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Paris - Greatest Cities of the World (EN)

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Paris - Greatest Cities of the World (EN)

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Gryff Rhys Jones looks at Paris

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The Secret Side Of Paris: Catacomb Exploring And More | The Greatest Cities in the World | TRACKS

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Gastronomie : l'authentique tartiflette savoyarde - Météo à la carte

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Inside the walls  of Mont St Michel and interior of his abbey

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A-level French 7652 | Assessment Resources | AQA

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A-level French 7652 | Assessment Resources | AQA

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Ace your exams with our comprehensive range of A Level French revision resources. Find everything you need to walk into your exam feeling confident and prepared. With our teacher-written revision materials, you can complete French past papers, refresh your memory with revision notes, test your knowledge with flashcards and tackle exam-style questions.

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All the course specific revision resources you need to ace your A Level French exams. Discover revision notes, exam questions, past papers, flashcards and more.

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Use this form to write up videos / articles that you have accessed

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Use this form to write up videos / articles that you have accessed

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Muslims under pressure to sign French values charter

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Muslims under pressure to sign French values charter

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France's Muslim Council is due to meet President Emmanuel Macron this week, to confirm the text of a new "charter of republican values" for imams in the country to sign.

The Council (CFCM), which represents nine separate Muslim associations, has reportedly been asked to include in the text recognition of France's republican values, rejection of Islam as a political movement and a ban on foreign influence.

"We do not all agree on what this charter of values is, and what it will contain," said Chems-Eddine Hafiz, vice-president of the CFCM and Rector of the Paris Grand Mosque. But, he said, "we are at a historic turning point for Islam in France [and] we Muslims are facing our responsibilities".

Eight years ago, he said, he thought very differently.

The Islamist Mohamed Merah had just carried out attacks in Toulouse.

"[Former French] President Sarkozy got me out of bed at 5am to talk about it," he remembers. "I told him: 'His name may be Mohamed, but he's a criminal!' I didn't want to make the connection between that crime and my religion. Today, I do. The imams of France have work to do."

The plan is for the CFCM to create a register of imams in France, each of whom would sign up to the Charter, in return for accreditation.

President Macron spoke in October about putting "immense pressure" on Muslim authorities. But this is difficult territory in a country that cherishes state secularism.

Mr Macron is trying to stop the spread of political Islam, without being seen as interfering in religious practice, or singling out one particular faith.

Integrating all groups of Muslims into French society has become a pressing political issue in recent years. France has an estimated five million Muslims - Europe's largest Muslim minority.

Olivier Roy, an expert in French Islam, says the Charter raises two problems. One is discrimination because it targets only Muslim preachers, and the other is the right to freedom of religion.

"You are obliged to accept the laws of the state," he told me, "but you are not required to celebrate its values. You cannot discriminate against LGBT, for example, but the Catholic Church is not obliged to accept same-sex marriage."

Fashion designer Iman Mestaoui receives regular abuse from those she calls the "haters" - hardline Islamists who say her brand of scarves and turbans does not always cover a woman's hair enough.

But, she says, the idea of getting imams to sign up to "French values" is a problem, when Muslims are already seen by many as not fully French.

"It's putting us in a strange place where you have to show people that you subscribe to the republican values; where you feel French, but they don't feel you are," she explained.

"We feel like nothing we do - pay taxes, do [national service] - will be enough. You have to prove that you're really French: you have to eat pork; drink wine; not wear hijab, wear miniskirts. And it's ridiculous."

'Extremist time-bombs'

But Hassen Chalghoumi, imam of the Drancy mosque on the outskirts of Paris, says that after years of terrorist attacks, the government has been forced to act. Mr Chalghoumi is now in hiding, following a spike in death threats over his reformist views.

"We have to go the extra mile, to show that we are well-integrated, that we respect the law," he told me. "This is the price we have to pay because of the extremists."

Outside the Paris Grand Mosque, Charki Dennai arrives for prayers, his rolled-up mat and Koran tucked under his arm.

"These young [extremist] people are time bombs," he says. "I think the imams are a bit too nice to them. We can respect French law and also Islam, it's feasible. That's what I do."

But there are questions over how much influence imams have among younger Muslims, especially when it comes to extremist violence.

"It won't work," says Olivier Roy, "for a very simple reason: the terrorists don't come from Salafi mosques. If you take the biographies of terrorists, none of them is a product of Salafi preaching." Salafism is a hardline, ultra-conservative movement identified with political Islam.

Tackling alienated youth

The charter is one part of a wider government strategy to curb foreign influence, prevent violence and threats from extremists, and win back young people who feel forgotten by the state.

Mr Macron has proposed more Arabic-language teaching in state schools and more investment in run-down areas, and has emphasised that he is targeting Islamists who reject France's laws and values, not Muslims as a whole.

Hakim El-Karoui is a specialist in French Islamist movements at the Institut Montaigne who regularly contributes to government thinking.

"I'm a real fan of the strategy," he told me. "It's comprehensive. It's cultural, and also about organisation and funding."

But, he says, Muslims themselves should be included by the government in projects like this, "because they can do a lot in terms of spreading the enlightened version of Islam on social networks - the government is not able to".

And without the buy-in of "grassroots Muslims", says Olivier Roy, the new Charter will be hard to enforce.

"Let's suppose that the local Muslim community decides to ignore the CFCM and appoints its own imam," he told me. "What will the government do? Either we change the constitution and give up the concept of freedom of religion [or] the government cannot impose certified imams on local Muslim communities."

In a Paris studio, shooting pictures for her new catalogue, Iman Mestaoui tells me she made her whole family vote for President Macron in 2017.

Since then, she has noticed a "huge shift" to the right on issues like immigration and security.

"I was pro-Macron," she said. "He was a real hope in our community, but we feel like we've been abandoned."

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France Islam: Muslims under pressure to sign French values charter

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France's Muslim Council is due to meet President Emmanuel Macron this week, to confirm the text of a new "charter of republican values" for imams in the country to sign. The Council (CFCM), which represents nine separate Muslim associations, has reportedly been asked to include in the text recognition of France's republican values, rejection of Islam as a political movement and a ban on foreign influence.

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rom the industrial north to the sun-baked south, Eric Tabuchi has spent two decades scouring the landscape of France with an obsessive eye. In 2008, the Danish-Japanese-French photographer created a beguiling series called Alphabet Truck by sneaking up on 26 different articulated lorries on the move and photographing the single giant letter adorning each one's rear, from A to Z. In 2017, he made Atlas of Forms, a 256-page guide to all the shapes, from pyramid to polygon, the world's buildings are based on. And in 2017, he joined forces with the painter Nelly Monnier, also his partner, to create the Atlas des Régions Naturelles.

This sprawling, unwieldy multipart portrait of a nation takes as its foundation the 500-odd régions naturelles, or non-administrative areas (a bit like British counties) into which mainland France is divided. Monnier and Tabuchi are slowly making their way around the country, arriving in each area with a minimum of preconceptions. First impressions are key, the idea being to shoot a few characteristic landscapes, then to work their way up through the area's vernacular architecture, with everything dictated by local conditions.

There are great photographs of the two of them sitting on maps the size of living-room floors, plotting routes through suburbs, semi-industrial zones, emptied towns and overlooked villages. Each region gets exactly 50 pictures so, once completed, there'll be 25,000 shots in all, always centred and flatly lit, as descriptive as they are elegant.

2000 was the future once ... shopfronts. Photograph: Atlas des Régions Naturelles, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier

Just before Covid hit, the pair were in the Massif Central, which is about halfway through, geographically speaking. Unable to get back on the road, they started picking through what they had, to put it online. The result is a searchable map, a sort of digital museum of France, or at least half of it, with images tagged by theme (agriculture, religion, business, entertainment) but also by colour, shape, pictogram or series. They even plan to print out the entire Atlas, all 9,000 pages of it.

The pair received a detailed message from a boy who had found the spot where he had first kissed a girl

Browsing through the online archive is a uniquely digital experience. A search for "pink" yields a water tower, a silo, a casino, a Dégustation Midi et Soir cafe, and the metal gate to a private museum in the Vosges called Le Musée des Oubliés. There is a whole series on the late-19th-century geodetic towers built across the north, mostly along wartime frontlines, that were used by cartographers before aerial photography. There are the shopfronts with "2000" in their signage, as well as the makeshift shelters used by gilets jaunes protesters. The resulting grids echo the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German artists who spent decades photographing disappearing industrial architecture around America and Europe to produce series of water towers or gas holders.

Right after the launch of the Atlas, the pair received a detailed message from a boy who had found the spot where he'd first kissed a girl. There's no such place as nowhere - or as Tabuchi puts it: "You realise everyone is from somewhere." The writer Denis Cosnard, meanwhile, instantly hit the archive's backstreets, tweeting that, with its "erstwhile modern bars, shuttered factories, the kind of building that's just not built any more ... the Atlas is a deep dive into a forgotten France".

High and dry ... a collection of swimming pools for sale. Photograph: Atlas des Régions Naturelles, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier

We see fine old buildings that are now past their prime, but haven't been fixed up or changed by gentrification, since they're in economically depressed areas. This is the strength of telling your story through vernacular architecture: the Côte d'Azur, by contrast, is a jumble of new builds and bland taste.

"Towns and cities account for less than 5% of the land," says Tabuchi. And in between them is a whole lot of country, of which 60% is agricultural. This was one of the big revelations for the duo: that France has returned to a rural state. "It's just not what we talk about," says Tabuchi. The popular image of France, he says, is "the TGV, the Eiffel Tower, luxury fashion houses, the chateaux de la Loire. But actually there are as many cows and pigs in France as there are people." Filling in this gap, or chasm, is what gives Tabuchi and Monnier's atlas such power. It's a journey into the local, the particular, the unique.

It also highlights things under threat. Many of the structures they've photographed have since disappeared. And, when economies do pick up, there is a shift in the built environment towards homogenisation, which is tragic since the regions, traditionally, have had their own unique identities, from the culinary to the architectural to the cultural.

Green and pleasant land ... the duo documented objects by size and colour. Photograph: Atlas des Régions Naturelles, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier

While Tabuchi draws a parallel between savouring a region's wines and getting to know its colours, the pair's odyssey has been no road trip through a foodie paradise. "We've neither the time nor the budget to enjoy local gastronomie," says Monnier. "We drive 10 hours a day with some bread and a hunk of cheese." But there was another factor: "We've also noticed that traditional dishes have all but disappeared." If there's enough of a tourist industry in an area, passable meals aren't so hard to come by, but otherwise it's yet another example of the distance between the real France and the popular projection. Brittany, which actually grows great vegetables, is all industrial pork and ready-grated gruyère apparently, and sometimes all they can find anywhere is burgers and fries. "That warm auberge - comforting, welcoming - just doesn't exist any more."

Tabuchi adds: "The fact that I am half-Japanese and half-Danish is super important. I'm looking at this country that my parents somehow decided to have me in." He is as unrooted as Monnier is grounded: she comes from the countryside between Lyon and Geneva, where her family has lived for generations. The contrast between the two, united in their exploration, only deepens the sense that this is a real questioning portrait of a country in flux. Globalisation, says Tabuchi, makes the planet feel small. "The world is much, much, much bigger," he says. "It is rich and diverse, irreducible and impossible to summarise."

That is certainly the feeling I got browsing this archive. At a time when Emily in Paris is bringing caricatured France to the small screen in a way not seen since the days of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, their atlas shows my home country to be both mysterious and broken, unknowably huge and a place I want to safeguard. Tabuchi and Monnier are thinking of expanding into other countries. Imagine what an atlas of Brexit Britain might look like.

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Sacre bleu! France as you've never seen her before

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rom the industrial north to the sun-baked south, Eric Tabuchi has spent two decades scouring the landscape of France with an obsessive eye. In 2008, the Danish-Japanese-French photographer created a beguiling series called Alphabet Truck by sneaking up on 26 different articulated lorries on the move and photographing the single giant letter adorning each one's rear, from A to Z.

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Why France may ban discrimination against accents

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Why France may ban discrimination against accents

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By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris

Imagine a well-known Westminster MP - a party leader - caught in a press scrum and being asked a question which is delivered in a thick Scottish accent.

He looks at the journalist in mocking incomprehension, and says: "Sorry I didn't understand a word of that. Can someone ask me a question in proper English?" Unthinkable, right?

And yet in France more or less exactly that exchange was caught on camera between left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and a hapless woman reporter from French regional TV. Her offence: having a strong southern twang.

Regional accents in France have long been the victim of a patronising Parisian disdain.

Those funny nasals from Marseille are great when accompanied by pastis and a game of boules. Some good comedy parts on TV, too.

But woe betide anyone with a hint of the south in their voice who seeks promotion in broadcasting or national politics or the higher end of academia and the civil service - or even in telesales.

Get ahead, speak Parisian

If you want to communicate in France - and not just raise a laugh - then you conform to the norm, and that means speaking standard Paris bourgeois. There are plenty of online elocution classes to teach you how.

But times are changing, and for the first time a pushback is underway on behalf of the estimated 30 million French citizens who speak with an accent. That's almost half France's population of 67 million.

I too have corrected over time my so-called "banlieue" accent, first by entering Sciences-Po (university), then by becoming a lawyer. So I know all about this personally

Under a private member's bill going before the National Assembly on Thursday, it will become an offence under the labour and penal codes to discriminate against an individual on the basis of accent.

The French word for it is " la glottophobie".

Why an accent can harm your career

"Having a regional accent in France means automatically that you're treated like a hick - amiable but fundamentally unserious," says the bill's sponsor Christophe Euzet, who is from Perpignan in French Catalonia.

"It is unimaginable in France that you could have someone with a southern accent - or a northern one for that matter - broadcasting commentary on Remembrance Day. Or discoursing on Middle Eastern politics.

It's a personal problem for many people who find they have to give up part of their identity if they want to advance their careers

"But it is also a political issue today. The yellow vest movement was a classic example of what happens when millions of people from the regions look at their representatives in Paris and feel they have nothing in common."

But hang on. Isn't France's Prime Minister, Jean Castex, famous for being the first in the office to speak with an accent? And isn't that all about reconnecting with the people?

"Yes," says Euzet. "But how long did it take Castex before he was taken seriously as a politician?"

How French accents differ

France cannot boast quite the same diversity of accents as the UK. Centralisers from the Revolution on did their best to suppress regional languages first - like Occitan and Breton - then the accents that emerged from them. Schools were the first instrument of conformity, then mass media.

The biggest family of accents is the southern one, marked, among other things, by pronunciation of the normally silent 'e' at the end of words, and the famous "pang" and "vang" for pain and vin (bread and wine).

Other regional accents can be found in Corsica, eastern France, Alsace (influenced by German), Brittany and the north - influenced by the local dialect Ch'ti.

In many rural areas of France, accents are preserved among older people but are heard less frequently among the young.

There is also an identifiable banlieue accent, popular among people of immigrant origin and characterised by hard consonants and rapid-fire delivery.

One myth is that the best French is spoken by the people of the Tours region in the Loire valley.

Under the ancien régime, members of the court kept châteaux along the Loire, and brought with them the educated Paris vernacular.

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Why France may ban discrimination against accents

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By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris Imagine a well-known Westminster MP - a party leader - caught in a press scrum and being asked a question which is delivered in a thick Scottish accent. He looks at the journalist in mocking incomprehension, and says: "Sorry I didn't understand a word of that.

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This video is in Occitan, with French subtitles

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Les villes d'Occitanie et l'Occitan : Episode 6 Carcassonne (11)

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The locks and barges of France's Canal du Midi

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From young apprentices to accomplished craftsmen, from farmers to Michelin-starred chefs... We meet the people who keep French heritage alive. Saturday at 7.…

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Episodes from 2020

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Winter warmers: Discovering typical French soups

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Episodes from 2019

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From young apprentices to accomplished craftsmen, from farmers to Michelin-starred chefs... We meet the people who keep French heritage alive. Saturday at 7....

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La crêpe, symbole de la gastronomie bretonne

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Gastronomie : la véritable bouillabaisse marseillaise - Météo à la carte

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Les bouchons, temples de la gastronomie lyonnaise - Météo à la carte

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Gastronomie : les incontournables moules-frites printanières

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American director Michael Moore looks at how the French school dinner is a work of art!

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Patrimoine : Versailles, la restauration de la chapelle royale

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Faut-il reconstruire les monuments? (FR)

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Faut-il reconstruire les monuments? (FR)

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Notre-Dame, Saint-Denis... Faut-il reconstruire les monuments détruits ?