(This picture of Martine Aubry is from Liberation)

We’ve been hearing the idiom ‘d’un cheveu’ in the French news lately, so I decided to translate Yvan Amar’s explanation of it from his Les Mots de la Semaine column on Radio France:

In France they’ve been voting to elect the head of the Socialist Party. Of course, not everyone has voted, only the members of the party. And Martine Aubry has come first by a whisker (in French the idiom is ‘d’un cheveu’: by one hair). This is one of those expressions we hear often, and Abdalla Hamlaoui asked us what it means, and especially how it can be explained.

Everyone understands its meaning: Martine Aubrey had more votes than Segolene Royal, but very few! The difference was minimal, miniscule. So, we know that a hair is very fine, and often we use this word to express something which is so small as to be almost nothing.

But there is another reason for using this word. We say sometimes that one competitor has won by a head. This means that they have won by very little. So, one hair is even less than one head, but we are still using the same type of image because the hair is on the head. We also say quite often a ‘short head’, if we want to add that it’s only a little difference, or we might even say a ‘very short head’. And sometimes we keep only the adjective, as in a ‘short victory’, or a ‘very short victory’.

I was interested to read in Liberation that Segolene Royal has won the Socialist Party’s endorsement of her policies. In the voting, Royal received 29%, with Aubry and Delanoe following with 25% each, and Hamon with 19%. Bertrand Delanoe, who has the support of Royal’s ex-partner Francois Hollande, is also mayor of Paris.

I’ve always liked Royal, and thought she conducted a reasonable campaign back in 2007. Stylish and assertive, she even wears heels when visiting remote farms! A good debater, she was a match for Sarkozy in their final debate, perhaps too much so, since as Adam Gopnik remarked in his article, ‘this allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he’d never had the chance to play before–a sympathetic, erring, middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.’

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I don’t think I know anyone who is not elated about Obama’s win. A friend and I watched the election results on his i-phone during an all-day meeting in Melbourne today and held our breath until the votes moved beyond the point of no return.

Obama should, however, watch out for anyone phoning with a French accent. The Masked Avengers like calling the newly-elected (as well as the too-idiotic-to-ever-be-elected) and Chirac and Sarkozy have both been pranked. See the clip below, in which Sarkozy takes a call from the ‘Canadian President’…

Campaign poster, early 2007

(Phrase of the week: avoir le vent en poupe = to be on the road to success; literally ‘to have the wind in the stern’)

Could the next FRENCH PRESIDENT be a communist? This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, according to a report I’ve just read in Le Monde, headlined (and please correct me if my translation is wrong!): Olivier Besancenot has won credibility among left-wing sympathizers. More on this below. First some background…

As many will recall, in the French presidential elections of early 2007, Besancenot was the candidate for the LCR, the Revolutionary Communist League. A university graduate who works as a mail delivery man, in his election posters he looked about sixteen, although he’s in his early thirties (I wasn’t the only one to think he looked young; later I read another Le Monde article which described him as having a ‘chubby Tintin face’). Under this face on his election poster was the slogan, ‘Our lives are worth more than their profits’.

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Ile St-Louis from Quai de la Tournelle

Seven reasons why I’m starting a blog called ESCAPE TO PARIS…

1. Ever since I was a child, I have loved France, and especially Paris. Born in the UK, where I lived during my childhood, I always felt that I was growing up on the wrong side of the English Channel.

2. I also adore writing, so a blog about escaping to Paris combines my two great loves very nicely…

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