French press review 2 January 2012

Not surprisingly, the newspapers take the opportunity to make a few predictions for the year ahead with both good and bad news on the horizon and there is an early reminder that presidential elections are due this year as well as football's Euro 2012.

Popular tabloid Aujourd'hui en France sets the tone with a front-page headline asking us to "Say no to the crisis".

It's not that they've found a magic solution to Europe's financial woes, just that Aujourd'hui en France has decided to start the year on a optimistic note, interviewing French people who are getting along better than ever, despite the doom and gloom.

The paper even publishes twelve reasons why we should enjoy 2012. It's all fairly tongue in cheek, with suggestions like learning to appreciate the cheaper pleasures, and looking forward to watching the European football on the telly next summer.

Which is fine for those who can still afford a television. But the last reason is the clincher. We should enjoy 2012 because it's our last chance.

Aujourd'hui en France reminds us that the Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and Nostradamus also predicted the end of the world for 21 December, 2012. We predict that you haven't heard the last of such predictions.

The lads at communist L'Humanité have been doing a spot of crystal-ball gazing as well, but they don't quite get to the end of the world.

They'd like to get to the end of the Sarkozy presidency, and so see 2012, with its presidential and general elections, as "A decisive year".

Le Monde's main story looks back at the first decade of the European single currency, the little-loved euro, which first started changing hands on 1 January, 2002, all of ten years ago.

Most French consumers associate the euro, not with sovereign debt, but with price increases. And the suspicions of those French consumers are, broadly speaking, well founded.

Le Monde shows that most basic foods have indeed increased in price over the ten years of the euro: the common apple costs 65 per cent more now than it did in 2001, a standard baguette is 27 per cent more expensive, the average chicken currently retails at nearly twice its 2001 price.

Right-wing Le Figaro is trying to be optimistic, with a headline announcing that it will cost less to make mobile phone calls next year. This is because of the arrival on the French market of the low-cost operator Free Mobile.

The competition say they will cut their rates accordingly. That's good news for the 99.7 per cent of French people who own mobile phones, but one might ask why the existing operators don't lower their prices anyway, instead of waiting to be forced into such a move.

There's not much optimism on the front page of business daily Les Echos.

In previewing prospects for the year just starting, Les Echos warns that many economic sectors are preparing for a year of recession, with the building industry likely to be the worst affected.

Even the chemical, mechanical and computing sectors, which have been doing relatively well in recent dark days, are going to be obliged to slow down. There won't be many new jobs, and there won't be much investment either.

The only good news, according to Les Echos, is that the elections will serve as an escape valve for popular anger and so we're not likely to see a higher than average number of strikes and stoppages before September.

Catholic La Croix looks at the introduction today, for the first time in French legal history, of popular juries into the nation's criminal courts.

It's still very experimental, with just nine jurisdictions taking the big step today. If the results are good, the practise will be spread nationally over the next two or three years.

The idea is to involve ordinary people more in the operation of the justice system, frequently seen as distant and disconnected. But will popular justice be any more just than the distant and disconnected version?

In England, for example, where juries have been operational for the past nine centuries, a recent study showed that two-thirds of jurors admitted they did not understand the legal explanations offered by the judge to help them in their deliberations.

Perhaps, suggests La Croix, what they lack in legal expertise may be compensated by the new jurors' capacity to listen attentively to fellow human beings. Which begs the question of what exactly judges have been doing up to now.