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INSIDE FRANCE

Inside France: Budget airlines, cowbells and lunch

From headline-grabbing ideas on cheap flights to the future of Alpine tourism, via celebrations at France's winning way with lunch, our weekly newsletter Inside France looks at what we have been talking about in France this week.

Inside France: Budget airlines, cowbells and lunch
Photo by JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT / AFP

Inside France is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

Eating champions

Everyone loves topping a league table – and I’ve especially enjoyed the reaction to this OECD one, which reveals that the French are global winners when it comes to time spent eating and drinking – spending double the amount of time at the table as the poor old Americans down in last place.

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has spent time here that meals are prioritised in France – it’s common for workers to take at least an hour break for lunch, sometimes two, and there’s virtually no culture of snatching a sandwich as you work (in fact, eating at your desk is technically illegal).

This is also reflected in one of the things that visitors to France frequently complain about – slow service in restaurants. Yes, service in France is slow, but that’s intentional. The idea is that you relax and take your time, enjoying the experience of a good meal with friends or family – it’s not a competition to bolt your food and get out as quickly as possible. 

Mountain summer

An alarming new report in the journal Nature Climate Change predicts that 90 percent of European ski resorts will face a critical shortage of snow in the years to come, due to ever-warming temperatures.

This is already happening in many of France’s lower-altitude resorts and there’s a push towards making areas like the Alps and the Pyrenees year-round destinations, so that tourism revenue no longer relies on snow.

Having just returned from a weekend in the mountains in Savoie, close to the historic spa town of Aix-les-Bains, I can confirm that summer tourism in the Alps is certainly no hardship (even if the noise of the cowbells distracted me from my book and forced me to open a bottle of local wine instead). 

Ticket to fly

Talking of environmental issues, France’s transport minister Clément Beaune (a man who knows how to grab a headline) has called for an EU-wide minimum price on plane tickets, saying that €10 flights ‘are no longer possible’ during a climate crisis.

Like anything involving the EU, this will not be a quick or simple process, but it follows a consistent line from France which has already limited domestic flights and plans to increase the tax on plane tickets in the 2024 budget.

Factcheck: Is France really banning cheap flights?

Residents in France are of course fortunate to have a great train network as an alternative – apart from the environmental considerations, going by train really makes the journey part of the holiday, rather than something to be endured as you cram yourself like a pretzel into a Ryanair seat and contemplate whether to pay €7 for a glass of dodgy wine. 

French TV recommendation

If you haven’t already seen it, I really cannot recommend highly enough the French series Le Bureau des Légendes. A Canal Plus production, it’s only available via the pay-TV channel or on DVD but I was lucky enough to get the box set for my birthday.

I finally finished it this week and I’m still processing just how stunningly good it is – smart, sexy, emotional, intelligent and with plot twists galore.

Inside France is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

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INSIDE FRANCE

Inside France: French lose the plot, sports stars speak out and Paris prices fall

From the latest on the increasingly crazy French elections to the powers of a president, the influence of sports stars and the lustre of the Olympics, our weekly newsletter Inside France looks at what we have been talking about in France this week.

Inside France: French lose the plot, sports stars speak out and Paris prices fall

Inside France is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

Losing the plot?

Welcome to another crazy week in French politics – I’m not saying that this election is getting to me, but the other night I dreamed I was having an argument with far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. I think I need a holiday.

France might need a holiday too – the political discourse is getting increasingly wild, leading to our columnist John Lichfield to declare that the country has “taken leave of its senses”

Latest polling suggests that Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party would take the biggest vote share at 33 percent, followed by the increasingly fragile leftist coalition Nouveau Front Populaire with 29 percent and then Emmanuel Macron’s centrist group with 22 percent. Those figures would give none of the blocks an overall majority, instead leading to a total parliamentary deadlock.

French election breakdown: All the latest from the campaign trail

Earlier this week ‘Article 16 of the constitution’ was trending on French Twitter; this is the one that lays out the powers afforded to the president versus the prime minister, as people tried to work out what – if any – decisions Macron would be able to take in the final three years of his mandate.

READ ALSO: What does a French prime minister actually do

The satirical magazine Le Canard Enchâiné perhaps sums it up best in its cartoon, showing a man about to shoot himself in the head with a gun labelled ‘Rassemblement National’ and saying “We never tried this before”.

The Canard Enchainé’s cartoon as posted on Instagram

Sports stars engaged

On a more positive note, it’s been nice to see France’s biggest sports stars use their platforms to encourage people to vote, and speaking out against hatred and intolerance and in favour of diversity and inclusion.

I could not disagree more with the Spain goalkeeper Unai Simon, who criticised Kylian Mbappé’s call for people to vote against the far right, saying that footballers should “leave politics to other people”.

The whole point of living in a democracy is that politics belongs to everybody. As Mbappé said: “The Euros are very important in our careers, but first and foremost we are citizens and I don’t think we can be disconnected from the world around us.”

And I admit I’m biased about this – I’ve been a fan ever since I saw him make his professional debut at the age of 18 in my then-hometown of Castres – but I was also pleased to see French rugby legend Antoine Dupont taking a stand on another social issue, appearing on the front cover of LGBTQ magazine Têtu to decry homophobia (although the cover photo did rather make him look like he had forgotten his shades and was squinting into bright sunlight).

Talking France

We of course discuss all the election latest with John Lichfield in the latest episode of the Talking France podcast – and in what was perhaps linked to my need for a holiday we’re also discussing places to visit in France this summer.

Amid warnings of over-tourism we’re taking a look at the places predicted to be most crowded this summer – and suggesting some alternatives. Listen here or on the link below.

Fun and Games

It was thought that people might avoid Paris this summer – but the combination of good deals on the Olympic ticket resale site plus travel and accommodation costs dropping back to seasonal norms has seen a flurry of people booking a last-minute trip to the Games.

Personally I always thought the ‘everyone fleeing the capital’ narrative was a little over-played, but it’s been interesting to see that attempted price-gouging has also largely failed – at the start of the year there were Airbnb listings for frankly insane prices (I saw one that was €7,000 for two weeks), while now costs are largely at the summer average.

Paris travel deals to take advantage of as prices fall ahead of Olympics

Wrestling 

If you’re a Games fan I highly recommend the temporary exhibition at Paris’ Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (a strong contender for the capital’s best museum, in my opinion) on the history of Olympics and their politics.

It also includes this statue which we’re told depicts ‘wrestling’ at the Olympics in antiquity. If you say so . . .

Photo: The Local

Inside France is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

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