With Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement on Monday, France has become the latest country to have a national political campaign take a detour into the law courts. In the USA, the first phase of last year’s presidential election centred …
How rearmament can make us rich
On May 1, 1954, for its May Day air show, the Soviet Air Force flew a pair of four-engined Myasishchev-4 jet bombers over Red Square. With their ultra-modern lines, and dimensions large enough to suggest a sufficient range to reach …
Is civil war coming for France?
Today marks the moment, 63 years ago, that France finally ceded control of Algeria. But speak to many in both countries and the war might have finished yesterday, with tensions between Paris and Algiers now higher than they’ve been for …
Jean-Marie Le Pen poisoned French politics
21 April 2002 was a watershed date in post-war French politics. Turning on their televisions that evening, the French public heard the startling news that Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National — a party boasting a former member …
How the Left betrayed Charlie Hebdo
The 7th Arrondissement is usually a sedate corner of Paris: just embassies and government offices. But as soon as I entered the café, not far from my office, around midday on 7 January 2015, I immediately saw something was wrong. …
Emmanuel Macron is no de Gaulle
With France facing its worst political crisis since 1968, most of its citizens know exactly whom to blame: President Emmanuel Macron, whose tumbling approval levels hit just 23% even before the no-confidence vote that toppled his latest government. Across the …
Notre-Dame won’t redeem Macron
Who, save for the most embittered cynic or those who ritually deprecate Western culture, could do anything other than raise a cap, beret or biretta, metaphorical or real, to those who have rebuilt Notre-Dame? Who is unable to salute the …
The radicals are coming for Macron
After three months of a Barnier government, it seems that France is back to square one. This week, as predicted, a coalition of the Left allied with Le Pen’s far-Right acted to bring it down. It was not an auspicious …
Who will bring down Michel Barnier?
During a recent visit to a Michelin factory, on the outskirts of Paris, the minister for industrial affairs Marc Ferracci was heckled and shouted at. The factory is one of many to be shut down as part of a wave …
Marseille can’t escape its drug gangs
Marseille is making headlines — as usual for the wrong reasons. Back in October, two teenagers were caught up in the deadly gang wars that have long plagued France’s second largest city. The first, aged 14, was arrested for killing …
The end of Lebanon’s French connection
A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged …
Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer
According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What …
How Macron killed Macronism
As soon as the dust settled around Michel Barnier’s surprise nomination as French Prime Minister, the choice was met with something like grudging admiration. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the President realised an unexpected coup. But in …
The annihilation of Michel Houellebecq
In Michel Houellebecq’s startlingly long new novel, the 735-page Anéantir, our Everyman protagonist Paul Raison is returned by family illness to his childhood bedroom. There, in typical Houellbecqian fashion, he jabs us with a completely heterodox, completely confident provocation: Matrix …
The unholy alliance of Macron and Le Pen
Macron has faced relentless criticism for his decision to call a snap parliamentary election in July. Having said he wanted a “clarification” from the people after Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) surged to first place in the European Parliament elections, …
