Le Havre, France
At a political rally in the Normandy port town of Le Havre, an elderly man with flowing white hair and beard waves a tricolour gently in my face. On it is written “Ni Fascio, ni BoBo [bourgeois …
Does Europe need to split?
Emmanuel Macron’s call for Europe to reduce its dependency on the United States and develop its own “strategic autonomy” caused a transatlantic tantrum. The Atlanticist establishment, in the US as much as in Europe, responded in a typically unrestrained fashion …
Macron’s extreme centre will not fall
The French have taken to the streets, and some foreign commentators are having the vapours. Last week, Foreign Policy suggested that President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform “has sparked one of the most serious crises in French history”. Nicholas Vinocur wrote …
Macron needs to be more like Thatcher
Five years ago, the only roundabout in my nearest town in Normandy was seized by people in yellow hi-viz jackets who had never joined a demonstration before and, in some cases, had never bothered to vote. Last Thursday, several French …
Toulouse and the birth of modern jihadism
When two young men embellish a Toulouse FC replica shirt with the name of the city’s most notorious mass murderer, is it just a sick and provocative gag, or evidence of sympathy for the killer’s worldview? Earlier this month, the …
Is France too sexy for the trans wars?
A bit like Napoleon, radical transactivism is moving swiftly and imperviously across Europe. Blithe to the consequences for women, lesbians, and gay men, pan-European LGBT organisations such as ILGA Europe are lobbying hard for governments to introduce self-ID, and also …
The French love to hate Brexit
Now that Boris Johnson is back to what he does best — writing and being usefully jovial in countries where he can’t run for PM — the Franco-British relationship is back on an even keel. Mutual respect has been restored …
The bourgeois war on French wine
Jean-François has two hectares of vines in our valley in South-West France: his family have been making wine here on this hard limestone soil for more than half a century. And yet, he would like nothing more than to grub …
Is Macron ready for a street fight?
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four.”
How many French people does it take to re-write the lyrics of a Beatles song? Answer: One million.
That was the combined size of the crowds which …
The Dreyfus Affair is not finished
On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It …
How to save Britain’s pig farms
Did you pig out on pigs in blankets this Christmas? Or perhaps you had a traditional roast pork joint with apple sauce for New Year’s Day lunch? The British pig farming industry will certainly hope so, after suffering two of …
The American experiment has just begun
“The anti-American obsession: it’s all in me, I confess. America is terrifying. Its internal unbalances appear extreme (economic, cultural, racial), an unimaginable fragility. It concerns us closely as a mirror of the future — our future, if we still have …
Michel Houellebecq’s sexual apocalypse
Looking back, the National Public Radio building in midtown Manhattan felt like the centre of a dying world. I was set to appear on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where, two days before my 33rd birthday, I would join the …
Macron’s grand European delusion
“The impression of narrow-mindedness… prompted a great part of public opinion to turn to a spectre. This spectre was born in Geneva, and against the sterility of the French political landscape, it bore resemblance to hope. Its name was Europe.” …
The gangs of Calais
Everything about Calais is grey. The sky is grey, the roads are grey, the mesh fences with their tangles of razor wire are grey. Even the bottle of water I’m drinking appears, in the coastal gloom, to be grey. Calais …