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Homage to Polly Platt

My beloved, charming, funny friend Polly Platt has died suddenly, the day after Christmas, 2008. I'm so sad.

She missed her husband, Ande, so much since his death a few years ago. I believe she died the way she would have wanted to go, in lovely Vienna at Christmas, surrounded by her family, active till the last, and with a new, successful book out.

She will be greatly missed.

Polly's entertaining and profound books:

French or Foe?

If you read one book about France, this should be it.

A friend from the British Embassy was given French or Foe and told to read it before moving to Paris!

translated into French as: Ils sont fous ces français!

Savoir Flair

Love à la Française: What Happens When Hervé Meets Sally

Polly's website

Sarko

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Sarkozy appears drunk after a meeting with Putin at the G8 summit last week (those Russians!) and the French press mentions nothing, but the Belgians have a field day (and then have to apologize).

Better watch this quickly-- I bet YouTube takes it off!

The French H-bomb, thanks to the English

The President of the French Fifth Republic is indeed the only person in Europe who can freely activate a nuclear weapon. It is true that the British Prime Minister also possesses this power, in theory. But his vectors (submarines and missiles), his tests, and therefore his nuclear weapons are dependent on American technology. And if, on paper, he can decide to use them alone, in actuality it is much harder to do so without the agreement of Washington. However, in all their disdain for a Britain too tied to the Americans to be the complete master of its own nuclear weapons, the French forget what they owe to the British: the French H-bomb. Let us remember that the first version of the atomic bomb, bomb A, the bomb of Hiroshima and of Reggane [first French A-bomb, tested at Reggane, Algerian Sahara in 1960], was a fission bomb, while the H-bomb, which France exploded for the first time in August 1968, was a bomb called "hydrogen," or fusion.

This book does not lend itself to technical digressions, so we will just say that the H-bomb is incomparably more powerful that the A-bomb. It was developed by the Americans Edward Teller and Stanislaw M. Ulman [sic for Stanislaw Ulam], who perfected the Teller-Ulman [sic for Teller-Ulam] procedure. This used the X-rays emitted by the explosion of a small A-bomb to compress the elements tritium, lithium, deuterium, etc. in a thermoclear combustion and take it to fusion. The physicist Andrei Sakharov imagined a similar procedure for the Russian bomb, and the British had followed the same course. But at the end of the 1960s, French atomic scientists still did not know of any of this work and had to rediscover the procedure. It was long, it was expensive, and the head of state was stamping his feet in impatience.

Once France was in possession of the A-bomb, De Gaulle could not wait for the nation to go up one gear and acquire the famous H-bomb. The first American bomb of this type, Ivy Mike (10.4 megatons, or 600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb), had exploded on the atoll of Eniwetok in November 1952. Then, in August 1953, the Russians exploded their first H-bomb, perfected by Sakharov, who many years later became the main Russian figure opposing the Soviet order. In 1957, it was the turn of the British, who were remarkably rapid. All this was already vexing enough. But what put De Gaulle into a black fury was the idea of the explosion of a Chinese H-bomb, which in fact came to pass in 1967. France behind China? Unacceptable...and yet!

While De Gaulle pressed the teams of the CEA [Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, the French atomic energy agency], the nucléocrates were having trouble. Not only could they not manage to find a solution, but the Élysée Palace [equivalent of White House] found that they were reluctant and dragging their feet. This was not wrong! Feeling little affinity for this project, they considered that the A-bomb France already possessed was already quite powerful enough. They were in agreement with the military men, who were just as unenthusiastic about nuclear weapons, that it was scarcely useful to acquire a weapon that could kill an enemy a thousand times, when it is already possible to kill him a hundred times. Pierre Messmer, who was Army Minister at the time, was still so angry twenty years later with those who refused to toe the line that he denounced them at a Sorbonne conference in 1989: "One of the reasons that we were relatively slow in moving from the A-bomb to the H-bomb, that is from fission to fusion, was that the scientists who worked for the CEA systematically refused all studies and research of a military character." This was a little unjust, but what matter? The army chief must be satisfied at any price!

Charles de Gaulle found himself a scapegoat, Alain Peyrefitte, his Minister for Research and Atomic and Space Affairs from January 1966 to April 1967. Just after having named him, the General browbeat him until the minister, as he recounts in his book Le Mal français, avowed the dishonorable truth. The engineers were stumbling, they were stuck, they couldn't do it: the H-bomb seemed to be beyond their capability within the timeframe fixed by the head of state in 1968. Officially, Peyrefitte solved the problem by naming an exceptional man, Robert Dautray, to the head of the H-bomb research group. Legend has it that Dautray knew how to put the teams to work, and that they then miraculously found the way to the bomb. The truth, which hides a very big secret, is a little different!

In fact, it was the British who offered the H-bomb to the French. It was the engineer Pierre Billaud, ousted by Peyrefitte shortly after the Jupiter-sized temper tantrum of January 1966, who took off the rose-colored glasses, first partially in a short book [La véritable histoire de la bombe H française, 1994], then in December, 1966, in an article in the magazine La Recherche. He reveals in them that at the time when the French atomic scientists were thrashing around helplessly, one of the[ French] military attachés in London assigned to [French] ambassador Geoffroy de Courcel-- who was a close friend of De Gaulle's--  met several times at cocktail parties a scientist who was very well informed about the laborious French research. William Cook was one of the fathers of the British H-bomb, and had worked for years at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the equivalent of the DAM (Direction des applications militaires) of the CEA. His French conversation partner, General André Thoulouze, was not a technician and did not understand much of what his new English friend was telling him, except that he said he was ready to help the French, gratis pro deo [free for God]. Thoulouze gave an account of these conversations to Henri Coleau, the head of the BIRS (Bureau information et renseignement scientifique), the private information service of the CEA. The conversations with Cook continued, but Cook never provided the French with any document. He recounted and explained in simple terms, and André Thoulouze retranscribed everything afterwards. The information the scientist was delivering was crucial: the path to follow to succeed in exploding the H-bomb was that of the Teller-Ulman method, which the French were not aware of: the famous compression by X-rays.

A young French engineer, Michel Carayol, had indeed come up with that solution, but it was  repudiated by his peers, and he himself scarcely believed in it. On September 19, 1967, an emergency meeting was called at the CEA to discuss William Cook's revelation. This time, the road was clear...The French H-bomb exploded at Fangataufa, in the Pacific, less than a year later, on August 8, 1968, and remained one of the greatest prides of Charles de Gaulle.

Of course, this story gives a big slap in the face to the theory of an exclusive [French] "national path" in access to French nuclear weapons. Moreover, when Maurice Schumann, Alain Peyrefitte's successor in the ministerial oversight of the CEA, informed Charles de Gaulle of the British contribution, the latter "almost had a stroke."* Quite a few mysteries remain, however, concerning this episode. It would be especially important to know on whose political instructions William Cook, who died in 1987 years before his role came to light, was acting. For the French are still absolutely convinced, without having proof, that it was the British government of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson that sent him in contact. Let us recall that at the time, Charles de Gaulle had just decided to withdraw France from NATO, and that he was opposed to British entry to the Common Market. But if London hoped to make the general soften with the gift of the H-bomb, it was a bad calculation. Five months after the explosion of Fangataufa, he renewed his opposition! So ungrateful....

Oh, the British! If only they had wanted to discuss a common nuclear strategy with the French. If only they had accepted, for example, to "take the nuclear alert" with the French. In the 2000s, France had four SNLEs (sous-marins nucléaires lanceurs d'engins)[nuclear submarines] available, one always at sea. Another nuclear secret, from the Chirac era this time: from 1995 onwards, he had teams working on a rapprochement with the British in this domain. Which went far: on November 2, 1996, Jacques Chirac and John Major publicly declared in London, "We do not imagine a situation in which the vital interests of one of our two countries, France and the United Kingdom, could be threatened without the vital interests of the others being threatened too." After this declaration, the chiefs of staff met, scenarios were elaborated and war games carried out, until there was a roadblock: the integration of the British dissuasive force with the American system was such that British autonomy was very much affected...The French President, as for him, has no one to answer to... The bomb is all his!

            --From Histoire secrète de la Ve République, under the direction of Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel (Éditions La Découverte, 2006) 

* Marcel Duval, À la recherche d'un "secret d'État", in Défense nationale, August-September 2004.

 

 

"Today, schools are creating barbarians

Opinion

Today, Schools Are Creating Barbarians

by Jean-Paul Brighelli, teacher and author of La Fabrique des crétins ["The moron factory"], who is publishing a pamphlet on schools

The presidential campaign is underway. To take account of the ideas in debate, our section "Opinion" welcomes iconoclastic, even provocative remarks. We can each make up our own minds. Today: Jean-Paul Brighelli, who is publishing L'Ecole sous influence ["Schools under the influence"], a scathing attack on our school system.
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From "morons" in your first book, the students, at least in ghetto areas, are now supposed to have become "barbarians." How?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. We have the school we deserve: that of a weaker and weaker democracy. We are currently paying the last consequences of the Jospin school law of 1989, which puts the pupil at the center of the system and incites him to "build his own knowledge," as the hackneyed educational refrain goes. But after not learning anything solid, many students have been walled up alive behind a terrifying screen of ignorance that leads to the worst excesses. Moron, that was nice. Today, the schools are manufacturing barbarians. The riots in the suburbs, which will happen again, show that I was right. By "respecting" the law of the ghettos and its underlying language, we have let an entire generation degenerate.

Does barbary begin with language?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. The barbarian, in the first sense of the word, is someone who does not speak the language of the city. Those from the projects make do with a rudimentary illiterate slang, reduced to a few hundred words sprinkled with English terms like "gun" or "cop." Bad rap, in a way. We are guilty of having let it happen by amputating by one-third, in twenty years, the number of hours devoted to learning French. With the result that there is a gangrene of the spirit, zero degrees of thought: the students don't even understand the words the teacher is reading.

The effects go even farther, you say....

Jean-Paul Brighelli. The Jospin law opened Pandora's box. It's not an accident that two months later, the first veil affair broke out in Creil (Oise). It was a way of testing the law, which legitimized the right-- without anything asked in return-- to express opinions, especially religious opinions. That is how debates that should have stayed in the private sphere erupted into schools. Today, school is no longer a sanctuary. We can feel the rise of violence, which is the only way barbarians communicate. Into a skull emptied by the absence of knowledge and of culture, you can slip any ready-made extremism. The future makes me uneasy.

"We have ended by tolerating the intolerant."

Then the principal of secularism is in danger?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. You must be joking, it doesn't exist any more! All you have to do is read the Obin report* published in 2004 by a team of inspecteurs généraux. An official, rigorous inquiry... and apparently kept out of sight by the Education department because it was too upsetting. It shows how public schools suffer every day from attempted infiltration by small religious minorities, and ends up by giving way over and over. In the name of the spirit of tolerance and cultural diversity, we end by tolerating the intolerant.

For example?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. Some principals act as if it is normal to have a prayer room for Muslim students in the Paris region; teachers give up teaching Voltaire, for example, or barely mention Darwin; students ask the gym teachers for separate locker rooms [WHOA! does this mean French boys and girls share locker rooms?!?]; the cafeterias prefer to use only Muslim-rule meat; the heads of schools receive veiled mothers [even though the veil is forbidden at schools]... It's certainly only a partial visiton, because these problems are concentrated in certain areas. But twenty years ago, there were no head-scarves in schools, and a lot fewer in the streets.

Since the law on religious signs, two years ago, however, the veil seems to have disappeared from schools. Do you disagree?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. What we chased out the door by banishing the veil has come back through the window in another form. Look at these boys who challenge girls at recess to force them to lower their eyes. Or that girl beaten up in a junior high school in Lyon for having dared to eat during Ramadan. They are the first victims of intolerance. For antisemitism, it's the same thing: we reassure ourselves by saying that the crimes are diminishing, but in the minds, it is becoming normal.

Do you not refuse, basically, for schools to be the mirror of a multicultural society?

Jean-Paul Brighelli. Society has never been multicultural, or only at the level of regional cultures. Schools have their share of responsibility. By putting all cultures on an equal plane, schools have neglected and even torpedoed our culture and our common language. They have encouraged kids to exalt their differences. Is it an accident that "Céfran" [verlan slang for français, French] has become an insult in the mouths of young Beurs [French of Arab origin] who almost all, however, have French nationality? We have let it happen because we are paralyzed by the post-colonial guilt that puts us in a situation of repentance.

You want to go back to "nos ancêtres les Gaulois"? ["Our ancestors the Gauls," traditional first words in French history class]

Jean-Paul Brighelli. No, no more than I'm nostalgic for the gray smock. It is not a question of creating an aberrant model, but of rediscovering a cement that will allow us to teach the same history, the same culture and to speak the same language from Lille to Bonifacio. School must no longer be the place of diversity, but that of a uniting speech. In order to do that, we must re-think the carte scolaire [which assigns pupils to schools for social-integration reasons], review programs from top to bottom while returning to basic learning, first of all French and math, even learn things "by heart" sometimes. The frame may look strict, but it is the only way to give students a solid base.

        --Interview by Charles de Saint-Sauveur in Le Parisien, 19 October 2006

* Brighelli also contributes to a collective work based on the Obin report (l'Ecole face à l'obscurantisme religieux, Schools and religious obscurantism)

Police accused of classifying delinquents by ethnic origin in report

In an official complaint lodged by SOS-Racisme on Tuesday in Paris, in which the association claims to have suffered from a crime, the police officers of the General Information Office [Renseignements généraux] are accused of having created a dossier classifying delinquents by their ethnic group, the association announced.

This procedure accuses a report of the General Information Office on January 6, 2005, which identified the ethnic origin "of 436 perpetrators in 24 quartiers sensibles" [touchy neighborhoods], a document published in several press outlets since February.

"Among [the perpetrators], 87% have French nationality, 67% are of North African origin and 17% of African origin. French citizens of non-immigrant origin represent 9% of perpetrators," the report concluded.

SOS-Racisme considers that to arrive at this conclusion, the policemen of the General Information Office must necessarily have created a dossier of delinquents with a racist base.

"No matter what, the statistics of delinquents according to ethnic origin could not have been revealed to the press unless a dossier was put in place in the heart of the General Information Office," writes Samuel Thomas, vice-president of the association, in the complaint, which was given to the press.

These facts constitute, according to the association, the infraction of "creation or conservation in digital memory without the express consent of the concerned party, of data of personal character, which directly or indirectly shows a person's racial or ethnic origins, political, philosophical or religious opinions, or union memberships."

The penal code provides a penalty of up to five years of prison and 300,000 euros in fines for this offense.

SOS-Racisme directly accuses Nicolas Sarkozy by including in its complaint a declaration of the minister to RTL last February, in which he deplored the legal impossibility of mentioning the ethnic origin of delinquents.

"The fact that in France it is not possible to understand the diversity of the population, because the ethnic origin of delinquents is forbidden, is one of the reasons for the wreck of our system of integration," declared the president of the UMP.

The report of the General Information Office was used by several extreme-right internet sites, SOS-Racisme emphasizes in its complaint.

The General Administration of the National Police [DGPN, or Direction générale de la police nationale] declared in a press release that "no specific file of that type was created by any police service."

"The numbers contained in the report...are the result of an evaluation based on data on the état civil*, which are obligatory in the hearing reports of 436 perpetrators who were arrested during acts of urban violence in all the quartiers sensibles [touchy neighborhoods] combined," it explained.

The DGPN explained that it was "the origin of surnames and first names that allowed this study, which uses solely numbers, not names, to be carried out."

*  état civil is an expression hard to explain to us Anglo-Saxons. It basically means your legal identity. You used to have to produce an official fiche d'état civil-- which involved a bureaucratic hassle-- for almost everything in France, from registering for school to getting a driver's license to renting an apartment. It was ridiculous going to the American consulate and getting a piece of paper that  constituted the U.S. equivalent of the fiche d'état civil; the consul would carefully explain that they were happy to give you the scrap of paper the French bureaucracy asked for, but that the U.S. version actually had no legal validity.  A few years ago the French bureaucracy accepted that a fiche d'état civil is pointless when everyone has an I.D. card or a passport, and you rarely need to deal with it any more.

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La police accusée d'avoir constitué un fichier raciste

    23/08/2006 - 07h31

PARIS (Reuters) - Les policiers des Renseignements généraux sont accusés d'avoir constitué un fichier de délinquants sur la base de leur origine ethnique dans une plainte avec constitution de partie civile déposée mardi à Paris par SOS-Racisme, annonce l'association.

Cette procédure incrimine un rapport des Renseignements généraux daté du 6 janvier 2005 répertoriant l'origine ethnique "de 436 meneurs recensés dans 24 quartiers sensibles", document publié dans plusieurs organes de presse depuis février.

"Parmi (les meneurs), 87% ont la nationalité française, 67% sont d'origine maghrébine et 17% d'origine africaine. Les Français d'origine non immigrée représentent 9% des meneurs", concluait ce rapport.

SOS-Racisme considère que pour arriver à cette conclusion, les policiers des RG ont nécessairement établi un fichier de délinquants sur une base raciste.

"En tout état de cause, les statistiques des délinquants selon leur origine ethnique n'ont pu être révélées à la presse qu'après qu'un fichier ait été mis en place au sein des Renseignements généraux", écrit Samuel Thomas, vice-président de l'association, dans la plainte transmise à la presse.

Ces faits constituent selon l'association l'infraction de "mise ou conservation en mémoire informatisée sans le consentement exprès de l'intéressé, des données à caractère personnel qui, directement ou indirectement, faisant apparaître les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses, ou les appartenances syndicales des personnes".

Le code pénal prévoit une peine maximale de cinq ans d'emprisonnement et de 300.000 euros d'amende pour ce délit.

SOS-Racisme met en cause directement Nicolas Sarkozy en joignant à sa plainte une déclaration du ministre à RTL en février dernier où il déplorait l'impossibilité légale de mentionner l'origine ethnique des délinquants.

"Le fait que l'on ne puisse pas, en France, connaître la diversité de la population parce que l'origine ethnique des délinquants est interdite participe à la panne de notre système d'intégration", déclarait le président de l'UMP.

Le rapport des Renseignements généraux a été exploité par plusieurs sites internets d'extrême droite, souligne SOS-Racisme dans sa plainte.

La Direction générale de la police nationale (DGPN) a déclaré dans un communiqué "qu'aucun fichier spécifique de ce type (n'avait) été créé par un service de police".

"Les chiffres contenus dans le rapport (...) sont le résultat d'une évaluation effectuée sur la base des renseignements d'état civil figurant obligatoirement dans les procès-verbaux d'audition de 436 meneurs interpellés au cours d'actes de violences urbaines dans l'ensemble des quartiers sensibles", explique-t-elle.

La DGPN explique que c'est "l'origine des noms et des prénoms qui a permis d'effectuer cette étude uniquement chiffrée et non nominative".

© Reuters Limited.

That sinister word social

The word social always makes a frisson go up my spine when I hear it on the radio. It's up to no good.

action social = strike

plan social = mass layoff

logement social = housing project (also known as HLM-- pronounced AhshellEM)

conflit social = labor dispute

partenaires sociaux= the bosses (always referred to as le patronat) versus the workers, the government and the media

mouvement social =  labor protest, strike

acquis sociaux [plural]= the things we have fought for, e.g. the 35-hour work week; retiring at 55; six-week vacations; the near-impossibility of getting fired for rudeness or incompetence

My French vs English wordlist (on-going)

I love the French and English languages. They are an endless source of pleasure.

[Disclaimer: all these definitions and opinions are my own and cannot be considered authoritative. I realize that you can eventually explain any notion in any language--but not equally easily.]

French words with no real English equivalent

les acquis sociaux [means "the things that we have fought for: the 35-hour week, etc." ]

cadre [someone who is not an ordinary employee, part of the elite; but it's fuzzy]

chômer, chômeur [to be unemployed, an unemployed person: but in French, it's somehow active]

dépaysement [the sensation of being in another country]

déroulement [unfolding, how things happen] 

doux [means so many things at once: sweet, tender, soft, gentle]

douleur [means so many things at once: pain, sorrow, sadness, ache, heartache]

encadrer [to be surrounded and taken care of]

la fête  [we need a word like this in English. "Party" or "feast" are not the same.]

incontournable [something you can’t escape from or get around; inevitable]

le patronat [the class of bosses, as if they're separate from normal people; I find this concept very French]

retrouvailles [meeting again after a long time, the happiness]

That sinister word social 

sortable [adjective for someone you can take places without being embarrassed]

spectacle [a show of any kind]

surenchère [one-upmanship, upping the ante, increasing your bid]

English words with no true French equivalent

block  [as in "Go two blocks"-- the French word is pâté de maisons, but the French never use it. Instead they say "two streets."]

float  [as in a parade]

friend     [Of course, the French have friends too. But a French ami/amie always has to have a sex, whereas we find it's often so convenient not to have to say.]

gentleman   [in French, seems to be more of a fashion statement than a personal quality.]

kick  [you have to say: "donner un coup de pied" which I find a bit long]

kind  [the French have to say “gentille” or “généreux”; the nuance of this being a deep character trait is missing]

mind  [all senses, from "I don't mind" to "have in mind" to "a beautiful mind"]

miss [as in "missing someone"; you have to say "Tu me manques" which means "You are lacking to me."]

remember  [you have to say je me souviens or je me rappelle, "I recall to myself"]

ride  [as in an amusement park; you have to say "attraction"]

neighborly 

rude   ["mal poli" does not translate the American sense: aggressively, deliberately impolite.]

tailgating   [as in a car. This is curious because almost all French drivers tailgate. Maybe it's like our not noticing gravity until Isaac Newton pointed it out.]

thorough  [you have to say profond or à fond] 

wonder  [in French you have to say, "I ask myself" to translate "I wonder," but it's not the same thing]

wrong  [you have to say "faux" or "mauvais" as in "the bad direction" instead of "the wrong way"; a nuance of wrongness is missing]

French expressions I find strange

je n’y suis pour rien [literally "I am not there for nothing":  "it’s not my fault"]

passer un savon à quelqu’un  [literally "pass a soap to someone": scold someone]

tirer les vers du nez   [literally "pull the worms out of the nose": used as in English, "getting him to talk was like pulling teeth"; people actually say this]

French words I like/think sound funny

coup de barre

galipette

gueule

polisson

racaille, pagaille, canaille, gouaille, grisaille; chatouille, rouille, bouille

zozoter [the French have a word for lisp even though en principe they don't have a "th" sound!]

tentative d’attentat   [attempted terrorist attack; say it out loud!]

trois

Vive le roi!  [Try to say “roi ” and see if it sounds like a king!]


Common French expressions whose equivalent you don't hear much in English

en principe  ["in theory"; actually means "but in reality, probably not"]

mais puisque je vous le dis   ["but because I'm saying it to you"-- someone who often seems untrustworthy says this when you doubt what they are saying. ]

faut pas vous énerver!   ["(you) must not get annoyed!" Always said by annoying people when you object to their cutting in line/queue-barging]

Common English words and expressions whose equivalent you don't hear much in French

Sorry, but I didn't make the rules!

I don't buy that!

wasting time

Is karchériser French? The UMP says no

First session of Wednesday 12 April 2006
198th session of the ordinary assembly 2005-2006

Presided by M. Jean-Louis Debré
(The session opened at 9h30.)

1. Reminder of the rules.

The President: Mr Jean-Pierre Brard will speak to remind us of the rules.

Mr Brard: My speech directly concerns how the session takes place. It fits perfectly into article 58 of the rules.

The right to amend is a fundamental right of parliamentary representatives. It allows them to influence the making of the law.

Well, Mr President, you have made one of my amendments disappear. (Exclamations from the UMP benches.) I am surprised at you. You always have protected the rights of the opposition. The amendment went like this: “Article 8 of law number 2006-396 of March 31, 2006, on the equality of opportunity has been karchérisé [fire-hosed down, a reference to UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy's use of the word during the unrest in November 2005].”

Several deputies of the UMP: It’s not French!

Mr Brard: Even though that amendment was examined by the Social Affairs Committee—in other words under the control of Mr Hénart and Mr Dubernard—you have judged its words to be unacceptable, under the pretext that the verb “karchériser” is not in the Larousse dictionary.

Mr President, I will first say that the Larousse is not an official document; it does not make the law in linguistic matters; it does not even have academic authority. Second, the fact precedes the law. It is not I who first used this word, which is Teutonic, but, and there’s nothing surprising about this, it was a politician who declared in New York that he felt like a foreigner in his own country.

I do not have to teach you, Mr President, since you yourself use that art, that humor is often more useful than boring litanies of legal formalism. On my side, I have found a dictionary that defined “karchériser” as “to clean thoroughly” or in other words to remove what is not clean— in this case, the CPE.

Mr Jean-Michel Dubernard [President of the Cultural, Familial, and Social Affairs Committee]: This is advertising! That’s enough!

Mr President: Finish up, Mr Brard.

Mr Brard: I am finishing, Mr President.

Mr Gérard Larcher [Minister for Employment, Work, and Insertion of Youth into Careers] This is Bricorama! [a large home-repairs store]

Mr Brard: Not at all. That word, which betrays a profound scorn for the youth of poor areas, constitutes a veritable aggression….

Mr Eric Raoult: The company in question is based in Seine-Saint-Denis!

Mr Brard: …against the youth, Mr Raoult, who are already humiliated daily, constantly denigrated in their personal and family life. The minister of the government, whose character of provocateur is known to us, will not go so far as to take responsibility for his past opinions. I remind you of the enthusiastic declarations of the Sarkozyites of this assembly….

Mr President: Thank you, Mr Brard….

Mr Brard: …in favor of the CPE.

Mr President: Mr Brard.

Mr Brard: You will allow me to finish by saying, Mr President, that you are wrong to deprive the assembly of the support of the government minister for the renewal of our language, a government minister who is the friend of Madame Bétancourt and of Tom Cruise!

Mr President: It is true, Mr Brard, that I refused your amendment. But be aware that I intend to submit to the Académie française, first the question of whether this word is French, and secondly your candidacy! (Smiles)

--Noted from the blog Aixtal, post of 16 April 2006.

CPE, the magnificent unanimity

From the newspaper Libération, 17 March 2006
CPE, the magnificent unanimity
Daniel Schneidermann

What a week! Moral is good. Spring is coming. Victory is in sight. The horizon is clear. Each morning the radio tells us that the movement is growing. The enemy has been designated: the infamous Villepin and his CPE. Nothing for improving the morale of the nation like a great unanimous combat. All of France is nothing but a vast resistance movement. In the front line, all the young people. The university students, of course, pulling after them the high school students, who in their turn are soon going after the junior high students. But not alone. The whole country, the polls attest, repeat, trumpet, and the polls cannot be wrong, as we all know, the whole country is in an uproar. Each morning some bastion falls.

The Left, all the Left, is magnificently reunited. Bernard Thibault obviously. Chérèque too, who has just explained that this Villepin, decidedly, is not a man of his word. Hollande, Fabius, Royal, Strauss-Kahn are marching hand in hand. But not alone. One feels that resistance is gaining on the Right. One morning, we learn that the former Giscard minister Hervé de Charrette has joined the rebellion. There he is on all the stages, a hundred microphones stretched toward him, since when has he had such excitement? Without speaking of all those who secretly feel close to the movement. A heartbeat away from taking to the resistance, Laurence Parisot didn't renounce that till the last minute, it is murmured that it is the fault of the Fédération patronale de la métallurgie. That is just a delayed game. A good part of the government encourages us behind the scenes. It seems that Borloo burns to join us. That Sarkozy is thinking about it too. Besides, the television stations have taken a cruel pleasure in showing the spokesman for the UMP, his nose in his socks, obliged to pretend to support the CPE. As for Chirac, one certainly feels that if he were free to express himself, he too....

If all these images, all these rumors come to us, it's because for once the media are on the right side: ours. They are passionate. Those first days of combat are good and forgotten, when the press, caught up in its bird flu and chikungunya [epidemic in La Réunion], superbly ignored the first university strikes. It is good and forgotten, the usual bow at eight p.m. to all the government's wonderful plans. PPDA [Patrick Poivre d'Arvor] is with us, who sent the entire staff of TF1 to the heart of the demonstrations. No connection, of course, with the ostensible silence of Sarkozy. Those who think that TF1 says out loud what Sarkozy is thinking certainly don't understand the independence of the media.

And the sempiternal complaints of the editorialists on the impossibility of reform, that French illness, where has it gone? "You don't reform, you have no courage, you surrender to the street, it's no wonder this country is in such bad shape!"-- where did that line go? Another one, temporarily, is replacing it: "When is he finally going to give in, this Villepin who didn't consult anyone?" In Libération, Alain Duhamel understands that Villepin was a "casting error." On RTL, Jean-Michel Aphatie reads quotations from Villepin, extracts from the latest book by Giesbert, to the spokeswoman of the UMP, Valérie Pécresse:  "France wants one to take her. It's an itch in her pelvis. Whoever wins her at the next election, it won't be a permanent politician, but a seasonal worker, a rascal, a marauder." And Aphatie confides on his blog that Pécresse, coming out of the studio, reacted: "I hate that phrase, that way of speaking." Pécresse with us!

Of course, everything could happen differently. One could discuss it, this CPE. One could ask the employers, and the young employees. One could shine a spotlight on the precariousness which, in the shadow, extends its social and psychological ravages. One could imagine that the CPE could be, in certain cases, an adaptive response, but ineffectual and humiliating in other cases. One could ask what young people with no diplomas think, those who have nothing on the horizon but rejection and unemployment. One won't know anything about that. When cars aren't burning, the suburbs are of little interest.

Alone, at the beginning of the week, Le Parisien went out to meet a handful of youths from the suburbs, in a cafeteria in Mureaux (Yvelines). "Two years trial period? That's not too bad. When you don't have a job, it's still better than nothing," says Moussa, 19.

"We don't have anything. Nothing from nothing. So even if the trial period lasted ten years, it's not a problem: I'd sign right away," adds Malik...who has never worked. And Rachid...: "For a boss, it's more reassuring. He'll be more likely to take the risk of hiring kids like us when he says to himself, 'If it doesn't work out, I can always fire them.'"

Who says these words? In themselves, not much. They obviously don't suffice to legitimize the CPE. No one can know if they are representative. But one doesn't hear this tonality in the concert around us....The hour is one of Unanimous Resistance and all its charms. Let's not disturb it.