French press review 22 June 2011

Le Monde gives pride of place to yesterday's announcement by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that there'll be no further class closures in French primary schools, at least until after the 2012 elections.

Somebody should be worried. 1,500 classes were closed this year, to the great annoyance of rural voters and their representatives.

T

he president said the closures were necessary to save money and use available resources as effectively as possible.

But that sort of talk can cost a man important votes when he's trying to get elected and already has the disadvantage of a popularity rating which would have embarrassed Joe Stalin.

Hence yesterday's announcement. No more class closures.

However, the basic principle of not replacing 50 per cent of teachers who leave the profession is to be maintained, as is the presidential determination to get rid of 16,000 posts in the education sector in the course of 2012. It just doesn't add up.

Either other divisions of the education establishment are going to have to pay the price, or else, as Le Monde suggests, the cuts will be cleverly masked to confuse the voters . . . by keeping kids under the age of three out of the school system, for example, or by cutting down on replacement teachers, or by simply increasing the number of children in each class.

Says one commentator interviewed by Le Monde, "the system has been pared down to the bone. Now, they're attacking the bone."

Le Figaro also looks to the school system for its main story, bizarrely headlined "Morality makes a major return in French schools".

This is because the Education Ministry feels that morality is rarely, if ever, dealt with in the current primary school system, and has launched an offensive to encourage teachers to discuss, on a daily basis, a moral principle with their students. The idea is to prepare students to be good citizens.

Critics of the proposal say it is old-fashioned, inefficient and silly.

But when you read, on an inside page of Le Monde, that a 13-year-old girl was killed this week, punched to death outside her school by the 15-year-old brother of one of her classmates because the two girls were in love with the same boy, you realise that it is high time the kids were reminded of a few basic facts about life in community.

Earlier this week, the Paris city council decided, once again, not to name a street after the revolutionary political figure, Maximilien Robespierre.

Old Max got himself a bad name for chopping off his rivals' heads during the post-revolutionary period known as the Terror, but he was not alone in that. And he did give us the national motto "Liberty, equality and brotherhood" as well as staunchly opposing slavery at a time when it would have made political and financial sense to look the other way.

Despite the fact that fellow "Terrorists", Danton, Saint-Just and Desmoulins all have Parisian streets bearing their names, Bad Max remains on the black list, an irony of history perhaps, since all three were put to death by Robespierre. Just before he lost his own head.

And you thought contemporary French politics was a dirty business!

The financial daily, Les Echos, is in gloomy form, as it gives headline honours to the recent series of failed or postponed stock market launches on the Paris exchange.

The television operation Canal+, the casino and betting group Barrière, and the glass-bottle manufacturer Verallia have all cancelled plans to raise cash by offering shares for sale.

All three cite market uncertainty and a nervous investment climate to explain their hesitations, which hesitations have made the markets even more uncertain and given normally nervous investors the jumping jitters.

Libération reports that the war in Libya is costing France more than two million euros every day.

If Moamer Kadhafi has not been moved to the exit by the middle of July, questions will be asked about whether or not the money is being wisely spent.

The problem is that the Defence Ministry has spent all the 630 million euros it has for external operations this year, and has called on the government for more money to throw at Kadhafi.

Sounds like a good reason to sack a few more teachers?