French press review 4 June 2014

Hollande hopes to redraw France's administrative map but that means treading on a few toes, not to mention problems finding new names for new regions. And there are some fascinating revelations about sleep.

France currently has 22 mainland regions. President François Hollande thinks that's far too many. He wants to get the number down to just 14, which is going to mean a certain number of forced marriages and considerable domestic bickering. What will they call the new entities? Where will the local administration be based? What will become of the regional representatives who no longer have a region to represent?

Conservative paper Le Figaro says the whole thing is a mess and has already sparked harsh criticism across the political spectrum, including within the Socialist majority.

Le Figaro's editorial says we're seeing another hasty improvisation typical of the Hollande regime, with the only real benefit being to divert, however briefly, attention from the real problems facing France. Neither Brussels nor the financial ratings agencies will fall for such a shallow trick, it opines.

Among the incidental anomalies noted by Le Figaro are the fact that Dreux, a town of 30,000 people which is effectively a suburb of Paris, will, under the presidential reform, be administratively closer to the town of La Rochelle, which is five hours' drive away on the Atlantic coast. And what are we going to call the new super-region combining the current Centre, Limousin and Poitou Charentes . . . Limpousin?

Left-leaning Libération says the final shaky form of the president's house of cards was imposed by the refusal of the barons of Britany to accept fusion with anybody. The old queen Anne de Bretagne would be proud of them! It's a shame, says Libé's editorial, that such an important reform was watered down and botched at the last minute.

Catholic La Croix looks to Syria in the wake of a so-called presidential election and sees a country abandoned to the dogs of war.

Communist L'Humanité says looking after France's growing population of dependent people is an obligation which will require national solidarity and a lot more money than is currently available.

And sports daily, L'Equipe, wonders who's out to get Michel Platini, former French football captain, now boss of the body that runs European football. He stands accused, notably in the English press, of having illegally helped the enormously rich Gulf state of Qatar to become the host nation for the 2022 World Cup. The man who scored 41 international goals for France now finds himself playing in defence.

My eye was caught by two stories about sleep on the science pages of Le Monde.

One describes an anti-common-sense experiment carried out in England over 50 years ago by a psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders. Instead of the quiet, comfortable and gloomy conditions that most of us consider esssential to dropping off, Ian Oswald exposed his volunteers to loud blues music, mild electric shocks and blazing light from 60-watt bulbs placed just above their faces.

Their eyelids were taped open. Oswald's idea was to mimic the environment of those torture chambers known at the time as discos. Despite this Guantanamo-Bay-style treatment, the three volunteers fell deeply asleep within eight to 12 minutes. It took a malfunction of the electric shock machine to wake them up.

Oswald deduced that either his subjects went asleep because their brains switched off to avoid a potentially dangerous overload or because they were hypnotised by the synchronised pulsations of music, light and the shock generator.

The experiment at least explains why it's so difficult to have a serious conversation with a girl at a disco. She's out on her feet.

The other concerns dreamers with Parkinson's Disease. In some cases of advanced Parkinson's the sufferers are completely paralysed while awake but are capable of complex movement while dreaming. One man bit his wife's thigh. When she finally got him to wake up, he lapsed back into his habitual paralysis, saying, "It's all right, I'll finish tomorrow."

The point is that the neurologist who first heard about this cannibal husband is now trying to understand how the dream state of the man's brain overrode the motor effects of the disease.