Once Upon A Time In France: Ibiza Impropriety, France First, And Downhill Disasters
Dreaming of La Bresse
Post-holiday life has settled back into a routine weighed down by a sense of limbo and contradictions that feel paralyzing.
The pandemic is worse than ever. No, it’s not so bad. Covid cases are hitting record numbers. But it’s not making people so sick. But everyone on the planet except me has gotten Covid. Do I tempt fate and get on the RER to go to Paris for a meeting? Or do I wrap myself in saran wrap and hunker down chez moi?
For the moment, the most adventurous outings the past couple of weeks for our family have been walking up the hill 10 minutes to the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye and its massive parc for open-air walks that afford lovely views of the Seine and the jagged La Défense skyline in the distance.
The powerful pull of inertia coupled with extreme pandemic fatigue perhaps makes us even more susceptible to becoming obsessed with the foibles of others. Fortunately for a nation in search of a distraction from the dreariness of daily pandemic life, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer served himself up on a platter.
Already a disliked figure, Blanquer committed the crime of going on vacation, which is the unlikeliest of offenses in a nation where the right to vacation is written into the national charter and where figuring out how to spend all the holiday time French receive is almost a full-time job. But vacation he did, visiting Ibiza over the winter break, a name that manages to conjure up images of decadent frivolity even among those who have no first-hand knowledge of the place.
While Ibiza, where he was no doubt dancing topless on tables while guzzling Tequila shots, Blanquer announced new Covid measures for schools in the face of the Omicron surge. The education minister announced the plan in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper but failed to disclose that he was in Ibiza! This scandalous revelation was made later by enterprising reporters at investigative newspaper Mediapart.
And so, a nation weary from lack of scandal finally had one to chatter about and have its hackles raised to animate otherwise bland conversations with neighbors. Naturally, with the presidential campaign in full swing, opponents expressed predictable indignation over this grave breach of political protocol that had shaken the foundations of the Republic. Per The Guardian:
France’s education minister is facing calls to resign after it emerged he had announced a strict Covid-testing protocol for schools shortly before the start of the January school term while he was on holiday in Ibiza.
As French teachers and parents struggled to prepare children’s return to school amid France’s fifth wave of Covid, Jean-Michel Blanquer had flown to the Spanish island known for its beautiful beaches and party culture for a four-day holiday over the new year, the investigative website Mediapart reported.
French teachers tried to leverage this outrage into a series of national strikes that largely fizzled. And there wasn’t much evidence that this had dented President Macron’s standing in the polls as continues to chug along, even as he continues to pretend to be coy about whether he will run again while clearly on the campaign trail.
Blanquer’s scandals also had a hard time competing with the far more entertaining meltdown of Boris Johnson’s career across the water where disclosures about government parties that violated Covid restrictions seemed to threaten to bring down his administration.
Most delightfully, the Johnson imbroglio gave rise to British newspaper headlines about a “pork pie putsch.” Since I don’t speak British (or German for that matter), I had no idea what this meant. Twitter explained to me that one of the leaders of the plot to overthrow Johnson hailed from a town known for this “delicacy.” (Less clear was whether this association is a point of pride or ridicule for this hamlet). Of course, this left the French media tying itself in knots to both translate and explain. According to Multilingual.com:
In the neighboring EU countries, headlines started to provide a little bit more background. France24 wrote the somewhat awkward: “le ‘complot du pork pie,’ cette tourte au porc qui est une spécialité de la circonscription de l’une de ces élus,” which can be back-translated into English as “this pork pie, which is a specialty of the constituency of one of these elected officials.”
Rolls right off the tongue.
France Rocks
The French tend to be a glass-half-empty kind of bunch. The worst French bashing tends to come from the French. They love devouring their politicians, whose favorability ratings struggle to top 30%. And a favorite subject of conversation is how things aren’t as good as they used to be.
So, it’s no doubt a shock to the system to be receiving praise over things that seem to be going right in France.
New York Time columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, penned an op-ed hailing the way the French government handled the economics of the pandemic’s impact:
How did it do that? When the pandemic forced economies into a temporary lockdown, Europe, France included, and the United States took divergent routes toward supporting workers’ incomes. We offered enhanced unemployment benefits; France offered subsidies to employers to keep furloughed workers on the payroll. At this point it seems clear that the European solution was better, because it kept workers connected to their employers and made it easier to bring them back once vaccines were available.
Still, at a time when Republicans denounce as destructive “socialism” any effort to make America less unequal, it’s worth knowing that the economy of France — which isn’t socialist but comes far closer to socialism than anything Democrats might propose — is doing pretty well.
A dumbfounded nation barely had time to pick its socialism-loving chin off the floor when France’s Council of Economic Analysis issued a report that concluded that the Health Pass created by the government last year probably saved almost 4,000 lives. According to The Local:
We estimate that the announcement of Covid certificates during summer 2021 led to increased vaccine uptake in France of 13.0 percentage points of the total population until the end of the year,” write the authors.
“Further, this averted an additional 3,979 (3,453‐4,298) deaths in France.”
“Notably, the application of Covid certificates substantially reduced the pressure on intensive care units (ICUs) and, in France, averted surpassing the occupancy levels where prior lockdowns were instated.”
This won’t stop protests over the passes, which have now become vaccine passports. And no one here would argue that the government’s response to the pandemic has been anywhere close to perfect. But in comparison to other countries, France has earned some modest bragging rights.
Downhill Disasters
Winter season is upon us and ski resorts are open again after the previous season was gutted by Covid. But rather than being a cause for rejoicing, ski season has been twinged by tragedies.
French actor Gaspard Ulliel, star of “It’s Only the End of the World” and Marvel’s upcoming “Moon Knight” series, has died following a ski accident in the French Alps on Wednesday, according to news agency AFP. He was 37.
The Cesar-winning actor was skiing in the Savoie region when he collided with another skier and suffered a serious brain trauma on Tuesday. He was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Grenoble. Local authorities have opened an investigation into the accident, according the AFP.
Ulliel’s death triggered an outpouring of grief from France’s entertainment community even as authorities tried to determine exactly what happened when he and another skier collided. While the 2nd skier was wearing a helmet, Ulliel was not, according to police.
Ulliel’s death came just a couple of days after another fatal skiing accident:
A French skier who killed a five-year-old British girl after slamming into her at a resort in the Alps has been charged with manslaughter.
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Bonneville said the accident had been caused by the experienced skier’s excessive speed, and charged a 40-year-old local man with manslaughter late on Monday after an inquiry was launched that morning.
A grim way to start the season for a region that was hoping the return of tourists would revive its fortunes.
Dreaming of France
La Bresse lies in the heart of the Vosges, a mountain region in eastern France that is less heralded than the Alps or Pyrénées but nonetheless offers spectacular vistas and year-round outdoor activities. It’s also a great jumping-off point for exploring the surrounding Alsace Lorraine region.
Great Reads
First, some more somber news:
The 75-year-old Frenchman attempting to row across the Atlantic has likely died, according to Portuguese authorities who are still trying to recover his boat. French designer Manfred Thierry Mugler, known as an icon of 80s fashion, has died. And French film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, known best for Diva and Betty Blue, passed away at the age of 75.
Actress Nathalie Portman, who lived in Paris for a couple of years but didn’t dig it, was one of the investors who participated in a €25M fundraising round for plant-based-food startup La Vie. After a couple of dreary years, Champagne sales hit a new record in 2021. French bakers are up in arms over a supermarket chain offering a steep discount on baguettes.
Meanwhile, Paris is launching a beautification campaign after months of carping about dirty streets on Twitter. A prominent surgeon is under investigation for trying to sell an x-ray of a victim of the Bataclan shooting as an NFT.
Finally, The New York delivered two delightful long profiles of amazing French characters.
In a supposedly more sensitive era, hundreds of people regularly travel from all around the world to a small town an hour outside of Paris to study clowning with Gaulier, a gruff 78-year-old éminence grise known for his blunt, flamboyantly negative feedback.
And Françoise Gilot, the painter and former partner of Picasso, who just turned 100:
Never mind the stir she created with the 1964 publication of “Life With Picasso,” a blisteringly candid account of her 10-year relationship with the artist. (She was the only woman to have walked out on him.) Or her stature as an artist: Her works are exhibited in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, their prices on the rise…
Ms. Gilot has for the moment laid her brushes aside. But she is still evolving. “It’s very difficult to become who you are,” she said. “People tell you to be natural. But what is natural, I would like to know?”
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq, France