Once Upon A Time In France: Profane President, Twin Tragedy, And Enduring Emily
Dreaming of Strasbourg
We are now deep into the heart of the month of galette des rois and bonne année. The French insist that the first time one sees someone in the new year they wish them Happy New Year or meilleurs vœux (best wishes) or bonne santé (good health) and in theory one has until the end of January to do this, after which such greetings basically become as awkward as a seersucker suit after Labor Day. Though I have, on occasion, slipped in a passive-aggressive bonne année in say, mid-May, to someone I have not seen for several months just to make them feel a twinge of guilt.
We spent our 2nd Xmas in Paris which manages to put on its festive best despite the persistent grey skies and short days. On Christmas Eve, we decided to do a blitzkrieg holiday tour of Paris despite the mounting Omicron cases. The upside was that rather than being packed with tourists, the crowds everywhere we went were smallish to reasonable. Bad news for merchants, of course, but pleasant for local tourists such as ourselves.
We made obligatory stops at Galeries Lafayette and retail rival Printemps (which to our untrained American eyes seem to simply blur into one unending semi-upscale neighborhood of overpriced shopping complexes). But the holiday window displays feel like such a throwback that we couldn’t resist ogling them. We are indeed basic.
At my insistence, we ate lunch at Regain, a restaurant on the 7th floor of Printemps. I had eaten there the previous month at the invitation of some venture capitalists and was surprised at first that they had basically invited me to eat at the mall food court, albeit an expensive one. It seemed not very…French. But when I arrived, I understood the appeal: The view is spectacular enough to touch the heart of any Paris cynic and the food is wonderful. I’m cheating a bit, but this is a photo from that amazing November lunch because on Christmas Eve it was foggy and bleak (though still a great panorama).
For lunch, the VC team insisted I order the hamburger, which I assumed was because they wanted to play to some American cliché. But it turned out they just wanted to see the look on my face when a hamburger drenched in melted comté cheese arrived. This seemed to serve the purpose of being both delicious and preventing the dreaded American habit of eating food with one’s hands. I ordered the same with the family but they seemed less amused by it than me.
Our Paris tour took us briefly through the Christmas marché and past the Louis Vitton building before we hopped in our car and returned to our Western suburban enclave.
Unfortunately, the winter vacances period turned out to be rather subdued in France thanks to the aforementioned Omicron. That’s hardly breaking news at this point, and it’s the same story everywhere. Still, it feels particularly shocking in France where many had hoped the extremely high vaccination rate would protect the nation from another variant wave. It hasn’t, but frustrations are clearly mounting with splits along the predictable lines: the government is being too heavy-handed vs the government is not doing enough.
Stuck in the middle, of course, is President Macron, just three months away from the first round of presidential voting. His short-term plan for dealing with the pandemic includes converting the health passport, which is required for access to just about everything, into a vaccine passport. Where non-vaccinated people could previously use the pass with a recent Covid test, now someone must be vaccinated for the passport to be valid.
This required some legislation to be passed by the National Assembly, where it ran into a surprising — and ultimately short — delay as opponents sought to score some political points. More importantly, however, this led to a moment of candor from Macron who, in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper, uttered the word that will no doubt be in the lead of his obituary one day: emmerder.
This sparked an even more essential debate than how to handle a two-year-old pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Namely: How should one translate emmerder? (derived from merde). The French media looked on with amusement, calling it a casse-tête (brain teaser) for Anglophone newsrooms who wrestled with “annoy” or “hassle” (both definitely too soft) or “to bug” (worse) or “to give shit” (too literal and not active enough). The consensus fell to “piss off” (better, but doesn’t quite capture the nuance here).
Meanwhile, French pundits got to express faux shock that the president would make such vulgar statements and needled him for seeking to be divisive (as opposed to his numerous political opponents who only seek to bring the country together in a harmonious hand-holding circle.) As for defining his deeper political calculus, The New York Times intoned with all of its Grey Lady gravitas:
By shocking the nation with a vulgarity three months before presidential elections, Mr. Macron was relaying not only a public health message, but also a political one. He appeared to be calculating that tapping into the growing public anger against the unvaccinated held more potential electoral rewards than the risk of angering an anti-vaccination minority whose support he has little hope of ever getting.
Sure. Or maybe he was just tired of dealing with anti-vax BS like many of us? In any case, with just under 90 days to the first round of voting, Macron continues to hold a strong lead in polls:
Populist demagogue Eric Zemmour seems to be deflating, and may even struggle to get on the ballot due to some arcane French rules. Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo continues to poll in the LOL range with other left-leaning candidates splitting the vote to ensure none of them has a glimmer of hope.
The real drama at the moment is whether far-right candidate Marine Le Pen or semi-far-right candidate Valérie Pécresse will finish 2nd and advance to the Presidential Tournament Finals against Macron. The center-right Macron would coast against Le Pen, but a match against Pécresse could be a squeaker.
Twin Tragedy
I have a lifetime of learning to catch up on the entire history of French pop culture. But an object of fascination for me since arriving has been the Bogdanoff twins Igor and Grichka. Apparently anti-vax, according to French media, the twins recently died just a few days apart at the age of 72.
What’s the fascination? Well, let’s just start with an hommage to plastic surgery gone terribly wrong:
The brothers disputed the plastic surgery claims, according to France 24:
The brothers denied having had plastic surgery to explain their transformed looks, but admitted to having undergone "experimentations" which gave them their extreme high cheek bones, as well as large lips and pronounced chins.
"We are proud of having faces like extra-terrestrials," they said in 2010.
They were once considered hunks when they hosted a 1980s science fiction TV show.
Ah, the 80s. Their legacy includes accusations that the brothers, who both had PhDs, published phony scientific papers. France 24 also notes that they had claimed to have invented Bitcoin. For all of this, they still received a funeral service at Paris’ Madeleine church which was the scene of Johnny Hallyday’s ceremony in 2017.
They may be wandering the cosmos now, but their place in France’s Virtual Pop Culture Pantheon is assured.
Enduring Emily
In these divisive times, nothing has united the French as much as their utter contempt for Netflix’s hit comedy “Emily In Paris.” The Disney-fied version of Paris came back for its second season last month and I joined an entire nation in hate-watching my way through this incomprehensibly bad show that somehow manages to get so much wrong about France. A French woman calling a waiter “garçon” I MEAN COME ON! The blood vessels on my face are still broken from yelling, “WTF is she wearing now!” every time Emily enters the room.
But Netflix knows a good thing when it sees it, or at least its algorithms do. According to Variety:
Season 2 was released on Dec. 22, debuting in the Global Netflix Top 10 and topping the list across 94 countries with 107.6 million hours viewed from Dec. 22 to Dec. 26. Season 1 also made the Global Top 10, re-emerging on the list across 53 countries.
And so Netflix has renewed it for not just one, but two more seasons! A rare move for the streaming giant that will extend our suffering into 2024. Like good self-flagellating masochists, we will be there for every minute of it.
Dreaming Of France
Our original vacation plans got turned upside down, so rather than visit Strasbourg in Alsace the week before Christmas to experience the famed Marché de Noël, we went the first week of January after school-age kids had gone back to school. We stayed just outside the city center at the Hotel Athéna which offered the benefit of a sauna and steam room spa.
We toured the European Parliament which definitely seems to serve some purpose and occasionally actually brings lawmakers to town. We wandered the city center, including La Petite France, the Instagrammable neighborhood of canals and half-timbered Germanic homes. And, of course, we visited Strasbourg’s Notre Dame which for my money outshines its cousin in Paris.
On Day 2, we did some wine tasting along the Alsace Wine Route while also driving up into the foothills of the Vosges mountains for a snowy hike around the Mont Sainte-Odile monastery. But mostly we ate like fiends, indulging our love for the Germanic-influenced gastronomy, first with dinner at La Corde À Linge (clothesline) and then lunch the next day at Les Chauvins for Alsacien tapas which was the perfect way to sample local dishes (see my effusive Twitter thread here).
Two days was too short, but it was still a tantalizing introduction to the area.
Great Reads
The spectator who caused a big accident at the start of the Tour de France last summer was fined €1,200. The French language police are pissed off that the new national ID cards include English. A dude who had registered France.com years ago and built a travel business around it was denied a Supreme Court hearing in his case against French officials who had seized control of the domain. No jetpacks, but Paris is promising flying taxis for the 2024 Olympics that will feature the Seine River in the opening ceremonies.
Whether the Olympics will feature spectators remains to be seen.
Le Pecq
Chris O’Brien