French press review 16 June 2010

The mighty school-leaving exam, the baccalaureat, kicks off tomorrow in France, presumably to the great chagrin of any football-loving French school-leavers who'll be under house arrest while everyone else is following the football.

And so in business daily Les Echos we learn today that the French have almost given up on the study of literature, at least at senior high school. It says French students are still avoiding the literature specialty in the baccalaureat.

Over half the students who sit the general baccalaureat choose the science option, and just a sixth of the candidates opt to sit the literature specialty, down 2 per cent on last year. The numbers of literature specialists have been dropping every year since 2006, the paper observes.

Centrist daily Le Monde takes a different line ahead of the exam. On the front page it asks "should we get rid of the baccalaureat exam altogether?"

The two-page spread inside the paper is less radical than the headline might suggest and simply runs through the figures and the issues surrounding the exam.

But right-wing Le Figaro raises one possible weakness in the system, saying that an exam that almost everyone is passing today (86 per cent last year), may have lost its raison d'être.

The whole thing kicks off at 8am tomorrow, as is tradition, with the philosophy paper.

Someone who is getting to watch the football is French Junior Minister for Sport, Rama Yade. She's in South Africa for the World Cup and is in the news again after she recently criticised the French football team.

She thought their hotel was a bit on the luxurious side, given that most European governments are currently slashing budgets, preaching austerity and generally telling their citizens that there's no money for anything, except maybe for bailing out the odd bank.

So Rama thought the team should have been a little more modest in their budget accomodation and now she's back in the news because the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported that she booked two nights in a five-star hotel for the princely sum of almost 700 euros a night.

So left-wing Libération mentions this in their World Cup coverage, and tells us that she ended up on the couch at the French consulate, but that the two nights still had to be paid for.

The French papers are also full of the news on the Bloody Sunday report, the reform of the French pension system and the latest installment in Franco-German economic relations.

But Catholic daily La Croix looks at a big question in its parents and children section, asking "why do children need superheros".

But returning to the baccalaureat exam, Libération looks at what students this year, and in previous years, do to get them through the ordeal.

The solutions range from early to bed to vitamin supplements or lots of sunbathing. A successful candidate from last year says he did no revision but made sure he got enough sleep and smoked some drugs.

One man sat the exam in 1979 on chocolate bars and one girl used an "elixir" from her grandmother in 1987, which turned out to be a rather lethal cocktail of alcohol and drugs. She got through the exams just on chocolate after that.