Public bar

[Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg/Getty Images. Éric Zemmour at a campaign rally, Bordeaux, France, November 2021]

A second rise contretemps with Batch No.637 yesterday afternoon, a proper use of the word in the sense that it arose from forgetting the time. The result of this was partial collapse on entry to oven, fortunately a partial collapse which was largely recovered, leaving the tops of the slightly smaller than usual loaves a little pockmarked. To recover from all this, we thought to reprise our before Christmas visit to the forecourt of the Marquis with a visit to the shiny new terrace outside the Assembly Rooms, that is to say Wetherspoon's, where we found that a lot of the staff were very young - and English. Very much a public bar of old experience, with the Marquis playing the saloon bar - to the extent that, even sitting outside, we felt a little uncomfortable, not least because of the all too probable lack of Covid-discipline of the customers involved. Supplemented by quantities of false eyelashes and bare flesh, leggy and otherwise, from their ladies. We wondered this morning whether management had booked a posse of hefty looking security guards for later. And I might add that wine in Wetherspoon's was roughly half the price of something similar from the Marquis.

So home a little earlier than planned to take in one of the many elderly films on offer, in our case 'Funeral in Berlin', which carried its near fifty years quite well.

This was followed by perusal of the article about the politician of the far right in France detailed at reference 1. A chap born in France of Algerian Jewish stock, a chap who goes to synagogue, which seems to give him a license to be particularly rabid about Moslems, of whom there are large numbers in France, many from North Africa, not to say Algeria. Wikipedia talks of 5% of the population as a whole, 10% of the population under 25. So a bit more than us here in the UK, but a much bigger issue, with regular highly charged debates about this or that instance of hijab wearing - or attempted hijab wearing. And depressingly frequent murders and terrorist attacks.

Like his analogues here, Zemmour plays to a vision of a mythic France of old where everyone was French and there were no foreigners. Or Jews. Despite his background and his own faith, his message seems to resonate with deep-rooted French anti-Semitism. Now supplemented by Islamic anti-Semitism.

A chap who is, it seems, is a product of CNews of reference 4, the French equivalent of Fox News, owned by one Vincent Bolloré. So even if his bid to become president fails, as it surely will, he will still make lots of money.

In which connection, I learned that Jean-Marie Le Pen has another dear friend in Ursula Painvin, born Ursula von Ribbentrop, the daughter of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the wine salesman who went on to be Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, executed after trial at Nuremburg.

If nothing else, a reminder that other countries are just as complicated as we are. From a distance we might talk of France doing this and France doing that - but from a bit nearer things can look a bit different. And, sad to say, the far right seems to be getting everywhere.

References

Reference 1: Who Does Éric Zemmour Speak For: The far-right French presidential candidate offers a crude exaggeration of what many in France believe but few dare to admit - James McAuley, New York Review of Books - 2022. January 13, 2022 issue.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France.

Reference 3: Destin Français - Zemmour, Éric - 2018. In the words of the man himself.

Reference 4: https://www.cnews.fr/. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNews.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Bollor%C3%A9.

Reference 7: Royal insider Anne Glenconner: ‘I’m not frightened of anything’: The former lady-in-waiting on the monarchy, Mick Jagger - and becoming a publishing sensation in her late eighties - Henry Mance, Financial Times - 2021. To be paired with the BBC pot boiler about dodgy doings in the upper reaches, at the other end of the social scale.

Reference 8: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism. Found in the course of chasing another hare this afternoon. One can see how someone like Corbyn (the crow one, not his eccentric, weather forecasting brother) could get into deeper water than he could manage on this one.