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On the Sunday between the two rounds of voting for the French presidential election, a curious thing happened in North-West London. Two Frenchmen rang the doorbell of my parents’ house and asked to speak to my mother (who is French). They wanted to know if she would be supporting Nicolas Sarkozy next Sunday, and if she had any doubts, would she like a leaflet outlining the President’s agenda for his second term. Naturally, not a word of English was spoken.
As it happens, I have never been canvassed in France for a French presidential, or any other kind of election. I was under the impression it was not done the same way as in the UK (privacy laws and so forth). Yet here were a couple of party activists, one white, the other of likely South-East Asian origin, wandering around London looking for swing voters. With about 400,000 votes cast by French citizens in the first round outside France (a turnout of nearly 40% of the registered overseas electorate), I can see why this get out the vote operation [GOTV] would exist. But even in London, where most of the UK’s half million French people live, it is not a case of calling door to door.
Before recent changes to French election law which create constituencies outside French territories that are represented in the National Assembly, presidential elections in the Fifth Republic (since 1962) were already a worldwide affair. Citizens in such French territories of Wallis and Futuna, Tahiti and Mayotte would cast votes at polling stations in Mata’utu, Papeete and Mamoudzou respectively. → Continue reading: National elections go global
“Listening to the candidates last night, it was clear that there is no pro-capitalist, pro-globalisation, low-tax, eurosceptic, outward looking party in France – there is no equivalent to the British Conservative party’s Thatcherite tendency. What passes for the centre-right in France is social-democratic and fanatically pro-EU; it is very different to the centre-right parties seen in English-speaking countries and many emerging markets. The “right-wing” eurosceptic candidate (who was crushed) is a protectionist who wants to tax the rich – and hates French workers who have moved to London. The only successful eurosceptics are the hard left who believe Brussels to be a capitalist plot and fascists who hate foreigners, the free market and multinationals.”
Allister Heath.
In the latest series of problems to hit the euro-zone, there are problems for the Dutch. Spain and previously, Italy, have been in the news for their economic woes. But France is the Big One. If this country – about the same in terms of wealth as the UK – votes for a socialist, with his promise to impose a 75% tax on those he deems rich, then the cafes, restaurants and schools in and around parts of London will ring even louder with the sounds of French accents than is the case already. The exodus of French people in recent years to these and other shores has been striking (they are not coming here for the weather). It is, if you like, a sort of French version of “Going Galt”, although I doubt any of the French political establishment has ever read Atlas Shrugged, nor cares.
I like France a lot and relish any chance to go there. In fact, during the two weeks of this year’s London Olympics, I am in the southwest of France, in a small town to the west of Montpelier. But I would not want, as a professional, to live in the country if it heads down a damagingly socialist path.
A couple of months ago now, I went ahead and bought that new camera that I had for quite a while been thinking about buying. The circumstance that provoked me into making a decision earlier than I otherwise would have done was a trip, early in February, to Paris. Yes, it was cold:
That’s a water feature, somewhat frozen when I photoed it, in La Défense, the big clump of modern architecture in the west of Paris.
The thing that clinched it for it, in favour of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, was how reviewer after reviewer used phrases like “an all round winner” and “all round best”, as in best for the sort of camera that I wanted, when writing about it. Such talk suggested to me: excellence in what I knew I wanted (zoom, picture quality, good video recording) together with excellence in other areas that I would only learn about after I had started using the thing. So it is proving.
The other camera I was considering buying was the Canon SX40 HS. I can’t compare my new Lumix with that, and will presumably never know for sure if I made the exact right choice. But I can compare my new Lumix with all the previous cameras I have ever owned, and in particular with my most recent previous camera, a Canon S5 IS. And I can now tell you that I am a very happy snapper. Could I have chosen even better? Perhaps. Have I meanwhile chosen well? It certainly feels that way now.
The x24 zoom supplied by the new Lumix is wonderful, just as I expected it would be. The Canon SX40 HS has x35 zoom, but I reckoned that x24 would suffice for my purposes and so it is proving:
That’s a snap taken last week from Primrose Hill. On a typical London day, the limits of how far your camera can see with clarity are set not by its lens but by the clarity of the air, which is mostly set at: not very. So I am very happy with my new zoom superpower.
Other improvements on my old Canon were not quite so expected. → Continue reading: My new Panasonic Lumix FZ150
Of course, a number of governments, including the late, unlamented one of Tony Blair, were prepared to hold their noses and do business with the now very dead former dictator of Libya, but this story about an alleged £42 million campaign contribution to Nicolas Sarkzoy in 2007, if true, would surely be the end of the diminutive president of France.
Excerpt:
“The “terms” for handing over the money were agreed in a meeting between the two men in Libya two years before Mr Sarkozy’s election, documents published by a French investigative website suggest.A memo obtained by the Mediapart site and handed to a judge alleges that the meeting on Oct 6, 2005 resulted in “campaign financing” of “NS [Nicolas Sarkozy]” being “totally paid”. At the time Mr Sarkozy was France’s interior minister with well-documented ambitions to succeed Jacques Chirac. Political financing laws ban candidates from receiving cash payments above €7,500 (£6,300) but Mediapart claims that €50”‰million mentioned in the memo were laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland.”
Of course, given the range of poisonous collectivists running for the job of French president, it is very much the case of “none of the above” if I were a citizen of that country and thinking about voting in the upcoming French elections this year.
I am in Paris, staying with occasional Samizdatista Antoine Clarke.
Photoed out of the Eurostar on the way, the M25 bridge over the Thames:
When I got there and after I’d settled in, we went out for supper and then went walking for a while.
Arc de Triomphe:
Old internal customs duties office, which ceased functioning in 1943:
Antoine on Twitter this morning:
Ice cold in Paris … And those nice straight boulevards make wonderful wind tunnels.
Michael Jennings on Twitter:
Brian is having a good time then?
Antoine:
Likes this.
Bastard.
We were going to go out walking today, but instead will be indoors, either at Antoine’s home or in some museum.
I suppose it’ll add some spice to history exams though. Get the wrong answer and you not only fail: you get carted off to jail as well.
– The concluding sentences of a piece by Mick Hartley criticising a new French law which, once President Sarkozy signs it, will make it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.
A Napoleonland theme park is being planned. I find it hard not to see this as being rather like “Hitlerland” but with more elegant looking clothing.
“All this [illicit trade] suggests that, while customs barriers stifled trade, they did not necessarily increase isolation. The `fortress’ of France was remarkably porous. Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open.”
Page 152, taken from The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb. The entire book is crammed with wonderful examples of French life down the ages, and in particular, I am struck by what were, by the standards of the time (18th and early 19th centuries) vast migrations of people within the country in a way that resembles the even longer migrations of people around the world today. Even the “Tour de France” cycle race seems to have its echoes in the heroic journeys made by pilgrims, travellers and labourers of ages past.
This is a great book if you are thinking of spending a week in that country. Robb has also written a fine biography of that giant of French literature, Victor Hugo.
As a new (slightly overweight) inhabitant of Neuilly-sur-Seine, I have got into the habit of walking the boundaries of this small suburb to the West of Paris [link in French]. The idea is to become familiar with the street names and neighbourhoods, and drop a few kilos in the process. At many of the main road junctions, rather nicely-built small brick houses can be found, looking like 19th century rural railway stationmasters cottages. They are in fact a vestige of one the French Revolution’s greatest failures, and probably the only thing the collaborationist government of Le Maréchal did right.
August 1st, 1943 is the date when Pierre Laval’s proposal to abolish internal customs tariffs in France came into effect. It was even done for a good reason: wartime hardship meant that the population of France was suffering enough trouble obtaining food at all without having to deal with a tax for crossing a city boundary.
One of the complaints that triggered the 1789 revolution was the practice of taxing the transport of goods within France. For nearly a decade, the “octroi” was eliminated, but restored by the Directorate in 1798. Several attempts were made to scrap the tax during the 19th century. At the turn of the 20th century, individual towns were allowed to scrap the tax, but many did not do so, due to the lack of an alternative source of revenue.
The Neuilly Octroi buildings have been preserved and in some cases have better (or worse) uses today. One of them is a shop selling newspapers and sandwiches. Another is the local office of a trade union syndicate, which I am guessing, is provided either free of charge or at a subsidized rate.
I like the fact that a reminder exists of a time when families would go out of town to buy such things as butter or jam, and smuggle it in baby prams to avoid the tax, less dramatic versions of Checkpoint Charlie. I have not checked, but Montmartre was outside the Paris octroi in the 19th century and as a result a lot of bars opened up offering the Parisian equivalent of “booze cruises.” This in turn became the spot where artists looking for cheap alcohol – especially absinthe – would hang out. So the octroi may well have had a profound indirect effect on the artistic careers of Salvador Dalí, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.
Pierre Laval was shot for his crimes in 1945. Scrapping the octroi was not one of them.
The easy part is taking all the photos. The slightly harder part is knowing which are worth foisting on other people, not least because foisting is more complicated than taking. Anyway, I hope you enjoy these Brittany holiday snaps which I took a couple of months ago and have now picked out as worth exhibiting here.
My usual Brittany airport destination has been Brest, quite close to where the friends whom I regularly visit live, in Quimper. But, probably because of the new and very obviously architect-designed buildings, all plate glass and shiny metal at peculiar angles, that have been constructed at Brest airport, Ryanair no longer sends its 737s from Stansted to Brest. It either costs them too much or it takes them too long to turn their planes around, or some combination of the two. Ryanair prefers its airports to be not very glorified sheds.
So instead I arrived in Brittany at Dinard, near the coastal town of St Malo. And when my friend came by car from the other end of Brittany to collect me, it made sense for us to have a wander around St Malo, which has a particularly fine smaller and older version of itself, right next to the sea, with a wall around it that you can walk on top of.
On the evening of my arrival I observed this:
What could it be? A wreck perhaps? Odd.
A week later, in the course of my return home, we visited St Malo again, and once again took a stroll around the old town walls. The tide, having been in when I arrived, was out, and all was revealed:
It’s a swimming pool, refreshed and replenished every time the tide comes in. Which makes a lot of sense. When the tide goes out in that particular part of coastal France, it goes out a long way, and wherever the sea is, my guess is that the currents in it can play evil tricks, what with the tides having such a long way to travel, and through such complicated places. How much nicer to wait for the tide to be out, and to take a swim in a nice safe pool, as this person obligingly proved for me.
Now here are a couple snaps of images done by other people, both timeless and universal in their different ways. First, an advertisement, on a bus shelter:
I don’t think I need comment on that, other than to say that I haven’t seen this particular advert in England. Which proves … I don’t know what.
Second, another universal set of circumstances:
Not very well photoed by me, for which apologies, through a shiny shop window. Had I been a cleverer photoshopper, I might have been able to straighten that out, but you surely get the picture, and clicking on it makes it that bit clearer, as with all of these snaps.
A sheep in the middle is saying “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me”, to get to the precipice quicker.
Again, I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions about what particular contemporary circumstance is being portrayed. Euro purchasers perhaps? You decide.
Finally, a surfer, photoed through rain:
This was taken at something called the Baie des Trépassés, which does not mean the Bay of the Very Out of Date. Trépassés means people who have trespassed as in “crossed over”, in other words people who are dead. The very same complicated coastal currents which caused anyone drowned at sea anywhere near it to wash up at the Baie des Trépassés (hence the name) now cause the waves in the Baie des Trépassés to be bigger than in any nearby places, hence the surfers. Of the many intriguing places I have visited in Brittany, this was the weirdest. The vile weather when I saw this place only added to the weirdness.
Buried deep in this article – which (and I realise this won’t go down very well here) is effusively positive about David Cameron and his attitude towards the internet and internet entrpreneurship, at any rate when compared with Nicholas Sarkozy – is the following extraordinary claim:
… France just banned the use of the words Facebook and Twitter on TV …
This report, however, at least adds the words “unless those specific words are a part of a news story”, which makes it somewhat less mad. Still mad, though.
Can it be true? The story seems to have come and gone sometime around one month ago, and my first guess was that maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t, but that the wave of derision which greeted it will by now have caused the French Government to say that it never said any such thing, and that what it did was was totally misunderstood, blah blah, clarification, we didn’t say it, we did say it but we didn’t mean it, malicious twisting by foreign commercial interests saying that we said what we said, how dare they?, blah blah.
Apparently not:
The French reason that mentioning the companies by name gives unfair “advertising” to giant social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Their logic: why give a leg up to Facebook, already worth millions, when there are dozens of smaller sites struggling to survive. So, to be extra fair, when signing off, the newscasters can suggest that their viewers follow them on a social media platform in which transmission is limited to 140 characters. Bon chance!
They’re not allowed to say “email” either.
Les Grenouilles are indeed strange people.
Our own Michael Jennings does his bit to stave off a new Ice Age by his almost obsessive amounts of globe-trotting, and I cannot compete with that, but I did my little bit at the weekend, as did a lot of other crazy people, by attending this event in France.
Ever since I watched the Steve McQueen film about the extraordinary 24-hour race in this part of France, I have wanted to go to Le Mans. I was not disappointed. The sight and sound of the cars setting off for the race, and then thundering down the Mulsanne Straight, or twisting around the S-bends after shooting down the track under the Dunlop Bridge, was unforgettable.
There is, I suppose, something very elemental about getting excited about the sight of such things, and of course, there is the satisfaction in how Man, by mastering technology, can produce cars able to go flat out for 24 hours and drive at such speeds, competitively, and live to tell the tale.
I shall definitely be going back.
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