French actor Gérard Depardieu appeared in a Paris court on Monday afternoon at the start of his three-day trial on charges of sexually assaulting two women during filming in 2021 of the feature film Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters), which he denies.
In a lively and to-the-point essay published this month in France, historian Sophie Bessis analyses the notion and roots of the phrase “Judeo-Christian civilisation”, a now commonly employed expression that is also an ideology. In her book, reviewed here by Joseph Confavreux, she argues that “this extraordinary semantic and ideological invention" is a concept that is fundamentally flawed, and a deception employed as a political weapon.
Rabbi Arié Engelberg was verbally insulted, punched and bitten by a 16-year-old boy on Saturday afternoon as he and his young son left a synagogue in the north-central French town of Orléans.
A pile up involving three police vehicles and a car they were chasing through Paris streets early on Saturday morning was caught on CCTV in scenes that resembled a Hollywood blockbuster, when ten police officers and three people from the fleeing car were slightly injured.
The power and influence of the owner of the Hachette publishing group, Vincent Bolloré, whose TV, radio and print media are used to propagate conservative and hard-right views, has prompted the ire of some independent booksellers in France who have taken to placing Hachette books on low shelves and limiting orders for them.
Five former members of the so-called Islamic State group were found guilty, two of them in absentia, of their various roles in the kidnapping, detention and torture of four French journalists in Syria 12 years ago, and were handed sentences of between 20 years in jail and life imprisonment.
The 153-year-old restaurant Georges Blanc, located in Vonas, close to the city of Lyon, which was first awarded a Michelin star in 1929 and gradually rising to the full three stars in 1981, has lost one, the restaurant guide book created by the eponymous tyre manufacturer has announced.
The French education ministry's decision to cancel a mass order for 800,000 copies of a comic book that gives a modern take on the story of the Beauty and the Beast, destined for distribution among children but which the ministry judged to be too grown-up for pre-teens, led the book's author, Julien Berjeaut, aka Jul, to complain it was 'as if Trump and his team were in charge'.
Drawings by the 19th-century French author, poet, playwright and essayist Victor Hugo, lesser known than his writings and described by his contemporary Vincent van Gogh as being 'astonishing things', are on display at London's Royal Academy until June 29th.
A spokeswoman for the US Department of Homeland Security has said a French scientist was refused entry into the country earlier this month because of classified information from Los Alamos National Laboratory on his electronic device, and not because of messaging exchanges critical of Donald Trump's policies found on his phone, as claimed by France's minister for higher education.
Prosecutors in north-west France have begun searching for further victims of Joël Le Scouarnec, a retired surgeon on trial for sexually abusing 299 mostly child victims, the majority when they were his patients, after the 74-year-old admitted to perpetrating a larger number of crimes.
Olivier Grondeau, 34, who was detained in Iran in October 2022 during a world tour and sentenced to five years in jail for 'conspiracy against the Islamic republic' has arrived back in France after his release earlier this week.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was questioned for the final time this week at his trial, alongside 12 other defendants, over the alleged funding of his 2007 presidential election campaign by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Sarkozy has insisted he is innocent of the charges of corruption, criminal conspiracy, receipt of the proceeds of the misappropriation of (Libyan) public funds, and illegal campaign financing, and this week denounced what he called “the basic premise” of the prosecution services that he is guilty. “I’m not a highwayman, I’m not a bandit”, he told the court this week. Karl Laske reports.
André Rives, 81, was hunting boar when he stumbled across a bear and her two cubs in the Pyrenees mountain range, where the animals are a protected species, when the mother attacked him before he managed to shoot her dead.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, rejecting a call by French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann for the return to France of the Statue of Liberty in reaction to the policies of Donald Trump, said the French should be grateful to the US that they 'are not speaking German right now'.
