INED, the French demographics institute, came out with an intriguing report on suicide among the incarcerated. These points struck me:
The suicide rate among incarcerated men in France is six times higher than the rate among the general male population;
The French rate has increased over 50 years, from 4 in 10,000 in 1960 to 19 in 10,000 in 2008;
French prisoners exhibit the highest suicide rate among prisoners in the 15 members of European Union for the period 2002-2006;
Prison overcrowding does not explain the French suicide rate among the incarcerated;
In France, suicide is most likely to occur at the beginning of detention. This aggravates the suicide rate among those who are detained before trial or judgment. Among those tried and sentenced, suicide correlates with gravity of the offense committed, with convicted murderers and rapists being most likely to commit suicide.
Granted that there are definition and measurement problems, but there’s important social science still to be done on this subject, in Europe and beyond.
A French press group won a favorable award against Google in connection with book digitization. (Full disclosure: I practiced law with the press group’s lead lawyer in the ’90s.) Google will likely appeal that judgment, and the appellate court may rule in its favor.
It would be a mistake to read too much into this award. Far from resisting digitization, the French state has long embraced it.
According to urban legend, president Mitterrand favored relocating the collections of the French National Library in towers –rather than underground, as most libraries do– because he was convinced that books soon would be digitized, making paper copies superfluous other than as collectible objects.
More recently, president Sarkozy has earmarked some €750 million to digitizing collections in the French National Library. Although it’s possible that this effort will become an alternative to Google, it’s also possible that French actors, public and private, will team up with Google in the future.
French young conservatives (jeunes populaires) produced and posted on their site a video that showcases their late-summer congress, with leading figures from the Sarkozy government in attendance.
I like the video. It answers the question: how can you be young and conservative without being complacent? It’s also sufficiently unpolished to be the work of real young people, not an advertising agency.
To begin with, the young don’t call themselves “conservative”; they’re “popular”, in keeping with Sarkozy’s big-tent vision of the conservative party as the leading party and the party of good government.
The young conservatives also look to the future, reprising a 1976 song by Canadian artist Luc Plamondon, “Tous ceux qui veulent changer le monde” (Everyone who wants to change the world). They’re young and fresh and hopeful; they want change.
Most of all, the young conservatives have a sense of humor. They’re a bit silly, and their friends in the Sarkozy government are comfortable being a little silly themselves. These young people get along with their elders, who actually seem to enjoy their company. The ambiance recalls, for me, a big family get-together or a church picnic (but not a company picnic: these people are confident and comfortable enough not to take themselves too seriously).
The video has sparked reactions.
Those on the left, for whom “young conservatives” are an oxymoron or heresy, have enjoyed a laugh and produced parody videos. By a casual count, there seem to be at least a hundred, possibly several hundred, parodies.
Some of those on the right are scandalized, put off by a lack of seriousness or an overabundance of fooling-around. The standard-bearer of the scandalized conservatives is former education minister Luc Ferry, who in an interview –apparently after seeing excerpts of the video for the first time– described the video as “dripping with drivel” and wondered aloud about the dangers it presented for the future of civilization.
A reader pointed out that Nadine Morano, the French junior minister for family affairs who recently misspoke (or was “mis-heard”) about French people of North African descent, has been chronically “misunderstood”.
A few years ago, Morano was interviewed on a morning news show. The discussion is best described as combative. As soon as she was introduced, Morano contested accounts that, during the presidential campaign, she had infiltrated herself and imposed herself as a speaker a rally for rival candidate Ségolène Royal. For Morano, “journalists will say anything”, even though, in this case, Morano had been filmed by journalists, whose package was later featured in a prime-time news program.
Morano’s interview was posted on the web, and viewers commented. One of the viewers was Dominique Broueilh, a mother of three from Dax (with a name remarkably rich in vowels). Broueilh’s comment was: “Hou, la menteuse“, or “liar”.
Was Broueilh questioning Morano’s truthfulness? Not really. Broueilh was actually commenting on Morano’s debating tactics, which Broueilh compared to a song by Dorothée, a French singer popular with children (and some dads) thirty years ago. In her hit, “Hou, la menteuse“, Dorothée plays a teenager teased by her little brother about a love interest, which interest Dorothée repeatedly but unconvincingly denies.
The humor was lost on Morano. The junior minister made a criminal complaint under an 1881 law on press freedom and its limits. The police tracked down Broueilh and wanted to question her. Broueilh talked to the press. The paper Sud-Ouest reported on the case, and others repeated the report. Morano backed down, again claiming to have been misunderstood and insisting that she obviously had not wanted to act against Broueilh.
Amidst all these misunderstandings, it will not come as a surprise that Morano has been misunderstood in other contexts. For example, after having spoken out against violent video games, Morano invited the press for a photo op at her home, where they witnessed her family playing the very video game against which she had spoken. In a subsequent video, Morano shows familiarity with the game, especially that it depicts women being raped and murdered.
Rachida Dati is fed up with serving as a Euro-MP, a job she has held for less than six months out of a five-year term.
Speaking candidly when she forgot that microphones were recording, Dati said, “I can’t take it any more; I can’t take it any more. I have to stay here and act clever, because there’s some press here and there’s [European Commission president] Barroso’s election. When you’re in Strasbourg, they see if you vote or not; if you don’t, that means you weren’t there.”
Dati enjoys celebrity in French conservative circles. She makes much of her other-side-of-the-tracks background as one of twelve children born into a modest Moroccan-Algerian couple in provincial France; today, she’s partial to Dior. A close advisor to Sarkozy during his presidential bid, Dati served as justice minister, winning a reputation as a difficult person. Her main accomplishment at the justice ministry probably was an administrative reorganization of the French court system; other initiatives generated attention but little action. Dati, who had never run for any elective office, won contests in 2009 as Euro MP and as mayor of Paris’s posh seventh arrondissement. Oddly, Dati seems both to crave attention and to court mystery. The greatest mysteries in her life today are the identity of the man who fathered the child she bore in 2008, and whether he has a place in the mother and daughter’s lives today.
Part of Dati’s remarks suggests a preoccupation with money: Euro MPs receive base pay of €7661 per month, plus €298 per day of actual presence, plus a basket of perks.
Dati’s remarks certainly show frustration. For green party leader Daniel Cohn Bendit, this was inevitable: “She’s had enough. You could see it coming. I told you that she couldn’t stand it, that she’d come home.”
There’s nothing especially burdensome in serving as a Euro MP. Deputies aren’t made to suffer financially. The workload is not oppressive. Many political figures have made a second (or third or fourth) career as a Euro MP; it’s an excellent destination for skilled parliamentarians who suffer defeat at the polls when national political tides change.
Dati’s case is hardly isolated and shows the limits of the European political project. The European Parliament counts 736 (!) members and generates enormous operating costs. Its responsibilities have grown over the years, most recently through the Lisbon Treaty. But when the European Parliament is treated as an annex of national politics, the opportunities presented are wasted.
