President Hollande’s message to the nation went down rather less well. He urged his compatriots to stop complaining about everything; the mere fact that everyone feels so honour bound to complain is because there is plenty to complain about. The economy is back in recession and despite Hollande’s feigned optimism, there’s little feeling in France that the country is going to emerge from this long tunnel of economic woes any time soon. Perhaps Hollande wants the French to follow the Irish example and just roll over and say nothing as the recession motors on, and take all the new tax hikes and new government charges, like property tax and the forthcoming water charges, with just a little smile of forbearance. Somehow I can’t see the French emulating the extraordinary passivity of people in Ireland.
Hollande was even sporting his new glasses, which are very snazzy, but naturally, he’s got into trouble, because they were made by a Danish firm. Naturally, this has got all the French spectacle makers up in arms-see what I mean, all this complaining has become endemic. Not surprisingly, Hollande’s approval ratings continue to slip and slide all the way down the charts; the latest poll shows that public approval for the French President is down to 24 per cent.
Still you have to be careful how you complain. The other day, a woman who wrote a disparaging blog comment about a pizzeria in the seaside town of Cap Ferret got into big trouble. Cap Ferret is a lovely spot, on the long, narrow peninsula on the northern side of the Gironde estuary in western France. The whole place has a real feel of the Atlantic ocean about it, but the amateur restaurant review was anything but appealing for the owners of the restaurant. They took the blogger to court and she was fined €2,500 as well as being ordered to pay another €1,000 in costs. The judge said that the headline to the piece in which the reviewer suggested that people should boycott the pizzeria was the real decider, before adding that the outcome of the case shouldn’t be considered a legal precedent.
Meanwhile, something that comes naturally in France is striking and a big strike on the SNCM ferries that cross from the south of France to Corsica, was still ongoing at the time of writing. The strike started a month ago and so far, it has prevented around 0.25 million holidaymakers travelling to Corsica. Also in Corsica last weekend, a small plane with three people on board took off from the north of the island, bound for Italy. It never arrived, having crashed in the mountains of north-east Corsica during very violent storms. Add to that the woes of travellers using the Channel Tunnel last week and all the monster traffic jams in France and Switzerland at the moment and it’s not the best time to be travelling.
Last Saturday was the first anniversary of the rail crash at Brétigny-sur-Orge, just south of Paris, when the Gare d’Austerlitz to Limoges Intercity train derailed in a station, killing seven people, including two pensioners who were waiting on the station platform and couldn’t move out of the way in time. Close on 200 people were injured, many seriously. The official report found serious shortcomings in the way the French railway network maintains tracks; it was an accident waiting to happen, and by the sound of it, maintenance has got so sloppy that it can only be a matter of time before something similar happens again.
But sometimes, new technology can be put to good use. Summertime in the south of France always means forest fires. This year,fire fighting drones instead of aircraft are being tried out; the drones can relay live pictures to the ground and they also help eliminate the risks to fire fighting crews. Another technology story has also emerged from the south of France. It turns out that Nice has more closed circuit television cameras than anywhere else in France. However, despite all everything, the French remain great book readers.
It turns out that 70 per cent of people in France read at least one book last year and that many read as many as 15 annually. People in France trust books far more for ideas and information than either newspapers or TV and neither are they great lovers of ebooks, which account for a mere three per cent of the market. In the latest laws aimed at preventing online sellers like Amazon offering big discounts on books, thereby distorting the market, Amazon in France has come up with a new gimmick: a one cent delivery charge on books.
Meanwhile, even though we’re in the middle of July, the weather across much of France has been an absolute washout this month, with lots of heavy rain. In the French Alps, it has been snowing heavily and in one snow-laden town, La Rosiere, the other day, tourists were looking for toboggans to make the most of the snow. Will the rest of July be a washout? As if all this rain wasn’t enough, Brittany had quite a big earthquake at the end of last week, around four on the Richter scale, which is quite strong, although not enough to cause any damage.
Amidst all these weather reports, a strange story emerged from the tiny village of Flassans-sur-Issole in the Var, down in the south of France. When gendarmes broke into a house there, they found 64 dogs and seven cats crammed into the kitchen. The smell, as you can well imagine, was unbelievable. I also discovered a new word this week: bouligans. The time honoured game of boules is very popular, especially in the south of France, but it seems that more and more middle aged and elderly people who’re bashing the balls are drunk or otherwise in cantankerous mood while they’re playing the game. Hence the word ‘bouligan’!
Amid all these comings and goings, a group of French celebrities have been out protesting against the proposed US-EU free trade agreement. They’re opposed to it; one of their objections is that it could lead to an influx of tainted US food into the EU. The protesting French celebrities argue that we need less not more American influence in Europe, an age-old theme in France. Then if you can wait until September, there’s an interesting auction coming up, of the marriage certificate of Napoleon and his first wife, Josephine.
If you want the real low-down on what life is really like in France, you should turn to Lara Marlowe, the American journalist who has lived long in Paris, writing for The Irish Times. She was also once married to Robert Fisk, the veteran reporter based in Beirut. Lara always tells it like it is and I was intrigued to see that she has moved into a flat in the rue de Bellechasse in the 7th.
We happen to know the street well, having often stayed and dined there. But when the Musée d’Orsay opened, the modest and likeable Hotel de Bellechasse decided to get gentrified and put its prices up accordingly. In the old days, the hotel, with its lack of services and rather cramped facilities, had a certain charm of ancient Paris, but after it was given a thorough makeover, its old atmosphere went out the window. At the same time, the once quiet street itself became jammed with tourists.
Lara Marlowe points out quite rightly, that the 7th has a fine cultural tradition, but at the same time, like most old buildings in Paris, noise is always a big problem. The restaurant on the ground floor of her block generates a lot of that noise at night time, while just at the back of the building are the printing presses of the Department of Education-more noise. Then she says that noisy demonstrations in the area have become commonplace, another disruption. Paris can be idyllic if you’re a tourist-perhaps!-but unless you have vast amounts of money for a fine residence, it’s not always the best place to live.
Talking of tourism, to coincide with the current state visit to France of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, a survey has been released that shows of all the countries in Europe, Chinese tourists say they get the best welcome in France. Only Australia and Singapore give as good a welcome as the French and hardly surprisingly, both the UK and Germany are well down this particular list.
Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Juncker is the new president of the European Commission. While he was long serving prime minister of Luxembourg, he was largely responsible for turning that tiny country into a vast tax haven for multinationals. Many voters wouldn’t see this as a particularly enlightening recommendation. Here in Ireland as well as London, cabinet reshuffles have just taken place, which some commentators say are as relevant as reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. One government minister who was shown the door in Dublin was the communications minister Pat Rabbitte. It was he who a couple of years said that anyone who doesn’t have a television set is living like someone in a cave. The suggestion was ridiculous and engendered a huge amount of criticism. I’d have thought that anyone who doesn’t have a television set should be suitably rewarded and commended!
An extraordinary controversy here in Dublin just won’t go away, over the cancelled concerts for Garth Brooks, the American country and western singer. A total of 400,000 people had booked tickets to the concerts, including 70,000 from outside Ireland. All the shilly-sallying has meant that a vast stream of tourist income and goodwill has been lost. All the official interventions in the dispute have been totally hamfisted and bring to mind an old expression about incompetence in Dublin: ‘they couldn’t organise a pissup in the Guinness brewery’.
A member of the aristocracy in Ireland has just died, Lord Altamont. He owned Westport House, a magnificent mansion and estate at Westport in the west of Ireland. Death duties could have seen the place sold off, but the brave lord concocted all kinds of tourist entertainments to bring in the crowds and keep the place going, which he did. When I was writing a lot about tourism in Ireland, I quite often talked with him. He was a very down to earth sort of person and the first thing he always said was: ‘Call me Jeremy’.
Over in England, I see that the venerable Brighton Argus newspaper has been so beset with cost cutting, the idea of its American owners, that utterly ridiculous spelling mistakes are creeping into its copy. The situation has become so bad that many former regular readers have just abandoned the paper and don’t bother buying it any more. And on the subject of the BBC, the online programme listings of Radio 4 are now so utterly boring they’re just not worth bothering with. Once, Radio 4 was jam packed with all kinds of feature goodies that were absorbing listening, but not now. And on BBC Radio 3 the other day, a feature on why people in the arts in Scotland have all turned nationalist sounded an interesting proposition. In reality, it was deadly boring and filled with technical errors, like big variations in audio levels. The only solution, as with so many BBC programmes these days, was to reach for the off switch.
Just to end this week, I see that one wine lover in France is calling for a national day of mourning. An open topped lorry laden with 18,000 bottles of 2011 Saint-Émilion Grand Cru overturned when it was negotiating a roundabout in the south-west of France. The lorry turned on its side and all the bottles spilled out and broke. That’s what I call a real tragedy!