



Friday

WALKING back to the office from lunch earlier this week, I came across one of those quintessentially Parisian scenes. Outside the Dior shop on Avenue Montaigne, the Paris showcase of designer fashion, some 30 gendarmes in full riot gear appeared to be blocking the way in. Three rather chic male bouncers, armed only with silk ties and charcoal-grey pinstripes, were gingerly closing the steel security gate across the entrance. A lady, dangling from her fingertips a shopping bag the size of a suitcase, hurried inside to safety.

Stepping closer to see what was going on, I caught sight of a sea of highly polished silver helmets behind the shoulder-to-shoulder ranks of riot policemen. They were sapeurs-pompiers, or firemen, about 50 in number, and they were not out for a spot of early Christmas shopping. Some were yelling at the gendarmes, who were beginning to edge slowly forwards in neat formation past the mannequins in Dior's window.

I approached a policeman sitting in a nearby police car, which had a line of gendarmerie vans parked behind it. He explained that this was a one-day firemen's strike.

“Why are there so many gendarmes?” I asked.

He gave a wry smile.

“When the firemen demonstrate, we always call in the gendarmes. There can be trouble,” he replied. “A few years ago, one of them exploded a hand grenade and had to be taken to hospital.”

While the stand-off between the firemen and the gendarmes continued, I looked across the broad tree-line street towards L'Avenue, a restaurant that is best summed up by the French phrase “m'as-tu vu?”. A haunt of the fashion and advertising crowd, it is one of those places where the chairs on the terrace face the street, to maximise people-watching. As gendarmes herded angry firemen away from the entrance to Dior, past the suddenly vulnerable-looking plate-glass picture windows, a row of women in large designer shades and fur wraps sat watching the scene from the tables on the terrace, quite unmoved, sipping Perrier.

EPA

The battle of Austerlitz

When I got back to the office I discovered that several thousand firemen from across the country had joined the strike in Paris that afternoon. They were demanding the reinstatement of a monthly bonus of €72 for all fire-fighters, as well as the option of retirement on full pension at 55. Near the Gare d'Austerlitz there had been a stand-off far more violent than the one I witnessed. Gendarmes were pelted with glass bottles, flares and stones. Three ended up in hospital and a gendarmerie van was torched. By the evening Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, was visiting the wounded gendarmes at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. For all that, the episode failed to make the headlines of that evening's main television news.

What to make of this fleeting scene from Paris life? I have compiled a short list:

1. The French sapeurs-pompiers are thorough professionals when on the job. They are para-medically trained, and I can vouch for this, having had to call them out recently to deal with an accident at home. Their sympathy capital among ordinary people is high.

2. The sight of one public service designed to ensure citizens' safety, attacking another service also designed to ensure citizens' safety, saps that capital.

3. Street demonstrations in Paris pass almost unnoticed. On any given day you can expect to stumble across a crowd of banner-waving protesters. This street theatre is the wallpaper of French political life.

4. There really are two Frances. One demonstrates; the other shops.

5. When I accompany my son and a group of 20 more six-year-olds to our local fire station next week to learn about fire safety, I will not carry a Dior shopping bag.

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Thursday

ON THE way home from work yesterday evening, in an inexplicable fit of adventurousness, I decided to try out a different boulangerie when buying my baguette. On the short high street in our western Paris suburb there are no fewer than two boulangerie-patisseries and two patissier-chocolatiers. You need to know your supplier. One of the patissier-chocolatiers sells baguettes, as well as an exquisite selection of fresh gâteaux. The one across the road, however, which is squeezed with rather delightful symbolism between a lingerie shop and a funeral parlour, sells cakes and croissants, but definitely not baguettes.

A few months ago one of the boulangeries shut its doors. At the time I put this down to the onward march of American-style out-of-town hypermarkets at the expense of small local shopkeepers. A short drive away across the Seine stands a vast, modern illustration of the challenge: a Carrefour hypermarket, the second-biggest in France, with parking for 3,000 cars. It takes longer to cross the floor of this store than it does to walk down our high street. Shopping there is a test of footwear as well as stamina. You can pile a flat-screen television or a microwave into your trolley as readily as a lapin à la moutarde. Outside central Paris, the French have taken to this suburban drive-in life with abandon. Within minutes of our high street you can find a drive-in McDonald's, a KFC, a Buffalo Grill, even a second Carrefour superstore. All of this seemed to me to explain why the traditional high-street boulanger might be folding.

In fact, it turned out that the boulangerie in question, Fabien Ledoux, was not closing for good, only for refurbishment. Recently it re-opened its doors. It has been transformed into a chic temple of temptation. The colours are elegant neutrals, the lighting is dim. As for a baguette, well, for 85 cents you can buy the humble stick, but the place now offers, if my hasty count last night was right, 27 different sorts of bread. I splashed out on a tradition, for €1.

For conspicuous consumption

Is my high street typical? No, in the sense that it is a fairly bourgeois sort of place. But I would argue that it is has much in common with small-town France, a claim you could not easily make for central Paris. There is a heaving twice-weekly street market selling produits du terroir, frequented by old and young alike, where pigs' snouts nuzzle up to freshly skinned rabbits. On the high street there is an épicerie, two traiteurs, one fromager, and two butchers, whose windows are dressed with offerings such as rôti de pintade farci aux pommes flambées à l'armagnac. Every Sunday morning the queues at the butchers spill out on to the pavement. The professionals behind the counters at these shops are authentic craftsmen, not the faux-artisans that man the boutique cheese-sellers in smart bits of London.

Up to a point, the French high street is protected by laws preventing hypermarkets from selling goods below cost, and restricting the number that can be built. That reduces price competition between out-of-town stores and the high street, and pretty much eliminates it between the hypermarkets themselves. But my unscientific observation of suburban French shopping habits suggests that price is only half the battle.

I hear a lot of French indignation about price inflation for basic goods, especially since the introduction of the euro. According to a survey in Le Parisien, the average price of a baguette (80 cents) has jumped 23% since 2001, way in excess of inflation.

But when it comes to quality, the French are prepared to pay more—and queue for longer. The importance of gastronomie, the refusal to accept bland substitutes, guides retail habits. The same shoppers who steel themselves for a draining two-hour trawl round Carrefour will also drop in on the high-street butcher and pay top prices for a côte de boeuf. If this is so, then the government's reluctance to ease restrictions on hypermarkets, for fear of hurting the high street, could well be misplaced.

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Wednesday

A FAVOURITE Parisian parlour game is to try answering the question: Will Jacques Chirac stand again? It gained a new edge when the president's wife, Bernadette, hinted at a possible third term in an interview last week with Le Nouvel Observateur. “Have you seen what good shape he's in?” she declared―adding, just a touch too insistently, “my husband is not senile.” On leaving the Elysée Palace Mr Chirac would be entitled to a seat on the Constitutional Council. Would he take it up? “Yes, he'll go ... in five years!”, Mrs Chirac replied. “Do you hear me? In five years!”

I first stumbled across the idea that Mr Chirac might stand again three years ago, from one of his advisers at the Elysée. That was when he was riding high in the opinion polls thanks to his defiant opposition to the war in Iraq, and before he ceded control of his Gaullist party to Nicolas Sarkozy, now the centre-right's front-runner for the presidency. Mr Chirac is surely correct, for his own purposes, to keep his options open. He says he will announce his decision early next year. It is hard to picture him, after 40 years in politics, pruning roses in a country garden.

All the same, I find the idea of his standing again hard to take seriously. Perhaps age alone should not disqualify him, but you can scarcely overlook the fact that he will be 74 on November 29th. (Word from the Elysée is that no celebrations are to be organised.) Besides, his poll numbers are dismal. When TNS Sofrès asked the French public this month who should be running for the presidency, Ségolène Royal (63%) and Nicolas Sarkozy (57%) topped the list. Mr Chirac came in a lowly 17th, trailing the McDonald's-trashing José Bové and the far right's Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Reuters

The head of state reflects

Yet in recent days the Chirac camp has been waging a fresh campaign to revive enthusiasm for its flagging champion. In the current issue of Paris-Match we are treated to ten pages entitled “A week at the Elysée”.

The president is photographed at his desk, on the telephone, chairing defence meetings, talking with army chiefs, looking generally statesmanlike and worldly. He arrives in his office, were are told, between 7.30am and 7.45am, after two hours spent reading the papers and listening to the radio. He calls his diplomatic adviser first thing, even on a Sunday. The message of the piece is as clear as it is unstated: here is a man in control and on the go—just the ticket for another five years.

Last week I asked somebody who knows Mr Chirac well whether this pre-campaign was for real. “It depends what's going on internationally,” came the reply. “If there were a crisis comparable to Iraq again, and his popularity climbed, he could well go for it.” This seemed to be what Bernadette Chirac was suggesting when she said, “The situation in the world is complex. And sometimes that upsets everything.” In any event, Mr Chirac's supporters dismiss polls taken so far in advance of election day, and perhaps rightly. I've just looked up the polls for January 1995, three months before that year's presidential election. Edouard Balladur was a runaway favourite, expected to get 29% in the first round against 16% for Mr Chirac. On polling day Mr Chirac beat Mr Balladur into the run-off.

It is not only Mr Chirac who seems to be manoeuvring on the right, where, if Mr Sarkozy stumbles, a space may open up. Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, insisted in a television interview at the weekend that “the game isn't over yet”. Michèle Alliot-Marie, the defence minister, turned up at her own party's convention last week and torpedoed some of Mr Sarkozy's hallmark policies.

So will Mr Chirac stand again? I can't see it happening, unless the balance of power on the centre-right is radically upset. I'm inclined to agree with a French politician who told me last week: “Does Chirac want to stand again? Of course he does. He's lived in official palaces for 30 years. He even spends his weekends at the Elysée. He has nowhere else to hang his clothes. But the odds are absolutely against his doing so.”

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Tuesday

ONE of the most perplexing issues in contemporary France is this: when to use “tu” instead of “vous”. When I first arrived in Paris three years ago I consulted an expert on linguistic etiquette. She told me it was simple: “'Tu' is always used when you know someone well.” That sounded straightforward. “Except,” she added, “when it isn't.”

It turns out that Jacques Chirac and his wife, Bernadette, call each other “vous”. Yet the president addresses Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he introduced to Gaullist politics 30 years ago, and who is now his interior minister, as “tu”.

The use of “tu” can confer intimacy, but also disrespect. During the rioting in the suburbs a year ago I remember talking to a group of young men in a Turkish café in Evry. They complained that when the police stopped them on the streets for an identity check, they did so with the insulting use of “tu”: “qu'est-ce que tu fais là toi?” In new-media start-ups or ad agencies, on the other hand, using vous, even to a superior, is about as acceptable as wearing a neck-tie. Jacques Séguéla, the grand homme of French advertising and a former adviser to both François Mitterrand and Mr Chirac, famously uses “tu” to strangers.

So I was rather disarmed last week when I rang a government official whom I've known for a while, and always addressed as “vous”. “Ah bonjour!”, he said, “Tu vas bien?” It felt like a breakthrough. I saw a whole new horizon opening up, of insider confidences and frank exchanges.

Penetrating the formality of French life, after all, is a daily ordeal. I finished off a note to a minister the other day with a simple “Je vous prie de croire, Monsieur, à l'assurance de mes sentiments distingués.” My French assistant was horrified, seized the note from my hands, and plonked a copy of “Who's Who in France” on my desk. It lists 25 different ways of finishing a letter depending on the recipient's title: minister, ambassador, general, pope. A minister, she insisted, needs a “Je vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Monsieur le ministre, l'expression de mes sentiments dévoués”.

AFP

Et toi, Nicolas

Such conventions are being challenged, though, by a combination of high-technology and teenage culture. Even in French the use of email legitimises a degree of informality: “Cordialement” is a handy all-purpose sign-off. Text-messaging demolishes the language outright. Our French teenaged babysitters readily adulterate their language with “c” for “c'est”, “A2m1” for “à demain”, or “Kdo” for “cadeau”.

Mangling the language and using the “tu” form are obviously not quite the same thing. But both carry a certain symbolic informality. Politicians (and journalists) who casually tutoie each other in private still address each other in the “vous” form before the television cameras or at an official event. The only time that the French authorities have intervened in the use of “vous” was in 1793, shortly after the revolution, when a decree was issued that temporarily made the use of the “tu” form compulsory in the administration.

Speaking of the revolution, Ségolène Royal, like most Socialist camarades, also uses the “tu” form liberally. During her campaign meetings for her party's presidential nomination she did not flinch when questions from the audience were put to her in the “tu” form. In another era, that would have been unthinkable. If the new France that she promises were to phase out the “vous” form altogether, at least this would rescue foreigners like myself from frequent gaffes—as well as unfounded presumptions of intimacy. The government official rang me back this morning. “Bonjour,” he said, “Vous allez bien?”

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Monday

THE scale of Ségolène Royal's triumph in the Socialist Party's presidential primary last week has left the political class reeling. What the French call le microcosme, which is the Paris equivalent of the Westminster village or inside-the-beltway Washington, has been abuzz ever since. Had she scraped through with a narrow margin, it would have been historic enough. But with 61% of all members' votes, and over 80% in some regional federations, her crushing victory has knocked le microcosme sideways.

For most of this year pouring scorn on Ségolène's candidacy has been a favourite political hobby in Paris. A few months ago, I asked one Socialist grandee, who was incensed by the way she was using her popularity to impose herself on the party, whether he thought she would win. “This is not a beauty contest,” he snorted. Like many others, he consistently underestimated her. Earlier this year, I read a book by Alain Duhamel, a veteran political analyst, called “Les Prétendants 2007”. In it, he profiled no fewer than 15 potential candidates—but managed to leave her out altogether.

What does her overwhelming victory say about how France is changing? Endless radio talk shows over the weekend have dwelt on the fact that she is a woman. A poll yesterday in Le Journal du Dimanche suggested this to be the single most important reason for her appeal. One commentator tried to argue to me the other day that she embodied softer, maternal values from which the French drew comfort in this harsh, globalised age.

I find this nonsense. For one thing, she is about as cuddly as Margaret Thatcher. “Everybody thinks she is nice and not clever,” a former class-mate from her days at ENA told me last week, “but the truth is she is very clever and absolutely not nice.” If the fact that she is a woman has any relevance at all, it is only in one sense: that she is different.

AP

A Royal with the common touch

To my mind, the appeal of Ségolène has always been that she is Not One Of Them. She has exploited this with ruthless professionalism. After her image was relooké just over a year ago, she has increasingly chosen to wear virginal-white suits, while her rivals turn up to television studios in sombre shades of grey. She made her victory announcement last week from the rural village of Melle, in her constituency, keeping well away from the leafy boulevards of the Paris left bank, home to the Socialist Party headquarters. She may stumble over questions touching on policy towards Iran's nuclear programme or Turkish membership of the European Union, but she talks concretely about everyday concerns such as paying the rent or the cost of school books.

I also think that the vote for Ségolène carries a certain vote of sanction. If, by electing her, Socialists were saying "it's time for a change", then in some ways she taps into that same popular dissatisfaction with French politicians exploited by Jean-Marie le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front. That may seem a preposterous comparison. But Mr Le Pen's electoral appeal rests not only on his obnoxious xenophobia, but on his anti-establishment populism. He readily denounces the Paris political class as a self-serving, out-of-touch elite. When Ségolène says that her policy towards Turkey is “that of the French people”, she is building a brand as a politician who listens. Curiously, when I interviewed Mr Le Pen a few months ago, he told me that he had been the first to spot Ségolène's potential as a presidential candidate three years earlier.

Will she be able to keep up the momentum for a further five months? The word from Nicolas Sarkozy's camp is that the right is steeling itself for a bruising contest. They always said it would be harder to take on a female opponent. Already, Ségolène seems to have a glow about her. And everyone loves a winner.