On Monday I wrote a post about France’s tradition of journalistic non-apology. As a French hack based in London, I have long noted the inability of my country’s newspapers to own up to misreporting.

The post linked to an essay I co-wrote with media critic Jean-Pierre Tailleur on the subject in 2023. It also included the translation of an interview he and I gave to Le Point last week about a recent mistake by Le Monde – which that newspaper had neither explained nor expressed regret for.

It turns out that shortly after Le Point ran our interview, Le Monde did issue an apology of sorts. I missed it, and my post did not mention it. I apologise for the oversight, and take the opportunity to explore some interesting wrinkles that Le Monde’s note adds to the story.

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Under the heading “À nos lecteurs” (“to our readers” - paywall), it concedes that its report of National Rally leaflets being found the car of a man accused of a racist murder was not, “strictly speaking”, accurate. But it insists it contained more than a kernel of truth: investigators found 30 stickers at the suspect’s home reading “Vive la France, RN, fier d’être français”.

There is, surely, a difference between leaflets printed by a party and found in a gunman’s car, and self-made stickers kept in a drawer at home. But the apology, when it comes, is for a mere “approximation”, one that was, the paper adds, “partly confirmed in substance by the facts established by investigators”.

You might point out that a mistake is a mistake, especially when it concerns the very detail that made the story news. A paper would raise eyebrows if it told readers that its report of a Lufthansa plane crashing near Grenoble was only half-right, as the aircraft that came down outside Lyon belonged to Air France, although a crash had indeed been “confirmed by the facts established by investigators”.

Following that most cursory and heavily qualified of apologies, Le Monde devotes more than half of its note to presenting itself as the victim. It denounces a wave of hatred against its journalists and dismisses criticisms as a smear campaign.

It sternly warns the “RN, as well as all the other racist and xenophobic components of the far right, including media mouthpieces” that “no campaign of intimidation” will stop it from exposing their theories, whose effects on the country, it says, the Trappes attack has illustrated.

In other words, the note ends by implicitly reasserting the very link between the party and the crime that its false report had drawn.

The text, signed by the paper’s two top editors, is not so much a correction as a case for the defence.

A proper rectification advertises itself as such. It acknowledges that a mistake has been made, without ifs or buts. Rivals will of course pounce on it: ignore them; the best rejoinder is simply to set the record straight.

Consider the following:

- From the BBC: “Correction 18 August: In previous versions of this story, we said that wildfire “tore through cities” on Croatia’s coast. In fact, the fire hit residential areas in a small town and other settlements. We have changed the wording accordingly.”

- From The Economist: “We made a couple of mistakes in “The world this year“ (December 21st). We misspelled the name of Israel’s Hatnua party. And Angela Merkel is not the only leader in the euro zone to have been re-elected since the start of the currency bloc’s debt crisis. Austria’s Werner Faymann was also re-elected in 2013. Sorry. These errors have been corrected online.”

- From The Guardian: “Owing to an error in supplied information, an article said at least 10 families had been evicted from Groot Constantia farm in South Africa. In fact, it is two families (South Africa’s wine farms grapple with history of slavery, 26 October, p26).”

Such regular corrections have no equivalent in the French press. The satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, which owns up to errors in its “Pan sur le bec” column (“slap on the beak”), does so with lame self-deprecating jokes in lieu of repentance.

I entitled my last post “Never explain, never apologise”, paraphrasing a Victorian maxim. In view of Le Monde’s note, the above line from the late French comedian Coluche seemed more fitting for this one.

I’ve been a journalist for a long time and a Frenchman for even longer. One thing has often struck me: French newspapers are never wrong — by their own account, at least. Rare admissions of misreporting come laced with qualifications and complaints about malicious critics.

English-language papers can struggle with fallibility too. The New York Times took decades to acknowledge Walter Duranty’s lies about the Ukraine famine. But this is not the norm. In Britain and the US, a culture of accountability pushes publications with a reputation to protect towards taking a hard look at themselves when they print untruths. The same New York Times revealed the full extent of its ignominious Jayson Blair affair.

The absence of such norms in France was again in evidence last week. After carrying a false report about a murder suspect, Le Monde sought to set the record straight by publishing a mere update contradicting the initial report: no explicit retraction, still less an explanation. The paper was guilty of error rather than deliberate lying, but this relatively minor lapse should have made it easier to come clean.

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As I have publicly lamented the French media’s habit of keeping their dirty linen in the closet, Le Point invited me, along with Jean-Pierre Tailleur, a fellow critic and writing partner, to comment on the case. The resulting joint interview is translated below.

The fact that Le Point approached us was itself remarkable. In 2022 the magazine had been caught up in a scandal of its own. Serious accusations on its website against Raquel Garrido and Alexis Corbière, a left-wing parliamentary couple, proved to be a fabrication, complete with fake text messages. Le Point withdrew the story the next day, apologised and promised to publish an investigation into what went wrong.

When Jean-Pierre contacted me to ask what I made of it, I hailed an act of journalistic contrition for which I knew of no precedent in France. My friend was not so sure, and pointed to ambiguous wording in the apology. We decided to wait for Le Point’s post-mortem. When it came a week later, we found it fell far short of the full-throated mea culpas of the Anglo-American press.

At this point, a few words of background are in order. Jean-Pierre’s determination not to let any malpractice go unchallenged came from bitter experience. Like me, he had attended Columbia University’s journalism school in New York. Like me, he had returned home struck by the poor ethical standards of the profession there.

But while I left France and found a more congenial environment in London, Jean-Pierre chose to stay and fight. His 2002 book, Bévues de presse, was a meticulously documented catalogue of French journalistic failings. Predictably, perhaps, it got little coverage. The discussion he hoped to generate never happened. When he shared his views with potential employers, they didn’t care. By the time I met him in the mid-2000s, Jean-Pierre had given up on a media career and turned to teaching and media monitoring for institutions.

All those years later, the Garrido-Corbière case provided an opportunity to revisit his longstanding frustration with French newsroom practices, with my British experience as a point of comparison. Together, we wrote an essay taking Le Point to task and exploring France’s traditional lack of editorial accountability.

One key problem, we argued, was clubbiness. The Paris press is a small world where people call rivals confrères (colleagues). In such a glass house, stones are best left unthrown. Historically, papers have fought each other over politics, not over professional standards.

Once again, predictably perhaps, finding an outlet proved difficult. But after a year of trying, we placed our piece with AOC, a French online magazine (full text accessible here if you subscribe to their daily email).

Fast forward another three years. Peggy Sastre of Le Point told me she had read our sharply critical article and liked it. I wondered if she was being ironic. But she then quoted our key idea back at me:

France has no shortage of rigorous journalists, but its newspapers lack a culture of self-criticism. A press earns trust not by never making mistakes, but by always owning up to them, and dissecting them when necessary.

She was serious. So serious, in fact, that soon afterwards she asked Jean-Pierre and me to comment on the Le Monde row. Of course, it may have suited Le Point to highlight a rival’s slip-up. But by running the interview, it was also reminding readers of its own.

For those curious to know more, our exchange can be read in French here (behind a paywall). Below is a translation of our answers, with summaries of Sastre’s introduction and questions.

“Le Monde must answer the questions”

Le Point, 29 October 2026. Interview by Peggy Sastre.

[On 23 October, a gunman firing from his car killed one man and wounded five other people in Trappes and La Verrière, south-west of Paris. The suspect, Kevin T., 39, reportedly told police on his arrest that he had targeted black and Arab people to avenge shopkeepers whose premises had been looted during recent riots. Anti-terrorism prosecutors opened an investigation into murder with a terrorist link and the aggravating circumstance of a racist motive, which the suspect disputes.

In its introduction, Le Point recounts how, on 26 October, Le Monde reported that leaflets from the right-wing populist National Rally had been found in the suspect’s car, a claim the paper later amended and the anti-terrorism prosecutor denied. It notes that Le Monde’s statement of 27 October focused on threats against its journalists rather than on how the error occurred. It explains that it invited myself and Jean-Pierre, authors of the 2023 critique of Le Point’s handling of the Garrido-Corbière affair, to apply the same standards to Le Monde.]

In 2023, you criticised Le Point for admitting its error without explaining the failings that allowed it. Do you expect the same public inquiry and explanations from Le Monde?

Henri Astier: Le Monde published a false report that clearly came from a dubious source, indirectly linking the National Rally to this murder. That calls for an explanation and, if need be, an apology. There is an obvious lack of clarity and transparency.

The facts are these: on the morning of Monday 26 October, an update to an article dated the 24th stated that, “according to Le Monde’s information”, National Rally leaflets had been found in the suspect’s car; the same day, a new article carried the claim in its headline, before being rewritten that evening to report the prosecutor’s denial and pin the blame on the source. This is not a retraction: as of 29 October, the false claim still appeared in the article of the 24th, as revised on the 26th.

This touches on a very French failing: the lack of self-criticism in the press. By comparison, in the Garrido-Corbière affair, Le Point immediately withdrew its false accusations and made amends, something extremely rare that we acknowledged in our article. A full inquiry was warranted then by the direct involvement of elected officials in a case of exploitation, and by the lack of supervision of the reporter. In the Trappes affair, we do not think a lengthy post-mortem is needed. A correction explaining how the error occurred might suffice. Such a gesture would cost little and would even strengthen the paper’s credibility.

Jean-Pierre Tailleur: That said, in my view we need to know exactly how Le Monde came to misinform its readers when it stated, at 12:16 on Monday 26th, that “National Rally leaflets [had been] found in the suspect’s car”. It cited “a source close to the investigation”, but was there undue haste? Was this informant really reliable, and should the claim not have been checked with one or two other sources? Was it driven by a desire to “get the National Rally”, if you’ll pardon the expression?

Le Monde must answer these questions, rather than merely doing what its sister publication Télérama did: complaining that “media close to the National Rally, such as Frontières and CNews” had accused the paper of deliberately spreading “fake news”, when in Télérama’s view it was merely an “error”.

You stressed the responsibility of editors: trusting a journalist or a source is not enough. Le Monde published an explosive claim on the strength of an anonymous source. What checks should have been required? And does responsibility lie with the journalist alone, or with the whole editorial chain?

J.-P. T.: With both the reporter on the front line and his superiors. Outside the press, in any institution, the person in charge of a task and the managers who are supposed both to trust and to supervise him are accountable. As for anonymity, Le Monde should of course say precisely, in the explanation it owes its readers, whether or not it was justified.

H. A.: Responsibility cannot rest with the journalist alone. When a contact comes in with information, editors must make sure the minimum rule - two independent and reliable sources - has been followed. The prosecutor’s office, and perhaps the National Rally, should also have been approached before publication. Moreover, the headline and the news alert are the responsibility of senior editors, and it was the headline that was widely shared on social media.

In 2023 you wrote that Le Point presented itself “as much as a victim as a sinner”. Le Monde’s main institutional response has focused on threats against its journalists, without explaining how the mistake occurred. Can condemning threats stand in for answering for a journalistic failing? Are we not witnessing the very mechanism of displacement of responsibility that you denounced at the time?

J.-P. T.: Absolutely. And these condemnations of threats are highly problematic when Le Monde refrains from doing the same for journalists at outlets it regards as enemies.

H. A.: The “displacement mechanisms” at work in the two affairs are different. When Le Point claimed it had been doubly hoodwinked, once from outside and once from within, we found neither explanation convincing. But while the magazine presented itself as the victim of a malicious source and of one of its own journalists, it never claimed to be the victim of the colleagues who were holding it to account.

The most visible reaction here came from a publication belonging to the same group as Le Monde: rather than dissecting the error, Télérama objects to the term “fake news” as politically loaded. As for threats against journalists, they are of course unacceptable, and it is only natural for a paper to stand up for its own. But a newsroom cannot excuse itself from clearly admitting an error on the grounds that its opponents are using it to attack it.

You also denounced French journalists’ indulgence towards their peers, and their tendency to focus on the political side of scandals rather than on professional failings. Is this affair a new test for the profession? And how can ethical principles be applied with the same rigour regardless of the political identity of those the error harms?

J.-P. T.: This is at the heart of what prompted the long research that led to my 2002 book Bévues de presse, on journalistic malpractice in France. I focused on failings attributable solely to newsrooms, irrespective of their editorial line (left or right) or their ownership (corporate or co-operative).

Whether papers were “independent”, like Le Canard enchaîné, or owned by “industrial and financial powers”, like Le Figaro, I found shameful lapses that are never discussed. It is easier to accuse a paper of being in thrall to an economic or political camp than to point out the lack of professionalism in some of its reporting.

A healthy response would be open debate, as apolitical as possible, about the craft of news, with no hesitation in discussing errors or inglorious conduct, just as one would criticise a bad film or a bad restaurant. My book shows, among other things, how Le Monde stifled criticism of its indefensible coverage of the tainted-blood scandal [in the early 1990s]. Its editor at the time, Bruno Frappat, claimed to be acting transparently by commissioning an internal report. The report was presented as having cleared the paper, but was never made public.

When Bévues de presse came out, no media correspondent, journalism student or teacher showed any curiosity. The omertà held, even when the polemic La Face cachée du Monde appeared shortly afterwards. Its authors, Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, made a great deal of noise while carefully avoiding these awkward questions.

Le Monde’s false report had everything it needed to spread: it seemed to confirm an established political narrative, and was immediately exploited by left-wing figures to attack the National Rally. Isn’t the most insidious danger a journalism that checks information less the more it confirms its convictions? How can one tell an ordinary error from ideological bias contaminating the editorial process? And how can a paper investigate such bias without lapsing into corporatist self-defence?

J.-P. T.: Two rules are enough: facts first, and even-handedness towards the people in the news. Whether one loathes or adores them, outbursts of feeling belong in editorials. Télérama or CNews, LFI or the National Rally: factual information must be treated the same way.

H. A.: The confirmation bias you mention is indeed the most insidious and widespread danger. No one is immune. The best way to minimise the risk is to foster a culture of soul-searching and mea culpa, such as the major British and American media maintain. The BBC, where I worked for thirty years, recently provided an example, all the more telling because the case was relatively minor.

In June, the television programme Newsnight attributed to Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist leader, the phrase “white cold rage”, when he had in fact said “pure, cold rage” in response to a murder, a distortion that suggested he was calling for racial anger. The journalist admitted a lapse of memory which, he said, changed nothing of substance. The BBC nonetheless published a correction, apologised to Farage and removed the programme from its platforms, admittedly under pressure from his party, Reform UK. That is the kind of explicit gesture one might have expected from Le Monde towards the National Rally.

The wave of rioting that erupted across France last weekend shocked the world. The political reactions – although less spectacular than looted shops - were equally symptomatic of national pathologies.

The violence erupted amid demonstrations against high prices combined with ongoing protests about bad schools to bring half-a-million people to the streets on Saturday. Amid the mass of peaceful marchers were ultra-left militants known as “black blocs”. In Paris they gathered ahead of the main procession, assaulted police and public buildings before melting away, leaving the teargas-filled space to well-prepared criminals, mindless vandals and opportunistic looters.

Black blocks have long been a fixture in protests in France. What was new on Saturday was the degree of co-ordination and the numbers involved. It was the worst day of rioting in decades, which is saying a lot in France. About 1,000 officers were wounded and almost 3,000 businesses attacked. In Marseille alone, police counted 30,000 looters.

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It was always unrealistic to expect the opposition to call for national unity against the forces of chaos. “We hate this government’s policies but support it as a guarantor of law and order; violence only serves the powerful” are among the words you are least likely to hear from a French politician.

More predictably, opposition parties of both right and left have rounded on the centrist government, accusing it of failing to keep the peace. The charge is fair, and ministers have acknowledged serious security lapses. But there is a big step between arguing that the authorities did too little to quell the unrest and blaming them for inviting it, and most of the opposition is happy to take it.

“The government alone is responsible. It failed to keep public order,” posted Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI). He has condemned looters while seeming to condone attacks on police. Asked in a TV interview to disown the slogan ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards”), he quipped: “It depends on the day and the hour.”

This ambiguity is consistent with his response to weeks of student protests, many of them violent, in which he has reserved his criticism for the police. This week Mélenchon said the real choice was not between order and chaos but between victimised youths and an illegitimate government, and again called on Emmanuel Macron to stand down. LFI’s leader in the Assembly called the president “an architect of chaos”.

The right-wing opposition, too, has made policing its theme - from the opposite standpoint. Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally attacked both LFI, for stoking the clashes, and official impotence. The government, she said, “deplores events without managing to prevent them, control them or even handle them.”

The mainstream right echoed her scorn. Bruno Retailleau of Les Républicains castigated Mélenchon but quickly turned on the interior minister: “Neither the numbers deployed nor the orders given were equal to the situation.” Macron, he added, had “disarmed” the security forces by calling for police “empathy” during earlier school protests, in which several teenagers were badly injured.

Whether the government is accused of brutality or incompetence, what is missing is any sense of perspective. On 17 October France deployed 60,000 officers – one for roughly every 10 marchers. A useful comparison is the pro-Palestinian march in London on 11 November 2023, when fewer than 2,000 officers policed 300,000 participants at an event considered high-risk because of fears of far-right counter-protests. In London, one for every 150 marchers was enough to keep the peace, more or less.

What stands out in comparisons with France’s neighbours is not a shortage of riot police but an abundance of rioters. Some blame aggressive methods for this. British research on crowd behaviour suggests that heavy-handed policing can itself make a crowd violent, and the French routinely use weapons rarely deployed elsewhere, such as rubber-bullet launchers and stun grenades.

However, it is hard to draw conclusions in a country which, unlike Britain, harbours thousands of ultra-left militants spoiling for a fight. And claims that police systematically attacked peaceful demonstrators ignore the fact that last Saturday the main marches along the authorised routes passed off without major incident. There is a serious debate to be had about French crowd control. But the parties’ anti-government polemics contributed nothing to it.

The moderate left joins in the widespread condemnation of the looting and the security failures, but adds its own mantra: “political response”. Thus the Socialist leader Olivier Faure: “You cannot treat an issue purely as a security matter when it is above all a political one.” Raphaël Glucksmann, the social-democratic presidential candidate, said the government had “failed first by not responding politically to a political movement”. He later proposed a “crisis exit plan” that included a big rise in the minimum wage and the scrapping of a key but controversial platform that allocates higher-education places.

“Political response” sounds sweet to centre-left ears. What it means here is that during the first school blockades in late September, the government should have made concessions - perhaps not the full €10bn for education the students are demanding, but at least something.

The trouble is that this approach is nothing new. For decades, governments have treated violent unrest as a political rather than a security issue. The “crisis exit plan” has typically involved writing large cheques, which the French will be paying off for the foreseeable future.

So even if a government without money or a parliamentary majority could somehow cure student angst or shield people from rising world prices, it would be storing up trouble. France does not lack aggrieved groups. And such a feat would certainly not satisfy the black blocs, who will settle for nothing less than regime change through insurrection.

For middle-of-the-road parties, there is no obvious solution to a crisis that stems from deep-rooted national ills. Turning on a dying administration smacks of panic. The radical left and the far right, for their part, thrive on the disturbances. Each round of rioting makes it more likely that Mélenchon and Le Pen will face each other in the presidential run-off next May. Whoever wins, both camps will claim that democracy is in danger, adding fuel to the fire.

For more on the root of France’s political problems, see my earlier piece for Persuasion:

Persuasion

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a year ago · 104 likes · 5 comments · Henri Astier

This post is adapted from my article published by Le Point on 6 October 2026.

Salomé Saqué is a journalist with a mission. In her new fortnightly commentary on France Inter, she has made the case for disobedience against “climate inaction” and urged listeners to resist the “fascist storm”. She calls journalistic neutrality “dangerous”.

You might think this would put her at odds with France Inter. As a public broadcaster, it is committed to “impartiality” as one of “the pillars of journalistic practice”. But fear not for Saqué’s position. When it comes to broadcasting, neutralité, or impartialité, has a meaning all its own. This peculiarity lies at the heart of a recent row over a right-wing pundit’s ill-fated spot on the station, and points to a malaise far deeper than one person’s airtime.

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Start with definitions. Neutrality is commonly understood as not taking sides. This is how Saqué sees it – only to dismiss the notion as harmful. It is also what the BBC means by “impartiality”, the avowed cornerstone of its journalism. Guests may voice opinions; the corporation’s journalists and regular news contributors may not. Saqué’s activism would not pass muster there. Yet she and the BBC are talking about the same thing: one rejects what the other embraces.

In French broadcasting, the concept means something else altogether. “Impartiality” is equated with “pluralism”: an outlet is deemed impartial when it reflects as many views as possible. To be sure, this would require commentators committed to saving the planet, defending minority rights and other progressive causes shared by many people. But at least as many fret about immigration endangering secularism and traditional ways of life, as well as “woke” elites. The latter concerns are amply aired by CNews, the country’s most-watched news channel, owned by a conservative billionaire. On public media, resident contributors highlighting them are vanishingly rare.

In May, a parliamentary inquiry into the “neutrality, functioning and funding of public broadcasting” faulted France Inter in particular for a lack of pluralism. Its report, drafted by an MP allied with the far-right National Rally, was contested by the broadcasters’ chiefs. But when the new season began in August, the station implicitly conceded the point: alongside Saqué, it gave a slot to Charles Sapin, a staunch conservative.

Sapin’s arrival triggered an in-house revolt. It was not over anything he said: neither of the two-and-a-half-minute editorials he had time to deliver touched on hot-button issues (they were about AI and public debt). The problem was his senior job at Valeurs actuelles, a hard-right weekly. Radio France’s unions deemed his very presence incompatible with the “humanist, democratic and republican values” of public service. After a two-day strike, management backtracked. It offered to turn his editorial into a debate, meaning that he alone among France Inter’s commentators would have to share the mic with an opponent. Sapin declined. In late September he was replaced by a centrist figure the unions could live with.

The furore has been over whether or not France’s leading radio station is serious about pluralism. Both camps have blind spots. Those glad to see the back of Sapin argue that the duty to air a range of views does not extend to the far right. But it is tricky for a national broadcaster to proclaim equal treatment for all currents of thought except those linked to the nation’s largest party – which incidentally may well win power next year. For others, the affair confirms that France Inter is a nest of subsidised lefties. This overlooks the fact that, by hiring Sapin in the first place, the station tacitly admitted that it had a balance problem. Moreover, according to Le Figaro, the vast majority of its journalists did not join the strike.

Seen from Britain, other aspects of the affair leap out - though hardly anyone in France has remarked on them. One is the open intervention of trade unions in editorial matters. The practice is nothing new. For decades the communist-dominated typesetters’ union sought to influence what newspapers said. Technology has largely put paid to such interference in print, but old habits die hard. A guide published last year by the CFDT union urges journalists to “question the need” to invite the National Rally at all outside election periods.

British unions used to be just as militant as their French counterparts: in 1984, printers forced the Sun to drop a front page depicting Arthur Scargill as “Mine Führer”. However, following legislation passed in the 1980s and retained by successive governments, lawful strikes can only be over pay and conditions. A National Union of Journalists manual on how to cover Reform UK is inconceivable.

The principle of non-interference in content has always been crucial in public broadcasting. The BBC’s Charter guarantees its independence “in all matters”, notably “as regards editorial and creative decisions”. That protects it from union pressure as much as from government. In France, governments have largely kept public broadcasters at arm’s length since the 1980s. Union meddling, on the other hand, is sanctioned by custom, and in this case by management.

More fundamentally, the affair shows that the peculiar French idea of “neutrality” remains sacrosanct. France Inter’s fiercest critics do not want to banish editorials from its airwaves. The parliamentary report called for in-house commentators to be replaced by pundits from the private opinion press, in the name of pluralism. Its right-wing author - perhaps with an eye to next year’s election - also wants the president to regain the power to appoint the heads of public radio and television. Nothing could be further from the British ethos of independence.

Using public-service news as a showcase for rival opinions, even a perfectly representative one, is a recipe for discontent. Imagine dividing the ideological landscape into four camps: the radical left, social democrats, moderate conservatives and the nationalist right. Give each 25% of the editorials. Every listener, whatever their leanings, would find that three-quarters of the opinions their taxes pay for range from the uncongenial to the abhorrent. In France’s increasingly fragmented politics, the true share would be even higher.

The only way out would be true impartiality: a France Inter without Saqué’s advocacy, Sapin’s editorials or union interference. Journalists would inform rather than opine, with opinions left to guests and debates. Even that may not guarantee survival. The BBC, which has long practised this kind of impartiality, faces attacks - some deserved, some not – and growing calls to scrap the licence fee. If the sturdiest model is wobbling, the future for French public broadcasting looks bleak.

This piece is adapted from my BBC article “France’s school protests: what lies behind the anger”.

In recent weeks students across France have been holding protests, blocking access to many high schools. The movement has turned violent in places – hundreds of students, teachers and police officers have been injured. Thousands of people, including an unknown number of outside troublemakers, have been arrested.

The students are complaining about staff shortages and dilapidated facilities in the country’s lycées, attended by 15-18-year-olds. “Sometimes our teachers are absent for several weeks without being replaced,” Madalena, a Paris student, told the BBC during a day of demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands onto French streets this week. She had to sit in “boiling hot” classrooms during the recent heat waves. There’s worse, she added: some schools run out of toilet paper.

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Other complaints vary in seriousness. There’s resentment about the banning of mobile phones and schooldays that can last until 6pm. “You get home at seven, and have no time to sleep or do your homework,” one lycéen told France 2.

France’s online platform that allocates places in higher education, Parcoursup, is another sore point. The frustration has deep roots. About 80% of each cohort now passes the baccalauréat, which entitles students to a university place, though not necessarily on the course of their choice. Hence a scramble for desirable courses, and an anxiety focused on Parcoursup, regarded by many as opaque.

Those grievances are real. But do they explain the form the protest movement has taken? To answer the question, some international comparisons are helpful. According to a recent report by the OECD, a club of developed nations, the French government spends more per lycée student than the EU average for upper-secondary schools.

Teacher shortages are indeed acute, but no worse in France than elsewhere. By OECD measures they are actually milder: despite relatively low pay, fewer posts go unfilled.

Schooldays stretching into the late afternoon have always been a problem for French pupils. This is mainly the result of long lunch breaks and complex schedules – rather than compensation for holidays, which are not exceptionally long compared with other EU countries.

The extended day is a sad fact of French school life and can hardly account for the present eruption. Neither can pressure created by a dysfunctional higher-education system. In most European countries, 80-90% of young people complete secondary education, and competition for good university spots is fierce everywhere. It is hard to think of a place where aspiring students are not stressed.

This is not to say that French pupils have no reason to grumble and that they should – as their ironic slogan puts it – “be young and shut up”. The puzzle is the way they have chosen to express their anger. It would not occur to English pupils to seek better facilities by shutting schools with wheelie bins or defacing premises. Nor is it obvious how the sight of burning schools will help attract the young graduates the country needs as teachers.

The French method is all the more remarkable as those embracing it are doing so at considerable risk. Preventing teaching through force, threats or damage is illegal, and inevitably draws in both police and rioters spoiling for a fight. Students caught up in sometimes heavy-handed crowd control operations face anything from tear gas to serious injury.

To understand their tactics, one must look beyond the barricaded school gates to a political tradition. In France, power has often resided on the street as much as in elected bodies. And students know this as well as anyone else.

In October 1990, the rape of a pupil at a school in Seine-Saint-Denis – an area north of Paris that has been a focus for the present unrest – was the trigger for mass rallies against underfunding and staff shortages. The government responded by releasing the equivalent of €1.2bn (£1bn) in today’s money for lycées.

In 1998, half a million pupils marched across France over similar demands, resulting in almost €1bn to renovate schools and 14,000 extra staff.

On several occasions student protests defeated government reforms – such as a university overhaul in 1986 and a lower youth minimum wage in 1994.

Probably the most striking display of student power came in 2006, with the withdrawal of a law designed to loosen hire-and-fire rules for those under 26 to tackle youth unemployment. The measure, passed by parliament and signed into law by President Jacques Chirac, was scrapped after weeks of blockades in universities and lycées often marred by violence.

Of course, French adults too have shown that mere elected officials can be no match for rioters. The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) uprising of 2018-2019 – which saw shops ransacked and government buildings attacked across the country – led the government to drop a rise in fuel taxes. It approved €10bn in extra spending, precisely the amount today’s young protesters are demanding.

Although French fiscal policy can be made on the street rather than in parliament, the barricade is not always stronger than the ballot. In 1968 – a heroic precedent cited by every protest movement since then – a student uprising was brought to an end by a snap election. But the lycéens are heirs to a political culture in which demonstrators compete with representative institutions to be seen as the legitimate voice of the people.

On the face of it, the current balance of power favours the pupils. Polls point to wide popular support for their movement, which is actively backed by trade unions and left-wing politicians. By contrast, the government has never been weaker. After nine years in power, President Emmanuel Macron is a deeply unpopular lame duck who is barred from standing in elections due in six months’ time.

His decision to call a snap election in June 2024 has resulted in a hopelessly gridlocked assembly. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has described himself as the “weakest prime minister” in living memory and seems unlikely to get a budget through parliament.

One irony is that France spends over 14% of its GDP on pensions. If that were brought in line with the EU average of 11.4%, the savings would be €80bn a year. The education ministry illustrates the problem with such generosity: almost a third of its €89bn budget for 2027 goes on pensions. The old seem to come first. Every attempt at pension reform meets fierce resistance, including from lycéens like those now protesting about crumbling schools. The fight, in the end, is between the French and themselves.

The deeper irony is that the government’s very weakness could prove an asset in the showdown with students. Faced with rising borrowing costs, a deficit of 5.4% of GDP and a public debt at its highest level since the 1940s, Lecornu is financially as well as politically hamstrung. Unlike his predecessors under intense pressure from the street, he has little to give.

René Viénet is one of the last great figures of 1960s-70s radicalism: docker’s son, sinologist, publisher, Situationist provocateur, scourge of establishment Mao-worshippers and filmmaker - before reinventing himself as a nuclear industry broker in Taiwan. His memoir, Avec ma bite et mon couteau, is published this week by Marest Editeur. The following excerpt, translated with his permission, explains how his collaboration with Latvian-born historian Miriam Novitch in the 1970s exposed on of France’s most uncomfortable secrets. It puts into sharp perspective the current rows over antisemitism on US campuses and on the British left.

At that time, in my editing suite, I was smoking a Havana to celebrate my very recent status as a film director and producer — a modest piece of swagger I indulged in for fun — and reading Variety, to which I subscribed in order to look rich. And there I came across an Israeli documentary called The Eighty-First Blow, released in California in 1974 to considerable success and nominated for an Oscar in 1975. Like most young people of my generation, I had seen Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol’s Night and Fog (1956) ten times at school — only to realise, fifteen years later, that the words “Jew” and “extermination” are never once heard in it.

That small article made me want to see the film. I made a couple of phone calls and very quickly received a visit from a Dror (1) representative in Paris, who brought me a 16mm print and suggested: “Since you’re interested in this film, why don’t you find a distributor in France?”

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I didn’t find a distributor. Miriam Novitch then turned up in the wake of the Dror delegate. She challenged me: “Young man, if you can’t find a distributor, distribute it yourself.” I immediately did so, and I am glad — indeed proud — because it allowed me to see something I had not quite dared to perceive: left-wing antisemitism in France. In the working-class milieu of Le Havre where I grew up, there were no antisemites. Jews were not an issue; there was no reason to speak ill of anyone, and no one did.

It was only when I stumbled on Spanish anarchists in Paris before 1968 that I met my first antisemites. I hadn’t read Drumont (2), I had read little Céline and the sheer stupidity of the antisemitism voiced by those Spanish anarchists left me dumbfounded.

Around the same time, I showed some prescience about a man Guy Debord wanted to recruit into the Situationist International (3). Pierre Guillaume was an activist from Socialisme ou Barbarie (4) who ran La Vieille Taupe, an ultra-left bookshop on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. When I met him, I thought he was a nasty jerk. I held firm and said no, I don’t want him in the SI.

It has to be said that at the time I served as something of an arbiter of taste when it came to recruiting pro-Situs. In this particular case I refused point-blank, and I’m glad I did because that bookseller went on to become the chief propagator of Faurisson (5) and Holocaust denial in France. It remains absurd and intolerable to think that someone could declare himself pro-Situ, position himself on the far left of the far left, claim to be anti-Stalinist - and end up as a propagandist for the denial of the mass killings of the “Bloodlands”, the denial of the gas chambers, and so on.

When I came across Miriam Novitch’s film, the memory of that bookseller’s idiocy was still fresh in my mind. I lost no time in finding ways to get the film shown, because I felt it was important to expose antisemitism in left-wing circles.

As for Miriam Novitch herself, I want to stress that her work has not been praised or celebrated enough. A Latvian Jew and resistance fighter, she set up the first museum devoted to the genocide of the Jews. It was at her Ghetto Fighters’ kibbutz in Galilee — and it preceded Yad Vashem in Jerusalem by several years. All her life she carried out exceptional work: collecting, cataloguing, organising and transmitting not only the memory of the genocide of Jews, Roma and other victims of Nazism, but also the history of their resistance.

I registered The 81st Blow with the Centre national du cinéma and retitled it Ne laissons pas les morts enterrer les morts — a riposte to the Gospel phrase “Let the dead bury the dead” — and distributed it with my friend Françoise Zylberberg.

The film lists three professional writers and filmmakers as its authors: David Bergman, Jacquot Ehrlich and Haïm Gouri (7). But it was Miriam Novitch who had the idea, Miriam who assembled the archive material, and Miriam who, out of modesty, stepped back and let the pros take the credit. The three men clearly played a real part in the film’s structure and execution, but Miriam’s role should not be minimised. She was the source, the origin, the driving force behind The 81st Blow.

The film’s great idea is to add no commentary to the footage. It rests entirely on the power of the archive images, a few testimonies given at the Eichmann trial, some children’s songs, and the rhythm of the editing. That is what makes it an extraordinarily modern film. The principle impressed me greatly, as I had taken the same approach with Mao par lui-même (8): no subjective commentary, only authentic documents, period images and period texts.

Yet even so admirable a film provoked controversy. In Rouge, (9) one “P.A.P.” headed his review “Objectivity as Trompe-l’œil”, arguing that class struggle was conspicuous by its absence, that the film dealt too cursorily with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (a remarkable charge, given that Miriam was a leading historian on the subject), and that it was therefore Zionist...

Later, the film was in effect subsumed: much of the original ninety-minute version was used to re-edit a longer documentary and folded into a trilogy (10) whose aim was different — a celebration of the founding of Israel. In my view it would have been preferable to leave Miriam Novitch’s film intact and make a separate film about Israel.

Be that as it may, Miriam’s documentary, in its original version, remains a unique achievement that deserves to be preserved as a founding work — the stone in the entrance of her museum.

Before making the film, Miriam Novitch had written several books in French, among them La Vérité sur Treblinka (1967), La révolte du ghetto de Varsovie (1968), and L’extermination des Tziganes (1969). In 1978 I was glad to publish the original French edition of her book on Sobibor: it was the thirty-seventh volume of the Bibliothèque asiatique. It was subsequently translated into English (11).

In his preface, the French Holocaust historian Léon Poliakov conveys the unfailing dedication that was Miriam’s hallmark:

“Getting the plain truth of the extermination camps accepted is no easy undertaking —Miriam Novitch has devoted herself to this enterprise for over thirty years with total selflessness. Yes, over thirty years: I recall how, on my return from Nuremberg, she came to find me in Chevreuse, where I was living at the time, to show me the first bundle of survivor testimonies she had collected.”

Some years after these two initiatives — distributing the film and publishing the book — I was shocked to read that a journalist had visited Miriam at her kibbutz where, evidently, she had been somewhat neglected by her friends and colleagues.

Footnotes:

(1) Dror: a global Zionist youth movement

(2) Édouard Drumont, author of the antisemitic pamphlet La France juive, 1886

(3) Situationist International (1957–1972): a radical group of artists and thinkers led by Guy Debord, whose critique of consumer society influenced the 1968 movement.

(4) Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–1965): an anti-Stalinist revolutionary group founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, also influential on the French far left.

(5) Robert Faurisson (1929-2018): France’s most prominent Holocaust denier. La Vieille Taupe also published Roger Garaudy's Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (1996), in which this former leading French Communist argued that the gas chambers were not used for mass extermination.

(6) The Ghetto Fighters’ House was set up in 1949 and Yad Vashem in 1953

(7) David Bergman, screenwriter-director; Jacquot Ehrlich, editor-director. Haïm Gouri filmmaker and author of the book The Glass Cage: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann (1962).

(8) Mao par lui-même (Mao by Mao) consisted of archive footage and Mao’s own words. When Mao died on 9 September 1976, French TV had no obituary prepared: so deep was the reverence of elites that contemplating his death seemed sacrilegious. The 26-minute film thus had no competitors and was aired that evening. Its candid portrait of a ruthless strongman stood in stark contrast to the hagiographic platitudes oozing from the rest of the French media — but the film was beyond reproach, since every word on the soundtrack came from the Great Helmsman himself.

(9) Rouge, a Trotskyist weekly, was influential on the far left and a fixture on French newsstands. The quote is from no 476, 15 October 1977.

(10) The trilogy comprised The 81st Blow, The Last Sea (1979) and Flames in the Ashes (1985).

(11) Viénet edited the “Bibliothèque asiatique” series at the Paris publisher Champ Libre. Novitch’s Sobibor was translated into Hebrew in 1979 and into English — as Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt — by the Holocaust Library, New York, in 1980.

As show business is by definition both art and commerce, creative types and producers are inevitably locked in a fraught partnership. Proud artists have long complained about profit-chasing suits pandering to the public’s baser tastes. In the 1970s, such gripes were neatly captured by the French comic legend Coluche: “To think that all it would take for bullshit not to sell is for people not to buy it,” he had a protest singer sigh.

Lately the tension has taken on a political edge. In the US, late-night hosts have run afoul of network paymasters accused of exerting or caving in to ideological pressure. Nowhere is the strain more apparent than in France. As the Cannes film festival opened last week, 600 film professionals signed a petition against the “grip” of billionaire Vincent Bolloré on their industry.

A conservative Catholic with a mission, Bolloré already controls a vast media empire. More to the point, he is the main shareholder of Canal+, a subscription channel that is also by far the leading source of funding for French films. “By leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right mogul, we risk not merely uniformity in films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination,” wrote the signatories, who include actress Juliette Binoche, documentary maestro Raymond Depardon and writer-director Arthur Harari.

They are particularly alarmed by Canal+’s recent acquisition of a 34% stake in UGC, a major French cinema chain, with a view to achieving full control by 2028. Bolloré will then “control the entire filmmaking chain, from financing to distribution on both big and small screens”. To counter his alleged “civilisational project”, the signatories have formed the collective Zapper Bolloré (”Switch away from Bolloré”), with the aim of “building a movement capable of defending the industry’s independence”.

Now you might roll your eyes at such language. The overused word “fascist” has long lost its sting, and Canal+ has a track record of funding a wide diversity of films regardless of political criteria. On the other hand, the signatories insist they are flagging a risk, however distant. As a libéral who believes in competition, I can only welcome any attempt to build alternative production structures. Even if the rhetoric was overblown, I felt the impulse was healthy.

I was further encouraged by Canal+’s response. Taking a break from relentless film-viewing at Cannes, company president Maxime Saada took stock of the signatories’ desire for independence. “I don’t want Canal to work with those who signed this petition any longer,” he told reporters. Admittedly, Saada’s tone matched the petition for intemperance. His talk of a “blacklist” was as ill-chosen as the petitioners’ f-word, and especially idiotic as those critics had explicitly said they wanted to switch away from Bolloré anyway. On the main point - the need for rupture - the two sides appeared in violent agreement.

Some media reactions supported such a reading. Parallels were drawn with the Grasset affair when a slew of writers left the publishing house — a Bolloré Group company — after its iconic CEO was forced out (see my piece below). In both cases, principled artists refused to lend their talent to an enterprise they considered dangerous.

But most journalists, from France Info to Le Monde, offered a different take on the row: the Canal+ response was seen as a threat. I was baffled. Telling someone who has just broken up with you that you never want to see them again is not a threat: it is a gift. True, Canal+ was a dominant force in the industry – which explained why the signatories included few big names. But its dominance was the very reason why, from the petitioners’ point of view, resistance was needed. Surely they would set the record straight: if “Zapper Bolloré” meant anything, it meant boycotting his company.

You can imagine my surprise when, instead of correcting the media’s curious interpretation, the group endorsed it. Far from welcoming Saada’s confirmation of a clean break, they denounced it as “intimidation”. “Can we still believe in Canal+’s independence from the far-right billionaire, when it is now officially impossible to speak out against him?” the rebels’ statement thundered. The collective was shocked, shocked to see Bolloré doing exactly what it had warned he was in a position of doing. It seemed surreal.

This is when I realised I had been living out of France for too long. In the plain-speaking world of the Anglo-Saxons, if you go your own way, you go your own way – call it the Fleetwood Mac principle. And telling a mogul he is hell-bent on a fascist takeover of a nation’s minds strongly suggests you want nothing to do with his business. For the French, it turns out to be an invitation to dialogue. As one signatory told Le Monde, they just wanted to “put the Bolloré issue on the table” and speak out “as citizens in the global context of the rise of the far right”.

An actors’ association quoted in the same article reminded Canal+ of its contractual funding obligations. It was now clear that Zapper Bolloré was not about disengagement at all. Depardon, Binoche and Harari were no Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith taking on the majors - the Hollywood trio, mind you, did not sign a petition; they set up United Artists. The Grasset precedent was equally irrelevant: rather than walking away, the self-proclaimed Bolloré zappers expected Canal+ to keep hiring professionals who considered its principal shareholder a dangerous extremist.

We are dealing here with a time-honoured phenomenon in French cultural circles. Artists seek to enjoy both the frisson of raging against the system and the comfort of living off it. Once again, it was Coluche who put it best, almost half a century ago. At the end of the singer sketch, the character puts down his angry guitar, scans the audience in vain for record executives and wonders if they got lost. “I don’t understand,” he says. “This place is signposted all the way from the Porte d’Orléans.”

For those who wish to savour Coluche in the original, here is the two-part sketch — “Misère” followed by “Stéphane Maréchal” — from which the quotes above are drawn.

This piece develops themes explored in an article published by Persuasion on 6 May 2026.

Jordan Bardella has been described as France’s answer to Donald Trump. Like the US president, the leader of the French hard-right National Rally (RN) has ridden a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, anger at globalised elites and mistrust of multilateral institutions. France’s most popular politician, he looks the favourite to win the presidency in elections next year.

There are obvious differences between the two men, notably in age and background: Bardella is 30 and grew up in a rough neighbourhood. More significantly, they took opposite routes to the top: while Trump radicalised a mainstream party, Bardella helped steer a once pariah movement towards the centre. Last year he withdrew from a US conservative event after Steve Bannon made what looked like a Nazi salute. Since then Bardella has condemned Trump’s commercial offensive against Europe (”blackmail”) and Middle East policy (”totally erratic”). He has also quietly dropped the RN’s early sympathy for Russia over Ukraine.

Bardella’s politics can be best described as populism with French characteristics. But in a country traditionally run by high-flying graduates, a university drop-out with no government experience in the Elysée would be just as disruptive as a Trump White House. It would also send shock waves well beyond France’s borders.

Bardella’s ascent tells its own ground-breaking story. He was raised by a single mother in Saint-Denis, a bleak northern suburb of Paris. He is almost entirely of Italian stock, with a Kabyle great-grandfather on his father’s side. To those who cite his ancestry against his anti-immigration stance, Bardella has a ready answer: his European forebears fully assimilated; when the cultural distance is greater, he adds pointedly, the journey is harder.

He became politically active at age 16, drawn to far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who he felt spoke to people like him living in gang-ridden banlieues and other areas the establishment had forgotten. She was then engaged in turning the rabble-rousing National Front — founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen — into a true post-fascist party by expelling its openly racist and antisemitic elements, and eventually Jean-Marie himself.

Bardella rose rapidly through the ranks and caught Marine Le Pen’s eye. A smooth-talker, he became party spokesman. His big break came in 2019, when she picked the 23-year-old to lead the rebranded National Rally into the European Parliament election. The gamble paid off: Bardella’s list narrowly beat the centrist bloc supporting President Emmanuel Macron. The RN was not just the main opposition party: it was France’s largest.

2022 was another pivotal year. After a second consecutive defeat to Macron in a presidential run-off, Le Pen decided to prepare more rigorously for the 2027 election by stepping back from day-to-day party business. She needed a loyalist to take over as RN president. No prizes for guessing who got the job. The division of labour suited both: he had the title and the platform while she retained her position as head of the parliamentary group and overall strategic leader.

A series of twists over the past two years has turned Bardella into prime presidential material. In European elections in June 2024, Bardella’s list achieved double the score of Macron’s centrists. A humiliated Macron immediately called a snap general election and paid dearly for it. The RN and its allies made historic gains, falling short of a governing majority – mostly because France’s two-round system allows established parties to thwart unwanted intruders in run-offs (at the same time, Britain’s Labour was winning a landslide with the same share of the vote, about 33%). Since then the RN has been in a position to help topple governments in a hung parliament – which it has since done twice.

Then came the legal shock. In March 2025, Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzling EU funds and sentenced to five years’ ineligibility. With an appeal verdict expected in July, the party has been preparing an alternative candidate. “Plan B for Bardella” became the inevitable shorthand.

Although Bardella rejects the phrase, insisting that “plan A has not yet run its course”, his evident electoral appeal had already led the RN to place him on a presidential trajectory. In October 2024 his autobiography became the political best-seller of the year. Book signings up and down la France profonde drew long queues, confirming his star status. By the end of the year his approval ratings had overtaken Marine Le Pen’s. In late 2025, a second book went straight to the top of the charts - held off the number one spot only by the latest Astérix volume.

His main asset was his ability to expand the RN’s reach into territory where it had historically been weak, starting with younger voters from working-class backgrounds. His social media presence – 2.6m followers on TikTok - reinforces this image of a man who has grown up in the same suburban France as his audience. In behind-the-scenes footage, he is shown relaxed, sipping pastis, nervously preparing for a rally, or compulsively snacking on sweets. It may be manufactured authenticity but it hits home. As one young voter told Le Monde: “The others are a different world, they don’t speak the same language.”

A subtler dimension to Bardella’s allure deserves mention. His videos also highlight public appearances where he invariably sports a suit and tie. This is a deliberate statement. In his first book he wrote that dressing well is a mark of “deference towards those who place their trust in you”. This echoes Michel Houellebecq’s description of sartorial propriety as the ultimate social leveller. To be accepted as a professional, the protagonist says, “all I need to do is buy a suit, a tie and a shirt - purchasable for 800 francs at C&A in the sales – and to learn how to tie a Windsor knot.” It is informality that signals the quiet arrogance of those who can afford not to make an effort. Bardella, the banlieue boy in the dark suit, understands this instinctively.

More broadly, he has proved remarkably effective at expanding the RN’s reach into social and political territory where it has historically been unwelcome. A recent IFOP survey suggests that among lower-income voters, Le Pen and Bardella perform equally well. But in richer categories, where the RN has struggled, he pulls markedly ahead of her. IFOP also asked respondents whether they would like various politicians to run in the next presidential election — a different question from voting intention, but a measure of how they feel towards other forces. Among centrist and centre-right supporters, approval for a Bardella candidacy significantly outstrips that for Le Pen. The lesson is clear: where Marine Le Pen consolidated the RN’s popular electorate, Bardella is expanding it upward — towards wealthier voters and what remains of the mainstream right. That, in essence, is the Bardella effect.

A key part of Bardellism has been wooing corporate France, which has long shunned the RN. The programme cobbled together for the 2024 snap election did contain some pro-business measures — lower taxes for companies, a bonfire of regulations. But they were far from fully costed. The promised savings were either wildly optimistic — gains from curbing immigration, reducing France’s EU contribution — or deliberately vague: cuts in public agencies, a crackdown on fraud. Meanwhile the programme piled on new spending: scrapping the pension reform, cutting VAT and fuel taxes. According to the Institut Montaigne, a think tank, the overall package would have widened France’s deficit by 71 billion euros. Not a single mainstream economist came to its defence.

Against this backdrop, Bardella has worked hard to arrange meetings with the MEDEF, France’s main employers’ federation. The bosses, on their side, have been eager to inject some fiscal reality into a programme that, as it stands, would alarm the bond markets. After a private lunch with the MEDEF’s executive bureau, Bardella struck a reassuring note: “I believe in freedom of enterprise; we need to give back freedom to those who create and innovate.”

This charm offensive towards big business sits uneasily with Marine Le Pen’s more traditionalist line. Catering to RN voters who peeled away from the left, notably in the northern rust belt, she is not afraid of striking redistributive poses. Her party’s programme still contains a “tax on financial fortune”. More recently, the deputies she leads backed a levy on “unproductive” assets — an attempt to revive an old wealth tax — and an equally controversial tax on multinationals’ profits in France. Neither was retained in the final budget, but both confirmed where Le Pen’s instincts lie when it comes to big business.

The tension with Bardellism extends to the taxation of oil company windfall profits during supply shocks such as the current conflict in the Gulf, a measure also championed by the left. Le Pen embraces it as “a matter of social justice.” Bardella, characteristically, cultivates strategic ambiguity: when pressed on the question, he simply said “Why not?” The two-word answer sums up the studied vagueness he has developed into an art form.

None of this is easy to read. Are the two playing a double act to maximise their electoral reach? Both Bardella and Le Pen insist there is no daylight between them. Even if genuine divergence exists, the question remains: does Bardella have the weight, or the will, to reshape a party the Le Pen family has spent half a century building?

Whatever happens, the RN’s core principles remain on a collision course not only with France’s need for fiscal stability but with European realities. The party’s flagship policy of préférence nationale — reserving jobs, housing and welfare for French nationals — runs against EU commitments to equal treatment for all citizens of member states. Its suspicion of free trade and Bardella’s talk of “intelligent protectionism” jar with France’s deep integration into global supply chains. And the RN’s vision of a “Europe of nations” rests on the illusion that French companies can enjoy the benefits of the single market while Paris picks and chooses which rules to follow.

Bardella is no Trump. But neither is he Giorgia Meloni, who set out to make a pragmatic peace with European Union rules and multilateral institutions. Populism with French characteristics carries the vertiginous prospect of untested 30-year-old in charge of the EU’s second-largest economy and its only nuclear power. In an already turbulent world, France's partners would be dealing with an unknown quantity of the first order.

Parochial disputes are famously vicious. The latest storm in the small world of French publishing illustrates that truism. The sacking last week of the head of Grasset, a venerable publisher, has been called an “earthquake” by the smart press. An avalanche of furious editorials and petitions has been published. A slew of Grasset writers have walked out in solidarity with the ousted CEO. The world beyond, however, is unmoved. In a nation that takes to the streets at the slightest opportunity, no protests are planned. The row has barely registered abroad. Yet the fact that the stakes seem so small is itself revealing: it is also a truism that, as Sherlock Holmes put it, “the little things are infinitely the most important”.

It all kicked off on 14 April when Hachette, Grasset’s parent company and France’s largest publishing group, announced the departure of Olivier Nora, who had run the Paris house for 26 years. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt by Vincent Bolloré, Hachette’s billionaire owner, to assert direct control. This worried many: for over a decade Bolloré, who made his fortune in African ports, has been assembling a sprawling media empire and is frequently accused of using it to impose conservative, Catholic-inspired views.

In an open letter printed by Le Monde the next day 130 writers announced they were leaving Grasset. The signatories – who read like a roll-call of the Parisian cultural establishment and spanned a range of political opinion – said they refused to be “hostages in an ideological war” aimed at “imposing authoritarianism”. By Monday their numbers had grown to 217. Heavyweights from other Hachette publishers joined in, one open letter warning that its signatories would leave their own house if subjected to “similar pressures.” Among them was J.M.G. Le Clézio who had his Nobel Prize duly noted after his name.

The authors’ reaction in itself is not unreasonable. Nora is a charismatic editor from one of France’s great intellectual families. His replacement is an all-purpose technocrat who has overseen the management transitions at other Bolloré companies. These have included Fayard, a publishing house that is now an outlet for conservative and far-right authors. Those who want no part of that process are perfectly entitled to walk away.

But then Bolloré, as the owner, is equally entitled to the course he has chosen. From the moment he took control of Hachette in 2023, it was clear he wanted a pliant management. A parting of ways with the scrupulously independent Nora was inevitable. When it came, it followed due process. Under French employment law, a dismissal requires both a good reason and a severance package. The stated reason was a row over the publication date of a new book by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal: Bolloré wanted June, Nora the autumn. There are reports of “stormy meetings” in which Nora refused to budge. Whether or not the row was choreographed, a pretext was needed. Once one was found, lawyers on both sides got to work.

Everything about Hachette’s statement on 14 April points to a fruitful outcome. Nora was wished “every success in his future endeavours” and thanked for his “remarkable work.” He in turn declared himself “proud” to have led Grasset “in complete independence.” He didn’t storm out of the C-suite but skilfully negotiated his exit. We will never know the size of the pay-out — tellingly, Nora has said nothing about his dismissal. But Bolloré has since revealed that the publisher’s salary topped one million euros. The legal minimum in such cases is 18 months’ severance: for someone of his calibre, the figure will run into millions. And at sixty-six, he has plenty of road ahead.

Many in the media have turned a falling-out between an owner and a star employee into a Nazi-themed pantomime. The Nouvel Obs characterised Nora as the “son of a Resistance hero [who] restored the lustre of the publishing house founded by the collaborationist Bernard Grasset”. The implication about Bolloré is clear. A show on state TV held a “debate“ in which all six guests inveighed against Bolloré in unison. One invoked Viktor Klemperer’s classic study The Language of the Third Reich to describe Bolloré’s strategy and quoted Hannah Arendt. Another guest tore up his publishing contract live on air and declared himself ready for battle: “Formons des bataillons!” he exclaimed, echoing the Marseillaise.

Le Monde has been running almost daily articles excoriating Bolloré. In one, the revelation of Nora’s salary - a twelfth of Grasset’s annual turnover - is branded as “populist demagoguery“, marking the first time France’s newspaper of record has found the disclosure of a CEO’s pay objectionable. Raising the spectre of cultural devastation, a Bordeaux academic warned that books could vanish from Grasset’s catalogue “at a stroke” — a somewhat overblown worry, as French law gives authors the right to reclaim their works if a publisher lets them go out of print. Left-wing politicians have chimed in. Socialist leader Olivier Faure accused Bolloré of wanting to “lobotomise publishing” through “purges”; Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for the dismantling of his “totalitarian conglomerate”.

Lost in the moral uproar are facts of publishing life. One regards the fate of authors swept up in the mass exodus from Grasset. The celebrities who led it - such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Virginie Despentes – will land on their feet as easily as Nora will. Lesser names may find the market less welcoming. And those who stayed behind simply to see a book through the press risk being tarred as collaborators.

The larger picture is France’s historic entanglement between big business and the world of journalism and publishing. The country’s industry moguls began gobbling up media long before Silicon Valley moneybags got the idea. In the 1960s Claude Perdriel used his sanitation-and-toilet fortune to build Le Nouvel Observateur into the bible of the trendy left. In the following decades Jean-Luc Lagardère merged Hachette with Matra, his aerospace group; Serge Dassault, an aviation and defence tycoon, bought Le Figaro, a conservative daily; Francis Bouygues, a construction magnate, took over TF1, a top TV channel; luxury goods tycoon François Pinault owns Le Point, a centre-right magazine.

None of them shied away from using their platforms to further pet causes and other interests. Dassault, who ended his life in politics, brazenly bought a local newspaper in the area he represented. Lagardère once ordered a Hachette travel imprint to rush through a useless guidebook about a country he was investing in. Having sold off his assets outside media and communications, Bolloré is, to be sure, less vulnerable to accusations of conflict of interest: his is a purely ideological crusade. But this will earn him no credit on the Left Bank - his ideology is precisely what the smart crowd despises. The big truth behind this small affair: Vincent Bolloré is the wrong kind of billionaire.

This is a slightly expanded version of a piece first published in American Purpose.

The death of Lionel Jospin on 22 March, aged 88, has reopened familiar debates about the French left. Some hail the Socialist who brought Communists and Greens into a pragmatic governing coalition between 1997 and 2002, and see it as a template for the future. Others argue that the rift between radicals and moderates is now deeper than ever, making any such alliance a mirage. Jospin has been given credit for his stewardship of the economy and his signature social policy, the 35-hour week. For critics, the dream of France working less and maintaining its rank among nations has been conclusively crushed. These are legitimate arguments. But this article sets them aside to examine something on which there is near-universal agreement: the man’s moral character, or rather, the legend of it.

When he was alive, Jospin was widely regarded as the most honest president France never had. Words like “probity”, “sincerity” and “honour” tripped off the keyboards of journalists who wrote about him. Much was made of his protestant background (why a Catholic, Jewish or Muslim upbringing should inspire less trust was never explained). After his greatest setback – his elimination in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, eventually won by Jacques Chirac - he was praised for withdrawing from politics. “Jospin is a man of principles who does not deceive himself and acts on his convictions, even at his own expense,” the veteran political analyst Alain Duhamel wrote in a recent book of political sketches.

In death, he has been virtually canonised. “Jospinism was above all the ethics of a man,” opined Le Nouvel Obs. The religious angle was duly stressed: although he was an atheist, the magazine added, “an aura of puritanism always clung to him”. He “refused to separate ethics from politics,” noted Le Monde. The right-wing channel CNews faithfully compiled the tributes heaped on him by political friends and foes alike: “rectitude”, “a model of integrity”, “an exemplar of hard work and exacting standards.” Lost in the encomia, or discreetly relegated to a footnote, is the fact that Jospin led a political double life for decades on his way to the top — and lied about it repeatedly once it was exposed.

“We live at the mercy of certain silences,” Henry de Montherlant wrote. For Jospin, the silence was broken in June 2001, four years into his prime ministership. An elderly revolutionary Marxist, Boris Fraenkel, revealed that in 1964 he had recruited Lionel Jospin into the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), a cloak-and-dagger Trotskyist group dedicated to infiltrating key institutions. Jospin, then a student at ENA, an elite school for bureaucrats, was quite a catch. “We didn’t have any énarques in the movement then,” Fraenkel told Le Nouvel Observateur. “It was a unique chance to penetrate the upper reaches of the civil service”.

In 1970, after five years as a diplomat, Jospin became a university professor. More interestingly for his revolutionary handlers, Jospin — codenamed “Michel” — decided to join the Socialist Party (PS) the following year. OCI leader Pierre Lambert, an imperious guru who kept a personal grip on every tactical move, gave his blessing. The PS had just been relaunched by François Mitterrand with a programme of “rupture with capitalism”: having a mole on the inside was an opportunity not to be missed. Jospin, Lambert later acknowledged, “went into the Socialist Party with my consent” and “had a particular job to do”.

The operation was a ringing success. “Michel” rose through the ranks of the PS. By 1979, he was Mitterrand’s second-in-command, running the party by day and discussing the revolution in cell meetings by night. He hid his clandestine activities even from his wife.

By the turn of the 1980s, he was easily recognisable with his owlish glasses and frizzy hair and rumours about his Trotskyist connection began to circulate. His response: people must be confusing him with his brother, an avowed OCI member. Although Jospin became party leader in 1981 and cabinet minister in 1988, the press looked away. In 1995, when he seemed well-placed in the presidential race, Le Monde mustered the curiosity to ask him if he had ever been a Trotskyist. He flatly denied it, once again sheltering behind his younger brother.

Six years later, now Prime Minister, Jospin was finally cornered. Both Fraenkel and Lambert had gone public and the game was up. In June 2001, he rose in the National Assembly to deliver what passed for a confession: “It is true that in the 1960s I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas and established relations with one of the groups of this movement. This was a personal, intellectual and political journey of which I have no reason to be ashamed, if that is the right word.”

This masterclass in evasion warrants close scrutiny, as every word is carefully chosen to blur facts without lying outright:

• In the 1960s: this conveniently ignores credible reports that he remained an OCI operative well into the 1980s; more than a decade of entryism within the PS is airbrushed out;

• I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas: it sounds like a case of youthful intellectual exploration rather than a structured clandestine activity, complete with a codename and deliberate double membership;

• “I established relations with one of the groups“: the indefinite article deepens the fog. The OCI is not named — as though he had vaguely frequented one club among many others;

• “A personal, intellectual and political journey“: the three-word formula dilutes a political commitment into something resembling a voyage of self-discovery;

• “Of which I have no reason to be ashamed, if that is the right word“: the final rhetorical caveat allows him to both distance himself from his own formulation and reinforce it. He does not merely deny shame - he questions whether shame is even a relevant category.

In France, Trotskyism — an anti-Stalinist strand of Marxism dedicated to permanent revolution — is not the quaint ideological relic it might seem elsewhere. Among baby-boomers, former devotees rose to prominent positions in politics, the media and the civil service.

Many have worn their past affiliation as a badge. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a towering figure on the left, had a brush with the OCI in his youth. At Lambert’s funeral in 2008, he declared that he had “never disowned his past as a revolutionary activist” and acknowledged a personal “debt” to the man. Edwy Plenel, a star investigative journalist who was editor of Le Monde before founding the Mediapart website, has never hidden his pride in his past as a member of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).

A rare instance of clear repudiation was by the late Socialist senator Henri Weber, another LCR alumnus: “All the tenets of Trotskyism have been squelched. Permanent revolution — what a load of balls!” he once thundered. Jospin, who had belonged to a particularly conspiratorial branch of the brotherhood and traded on an upright public image, was not capable of such plain-speaking.

In 2010, Jospin had a chance to come clean. After an inconclusive flirtation with the presidential race three years earlier, he was well and truly out of politics. Two journalists approached him to take stock of his career. In the resulting TV documentary and book - both entitled Lionel raconte Jospin - Lionel may have told Jospin’s story, but he dodged all questions about “Michel”. “I was first a Trotskyist and a Socialist, then the Trotskyist faded before the Socialist,” he said, not mentioning that he was a Trotskyist long before joining the PS and neglecting to specify when he left the OCI. Most analysts place the final break in 1988, when he became education minister.

No one is accusing Jospin of corruption or attempted subversion. By the standards of French leaders, his record is honourable. In retirement he served on a Commission on the Renewal and Ethics of Public Life and later joined the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s highest constitutional authority, whose members are known as les sages (the wise). At the heart of his personality was not so much subterfuge as conflict. At first, his secret revolutionary identity was a way of managing an inner tension: in the late 1960s, the budding diplomat felt out of place climbing the career ladder in de Gaulle’s France while the country’s idealistic youth was rebelling in the streets.

In the 2010 interviews, Jospin described his OCI membership as an “antidote” to the risk of “conformity.” But the dynamic of the double life gradually reversed itself. He continued to play the undercover agent without believing in the cause; it was his open life — a life in which he made a real difference — that became his true self. His first wife put it plainly in 2002: what had begun as a conviction had become a constraint, and eventually a prison. Jospin was a decent man whose past had caught up with him.

But to then make him out to be a paragon of probity - that is a step taken with remarkable ease in the only Western country where at least two rival Trotskyist candidates stand in every presidential election.

One of the late prime minister’s eulogists (ironically, one of the journalists who had first unmasked him) went so far as to write: “Jospin was never more sincere than in his double life, never more honest than in his secrecy. Never more free than in his contradictions.” Mendacity elevated to the highest form of sincerity! To understand that, to quote the late Madeleine Albright in a rather different context, “you have to be either a genius or French”.

Uncharacteristically for a French writer, Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was oblivious to intellectual fashion. After being recruited into surrealism in the 1930s, he noisily broke with André Breton, and then parted from Georges Bataille, the high priest of transgression with whom he had founded the College of Sociology. After the war he criticised psychoanalysis and Marxism, had a very public row with Claude Lévi-Strauss and entirely ignored the structuralist vogue.

Perhaps the most telling illustration of Caillois’s free spirit came near the end of his life. In 1978 he and René Girard were among the guests of Apostrophes, a must-see chat show. Girard, then at the height of his fame, was introducing his latest book, modestly entitled Of things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. He expanded on mimetic desire, scapegoating and other mysteries that had shaped societies since the Palaeolithic.

The host then turned to Caillois, himself known for his interest in ethnology. Everyone was stunned by the reply: “And what, in all of this, do you make of the little goldfish?” (”Mais dans tout cela, que faites-vous des petits poissons rouges?”) Girard took it as a gratuitous put-down, but Caillois insisted it was a perfectly serious point.

This most idiosyncratic of thinkers stands out among his French peers in at least two other ways: his deep curiosity about other cultures and his engagement with the “hard” sciences.

Both are on striking display in an exhibition “Stones and Reveries – the Poetry and Minerals of Roger Caillois”, which runs until 29 March at the School of Jewellery Arts in Paris. It brings together about 200 natural stones from Caillois’s collection, accompanied by some of his writings on the subject.

Caillois discovered stones while visiting a dealer in natural specimens in 1952. By then he was well-established as a hyperactive polymath: he had written about civilisations, games, animal mimicry, the impostures of poetry (hence his break with Breton), the dangers of sacred ritual (hence his break with Bataille) and many other things besides – on top of a busy day job as UNESCO’s literary supremo.

At first he simply collected stones during his travels as an international civil servant. Then the collector became a scholar. He learned enough geology to understand different minerals and how they form.

But in his three books on stones in the 1960s and 1970s Caillois does not write as a mineralogist: he is a cultural historian informed by mineralogy. He explores the lure and symbolic significance of stones across civilisations, and asks why human beings have always seen evocative forms in the natural world — mountains, faces, monsters.

This habit of finding unexpected patterns in seemingly unrelated subjects was Caillois’s trademark. In his early studies on insect camouflage, he spotted similarities with human disguise and ritual and came to call such lateral thinking “les sciences diagonales”.

This approach to stones led to a reconciliation with poetry — an art Caillois had previously dismissed as dubious. He discovered that the Chinese have long used the contemplation of stones as inspiration for poems and even as a spiritual experience. He was particularly struck by Mi Fu, a major scholar of the Song dynasty in the 11th century, who revered stones so deeply that he regularly knelt before his favourite one chanting: “Glorious rock, I am your slave.”

This mineral worship raised eyebrows at court, where one was expected to bow only before the emperor. The sage was unmoved, and continued to prostrate himself before his lump of rock regardless.

Caillois identified strongly with Mi Fu — whose name pronounced in French sounds, incidentally, like “half-crazy.”

The association between stones, spirituality and poetry is central to his mineral writings, in which he finds lyrical accents of his own, as in this passage from Les Pierres (1966):

I speak of stones that have always lain outside, or that sleep in their beds, in the darkness of the seam. They have aroused no interest in the archaeologist, the artist or the diamond merchant. No palace, statue or jewel; no dyke, rampart or tomb was ever built from them. They are neither useful nor famous.

Their facets gleam on no ring, no diadem... Architecture, sculpture, glyptics, mosaic, jewellery have no use for them. They are from the planet’s beginnings, and perhaps came from another star… They existed before mankind; and when man arrived, he did not mark them with his art or his industry. They only perpetuate their own memory.

Caillois reflects on the rivalry between the painter and nature as artist. He investigates why and how Renaissance men — Leonardo da Vinci among them — saw entire landscapes and battles in stones.

He is particularly drawn to paésines — Tuscan limestones whose fractured surfaces suggest cities with towers, ruins, and mountains.

Caillois had a special connection with South America. Invited to Buenos Aires in 1939 for a lecture tour, he stayed when war broke out in Europe and befriended Borges and many other writers.

After the war he launched “La Croix du Sud”, a landmark collection that introduced the French to modern Latin American literature. His discovery of the vast landscapes of Patagonia later intensified his wonder at the continent’s mineral wealth.

Caillois was fascinated by the symmetry and asymmetry of the mineral world.

Some crystals exhibit an implacably rigorous symmetry while “out of control” chalcedonies seem to defy all laws.

Septaria are clay-limestone rocks threaded with cracks filled by other minerals, such as quartz, pyrite (example below) . Caillois saw in them “the most remarkable manifestations of the elementary, anonymous, irresponsible forces that, endlessly entangled, compose nature.”

They are “hieroglyphics without a message”. He lets his imagination run wild when describing such patterns: “ravines carpeted with tiny crystals”, “webs spun in empty air”, “a whole frozen sabbath of lemures, harpies and vibrions.”

Caillois brings formidable learning to bear on the ways widely different cultures have projected onto stones the same visions — mountains, faces, monsters. Yet he remains wary of what Mallarmé called “le démon de l’analogie”.

Hence the dual nature of his stone writings: he gives his imagination free rein, then pulls back with the detachment of a man determined not to be fooled by his own reveries. He admits reading his own “anxieties” and “hesitations” into nature, and never forgets “that they are mirages”.

When Caillois was elected to the Académie française in 1971, he marked the occasion in characteristically otherworldly fashion. Every académicien receives a ceremonial sword, often adorned according to personal taste.

Caillois had a jeweller set stones from his own collection into the blade: notably dendritic quartz from Brazil and moldavite from Bohemia, forged by a meteorite impact 15 million years ago. The sword, on display at the exhibition, is the only one in the history of the Académie to contain material from outer space.

Roger Caillois’s eccentric versatility, defiance of genre and imperviousness to fashion have condemned him to posthumous neglect. If you happen to be in Paris over the next few days, the exhibition offers a rare and colourful glimpse of his legacy.

For those interested in exploring various aspects of his work, I’m writing a separate series on Medium (in French).

The first two posts:

• Caillois’s 23 rules of poetry

• Caillois, psychoanalysis and dreams

I also recommend France Culture’s radio series Roger Caillois, arpenteur de l’imaginaire.

“There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it,” George Orwell wrote. I was reminded of this remark after a nationalist activist was beaten to death by antifascist militants during a protest in Lyon last week.

The suspects are members of the Jeune Garde, a violent group linked to La France Insoumise (LFI), France’s main left-wing party. The founder of the Jeune Garde, Raphaël Arnault, is an MP and close ally of LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Two of Arnault’s parliamentary aides are among those detained, suspected of involvement in the killing.

Despite all this, Mélenchon — who has consistently opposed government moves to ban the Jeune Garde — reiterated his unconditional support for Arnault and the “resistance” waged by his militia.

This backing is rooted in Mélenchon’s obsession with the historic struggle against fascism. He is fond of recycling slogans such as “No Pasaran!” from the Spanish Civil War and the anti-Mussolini chant “Siamo tutti antifascisti”.

Mélenchon engineered Arnault’s election as an MP to feed this narrative. Ditching him now is out of the question: it would mean surrendering a resistance fighter to the fascists. The reasoning is fully Orwellian: a man who is acting in a noble cause cannot be guilty.

But even more striking is the intellectual gymnastics deployed by left-wing commentators who have no personal or even ideological allegiance to La Jeune Garde. Their main concern is not to condone a crime, but to put it in perspective.

Take Le Monde:

“Everywhere in France, this affair must not eclipse the violence perpetrated by neo-fascist gangs. The majority of acts of political brutality originate from these groups — a reality entirely brushed aside by the right and the far right, who have been united for the past few days in exploiting the death of Quentin Deranque to demonise part of the left.”

Le Monde firmly condemns the Lyon killing and acknowledges LFI’s political responsibility in it. But it points to another crime committed by the right: political opportunism. It follows that only the left can condemn the murder and call Mélenchon to account without ulterior motives.

Mediapart strikes the same note, in a piece headlined “An unspeakable tragedy, a sordid exploitation”:

“Everyone, including those in the antifascist camp, must reflect deeply on their practices and strategy. But nothing can justify the red carpet being rolled out for the far right, and the inversion of values we are witnessing.”

These days Orwell’s dictum might be extended as follows: ...and if a crime committed by our side cannot be excused, one must simultaneously condemn those who denounce it for the wrong reasons.

We are thus dealing not with one crime but two, each duly noted with perfect even-handedness.

In April 1990 Jack Lang, then France’s culture minister, attended Seville’s feria with an abundant retinue in tow. Although it was a private visit, he secured from the municipality one of the exclusive tents (”casetas”) at the heart of the week-long festival. Although high-paying concession holders who had been pushed aside complained, the French visitors enjoyed the flamenco and horse parades at close quarters.

There were a few grumblings at home too. Some questioned whether public money should finance the personal entertainment of the minister and numerous friends. Lang silenced most critics by breezily stating that a “patron” had covered all expenses. The essayist Jean-François Revel, for one, remained unconvinced: supposing the secret sponsor existed, he wrote, it was “even more improper as a serving minister of the Republic has no business accepting such a lavish gift from a private individual.”

In Lang, Jeffrey Epstein found the perfect French contact. When he was not pursuing young girls, the sleazy predator spent his millions courting celebrities in the worlds of high politics and entertainment. Jack Lang offered entrée to both. He was also a man of taste, dividing his time between his large apartment on Paris’s swanky Place des Vosges and a house in the Lubéron hills of Provence. And a bigwig who thought nothing of accepting €500,000 worth of designer suits from Smalto over 15 years after leaving government was clearly receptive to lavish generosity.

It should have been no surprise, then, that Lang features in the latest batch of Epstein files (almost 700 times). They document a pattern of largesse that began in 2012 – long after the American’s conviction for sex offences. Lang solicited loans of Epstein’s car and private jet for himself and his family. He secured $57,897 in funding for a film celebrating his ministerial achievements and acted as intermediary for Epstein’s purchase of a riad in Marrakech valued at €5.4m. He also let Epstein pick up tabs for fancy dinners. In one email, Lang wrote: “Dear Jeffrey, your generosity is infinite. May I abuse it further?”

Lang’s politics were a key reason why the two men were made for each other. Not that Epstein cared about ideology – the global list of people he showered with gifts spanned the political spectrum. What drew the New York moneybags was certainly not Lang’s history of diatribes against capitalism or tributes to Cuba (”a courageous country that is building a new society,” he once said). Rather, his attractiveness to someone like Epstein lay in Lang’s conception of socialism – one in which culture played an all-encompassing role.

He became minister when François Mitterrand won the presidency in 1981. As the left revelled in its long-awaited victory, Lang claimed everything from the abolition of the death penalty to the shorter working week and women’s rights as cultural matters. This expansionary remit secured an immediate doubling of the culture budget. It also meant that in a country where creative industries live largely on state handouts, Lang wielded both considerable patronage and widespread influence.

Lang personified the incestuous intermingling of political and cultural elites long after he left office. Although he had critics – his patrician diction combined with a zest for progressive grandstanding was often lampooned - he was regarded by many as a national treasure. His successors all paid tribute to him. After Mitterrand, every president, left, right or centre, entrusted him with important positions. The latest was Macron, who kept Lang on as president of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) although he was well into his 80s. A man enjoying such enduring such staying power and wide-ranging connections was a tempting target for a chancer.

Politics also endowed Lang with a remarkable ability to rise above norms that bound lesser politicians. Like most charismatic figures, he was untroubled by requirements for intellectual consistency. In a famous 1982 speech, he denounced the hold American entertainment had on global audiences, calling for a “crusade” against “an intellectual imperialism that no longer grabs territory… but grabs consciousness”. Over the following years, he paraded himself with Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Robert de Niro and other US icons. There was no contradiction there: just as “culture” meant exactly what Lang chose it to mean, so did “cultural hegemony”.

But the rule-exempting power that best served Lang’s relationship with Epstein lies in the moral realm. How can anyone suspect him of being swayed by gifts from a rich man, whether from Seville or Manhattan? His reaction when asked about Epstein exuded wounded virtue. “There is such a thing as pure generosity, for Christ’s sake!” he thundered. Even from a convicted paedophile? The journalist insisted. “When I meet people I don’t ask for their criminal record,” Lang replied. Elsewhere, he invoked Epstein’s “helping hand” in funding a film about Lang’s daughter who had died of cancer. The subtext: what kind of warped mind would deny a grieving father such comfort? These self-exculpatory reflexes are grounded in the conviction that a good Socialist like him could not do wrong.

There is no evidence that Lang ever took part in Epstein’s paedophile activities. His proven transgressions in that regard were words, not deeds. In the 1970s, he was part of a broader movement on the left advocating wider acceptance of sexual relations between adults and teenage minors.

In January 1977, he signed a petition in support of three men held in pre-trial detention, accused of sexually abusing children aged 12-14. The signatories – who also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and many other left-wing luminaries – asserted that the defendants had suffered enough and that children of that age have a “sexual life” justifying relations with adults. “If a 13-year-old girl can be on the pill, what do you think it’s for?” the petition asked.

Lang did not publicly retract this view until 2021, 44 years after signing the petition. He did so when pressed by an interviewer and in equivocal language. In the aftermath of May 1968, he pleaded, he and “many others” had been “carried away by a libertarian wind”.

The Epstein files have brought Lang’s sparkling career to a sorry end. He has been pushed out of his plum job at the Institut du Monde Arabe and financial prosecutors have opened a preliminary inquiry. But his readiness to tap wealthy benefactors and find it perfectly normal has been public knowledge for decades. The fact that it took such a global scandal for Lang to be called to account is another sign that the French live in what Jean-François Revel called a “banana monarchy”.

It is tough being a public broadcaster these days. As governments squeeze your funding, private competitors poach your audiences and right-wingers question your neutrality, trouble awaits if you put a foot wrong. In Britain and France, where nationalist parties are within reach of power, two incidents illustrate the consequences faced by public media accused of bias.

The BBC has been under fire over a documentary broadcast just before the 2024 US election. The filmmakers spliced together two clips from Donald Trump’s notorious speech on 6 January 2021, suggesting he had told supporters to storm the Capitol. When the edit belatedly came to light last November, the BBC apologised. This pacified neither Trump, who sued, nor Britain’s right-wing press, which sees the corporation as a nest of lefties. Critics asked why nothing had been done about the mistake until it was exposed. By mid-November the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and its head of news had resigned.

Across the Channel, the offence involved France Inter, the country’s main public radio station. In October 2023, three weeks after the Hamas killing spree that triggered the Gaza war, one of the comedians hired to spice up news programmes called Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu a “Nazi without a foreskin”. There was outcry. Back on air a few days later, the comedian refused to apologise and sarcastically conceded that Hamas too were “Nazis without foreskins”. In April 2024, after prosecutors rejected hate-speech complaints over the original outburst, he repeated it on air. He was suspended and fired six weeks later.

Although national broadcasters in both countries face similar pressures, what these incidents reveal above all is the vastly different standards to which they are held. The BBC is being punished for an editing error in an otherwise balanced documentary from the prestigious Panorama strand. The two sentences we heard Trump say – “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you (…) and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore” – are a fair summary of his speech. Under the rallying cry “Stop the Steal”, the then-outgoing president had called supporters to the National Mall with the aim of preventing Congress from approving the election results. But the BBC should have clarified that the sentences belonged to different parts of the speech.

The problem, first flagged in an internal report, was not noticed by the public (least of all in the US where the film was never available) until a year after broadcast, when the report was leaked. The BBC’s failure to acknowledge the mistake while executives wrangled over its gravity ultimately cost the bosses their jobs. And the corporation may pay a heavier price still. Trump is seeking up to $10bn in damages for “brazen” election interference.

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While the BBC selectively quoted one world leader, France Inter threw an anti-Semitic insult at another. The jibe against Netanyahu drew a warning from the regulator but no retraction or apology from the station. While expressing “unease”, France Inter chief Adèle Van Reeth stood by the comedian. “You don’t fire a humourist over a bad joke,” she declared. “A space for political satire… is the sign of a functioning democracy.” No doubt – but is public radio really an appropriate forum for calling a foreign head of government a Nazi without a foreskin? Management never offered a clear answer.

Even the comedian’s firing was equivocal. Appearing before a parliamentary inquiry on public broadcasting in December, radio bosses made clear that the insult by itself had not been the reason. Van Reeth said that repeating it had only been part of a pattern of disloyalty that included social media posts and disparaging comments about colleagues. Although the parliamentary panel is dominated by right-wing critics, neither she nor the head of Radio France faced any pushback about their handling of the affair, let alone resignation calls. The comedian, meanwhile, is challenging his dismissal in an employment tribunal, citing violation of his freedom of speech and seeking €400,000 in damages.

The gap between the nature of the transgression and the consequences in the two countries – minor for crude reductio ad Hitlerum vs cataclysmic for an unmarked edit – reflects a wider divergence in journalistic culture. The French tend to ingest their news coated in opinion. So do many Brits, of course, hence the success of their tabloids. But sufficient demand for cold facts persists to maintain a press tradition of separation between news and comment. Of course, as the cliché goes, editorial choices always reflect unconscious biases. The operative word here is “unconscious”: all a journalist can do is try to keep their own angle out of the copy. This discipline is drilled into every hack in the UK. In France it is optional. Reporters there operate in a professional environment where wearing your politics on your sleeve is not just tolerated but expected.

The upshot is two fundamentally different models for public broadcasting, despite similar-sounding language. Neutralité - the focus of the French parliamentary inquiry – does not mean “neutrality” in the British sense. A better translation would be “pluralism” or “diversity”. French law mandates “the pluralist expression of currents of thought” for all TV and radio services. The head of France’s broadcasting regulator, Arcom, told the inquiry that neutrality “must be reconciled with editorial freedom and the right to criticism and even parody”. So long as overall balance is respected, journalists in private and public media may opine forcefully - and the chase for audiences encourages them to do so.

Pluralism is a requirement for British broadcasters too. But the BBC goes beyond this legal minimum: on top of ensuring a range of perspectives, it bars in-house journalists and experts from expressing political views in any outlet, including social media. This self-imposed rule is rooted in the idea that a claim on the public purse entails a duty of neutrality. Expecting people to pay you on pain of a criminal record is a big ask. As those forced sponsors come from across the political spectrum, the least the BBC can do is abstain from furthering causes they might oppose.

My contention is that the BBC’s approach to neutrality is vital if state media is to survive as a credible institution. You might object that someone who worked for the BBC for 30 years would say that. But this hopefully makes me a knowledgeable observer, not an apologist. I acknowledge that the corporation is far from perfect: the Panorama edit was one of many problems catalogued in the leaked memo. Davie was the third director general forced out over journalistic lapses in the past 21 years. The BBC doesn’t always live up to its principles. What I’m defending is not so much a record as a model.

French-style pluralism is a recipe for discontent. You cannot import the confrontational culture of modern media into the public-service sphere without angering most of the people most of the time. France’s electorate can be divided into five broad blocs: the hard left, the moderate left, centrists, conservatives and the far right. Under Arcom’s loose representativity rules, a scrupulous channel might rotate various journalists through its opinion segments accordingly. The result: any given slot offends 80% of potential listeners to some degree.

Barbs about circumcision aside, two samples give a flavour of the kind of language used on France Inter without attracting censure (clips added for polyglots who want the full diatribes).

In the first, comedian Charline Vanhoenacker imagines she is the overcoat of conservative leader Laurent Wauquiez, to gales of laughter in the studio of the main morning programme: “Even when I come back from the drycleaner’s, I feel dirty. Sometimes I want him to catch one of his balls in my zipper.”

In the second, commentator Sophia Aram says antisemitism “oozes from every pore” of La France Insoumise, the largest left-wing party. “Antisemites are like paedophiles,” she adds. “They always lurk where they can exercise their vice: paedophiles near kids, antisemites wherever they can call for Israel’s destruction with impunity.”

Depending on your views, you might applaud one of these statements and recoil from the other. But the damage is cumulative. As Vanhoenacker and Aram both lay into the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) as well, between them they manage to antagonise 100% of the electorate.

It would be troubling enough if France Inter was the equal-opportunity offender it claims to be. But it isn’t. Its newsroom comedians target the right-wing opposition much more often than they do the left (leaving aside the governing centrists and their allies: those in power are fair game).

Nor is the imbalance confined to satirical slots. I listened to the Grande Matinale, the four-hour morning programme on France Inter, on two consecutive days in December. The news was dominated by the publication of Journal d’un prisonnier by Nicolas Sarkozy, which went on to be a best-seller. Comment was uniformly negative. Columnist Patrick Cohen focused on Sarkozy’s overtures to the RN, adding drily: “This amounts to implementing what his son Louis has proposed for road traffic: removing all red lights.” Aram and Vanhoenacker, in rare agreement, laid into the book. Another comedian sneered: “This sob story made me bawl my eyes out... Better get the audiobook: reading while crying doesn’t work: tears smudge the words and you can’t see a damn thing.”

Not all segments expressed opinions, but those that did reflected progressive themes. The press review was particularly striking. On one day the focus was “eco-anxiety” among children who had experienced climate disasters such as flooding. The lesson: “We need to take care of our planet to take care of our kids.” The next day’s digest pulled together articles highlighting various forms of male domination: MPs chatting among themselves when women colleagues take the floor; rural women relegated to childcare and low-pay jobs; girls getting less pocket money than boys. In conclusion, the presenter exhorted mothers who work part time to ask their partners for compensation “because your time is not free”. It was a lecture masquerading as a press review.

Two mornings of listening prove nothing on their own. But hard data support what anecdotal evidence suggests. The Institut Thomas More, a Paris-based think tank, analysed 200 hours of prime-time morning programming on Radio France stations throughout October 2025. It found, first, that both ends of the political spectrum were underrepresented and got largely negative coverage, particularly the far right. The moderate left got the most favourable treatment of all political groups. Secondly, comment segments were heavily skewed towards the left, notably on France Inter and France Culture (France Info, a news channel, was much more balanced – chart below). The study also found that of 98 topics raised on all three stations, none showed a majority of segments approached from a right-leaning angle, with some subjects (feminism, policing, discrimination) treated almost exclusively from a left-wing perspective.*

A notable form of activism on public airwaves is the critique of right-wing media. It is vital for journalists to hold each other accountable and expose falsehoods. But those who extend the scrutiny from facts to opinions are on slippery ground. Whether a particular worldview distorts coverage can be a matter of interpretation. Criticising the editorial priorities of a competitor is especially tricky for public-service organisations supposed to stay above the political fray. The media empire owned by Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire with staunch conservative views, comes in for relentless attack by public broadcasters over the quality and tone of its journalism. Admittedly, Bolloré outlets also snipe at them just as relentlessly – but this only reinforces the suggestion of payback by state-owned channels.

The attacks on conservative media vary in tone and substance. At the high end is a recent hour-long film on France 2 which mixed legitimate critiques of untruths spread by CNews, Bolloré’s flagship channel, with criticism of its programming choices (platforming far-right figures, highlighting immigration, etc.) At the low end is a France Inter broadside against a female journalist working for a magazine on the “right, right, right, right, right, right, right – really right”, to whom the columnist sends a mock love message: “Little Catholic girls turn me on… When I think of you I dream of Austrian holidays in lederhosen. Let’s play naughty games where you dress as Joan of Arc and I as [far-left leader Jean-Luc] Mélenchon.”

Needless to say, the BBC would not allow such crudeness from a guest, let alone one of its journalists. But it’s important to understand why, fact-checking aside, it refrains from criticising other news organisations. Beyond political neutrality, the concern is commercial fairness. As a tax-funded body, the BBC is open to the charge that its free content can damage rivals that live or die by the audiences they can attract. The answer - the corporation fills gaps in the market and avoids competitive harm - isn’t completely convincing. But at least the need for restraint is recognised.

French public broadcasters feel no such inhibition. Despite substantially higher budgets per employee and the security of state funding, they are losing ground while Bollore’s audiences are rising. CNews recently became France’s top news channel. This superior ability of a private operator to cater to public needs might have given pause to reflect. Instead, state-run channels have intensified their attacks. France Télévisions is even suing Bolloré media, alleging that the denigration it suffers at their hands amounts to commercial harm.

Another little-known safeguard of BBC neutrality is its relationship with trade unions. Those representing staff may negotiate on pay and conditions, but editorial interference is strictly forbidden. In France such meddling is routine. In September the communist-led CGT, the main union within France Télévisions, pilloried star anchor Léa Salamé over her coverage of protests against budget cuts, accusing her of “totally obscuring the reasons for popular anger”. Another major union, CFDT, has issued a booklet advising journalists on how to avoid “falling into the trap of promoting extreme-right ideas” and calling for different treatment of the RN because “it does not share our democratic values.”

In Britain, union instructions on how journalists should cover a specific political party would be unthinkable. So, for that matter, would the hiring of someone like Léa Salamé as a news anchor. She is the partner of Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent centre-left MEP and potential presidential candidate. Regardless of Salamé’s professionalism, the conflict of interest is apparent. But then in France lines are crossed at every level: partisan journalists on public payrolls, unions seeking to dictate editorial choices, and presenters partnered with politicians. Small wonder that accusations of bias stick.

Defenders of public broadcasters present them as victims of an international campaign by populists. Around Europe, warns Le Monde, “funding for the sector is shrinking while attacks from the extreme right are multiplying”. According to Spain’s El Pais, the far right everywhere threatens “to strangle state-owned media corporations or put them at its service if it comes to power”. True enough, and precedents from Eastern Europe are alarming. The head of the European Digital Media Observatory, a EU-funded body, quoted by El Pais calls public media a “cornerstone of democracy”. Indeed, but a caveat is missing: on condition of genuine neutrality and sound management.

Claiming that public broadcasters are virtuous by nature is a convenient piety. Such circling of wagons dispenses them from taking a hard look at their own practices. Timothy Garton Ash, quoted in the same El Pais article, cites Canada among the countries with a “trusted public broadcaster”. But it is not trusted by most Canadian conservatives, and it’s facile to claim bigotry as the reason. Thoughtful critics have argued that the CBC has abandoned mass appeal for cultural elitism. In 2022 journalist Tara Henley, hardly a right-wing firebrand, publicly resigned from the corporation in protest at editorial priorities that included non-binary Filipinos suffering from a lack of LGBT terminology in Tagalog.

Accusations of metropolitan provincialism levelled at public broadcasters are not all politically motivated. Neither can budget concerns be dismissed outright as attempts to starve critical voices into silence. The question of value for money is particularly valid in France. The BBC gets about €4.24bn in public funding, €61 per capita, about the same as its French peers (€3.95bn; €58 per capita). Workforce levels are comparable too: 21,000 for the BBC, against 17,000. But the gap in reach and efficiency is yawning. On top of dominating its domestic market, the BBC is a global brand, notably through the World Service and its 300 million weekly listeners. The reach of French public broadcasters is relatively low at home (only 28% for under-35s) and negligible abroad.

The BBC has remained a major player despite seeing its annual budget slashed by 30% in real terms over 15 years, deeper cuts than those at France Télévisions. Respective pay levels are good indicators of efficiencies on both sides. The average salary at France Télévisions is €71,500 a year, well above the industry rate. The median wage at the BBC - €60,000 – is near or below market rates depending on the role. And this is despite greater competition for talent: underpaid BBC workers have alternatives to choose from, including US giants (TV networks, major newspapers, Netflix, Amazon, Apple) which maintain large offices in London. France Télévisions faces no such upward pressure on salaries. Bolloré media are notoriously stingy employers.

The BBC is a lean operation with a worldwide audience. French state media combine high costs and narrow appeal. When Le Monde states that even the “venerable” BBC faces the type of challenge that plagues its counterparts in France, the comparison is designed to flatter. A struggling second-division club with a bloated payroll may as well argue in its defence that Manchester United too is beset by injuries, glossing over the fact that the two teams are not in the same league.

Instead of using the BBC as a shield, French public broadcasters would do well to see it as an inspiration. National media are most vulnerable when societies polarise — yet that is when their traditional mission becomes most vital. They must stress shared values when everyone fights for a cause, speak truth when everyone spins, and take responsibility when others point fingers. Even the BBC’s focus on these principles may not save it from the populist ire. For French broadcasters, their blithe indifference to genuine neutrality will lead to irrelevance at best, takeover by the fiercest partisan forces at worst.

* Radio France and others have criticised the Institut Thomas More study for relying on artificial intelligence — yet Radio France itself announced it would use AI to analyse its own content “to make things even more objective”. During Adèle Van Reeth’s recent hearing, a sympathetic panel member brushed aside the findings as coming from a “self-proclaimed liberal and conservative think tank”, attacking the messenger rather than engaging with the message. The institute’s methodology is transparent: AI processes hundreds of hours uniformly, with human review correcting transcription errors and misunderstood irony. The study reveals less political bias that the objections do.

The premise of this newsletter is that you only understand your own culture by getting to know another. Thus after decades of living in the Anglosphere, I hopefully have a sharper view on France.

Pierre Boncenne has his own unique, semi-detached perspective on Frenchness. In many ways he is a consummate insider. Born and bred in Paris, he edited the country’s most popular literary magazine and won a book award from the Académie française. But as he makes clear in his illuminating memoir Colombiennes, he never felt he quite belonged.

Boncenne did not achieve semi-detachment by travelling, but through birth. His mother was Colombian, the daughter of a diplomat who chose to stay in France after World War II. She married a Frenchman, Boncenne’s father, but ran the household as a Spanish-speaking enclave ruled by the values of the old country. She hailed from a family that had produced a string of statesmen, writers and artists since the 19th century and was intensely proud of her lineage.

However the real sense of affiliation she passed on was not to a clan or class, but to a culture. The author regards his bilingualism as a “hidden wealth”. Many expats are exhilarated to discover they can see the world differently. Boncenne and his siblings imbibed this power with their mother’s milk. Their “intimacy with another language was enriched by a deep sense of belonging to that vast world which, from our youth, projected us far from France: South America,” he writes.

The problem was, Boncenne’s French countrymen did not regard his double bond as a superpower. As a child he was aware of the look of smug superiority others directed at his family. His tan skin tone stood out on school photos and a classmate once called him a métèque, a mild xenophobic slur. It may have been used in jest but he has not forgotten. As an adult, Boncenne found that his background was an irrelevance at best, a blemish at worst. He noted “strangely ambiguous reactions when people discovered that I belonged to the Latino tribe”.

The struggle to accept other cultures as valid, or even real, is a well-established French trait. It was lampooned by Montesquieu, whose fictional traveller from Persia is greeted with bafflement by his hosts: “Ah! Monsieur est persan? C’est une chose bien extraordinaire! Comment peut-on être persan?”

The French may laugh at their own ethnocentrism, but they’re dead serious about one thing: the promise of intégration. The English word “integration” does not capture this supremely Gallic concept: regardless of race or creed, incomers can aspire to the blessings of Frenchness if they embrace the country’s way of life and abide by the laws of the République – a conversion made easier by a national ethos of universalist tolerance.

If you ask a French person about nationhood, you’re likely to get a peroration along the lines of: while the Germans obsess over blood and soil and British-style multiculturalism makes a mockery of citizenship, we have it just right - relaxed on ethnicity, strict on culture and values.

Intégration is not a complete sham. Children of working-class immigrants in France experience higher upward mobility than children of the native working class. The National Rally, a mass party fixated on national identity, has many black and brown supporters. What Boncenne’s testimony does show, however, is that full automatic admission to the club through culture is a myth.

You might be able to quote Lafontaine and Brassens, you might know your bourgogne from your bourgueil and thrill to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; you may even be born in France with a passport to prove it: a foreign background still sets you apart. To be Franco-something is to be less than French.

France seems particularly suspicious of hyphenation when it comes to South America. De Gaulle never said that “Brazil is not a serious country”, yet the persistence of the apocryphal quote reveals much about French attitudes toward the whole region.

From an early age Boncenne noted how quick his friends were to judge a continent they knew nothing about. Rather than an actual place, it was a repository for both prejudice and fantasies. Ignorance remains abysmal, even among world-affairs cognoscenti. How many realise that Colombia has experienced only one coup since the 19th century (a bloodless move by liberal conservatives against a right-winger in 1953)? In a 1969 article, the illustrious writer François Mauriac confused Colombia and Bolivia. At least he immediately apologised. But Boncenne cites recent examples of similar errors left uncorrected by major French media outlets.

At the heart of such blithe contempt lie dystopian assumptions about an undifferentiated landmass mired in violence. Equally misguidedly, Latin America can also fire the utopian imagination. Although the myth of El Dorado and its treasure-laden adventurers has receded, in the late 1960s a political new gold dream took over.

The best book on the subject remains From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary by the Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel. After belatedly realising that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic tyranny, European radicals looked towards Cuba for a model society freed from capitalist exploitation. As in the days when the “noble savage” was all the rage, Rangel writes, “Europe’s eyes turned toward us not to discover scientific truths, but to find support for prejudices, myths, and frustrations that were entirely European.”

The French translation of Rangel’s book was published in 1976, ahead of the Spanish-language original. This precedence is telling. Latin American revolutionaries have exerted particular fascination on the French left. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the first intellectuals to beat a path to Castro’s Cuba. It took a long time for Parisian progressives to see Castro’s regime for the sinister tropical dictatorship it is. Some still believe in a Latino anti-imperialist fairyland. France’s main left-wing party is led by a Hugo Chavez fan who refuses to condemn Venezuela’s stolen election of 2024.

Boncenne argues that Tintin albums reveal more about the continent’s upheavals than any ideological screed does. Consider this line from the rebel general in Tintin and the Picaros: “A revolution without capital executions?... It’s unthinkable!... Tapioca and his ministers are bloodthirsty tyrants... Every last one of them will be shot!” As Boncenne reminds readers, Castro restored the death penalty in Cuba when he came to power in 1959.

There is much more to Colombiennes than a man’s navigation between cultural identities. Boncenne confronts Colombia’s history of social inequity and brutal conflict. He writes movingly about the activist priest Camilo Torres, a beloved uncle of his who joined the ELN guerrilla group and died while fighting the army in 1966. The book also includes fascinating vignettes on Latin American writers, many of whom Boncenne has known personally.

But for this reviewer, a bona fide Frenchman who lives comfortably in a neighbouring country that respects France and is respected by it, Colombiennes provides a sobering lesson about belonging. For many people, carrying a dual heritage is an uneasy balancing act. The difficulty was perhaps best put by the French-Uruguayan writer Jules Supervielle 100 years ago: “You would like sunbeams to bridge countries that are separated by oceans and climate and will always remain strangers.”

Nicolas Sarkozy is now sitting in a prison cell in Paris. He is only the third former French head of state to serve time for crimes, after Louis XVI (in 1792) and Philippe Pétain (in 1945).

Sarkozy’s enemies have hailed a victory for the rule of law. He and his friends argue that he is the victim of politicised justice. What should the rest of us think?

The case has raised two separate issues: the guilty verdict and the immediate incarceration.

Start with the conviction. Prosecutors had accused Sarkozy of a string of crimes connected with alleged funding by Libya of his successful 2007 presidential bid: notably corruption, embezzlement of public money (Libya’s) and campaign finance violations.

In September the court cleared Sarkozy of the above counts. The prosecution failed to prove Sarkozy’s campaign had received any funds from Libya, the presiding judge said, adding that a note to that effect purporting to be from Col Gaddafi’s intelligence chief was “probably a fake”.

But there remained one count: “association de malfaiteurs“ (conspiracy). This prosecutorial blunderbuss, which originated in the 19th century, covers the mere discussion of criminal activity, whether or not a crime occurs as a result. In 1983, the socialist government scrapped it from the penal code, pronouncing it “liberticide”. But it was revived by a conservative government and has proved a handy tool in terrorism and drug-related cases.

Association de malfaiteurs was added to Sarkozy’s rap sheet in the late stages of the investigation, when two aides and a fellow former minister were added to the case. That was the one charge that stuck. The court ruled that Sarkozy, as interior minister in 2006-2007, had “allowed aides to approach Libyan authorities for financial support” for his presidential bid.

It didn’t matter that no cash had flowed into campaign coffers. Equally immaterial was the lack of any quid-pro-quo: as the judge made clear, policy towards the Gaddafi regime did not change under Sarkozy’s presidency - it actually toughened, as French planes took part in NATO raids over Libya in 2011.

To convict the alleged malfaiteurs, all the state had to prove was that they met and were up to no good. There was evidence of that. Gaddafi clearly sought influence in France, where a court had convicted his spy-chief and brother-in-law of terrorism in absentia; the regime desperately wanted him rehabilitated. Sarkozy’s underlings did travel to Tripoli and there were claims millions of euros had changed hands in suitcases. Although the court could not establish where any money went, it found that Sarkozy must have known his associates were pursuing Libyan funds and thus was in on the conspiracy.

Sarkozy’s defenders have cried foul, calling the verdict a “judicial coup d’État”. Convicting someone for just considering an offence does appear harsh in the extreme. But the law giving courts the power to do so was passed by the National Assembly. And over time elected representatives have toughened the penalty for association de malfaiteurs: a 2025 anti-narcotrafficking law raised the maximum sentence from 10 to 15 years. Under such draconian legislation, one might argue that Sarkozy got off relatively lightly. While stressing the “exceptional gravity” of his crimes, the judges sentenced him to “only” five years.

This brings us to the court’s most controversial decision: locking up a former president without waiting for the appeals process to run its course. This came as a shock, as the prosecution itself had not requested it. Exécution provisoire, as the French call incarceration straight after sentencing, is typically reserved for drug lords and violent criminals, and applied when there is a danger of reoffending or a flight risk. Neither was relevant here. But the judges ruled that the very seriousness of crimes that “undermine citizens’ trust in their representatives… and in the very institutions of the Republic” warranted immediate imprisonment.

As many commentators have noted, the move is unprecedented in the European Union. Even Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi - the embodiment of sleaze, with a criminal record to prove it - never spent a day in jail. More fundamentally, Sarkozy and his supporters regard the Paris court ruling as an affront to the presumption of innocence. Critics counter that more than 20,000 people are serving time pending a definitive conviction. Making such a fuss over Sarkozy’s treatment, they argue, smacks of hypocrisy, especially from conservatives who usually cultivate a “tough on crime” stance.

But being hypocritical is not the same as being wrong. There is a valid debate around France’s use of exécution provisoire. It is supposed to remain an exception, and largely is: only 5% of convictions are accompanied by immediate remand. Even with such limited use, France’s rate of pre-trial and pre-appeal detention is above European average, at over 28% of the prison population (the rate is 20% in the UK). Sarkozy seems to have been among many French convicts who have suffered heavy-handed treatment at the hands of judges.

The rulings in the Sarkozy case are questionable. But all judicial decisions are open to question, and here both the verdict and the exécution provisoire are being contested in court. Dubious as they may be, they are not part of a power grab or illegal vendetta against politicians. Parliament approved the laws that enabled judges to imprison Sarkozy and his co-defendants.

Those who have challenged not just the propriety but the legitimacy of those rulings are playing a dangerous game. Death threats have been made against judges in both this case and the one involving Marine Le Pen – who has been made provisionally ineligible as a result of another exécution provisoire. If the judges overstep their authority, they should be held accountable by other judges or through legislation, not intimidation.

This post expands on my article published by The American Purpose on Thursday, with fresh analysis of Macron’s gamble on the same PM

When someone quits because a job is impossible and your only option is to ask them to try again, you know you’ve run out of road. That is the situation Emmanuel Macron finds himself in after reappointing Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister on Friday, four days after accepting his resignation. Lecornu had spent a month attempting to cobble together a minority government but concluded he couldn’t. Clearly no one else was up for it, forcing the French president to turn again to his last faithful servant.

The country has appeared increasingly ungovernable following a snap election that resulted in a hung parliament in mid-2024. Lecornu is Macron’s third prime minister since then. Such instability is unprecedented under France’s 1958 Constitution, which was designed to secure executive authority. The next victim of this systemic failure will surely be the isolated figure at the top.

Lecornu is doomed by parliamentary arithmetic. The assembly is divided into three blocs: the left, stretching from the radical LFI to middle-of-the-road socialists; the Macronista “socle commun” (common base) bringing together centrists and moderate conservatives; and the far-right. Each group refuses to work with the other two, but is ready to unite with one rival against the third. Both previous PMs fell when the left and the far-right joined in no-confidence votes.

And Lecornu has even fewer friends than his predecessors. Conservatives are threatening to leave Macron’s sinking ship – it was their intransigence that prompted him to throw in the towel last Monday. Lecornu’s main hope is to seal a non-aggression pact with socialists. But the price of their neutrality will be the abandonment of his pension reform, a key election pledge delivered in the teeth of fierce opposition two years ago. Such a reversal would be extremely costly in a country with a crushing debt burden and could cause Conservatives to break with the “socle commun” once and for all.

If - or more likely when - Lecornu falls, Macron will no longer be able to resist pressure for another snap election. The far-right National Rally (RN) is particularly keen on this: credited with about 32% support by pollsters, it is by far the most popular party in France. No one knows whether this will translate into a parliamentary majority in the country’s two-round voting system. What is clear, however, is that the left will also do well while the president’s centrist rump will shrink further. Whether a new election produces a strong shift to the right or another deadlock, the president’s legitimacy will be under renewed attack.

Macron insists he will serve his full term until 2027. But most French voters see him as the problem and a vast majority want him gone. Moreover political uncertainty carries a financial cost: 0.3% of GDP this year, economists reckon, as consumption, hiring and investment languish. Meanwhile France’s borrowing costs continue to surge amid an unresolved budget crisis. Until recently calls for Macron’s resignation came mainly from the extremes, notably far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Senior conservatives now back the idea as the only way out. Most strikingly, longtime Macronista Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister, has joined the chorus.

If that scenario unfolds, Macron faces humiliation. He would be the only French president of the Fifth Republic to be forced out (when Charles de Gaulle resigned in 1969, he did so out of wounded pride after losing a referendum, not from necessity). Furthermore, if a new presidential election were held now, power would almost certainly fall to either Mélenchon’s hard left or to the nationalist RN.

Macron first won the presidency in 2017 promising a “revolution”. Traditional divides, he said, were woefully outdated. The vast majority of French people yearned both for the social safety net pioneered by the left and individual opportunity championed by the right. But each side had become corrupted by partisan spirit and collectivist shibboleths, whether misguided egalitarianism or narrow nationalism. He would retain the best traditions from the two camps at the same time (”en même temps” was his early catchphrase) and bring that legacy into the 21st century. Prickly, state-heavy France would turn into a pro-Western, market-friendly power that took inspiration from its European partners the better to lead them. The future belonged to the open-minded, pragmatic centre as the old left and right faded into ideological irrelevance.

Eight years on, this vision lies in ruin. Macron is hemorrhaging support to the very extremes he had staked his reputation on fighting. The main political battle in France will now pit tax-and-spend leftists against right-wing xenophobes, with both sides bent on looser ties with the EU and NATO. Whichever side prevails, it will mark defeat not just for a man, but for everything he embodies.

How did we get here? Many blame Macron himself. In 2022, he made history by winning re-election, but squandered that opportunity. Neglecting the parliamentary campaign, he lost his majority. He still commanded a sizable bloc that could have anchored a coalition on favourable terms. Instead, his prime ministers used a constitutional device to ram legislation through parliament without votes, stoking anger. Then came last year’s dissolution, a rush of blood after a routine EU election setback. The disastrous snap election shrank his representation further and produced the current stalemate.

Since then Macron has been widely accused of ignoring the voters’ message and ruling as if nothing had changed. He appointed loyalists as prime ministers - Lecornu, who has served in every one of his governments, epitomises this approach. Moreover, the president courted conservatives, who had far fewer MPs than the left-wing bloc. Another complaint, often heard during his first term, is that Macron irresponsibly set out to destroy traditional parties. By aggressively poaching moderates from both sides, he abandoned the right and the left to demagogues.

Some of those accusations are justified. Macron certainly lost his touch after his 2022 re-election, which owed much to fears of his main opponent, RN’s Marine Le Pen. His subsequent miscalculations stem from the illusion of a warm endorsement by voters. And his initial project of gathering centre-right and centre-left figures under one big tent was flawed: a functioning democracy requires a contest between alternative governments-in-waiting, not a single party of reason opposed only by radicals on the margins.

But most of the charges are unfair. You can accuse Emmanuel Macron of recklessly calling a snap election or of disregarding voters, but you can’t accuse him of both. His turn to conservatives made sense after Mélenchon, speaking for the united left, insisted on a big-spending programme without compromise.

More fundamentally, the rise of populism was not Macron’s doing. Mainstream parties of right and left have been in retreat across the West for a decade – often with justification. In France, the centre-right and centre-left crumbled through their own mistakes, not Machiavellian planning. The socialists failed to articulate a clear, modern vision. Their president, François Hollande, ended his term in 2017 with even lower approval ratings than Macron has now. That year the conservative Republicans fielded a terrible candidate and have continued their slide ever since. Their rival chieftains now fight over the remnants of a once-dominant party that attracted barely 10% of the vote in 2024.

Uniquely in France, the anti-establishment spirit of the late 2010s benefited a charismatic centrist. In many ways that was lucky. Despite many hiccups and headwinds – the “Gilets jaunes” tax revolt, urban riots and a pandemic, among others – Macron has a solid record. His labour reforms and tax cuts, notably for businesses, have sparked an investment boom and ended mass unemployment. Much remains to be done: France’s GDP per capita still lags far behind Germany’s and the Netherlands’, and even trails Britain’s. But unlike his immediate predecessors, Macron has reversed the country’s slide at a time when others have struggled.

Now enemies emboldened by widespread anger propose to unpick those achievements. Whether they will actually risk a full-blown financial crisis with repercussions across Europe remains to be seen. But there is no question that, deserted by all, Macron has failed to secure his legacy. This is not surprising. All his predecessors have ended up trapped in what one of them, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, called “the lonely exercise of power”.

French presidents wield outsize powers that leave them exposed as lightning rods for all discontent. Every incumbent has ended deeply unpopular. For a maverick without a strong party behind him, that failure can be fateful for the project he represents. If Macron had instituted a more collegial rule, he might not have taken his ideas of centrism down with him. Instead he followed the heady logic of an absolutist system. The collapse of macronisme reveals the tragedy of France’s imperial presidency.

This is the third in a series of trans-Channel comparisons. The first instalment was about debt woes and the second government gridlock. This post focuses on an even darker threat.

People only put up with government to escape the “miseries and horrible calamities of civil war”, Thomas Hobbes wrote. Modern authorities may be entrusted with higher missions, but preventing social breakdown remains a minimal expectation. Any state that does not meet it is deemed a “failed” one.

Worryingly, many Western countries are struggling with that basic test. Hobbes was no democrat, but liberalism rests on the trade-off he posited: if I don’t allow the state to boss me around, my neighbour will bully me instead and life will be hell. Liberal theory added a crucial wrinkle: leaders whose legitimacy rests on popular backing – instead of an implicit Covenant - strengthen their authority to keep the peace.

The deal hangs in the balance. Talk of civil war is rife in democracies. In the US the opponent is mostly seen not as a competitor but as an enemy leading the country to perdition. Rather than urging unity, the administration has blamed the whole left for the murder of a right-wing activist. If political violence erupts in the US, the sovereign will have done nothing to prevent it. This makes America an outlier. This article focuses on two other historic beacons of democracy, the UK and France, where governments at least attempt to fulfil their Hobbesian mission as peace enforcers.

In a scholarly article published in June - and which got media attention in France – David Betz of King’s College London warned that both multicultural societies could face “fracture” along “lines of identity”. But France, he concludes, was marginally more at risk than the UK.

Some of his arguments are shaky. Betz exaggerates both the weight of the far-right Rassemblement national (RN) and the threat it poses. He states that “457 constituencies voted [for the RN] in the first round” of last year’s European elections” against “119 that voted for other parties”. But EU elections in France use proportional representation: one round in a single national constituency. And with 30% of the vote, the RN is very strong, but not four times as all rivals combined. Nor is it an obvious civil war factor: the party’s very popularity drives it towards power through ballots, not chaos.

That said, Betz’s conclusion about deepening fragmentation is undeniable. Leading French analysts have made this diagnosis. A lack of social cement, combined with France’s mystique of the barricade, increases the risk of fractures turning violent. In the 2018 gilets jaunes crisis, a tax revolt escalated into a quasi-insurrection: looted shops, burning buildings, road blockages and an attack on the National Assembly.

The latest incipient uprising was launched under the slogan “bloquons tout” (”block everything”). Launched by far-right social networks in June, the movement was endorsed not by the RN but by the radical-left La France Insoumise. It hasn’t reached critical mass – just 175,000 people marched nationwide on 10 September. But sporadic disturbances erupted and hundreds were arrested. Only an exceptional police deployment - nearly one officer per two protesters - prevented serious violence.

A comparison with the “Unite the Kingdom” rally held in London three days later is instructive. Organised by a far-right firebrand, it was the closest thing to a threat to public order Britain had experienced this year. Up to 150,000 people marched to protest about immigration, the most mobilising theme against the government (in France it’s the budget). But the capital was not on a war footing. One thousand officers – which the Metropolitan Police called “a huge deployment” – were enough to deal with minor scuffles with counter protesters. Two dozen arrests were made.

The absence of violence does not reflect a lack of anger. The slogans in London were in fact more extreme than “bloquons tout”: “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”; “From the river to the sea, let’s make England Abdul-free”. People cheered when Elon Musk via video link called the left “the party of murder”. However brutal words were not matched by brutal deeds.

English nationalists can show appetite for destruction, as the summer riots in 2024 showed. But they did not speak for a wide section of society – a prerequisite for civil war.. Britain’s press and all parties condemned the thugs who attacked migrant hostels and mosques. In France, by contrast, every wave of rioting – whether by banlieue youths or yellow-vested folk – is treated as the expression of grievances. Violence is a signal not a stain. Both countries are rife with discontent over discrimination, immigration, remote elites etc. France is an angry country ready to erupt, while Britain is just angry.

The difference is often attributed to national temperament. But anyone who remembers English football hooliganism in the 1980s, or has experienced Friday night on any high street, knows that locals are not inherently meek. Britain’s history is at least as rich in blood-soaked conflict as France’s.

If two countries with comparable cultures experience similar tensions, why does one feel so much more volatile than the other? The answer has to be in institutions. The British state is simply better able to impose order on its subjects – or, as Hobbes wrote, “to tie their hands from rapine and revenge”.

To understand how this came about, go back to the foundation of democracy. On both sides of the Channel it arose from the same process: the collapse of absolutism, civil war, dictatorship and a century of fumbling towards the representative model. Democracy ensured stability by setting limits on itself: rules and values beyond the reach of ordinary politics reassured participants that electoral defeat didn’t mean catastrophe. These guarantees were embodied by the monarchy in the UK and the République in France.

The idea was to build upheaval into a rules-based order. In 1789 France, the deal between citizens and their new leaders was: we’ll do the revolution so you don’t have to. Even the Terror was a bid to control mayhem: “Let us be terrible to spare the people from being so,” Danton said. Likewise, the premise of Britain’s constitution is that the revolution will be institutionalised. As Lord Hailsham put it, “Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman” (and many now would give MPs that power as well).

There are key differences between the two systems. Britain’s was a product of evolution, not design. There was no blueprint in the late 17th century: promoters of the new order built on the ancient powers of assemblies and improvised from there – a pragmatic approach in keeping with their common law heritage. Such an arrangement facilitated reform, as anything was possible within the framework of parliamentary supremacy.

The French started the process 100 years later, at a time when constitution writing was trending – which suited a legal culture inherited from the Romans. The downside of France’s scripted approach was inflexibility. The first revolutionary constitution lasted two years; its replacement was set aside right away. At each crisis, the temptation was to write a better rulebook. The country has gone through 12 more regime changes since then.

This brittleness is compounded by a focus on personal power. The French endow popular individuals with inordinate legitimacy, but popularity has an expiration date. The British system, for its part, places ultimate authority in a less inspiring but more solid collective whose leader is expendable. Four of the past five prime ministers have been ousted by their own party and the current one is under pressure.

Britain’s Leviathan is nimbler than France’s and better able to take the sting out of civil strife. But neither system is immune to Betz’s scenario of spreading unrest. This matters because an alternative to liberal democracy is gaining ground. That model is closer to what Hobbes envisioned: a sovereign above the law, with a mandate to enforce order by crushing dissent rather than channelling it. This approach has admirers in both the UK and France. The challenge from far-right parties will be the focus of my next piece.

Countries, like families, are unhappy in distinctive ways. In a series comparing challenges faced by the UK and France, I began with their debt crises. This post, adapted from a piece I wrote for Persuasion, turns to political stalemate in both nations.

France's prime ministership – once a step on the ladder to the presidential top – has become a temp job. The new incumbent, Sébastien Lecornu, is the fifth in less than two years. Such instability is unprecedented under the current constitution, which is predicated on executive authority.

Lecornu's predecessor, François Bayrou, in effect fell on his sword after finding it useless against opponents. The fiscally prudent centrist had called a confidence vote over plans to curb public spending and was sure to lose. Last Monday the far right and the left, which agree on nothing except opposition to serious savings, united against him - as they had done for Bayrou's predecessor nine months earlier.

As the National Assembly is divided into three antagonistic blocs of roughly equal size (left, centre and centre-right, far right), France is not just without effective government: it looks ungovernable. Some are comparing the turmoil to the 1958 crisis that ended the ineffectual Fourth Republic - in which prime ministers lasted six months on average. One seasoned French analyst has argued that the situation is even worse now, as there is no de Gaulle figure in the offing to save the day.

The most startling aspect of the turbulence is that France is far from an economic basket case. In terms of investment, growth and productivity gains the country has done better in recent years than many of its neighbours, notably Germany. Unemployment is no longer a perennial scourge. Public finances are a mess, but as I argued in my previous post, the economic and fiscal outlook is even darker across the Channel. While Britain's main problem is its economy, France's is its politics.

I don't mean to minimise the travails of Keir Starmer. At last year's election he ran on merely not being Conservative and boxed himself in with ill-considered promises. As prime minister he has failed to project authority. This summer a backbench rebellion gutted a bill on tackling disability benefits, reducing his chancellor to tears as borrowing costs soared. More recently Starmer lost his deputy to a minor scandal. The ensuing reshuffle briefly calmed critics, until it emerged that he had knowingly appointed a friend of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein as ambassador to Washington.

But flailing prime ministers, uproar in Parliament, calls for resignations and scathing editorials are the normal stuff of British politics. Far from representing a challenge to institutions, the tumult highlights their relevance.

Why, in the face of comparatively manageable difficulties, does France's crisis appear to be existential? A common explanation blames "la classe politique". On this account, parties are run by self-serving hacks who won't work together to save the nation. There is no shortage of culprits: populists at both extremes who deny the need for fiscal restraint while clinging to simplistic solutions (tax the rich, squeeze immigrants); socialists who side with the hard left rather than the responsible centre; mainstream conservatives who similarly prefer carping from the sidelines to getting their hands dirty.

The centrists are not spared either, starting with a hopelessly unpopular president. Emmanuel Macron first stood accused of ignoring the outcome of the 2022 election that produced a hung parliament, and trying to run the country in his usual imperious style. Two years later, his attempt at "clarification" through a snap election failed spectacularly, yielding the present deadlock. Macron's handpicked prime ministers have been similarly criticised for failing to initiate broad-based dialogue.

No wonder people are disgusted, you might argue. Political trust has plumbed new depths, with just 16% of French voters expressing confidence in parties, according to one survey. This chimes with the popular sentiment aired daily in the media and on the street: politicians don't care about us; throw the whole lot out; we have nothing to lose, etc. One woman told France Info this week that the public debt was not her problem: "Let the bastards sort it out. I don't consider it mine."

There are problems with this view. One is that it rests on an over-idealistic view of public life. Woe betide any country that depends for its stability on the virtue of its officials! There's no evidence that leaders are more civic-minded outside France. The reason the Labour government has been able to muddle through is not superior wisdom. Bayrou, despite his flaws, was straighter with voters than Starmer or anyone in Westminster.

But the main flaw with the "blame the politicians" theory is that the political class did not land from outer space. Every French elected official was chosen by voters. Politicians disagree among themselves because people don't. And there's something surreal about citizens accusing squabbling party leaders of obstruction - then angrily taking to the streets with "block everything" as their rallying cry.

So is an irredeemably divided electorate at the root of the impasse? Once again, the British comparison suggests that is not the whole story. The same anti-establishment forces are at work on both sides of the Channel. On the far right, the message centres on sovereignty, national values and curbing immigration. And the radical left makes similar demands in the two countries: maintain benefits, tax wealth, bring corporations to heel; in foreign affairs, there is strident hostility to Israel.

Both sets of critics enjoy comparable popular support. On the far right, the Rassemblement national and Reform UK both poll around 30%. Britain's hard left lacks a rallying figure like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but the Greens, Corbynites and Labour dissidents together draw in about 20% of voters—Mélenchon's 2022 presidential score.

Political trust has also hit an all-time low in Britain. Just as is the case in France, there is a yawning gap between the nation's needs and the people's demands. Yet no-one is talking about tearing up the post-1688 parliamentary order.

If an overbearing president, irresponsible party apparatchiks, and voter polarisation cannot by themselves explain France's predicament, what can? The distinctive feature of the country's political system is personal power. It is democratic in the sense that voters always have the final say. But the constitution is designed to place supreme authority in the presidency, with a prime ministerial nominally answerable to MPs as an adjunct.

In such a system, which tellingly no other democracy has copied, parliament is a subordinate force. No one aspiring to lead the country has an incentive to join a governing coalition. This would mean owning the country’s problems and sinking their chances for the presidential election due in 2027. As a result, the "présidentiables" sensibly wait in the wings until they get a chance to run for the top job.

The UK too has overly centralised power – but legitimacy rests with a party headed by an expendable figure. This individual weakness is a source of collective strength. By contrast the French system, where ultimate legitimacy rests with a highly exposed figure, is a recipe for what Jean-François Revel called "ineffective absolutism".

The odds of the new prime minister lasting any longer than his predecessors are slim. Given the parliamentary arithmetic Lecornu remains as vulnerable to a no-confidence vote as his two hapless predecessors.

All French opposition parties – and even some within the "central bloc" that supports Macron - are calling for new elections as the way out. The RN and Mélenchonistas want the president to resign. But as long as a better autocrat is seen as the solution to the country's problems, governing it will be a struggle.

"Having no money is hard enough," the playwright Sacha Guitry remarked. "But if you had to stint yourself as well, it would be intolerable." The quip encapsulates French attitudes to public finances over the past 50 years: not once has the state balanced the books.

Infuriated by such levity, the frugal-minded prime minister, François Bayrou, has chosen to go out with a bang now rather than with a whimper later. He has scheduled a confidence vote over general budgetary policy that he is sure to lose. By Monday evening, his embattled minority government will be gone.

Bayrou's travails mirror those of his British counterpart. Keir Starmer is not about to fall on his sword, but struggles to rein in spending amid huge public debt. The two governments have many problems in common, notably parliamentary revolts and rising populism. As this newsletter looks at France from an expat's perspective, I plan to make trans-Channel comparisons in coming posts. Today, the question is simple: between France and Britain, which is more broke?

Start with the similarities. The two countries have been hit by repeated shocks over the past 20 years: the financial crisis, the pandemic and the energy crunch. Each led to massive interventions, with borrowing never falling back to pre-crisis levels.

After piling up debt upon debt, the UK and France owe the same amount - around £2.9tr (€3.3tr). With similar population sizes, this means nearly identical burdens per head: £44,000 for each man, woman and child in Britain, and €51,000 in France. These are not notional figures: year after year households are paying the interest on that debt. And they will have to give creditors their money back.

And looking ahead, both governments face identical challenges: slow growth, runaway welfare costs, aging populations that strain health and pension systems, plus heroic new spending required for climate and defence.

On the face of it, France might appear in a worse position to confront those challenges. Its public debt is 114% of GDP, compared with Britain's 98% (the amounts are similar in cash terms, but France's smaller economy makes its debt burden relatively heavier). And while public spending in the UK accounts for 44% of GDP – less than the European average – the French have the most profligate state in the world, with 57%.

The country cannot keep a lid on expenditure. During Covid, President Macron declared a "whatever-it-costs" approach to tackling the crisis. Many of those "emergency" measures are still running - including funding for training and childcare.

One example of temporary spending becoming permanent is the sports budget. It doubled in the years leading to the 2024 Paris Olympics, which was understandable. But when Bayrou suggested cutting funding by a third in January, there was uproar in the media. Hundreds of sports celebrities signed a petition in protest. Even Macron criticised his prime minister. In the end, the budget was pared back by only 10%.

For decades, France has borrowed not just to invest but also to fund day-to-day government operations. New debt finances public sector salaries, healthcare, and other current spending, with a growing share going to debt servicing itself. Like a household that borrows to cover living expenses and credit-card repayments, France is addicted to debt.

As Bayrou has stressed, borrowing costs this year will outstrip funding for defence or education. He called for savings worth €44bn in next year's budget, or 2% of spending. But his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. The far right insists on cutting government "waste", especially help for migrants; the left wants to soak the rich in a country with the highest tax burden in the EU. No one wants to hear about targeting social spending, notably pensions – by far the state's biggest expense.

If France is facing a fiscal abyss, what about Britain? Its public finances may look less dire, but it faces the same fundamental problem. Despite Labour's parliamentary majority, there's no more consensus than in France on how to start making the numbers add up.

Take this year's debacle over winter-fuel payments for pensioners – which the government had to drastically revise after a backbench rebellion. It shows how difficult it is to remove benefits people have grown accustomed to. Starmer faces similar pushback against plans to curb soaring sickness and disability benefits.

In a crucial way, Britain is worse off than France. Bayrou is rightly alarmed that the government will pay €66bn (£57bn) in interest this year. But the UK spends well over £100bn annually on a similar level of debt. This gap partly reflects France's timing - it borrowed heavily when rates were very low, while much of Britain's debt is more recent, taken out on less favourable terms.

But the main factor is lender confidence. Creditors remember all too well the 2022 debacle when Liz Truss recklessly cut taxes while increasing borrowing. The market reaction was brutal: credit dried up and the damage proved long-lasting.

France enjoys the relative protection Eurozone membership provides. In a full-blown debt crisis, various forms of help would kick in – such as ECB bond purchasing programmes. The UK, by contrast, is on its own and would have to swallow the IMF's bitter medicine. This explains why British borrowing costs are much higher than those of the most-indebted Eurozone countries – 4.5% for 10-year bonds, compared to 3.5% in France and 3.3% for Greece (yes, Greece is less of a credit risk than France or Britain these days!) The UK is even struggling to find long-term lenders. This week it had to pull a 30-year gilt auction because there wasn't enough demand.

From a strictly budgetary perspective, France can currently tell itself that Britain is in an even worse situation. But if the French continue on their current path, they could come to envy their neighbours across the Channel. As cheap old debt matures and France's fiscal situation keeps deteriorating, the country could face UK-level servicing costs within a few years. And with foreign investors holding over 50% of the debt, compared to about 30% for the UK, it is much more vulnerable if outsiders lose confidence. Britain had its "market moment" in 2022. France hasn’t yet.

There is another difference: the UK is a nation living above its means and run by an ineffective government. France is a nation that lives above its means with no government. Here we're getting into the realm of comparative politics, a subject I leave for my next post.