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Well, why should the English-speaking world have all the fun when it comes to a banking disaster?

Société Générale, France's second-biggest bank, has revealed that one of its traders in Paris had committed a 5bn euro (£3.6bn/$7.1bn) fraud.

3.6bn quid. However one looks at it, that is a lot of money. The Telegraph story I linked to has named the guy who is alleged to have perpetrated the fraud; the meltdown easily surpasses the collapse of Barings, the blue-blooded British bank that went down due to massive losses incurred by derivatives dealer Nick Leeson back in the mid-90s.

What early conclusions can one draw? First of all, it is not possible to argue that the more heavily regulated banking systems in continental Europe are inherently superior to those wild, anarchic Anglos. At the very largest banks operating out of Paris, New York or London, it seems that human venality, incompetence and dishonesty is no respecter of cultural differences. What investors need to realise is that banks contain human beings with all the weaknesses, as well as virtues, humans have. Regulatory zeal has not prevented frauds; and yet every time there is a fresh SNAFU, a chorus goes up demanding some new set of regulations - "something must be done". In the end, the only course is to catch the wrongdoers, lock them up or force them, if possible, to repay the folk they have swindled.

To say that 2008 has started badly in the financial markets is an understatement; with banks like Citi taking huge losses linked to the falls in the US housing sector, this latest, Gallic twist of bad financial news is the last thing that investors needed. Jobs have already been axed in the City; it is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Here is a list of recent monster banking frauds.

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Interesting story at Bloomberg saying that despite the blandishments of President Sarkozy, who is currently diverting the celebrity pages of the press with his amorous adventures, Frenchmen and women living in Britain do not want to return home to a land still hobbled by taxes and regulations.

They certainly cannot be staying in Britain for its weather.

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A close friend who recently bought a lovely property down in Cannes, France, invited Mrs Pearce and yours truly down for Christmas. How can one refuse? We did not. I rather like the old seaside town, with its 19th Century Belle Epoque hotels and small side-streets. The place is pretty civilised over Christmas: unlike the Film Festival season or the various financial services conferences held there during the year, the place was mostly filled by locals and there was a merciful lack of beer-swilling Brits. France likes to pride itself as being far more grown-up in its approach to alcohol than the British, and I think this is mostly accurate, having been to France many times to see the locals in action of an evening. This item, however, says the French go pretty "British" in their drinking habits over the New Year.

Meanwhile, France is of course joining the puritanical Anglosphere by banning smoking in all cafes and restaurants from next February. A shame: although I dislike tobacco smoke intensely, if I choose to enter a bar where the owner of said private property allows it, it is my problem, not his. I can choose to leave. No-one forces me to work in a bar or drink in one at gun point. One of the things I quite like about France is that despite it being a more bureaucratic nation than Britain in many ways - although that is passing - the French have always struck me as a fairly tolerant bunch on certain social issues (the Catholic influence, maybe, I am not sure).

It will be interesting to see whether the ban is enforced in all French premises. I rather doubt it.

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I wonder what conclusions French voters will draw from this:

Down in the Pays Basque, the young natives are disconsolate. Immobiliers (estate agents) with sharp English marketing techniques are sprouting like radishes in the towns. In the markets, one hears three languages: Basque, French and English. And, astonishingly, in a nation so protective of its culture, some houses this summer had signs advertising them For Sale instead of À Vendre.

It was my French niece who saw them, out on her travels as a veterinary surgeon, and she came home to her small, rented house and dropped her handbag with an exasperated clunk on the table. What hope do we have of ever being able to afford a house, she said, when the Brits are paying crazy prices and we can't compete? It's just so depressing.

Partly this is a story about French economic decline. Economic decline often happens without you realising it. And then, suddenly, you do realise it. That factory you thought you had a safe job in for life gets abruptly closed, because the government has decided that the subsidies to keep it going are becoming too huge. You suddenly realise that private education for your kids is going to be forever beyond you, that where you live state education is actually getting worse, and that also you can not afford to move to where it is any good. Multiply little dramas like that by a million, and you have an entire country in economic decline. Thus, economic decline often impinges upon an electorate not in the form of rather meaningless statistics moaned about by journalists even as life goes on happily, but rather in the form of dramatic vignettes like this one, of vulgar English people invading the formerly idyllic French countryside.

Another French vignette of decline is of clever sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, who can not seem to get jobs worthy of their obvious talents and superior educations, unless they go to vulgar England. Even there, they will have to start out as waiters and waitresses, but at least they'll have a chance of better things soon. In France, education is obviously far better than in vulgar England, but in vulgar England, for some reason probably involving evil America, more stuff is actually being done.

Another force which I think France is on the receiving end of here is the enormous difference that the internet, e-mail, etc., has made to the nature of life in the formerly deep countryside, of which France has a great deal, but England relatively little. (In Scotland it is different.) Simply, you can now do a lot more with your life when physically cut off from everything than you could twenty years ago. Did Engels say something about the "idiocy" of rural life? Some smug townie did. Well, now, country life is not nearly so idiotic as it was. Outsourcing is not just taking work from Europe to India, it is taking it from European cities jammed with commuters to European rural escape havens. The big thing they now sell in the countryside of places like France is not what the countryside grows, so much as how beautiful and nice it is to live in, provided you don't have to scrabble about in the rural mud for a living. Thanks to email and the internet, organising the switch from suburb to country has also got a lot easier.

Or, to put it another way, the suburbs just got a lot bigger.

So, will France's voters try to make the symptoms of economic decline and of the new super-suburbanisation illegal? Probably. Good luck with that, mes amis. You will need it. A smarter attitude would be to stop fretting about these changes and to start profiting from them, as many French people are already doing, of course, not least by selling their rural shacks for silly English money.

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If you are in central London and want to see some wonderful art, I can recommend this. The ticket prices are a bit steep and the collection is not quite as big as some, but definitely worth it. It makes me want to get across the Channel and sip wine in a nice restaurant in Normandy or Brittany.

There is something strange about contemplating a peaceful scene on a Normandy beach, painted in say, 1870, to realise that 74 years later, the place was swarming with Allied troops slugging it out with the German Army, or what was left of it.

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Well, that appears to be the reaction so far of wealthy French ex-pats who have turned away from the land of Moliere and fine wine for other climes in order to flee the French taxman. New president Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to cut, or at least change, some of the more crushing taxes on wealthy people to lure them back to France. If he wants to revive the French economy, this has to make sense. An even more obvious policy would be a dramatic tax cut across the board, in a flat tax fashion, with the overall burden sharply reduced. (Waiting for hell to freeze over? Ed).

The effects of French hostility to the rich, or least les nouveaux riches, is pretty obvious here in Britain. The areas around Chelsea, South Kensington and Knightsbridge are full of young French people who work in the capital, such as in the Canary Wharf financial district. A number of big banks, with their fancy derivatives trading platforms, operate out of London and French education still churns out the sort of highly qualified maths graduates who work in sectors like hedge funds and futures markets. I don't know the exact figures - who does? - but I have read that upwards of around 350,000 French people live in London today.

I remember a while back that the French model and occasional actress, Laetitia Casta, left France after shortly having been chosen as the model for the French revolutionary heroine, Marianne. She apparently quit the nation for tax reasons, although she also denied that as her reason, according to the Wikipedia entry linked to here.

Of course, there is no excuse whatever for Brits to guffaw about this. Lots of Britons quit these shores every year for nations like Canada and New Zealand, where the taxes are are sometimes lower and the opportunities for raising a family etc appear more easy. As one senior lawyer told me this morning, the best advice to any rich person these days is to try and head for Switzerland. Britain may be, temporarily, a haven for some City pros like the private equity bosses, but for how long?

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Via Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog, here is this rather amusing item about how French motorists with clean driving licences sell their speeding points online for a fee to drivers who are in danger of using up all their points and then getting banned. Yes, yes, I can see the usual Dudley Do-Rights out there bleating that this is all terribly naughty, a sign of decadence, blah, but in fact what this demonstrates, in a slightly naughty French way, is how if you oppress people enough with laws and taxes over a period of time, it breeds such disregard for the law that even laws that have sense - and driving very fast can be bloody dangerous - get spurned. (It appears the French are smarter at getting around certain rules - look at what happened to former Spurs, Manchester United and England player Teddy Sheringham for allegedly trying to pull the same speeding-point move).

I have driven a few times along France's magnificent, sweeping autoroutes, and am occasionally reminded that France invented Formula 1 motor racing. Maybe there's plenty of life left in Gaul yet. If only they could do capitalism in a slightly more routine way.

Talking of such alternative markets, here is an old article about the market in air miles.

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President Sarkozy has made an immediate impact as French President:

President Sarkozy has fallen foul of intellectuals and critics who see his passion for jogging as un-French, right-wing and even a ploy to brainwash his citizens.

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I have travelled to a lot of cities in the world in my relatively short life (Paris, San Francisco, New York, Cologne, Geneva, Milan, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Vienna......) and there are quite a few more that I want to knock off the list before I step off this mortal coil. Well, this week, I did just that and spent a wonderful day ambling around the old southern French town of Montpellier. The city is a university town with a strong commercial base, oodles of history and some of the swankiest French urban architecture outside of Paris. Access to the city from Britain is easy: a one-and-a-half-hour flight from Gatwick.

I know that there is a lot to gripe about with France: the taxes, red tape and as we know, considerable problems with a large and angry underclass, made worse by a lack of assimilation of its Islamic population. However, from my point of view, if newly-elected Nicolas Sarkozy manages to cut taxes somewhat and reverse some of the daftest labour market restrictions, then any advantage to living in Britain rather than France will look increasingly slender. (I see no sign that Britain's petty brand of health and safety puritanism has completely taken hold). I am not the first person to make that observation, of course.

Mind you, the beer is alarmingly expensive, but you can buy wine for a Euro a litre - and it tastes good. Emigration never felt so compelling.

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I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff.

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This startling story from France even made yours truly, who has become a jaundiced observer of French political life, sit up and take notice. Apparently, a bunch of people styling themselves as protectors of the Gallic wine industry have issued an ultimatum to new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, that unless those evil cheap imports from countries such as Australia (the horreur!), New Zealand (Rainbow Warrior, anyone?), South Africa (enough said), America (the Great Satan) and other places are stopped, then supermarkets, offices and other places will be dynamited.

Suppose that people in such venues get killed. I think that such a terrible outcome might begin to get across to the politically and economically uncommitted the true nature of the thuggery that sometimes accompanies protectionism and any form of coercive interference with voluntary economic exchange. Ultimately, such folk believe that you, the consumer, or worker, or entrepreneur, are beholden to buy, produce or sell not on the basis of freely consenting exchanges with your fellows, but on account of some state of affairs that the protectionists deem right and proper. In this case, the wine industry of France, or at least the mass-produced bit of it, is under threat from the cheaper stuff from other parts of the world. (I think it is safe to assume that the producers of Latour or Lafite are unlikely to be worried). I am actually off to Southwestern France in early June for two weeks' much-needed holiday and the Languedoc region is one of the places where these thugs hail from, apparently. I tend to notice that whenever I visit France, which is quite often, it is hard to see non-French wine in the shops. So if these thugs are getting upset at the arrival of a relatively small amount of foreign imports, they would go totally batshit if they saw the mixed wine-racks in Sainsbury's or Tesco's in a standard English town.

Sarkozy's time in office is unlikely to be a quiet one.

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Reading Financial Times this morning, I came across an interview with Sarkozy during his election campaign, the FT’s sister paper, Les Echos. This extract says it all.

Sarkozy: ... I want to raise clearly in this campaign the issue of morality in financial globalisation. We didn’t create the euro for it to result in capitalism without ethics or scruples. I am extremely troubled by speculative movements. Who can accept that a hedge fund buys a company with borrowings, makes a quarter of the staff redundant to repay the loans, and sells the business piecemeal? Not me. In that economy, there is no wealth creation. The capitalist ethic, is that he who creates wealth earns money, and he who creates lots of wealth earns lots of money. That’s normal. On the other hand, speculation isn’t normal. Capitalism won’t survive without respecting a minimum of ethical rules. The eurozone should be at the forefront of this thinking.

Les Echos: Do we need coercive measures?

Sarkozy: If I am elected president of the Republic, I will ask the finance minister to propose, at the European level, a measure to reinforce the morality and security of financial capitalism. In this respect, taxation of speculative movements seems to me an interesting idea if it were introduced at a European level. I want to make France a country which rewards wealth creation, but which also knows how to strike predators.

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France has elected Sarkozy and I must say I am curious to see what happens next.

In the short term, will the anticipated riots in the banlieue happen? In the long term, will Sarko be France's Thatcher and solve the serious structural problems created by decades of intrusive statism? Or will he be a disastrous Ted Heath, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with no real understanding why things are so bad? Does he even have the perspectives needed to change the right things and move France in as more market/liberty oriented direction? And even if he does, will the System simply defeat any attempt to change it? I am dubious to say the least about the willingness of French society to break its addiction to other people's money but we will see.

What do you think?

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Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal?

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I have a confession to make. I love the French TGV train that recently set an speed record of more than 350mph - that is quicker than some of the fighter aircraft of World War 2. It is a brilliant, sleek example of engineering and no wonder the French are proud of it. French civil engineering is in fact world-class, a fact that Frog-bashers would do well to remember. The French also played a part in that other magnificently quick and elegant beast - Concorde.

I read an interesting article on the TGV business in the UK weekly, The Spectator, last week, by Neil Collins (subscription-only). In this week's Speccie, old-style socialist Neil Clark (defender of Milosovic, to his eternal shame) pops up in the letter's page of the print edition to poke fun at privatised railways, arguing that the TGV example proves how splendid nationalisation is. It is a superficially appealing argument, but wrong on a number of grounds.

First of all, the TGV train has most of its fixed costs paid for by the state, ie, the French taxpayer. Taxes in France are high, some of the highest in the western world. It is all very well for Collins or Clark to wax lyrical about the ability of Monsieur and Madame to travel from Paris to Marseilles for under 20 euros, but that rather ignores the heavy tax bill that the benighted citoyens of France pay to keep this ultra-quick train system operating. When anyone talks about the 'profits' that the TGV might make, it is an abuse of economic language, since the initial investment into the railway was not an 'investment' in the sense that anyone spending their own money of their free will would understand it. And France, a less densely populated nation that Britain with a rather less respectful attitude towards property rights, can more easily punch straight railway lines across the land regardless of the objections of anyone who stands in the way. These are costs that lie on the debit side of the ledger.

The truth is, that many big state projects are often awe inspiring and people will therefore conclude that we should model the rest of our activity on that. When emergency planning methods were used to make war machines during WW2, socialists and others imagined that we should turn to such 'rational' methods in times of peace. How naive they now appear, but no more naive than those folk like Al Gore who claim that the State should take the credit for the internet, for example, as if such things as Google, YouTube or this blog would ever occur to a civil servant. In fact, just imagine how crap the internet would be if it was run by a state monopoly, like British Rail in the 1960s and 70s.

UK rail privatisation is often held up as an example of the supposed limits of 'free market fundamentalism', but given the botched way in which railways were sold off, the constant interference with the railways in the early years of Labour, it is a nonsense to claim that only state monopolies can run rail networks.

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I seldom encounter much in the way of verbal discussion attached to Flickr photos, because the kind of Flickr photos I usually look at are things like pictures of footbridges, concerning which there is really not a lot to be said, given how many such snaps abound on Flickr. But this snap (catchily entitled "DSC07222.JPG") is different because it is a photo of a rather violent political demo in France. This was taken by an accredited photographer, who had his card examined by the Police but who was then permitted to keep his snap. But, says one of the commenters:

i got all the photos and videos i took yesterday on my camphone deleted by a policeman who told me he would arrest if he ever saw me doing again. I don't know if he had the right to erase the photos, i should see about that.

Presumably not. My thanks and congratulations to Norwegian media blogger Kristine Lowe for the link to that, and for spotting the above comment. Kristine blogged earlier about the new French law.

If all French bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, and even those snapping a picture with their mobile phone camera and sending it to a relative, could be put on trial or fined for publishing footage from the frontlines. How bizarre, troubling, surreal. ...

Indeed. This is a huge issue. I was in Parliament Square not long ago and observed some hairy anti-war person being shoved into a Police van. The entire scene was surrounded by other demonstrators holding video cameras. They were subjecting to the Police themselves to surveillance, guarding the guardians you might say. I do not ever want that to be illegal in Britain, but in France, it would appear that it already is.

Expect a thriving market in fake "accredited photographer" cards. And expect things in France to get even more interesting, when, as they soon will, digital cameras become so small that it will be impossible for the Police or anybody else to spot them being used. In fact, expect things everywhere to get more interesting.

Meanwhile, I have been chronicling that brief moment when digital cameras are (were) quite small, but still visible in action.

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One of my lesser vices is that I take a certain childish delight in unexpectedly arriving at a party when all the other guests think I am on a different continent, or unexpectedly posting to Samizdata from Maputo. In truth, I am thinking that the "blogging from unexpected places" technique is getting a little tired. In addition, it often leads to my getting messages three days later from people who I might have wanted to meet, saying that if they had known I was in town they might have liked to have bought me a drink or shown me some interesting part of town I was not aware of. Therefore, let me do something a little different.

I will be in Paris from the 6th to the 10th of April - the Easter weekend from Friday morning to Monday evening. Does anybody want to get together for a Samizdata drinks session, or perhaps we could go out for dinner? The evening of Saturday April 7 might be good for it.

Secondly, does anybody know of a bar or pub in Paris that is showing the matches of the cricket World Cup live? In particular, I would like to watch at least some of the Australia v England game this is being played on April 8, Easter Sunday. Help on this matter would be appreciated.

In the "really long term planning" stakes, I will be in Singapore on Thursday December 20. If anyone wants to do an Asian Samizdata dinner that evening, that would also be a splendid thing.

And of course I shall be in many other places at various times in between.

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I have been keeping an eye on the French Presidential race, if only because it is high time perhaps that that great, sometimes infuriating country had the sort of leader who might unleash the entrepreneurial energies that do exist. (Entrepreneur being of course a French word). We like the witty French economics writer Bastiat at this blog and it would be lovely to think that some of his classical liberal spirit might return to that country.

Alas, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Gaullist candidate, has already signalled that he is as hostile to capitalism as any Sartre-reading socialist:

Nicolas Sarkozy will push for a European tax on “speculative movements” by financial groups, such as hedge funds, if he wins this year’s French presidential elections.

The centre-right candidate to replace Jacques Chirac said in comments published by Wednesday’s Les Echos, the Financial Times’s sister newspaper, that he aimed to “raise moral standards and improve security in financial capitalism”.

Hedge funds, which are investment pools usually registered in sunny Caribbean islands, have become a bugbear for protectionist-minded politicians, who fear the ability of these folk to quickly move in and out of a company's stock, a currency or bond to make a profit. Hedge funds typically amplify the size of the market positions they take by what is called leverage - borrowing to you and me - and from time to time their bets go badly wrong, as happened during the Russian debt default crisis 9 years ago. On the whole, though, hedge funds make markets more liquid and efficient by increasing the number of buyers and sellers in a market and their arbitrage skills remove inefficiencies in how assets get priced. They also, on a more venal level, generate enormous revenues for financial centres like London and Wall Street. They often put pressure on underperforming company boards to raise their act, which is hardly a bad thing. Like private equity buyout funds, however, hedge funds sound mysterious and a bit dodgy; they prefer to operate in secret and their PR is often awful. For most people, a hedge fund manager is a guy with a slicked haircut shouting into a telephone.

The French business culture, despite a few improvements, is overwhelmingly dirigiste, and can ill afford to give the finger to some of the sharpest financial talents around. If Sarkozy wants to market himself as a sort of French proto-Thatcherite, this seems hardly the way to go about it. Bashing speculators is the oldest and one of the grubbiest tricks in the political book. It plays on public ignorance about economics, it plays on envy at great wealth, and panders to the out-dated idea that wealth is only real if you can hit it with a hammer or or dig it out of the ground. Sarkozy should do his underperforming republic a favour and read some Bastiat instead.

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I missed this the other day... The French government, the same people who gave aid and comfort the the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, and have done everything they could to thwart the arrests of mass murderous Serbian war criminals in Bosnia, have decided to 'honour' one of their own. They have awarded the Legion D'Honneur, France's highest award, to Harold Pinter, that well know playwright, man of letters, literary colossus and apologists for mass murdering national socialist Slobodan Milosevic and mass murdering national socialist Saddam Hussain.

Vermin, one and all.

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The French involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 has been something about which the chattering classes have been largely indifferent, much to the annoyance of many Rwandans. The Rwandan government recently unceremoniously threw out the French embassy, and any French institutions with links to the French state, after a court in France issued arrest warrants against several leading Rwandans (including the president) for assassinating former President Habyarimana, whose death was the event that sparked the genocidal murder of 800,000 Tutsi. That was rather like France in 1956 calling for the arrest of the few surviving conspirators behind the (sadly failed) plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944.

I cannot escape the suspicion that if somehow, however tangentially, the USA was involved then articles about Rwanda would be a far more common thing in the media. That said, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has concocted a conspiracy theory that it was the CIA, rather than France, who was backing the Bad Guys in 1994, supplying the Interahamwe with machetes from a secret Halliburton machete factory in somewhere in Texas.

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An unsavoury developement of Le Web 3 in Paris, a conference about and for bloggers organised for the third time by Loic Le Meur of Six Apart. I have always considered Loic as one of the clued up people in this area and I will give him the benefit of the doubt as to what really happened. Politicians are a toxic breed. Dealings with them tend to backfire and so I'll wait to hear his side of the story. Jackie has more on this. Following a link from her post, I came across a comment that captures one of the fundamental differences between the Anglosphere and ze Europe.

The very notion that liberty can be restricted by rules and STILL be called liberty is very difficult for English or American people. Actually, I don't really know about the notion of liberty in the UK, but I do know that the Americans tend to define it as the absence of constraint (especially from the State... constraint from the dominant Opinion is still quite strong and widely accepted).

Now for the French side: liberty is defined as the ability to do what you want INSIDE of a collectively defined set of rules. See Rousseau on that matter.

I'm not pretending that any of these view is better than the other. But I think it helps why a Frenchman can say that liberty should be bound without (French) people gazing at him like he was a madman.

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There is now a very high chance that Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium operating the Channel Tunnel rail-link between London and the continent, could be liquidated by this September, having failed to reach a key agreement earlier this week with creditors. The saga of how the operator would persuade a group of banks to let it restructure a huge pile of debt has been chugging along for months. Now there is a real risk that this marvel of civil engineering could be known as one of the biggest transport commercial flops in history. The free-marketeer in me says well, the venture was never based on fully commercial grounds in the first place. The folks concerned probably no doubt rightly thought that if the project was a flop, then the fortunate taxpayers of Europe would pick up the tab, just as they did with that other venture of high-tech wonder and dubious economics, Concorde. The romantic in me would be very sad to see this wonder of rail come to an end. I have used the Eurotunnel service several times, both for work and for short breaks to France in recent years. Every time I have marvelled at the smoothness of the service, only occasionally marred by delays in the English side of the operation, or by the odd rude French ticket inspector.

It certainly beats messing around in airport lounges, that is for sure.

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Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French 'Google killer,' he "doesn't even know what a mouse is". And that comes directly from a guy who is a partner in the French non-'Google killer'. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:

So what is [Chirac] funding? Well, according to Bourdoncle, there will be no single Quaero site. Instead, Quaero is a program, a long term effort to spur various European competitors toward creating better search related technologies. Participants will share R&D, for example, as well as become each other's customers. In other words, this is a government funded attempt at pulling together a keiretsu of sorts.

Not exactly a European Google killer, I commented. Nope, Bourdoncle responded, and attempting to do that would be a pretty stupid move. I couldn't agree more. Sounds to me, I thought to myself, that Quaero is simply a way for huge companies like Thompson to insure a steady flow of dollars from its government, and if using the Big Google Is Going to Kill European Culture meme helps along the way, so be it. Before I could even mention that idea, Bourdoncle addressed it head on, saying he was sure folks might see it that way, and he was not one to say if it was true or not. "I'm not really sure what (Thompson's) strategy is," he said. "They don't tell me that." Sounds like the keiretsu is shaping up nicely, no?

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Jacques Chirac is, in typically sophisticated French fashion, subtly inferring that French culture reigns supreme amongst the illuminati of high civilisation:

When M Seillière, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M Seillière explained: "I'm going to speak in English because that is the language of business".

Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M Seilière had finished speaking.

I suppose it is always a positive when the children leave the room. Then the grown-ups can talk.

(Hat tip RWDB - J.F. Beck)

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I have always found group names quite interesting, such as a 'crash' of rhinos, 'school' of fish, a 'gaggle' of geese, a 'stupidity' of politicians, a 'conspiracy' of lawyers, etc... but what is a collection of French students to be called? Perhaps an 'unreasonableness'? Or would it be a 'perversity'? Or maybe a 'delusion' of French students?

Three hundred thousand of them were protesting and/or rioting because of attempts to change the laws that make no business in their right mind want to hire them in the first place. This is because if they turn out to be indolent layabouts, a company is still not allowed to fire them. So, as unemployment approaches 10% in France (or quite a bit higher according to some), demonstrating that something is just a tad wrong with the ways things work in France, these clever chappies want to motivate employers to continue to not hire people. Outstanding.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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