French press review 8 December 2010

Leading two of the French papers, the left-wing daily Libération and the right-leaning Le Figaro, is the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who was hunted through Europe and is now remanded in custody in London after yesterday's court hearing.

Libération gives him the front page, looking implacably into the distance - and he admittedly has a lot to put up with at the moment.

Inside, the paper takes a look at the allegations of rape against Assange in Sweden: its editorial points out a salutary truth in danger of neglect amid the groundswell of Wikileaks support, which is that no evidence exists so far to link the sexual misconduct allegations with the attacks on Assange's website.

There's been a lot of insinuation this week and Libé reminds us there is still a case for Assange to answer here. There's also a brief profile of Assange, whom Libé calls "an internet Tom Sawyer obsessed by the truth".

Apparently this is how he characterised his own childhood in Australia, horseriding and climbing trees and so on.

They also have a professor of law looking at the attempts made to shut down the Wikileaks website.

These include the website's suspension by service providers Amazon and payment companies Paypal, Mastercard and Visa, and condemnation from the French industry minister Eric Besson. Libé's professor says he's never seen such a dedicated attack.

Over to Le Figaro, which quotes Besson saying he never asked for Wikileaks to be taken off French servers.

What he did, he says, was send a letter before the weekend asking for a report on how its operation in France could be stopped - but he's taken no actual measures to drop it for now. That's the kind of fine distinction you only get in politics.

Also in France, there's some consternation over a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development saying that France's beloved education system is only average.

Or as centrist daily Le Monde's editorial puts it, in rather mealy-mouthed style, it doesn't sufficiently succeed in prioritising success among students.

The OECD's study took place across 65 countries, and aimed to test students' capacity to approach what it calls "real world challenges" in the fields of written comprehension, maths and science.

Several Asian countries came out above average in the survey - among them China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea -- as well as Canada, Australia, Finland and the Netherlands.

But France has slipped into the average category along with neighbours Germany, Italy, Ireland and the UK, which has prompted a lot of breast-beating in the papers today.

Le Monde says that the gap between good and bad students is widening, and that French education favours the elite over the rest.

Libé concurs: France must do better. The inequality, it says, is most pronounced in the area surrounding Paris, and shows a worrying trend towards social determinism: the children of first-generation immigrants are twice as likely to perform below average in the tests.

Catholic daily La Croix, however, points out that there's good news in this report for anyone worried that the internet is eating their children's brains - apparently kids who spend a lot of time online do better in reading comprehensions.

Le Figaro has an interview this morning with the French interior minister Brice Hortefeux on immigration.

The paper's going big on this because Hortefeux is proposing some fairly tough measures against illegal immigration, including the tightening up of controls on asylum seekers and on short-term visas.

He says he's meeting with officials next week to thrash this out ahead of Senate debates in January.

Hortefeux also says he'll go ahead with projects for dismantling illegal traveller encampments in france, although, after the international outcry when France began expelling Roma people earlier this year, he's at pains to stress that it's not about targeting a single ethnic group.

And on a lighter note, the former footballer and actor Eric Cantona did indeed participate in a so-called "cashpoint rebellion" organised after he made an unguarded comment in an interview.

Cantona had called in passing for a run on the banks to protest their role in the financial crisis: a group of anti-capitalist protestors subsequently took him up on it, asking supporters to withdraw all their money from banks yesterday afternoon.

Libé was following Cantona fairly closely yesterday, and today's article has a host of rumours suggesting that he, A) warned his bank last week that he'd be taking money out, and, B) took a large sum of money out of one bank to put it in another for withdrawal.

But it does also quote Cantona's agent, who says he did in fact make a "symbolic withdrawal" at a bank in the Somme where he was shooting a film.

How much he took out was unclear: "there are legal restrictions that mean you can't withdraw 10,000 euros just like that," said his agent.

Support for this so-called blow at international capitalism was more muted than most people expected, and Libé sent various reporters to chat to bankers across France who say they didn't notice any increase in the amount of cash taken out.

The financial plutocracy isn't on its knees quite yet, it appears.

And Le Figaro has perhaps the funniest story of the day, a brief item from Russia about a businessman who says he's a descendant of the 16th century ruler Ivan the Terrible, and therefore a member of the dynasty that built the Kremlin.

Valery Kubarev now claims that the current occupant of the Kremlin - who, lest we forget, is the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev - is no more than an illegal squatter, and that he should clear out and leave the palace free for the people.

A Russian court says there's no evidence that Kubarev's rights have been infringed - so he is threatening to take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.