French News
April 3, 2014
THE FRONT NATIONAL won historic gains in the French elections earlier this week, winning a total of eleven cities. The nationalistic, anti-European Union, anti-immigration party is widely identified with its leader, Marine Le Pen. “People want to live like French people in France, not like Saudis or Qatari,” Le Pen said at a campaign rally. There is no major political figure in the United States who could get ahead saying similar things about American culture.
As an aside to the main news, Galliwatch has a post on the second “wife” of the new prime minister, Manuel Valls. In keeping with French fashions in political polygamy, Anne Gravoin replaced the mother of Valls’s four children. Tiberge writes of recent political wives:
They all seem similar. Cecilia Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Ségolène Royal, Valérie Trierweiler, Julie Gayet, and now Anne Gravoin. Hugely ambitious (Cecilia less so), totally dependent on the man in their life for their own celebrity status, vaguely immoral, “cool” fashionistas, very leftist, antagonistic toward the traditional woman be she Madame De Gaulle, Marine Le Pen or Madame Ayrault, they ply the trade of social climber/courtesan with cold-blooded determination. Unfortunately, I don’t find them interesting.
— Comments —
Bob writes:
I normally enjoy the bits you repost from Galliawatch, but this one deserves several corrections, one minor and one significant.
Starting with the former, Manuel Valls is a Socialist Party politician, not a UMP man. Now, I’m not sure the difference is particularly significant, but there it is.
More importantly, the description of Marine Le Pen as a traditional woman struck me as bizarre. Now, I wish Ms. Le Pen and the FN all the best, but surely support does not require self-delusion. Despite professing herself to be Catholic, she is twice divorced and publicly cohabiting with a new man. There is nothing I could find about an annulment. She has spoken out against measures meant to ban abortion. Ms. Le Pen would certainly be an upgrade over the UMP-Socialist duopoly in France, but to say that she is a traditional woman strikes me as strange.
Laura writes:
It was my mistake to refer to Valls as UMP.
Tiberge has discussed the things you mention about Le Pen before. She is not a traditional woman except with regard to French nationalism.
Sydney writes:
Carla Bruni, Ségolène Royal, and Valérie Trierweiler were all celebrities in their own right, long before their relationships with the respective men in question. Bruni for her singing and modeling career, Royal as a regional politician, and Trierweiler as a journalist.
Laura writes:
Their international, mega-celebrity status was dependent on the men in their lives.
I do not think they were “vaguely” immoral, as Tiberge mentions. They were flagrantly immoral.
