Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron's vow to press ahead with plans to bring back national service for France's youth has taken many by surprise. The French president's insistence that the scheme would be mandatory is also something of a shock, contradicting remarks made last week by Florence Parly, the minister of the armed forces, who appeared to suggest the service would be voluntary. Not so, according to a government spokesman, who said 'it will be universal...and it will be obligatory'. So how has this announcement been greeted? In Britain, such news would inevitably be met with howls of outrage from certain quarters. In France, however, Macron's plans have, for the most part, been greeted warmly.

In January 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy was honoured by British Jews at a ceremony in London. The former French president was thanked by Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldsmith for his support during a decade that had seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism across France. 'France right now is the main battleground between hope and fear for the future of Europe, especially for the Jewish community', said Goldsmith. Two years on, and Britain has also become a battleground for Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks are now at record levels in the UK, according to a report released this week, with 2017 witnessing a 34 per cent rise in violent assaults against Jewish people. Holland and Belgium have also undergone similar dramatic surges in anti-Semitism in recent years.

Why the big fuss about the 100 eminent Frenchwomen, including Catherine Deneuve, who have criticised the #Metoo movement as a puritan backlash? Their viewpoint, expressed in a letter to Le Monde, is little different to the one expressed by their president in November, when Emmanuel Macron spoke out against sexual violence and harassment but warned against a culture of 'denunciation' where 'each relationship between men and women is suspicious.' In reminding France that they are 'not a puritan society,' Mr. Macron was tacitly drawing comparisons with the Anglo-Saxon world, long seen by the French (and other Latin countries) as prudish in sexual relations.

The new year in France has got off to its traditionally violent start, with hundreds of cars set ablaze across the country and an attempted lynching of two police officers in the suburbs of Paris. Yet in the increasingly surreal world of social media, what is causing uproar is Brigitte Macron's breach of protocol to stand beside her husband on state visits. The custom has been for president's wives to stand behind their husbands, but Madame Macron has said that from now she'll be side by side with her man. 'A woman does not have to be behind', she is quoted as saying by RTL radio.

Last month I spent an afternoon in the company of a 91-year-old German called Karl-Heinz. He was a teenage paratrooper in 1944, whose war ended when he was shot in the face by an American sniper the day after D-Day. Karl-Heinz hated the Nazis, but they for their part respected the martial prowess of the parachute regiment. On several occasions, he told me, he was approached by the SS while about town in his uniform, but their attempts to recruit Karl-Heinz into their ranks failed. He didn't fall for their guff about true Germans only serving in the SS. ISIS is to Islam what the SS was to Germany and as the West prepares to usher in a new year we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking 2018 will be any different to the three previous years.

Laurent Wauquiez has done the easy part. It was never seriously in doubt that the 42-year-old was going to win last night's contest to elect the new leader of Les Républicains, a position vacated by François Fillon after his humiliating presidential campaign in May. But now for the real test: challenging the hegemony of Emmanuel Macron. In the six months since he became the youngest president of the 5th Republic, the 39-year-old Macron has invaded centre-right territory. Not only that but he's made off with several high-profile Républicains, including Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire.

Six months into his presidency, Emmanuel Macron looks untouchable. He has conquered the unions, and his political opponents are a shambles – none more so than the Socialists. Just how divided they are was demonstrated earlier this month when a vicious war of words erupted within the French left. The cause was Islam, an issue that has been agitating Socialists for decades. When the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, François Mitterrand, was elected in 1981, his government was initially a friend of Islam. As the eighties wore on though, some on the left became alarmed at the demands being made of the Republic: prayer rooms in factories and the right to pray five times a day were particular sticking points.

Poland is cross about a cross. Specifically, the one that, last week, a French court ordered to be removed from above a statue of Pope John II. A gift in 2006 to the mayor of the Breton town of Ploërmel, the 7.5 metre-high statue depicts John Paul II praying beneath an arch adorned with a large cross. But the cross will be dismantled because it violates French strict secularism, enshrined in the 1905 'laïcité' law separating Church and State. The Poles are furious. Prime Minister Beata Szydło accused the French of 'censorship', warned that the removal of the cross was another blow to Europe's Christian heritage and would lead only to the further rise of 'values which are alien to our culture, which leads to terrorising Europeans in their everyday life'.

Let us give thanks for the straight-talking Rory Stewart. After last week's alarming comments from Max Hill, a QC who appears to believe British Isis fighters just need some TLC, Stewart, a Foreign Office minister, has given a more incisive assessment of the approach that should be taken towards the British jihadists still at large in Syria and Iraq. 'They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State, towards the creation of a caliphate,' the Conservative MP told the BBC's John Piennar. 'They believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others and trying to use violence and brutality to create an eighth century, or seventh century, state.