John Lichfield

Profile: Full name: John Lichfield Area of interest: French Society, Culture, Politics Journals/Organisation: The Independent Email: j.lichfield@independent.co.uk Personal website: Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-lichfield Blog: Representation: Networks:

Biography: About: Education: Career: Has reported from France for more than ten years for The Independent Current position/role: Paris correspondent also writes/has written for: Other roles/Main role: Other activities: Disclosures: Viewpoints/Insight: Broadcast media: Video: Controversy/Criticism: Awards/Honours: British Press Awards, Foreign Reporter of the Year, 1999 Scoops: Other:

Books & Debate: Latest work: Speaking/Appearances: Debate:

The Independent: Column name: Remit/Info: French Society, Culture, Politics Section: Role: Paris correspondent Pen-name: Email: j.lichfield@independent.co.uk Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-lichfield Commissioning editor: Day published: Regularity: Varies Column format: Average length:

Articles: 2011 The young Muslim woman at the heart of France's modern regime - World Focus: Thirty years ago, a four-year-old Moroccan girl emigrated to France to join her father. Yesterday, she became the official "face" of the new French government - 18th May For the first time, Hollande seemed the president, and Sarkozy the challenger - Sarkozy had expected him to wilt under pressure, but the Socialist proved he is tougher than he appears - 4th May President Hollande's first task? Reuniting a fragmented France - World Focus: In Normandy, Brittany, the South and other parts of deepest France, hundreds of villages voted for Le Pen - 3rd May Le Pen's six million supporters hold the key to the Elysée - The more Nicolas Sarkozy talks the talk of the far right, the more he will alienate centrist voters - 24th April Could France get the competent new leader it needs? - Mr Hollande’s economic programme is vaguely promising compared with the “Merkozy” orthodoxy - 21st April If Cameron ups ante on the euro, things will get very nasty - Brussels believes the PM is ready to take a step back, and Jose Manuel Barroso said he hoped for a 'constructive' relationship - 14th December Cameron has played a poor hand badly - Britain's future? Proud isolation: like the Cayman Islands, but without the weather - 10th December Saving Europe will leave Britain on the edges, but the alternative is grim - Some of us remember when Europe was boring - 5th November Feud between Socialist rivals turns nasty - Sibling rivalry can be poisonous in politics, as the Labour Party knows - 17th October Pleasures of the Norman table - Oh the joy of escaping to Normandy away from the rioting, looting and collapse of the financial markets - 15th August Just the part for you, M Sarkozy - Sarkozy has become, late in life, a great film buff - 1st August A train to the dark heart of the city - In The Time Machine (1895), HG Wells imagined a future in which childlike aristocrats lolled in the sunlight while brutalised workers lurked below ground - 18th July Can Strauss-Kahn really run for president? The jury's out on his chances of making a comeback - The View From France: France has been stunned, divided – and to an extent relieved – by the apparent disintegration of the prosecution's case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn - 4th July The French more relaxed about sex? It's a myth - Dominique Strauss-Kahn will never be President of the Republic but his political and social legacy is secure. He has shaken France more profoundly from his prison cell and gilded judicial exile in New York than he could possibly have achieved from within the Élysée Palace - 4th June L'affaire DSK' leaves France in shock and denial - France is still in shock. And denial. More than half of people interviewed for a poll yesterday – 57 per cent – said that they were convinced that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the victim of a plot - 19th May There's no escaping big-screen royalty - What on earth was Mr Depardieu doing in St Petersburg? - 9th May European unity crushed by crude nationalism - The Great European Idea has never faced so many overlapping threats to its survival - 23rd April A success for France's army, but a failure of its diplomacy - The Ggabgo loyalists will claim that their man is a victim of French post-colonial ambition - 12th April Love and other bombshells - A legendary French novel has just been published in France for the first time - 4th April Walk the streets of Paris to see how polarised France is - My pedestrian commute from office to home takes me up the Champs-Elysées and through the tourist tunnel beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Most evenings, I come across two forms of street theatre which symbolise the parallel, non-communicating universes of 21st-century France - 19th March With a smile not a snarl, the French far right is gaining ground - There are warnings for democratic politics in Europe - 10th March All hail the Percy Pig revolution - A Marksist revolution is brewing in the expat British community in Paris. Brewing is the right word - 7th March How to save the world - Could a blueprint for a happier and more successful society come from someone outside politics? George Orwell's utopian vision has found an echo in a little-known French philosopher - 1st March Edgar Morin Note to M&S – Paris is pining for your sausages - I have terrible news for Parisian Anglophiles and British expatriates in Paris. The British sausage and the pork pie are not, after all, returning to the French capital - 5th February The can-do spirit is finally taking off - Despite the gloom, the French are busily making babies - 24th January France favoured autocracy as a bulwark against radical Islam - France, Tunisia's former colonial master and closest European ally, has been struggling to adjust to the overnight collapse of an autocratic regime that it long supported - 20th January So what ever happened to France's Socialists? - President Nicolas Sarkozy will almost certainly run again in 2012, though he has yet to say so. Marine Le Pen said yesterday that she would mount a powerful challenge on the far-right. Centrist candidates are breeding like flies - 17th January Enfants terribles and their twins - A welcome, and rare, experiment in fraternité - 10th January Are we looking for a new message – or a new Messiah? - France has a new political and philosophical prophet - 7th January

Articles: 2010 Don’t let’s be beastly to the Belgians - I share a distinction with Johnny Hallyday, Audrey Hepburn and a village on the Belgo-Luxembourg border which is nothing but cigarette shops on one side of the street and trees and cows on the other. I am half-Belgian - 27th December Why is the French left so gauche? - The Socialists’ goodish idea has become a vehicle for prolonged party civil war - 13th December An exaggerated tale of two cuisines - We love to say that French food is not what it is reputed to be - 29th November Poppies, patriotism and the souring of an honourable tradition - The scarlet poppy is a symbol of blood sacrifice and death; it is also a symbol of the stubborn renewal of hope and life - 6th November Rolls-Royce stands to lose more than Qantas if investigation finds fault - The engine failure on the A380 superjumbo is a potentially serious blow to the European aircraft industry – and especially to the British engine-maker Rolls-Royce - 5th November Sarkozy's mission has failed - Whatever the outcome of the present dispute, Mr Sarkozy has already lost - 20th October Europe needs sceptics - When France and Germany saw the EU as themselves writ large, they sought closer union. But as its size increased, the Federalist countries backed off. Is the 'British' idea of a looser alliance of states now Europe's future? - 12th October All Le President’s men? - The crisis engulfing France's President Sarkozy is drawing comparisons with the Watergate scandal of the 1970s - 15th September Holidaying en masse: What France can teach us about the Big Society - The French love to do their own thing so long as everyone else is doing roughly the same - 24th July The Bettencourt affair: Sarkozy's summer of scandal - He came to power as a new kind of politician. Now the French President is beset by troubles - 14th July Europe can't bring itself to go forward - From the beginning, the great euro crisis has been a confrontation between two versions of reality - 19th June First it was McDonald's, now it's primaries - Official France likes to boast, Asterix-like, of its resistance to Anglo-Saxon cultural incursions - 4th June Cameron's European opportunity - The Tory leader has an opportunity to wean his party from demonology and present the EU as it really is - 27th May The debate and Europe - A large blue and yellow elephant had been standing unnoticed in the room of British electoral politics – until last night. Euro-quarrels seem to dominate British politics, except at election time - 23rd April Cereal killers and bungalows lead a Norman conquest - Normandy Notebook - 12th April The deflation of President Sarkozy - He is in a double-bind, excoriated more for his rhetoric than for his achievements - 25th March Moving story of the missing 'Picasso' - Paris Notebook: He left a painting on the studio wall to thank the BBC for having been the voice of freedom in France from 1940-44 - 22nd March A lesson, son, in crisis and paradox - Why did the banks go after the poor Greeks, Daddy? Good question .. - 15th February Feeling down and out in Paris - Paris Notebook: On restaurants – a tip - 1st February Nothing French about fraternity - The casual rudeness which foreigners associate with the French is mostly the fault of the Parisians - 4th January

Articles: 2009 The First Lady and a down-and-out - In another recent TV interview, the Première Dame turned philosopher - 28th December Review of the Year 2009: The EU - Let's hear it for the grand tradition of Euro-muddle - 23rd December Cafe society is dead, but long live the cafe - Paris Notebook: The cafe is no longer a community in which strangers become, briefly, friends - 30th November The hand of Dieu – but with heads hung - View from France: Jubilation struggled with embarrassment in France after Thierry Henry's "main de Dieu" qualified les Bleus for the World Cup finals. On the whole, embarrassment won - 20th November Dream ticket may send the rest of Europe to sleep - They will be cheering in the bars of Riga and stomping their feet in the pubs of Rotherham. Europe's dynamic duo is... Herman van Rompuy and Baroness Ashton - 20th November What a relief to be driving in disguise - Parisians, it seems, are choosing to identify with the département of their grand-parents; or their holiday homes - 16th November When a kiss is not just a kiss - Paris Notebook: The bise, and the handshake, are hard-wired into the French psyche - 14th September Our neighbours are now a public menace - The wild boar population of France has increased five-fold in the last 20 years - 31st August Even the French are starting to worry about healthcare - France has the worst health system in the world, except for all the others I've tried - 27th August The French in their maison secondaire - For the French middle class, a ‘little place in the country’ is just part of life - 1st August The life cycle of the Dutch teenager - Emmeloord Notebook: Teenagers chatted each other up by cycling in slow circles, without dismounting - 20th July Road deaths back on political radar - Paris Notebook: I suspect that many radar traps have been switched off to increase the President's popularity rating - 13th July How I became chic growing roses and parsnips - 21st June Where can you find France? In 'Le Monde' - Paris Notebook: There is one great landmark of French life which remains largely itself - 18th May Cricket as you've never heard it before - Paris Notebook: Did you ever wonder what the French might be for deep backward square leg? Answer: "Barrière oblique côté fermé" - 4th May When cleaning is imprisonment - Paris Notebook - 10th April The Janus face of France's president - A bizarre phenomenon is sweeping France: Chirac nostalgia - 6th April Sarkozy shows off his new best friend - Obama met O banana in Strasbourg yesterday. Obama you know. But who is O banana? That is a new nickname for Nicolas Sarkozy invented by Plantu, the wonderfully insolent cartoonist of Le Monde - 4th April Even the French are giving up on lunch - Paris Notebook: How is trade? "Terrible", said the patron. "All the publishers have moved offices" - 16th March France’s myth of the cheesemaking peasant - 24th February Transport bosses handbag history - Paris Notebook - 16th February French foes bury the handbag - Paris Notebook: This was like King Kong agreeing to have a quiet meal with Godzilla - 26th January My daughters' Oscars surely await - Paris Notebook: Celebrity at last, my daughters are to appear in a film with George Clooney - 12th January A reminder that theatre is booming here - British theatre, from William Shakespeare to Howard Barker, is packing in audiences across the Channel - 8th January 2009 is the year when the EU awakes - With a little energy and leadership, the EU can act like a giant. For a short time anyway - 3rd January

Articles: 2008 Where has all my money gone? - Paris Notebook: Try living on a sterling salary in Euroland - 22nd December 2008 The French learn to love Shakespeare - Paris Notebook: The theatre scene across the Channel has become a kind of Paris-upon-Avon - 1st December 2008 Female mud-wrestling, French style - Relations on the left are so venomous that schism seems inevitable - 24th November 2008 Credit crunch even hits dog-sitters - Paris Notebook: Parisian super-wealthy can no longer afford professional dog-sitters when they go to the hairdressers - 10th November 2008 Boos that shouldn't come as a surprise - Paris Notebook: Would Zidane be considered French if he wasn't picked for the French side? - 20th October 2008 Confessions of a trainspotter - French Notebook: This was an American-designed, Canadian-built, British locomotive operating in France for a German company - 29th September 2008 ‘The English power stations – like its girls – are ours’ - After decades of being told that the dirigiste Gallic "model" was doomed to failure, the French cockerel might be excused for crowing over the triumph of Electricité de France - 28th September 2008 Paris Notebook: Carla's 'sales' hit by sound of silence - A statistical row is raging in France over the true popularity of the First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy - 15th September 2008 Normandy Notebook - Village life gets a ringing endorsement - 1st September 2008 In Brittany, a wedding with a difference - 14th August 2008 Racy goings-on in la France profonde - The wife-swapping club comes to rural Normandy - 4th August 2008 Out of France: If anyone could win Ireland's Eurosceptics round, it's Ms Bruni - Sunday 20th July 2008 With the Taoiseach in the naughty chair, this was a polite mad hatter's tea party - Friday 20th June 2008 Our Man In Paris: Threat to suburban pleasures of a petite Parisienne - Monday 9th June 2008 Our Man in Normandy: Sarkozy to fight defeatism on the beaches - Monday 5th May 2008 France still can't confront its wartime self - Saturday 26th April 2008 Paris prepares to fall – and the rest of France cheers - Saturday 19th April 2008 Our Man in Paris: An invitation no mere foreigner can refuse - Monday 31st March 2008 Our Man in Paris: France warms to its ‘frozen north’ - Monday 3rd March 2008 Our Man in Paris: Case of the literary murder inquiries that don't stack up - 4th Febuary 2008 President Sarkozy's new philosophy for the world - 16th January 2008 Shunted off in a tale of two railways - While British trains are a byword for chaos, vision and flair are the French way - 5th January 2008

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