. The police have been rounding up the