"dramatiquement drôle" - L'Express
Acheter ce livre: Amazon.fr, FNAC, Eyrolles, Gibert Joseph
"Une fraîche et amusante satire du monde de la recherche." - Le Monde des Livres
Will allowing French universities to teach some classes in English endanger the French language?
Debate (in French) on Arte with Elisabeth Quin, Renaud Dély, Nadia Daam, Bernard Pivot, Peter Gumbel, and Vincent Berger.
(sorry, Arte seems to have removed the video today.)
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In 2013 French high school students must pass an oral exam in English. Many are terrified. Judging from the performances of the highest ranking French policians, they shouldn't be.
President François Hollande (an HEC - ENA - Sciences Po grad who got a 16 in English on the ENA entrance exam - and who signed a personal letter to Barack Obama "friendly")
President Nicolas Sarkozy
Prime Minister Jean- Pierre Raffarin.
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Five billion euros in losses in 2012, 11,000 layoffs in France planned by 2014, saddled with overcapacity in a shrinking European car market, how long can asset sales and French government aid keep PSA - and the tens of thousands of suppliers that depend on it - afloat?
Car companies have been saved before. But France's industrial policy is in stunning disarray. Worse, Europe is wary.
What future for France's automaker?
A short press review.
Les immatriculations de voitures neuves en France ont reculé de 9,5% sur les trois premières semaines de mai, selon des chiffres officieux. Renault plonge, malgré le succès de sa marque roumaine à bas prix Dacia. Peugeot reste quasi-stable
Bruxelles veut vérifier si les aides accordées par l'Etat français au constructeur automobile respecte les règles en vigueur dans l'Union.
La troisième réunion tripartite sur l'avenir du site de PSA à Rennes a été jugée très décevante par la CFDT. 1.400 suppressions d'emplois y sont prévues. Certains redoutent mettent une fermeture du site à terme.
FT
May 17 2013 23:36 BST Car sales drive European stocks near five-year high
The Economist
PSA Peugeot-Citroën’s troubles - Running out of road - Another dire warning for Europe’s carmakers
Peugeot (the large French car manufacturer) have plunged year-over-year. Now down over 40% in the last ... Montebourg, Montebourg : my Ministry for a Peugeot! No problem. The French No problem. The French ... Peugeot--1 month to assemble and 35 months break time. High frequency High frequency commenting..You ...
Story - Tyler Durden - 03/04/2013 - 12:24 - 66 comments - 0 attachments
past few weeks: namely the case study of emblematic French automaker Peugeot , which just happens to ... nearly doubled from 29% to 52% in a few short months. Yet what is it about Peugeot that is interesting - ... May after pledging to block a “parade of firings,” said July 14 he would lean on Peugeot to rework ...
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The unwritten rule among Paris bloggers is not to "burst the bubble". For many visitors - especially Americans - Paris represents a gorgeous dream, and a visit here is often a culmination of considerable effort and expense, in search of a glimpse of a better, more beautiful, higher way of living. It is, among those who write regularly about France, considered cruel and unnecessary to undermine these innocent desires.
However, a dear friend of mine was recently pickpocketed for the second time on a bus, joining the thousands of tourists who get robbed every year in the capital, often by criminal gangs that work openly using the same techniques again and again, risking - giving the vagaries of the French justice system - basically nothing.
In fact, if you have a free moment, you can take a ride on the 1 line and watch the youngest pickpockets at work. Or, if the sun is shining, enjoy the sight of teenaged gangs relieving happy, jet-lagged tourists of their wallets with the famous fake petition trick around the Comédie Française.
These attacks on defenseless tourists are so common that they rarely even make the news - unless, as yesterday, it is a member of former president Clinton's inner circle who is attacked. (On the Champs Elysées, withdrawing money from an ATM, with the old "distract the target with a fake petition" ploy)
"C'est un vol à la tire, comme malheureusement il y en a beaucoup à cet endroit", selon une source policière, quotes le Figaro in today's "Un conseiller de Clinton dépouillé à Paris.
Earlier this week it was a Chinese film mogul who complained about the lack of security in France. After his room was robbed at a Pierre et Vacances in Cannes, he said the manager offered no help whatsoever, abandoning him to figure out how to deal with the police and papers on his own. A treatment which so outraged film industry people that Hollywood Reporter picked up the story (see China Film Group vice president Zhang Qiang had all of his luggage stolen from his rented Cote d'Azur apartment, leading the senior exec to tweet: “This film festival is not worth mentioning!”)
Usually, however, victims are just tourists not worth a mention and the crimes shrugged off as "normal".
Last month, in an exceptional event, workers at the Louvre shut down the entire museum, so sick they were of watching tourists get robbed and fearful for their own security (see Le "ras-le-bol" des agents du Louvre face aux vols des mineurs roumains in Le Monde)
Only a massive police presence on the streets of Paris prevents the problem from being even worse. But the "forces of order" can only do so much. Underage pickpockets are systematically released and even the most hardened repeat adult offenders rarely incarcerated for long. After long investigation, the police managed to break up an organized crime group that forced gypsy children into pickpocket slavery - and despite the severity of the crime (child slavery?) the judge accorded only the lightest sentence to the adult kingpin.(see Le gang Hamidovic jugé pour traite d'êtres humains in Nouvel Observateur)
Paris bloggers who try to warn their readers about these criminals by describing them and their tactics specifically run the risk of being criticized for being downers - or even worse and highly unfairly - racists.
But is putting our heads in the sand really the best we can offer the tourists who flock here to enjoy the City of Lights?
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François Hollande was elected to the French presidency on the flamby promise to close his eyes and plug his ears and yell ee eee ee eee eee eee eee until the Dragon of Reality got bored and went away.
Now it's been a year, and the charmingly wishful ee eee ee eee eee eee eee policy is under strain. Instead of disappearing in a puff, the Dragon of Reality, contrary to expectations, has been devouring everything in sight. This is bad news. For France. For the left. For the President himself. No one is more stunned than Mr Hollande's supporters - who now slam him for his lack of faith. Shout ee eee ee eee eee eee eee louder, you flabby infidel! they cry.
It's like watching a theater full of children clapping frantically to save Tinkerbell, only to see her, not just die, but get hit by a bus, and thrown into a boiling poisonous river, where she is ripped apart by that awful crocodile with the clock ticking inside him.
Imagine the trauma.
This, in short, is the psychological position of the French left today.
What is the Dragon of Reality? (Or the ticking clock) Take your pick:
unemployment, or
unfunded pensions or
massive government overspending, or
a dying industrial base, or
excessive costs to employers, or
endemic corruption, or
disheveled universities, or
inegalitarian schools, or
polluted water, deadly seaweed and lost and dying bees, or repeat violent offenders, or
the unspeakable horrors of foreign languages...
Poor François. Unable to sustain the fiction that he was stupid enough to believe his own promises, he started plummeting in the poles only weeks after entering office, and, like that cool Mad Man suit guy, has only accelerated since (but way less cool).
Splat, the one word on everyone's lips, makes no sense in French, where one talks of deserts to be crossed and waiting for one's moment.
What if one's moment is here and one has not the slightest idea what to do with it?
What if one is not the right man for the job?
What France needs, more than a man of incessant action, is a calm yet steely explainer-in-chief, someone who can put France's troubles in context, carefully showing how France got into them and how France can get back out.
But for that to happen, François Hollande must first acknowledge that Reality is not the enemy - false, wishful and crazy thinking about Reality is.
Consequently, his first arrow must be destined for the hallucinations of his own political base: the people who cast their vote for him in the absurd and touching hope that believing in miracles will make it so.
His second arrow should be aimed at incompetence in his own ranks - Hollande has assembled the least experienced crew of "broken arms" we've seen in 25 years. Hardly anyone has any idea of what goes on in the private sector, how companies function, what is takes to produce, distribute and market goods and services. This lack of basic knowledge of the world is killing. Time to bring in some people who know what they're doing.
His third arrow should go straight to the heart of ideology. In nearly every sector - most visibly education - ideology has trumped basic pragmatism. The preference for the theoretical over the real is a traditional French disease, but under Hollande it's grown to devastating proportions.
THE GOOD NEWS is that it should be easier for François Hollande to apply common sense than it was for his predecessor: he has only his own supporters to overcome - and not an insanely irresponsible opposition.
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It's easy!
Especially with teenagers, say, around age fifteen or so, who are just opening up to the mysterious powers of language and poetry.
All you have to do is to (teachers please take note):
1) put the kids in a stressful test situation - a bac blanc in a French public school or épreuves groupés in a private Catholic school
2) demand that they write a poem, under time constraints, on a passage from a text they studied
3) then, with a BRIGHT RED MARKER, scribble all over their poem:
TERRIBLE
AWKWARD
BADLY THOUGHT OUT
AWFUL RHYME
SLOPPY
UGLY
VERY POOR
with blood red circles around the offending portions of the child's poem.
Special tip: Correct the copy quickly with the aid of a "correct response grill" to ensure that no irony, humor, or otherwise subversive stray thought distract you.
4) Make sure that "la moyenne" is less than 10 out of 20 (don't want the little writers to get proud, now, do we!) And, where possible, throw in some nasty oral commentary in front of their classmates as well!
All you writers out there know exactly what this kind of "teaching" moment will do to a person's (and not just a child's) enthusiasm for writing.
If I am furious enough to write this post, it's because an otherwise excellent French teacher at one of France's top middle schools did exactly this. Apparently thinking this was a normal and appropriate way to teach poetry...
Just when I thought it was safe to get back into the French school system.
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From "21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous" in Wonkblog by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post
See also:
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are KillinAmg Us, by Steven Brill in Time
Why an MRI costs 1080 USD in American and only 280 USD in France by Ezra Klein on Wonkblog
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Sure, snowbirds prance around in shorts and sunglasses in my native Arizona, but truly can anything compare to the humid, yet fashionable, snow monkeys of Paris?*
Paris may be cold and gray, but I'm already looking forward to a full agenda of terrific literary events easily reachable by clean, fast and efficient mass transit - not to mention our Sunday market where the chicken is so fresh I have to send my husband to buy it because head and feet have yet to be removed by cleaver power.
What has changed in the past month in France? Why, nothing at all!
Elsewhere, there is a new Pope, which is nice.
In discussing this with my own private professor I learned of the legend of the only female Pope, whose name was said to be "Jeanne". For Vatican traditionalists this is even worse than a South American poverty-seeker named "Francis". Whatever the outcome, there's definitely a movie in here somewhere.
What news from sunny Arizona?
Sheriff Joe continues his Orson Wells impersonation from Touch of Evil while waiting to be called home.
Meanwhile, in an about-turn of breathtaking suddenness, the extremely conservative GOP governor Jan Brewer has embarked on the radical project of expanding medical coverage to an additional 400,000 Arizonans. Once Obama's rudest critic, Brewer has now thrown her full political weight into convincing the not-especially-progressive Arizona legislature that Federally-financed Medicaid is not an evil commie plot.
A hard row to hoe, but angels are singing somewhere.
Having watched friends and family too young for Medicare be BANKRUPTED and LOSE HOMES in Arizona because of insane medical bills, I can only applaud this initiative. The winds of change, are they finally a-blowing? (See Time magazine's Steven Brill's excellent article detailing the perverse - and criminal - pricing of medical care in the USA - à la tête du client as we would say in France.)
As one personally grateful for the life-saving excellence of the French health care care system (thank you neurological ICU at Pitié Salpetrière!), I can only urge expats to share their stories of the Carte Vitale with their fellow Americans.
France could show America how to organize delivery of medical care to people under 65. In exchange, America could, perhaps, teach France about the usefulness of paying supermarket employees to cheerfully bag groceries. (And to distinguish cows from horses.)
* Japan actually. See WSJ article on Japanese hot springs for this splendid photo
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Lack of traceability in the food we eat is no joke. But a picture's worth a thousand words, as internet humorists mock the incredible failure of food giants to perform basic supply chain quality management. Findus bears the brunt of the attack in France, but Tesco and Aldi also inspire #sm wits.
and the less funny headlines...
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"Uranium mining in Niger is absolutely strategic for Areva, both for the supply of French nuclear power plants for the sale of this valuable material to foreign clients. In addition, according to French Government and business sources: Areva must increase its staff significantly to operate a new mine, which will increase its workforce from 25 people to over 300."
Several of Areva's employees are still being held hostage and, after the attack in Algeria, security concerns have intensified. The sending of French troops to secure a private company is, according to Guisnel, a first. Despite requests, the previous Prime Minister François Fillon had refused to send troops to guard the company, unlike his successor, Jean-Marc Ayrault.
For the complete article in Le Point click here.
For Areva's official information about its uranium mine at Imouaren click here.
For an Oilprice.com analysis of why The energy industry’s biggest security concerns right now should be Niger, click here.
For a Slate 2010 analysis of France's strategic interests in Niger by Gilles Bridier click here
Note: France relies on nuclear power for 80% of its electricity. This electricity is produced by EDF which contracts with Areva for the supply of uranium, the fuel currently used in French nuclear reactors. EDF and AREVA signed "two major contracts for the supply of 30,000 tonnes of natural uranium" last fall. See official Areva announcement here.
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