PORK FARMING IN TROUBLE; PORK AT SCHOOL; AMERICAN HEROES

PROBLEMS AT THE PORK FARM

Pork farmers blocking roads

The summer of 2015 has been a hot one, with temperatures rarely dipping below 30-C and often reaching 37 or 38-C, which is uncommonly high in Provence. The usually quiet month of August (government on holiday) was further heated up by a crisis in the pork industry that has resulted in truckloads of manure being dumped in front of government buildings, access to certain supermarkets and tourist sites (Mont St. Michel) being blocked, and major roads from Germany and Spain being barricaded to stop agricultural products from coming in. The cause of this upheaval is the price of pork, set twice a week by the Breton Pork Market in Plérin, which pig farmers claim is too low to cover their production costs.

Some external reasons for this are the EU economic sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, effectively closing down a huge export market of EU meat, as well as slowing Chinese demand. The resulting excess of pork products has flooded European markets at depressed prices. But other reasons are to be found in France and its family farms that are too small to compete with the larger, heavily mechanized farms in Germany and Spain. Says one farmer: "We pay higher social charges than our European competitors and are burdened by an accumulation of environmental and other regulations in France, including a government-set maximum size of our farms. How can we compete?"

The support system of price controls, EU subsidies and state aid that has underpinned French agriculture for decades is now unraveling, and it is generally agreed that France needs to reform its agriculture in depth. This includes the entire breeding sector, from pork to beef to milk producers, whose size and traditional methods make them uncompetitive.

France accounts for more than ten percent of EU pork production, most of it in Brittany. In the past, the industrial meat purchasers have occasionally bought up overproduction at set prices to absorb the excess, but this time two of the biggest French pork buyers were unwilling to participate, boycotting the Plérin exchange and shutting it down for eight days. They refused to pay the farmers' price of €1.40 per kilo below which, the farmers say, they cannot make ends meet. Today, one quarter of all French pig farmers are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Farmers dump live pigs at supermarket

All eyes are now on Stéphane le Foll, French Minister of Agriculture, who has called a roundtable of all players and offered the farmers an emergency package of €600 million in tax relief and government-backed loans but failed to address the foreign competition issue. Like most French farmers who blame Europe for overproducing and selling at cheap prices which they cannot match, Le Foll agrees that the solution lies in harmonizing prices among European states. "If we could find a price compatible with the German, Spanish and British systems, we could talk" he said at a news conference last week. He will meet his counterparts from other European farming nations in Brussels on September 7th, where he will try to obtain guarantees. However, according to Catherine Laillé who runs a pig farm in the Loire Atlantique region, the government should act on the French social welfare charges and regulations which need to be brought in line with those of other EU farming nations. Failing that, she says, the French breeding sector is bound to die out.

French public opinion is squarely on the side of the farmers. The French love their farm-raised products, which they buy at daily outdoor markets, convinced that fresh small-farm produce is superior to supermarket produce. They are willing to pay more for organic food, a growing sector, and would probably be willing to pay more for French pork to save the breeders, but supermarkets and distributors object to a rather significant price difference between French and less expensive imported pork. For the consumer, saving the French family farm is an emotional issue, for the free market an economic one. We all know, of course, which side will win.

PORK AT SCHOOL?

Speaking of pork, the question of whether or not pork should be offered at public school cafeterias has made front-page news this month. For years, public schools have been offering a standard lunch menu as well as one without pork for those with religious objections. But in March of this year, Mayor Gilles Patret of Chablon-sur-Saône announced that he was against religion-based substitute menus in public schools and would ban them in his community come September. Pork has been served once a week as part of the standard school menu, and on those days a substitute menu was available to Muslim or Jewish students. Patret's decision was denounced by his Muslim constituents and by some Muslim leaders, and ended up being challenged in court. But on August 13th a judge in Dijon ruled in favor of Mayor Patret, accepting his argument that vegetarian menus are available every day and that nobody is obliged to eat pork. Citing the cost of substitute menus and the principle of laicité in public schools, Patret suggested that Muslim parents (he does not have Jewish constituents) pack a sandwich on pork days, but that no secular school should be expected to observe religious restrictions of one kind or another.

The 1905 French law on separation of church and state has at times been used to political advantage, and some ten years ago served to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves, Jewish skull caps, crosses or other "ostentatious" displays of religion inside French public schools. France has both the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe, and tensions in the Middle East are often replayed between the two communities. Not surprisingly, the incident in Chalon-sur-Saône was seized on by the extreme-right Islamophobic Front National Party of Marine Le Pen who declared she would immediately ban the pork-less substitute meals in the eleven communities her Party controls.

Public opinion is largely divided along political lines, with conservatives supporting the court's decision, but Abdallah Zekri, speaking for the Council for the Muslim Faith, called the decision regrettable and "not taken to bring social peace to schools". No comment from the French pork farmers who must be quietly jubilating.

PARIS PLAGES - GAZA PLAGE 

Paris Plage 2015

Every summer the City of Paris offers local vacationers a very popular month-long event, Paris Plages: more than three kilometers of sandy beaches on the banks of the Seine with deck chairs, parasols, palm trees and food stands, and some water-sports events at the La Villette Basin. This year, however, the holiday atmosphere was clouded by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's decision to celebrate the city of Tel-Aviv on August 13th with one-day festivities of Jewish music and foods as part of Paris Plages. The announcement was met with outrage from pro-Palestinian quarters who responded with their own Gaza Plage on the other side of the Notre Dame bridge, facing Tel-Aviv sur Seine.

Trying to calm the waters, Hidalgo explained: "The idea was born on a diplomatic mission of the Paris City Council to Israel and Palestine last May to feature Tel-Aviv this year just as we have in the past invited Athens and various beach-front cities of Brazil and Polynesia". She called Tel-Aviv a progressive city that is known for its opposition to the hardliners in their government and said that France entertains a lively exchange of culture and new technologies with the city.

Nevertheless, the pro-Palestinians found it unacceptable to honor a country responsible for the killing of four children on a Gaza beach last summer and more recently the fire-bombing of a house in Gaza that killed a young father and his baby boy. "Would you have organized a Berlin Beach in 1944?" one protester cried. Answering the call of the Europalestine Association, some one hundred protesters gathered to wave a Palestinian flag, hand out free falafels and carry "Boycott Israel" signs.

Tel-Aviv sur Seine

On the opposite bank a festive mood reigned as people danced with an Israeli flag and chanted to Jewish music, offering typical pastries and generally ignoring the disturbance as much as they could. Some, however, spoke of a sense of apartheid and expressed their disappointment at the reconstitution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict in this relaxed and happy beach setting in Paris.


Despite the tension in the air, the day ended without major incident, in large part due to preventive security measures (metal detectors and a bag check at the entrance to Tel-Aviv sur Seine) and a police force of 500 who managed to keep the two opposing camps separated and nipped flare-ups in the bud. 

Free-market pricing, pork on public school menus, even Paris Plages − in the end All is Politics, as Thomas Mann would say.

AMERICAN HEROES

L to R: Americans Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Englishman Chris Norman

The talk of the day in France is about the courageous Americans who forestalled a terrorist attack on a passenger train from Amsterdam to Paris last Friday. It so happened that in the last car of the Thalys high-speed train three Americans (two off-duty military personnel and one university student who were childhood friends) were traveling together when they noticed a young man with a heavy bag on his way to the toilet. Next, their trained ears picked up the sound of a magazine being loaded into a machine gun and almost simultaneously a shot being fired at a French passenger who tried to stop the gunman as he came out of the toilet with a Kalashnikov rifle. "Let's get him" one of the Americans yelled as they ran up to jump the gunman, led by Spencer Stone (6 ft. 4") who got there first and tried to wrestle the gun away. In the struggle a shot went off, slightly wounding a passenger, and Stone was slashed in the neck and hand with a box cutter knife. The three managed to overpower the gunman ("we beat him unconscious") and, helped by a British passenger who came to their aid, tied him up and grabbed the weapons: a machine gun with nine magazines, a handgun and a box cutter.

Spencer Stone leaving hospital

As the train rolled into the station of Arras where police took the attacker into custody, the train carriage (the last one on the train, a perfect trap) revealed a movie-like scene of dazed passengers and several bloodied victims: the wounded Frenchman, Spencer Stone with knife wounds to his neck and hand, one passenger with a superficial head wound from a glancing bullet, and another one with cuts to his hand sustained when he broke the window to pull the emergency brake. The Frenchman who was shot is recovering in a Lille hospital and is out of danger, Stone underwent an operation on his nearly severed thumb and was released two days later, and all others were treated for minor injuries.

Bernard Cazeneuve, Minister of the Interior, who had rushed to the scene, later announced on television that an initial investigation has revealed that the suspect is 26-year-old Moroccan citizen Ayoud El-Khazzani who had lived in Spain and in France, and had been placed on a police watch list in 2014 for his radical Islamist views and suspected links to ISIS. He had boarded the train in Brussels, intent on committing a massacre. Cazeneuve expressed his gratitude to the Americans for their courageous act that without a doubt had foiled a terrorist attack. They were also praised by President Obama and will be received by President Hollande at the Elysée Palace on Monday.

To each of the fearless Americans I say, ATTABOY!!  And VIVE L'AMERIQUE!

OPERA IN AIX; HEAT WAVE; WEEKENDS ROUGES

OPERA IN AIX (*)

I promised to write about our July opera and here it is in a nutshell:
the 2015 edition of this annual Festival d'Art Lyrique was exceptional, with four beautiful productions and one ugly, off-putting one that I walked out of.

Abduction from the Seraglio

For Mozart's ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO, Austrian director Martin Kusej had the bad idea to transplant this lovely Singspiel to a jihadist camp in the Sahara desert where Konstanze and her servants Blonde and Pedrillo are being held hostage by Pasha Selim in a Bedouin tent guarded by a dozen machine-gun-toting terrorists. Chief guard Osmin threatens to behead them with a scimitar.

In France, we vividly remember the tense days last September when Islamist terrorists kidnapped a French tourist guide in Algeria and beheaded him. More recently, on home ground, a businessman in the Lyons area was kidnapped at his place of work and driven to the site of a nearby chemical plant where the kidnapper beheaded his victim, hung the head and an ISIS flag on the entrance gate, and then tried to ram his vehicle into a chemical storage tank which failed to explode. And who can forget the murderous attack by Islamic extremists on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris last January?

This Entführung (Abduction) was performed in the original German, but director Kusej had taken the liberty to insert references in English to the rapacious West that robs the Arab world of its oil, completely changing the tone of the libretto and making it political, aggressive, and inconsistent with Mozart's text and intent.

First performed in 1782, the Abduction had the then-popular orientalist theme of a turquerie − a lighthearted and often comic treatment of the "exotic" culture of the Ottoman empire which not so long ago had been a military threat to Austria. It was the European view of orientalism − of harems and libertinage, of janissaries and stereotypes of Turkish despotism which Mozart brilliantly countered by a selfless final act of forgiveness and tolerance on the part of Pasha Selim who had fallen in love with Konstanze but sets her free. 

When Festival Director Bernard Foccroulle saw the first rehearsal he asked Martin Kusej to remove certain scenes, which Kusej objected to in the name of artistic freedom. Finally, a compromise was reached and the final scene now shows Osman throwing down the bloody clothes of murdered hostages rather than their severed heads. Not reassured, Foccroulle then took the unusual step of calling for increased security (all bags were inspected at the entrance) and making an announcement before each performance referring to his personal differences with director Kusej's interpretation and asking the audience to make their own judgment.

That judgment was uniformly negative, ranging from shock to outrage. Even the critics were harsh, though some were careful to spare the singers who valiantly fought their way through the horrible staging and poor lighting of this mutilated Mozart.

Luckily, the other operas were just the opposite: delights for the eye and ear.

Alcina at work

For openers, ALCINA by Haendel with inventive sets and imaginative staging by Katie Mitchell. A tour de force of singing by Patricia Petitbon in the title role in an unabashedly sensual performance. Multiple sequences of tie-me-up, tie-me-down and beds being made and unmade at a furious pace, sometimes pushing the erotic envelope but never going over the top. All this so the pleasure-seeking Alcina and her sister and fellow-sorceress Morgana can seduce all comers and then transform their lovers into stuffed animals to be shown off in taxidermy display cases. The very clever sets showed the unconscious lover sliding into a wicked machine and coming out as a stuffed animal.
Alcina, magic at its best. A triumph.

Midsummer Night's Dream

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM by Benjamin Britten, staged by Robert Carsen. The enchanting sets were just as beautiful and effective as they were in 1991 when Carsen first created this production for Aix-en-Provence. Nothing was changed; proof that a thing of beauty need not be updated to retain its appeal. Widely applauded by public and critics alike.

Iolanta

IOLANTA by Tchaikovsky and PERSEPHONE by Stravinsky. These two one-act operas were performed together, beautifully staged by Peter Sellars with sets that served both pieces. An achingly romantic and moving Iolanta that brought the audience to its feet was followed by the poem Persephone, written by André Gide and set to music by Stravinsky.

Persephone

Persephone was read by French actress Dominique Blanc and "danced" by a small troupe of Cambodian dancers. Magnificent.

For a video  interview with Dominique Blanc and Peter Sellars in Aix, click here: 

SVADBA is an a capella work for six female voices written by Serbian-born Ana Sokolovic who lives in Montreal where she teaches composition. Svadba, which means Marriage, is the story of a group of girlfriends getting together to say goodbye to one of them who is getting married. Sung in Serbo-Croatian (subtitled). A wonderful surprise.

If any of these productions come your way, run to see them.  

HEAT WAVE

We're well into the second month of a heat wave, which is getting hard to handle for those who, like me, don't have air conditioning. Many of the older houses in the center of Aix have no central AC and people make do with ventilators. But my husband and I decided a long time ago that our best defense was going to the movies, which we do every afternoon. Luckily, we have three movie houses with multiple theatres right in the center of town where we must have seen at least two dozen films in the past month. You return to a hot apartment, take a cool shower and make do until you can open all the windows for a bit of a breeze.

Want to know how hot it is indoors? I have a rather artsy necklace made of thin rubber disks. When I pulled it out of a drawer the other day I found a stuck-together lump. With careful untangling and a dusting with talcum powder I managed to limit the damage to a few ruined disks, but I fear finding more surprises (sticky rubber-tipped ear clips?) in my drawers.
The Aix city government has its own problems and had to close the Public Finance building when the air conditioning system broke down. No tax or fine collection until the problem is fixed. 

Trains have suffered significant delays due to buckled rails, and several French cities have endured their highest temperatures ever recorded, including Paris where the thermometer reached 39.7 Celsius (103.46 Fahrenheit). The most popular places on a hot day are the shallow wading pools that are a recent feature in cities like Nice, Bordeaux and elsewhere. Very effective for a cooldown and a lot more fun than air conditioning.  

Avignon 2015 poster

Our open-air operas start at 9:30PM when it may still be warm but no longer hot (except for the singers in costume), but the theatre festival in Avignon is taking a hit during this heat wave. More than 1300 plays are shown there during the month of July, most of them in the category Off throughout the day. Many of the temporary daytime theatres have no air conditioning and it pains me to see the actors and actresses who roam the streets, in costume and sweaty stage make-up, trying to lure the crowd to their hot little theatres. Some of our non-opera friends have come back with tales of overheating and it looks like this year, for the first time, I will not be going to Avignon for daytime theatre. 

WEEKENDS ROUGES

The only people who will not be held back by a mere heat wave are the French holiday goers who, like a line of unstoppable fire ants, move in a steady bumper-to-bumper column down the country's highways southward during weekends in July and August. Holiday rentals run from Saturday to Saturday, and people seem to prefer suffering painfully long days on packed roads rather than drive south on Sundays when only northbound traffic is dense.

Traffic forecasters invariably announce another weekend rouge throughout these two months, with the exception of a couple of notorious weekends noirs (worst category) in early and late August. 

Makes me perspire just to think about it. I think I'm going to join those ladies in the fountain. 


(*) To read more about Opera in Aix in my book TAKING ROOT IN PROVENCE click here:  

BETTENCOURT; DSK; PRINCESS CRISTINA; SWEDISH ROYAL WEDDING; HOLLANDE-ROYAL; LE BAC AND PHILOSOPHY

BETTENCOURT

François-Marie Banier

Remember the Bettencourt case (blog 2/28/15) and some of its players?  Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, only child of France's richest woman Liliane Bettencourt, filed a complaint against Mrs. Bettencourt's close friend and confidant François-Marie Banier for abuse of weakness when she discovered that her elderly mother had given him gifts valued at more than one billion euros and at one point named him her sole heir. In his defense Banier said that Mrs. Bettencourt was a very generous person who liked him and could do with her money as she pleased. Last week, the court disagreed, finding that Banier had exercised undue influence on a mentally fragile person and sentenced him to three years in prison (six months suspended), a €350,000 fine, and reimbursement of €158 million to Bettencourt.

Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt with her sons

In all, ten people of Mrs. Bettencourt's entourage had been charged and eight were found guilty, among them Patrice de Maistre and Pascal Wilhelm, Mrs. B's financial advisers, who were given 18-month sentences and fines. The charges against former Budget Minister Eric Worth of obtaining illegal cash contributions for the presidential campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 were dropped for lack of evidence.

DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

In another courtroom, this one in the northern city of Lille, former IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was cleared of all charges of aggravated pimping in the so-called Carlton Affair. After four long years of legal battles following his arrest for sexual assault at the Sofitel Hotel in New York in May 2011, DSK was finally a free man.

Aged and beaten-looking today, he has paid dearly for his sins:  he lost his job at the IMF as well as his chance of winning the French presidential election in 2012 for which he was poised; his wife, wealthy and popular French journalist Anne Sinclair, left him in 2013; much of his fortune went to pay lawyers' fees and a financial settlement to his New York victim, and he suffered heavy financial losses in an investment firm he had founded with a partner who bankrupted the company and then committed suicide. Today he looks far older than his 65 years, burnt out and burnt up in the sordid and humiliating blowup of a brilliant career in politics and finance. Icarus revisited.

PRINCESS CRISTINA OF SPAIN

Princess Cristina, youngest sister of King Felipe of Spain, has suffered another setback in the corruption scandal in which she and her husband, former Olympic handball medalist Iñaki Urdangarin, are accused of embezzling €6 million from a charitable foundation (blog 12/3/14). In November 2014, she appeared before a judge in Palma de Mallorca who rejected her argument that she knew nothing about her husband's business dealings and trusted him implicitly. Judge Jose Costa found that she had personally benefitted from the embezzlement and ordered her to stand trial, together with her husband, on charges of tax fraud. The trial, in which Urdangarin is also accused of money laundering, is scheduled to take place at the end of this year in Palma de Mallorca.

In an effort to distance himself from this situation and the fallout of his father's scandal-plagued late reign and sudden abdication in 2014, young King Felipe, who had vowed to restore public trust in the monarchy, has now revoked the title of Duchess of Palma de Mallorca that was bestowed on his sister Cristina at the time of her marriage in 1997. Urdangarin automatically lost his title of Duke at the same time. If convicted, Cristina could face up to four years in prison, while her husband may get up to 19 years.

SWEDISH ROYAL WEDDING

More cheerful news reaches us from Sweden, where on June 13th Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte, youngest of King Carl Gustaf's three children, married his Swedish girlfriend Sofia Hellqvist. Like his father and his two older sisters before him, he married a commoner, upholding the growing trend that has been injecting non-royal blood into most present-day European monarchies. Whereas Germany used to furnish a seemingly inexhaustible supply of princes and princesses to marriageable royal candidates, today's crop of future kings or queens has been looking elsewhere and choosing from a wider pool.

Cases in point: King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands married Argentine economist Maxima Zorreguieta who today is the most popular queen Holland has ever known; King Felipe of Spain married television journalist Letizia Ortiz; Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark married Australian lawyer Mary Donaldson; Crown Prince Haakon of Norway married single mother and fellow Norwegian Mette-Marit; Prince William of Great Britain married Kate Middleton. All these young women are or will be queen one day, proving that one need not be born to the job − or that the job is rather irrelevant. 

At one time, royal marriages were a matter of forming political alliances, but today's young couples are willing to forego the throne to marry for love. In the constitutional monarchies where present-day royals play a largely ceremonial role, there is little reason why fresh blood should not mingle with stale blue blood. And do we really care who marries whom up there, when it is our representatives in Parliament who decide our future?

(Confession: I would miss the glorious royal weddings on television, having relished those of Kate and Maxima. Yum-yum).

 

HOLLANDE-ROYAL

Spanish State visit to Elysée Palace

Hollande-Royal in Manila

Another couple frequently in the news is President François Hollande and his former partner-in-life Ségolène Royal. Joined in politics for over 30 years but never in matrimony (though parents of four children), they split up when Hollande took off with Valérie Trierweiler with whom he lived a very public break-up in 2014 at her discovery of his secret romance with an actress (blog 1/30/14). Ségolène Royal, meanwhile, had been defeated in her run for senator and been politically marginalized. While the man who wished to be a "normal" president was living an abnormally complicated love life in the glare of the press, exit Trierweiler from the scene and, before long, re-enter Ségolène Royal after President Hollande saved her from the political wilderness and appointed her Minister of the Environment. Not only is Royal back in her element of high-level politics but also by the side of François Hollande. She recently accompanied him on official visits to the French Caribbean and to Manila, and acted as First Lady when she and the president welcomed the king and queen of Spain during their State visit to France on June 2nd. As a duo Hollande-Royal form a formidable whole that is stronger than its individual parts − at least in politics. After her painful personal and political repudiation, Royal is back on top, and together they seem just like other "normal" people who find it difficult to live with but also without each other.   

LE BAC AND PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

This week saw the beginning of the week-long final exams that conclude the six-year secondary education in France and leads to the Baccalaureate, popularly known as le bac, and access to university. The first of these standardized exams is Philosophy, which all students have to take and which is a uniquely French requirement.

In French society philosophers or "intellectuals" occupy a special place and seem to be more visible than elsewhere. Ever since Descartes and the subsequent Age of Enlightenment, French thinkers such as Voltaire, Michelet, Rousseau, Comte or de Tocqueville have contributed greatly to Western intellectual thought. But according to a recent article in The Guardian, the days when France shaped the values of other nations are long gone and in the course of the 20th century, with the exception of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, France's influence on western philosophy has waned to a sputter and today carries little weight in the universe of creative international thinkers. In his article The French Malaise Oxford professor Sudhir Hazareesingh describes the progressive loss of intellectual creativity and imagination in France and the dimming of its radiance across the world over the past decades. Contemporary French thinking has become increasingly more inward-looking, he writes, which is explained at least in part by a collective recognition that France is no longer a major power and French no longer a global language. Historian Pierre Nora laments France's "shrinking horizons, the atomization of the life of the mind, and national provincialism". It's a long way from the self-confident mission civilisatrice in the colonies and "the deeply held belief of the beneficial quality of French civilization for humankind".

The most public of all French thinkers today is Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of the New Philosophers, a movement better known for what it rejects than for what it espouses. He is often seen and heard in the press, although hardly ever on philosophical issues, and with his glamorous wife, singer-actress Arielle Dombasle, is a regular of the Parisian beau monde. Always dressed in black suits and starched white shirts worn open way-way-down, he has been called le plus beau décolleté de France -- perhaps one reason why Hazareesingh in The Guardian calls him "a permanent spectacle of frivolity and self delusion".

Ouch!

……
A delicious sound calls me to the window where I hear a young voice trilling to a Haendel aria accompanied on the harpsichord. It's that time of the year in Aix-en-Provence, where the pre-opera season of master classes, open rehearsals, conferences and free concerts started a week ago.
I must go now, but I promise to be back to you next month with some up-close news from our opera festival.

MAY HOLIDAYS; SCHOOL REFORM; CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

MAY HOLIDAYS

In France, the month of May counts four official holidays, which inevitably results in four long weekends. It is a complicated time for those who have deadline projects or emergencies requiring outside help. 

[My apartment renovation, already three weeks past its due date, took another hit when our workman, who is his own boss, announced that - naturellement - he would not be working on any of those holidays and would in fact add one more day off to faire le pont. There went another week.] 

In addition to their standard paid vacation time of 35 days per year, the shortened 35-hour work week has resulted in many employees earning compensatory time off for additional hours worked (called RTT time), which they use to "bridge" a mid-week holiday to the nearest weekend. Some people use their RTT time to take a number of short breaks throughout the year, but the month of May is particularly vulnerable to repeated long and longer weekends. The government's position is that what is lost in productivity is gained in money spent on hotels, restaurants, tolls and other travel expenses. 

In case you need to be reminded of the May holidays in France, here are some helpful pictures from blogger Annie André. This year the holidays occur on May 1, May 8, May 14 and May 25.

With a bit of planning it is all quite manageable, but it still was a bit of a shock when last Friday, following the Ascension holiday on Thursday and just two days before paper tax returns were due (electronic filings are due later), my husband found the local tax offices in Aix closed with a handwritten sign on the door saying Exceptionnellement fermé, which translates to: we are taking the Friday off to make a four-day weekend. Sorry−no tax advice, no tax collection, go home and come back next week.

SCHOOL REFORM

Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem

One person who is not likely to take much time off in May is our Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. She is charged with the sticky project of reforming the national high-school curriculum, but her proposals have met with severe criticism, and a number of teacher unions have called for a nationwide strike on May 19th.

French public schools are free and have long had a good reputation but teaching methods have changed little since our parents' time and are producing increasingly poor results. In December 2013 the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published its latest PISA* Survey (Program for International Student Assessment) that compares math, reading and science skills in 15-year-old students from 65 countries. It showed that the unbeatable Asians took the first five places (Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) and that in mathematics France had dropped to 25th place (from 9th place in 2003). Numerous reasons were given, including fatal budget cuts, and numerous improvements suggested, but few educators agree with the program of Najat Vallaud-Belkacem which (in a nutshell and limited here to its most objectionable elements) proposes to drop Latin and Greek from the national curriculum as well as compulsory German, considered "elitist" subjects, in favor of rather vague "interdisciplinary studies" and courses like The Expansion of Islam as more appropriate for today than Medieval History.

It is undeniable that children from poor and immigrant backgrounds do less well than others, but bringing the overall level of education down to that of the poorest performers is seen as a great disservice to all. The message is read as: in the name of equality we should all be equally poorly educated. 

Equality is indeed high on the agenda of our socialist government and fits its utopian image of a fair world. This administration takes a dim view of the rich (a campaign theme of presidential candidate François Hollande) and of the world of finance. Yet, intellectual brilliance is much admired and the vast majority of high-level government positions are filled by people formed at the elite Ecole Normale d'Administration, among them François Hollande and most of his ministers. It is at the high-school level that the government wants to "level downward" to motivate the laggers, in hopes that this will inspire them to higher educational goals later on. The protesters' signs of "Equal elitism" or "Latin Makes Other Languages Live" speak for themselves.  

Despite general agreement on the need for school reform, it is the Vallaud-Belkacem reform that draws criticism and calls for debate. Unfortunately, on the very day of the teachers' strike, Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced that this school reform would be imposed by decree the next day rather than by vote, and the decree was indeed published in the Journal Officiel of May 20, 2015. Considering the strong objection of many teachers, this hurried implementation of the new rules by decree may indicate the government's fear of prolonged strikes and the hope that a sentiment of it's-too-late-now will set in and get teachers to give up the fight. But this is France, and change never comes without a fight. Stay tuned...

(*) See the full PISA report here: 

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL and JEWELRY HEIST

A week before the 2015 Cannes Film Festival opened on May 13th, the chic Cartier jewelry shop on the famous seaside Croisette was robbed of nearly €18 million worth of gems. In its smooth and professional execution it resembled previous thefts in Cannes, notably in 2013 when the biggest-ever heist took place at the Carlton hotel where Israeli jeweler Lev Leviev was proudly displaying his "Extraordinary Diamonds" collection and a single man managed to make off with two cases of exceptionally large and pure diamonds estimated to be worth 136 million dollars. During the film festival that same year €1 million worth of Chopard jewelry to be worn by one of the actresses was stolen from a room safe at the hotel Novotel and, days later, during a gala evening at the Eden Roc Hotel in nearby Cap d'Antibes a €2 million diamond necklace from Swiss firm Di Grigogono was robbed. Not a single shot was fired in any of these robberies. Arsène Lupin lives! 

Jewellers like Harry Winston, Cartier, Chopard, or Bulgari are more than happy to showcase their creations on beautiful actresses and models at this film festival with its worldwide television audience.

But perhaps the time has come for actresses to start wearing "fun" jewelry at Cannes. A good fake worn with style and panache on an haute couture dress would fool us all, and Cannes would be a safer place — but perhaps a tad less exciting.

RADIO FRANCE; SEGOLENE ROYAL

RADIO FRANCE

This past month France has been experiencing a record-breaking strike at Radio France, the revered public-service radio broadcaster that houses seven separate stations and counts 5000 employees. Radio is still the first source for news in France and as essential at breakfast time as coffee and croissants, so when news was replaced by canned music for weeks on end it was a major irritant. The strike was called in protest against planned job cuts and program reductions. Midway through the tense negotiations, the recently appointed CEO Mathieu Gallet had to make way for a mediator at the insistence of the unions involved. Nevertheless, it took 28 days and a push from the Minister of Culture before four of the five unions finally accepted a return to work. It was the longest strike ever in French public radio and cost €1 million per week.

Mathieu Gallet

As part of the much-needed reforms and cuts in public spending imposed by the European Commission, and armed with a devastating report from French Treasury watchdog La Cour des Comptes, President Hollande went looking for a hatchet man and appointed Mathieu Gallet, former head of the INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel). His mission is to bring Radio France more in line with other institutions and reduce its annual deficit of €21 million. Here is what he's up against:

In the past ten years, when other companies suffered the consequences of the global financial crisis, the cosseted cocoon of Radio France was unaffected and took on 1000 new staff members, bringing its total work force to 5000 (388 of them paid union representatives) who count among their accumulated privileges up to 13 weeks of paid vacation. It has two full-blown orchestras: the Orchestre National de France and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and the renovation of its Maison de la Radio headquarters in Paris, budgeted at €262 million, has cost €575 million. It's an expensive outfit and the State coffers are empty.

Radio France headquarters

Whatever the final agreement will be, it will have been achieved at great cost and turbulence, once again illustrating just how difficult it is to effect change in France, particularly in the public sector which employs 20 percent of the total working population. Yet, the general public usually supports the strikers and shows great solidarity, at least in part generated by a common French characteristic:  fear of change.

The story of the French welfare system is a long one and dates back to the post World War II years when a 30-year period of uninterrupted growth and expansion made the country rich. It could well afford to increase paid vacation time from two weeks in 1946 to five weeks in 1982, and shift the cost of building a family entirely to the state. But the free healthcare and generous family allowances that were meant to counteract the population decline were kept in place once that population rebounded and France became the most fertile country in Europe with a growth rate of 2.01 in 2012 (on a par with Ireland). The same goes for most other welfare benefits, which have become acquired rights and are today seen as entitlements for life, at a cost that today's Treasury can no longer bear. Under pressure from Brussels to bring its budget deficit down to 3 percent of GDP by 2017 (representing a cut of €50 billion euros) it seems inevitable that some of these savings will have to come from France's welfare system.

It will be difficult to find this kind of money, especially since some of the more obvious solutions seem out of the question:

    increase the 35-hour workweek;
    raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 (planned for 2017) or beyond;
    reduce paid vacation time;
    allow shops to open on Sundays (currently only 12 Sundays a year);
    allow greater competition.

All the above have been debated and rejected by center-right and socialist governments alike, generally to appease those who warn of an "Americanization" of France and a decline of its vaunted standard of living. So what other solutions are there?

It seems to me that a secular country such as France could do without the religious holidays that go against its proclaimed laïcité (Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Pentecost Monday, Assumption Day August 15, All Saints Day). This could add five working days to the national economy without harming anyone.

And why not bring back the ECOTAX (blog 6/30/14) on heavy vehicles that would have provided €1.2 billion per year income with which to develop alternate transportation systems such as river and rail transport and more trams and pollution-free buses in cities, while providing employment for years to come? This Ecotax was already approved by the French Parliament but subsequently canceled by SEGOLENE ROYAL, Minister of the Environment, in response to protests by truck drivers in Brittany last year. Instead, said Royal, she would get this income from highway companies that have been charging too much toll anyway. The government negotiations with these companies have just ended with a clear advantage to the toll companies who agreed to freeze any toll increase for one year in exchange for an extension of their current contract. So far: Highwaymen 1 - Government 0, while leaving in place a government obligation to pay the Italian company that installed the Ecotax stations in France €850 million for breach of contract. A costly mess when you desperately need money.

Anne Hidalgo (L) and Ségolène Royal

One may question some other decisions by our Minister of the Environment, such as her recent objection to alternate driving days in Paris during another peak of fine-particle pollution that exceeded safety standards. No sooner had Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo decreed alternate driving days when a health hazard was reached than Ségolène Royal blocked the decree because she considered this an infringement on the rights of drivers and the dangerous levels had only existed for 24 hours. Only after 48 hours of continuous severe air pollution would she consider alternate driving days, she announced. Needless to say that clean air and health protection do not rank high for this Minister of the Environment.

Back to finding money:  Would it be an infringement of human rights to demand that driver's licenses be renewed every four years, like most anywhere else? To my knowledge, France is the only western country where a driver's license is issued for life. If the French government required regular renewals, even at a modest fee, this would bring in a flood of money - again, without any harm to anyone.  

Naive, perhaps?  Well, just sayin' …

Meanwhile, we are experiencing another weekend rouge, when the French leave massively for the coast or the mountains during staggered school vacations (this is the third and last 2-week Easter break). Trains and roads are clogged with vacationers, giving an impression that things cannot be all that bad.