French press review 22 April 2014

Whatever else you can say about the French papers this morning, there's plenty of variety on the front pages...

Libération wonders what went on behind the scenes to ensure the release of the four French journalists freed at the weekend after ten months is the hands of Syrian rebels.

Le Monde looks at socialist alternatives to the Valls plan to save fifty billion euros.

Communist L'Humanité belatedly gives the front-page honours to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel Literature Prize winner who died last week at the age of 87.

Le Figaro examines government proposals aimed at preventing young French people from going to fight in Syria.

And catholic La Croix has a debate between an atheist biologist and a catholic philosopher on the limits of bio-medicine.

I'm going to start with Marquez, and a story I hadn't heard before. When he arrived in the local post office in 1966 with the typed manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude, all of 590 pages, the official weighed the package and demanded 82 pesos in postage. The writer and his wife, Mercedes, counted all the money they had, and came up with 53 pesos. So they decided to split the manuscript and just send half. When they got home, Marquez realised that he'd inadvertently sent the second half of his novel.

Luckily, the wrong half landed on the desk of an editor with sufficient verve and intelligence to recognise what was to become a classic of world literature, one of the defining books of the 20th century. He sent off the necessary postage so that the first half could reach Buenos Aires. The rest is history.

Marquez came to writing through journalism and claimed that his sole ideological commitment was to love. He memorably said that "life is not what we have lived, but what we remember and the way we remember it".

Libé celebrates the return of the four French hostages from Syria, wondering at the links between kidnapping and the financing of islamic organisations, especially the dangerous Islamic State in Iraq and the Middle East, whose members regard Al-Qaeda as a bunch of westernised wimps.

Libération's editorial says this kind of situation will always have shadowy areas, and it is not a good idea for journalists to go poking their pointy little noses too deeply into the background. There are still other hostages whose chances of a safe return to their normal lives could be fatally prejudiced by idle speculation.

Libé goes no further than quote Didier François, one of the four weekend returnees, who said they were lucky to be French. There are other hostages without that advantage. They must not be forgotten.

Le Monde asks the 50 billion euro question. Or, rather, looks at socialist answers to said question. The problem is fairly worn at the edges by now: France has to save five thousand million euros between now and 2017. Manuel Valls has already explained how he's going to do it, basically by hacking 30 billion off state spending on the civil service, and another 20 billion off the social security budget.

The problem is not just the political opposition, who will vote against the proposals as a matter of course (despite the similarities with François Fillon's savings plan back in 2011). There are a worrying number of socialist deputies who may not vote along party lines, meaning that when the vote on the financial plan is taken at the National Assembly on 29 April, there's no guarantee that the motion will get majority support. Hence these last-minute efforts by various socialist MPs to find alternatives which would satisfy Europe and basic socialist principles. Not an easy trick.