Siege of the Chamber of Deputies
PARIS, 6 FEBRUARY 1934
I am telephoning you from a besieged fortress. No one can leave the Chamber of Deputies. The whole district on the south side of the river adjoining the Chamber is cordoned off by police, and as I speak thousands of rioters are attempting to break through the barricade of police vans on the Pont de la Concorde and get into the Chamber.
Click to continue reading “Siege of the Chamber of Deputies”
Categories: Famous France Tags: Édouard Daladier, France, French people, French Third Republic, Gaston Doumergue, M. Daladier, Paris, Politics, Politics of France, War/Conflict
A&F Markets Launches Art Exchange
A&F markets will offer shares in works by modern artists such as Anselm Kiefer, above. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Culture-lovers who cannot afford to hang a modern master on their wall will soon be able to buy shares in art works as the first art stock exchange prepares to open in the French capital.
Paris-based A&F Markets wants to allow investors to buy and sell shares in art works as they would any other commodity, with prices quoted on a public index. The shares will start at €10 for works valued at more than €100,000 (£85,880). The scheme will only trade in modern pieces from the late 19th century onwards, including painting, sculpture, video installation and photography.
The project, expected to launch in January, has been secretive about its opening art works. The first pieces for sale will include a 2006 installation by the German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, who is based in the south of France. Also on offer is Irregular Form, a 1998 oil painting on paper by the late American artist Sol LeWitt. Those pieces are owned by galleries, but the scheme is also negotiating directly with the French painter and sculptor Richard Texier for one of his works.
The company’s founders are initially working with about six Paris galleries but are seeking to expand in the UK, China and across Europe. They hope to attract financiers and investors who might previously have been wary of the art world’s volatile and sometimes confusing prices. The scheme is also hoping to attract investors tempted by French tax breaks on art.
The idea has been lampooned by some cultural commentators, who warn that treating art like a financial commodity debases an artist’s work. Patrick Bourne of the London-based Fine Art Society said the idea was a “stinker”. But Pierre Naquin, the 26-year-old French entrepreneur behind it, argued that new investors in the art world would be “reassured” by a marketplace that copied the financial mechanisms they were used to. He said: “Just because someone makes an investment in art, it doesn’t mean they lose the emotional tie to the work. On the contrary, I think this will bring in new buyers, and allow people who can’t afford to pay €100,000 for their own work to take part. We’re actually opening up the market to art lovers.”
‘Paris mix’: the 1st Music France Cluster Company
Paris Mix is a grouping of 40 companies in the music sector – labels, producers, Turners, organizers of shows, theatres, media – related to Paris and the Ile-de-France region crossroads music world.
In tune with the expectations of a racially and urban society, musiques du monde are creative intercultural and intergenerational social connection. Carrying of identities, values and meaning, they make up a vector of openness and citizenship education and represent real issues economic, social and cultural Paris and its region.
Click to continue reading “‘Paris mix’: the 1st Music France Cluster Company”
Categories: Business Tags: Cluster, companies, culture, Entertainment/Culture, France, Mass media, Music, Paris, World music
French Heritage Sites to become Hotels
The French president Nicolas Sarkozy. His government says it can no longer afford the upkeep of some of its listed landmarks.
Paris boasts so many historic monuments it has been called a living museum. But now Nicolas Sarkozy is under attack for seeking to sell the capital’s heritage to luxury hotel chains.
Click to continue reading “French Heritage Sites to become Hotels”
Carnival in Paris
Paris holds its Carnaval late in the season – 6 March 2011 with a procession through the heart of the city from Place Gambetta to the rue de Rivoli and the Place de l’Hotel de Ville which takes from lunchtime to early evening.
Aslo known as the Promenade du Boeuf Gras (procession of fatted cows!) there will be many colourful floats, costumes and masks, accompanied by music and dancing. For 2011 the theme is “Flowers” (la ronde des Fleurs)
Peter Brook bids farewell to Paris theatre after 36 years
Peter Brook with Romane Bohringer during a rehearsal of The Tempest in 1991 in Avignon. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
For lovers of Parisian theatre, the first days of 2011 have a slightly melancholy edge. On New Year’s Eve the hugely influential English director Peter Brook finally ended his 36-year tenure at the experimental Bouffes du Nord theatre in the French capital.
Friday night’s performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was the 85-year-old’s last production as the artistic head of a venue that has become synonymous with inventive, avant-garde work. As Brook’s opera heads off on a European tour that reaches London’s Barbican in March, the director is handing over the reins at the Bouffes to two younger Frenchmen: the former deputy head of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Olivier Mantei, and the theatre entrepreneur and modern music specialist Olivier Poubelle. Both have been part of Brook’s wider creative team for some time.
“He is doing the right thing moving on now,” said Tom Piper, the Royal Shakespeare Company designer who worked with Brook in the early 1990s. “He got a very international audience there and French audiences appreciated it. He is amazingly charismatic and so he gets amazing things out of people.”
When Brook announced two years ago that he would gradually step down from the Bouffes, he spoke of a conviction he shared with Poubelle and Mantei that “opera, popular music, theatre and dance can be married in a single spectacle in order to invent new forms”.
Brook has produced ground-breaking shows in French, including La Tragedie de Carmen; the epic Indian poem The Mahabharata; and, more recently, Tierno Bokar, a Sufi tale from Mali. But last year Brook, who was born in west London to Russian-Latvian émigrés, admitted he sometimes missed the English language.
Brook began what many have seen as a creative exile in Paris after enjoying British success in 1970 with RSC productions of Marat/Sade and the anti-Vietnam play US, and finally with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Frances de la Tour and Ben Kingsley. His guiding principle, regarded as startling at the time, was that the stage should be left uncluttered so the imagination could work. His 1968 handbook, The Empty Space, set out the idea that the audience is central to the atmosphere of a piece. Elaborate sets, according to this theory, just divide the actors from the public.
Brook’s revolutionary methods were always fluid, however, as Piper recalls. “Decisions were never final. When we were rehearsing La Tempête in Paris, we brought a whole load of earth into the theatre for a week before we decided it wasn’t right. In the end we went with a patch of sand and a single rock. We had an orange box which became a boat and was then worn on Ariel’s head. This became the image on the poster, but it had all come from rehearsal.”
Brook’s 1963 film of Lord of the Flies is regarded as a classic, but the poor reception in Britain of a 1978 stage production of Antony and Cleopatra, starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson, heralded a long period of work at the dilapidated former variety venue in Paris.
Brook’s productions came to Britain intermittently. His nine-hour Mahabharata was a hit at Glasgow’s Tramway in 1988 and in the 1990s an acclaimed stage version of Oliver Sachs’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat came to the National Theatre.
“The British establishment is difficult for him,” suggests Piper. “It is a shame we have never found the way to get him to come back permanently to Britain. He has become a special event when he comes back and perhaps that helps him to have a bigger impact.”
Brook’s pared style – with a stripped stage and minimal props – is so pervasive as to be mainstream now, but the director, says Piper, always worked at the Bouffes as if he were struggling in a start-up venture. “In my time he ran just a skeleton staff there. If you wanted to take anything anywhere, you had to hire a van. It was like working in a fringe theatre.”
Brook’s innovative thinking has been reflected, Piper believes, in the shape of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford. “We have a stage that thrusts out and the audience is wrapped around it. We wanted to put the actor right at the heart of it. It is about preserving the past too, but we wanted to be playful. You have to keep the character and the ghosts of a theatre,” said Piper.
Brook does not want his successors at the Bouffes to feel impelled to follow his rules. “The first thing I wanted to establish – having spent all my life fighting against tradition – was to avoid [appointing] a successor who would have to try and prove my line.”
1981 La Tragédie de Carmen, after Prosper Mérimée, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
A radical reworking of the Bizet opera taking it closer to the dark themes of the original novel.
1981 La Cerisaie, by Anton Chekhov
A version of The Cherry Orchard in which the faded grandeur of Chekhov’s country estate setting has been stripped away from the first.
1985: The Mahabharata
A nine-hour version of the epic Indian poem that was created by Brook for the Avignon festival. It tells of the clash between two warring families and between good and evil.
1990 La Tempête, by William Shakespeare, in an adaptation Jean-Claude Carrière
Shakespeare’s desert island was represented by a rectangle of sand and a rock. A wooden crate represented the wrecked boat.
Ivory Coast embassy taken over in Paris
AFP – Supporters of Ivory Coast’s internationally accepted president Alassane Ouattara on Monday peacefully took over their country’s Paris embassy after loyalists of rival Laurent Gbagbo left.
“They have taken control of the embassy which was empty,” a police source told AFP. “They are indeed Ouattara supporters.”
The takeover came after Paris said it would recognise Ouattara’s envoy over that of embattled strongman Gbagbo, who has clung on to power since a disputed November 28 presidential vote.
“We did not damage anything, we just removed Gbagbo’s portrait from the wall,” said Marcel Youpeh, who represents the pro-Ouattara group RHDP in France.
“We no longer recognise those who were named by Gbagbo, they must go. What’s more France no longer recognises them either. Ivorians have come to say they’ve had enough.”
An AFP journalist who visited the embassy in the morning said that it appeared to be business as usual ahead of the takeover in the early afternoon.
Amid rising pressure from the international community for Gbagbo to stand down, Ouattara’s supporters called for a general strike in Ivory Coast, but the call appeared Monday to have had few followers.
“Following the call for a general strike until Laurent Gbagbo leaves, the RHDP youth movement decided embassy employees should also stop work,” Bouake Karamoko, who also represents the RHDP in France, said inside the mission.
Around 20 French police blocked the entrance to the mission, in Paris’ chic 16th arrondissement.
“The civil servants have left. There was no violence. We’re awaiting the arrival of the new ambassador,” Karamoko said, adding that the envoy named by Gbagbo, Pierre Kipre, had not been at the embassy on Monday.
“Around 30 people have entered the embassy peacefully,” said pro-Ouattara embassy employee Meite Mahmud, stood outside the building.
“This is proof that the Ivorian people are prepared to go as far as it takes to get the new government set up. The youths will stay until the new ambassador arrives,” she said.
The embassy in France, Ivory Coast’s former colonial ruler and a major trade partner, is one of the West African country’s most important diplomatic missions.
The move to recognise the new envoy came a day after French authorities grounded a plane belonging to Gbagbo at an airport in France in response to a request by the rival Ivorian government set up by Ouattara.
Gbagbo, who has been in power for 10 years and rejected UN-certified results that said Ouattara beat him in the November 28 run-off vote, has denounced what he calls a French-US “plot” to oust him.
International leaders have warned the West African country could plunge back into civil war if Gbagbo clings on. Major powers have threatened diplomatic and financial sanctions against Gbagbo and his camp.
Paris airport terminal evacuated due to snow on roof
Air France planes parked on the snow-covered tarmac at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Photograph: Reuters
Passengers at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris were evacuated from one of its terminals today amid fears for their safety because of an accumulation of snow on the roof.
Bernard Cathelain, the deputy director of the Paris airport authority ADP, said the terminal was still operating but passengers had been asked to move.
Le Monde reported that about 60cm of snow had built up on the roof of the terminal and about 2,000 people had been evacuated. Firefighters have been sent in to clear the snow.
The problem added to the woes at Charles de Gaulle, where freezing conditions and a strike at the main French factory producing de-icing fluid forced the cancellation of half – about 400 – of the flights scheduled for this morning. A supply of de-icing fluid (glycol) has been flown in from the USbut many passengers already face missing Christmas dinner, which is traditionally served tonight in France.
An Air France ground official, Michel Emeyriat, told the iTele TV channel that getting people home was “our goal for tonight” and long-haul flights were getting priority treatment.
The airport has suffered structural problems before. Four people at terminal 2E were killed in 2004 when the roof collapsed shortly after the building’s inauguration.
Fresh snowfall and cold weather has caused travel problems across Europe. Dusseldorf airport in Germany was shut for several hours this morning, causing the cancellation of about 65 flights.
The railway line between Hanover and Berlin was closed overnight because of ice-covered overhead electric wires but services resumed early today.
Irish Ferries added extra crossings between Britain and Ireland after about 40,000 travellers were left stranded or delayed at Dublin airport because of blizzards that caused the airport to close three times yesterday. Dublin airport had eight inches of snow yesterday and emergency staff cleared an estimated 120,000 tonnes of snow overnight. Aer Lingus and Ryanair said they were both attempting a full schedule today but feared more snow could be on the way.
The unexpected Irish cold snap is killing cows, sheep and pigs and particularly young salmon at Ireland’s fish farms, which are used to stock lakes in springtime for anglers.
Brussels airport was closed until 4pm (3pm GMT) today after 25cm of snow. fell. A statement on the airport’s website reads: “Because of heavy snowfall there is only one runway in use. We have delays and cancellations so please check the flight info before coming over to the airport. For the moment we don’t have enough capacity to handle incoming traffic. Only a few flights are accepted.”
By contrast, the situation in the UK was improving after days of problems. Major airports said services were operating largely as normal but Christmas travellers still had to contend with reduced rail services and icy roads. About a quarter of services were cancelled on some rail routes.
Categories: Living in France Tags: airport, evacuated, Paris, terminal
Paris mimes to remind raucous revellers to be quiet
When Paris banned smoking in bars and clubs three years ago, no one planned on a sneaky side-effect: legions of party-goers spilling onto the streets to smoke, chat — and keep the neighbours awake.
Bad blood between revellers and residents already grouchy at noise levels in the capital’s trendy quarters has curdled since the smoking ban took effect in nightlife spots in January 2008, a year after other public places.
Click to continue reading “Paris mimes to remind raucous revellers to be quiet”
Categories: Living in France Tags: Bertrand Delanoë, France, French people, Health, Paris, Public health, Smoking ban, Space, Tobacco control
Thanksgiving in Paris
If you want Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings but without the fuss and dirty dishes, here is a partial list of American style dining options:
Categories: Paris France Tags: American cuisine, Canadian cuisine, EUR, Food and drink, Hospitality/Recreation, Joe Allen, Meals, Paris, Pecan pie, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving dinner