France

Monday

Marie-Claire Chappet

Secret France: the hidden havens worth discovering

Vive la France! Our beloved Gallic neighbour has reopened its borders to the casual tourist once more and, as travel slowly yawns its way back to something resembling normalcy, it is the perfect time to hop across the channel. France, in my half-French-totally-unbiased opinion, is never a bad idea. The diversity of the country is staggering – offering you undulating valleys dotted with vineyards, luxurious beach breaks or quaint Provençal villages; the eternal allure of Paris and majestic snow-capped peaks. But why not discover its lesser known enclaves? Seasoned Francophiles may like to take this opportunity, after a miserable time apart, to discover hidden France. So, here are my top

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The fate of the French Socialists is a warning for Boris Johnson

The defection of Christian Wakeford to Labour has put a spring in the step of the left-wing party. Apparently it marks the start of their revival. Give it two years and Keir Starmer will be waving from the steps of Number 10. That’s one scenario. A more likely one is that the good people of Bury South will unseat Wakeford at the next general election as Labour suffer another humiliating defeat. What so many in the Westminster bubble don’t get is that for the average voter in Bury, Basildon or Blyth Valley, ‘partygate’ is not top of their grievances with Boris Johnson. It’s often immigration, tax rises and the nonsense

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Has Macron shot France’s energy industry in the foot?

Gas prices are soaring. Europe could be about to witness electricity shortages. Power companies are collapsing by the day, and, on top of all that, the government is set to phase out traditional energy to meet its net zero target.  So might think that a cable to ship in cheap, greener electricity from the other side of the Channel is something of a knight in shining armour. Yet the government blocked the proposal today, and it was absolutely right to do so. Britain may need all the electricity it can get its hands on right now — but the last thing it should do is increase its dependence on Macron and Putin. Britain

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: No. 10’s garden party, Djokovic’s visa row and France’s vaccine protests

Home Boris Johnson admitted to attending evening drinks for about 40 staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street on 20 May 2020, when lockdown regulations made social gatherings illegal. ‘We thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No. 10 garden this evening,’ said an email from the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. ‘Please join us from 6 p.m. and bring your own booze!’ Mr Johnson said that he had been talking to Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, about how people could be helped with soaring energy bills. Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller

Will Le Pen’s niece join Éric Zemmour’s campaign?

Is Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of Marine, about to emerge from political retirement to support the presidential election campaign of Éric Zemmour?  Normally the answer to any question posed by a journalist is ‘no’ but maybe not this time. Marion could give new momentum to Zemmour’s campaign, which seems recently to be stuck in a rut. Marion could be the right figure to lure National Front voters — who have been disgruntled with her aunt, Marine Le Pen — towards Zemmour. Zemmour’s political consultants think she could be the deus ex machina to resolve the conflict at the heart of the opposition to Macron: three

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

The EU’s new emperor: what would Macron’s second term look like?

Montpellier Emmanuel Macron, with eagle eyes, is staring at Europe like stout Cortez. Elected president of France almost five years ago aged just 39, he dreams beyond the renewal of his lease on the Élysée Palace in the April election. Now Angela Merkel has left the world stage, Macron’s ambition is to replace her as Europe’s de facto leader and to father a European federation, a United States of Europe, with France and himself at its centre. On New Year’s Day, France assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the European Council, the supreme institution of the European Union, an organisation some might think besieged by unresolved crises and policy conflicts

Jeremy Clarke

My wig faux pas

I listed for Catriona the reasons why I did not want to go out to dinner that evening at the posh new restaurant in the village. The Hammers were on telly that evening and we had a fire lit. Plus, I was only just back from the hospital at Marseille where another half pint of turps was tipped into the tube in my neck, which would easily do for my supper. Also I wanted to lie down. Also that day the Omicron variant, in its speed and spread across France, was doing a fair impression of Rommel. Why should I with my double-asterisked low white blood cell count take an

Wednesday

John Keiger

France has the most to lose from Britain’s turn away from Europe

It was Napoleon who declared that ‘a state has the politics of its geography’. We do well to remember that in taking stock of European international relations as we speculate on a new year and beyond. By Europe is meant the European continent, ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, in de Gaulle’s words. Not the 27-member European Union, which Brussels linguistically and imperialistically conflates with the 44 sovereign states that the UN defines as Europe. Of those 44 states, four are still the European great powers, as they have been since at least 1870: Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. They are still the continent’s most populous, wealthiest (except Russia), and

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The misery of Macron’s Covid clampdown

My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother has been prevented from making the trip by her president. It’s a funny world when hundreds of people can quite easily cross illegally from France to England in small boats – 1,200 in four days last week – but a mother isn’t allowed to take a train to be with her daughter at Christmas. But that is France for you in what Macron’s opponents call his ‘Covid Dictatorship’. Even so his authoritarian measures are doing him and his country a fat lot of good. Yesterday France recorded 91,000 new cases

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s British travel ban is entirely political

Emmanuel Macron subjected France to a two-hour primetime television interview on Wednesday evening which must have been a pre-Christmas treat for the nation. Just under four million tuned in to see Macron discussing his achievements as president in what was a polished performance; not since Tony Blair has a world leader been such a consummate actor as Macron. He declined to confirm that he will be standing for a second term in April’s presidential election but his people know that he will. There was one fly in the ointment, however, a buzz which has been distracting Macron for months: Covid. France is only just emerging from a ‘fifth wave’ of

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller

Will Valérie Pécresse vanquish Macron?

It seems like just minutes ago that Michel Barnier, former Brexit negotiator, centre-right Républicain exiled to Brussels two decades ago, was being widely touted (not least by British correspondents in Paris) as the respectable opposition to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 presidential election campaign. As I predicted here and here, he’s subsequently disappeared in a puff of smoke, finishing third in the party’s candidate selection. So meet Valérie Pécresse, 54, the somewhat surprisingly selected candidate of Les Républicains for president of France, and now in her turn being touted as the acceptable face of opposition. She’s certainly more credible than Barnier. Excited journalists inside the périphérique are reporting polls

Thursday

Katy Balls

Britain’s relationship with France has taken a turn for the worse

How will Priti Patel’s tour of European capitals in a bid to solve the migrant crisis go? Well, any visit to Paris will be difficult. Relations between the UK and France have taken a turn for the worse overnight, with Emmanuel Macron making a series of comments both privately and publicly that have landed badly with the UK government. Discussing the Northern Ireland protocol, the French President said the EU must not ‘cave in’ to British demands on border checks. In comments viewed as incendiary by ministers, Macron described the issue of the border as a matter of ‘war and peace’. However, where Macron has allegedly been the most critical

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer

Why a love child might help ‘Papa Zemmour’

It’s not often you find Eric Zemmour plastered across the front of Closer magazine. Brigitte Macron, Beyonce and Lady Gaga are the preferred darlings of the celebrity magazine. But this week’s issue – which is selling like gâteaux chaud in France – has on its cover Zemmour and his 28-year-old paramour Sarah Knafo and underneath what can only be described as a bombshell: ‘He’s going to be a dad in 2022!’ Is Zemmour really upset or is it faux outrage? There are more photos on pages 12 and 13, including a close-up of Madame Knafo’s alleged bump as she and her beau, 35 years her senior, stroll through a Parisian

Harry Mount

Don’t turn Notre Dame into a ‘politically correct Disneyland’

Sacré bleu! Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a ‘politically correct Disneyland’. The plans, yet to be rubber-stamped, will turn the cathedral into an ‘experimental showroom’, with confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures replaced with modern art murals. New sound and light effects will be introduced to create ‘emotional spaces’. Themed chapels on a ‘discovery trail’, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, will pop up. And Bible quotations will be projected onto chapel walls in various languages, including Mandarin. The last chapel on the new trail will have an environmental emphasis. Defenders of the new plan are bound to

Friday

James Forsyth

Both Johnson and Macron need to get a grip

Anglo-French relations continue to deteriorate. Not even this week’s tragedy in the Channel can stop the point scoring between the two governments. Last night, Boris Johnson issued a letter to Emmanuel Macron which proposed, among other things, a bilateral readmissions agreement between the UK and France which would see those crossing the Channel returned to France straight away. The French were not impressed either by this proposal or it being made public.  This morning, Priti Patel was uninvited from a meeting of northern European interior ministers. Macron then went on TV to accuse the British of not being ‘serious’ and to say that leaders shouldn’t communicate by tweets. (He is right

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of French hospital food

After checking me in, the receptionist, who was wearing an overcoat, said: ‘There is no heating in the hotel. The unit is broken. But it is not cold today so you should be fine.’ Room 357 was cold. Hoping to raise the temperature by a degree, I filled the sink with hot water, turned on all the lights, and switched on the massive telly. It showed drug squad officers busting dealers in a poor northern French town. After combing through a suspect’s text messages, they bashed down his or her front door and arrested everybody and seized their drugs and cash. Most often it was hashish in small amounts and

Monday

Susanne Mundschenk

The fifth wave could break Macron

The fifth Covid wave has started in Europe. Some governments are already imposing lockdowns and wage cuts for the unvaccinated as hospitals are filling up. Mass protests against restrictions are popping up, some peaceful like in Austria, others turning violent like in the Netherlands and Belgium. A nationwide lockdown in Germany is unlikely, but local lockdowns may happen if hospitalisation rates continue to shoot up. Some patients in Bavaria have already been sent to Italian hospitals due to under-capacity, a reversal of what happened in the first wave. France is still counting on getting through the fifth wave with no restrictions. With only five months to go before the presidential

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Europe gripped by a fifth wave

How quickly things change. Just a month ago many EU countries were being praised for keeping some Covid restrictions in place, in many cases operating vaccine passport systems. By contrast, Britain was being attacked for removing most Covid restrictions in July. The UK suffering elevated infection rates ever since, leading to predictions that we could be back in lockdown by Christmas. Now, many EU governments are panicking as infection rates soar — and protesters have taken to the streets to oppose new lockdowns and, in the case of Austria, compulsory vaccinations from next February. What is the situation in the worst-affected countries? Austria Current number of people recorded as infected: 144,442 —

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

How Britain and France learned to live with terror

Emmanuel Macron told his people last summer they would have to learn to live with Covid. A year-and-a-half on, France is unrecognisable to the country it once was: Covid passports are in force and face masks remain mandatory in many places. The president of France is not alone among Western leaders in his uncompromising approach to the pandemic: Holland, Austria and Germany are re-imposing restrictions and Boris Johnson, who used the ‘learn to live with it’ line in July, has refused to rule out a Christmas lockdown. Yet while Europe’s presidents and prime ministers appear ready to go to any length to protect their people from this virus, their approach to another

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My moment of madness in the opticians

Foolishly I chose new specs in the village optician’s after a long lunch: a rather outré design that I might not have chosen had I been completely sober. For the past decade I’ve worn a retro design I’d first admired in David Bailey’s striking black and white photographs of Ron Kray. Thinking it might be time for a change of style to reflect my invalid passivity, and the hairless dome of my surprisingly small skull, I’d gone in a moment of madness for a pair of John Lennon’s hippie silver circles. Three weeks later, I returned to the shop to try them on with the new prescription lenses fitted. It