French Prime Minister François Bayrou gave a laborious, muddled, misleading and aggressive presentation when he appeared before a parliamentary commission hearing on Wednesday into his role in the scandal of repeated sexual assaults and physical cruelty against pupils at a Catholic school in his political fiefdom in south-west France. He launched into attacks against the commission itself, against a whistle-blowing teacher, the media in general and Mediapart, which began revealing the depth of the scandal earlier this year, in particular. Mathilde Goanec, David Perrotin and Antton Rouget report.
French President Emmanuel Macron appeared for three hours on national television on Tuesday evening to debate policy issues with political opponents in an effort to return to the domestic front he has largely abandoned since his dissolution of parliament last year, but no clear initiatives emerged.
One of cinema's glitzy highspots of the year, the Cannes film festival opened on Tuesday to concerns over President Donald Trump's recent threat to impose 100 percent tarrifs on foreign-made films presented in the US, when the industry is already grappling with the competition from streaming platforms.
The German government and the French presidency have dismissed claims by Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman and Russian social media platforms that Emmanuel Macron, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and British prime minister Keir Starmer snorted cocaine together on the train that took them to Kiev last weekend.
French President Emmanuel Macron is to make a state visit to Britain from July 8th-10th, when King Charles and Queen Camilla will host the president and his wife Brigitte Macron at Windsor Castle.
Armed would-be kidnappers of the daughter of a cryptocurrency businessman and her two-year-old child were fought off in a Paris street on Tuesday and forced to flee, in an incident which follows two kidnappings of cryptocurrency tycoons in France this year.
The US socialite and businesswoman, 44, wept in court in Paris as she recounted the night in October 2016 when a gang burst into her hotel suite and stole an estimated 10 million dollars-worth of jewellery.
French actor Gérard Depardieu has been handed an 18-month jail sentence after a Paris court found him guilty of groping two women during the shooting of a film in 2021, after which his lawyer announced he would appeal the verdict.
French-Algerian journalist and novelist Kamel Daoud has been accused by a 31-year-old Algerian woman, Saâda Arbane, of “stealing” her true-life story to create the heroine of his acclaimed book “Houris”, which last year won France’s prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Arbane survived the massacre of her family by jihadists in Algeria during the country’s 1992-2002 civil war, when her throat was cut, leaving her permanently handicapped. She spent eight years in therapy in the care of Daoud’s psychiatrist wife, and accuses the novelist of using her medical file to build his heroine character in Houris. After filing complaints against Daoud in both France and Algeria, amid a climate of high tensions between both countries, Algiers has now issued international warrants for Daoud’s arrest. Nejma Brahim reports.
Mezzo-soprano Célestine Galli-Marié was the first to perform the lead role in Georges Bizet's operatic masterpiece Carmen in 1875, and her influence in bestowing the character with headstrong and sensual qualities which remain to this day is finally recognised with the publication this year of an autobiography of the star and an album of her greatest hits.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Nancy, eastern France, on Friday where the two men signed a treaty in which each country is committed to militarily helping the other in case of an attack on either.
The trial in north-west France of retired surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, on charges of raping and sexually assaulting 299 people, of whom 296 were his patients, most of them children, has been examining the horrific history of the surgeon’s vast catalogue of attacks, and how he was able to find employment caring for children despite a conviction for possession of child pornography. It has also been hearing the testimonies of the victims, nearly all now adults, some of who were joined on the witness stand by their parents. Their stories tell of how the consequences of sexual crimes can destroy family relationships. Hugo Lemonier was in court in Vannes to hear one very poignant case.
Former French prime minister Gabriel Attal is among a group of parliamentarians who have prepared draft legislation to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 amid a virulent anti-Semitic campaign, and finally rehabilitated after serving several years of a sentence to life in a penal colony, to the rank of brigadier general.
In his first visit to Europe since becoming Syria's president in January, Ahmed al-Shara, who overthrew dictator Bashar al-Assad last December, held talks in Paris on Wednesday with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron when he confided that his country was holding indirect talks with Israel to 'calm down' the military confrontation between the two.
In this joint op-ed article for Mediapart, the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux, former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, French-Tunisian historian Sophie Bessis, and the Lebanese novelist Dominique Eddé, call on France and the European Union to “clearly and at last” take a stand against the Israeli government’s “policy of destruction” in Gaza and the Middle East.
