Category Archives: Paris

Ruth Mackenzie: the British change-maker sacked by Paris’s artistic elite

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Despite fulfilling her brief to bring diversity to the Châtelet Theatre, the veteran director was brusquely dismissed. So what went wrong?

When the British arts supremo Ruth Mackenzie was named artistic director of Paris’s Châtelet theatre she thought everyone knew what they were getting.

Her pitch for the job, approved by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, after a gruelling four interview panels, was to reinvent the historic Paris venue – known as “Broadway sur Seine” after the previous director’s penchant for American musicals – as a more diverse and inclusive people’s theatre.

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Thirty-year-old corpse discovered in cellar of €35m Paris mansion

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Gruesome find halts work on restoring newly purchased complex in prestigious area

Work on restoring an abandoned €35m (£27m) mansion in one of the most prestigious areas of Paris has been suspended after the discovery of a corpse that had been decomposing in the basement for 30 years, local media have reported.

Minutes from Les Invalides and the French prime minister’s official residence, and backing onto the former home of Yves Saint Laurent, the vast but crumbling complex at 12 rue Oudinot in the heart of Paris had been empty for more than 30 years.

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Fingers crossed at France’s brasseries and cafes as tourist quarantines loom

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Numbers of foreign visitors are already down – and the fresh surge of Covid cases could spell the end for the holiday season

In a normal August, the much-loved miniature tourist train in the French port city of Sète would be full of tourists from Britain and elsewhere, enjoying the ride.

Optimistically, the manager, Romiy Priore, took steps to make his attraction safe for Covid times. “With the virus, we decided to order disposable earphones for the start of the season on 23 June – 100 of them,” he says, huddling behind a Perspex screen in a cool cabin on the quayside. “It’s August, and I still have 70 left. That tells you how many foreign tourists we currently have.”

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French intelligence agents charged with attempted murder

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Police discover agents in stolen car with false plates while plot to kill woman was not part of duties

Preliminary attempted murder charges have been filed against two agents from France’s foreign intelligence agency over an alleged plan to kill a 54-year-old woman last month in the Creteil suburb of Paris, the city prosecutor’s office has said.

French media reported on Wednesday that the directorate-general for external security (DGSE) agents were believed to have been plotting to kill a target, but not as part of their job duties. The agency is the French equivalent of the CIA.

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Man attacked in Paris launderette for asking customer to wear mask

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Alleged victim says he was beaten with baseball bats after asking man to put on mask

A man using a launderette in a Paris suburb says he was beaten by two men with baseball bats in front of his young children after asking a customer to put on a face mask.

Masks are obligatory inside all public places in France to combat a recent surge in coronavirus cases.

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Emmanuel Macron accosted by gilets jaunes as he takes Bastille Day walk

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Call for increased security as French president tells demonstrators ‘be cool’

Anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow vests) hurled abuse at Emmanuel Macron as he walked with his wife, Brigitte, on Bastille Day in a public garden in Paris, prompting calls from opposition leaders for increased security.

Demonstrators confronted the French president and his wife, Brigitte, as they walked with bodyguards in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris on Tuesday.

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Bodies donated to science ‘left to be eaten by rats at Paris centre’

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Inquiry to examine claims remains were found strewn around and dismembered

Authorities in France will investigate claims that human corpses donated for science were left to rot and be eaten by rats at a university research facility, the Paris prosecutor’s office has said.

An investigation into “violations of the integrity of a corpse” was handed over to magistrates by prosecutors who handled the initial phase of the investigation after l’Express magazine reported the scandal last November.

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French coronavirus study finds black immigrant deaths doubled at peak

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Statistics agency is first in France to cross-check Covid-19 fatalities with country of origin

Death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of France’s coronavirus outbreak, finds a study from the French government’s statistics agency.

The INSEE agency’s findings, published on Tuesday, are the closest France has come to acknowledging with numbers the disproportionate impact of the virus on the country’s black immigrants and members of other overlooked minority groups.

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French Revolution: remains discovered in walls of Paris monument

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Experts believe up to 500 people guillotined in period may be buried in Chapelle Expiatoire

Experts believe the remains of up to 500 people guillotined during the French Revolution may be buried in the walls of a listed monument in Paris.

The discovery blows apart the accepted historical account, which suggests the bodies of famous guillotinés, including Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry, Olympe de Gouges and Maximilien Robespierre, revolutionary architect of the Reign of Terror, were moved to the network of catacombs under the city.

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‘I’m suffocating’: French delivery driver’s last words echo George Floyd case

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Four police officers questioned for involuntary homicide over death of Cédric Chouviat

A French delivery driver who died after being arrested in Paris pleaded “I’m suffocating” several times as police held him to the ground.

Footage has emerged of 42-year-old Cédric Chouviat saying he could not breathe seven times in 22 seconds as officers pinned him to the ground.

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Police fire teargas at largely peaceful healthcare protest in Paris – video

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French nursing unions called for a national strike to ask for better working conditions and to demand the government keep its promise to overhaul France’s hospital system in response to the coronavirus crisis. 

Police fired teargas after being pelted with objects by a small minority that overturned a car during the demonstration led by healthcare workers

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Cafe society spills on to Paris cobbles as drivers bid to reclaim post-lockdown streets

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With streets pedestrianised and the mayor turning parking spaces into cycle lanes, motorists fear being squeezed out of public spaces

It is evening rush hour and the Rue de Rivoli, a major east-west road through central Paris, is heaving. Pre-coronavirus, it would have been one long traffic jam, paralysed by increasingly frustrated and angry motorists. Now, though, with private cars banned, it is busy with pedestrians, cyclists and a smattering of taxis and buses.

North of Rue de Rivoli, in the Marais, a maze of narrow cobbled streets, cafes, restaurants and bars have spread out across pavements and parking places.

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Anne Hidalgo likely to be reelected as Paris mayor after forging green alliance

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Opinion poll puts Socialist at 44% of intentions to vote, well ahead of her closest rival

The mayor of Paris has opened up a strong lead in her bid to be reelected after forging an alliance with the city’s ecologists.

An opinion poll put the Socialist Anne Hidalgo at 44% of intentions to vote, well ahead of her closest rival, the centre-right candidate Rachida Dati, a former justice minister under Nicolas Sarkozy. 

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Global report: Germany eases travel ban and cafe culture returns to Paris

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Elsewhere, Italy’s president warns Covid-19 ‘is not over’, and former UK PMs join calls for a coordinated global response

Germany lifted its blanket European travel ban as coronavirus lockdowns across the EU continued to ease, with officials saying new cases in western Europe were now in steady decline.

Parisians reclaimed their cafe terraces and Berliners took back their bars as normal life inched closer to returning in many parts of the continent.

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Parisians angry as trees in famous cinema’s Japanese garden cut down

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Property magnate Charles Cohen’s €8m renovation of La Pagode branded a ‘massacre’

When the property magnate Charles Cohen bought the La Pagode cinema in Paris, complete with its celebrated Japanese garden, three years ago, he announced that as an American in Paris he wanted “everyone to be happy”.

The cinema-loving Francophile promised to “restore and preserve” the magnificent listed building and pledged he would “not disappoint” with his €8m facelift.

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French police arrest Rwandan genocide suspect Félicien Kabuga

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Officers find African country’s most-wanted man living under false identity in Paris

French police have ended a decades-long hunt for a fugitive accused of playing a key role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, arresting 84-year-old Félicien Kabuga during a dawn raid near Paris.

Kabuga, who is accused of financing the killings and frequently listed as one of the world’s most wanted men, was living under a false identity in the French capital’s suburbs, local police and prosecutors said in a statement on Saturday.

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‘People feel a bit nervous’: France braces for end of lockdown

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As schools and businesses get set to reopen some citizens urge caution, wary of a spike in infections

France is set to end eight weeks of strict lockdown as the government urged people to behave responsibly to avoid a sudden spike in coronavirus cases.

Hours before the national déconfinement there were reports of two new Covid-19 clusters in départments designated green – areas where the virus has largely stopped circulating and where most restrictions are being lifted.

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French hospital discovers Covid-19 case from December

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Man found to have had virus a month before government confirmed first cases

A French hospital that retested old samples from pneumonia patients has discovered that it treated a man with the coronavirus as early as 27 December, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.

Dr Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for flu.

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Tony Allen, legendary drummer and Afrobeat co-founder, dies aged 79

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Gilles Peterson and Biz Markie pay tribute to the Fela Kuti collaborator, described by Brian Eno as ‘perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived’

The Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who is credited with creating Afrobeat along with his old bandmate Fela Kuti, died suddenly at the age of 79 in Paris on Thursday, his manager said.

“We don’t know the exact cause of death,” Eric Trosset said, adding it was not linked to the coronavirus.

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What the butler saw: sex secrets of French presidents’ palace revealed

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For 300 hundred years staff at the Elysée witnessed men flaunting their power over women, but no longer, says author of a new book

From the time of kings and emperors to modern day presidents, the Elysée Palace has stood as a symbol of male dominance in society and politics. Behind the wrought iron gates its gilded salons have witnessed conquests of many kinds – including, frequently, the sexual.

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