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French press review 7 December 2010

Family reconciliation steals the limelight in most of the papers on Tuesday morning, but tortured diplomats, a former Afghan insurgent, trying to form a government while you're grounded and Leonardo da Vinci also get a look in.

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A formidable family, Libération declares in its headline. It’s the Bettencourts. L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and her daughter Françoise yesterday announced that they have been reconciled. Francoise's husband Jean-Pierre will take charge of L'Oréal, Françoise will drop her suit against Francois-Marie Banier, who she has accused of taking advantage of her mother’s senility.

The paper’s coverage is rather sarcastic, leading with an imagined Sunday lunch, the Bettencourt table is sure to be laid with five places this weekend. This family quarrel, says Libération, that made the very Republic tremble is over in time for Christmas. It takes the opportunity to entitle its editorial Cosmetic.

Figaro leads with the same story, going for the headline The great reconciliation. Both papers point out that the story is not over for Eric Woerth, who is still under investigation for giving tax breaks.

Catholic La Croix strikes a balance between its moralising and journalistic impulses in its editorial entitled A mother, a daughter. It starts by looking back nostalgically on the media paradise of the Bettencourt affair: a legendary company (L'Oréal), an immense family fortune, a seductive dandy, a butler with a secret tape machine, an island in the Seychelles, hidden bank accounts in Liechtenstein and secret political donations.

But, says La Croix, two aspects of the saga were sadly ignored: the tragic breakdown of relations between a mother and daughter, and the destabilisation of a great enterprise and its employees who had nothing to do with the whole imbroglio. One needs great virtue to act with dignity and decency, to resist the temptation to fight or to lie and corrupt.

Love between a mother and her daughter is possible - and just as you think you’re beginning to hear choirs of angels backing the prose - Because It’s Worth It.

Several papers run pictures of one of Côte d’Ivoire’s presidents, Alassane Ouattara, trying to put together a government from the Golf hotel in Abidjan, where he is being grounded by the other president, Laurent Gbagbo.

Le Monde’s Plantu cartoon is entitled The Ivorian farce. It shows a broadly grinning Gbagbo prancing on a stage, kicking over a ballot box, while Ouattara looks on dourly from a theatre box flanked by some very small people wearing United Nations helmets.

It's Taliban season in Kandahar, says Le Monde. Here's why: the beginning of winter marks the end of the battle season for many of them; they go to Pakistan until April or May; some of them establish madrassas along the Afghan border, but many go to Quetta and Karachi.

So the end of November is an ideal time to meet them on their way though Kandahar. Le Monde meets a former insurgent, who goes by the name of Mokhless, which means “be honest” in Pashto, who was the centre of the US offensive in the centre of the province in October, where Nato troops have regained control.

He says the financial power of the US has caused divisions among the Taliban; local leaders are happy to take money, but there is pressure from outsiders not to. Mokhless says 80 per cent of Taliban leaders are in contact with drug traffickers as a way to help make ends meet. He has distanced himself recently from the Taliban despite repeated requests he become a commander.

Libération interviews Floyd Abrams, the lawyer who defended the New York Times when it published Pentagon papers in 1971 on the Vietnam War. In an interview yesterday in El Pais newspaper, Assange said Barack Obama himself would have to resign if it turns out he gave the order for US diplomats to spy on their colleagues at the United Nations.

US Democrat John Kerry is calling for a new law to allow the US government to prosecute Assange and, in the meantime, suggests twisting existing laws to bring Assange to trial.

Abrams says it would still be possible to try Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act, but if this act were applied to the letter it would be possible to sue the press almost every day. You have to prove someone has acted in bad faith with the aim of compromising national security. Assange was clever, says Abrams, in writing to the State Department to say he did not want to harm security before publishing the collection of diplomatic cables.

Figaro’s histoire du jour tells us that a new Leonardo da Vinci manuscript fragment has emerged in Nantes. A journalist spotted a passing reference to the probable existence of this manuscript in a library in Nantes; he searched for two weeks and found it at the bottom of an 1872 archive given by an artist and bibliophile called Pierre-Antoine Labouchère, to whom we already owe a Mozart manuscript.

The fragment is 20 centimetres by 10 centimetres, handwritten in a mixture of Italian and Lombard dialect, and uses mirror writing. It has not yet been deciphered.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is in India and Le Monde tells us the trip has allowed him to make deals worth 15 billion euros for arms, nuclear energy and the air company Airbus. He’s got the edge on US President Barack Obama, who went to India a month ago and only signed 15 billion dollars worth of deals.

Sure, they're only agreements and not definitive contracts, that's of little consequence to Sarkozy says Le Monde. “The decision is taken,” the French president said at a press conference. “It's a process we know very well and will not give us any surprises.” 

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