Inside France: Border woes and the bickering flatmates of French politics
No easy answers
This week France is reeling from the
killing of a teaching assistant
by a 14-year-old pupil at a school in eastern France. Mélanie, 31, mother of a toddler and step-mum to an older child, was attacked as she supervised a routine bag search at the beginning of the school day.
The details that have emerged about this case so far are distinctly disquieting, since the attacker - a teenager with no record of legal or health troubles - has told police that he decided in advance to kill a member of the school staff, apparently in response to being told off the previous week.
It's clear from the response from France's teaching unions and politicians that no-one really knows how to respond to this kind of attack, and several of the suggested responses - a
social media ban for under 15s
, metal detectors in schools - would have made no difference to this case.
The sense of puzzlement at an apparently senseless crime reminds me of the British Netflix drama
Adolescence
which - it was announced before the attack -
is to be screened in French schools
. Although it has a lot of topical talking points, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham's four-parter carefully avoids blaming any one thing for the shocking actions of its lead character which is, for me, one of its great strengths as a drama - a reminder that sometimes there are no easy answers.
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Talking France
We discuss the attack, and the general issue of violence in French schools, in the
latest Talking France podcast
. We also had some fun looking at some world-changing French inventions, plus a few 'French' things that were actually invented elsewhere. Listen
here
or on the link below.
Violent flatmates
Prime minister François Bayrou is celebrating - if that's the right word - six months in his job this week. While that might not sound especially impressive, there were people offering odds that he wouldn't even last six weeks when he accepted this
cadeau empoisonné
.
Not only is his job security practically non-existent, but Bayrou has a tense relationship with his ultimate boss Emmanuel Macron, who has been forced to nominate two prime ministers from rival political camps since his party lost its majority in parliamentary elections last year.
An insider this week
told Le Parisien newspaper
: "
Entre eux, c'est quand même violent
" - it's still violent between them, although they presumably mean violent in the verbal sense, rather than revealing that the two of them engage in fisticuffs in the office.
Although not quite a
cohabitation
in the classic sense, this is still something of a forced pairing. Although I know the meaning of the political term - when a
president is forced to appoint a PM from the opposition
party - whenever I hear the word I can't get rid of the mental image of the two of them forced into a flatshare (which would in fact be a
colocation
), endlessly bickering over bathroom time and who ate the last bit of cheese.
I still can't believe no-one has made a French comedy about this.
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Typo of the week
A very unfortunate single misplaced letter in this job advert turns UK-France 'border' control into '
bordel
' control -
bordel
being the French word for
a fuck-up or general chaos
.
This might be sadly apt for the UK-France border which ever since Brexit has seen chaotic scenes at ports like Dover during peak travel times, meanwhile remaining a source of political tension over migrant/asylum seeker boat crossings from France.
READ ALSO
:
EES: Why is the UK-France border such a problem?✎
Still, at least this job advert's intended audience of interpreters will get the joke. Maybe authorities can save face by pretending that it's a translation test?
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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