A French economist, Henri Sterdyniak, says that pensioners
are among the most privileged groups in the country, while younger people are much less well treated. In general, the gap in living standards between those who are still in work and those who are retired is only nine per cent in France, compared to 20 per cent in the UK.
The pensions that are paid to people in France have been steadily improving over the past 40 years. When the Sécurité Sociale was started in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, people reaching 65 could expect a pension that was 45 per cent of their final salary. By 1972, this figure had risen 50 per cent, but since then, the
increases have been dramatic. However, in 1993, pensions started to be indexed to prices rather than to salaries, which meant that for some pensioners, the amount they got started to decrease. Today, although most pensioners in France are comparatively well off, there are still 10 per cent of pensioners who are on the basic monthly State pension of €787. Other countries pay pensions equal to what’s available in France, but where France scores is that compared with other European countries, like Ireland, the cost of living is far cheaper. It costs 30 per cent more to live in Ireland than it does in
France; in Ireland, the big mark-up in retail prices compared to other countries, like France and the UK, is still the order of the day.
One symbol for younger people in France is, however, creating a lot of problems - the love padlocks that have been placed over the years on the bridges of Paris. It’s a demonstration of love that has become too popular; now, the city council says that there’s a risk of love padlocks causing lumps of
masonry to fall off some bridges onto the many tourist boats that ply the Seine. One bridge in particular has attracted people wanting to declare their love for their partner, the Pont des Arts, which is absolutely festooned with love padlocks. On this particular bridge, the sheer quantity of love padlocks is starting the damage the parapet, creating the possibility of bits of masonry
falling onto boats below. So there are now reports that the city council is secretly removing as many love padlocks as possible from bridges at high risk and binning them. The whole trend of placing love padlocks began in Italy and there, the authorities are far stricter. On the Ponte Milvio in Rome, they are banned, while on the even more famous Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the local authority has removed them altogether.
Another icon of France, especially for tourists, has also come a cropper. The Canal du Midi in
south-western France was constructed in the 17th century and opened in 1682. It runs for 240 kms and it’s so popular that 50,000 tourists take boating holidays along it every year. One of the big scenic attractions has long been the plane trees that line its banks, but now, the ravages of a fungus are all too
evident. When American troops arrived in France towards the end of the Second World War, the munitions they brought with them were stored in wooden boxes. These boxes contained an American fungus, ceratocystis platani, which was first spotted in the trees lining the Canal du Midi back in 2006. Already, about 15,000 trees have either been felled, or are about to be felled, and the tree experts believe that all 42,000 trees lining the canal will have to be cut down over the next 20 years.
It could cost up to €200 million to plant new trees, but recently, when the Voies Navigables de France, the country’s inland waterways organisation, appealed for private donations in the absence of
any national or local funding, to help the replanting programme, the results were derisory to say the least. The first three weeks of the campaign only brought in 30 donations, some as low as €20.
It’s often said that when the French look for a scapegoat to blame for their ills, they pin the blame on the Americans. In the case of the Canal du Midi, it is literally true. Which makes the support that President Hollande wants to give the US in punishing Syria for that country’s government allegedly using chemical weapons, all the more strange. True, the French have a close interest in Syria, since it was once part of the French colonial empire, but most people in France, like those in the
UK, are vehemently opposed to France helping to launch missile strikes against Syria.
Such missile strikes could literally open the Pandora’s Box of the Middle East conflicts. President Assad of Syria wasn’t so far off the mark the other day when he said that the whole Middle East is like a powder keg and that an American led attack on his country could well be the spark that causes the whole lot to blow up.
Just yesterday, September 3rd, I heard a clip from one of the most famous radio speeches of all times, that made by UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, on September 3rd, 1939, when he declared that since Germany had ignored the ultimatum to withdraw from Poland, Britain was now at war with Germany. No matter how many times you hear this speech, it still has a chilling effect, and the way things are going in the Middle East, we might well be hearing its present day counterpart any time soon.
It all reminds me of a very strange occurrence last Thursday morning in British Columbia, the far western province of Canada. There, in a normally sedate suburb called Terrace, residents were woken up by a strange noise coming from the sky, which they later said sounded like the trumpets of the Apocalypse. A local resident was woken up by the noise; she’d heard something very similar back in June, but not nearly as strongly. She got out her video camera, went outside and recorded the whole phenomenon. It’s been widely reported in the media in British Columbia, but doesn’t seem to have
caused any stir outside Canada. I’ve seen and heard the short videos and I must say I agree with the residents of Terrace and their description of the noise coming from the skies, that it sounded like the trumpets of doom.
There’s damnation too facing France’s winegrowers. This year is going to see the worst grape harvest for the past 40 years, because earlier this year, France had so much cold, wet weather, with lots of hail storms that caused immense damage to the vines. The end result is that this year’s wine production is expected to be 43.5 million hectolitres, well below average, making this year’s wine production even worse than last year’s. So cheers/santé while you can!
Still, despite all the doom and gloom, the antics of French screen actor Gérard Depardieu are always good for a smile. He’s just been made an honorary citizen of Belgium, having settled in his new home at Nechin, literally just across the border from France. The tax laws in Belgium are far less onerous than the proposed top rate of tax of 75 per cent in France, so many wealthy French people, like Depardieu, have decamped to Belgium. At the beginning of this year, Depardieu was also given honorary Russian citizenship and by now, the actor is thought to own passports from a total of
eight countries!
This month sees the 70th anniversary of the first publication of the book about the Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was a fascinating character, an aristocrat, a writer, an aviator, an inveterate womaniser, and even though this metaphsyical book for children is only 100 pages long, it has caught the world’s imagination ever since it has published. By now, it has been translated into some 250 languages around the world. The end of the little prince is almost a preview of the end of
the writer himself, when his military plane crashed into the Mediterranean in July, 1944, less than a year after his famous book was first published. Did the end of his life imitate the end of the little prince, did Saint-Exupéry have an inbuilt desire to reach the end of his life just the same as the little
prince? We will never know, but the endless speculation continues.
If you go to the astonishing air and space museum at the old Le Bourget airport in Paris, there’s a big permanent exhibition devoted to the book and the man who wrote it. There’s also La Boutique du Petit Prince, at 57 boulevard Arago in the 13th., close to the Paris observatory. There’s even an online boutique devoted to the little prince.
Still the tourists keep coming to Paris, the world’s favourite tourist destination. Paris hoteliers have seen more visitors this year than last, with numbers up close on 10 per cent. However, elsewhere in the country, the news hasn’t been so good. Tourist numbers are down by 10 per cent in Languedoc-Roussillon and 30 per cent in the Dordogne. But visitor numbers are up in Brittany and Normandy, on the northern coast of France, presumably because of more visitors from the UK.
At least, the French judicial system has done something very favourable for the tourist industry. Plans to build four huge wind turbines 25 km south of Mont St Michel have been thrown out by a
court in Rennes. The plan was to build these 140 metre high turbines on land that was 95 metres above sea level; on a clear day, they would have been easily visible from Mont St Michel, which attracts 2.5 million tourists a year. Already, five other plans to build wind turbines around the bay surrounding Mont St Michel have been thrown out. The latest decision is very welcome, a
contrast to the gay abandonment with which wind turbines have been scattered across many landscapes in Britain and to a lesser extent, Ireland. The benefit of wind turbines in generating electricity is debatable; they are fine if they are “planted” in clusters at sea, but to destroy so many beautiful landscapes seems little short of daft. That court decision in Rennes was as sensible as the one
in the House of Commons in London last week against British government plans to attack Syria.
I was reading the other day about another very sensible decision taken in Paris in the 1920s, not to proceed with a mad architetectural design. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier had come up with a
grand plan to demolish most of the then very run-down 3rd and 4th arrondissements in Paris and built 18 enormous glass skyscrapers that would form a new business and government district. Those areas of Paris were then very delapidated and Le Corbusier called their inhabitants “troglodytes”, which
wasn’t very diplomatic. He wanted to move them all to new garden cities around the fringes of Paris, although Le Corbusier wanted to preserve certain historical places like the Palais Royal and the place des Vosges. But very fortunately, nothing ever came of his grandiose plan, which was just as
well!
One new book that’s just come out about French history seems very interesting and I look forward to reading it. It’s the story of the Huguenots, the French Protestants. Their expulsion from France was that country’s loss and a great gain for other countries where they settled, such as the Netherlands, Britain and Ireland. The book is published by Yale University Press, whose publishing standards are legendary. There’s also a very interesting sounding new French film out, called La Maison de la Radio, a documentary about working life in the great round building in the 16th arrondissement in Paris that houses the French state broadcaster, ORTF.
The past few days has seen an outpouring of grief and affection for one of the world’s greatest
poets, probably the greatest of the late 20th century, Seamus Heaney. It’s telling that the last message he sent his wife from his hospital bed, minutes before he died, was a text saying simply “noli temere” - don’t be afraid. He was a man of tremendous personal moral integrity, quite apart from his genius as a poet, and he is now up there with the other Irish literary greats, including Joyce, Yeats and Beckett. In modern times, with all the available medical technology, Heaney should have had another 20 years writing ahead of him; poetry often does get even better as the poet gets older, but in the case of Seamus Heaney, we’ll not now see this. We didn’t know him at all, but curiously, we know his charming down to earth wife, Marie, well. One of the troubles with Seamus was that he could
never say no, so that if he was invited to some interesting literary event, no matter where it was in the world, he’d say “yes” and pack his bags. It must have worn him out, literally. Sad to see another media great departing, at the same age, 74, as Sir David Frost, who managed to keep his television career going at full throttle for 50 years. When I was a typical rebellious teenager, back in
1962/63, I really enjoyed Frost’s first outing on television, with the programme, That was the week that was. It was unheard of for the BBC so be so unstuffy, even anti-establishment, and it made for great viewing, even though by today’s trolling standards, it was so tame.
I can’t finish these musing without mentioning a case that has come up today, that illustrates
perfectly the frequent absurdities and injustices of Ireland’s legal and administrative system. A well-known media figure here, John Waters, parked his car in a town just south of Dublin, one day in 2011, while he did some shopping. He paid for his parking ticket and when he returned to his car, he found that he still had four minutes left on it. This hadn’t deterred a local jobsworth from
issuing a parking fine. Waters quite rightly, refused to pay the fine for something he wasn’t guilty of, but nevertheless, was found guilty. The whole saga ended yesterday when he got sent to prison; it turned out that he had to spend just 45 minutes in a cell before being released and of course today, he is making a meal out of this absolute legal farce.
But at least to end on a pleasant topical note. Too often, online advertisements are as boring
and forgettable as their offline counterparts. But this week, some sections of the online media in France have been running really stunning ads for autumn holidays in the Auvergne. The autumnal colours are really brilliant and they do
make one want to pack one’s bags and head off!Lovely advertising and it really
works!