Maxime Chapoutier's family have been Rhône Valley winemakers for more than 200 years, and he is now taking advantage of Brexit to circumnavigate EU rules to blend Australian and French wines in the UK, but the audacious mixing of grapes from the two hemispheres is not to everyone's taste.
David Balland, a co-founder of Ledger, which sells physical devices for storing crypto assets, and his partner were freed after their kidnapping on Tuesday in central France.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday published a ruling against France over a divorce case in which the wife was found to have been at fault for the collapse of her marriage because the mother of four had refused, over a period of several years, to have sexual relations with her husband. For the French justice system, the ECHR ruling marks the end of a notion of “marital duty” which has previously been cited by courts in apportioning the blame in divorce cases. "Marriage is no longer a sexual servitude," commented one of the divorcee's lawyers after the ruling. Marine Turchi reports.
The largest exhibition ever of the works of British artist David Hockney, including canvases that have never before been displayed, is to open in Paris in April at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which Hockney said will also include his most recent paintings, adding 'I think it’s going to be very good'.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou said that if Europe does nothing to counter the 'dominating' politics of US President Donald Trump, who was sworn in for a new term of office on Monday, 'we will be crushed, we will be marginalised'.
Champagne sales fell in 2024 by 7.2% on the domestic market while exports were down by almost 11%, which the head of the festive wine's trade body said was due to economic worries, political instability and conflicts around the globe, underlining that 'Champagne is a real barometer of the state of mind of consumers'.
French editorial cartoonist Aurel (real name Aurélien Froment) this month published an essay in the format of an album warning of the steady decline of his profession, which he argues is due to the economic difficulties of the printed press, and the hijacking of what is termed the “Charlie spirit”, the term used to describe the irreverence exercised by the team of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who were gunned down by Jihadist terrorists in January 2015. “Colleagues were assassinated because of their cartoons on religious themes,” he tells Mediapart’s Yunnes Abzouz. “But that’s not a reason it should become the alpha and omega of our freedom of expression.”
Ian Thomas Cleary, 31, was detained in France after an Interpol red notice was issued for his arrest and extradition to the US where he is wanted for the alleged sexual assault in 2013 of a fellow student who, years later, he sent messages to on Facebook, including one in which he admitted raping her.
Falling bread consumption in France has placed in question the future of some of the country's flour mills, but such fears have dissipated with new and steep demand from the US for French ground meal, and which almost doubled year-on-year in 2024, despite its comparative high price.
A French court has ruled that local authorities in central France must review their order that a boar, found in the wild by a horse breeder after it was abandoned by its mother, and which is now fully domesticated, should be handed to a sanctuary or euthanised.
Five days after his private funeral, hundreds of admirers turned out on Thursday in homage to the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen at a ceremony held at the Paris church of Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce, including political figures from the hard- and far-right. The event capped numerous homages already paid to Le Pen, who died on January 7th at the age of 96, including from Emannuel Macron and his prime minister François Bayrou, and which have skirted the reality of the ideology behind Le Pen’s hate-filled outbursts, jibes and speeches throughout his long political career. Youmni Kezzouf dresses a list.
In a policy speech before France's parliament, the country's new prime minister, centre-right veteran François Bayrou, warned of a 'new world disorder, that threatens all equilibrium' following the re-election of Donald Trump as US president, and that those who embodied that threat 'without complex' include tech billionaire Elon Musk.
In a much-awaited speech setting out the major markers of his government's policy, France's new prime minister François Bayrou announced on Monday he will re-open talks on a possible revision of Emmanuel Macron's unpopular pension reforms, in a bid to garner the support of socialist MPs and their allies in order to survive a no-confidence vote in the hung French parliament.
In the small town of Saint-Flour in central France, the local cathedral raised funds to repair the building's 19th-century choir organ through a share of profits from the sale of hams cured in its belfry, an unusual illustration of the plight of an estimated 2,300 French religious edifices in poor condition and lacking financial support.
An attempt to exploit the impact of Operation 'Red Hands' – the painting of hand symbols on the Holocaust memorial in Paris in May 2024 - was made via a network of several thousand fake accounts on X. French analysts found that all these online bots - plus a curious French media outlet which tried to stir up controversy - were ultimately controlled by the Kremlin. Matthieu Suc reports in this third and concluding part of a Mediapart investigation into how France foiled a Russian destabilisation plot.
