French press review, Wednesday 15 September 2010

In two separate incidents, the government was accused of racism and spying yesterday. A wonderful day for the French press.

The spying charge came from Le Monde, which says the government deployed the security services to investigate the source of leaks to Le Monde during the Bettencourt-Woerth affair. This violates the legal right of journalist sources to remain anonymous, according to the centrist paper, which says it will be pressing charges.

The government says it did nothing wrong and was only doing its duty in trying to uncover a mole at the centre of government. The leaker in question has been identified in the report as Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie's adviser David Senat, who has since been removed from his post and sent as far away as possible: on a mission to Cayenne, in French Guyana.

Left-leaning Libération combines the two stories gleefully on its front page, calling it the government’s Black Tuesday and punning with abandon. Leaks, it says, the right is taking in water; the good ship UMP is going down. Continuing the pun, Libération's editorial says when you don't know how to plug leaks, you get wet. It's both ridiculous and worrying, it says.

The other accusation against the government came from the European Commission. France’s deportation of Roma people is, according to Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, a disgrace. Government-supporting Le Figaro leads with neither story, choosing instead the new budget.

It hits back in its editorial, saying the EC has spent its energy focusing on why the countries of these 10-12 million people systematically refuse to integrate them, leaving them to range over Europe. Then we'd never have been in this situation in the first place, it says, adding that whether we like it or not, the dismantlement of the illegal camps that shelter the nomads who are only here to enjoy the generosity of the French state, has met with the approval of the majority of our compatriots. The commission caused this mess by it's laissez faire attitude, and by threatening legal action against France, it's just fanning the flames of a very polarised debate. It is not responsible to condemn France without proposing an alternative, according to Figaro.

La Croix marks the second anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers with an interview with Jean-Pierre Jouyet the head of the financial markets authority. He says the usual stuff about markets needing more transparency.

Figaro's daily histoire du jour comes from America. Operation Dark Heart is the account of a special forces officer in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Lieutenant colonel Anthony Shaffer got as far as having his book about secret operations printed, having been given the green light by the army, but now the Pentagon has decided it’s a threat to national security and is in negotiations with the publishing house to buy all 10,000 copies of the print run. He's only allowed to recount stories more than 20 years old and the author can't even defend himself in the press; as a special reserve officer he's bound by the law of silence. At least, he has a guaranteed sell-out in the first print-run, however.

For some very local news, Paris tabloid Le Parisien comes up trumps. Yesterday, hundreds of people had to be evacuated from the Eiffel Tower after an anonymous caller said a bomb had been put there. Another call was put in to St Michel station, too. Hours of searching by dogs and bomb disposal experts yielded nothing.

Le Parisien also manages to combine showbiz and crime. The husband of the actress Béatrice Dalle appeared yesterday before a correctional tribunal in Avignon for abusing a prison guard and illegally keeping a telephone microchip while in prison. His excuse: it's hard for him in prison because the other prisoners make unkind remarks about his wife all the time and when she comes to visit they threaten her and try to extort money from her. Dalle met the defendant, Guenaël Méziani, while he was in prison for rape and torturing an ex-girlfriend. They were married behind bars in 2005.