Salon.com > Mark Hunter

Letter from France

Thu, 22 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

If content is king, then Jean-Marie Messier is the most uncontested royalty France has produced since Louis XVI took a ride on the guillotine.

Four years ago, the round-faced and youthfully energetic Messier, 43, took over a highly profitable water company, the Ginirale des Eaux, and began pumping its profits into a new-economy powerhouse called Vivendi.

Today, Messier's media mills include Havas, which owns the cream of France's print media, and Canal Plus, the TV network that is the biggest producer of cinema in France. He's the symbol of a new generation of French business leaders. He's also a textbook symbol of a country in which power remains concentrated in the hands of a tiny caste.

Messier comes from a system in which the state trains an elite that goes on to dominate both politics and business. He attended Polytechnique, an engineering faculty founded by Napoleon, and the National School of Administration, which is a lot like going to MIT and the Harvard business and law schools.

Europe’s monster plane

Fri, 09 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Here is the future of aviation: By 2015, air passenger traffic will double; by 2020, it will triple to nearly 4 billion passengers a year. Think of your last flight -- the lines, the chaos, the lost luggage -- then multiply the number of people in the airport by three.

Over the past four years, a cabal of airline executives from around the world has regularly convened in the French countryside to decide if they want to change this picture. To do so, they will have to take one of the costliest gambles in the history of civil aviation. The price tag may be as high as $12 billion, but the payoff could be global dominance of the airline industry for the next half-century.

At the center of this bet is a new plane from Airbus Industrie -- the innocuously named A3XX, which happens to be the biggest passenger-carrying bird ever put in the sky -- a plane that makes the Boeing B747-400, currently the largest airliner flying, look like a runt.

A California lawsuit makes Paris tremble

Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Some battles you lose, even if you win. For the French
co-defendants, the Executive Life case may be one of those
battles. Executive Life was a California insurance company that
bellied up and was sold in 1991 by the state insurance
commissioner to French investors, who subsequently derived
enormous profits from the company's junk-bond portfolio. Now
those investors face the possible creation of a trial record --
resulting in public disclosure that may loom as large for some of
them as the potential loss of billions of dollars.

Last year the California Insurance Commissioners office filed
suit to force a cluster of French and Swiss financial entities,
grouped around the scandal-tinged Cridit Lyonnais bank, to
cough up their estimated $2 billion gains from "a joint venture
to fraudulently and wrongfully obtain the assets" of Executive
Life. An amended complaint, filed Jan. 21 in the U.S. District
Court of Los Angeles, widened the conflict to include the rising
star of French finance, Frangois Pinault. That makes the case
what the French call "an affair of state," and not only because
investigators from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and
the Department of Justice are also looking into it.

France's hidden treasure

Tue, 16 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Antoine is acting strange, and the grown-ups -- two expat Russians, a Frenchwoman and me, the expat American -- are sitting on Mischa's bare concrete terrace under the pavilion tent overlooking a hillside in the Creuse, trying to figure out what it means. All summer Antoine has been a model 10-year-old. He doesn't bother Mischa during writing hours, or me when I play the guitar, or torture the kittens, and he hasn't broken anything in his body, the junk depot or the stone barn that Mischa has been turning into a three-story house over the past few years. In fact, Antoine learned more masonry working on the barn than some men in the Creuse, where stonework remains a skill as common as knitting. So why is he brooding, when he isn't chirping like a hysterical bird?

Finally someone says: "He doesn't want to go back to Paris."

"Who does?" comes the reply.

For most people, Paris is a city of dreams, and most of those dreams are true. But Paris is also what the French escape in the summer. Paris is where you make the money, and where there must be more money, as D.H. Lawrence's rocking-horse winner said before he died. Paris is where everything you do must have a purpose, because it is the capital, the place where you find all the brains, prizes and risks.

Newsreal: Free the Boulder Two!

Fri, 17 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

i always wanted to be unique, and now I've made it: I'm the only person in America -- apart from the two accused -- who thinks that John and Patsy Ramsey are being publicly destroyed for a crime they didn't commit.

Perhaps I'm merely ignorant. I don't have access to the police files on the case -- just the copious "evidence" that's been leaked steadily to the National Enquirer, the Globe, Newsweek and Vanity Fair by the Boulder, Colo., cops. Problem is, what they've got, more than 10 months after the slaying, isn't anywhere close to an indictment. So they've done the next best thing: smeared the Ramseys up and down, with the aid of the press, hoping to make their prime suspects crack. It's the same tactic the FBI used against Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case. And, as with the Jewell case, the cops may be flat out wrong.

Let's look at the case, which rests entirely on circumstantial, often unspeakably tendentious, evidence that the cops have fed to the press.

Newsreal: Goodbye, my toujours Provence

Mon, 02 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000

The good news about the French elections is that Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front didn't do better than it did in Sunday's runoff. The bad news, if the accelerating resurgence of neo-fascism in la belle France is a prospect you find troubling, is that it has hardly begun to march. When it does, get ready to kiss your toujours Provence dreams goodbye because the extreme rightists are well on their way to taking control of the region -- along with many others.

That the Front is a mere blip in the National Assembly is beside the point -- the party is not that concerned with national victories at this stage. Its real strategy is to conquer France piece by piece, town by town, region by region. During a year I spent with the Front in 1995-96, its cadres kept dropping references to the party's policy of "local implantation," and they weren't just referring to the fact that in June 1995, the Movement (as its militants call it) captured three major towns in Provence -- Orange, Marignane and Toulon -- to which they added a fourth, Vitrolles, in February. They meant that the Front knows it can never take France the way Hitler took Weimar, from the top down. It has a slower but surer plan.

The Buffoon Brigade

Wed, 26 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

"These people should get a life," said the FBI's chief investigator of the still-unsolved downing of TWA Flight 800 last July.

That blast of frustration from the FBI's James Kallstrom was aimed at the motley army of believers, including former JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger, who continue to push the theory that American "friendly fire" blew the plane out the sky, killing all 230 people on board.

The theory, wearily discounted by investigators, got a fresh lease on life earlier this month in an article co-written by Salinger in Paris Match claiming that a "super-secret" new Navy missile had destroyed TWA 800 during a botched test firing. As "proof," Salinger showed off a photo from an official radar tape with an "unexplained blip," which he said was the Navy missile.

Kallstrom said the blip was an unarmed Navy P-3 Orion flying approximately 7,000 feet above TWA Flight 800 when it exploded. Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, after looking at the tape, said his committee was "unequivocally convinced that friendly fire did not cause this crash."