Robert Zaretsky

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Demonstrators with a banner which reads as “for retirement gold and platinum” during a rally called by French trade unions in Nantes, western France, last week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

EuropaUnión Europea

France has been gripped recently by a wave of strikes and demonstrations — protesters old and young, rural and urban, progressive and conservative, blue and white collar, all taking to the streets to protest their government’s effort to nudge the retirement age from 62 to 64.

It all seems so déjà vu. Yet, as trade unions and political parties mobilize for a new and perhaps greater wave of strikes on Tuesday, we might take a break from our workday to glance at the country’s history. Are the French, as the stereotype goes, being just lazy?

Statistical tables offer one startling answer.…  Seguir leyendo »

French baguettes on display at The French Bastards bakery in Paris on Nov. 30. (Yoan Valat/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

EuropaUnión Europea,

France is on a roll. A cylindrical roll, to be precise. Weeks after French novelist Annie Ernaux earned the Nobel Prize for literature, the French baguette has bagged UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage prize. Along with Indian yoga, Irish hurling and Iranian oud playing, baguette-making has now been consecrated as a tradition “inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants” that maintains “cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization”.

Sadly, UNESCO’s announcement is as laughable as it is laudable.

Savor the opening line: The baguette, it declares, is “the most popular kind of bread enjoyed and consumed in France throughout the year”.…  Seguir leyendo »

French President Emmanuel Macron campaigning in Saint-Denis, France, April 2022. Francois Mori / Pool / Reuters

EuropaUnión Europea

On June 19, France entered what could be a state of political paralysis. In last April’s presidential election, a rematch of the country’s 2017 contest, French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his extreme right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen, with 58.6 percent of the vote. But in the June legislative elections, Macron’s center-right coalition failed to win a majority in the 577-member National Assembly. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) won a historically remarkable 87 seats—more than ten times the number it previously controlled. A conservative party, Les Républicains, won 64. And a coalition of four leftist parties, New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES), led by the acerbic and often antagonistic hard-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, took 131 seats.…  Seguir leyendo »

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris and the presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party, has warned there may be no future for the left in France. (Ian Langsdon/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

EuropaUnión Europea,

In 1987, the French comedian Guy Bedos quipped, “The left is now the center, the center is now the right, and the right is now the extreme right.” More than 30 years later, the right has become more extreme while the extreme right has become respectable. As for the left, it is missing in action.

This is not at all a laughing matter. Thanks to the Socialist Party, democracy in France has tended to rhyme with generosity and humanity. With the presidential election just four months away, the case of the missing left may well have dire consequences for this older and greater understanding of democracy.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea

This week, Emmanuel Macron reinvented himself. In a televised address on the coronavirus epidemic, the man who began his presidency two years ago as a liberal Europeanist reappeared as a Charles de Gaulle-style nationalist. Both the future of France and future of Macron’s presidency rest on how well he negotiates this transformation.

The speech, watched by a record-breaking number of people — some 35 million viewers — was set at the Élysée Palace, against the spare backdrop of a gilded wall and French and European Union flags. Dressed in his habitual blue suit, blue tie and white shirt, Macron spoke for 20 minutes, explaining the precautionary measures the government had already taken and urging the French to obey them.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, , , , , ,

When Dooley Wilson, playing the role of Sam in the classic film “Casablanca,” croons to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman that “a kiss is just a kiss,” he could not have been more wrong. They were gathered, after all, in Paris — a city where une bise, or kiss, is never just une bise.

The coronavirus pandemic has just reminded the world of the complexity of kissing in France. At a news conference last Saturday, the French minister of health, Olivier Véran, discussed the government’s measures against the disease’s spread. Observing that “the smallest gestures offer the greatest protection,” Véran urged the French to avoid shaking hands with others.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Emmanuel Macron, left, with General Pierre de Villiers at a Bastille Day parade earlier this month. Credit Stephane Mahe/Reuters

EuropaUnión Europea

After a weeklong battle of wills with President Emmanuel Macron, France’s military chief, Pierre de Villiers, resigned on Wednesday. The president, in forcing the hand of General de Villiers, took a page from the playbook of Charles de Gaulle, the strong-willed former general who founded the country’s Fifth Republic in 1958. But as Mr. Macron soon discovered, the Gaullist rules of politics no longer apply.

As the first president of the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle wished to impose on the nation — and on its military — an executive authority so powerful that France would regain not just stability, but also its former glory in world affairs.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea

In French, the word “déchéance” has several meanings, all of them bleak. It can refer to the fall of a civilization, or the degradation of the social fabric. More formally, it means the forfeiture of a right or a possession — one’s citizenship, for example. All three meanings, carrying echoes of the country’s experience under Vichy, resonate in a political drama unfolding in France.

Two weeks ago, the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, delivered a stunning blow to the French revolutionary ideal that citizenship is no less indivisible than the republic itself. He announced at a news conference that his government would introduce legislation this year to amend the Constitution to allow the government to strip French citizenship from individuals who are found guilty of acts of terrorism — but only if they are among the three million French citizens who hold dual nationality.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaUE a debate

On Oct. 13, 1765, the writer James Boswell arrived in Corsica to meet the nationalist hero Pasquale Paoli. The trip was remarkable in part because the island — home to a wild people fighting one another when not fighting off foreign conquerors — had never before been explored by someone from England. It was no less remarkable because Boswell, though a resident of London, was not English, but rather a Scot, whose conservative Tory politics mixed with romantic nostalgia for his own nation’s lost independence.

As Boswell later explained in his account of his visit with Paoli, he wanted “to find what was to be seen no where else, a people actually fighting for liberty.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Tourists look at the work of painters in Place du Tertre in the Montmartre district of Paris on August 16, 2015. (Patrick Kovarik / AFP/Getty Images)

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Eleven women have caught the attention of the thousands of tourists visiting Paris' celebrated Montmartre neighborhood. They are les dames pipi — the peepee ladies. Though their name suggests an avant-garde theatrical troupe, they instead represent the rearguard of one of France's less glorious but still vital professions: the women who clean and service the city's public restrooms.

Since July 1, the dames pipi have formed a picket line at the public toilets in Montmartre, blocking access to the facilities. Anyone who has ever pounded the Parisian pavements in pursuit of a loo can appreciate the consequences. Desperate tourists are besieging nearby restaurants and cafes, which limit access to their frequently dubious restrooms to their clients.…  Seguir leyendo »

Greece-EU standoff: Echoes of 'Antigone'

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía

The frantic negotiating to resolve Greece's debt crisis before Sunday's deadline is a race that launched a thousand cliches. We're told that the Greeks have embarked on a new odyssey in uncharted waters, that as the EU tightens the screws, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande have left the door open and that the world is holding its breath, though the economic details are Greek to us.

And, of course, countless headlines insist we're watching a Greek tragedy unfold. It's hard to blame the editors and columnists: After all, tragedy goes hand in hand with Greece, just like ouzo and "Mamma Mia!"…  Seguir leyendo »

Statue of the Greek philosopher Thucydides Credit Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía

A foreign delegation representing a powerful alliance confronts a small Mediterranean country with an ultimatum. Either join our alliance, pay ruinous dues and cede your national sovereignty, or you will be destroyed. Unwilling to allow the delegation to present its case to their fellow citizens, the country’s political elite tries to buy time. But appeals to reason, pragmatism and common decency fail to budge the visitors. When the elite finally replies that it is not prepared to surrender its nation’s freedom, the delegation withdraws and, true to its threat, crushes the rebellious country.

Sound familiar? Apart from a few details, the situation resembles the present standoff between Greece and the European Union.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

Before the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks on Jan. 7, France was bracing for a dispute that, though neither violent nor volatile, nevertheless goes to the heart of the internal tensions over the role of religion in this devoutly secular country. After a tense, week-long negotiation between a special committee and the minister of the economy, Emmanuel Macron, the National Assembly will begin debate Monday on whether department stores and shops will be allowed to open more often on what has been a traditional day of rest.

During his presidential campaign in 2012, François Hollande lambasted the Right for its efforts to transform Sunday into a day like any other, devoted to business and material gain.…  Seguir leyendo »

An image grab taken from an Islamic State propaganda video released on Nov. 16 shows a fighter, on the right, believed to be French citizen Maxime Hauchard. (AFP/Getty Images)

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea,

The Islamic State video marking the executions of 18 captured Syrian soldiers along with American aid worker Peter Kassig shocked the world for the usual reasons and one more as well. The militants did not wear masks. Two who appeared in the video, Michael Dos Santos and Maxime Hauchard, are French citizens. Their unmasking allowed the French to put faces to two of the more than 1,000 of their countrymen estimated to have given themselves to Islamic State and its terrifying worldview.

These particular faces have blurred the typical profile of a French Islamic militant: young men of a particular socioeconomic and psychological stamp, offspring of North African immigrants, no longer part of their parents' world and not yet part of their new world.…  Seguir leyendo »

Jean Jaurès, the founder of France's Socialist Party, giving a speech on the outskirts of Paris in 1913. Credit Maurice-Louis Branger/Roger-Viollet

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April was the cruelest month for François Hollande. The French president, battered by abysmal poll ratings, traveled to the southwestern town of Carmaux to commune with the spirit of its native son, Jean Jaurès, the founder of France’s Socialist Party, titanic tribune of the people and tireless defender of the values of 1789.

Desperate to save his own political hide, Mr. Hollande hoped he would somehow profit by identifying publicly with the man who ever since his assassination in 1914 — on the eve of the outbreak of the catastrophic war that he had fought so hard to prevent — has become a modern icon of French greatness, perhaps second only to Charles de Gaulle.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica,

Though the votes have not yet been counted in Thursday's presidential election in Algeria, the result is all but decided: President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will win a fourth term.

Bouteflika's long reign is unprecedented (and unconstitutional), and so is the nature of the election. The ailing and frail 77-year-old Bouteflika had not made a single public or televised campaign appearance until this month's meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in which Bouteflika looked more dead than alive.

Indeed, one critic, novelist Yasmina Khadra, calls Bouteflika's government a "zombie regime." The president — a functionary of the National Liberation Front, the party that has owned Algeria since its independence in 1962 — is entrenched, propped up by generals and an uneasy status quo.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea

Future historians of France may well decide that the Fifth Republic died as it was born: in a traffic incident.

As France and much of the world now know, part of President François Hollande’s morning routine of late has been to zip on his moped between the Élysée Palace and an apartment on the aptly named Rue du Cirque for romantic trysts with the actress Julie Gayet. While his partner, Valérie Trierweiler, and his interior minister, Manuel Valls, were unaware of these jaunts, the paparazzi, cameras trained on the building, shot a helmeted Mr. Hollande entering and leaving by the front door.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfricaEuropaUnión Europea,

For food, fashion and fast trains, few labels are more sought after, and rightly so, than "Made in France." But when it comes to the making and unmaking of empires, not so much. Take the case of the Central African Republic.

Three weeks ago, as bloody mayhem engulfed the CAR, François Hollande did what French presidents do best: He sent in the paratroops. With the blessing, and precious little else, of his European neighbors, Hollande declared his intention to protect 100 or so French nationals in Bangui, the capital, and to disarm both the outlawed Seleka fighters, overwhelmingly Muslim, and the vigilante anti-balaka (or "machete") militias, which are Christian.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesTestimonios

Albert Camus, who would be 100 years old Thursday, is ageless. The French Algerian's life and work reflect the long tragedy of the 20th century, marked by disquiet, genocide and violence, but his diagnosis of our absurd condition, and his effort to find not a cure (there is none) but the proper response, tie him just as firmly to the new millennium.

Camus lived on intimate terms with the absurd. He lost his father, whom he never knew, in the war to end all wars that emphatically failed in that regard. He was a French intellectual from working-class Algiers, a writer raised by a grandmother who could not read and a mother who could not read and could scarcely speak.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

In the politics of national identity, as with the politics of real estate, there are three cardinal rules: location, location, location. Few events better illustrate this truth than the current debate in France over whose earthly remains best belong in the basement of a hulking neo-Classical pile with a fissuring dome and bricked-up windows that looms over Paris — otherwise known as the Panthéon.

The Panthéon was not always what one wit called the “Académie Française of the dead.” Commissioned by King Louis XV to honor the patron saint of Paris, the church of Saint Génèvieve was completed just as the king’s son, Louis XVI, lost his throne and, eventually, his head to the revolution.…  Seguir leyendo »