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French press review 10 February 2017

This morning Cédric Herrou, the French farmer accused of helping and housing  migrants, shares the front pages with François Fillon, accused of paying public money to his family, and Marine Le Pen, accused of using European Parliament allowances to pay her French staff. Herrou says he's guilty. Fillon and Le Pen say they are innocent.

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Le Monde devotes a lot of space to Cédric Herrou, the French farmer from the Roya valley near the Italian border who will, later today, hear the verdict in a case in which he is accused of helping illegal migrants.

Herrou is happy to admit that he opened his door to about 200 people who arrived at his farm having made the dangerous and demanding Alpine crossing from Italy. He even set up a campsite for those he couldn't fit inside his farm. He continues to house and feed new arrivals. The prosecution has asked for an eight-month suspended sentence.

Herrou says history is being written right now and he doesn't want to be remembered as one of the bad guys who closed their hearts and their doors to people with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Fillon lawyers ask for case to be thrown out on technicality

Which brings me to the latest on the Fillon family saga, the one where the former prime minister and presidential hopeful is now attacking journalists in general for their audacity in exposing his efforts to save his wife and two of his children from penury, poverty and financial distress.

Fillon promised his political party, the Republicans, and the general public that the truth would be established by the French courts and that he would be triumphantly exonerated of all wrongdoing in an affair where he paid family members nearly one million euros of public money for work as parliamentary assistants.

The crucial question to be decided by the courts is whether they did any, or sufficient, work to warrant such generous remuneration with tax-payers' money.

Yesterday Fillon's lawyers asked for the case to be thrown out, saying that the National Financial Court did not have the right to investigate the doings of a member of parliament.

Shock, horror! Fillon admits he's not a saint

Meanwhile, right-wing Le Figaro has the man himself triumphantly continuing his campaign tour, telling supporters in the city of Poitiers last night that he was not going to yield to the "effort to demolish" his presidential bid by a seies of pittiless attacks.

Le Figaro says the campaign is being run on the basis that the whole Penelopegate scandal was a bad dream, a media fabrication, a vicious plot to bring a good man down.

"I'm not a saint," the candidate reassured supporters, "I'm a man. But a man who has never broken the law . . . with your help, I will weather this storm." There wasn't a dry seat in the house.

Tense, tough, pointless television debate for far-right leader Le Pen

Another presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front, was on television last night, explaining and defending her programme.

Left-leaning Libération says it was a tense affair but won't have done anything to change the overall situation: those who support the far-right candidate will continue to support her, those who didn't like what she stands for before won't feel encouraged to change their opinion.

So much for two and a half hours of television. Le Pen is consistently given as the winner of the first round, but consistently tipped to be hammered in the second. But that's just opinion poll talk.

Last night she was in fighting form, taking a Fillonist line of defence against accusations that she used 300,000 euros worth of European Union salaries to pay National Front employees.

"A plot," she assured us, orchestrated by her enemies in France and their allies in the European parliament.

Le Pen has promised to take France out of the euro and reestablish the franc. Confronted with expert opinion that such a move would increase costs by 16 or 20 percent and make us all a lot poorer, Le Pen replies that that's just accountancy and technicalities. Which makes you wonder, says Libération, how strong her grasp of such matters can be.

On the question of education, Le Pen found herself face to face with the current minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. Sadly, laments Libé, the debate rapidly deteriorated into a shouting match, with no audible outcome.

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