In Paris Without Papers, and Seeking Visibility
By Scott Sayare
The New York Times
Sunday, October 11, 2009, p. A14
PARIS — The 2,000 illegal immigrants camped in this vacant warehouse are not hiding. Quite the contrary.
These West Africans, Turks, Pakistanis and Chinese have done all they can to publicize their camp, a sprawling colony of mattresses and cardboard, quilts and concrete at 14, rue Baudelique, in the 18th Arrondissement. They march every Wednesday, distributing fliers, hanging banners and hoping to rally public support as they petition the state for legal status. It is a gamble, though, a knowing admission of guilt: they are seemingly flirting with deportation.
“If it is going to come, it will come — it is destiny,” said Moussa Konte, 36, who arrived here from Mali nine years ago. He flashed a knowing smile. “But I do still prefer that it doesn’t.”
Known as “sans-papiers” — people without papers — their approach is bold, but by no means uncommon. Illegal workers regularly hold labor strikes here, demanding that their employers procure them residency permits. And for years, immigrants have been forcing their way into French churches, government offices and universities, refusing to leave without guarantees that they will be considered for “regularization.”
The Rue Baudelique camp is almost unparalleled, though, in both scale and visibility. But the government has made no move to shut it.
“In practice, in France we don’t do police checks in public shelters, for example, where there are lots of sans-papiers,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for Paris’s police prefecture. The same goes for camps like the one in the Rue Baudelique, she said; the police often negotiate the immigrants’ departure from such a site without deportations.
Sans-papiers have long proved to be an awkward issue for the government. While many French have called for tightened restrictions on illegal immigration, which is widely viewed as a colossal drain on state services, government action against sans-papiers has historically drawn public reproach.
The French still proudly refer to their nation as the birthplace of human rights, and France remains a bastion of social activism; the country’s labor unions have also taken up the sans-papiers’ cause, inscribing them in France’s rich tradition of workers’ struggles.
“France remains a welcoming country, even if it is stiffening its immigration policies,” said Djibril Diaby, the leader of the sans-papiers’ association that organized the Paris camp. He came to France from Senegal in 1999, and received his papers in 2003. Mr. Diaby, 35, now hosts a Thursday morning radio show called “The Voice of the Sans-papiers.”
The immigrants began arriving in the Rue Baudelique on July 17. About 1,200 came en masse from an administrative building near the Place de la République. A yearlong occupation there won 126 residency permits, renewable annually — a typically modest success, organizers conceded, but a success nonetheless. Only one man was deported, and he has reportedly made his way back to Paris.
At the new camp, one or two sans-papiers receive residency permits every day, organizers said. Word of their success has spread, and immigrants have been flocking to the Rue Baudelique from across the Paris region: since mid-July, an additional 800 or so have arrived, according to organizers.
“This is the first time we’ve seen such a crazy number of people,” Mr. Diaby said. Asked why the immigrants living at the camp had not been rounded up and sent away, he erupted in laughter.
“It is a bit surprising,” he admitted. But, paradoxically, it is their very visibility that seems to protect them.
“They can do identity checks in the street, stop people in the street,” he said, referring to the police, who routinely detain lone sans-papiers. “Mass arrests, the French are not ready for that. French national opinion wouldn’t accept it, and the government knows this.”
Government estimates have placed France’s illegal immigrant population near 400,000; the country has deported over half that number in the past two decades, official statistics show. President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007 with a pledge to stiffen immigration policies; his government is aiming to expel 27,000 sans-papiers in 2009, about triple the annual average from 10 years ago.
But France remains relatively generous compared with other European nations. The country awards citizenship to about 150,000 applicants annually, which ranks it second in the European Union. In 2008, it received and granted more asylum requests than any other nation on the continent, according to government and United Nations numbers.
And the sans-papiers have had particularly strong support from France’s leftist political parties and powerful labor unions, where populist ideology runs deep.
“This is class struggle,” said Sigrid Dumonçay, a delegate from the union SUD Solidaires and a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party, both of which have backed the immigrants. “When we support the sans-papiers, we’re defending our class, the proletariat.”
For the sans-papiers themselves, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie remains, at best, a distant concern. From Mali, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, but also Ukraine, Kurdistan and Bolivia — 19 nations in all, at the camp — most of them arrived with more modest aspirations.
“I came to feed my family, and myself,” said Nouha Marega, a bashful man of 32. “I came for my life.”
On July 11, 2001, Mr. Marega left Mali on a direct flight to Paris with a three-month visa and little else. He has since worked in construction, pouring concrete, and at a recycling plant, sorting plastic bottles with his long, slender fingers. Raised on glossy photos of Paris’s gilded monuments and grand boulevards, Mr. Marega said he never expected to find himself living in a warehouse, out of a job — he was fired in mid-August, he said, after asking his employer for a full-time post — and still without papers.
Most of the sans-papiers at the Rue Baudelique camp work under the table, they said, earning six to eight euros an hour, or the equivalent of $8.80 to $11.80 (the legal minimum wage is 8.82 euros, or $13). Others work under the names of legal friends. And a majority say they pay taxes — social security payments are automatically withheld from their paychecks, though they have no access to the corresponding benefits.
A steady stream of men, mostly Africans, mostly moving with the tired gait of the day laborer, flows in and out of 14, rue Baudelique. Inside, they lie about a sea of mattresses, packed amongst crumbling concrete pillars and industrial dumpsters. Some pray on the central loading dock. Others huddle in the half-light around boiling pots of mint tea. Women stir vats of riz-au-lait on the pavement, chop vegetables on what were once office desks. Many sleep.
Despite their efforts to attract popular attention, most of the sans-papiers’ energy is dedicated to the day to day. Neighbors say their presence has been little felt, but it has stirred debate.
“We can’t take in all the world’s misery,” said Fabian de Villars, 54, a chain-smoking gym teacher, over a half-pint of Record at the nearby cafe Le Flash. “In a month, there will be 300 more who show up.”
Mr. de Villars’s is a common refrain here. But he added, “Someone who comes to France to work, and then to bring his family later, that doesn’t bother me.”
Such was the case for Mr. Marega, the Malian immigrant. He tells his story to family and friends, a warning to those who dream of France, as he once did, as a welcoming, easy-money paradise. But they cannot be deterred, he said.
“They think we have a beautiful life here, with everything we need. Even if we tell them they mustn’t come, they don’t believe us.”
______________________________________________________________
French Rap as a Flash Point
By Scott Sayare
The International Herald Tribune
Thursday, August 27, 2009, p. 9
PARIS — A gentlemanly patron of the arts, Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, seems an unlikely champion of rap. But when the French artist Orelsan called publicly for his support at the height of a months-long free-speech polemic around the rapper’s song “Sale Pute” (Dirty Whore), Mr. Mitterrand obliged.
“Orelsan expresses a lover’s spite, with terms that are not my own — I don’t speak exactly the same language — but he has every right to express it,” the minister told RTL Radio. “Rimbaud wrote things far more violent, which have become classics. I do not know if Orelsan’s songs will become classics, but, in any case, what is certain is that this is a lot of fuss over nothing.”
The minister’s support aside, the polemic has struck a heavy blow to Orelsan’s burgeoning career. Denounced by feminists and public officials of all stripes as promoting violence against women — “We’ll see how pretty you look with a broken leg,” he raps on “Dirty Whore,” in one of its tamer phrases — the rapper has been banned from some French concert halls, and Paris’s public libraries have declined to carry his album. In response, musicians and free speech activists have been up in arms. “One wonders if our leaders understand their electors aren’t living in Tehran,” wrote Gilles Martin-Chauffier, editor in chief of the newsweekly Paris Match.
This is by no means the first time rap has fueled major controversy in France. Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, the music has often proved a flash point in debates here over free speech, tradition and race. French rappers and politicians have a rich history of bad blood, the performers testing social and legal limits with their music, the state hauling them into court: ministers and parliamentarians have brought suit against N.T.M., Ministère A.M.E.R., Sniper, Monsieur R, La Rumeur, Lunatic and several others.
But Mr. Mitterrand’s intervention last month seemed to presage a new phase in the usually hostile relationship between French rappers and politicians. Though the artists remain committed and popular provocateurs, some leaders who once called them a serious threat to French culture and public safety have begun to soften their tone. The change mirrors broader attitudinal shifts in France, a nation devoted to tradition but adapting, sometimes grudgingly, to an evolving, multiracial society.
“The fact is that artists have always shocked in their own time, and Frédéric Mitterrand is conscious of that,” Orelsan, whose real name is Aurélien Cotentin, said in an interview. “It’s not by censoring everything that you’re going to promote discussion.”
Beginning 15 years ago and until as recently as last year, French government officials launched repeated legal offensives against rappers, accusing them of defamation, public insult (a crime here) or incitement of hate and violence. French rap has often distinguished itself in its outspoken criticism of the state; President Nicolas Sarkozy and the police, both deeply unpopular among urban youth, have been favorite targets. And though musical protest is itself a cherished French tradition, public officials have been unwilling to stand idly by, prompting many rappers and observers to accuse them of racism.
“At a certain point, what they accept from a Franco-French artist they don’t accept from an artist of North African origin,” said the lawyer Guillaume Traynard, who has defended several French rappers in cases brought by politicians. He called the suits a misguided “shortcut” for addressing the problems of France’s tense minority neighborhoods, from which most French rappers hail.
Orelsan, who is white, suggested rap’s troubles have had more to do with culture than with politics or race.
“Rap is a kind of music that people don’t really understand,” he said. “It’s a musical genre that’s not accepted as ‘culture’ by a large part of the population.” Some French have attacked rap, he said, simply because they don’t view it as art — and mistake aggressive posturing for literal threats of violence.
In recent years, though, French lawmakers have begun to back down — be it for reasons of moral conviction, electoral calculus, or simply because the lawsuits have rarely brought guilty verdicts. The Orelsan polemic moved Fadela Amara, a member of Mr. Sarkozy’s cabinet, to call for a roundtable women’s rights discussion amongst rappers, an indication that at least some government officials view the artists as cultural figures worth hearing from. Some politicians have gone so far as to seek rappers’ endorsements.
During his presidential campaign in 2006, Mr. Sarkozy touted a friendship with the dreadlocked Doc Gynéco, who once sang, “I love it when cops croak!” — and who had been the target of a government lawsuit a decade earlier. Police unions were scandalized — they knew Mr. Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, as a law-and-order champion who took rappers to court. But the relationship has endured, and Doc Gynéco’s last album was produced by Mr. Sarkozy’s son Pierre, who works under the stage name Mosey at a label known as Da Cream Chantilly.
“When you have a son in rap, perhaps you bring suit against rappers a bit less,” offered Mr. Traynard, the lawyer.
But the troubles of French rap are far from over, said Stéphane Espinosa, who heads 3ème Bureau, Orelsan’s label.
“It’s incredibly hard to put on a big tour for a hip-hop group,” he said. Because concert promoters here rely heavily upon state funding, they have been reluctant to book acts so often at odds with the government, a set of circumstances Mr. Espinosa called “economic censorship.”
Since the polemic around “Dirty Whore” began in March, Orelsan has had a dozen concerts canceled and confirmed just a handful of the 40 shows he planned to play this autumn. Concert organizers feel he is not worth the risk, said the artist. “It’s logical. I’d do the same in their place,” he said. A soft-spoken 27-year-old from Normandy, Orelsan has drawn comparisons to Eminem, though he is more self-deprecating than bellicose. He has preferred a quiet spot in the background during the controversy.
Had Mr. Mitterrand declared his music unacceptable, he said, he would have swallowed his pride and apologized. (He has already removed “Dirty Whore” from his Web site, the song does not appear on his album and he does not perform it in concert.) He acknowledged some of his lyrics could be shocking, and said he understood the women’s groups that first protested “Dirty Whore.”
“These are associations that fight for just causes,” the rapper said. “But if you outlaw everything, that means you’re outlawing dialogue — and that’s stupid,” he said, though he was quick to add, “I’m not a cultural specialist. I’m just a rapper.”
______________________________________________________________
France Seizes Two ETA Weapons Caches
By Scott Sayare
The New York Times
Friday, August 21, 2009
PARIS — French police on Friday seized two weapons caches thought to belong to the Basque separatist group ETA, bringing to five the number of such hiding places discovered this week in the rugged hills of southwestern France. Police also arrested three suspected high-level ETA operatives in a raid in the French Alps on Wednesday.
“This all leads us to believe that ETA is extremely active in France,” said Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the state prosecutor’s office in Paris, which handles anti-terrorism proceedings. The militant group seeks to establish an autonomous state in the Basque country, a region spanning the border between northern Spain and southern France.
The discoveries of the buried weapons at two sites in the French Pyrenees and three others outside the southwestern city of Béziers followed on tips from the Spanish authorities, Ms. Montagne said. The caches contained stolen French firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and several hundred pounds of bomb-making chemicals, along with dozens of detonators, hundreds of yards of fuse and varied electronic equipment, according to French and Spanish officials.
This week’s discoveries and arrests come in the wake of a series of late July bombings attributed to ETA. A powerful car bomb detonated outside a police barracks wounded nearly 60 in the northern city of Burgos, and a subsequent attack killed two policemen on the island of Majorca.
One of the men arrested by French police this week, identified as Alberto Machain, had been sought in connection with the Majorca bombing. Also detained was Aitzol Etxaburu, a suspected ETA senior operative. Spain’s interior minister, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, called all three suspects “top members” of the group’s military logistics apparatus, saying their arrest disrupted a major weapons supply chain.
News reports indicated the men had been under surveillance for weeks before French police carried out a dawn raid on their apartment at the mountain resort of Le Corbier. Investigators recovered several explosive devices along with false identity papers and license plates and stolen French handguns. The suspects were being transferred to Paris on Friday.
Many experts view ETA as seriously weakened by the arrests of several of its military and political leaders over the past year. They say the group has also been split by a conflict between members wishing to continue the armed struggle and those who would like to move the organization into the political mainstream.
Listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department and the European Union, ETA has long used France as a rear supply base for its attacks, which are concentrated in Spain. Since its inception a half-century ago, the group has killed more than 825 people.
______________________________________________________________
Football, American Style, Is Alive in France
By Scott Sayare
The New York Times
Sunday, July 12, 2009, p. SP 11
PARIS — The National Football League scrapped its overseas experiment two years ago, but that does not mean Europeans have stopped playing the game. In France, despite what one may expect, football does not refer exclusively to soccer.
Semiprofessional leagues have long been fixtures across the continent — as have the American journeymen who come to play in them and, perhaps, forge a trans-Atlantic path to the N.F.L.
“It’s real football,” said John McKeon, 25, a barrel-chested offensive lineman with a square jaw and bear-paw hands. McKeon, a former starting tackle at North Carolina State, is one of two Americans on the roster of Le Flash de La Courneuve, the perennial French champion. On Saturday, his team faced the Swarco Raiders of Tirol, Austria, in the 23rd Eurobowl, in Innsbruck.
After a Flash victory on a recent Saturday outside Paris, celebratory hoots and laughter echoed from the team’s locker room beneath the Stade de Marville, linemen, receivers, defensive backs and ends dancing in jockstraps, snapping their towels at one another. Less enthusiastic, a player in a ragged cutoff T-shirt leaned back into his locker, lighted a cigarette and took a long, slow drag.
McKeon rolled his eyes. “The backup QB,” he said. It is not a shock to see teammates smoking at a game, McKeon said. This, after all, is France.
Although American football has yet to attain anything like the prestige of soccer or rugby, whose champions are national heroes, a handful of French teams maintain a loyal following.
Fans pack the stands of municipal stadiums to watch them play, chanting battle cries in broken English, singing along to John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd. They gorge themselves on nachos and hot dogs — served with mayonnaise, on baguettes — and wash it all down with cup after plastic cup of draft beer.
Just like in the States, sort of.
“I thought you played with your feet,” said Bruno Lacam-Caron, a former player and now general manager of the Flash, who helped found the team in 1984.
Since then, the Flash and other European teams have been recruiting foreigners like McKeon, padding their rosters with American ringers who know the game. They are mostly young, former college players who were not drafted — only a small percentage of the thousands who play college ball make the N.F.L. — but are holding out hope for a future in football.
Few aspiring pros have made the American big time by way of Europe, though.
The N.F.L. started the overseas farm system, eventually called N.F.L. Europa, in the early 1990s. It produced some standouts: the Pro Bowl quarterbacks Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme once vied for a starting spot with the Amsterdam Admirals, where the star kicker Adam Vinatieri also got his start; receiver Dante Hall played a season with the Scottish Claymores; and quarterback Brad Johnson with the London Monarchs. The N.F.L. scrapped the project in 2007, though, having lost as much as $500 million.
“I had no idea there was competitive football in Europe,” said McKeon, who also played a season with the Helsinki Roosters in 2008 after injuries dampened his hopes for a future in the N.F.L.
“I love football to death,” he added. “But playing in the U.S. is probably something I can’t do anymore.”
La Courneuve, where he now plays, is not the most welcoming locale. The city is in the heart of the suburbs north of Paris; its decrepit public housing projects were the epicenter of the urban riots that flared across France in 2005.
But with a room in a dilapidated three-story apartment complex, a transit pass, a monthly income of 800 euros (about $1,100), and a chance to keep playing ball while seeing Europe, McKeon said he has everything he needs.
“I didn’t really care about the 65,000 fans, the merchandising, the fact that people knew my name,” he said, recalling his college days.
Although the level of play in France is similar to what he knew at North Carolina State — several of his current teammates played college football in the United States — the details differ.
Flash home games have no cheerleaders, fireworks or halftime shows, no television cameras or commercial breaks, no blimps and no instant replay. With the exception of the Americans, the players are amateurs: sanitation workers, bankers, electricians and bodyguards, some with rippling biceps and neck-swallowing deltoids, but just as many with flabby midsections and shrunken calves. During games, most opt for potato chips over Gatorade.
And every order shouted from the sideline by Patrick Esume, the Flash’s fiery, English-speaking head coach, must be translated into French.
“Twenty-one!” Esume screamed at a recent home game, hurriedly calling an offensive variable from the sideline. “Vingt-et-un!” came the obligatory echo from a handful of bilingual players.
At halftime, some neighborhood youngsters tossed a ball, shovel-passing it to each other as in rugby or two-handing it over their heads like a soccer ball.
With the Flash narrowly ahead as the final minutes ticked down, the defensive coordinator Charles Morgan Jones Jr. — a smoky-voiced American known as Yogi, dressed in a cap, dark glasses and black nylon sweats — shouted: “Allez, offense, allez, baby! Let’s go!”
The Flash beat the Graz Giants of Austria, 35-33.
“Next week, we’re going to take over France!” Esume told the team.
(They won their fifth straight national championship the next weekend.)
“And in July,” he went on, almost forgetting to pause for the translation, “we’re going to take Europe!”
______________________________________________________________
Bicycle chain gang for French convicts
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
June 10, 2009
PARIS (AP) — Most days, they live behind bars. But last week, a pack of French inmates — joined by their jailers, a police escort and a string of support vehicles — embarked upon their own Tour de France, trading cells for the vineyards of Provence, the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast, the majestic spires of the Alps.
The two-week, 2,200 kilometer Tour de France Pénitentiaire is not a competition, prison officials say — the “breakaways” and “escapes” of the better known Tour are, of course, strictly forbidden — but rather an exercise in commitment, solidarity and grit.
“It’s beautiful gift they’re giving me,” said Olivier, an inmate at a prison in Montmédy, near Luxembourg. He gave only his first name in accordance with French judicial code.
“It brings a close to my situation perfectly, spot-on,” he said. He is scheduled for release two months from now. “It’s the icing on the cake.”
Officials chose 200 participants from across France, prisoners with terms as short as two years and as long as 25, men and women, young and old, petty crooks and hardened criminals — including reformed rapists and murderers.
“Invariably, when any prison administration does these things, people will say, ‘Hang on, why is this happening? Aren’t they in there to be punished?” said Andrew Coyle, a professor of prison studies at King’s College, London, who spent 25 years as an overseer in British penitentiaries. “One understands that point of view. But if we’re serious about helping prisoners to reenter and to reintegrate, then we need to find opportunities to give them positive experiences.”
French victims groups agree.
“At a certain moment, you have to consider these people, these individuals, these prisoners as people who might one day once again take up the path of society, of community life,” said Sabrina Bellucci, director of the French National Institute for Victims’ Aid and Mediation. “I believe victims understand that very, very well.”
As prison populations across the world have swelled in recent years, officials are increasingly turning their attention to the reinsertion of prisoners into civil society. The Tour de France Pénitentiaire is meant to challenge the incarcerated, organizers say, but also to inspire a self-respect and pride that will facilitate an eventual return to normal life.
“Why a Tour de France?” asked Francois Grosvalet, director of athletic programs for France’s prisons. “Because in the history of French sporting events, the Tour de France is something that finds itself very near the summit.”
The event is no small undertaking: its 15 stages average 150 kilometers in length, some stretching to over 220. Starts and finishes were selected for their proximity to French penitentiaries, where the tour picks up and drops off inmates and prison personnel as it circles the country. They sleep and eat in hotels. A core group of six prisoners and a dozen guards will be riding the entire course, which finishes in Paris, like the real Tour — minus the champagne and fanfare.
The riders have been training for months.
“Believe me: you can’t just do it like that, 200 kilometers on a bike,” said Grosvalet. And that’s part of the point, he said, speaking by phone from a support vehicle in the motorcade behind the riders.
“I can’t think of a better way to strip down a person to their basic human nature,” said David Millar, the British professional cyclist and veteran of the Tour de France, where he’s worn the yellow jersey and won several individual stages. Millar knows something about rehabilitation: he returned to racing in 2006 after serving a two-year doping suspension.
“I have had my own personal struggles,” he said, “and it was cycling that gave me the peace and tranquility I needed to rediscover myself, then the passion and drive to better myself.”
Such are officials’ hopes for the inmates pedaling the French countryside.
“It’s a huge first,” said Grosvalet, the prison administrator. “It’s an absolute innovation to take the risk — but which is a calculated risk — of sending out so many prisoners at the same time and for so long, and to expose them in such a willful and even deliberate way to the eyes of French society.”
The prison peloton has rolled through country villages and hamlets to applause. Cheering crowds have massed under the arches at each stage’s finish line.
Cycling’s simple elegance has long enchanted the French, who lionize their champion riders; “prison cycling,” as officials have taken to calling it, has thus far proven little different.
It helps, perhaps, that the riders are unidentifiable as members of the penal system, save the word “Pénitentiaire” across the backs of their jerseys.
“Actually, it looks a bit like the Tour de France that we know,” said Thierry Huguenin, sponsorship director for Française des Jeux, a French lottery group that helped finance the event.
The company also sponsors a professional cycling team, a perennial competitor in the better-known Tour; in the past months, the pro racers and coaches visited prisoners to offer training advice and mechanical help.
Huguenin has been pedaling in the pack, where wardens, guards and judges — some 200 are participating in total — ride shoulder-to-shoulder with prisoners, all indistinguishable from one another in their matching white jerseys and lycra cycling shorts.
“The guards and the prisoners, who are usually arch-rivals, are teammates here,” he said, speaking by phone as he refilled his water bottles during a sunny, 188 kilometer stage from Valenciennes to Montmédy, in the north. “It’s a project where the element of human emotion, of human warmth is really exceptional.”
The Tour de France Pénitentiaire comes at a tense moment for France’s penal system, though.
Long criticized as brutal institutions, French prisons have seen a rash of suicides by personnel and inmates since last year. Correctional workers blame living and work conditions in the country’s aging, increasingly overpopulated facilities — many date from before the First World War, and the Justice Ministry says the system is more than 10,000 detainees over capacity. Suicides climbed 20 percent in 2008; at the current rate, they are expected to jump another 20 percent this year. And the prison population continues to swell.
But the riders have temporarily put such concerns out of mind. The inmates say they’re focused on the whir and click of spinning chains and shifting gears, on the open road unfurling before them.
“We’re not here to remind them what they’ve done,” said Huguenin, the sponsorship coordinator riding in the bunch. “We’re here to talk about the future.”
______________________________________________________________
French snub British queen, then shrug off uproar
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
May 28, 2009
PARIS (AP) — While Britons fumed over a perceived French snub of their queen, the French responded Thursday to the latest cross-Channel spat with a Gallic shrug.
France failed to invite Queen Elizabeth II to Normandy for next week’s 65th anniversary of the Allied landings on D-Day, where President Barack Obama is being given the starring role. The diplomatic faux-pas prompted uproar in Britain, which lost thousands at Normandy and across France while helping free the country from the Nazis.
French officials backpedaled Wednesday and said she was welcome to come — but to no avail. Buckingham Palace said Thursday no member of the royal family will attend the ceremonies. Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be there.
“I don’t get it, personally,” said Guy Briand, browsing the morning papers on a park bench just off the Champs-Elysées, in the shadow of a bronze memorial statue of Sir Winston Churchill. “If she comes or not, it’s her problem.”
He and others did not think the government had intentionally snubbed the queen.
“We like the English,” said Yannick Lauden, reading a novel outside Paris’ Musée des Beaux Arts. He was waiting to enter an exhibition of the works of William Blake, the British romantic poet and painter.
“English culture, in any case,” he said.
Many British visitors to Paris felt less friendly toward the French in the wake of the latest flare-up in a long history of trans-Channel tensions and cross-cultural ribbing.
“It is an offense, really,” said Eleni Laws, who had just stepped off the train from London into the Gare du Nord station.
“If they did the same thing to the French prime minister, the French would be up in arms and waving their flags, as they do.”
“It’s typical of the French,” said John Halley, searching for the ticket counter at the Paris train station.
Caieta Hendry, a young British law trainee visiting family in Paris, said the perceived gaffe hardly justified the uproar it’s caused in Britain.
“Should she be invited? I don’t think it’s really that important.”
John Halley agreed — and said the whole controversy was likely a moot point.
“I don’t think she’d have gone,” he said. “But she might have sent some sort of prince.”
______________________________________________________________
France reports sharp drop in wine, champagne sales
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
May 27, 2009
PARIS (AP) — As wallets grew thinner around the world, fans of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne cut back heavily on their purchases of French wine in 2008, according to French government statistics released Tuesday.
French households drank almost 10 percent less wine last year than in 2007, and exports by French vintners sank 15 percent by volume and almost 30 percent by value in the first quarter of 2009, the agriculture ministry reported.
“It’s a phenomenon of the current economic situation, so we need to be prudent and not sound the alarm,” said Xavier de Volontat, who heads an association of French vintners. “We’ll have to be prudent vis-à-vis our members in the months to come. It’s true that they’re being patient, but they have to be able to get by economically.”
France’s chateaux and vineyards have voiced concerns for their future after seeing orders plunge since the end of 2008.
But Arnaud Crete, of Chateau Listran in Bordeaux, said he has been pessimistic about the prospects for French wine for some time, as new, low-cost vintages from across the globe gain ground in the international market.
“I always take the example of tomatoes,” he said. “They’re inedible, the tomatoes you find in supermarkets. But people buy them just the same.”
Though France remains a nation of wine-lovers — 86 percent of French households bought at least one bottle last year, and the country retains its distinction as the world’s top producer — the French are drinking less and less: the average household bought just 43 liters in 2008, down from 47 in 2007.
Many experts and vintners have linked the drop in consumption to the global financial downturn. But another set of government numbers released this week show French households have bumped up their purchasing in recent months, and some view the falloff in wine consumption as an emblem of a larger, ongoing cultural shift.
“In the old days, it’s true that we drank 10 times more alcohol,” said Jacques Delpiroux, who runs a Paris brasserie with his wife and has worked in cafes since 1968. “The bars used to be full morning to night.”
In 1960, the average French adult drank almost 175 liters of wine per year — more than four times as much as the average for an entire household in 2008. And wine has been harder hit in recent years than beer or spirits — the French drink only half as much total alcohol today as 50 years ago.
Gone are the wine-drenched lunches of yore, the early-evening bottles of Bordeaux, traditions now relegated to the realm of cultural lore, said Delpiroux. A few years ago he kept his brasserie open for the after-work crowd, but he now shuts the door at 4:30 p.m.
“It wasn’t profitable,” he said. “It didn’t even pay for the lights.”
______________________________________________________________
Sign of the times: Struggling French pawning off grands crus as economic crisis bites
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
May 13, 2009
PARIS (AP) — The French have confronted their worst economic outlook in 30 years by locking up their bosses, marching on the capital and barricading oil terminals. Now the cruelest cut of all: They’re pawning off their wine.
Over the past year, cash-strapped Parisians have handed over thousands of bottles of grands crus to the Crédit municipal de Paris in exchange for cash or loans.
The city-run lender and pawnbroker of sorts has seen demand for new loans soar in recent months. To help meet that growing need, it auctioned off about 2,500 bottles Tuesday, bringing in nearly €200,000 in fresh funds.
“In the wine cellars of Paris, and even in the wine cellars of the provinces, there are veritable treasures,” said Robert Gorreteau, wine expert at Credit municipal.
As the financial downturn deepens, more and more Parisians are converting those treasures to cash.
Crédit municipal — founded by Louis XVI in 1777, it proclaims itself Paris’ oldest financial institution — has seen loan requests climb to an average of 520 per day, up 30 percent since April 2008. Last year, the lender gave out €75 million, €10 million more than in 2007. And they’re on track for an even bigger 2009, based on what they’ve seen so far this year.
More and more borrowers are opting to trade their bottles for quick cash instead of loans that accumulate interest and need to be paid off, Gorreteau said. The wines sold at Tuesday’s auction were traded in by Parisians who agreed to part permanently with the bottles.
Crédit municipal paid half-price for the wines, but sold them at market rates or better.
The auction saw a single bottle of 1982 Chateau Petrus go for €1,950, a five-bottle box of 1990 Chateaux Margaux fetch €2,400 and six bottles of 2000 Chateau Lafite Rothschild sell for almost €4,000 — prices that might convince more than a few wine-hoarders that now is the right time to sell.
“During this sale, we heard people say, ‘Oh la la, I’m going to give my entire wine cellar to the Crédit municipal!’” said Gorreteau.
Despite his own love for fruit of the vine, Gorreteau is not saddened that some are trading the pleasure of uncorking a closely guarded bottle for the satisfaction of a full wallet.
“Wine, it’s a convivial pleasure,” he said. “It has to be shared.”
______________________________________________________________
France excavates mass WWI grave with remains of Australian and British soldiers
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
May 5, 2009
PARIS (AP) — Excavators near a rural village in northern France began work Tuesday unearthing the remains of as many as 400 long-lost Australian and British soldiers who perished in World War I.
The remains, buried in a cluster of mass graves discovered in 2008, are to be individually reintered in a cemetery being built near the site.
Australian, British and French dignitaries gathered in the village of Fromelles for a ceremony marking the launch of the project, which is expected to conclude in just over a year.
“Today marks the beginning of the journey to afford many of those killed at Fromelles with a fitting and dignified final place of rest,” said Admiral Sir Ian Garnett, Vice Chairman of Australia’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is charged with overseeing the excavation.
An Australian amateur historian discovered the graves — which contain the largest group of Australian remains from World War I ever found — in a muddy field at the edge of a small wood, prompting an investigation in 2008 by the Australian government.
Australia has since commissioned the construction of the nation’s first war cemetery in more than 50 years near the site and dispatched a team of archeologists to exhume and attempt to identify the remains.
“This site is part of our national story,” said Warren Snowdon, Australian Minister for Defence Science and Personnel. “It filled a gap in our history.”
The remains appear to date from a single, famously ferocious night of fighting more than 90 years ago. Late on July 19, 1916, Australian forces launched the battle of Fromelles, the first Australian combat operation on the Western Front.
Many consider the battle “the worst wartime tragedy in Australian history,” Snowdon said.
More than 5,500 Australians were killed, wounded or went missing at Fromelles in under 24 hours, along with over 1,500 British, cut down by German machine guns and artillery. German troops buried them afterwards, Australian investigators say.
The bodies of more than 165,000 Australian troops killed in World War I have never been recovered, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, lost beneath the fields and forests of Western Europe.
“To understand that you’re standing near the site where these fallen heroes are buried,” said Snowdon, who visited Fromelles last year, “was extremely moving.”
Born in the village, mayor Hubert Huchette never imagined that the field on its outskirts, down a gentle slope from the brick church that rises over the town’s red tile rooves, could hide such a secret.
“History, it catches up with us,” he said.
Since the discovery of the site, about 400 pilgrims from Britain and Australia have come to pay their respects, said Commonwealth War Graves Commission spokesman Peter Francis.
“It was over 90 years ago, but the wounds still run deep,” he said.
The discovery of the Fromelles site coincides with a burgeoning popular interest in Australian history, added Snowdon, the Australian minister.
“In Australia, it’s got a lot of public support and drive,” he said. “It really is part of our national history, of who we are.”
______________________________________________________________
French captain recounts hostage-taking by pirates
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
April 16, 2009
PARIS (AP) — “When you see them coming, it’s too late.”
A year ago, Patrick Marchesseau watched helplessly as a band of Somali pirates hijacked his ship and took him and his crew hostage in the turbulent Gulf of Aden. The pirates held him captive aboard Le Ponant, the 288-foot luxury sailing yacht he was captaining, before French commandos freed him and the others.
“It’s not worth shooting at them,” Marchesseau said of the pirates, speaking by telephone Wednesday from the Egyptian coast, where he is once again captaining Le Ponant. He sailed the ship through the Gulf of Aden last week, this time escorted.
“They’re more armed than you, and life has, I think, a bit less importance in Somalia, based on what I’ve seen,” he said.
Piracy has exploded off the East African coast, and ship captains, shipping companies and international military forces are struggling to find an effective way to prevent the strikes. Marauders armed with rocket-launchers and machine guns have already attacked 79 ships this year, and are still holding 280 crew members and 15 ships, according to the International Maritime Bureau.
“It’s an experience where you learn a lot about yourself,” Marchesseau said. “It’s not ‘by the book,’ it’s lot’s of sang-froid and common sense.”
Nonetheless, his time as a hostage did not change his life.
“I headed back to sea three weeks after I was freed,” he said.
France has been particularly aggressive against pirates, and spearheaded European efforts for an anti-piracy force in the Gulf of Aden. French special forces freed Le Ponant and one other boat last year from pirates, and last week rescued a third.
The latest raid illustrated the risks of such operations: The ship’s captain was killed in a shootout between hijackers and French forces. Marchesseau called the skipper’s decision to pilot a small pleasure boat through the Gulf of Aden — which is “crawling with pirates,” he said — a “thoughtless risk.”
“It’s obviously an area that’s boiling hot at the moment,” said Marchesseau. “There are enough heavenly places to go to in the world which are safe and peaceful and wait for that area to calm down.”
He doesn’t expect the violence to subside, however, until anti-piracy tactics are revised in the Gulf. He argued against the military-secured convoys currently being tried, for example, saying they are too fast to effectively guard small tourist boats.
“We’ve seen that, in spite of everything, the pirates have no fear, they don’t hesitate to defy the military presence in the area,” Marchesseau said. “You need to systematically inspect the ships in the area that claim to be harmless fishing boats.”
Pirates would be easy enough to spot, he said.
“Fishermen without Kalashnikovs, that’s immediately harmless. But fishermen with Kalashnikovs, those are pirates.”
______________________________________________________________
In surprise move, French lawmakers reject bill punishing illegal downloading
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
April 9, 2009
PARIS (AP) — French legislators on Thursday rejected legislation to permit cutting off the Internet connections of people who illegally download music and films. But a stubborn government plans to resurrect the bill for another vote this month.
Backers of the bill — record labels, film companies and law-and-order parliamentarians — couldn’t rally the needed support during in a near empty lower chamber ahead of the Easter holiday. Lawmakers voted 21 to 15 against it.
The measure would have created a government agency to track and punish those who pirate music and film on the Internet. Analysts said the law would have helped boost ever-shrinking profits in the entertainment industry, which has struggled with the advent of online file-sharing that lets people swap music files without paying.
The government, intent on gaining the upper hand in piracy, managed to slip the measure into an April 28 special session devoted to initiatives by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party.
The president’s office reaffirmed Sarkozy’s wish to get the law passed “as quickly as possible.”
He “does not plan to renounce this whatever the maneuvers” to try to stop the bill’s passage, a statement said.
Music labels, film distributors and artists — who have seen CD and DVD sales in France plummet 60 percent in the past six years — almost universally supported the measure, hailing it as a decisive step toward eliminating online piracy and an example to other governments. Artists’ groups in France have said the future of the country’s music and film industries depends on cracking down on illegal downloads, and the legislation received industry support from around the world.
“It is disappointing that the law was not confirmed today,” said London-based John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recording industry worldwide and supported the bill.
Legislators and activists who opposed the legislation said it would represent a Big Brother intrusion on civil liberties — they called it “liberticide” — while the European Parliament last month adopted a nonbinding resolution that defines Internet access as an untouchable “fundamental freedom.”
Opponents also pointed out that users downloading from public WiFi hotspots or using masked IP addresses might be impossible to trace. Others called its proposed monitoring structures unrealistic.
“It is a bad response to a false problem,” said Jérémie Zimmerman, coordinator of the Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based Internet activist group that opposed the bill, calling it “completely impossible to apply.”
He said the bill’s rejection is proof of a widespread sense that it was a draconian approach.
Under the legislation, users would receive e-mail warnings for their first two identified offenses, a certified letter for the next, and would have their Web connection severed, for as long as one year, for any subsequent illegal downloads.
French Culture Minister Christine Albanel had said the bill did not aim to “completely eradicate” illegal downloads but rather to “contribute to a raising of consciousness” among offenders.
“There needs to be an experiment,” said Pierre-Yves Gautier, an Internet law expert at the University of Paris, noting the plummeting profits of the entertainment industry. “Frankly, it’s worth it.”
______________________________________________________________
French workers sequester 4 bosses at UK company
By Scott Sayare
The Associated Press
April 8, 2009
PARIS (AP) — French workers at a British-run manufacturing plant were holding four bosses captive Wednesday, having kept them overnight after a breakdown in negotiations about the closure of the work site, a company official said.
Employees of Britain’s Scapa Group PLC barred the senior managers from leaving the plant in Bellegarde, in the foothills of the French Alps, in what has become a popular negotiating tactic amongst frustrated French workers. The plant makes adhesive tape for the auto industry, which is suffering its worst crisis in decades.
“A substantial offer was made,” said Ian Bushell, Scapa’s European finance director. But employee representatives rejected the company’s proposal and decided to hold the bosses, blocking the entrance to the site with a truck in what Bushell called a “non-aggressive action.”
Employee representatives could not be reached for comment.
“Our primary concern is always for the safety of our people,” Bushell said by telephone from the company’s global headquarters in Greater Manchester. “Our secondary concern is that we should immediately have a re-engagement of negotiations with the union.”
In the past month, employees at French plants belonging to Sony, U.S. manufacturers Caterpillar and 3M and German auto parts maker Continental have seized and held bosses in response to proposed layoffs and plant closings. In early March, workers at a small French autoparts company occupied a bank in Lyon, successfully demanding that RBS Factor — a heavily indebted subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland — pay out its debt to the company.
Though the approach might seem extreme, the French population largely agrees drastic times call for drastic measures; a poll released Tuesday by the CSA agency showed 45 percent of French believe taking a boss hostage is “acceptable” during protests over the job cuts and restructurings that have accompanied the economic downturn.
But French President Nicolas Sarkozy has denounced the radical tactics.
“What is this story about going and holding people hostage?” he asked Tuesday. “We are in a state of laws, there is a law that applies, I will ensure it is respected.”
The Scapa site in Bellegarde employs 68 people. Plans to close the plant were drafted in response to a faltering auto market, Bushell said. Tuesday’s negotiations centered on job transfers or layoffs that would accompany the closing.
Negotiations were slated to resume Wednesday afternoon at the Bellegarde mayor’s office.
Steep labor costs have made France a target for companies cutting jobs in the down economy, and the country has seen a spate of recent factory closings.
But Bushell insisted that labor costs in France were not a reason for the Scapa closure. The company has plants throughout Europe and North America, as well as China and Malaysia.
______________________________________________________________
Police, protesters clash in France at NATO summit
By Scott Sayare (Reporting)
The Associated Press
April 4, 2009
STRASBOURG, France (AP) — Hundreds of protesters attacked police and set a hotel and customs station ablaze Saturday in this historic Alsatian city on the German border chosen by NATO summit organizers as a symbol of European unity.
First lady Michelle Obama and other spouses canceled a visit to a cancer hospital out of concern for security, the French president’s office said, after hundreds of protesters took up positions near the hospital they were to visit.
Most protesters marched peacefully, calling for an end to war and decrying NATO as a tool of Western imperialism.
But a demonstration that began calmly turned violent around noon (1000 GMT) in east Strasbourg about a mile from the Rhine River and the German border. An AP reporter saw police in body armor and helmets hoisting shields as they were pelted by several hundred protesters with rocks, sticks and then Molotov cocktails.
About 100 officers responded by lobbing concussion grenades and volleys of tear gas into the crowds of demonstrators, many dressed in black and wearing masks or balaclavas.
“I’ve never pulled so much metal out of people,” said Ramon Schmidt, a medic tending to injured demonstrators.
Members of the violence-prone “black bloc” — named for their black clothes and hoods — then headed toward the Europe Bridge over the Rhine river.
French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie condemned the violence, telling France-3 television that some of the protesters were “very violent.” “There was a band of hoodlums, you must call them by their name, who were there only to destroy,” she said.
Hours earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and two dozen other NATO leaders had walked across the bridge from Germany to France to open the main session 60th-anniversary summit with a photogenic display of European cooperation.
As the leaders met behind closed doors near Strasbourg’s center, the black-clad demonstrators set fire to the customs station on the French side of the Europe Bridge and sprayed graffiti on the walls of buildings.
German police used used water cannon to extinguish the blaze, but French fire fighters had to be called in. As the crowd dissipated, a convenience store was overrun and ransacked.
French police said approximately 1,000 of the estimated 10,000 demonstrators in Strasbourg were “particularly violent” and “had not stopped attacking.” They reported about a dozen injuries in the series of clashes that lasted until the late afternoon.
AP photographers saw protesters storm a budget hotel about a 5-minute walk from the Europe Bridge, setting fires and pilfering alcohol from its bar. Police said that a local pharmacy was also gutted, along with a building that housed small businesses.
Stacks of old tires were also set ablaze, unleashing thick plumes of black smoke that could be seen from across the river. Near the bonfire was a sign welcoming visitors to Strasbourg.
Around 2:45 p.m. (1245 GMT), the protesters, throwing rocks, tried to storm a massive police blockade at the d’Anvers bridge. They were driven back by water cannon, tear gas, flash bombs and rubber bullets. Across the canal, nearly 1,000 people gathered to watch the fracas.
Across the Rhine in Kehl, Germany, an estimated 7,000 demonstrators gathered peacefully and hoped to cross into Strasbourg but were diverted by scores of police. Protest organizers said 10,000 people were on hand.
German authorities had estimated that up to 25,000 protesters would take part in demonstrations but many were frustrated by the presence of some 15,000 German police and 9,000 French police, some in helicopters and fast boats patrolling the Rhine.
______________________________________________________________
Strikers take French 3M chief hostage as outrages mounts across France over layoffs, cutbacks
By Scott Sayare (Reporting)
The Associated Press
March 25, 2009
PITHIVIERS, France (AP) — Striking French workers for U.S. manufacturer 3M held their boss hostage amid labor talks Wednesday at a plant south of Paris, as anger over layoffs and cutbacks mounted around the country.
While the situation at the 3M plant outside Pithiviers was calm, worker rage elsewhere boiled over into an angry march on the presidential palace in Paris and a bonfire of tires set alight by Continental AG employees whose auto parts factory was being shut down.
While France has a long tradition of labor unrest, the latest wave of hostage-takings, marches and strikes has echoed across Europe, as the global slowdown fans job fears and leaves many workers skeptical of their leaders’ ability to solve the crisis.
The French division of 3M — a diversified manufacturer known for Post-It notes and Scotch tape — recently announced layoffs and job transfers among its 2,700 workers at 13 French sites. Among those targeted are 110 of the Pithiviers factory’s 235 workers.
A few dozen workers at Pithiviers took turns standing guard Wednesday outside factory offices where the director of 3M’s French operations, Luc Rousselet, has been holed up since Tuesday. The workers did not threaten any violence and the atmosphere was calm.
A few police officers stood outside, while workers inside exchanged jokes and worries about their future amid heaps of empty plastic coffee cups and boxes of cookies.
Talks among 3M workers and management resumed Wednesday mediated by a local labor official. Rousselet was not taking part. Workers want better severance packages for those being laid off and better conditions for those keeping their jobs.
In France, it is not unheard-of for striking workers to hold company executives as a way of winning concessions from management. The hostages are almost never injured. A similar situation ended peacefully earlier this month at Sony’s French facilities.
“We don’t have any other ammunition” other than hostage-taking, said Laurent Joly, who has worked at the Pithiviers plant for 11 years and is angry that he is being transferred to another French site.
“I really have the impression that we no longer exist for these people,” Genevieve Camus, who has worked for the plant for 35 years, said of the company’s U.S. management.
The Maplewood, Minn.-based 3M is also planning job cuts at facilities in the United States and other developed nations.
The 3M workers at Pithiviers have been on strike since Friday. Hamon said Rousselet was blocked from leaving the factory Tuesday after arriving from 3M France headquarters near Paris.
Store owners in Pithiviers were shutting down early on Wednesday to support the factory workers.
When Rousselet came out of the guarded office to go to the bathroom Wednesday, workers booed him while reporters asked how he was holding up.
“Everything’s fine,” he said.
Workers planned to bring Rousselet mussels and french fries for dinner if he was still there Wednesday night.
In Paris, an acrid plume of black smoke from burning tires wafted mere blocks from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Elysee Palace. It was a clear signal that French labor unrest over the state of the euro zone’s second-largest economy had taken an ugly turn for the worse.
Faced with what it calls the collapse of the European auto market, Germany’s Continental recently announced plans to close the plant in Clairoix, northeast of Paris, in 2010.
“We shouldn’t let this company close down, otherwise it means that all these robber bosses can do whatever they want to,” said Antonio Da Costa, a union representative.
Rising public outrage at employers also surfaced in Scotland.
Vandals attacked the home and car of the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, smashing windows early Wednesday at the house of the ex-CEO who resigned in disgrace but walked out with an annual pension of about 700,000 pounds ($1.2 million).
Three windows were smashed at Fred Goodwin’s sandstone Victorian house in one of Edinburgh’s wealthy suburbs. The rear window of a black Mercedes S600 car parked in the driveway was also smashed.
