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French press review 24 November 2017

Il Cavaliere, Italy's unsinkable Silvio Berlusconi, took his first tentative legal steps on the road to political return yesterday, telling the European Court of Human Rights that he's been unfairly treated. It looks as if Harvey Weinstein's film company is going to be bought out by a group of women investors. And what is that venerable institution, the French Academy, doing to take male domination out of the language?

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Robert Mugabe may be on the way out but, luckily, Silvio Berlusconi looks like he could be on the verge of a comeback.

Yesterday Silvio's eight lawyers were earning their spaghetti and meat balls before the European Court of Human Rights, explaining that it was unfair to exclude their client, the man who used to be the Italian prime minister, from political life for five years simply because he was sent to jail for four years for a touch of fiscal fraud.

It's not that the lawyers deny the facts; everyone knows their man is guilty, that's been proven in a court. The legal problem has to do with imposing a penalty retrospectively. That's against European law.

Worse, throwing poor old Silvio out of the Italian Senate, which unthinkable event took place in November, 2013 was, according to one, the result of a trial which had little to do with justice and was more like something staged in a Roman arena.

There were 17 judges in court yesterday, listening to the eight lawyers. The decision will be published in six months, too late, unfortunately, for Berlusconi to get involved in next year's Italian parliamentary elections.

But the man is clearly on his way back. And he has time. He's only 81.

Le Monde, perhaps unkindly, says Silvio is in the best of form, looking tanned, with his smile a little on the fixed side, perhaps owing more to plastic surgery than to nature.

Women fight to buy out Weinstein

It looks as if Harvey Weinstein's film company is going to be bought out by a group of women investors, Le Monde informs us.

According to the centrist paper there are actually two groups of women bidding for the movie empire of the disgraced Weinstein, forced to step down after he was named in dozen sexual harassment complaints.

One is the cutely named Killer Content, which is run by peace activist Abigail Disney and gets its money from the New York Women's Foundation.

The other offer comes from a group headed by Maria Contreras-Sweet, the woman who used to run the federal business agency under Barack Obama. She's bidding 232 million dollars (195 million euros) and insisting that the incoming management has to be run by women.

The shares in the Weinstein Company aren't worth diddly right now and an awful lot of cash is going to have to be paid out to Harvey's victims. The name is expected to be changed as soon as the new management is put in place.

Let's hear it for the girls, boys

Right-wing Le Figaro looks at what that venerable institution, the French Academy, is doing to take male domination out of the language.

The fact is that an awful lot of French nouns for important functions like "president," "colonel", "minister", "mayor", "judge" and so on exist only in the masculine register. You have to make up the feminine version as you go along but there's no grammatical basis for doing so.

Now the august academy, which has been working on a dictionary of the French language since about 1650 and still hasn't got past the letter Q, has promised the courts that it will work urgently on the feminisation of the language. This is a change of heart for the male-dominated assembly, which has up to now refused any change of the French rules about the sex of words, claiming that they are abstract terms and that the person occupying a particular post fades into the character of that post.

Of the current membership, allowing for half a dozen vacant seats and a few names that could be one thing or the other, I count only four women among the 40 members. Ten percent. That's a lot of old geezers.

Now they've been put onside by the national appeals court and told to get cracking.

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