The picture is not a reminder of the festive season, which closes today with Epiphany. It illustrates the favourite cliché of French journalists: la cerise sur le gâteau, the cherry on the cake, or icing in the English version.
The cherry tops the current list of most hackneyed expressions in the French press, as tracked on the internet. Next comes dans la cour des grands -- the big kids' playground, meaning the big league. Then comes le vent en poupe, running before the wind, in English with the wind in the sails.
Before having fun with French media clichés, it goes without saying that journalists everywhere thrive on lazy images and we British are big offenders -- worse than the Americans. Blueprints are launched, policies are always in tatters, hopes are dashed, people are plunged into gloom, tanks rumble through and travel chaos always causes misery. Most of this is lazy ritual but short clichés can be useful. Nobody vows to do anything in real life, but the syllable conveys an idea that otherwise takes a couple of words.
Clichés seem to jump out more in a foreign language than one's own. My list of annoying ones in the French press includes silence radio (a military term), used when someone in the news says nothing. When someone carries on doing something, they persiste et signe (persist and sign), never just persist. A business never just does well, it "ne connaît pas la crise". That is the refrain of an Alain Bashung hit song of 1994 which translates as "My little business hasn't been touched by the crisis". On broadcast media these days, questions always contain a concrètement, in concrete terms or basically.
The internet has enabled language crusaders (useful cliché for anyone with a cause) to keep tabs on cliché abuse in the press. The pioneer in this exercise in naming and shaming seems to have been the American Killthecliche.com, which tracks flabby language in five US newspapers and the Financial Times (The site seems to have moved or be closed today).
A French cliché-hunting robot scours Google Actualités for offenders and lists them on the Twitter address AlerteCliche. The Rue89 news site last summer performed its own analysis and ranked the worst-offending publications. Surprisingly, the cliche champion was not one of the provincial papers whose language often seems stuck in the 1950s. It was Le Figaro, the venerable daily which has lost some of its soul since Serge Dassault, the avaition and arms tycoon, took it over and turned it into President Sarkozy's court gazette. Second came Les Echos, the main business daily.
Rue89 based its findings on a list of 15 egregious clichés; below. Translations are mine with literal first. Please suggest improvements.
-- la cerise sur le gâteau
-- dans la cour des grands
-- le vent en poupe
-- un pavé dans la mare [a cobblestone in the pond --set the cat among the pigeons]
-- caracoler en tête [to prance in the lead, to be far out front]
-- attendu au tournant [awaited at the bend, lying in wait for someone]
-- revoir sa copie [revise his (exam) copy, sent back to the drawing board]
-- l'ironie de l'histoire [an irony of history, or just ironically]
-- la balle est dans leur camp [The ball is in their court]
-- ne connaît pas la crise
--la partie émergée de l'iceberg [The tip of the iceberg]
-- à qui profite le crime [Who profits from the crime?]
-- les quatre coins de l'Hexagone [the four corners of France (Hexagon is cliché for France)]
-- s'enfoncer dans la crise [plunge deeper into (the) crisis]
-- une affaire à suivre [a matter to be followed/a story to watch],
Nicolas Sarkozy is starting the New Year with egg on his face. The Constitutional Council has just quashed his new "carbon tax". The scheme was due to take effect on New Year's day, putting France at the forefront of green-minded states.
The annulment scuppered what Sarkozy had cast as a revolutionary initiative that would go down as a milestone of his presidency.The sages of the Council struck down the law as ineffective and unfair. The government is now rushing to rewrite it in acceptable form. It is unlikely that they will succeed in the face of public hostility and stiff resistance from industry. The episode has illustrated the failings that have become evident in "la méthode Sarkozy" -- a tendency to rush out showy, ill-prepared initiatives and then failing to follow through.
As the year turns, the President has some reasons to be satisfied. He handled the financial crisis deftly. France has weathered the recession better than any other large economy -- though unemployment and public debt are soaring. The French model of economic regulation has become desirable again. Some of Sarkozy's reforms are bearing fruit -- notably in improving business conditions. But half way through his term, he has stumbled, giving the impression of poor judgment, improvisation and lack of strategy.
Super Sarko has lost the invincible aura that led people to put up with his difficult side, the impossible ego and impetuous nature. In recent months, his own camp has rebelled over reforms to taxes, local government and the carbon gas law. His great debate on national identity has caused unease among his allies by descending into an excuse for bashing Muslim immigrants.
Some of Sarkozy's own parliamentarians have taken to mocking him in private and ministers have engaged in open subordination. The turning point was the scandal in October when the President tried to have his undergraduate son promoted to a high public post. The misjudgment was compounded by the way he forced his ministers to support him before he backed down and young Jean retreated.
Sarkozy's goal now will be to repair the sense of drift. It is hard to know what the Sarkozy vision is after the twists and turns of the past 18 months. The man who won office with promises of rupture and deregulation has been reborn as scourge of capitalism and champion of state dirigisme. "Sarkozy the American", as he was known, has become Sarkozy the European and critic-in-chief of Barack Obama. The president who promised to cure French pessimism has gone negative, gloomy on the state of the world and a prophet of doom on the environment. This posture now comes over empty after the failure of the Copenhagen summit and then the climate change tax. The only constants in Sarkozy's policies have been his tax shield for high earners and his hard line on law and order.
The experts are telling Sarkozy that he should turn positive and strike a more serene, presidential figure if he wants to restore approval ratings that are running below 40 percent. In other words, he should be more Barack Obama. Tonight, fresh back from a holiday as guest of King Mohammed VI of Morocco, he will attempt to reconquer public opinion in his New Year's eve address.But the President can't change character. Impulsiveness is one of his biggest traits. He does, however, have one big asset as he starts the haul towards re-election in 2012. The Socialist opposition remains in a state of breakdown under weak leadership and with no plausible candidate yet for the next presidential campaign.
And, it should not be forgotten that Sarkozy has been teasing people lately with hints that he might not run for a second term.He might just decide to stop in 2012 in order to please Carla Bruni. She said the other day that she would prefer that he stand down.
Bonne année à tous les lecteurs de ce blog....
In honour of its 120th birthday and the new decade, the Eiffel Tower is offering its first New Year light show on Thursday night. If you're in Paris, you can watch it from the Trocadero side. If not, the spectacle will be presented live on a special internet site.
The show starts at 11pm Paris time [2200gmt]. You get an idea in the video posted below. It is a special version of a display that has been running over the Christmas period which uses 400 high technology flood-lights and four-colour LEDs. It ends with a 10-minute count-down to midnight.
Gustav Eiffel's iron tower, put up as a high-tech, temporary gadget for the 1889 Paris Exposition, has never enjoyed such good times. Repainted and with better restaurants, it is drawing about seven million visitors a year. A global survey of 10,000 travellers has just voted it the world's favourite monument. It came far ahead of the St Peter's Basilica and the Taj Mahal. No British edifice made the top 10 in the survey of people from five continents by hotels.com. You will note that Eiffel scored twice. He also designed the structure of the Statue of Liberty
Virginie Couperie-Eiffel, Gustav's great-great grand-daughter, was on the radio this morning musing about the extraordinary way that the tower symbolises Paris and France in general. It is chilling to remember that in late December 1994, the tower came close to destruction by Islamic terrorists. A group of heavily armed and very determined Algerians took over an Air France Airbus with plans to crash it into the tower -- seven years before September 11. They were tricked into landing in Marseilles, where special forces captured the plane in a fierce gun-battle (I was watching from the terminal about 30 yards away when the guns and grenades went off). It was only later that the government leaked the hijackers' Eiffel destination, which they had intercepted during the stand-off at Marseilles. Paris had a much closer shave than anyone realised.
Below: the world's favourite monuments:
1. Eiffel Tower, Paris
2. St Peter's Basilica, Rome
3. Taj Mahal, Agra, India
4. The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
5. Empire State Building, New York
6. Statue of Liberty, New York
7. Sydney Opera House
8. Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
9. The Acropolis, Athens
10. Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro
11. Big Ben, London
12. The London Eye
Top picture: 1889 illustration of Univeral Exposition with new "300 metre" tower as gateway
Below: Tower's New Year 2010 show:
Roman Polanski has spoken. For the first time since his arrest in Switzerland in September, the French-Polish film-maker has made a public statement, thanking his fans for their support in his ordeal. He has done this via a letter to his fan number one, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a commentator-celebrity who made a name in the 1970s as a philosopher [picture].
At Polanski's request, BHL, as he is known, has put the letter of gratitude on La Règle du Jeu the online culture journal that he runs. From his chalet in Gstaad, where he was consigned to await his possible extradition to Los Angeles, Polanski writes to his supporters:
"I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning mail. In the darkest moments, each of their notes has been a source of comfort and hope, and they continue to be so in my current situation."
I'm not sure that Polanski is doing himself a service with his recourse to the dashing personality from the Left Bank. In Los Angeles, where the director is wanted for taking a 13-year-old girl to bed in 1977, BHL's over-blown indignation cannot be helping. His diatribes against the Swiss are not making friends there. I suspect that his campaign is not doing much good in France either, despite the platform that the media always offer the star penseur to pronounce on moral matters of the moment. 
BHL has mounted two petitions for Polanski's release. Here he was in full flow last week reporting in his column in Le Point on his pre-Christmas visit to Polanski in Gstaad. The cinéaste is putting the finishing touches to Ghost, his latest film, while suffering from the media siege around his chalet, BHL tells us. "Prisoner of his gaolers and now of the entertainment society...Harassed by the pack as few of our contemporaries have been. This must stop. Roman Polanski and the world must wake up from this nightmare."
In arresting Polanski on behalf of the California authorities, Switzerland has lastingly sullied its national honour, insulted its own tradition as a haven with this "hallucinating manhunt".... and so he went on.
BHL struck a similar theme in Le Parisien last week, calling on public figures to come forward "to say how mad, surrealist, unthinkable it is that in countries where a murderer leaves prison after 20 years, they can put back in prison someone for a sex act with a minor more than 30 years ago."
Lévy gets away with his imprecision and logical fallacies because of France's enduring respect for intellectuals. This kind of stuff does not come over so well in English as he found in 2006 when he published his observations on the United States in 'American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville'. The book was incinerated by US critics. On the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Garrison Keillor said Lévy had “the grandiosity of a college sophomore, a student padding out a term paper." He added: "There’s no reason for [the book] to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening."For a summary of the American case against BHL read here
Last week, appeal judges in Los Angeles threw out an attempt to quash the proceedings against Polanski. They have been in abeyance since he fled in 1978. But they held out the possibility that he might not face prison time for his old offence. It seems counter-productive for Lévy to be dumping on US and Swiss law and depicting Polanski as a victim of monstrous injustice. It might be better to counsel his friend to get on a plane and go and face the music.
Travellers in France know not to pay attention to the number of stars attached to a hotel. You can turn up at an establishment rated with three and find the plumbing broken and the bed in a state of decay. The government is finally getting around to changing a state of affairs that is odd for a country which receives more visitors than any other.
Under a new tourism law, hotel ratings are to be put into the hands of outside consultants. Classifications will be reviewed at least once every five years. Under the current system, in force since 1986, once a hotel received its stars, no-one checked again to ensure that they were still deserved. That means that a three-star hotel of 1986 can still boast of its rating even if it has not had a lick of paint since.
Under the old system, stars were awarded by the local branch of the DGCCRF (Directorate-General for Monitoring Competition and Combating Fraud) on the basis of a few criteria such as the presence of a lift and a television in the room. The service or cleanliness were barely taken into account. The 1986 criteria are wildly out of date. It is still deemed essential, for example, for a hotel to have a telephone booth. The new system, to be phased in over the next couple of years, is part of an attempt to harmonise hotel classification across Europe.
This year they started rectifying another French anomaly -- the lack of a five star status. This new luxury level has now been awarded to some 60 hotels, mainly in Paris, the Côte d'Azur and Courchevel, the Alpine resort favoured by Russians. Hervé Novelli, the Tourism Minister, thinks 200 hotels can make the grade. Earning five stars means fulfilling 300 criteria, from multilingual staff to 24-hour room service and wi-fi in the rooms. Some critics say the new system is still behind the times. Mark Watkins, President of the Committee for Modernising French Hotels, told today's France Soir that the new criteria are old fashioned. They will also favour big groups and put many independent hotels out of business, he said.
And the industry is reporting one perverse consequence of the new system. Some business travellers are staying away from five-star hostelries because company policy forbids using luxury hotels.
[Picture: Plaza Athénée, Paris]
The trains are running again almost normally between London and Paris after days of paralysis then disruption caused by snow. On just about any other line a faulty rail service would hardly be the stuff of national headlines, but the Eurostar is different, especially for the British. The train uses Great Britain's only land route to the place known as "abroad".
It is "a rail link that wrought an upheaval in the British imagination", Le Monde said this week. Marc Roche, its London correspondent, explained why the Eurostar breakdown had caused emotion in the UK. Its opening in 1994 meant that "the nation which was at the centre of a colonial empire turned the page on its insular pride..."
Perhaps he should have said residents of southeast England rather than Britain because that is where the 15-year-old cross-Channel train service has had its biggest impact (and where the people who write the headlines live).
We take the Eurostar for granted these days. It has become routine to hop onto a train at the Gare du Nord in the morning rush-hour, spend a day at the office in London and be home for dinner in Paris. On board the trains, they no longer bother to announce the arrival in the tunnel as they did in its early years. I remember the excitement among my usually blasé colleagues when we took the inaugural Eurostar trip in 1994. Just before that, we watched in Calais as the Queen and President François Mitterrand climbed into the back of a royal Rolls Royce parked in one of the shuttle rail wagons. They trundled through the tunnel for 20 minutes and emerged in Kent. It seemed indecently easy when you thought of the great service that those 21 miles of water had performed over the ages as a barrier to continentals.
The fast ride between the two city centres (two hours, 15 minutes) has made Britain easily accessible for northwestern France and Belgium. London-Brussels takes less than two hours. It has been a big factor in the move to London by thousands of young French -- dubbed the Eurostar generation -- since the mid 1990s. Since the fall of the pound in in 2008, Parisians have flocked to shop in London. For them, the rainy island with eccentric habits has become a little less exotic. The high-speed trains have made it simple for people in southeast England to spend weekends in Paris and reach Alpine resorts.
The service has changed the mental landscape. As le Monde noted, the psychological impact has been heavy on the British side. The train is useful for the French who want to visit Britain, but the Channel land-crossing has brought the whole continent closer to England. The majority of passengers are British.
The French do not realise how much the British think about them. British islanders -- especially the English -- define their national character almost in terms of not being the people who live on the other side of the Channel. For France, the "Anglo-Saxon" rival is American before British.
As the ancestral foe, France was the embodiment of abroad, or at least the continental version, with all its attractions and strangeness. Foreigners begin at Calais, they used to say. That was the port where would-be invaders looked across in frustration at the White Cliffs of Dover. . The Channel was what made England different. As recently as 1992, Norman Tebbit, a Conservative politician, said Britain had been blessed by "insularity which has protected us against rabid dogs and dictators alike". Now Calais is an hour by train from London, like Oxford or Winchester.
Of course the Channel rapprochement has not just been caused by the tunnel. Easyjet and other low cost airlines have helped bring Europe closer too. And the Anglo-French entente wrought by the Eurostar should not be overstated. It's not like Manhattan, with its bridges and tunnels to the rest of the nation. England still keeps its distance from its neighbours on the western continent.
Happy Christmas Everyone!
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*Note on headline: This alludes to famous British newspaper headline: "Fog in Channel. Continent isolated". It is said to have been run by The Times early in the 20th century, but it is probably apocryphal.
[Link here to book in picture above.]
Jean Sarkozy can toast the outgoing year in the knowledge that he has mightily impressed his father's subjects. According to a national survey, the President's 23-year-old son made the biggest media splash by a newcomer in 2009 and he also outraged the public more than anything other than bankers' bonuses.
The impact of Sarkozy's misguided attempt to elevate Prince Jean emerges from a stream of year-end surveys that throw up nuggets for those interested in France. Regulars here will be familiar with most of them but there are surprises.
Who would you guess is the favourite politician among the top 10 personalities of the year, as voted by consumers of two popular media? Answer: Christine Lagarde, the Finance Minister [Picture below]. Some 4,000 voters ranked Lagarde, a US lawyer by profession, in second place behind Johnny Hallyday in an internet poll by Le Parisien and RTL radio, published today. Of course that is a self-selecting sample, but few would have guessed that the rather stern and uncharismatic minister would rate so high in popular esteem in a field dominated by entertainment celebrities (full list below) -- unless of course the Ministry of Finance did a lot of clicking. 
What was France's most ridiculous event of the year? A "2009 Balance Sheet" by the TNS Sofrès polling firm for Europe1 radio proclaimed the winner to be the claim by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former President, that he had had an affair with the late Diana, Princess of Wales. He made the boast in a book in the autumn. He later said it was pure fiction and the book flopped in the shops. Second most ridiculous was Sarkozy's false boast that he had personally helped demolish the Berlin Wall on the night that it fell in 1989. The Elysée Palace insisted for a while that he really was there, but witnesses of the time contradicted this.
What were the favourite French films of the year, from the same survey? First came Le Petit Nicolas [picture], a film based on the classic stories about a 1960s school-boy, by the late René Goscinny and Sempé. Second was LOL, a family comedy starring Sophie Marceau. Third was OSS 117, Rio ne répond plus, a stylish James Bond spoof starring Jean Dujardin.
Note that only two of these favourite films were in the 10 box office winners of 2009, seven of which were Hollywood products. Top at the cinema in 2009 was Ice Age III, followed by the latest Harry Potter. Le Petit Nicolas came third. LOL came seventh in the top 10 movies. Coco, a Gad Almaleh comedy, came ninth.
People sometimes tell pollsters what they feel they ought to say. That happens with questions on far-right politicians and on television programmes. French viewers always give a high rank in their esteem to Arte, the Franco-German cultural channel, but few bother watching it. I suspect that a little hypocrisy is involved in the list of TV shows that France would most like to dump. According to the TNS-Sofrès poll,they are all reality shows. First is Secret Story, the latest version on the Big Brother theme, second La Nouvelle Star, a French American Idol, and third Koh-Lanta, a French version of the US Survivor. The French cannot hate these shows so much since they score quite high ratings. The first US-made show that the French want to scrap is CSI. The series, known as Les Experts here, continues to reign over prime time rivals, including all locally-made crime dramas.
I suspect that respondents were not wholly honest with the list of "social debates" which most interested the French in 2009. Sarkozy's scheme for a carbon tax came first, followed by the controversy over giving residence papers to illegal immigrants (more politely called 'people without documents'). Sarkozy's sulphurous debate on national identity came next, followed by the associated issue of whether to ban face-covering by Muslim women. I know that taxes involve people's pockets most, but I would have bet that the Muslim-related topics had attracted most interest.
A final nugget: What is the forecast for 2010 that the French believe the least ? Answer: That capitalism will be reformed. But six percent still think it will happen, according to the TNS-Sofrès poll. .
Here are some of the end of the year rankings:
Top 10 personalities of 2009 (voted on sites for RTL radio and Le Parisien)
1 Johnny Hallyday (eternal rocker -- chosen before his recent illness)
2 Christine Lagarde (Finance Minister)
3 Yann Arthus-Bertrand (film-maker who campaigns for the environment with attractive aerial photography)
4 Yoann Gourcuff (Bordeaux footballer)
5 Sophie Marceau (actress)
6 Florence Foresti (comedian) [picture at bottom]
7 Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Franco-German Green leader with impertinent media personality)
8 Kad Merad (actor, co-star of Les Ch'tis comedy hit)
9 Michel Desjoyeaux (champion ocean sailor).
New faces who made the biggest media splash (TNS-Sofrès national survey)
1) Jean Sarkozy
2) Toni Musulin (armoured van driver who made off with millions, now in jail)
3) Susan Boyle (Scottish singer)
4) Octomom (American mother who gave birth to eight babies)
5) Yann Barthès (Presenter of irreverent Petit Journal on Canal Plus TV)
The events that most outraged people (TNS-Sofrès)
1) Traders' bonuses (The word covers bankers and traders outside them)
2) Jean Sarkozy's candidacy for EPAD (management agency for La Defense business district)
3) "Boss-napping" -- disgruntled workers' sequestering managers in their offices
4) The attacks against Frédéric Miterrand (popular Culture Minister who caused a stir by defending Roman Polanski and for confessing to homosexual sex tourism in Thailand) -- interesting that opinion condemns the attacks, not Mitterrand.
5) The arrest of Roman Polanski (popular film director who was arrested in Switzerland to face 32-year-old sex charges in Los Angeles) -- so France backs Polanski after all.
Best Marianne (feminine symbol of the Republic, mix of beauty and personality) (TNS-Sofrès)
1 Florence Foresti (comedian, left below)
2 Carla Bruni (president's wife, supermodel-singer, right below)
3 Laure Manaudou (retired Olympic swimmer)
Interestingly, men ranked Manaudou first, followed by Rama Yade, Sarkozy's junior Sports Minister, then Bruni. Women put Floresti first, followed by Bruni, then Anne Roumanoff, a popular satirist. No accounting for taste.
As a daily user of the excellent Vélib self-service bicycles of Paris, I find it hard to be optimistic over the latest transport revolution from Mayor Bertrand Delanoe: self-service electric cars.
Instant car rental already operates in many cities, including Paris. The novelty of Delanoe's scheme is its very ambitious scale and the use of all-electric vehicles. A week ago, Delanoe opened the "Autolib" project to tender from potential operators. Renault, Peugeot and Daimler are possible suppliers of the 3,000 vehicles, along with new specialised green vehicle firms.
If it works, in about 18 months time, Parisians and residents of near suburbs will be able to pick up an electric car with a card swipe at 1,000 stations day and night and drop it off at any any of them. This will cost about 15 euros a month plus four or five euros per half hour of rental.
Delanoe said that the eyes of the world would be on his pioneering venture but he acknowledged that it faced many unknowns. Like the Vélib bikes, the Autolib is meant to cut pollution.
Delanoe, an enthusiastic promoter of alternative transport, estimates that the availability of low-cost vehicles will encourage Parisians to give up car ownership, saving some 22,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
"This is a world first... We are starting a little revolution," Delanoe said earlier this month when he announced specifications for potential operators. "We have to change. We have to invent another way of moving around. It is a new concept for communal life."
The scheme is backed by conservative suburban councils as well as by Delanoe's Socialist party, but it is opposed by the Greens who are his allies in the capital's council. Even green vehicles will increase congestion, they say. "Encouraging the public to use any type of car instead of taking bicycles or public transport is a mistake," said Denis Baupin, a Green Deputy Mayor.
Delanoe replies that cars are necessary even in a city with good public transport. An additional reason, compared with London or New York, is the abysmal taxi service in Paris. Taxi drivers have been been opposing Delanoe's attempts to increase their numbers and of course they are opposed to the Autolib.
The city is drawing on its experience with its bicycles. The 21,000 Velibs have improved life for many Parisians and tourists, but since 2007, the scheme has cost far more than expected because of theft and vandalism. Eight thousand have been stolen so far and 18,000 damaged. To help pay for the losses, the city last month renegotiated its contract with JC Decaux, the company that runs the bike system.
There will be elaborate security on the cars and users will have to give a substantial credit card deposit, but Delanoe and the suburban mayors are counting on civic spirit as they wean residents away from cars. Drivers will be expected to leave vehicles clean and plug them in for recharging. They will have a short range of about 100 miles and they will be be clearly identified. This is supposed to discourage mistreatment and theft. But I fear that abuse will be substantial. You only have to see the way that people inflict mindless damage on the bikes. These cost 600 euros each while electric cars will run to thousands.
The pricing is designed to encourage short trips, such as shopping, collecting children or taking the famiy to places poorly served by public transport. Users can check for nearest available vehicles and parking slots on their mobile telephones or internet.
According to a city study, Paris-based cars spend 95 percent of their time parked. Only 40 percent of owners use their cars daily. Owners are estimated to spend an average 450 euros a month on their wheels.
Delanoe says the new Autolib managing agency has been flooded with initial applications. One group includes Avis, the SNCF railway and the RATP, the Paris transport authority. Let's hope it works.
The image of French football has taken a new hit. Last month we had the hand of Thierry Henry in the World Cup qualifying match against Ireland. Now we have the mouth of Nicolas Anelka.
The 30-year-old Parisian is a star of the national soccer team. He has spent most of his career playing for the biggest clubs abroad, mainly in England. He is now in his second season as a striker with Chelsea. This week, he lived up to the caricature of professional footballers as overpaid oafs.
In an interview with 20Minutes , he said he will never live in France again because people don't like him owning a Ferrari and he would have to pay too many taxes. "When you have lived and played abroad, you can never come back to France," he said. "France has a problem with money...
"In Spain and in England, people have big cars and do not hide them. The French hide what they own... That's not my mentality. When you're a football player and you have dreamed of buying a beautiful car, a beautiful house, you do it."
He was asked if he missed anything about France. "Nothing. You can't do what you like in France. I don't want to play football and pay 50 percent tax on what I earn. If some people are shocked, too bad. France is a hypocrite country."
His remarks, widely deplored in the media, have reinforced the view that many of the country's top footballers are louts. One wonders what impact Anelka's remarks will have on the boys who idolize him.
Anelka, the world's second most expensive player in terms of transfer fees, has a new reason to celebrate. Last night, London's French community crowned him "Français of the Year" in the sports category. More than 4,000 of the French expats voted in the third year of the awards, which are run by the Grandes Ecoles City Circle.
(Artist of the Year was Roland Mouret, the fashion designer, Chief was Raymond Blanc of Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. Businessman of the year was Georfffroy de la Bourdonnaye, the boss of Liberty, the London store and fashion brand.)
France sent nine Afghan refugees back to Kabul today, so it was time for another shower of abuse for the man who is known as The Traitor.
Rarely does a European government member stir such contempt as Eric Besson, 51, Minister for Immigration and National Identity. Leftwing sympathisers, much of the media and some of his own colleagues simply cannot stand the Moroccan-born minister who features in a current news magazine [picture below] as "the most hated man in France".
Besson's post, which he took over in January, has made him front man for the cocktail of hard right themes that President Sarkozy's critics find most repulsive: French identity, with its attendant issues of Islam and burqa banning, and the expulsion of asylum-seekers.
To compound his offence, Besson is an unrepentant defector from the Socialist opposition. As a senior Socialist, he was economics spokesman for the party in early 2007 when he walked out on Ségolène Royal, its candidate in the presidential election that spring. For the rest of the campaign he sided with Sarkozy, her opponent, though he had just written a pamphlet denouncing him as "an American neo-conservative with a French passport".
Former colleagues nicknamed Besson Judas and they still turn their backs to avoid greeting him. Arnaud Montebourg, a prominent Socialist MP, calls him Laval -- after Pierre Laval, Prime Minister in the wartime Vichy regime. For the left-leaning media and chattering classes, Besson is the sycophantic villain of a Molière comedy. François Reynaert, a novelist, wrote in a Nouvel Observateur column last week: "He is a cunning boot-licker who will stop at nothing to have a post, the ideal knave for the king". [Thanks to reader Elizabeth for the good translation of fourbe (knave)]
Distaste for Besson was augmented by a revenge book in October by his newly-divorced wife. Sylvie Brunel, a writer and geographer, said that he had never stopped cheating on her, to use the modern expression. At their wedding ceremony 30 years ago, he changed the vows to omit the pledge to be faithful and went off to watch a Formula 1 motor race during the reception, she wrote. "The only goal that interests him today is killing the Socialist party, ensuring the re-election of Nicolas Sarkozy and thus restoring his honour," she wrote. Besson responded by turning up at a big football match with the 22-year-old Tunisian woman who has moved in with him. He had always devoted his spare time to women, he told Marianne.
Besson's Government colleagues privately voice their dislike for the unsmiling enforcer of Sarkozy's hardline immigration policies. They are appalled at the zeal which Besson, who was raised by a widowed Lebanese mother in Morocco, has shown for expelling clandestins trying to reach Britain (Besson only arrived in France at the age of 17). The final straw was his televised performance in an operation to demolish the Jungle, a makeshift refugee camp at Calais, in October.
The more squeamish in Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement, of which Besson is now a deputy leader, are unhappy with the national debate on French identity which he launched for the President last month. The exercise has descended into an ugly spat about immigration and Islam. Centrist members of the Cabinet want Sarkozy to call it off.
Besson seems to takes a pride in his antipathique public persona and displays indifference to the anger against him. "When I am convinced of something, I don't give a damn if it does or does not please the people who are permanently indignant," he said the other day. In his view, the chorus against him is politically correct humbug. He points to opinion polls which show that over 30 percent of the public support him.
However, for all his apparent enjoyment of his job, Sarkozy's chief trophy from the enemy camp was reported yesterday to be at the end of his tether. "He is on the verge of breaking," a minister told today's L'Express magazine.
Alerted to Besson's distress, Sarkozy strongly defended for his protégé at a lunch with his parliamentarians last week. In particular, he attacked the centrists who had rallied late to his camp in 2007. "Some of you are shooting Besson in the back. At least he has courage. He backed me for the presidency without blanching. He didn't wait for the final round to negotiate their support," Sarkozy told them, according to the Canard Enchaîné account.
Sarkozy is said to feel kinship with Besson. The careers of both have been marked by big betrayals. Sarkozy earned the name of traitor in the Gaullist camp when, as a rising protégé of Jacques Chirac, he abandoned his then boss in the 1995 presidential election. He backed Edouard Balladur, Chirac's chief opponent, who lost. Both Sarkozy and Besson are workaholic, iconoclastic non-drinkers. Sarkozy shared Besson's taste for extra-marital diversions, at least until Carla Bruni came along. They are both part-foreign outsiders from the establishment who grew up fatherless. Sarkozy's Hungarian father abandoned his family when he was a child. Besson's father, a flying instructor in the French Air Force, was killed before he was born.
Having said all that, it is difficult not to have a little admiration for the tête-de-turc (whipping boy) of the enlightened classes. In a field full of hypocrisy, at least he does not mask his cynicism and fierce ambition.
How much would you pay for a bit of the Eiffel tower ? How much for an old public urinal ? Bidders have just put down quite a lot of money on these items along with some 300 other pieces of memorabilia from Paris.
A 40-step stretch of spiral staircase from the original tower went for 85,000 euros (105 400 including taxes and commission). The iron vespasienne (urinal), from the days of Napoleon III's Second Empire, was snapped up for 3,348 euros -- twice its presale estimate (see note below on the name). An ordinary old 20th century ticket puncher (poinçonneuse) from the Métro underground went for 620 euros. It was the machine that could have been held by "Le Poinçonneur des Lilas", the hero of one of the late Serge Gainsbourg's best-loved songs. It's refrain goes, je fais des trous, des petits trous.... I make holes, little holes...
A pair of benches from the Métro dating from the late 19th or early 20th century fetched 22,320 euros. A hexagonal wooden newspaper kiosk sold for 14,260 euros. The proceeds from the sale, called "Paris Mon Amour," brought in a total of 256,912 euros, which was a pleasant surprise for the Drouot auction house.
The buyer of the Eiffel stairs, an eccentric scrap-iron merchant from Troyes called Yves Masson, has caused a stir by saying he plans to slice it up and sell off the pieces. In that way he will "bring art down to the street to multiply the pleasure of the beautiful," he said.
One lot in the nostalgia-soaked catalogue did not reach its reserve price. These were shards of glass from the Louvre pyramid. The sellers had hoped to attract fans of the Da Vinci Code, but it seems that even fans of Dan Brown were not quite as gullible as thought.
On the urinals: English speakers like to call these "pissoirs" but that's one of the numerous words that foreigners think are French but which the French have never heard of. The Germans, Slavs and Scandinavians also say pissoir. It may have come from old French, but the common slang in recent centuries was pissotière, from sailing ship days. The iron public urinoirs, introduced in 1834, were dubbed Vespasiennes after the Roman empreror Vespasian who imposed a tax on the urine that was used by dyers. When he was mocked for this, he replied with the famous line that "money has no smell" (pecunia non olet). The old vespasiennes have nearly all been removed since 1980. They linger on in literature such as Clochemerle, the 1934 satirical novel about a village row over one. The French Wikipedia entry tells you more on vespasiennes, including their notoriety in the 19th century as homosexual haunts.
Yet another French political star has been caught saying embarrassing things in front of a microphone. This time, the own goal has been scored by Rachida Dati.
Dati is the glamorous Cinderella figure who was wildly over-promoted from Nicolas Sarkozy's staff to the post of Justice Minister when he won office in 2007. She failed and he exiled her to the European Parliament last June, but she is working hard to stay at the top of national politics. While labouring dutifully as a European deputy in Brussels and Strasbourg, she is positioning herself to run for the national Parliament and then as Mayor of Paris, where she is already boss of the left bank's 7th arrondissement.
Dati casts herself as a good soldier who is happy and enthusiastic about her European job. She is cultivating her media image as a hard working parliamentarian, which is why she had a microphone on her lapel in Strasbourg the other day. She was being filmed by the M6 channel which for a piece on "a day in the life of Rachida Dati".
They recorded her in telephone conversation with a friend in which she is complaining about the boredom of her parliamentary job and reveals that she is only showing up because of the media.
"I am in the Strasbourg parliament chamber. I can't stand this, I can't stand this. I think there's going to be bloodshed before I get to the end of my term. I have to stay here, play clever, because there are a few press around and there's the election of (Commission President) Barroso... When you're in Strasbourg, they see you if you don't vote. If you don't, that means that you're not there." [French original below*]
If you know the European Parliament, there is nothing remotely surprising in Dati's sentiments. Trekking to Brussels every week and to Strasbourg once a month for plenary sessions is an excruciating chore. Many deputies don't bother to show up in Strasbourg beyond the minimum to collect their comfortable daily allowances. Dati is one of the few who are national stars, so she is under special scrutiny.
Everyone has supposed that Sarkozy's outcast favourite must be going round the bend in her Brussels-Strasbourg purgatory, but it's useful hear her confirm it. The audio clip is of course today's internet hit. Some commentators think that Dati did this deliberately in order to create a new buzz about herself.
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Translation note: In English, "Je n'en peux plus", her complaint, translates somewhere between "I can't stand this" and "I can't take it any more. "
*Je suis dans l'hémicycle du parlement de Strasbourg. Je n'en peux plus, je n'en peux plus! Je pense qu'il va y avoir un drame avant que je finisse mon mandat. Je suis obligée de rester là, de faire la maligne, parce qu'il y a un peu de presse et, d'autre part, il y a l'élection de Barroso (...) Quant tu es à Strasbourg, on voit si tu votes ou pas. Sinon, ça veut dire que tu n'es pas là...
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