It’s a fascinating event that draws about half a million people to this hilltop district of north Paris, within sight of the Sacré Coeur. The small area of vines was planted in 1933 and the vines are still tended by city hall staff, producing about 1,000 bottles of rosé wine a year. The wine is always auctioned to benefit local charities in Montmartre. At the opening of this year’s five day festival, at the end of last week, a folk singer called Jacques Higelin, who is regarded as the “godfather” of the festival, urged people to take their clothes off and dance to celebrate the liberation of Montmartre! It’s all good fun and a welcome contrast to the constant news diet of doom and gloom, not just from France but around the world.
While all this was going on, the south and south-west of France was having even more torrential rain, with the city of Montpellier being flooded for the third time in a month. The volume and ferocity of the latest flood waters there pushed cars up into trees; sometimes, they were swept downriver for hundreds of metres. This time round, as well, the Gard department was badly hit by floods, including the city of Nimes, which is well to the east of Montpellier.
The small village of Cailar, about 30km south-west of Nimes, is well regarded for its antiquity, going back to Roman times and earlier. It is regarded as one of the most rewarding archaeological sites anywhere in the Languedoc. Until the start of the 20th century, it was a small port, but changes in the landscape since then have meant that 100 years later, the village is now 10km inland. The other day, a 150 year old bridge across the river running through the village was simply swept away by all the floods. Then earlier this week, Provence was swept by a barrage of hailstones, many as big as tennis balls, which did a lot of damage to cars and roof tiles, especially in parts of the Alpes-Maritimes.
The bad weather hasn’t been confined to the south of France. The Italian speaking Ticino region of southern Switzerland, which contains such delightful cities as Locarno and Lugano, was also hit by torrential flooding. In the Locarno area last weekend, 100mm of rain fell in 12 hours and landslides and fallen trees blocked many roads, while the Foehn wind made an unseasonal appearance, bringing very windy but very warm weather. Just over a week ago, Genoa in north-west Italy was hit by dramatic floods, which hardly merited a media mention in this part of the world. Dramatic climate change hardly needs proving any more-it’s happening, all over the world, and the south of France is getting much more than its fair share of tempestuous weather.
In Nice, the tribulations continue for the owner of a beauty salon in the city that was burned out last March. When the fire brigade was putting out the fire, their fire engines were parked on the tramlines outside the beauty salon, stopping all the trams for several hours. The salon owner has now received a bill for €5,800 from the company that operates the Nice tramway system for loss of service on the tramline during the fire.
Troubles a plenty, too, at Air France, which now reckons the recent three weeks long strike by pilots cost it in the region of €500 million. More details have emerged about the Air France crash in June, 2009, when an Airbus en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 aboard, including three young Irish doctors, all women who were just starting their careers. It now turns out that before the crash, the two senior pilots on board were fast asleep, while the plane was in charge of the junior pilot in the cockpit. If the two senior pilots had been awake, they could have reacted promptly to weather conditions and perhaps have saved the plane. These revelations aren’t a great incentive for flying Air France!
The French economy continues to stagger along, with next to zero growth. Standard and Poors, one of the big ratings agencies, has downgraded it from stable to negative. No wonder that the other day, President Hollande received Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Elysée Palace. France needs a strong man right now, although I’m not quite sure this particular one would fit the bill! But curiously, the German economy is now starting to dip into serious recession, thus threatening the overall stability of the eurozone.
It seems that the Germans have been so intent on balancing their budgets and paying themselves massive pensions, that money has been very short for maintaining the country’s infrastructure. Much of Germany’s economic success has come from exports to such markets as Russia and China, now looking a lot less rosy, especially Russia. So nowadays, as always, economists are making fresh predictions about Germany, that in 10 years time, France will be the dominant economy in the eurozone. Try telling that to anyone suffering from the current budgetary outages in France! Last week, I said that the current public budget deficit in France was €2 billion; were the French so lucky! The correct figure is €2 trillion, just about the worst in the eurozone.
One reform that is slowly taking shape in France is of the regional structures for governing the country. The aim is to have far fewer regions and two of the regions busy working out how they are going to merge are Savoie and Haute-Savoie. Not all reform is welcomed, however. The proposed tax on heavy goods lorries, to reduce their use and exhaust emissions and fund road maintenance as well as preserve urban areas from excess traffic, has gone down like the proverbial lead balloon and now France’s lorry owners are threatening to paralyse the country’s highways. And voters in France are far from approving the return to politics of Nicolas Sarkozy. A recent poll showed that seven out of 10 voters don’t want him back.
Two French people have been rewarded Nobel prizes, Patrick Modiano for literature and Jean Tirole for economics. But some commentators are saying that the mere fact that the two are being lionised in France is a sign of the country’s weaknesses. In the old days, they say, such awards would have been taken as almost normal and everyday, a sign of true French greatness, but that these days, France is so weakened by conformity and multiculturalism that the reception of these two French Nobel prizes has been acclaimed by something akin to slavish fervour.
Certainly, though, the works of Patrick Modiano deserve wider recognition beyond France. The 69 year old writer, who usually shuns media interviews and the Parisian cocktail circuit, is known for his archaeological excavations of life in France during the Nazi era. He’s a very interesting writer, someone who even turned down an invitation to join the Academie Francaise.
I was also very intrigued by the story in the Guardian about the bedroom of a soldier killed by the Germans in Belgium 96 years ago. The bedroom was in a house in the village of Belarbre in the Indre department in the Loire valley. After he was killed, his parents kept his bedroom exactly as it was. When they sold the house in 1935, they stipulated that the room should be left as it was for the next 500 years. The people who now live in the house continue to keep the wishes set all those years ago, even though they have no foundation in law.
Then on November 11,Armistice Day, President Hollande is going to unveil the new Ring of Memory at Notre Dame de Lorette, France’s biggest national war cemetery. A total of 580,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of Flanders during the first world war and to commemorate them, a giant ring of gilded metal, engraved with all their names, will be unveiled.
While all this has been going on, Facebook has turned its attention to Breton, and has launched a Breton version of Facebook. Breton is still spoken by around 200,000 people in the north-west of France, but the trouble is that these days, nearly all Breton speakers are aged 55 and over. Perhaps this will help recruit some younger speakers, essential if this Celtic language is to be preserved.
Another interesting cultural development, this time in Morocco, where the country’s first modern art gallery was opened in Rabat last week by the king. It’s the Musée Mohammed VI d’art moderne et contemporaine and it cost the equivalent of €17 million to create.
Mind you, Morocco is one of the popular destinations for French tourists that is now under threat of seeing that trade decline drastically. Government travel advisories in France have urged people to show caution when visiting over 40 Muslim countries in North Africa and Asia, and since the recent murder in Algeria of Hervé Gourdel, bookings by French people of travel to holiday destinations abroad, for the mid term holidays at the end of this month, into early November, have virtually collapsed. One French traveller even cancelled his planned trip to Australia because it meant a stop over in Dubai!
But at least during all the world turmoil, French people have been flocking to the cinema this year to see a comedy called Qu’est ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu, or What did we do to God? It’s the story of two posh, rich Catholic parents who have four girls who all decide to marry men of other races and religions.It’s been the number one film in France this year and has also been very popular in other countries, especially Germany. It’s even due to open in China next year. And a sequel is due to go into production in just over a year’s time. But guess what? The film has been turned down for distribution in the UK and the US because it would be politically incorrect and borderline racist in those countries.
I noted another example of bureaucratic political correctness this week, this time in Switzerland. A 75 year old ex pat American, was for 39 years professor of chemical engineering at Switzerland’s top univeristy, ETH Zurich. He is well since retired but he and his wife have lived in Switzerland since the 1970s and brought up their family there. But the town where he lives has just turned down his application to become a naturalised Swiss, despite the fact that he is well informed about the Swiss way of life and speaks fluent German. But it turns out he couldn’t name six local villages near where he lives and didn’t known much about current political trends in his town of domicile.
On the internmational front, one dramatic piece of news is the collapse in world oil prices, because of over supply and lessening demand, not that you’d know about it from the price at the pumps. The Russian economy is based on the price of oil staying at $104 dollars a barrel, but its price is currently $20 below that, which means huge upheaval for the Russian economy.
Meanwhile back here in Ireland, a chance remark in the Irish parliament last week by the leader of the Irish Labour Party and deputy prime minister, Joan Burton, about all the protestors against the new water charges having expensive phone cameras and video equipment, nearly brought the house down. Within hours, the online abuse started and I never ever seen such a volume of online complaints about a politician, some of them very vulgar indeed. A similar volume of tweets concerned the water charges themselves. The impending water charges in Ireland have created a real people’s revolt and despite a benign budget on Tuesday, this revolt threatens the future of the government. Indeed, many commentators now say that seismic political changes are under way in Ireland. After years of docility in the face of austerity, it seems that people in Ireland are now mirroring those in France.
But while the budgetary news in this part of Ireland is better, the North of Ireland seems to be going into fiscal reverse, with widespread cuts to public funding. It’s so bad there now that even the future of the long established Ulster Orchestra is beginning to look precarious. No wonder that one of the BBC’s top political reporters in Belfast, Martina Purdy, who worked for 25 years in the media industry in Belfast, suddenly announced at the end of last week that she was giving up her media career and was going to become a nun instead.
One strange piece of medical news from the North of Ireland emerged last week. A GP from there has been struck off the UK professional register and banned from practising, because he was supposed to have been involved in the production of a fake will for a wealthy local female publican. He can’t now practice in Northern Ireland, so he just hopped over the border to Dundalk, which is just inside the Irish Republic, where he can continue to practice with impunity. Still, the North could be worse! In Britain, it now turns out that directors of any publicly quoted company are being paid on average £2.5million, or 120 times what their average workers are being paid. Just 14 years ago, that ratio was a mere 47 times greater. Doesn’t look like a good recipe for social cohesion!
Just to end this week, I must commend a new book written by four Frenchwomen and called How to be Parisian. It’s published internationally by Doubleday. They say it’s merely a cliché that a Parisian woman is perfect in everything, running a home, raising children, always looking immacutely stylish and in the process, holding down a good job. The writers say a true Parisian woman should wear red with pink, eat oysters at home and go to bed before midnight on New Years’ Eve. The authors also point out that at Parisian dinner tables, the number one topic of conversation is politics, closely followed by sex. But they say that faux pas include using corporate jargon in everyday conversation and using more than two colours in your hair.
Sounds as if they have really got under the skin of the true Parisian woman! Oh well, another Parisian myth or two demolished!
There has also been a dramatic rise in the amount of procrastination; people just can’t make up their minds what they are going to do, so dithering has become the norm. The vast range of choices offered by the Internet and social media are making the trend much worse. But it’s an age old trend, nothing new at all. The 19th century French writer Victor Hugo was so bad that he had his valet hide his clothes so that he couldn’t leave the house and go and procrastinate somewhere outdoors. This meant that he frequently wrote while he was in the nude. But if procrastination was bad in Hugo’s time, it’s infinitely worse today. But some topics are worth procrastinating for ever about, like Parisian women!