France

Saturday

Alice Pfeiffer

French women do get fat

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Paris ‘And please meet Alice, who has brought industrial cheese,’ said our Parisian host as she introduced me to the other dinner guests. Imagine my despair! I had failed her, not to mention her guests, on the sacrosanct fromage. A fate worse than death. Food is a national obsession for the French. The couple throwing the party presented us with a three-course meal, all made from scratch using seasonal produce from the local market. To think that I almost brought a six-pack of beer.

french women

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

All forecasts are off if Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz

From our UK edition

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Late last year, a range of forecasts suggested that the likelihood of recession in the US, with knock-on effects for the rest of the developed world, had significantly diminished. Last summer, many economists were putting the chance of a substantial downturn at 50 per cent but by November, Goldman Sachs had marked it down to 24 per cent and Morgan Stanley to ‘around 20 per cent’. Underlying this shift were strong corporate earnings and consumer spending, plus rising hopes of a settlement of US-China trade tensions. Last month saw a sell-off of safety-first government bonds reflecting the mood, and the FT’s end-of-year forecasts included a confident ‘No’ to ‘Will the US go into recession?

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

The strategy of France’s Islamists is to turn Muslim against non-Muslim

From our UK edition

France has endured an appalling series of Islamist terror attacks in recent years. One might feel a sense of relief that the country escaped relatively lightly last Friday. That will, of course, be no consolation to the family of the man who was killed by 22-year-old Nathan C, a recent convert to Islam, who stabbed his victim to death as he defended his wife in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif. She is recovering in hospital, as is another woman, while a passer-by apparently has his religion to thank for his survival. Confronted by the killer who was dressed in a djellaba and shouting 'Allah Akbar', the man pleaded for mercy, pointing out that he was a Muslim. The terrorist ordered him to recite a prayer in Arabic, which he did, and so off he went in search of other victims.

Sunday

John Keiger

France’s doomed socialist project should make Corbyn voters think twice

From our UK edition

What will happen if Jeremy Corbyn wins? Will it be a nightmare on Downing Street, as Liam Halligan suggests in this week's Spectator? Or might Corbyn not be as bad as his critics fear? Helpfully, France provides a useful parallel of what prime minister Jeremy Corbyn might mean for Britain. And it doesn't make happy reading for the Labour leader. It's Spring 1981 and France, the fifth largest economy in the world, elects the most left-wing administration since before the Second World War following eight years of conservative rule. The government immediately begins implementing its radical manifesto: nationalisation of 11 industrial conglomerates and most private banks, higher tax-rates at the upper levels and a special wealth tax.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Hell is an expat dinner party

From our UK edition

I just don’t understand it. Emigrating from Britain to France is a big step. Shifting from one culture to another takes courage and enterprise. Especially if you are of maturer years. But let’s assume it’s now or never and you follow through with it. You look for a house in France, buy one, go through all the bureaucracy, the rigmarole. You put all your worldly goods into a high-top van and get someone to drive it down. You move in. You go through the further circle of French bureaucratic hell and get your family saloon reregistered. At first you don’t know your way around. When you are driving, young and old French people tailgate you, hooting and giving you the finger. On foot, you can’t understand a word anyone is saying. You become discouraged.

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Trump is saving Nato

It’s almost Nato as usual when Emmanuel Macron calls Nato ‘brain dead’. It’s Nato as usual, and Donald Trump as usual, when Trump, who not long ago called Nato ‘obsolete’, chastises his bromantic partner Macron for being ‘insulting’ and ‘disrespectful’. It is unusual for Nato when Trump calls off a press conference and calls blackface artist Justin Trudeau ‘two-faced’.

nato

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie

From our UK edition

It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there actually,’ he says, pointing. ‘One blew over in a storm in ’99. But I was able to plant on both sides and create a vista. It’s getting there.’ He gestures across topiary and lawns and away towards the opposite hillside, where an avenue of trees and classical pillars sweeps up towards the skyline. Hang on: he created that too? It’s not unknown for famous conductors to act like Bourbon princes.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Yellow Vests are copying the French left’s worst traditions

From our UK edition

On Saturday, I visited Chartres and stood in awe inside its cathedral. I was as stunned by its splendour as I was by the knowledge that men once wanted to blow the cathedral sky high. The Revolutionary Committee was only prevented from carrying out its wish in 1793 by a local architect who warned that removing all the rubble would be a complicated task. So instead they stripped the cathedral of its metal and burned the peat wood sculpture of the black Madonna. The cultural sacrilege of the late-eighteenth century has returned to France in the shape of the Yellow Vest mob, many of whom share the Revolutionaries' hatred of their country and its traditions. The real Yellow Vests, the ones who last winter staged peaceful protests throughout France, have deserted the movement this year.

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Could this self-made billionaire become France’s first Muslim president?

From our UK edition

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has a disconcerting habit of correctly predicting unsettling events. In 2001 in Plateforme he predicted a terrorist attack on tourists that duly occurred in Bali a year later. Sérotonine, written last year, foretold the gilet jaunes. In Soumission (2015), he famously predicted that France would elect a Muslim president by 2022. This remains improbable, with the three-year timescale. Yet the odds have improved slightly thanks to the businessman Mohed Altrad, a Syrian exile turned building tycoon who employs 30,000 people worldwide and is due to run for mayor of Montpellier next year, in a country where the mairie is a well-trodden stepping stone to higher office.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron will regret his failure to crack down on Islamists

From our UK edition

It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France's minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn't know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator 'has never given the slightest cause for concern', yet on Saturday afternoon France's anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon's 'radical vision of Islam'. The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Labour is following in the doomed footsteps of the French left

From our UK edition

The left no longer exists as a coherent political force in France. Embarrassed in the 2017 presidential election, the Socialist party has continued to disintegrate, polling just 6.2 per cent of the vote in May's European elections. That was marginally fewer votes than Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, which mustered a distinctly modest 6.3 per cent. The far-left leader polled well in the first round of the presidential election but as one French commentator wrote this week, his mistake was then to 'to revert to his original culture, that of the radical left'. As for the Socialist party, since 2007 their membership has plummeted from 260,000 to 102,000. But that is what happens when middle-class politicians alienate their traditional working-class voters.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

An uncanny gift for prophecy — the genius of Michel Houellebecq

From our UK edition

The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’ There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

The French city zones where police rarely escape unscathed

From our UK edition

In December 2015, Donald Trump claimed parts of the French capital were no-go zones for the police. 'Paris is no longer the same city it was,' said the then-Republican presidential hopeful. 'They have sections in Paris that are radicalised... The police refuse to go in there.' His remarks echoed a similar claim made by Fox News earlier in the year. In response the mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, was outraged, and even muttered about pursuing legal action for the 'honour of Paris'. Trump was wrong. There aren't any no-go zones in France for the police. There are, however, a growing number of zones that the police enter knowing their chances of emerging unscathed are slight.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Does Macron grasp what Corbyn would mean for France?

From our UK edition

I had supper on Saturday with an old friend. She's a committed French socialist, a schoolteacher in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, the most impoverished department in France. She's relatively new to the profession, having decided in her late thirties that teaching was her calling. So she went back to university and upon qualifying she asked to be sent to the most challenging suburb in France. Earlier this year I accepted her invitation to address her pupils on the subject of writing and journalism. It was a good day out. I went not knowing what to expect but left having met two classes of teenagers who were attentive and appreciative.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The mysterious ways of the French

From our UK edition

These new tablets that will save or at least prolong my life have unpredictable side effects which only now, a month after starting to take them, are making themselves felt. Breasts, round and wobbling that I can cup in my palms and jiggle up and down; breasts, moreover, with painfully sensitive nipples. Fatigue: it is almost impossible to be both immobile and awake. By early evening, trapped upright in a chair drawn up to a crowded restaurant table, I’m longing for sleep or even death. And wind, which is perhaps the least expected and most disastrous side effect. Quelling the Boxer Rebellion is the only thing keeping me awake.

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Emmanuel Macron’s climate change virtue signaling

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the 'emergency’, the 'international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) 'the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ 'Our house is burning.

emmanuel macron

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why you can’t let Brexit affect your life

From our UK edition

A couple with a first baby sought my advice: they had accepted a low offer for their cramped London flat and bid the asking price for a nice house in commuterland. But they need a bigger mortgage and if Brexit leads to a property crash, they could face negative equity and financial stress. Should they call the whole thing off? Emphatically I said they should not: buying a family home is a long-term choice, rarely regretted, in which fluctuating value matters far less than whether you love the house and whether (as in their case, I gathered) income is sufficient to support the mortgage. Conventional wisdom, perhaps, but I’m pleased to see the nation thinking the same way: the property website Rightmove reports a 6.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Why are fewer Frenchwomen sunbathing topless?

From our UK edition

I was taken by surprise last month while holidaying in Biarritz. As I splashed through the surf towards the beach I passed a woman paddling. She was topless and it struck me that this was a sight you don’t often see any more in France. I first came to France on summer holiday as a young boy and recall asking my mother, who is of Scottish presbyterian stock, why French women didn’t wear bikini tops. She replied from behind her sturdy one-piece swimming suit that it ‘was just the French way’ Not any more. In 1984, a survey found that 43 per cent of Frenchwomen bathed topless on the beach. But a similar poll last month revealed that figure had fallen to 19 per cent.

Tuesday

John Keiger

Why France is frustrated – and baffled – by Brexit

From our UK edition

Silence has befallen French pronouncements on Brexit. Le Monde’s vitriolic editorial (12 June 2019) on Boris Johnson apart, the scene is remarkably calm. But this isn't good news. In fact, such silence is often a sign of French anxiety and a presage to trouble, particularly when Britain is concerned. As rationalists, the French are frequently frustrated by the ‘wait and see’ of the empirical British. ‘What is not clear is not French’, said the 18th century French philosopher Antoine de Rivarol.

Thursday

Dominic Green

On D-Day, Macron has learned nothing and forgotten everything

No one wants to hear a lecture on ‘liberty and democracy’ from a finance guy turned technocrat. Especially not at a service commemorating the dead of the D-Day landings. In the last 30 years, finance guys and technocrats have enriched themselves at the voters’ expense, abused the notion of economic liberty, and wrecked social contracts across the West. Thank you for your service, as the voters never say. The 75th anniversary of D-Day should be a time for remembering the true meaning of freedom and democracy — and for honoring the thousands of young men who died in foreign fields so that we might inherit those privileges. Instead, we got Emmanuel Macron’s side-eyed hectoring of Donald Trump at Thursday’s memorial service.

macron d-day