PARIS LETTER/Lara Marlowe: The mood here at the start of September is as morose as the weather, doom-laden with apprehension about another al-Qaeda attack. News stories are sad or sordid, at best silly.
First, there was the outrageous hit-and-run shipping collision that left four French fishermen dead off the coast of Brittany. The Bow Eagle, a Norwegian chemical tanker, crashed into the trawler Cistude on the night of August 25th-26th, then sailed on, leaving the trawler to sink and its crew to drown. That the crew of the Bow Eagle were poor, ill-paid Filipinos seemed to make it only more tragic. Norwegian police announced this week that they will extradite the Filipino duty officer.
In Chateauroux, seven people have been charged with imprisoning a homeless 19 year-old for a month, starving and torturing him, and forcing him to perform sexual acts. The young man's ears were torn off and he was severely burned with a clothes iron.
He was saved when neighbours saw a cardboard SOS sign in the second-floor window of the flat where he was held.
In Nantes, six people have been holed up in a villa since mid-July, waiting for the apocalypse. Their guru, Arnaud Mussy, claims he is Christ and swears the world will end on October 24th. Mussy founded his sect, called Néo-Phare, after September 11th. One follower has already committed suicide and two others tried.
And in Melun yesterday, 11 men, including a shop-keeper, a gardener and a lab technician, went on trial for abusing dozens of little boys over the past decade. The paedophilia ring was led by a sales representative and former teacher who handed out 200 franc notes to boys younger than 10. France's most prestigious publisher, Gallimard, has suspended deliveries of Rose Bonbon, a novel that recounts a travelling salesman's sexual exploitation of girls aged seven to 10.
By comparison, the ruckus at the extreme right-wing National Front's "summer school" was trivial, if in bad taste. As Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the Front's leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, walked towards the podium to make her speech, Bernard Antony, the leader of the fundamentalist Catholic faction of the Front, was heard to say": "Elle est dragable". ("You'd try to pick her up.") But when Libération reported the comment, Antony called the newspaper's reporter a pig, guttersnipe and traitor, and challenged him to a fist fight. Mr Antony and Ms Le Pen are rivals, and he shouted at her: "I know you would have liked it if I'd said that, but I don't want to pick you up."
Green leader Dominique Voynet, a former environment minister, told her party's "summer school" that she was "tired of going around with a bullseye on my back" and was resigning. "Politics is brutal everywhere," she explained. "With the Greens, it's often inhuman. The rumours, insults, insinuations. . ."
The business executives' movement MEDEF discussed the big fears of the new millennium at the first discussion of its end-of-summer meeting.
Claude Bébéar, former chairman of insurance giant AXA and patriarch of the French business community, stunned his audience by stating that "the white race is committing suicide" by having too few children. Companies should not feel guilty about "delocating" jobs to the developing world. "When you create 1,000 jobs in India or Bangladesh, you help these countries a lot, and the problem in France is very limited," Mr Bébéar said.
Even Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's honeymoon with the French electorate is ending, four months after he took office. The left-wing maverick Jean-Pierre Chevènement says Mr Raffarin is "imprisoned in a Bermuda Triangle: low growth, public finances under close scrutiny from Brussels, and big bills to pay". In recent days, Mr Raffarin's government has twice back-tracked faster than you can say "stability pact".
The Prime Minister announced that budget discussions would "set the cursor on the priorities which seem most important". Reducing social charges - not income tax, as promised and promised by President Jacques Chirac - was now the priority, he said. After an instant outcry, the government "clarified" the statement, confirming the tax cut would go through.
Then a junior education minister implied that up to 3,000 of 1,339,000 jobs at his ministry might be cut in the next budget. On the day French children returned to school, teachers unions threatened to strike.
Meanwhile in Johannesburg, Mr Chirac delivered a rousing speech about saving the planet. Back home in France, commentators admitted it was a good speech but asked, if he was so keen on fighting poverty, why didn't Mr Chirac start at home?
What nerve, they added, defending the environment when he ordered nuclear tests in the South Pacific! And what about agricultural subsidies, so dear to Mr Chirac; weren't they a major impediment to Third World development?