September strife, Seine swimming and funny-shaped balls

From the highlights of the summer in Paris to plans for protests and blockades in September, via an important citizenship rule change and some useful French sporting vocabulary, Inside France is our weekly round-up of news and talking points in France.

Inside France is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

It’s all going swimmingly

Welcome back to the Inside France newsletter after a short summer break.

I’ve had a very nice summer and have spent some of it splashing around in the Seine, enjoying the new bathing sites.

These have proved extremely popular with locals and tourists alike, and I’ve been really struck by the sense of sheer joy at these sites as my fellow swimmers enjoyed the huge novelty of swimming in a river that for 100 years has been so dangerously polluted that even the fish had mostly left or died.

It’s an incredible facility that the city authorities have provided (hopefully it will be back next year) and I think it really is a symbol of the Paris of the 21st century. In fact I’d go further and say the city is currently undergoing a transformation every bit as radical as the Baron Haussmann rebuild in the 1860s and 70s.

La rentrée

But summer is unfortunately drawing to a close. Soon we’ll be plunged into la rentrée which this year includes an especially challenging political ‘return’ when Prime Minister François Bayrou must somehow try to get his €44 billion cost-cutting Budget through parliament without triggering his own downfall, therefore ushering in France’s fifth prime minister in less than four years.

Added to the mix is the mysterious online group calling for a ‘total blockade’ of France on September 10th in protest at the Budget plans.

No-one really knows what to make of this – is it just another group of very online malcontents or do they have the potential to cause real mayhem in France?

If it wasn’t for the memory of the ‘yellow vests’ back in 2018 I think no-one would be paying this group much attention – but there are certain clear parallels between the ‘Bloquons tout’ group and the ‘yellow vests’, who also began life on social media as an unaffiliated group formed around a single issue (in their case a road tax).

Genuine threat or just online chatter? I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but French politics expert John Lichfield, who lives in the heart of ‘yellow vest’ country, has pointed to one important difference – camaraderie.

Citizenship

Although France doesn’t totally close down in August, certain parts are a lot quieter – I went to my local boulangerie last week and the owner, visibly concerned, asked me, ‘Are you not having a holiday this summer?’

But it seems that staff at the Interior Ministry have been working too, and we finally got confirmation that there has indeed been a change to the way that rules on ‘French income’ are applied in citizenship applications. This sounds like a minor technical point, but in fact makes it virtually impossible for retirees in France to become French.

Even worse, it’s being applied now, even to people who submitted their applications years ago, before the rule changed.

Allez les filles !

Looking back over the past month I notice that one of our most successful articles of the summer was How to watch the Women’s Euro 2025, which I’m taking as a win for women’s sport (although it may also be due to the fact that because the final went into extra time, the French TV coverage changed channels before the extremely tense penalty shoot out).

For my fellow fans, the Women’s Rugby World Cup is now underway – England, France, USA and Canada the bookies’ favourites – and in great news, almost all of the matches are on free-to-air terrestrial TV in France. If you’re not already a rugby fan, then now’s a great time to start (as I keep telling my long-suffering American colleague Genevieve).

September strife, Seine swimming and funny-shaped balls

Tags: