Readers of Prospect Magazine may have noticed that the December issue carries the final France Profonde for a while (it’s about that excellent hedonist thinker and writer, Michel Onfray). Dogged by fear of getting stuck in a rut, all editors believe that change is necessary - if only to avoid a feeling of déjà-lu. One way to do that is to change the regular columns so they are not too, well, regular. David Goodhart feels that five years of the France Profonde column is enough for the moment. However that will not affect this blog, which he has kindly agreed to keep under the Prospect banner (although as someone unkindly remarked, that means he can continue to benefit from my time and energy (read: prodigious talent, scintillating wit, deep knowledge) while no longer having to pay for it).

In fact the two are quite different. A column has a set number of words (FP had 870), a blog has no restrictions of length. Cutting and refining from a first draft of say 1,400 words is, for me, one of the most satisfying aspects of commissioned writing. It is time-consuming but fascinating to see how writing works. Like film-making, it is not about wonderful sentences (or in film terms beautiful shots) but juxtapositions of words and ideas, so that if you take out one sentence something else further along that used to work, now doesn’t. It’s also satisfying to have a piece of writing you think is polished and tight and right to send. I shall miss it immensely (but simply don’t have the time to do that amount of refining to my blog).

The France Profonde column was I think one of the first in Prospect, following Mark Cousin’s excellent Widescreen column which richly deserves to continue. I think readers found them helpful, short moments of respite, coming up for air, in between the longer, more demanding articles. Certainly their number in the magazine has increased, mirroring (or causing?) the rapidly increasing readership, with now about ten columns - from Bagdad, on the law, on science as well as the arts.

Perhaps the main regret for the passing of the France Profonde column in a magazine that is making a serious mark with more and more readers, is that under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, France is becoming increasingly interesting to an international readership. But with luck I shall continue to write longer pieces for Prospect, and, as one of the deputy editors told me, we must assume that all Prospect readers use the web, so perhaps that increasing interest can be stimulated or partially satisfied on this blog. Anyway, just because the column is taking a rest, please do not stop reading (and talking about) the France Profonde blog.

Already, just 24 hours after the announcement that Jacques Chirac had been “mis en examen” (an official investigation had been opened against him) for corrupt practices, people are saying that he is too old, too frail, he shouldn’t be subjected to the ignominy of a trial, all that happened a long time ago, a line should be drawn beneath it. Forget it and let him live out his retirement in peace – after all, nobody was hurt, no terrible crime was committed. Possibly. It is a hard decision, and probably there is no right or wrong answer.

Ten years ago many people said the same thing about the members of the elite being rounded up for corruption by Eva Jolie, Eric Halphen and other examining magistrates. People said then that those charges referred to the past, another country, where things were done differently. Draw a line under it, they said, France is not the same now. Five years ago, during a BBC radio interview a senior French civil servant attacked me for a Prospect article on corruption in France, saying exactly the same thing, that all that was passé, French politicians are no longer corrupt, he said. Today Le Figaro says “Jacques Chirac’s mise en examen illustrates the end of an epoch and of a system.” Most of the French press agrees, that this is all vieux jeu, it doesn’t happen any more.

There are several reasons for not investigating M. Chirac. As well as the above, there is the question of whether France needs to be reminded of this sordid recent history just at the moment when it is struggling to turn the page with new hope and a new president, while at the same time suffering from strikes, low wages, high cost of living, sluggish growth, uncontrollable euro and frankly not a lot to laugh about. Don’t let’s add another depressive factor into the equation.

And yet, surely there is such a thing as truth? Don’t we want to know the truth? Do we want future historians to wonder eternally whether or not France’s 5th President of the 5th Republic was corrupt? Do we want them to make their judgements on hearsay?

There is another reason: the implication in today’s editorials is that today’s politicians are squeaky clean. Yet, as I wrote in a different Prospect article on political corruption in January of this year, 78% of French people consider their government “quite or very” corrupt. 70% believe their president [that is, Jacques Chirac] is corrupt, and 68% say MP’s are too. Whether or not they really are corrupt, with that sort of public image you would think there might be some concerted effort to purge. All politicians are open to corruption and doubtless many are tempted - but that doesn’t mean to say the voters have to turn a blind eye.

Certainly the present investigation into Jacques Chirac is looking at malpractices that happened when he was mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995 (when he became president). However, saying it all happened too long ago is not a reason for not investigating, nor is it a reason for deciding to amnesty the former president if there are charges to answer. It is, however, an excellent reason for changing the way the French legal system works - and what better way to make a clean break with the past, to truly draw a line under all that undoubtedly dodgy practice? Reformers of French justice like Rachida Dati should be asking themselves why it takes so long to bring members of the elite to court. M. Chirac of course had special reasons, spending 12 years in an untouchable cocoon, but all the major corruption trials of the past decade have involved old men staggering into court with their zimmer frames, their naturally watery eyes are mistaken for tears of regret. Inevitably the court takes pity on them and they receive suspended sentences. That example can only encourage their successors. Like those now middle-aged involved in the Clearstream affair, and how many others…..?

If your day is as cold, rain-swept and wind-dominated as mine, warm the cockles of your heart for a brief moment with this enjoyable video available on Daily Motion - particularly if you can still remember bopping the night away to that ridiculous hit by the Village people back in the ’70’s, YMCA. The letters have been changed to SNCF, the lyrics, hard to catch, can be found, in French, on Charles Bremner’s blog. Basically “We have no competition, we are the kings of France, we’re always right, we take you for fools……” The opening’s a bit long if your French is rusty, but once the music cuts in it’s fun.

Always keen to break with French presidential tradition, Nicolas Sarkozy has added another first to his cap – taking it upon himself to announce who would be the new boss of a major (supposedly independent) French newspaper, the leading financial daily, Les Echos. Always pass-master at communication, Sarkozy is now getting particularly clever at controlling those who talk about him.

According to Rue 89, which has interviewed the people concerned, the President’s announcement caught everyone off-guard, including the person it concerned most, the new boss. Until two weeks ago Les Echos belonged to the British Pearson Group, which also owns the FT. Much to the horror of those working on the paper, they were sold to the businessman Bernard Arnault, who owns LVMH (think of Louis Vuitton bags’, Veuve Clicquot, Krug, Château d’Yquem - that kind of thing), purveyors of luxury goods and a close friend of M. Sarkozy – he was the best man at the Sarkozy’s wedding. Fearing that the influence of such a powerful business magnate and close friend of the President would hobble their objectivity – much of Les Echos is taken up with articles about the business world – the staff had objected strongly and had gone on strike over the purchase. That much was history, but the scene on Friday evening at the Elysée Palace took everyone by surprise.

The senior editors of Les Echos were invited to a discussion with the President. They assumed it would be an off-the-record briefing to hear the President’s views on the rail strike and his reforms. Who knows, perhaps he was even interested in their views? That at any rate was how the President’s press advisor, herself a journalist on the weekly magazine Le Point, set up the meeting. Indeed, still according to rue 89, at first they did talk about the social climate, the cost of living, the cost of the strikes – nitty-gritty that would interest financial journalists. Then quite unexpectedly, “d’un ton cassant” (brooking no contradiction), the President told them they were fools to fight the purchase of their paper by his friend Bernard Arnault, who “is a good man” and willing to invest in their paper. Finally, at the end of the interview, Sarkozy suddenly said: “And what about Nicolas Beytout?” Dead silence: everyone realised the President was telling them the name of their new boss. “The visitors were estomaqués (speechless).” Beytout, as editor-in-chief of Le Figaro, is much respected, with a reputation for protecting his journalists from forceful and meddling owners (Le Figaro is owned by another close friend of Sarkozy, the aeroplane and arms manufacturer Serge Dassault), but nevertheless Beytout is one of Sarkozy’s close circle, invited to the now infamous dinner at Fouquet’s on election night to celebrate Sarkozy’s victory.

“Breaking the silence,” Rue 89 continues, “Sarkozy repeated: ‘What about Nicolas Beytout?”
“So from now on it’s official: the President of the Republic himself announces the nominations for the media bosses.”

When Rue 89 telephoned Beytout two days later, he was surprised at what the President had said, adding that he hadn’t yet discussed the matter with his boss, Serge Dassault. One can imagine that neither was best pleased at this flagrant breach of internal etiquette – mere journalists discomfiting the mighty owner and his editor.

Beytout in fact is moving job to become the head of Arnault’s as yet unformed media group – the excitingly-named LVMH Medias. As well as owning Les Echos it is known that M. Arnault has his eyes on the FT, which Pearson also wants to sell, and the most popular TV channel, TF1 which Bouygues (owned by yet another close friend of Sarkozy, indeed the man he calls his brother) is no longer interested in.

One aspect of Sarkozy’s 6 months’ presidency that has been criticised by many experts in France and abroad is his lack of knowledge (putting it politely) of economic matters. I imagine nothing would please him more than to have a close friend own the main daily British and French financial newspapers.

Yesterday, while all eyes were focussed on the rail strike, an extremely disappointing piece of news slipped out quietly under the radar. The Constitutional Council has formally forbidden any studies which differentiate French citizens according to their ethnic origins or grouping. In other words it looks as though perfectly serious questionnaires such as the national census are still not allowed to ask whether the respondent or their family come or came from North or West Africa, or anywhere else. Thus it will continue to be impossible to know accurately how many people in France come originally from outside France and for the foreseeable future people (particularly tub-thumping politicians) will continue to be able to claim there are 5 million people of Arab origin, or 3, or 6 – choosing an emotive figure that suits their political point of view.

The ironically-named sages decided allowing people to ask such a question, or to carry out and publish such a study, would contravene Article 1 of the French Constitution: “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic,” which “guarantees the equality before the law of all citizens, regardless or origin, race or religion.” But they do not explain why asking someone about where they or their family come from should affect their rights under the law. As it stands at the moment the law only allows questions about ethnicity if the person asked gives their permission. The inability to ask everyone about their origins seems particularly ridiculous when it is quite obvious from their skin colour.

Libération this morning publishes an interview with Patrick Simon, a socio-demographer who with a team from Ined has been working on a study called “Trajectoires et Origines”: the Constitutional Council’s decision may bin two years of good work and deprive us all of valuable information. The first thing Simon said to the paper was “Well, the statement is a bit difficult to decode.” One may well ask what is to be gained by announcing some legal measure in terms that are “difficult to decode”. Simon goes on to say “Neither we nor anyone else has the definition of ethnic origin nor of race. That’s not just in France, that’s in most countries. In our studies we ask the question about skin colour, is that the same as race?” Another example of the statement’s ambiguity is that the Constitutional Council says specifically “origin or race”, whereas the Constitution says “regardless of origin, race or religion”. Does that mean you can ask someone about their religion, but not where they come from? Or did the sages just leave it out by mistake?

I caught the tail end of an interview on France Inter this morning with Bruno Racine, the president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He was just announcing a new version of the much maligned Gallica, the initiative launched a couple of years back to digitalise a large part of the BNF’s collection of books and documents and make them available on-line. The original Gallica, rather like the similarly criticised Galileo, the pan-European satellite navigation system, was a deeply Chiraquian venture: both were conceived as bold European initiatives (copying existing American technologies) so that when war (between Europe and America) comes, as it was felt inevitably it must, the Europeans would a) be able to read ancient books and b) be able to travel without maps. Gallica, the brain-child of the then president of the BNF Jean-Noël Jeanneney, was in fact seen as a direct rival to Google books. Jeanneney was horrified by the idea that the American world view would not only dominate every other, but future generations would only have that as their source and inspiration. He particularly took against the anglo-saxon view of the French Revolution which, from Dickens to Schama, passing by the “Scarlet Pimpernel”, has concentrated on the Terror and not on the Rights of Man.

When I interviewed M. Jeanneney in May 2006, he was hugely optimistic about the technical brilliance of Gallica. I remember protesting rather feebly that on my PC I could never get beyond the facsimile title page, which he didn’t hear as a criticism of his system but as an admission of my inadequacies. From the moment I filed my France Profonde I never looked at Gallica again. So it was a surprise this morning to hear the new BNF president churning out the same optimism for Gallica 2. The interviewer seemed deeply bored by the subject and just as sceptical. His intonation gave the impression he was doing the interview under duress, because his boss had told him public radio has some sort of obligation to broadcast the ideas of the president of the national library. “How much will Gallica 2 cost? 4 million euro a year. “Who’s paying for it?” unable to conceal the rhetorical nature of the question. “The state,” replied the BNF proudly.

In fact Gallica 2 looks far better than its predecessor – it even seems to sense that my PC is English because it opens on an English page. Only the Beta version is running at the moment, and will be added to almost daily over the next few years. You can search by character, for a particular work, a topic, a place or under themes such as biology or whatever. I typed in “Montaigne” and got 462 results – 19th century biographies and studies mainly, which look as though they would only interest the thesis writer, as well of course as different editions of the Essays. I couldn’t see anything as modern as Alain Juppé’s biography of him, presumably because it’s under copyright. Typing in “Emma Bovary” gave only 11 answers, including the catalogue of the 1980 centenary exhibition. The idea is the same as Gallica 1, you read a facsimile page, so you can’t scroll quickly but have to plod page by page – but then you have that delightfully olde worlde feeling of reading a real book (off the screen). The themes are not up to much at the moment – go to the Discovery page, click on any subject and every time all I got was “No documents were found for your search”. This is nothing to do with Gallica 2, you understand, it’s clearly me being inadequate - probably my English way of clicking or something.

The uncertainty over whether tomorrow’s rail strike is affecting me badly. Is it going to be just for 24 hours or reconductible (carried over into the following day(s), and if so how many days could it go on for?). Next Tuesday (the day the fonctionnaires hit the street) I’m supposed to be in Paris to take part in a seminar on “La France qui se réinvente?” (note the question mark) and I do not want (cannot afford) to get stuck in Paris if the strike goes on and on. It is quietly ironic that the reinvention of France might be compromised by that much-loved old-stager “la rue”.

The striking train drivers have a point, though, that I haven’t seen bandied around much: if train drivers have to work 40 years before they can retire, the chances are that during the last five or six years of their career a good many will fail their medical tests (it terrifies me to know that the pilot who was going to fly the 103 “orphans” out of Chad is 75! Indeed he had to be flown home in an ambulance plane!). If they are not medically fit to be drivers, where will they be parked until they retire? Probably sorting paper clips. But since nobody expects them to take a cut in salary for the last few years of their service, that means they would be sorting paper clips at a ridiculously high wage – which would in turn create extreme jealousy with career paper-clip sorters. As anyone who understands French bureaucracy knows, the repercussions of a strike of paper-clip sorters would be wider and far more damaging than a strike of train drivers. Which is why the one union which has done a deal with the government, the FGAC, wants its drivers to be promoted if they fail their medical. But promoted where? And since pension is based on the last 6 months’ salary, that would bump up their pensions (which is why they are willing to consider it). But paying higher pensions to retired drivers for 30 or more years would cancel out the financial advantages of having working drivers paying their cotisations for an extra 2 ½ years. Sometimes it’s wiser to let things be, for all their imperfections.

Also on the strike, Eric le Boucher has a good piece in Le Monde pointing out the differences in approach to reforms and strikes taken by Mrs. Thatcher and M. Sarkozy. Quite rightly M. Boucher treats the whole idea of comparing the two countries with great caution, but he does point out that whereas Sarkozy is rushing as fast as he can into changing every aspect of France at once, Mrs. T took her time before confronting the miners. Indeed at first, for all their then power, she refused to have anything to do with them, while Sarkozy sees them and buddies-up to them as much as he can. Mrs. T waited until her second mandate, after “her” victory in the Falklands and only once the economy was looking brighter before she took them on. Sarkozy, M. Boucher implies, should wait. He may have a point, but Milton Friedman’s adage that unless a new government “makes major changes in the first few months after being elected, the tyranny of the status quo will assert itself and prevent further change”, also holds good.

Coming back to my problem of whether or not to book my train and hotel for Paris next week, M. Boucher makes the strong point that Sarkozy cannot afford to back down over the special pension regimes. In that sense the outcome of the strikes is not in doubt: Sarkozy will have his way. He has staked too much of his presidency and all his credibility on this reform (which is mild compared to the up-coming reform of the Code du travail). If he fails he will be seen everywhere as just another Chirac. Thus the key to the strike is not Sarkozy but the unions, who have to follow their members or lose them to their more radical rivals.

As coda to the last blog, there’s an interesting piece in this week’s Canard Enchainé about Maud Fontenoy, an indefatigable sailor, best known for rowing alone across the Atlantic from West to East in 2003 and her disputed single-handed sail round the world against the currents in 2006. She’s another personality from outside politics who Nicolas Sarkozy wants to bring into the government - perhaps for her penchant for doing everything alone. However much to everyone’s surprise, she declined his offer to become junior minister for youth for the beautifully simple and disarmingly honest reason that “accepting this job would mean giving up her television programme and the royalties due to it. It would mean giving up the book-signing sessions for her two new publications [most authors would give anything, perhaps even work in government, to get out of that], giving up her contract “appréciable” with Oreal.” Nothing high-minded you understand: before she can look after others she needs to look after herself. “I don’t have time in my diary to fit in working for the government. It’s already full with the publication of my two books, a documentary about my round-the-world trip…..”

Most people asked to become a minister talk piously about “public duty” and “selflessly serving la patrie”. I find such honesty refreshing. It may also be that as an experienced sailor she senses which way the wind is blowing. The two items she mentions filling her diary will be over by Christmas – perhaps she doesn’t see the present government lasting much longer.

Oh the cynicism of it all! It is becoming increasingly difficult to have faith in the French government – not as a government necessarily but as a bunch of individuals who are supposed to have some integrity.

Ten days ago former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur handed in his 77 proposals for reforming parliament and the way France is governed. Article 23 suggests putting an end to the practice of dual or triple mandates for ministers: once asked to be part of a government one should drop all elected positions – mayor, member of regional council or (most surprisingly) member of parliament. Many people in France welcome the proposal as a first step to ending all dual mandates, believing that someone who is, say, mayor of a large town (i.e. has municipal responsibilities), member of the regional council, member of parliament and government minister must be split in too many directions to do justice to all his/her jobs – or conversely may be pushing his/her local interests too much at a national level to the exclusion of others. Local lobbying is no less insidious than lobbying by industrials - particularly when the person doing the lobbying is a government minister. The text of the 18th proposal is quite clear on this point: “The functions of a member of the government are incompatible with the exercise of all elected mandates.” It is indeed hard to know how they do any of their jobs well. I have a friend who has three mandates and spends only two days a week in Paris working at his parliamentary duties, indicative of how little importance he gives them.

Balladur’s Report has to be first of all thought about by the president. It then has to be debated and voted upon by parliament. However, last night the Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, who holds no elected office, announced that she will stand as mayoress for one of the Paris arrondissements. In other words without waiting to see how parliament votes she is seeking a double mandate, clearly believing that Balladur’s proposal will be thrown out. Given her high profile and the publicity she knew would surround her announcement, she must be pretty certain of her ground.

Part of Balladur’s remit was to give the French parliament a bit more power: Dati’s announcement last night shows us what she (and presumably her mentor Nicolas Sarkozy) thinks of that.