French press review 11 November 2013

A weekend dominated by the terrible progress of Typhoon Haiyan in Asia . . . the authorities in the Philippines suggesting that the provisional toll of 10,000 dead may turn out to be a tragic underestimation. But the failure of the weekend talks on Iran's nuclear programme is also making news, especially since many diplomatic observers are criticising France for insisting on several, perhaps inessential, points in the dossier.

According to Paris, clarification is needed on the status of the nuclear reactor at Arak, what is finally going to be done with Teheran's stocks of enriched uranium, and indeed with the whole enrichment programme. Critics quoted by Le Monde say the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, has been interfering in a debate on which others have worked intensively for months, simply with a view to giving himself an exaggerated level of importance.

Fabius didn't help matters by speaking to the press about the failure of the Geneva talks before the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, had made her official statement. The sides are to meet again later this month. Let's hope the international negotiators can come to some sort of internal peace agreement, before they again meet their Iranian counterparts.

Le Monde's main story is devoted to the question of Europe and migrants, against the background of news that Bulgaria is building a 30-kilometre wall along its border with Turkey. There's already a wall separating Greece from Turkey, and a chain-link and barbed-wire fence keeping people out of the Spanish Moroccan territories of Ceuta and Melilla.

The Bulgarian crossing has, up to now, been a relatively safe and, at 500 euros, relatively cheap way into Europe for those desperate to escape economic or political miseries at home. The new wall will force the would-be migrants elsewhere, perhaps around the ends of the wall, which covers only 30 kilometres of a 260 kilometre border. Or perhaps, back to the Mediterranean, and the 1,500 euro crossing from north Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Le Monde remarks on the irony that the new wall is being built on the ruins of a fence established during the Cold War to prevent Bulgarians fleeing into Turkey to escape the economic and political stupidities of Communism.

This is a public holiday in France, marking the end of the First World War.

Right-wing Le Figaro is happy to bash French president François Hollande for his attempt to use the occasion to promote national unity in a time of crisis.

The president has called for solidarity in the economic battles ahead. But there are already signs of confusion and disagreement among his generals, and we, the foot soldiers in the trenches, bombarded by tax increases, confused by orders and counter-orders, are on the brink of disorder.

On its feature pages, Le Monde looks at the episodes of so-called "fraternisation" between Allied and German troops on the western front, especially around Christmas 1914.

There was indeed applause from the allied trenches when a German tenor sang a Christmas carol; there were many, perhaps dozens, of football matches between the rival armies. Common funeral services were organised in no man's land, with allies and enemies attending Mass together. Many exchanged addresses with their opponents, with a view to meeting again when the war was over.

Says Le Monde, the whole series of episodes was savagely repressed by a high command that considered such peaceful shared activity as virtually treasonous.

The article ends with a call for some monument to the largely forgotten men who, for at least the quiet hours of one winter's night, managed to forget the propaganda of hatred that had pitched them into war and became simply men.