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French press review 25 September 2014

The murder of French mountain guide Hervé Gourdel by an Algerian jihadi groups is this morning's main story. But there are also reports and comments on the Air France pilots' strike, French education anda a naked actress in Greece.

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The 55-year-old from the southern French city of Nice was kidnapped last Sunday in Algeria by a group calling itself Jund al-Khilafa (Soldiers of the Caliphate). Gourdel's captors gave the French authorities 24 hours to cease all participation in allied air attacks on the Islamic State armed group in Iraq. Paris refused that ultimatum. Yesterday Gourdel was killed.

Conservative paper Le Figaro prints half its front page in black, with a portrait of the dead mountaineer and the simple headline "Barbarity".

Left-wing Libération adapts an expression from President François Hollande's reaction to news of the murder. Libé's main story reads "Beheaded because he was French".

Catholic La Croix avoids the temptation of anger and revulsion with the factual headline "French hostage in Algeria killed by his captors".

Le Figaro's editorial is very angry, the anger directed against "the network of death" and the masked assassins who have brutally murdered James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines in Syria and now, despite the fact that the mountains of Kabylia are a long way from the Middle Eastern war zone, Hervé Gourdel in Algeria.

Le Figaro quotes one former jihadist, who has since renounced the status of holy warrior, as saying that the international fundamentalist movement has attracted "all the psychopaths and criminals on the planet". Without contesting that analysis, it is surely a mistake to underestimate the dangerous potential of those motivated by a conviction that the destruction of a world dominated by Western values merits any sacrifice.

The conservative paper says the real solution is in the hands of leaders in the Muslim world, where too many governments have for too long been happy to turn a blind eye to the activities of their more radical citizens.

And, warns Le Figaro, while we work towards the inevitable defeat of these cowardly enemies, we must be careful to identify the real culprits. Because despicable actions like the murder of Hervé Gourdel also serve to widen the gap of incomprehension which already separates cultures and peoples in, for example, France.

Communist L'Humanité regrets Gourdel's murder, but regrets still more the French parliament's determination to drag the country into another war. Says the L'Huma editorial, the United States and the Western allies have already created monsters and they're now trying to destroy those monsters, using the very methods that gave rise to them in the first place. The outcome, says the communist paper, is predictably tragic.

The Air France plane drivers are still on strike, still negotiating the terms on which they will return to work after a dispute that has cost their company millions. The strikers would appear to have won the battle, forcing management at the national carrier to abandon plans to broaden its low-cost operation.

Children in French schools who fall behind their peers will no longer be subject to the embarrassing and dubious practise known as "repeating". Except in cases associated with long-term illness, kids will stay with their age group no matter how bad their results. Apart from cutting down on embarrassment and doing away with a system most teachers say is useless, the state will save an estimated two billion euros every year.

The Franco-German film and theatre director Matthias Langhoff is in trouble with the Greek authorities, for getting a naked actress to run around the ancient theatre at Epidaurus.

Libération carries the story, saying it's a bit thick considering that the place was coming down with naked athletes in its heyday, 3,000 years ago. And that this little romp took place in the middle of the night. Langhoff is filming an episode from The Odyssey, written by a local. But none of that saved him from a spell in police custody. He is accused of "offending a sacred place".

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