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Swap London fogs for Paris frogs: France woos the Brits

Paris's business district, La Defense, has launched a playful advertising campaign to lure away companies based in Britain seeking a new European base of operations following Brexit.

Published: 17 October 2016 15:40 CEST

Swap London fogs for Paris frogs: France woos the Brits

Photo: Hautes de Seine/Defacto

Hoardings of a frog sporting a tie with the colours of the French flag and asking “Tired of the fogs? Try the frogs!” are to go up in the City, London's business district, as well as at train stations and airports in the British capital.

The attractiveness of London as a European base of operations for financial firms has been thrown into question following the surprise approval of British voters of a referendum to leave the European Union.

Moreover, the new government of Prime Minister Theresa May appears to favour an exit from the single market, which could threaten London's status as Europe's financial capital.

Paris, Frankfurt, Dublin and Luxembourg city have all mobilised to attract companies that need a new European base for their operations.

“Paris La Defense is a turn-key destination, with a flowering economic ecosystem in the heart of Europe that offers an unbeatable level of culture, quality of live and dynamism,” said Marie-Celie Guillaume, head of the Defacto firm which manages the business quarter.

The high rise district to the west of the French capital is home to 500 companies, 40 percent of which are foreign, and 160,000 people are employed there. Rental prices are a third of those in the City.

The frog billboard comes after French authorities said in September they would fast-track the process for British-based financial firms to decamp to France after Britain quits the European Union.

Bienvenue en France: France cuts red tape for UK firms

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French barber still trimming at 90

“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” the 90 year old said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.

“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than €2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off sad thoughts.

“I’m not grumpy getting up [to go to work],” he said.

France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be the country’s oldest active barber.

“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.

“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off.”

According to national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.

Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.

“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.

German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.

“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said. “Luckily, he did.”

He said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947.

But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased quiffs in the 1950s, to 1970s bowl cuts.

The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.

“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.

That same decade, the Aids epidemic worried customers, who understood little about the illness at the time.

“People were scared,” Amilhastre said. “They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer.”

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.

Behind his bar, Surre said he remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne – you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.

He is one of several older customers to regularly drop by Achille’s – even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.

Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut. “With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.

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