France is no longer the country of Notre-Dame, nor the country of De Gaulle, where the Concorde was built and a broad middle-class prospered. To understand this moment of profound transition, you have to look past the results of last …
Macron rules over a political desert
Watching Emmanuel Macron hard on the campaign trail in the Northern France rust belt yesterday morning, mere hours after he’d scored a surprisingly decisive top place in the first round of the French presidential election, a question sprang to mind. …
How Marine Le Pen conquered Normandy
Here is a confident prediction about tomorrow’s first round of the French presidential election. In my lovely, peaceful village in the Calvados hills, Marine Le Pen will comprehensively top the poll. President Emmanuel Macron will come third or maybe even …
The resurrection of Marine Le Pen
Three months ago, Marine Le Pen’s political future seemed smashed into irrelevance by the rise of Eric Zemmour. She was past it, a tired war horse with no project and a quasi-bankrupt party, watching her closest National Rally associates being …
France’s demographic civil war
When I was 15, back in the very early Eighties, I spent the best part of a summer is a sleepy corner of “la France profonde”. The family I stayed with were hard-up members of the nobility, trying to earn …
Sanctioning Russia could topple the West
The West, following the lead of the United States, has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by introducing a “crippling” regime of sanctions. It is a “total economic and financial war” aimed at “caus[ing] the collapse of the Russian economy”, …
The origins of Eric Zemmour
“Long live France anyway.” Even in front of a 12-man firing squad, Robert Brasillach was never lost for words. The author and journalist turned his dying phrase (“Vive la France quand même”) into a sort of “whatever…” quip on 6 …
Violence has returned to Corsica
Yvan Colonna, a Corsican terrorist and shepherd, was once regarded by the French state as its Public Enemy Number One. Paris is now praying that he will stay alive.
Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after …
How Russia’s elite bought Biarritz
“Slava Ukraina”. Glory to Ukraine. So reads an anti-war graffito sprayed on a wall. But not any old wall. It daubs the gateway of Villa Suzanna, avenue des Dunes, outside Biarritz. An extravagant 1927 Art Deco residence facing the Atlantic …
Putin has secured a Macron victory
Let’s call them “The Three Moscowteers”. Until Russian bombs and rockets fell on Ukraine last week, three of the leading candidates in the French Presidential elections were enthusiastic supporters of Vladimir Putin. Between them, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen and …
Europe must prepare for war
Beregsurány, Hungary
At dusk on Hungary’s Beregsurány border crossing with western Ukraine, a small, but constant flow of displaced people was making its way across the border. They were mostly women, children and old men: Ukraine has reportedly banned men …
The French centre is doomed
Minutes after the end of French presidential hopeful Valérie Pécresse’s Paris rally earlier this month, an uncharitable cartoon started to circulate among the WhatsApp and Telegram groups of the candidate’s own Les Républicains (LR) party. It showed a Titanic-like ocean …
How Macron manipulates Europe
France — in reality, Emmanuel Macron — has taken up the presidency of the EU, or “our Europe”, as he calls it. He set the scene with a typically magniloquent speech to the European parliament, meeting symbolically (as the French …
The impotence of the French Left
The Communist candidate in the French presidential elections is a calm, likeable man called Fabien Roussel. Last week, he made an unremarkable statement: “A good wine, a good piece of meat, a good cheese; that’s what French Gastronomy is all …
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 …