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 …
Europe is blind to the next jihadi threat
It’s been a while since Isis staged a major attack on the West. Occasionally the group’s degraded propaganda organs will try and claim one, but even that is less common nowadays. Still, just because Isis central isn’t orchestrating mass murder …
Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of …
France’s MPs reject virus health pass
In a surprise vote, France’s National Assembly has decided by a thin margin against introducing a coronavirus health pass that would regulate entry to certain places.The vote, with 108 deputies against versus 103 in favour, was thanks to the centrist …
Deconfinement in Strasbourg: The administrative court suspends the municipal decree making the wearing of masks compulsory
Wearing a mask is no longer obligatory in the centre of Strasbourg. The measure, which was taken by a municipal decree on 20 May, was suspended on Monday by the administrative court.
In his decision, the interim relief judge Henri …