French press review 25 April 2011
Four papers to hand this Easter Monday holiday morning. Those not reporting for work are the Massed-out Catholics at La Croix for whom yesterday was a big day and the struggling Communists at L'Humanité who probably believe that a day off work is always good news, even if it comes on the back of a decadent religious festival. Nothing either from the business bods at Les Echos who are spending their ill-gottens, since the stock markets are closed across Europe.
So much for what's not happening. Now, here's the news.
The weekend edition of Le Monde says France is showing signs of withdrawing into its shell, under the three-pronged threat posed by globalisation, immigration and the question of social integration.
goes on to detail French and German attempts to re-install identity controls inside the so-called Schengen Zone, where people with identity papers are supposed to be able to travel freely.
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Le Monde
The problem recently has been that Tunisian refugees have been getting papers from the Italian authorities (who want to be shut of them as quickly as possible) and have then been travelling north, mostly with the intention of reaching France.
France does not want an extra 25,000 Tunisian migrants, all illegal strictly speaking, since the Schengen rules do clearly state that holders of temporary identity papers have no legal right to cross an international border.
Popular Le Parisien's main story looks at the increasingly lucrative business of genetic testing.
You can get (if you so wish) an early estimation of your chances of contracting cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or you can confirm (or otherwise) that you are the father of the children for whose food and lodging you are busting a gut. And all this from a simple saliva sample.
It's completely illegal here in France, but US firms offering the analyses by internet are doing booming business.
There's a cartoon of an older man reading the results of his tests to another. The old guy says: "It looks as if I'm going to die very soon, but you won't get anything since it turns out you're not my son."
You can understand why the French have decided to keep this sort of thing on the other side of the legal line.
But it does raise the question of what national legislative independence means in the face of the world wide web.
Le Figaro looks to the situation in Syria, saying that the struggles of Bachar al-Assad to cling to power are leaving an awful lot of dead bodies on the streets, as well as isolating the regime internationally, even from regional Arab opinion leaders like Saudi Arabia.
And there's a further risk, according to Le Figaro, of a complete destabilisation of the Middle East.
Le Figaro also reports the disturbing news that Confuscius has disappeared.
Last January, an enormous nine metre statue of the philosopher, weighing 17 tonnes, was inaugurated in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
This was read as a sign that the man decried as a reactionary old fart by Mao Tse Tung had been reinstated in the national pantheon. Well, it didn't last long, because the man has just been taken away again, leaving an empty plinth.
Confuscius may have been very wise, but he was not a paid-up member of the Communist Party.
The Party hadn't been invented in his day, 2,500 years ago, but that's neither here nor there. He was strong on law and order, and the idea of hierarchy, which might explain how he got his plinth in the Chinese capital's main square in the first place.
But now he's been taken away, perhaps for questioning by the same police officers who recently arrested the artist Ai Weiwei for something called "economic crimes".
It is some consolation to know that the great man was wary of pomp and power, taking great pains to avoid too much contact with the princes of his day.
He won't miss Tiananmen Square, and will still be justly celebrated when the little men who have taken his statue away are just anonymous dead Chinese civil servants.
Confuscius did write "do not worry that men know you not; worry rather that you do not know men". That's better that a 17 tonne statue any day.
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