Presenting the key features of the government’s planned draft legislation for the 2026 budget on Tuesday, French Prime Minister François Bayrou adopted a grim, alarmist style, warning that the country was in “mortal danger” at this “critical moment”, his measures representing a “last stop before the cliff” and the “crushing of France by debt”, justifying budget cuts totalling a massive 44 billion euros. Mathias Thépot reports.
In a much-awaited speech on Tuesday, France's prime minister, François Bayrou, presented his government's plan for reducing the indebted state's spending by 44 billion euros, including cutting back the numbers of public service employees, the introduction of a 'white year' in 2026 when welfare benefits and pensions are frozen, and the scrapping of two public holidays.
France has officially expressed its readiness for 'bilateral dialogue' over the theft of artifacts looted during a French army colonial campaign in present-day Niger in 1899, although it has stopped short of acknowledging responsibility for the simultaneous massacre of thousands of unarmed locals.
Gisèle Pelicot, who was widely admired for choosing to appear publicly for the trial of her former husband who organised his wife's repeated rape by strangers after drugging her, has been made a 'knight' of France's highest award for merit, the Legion of Honour.
Representatives of the pro- and anti-independence camps of France’s strife-torn Pacific Ocean territory of New Caledonia on Saturday announced they had reached an agreement for a package of institutional and economic reforms aimed at defusing the volatile situation on the archipelago, where 14 people died in a separatist revolt last year. It includes the creation of a state of New Caledonia, but which would remain a part of France. “We’ve given work to jurists for the next twenty years,” jokingly commented one negotiator. Ellen Salvi reports.
In a speech on the eve of the Bastille Day military parade, and hot on the heels of a rare public appearance of his chief of military staff who warned that France had become Russia's primary target in Europe, President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday announced a steep increase in military spending, saying 'There are no more rules, it’s the law of the strongest that wins'.
The French president said the EU should be ready for a trade war and to stand up to his US counterpart who, before his threat this weekend to impose 30% tariffs on EU goods, had been expected to approve a 10% tariff agreement with the bloc.
Pro- and anti-independence representatives from France's strife-torn Pacific Ocean territory of New Caledonia, meeting together near Paris, have reached agreement on a new status for the archipelago, to be submitted for parliamentary approval, which would allow islanders dual French and New Caledonian 'nationality', creating greater powers for the local parliament, while also opening up the right to vote to those who have settled in New Caledonia for ten years or more.
Financial weekly magazine Challenges reports that an unprecedented number of wealthy people were asking to be removed from its yearly ranking of the richest individuals in France over fears that detailing their fortune would attract criminal interest.
For the yearly Avignon Festival, the largest performing arts festival in Europe, held every summer in the former papal city in southern France, rising summer teperatures have become an existential threat, when days sweltering under more than 40 Celsius are no longer a rarity, causing serious effects on audiences and workers.
The sails of the red windmill on top of the landmark Moulin Rouge cabaret in the Montmartre district of Paris are back rotating again more than a year after they collapsed to the ground, an event celebrated by a street party of the venue's dancers performing the high-kick can-can dance that made its fame in the late 19th century.
The very first Birkin bag, a design collaboration between French fashion house Hermès and the Paris-based late British actress and singer Jane Birkin, has been sold at a Sotheby's auction for 8.58 million euros (10 million dollars) to a Japanese buyer, a record price for a handbag.
At a joint press conference in London, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who was wrapping up a three-day state visit to the UK, announced their agreement over a pilot scheme for migrants reaching Britain in small boats whereby some arrivals would be detained and returned to France while the UK would accept an equivalent number of asylum seekers.
Lawyer Maxime Tessier, 33, a defence counsel for former surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec, who was handed a 20-year jail sentence in May for variously raping and sexually assaulting 299 victims, mostly child patients, died in an apparent suicide overnight on Tuesday. Amid the shocked reactions to Tessier’s death, which one psychiatrist said may have been the result of vicarious trauma caused by the horror of Le Scouarnec’s crimes, a number criticised the lack of psychological support offered to lawyers faced with such harrowing cases. Hugo Lemonier and Mathilde Mathieu report.
French police on Wednesday raided the headquarters of Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement National party as part of an investigation into suspected illegal funding of its election campaigns in 2022 and 2024, a move described by the party's chairman, Jordan Bardella, as 'a serious attack on pluralism and democratic choice'.
