French press review 3 August 2010

It’s high summer and some of the papers are resorting to making up stories. But it’s not all nonsense: there’s a woman who kept her husband in the basement, squirrels, the president's health, and modern Romeo and Juliettes in India.

Starting with the invented coverage, Figaro devotes page two to Ayrton Senna, a motor racing hero who died in a crash in 1994. It imagines he had lived and gone on to set up a foundation for children.

Tomorrow, they’re doing James Dean. I guess he would have gone on to make it big in the dotcom bubble or something.

Le Monde scripts a conversation between Jacques Chirac and his friend Jean-Louis Debré. This fills a full page, too. The main joke is that Debré is trying desperately to get Chirac off the telephone, because now that Chirac is no longer president, he spends his days harassing his friends with calls.

As for the real news: squirrels. How they mock us on the other side of the channel for our frogs legs and our snails, says Figaro, yet there's a supermarket in north London selling squirrel meat.

What’s more, they are claiming that in a few months it will be considered like rabbit. It's a bit like hare, but fattier, according to Fergus Henderson, the chef at St John's restaurant. Animal rights groups are up in arms, but their battle is only just beginning says Figaro; one vendor sells 200 a week to restaurants in London.

Libération’s front page lulls you into feel-good summer mood with a picture of a jolly looking beach. Where is this parasol and sand and blue sea? The Gulf of Mexico.

“Where has the oil spill gone?” asks Libération. No sooner have you reached out for the good cheer, it turns bad. The oil has disappeared from the surface of the ocean and the coasts, but inside the paper, it’s the same story as usual: untold damage that will last for untold years.

Elsewhere in Libération is a story about a woman known only as Béatrice F. She married a man 35 years her senior and then kept him locked up in the cellar. François F, an 80-year-old blind man, was found under-nourished and bruised after the woman’s ten-year-old daughter told a social worker some odd things about a mysterious old man.

Béatrice F says she kept him in the cellar for his own protection. The story is illustrated with a line drawing of a man of a dejection last seen in the Bastille prison, with a woman’s feet advancing down the stairs.

Le Monde also features family crime. More than 1,000 people are killed each year in India for inter-caste marriages, victims of honour killings by their own families. There is a feature on what Le Monde calls India’s Romeo and Juliettes: Rashmi and Sanjay (names changed) tell the paper about their elopement.

Rashmi got in touch with her mother who begged her to come home. When she did, the family locked her up. Sanjay mobilised lawyers and eventually she was given the chance to testify that he, Sanjay, was her husband, not her kidnapper.

Communist Humanité has a snarky nib about the French President. He is going on holiday with a clean bill of health. Yesterday his office made a brief announcement that his medical check up had gone well, the first news we've had since that episode he had while jogging last year.

Voilà, says Humanité, that will reassure the 20 million French people forced to be deprived of him for the next three weeks.

Centrist Le Monde's editorial criticises the ruling party’s recent histrionics against hoodlums. Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said last week that 50 years of insufficiently-regulated immigration have caused the failure of integration.

Sarkozy made similar comments. Le Monde says the head of the state is trying to create a category of nation-less people, neither citizens nor outcasts. Neither a re-election strategy nor an attempt to protection of citizens justifies these means, it says.

France did very well in the European athletic championships, winning 18 medals, eight of them gold. Catholic La Croix produces an admonitory editorial on the subject, telling us to meet the impostor of good fortune calmly.

France must make sure that victory doesn't create trumped up jingoism that produced the national disgrace at the World Cup. Leave the victors to savour their laurels without too much adulation, says La Croix; they deserve better.