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4 hours ago
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Houra! Or rather, hurrah! On Monday, the French government, led by François Bayrou, our fourth prime minister in a year, did not fall. Our expectations have sunk so low since the July 2024 snap elections derailed our politics that we are grateful when catastrophes foretold don’t materialise. When Michel Barnier’s government fell before Christmas, it had been in power for just three months and had not managed to pass any sort of legislation. It was the first time since 1962 that a government had been toppled after a vote of non-confidence.
The current government did not fall again last week thanks to the Socialists, who seem to be finally “decoupling” from the chaos-hungry far left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The Socialists are now the kingmakers and quite enjoy the limelight. Let’s hope they will continue to think with their head and not be tempted by futile revolutionary impulses. France needs a little pragmatism, for a change. Bayrou, a centrist and smooth operator, has achieved one thing: France now has a budget. And even if this budget doesn’t tackle the huge public deficit (6% of GDP), at least it exists. Now we can all return to our favourite pastime: feeling morose.
Role model
An antidote to French morosity can be found at the Pompidou Centre, which is exhibiting the first retrospective in almost 60 years of the great painter Suzanne Valadon. What a fitting tribute to such a strong and unyielding artist before the museum closes its doors for the next five years (those big colourful tubes need a serious overhaul).
Valadon, the daughter of an illiterate laundress in Montmartre, first modelled for Renoir, Puvis de Chavanne and Toulouse-Lautrec, before taking to painting. She learned her craft from observing them at work and constantly sketching and drawing from the age of nine. The Pompidou Centre is showing more than 200 of her works in which she spares no one – especially not herself, in unflinching self-portraits that document her slow addiction to alcohol. Championed by Edgar Degas, Valadon’s style transcends all the art movements of her time. In the end, Valadon is Valadon, her own woman. In his affectionate letters, Degas called her “my terrible Maria” (her real first name). On 8 January 1896, he wrote to her: “I love seeing those big and supple brushstrokes of yours. Happy new year.”
La belle dame
From the Pompidou Centre, you can hear the bells of Notre-Dame cathedral now ringing many times daily. What a joyful soundtrack to our life after five years of silence in the heart of Paris. Long queues have resumed on the parvis in front, and last week the Paris Tourism Office revealed that the cathedral has already welcomed 800,000 visitors in its first month of reopening, an average of 30,000 a day.
A third booked in advance; the others chose to queue, sometimes for hours, to enter. The average time they spent inside, marvelling at the restoration work of artisans, is 32 minutes.
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Beyond statistics and figures, here is an extraordinary feat of craftsmanship, one that President Emmanuel Macron last week promised to deliver again by giving the overcrowded Louvre a second entrance by 2030. An international architectural competition will be launched soon and judged before the end of the year. Good luck to the architects who will try to measure up to the genius of IM Pei’s glass pyramid, in front of the world’s largest and most popular museum.
