Sébastien Lecornu, 39, was on Monday appointed by Emmanuel Macron as France’s new prime minister, tasked with pushing the president’s policy programme through France’s hung parliament – there where his predecessors failed and where his reputation as an expert in the art of political manoeuvring will face its sternest test yet. However, Lecornu, whose ideological convictions are unclear, and who is cited in a judicial investigation into favouritism, also has a mixed record of success as minister. Mediapart political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani dresses a portrait of he who is widely regarded as Macron’s last chance for avoiding fresh legislative elections, and the risk of the far-right obtaining a majority.
Following the surprise announcement by French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Monday (photo) that he will submit his government to a confidence vote in France’s hung parliament on September 8th, which several opposition parties have announced they will reject, his fate now appears sealed after less than nine months in office. As Pauline Graulle reports, the parties of the Left and Right are now preparing for the post-Bayrou period, with the looming possibility of new snap parliamentary elections amid the deepening political chaos.
A state of famine in the Gaza Strip was officially declared on Friday by a UN-affiliated body of experts, the IPC, that evaluate food insecurity around the world. The famine is declared in the Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City with a population of one million and which now faces a large-scale Israeli military offensive. Mediapart’s Gwenaëlle Lenoir interviewed Jérôme Grimaud, the emergency aid coordinator in Gaza for the French NGO Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), who told her of the horrific consequences of the famine, notably on hospital patients.
There has been outcry in France after Raphaël Graven, aka “Jean Pormanove”, or simply “JP”, died on Monday in front of the cameras of an online streaming channel whose viewers paid to watch him being subjected for 12 days to cruel physical and psychological abuse. After an autopsy found no external or internal injury to explain his death, toxicological tests have been ordered. Questions remain over the precise circumstances of his death, and others over the antics of his fellow streamers, the failure of relevant authorities to intervene beforehand, the laisser-faire attitude of the Australian platform Kick which hosted the channel, and why viewers watch the disturbing content.
The heatwave that hung over much of France since early August, with temperatures exceeding 40°C in parts of the country, finally lifted this week. In parallel, and less talked about, a marine heatwave was in progress in the Mediterranean Sea, with water temperatures off the French coast reaching close to 30°C. It was the last of many recorded over recent years in the waters of the Mediterranean which, over the first half of 2025, reached their warmest-ever on record. The acceleration of the sea’s heatwaves is alarming scientists, and leave behind decimated ecosystems. Mickaël Correia reports.
France’s south-east region of Provence is famed for its production of lavender and hybrid lavender, called lavandin, a symbol of the summer when the blue and mauve flowers of the plants explode in colour and heady fragrance. But many of the century-old plantations are facing an increasing double threat to their existence, from over-production and climate change. Pierre Isnard-Dupuy reports on the crisis from France’s Valensole plateau, traditionally a major centre of the country's lavender trade, where some are turning to alternative, and notably organic, methods for growing the coveted aromatic plant.
Israel has claimed responsibility for the assassinations in Gaza on August 10th of a group of Gazan journalists working for the TV channel Al Jazeera, and alleged that one of them, reporter Anas al-Sharif, was "the head of a Hamas terrorist cell". The Israeli military have carried out an unprecedented number of executions of Palestinian journalists, writes Mediapart co-founder Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. He argues that the slaughter of local reporters in Gaza, to where no international media can gain access, is in order to eliminate the evidence of the crimes being committed there.
The gigantic wildfire which, in barely more than 48 hours, burnt through about 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of vegetation and forestland in southern France this week has finally been halted. For an explanation of the magnitude of this exceptional wildfire, the tactics employed to contain it, and the lessons to be learned from it, Mickaël Correia turned to Éric Brocardi, a senior firefighter and spokesman for France's National Federation of Firefighters, who described the events this week as a "turning point".
Beginning in May, Mediapart has been publishing a series of reports regularly sent to it from inside the Gaza Strip by two young Palestinians. Nour Elassy, a 22-year-old journalist, who is also a poet and writer, and Ibrahim Badra, a 23-year-old journalist and human rights activist, have been chronicling the grim reality of life and death in Gaza as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to wage a genocidal war against the population of about 2.1 million. Elassy last month arrived in France to study political sciences, while Badra remains in Gaza where “famine shows no mercy”, he writes in this latest despatch. “It steals our lives silently, weakens our bodies, and leaves us to face death alone.”
In 1899 a French-led military expedition left widespread carnage and death in its wake as it marched across parts of West Africa. Soldiers from the so-called Voulet-Chanoine Mission – otherwise known as the Central African Mission – looted, killed and raped in areas that are today part of the nation of Niger. Descendants of those communities hit by the military mission's rampage are now calling on France, via organisations at the United Nations, to acknowledge and make amends for those colonial crimes. Paris has flatly refused, amid a major breakdown in diplomatic relations with Niger. Report by Rémi Carayol.
