Erik and Arthur Wneir from No Pasaran took on several thousand Muslim protesters and only the intervention of French police prevented a repeat of the Battle of Tours.

More seriously, watch the video to see the characteristic Muslim reaction to people daring to state an opinion different to theirs.

Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.

Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.

I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of "totalitarian democracy" and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.

Jacques Chirac has suddenly come out with a statement (French version here) that not only is France prepared to use nuclear weapons "against any state which launched a terrorist attack against it", their nuclear forces had been "configured for such an event".

As clearly this is a direct threat to nuke Iran, I can only wonder what the hell is going on here? Makes me wonder what exactly do they know in the Quai d'Orsay that they are not sharing with the rest of us.

Officials from the Israeli security services, not usually thought of as the Europhiles' favourite, are apparently in France at the moment advising that country's security services on riot control, following the mass mayhem in France a month ago. It strikes me as rather ironic, given the anti-Israel tilt of French foreign policy in recent years, that the country's leaders are calling for help from Israel. Strange days indeed.

Joel Kotkin, in a fine article at the Wall Street Journal, draws out these telling facts on the European economy's lousy job-formation record in recent years:

Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.

Kotkin goes on to contrast the lack of entrepreneurial (good French word, ironically) vigour in countries like France with that in the United States. There are plenty of other statistics to back up his points, but you get the general idea.

As the French rioting has gone on, I remain to be completely convinced that we are seeing some sort of European "intifada", as a number of commenters on this blog and other blogs say. Islamist radicalism may not be the primary cause, though it is a contributing factor, no doubt. I do certainly see the frightening potential for radical Islamists to exploit the situation and turn it to their own ends. This may already be happening. But I think the primary problem has been a refusal of the EUropean political elites to realise that the Big Government, and a highly protected labour market is a recipe for disaster and alienation. Coupled with the slowing dynamic of a greying population, falling economic growth and so forth, you have a serious problem of a stagnant economy. For example, the article I cite goes on to point out that hundreds of thousands of young Europeans now work abroad, in the U.S. and in Britain, since the work opportunities are so much better. Left behind is an increasingly state-dominated workforce and a huge population of tax-eating bureaucrats and welfare recipients. Not a great foundation for social peace.

Magnus Linklater, meanwhile, points to a worrying trend in Britain of young thugs hurling stones, firing rockets and other projectiles at firefighters in the course of their work. There have been hundreds of these incidents, many of them hardly reported in the media. Only a few years ago, firefighters were heroes, widely praised by all. Now they are almost routinely attacked in the tougher parts of this country.

If I were a member of the alienated army that shared Guy Fawkes night with the French on November 5th, as part of their general celebration and indulgence, wouldn't cars present an opportunity to joyride? How clear that these hotheads, raised in a political culture of entitlement and spectacle, now turn against their patron and paymaster. Schools, buses, hospitals and cars are destroyed to preserve their imprisonment and immobility. As masters of their estates, the rioters cock their legs and piss molotovs to provide the reek of burnt plastic that serves as their territorial marker.

The puzzled onlooker will wonder why it took a damp November rather than a hot July or August. Everyone gets more attention during the busy autumn when some of the French population deigns to work for a living. Now the lighthouses of punditry highlight hubris expunged from the once proud Gallic rooster and the smart riots of the European intifada. Some may fly the flag of Eurabia as their singular explanation for this tinderbox.

Yet the answers lie in crappy suburbs where the height of social mobility is raking money as a drugs and dole prole. The state is an absent employer, white, French and a danger to profits. Where economics provides motive to keep out the state as a threat to the monopoly of drugs and Islam, politics and terror will probably follow.

While trying to sort out my thoughts concerning the mayhem engulfing the huge public housing projects ringing Paris for the last week or more (11 days' running) it struck me that one of the basic problems is just how dreadful is the style and character of the architecture of such places. Among the many contributory factors to the present dismal mood in poorer parts of France, it seems to me, is the relentlessly cheerless atmosphere of such places. Many of the buildings are vast tower blocks, without gardens or private enclosed spaces. Long walkways - ideal for muggers and drug dealers - connect the blocks. Without an organic sense of place, there is also a lack of spontaneous neighbourliness that is much easier to create in a terraced street.

I am not going to push this point too far. The terraced housing areas of north-west England were scenes of violence involving young Britons from different ethnic groups only a few years ago. If the French government were to demolish the greying monoliths tomorrow and replace them with low-rise homes, it would hardly represent a major advance towards solving the problems of that country. But I think it would have an effect. Perhaps someone should send a copy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities to Jacques Chirac and his cabinet as a matter of urgency. Compared to some of the advice the French administration may be getting, they could do a lot worse.

Let's not forget that one of the high priests of Modern Architecture, Le Courbusier, was Swiss (born just over the border from France), and had a huge impact on thinking about mass public housing for much of the 20th Century, and also influenced thinking in other parts of the world, including Britain. To be fair, though, I resist the fogeyish habit of damning big modern buildings across the board. I agree with fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait that there is good modern architecture that can work brilliantly and crappy modern architecture that does not. When it comes to mass housing, though, Modernism seems to be seriously unnattractive in every sense of the word.

(Correction: I originally said that Corbusier was French. He was not - by a matter of a few miles. Thanks to a commenter for setting me straight).

Meanwhile, here is a grim update on developments.

I have visited Paris many times and have always loved that city, warts and all. I proposed to my future wife there earlier this year. I have noticed, however, over the years of my going there that the place does not have that relaxed atmosphere that I recall when I first went there in my early teens. I could not always put my finger on it.

Well, people are definitely noticing that Paris is not "all right" now. U.S. blogger Roger L. Simon (who writes excellent crime fiction) has some thoughts about the wave of riots breaking out in the outer suburbs of the city. There is also plenty of food for thought via the wonderfully entitled Merde in France blog for some observations close to what is going on.

(UPDATE: link to this instead of the Merde in France site. The url has changed, as spotted by a commenter. Thanks. Mea culpa).

I watched the British Channel 4 news programme tonight, which devoted about five minutes to the mayhem, now in its seventh consecutive night. The report stated that at least 177 vehicles have been damaged, in some cases set on fire. Security services have been fired upon with guns. A primary school has been burned to the ground. This is the sort of thing one expects to read about in Iraq, or, perhaps the Watts area of LA back in the late 1960s. The Channel 4 programme skated over the possible reasons for the mayhem, also ignoring a number of salient facts about life in the area, such as the massive concentration of immigrants of mostly north African descent, the huge drug trade, the lack of assimilation into broader French society and the chronic and relentlessly high levels of youth unemployment.

This vast housing estates are totally in contrast with the elegant, touristy bits of Paris that you see in the travel brochures. I was chatting with fellow contributor Michael Jennings about this over lunch today and he actually makes a point of going to the less salubrious bits of cities like Paris to see what life is really like. I have often noticed, either during car journeys or while taking the Eurostar train, just how grimy and cheerless the environ developments are. These are not places a sane person should spend a lot of time in, given the choice.

Theodore Dalrymple wrote a fine piece about the outskirts of Paris a while back here. Definitely worth checking out.

I heartily hope that order can be restored before that great city starts resembling one of the more violent parts of a Victor Hugo novel.

Now this gaffe by the French foreign minister in Israel would seem to defy belief...

The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked - while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed - whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II."

Now please, somebody, tell me this is a piece of gross mis-reporting by Haaretz (not the first time that would have happened). Surely, the foreign minister of France cannot actually be that utterly clueless. It would be funny if it was not so scary to think someone like that can hold high office in a nuclear armed First World nation.

Or could he have been thinking about England in 1190 and just got a bit (ahem) confused about the dates?

Hat tip to the Dissident Frogman for unearthing this gem

Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):

How come the French all think alike?

Well, OK, the French don't really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted "no" in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.

This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.

But that's not all: Even the "private" French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you're a journalist -- or just a "journalist" -- you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.

The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that's as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.

Who knew?

Yesterday, I travelled as a foot passenger to Calais on the ferry from Dover, as part of a group celebrating the birthday of a long-standing friend. It was ironic to read the Times on embarkation controls and experience the poorly organised efforts of the Immigration Service. After checking in, all foot passengers are taken on a courtesy bus towards the ferry. However, as the embarkation infrastructure was dismantled in 1998 to save money, they have established an ad hoc arrangement. You have to exit the courtesy bus twice, once to show your passport, the other time: to check your luggage. Such practices were not in evidence on the return journey from France.

We noticed that there were two or three Asian men holding camcorders and filming stairwells, restaurants and the maps of the ferry. This may be innocent behaviour but we took photos of them. The photos have been passed on to the Kent constabulary. This could be something or nothing, but vigilance is the purview of the alert citizen, not a monopoly of our less than competent authorities.

Calais, itself, is a nondescript town whose tourist potential is undermined by the large numbers of illegal immigrants who loiter around the parks and telephone boxes. Most appeared to be from the Middle East of the Horn of Africa. For a Saturday afternoon, they did little apart from sit or chat, cultivating indifference to the French or the holidaymakers. When attempting to look at a map of the town of Calais, that a group of them were obscuring, they quickly got out of the way. Perhaps this indicated past encounters with the French police and a fear of transgressing unspoken rules. Whatever the set-up, they have no place to go apart from the public spaces.

The local beer is worth imbibing and we found a well-stocked Irish pub near the main square that deserves patronage. Nearby is the local war museum, housed in a bunker, with jumbled momentoes of the occupation. Calais suffered heavy damage during the Second World War and testament is apid to this suffering with the photos of local landmarks, just situated outside the bunker, surrounded by piles of rubble and destroyed buildings. A vivid and revealing contrast of sixty years of peace.

To conclude, Calais does not cater for the tourist. We had to walk out of the ferry terminal and into town. Unlike any previous country I have visited, there was no sign for taxis or taxi ranks to pick up arrivals. One existed at the local station in the town although we had to wait for some time before a people carrier appeared. One could muse at the unmet demand for transport from strangers which the locals did not appear to consider a profitable enterprise. You could not help commenting that, in Britain, some of those sitting in the parks would obtain work by driving minicabs, and relieving the taxi drought.

Last month I was in France, and as always I thoroughly enjoyed it. What a beautiful country it is. And if only because I like France so much I am saddened at how badly us Anglo-Saxons and the French seem to get along with each other. But now, after my recent visit, I think I have a partial explanation for some of this hostility to offer.

On one of the days I was in France, I wandered around the village where my hosts lived, on my own, and I was struck by how almost everyone I met or even merely passed said "Bonjour!" to me. Everyone said it. Even quite young girls, on their own, girls who in England (or the USA?) would never say a word to a middle aged man whom they did not know.

Everyone said "Bonjour!", I said to my hosts when I got back home. It was rather nice, I said. Very communal. Well, they said, do not read too much into it. "Bonjour!" is all that they say, and in a year's time, "Bonjour!" may still be all that they say. They are not making friends, just being polite.

Quite so. Just being polite. But it is a politeness that we Anglos tend not to bother with. When we go into a shop, for example, we tend to get straight down to business, with only the most cursory of hellos. Only after we have done our business do we unbend and become human, and say "Thank you!" rather effusively, and perhaps shake hands. Ever since I started thinking about this posting I have noticed myself and the people I have dealings with here in London doing this same one-two pattern, of business, followed at the end of our brief relationship by politeness. First we do the business, impersonally and correctly, and only then, when the business is done, do we unbend, make eye contact, smile, and generally behave like nice friendly people.

So my hypothesis is this. The French have no deep hatred for us Anglo-Saxons on account of our Anglo-Saxon-ness, our foreign policies, our Hollywood movies or our lousy state medicine. It is simply that they do not like rudeness, or rude people, and to them, we come across as extremely rude. Instead of saying "Bonjour Madame" to the lady selling patisserie, we pitch right in and tell her which patisserie we want, without any preliminary courtesies. Which, in France, is very rude. That is why madame is always, to us, so grumpy.

I once had an extremely unpleasant acquaintance, whom I now avoid, who was and remains notorious for saying unpleasant things to everyone he ever meets, perhaps because he has a permanent pain in the top part of his back and wants to spread the pain around. I remember him saying to me once: "Everyone's in a terrible mood these nowadays." I knew why. Everyone he met had just had the misfortune to meet him. They were fine until he showed up. They were in a bad mood because he put them in a bad mood.

Well, I surmise that maybe we Anglos tend to do that to the French. They are not snooty and unpleasant all the time. They are just snooty and unpleasant to us, because we immediately come across to them as very rude, and they do not like it.

Could it really be that something as superficial as our different styles of greeting one another is a big reason for the Anglos and the French not getting along? I really think it might be. I would welcome suggestions for further reading along these lines, but am not able to offer much linkage myself, as I have never heard anything similar suggested.

The nearest related thinking I can suggest is the work of Deborah Tannen, who has written books about contrasting conversational styles among us English speakers – Southerners and Northerners in the USA, slow speechmakers and fast interrupters, and most famously, women and men. Maybe she could do another book about us and the French.

Final thought: Australians are famous over here for saying "G'day" all the time. I wonder if they get along better with the French than other Anglos. Maybe not, because it is not just what you say, as Tannen has spent half a lifetime explaining, it is the way you say it.

Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:

Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?

Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir...

Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?

Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being 'culturally inclusive' by choosing a non-European name!

A French blog (well, sort of a blog) which fisked the EU Constitution is one of a new wave of European political blogs which are going to make it a lot harder for the technocrats in Brussels and the various European capitals to just double talk their way past the issues with the connivance or at least indifference of much of the mainstream media.

Hopefully this sort of thing will become more and more common as tools for penetrating the dense fog of half-truths and outright lies thrown up around so many political issues by people who want as little informed choice as possible.

To all French crypto-communists, syndicalists, marxists, trotskyites, leninists, stalinists, national socialists, socialist nationalists, primitivists, Trade Union dinosaurs, student activists, greenie nutters, neo-fascists, old fashioned fascists, quasi-crypto-troglodyte-Pol-Pottist-year zero-flat-earthers, looney tunes and enviro-goons... Merci Beaucoup!!!!

I could kiss every single one of you (but I don't know how to say that in French).

French voters go to the polls this weekend to vote on the European Union constitution, with polls so far suggesting that the "no's" will narrowly win and shaft the wretched project, although one should never, ever under-estimate the ability of the political establishment to scare voters into saying "oui". My hope, needless to say, is that the French vote against the constitution and throw a great big spanner in the works and prevent the creation of what will be, explicitly, a European superstate.

It is pointless at this vantage point to guess exactly what will be the impact on British political life if the French do nix the constitution. My rough guess is that Blair will secretly breath a deep sigh of relief, as will the Tories. I also think that the United States will also be glad about a no vote, although I am just guessing.

As Anatole Kaletsky writes in the Times today, the chronic underperformance of the euro zone economy is at the heart of much of that disenchantment (although other issues are important too).

Here's a key graf:

The relative economic decline of "old" Europe since the early 1990s - especially of Germany and Italy, but also of the Netherlands and France - has been a disaster almost unparalleled in modern history. While Britain and Japan certainly suffered some massive economic dislocations, in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s respectively, they never experienced the same sort of permanent transformation from thriving full-employment economies to stagnant societies where mass unemployment and falling living standards are accepted as permanent facts of life. In Britain, unemployment more than doubled from 1980 to 1984, but conditions then quickly improved. By the late 1980s it was enjoying a boom, the economy was growing by 4 per cent and unemployment had halved. In continental Europe, by contrast, unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 per cent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 per cent only once in those 14 years.

He has a point, although I am struck by the fact that in France, much of the hostility to the constitution is coming not from pro-free marketeers, as is the case in many respects in Britain, but from those who fear that the process will open up France's high regulated, high-tax economy to the icy winds of laissez faire. The ironies abound.

Of course, the fact of mere voters saying no to the EU juggernaut is unlikely to deflect the mixed assortment of deluded idealists, crooks, place-seekers and sundry camp-followers from trying to advance their aims. But a delicious irony would it be if the land of Bonaparte, de Gaulle and Asterix puts a major block in their path.

People in France, that paragon of European economic sophistication, are being told that if they reject the European Constitution, they will suffer economic catastrophe.

But what might happen? Perhaps French unemployment might reach, say, 10%? Oh right...

Much has been written about the recently opened Millau Viaduct in the south of France, both here and elsewhere. It takes the form of statistics: 245m from the foot of the valley to the deck, 343m from the foot of the valley to the top of the towers, 2.5km long in total. A cost of €394m to build.

Going out of my way to see the great bridges of the world is something that I do, and after reading all this I was struck by a strong urge to go and see the bridge for myself. So, I flew to Toulouse this last weekend. I rented a car, and headed for Millau. I was in no hurry. I stopped for a pleasant lunch in Albi, and rather than going up the main road, I then wound along the litte roads following the Tarn valley. One thing became obvious quickly. The Tarn valley is a huge gash through the south of France, going for hundreds of kilometres. There was clearly no easy way to build a motorway across it, anywhere. The immensity of the new viaduct was clearly out of necessity.

I had some thoughts of following the Tarn river valley all the way from Albi to Millau, with the idea that I would appreciate the scale of the valley, finally glimpse the viaduct in the distance when I was a few kilometres from it, (or maybe tens of kilometres, depending on the geography), and then approach it and eventually drive under it.

As it happened though, this was not quite what happened. The drive up the valley was spectacular, but it was a difficult drive, due to a narrow road (with some very lengthy narrow tunnels from an earlier era of engineering), and some awkward driving conditions. (It was very cold. Much of the river valley and even some of the road was covered in snow). And I kept stopping due to the fact that the scenery was beautiful and at times remarkable. (The small village of Ambialet, built in a truly extraordinary curve in the river, kept me for some time, as did a few other places).

This part of France had an odd feeling of abandonment about it though. There are a lot of small villages along the river, containing beautiful old stone buildings, but these contained very few people and. I get the impression that the valley was a (fairly marginal) agricultural location a generation or two back (potatoes I would guess) but that is now gone. There are a few shops in the villages but these were mostly closed. The permanent population of these places appears to be small, and demographically not especially young. The buildings are generally in good repair, however. I get the impression that this place is highly seasonal. Tourists and owners of holiday homes probably come in summer in huge numbers for canoeing, kayaking, hiking, hang-gliding and various other activities, but not in the winter. Which is a shame, because in winter under the snow the valley was beautiful. But to attract people in winter you need to offer skiing, and this is not skiing country.

But on to the bridge.

After several hours of driving slowly and stopping regularly, I realised I was a bit fatigued and it was getting late, so I ended up diverting to the B999, the main road to Millau, which detoured over a couple of ridges rather than winding up the valley.

And oddly, this turned out if anything to be better than the original choice. For as it approaches Millau the B999 swerves back into the Tarn Valley and goes under the viaduct into Millau. But it doesn't do so at the foot of the valley but along one of the sides of the valley, probably about halfway up in altitude.

As it happened, I didn't see the viaduct until I was quite close to it when I came around a curve in the valley. I could only initially see a small portion of it, but it was a long way above me. I drove closer, and more of the viaduct became visual. Directly under it was a visitors centre, so I parked the car and looked around me. I looked down at the river, and one of the supports of the viaduct receded a huge distance downwards. I looked to one side of the valley. The viaduct receded into the distance.

I looked the other way. The viaduct receded a long way into the distance that way, too.

The legs of the viaduct are thick and emormous, but the deck looks somehow very slight, still somehow being held in the air when it probably shouldn't. The materials from which this bridge has been built are vastly stronger than anything that existed even 20 years ago. I have said this before, but this is in my mind the defining characteristic of modern post materials revolution structural engineering. Structures are then, flimsy. They almost look like spider webs. The defining characteristic of industrial age engineering was bulk. But now we are in this virtuous circle of stronger and lighter materials allowing a much thinner deck, allowing the other parts of the bridge to be lighter and less substantial too, allowing still more economies elsewhere, and a rapidly dropping cost of projects like this.

And this is why this viaduct has been built. One upon a time there was only one way for a road to cross such a valley, which was to have a road going down a steep winding pass into the valley, crossing the river, and then coming up another steep winding pass on the other side. And this isn't compatible with a motorway.

To build a straight motorway across such a valley there are two options: you dig tunnels through the cliffs on either side of the river to bring the road down to something close to river level and have a low level bridge, or you build an immense high bridge. Until recently, the cost of both options was prohibitive. Building tunnels probably still is. But due to the materials revolution the cost of a high bridge has been plummeting.

And here is the deal. Given the immensity and magnificence of the structure, the €394m that the viaduct cost to build actually wasn't very much. Given that this is the main road from Paris to the south-west of France and to Spain, one feels that toll collection will pay off the construction cost fairly easily, even if the toll (€6.50 in summer, and €4.90 at other times of year) seems cheap.

In any event, I drove into Millau, stopping at a vantage point for another view.

But to really get an impression of the size of this thing, it's worth standing at the very bottom, as I did the next morning. This is high. (It's unfortunately very difficult to take a photograph that captures both the length and the height of the bridge. It tends to be one or the other.

It's easy to make smaller structures look like this with a camera and the right lens, but I am not doing this. If anything, these photographs understate the scale of the bridge. I actually took these photographs from the bottom of the bridge at around 10am on Sunday morning. As I was standing below the bridge, it appeared to start raining. This was odd, as the sky was completely clear. It took me some time to figure out that the "rain" was in fact overnight frost that was melting on the bridge way way above me and that was falling onto the floor of the valley.

But of course a bridge needs to be crossed. I like to walk across bridges, but it is not really possible with this one. It is long, and the starting and finishing points are too inaccessible. So I paid the toll, and drove over it. No doubt I broke several French laws by taking photographs while I was driving, but I did.

The towers and cable stays are surprisingly small given the size of the bridge. Also, on most cable stayed bridges the stays connect the towers to both edges of the bridge. Here, there are a single set of stays connecting to towers to the median strip between the two traffic ways. The deck is clearly stronger and more rigid than decks were even five or ten years ago.



And to make sure people are not spooked by the height that they are travelling above the valley (and presumably to also stop people from jumping) the barriers at the edge of the bridge are pretty substantial.



Impressive, yes, but get used to this kind of thing. Of the various computer driven technological revolutions that have been occuring in recent years, the revolution in materials is one of the most important and yet this one has received less publicity than most. Which is a shame, as this is the one that is about our control of the physical world. Architecture has become more playful in recent years, very much because engineers are suddenly less constrained by the tolerances of materials than they were. Structures of unprecedented size and length are becoming possible, at dramatically reduced costs. Some of the structures we will see in the next twenty or thirty years will boggle the mind. It's a very exciting time to be alive.

The Millau viaduct is simply mindblowing. You may know in advance how big and how high it is in terms of numbers, but when you see it it really blows you away. I have seen a lot of great works of engineering, but I cannot remember the last time I saw one that was simply as awe inspiring as this one.

- Michael Jennings on the French engineering miracle previously reported on and argued about here

TF1, a French TV station carries this [link disabled] video report of a debate within France's Socialist Party, concerning the ratification of the EU Constitution. Two campaigning websites each for and against are listed.

The 'No' camp is split with supporters of Henri Emmanuelli on the one hand, a corrupt politician who's main claim to fame was his position as Treasurer of the Socialist Party when many of its leading figures were being caught stealing public funds to finance the Party. On the other side are supporters of Laurent Fabius, part of what was once the reformist wing of the Socialist Party (in the mid 1980s). Fabius himself of course is one of the blood contamination killers, four Socialist politicians who allowed HIV infected blood to be used in blood transfusions, leading to the contamination of as many as 2,000 French haemophilliacs or half the total French haemophilliac population. I seem to recall that there was a screening method that was delayed, on the grounds of cost. Naturally, the politicians escaped punishment, other than a token criminal conviction for "involuntary homicide".

Details of the campaigning sites can be found here.

Sadly, with champions like this, the credibility of a "Non!" campaign would be somewhat stretched. Even in France.

While idly surfing around the net thanks to the marvels of Google (what a wonderful thing Google is!) I had a look at a few stories about the worrying state of French cuisine, like this one.

I yield to no man in my love of French food, or indeed food generally. I love French food as much as I loathe the French political establishment. And it will surely be a tragedy of Napoleonic proportions if France, wedded to such economic absurdities as the 35-hour work week, were to drive many of its finest restaurants out of business or lead them to cut corners in their work. The irony, of course, is that if France does crush its wonderful restaurants through such nonsense, it will encourage the very fast-food big chains that the French intellectuals despise, since such chains have the economies of scale to shoulder red tape more easily than a small bistro. It would be a cruel irony indeed if MacDonalds spread its grip on the market thanks to French socialism. I guess the great French classical liberal economics writer Frederic Bastiat would have savoured the irony.

There is a silver lining to all this. Some of the best French cuisine is now being made in grey old London, which means I can indulge my tastebuds without making the trip across the Channel. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

In the leafy suburb of Clamart to the South-West of Paris, the rumor is breaking that Jacques Chirac's second favourite Arab (after Saddam Hussein) is dead.

CNN reports that Yasser Arafat has passed away this afternoon after spending a week in a coma.

Meanwhile in the Ivory Coast, demonstrators are parading banners that exclaim:

"Chirac is an assassin" and "Chirac= worse than Bin Laden" [thanks to millena at les libertariens, the French Libertarian newsgroup]

I thought the rednecks were all in the red states of the USA? ;-)

President Jacques Chirac, who has just rushed to the military hospital in Clamart to be at Yasser Arafat's bedside, took time off to pen a letter to his American colleague. My translation [handwritten bits in bold]:

Mister President, Dear George In the name of France and in my personal name, I wish to express to you my most hearty congratulations for your re-election to the Presidency of the United States of America.

I make the wish that your second mandate will be the opportunity to reinforce franco-american friendship. The ceremonies for the sixtieth anniversary of the landings paid a shining hommage to the American soldiers who fell on the Normandy beaches for our freedom and that of Europe.

It is in the spirit of dialogue, esteem and mutual respect that our co-operation, our common combat against terrorism and the action that we carry out together to promote liberty and democracy, must continue.

We cannot find satisfactory answers to the numerous challenges against which we are confronted today without a close transatlantic partnership. The United States and France are called upon to play in this an essential role. We share the ambition of assuring to the greatest number peace, security and prosperity, in the spirit of solidarity [this usually means entitlement programs in French]. I am convinced that together, we can get there.

I beg you to believe, Mister President, of the assurance of my very high opinion of you. and of my very cordial friendship

Jacques CHIRAC

I bet that was painless. Oh and I hope that the President Chirac is careful in his motorcade coming home from Clamart. That's right next to the road junction where the OAS tried to assassinate General de Gaulle (as seen in the Day of the Jackal) in 1962. And we would not want anything to happen to Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat's favourite Frenchman.

Since Hollywood studio bosses are famously averse to 'downbeat endings' for their movies, perhaps it was their clandestine intervention that resulted in this script change:

Kidnappers in Iraq have handed two French journalists to another group said to be prepared to free them, one of the men's editors told the BBC.

The second group, said to be from the Iraqi opposition, is "in favour of releasing them", Charles Lambroschini, Le Figaro deputy editor, told BBC News.

France's foreign minister said earlier that both men were alive and well.

The kidnappers had linked the men's fate to France's move to ban Islamic headscarves from schools.

No, probably not the handywork of Hollywood executives but a rather surprise 'ending' nonetheless given the grisly fate that has been meted out to just about every other hostage in Iraq.

If (as it appears) these two men are to be sent back home to their families in one piece, then I am very pleased. There are plenty of people in this world to whom I bear an extraordinary degree of ill-will but these two French hacks are not among them. However, I find myself unable to dismiss the question of whether there ever really was any risk that they would end up six inches shorter.

When Hamas, Hezbollah and a bevy of otherwise insanely violent Caliphascists are falling over themselves to denounce the kidnappers and call for the hostages release, you know that this is not business as usual. There could be any number of explanations, but the sudden materialisation of a 'caring, sharing' side is, I submit, the least likely of them.

Events may overtake this and I may yet be forced to recant, although that is hardly an important matter. But, until then, the impression I have formed is that this was not so much a hostage crisis as an elaborate pantomime.

Perhaps it is merely a case of grabbing whoever is conveniently to hand. Or perhaps not:

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro....

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

Of course, the only way to prevent this kind of thing happening again is for the French to change their misguided and interventionist domestic policies.

[P.S. Why were they speaking in English, I wonder?]

A few days past but who is counting? In all the talk of the anniversaries noted by the media on August the 4th (90th anniversary of the British declaration of war on Germany and the 300 hundredth anniversary of the capture of Gibraltar) I hoped (although I did not expect) that there would be a brief mention of August the 4th 1789.

The French Revolution was mostly just a story of murder and plundering (at least ten times more government officials, paper money, vast numbers of killings all over France, endless new regulations...) but there were a few good things (things that people like me often overlook) and most of them happened on August the 4th 1789.

It was on this date that the National Assembly abolished many of the old taxes and regulations of the Ancient Regime.

Taxes to the Church - abolished. Feudal dues - abolished. Many of the Royal taxes (including, I believe, the salt tax) - abolished.

True the good things were being overwhelmed by bad things even by August the 4th 1789 - but, to be fair, we should still remember the good things.

It was also the date when (again if my memory serves me correctly) serfdom was abolished. True French courts had hardly been in the habit of enforcing serfdom - but the fact remains that about half a million people were formally serfs in the France of 1789.

Sadly my memory fails me when I try to remember when the guilds were abolished - was it also August the 4th? True the guilds should not have been abolished, it was their legal monopoly on the production of various products (granted by Henry IV - before his time towns in France had varied in terms of guild rights) that should have been abolished - but the revolutionaries were sort of right in this area. They (or at least some of them) sort of understood that the effects of the guild monopoly (in-so-far as the courts enforced it) were bad.

I guess this means I have to be in favor of gay marriage.

Trade union members in France and Germany are becoming conscious of the need to break the law if they are to keep their jobs.

At present it is illegal to ask any worker in France to work more than a 35 hour week, except in special cases determined by political lobbying. Not surprisingly this has led to the closure of low-paid jobs at an accelerating rate with relocation to Eastern Europe the current favourite.

When I was last in Slovakia in May this year, a deal had recently been struck to move a Peugeot factory from France. On my previous visit in 1993, unemployment threatened to hit 80 per cent in some towns.

The power struggle between Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac now encompasses the scrapping of the 35 hour week. Chirac did not veto the measure when the Socialist government passed the law, no doubt under the influence of his then influential leftist political advisor - his daughter.

So now Chirac cannot face anything more than cosmetic reform of a job-destroying law, without looking the cretin that he his. Of course, leaving things as they are makes him look thick-headed, or a "veau" (calf) as we say in France.

So in the marketplace the obvious solution is emerging: factory workers are agreeing to work an extra hour a week without pay. How this is better for social justice than letting people work and get paid for the hours they want beats me, but if it makes them happy...

Unless he was lying on national television again, or changes his mind like he did several times over the Maastricht Treaty, Saddam Hussein's best chum has announced that the French (and colonies) will be given a chance to vote on the proposed European Union constitution.

Lucky, we know all the dirty tricks that can be used in such a referendum campaign, they were all used last time by the Florentine François Mitterand, to get the Maastricht Treaty through. So we shall be campaigning in Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and the Isle de la Réunion, and French Polynesia, St Pierre et Miquelon and New Caledonia, and Wallis et Futuna if necessary to avoid losing by 40,000 votes. Get the Atlas out!

I am starting a voter registration guide among the French refugees living in London. I am also checking whether foreign EU citizens living in France can vote and how to arrange this. My new blog Combat (named after the WWII Resistance magazine against the Nazi occupation) launched today will be tracking the campaign in French.

Instead of the national anthem's "aux armes citoyens!", let us "aux urnes citoyens!"

*"To the ballot boxes citizens!"

I wonder if the fact France is, get this, cracking down on opponents of the theocratic tyranny in Iran will produce howls of anger from the same people who complain that the US has on many occasions propped up unsavoury regimes for various reasons? I have my doubts as most are convinced that if the US is not involved in something, it does not really happen.

Why is the French state doing this? Well who knows... I am sure that fact lucrative deals have been signed in Iran by French companies over the last few months have nothing to do with it. Nope, that could not possibly be the reason.

It is fashionable to accuse the US of being an imperialist nation due to its extensive activities and interests overseas. The US, though, is sadly short of exotic tropical possessions, in contrast to one of its biggest and most self-righteous detractors, France, which is still a true imperialist, presiding over a bona fide colony of brown-skinned natives who have had the temerity to express a desire for independence.

Now, I am not sure exactly what the political arrangements are with respect to Tahiti. It is interesting to see that the French are placing their own self-interest ahead of Tahitian independence.

France is likely to oppose any move towards independence. Thousands of French troops and civil servants are based on Tahiti.

And a sweet posting that must be.

"French Polynesia is part of France's aspirations to have a presence in every ocean and any loss of territory would have an impact on their status as a power with global reach," said Mr Maclellan. "The territory also has a huge exclusive economic zone, with rights to fishing and sea bed minerals."

Classic imperialist/exploitative greed, non?

The Tahitians have been heavily subsidized by France, a way of getting French taxpayer to foot the bill for the aforementioned sweet civil service postings and for whatever sweetheart deals French businesses get for all those fish and minerals. However, in a real shocker "allegations of corruption, poor economic management and a desire for fresh political blood" have led to a political victory for the pro-independence party over the political hacks who stood for continued subjugation to the French imperium. In the punchline, the new leader is aligning himself more closely with the nearby Anglosphere nations.

Will the usual suspects who decry US imperialism at every turn show up to protest the real item when practiced by the French? Will there be international objections to the heavy-handed tactics the French bureaucrats will employ to defend their perquisites? Will one of the last outposts of colonialism disappear? Stay tuned.

This is oh so typical. Support Marxism and Islamo-fascism, and you get French police protection... support the USA and you get arrested.

While researching for my weekly CNE Environment column I came across a barking mad website. This led me to another loony story. Unfortunately, neither of these would do for an environment column that is meant to present a credible analysis of the eco-fascist movement.

So I ended up with this story from the French TV station TF1. In what has to be the most perfect economic suicide note since the 1920 Soviet Constitution, the French National Assembly has voted to amend the French constitution so as to enshrine the precautionary principle by 328 votes to 10. This could make any future government decision to deregulate anything illegal.

It is a shame that the precautionary principle is not applied to government regulation: in the absence of any overwhelming proof that it will work, such regulation ought to be prohibited. One might expect such lunacy in the French Assembly to be supported by the extreme left and the Green parties (there are several of these in France). But no.

The "centre-right" parties of the UMP and the UDF voted in favour, the Socialists and the Communists abstained, and the Greens voted against.

If this was appeasement, it failed. So which story was the barmiest?

In France on Sunday, Nicolas Sarkhozy has manouvered the UMP government party into supporting a referendum for the proposed EU constitution [link in French].

The decision to hold a referendum will be taken by President Jacques Chirac (anyone's guess what that will be), but the call by the newly appointed Minister of Finance represents a shift away from automatic rubber-stamping by the French parliament.

Privately Chirac will be fuming. He hates Sarkhozy and fears his possible election in 2007 as President. Unlike the recently convicted fraudster Alain Juppé, Mr Sarkhozy might not feel inclined to whitewash the current President's dubious financial history. Meanwhile, Alain Juppé the UMP party chairman, has endorsed Mr Sarkhozy's call with the qualification: "within the constitutional prerogatives of the President". Mr Juppé no doubt feels it is a good time to roll with his colleague's punches.

A mindboggling article on the TF1 (French TV) website.

Apparently, Jacqeues Chirac is dedicating today's presidential press conference to the subject of EU enlargement. The analysis is that this will dillute French influence in the EU, shift the balance of power in a more "Atlanticist" direction, and help bring about back-door free-market reforms.

The French Socialist Party has decided to make the threat of a libertarian Europe (Europe libérale) the main plank of its European election campaign, citing the EU constitution as part of the potential problem. They think it is going to be amended into something terrifying (i.e. good). Especially horrible for the European left is the prospect of cross-border private welfare arrangements: buying private pensions and health insurance without the 'protection' of nationalized welfare monopolies. Get your life insurance in France, health insurance in Germany and your pension in the UK for example.

Jacques Chirac as the agent of Anglo-Saxon capitalists! Priceless.

Only yesterday I had good things to say about "Continental" medical provision, and it was France in particular that I had in mind.

Here on the other hand, is another view:

The French health service, regarded as the world's best, is falling apart, a petition signed by 286 of its most senior hospital doctors claims. Waiting lists, almost unknown in France five years ago, are becoming common, and there is a severe shortage of doctors and nurses.

However, you need to be aware that this is being said by people who want this to be believed, so that they can be given more money to give to themselves, and each other. When did you last hear of people saying, when their annual grant was being discussed: "Oh, things are fine, really - in fact, we could probably get by with rather less money, if the truth be told" ? Not lately, I should guess.

"In casualty units, sick people have to wait for hours, sometimes even days, on stretchers, because there are no beds for them in the hospital," said the doctors' petition, sent to the newspaper Le Monde.

Nevertheless, that does sound rather anglais.

The recently appointed Health Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, has said the public health service budget would be €12bn (£8bn) in the red this year, €1bn more than the previous forecast.

The two events are closely connected. The doctors' petition was a shot across the bows of the unpopular centre-right French government, which is expected to announce plans next month for the most radical reform of the health service in more than 50 years.

Battle-lines are being drawn for what is likely to be the most bitterly contested domestic political issue in France this year, the future of a €130bn-a-year health service which is regularly named by the World Health Organisation as the world's finest.

A committee of inquiry reported in January that the "health insurance" section of the nation's social security system faces a €66bn deficit by 2020 unless something is done to increase its revenues or reduce its spending, or both. Half of public spending on health goes on the state hospital service, which was originally to be excluded from the reforms.

The argument is all about money in other words. Suddenly the French system looks good, yes, but rather expensive. The health equivalent of Concorde. And they want, if not to cancel it, then to clip its wings rather severely.

A French-based imam who preached polygamy, the right of husbands to beat their wives, the stoning of adulterous women, and the eventual conversion of the whole planet to Islam was bundled on a flight to Algeria at 9.20 this morning (European Summer Time). Abdelkader Bouziane, a father of 16 children who hold French citizenship was arrested at Lyon airport on Tuesday.

The expulsion was justified by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkhozy (since moved to the Finance Ministry) in a ministerial decree dated 26 February 2004 on the grounds of incitement of violence, especially against women, as well as because the imam was allegedly "an apologist for terrorism", a charge disputed by Mr Bouziane's lawyers.

A complaint had been submitted to the French government by the Deputy Mayor of Lyon following remarks published in a local paper, which are the subject of dispute.

In unrelated news, official unemployment figures in France suggest that unemployment reached 2,707,000 in December or 9.9 per cent of the workforce. Meanwhile a proposed law - which would prohibit the wearing of the Islamic veil and other visible religious symbols in state schools - now proposes that bandanas would be exempt if worn as a fashion accessory but banned if worn as a religious statement.

In many ways I would not get so put out by the machinations of the French political class if they were just more upfront about what motivates them. If they just came out and said "we could not care less about the fact the Iraqi people are ruled by a mass murderous tyrant, we are just interested in protecting our economic sweetheart deals", I would still think that was appalling, but at least one could hardly help but admire their brazen pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others. What is another 20 years of Ba'athism when a sweet below-market oil deal is at stake? No (Ba'athist) blood for (French) oil, please?

But no, Dominique de Villepin and Jaques Chirac actually have the bare faced effrontery to claim the moral high ground when anyone with a passing knowledge of French economics and a 'who's who' of French interests has been able to see what is really going on from day one. It is a measure of the web of corruption that lies over the French media and chattering classes that 'The Big Lie' is accepted so widely in France. Perhaps Colin Powell should have just responded to one of de Villepin ambushes in the UN during the lead up to the recent Gulf War by simply reading out a list of the names of the great and good in France and their interests in Iraq, without further comment.

Not that the French political class are alone of course, not by any means... they are just the most cynically sanctimonious about it.

As Antoine is fond of pointing out here, the French are not totally supine in the face of radical Islamism:

Yahia Cherif, who preached in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, was deported to Algiers after being found guilty of "proselytism in favour of radical Islam" and "active relations with a national or international Islamic movement linked to organisations promoting terrorist acts".

He was also found to have incited violence and hatred against people due to their origin. During the hearing, a lawyer representing the interior ministry cited evidence supplied by French intelligence to accuse Cherif of calling for a jihad during a sermon on March 19. The call represented a threat to national security, he said.

Cherif had also asked his followers for active support of Jamal Zougam, the prime suspect held in connection with the Madrid bombings, in which 191 people died.

Here is the case against deporting Cherif:

His lawyer argued that he did not promote terrorism but had been a victim of it, since he had witnessed his own father's murder in Algeria. He said he feared for Cherif's safety at the hands of Algeria's military authorities.

I know that there is an argument that people like this just, you know, giving sermons, is just them exercising their right to free speech, but meanwhile, this man was clearly breaking French law as it actually is, and from the sound of it he certainly intended his words to give rise to actions. So my immediate reaction to this story is, in the words of the Sergeant Major with the moustache played by Windsor Davies in It Ain't Half Hot Mum: "Oh dear. How tragic."

As was this. Not.

Paul Staines points out a splendid example of the French state doing its bit to support the world's largest tyranny

As Taiwan's democrats get bullets before ballots, France demonstrates its exceptionalism once again.  This week the French navy began joint exercises with the Chinese navy. No, really.

Not content with just lobbying other EU countries to lift the arms embargo on China imposed in the wake of the Tiannamen Square massacre in 1989 (who says the French are always against free trade?), they are training with the Chinese navy. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said they would be China's biggest ever joint military exercises with a foreign power.   (Note to Beijing,  it took Churchill a single day to sink almost the entire French navy, but maybe you have not got many seafaring friends to learn from.)

Taiwan obviously is anxious about the situation – which they describe as a threatening show of force. The French not content with cruising the seas with Taiwan’s mortal enemy recently condemned President Chen Shui-bian's plan to hold a referendum on missile defense as part of this coming Saturday's election, prompting Taipei to suspend top-level ties with Paris.

I suppose with reduced opportunities for arms sales to Iraq the prospect of equipping the Chinese military appeals.

Paul Staines

As any reader of this blog would have realised by now, the French political establishment is viewed with varying levels of disdain. I yield to no-one in my loathing of French President Jacques Chirac, who, let us not forget, would probably be an inmate of a jail for corruption were it not for the immunity from prosecution afforded to the holder of his office.

But as proud individualist and opponent of all attempts to lump people together under a single banner, I regard attempts to attack someone for being 'French' no better than doing so for being, say, American. Yet the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto does precisely this regarding Democratic wannabe Commander in Chief John Kerry. His constant snipes at Kerry for being "French-looking" are bigoted nonsense.

Well Mr Taranto, I would like to point out that many of the ideals enshrined in the US Constitution, which presumably is revered by the Wall Street Journal, originated in France. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bastiat, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Toqueville, all giants of classical liberalism, were all French.

James Taranto's "Best of the Web" column used to be a must-read for its snappy and often hilarious takes on the various media comments of the day. Alas, he seems to be little more than a cheerleader for George Bush these days. Maybe Taranto's talents, which are considerable, could be put to better use.

Brian reminds us that if Dr Kelly's death was embarrassing for the BBC and the British government, the capture alive of Saddam Hussein is potentially very embarrssing for the French President Jacques 'the Crook' Chirac.

Following his story, I decided to check out TF1, the major TV channel, to see what coverage - if any - there was about the Bagdad story. It certainly is not front page news in Paris.

For good reason...

One of the leading stories in France today is the report of an investigative judge into the sale of frigates by what was then Thomson-CSF to Taiwan in 1991. Under the ethical trade (!) clauses in this 14 billion French Franc contract (about 1.9 billion US dollars), if it were proved that bribes had been paid, the guilty party would have to pay damages of up to 600 million US dollars.

The government at the time was the Socialist Party and the prime minister would probably have been Pierre Bérégovoy, who committed suicide by firing an indeterminate number of bullets into the wrong side of his head shortly before being called to appear in court on charges of channelling public funds into the bank accounts of most of his Socialist buddies, or arch-crook Edith Cresson, she of the dentist-gigolo hired at the European Commission who called English MPs a bunch of public-school homosexuals. I forget which.

Naturally the damages will all be paid by the French government, i.e. the taxpayers. The notion that the political party or the politician that stole the money should be held somehow responsible? Where would it end...

"Corruption scandal? Which corruption scandal?"

This looks interesting, from today's Independent:

Claims that dozens of politicians, including some from prominent anti-war countries such as France, had taken bribes to support Saddam Hussein are to be investigated by the Iraqi authorities. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council decided to check after an independent Baghdad newspaper, al-Mada, published a list which it said was based on oil ministry documents.

The 46 individuals, companies and organisations inside and outside Iraq were given millions of barrels of oil, the documents show. Thousands of papers were looted from the State Oil Marketing Organisation after Baghdad fell to US forces on 9 April.

"I think the list is true," Naseer Chaderji, a Governing Council member, said. "I will demand an investigation. These people must be prosecuted." Rumours had circulated for months that documents implicating senior French individuals were about to surface. Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac staked out the moral high ground in opposing the invasion.

I don't remember Chirac staking out any moral high ground, just that some people thought he had, perhaps including him. But I do recall learning, although I forget how, that Saddam had a bribery network that covered the whole Middle East, and I recall thinking that it probably did not stop there. Of course, it is hardly news that France is riddled with corruption. The news is that a semi-major newspaper is saying it, today, again.

If you think the French 'headscarf ban' is going to cause friction, then I cannot wait to see where this is going to lead:

A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister.

The decision as to whether or not to grow a beard should be left to the individual schoolgirl. After all, it is what is going on inside that counts!

French state schools, unlike the British or American varieties, were founded explicitly to oppose clerical power. They are the most visible and enduring bastions of secularism in France. Originally, the prohibition of religious symbols in schools was aimed against Catholics. Many of the supporters of secularism in the 19th century in France were non-conformist or atheist: often Protestant or Jewish. The antisemistism of such groups as Action Française from the 1890s onwards is in turn a reaction against the French radical assault on Catholic society. In the early 20th century a deal was worked out that allowed religious schools to operate alongside the secular system.

The Islamist campaign against secularism is what the headscarf law is about. In some schools, violence has been threatened against girls who refused to wear scarves. Apologists for fundamentalists (ususally socialists hoping to play the race card) condoned the violence and have allowed a climate of terror in French schools.

As a libertarian, I oppose state schools. But also as a libertarian, I also support the prohibition of Islamic fundamentalist intimidation. If Islamic schools really allowed freedom to exit, I could back Moslem campaigns for lifting any restrictions the French government might have against their own schools.

When I visit a mosque, I take off my shoes, I do not interfere with the religious devotions of the worshippers, and I do not demonstrate my own devotions to eating pork and drinking beer. The person who chooses a turban ahead of an education has got "I'm a loser!" stamped all over him. But the people who organise the headscarf campaigns do not want freedom of choice: they want a licence to coerce.

This is not a campaign for religious freedom: Moslems are free to set up their own schools. It is a campaign to separate the public and the private sphere: in the school each pupil's religious affiliation is a private and not a public matter.

Far be it from me to condone the criminal régime of Chirac. But, this is the same fight as the Turkish Army's fight to defend a secular state against the fundmentalist tyranny. It is a small corner of the War on Terror, and compared with the some of the antics of the Department of "Homeland Defense" a.k.a. Minipax, one worth fighting.

It is also a campaign against obscurantism. French people often mock those parts of the USA where it is illegal to teach Darwin, or where Creationist theories have to be accorded equal credibilty in the classroom.

When the French government decided to place a prohibition of overtly religious symbols in state schools (or 'the headscarf ban' as it is more widely know), I bet they thought that they were removing a splinter from the soft tissue of the body politic.

But it looks like the wound is beginning to fester:

Muslim protests have been taking place in France and other countries against a French bill which would ban headscarves from state schools.

Up to 5,000 protesters, mainly Muslim women in scarves, rallied in Paris.

Many of France's five million Muslims see it as an attack on their religious and human rights.

And that view is not confined to French Muslims either:

"Ultimately, if I have to choose between further studies or my turban, I will keep the turban."

Fourteen-year-old Vikramjit Singh, who lives in suburban Paris, says giving up his studies would perhaps ruin his material life.

"But if I have to give up my turban, I am sacrificing my spiritual life. And that is totally unacceptable to me," he told BBC News Online.

For Sikhs, wearing the turban is crucial to their religious identity.

I get the feeling that this one is going to run and run.

Given the global prominence of this brand, I find it quite surprising that only now are Starbucks about to open their first branch in Paris:

When Disney arrived with its theme park they called it a cultural Chernobyl. Many Parisians will view as an even bigger disaster the opening today of the city's first branch of Starbucks.

Six years after it served up the first decaf cappucino in Europe, the Seattle-based global coffee giant is ready to take on the nation that invented café society.

They better hire some burly security guards as well. If they manage to get through the first month without succumbing to a Jose Bove-led sit-in protest they will be able to consider themselves fortunate.

Despite the global success, purists are predicting that in France, where ordering an express (often consumed with a cigarette) is a sacred tradition, the brand will flop. Bernard Quartier, spokesman for the organisation that represents French café owners said: "I don't believe this concept is going to work because nothing can replace the conviviality and sociability of the French café."

Now this is a different matter. If Starbucks fails to ignite the interest of the Parisians then so be it. The market rules and, in as much as he is basing his dismissal on his understanding of local market conditions, then Monsieur Quartier has got a point.

After all, if your idea of a good night out is lashings of Sartre and dollops of Foucault washed down with litres of bitter café noir and a lungful of Gitanes then the child-friendly play areas and sanitised chirpiness of Starbucks is probably not for you.

I must say, though, that I like Starbucks coffee and, yes, I do buy it from time to time and I also support their right to conduct their business in any way that see fit. But, let's face it, it is a very uncafé-like operation. If you were a morose left-bank intellectual would you really want to spend an evening gazing into the abyss under a blanket no-smoking ban and bright, shiny lights?

This is a part of what I find so irritating about Starbucks. I certainly do not begrudge them their success because they have earned it by giving the public what the public wants and doing it with sufficient consistency to make a lot of money and grow bigger than the Holy Roman Empire. But what I do find so tiresome is the goody-two-shoes sanctimony that they have draped over themselves in the process.

The last time I patronised a Starbucks outlet (in West London) I was struck by the number of leaflets there were dotted around the store containing feelgood PC homilies about 'fair trade' and 'environmental concerns'. Does this really mean that their customers want their coffee and Italian biscotti served up with a generous helping of middle-class guilt?

A quick perusal of the Starbucks UK website throws up acres of this kind of mummery, contained mostly in their 'Social Responsibility Statement' from which we can rest assured that:

By making investments that benefit coffee producers, their families and communities, and the natural environment, Starbucks is helping to promote a sustainable model for the worldwide production and trade of high-quality coffee.

That word 'sustainable' again! What does it mean, for chrissakes?

We strive to be a responsible neighbour and active contributor in the communities where our partners and customers live, work and play.

What are they, coffee vendors or boy scouts? Do they mean that they send their staff out onto the streets to be busybodies and pests?

Do the Grand Poobahs of Starbucks actually believe in all this modish claptrap? If so, why? Surely their own success serves as a standing refutation to the kind of anti-globo drivel that they appear to want to wallow in? Surely they, of all people, would have learned that the way to make the world a better place is for lots and lots of people to go out and do precisely what they have done, not posture uselessly with policies of mandatory, trendy niceness.

Or perhaps it is really all part of a cunning tactic on their part to shield themselves from the anti-globo morlocks. Perhaps, by slapping their entire operation over with this kind of Monbiotic boilerplate they hope to wrongfoot their sworn enemies. "Look guys, there is no need to trash our outlets. We may be playing the capitalist game but really deep, down we're with you". Perhaps paying lip-service is a lot cheaper than a shakedown by crusading politicans. If it is really all a talisman to keep the vampires at bay, then I suppose I cannot blame them.

But that doesn't mean I have to like it any more than those Parisian left-bankers will (although in the case of the latter they will recoil in disgust because all this managerial anti-globo cant is a poor substitute for the real thing).

If the owners of Starbucks really mean what they say then I do wish they would wake up and smell the coffee, preferably their own. If not, then I sort of understand, but I think it a shame that they feel obliged to submit intellectually to the enemies of progress in order to avoid having to submit to them in practice.

Either way, when I do go into a Starbucks, I want a cup of coffee, not lectures.

Back from Hastings with a satisfactory joint 3rd spot in my section of the weekend chess congress, I worry about what news I've missed since Friday. I shall report on this later in the week.

Today I discover from the French Socialist Party's website that they have a new, improved, cunning five-point plan to tackle unemployment:

1. Support economic growth and boost it, hence the necessity for increasing spending on government officials.
   
2. Reform payroll taxes to penalise further those businesses that make money with money, without really creating jobs.
   
3. Put into place jobs with social utility at regional level, or nationally, if possible.
   
4. Put into place a contract to find work for the long-term unemployed after two years out of work.
   
5. Draw up a training plan for the long-term and youth unemployed.
   [my translation]

I would go so far as to admit that for government job centres to call in their long-term unemployed, find out what they are doing to find work and even suggest re-training can produce results. But proposals 1 and 2... which incidentally contradict each other... I seem to recall that Jacques 'Superliar' Chirac proposed something like this in the 1990s when he stood for the presidency, but I and all the people I know that voted for him at the time were sure that he was lying.

French reaction to Saddam's capture is varied. The media call it a great victory for the US, the politicians are finding it harder to make up their minds what to say and public comment ranges from when will the US come and take Chirac? to No, they can't have captured him, it's impossible!.

Coming after the setback over the EU constitution - it will be harder to push through when the other countries join - this is a rotten weekend for Saddam's pen-pal Jacques Chirac. If the Iraqis stick him on trial, will we hear all about the attempt to sell nuclear technology in the 1970s by a former French prime minister? Now what was his name?

I really have no idea whether this will work or not. But whether it triumphs or bombs (so to speak), I think this is probably Europe's biggest story today. Certainly it's the most portentous for Europe's long term future.

Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols are almost certain to be banned from French schools and public buildings after a specially appointed commission told the government yesterday that legislation was needed to defend the secular nature of the state.

The 20-member group, appointed by President Jacques Chirac and headed by the national ombudsman, Bernard Stasi, recommended that all "conspicuous" signs of religious belief - specifically including Jewish skullcaps, oversized Christian crosses and Islamic headscarves - be outlawed in state-approved schools.

La France! You're either part of it, or not, and not is not an option. (By the way, I love that France's "national ombudsman" is called "Stasi". You truly wouldn't dare to make that up.) And since the French state and its doings are just about the most important thing in France, what the state ordains is a very, very big deal.

Meanwhile, here in the lackadaisical old UK, we don't do anything very much to ensure that the U bit continues to happen. (See also my previous posting immediately below.) We just do to our human imports whatever we would have done anyway. We show them the Premier League, Coronation Street, the All New Top of the Pops (yes Samizdata is always at the cutting edge of what the youngsters are excited about) on the telly, and if they want to join in fine. If not, fine also. That's how things are done in Britain. We just squirt all over them the general joy and misery of being British, and they swallow it or shake it off to taste. Whatever these soon to be ex-newcomers do to fit in, or don't do, we then decide to be a Great British Tradition.

It will be interesting to see which of these two profoundly contrasting methods does the business better. And when I say "interesting" I really do mean interesting. I don't mean I've already decided but want to hedge my bets, I mean I really will be fascinated to see how these two dramas work themselves out. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to live to be a hundred and fifty, to see how it all turns out.

Both approaches have their extreme hazards. Both could work out well.

What's the French for fingers crossed?

The French government's plan to establish the global hegemony has run into a spot of bother:

Staff at the French foreign ministry are to go on strike for the first time in protest at budget cuts that caused bureaucrats to run out of paper.

The strike, called for Monday, comes amid demands from the country's leaders that diplomats work harder than ever to regain France's former global prominence.

Pah! France can conquer the world without recourse to this barbaric, simplisme Anglo-Saxon idea of correspondence.

Budgets have become so tight that the ministry recently stopped paying its paper supplier. For three days last month it was paperless until a deal was reached.

'You supply us with paper, we get you a seat on the UN Security Council. Deal?'

The Europe minister, Noelle Lenoir, said she had to go to a local newsagent to buy exercise books to write in.

Around the world, France's ambassadors have complained of having to pay for official dinners and cocktail parties out of their own pockets, while the diplomatic bag service has also been interrupted.

Next thing you know they will have to fund their own bribes and rent their own whores. Outrageous!

"Half the lifts are not working - there's no money to fix them. For three days last month there was no paper and our representatives abroad are having to work 14-hour days."

So much backstabbing to do, so little time.

The strike is acutely embarrassing for President Jacques Chirac and his flamboyant foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who have made every effort to show the world that French diplomacy matters.

It certainly matters to Messrs Mugabe, Castro and Hussein. What would they do without it?

The six unions that have called the strike said in a joint statement: "We do not understand how President Chirac and the government can assert France's great ambitions on the international stage while at the same constantly cutting back the human and financial resources available to the ministry."

A review of ambitions may be required.

De Great White Colonial Adminstrator, Tony Blair, him be most worried about stirring up de natives:

British diplomats have appealed to France not to hold a referendum on the new European constitution to avoid embarrassing Tony Blair.

One high-ranking British official has privately told senior French diplomats that it would be "unhelpful" to Mr Blair if Jacques Chirac, the French president, decided to go ahead with a poll in France.

Massa Blair, de Great White Bwana From Across De Seas must jealously guard his God-like status among de native chillens.

Mr Blair said: "In my view, because it does not involve a fundamental change between the member states and the European Union, I do not believe that we should have a referendum on this issue."

De Great White Chief Has Spoken! But....

The proposed EU constitution would create a permanent EU president and EU foreign minister to speak on behalf of Europe. It would also give the EU new powers to harmonise legal systems across Europe, and end the national veto on home affairs issues, such as asylum and immigration.

Aha! So Blair Sahib he speak de truth! Now we serve de Massas in Whitehall but when de new constitution come to pass, we just serve de Massas in Brussels. So no fundamental change den!

Great is de mighty wisdom of de White Bwanas From Across de Seas.

[To de reader named 'cats.whiskers', a big 'Asante' for dis link.]

Champagne is a French drink and so it seems only right that the French have a right to find other uses for their bubbly then drinking or exporting it. There is always a possibility of holding a few bottles ransom to make your employer give in to your demands. Striking is so last year, mon cheri.

Angry workers at a French champagne manufacturer are threatening to dump large loads of champagne in a protest over the uncertain future of their firm, Bricout-Delbeck. Noel Sainzelle, a worker from the CGT trade union was heard yesterday:

We're fed up and we're determined. If recent mistakes are not corrected, we will destroy some of the stock.

Way to go. That really is going to help the company that employs you.

Reuters reports that staff at Bricout-Delbeck have seized six million to seven million champagne bottles and 800,000 bottles of the firm's not yet fully manufactured wine stock, estimated to be worth about 200 million pounds. Several dozen workers at the company in the eastern French champagne producing region have already destroyed 300 litres of not fully manufactured stock.

The champagne apocalypse hangs on a court decision on the firm's future in November. Bricout-Delbeck was purchased by a U.S. group earlier this year for the symbolic sum of one euro, but was declared bankrupt in April. Market leaders Moet-et-Chandon and Vranken-Pommery then launched a new plan for the firm, offering to take on 95 of the 133 employees and some stock and production facilities. The firm's previous owners have appealed the plan and a court decision is due on November 13. The delay and uncertainty sparking the protest by staff.

I do not have more detail about the 'Champagne Affair'. I appreciate the distress of the employees over their future and their right to protest. However, ruining the business of the company that they work for strikes me a bit short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. But who knows, if they fulfill the threat, the vintage may become extraordinarily expensive due to its rarity. Markets work in mysterious ways...

The 'fraudster' meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac. The new president of the European Central Bank is M. Jean-Claude Trichet and buried away at the foot of an old news report is this gem:

Mr Trichet's nomination was made possible earlier this week when he was cleared of involvement in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in the 1990s. He was one of nine men on trial for their part in the affair, which culminated in a €31bn ($33.7bn) bailout by the government.

That is more than £21,000,000,000! For one bank. Nine people. I can just hear them: "Bah! Nick Leeson! "Betsygate" indeed! You English drive your minis with your Benny Hill and your Michael Caine, stealing a few gold bars in Milan and think you're so marvellous! Hah!"

The Crédit Lyonnais bank 'affair' included a massive fraud including loans being made to friends of the late president François Mitterand. At least one of them got a few months in jail to my knowledge. A concerted effort was made to delay the appointment of a new ECB president until M. Trichet's problems could be dealt with. Ironically, the French verb for to cheat is tricher which is pronounced exactly the same as our new Euro bank president's name. A very suitable friend for M. Jacques Chirac. The president whose unofficial re-election campaign slogan was Vote for the fraudster, not the fascist! but who has avoided judicial processes by virtue of presidential immunity from prosecution. So much in common for them to talk about.

Now let us assume that M. Trichet were the innocent victim of devious bank subordinates who stole £21,000 million. Personally, I find such a degree of stupidity fantastic: the guy could scarcely have enough brain cells to know how to breathe. Is this really the calibre of executive to put in charge of an EU institution?

A couple of other things worry me. What did the other European leaders think they were doing when none of then vetoed the appointment of Trichet? Perhaps Mr Blair really is a closet hater of the euro - I hope so. And if the currency markets are not dumping euros for US dollars before M. Chirac's friends get their pillaging underway... what do they know about what the Federal Reserve guys are up to?

French anti-terror police have arrested five people suspected of links with the Real IRA. This is the splinter group of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process (such as it may be) and has been blamed for a series of attacks since breaking away from the IRA. The most serious was the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence.

The suspects were all French nationals and they are suspected of involvement in a support network for the Irish group. They were held after police discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition outside the ferry port of Dieppe.

Okay, hands up all those people who did not see this coming:

France faces a year of turbulent and possibly explosive politics after a tactical alliance was formed at the weekend between two parties of a resurgent far left.

Mainstream parties will go into three important polls next year, with a spluttering economy, rising unemployment, a continuing menace from the far-right and an extreme left which is united and powerful for the first time in 30 years.

In an opinion poll published yesterday, after two leading Trotskyist parties agreed to fight regional and European elections together next spring, 31 per cent of French people said that they would "consider" voting for the far left.

One of the parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has doubled its membership in the past 18 months, as young French people, seduced by the anti-globalisation movement and cynical about conventional politics, flocked to the extremes.

France is going down. It may well be too late to prevent this national self-immolation and were it not for their force du frappe that would be that. A tragic historical footnote but no more.

But will anyone be able to rest easy in the knowledge that a substantial nuclear arsenal has fallen into the hands of Les Moonbats? I just hope that someone, somewhere in the Anglosphere defence establishment is drawing up a contingency plan to deal with this. After all, we know for sure that they exist and the task of locating them should not prove too difficult.

Sylvain Galineau at Chicago Boyz, who refer to us affectionately(?) as Les Samiz, thus imbuing us with confidence to comment on matters Françaises, has a fast-paced and insightful analysis of a backlash against the French establishment's intellectual jihad.

The French intellectual spectrum has narrowed considerably in the past twenty years. Fourteen years of socialism, following the emasculation of the Right in 1981 by Mitterand, control of the main media outlets by former 1968 hippies and radicals, and a generalized popular addiction to state handouts have produced an extremely poor, predictable, rarefied environment where political correctness rules and little dissent is effectively accepted or tolerated as such.

Enter a bookshop and books by Chomsky, Krugman, Moore or Clinton are displayed prominently, available in their French edition weeks after they come out in the U.S. Good luck finding Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg in French, or anything that seriously and thoroughly challenges the daily Litany.

Combine such intellectually emasculated existence with the political elite of continental proportions and what you get is staid, bland, bitter, hateful and self-aggrandising public discourse. Wait, does not that remind you of someplace?

This generally dull, stultifying, suffocating homogeneity of thought is disturbing more and more people, as they grasp daily with the unintended consequences of social-engineering train wrecks and struggle to keep up with the increasing scale of governmental hypocrisy. One day, Chirac opposes a US intervention in Iraq on "principle", as being "illegal" and "immoral". Six months later, the very same government votes a UN resolution making the same intervention legal and legitimate, post-facto. After criticizing the "simplism" and "dangerous folly" or America's defense strategy, the same French government then updates its nuclear dissuasion policy to include rogue states either equipped with, or seeking WMDs, and a study of pre-emptive strikes using mini-nukes. One day health care is an "obvious and necessary mission of the state"; the next, after a heatwave kills thousands while officials and doctors are tanning their noodle on the beach and already limited nursing staff rests at home courtesy of the 35-hour week, it is the "responsibility of each and everyone of us".

Read the whole thing including a further comment by Sylvain in the comments section.

Nothing like a nice bit of Frog-bashing to fire up the commentariat and get the weekend off to a good start.

Alstom, builder of high speed trains (TGV), nuclear plants and cruise liners, was the showcase of French technology. It is now the showcase of French bankruptcy.

Like France, Alstom is badly managed, unable to balance its accounts, and encumbered with debt. Alstom illustrates the failure of French "social-capitalism," a state driven capitalism that is actually closer to socialism.

Hmm. State-driven capitalism. Where have we heard of that before?

The socialo-gaullist elites, who control French media groups, buy their support by distributing money to Communist (CGT) and Trotskyite (FO) unions, to 7 million public servants (often useless), to 12 million retirees (often pre-retired), plus millions of immigrants living on welfare. But French politicians are so "generous" that even with the highest taxes of any OECD country, they chronically accumulate huge debts in all public entities: state, regions, cities, social programs, public companies. Having been unable to balance any French budget for more than 30 years, they are driving France to a financial crisis that will shake all of Europe.

A very satisfying rant against the enarquist elite ensues, bringing on a moment of nostalgia for past French contributions to the cause of liberty.

Courtesy of one of the great Middle Men of the Internet, Dave Barry, comes this gripping story:

Bordeaux, France – A French magistrate caught masturbating during a court session was locked up on Thursday and put under investigation, justice officials in the south-western city of Bordeaux said.

The head judge of the city's appeals court said "a penal inquiry ordered by the prosecutor of the republic is currently being carried out by the police" while a request for a psychiatric evaluation of the magistrate – who was not named – had been made.

He said the justice ministry had also been asked to temporarily suspend the magistrate while the matter was looked into.

According to La Charente Libre, a local newspaper who had a reporter in court at the time of the alleged offence, the magistrate had discreetly lifted up his ceremonial robe while a lawyer was presenting final arguments, undid his pants and "engaged in gestures that left nothing to the imagination". – Sapa-AFP

Which, said a later commenter chez Barry, is how justice gets to be blind.

One of the most notorious features of Britain's socialist-inspired near-collapse of the 1970's were the insanely militant trade unions who helped drive much of our remaining smokestack industries either out of the country or onto the scrapheap.

Industrial disputes were such a common feature fo everyday life that they became a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. I can remember in particular a popular joke about a trade union official who calls a meeting of his members to announce that, from now on, they would only have to work on Wednesdays.

A moment's silence while this sinks in. Then one worker shouts from the back: "What, every bloody Wednesday"?

I wonder if a Gallic version of this joke has been doing the rounds in France:

The French government called yesterday for a renegotiation of the 35-hour working week introduced four years ago by the previous, Socialist-led government to create jobs and reduce unemployment.

It begs the questions of exactly what these people have rattling around in their heads that leads them to believe that forcing everyone to work less will create jobs? I suppose we should call it the 'fixed quantity of time fallacy'.

Left-wing politicians countered that the government was starting a "witch-hunt" to disguise its bad economic and budgetary management. Even independent economists poured scorn on the government's arguments and figures.

Well, I would love to know exactly who these 'independent economists' are. Unless they actually meant to say 'economists from the Independent' in which case their opinions deserve about as much respect as those of French left-wing politicians.

But the Grand Union of Philosophy Professors (which probably counts most of the adult population among its members) is not going to lie down for this. In fact, they will vote with their feet. From the cafes and bookshops they will pour forth onto the streets of Paris in droves and legions, complete with banners, drums, whistles and George Bush rubber face-masks. Nobody is going to tell them to work for a living when they can agitate for a living instead. Street protest is their last growth industry.

Times online (which we do not link to) has an article about France writing itself off as arrogant failure. Words such as "diplomatic Agincourt", "a nation in decline", "empty arrogance" and "a laughing stock" pepper the piece.

This soul-searching is apparently being done in a proper intellectual manner:

The mood is being fanned by three books which argue that there is nothing temporary about France’s troubles. With its chronic unemployment and dinosaur centralised state, France can no longer pose as a universal model of progress and civilisation, they argue. In L’Arrogance Française, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, both journalists, say that France infuriates the rest of the world with its discredited diplomacy.

In Adieu à la France qui s’en va (Farewell to a France that is departing) Jean-Marie Rouart, a novelist and member of the august Académie Française, says that France is losing its soul to mediocrity and needs a great leader to restore its grandeur. The biggest splash is being made by La France Qui Tombe (Collapsing France) by Nicolas Baverez, an historian and economist.

To read a gentle fisking of the article visit Cronaca. Now let's just sit back and wait for shrill accusations of frogbashing...

Via Instapundit

James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).

James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.

Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:

I can’t help but come back to the central theme these edits imply: we should have left Iraq alone. We should have left this charnel house stand. We should have bought a wad of nice French cotton to shove in our ears so the buzz of the flies over the graves didn’t distract us from the important business of deciding whether Syria or China should have the rotating observer-status seat in the Oil-for-Palaces program. Afghanistan, well, that’s understandable, in a way; we were mad. We lashed out. But we should have stopped there, and let the UN deploy its extra-strong Frown Beams against the Iraqi ambassador in the hopes that Saddam would reduce the money he gave to Palestinian suicide bombers down to five grand. Five grand! Hell, that hardly covers the parking tickets your average ambassador owes to the city of New York; who’d blow themselves up for that?

Would the editorialists of the nation be happier if Saddam was still cutting checks to people who blew up not just our allies, but our own citizens? I’d like an answer. Please. Essay question: “Families of terrorists who blow up men, women and children, some of whom are Americans, no longer receive money from Saddam, because Saddam no longer rules Iraq. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Explain.”

The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.

Lileks' piece fits nicely with Thomas Friedman's op-ed in the New York Times, in which he reaches the reluctant conclusion that France is not our friend, is not our ally, but is instead acting as our enemy.

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

Now, I tend to have a different view of events than Friedman (France's obstruction at the UN did not prevent a "real ultimatum" from being put to Saddam; that had already occurred), but his larger point is, I think, sound.

Wars, among their many, many faults, do have this virtue: they are enormously clarifying. This war is revealing who places other causes, whether transnational progressivism, anti-Americanism, narrow political self-interest, or even the preservation of their age-old view of themselves and the world, above the cause of winning this war.

The stakes are very large. The immediate stakes are, of course, the extermination of the current terror network before it gets its hands on WMD. Rest assured that, without this war, the Islamists would obtain these weapons - they fervently desired them, had the money to obtain them, and had close ties to governments that have them and are seeking more. In the corrupt cesspool of Middle Eastern politics, it was only a matter of time.

The larger stakes are, of course, changing the "root causes" of Islamist terror. The so-called "neo-con" strategy being pursued by the US addresses the root causes of terror by identifying the prevailing corruption, oppression, theocracy, tyranny, poverty, and ignorance in the Mideast as the root causes, and attacking those root causes at the source - the governments of the Mideast. Without some change in the current cast of characters, no improvement in the Mideast will be possible and Islamist terror will continue to be with us. Regime change throughout the Mideast is a necessay, but not sufficient, condition for the end of the Islamist terror networks.

Opponents of the war bear the burden of either demonstrating that the terror network and its state sponsors are no threat to the West (palpably impossible after 9/11), or coming up with a viable alternative strategy for triggering regime change throughout the Mideast. I await such an alternative strategy.

Not every issue has to be seen through the prism of the terror war, but those who address themselves to the war, either as diplomats, heads of state, or pundits, need to understand that their actions will aid one side or the other, and need to think very hard about which side they want to see as the victor and whether they are helping, or hurting, whoever it is that they want to win.

The Telegraph reports that the French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra. The ban is seen as reflecting Paris's opposition to the occupation of Iraq.

Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend.

Transport ministry officials said yesterday that the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry. The foreign ministry denied the report, saying there was "no political motive". But British defence officials appeared to confirm that the ban was political and not technical.

A Corsair spokesman said most of the flights undertaken for the MoD took troops to training exercises. For security and insurance reasons they rarely flew to war zones.

We did fly to Pristina during the Kosovo crisis, but only once it had been cleared for civil aviation.

Basra is already open to civilian aircraft.

For once I have nothing to add to Instapundit's commentary:

Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It's got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry.

Via Instapundit

The Guardian has an article about France's rearguard battle against the invasion of English:

"What is at stake is the survival of our culture. It is a life or death matter," said Jacques Viot, head of the Alliance Française, which promotes French abroad, warned last month. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse of the Académie Française was equally apocalyptic: "The defence of our language must be the major national cause of the new century."

Within France, the language benefits from a veritable battery of protective laws, decrees and directives. Radio stations must play mostly music with French lyrics, and advertisements in English are, with few exceptions, outlawed unless accompanied by a translation.

Most of the legislation stems from the 1994 "loi Toubon", which briefly threatened jail for anyone using words like "le weekend" or "le parking". Even today, companies are occasionally prosecuted - although not as often as organisations such as the Committee for the Defence of the French Language, one of a myriad of similar militant bodies, would like - for using anglicisms in ads and brochures.

"The time has come for concrete and targeted action," said Michel Herbillon, a campaigning conservative MP who recently completed a report on France's language problems within the EU. "The union recognises the principle of equality for all official languages, and that principle is manifestly being flouted. It is wholly unacceptable."

The situation is serious enough for President Jacques Chirac - who speaks excellent English but avoids using it as a matter of principle - to intervene. Earlier this year, he asked France's media companies to come up with plans for a French-language global news channel, a kind of "CNN à la française", to ensure France's voice continues to be heard in the world.

What can we say to that? C’est la vie...

The latest estimate of deaths from the French heat wave is up to 10,000 or so. This raises a number of issues.

1. How reliable is this number, of course, and what does it really mean? Most of the dead appear to be elderly and infirm in any event, and many would likely have been carried off by the next stressful event in their lives. Nonetheless, the number appears to reflect "surplus mortality" over a comparable period, so lets take it at face value for now.

2. What does this say about the state of the housing stock in France? We are told that apparently the French are unacquainted with modern air conditioning, apparently because their weather is so mild. I seem to recall during the recent Tour de France coverage a great deal of commentary about how the heat is always an issue during this event, so I wonder about this. I also lived in the American South for several years without air conditioning, so I can assure that it is possible, and that in fact lots of people have, and continue to do so, without dying.

   Nonetheless, in the US central air conditioning, never mind window units that can cool a single room, is standard equipment on most new houses regardless of where they are located (leaving aside Alaska). I live in Wisconsin, in the northern tier of states, and I can assure you this is true, and that many older houses, including mine, are retrofitted for central air. It is true that Chicago suffered some excess deaths during a heat wave a few years ago, but those were confined entirely to the very poorest parts of the city.

   Permit me to draw a connection here between the better condition of America's housing stock, its stronger economy and higher GDP, and its relative lack of government interference in the economy.

3. What does this say about the state of socialized medicine in France? This is a nation, after all, that prides itself on its socialized medicine and other social services, but it would appear that these are precisely what failed to prevent so many presumably preventable deaths. It turns out that the nursing homes were grossly understaffed during the August holiday period.

   Allow me to suggest a connection between the chronic understaffing of nursing homes and other health facilities in France and incentives to not hire created by all the worker protection legislation there. Allow me to further suggest that the practice of allowing employees to take vacations during August is a reflection of a culture that is focussed more on the needs of the employees than the customers, a classic symptom of either government employment or suppressed competition. Allow me to suggest that the sluggish response to the changed conditions of the heatwave is typical of top-down government-run systems.

Finally, to show the contemptible politicization of the health issues that occurs in socialized medicine, the following quote:

Many healthcare professionals - including the doctor, former health minister and founder of Médécins Sans Frontières, Bernard Kouchner - said it had been a disaster waiting to happen. "We are all to blame," Dr Kouchner said, irritating many of his colleagues on the left, who had hoped the crisis would help them to destabilise the centre-right government and head off health reforms planned this autumn.

One is certainly left with the impression that members of the French health care system are willing to sacrifice patient lives in order to score political points in defense of the socialized status quo.

I have just cast my beady eyes over this Stratfor article which, alas, I cannot link to (hefty subscription fee required) but here is the opening paragraph:

France is threatening to veto the consensus that the United Nations Security Council finally should lift sanctions on Libya. In the end, the French position is bluster. France cannot afford the heavy price a veto would levy. While Paris' anti-American policies are wildly popular at home, they are affecting France in meaningful ways that will continue to impact French prestige, power and the country's bottom line for years to come.

What follows is a detailed analysis in the impeccably objective Stratfor tradition but I reckon the above is enough to fuel a good-sized helping of thoroughly malicious glee on the other side of the Atlantic.

Once again the xenophobic and unilateralist French government displays its arrogant and dismissive attitude towards the international community:

France is saying goodbye to "email" and hello to "courriel" - the term that the linguistically sensitive French government is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.

The culture ministry has announced a ban on the use of the word email in all government ministries, documents, publications or websites, in the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.

We should protest against this vulgar attempt to pursue their own narrow and selfish national interests. Let's flood them with e-mails.

With the whole world apparently in a state of flux and a preponderance of gloomy prognoses, it gives me joy to be able to report just a smidgeon of good news:

Feminists and environmentalists, social pressure groups which usually see eye to eye, have clashed over a shock poster campaign on the streets of Paris and other French cities.

The poster shows a woman's breast dribbling a dirty, oily fluid. There is no caption or explanation, other than the name of a private, ecological foundation, run by a celebrated television journalist and green campaigner, Nicolas Hulot.

No show-trials or North Korean-style denouncements yet but give it time.

More please and faster.

Image located via D Anghelone

A few days ago I wrote an article pointing to information indicating that the French government had not only agreed to not arrest General Ratko Mladic, the man who supervised the murder of 7,000 men and young boys in Srebrenica under the orders from Chetnik leader Radovan Karadzic, but were also giving the former Bosnian Serb leadership a safe haven from arrest to this day in sector of Bosnia under their military control.

So when a French serial commenter who leaves his remarks on Samizdata.net left a comments under that post saying:

VIVE LA FRANCE !
VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE !
VIVE L'EUROPE !
VIVE LA PLANETE !
VIVE LA LIBERTE !

I whish you all the merriest July 14 ever.

My first reaction was pure fury. This guy might as well have just pissed on the graves of these people, murdered just eight short years ago. In fact to remind us all of his horror which happened under the nose of humane and oh so moral 'Europe', and with the complicity of government officials who are still in office today in Paris, London and the UN in New York, just last Friday it was reported that more bodies had been found in Srebrenica, bringing the total up to about 8,000 murdered in cold blood.

I was on the verge of banning this guy and leaving an extremely hostile remark of my own. But then I thought about those remarks a bit longer and calmed down. In fact it started to dawn on me that those comments were a perfect adjunct to the article.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was an event more important in the mythology of the French Revolution than in the actually history of it (far from freeing imprisioned patriots, the inmates were four forgers, two lunatics, and the Marquis de Sade), but it was indeed a portent of the blood soaked egalitarian horror that was to follow.

So yes, that was the perfect comment to remind us that not only is France, like most countries, rooted in slaughter and horror in the distant historical past... but that recent outrages (giving aid and comfort to mass murderers) will just be forgotten in France and millions of French people will sing the national anthem and feel good about the people who lead them. The same people who gave Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic a free pass for slaughtering thousands in Srebrenica and tens of thousands elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vive la France.

And yet this same commenter, like so many French people, decries the overthrow of Ba'athist Socialism in Iraq. Vive La Liberte? Not for the people of Iraq it would seem and certainly not for the slaughtered people of Srebrenica.

There are hypocrites and then there are French hypocrites. Do not let anyone ever tell you that there is nothing at which the French are truly world class.

It has been claimed that French President Jacques Chirac negotiated de facto immunity from prosecution for the second greatest post-WWII war criminal in Europe west of the former Soviet border, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, in return for the Bosnian Serb military releasing two captured French pilots.

The claim, dismissed as "hearsay" by Paris, was contained in the transcripts of a telephone conversation between the former Yugoslav president, Zoran Lilic, and the head of the Yugoslav armed forces in Belgrade.

They described Mr Lilic explaining in December 1995 that Gen Mladic would be safe from extradition after the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict, even though he had already been indicted for war crimes.

"He will not be delivered to anyone from the tribunal. He has got the guarantee by Chirac and Slobodan [Milosevic]," said the transcript. "Accordingly, he has to deliver these men to us, if he wants to, or he should come with us and place the men at the place of his choice."

If this is true, then Chirac is nothing less than an accessory after the fact to mass murder. The fact that both General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have both remained at large does rather suggest this report is true. Oh... and where are these two indicted mass murderers at large? In the French controlled sector of Bosnia, of course.

Britain has its own amoral creatures like Douglas Hurd who disgracefully equated murder victims with their murderers in the Balkans, so it would be fair to say that this particular shit sandwich is large enough for much of the political class on both sides of the English Channel to take a bite... but next time your hear a member of the French establishment lecture anyone about anything on 'moral grounds', tell them to drop dead, preferably in Srebrenica.

The usual practice here is to denounce France, and certainly (with only occasional and admirable exceptions) the French, as one of God's more incomprehensible derelictions of His creative duty. But this device, the Trottoir Roulant Rapide – which means "fast rolling pavement", is, I think, impressive.

Science fiction buffs have long been able to read about such gadgets. At Heathrow, as in many other places I'm sure, there's a slow rolling pavement, which makes your journey a bit less wearisome from the tube station to one of the terminals. And I seem to recall something similar connecting a couple of bits of the London Underground somewhere in the City, although I could be imaging that. But this TRR is an altogether more serious creation, because it is fast. It is rapide.

"People have to learn how to use it and that takes time," the trottoir's inventor, Anselme Cote, told BBC News Online.

He added that escalators had presented travellers with a similar challenge when they were first introduced.

People stepping directly on to the TRR would be sure to lose their balance, so they first have to be accelerated - and then decelerated again at the other end.

"The problem lies in the transitions; one has to glide from one phase to the next; we ask people not to move, but they are not used to it," says Mr Cote.

"One must keep one's feet flat between the two phases, but people walk. There's a technique to it. But people get used to it very quickly."

Fair enough.

Some regular users say it is a great timesaver, but that they would not dare use it with a rolling suitcase or a pushchair.

People who use walking sticks are also advised to steer clear.

What, no equal access for the handicapped? Apparently not.

It seems to me that "invent" is hardly the right word for what Mr Cote did here - we've all long known that such things could exist. It's just that until now they haven't, so to get the thing installed and working is still a major achievement. And it is no mere inventor's indulgence.

"The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds; they can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1km)," he says.

You can travel from Le Mans to Paris in 50 mins, he points out, but crossing Montparnasse Station may take you 20 minutes.

This explains the enormous international interest the TRR has aroused.

Experts from all over the world have gone to Paris to see the magic trottoir in action.

The price for moving short distances can often reflect these difficulties. In the age of cheap air tickets, it is now a common experience to find oneself spending as much to get to and from an airport as one spends on the plane ride itself. I'm not saying that there should be one of these things connecting London SW1 to Stansted. And in general, London is pretty full up and might not be able to accommodate anything new along these lines. TRRs have to be straight, it seems, and presumably they don't work so well in the open air. But for airports, spectator sports facilities and the like, surely the TRR, and its various spin-off and copies, has a big future.

Now I know that this has probably been done with public money and all that, so maybe I ought not to be, but nevertheless … I'm impressed.

I also like that word "trottoir", even if all it means is "pavement". It is suggestive, I think you will agree, of horses, although they'd better keep horses well away from this trottoir. And perhaps I should also add that my heading could be wrong. It could be a "nouvelle" kind of trottoir. Linguistically speaking, as I'm sure you all know, the French bring sex into everything.

Here's some good news, in the form, for me, of an email from the newly launched Molinari Institute's Director, Cécile Philippe:

I am delighted to announce the arrival a major new French-speaking free market think tank, the Molinari Institute, and the launch of its website www.institutmolinari.org

Named after the great nineteenth century French-speaking classical libertarian Gustave de Molinari, the institute aims to create an environment in which both individuals and businesses can thrive and be free without the ties of regulation and vested interest.

Through its website and conferences "Les soirées Molinari," it will help the rediscovery of the work of Gustave de Molinari as well as other French and European liberal thinkers such as Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Coquelin and Bruno Leoni. It will focus on public policy issues such as competition, healthcare, retirement and education.

To launch the website today there is an interview with José Pinera, former secretary of labor and social security in Chile, who radically and successfully implemented in the market-oriented 80's the pension reform.

The Molinari Institute is a non-profit organization. It accepts voluntary contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. No government funding or endowments are received.

I should say not. I know Cecile Philippe to be both a fearless and uncompromising libertarian activist, and a thoroughly charming and civilised person, two things which don't always go together. The ideal combination of qualities for someone running an institute like this, in other words. I wish her every possible success, as will many others.

Now I know what you're thinking. Does Cécile Philippe have a sister? Yes she does

Remember, France counts twice, at least. Whatever opinions, good or bad, sensible or stupid, those French intellectuals may happen to hold, they are, it must be admitted, totally brilliant at spreading them far and wide. Imagine the impact on mankind and its affairs if we could turn the bien pensants of France around, from statists and collectivists into the opposite. That might be a bit incroyable, but wouldn't it be formidable?

The Dissident Frogman has returned from his trip to Normandy, where he visited, among other things, the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy) in Bayeux... He is, as always full of interesting observations and has a new game for his readers. It is called "Guess what's missing at a museum dedicated to the Battle of Normandy, 1944?"

The game consists of three incredible pictures. My first reaction was - 'surely, they could not go that far'. But alas, it is true. What's more, he couldn't get any lucid and convincing explanation for this "fortuitous" accrual.

Please go here to 'play' and perhaps engage in shooting off a few emails to the Mayor of Bayeux...

As part of my continuing vow to be as nice as humanly conceivable towards our neighbours in France, I refer the readers of this blog to the following news item, purely for the purposes of conveying information, and not out of any desire to gloat over, denigrate or otherwise annoy the French.

Harry Potter has cast such a spell over the French that they are snapping up JK Rowling's latest book in English, rather than waiting for the translation.

[...]

"It's not exactly going to please the anti-globalisation movement," noted literary magazine Livres Hebdo, which compiles and publishes the bestseller charts.

Heh.

The Telegraph continues to paddle in the murky waters of our Gallic neighbours with a further editorial devoted to Sabine Herold and what appears to be a growing movement for free market reform in France:

The French long for a Margaret Thatcher to tame the over-mighty public sector trade unions, but despair of ever finding one. In the cafes of Reims, speaker after speaker deplored the weakness of President Jacques Chirac in the face of union opposition, with many echoing the withering Thatcherite critique launched against him by the 21-year-old student Sabine Herold in Paris.

What really caught my eye though, in the sidebar next to the article, is the link to Merde in France.

En avant et vers le haut, nos amis.

Interesting interview in the Daily Telegraph today with the 21-year-old Sabine Herold, the French student who has startled Frenchmen and women with her passionate advocacy of rolling back the state, reining in the unions, and cutting taxes.

I have no idea how this lady will fare in the future, and what effect the views of such young people will have on French national life. But she offers a glimmer of hope for those of us, who while revolted by the cynical Chirac, nurse a deep affection for that country.

She is an avid fan of Edmund Burke, Hayek, and the English classical liberal tradition. She is also - ahem - quite an eyeful.

I am in love.

The key reason why I oppose boycotting French businesses is because it is counterproductive. Some of the boycotters just avoid French goods to make themselves feel better. But many boycott with the idea that somehow this will get the French to be more supportive of America in future. They are mistaken.

The effect of fewer American tourists on the streets of Paris is to cut the interaction between ordinary French people and ordinary Americans. It eliminates those conversations in which the American tourists say, "Well, I can understand why you opposed the war, but I'm very pleased that Saddam can't kill any more people." It reduces understanding between the two peoples. It makes the French less reliant on trade with America, helping to make America more distant and easier to demonise. It encourages anti-Americanism.

In short, boycotting the French is a mistake.

Woody Allen has been hired by the French government to encourage Americans not to boycott France when going on holiday. In a promotional video, he says:

I don't want to have to refer to my French-fried potatoes as freedom fries and I don't want to have to freedom-kiss my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.

I am of the same opinion. Disagreeing with Jaques Chiraq's opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people isn't the same as hating French people. In fact, I really quite like France. It may sound odd to some neo-cons, but France has many positive aspects to its culture.

Don't get me wrong: I like the go-getting, entrepreneurial, play to win culture that America brings to the world. I like the ideas of Jefferson and other founding fathers. But it is a mistake to think that any culture cannot benefit from other ideas. For a start, the Paris approach to fashion and marketing is chic – often much hipper than America's. Readers in Britain will most probably have seen the recent adverts by Orange, the French-owned mobile phone company. They have a boy, aged maybe twelve, dressed up in a suit advertising their products. But it's not just any old suit. Oh no. It's a suit that oozes of fashion. The shirt and tie combination are spectacular. It's so, so French, and it's very appealing advertising.

Yes, I'd like the French government to learn from America's lower tax economy, but there's French culture that's valuable too. Oddly, French culture is actually less statist than American culture in some respects. There aren't any speed cameras on the road. There aren't proposals, as far as I can tell, for banning smoking in bars. Nor do they have America's puritanical laws against drinking by under 21s. There is an element of social libertarianism that is really quite refreshing.

For those who feel like a little (slightly horrifying, but not especially surprising) insight into the French way of doing business, might I recommend reading this article from the Economist giving a detailed history of the various occasions in which Airbus Industrie have been revealed or alleged to have paid kickbacks in order to procure orders for their airliners. It is worth observing that to some extent the cause of the problem is the traditional structure of the airline industry, in which there have been a great many state owned carriers for which aircraft purchases have had to be approved by (very corruptible) government (or in some instances even military) officials. Airbus are by no means the first company to indulge in this sort of activity, but the enthusiasm with which they apparently have gone about it, and the apparent collusion and encouragement of the French government, are quite impressive.

A highlight

The Delhi court has a withering opinion of the help Airbus has given the CBI. It allowed Mr Wadehra to add Airbus's Indian subsidiary to his action on the grounds that Airbus in France was not co-operating. Airbus told Mr Wadehra that French law forbade it from answering his questions. “[Airbus] sells its aircraft on their merits,” the firm insisted.

The court has castigated the CBI for its dilatory approach. It took the Indian authorities until 1995 to contact Airbus for information, only to be told that such requests should be routed through the French government. The CBI told Mr Wadehra, despite trying Interpol and diplomatic channels, it was not getting any help from the French government. The French embassy in Delhi in effect told Mr Wadehra to get lost when he wrote to ask why France was not co-operating.

(Link via Arts & Letters Daily).

Ilana Radwinter captures a precious moment of French 'democracy' and shares with us her experience of encountering striking teachers.

Well, most of the people demonstrating are teachers -- and not too many of those either -- but they are trying to engage others and actually managed to do a lot of damage by disrupting the end of year examinations as well as gross acts of vandalism.

Last Monday, I was driving my children to school at about 8 o'clock. On the way to the centre of Perpignan, just before a large roundabout, we hit a huge traffic jam. I saw a lot of cars turning back in front of me but I decided to continue. Eventually, the cars in front could no longer turn easily and I spotted some men holding banners. Ah, the strike! I had the choice of staying put or getting off the road and driving on the grass.

All around me there were people who were meekly waiting to be able to turn back. I could not believe it. Why couldn't we all shout and rev our engines and hoot and call them names and go past?! Haven't these people ever been to a football match?! After all, these were not the burly, tattooed hunks we saw last year during the truckers' strike! They were the normal, testosterone-depleted, round-hipped western males as seen putting the rubbish out on Monday mornings.

I chose the way forward and soon I found myself in front of the eight men who were stopping all the traffic. They pounced on my car and forced me to stop. It was just me, a petite middle-aged woman, dressed in pyjamas as mornings before school are too hectic to allow for any grooming, and my three children (11-year old girl and 7-year old twin boys).

I rolled the window down and I asked why I am not allowed to go where I needed to. I said that I respected their right to strike, I lied but I was not in a position to start fight, so a bit of politeness was probably wise, but by the same token they should respect other people's right to go about their business. After all, I was neither the government nor another teacher trying to cross the picket line.

They gave me leaflet and told me they were actually fighting for my children's future. Then, I really lost it -- I can't stand people using my children as an excuse for their anti-social acts. I told them that on the contrary, they are fighting for my children's ruin as in the future they will have to work for next to nothing to pay for their pensions. As anger tends to exacerbate a foreign accent, they realised I am a 'foreigner' and told me to go back where I come from. I retorted that they should go as they are the ones who clearly do not like their country as they were rebelling against a legitimate government. I suggested North Korea as a possible destination.

My 11-year old daughter was crying -- she had been crying all morning because her elder sister was going back to London -- and the boys at the back were speculating who was going to win, Mummy or those old men.

Sometimes during the argument, the bullies took their hands off my car and, quite unexpectedly, started to back off. It transpired that they were not in charge, just being big mouths. The real 'master of ceremony' was someone else, who kept quiet during all this. As they backed off, a nice woman approached me and said that many demonstrators did not approve of such methods.

A group of teachers just wanted to slow down the traffic, smile and hand out leaflets. So there were two camps: those who wanted to allow us to pass and those who did not. In the end, we were allowed to go...

Ilana Radwinter, Perpignan, France

Unlike the British press, we at the Samizdata are keeping our eyes on what appears to be the increasingly deteriorating situation in France. Because, say what you like about France (and, let's face it, who doesn't?) but it is still a major and important country and also one that happens to be but 26 miles away from us.

If the stream of reports from Claire Berlinski (who lives in Paris) are anything to go by then that country is in the process of meltdown. I am not sure whether anything can or will be done to reverse or halt this process but at least this Frontpage Symposium may go some way to shedding light on the context of this disintegration:

France behaves more and more as if she does [sic] belong to the West anymore and as though she is the leader of the third world. Doing this, France has nothing to win, maybe just second-rate contracts and an ephemeral popularity among all the frustrated in the world. France will win only one thing, and for a short time, peace inside France: it will avoid riots among Muslims living in France now.

The opinions and prognoses range from melancholy to apocolyptic but this is still well worth reading because it is not just another familiar orgy of Anglospheric Frog-bashing; the symposium participants are all French.

[My thanks to reader 'Rich' for the link to the Frontpage article.]

People involved in political arguments often argue as if arguments are the entire point. Yet the current disputes within the USA, within Britain, and between the USA and "Europe" are as much about who we are, as they are about who is right.

Take France. Ruled by a bunch of sleazebags, right? Their "arguments" for not going to war against Iraq were, if that's the way you are inclined to think, feeble in the extreme. X ergo Y and therefore it follows Z, blah blah blah.

But what if the real arguments now are not about who is right, but about who we are?

One of the oddities of British life is the extraordinary expensiveness and dramatic complexity of British TV car adverts. Something to do with a car cartel, I believe, which means there's money to burn getting each buyer to step forward. And one TV car advert in particular goes straight to the heart of the France question, and the "who we are" question. I refer to the one that advertises the Renault Clio, by claiming that this car possesses "va-va-woom". Various other things do also, like posh French-type birds posing in Mies van der Rohe style modern houses, while various other things don't, like an over-coiffured small dog, and a strange looking character wearing nothing but a pair of stars-and-stripes bathing trunks and a cowboy hat, and waving guns.

This last one is so ghastly an apparition that Thierry Henry – the ultra-skilled black French footballer who plays for Arsenal (and France) with great distinction and who is in amongst all this, narrating with good humoured subtlety – just stares blankly into the camera. That's all the comment we need. Those ghastly cowboys are just, you know, ghastly, while those (us) continentals are so suave and sophisticated and cultured.

It's also a clever ploy to use a black man for all this, because smuggled in there (but totally deniable) is the suggestion that the cowboy is probably the type of hick who'd be bothered by Thierry Henry's blackness, whereas you, oh viewer, are not, are you? Maybe I'm reading too much into things there, but I don't think so.

What the advertisers are betting on is that there are a lot of Brits who think of themselves most definitely as on the French side of the France/Anglosphere confrontation, and who are willing to put large wads of money where their preferred identify is. And there surely are. This advert has been running for quite some time, and they'd have pulled it by now if it didn't do the business. If Renault's sold better by being smothered in Union Jacks and sat in by British bulldogs, then that's what they'd have. Lots of Japanese companies sell stuff by waving the Union Jack and sponsoring ultra-British things like show-jumping.

Samuel Huntington (in Clash of Civilisations) saw all this kind of thing coming. He saw that whereas the communism/capitalism thing was about who and what was right (X ergo Y), now it's all about who and what we are. This, for example, is what the Euro argument is really about. "Economic interests" have nothing to do with it. Who we are is what that is about.

And this is why, in this new world, "we" (whoever, exactly "we" are) need to go beyond the narrow logicality of political debate – beyond X ergo Y, into the territory of cultural affinities and coolnesses, the territory of who has va-va-voom and who does not.

This is why blogging is such a crucial addition to our persuasive arsenal. We can argue on our blogs. And, as part of and in among and in between the arguing, we can tease out the va-va-voom of things.

I never know with Samizdata postings whether there'll be lots of comments, or some, or hardly any, or none. If there are comments on this, no doubt some will be easily summarisable: "I'm not French!!" But I'm hoping that others may be more nuanced.

There is a lot of remarkable news in Gabriel Syme's posting about Sabine Herold, the young French woman who is spear-heading a brave fightback against the bolshevik hegemony that squats on her country like a poisonous toad.

That someone so young should be prepared to shoulder such a herculean (or perhaps even quixotic) task should be enough to earn her unqualified praise but what takes her stance onto a higher plane of bravery is the fact that she is prepared to do this openly. As this e-mail letter sent to Steve Den Beste reveals, France is a country where dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy is really dangerous:

As you may now, France is now undergoing a series of strikes protesting the government's pension reform. Among the strikers, the Communist Union "Confederation Générale du Travail" is using unacceptable methods that violate the most basic human rights. Today it has vandalized and burnt the employers' union offices in several cities. Worse, this organization has prevented, in the city where I leave, a meeting by a democratic political party and violently intervened in a demonstration by people who protested the strike, in order to make sure that demonstration would fail.

Furthermore, the government is taking no steps to maintain public order and guarantee people's freedom of goverment and expression. The city of Toulouse was blocked during the morning of yesterday and not a single step was taken by public authorities to end this blocking. On the contrary, the police collaborated with the unions in order to make sure that people could not pass. In the demonstration I just mentioned, not a policeman was dispatched to protect us against the assaults of the communist union's members.

I realize that this is small stuff compared to the atrocities taking place in several countries. Nevertheless it is taking place right in the middle of Europe and it would be of great help if this state of things were publicized by your organization. I can provide you with further testimonies about the events I am referring to, if needed. We badly need the help of the international community in fighting these constant violation of human rights by the communist union.

Yes, this is happening right smack dab in the heart of 'civilised, sophisticated, nuanced' Europe. What a stark contrast it provides to the baseless squealing of the spoilt brats of Hollywood as they wrap themselves in cloaks of martyrdom at the first sign of a drop in CD sales. France is a country where it is not just your dissent that can get crushed; you can get crushed along with it.

The letter to Steve ends with this plea:

Could you help by mentioning that or tell me any organization or other blogs I could contact? Could you also NOT cite my name? I am afraid of reprisals. Today they beat a businessman who declared in the newspaper he was going to sue them for the blockade.

I am honoured to be able to provide some space on this blog not least because this is the kind of ugly truth that the mainstream British press would rather not touch with bargepole. It almost seems as if there is an unspoken policy of 'no negative news about Europe'. Far better to send off some supercillious scribbler to Texas to uncover the 'shocking truth' about 'George Bush's Amerikka' (pornography for the Guardianistas).

But the real barbarity lies across the Channel not the Atlantic. When communist thugs can rule the street unhindered you know for sure that there is no devil to whom the French political elite are not prepared to surrender. Nor is all the sanctimonious mummery about 'human rights' and 'democratic values' anything more than a sham. It is a smoke and mirrors act designed to provide a wafer-thin veneer of decency to what is, to all intents and purposes, a gangsterdom. Despite the size of the French state, it is apparently powerless (or unwilling) to come to the aid of even its own citizens when threatened with totalitarian evil. Apparently paralysed with fear and moral cowardice, the likes of Jacques Chirac content themselves instead with insufferably self-righteous finger-wagging to the rest of the world.

To add insult to injury, not only is there a blind unwillingness in this country to confront this reality, there is an active and well-funded movement to promote and spread its influence. The French social and political model is the one that British federasts (and I suspect no small number of metropolitan lefties in the USA) want the rest of us to sign up to. Our reluctance is, according to their mephitic propoganda, driven only by 'narrow-mindedness' and base 'xenophobia'. They constantly urge us to rely on the copious 'human rights laws' issued in Brussels to protect us from the enemies of civilisation both internal and external. But what, I ask, is the EU going to do about the beleaguered people like our correspondent from France? The answer is 'nothing'. All those grand-sounding conventions and lofty abastractions turn out to be not worth the paper they are written on.

No, if France is going to be rescued then it is going to be rescued by the likes of Sabine Herold and the above correspondent and by and this man and this man. These people constitute the true French Resistance and they need all the help and luck they can get.

There has been a lot of debate across the blogosphere recently about the role it may or may not have played in the downfall of Howell Raines. I do not know whether Bloggers made a difference or not in that saga. I do know that where we can make a difference is in making sure that stories about the reality of life in the rotten heart of Europe continue to be told and spread. We may not be able to help Sabine and her friends to overcome the forces of darkness but what we can do for them, the very least we owe them, is to bear witness to their noble and heroic struggle.

Sabine Herold is a courageous young woman who has put herself at the head of a popular uprising against the tyranny of union militancy to which President Chirac constantly kowtows, as reported by the Telegraph. She has been compared to Joan of Arc, and her impatience with her Gaullist government is certainly reminiscent of the saint's frustration with the French monarchy.

She is another example that despite the Left's intellectual hegemony established since the 1960s that turned France into a second-rate country with delusions of grandeur, some French individuals can transcend that context. The kind of liberal, cosmopolitan conservatism Mlle Herold embraced is almost extinct in France.

She has a memorable phrase for those, Left or Right, who are leading France to perdition: "reactionary egotists". Her movement may mark the beginning of the end of the organised egotism that has held France (and countless visitors) to ransom for so long. For France's sake, let us hope that it is not a revolt, but a revolution.

The good news is that she is by no means the first and only one. One only needs to visit Dissident Frogman's dacha or Merde in France to see how the blogosphere helped to flush out the illuminated few. The bad news is that if their numbers start growing, that popular Anglo-Saxon past time, 'frog bashing', may no longer be completely justified.

Vive les Français liberes!

As is obvious from reading this blog, we boys and girls at Samizdata are not exactly big fans of the European Union and its attendant horrors of red tape and regulation. So, here's an interesting experience of mine from last weekend. I managed to leave and enter France and then return without having a single item of paperwork inspected, including my passport. How come?

Well, I sailed to Cherbourg on a yacht from Portsmouth, stayed overnight in France and came back to Portsmouth. No passport check was carried out at either end. Now, I am sure if British Home Secretary David Blunkett were reading this (dream on!), he'd be aghast. ("You mean people can travel, breathe and eat without my express permission? Form a committee!"). But actually, I found the experience rather liberating. I was able to travel, using my own humble skills as a yacht sailor, to travel to and from a Continent without being troubled by officialdom.

And of course I loaded up the boat on cheap wine due to lower French duties on booze. So all in all the whole weekend was a poke in the eye for the offices of the Blairite state. C'est magnifique!

Nice 'fisking' of Chirac's preparations of G8 summit agenda by Collins on Pave France based on yesterday's article in the Telegraph titled Chirac to embarrass Bush at G8 conference:

He said Evian's main goal would be "to build the institutions and rules of a global democracy, open and interconnected"

Translation: I'm going to feed Bush a steady line of Communist bullshit until he gets fed up and leaves. Once he is gone, I will take cheapshots at the U.S., and then deny them when later confronted.

The French Trade Unions are up in arms at the disgraceful antics of pro-government activists. It seems that in response to the national strike by bureaucrats desperate to preserve their looting rights, a group of libertarian and pro-market conservative activists bombarded the mail servers of the trade unions with several million email messages crying out a stronger version of "Enough is Enough!" ["Ras le Bol!"].

As Marc Blondel, the General Secretary of FO (Force Ouvrière = "Workers' Power") bleated: "This is no way to engage in dialogue". The anti-strike campaign was launched by "Droite libre" ("the Free Right") a faction in the pro-government party. The grouping is led by former candidate to the UMP leadership, Rachid Kaci. He described the action as "supporting the reform of [state bureaucrats'] pensions. They blocade France, we blocade their email inboxes."

The campaign will continue in retaliation for any further strikes by the transport and teaching unions. I thought that I might include the list of email addresses being bombarded by the Free French forces, just in case any foreigners might wish to add their comments:

secgene@snes.edu; SUD-Rail@wanadoo.fr; sudrailpaca@free.fr; g10nat@ras.eu.org; sud.education@laposte.net; mblondel@force-ouvriere.fr; rhoup@force-ouvriere.fr; mbiaggi@force-ouvriere.fr; jmbilquez@force-ouvriere.fr; bdevy@force-ouvriere.fr; jjayer@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmailly@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmallet@force-ouvriere.fr; mmonrique@force-ouvriere.fr; mspungier@force-ouvriere.fr; rsantune@force-ouvriere.fr; rvalladon@force-ouvriere.fr; info@cgt.fr; cgt-com@cgt.fr; presse@cgt.fr; scbc@cgt.fr; synd-societe@cgt.fr; environnement@cgt.fr; territoires@cgt.fr; act-eco@cgt.fr; eco-sociale@cgt.fr; doc@cgt.fr; jeunes@cgt.fr; orga@cgt.fr; form-synd@cgt.fr; polfi@cgt.fr; revendicatif@cgt.fr; formation@cgt.fr; emploi-garanties-coll.@cgt.fr; culture@cgt.fr; travail-sante@cgt.fr; protection-sociale@cgt.fr; compta.conf@cgt.fr; ugict@cgt.fr; ucr@cgt.fr; ihs@cgt.fr; indecosa@cgt.fr; lepeuple@cgt.fr; webmaster@fsu.fr; unsa@unsa.org; cnt@cnt-f.org

Vive La France Libre!

This may only be one man's perspective but the picture it paints of France can only be described as melancholy:

France is almost finished. The nightmare is almost here. France has to know the horrors of the nightmare if you want her to have a chance to wake up. Sure, you may find some exceptions to the rule. France has some decent intellectuals: but they have about the same access to the mainstream media that dissenters had in the Soviet Union twenty years ago. France has bold politicians: one, maybe two if I want to be extremely generous. France still has genuine journalists: you could count them on the fingers of one hand. For the next years, come to France if you want, visit old monuments, but do not expect to be understood or appreciated by the locals. Behave as you would in a third world country; soon France will be a third world country. Perhaps it will wake up with a start, but who knows? Right now, if you read the polls, only 53% of the French hope the U.S. army will defeat Saddam: the rest hope the United States will be defeated and Saddam will win...

The author of the article is a Frenchman.

[My thanks to Boris Kuperschmidt for the link]

Another one you didn't see in the media.

"The demonstration comprised about a hundred protestors demonstrating against the arrest of Vietnamese pro-democracy campaigners. This action was organised by the 'Alliance Vietnam Liberté' (Vietnam Freedom Alliance) and various Ngos were invited. A representative of Amnesty International was present as well as Françoise Hostalier, former Human Rights Minister [yes we have one of those in occupied France!] and president of 'Action Droits de l'Homme' (Action Human Rights), as well as myself Laurent Muller, president of the 'Association Européene Cuba Libre' (European Association for a Free Cuba). The demonstration ended at 17 hours outside the Republic of Vietnam embassy [in Paris]."

It continues with the following:

"I take this opportunity to remind you that tomorrow, 8 April 2003, the AECL is holding a press conference about the latest wave of repression in Cuba. Some 80 non-violent dissidents are currently being tried for 'treason' and 'supplying information to an enemy state' (the USA). Prison sentences from 10 years to life have been requested [by prosecutors]. It appears that one death sentence has been requested against one dissident."

The press conference will be held at 15 hours at the aid centre for the Foreign Press, maison de la Radio, 116 avenue du Président Kennedy, 75016 Paris. The best contact I have is Prégentil (Americans will really like the graphics on his front page). Sad note: repression is operating worldwide whilst the eyes of the world are focused on the liberation of Iraq.

What do Stalinists do when they're a minority in the Party, and they want to oppose pluralist democracy and internal dissent on the grounds of loyalty to 'democratic centralism'?

Well the French Communist Party ended a chaotic weekend with just this problem. They re-elected Marie-George Buffet as their National secretary, the architect of reforms which allow among other things, several candidates for internal elections, more compromises with the socialists and other heresies for a Party that refused to condemn Stalin until... er, last year, I think. These are the guys that thought Leonid Brezhnev was a crypto-liberal!

At the last minute a revolt by the anti-democrats was averted by persuading them to withdraw their opposition candidates for the leadership election which they oppose on the grounds of revolutionary discipline. Embarrassingly, France's major news website doesn't carry a single comment on this story after more than a day: iron discipline or sublime indifference?

What 'the comrades' need isn't a Marie-George Buffet, but a Warren Buffett.

In Iraq, ordinary people begin to appear and cheer the liberators. In France, the pro-Saddam mob is disappearing as fast as a Republican Guard tank brigade.

I use the French TV station TF1 as my weathervane of authorised French opinion.

The Free French... in exile in London yet again!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have, thus far, refrained from engaging in the billious rounds of reflexive anti-French bashing that pepper the blogosphere.

This is because I appreciate that, despite the odious example set by their political classes, France is a very complex and varied country that is not always fairly represented by the mephitic emanations of its 'intellectuals'.

Also, as I have said before, not everyone who opposes the war is dishonourable or idiotic. However, some manifestations of anti-war sentiment in France plumb such depths of perversity that they serve only to drag that once-great country's reputation into the sewer.

For example, according to a French opinion poll published in the UK Times:

Relations will be further rent by a second poll, in Le Monde, showing that only a third of the French felt that they were on the same side as the Americans and British, and that another third desired outright Iraqi victory over "les anglo-saxons".

A THIRD!!?? Thirty-three per cent!!?? One out of every three people want Saddam Hussein to win?

Having given some careful consideration to the various social and cultural factors which necessarily play a part in such political dynamics and giving due weight to the nuances that ought properly to be examined to the extent that they shape the fabric of public debate in that demos, I have just one little question which arises out of this important article of statistical data:

What the f*cking hell is going in that country??!!

Those of you who still think that US foreign policy is a tool of commercial oil interests, might be advised to look away now:

The former president of Elf Aquitaine testified Monday that the French oil giant paid about $5 million to French political parties during his leadership — including to President Jacques Chirac's former party.

Loik Le Floch-Prigent said nearly all the money went to Chirac's former party until then-President Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist, demanded the cash be spread to both sides of the political spectrum. Chirac, a conservative, succeeded Mitterrand as president in 1995.

But hang on a minute, I thought it was George Bush who was supposed to be up to his neck in oil industry slush funds??!!

"We absolutely needed French politicians who supported us," Le Floch-Prigent testified. "There were politicians who didn't want to favor Elf ... We had to keep them quiet, to have them on our side."

But surely European politics is driven by high-minded ideals of social justice? I don't know, it's all too much, it really is. How many more cherished myths are going to be put to the sword by reality?

Looks like Jacques Chirac has given up on all hope of having an influence on temporal matters:

President Jacques Chirac sought to undermine the legitimacy of the war yesterday by offering to work with the Vatican to ensure the "primacy of law" in the future.

Having failed to stop the war, M Chirac still hopes to live up to the "Warrior for Peace" label given him by the French press.

What is the difference between Jacques Chirac and John Paul II? Well, one of them is deeply spiritual and holy man appointed as God's representative on earth and an inspiration and guide to millions of people across the world. And the other is the Pope.

According to the latest polls 85 per cent of the French approve of M Chirac's position on the war but he knows that people will soon start to ask whether it was worth it, especially if America seeks to isolate France internationally.

Who cares about isolation in this world when you can have rapture in the next?

Le Monde's editor, Jean-Marie Colombani, wrote yesterday that the diplomatic row over Iraq may finally have ended Europe's ambitions to be a military and diplomatic superpower.

Yes, yes Belgium would have bestrode the earth like a colossus if it hadn't been for those pesky Anglo-Saxons.

I expect Michael Moore is sitting by the telephone today waiting for the call from Jacques. Together they can build a better world.

I do not share the blood-lust of some of my fellow Samizdatistas, but I could not help thinking that if the [economic] Planning Ministry in Bagdad has indeed been destroyed, that a more suitable target would be hard to imagine for a free-market individualist. If President Bush hates Iraq, he'll have a bigger one rebuilt later...

I have been silent about the former Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac for some time now, but all I can say is that since I wrote this, this, this, this, this and this, nothing the so-and-so has said or done in the last month has come as a surprise. Chirac has only ever caved in to the left in his entire political career, apart from his infantile attempt to ban a royalist wreath-laying ceremony in early 1993.

Some voices I hear are talking about French loss of influence on the world stage and Chirac out within two years. On the first count, that's pure wishful thinking. For a start there is an element of this argument about the apparently incongruous alliance of France, Rusia and China. If you're looking for a reason to sack Colin Powell, his failure to keep Russia onside, or apparently to even realise what was happening are serious lapses on a par with Britain's judgement in 1939 that Poland would be a more capable military ally than the USSR against Nazi Germany.

On Chirac's imminent departure, I wish it were that simple. Chirac is in until 2007, unless he dies in office. I don't think he actually can be impeached: an investigator into his affairs can be either appointed by him (or by his appointees) or switched to other cases, if they come too close to finding anything, and his almost worse henchman Alain Juppé controls the party machine which has the majority in both houses. It would take street protests or a foreign invasion to remove Chirac, which is why his pandering to the left is so handy.

In the past few weeks we have all indulged in a spot of frog bashing, which will continue, I hope, until Jacques Chirac steps down from his UN soapbox, from which he is currently preaching Justice, World Peace and Morality.

This may be yet another nudge to kick him off the moral highground that only the French themselves seem to take seriously. Not even Peter Hain, one of Britain's leading Federasts, is fooled by France's posturing. The Telegraph reports:

For the next four-and-a-half months, the former top brass of Elf, the [French] oil giant, will have to explain what happened to hundreds of millions of pounds diverted from company accounts for bribes and personal enrichment.

President Chirac is reported to be deeply concerned that France is not embarrassed as it tries to establish itself as an alternative to America's global leadership.

I bet he is! Watching him wriggle out of this one should be interesting. French interests? Oil? Bribes? Moi? Elf was founded by General de Gaulle as a state-owned company until 1994. Its original purpose was to serve as cover for operations the French government wanted to keep secret, whether bribing African and Latin American leaders or funnelling money into Swiss accounts for domestic political backers.

The key defendants are the former chief executive of Elf, Loik le Floch-Prigent, its former director of general affairs, Alfred Sirven, and Andrèc) Tarallo, known as Elf's Monsieur Afrique because of his deep ties to the continent. In his testimony, Le Floch-Prigent says he urged M Mitterrand in 1989 to turn off the bribery tap. "Ah non," he claims M Mitterrand told him. "Let's carry on with what General de Gaulle started."

If M Mitterand did not want to upset de Gaulle 'legacy', what are the chances that M Chirac, with his Gaullist tendencies, would have done so during his time in power? I wonder whether there may be an Iraq-Elf connection. Or is that just too much to hope for? In any case, Chirac's fall, whenever it happens, is bound to leave an oily slick on the ground...

Thanks to their miserly and un-blog-friendly policy of charging non-UK readers a subscription, there is no direct link to this article in the UK Times. However it is worth a mention as it may go some way to explaining a thing or two:

Four decades of feminism have turned middle-class French men into miserable creatures who are intimidated by women and losing their way in an increasingly matriarchal society, a study says.

Of course, Groundskeepeer Willy would say that he knew this all along.

Men under 35 in particular felt that they were being treated as sexual objects by predatory young women.

And this is a cause for complaint?

Modern men see women as "castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed by men’s sexual performance".

And that's even before she's hired a lawyer.

Men blamed advertising and the media for treating them as useless or sexual objects. They had suffered various phases of "destabilisation". In the Sixties and Seventies they had experienced the moral revolution and the doctrine of female equality.

In the Eighties they had faced "implosion" through an explosion of models, from Golden Boys to gays and the Rambo type. In the Nineties they had been stressed by unemployment, aids, globalisation and the failure of the "masculine" technocratic model of society that had prevailed in France.

Younger men were said to be more unhappy than their elders. The 25-35 group felt that women "consume men and abuse them sexually". The saddest group seemed to be those aged 20-25, who the magazine defined as "subjugated and feminised".

It is not rare that they cultivate a gay image in which they find a model for acceding to femininity. Behind the abandonment of their virility there lies another odd ideal: that of 'homosexual fusion' with the woman, a loss of differentiation between sexes.

Perhaps this explains all that French obstructionism in the UN. Maybe it's the result of a deep mistrust of all this Anglo-Saxon 'virility'.

'Les 4 Vérités' is a French libertarian/economic liberal magazine published weekly with 10,000 subscribers in paper format and also available online. The title comes from the French expression: «dire ces quatre vérités à quelqu'un» ("to speak home truths to someone"), in this case to a complacently statist France. Archived editions (about a month old) are available free and one can subscribe (paper or pdf) for the first month free.

In the current issue: Various denunciations of Iraq; Guy Millère's piece on 'France's Debt to America' and a review of Pierre Kohler's 'L'imposture verte' (the Green Scam): a scientist's attack on the various eco-scares.

One of the two things I also like on the site are the cartoons - almost every French site seems to have a cracking cartoonist: this week's has Saddam welcoming the arrival of puppets on strings saying "At last! The return of the useful idiots!".

The other is the box which advertises the (street) demonstration of the week and offers two recommended web links. Plugged this week are a new current affairs site called 'Choc-info' and a pompously witty 'libertarian bureaucrat' with the outlandish name, even in French of Aristophane Triboulet.

I now have over 120 links for French libertarian groups, publications, blogs and online forums. 'Les 4 Vérités' may not have the most polished web site, but it provides the free market view unashamedly, in a country that needs it badly.

On Sunday (2nd March) a demonstration will be held in Paris outside the U.S. embassy. The assembly point will be the place de la Concorde. The rally has an English name: "Friends and Freedom", which in itself is unique.

It aims to promote: "Friendship and confidence between the French and American peoples" and "Friendship and solidarity between France and the United States of America". The slogans are French. More details can be found here.

Among French libertarians there is the same division as in the US, with minarchists tending to support a war of liberation and both the anarcho-capitalists and the conservatives against. The Catholic liberals (almost the exact opposite of the socialist 'liberal Catholics') are opposed to war both for the damage it could cause (some French people remember the 'collateral damage' of Caen in 1944), and the fear that a successor government might be less religiously tolerant than Saddam. An example of this view can be found here.

I regard the different cases being forward (in public by Messrs Bush and Blair) for war with Iraq as poor because they are either wrong (the Iraqi dictator probably has fewer 'weapons of mass destruction' than either Kim Jong Il or General Musharraf) or contradictory (is Saddam an ally of Bin Laden Yes or No?). Tyranncide is good enough and UNESCO can go and get stuffed.

I also consider the British forces almost entirely incapable of offering any worthwhile help to the Americans for reasons I've mentioned here before. Lend-Lease the air tankers and the SAS to the US and that's all. 'The Borrowers' are probably going to get in the way of a US air strike or hold up the advance when the British made tanks break down in "the wrong kind of sand".

Despite these misgivings, I would certainly go to the place de la Concorde this Sunday if I could afford the fare. The nasty game being played by French and German political leaders is as much a threat to world peace and the prosperity of this corner of the planet as any gang of terrorists.

They weren't able to save the Taliban, they won't be able to save Saddam Hussein but, by gum, they're going to dig their heels in and fight to the last drop of precious blood to save the French film industry:

"French directors and intellectuals say American films are producing a generation of "stupid children" in the country."

And, to compound matters, they're now running the place.

"I go very often to schools, and I have found a lot of young kids have difficulties in analysing a concept, an idea, in a film."

Maybe that's true but Hollywood would not be my prime suspect here.

"If we look at what the United States is exporting to the world that is creative, it has to do with computer, it has to do with software, it has to do with other kinds of technology - not the ideas."

Well, you don't need boring old ideas when you're inventing new technologies and software and things, do you.

"But Phillipe Rogier, author of L'Enemie Americain, said the French were not willingly accepting the increase in American culture in their society."

Except for French kids apparently, who can't get enough of it.

"The French would not call it a culture - it is a non-culture, a non-civilisation, just a way of life," Rogier contends."

A merest, meanest existance. A hollow, empty sham. A pointless, soulless skimming over a vast ocean of nothingness. So primitif, so barbare, so SIMPLISME!!!.

"This has been central to French attitudes towards America."

No kidding!!

"Ultimately, Tavernier insists, the films are the first step of an American takeover of France."

What's the second step and when it is scheduled for?

"They always understood that the first way to occupy a country was to impose their films."

Oh damn!! Somebody call the Pentagon, quick. They've gone and spent all these squintillions of dollars on Cruise Missiles and Aircraft Carriers when they could occupy Iraq by just sending in Martin Scorsese.

Note: The linked article on the BBC website is not satirical.

I was going to write about Les 4 Vérités a French free-market libertarian/liberal weekly magazine. However I came across a survey on pornography on the magazine's site which produced the following results:

• 32.52 per cent - "The State must take strong restrictive measures"
  
• 23.40 per cent - "I'm against it, I try to persuade others, but it's none of the State's business"
  
• 2.13 per cent - "I'm a consumer and I would like politicians to stop me"
  
• 41.95 per cent - "It's a pleasant past-time which should not be prohibited"

From these figures I assume that the number of British immigrants in France connected to the Internet is small.

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has arrived in Paris to take part in a Franco-African summit despite European Union sanctions against him.

France obtained a waiver to allow Mugabe to enter Europe as sanctions were formally extended for a further year on Tuesday. Mugabe will be joinig around 45 other African heads of state, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, as part of French attempts to forge closer ties with Africa.

His arrival has prompted protests from Britain and other EU countries and human rights groups are planning a series of protests during Mr Mugabe's visit.

Given the company Jacques Chirac likes to keep, I would be deeply concerned to see him getting along with Tony Blair and George Bush.

Or perhaps it's not personal. It is worse. Philip Delves Broughton's excellent analysis of France's hang-ups and downs shows a burning desire to emulate de Gaulle and restore France's glory. Chirac's years of political hackery and alleged expense fiddling and kickbacks as Paris mayor will be forgotten as the echoes of General de Gaulle are ringing louder and louder:

The Franco-African summit that convenes in Paris tomorrow has long been one of his favourite events. In years of diminished French influence, this bi-annual get-together of African leaders was a chance for French presidents to stand tall. But this week's summit will be especially satisfying.

It will mark the triumphant conclusion of phase one of the Chirac Doctrine, a foreign policy that has enraged America and large parts of Europe, but delighted the French and made M Chirac popular beyond his dreams.

M Chirac ignored Britain's objection to the invitation to the Zimbabwean leader because he believed far more was at stake than antagonising the Foreign Office or pleasing the Zimbabwean opposition. He sees France extending its reach into Southern Africa, once a British preserve. France believes it can bring peace to Congo, for which it needs Zimbabwean help, and expand its political and economic interests in the continent.

Despite the continuing unrest in the Ivory Coast, worsened by a recent French-brokered peace deal, M Chirac is confident France can display its full diplomatic plumage in Africa and demonstrate to Washington that it has a sphere of influence too.

He may even not be worried about missing a post-war carve-up of influence in Iraq. It just could be that France, he believes, is now the leader of the anti-American world and with that come dividends and responsibilities appropriate to the grand ministries of Paris and far exceeding those in one corner of the Middle East.

I hope the United States does not forget French crude attempts at the realpolitik game. I hope that the important players in the international arena will not let France usurp more influence that it deserves and make it face the consequences of its actions. Or is it too much to hope for?

The French libertarian movement is split over war with Iraq, though needless to say, not for the purely venal reasons of Chirac, the bespoke purveyor of nuclear technology to national-socialist dictators.

Most of the French libertarians I have been in touch with seem torn between a quasi-Randian view: "exterminate all practitioners of violent irrational beliefs" and the absolutist horror of any state violence. With a president like Jacques Chirac (imagine a cross between Richard Nixon, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and George Bush senior: with NONE of their redeeming features), such scepticism about the morality of one's own government seems reasonable. My fear about America is that unlike most Americans, I assume that the next US president could be almost as bad. But that's another issue.

A distinctive voice in France right now is Jacques Garello - a French Catholic economist of the Austrian school. Professor Garello has hosted the summer university of the "nouvelle économie" at Aix for twenty five years, probably the most significant event of it's kind in Europe. Here M. Garello considers the case for a "just" war:

The error consists in talking of a war against Iraq, when it really is a war against terrorism, and a legitimate case of self-defense of universal civilisation against barbaric forces which happen to find support and encouragement in Iraq.

He goes on to suggest that the real purpose of French diplomacy in refusing to side publicly with the US is the fear of the millions of potential Islamic militants in France: they would rather ignore the problem than fight it.

*= The Other France

In the classic British television comedy "Yes, Minister" the bureaucracy engineered the elevation of a conviction-free mediocrity to the post of prime minister. The episode, called "Party Games" involved the following altercation between Jim Hacker, the minister who is looking for a "big idea" to campaign about and a French-speaking Brussels bureaucrat¹:

Jim Hacker: "Do you know, there's an office at the European Commission where they pay people to produce food and next door there's another office where they pay people to destroy food?"

European Bureaucrat: "It is not true!"

Sir Humphrey Appleby (British bureaucrat): "Oh really?"

European Bureaucrat: "They are not even on the same floor!"

Now consider that exchange in the light of my Case for "War on Chirac" versus this defence by Gemini, presumably a Chirac fan:

Just a few things - Chirac as PM wasn't sacked, he's the only PM of the 5th Republic who actually willingly quit. Second, the bicentenary of the execution of Louis XVI couldn't have been in 1992, since he was executed on 21/01/1793. So out of the 7 wrong-doings in 27 yrs, 2 at least are wrong....

The first objection is of the "yes he was pushed... no he jumped" variety. See this page for a very different view than the "official Chirac" line. I might add that Chirac's nicknames include "Chameleon Bonaparte" and "Supermenteur" - Super Liar.

The second is too funny to take seriously. The row occured in late 1992 because the royalists asked for permission to lay the wreath in late 1992, but as M.Gemini put it, the event was due to take place on 21st January 1993. As an excuse for Chirac's partisan support for Communists who set up a mock guillotine to decapitate a pig carcass against laying a wreath of white flowers in a dignified ceremony, I find quibbling about the date a little rich. As for claiming that this means that "2 out of 7" claims are wrong, I couldn't help laughing.

Which reminds me of three additional reasons for declaring War on Chirac:

1. It was Chirac who was instrumental in assisting the sale of nuclear technology to Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s. The facility at Mossul was bombed by the Israeli air force in 1981. I've no doubt that many French politicians made a packet out the deal.
   
2. I still haven't discussed the financial corruption of the Chirac family.
   
3. I post this quote in full from a 1990 election meeting.

   "Comment voulez-vous que le travailleur francais qui travaille avec sa femme et qui ensemble gagnent environ 15000 francs, et qui voit sur le palier à cote de son HLM, entasses, une famille avec un pere de famille, trois ou quatre epouses, et une vingtaine de gosses, qui gagnent 50000 francs par mois de prestations sociale sans naturellement travailler ! Si vous ajoutez à cela le bruit et l'odeur, eh bien, le travailleur francais sur le pallier il devient fou ! Et ce n'est pas etre raciste que de dire cela. Nous n'avons plus les moyens d'honorer le regroupement familial. Et il faudra enfin un jour poser le grand debat qui s'impose dans notre pays, qui est un vrai debat moral, pour savoir s'il est naturel que des etrangers puissent beneficier, au meme titre que les Francais, d'une solidarite nationale. À laquelle ils ne participent pas puisqu'ils ne payent pas d'impots."

   "How do you expect the French worker who works with his wife and between them earn about 15000 Francs per month (about £1,500 at the time), and who see their next door neighbours in their tower block stacked together, a family with a father, three or four wives, and twenty odd kids, who make 50,000 Francs a month in in state benefits without naturally actually working. If you add to this the noise and the smell, well the French worker on the landing will become insane! And it is not racist to say that. We no longer have the means to honour family reunions (which allow relatives of working immigrants to come to France). And it will be necessary to start the great debate which our country requires, which is a truly moral debate, to decide if it is natural that strangers to this country should benefit, with the same entitlement as the French, of a national solidarity (the French term for government welfare) to which they do not participate because they don't pay taxes."

This is the same politician who in the second round of last year's presidential election thought it was "shameful" for Jean-Marie Le Pen to be his second round opponent. The unofficial election slogan was "Votez l'escroc, pas le facho!" - Elect the Fraudster, not the Fascist. Regarding Saddam, could France do a swap?

¹ = I'm recording this from memory so I don't mind being corrected.

I can't help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy.

Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M'lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.

"France has confirmed that it is inviting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to take part in a summit of African Heads of State next month.

Mr Mugabe is currently banned from entering the European Union because of doubts about the legitimacy of his re-election last year."

I suppose it would be bad form to have 'doubts' about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down 'Les JDAM's du Francais' on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the 'humanitarian' principles they claim to live by.

Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:

"But French President Jacques Chirac was convinced that the Zimbabwean leader's presence at the summit would help promote justice, human rights and democracy in his country, foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told journalists."

When the language of 'human rights' can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased.

But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable.

The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them.

Azedine Berkane, held in France for the stabbing of Bertrand Delanöe, the homosexual Mayor of Paris, in October this year, may be refused a trial on the grounds that he is a nutter.

Two psychiatrists have concluded that the Islamic fundamentalist who was assumed to have acted in accordance with Islamic hatred of homosexuality, is in fact suffering from a psychosis which often leads to violent behaviour "within a religious context".

A second opinion is expected before prosecutors have to decided whether Mr Berkhane, 39 years old unemployed and without fixed abode, can be considered mentally fit to stand trial for attempted murder.

In fairness to the psychiatrists, Mr Berkhane has a history of mental illness, and has allegedly claimed that he was being pursued by a "satanic cult". In 2001, Mr Berkhane was a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of St Denis. In March 2002, he was reported missing to police by his mother.

If the French authorities deal with homophobic attacks by Muslims by shaking their heads, saying "poor chap, he's off his rocker", locking them up indefinitely, and giving them drugs or electroshock treatment, it doesn't seem a very glorious path for a young Mudjaheddin to follow. Might this be better than the death penalty? Or is it too cruel?

Poor, beleagured France! All they're trying to do in West Africa is to keep the peace and impose some semblance of order.

"A rebel group in the Ivory Coast has accused France of waging war after a battle with French troops who are trying to maintain a truce in the country's civil war."

Meanwhile, the EU Commission in Brussels has denounced French unilateralism. The country's 'intellectuals' are doing nothing except sneer at their leaders 'simplisme' foreign policy. The UN has passed a resolution condemning French aggression. Church leaders are urging the French to be more tolerant and understanding. Thousands of left-wing academics and celebrities have launched a 'Not In My Name' Petition. African leaders are calling upon the rest of the world to resist French militarism and both the Guardian and the Independent are running editorial columns focussing on France's right-wing, red-necked President, their dangerous and uncivilised obsession with gun-culture and the danger that their blind, one-sided foreign policy represents to the rest of the world community.

Okay, none of those things have actually happened yet. But I'm quite sure they will. Any day now. You mark my words. Just wait and see.