Our first stop on a short New Year's visit to Paris was, coincidentally, the Senate, or more precisely "the event" taking place under its patronage.
This was the first Botticelli exhibition in half a century, subject of an excellent article by Lara Marlowe in this newspaper last Saturday. It is being shown in the Musée de Luxembourg, an annexe to the palace which houses the Senate, beside the famous gardens.
The palace was once home to Marie de' Medici, mother to Louis XIII, who was evicted after losing a power struggle in 1630 with Cardinal Richelieu, the so-called "day of dupes". The setting for the exhibition is especially appropriate, as her famous Medici ancestor, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was Botticelli's patron.
Under one oval painting is the magnificent claim that it has been "restored by the Senate". However, hosting art exhibitions and restoring "old masters" is unlikely to top the agenda of Mary O'Rourke's Senate Reform Committee or of the new Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, which met for the first time this week. Leinster House was an aristocratic town house, never a palace.
On the opposite side of the Rue de Vaugirard is a different sort of exhibition, a window display about the Senate. I loved the quotation from Georges Clemenceau in 1907: "Le temps de la refléxion, c'est le Sénat".
The method of election, described as "universal indirect suffrage", is similar to that in Ireland. There are 150,000 electors, consisting of deputies, regional counsellors, but mainly communal delegates.
The French Senate takes its historical derivation seriously. Le Conseil des Anciens was the name given to the second chamber under the constitution of the Directory (1795-9). Under that constitution, members had to be 40 years of age. The minimum age is still 30. The youngest French senator today is 40, the average age being 61. For deputies and senators together, the average age is 54. Senators are elected for six years. Eleven per cent are women, compared to 16.6 per cent in Ireland.
For those who think our legislative productivity is low, the French Parliament, legislating for 59 million people, passed 65 laws in 2002. Last year, a non-election year, the Oireachtas passed 46 laws.
The French newspapers, like one German newspaper I bought, covered the start of the Irish presidency with pictures of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in the courtyard of Dublin Castle for the raising of the EU flag on January 1st. "A breath of fresh Eire?" was the headline (translated) in the business section of Le Figaro. Interest in the Irish presidency has been magnified by failure to agree a constitution last December and also by respect for Ireland's presidency-wielding abilities.
None of the countries directly involved in the dispute over Council voting weights can afford a prolonged deadlock. If the EU is to become the world's most competitive economy by 2010, it has to be able to function. All member countries have had to accept periodically dilution of their voting strength. Poland has made its point, as Ireland did in the first Nice referendum. If Poland wants on an ongoing basis the sympathetic support and understanding that Ireland and other cohesion countries needed and received, it will not persist in blocking the constitution. It is hard to see what Spain has to gain either from a prolonged rift with France and Germany.
When I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in the 1970s, there was much concern even then at talk of a two-tier community, a long-standing pressure lever for integrationists, unspecific in terms of detail, whenever progress is stalled. Yet nostalgia for the Europe of the Six is puzzling, given that the clash between de Gaulle and the federalists made it the most disruptive period in the EU's history.
Presidents of the Commission and the European Council have an equal responsibility to hold the Union together, not to drive it apart. It is hard to see how the French and German economies or their countries' influence in the world would be enhanced by actually precipitating a major rift within the EU.
President Chirac gave a New Year's address to the nation. His priority theme was "jobs, jobs, jobs". Last year, more were lost than gained in France.
Continental newspapers often put on their front pages the opening paragraph of a long cultural-philosophical essay on the inside pages by an eminent person, rather than just current news stories. Maintaining France's leadership and Europe's and combating fears of decline are a recurring preoccupation of such articles.
France still maintains something of its old cultural pre-eminence. The Louvre remains the world's finest museum, with about eight different exhibitions running concurrently.
The Opéra Bastille, one of President Mitterrand's grands projets, has a vast and impressive interior. We watched a magnificent ballet performance, set to music by Prokofiev, of Ivan the Terrible, a favourite subject of Stalin's.
I discovered in Le Monde that the antagonists in the epic film, Master and Commander, set in 1805, starring Russell Crowe, were switched by Hollywood. In the original novel by Patrick O'Brian, a British naval vessel was chasing a malevolent American one during the war of 1812, which explains the puzzling supposed French strategic interest in the Pacific Ocean up to the Galapagos Islands in the film. Hollywood switched 1812 to 1805 and made "the baddies" French instead of American. Bully for Hollywood.
American (and British) statesmen who raged at de Gaulle's independence did not add to their own reputations. It is time for the US and Europe (i.e. France) to make up their differences. The United States owed its independence to France as well as to its own efforts.
The great equestrian statues of Lafayette and Rochambeau opposite the White House, and the vast tableau of young French officers on horseback beside Washington accepting the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, under the dome of Congress on Capitol Hill, are great symbolic reminders of a solidarity between "old Europe" and the United States that needs to be renewed.