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John KeigerThe Spectator |
Yesterday morning, the British Prime Minister travelled to Paris at the invitation of the French President to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown...
Wars begin and end in controversy. The war that ended 106 years ago today with the armistice of 11 November 1918 carried the germ of controversy...
It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into...
France’s 73-year-old prime minister, Michel Barnier, underwent surgery last weekend for a lesion on his upper neck. According to the government...
France has been without an official government for seven weeks, the longest in the history of the Fifth Republic. A caretaker prime minister and...
In the last years of Louis XVI’s reign, French finances were in a parlous state. State debt had ballooned, its servicing became exorbitant, and...
Writing of the state of France in the twilight of the fateful Second Empire, the left-wing journalist Henri Rochefort observed: ‘France contains 36...
French voters are looking on aghast at the state of their country’s democracy. Faced with stalemate in the French National Assembly since the 7 July...
Against a backdrop of considerable tension – barricaded city centre shop-fronts and 30,000 police on standby – a radically divided France has...
French president Emmanuel Macron has phoned Sir Keir Starmer to congratulate him on his appointment as prime minister. Macron’s Twitter account...
This week France has drifted from surprise to confusion and panic as Sunday’s second round vote approaches. The bien-pensant centre-left...
The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even...
There is one big winner from this evening’s exit polls for the first round of the French legislative elections – and several big losers. Exit...
In Brussels over the last two days EU heads of state and government have been carving up the ‘top jobs’. France is represented by President...
Of the 20 or so opinion polls since France’s president Emmanuel Macron announced a snap election this month, the vast majority put Marine Le Pen’s...
French and international media cannot break their fixation with the ‘extreme right’. They continue to target the Rassemblement National (RN) as...
The much loved and quintessentially French singer, Françoise Hardy, born in 1944, died last night. French certainties are disappearing. The Fifth...
It is said that the EU thrives on crises. These are what spurs it on to the ultimate goal of wider and deeper integration. But yesterday’s European...
The French presidential list score in the European elections ‘is not a good result for the parties which defend Europe’. So declared president...
Standard & Poor’s downgrading of France’s credit rating on Friday is a hammer blow to President Macron’s reputation. The ratings agency has...
Compare and contrast the frenetic, largely unwanted and unnecessary manoeuvres to create a common EU defence union, with the methodical, steadfast...
Emmanuel Macron is thinking and saying the unthinkable for a French President of the Republic. This weekend he suggested that French nuclear weapons...
At first, French elites haughtily dismissed the Rassemblement National (RN) and its voters. Then they were in denial about its rise. Now they are...
Riding high in the polls with a 20-point lead, the Labour party is preparing for government. Across the Channel with a 10-15 point poll lead in the...
Its an old ruse to deploy foreign policy for domestic purposes. France has a long history in that vein. General de Gaulle was adept at using popular...
Last week was a good time to bury bad news in France. While French and international media were focused on president Macron’s Trump-like maverick...
On Friday President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Volodymyr Zelensky to the Elysée with great fanfare. The Ukrainian president was in Paris to sign a...
President Emmanuel Macron and his freshly installed Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, appointed a new French cabinet this week. It is little more than a...
France’s Emmanuel Macron, the Fifth Republic’s youngest president, has just appointed its youngest prime minister, 34-year-old Gabriel Attal. The...
A French member of the board of Airbus – the giant European aircraft and aerospace group – once told me that the French thought of it as their...
You can tell that French elections are in the air because legal proceedings are being taken against a leading figure of the French right. So it was...