Forget Covid and Macron – there’s a lot more going on in France
It is easy to forget, but France in 2021 doesn’t just revolve around President Macron’s attempts to hold on to power and the ongoing tragicomedy of the nation’s Covid vaccination programme.
Even in the midst of a raging pandemic, which has so far claimed the lives of nearly 90,000 citizens – against a toll of 125,000 in the UK – any true account of this week in France would have to include the following:
Olivier Dassault, President of the Dassault Group, one of France’s leading aerospace corporations, was killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday. A centre-right politician as well as an engineer, Dassault was popular with Right and Left and highly thought of by his 24,000-strong workforce. His sudden death, at the age of 69, along with that of his pilot, while on a private visit to Normandy, was widely mourned, not least in the offices of Le Figaro, the conservative daily his family rescued from financial difficulties in 2004. Dassault, who was also a composer and musician and who once, as a pilot, held four air-speed records, was one of France’s richest men, with a fortune of five-and-a-quarter billion pounds.
On Monday, the body of a 14-year-old girl, known only as Alisha K, was recovered from the Seine in Argenteuil, a dormitory town northwest of Paris. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, both aged 15, were arrested at the scene and taken into custody. While the motive for what looks to have been murder has yet to be established, reports suggest a tale of adolescent love and jealousy. It might be worth noting that lighter sentences for crimes of passion were removed from the French penal code in 1975. However, while there is no legal threshold for criminal responsibility in France, courts are required to consider sanctions that go beyond incarceration, including probation and moral instruction.
The 2019 fire that nearly destroyed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral was arguably one of the most traumatic single events to have affected France since the Second World War. The entire country was stunned. This week, it was revealed that 1,000 ancient oak trees in the Domaine de Bercé, near Le Mans, are being felled to provide the wood necessary to rebuild the cathedral’s transept and spire. The trunks of the selected trees have to be straight, without blemishes, and at least 18 metres long. If they were to be traded commercially, each would have a value of some £13,000. The cathedral’s original roof, dating from the thirteenth century, contained so many oak beams that it was known as “la foret,” but the spire that toppled so dramatically to the ground during the fire was a nineteenth century addition. It is hoped that Notre Dame will be restored to its full glory and reopened to the public in time for the summer Olympics in Paris in 2024.
On the same day we learned that the forest of Bercé is to provide the timbers for Notre Dame, it was disclosed that Ken Follett, the English thriller writer, whose epic saga, starting in 1989 with The Pillars of the Earth, about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge – a worldwide publishing sensation – has donated £125,000 to help renovate the cathedral in Dol de Bretagne, north of Rennes. Follet – one of the world’s most successful authors – was moved by the fact that the building of the medieval masterpiece was halted for close to half a century due to lack of funds.
Back in the Paris suburbs, this time in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (close to Argenteuil), the Muslim girl who complained that her teacher, Samuel Paty, had made her class look at cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, admitted that she had been lying and that Paty, in the course of a lesson on freedom of speech, had first advised Muslim pupils that they should leave the room or avert their eyes if they felt offended. The girl’s father was so outraged by what he was told by his daughter that he started a social media campaign aimed at her teacher, who was subsequently murdered and decapitated by a Chechen-born extremist. The father is now in prison awaiting trial for hate speech. His daughter, we now know, was not even in Paty’s class at the time of the fatal lesson and had indeed been banned from attendance on the grounds of her persistent bad behaviour.
But though there is a lot going on in France at the moment that has nothing to do with the Élysée or the National Assembly – including Wednesday’s crunch match between Paris-Saint-Germain and Barcelona in the Champions League – the nation’s politicians haven’t taken the week off.
Most notably, Nicolas Sarkozy, the last President-but-one, is on a national tour, dropping into various towns and cities to proclaim his innocence of the charges that last week led to his being sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended, for attempting to bribe a judge. Sarko is indignant. He argues that he was only looking for information that would assist him in addressing a quite separate charge, which alleges that he was paid illicit campaign funds by the late L’Oréal heiress Lilliane Bettencourt in 2007. He denies that the judge, who was also convicted, was ever bribed, but is particularly vexed that the case against him depended on what he says were unlawful recordings of conversations he had after he left the Élysée and was a private citizen.
Meanwhile, the current occupant of the presidential palace, desperate no doubt to sidestep the many controversies surrounding his government’s failures on the vaccines front, has announced that he is unsealing previously classified documents relating to the conduct of French forces during the Algerian war of independence that ended in 1962. It is now accepted that France committed war crimes during its repression of the Algerian uprising. The good news, from the perspective of France’s armed forces, is that 58 years have since gone by and there is almost nobody left to be held to account for what happened.