Paris Plage: En vacances but on top of the news
France is on holiday. It’s official. I know this because when I went to pick up newspapers yesterday (this being central Brittany), I was able to buy Le Parisien, the capital’s house organ, owned by luxury goods giant LVMH.
When le tout Paris heads off to the coast, they leave behind the smog and humidity that envelop the city at the height of summer. But they do not abandon, even for an instant, their need to know what is going on in the 20 arrondissements that spiral out from Notre Dame to the ring road (Le Périphérique) and beyond. Thus, as July prepares to give way to August, Le Parisien is dispatched post-haste each morning before dawn to all parts of what the media likes to refer to as the Hexagon, where it is snapped up as proof that metropolitan concerns are not suspended just because the metropolis itself has been turned over, full-time, to tourism.
The tabloid is, in fact, an excellent paper, rather like the London Standard. Founded in 1944 as Le Parisien Libéré, the voice of the Resistance, it was later run by the owners of the sports paper L’Équipe before being sold on to Louis Vuitton, a subsidiary of Christian Dior, in 2015.
Its problem, in common with all local and regional papers in France, is that a high proportion of copies sold are perused, often at speed, in bars and brasseries by a multitude of customers. This is no doubt good for the advertisers, but means that fewer copies are sold and that many carefully crafted news stories and features are scanned in-between slurps of coffee and mouthfuls of croissant.
Far worse is the ubiquity of mobile phones, which allow users to catch up on news and events of the day, along with cat videos, without having to lay out cash on a printed paper that leaves ink on their fingers. The French, it should be noted, are every bit as mobile-dependant as their British counterparts. I have on numerous occasions watched couples facing each other over lunch in restaurants while busy on their phones. The conversation they are having with a friend on the other side of the city is evidently far more compelling than anything they might learn from their partner opposite. They cross busy roads in mid-Google. They carry on remote discussions while paying for their groceries with contact-free plastic. They skid along footpaths on their trottinettes while simultaneously listening to music through their earphones and checking their Twitter-feed.
But I digress. You know all this already and are most likely reading my words on your iPhone or laptop while your children are busy playing Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. My point is that a great institution like Le Parisien (and its sister title Aujourd’hui) is operating on borrowed time. Like all French dailies, it is subsidised by the State, which currently pays out more than a billion euros each year to the national, regional and local press in a bid to keep them in business. The trouble is, the subsidy, though generous, cannot keep pace with rising costs and falling circulations, so that prestigious national titles, like Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération, are less and less to be found outside the big cities.
At the same time, dedicated newsagents are becoming a rural rarity. Both my local maisons de la presse have closed in the last two years, obliging me to line up at the checkout of Intermarché, which stocks no more than two or three copies, in total, of the big Paris dailies – though also, as it happens, the New York Times and the Telegraph. Thus, I am frequently reduced to reading the local rags, available from the tabac or boulangerie, informing me of this week’s road closures or the winners of the most recent concour de boule.
It’s the same with television. Until a very few years ago, the nightly news bulletins on TF1 and France 2 were watched each evening by a third of the population. Not any more. There have been a number of additions, notably BFMTV and France 24, which provide a rolling news and opinion service (les têtes qui parlent, as my wife calls them), but the fact is that while these are never off the air, they only really come into their own when something momentous, or entertaining, happens, such as the funeral of Johnny Halliday, the fire at Notre Dame or the rampages up the Champs Élysée by the ultras of the Gilets-Jaunes. At other times, though the talking heads continue to opine, as if on a loop, they are more like moving wallpaper.
Yet we must try to keep things in perspective. This weekend, Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, take possession of the Fort de Brégançon, the island off the south coast that has been the official summer retreat of French presidents since 1968. The First Couple were distressed to learn upon their inaugural visit that the compound, though surrounded by the Mediterranean, did not have a swimming pool. This year, it does, at a cost of €35,000. And I am assuming that it will be on a shaded lounger, sheltering from temperatures of more than 30 degrees celcius, that the Président de la République will read his copy each morning of Le Parisien, couriered in from neighbouring Bormes-les-Mimosas. How else, after all, could he know what was going on?
“Cherie, what did you do with the remote?”