It is a warm Monday morning in Rome, and the city’s ancient ghetto resembles an armed camp. As carabinieri line the streets, a cloud of melancholy hangs in the air: not only had more than 1,400 Jews recently been slaughtered …
The millennials behind France’s far-Right youthquake
Marion Maréchal is 33 and Jordan Bardella, as of last month, is 28. These two young people — well-dressed, good-looking, in many ways archetypal millennials — are the leaders of the two main far-Right parties in France: Bardella of Rassemblement …
Terror is exposing France’s failed state
It is characteristic of France’s self-absorption that what started as a national sense of outrage at the latest Islamist killing on our soil soon evolved into a bitter scuffle between present and past tough-talking Home Secretaries. Last Friday, Dominique Bernard, …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
Britain’s rulers should be more French
In the English-speaking world, we tend to place Charles de Gaulle and his confrontational style of politics, filled with strops and tantrums, into a category marked “The French”, where we can alternatively laugh at and be a bit scared by …
The emptiness of Macron’s grand strategy
In the latest battle for strategic autonomy, Emmanuel Macron has notched up a small victory. Last month, under French pressure, American Fiona Scott Morton resigned from her post as chief economist of the EU’s Directorate-General for Competition. Starting from this …
In France, money is dirtier than sex
Almost anywhere in the world, you would have confidently expected people to celebrate their country overtaking Japan, the UK and Germany, to clock more millionaires than everywhere else except the United States and China.
Not in France, though. Accusations flew, …
How France lost control of Gabon
Gabon fulfils all the stereotypes you might have about the west coast of Africa. Brutal, kleptocratic dictator whose family have been in power for over 50 years? Tick. Highly corrupt political system that facilitates large multinational companies to pillage, rob …
Why incels should read Michel Houellebecq
When I was younger and going through some particularly unhappy break-up or other, I’d relieve my tumultuous feelings by rewatching The World At War on telly. Sometimes it feels good to have confirmation that things really are as bad as …
Modern Europe was born on the battlefield
Why write about the Hundred Years War? This succession of destructive wars, separated by tense intervals of truce and by dishonest treaties of peace, was one of the seminal events in the history of England and France, as well as …
Niger and the collapse of France’s empire
First, there was Mali; then came Burkina Faso. Today, in the epic saga that is the anti-Western revolt sweeping across the Sahel, it is the turn of Niger to play the protagonist — the third country to suffer a coup …
The populist Right are fake revolutionaries
Predictions that the pandemic would spell the end of populism and thrust voters back into the political mainstream have turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. In the US, polls show Trump creeping up on Biden. In Europe, …
The French need a revolution
You have to wonder what Indian PM Narendra Modi, guest of honour at the Champs-Elysées military parade today, will be making of the political fever in France. The tremulous mood was captured well in his counterpart Elisabeth Borne’s recent interview …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Communism has deserted the banlieues
It is grimly appropriate that the riots across France started when the police shot a young man in Nanterre. Nowhere epitomises France’s last few decades of social and political change better than this suburb of western Paris. The English word …