Last March, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was stabbed to death in Paris. This murder was the latest in a series of anti-Semite crimes that started a few years ago. In reaction, the Israeli Prime Minister urged French Jews to flee the country. These crimes, as heinous as they are, must be put into perspective, according to New York Times...
When it came to foreign policy, Barack Obama often sided with Angela Merkel rather than François Hollande. Things have changed since the election of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron. “Macron has established himself as the [American] president’s go-to leader in Europe,” writes Bloomberg. The two men have repeatedly clashed over climate change and international trade, but there seems to be...
"I think artificial intelligence will disrupt all the different business models and it’s the next disruption to come,” said Emmanuel Macron to the American magazine Wired. “So I want to be part of it.” The French president has recently announced that France will spend €1.5 billion within the next five years to catch up with the United States and China...
The Cannes Film Festival has changed its rules. This year, movies exclusively released on streaming platforms such as Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, or Amazon will be barred from the competition. Two Netflix movies entered the competition last year: The Meyerowitz Stories by Noah Baumbach and Okja by Bong Joon-ho. “When we selected these two films, I thought I could convince Netflix to release them in cinemas," explained Thierry Frémaux,...
American journalist Pamela Druckerman, who has been living in Paris and writing about French parenting for 14 years, is noticing a trend: "France is starting to seem like an upbeat, can-do country, while Americans are less sure that everything will be O.K." "The French haven’t become magically cheerful," she writes. But since Emmanuel Macron was elected last June, "there’s a...
On March 6, the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club lost to Madrid (1 to 3). However, French supporters rejoiced. They celebrated the return of their favorite athlete, French soccer superstar and Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane, who has been living in Spain since 2000. An unknown player until the 1998 World Cup, where he scored two goals that ultimately allowed France...
Female chefs are underrepresented in the Michelin guide, writes the New York Times. This year, the famous red guide awarded new stars to 57 French restaurants, only two of which have female chefs. The newspaper observes that the Michelin guide has "collided with the #MeToo moment." The are only 16 female chefs among the 621 Michelin-starred restaurants in France, and...
The letter Catherine Deneuve cosigned last January criticizing the #MeToo movement is "dangerous," said Marlène Schiappa. The 35-year old French Secretary of State in charge of Equality between Women and Men is the antithesis of the actress. Marlène Schiappa, writes the New Yorker, represents the modern French woman. She is a mother (she has two young daughters), an ambitious entrepreneur...
After discovering the work of choreographer Merce Cunnimghamm during a trip to New York in 1953, Bénédicte Pesle dedicated her life to promoting American stage artists in France. She was 90 when she passed away on January 17, 2018. She worked humbly backstage, stayed away from the spotlight, and considered herself a "secrétaire d’artistes," a secretary of artists, rather than...
To scout new members, soccer clubs took to exploring the Ile-de-France région, the area surrounding Paris which has become the world's top talent pool for professional soccer players. The area alone has provided a third of the French national team and more talent than Asia, Africa and North America combined. On rudimentary sports complexes ringed by dingy apartment blocks, children...
The French publishing house Gallimard announced that in May it will release Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Ecrits Polémiques (Polemical Writings), a series of three anti-Semitic pamphlets written by the beloved French author between 1936 and 1941. The Washington Post is questioning the timeliness of this decision as well as how to put into context pamphlets written in support of German and Italian...
Paris will host the 2024 summer Olympic Games. The head of the International Olympic Committee sees the event as "a win-win situation" and Emmanuel Macron has called it a "victory." But how will France benefit from hosting the Games? The 1900 Olympics resulted in the construction of several famous Parisian monuments such as the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais....
The development of France’s technological sector was certainly not sparked by the election of Emmanuel Macron. Long overshadowed by England and Germany, the emerging “French Tech” is now thought to have begun with the 2008 crisis and the burst of the dot-com bubble. Young French graduates are now spurning traditional industries and civil-service jobs in favor of innovation and start-up...
When it comes to gender in the French language, “the masculine always outweighs the feminine.” For example, if four female basketball players (joueuses) were joined by a male player, the group would become five joueurs. Does this mean the French language contributes to gender inequality? It does according to 314 French intellectuals, who signed a manifesto questioning this grammatical gender...
Les Trentes Glorieuses, the thirty-year period in France after World War II, saw a period of celebration and enlightenment in Paris that rebuilt the city as a capital of fashion, tourism, and, as American historian Justin Spring reminds us, food. Spring’s latest book, The Gourmand’s Way, chronicles the Parisian adventures of six American food writers — A.J. Liebling, Alice B....
On January 24, 1793, when France officially broke ties with England during a bloody revolution that had just seen the beheading of King Louis XVI, cannons rang out in Boston to celebrate the new French Republic’s first victory. Although the American government did not support the revolution, everyday Bostonians celebrated their allies across the Atlantic. Exceptionally, women gathered and rejoiced...
Philip Roth is a surprising French hit. In early October, he was awarded one of the country’s highest literary honors, joining the ranks of French giants Albert Camus and Honoré de Balzac and expats Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Roth’s complete works will be translated and published in the famous Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an anthology collection published by renowned...
French expats in Montreal are having trouble fitting in. Though the Canadian city has long treasured its shared bond and culture with the French motherland across the Atlantic, they are not so respectful of the recent influx of immigrants that have been pouring through their borders. The Atlantic's CityLab website reports that many Montreal residents have been expressing disapproval at...
In June, the hypermarket giant opened its first store in the outskirts of Paris. Costco, famous for selling cheap products in bulk, is the largest American membership-only warehouse chain and the second largest retailer in the world, after Walmart. Although its decision to cross into France was met with pessimism and predictions of its downfall, the brand’s performance seems to...
While the satirical newspaper is a household name in France, it is most widely known in the U.S. as the target of an Islamic terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 12 journalists in its Paris offices. Often, the publication’s controversial and brash cartoons, such as a recent cover of Hurricane Harvey victims as underwater Nazis, have sparked controversy in the...
