France

Saturday

Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Gavin Mortimer, Sean Thomas, Robert Colvile and Melissa Kite

From our UK edition

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls reflects on the UK general election campaign and wonders how bad things could get for the Tories (1:02); Gavin Mortimer argues that France’s own election is between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’ (7:00); Sean Thomas searches for authentic travel in Colombia (13:16); after reviewing the books Great Britain? by Torsten Bell and Left Behind by Paul Collier, Robert Colvile ponders whether Britain’s problems will ever get solved (20:43); and, Melissa Kite questions if America’s ye olde Ireland really exists (25:44).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

John Keiger

Macron’s power in Europe is draining

From our UK edition

In Brussels over the last two days EU heads of state and government have been carving up the ‘top jobs’. France is represented by President Emmanuel Macron, whose party took a lashing in the European elections, diminishing further his international standing. By contrast, Marine Le Pen’s victorious Rassemblement National, now on track to win the 7 July general elections, was not present. When RN forms a government it will have to live with the consequences of the President’s decisions for at least five years. It is no coincidence, therefore, that on Wednesday night Marine Le Pen gave an interview opening the way to a constitutional struggle with the head of state on one of his most important roles: the so-called presidential ‘reserved domain’ of defence and foreign affairs.

Friday

Cockburn

Candace Owens: ‘France is being run by perverts’

After staking her entire career on her claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron was born a man, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens was suddenly ousted from the company. While her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is ostensibly what got her the boot, Cockburn is sure claiming perverts run the French government didn’t help her case. Owens, who has always reveled in controversy, does not seemed phased however. “I am finally free,” she rejoiced, including to renew her attacks on Brigitte.  https://twitter.com/realcandaceo/status/1806055079570764216 "France is being run by perverts," she declared, in a sentence that could be considered objectively true in any of the last few centuries.

candace owens perverts

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

The shooting of Nahel Merzouk still haunts France

From our UK edition

One year ago today, a 17-year-old called Nahel Merzouk was fatally shot by a policeman as he sped away from a vehicle checkpoint in western Paris. What followed shocked France. Days of rioting, looting and burning across the country. Not just in the inner cities but in provincial towns such as Montargis in central France, where a mob vandalised the town hall and pillaged scores of shops. ‘I still have people who almost a year later don't want to come back to the centre because of the riots,’ said one shopkeeper this week. ‘They've been apprehensive ever since, traumatised, even though we're a fairly quiet town.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s ‘Somewheres’ want revenge

From our UK edition

The builder who has been working on my house in Burgundy will be voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on Sunday in the first round of the French parliamentary election. So will the electrician. I haven’t asked the plumber, but I suspect I know where his vote will go, given that his assistant is voting for Le Pen. My neighbour, a farmer, is voting Le Pen, as is a teacher acquaintance. The local policeman is also voting Le Pen. ‘What do I think of Macron?’ retorted the electrician. ‘Put it this way, he’s not my friend’ It’s not that surprising in this neck of the woods. The National Rally romped to victory in the Yonne department in the recent European elections, winning 41.4 per cent of the vote.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France under Macron keeps getting worse

From our UK edition

The warnings continue to come thick and fast in France about the disaster that could befall the Republic on 7 July if Emmanuel Macron and his government are not returned to power. From the celebrity world to the corporate world – including American investment bank Goldman Sachs – the belief is that France is doomed if either Marine Le Pen’s ‘union of the right’ or Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing coalition is elected to government. Several former senior French politicians have joined the fear-mongering, among them Dominique de Villepin, who was Jacques Chirac’s centre-right prime minister in the 2000s before leaving politics for a lucrative career working with Qatar.

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Meet the musicians trying to revive French-language pop 

From our UK edition

The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was just my own imperfect command of French that left me clueless as to their message. ‘C’était tout een eenglish,’ came the response from the guitarist afterwards. How come they never considered accompanying such emotionally charged music with lyrics in their mother tongue? ‘It’s considered cringe,’ she replied. ‘We only like English music.

The Spectator

Starmer and Le Pen’s similarities

From our UK edition

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election in France is turning out to be a blunder of Sunakian proportions. His second term as president lasts until 2027 and he could have struggled on with a hung parliament in which his was the largest single party. But when Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 31 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, to his party’s 15 per cent, he decided to call French voters’ bluff. In a parliamentary election, would they really back Le Pen and put in Jordan Bardella, her new 28-year-old party frontman, as prime minister? It is becoming clear that they may well do that. Macron’s Renaissance party, which won 39 per cent of the vote in the last legislative elections two years ago, is now polling at about half that.

Monday

Calla Jones Corner

How to make the perfect clafoutis

Clafoutis. Difficult to pronounce. But oh-so divine and easy to make. Originating in the Limousin region in south-central France, its name comes from the Provençal clafir, “to fill.” So popular was it “to fill” a dish with fruit and batter, that by the nineteenth century, the renown of clafoutis had spread from the Limousin to other regions of France and bordering countries. This classic and elegant summer dessert is usually made with cherries, among the first fruits to ripen, but also with other stone fruit as they appear — apricots, plums, berries and on into the fall with pears.

clafoutis

Sunday

John Keiger

Is France’s left-wing coalition more dangerous than Le Pen?

From our UK edition

French and international media cannot break their fixation with the ‘extreme right’. They continue to target the Rassemblement National (RN) as the ultimate menace for the 7 July legislative elections. But as of Friday, a more potent threat to French political and financial stability has raised its head: the radical left-wing ‘New Popular Front’ (NPF). This coalition of greens, communists, socialists and Trotskyists dominated by the radical-left La France Insoumise party (LFI), surprised many by their agreement to field common constituency candidates and a common manifesto.   Following the bitter breakup two years ago of the radical left-wing NUPES coalition, prospects for a new agreement were slim.

Thursday

William Moore

Macron’s game: can he still outplay Le Pen?

From our UK edition

45 min listen

This week: Macron’s game. Our cover piece looks at the big news following the European elections at the weekend, President Macron’s decision to call early parliamentary elections in France. Madness or genius, either way the decision comes with huge risk. And can he still outplay Le Pen, asks writer Jonathan Miller. Jonathan joins the podcast to analyse Macron’s decision alongside Professor Alberto Alemanno, who explains how the decision is realigning French politics, and argues it must be seen in its wider European context. (01:58) Then: Will and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine, including Catriona Olding’s Life column and Sam McPhail’s notes on Madri.  Also on the podcast: who decides how we see the past?

Laura Gascoigne

How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination

From our UK edition

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879. ‘From 10.30 to half-past noon, I will have my négresse and her partner who will come expressly to be at your disposal.’ Not content with dangling from a rope by her teeth, she suspended a 300-kilo cannon barrel from her jaw It’s not what it sounds like. The ‘négresse’ in question was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, stage name Miss La La, an aerialist at the Cirque Fernando who had been sitting – or more accurately hanging – in Degas’s studio for a painting for that year’s fourth Impressionist exhibition. As his friend was working on a circus novel, he thought he might be interested in meeting her.

Catriona Olding

My dreams of Jeremy Clarke

From our UK edition

The other week my eldest daughter and I were staying with friends in Richmond for the launch of Jeremy’s third collection of Low Life columns. The night before the anniversary of his death – the day of the launch – I woke at 2 a.m. and unable to sleep was back in the cave holding Jeremy’s hand; machines clicking and beeping as his life ebbed unpeacefully away. He died at 9 a.m.  A few weeks after Jeremy died, I dreamt he walked into the house… he looked fit, strong and full of life At 9.05 a.m., in tears and still wearing a nightie, jumper and flip-flops, I ran downstairs, almost colliding with one of our hosts, out the back door to the bottom of the garden. Beyond the high wooden fence and gate a path ran parallel with the Thames.

Thursday

Ella Johnson

Joe Biden’s D-Day performance is evidence of his mental unfitness

President Joe Biden spoke in Normandy on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day Thursday — and only slightly made a fool of himself. As he entered the event, it looked as if he entirely missed where he was supposed to sit, but played it off with a nice salute to a veteran. In the middle of a rousing speech, he talked about how many Russians died in Ukraine... for mysterious reasons. He did a bit of a squat in an invisible chair as the speaker Lloyd J. Austin III was introduced. The debacle ended with Dr. Jill Biden leading Joe away as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, nimbly ran to greet D-Day veterans. And we can’t forget Biden’s subtle double fist pump after the jets flew over the ceremony.

d-day
Chloë Ashby

Second life: Playboy, by Constance Debré, reviewed

From our UK edition

Playboy is part one of a trilogy that draws on the life of its author, Constance Debré. Part two, Love Me Tender, was published in Britain last year. The trilogy was inspired by Debré’s experience of leaving her husband, abandoning her career as a lawyer, and then losing custody of her child when she re-emerged as a lesbian (and a writer). In Love Me Tender we met a womaniser who referred to girls by numbers rather than their names; in Playboy, via her first female lovers, we witness her transformation into a queer Casanova. The novel is bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled. Take this line: ‘We’re all selfish, parents, kids, he, I, it’s no big deal, that’s life, it’ll all be fine.

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are slowly conquering France

From our UK edition

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally – formerly the National Front – is expected to triumph for a third time running in the European elections this weekend. The party topped the poll last time, in 2019, and in 2014. But its principal candidate, five years ago and today, is not the 55-year-old Le Pen but the youthful Jordan Bardella, whose story tells us a lot about the changing nature of the French right. The son of Italian immigrants, Bardella, 28, grew up on a housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, an impoverished area north of Paris. While Le Pen appeals to the middle-aged electorate, Bardella is the star attraction for younger voters. French politics is dominated by the bourgeoisie and Bardella is unusual in that he is working class.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Who will my wife marry next?

From our UK edition

Since I had a brush with death a couple of years ago, I have often wondered who my far younger wife, Carla, might marry after she has buried me. When I was out for the count in intensive care in Ravenna, the hospital’s duty priest, an Argentinian, even administered the last rites. ‘They do it just in case these days,’ Carla told me, as if it had all been a bit of a laugh, which I suppose it may well be if you believe, like her, that death is the prelude to eternal life. The other day, a herd of donkeys came charging into our garden out of the blue and I soon put two and two together They belonged to our nearest neighbour, Gianni, a farmer.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Why are French politicians obsessed with world war two?

From our UK edition

War talk is all the rage in France. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are often cited, but the war that has come to increasingly obsess the political class in recent weeks is the one that began in 1939. Almost every day brings another reference to a period that barely anyone in the Republic experienced first-hand. The latest example was a radio interview on Tuesday morning between Marion Maréchal, Vice President of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, and a journalist from France Inter, a radio station that describes itself as ‘progressive’. ‘What difference is there,’ the journalist asked Maréchal, ‘between the defence of the family that you propose and that proposed by Marshal Pétain?

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

France has become Europe’s Wild West

From our UK edition

New Caledonia must not become the ‘Wild West’ declared Emmanuel Macron last week during his flying visit to the Pacific Island. For two weeks the indigenous people, the Kanaks, have been in revolt against a voting reform they believe will marginalise them. The French President’s visit achieved little. Not long after Macron’s departure an insurgent was shot dead by police. Seven people have been killed in the unrest and the material damage is estimated at more than one billion euros. It is not only the Overseas French Territory that is in danger of resembling the Wild West. Mayhem has become a characteristic of Macron’s France, and rarely does a week pass without an act of barbarity. On Sunday afternoon in Lyon a man with a knife wounded four passengers in the metro.

d-day memorial day
Roger Kimball

This Memorial Day, reflect on your freedom

Last summer, I spent some time in and about Port-en-Bessin-Huppain in Normandy. The little fishing village and its surrounding towns on the English Channel (“La Manche,” “the sleeve” en français) is delightfully picturesque in that rugged, elemental way that proceeds from the collision of tempestuous sea and commanding headland. Expansive fields of corn and other crops ripened fast, orderly in their serried, midsummer ranks. Orange-red poppies punctuated the grassy, flower-strewn verge and complicated the landscape, heavy with age and history. Poppies are for remembrance — and there’s a lot to remember in these parts.