🤝Weekly Dispatch - Public Engagement
🤝Weekly Dispatch - Public Engagement
30 April 2023 - Macron celebrates the end of slavery and meets the French people, accusations of sexual blackmail in Saint-Etienne, and French MPs are in the top 3% of earners
The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly update on major events in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the ideal summary of current affairs.
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This week
🚗 Macron celebrates the end of slavery
⚖️ Accusations of sexual blackmail in Saint-Etienne
💰 French MPs are in the top 3% of earners
🚗Macron celebrates the end of slavery
Starting off the week is an important event, as Emmanuel Macron travelled to the Jura mountains to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France.
A part of this involved paying homage to the leader of the Haitian revolution and a hero of the anti-slavery movement, Toussaint Louverture, who was imprisoned in the Fort de Joux by Napoleon due to the threat he posed to public order.
Paying tribute to a hero who was “born a slave, but became a child of the Enlightenment” and who fought for “the ideal of the Revolution [and] the spirit of the Republic”, he also praised the “inspiration of American abolitionists and anti-colonial struggles”
President Macron’s visit to the Doubs department is part of his efforts to rebuild his contact with French citizens after intense contestation over Pension reforms in a way that he argued was genuine:
“Me, I make contact [with the French people]. Why do I do this? To hear the difficulties of the French people ... To have new ideas, to feel what is understood, what is not understood ... And also to be able to deal with anger, but to do it in a way that is not artificially organized”
To make the point, he labelled both the overly and lackadaisically planned political trips “where everything is arranged because it's going too well and those where nothing is arranged because it's going too badly” as “useless”.
This was in response to several events and stories in recent days, where state representatives and prefects have been getting creative and doing whatever they could to prevent protests from interfering with the President’s visits to their regions.
One such example was a prefectural decree in Orléans preventing gatherings using “sound amplifying devices” (also known as casserole dishes), which leaned on anti-terrorism legislation as a base.
Naturally, this was promptly cancelled and lobbed out of a window by the Orléans administrative court because at least some people understand how ridiculous this is.
This was so ridiculous that the Ministry of the Interior had to send out a reminder that establishing filtering perimeters “without any justification of a terrorist risk” was an outright “misuse of procedure” and shouldn’t be done, no matter how scary you find pots and pans.
While prefects are worried about how this is all playing out, the reality is that the French President is aware of the views that some hold of him, and he’s not been very shy about confronting those who disagree with him.
Kicking off his travels around Alsace in the Bas-Rhin department, he freely walked and spoke to protestors who confronted him about what they called his “corrupt government” and facing accusations that France is no longer a democracy.
Admitting to having dealt with much worse in the shape of the Gilets Jaunes, he was boisterous in how he responded to the criticisms from protestors and citizens alike:
“I don't ask people to make tough decisions for me. If you need to know who went to the elections with a clear project, he is in front of you… It does not please anyone to work longer, but if there is not someone to say so..."
⚖️Accusations of sexual blackmail in Saint-Etienne
Moving on to something more regional, per your requests, we have a salacious story of potential political blackmail coming out of Saint-Etienne.
To catch you up, the Les Républicains mayor of Saint-Etienne, Gaël Perdriau has been under investigation since last year after it was claimed that he was involved in a blackmail plot that targeted his deputy, Gilles Artigues
Supposedly, there is a recording of an erotic massage given to Artigues by a male escort, which was used to blackmail him for eight years to prevent him from challenging the incumbent mayor.
Naturally, this kind of thing has a habit of leaking. When it did in 2022, Artigues immediately filed a criminal lawsuit against Perdirau and his chief of staff for “aggravated blackmail, the organization of an ambush and embezzlement”.
Naturally, the Mayor of Saint-Etienne has dismissed these claims, saying that he has never seen, held, or sponsored any such videos. Defending himself, he had this to say:
“I am the mayor of the 13th city of France, of the 15th metropolis, and I have something else to take care of than sex between my deputies”
However, his defence during hearings that took place this week was questioned by the magistrates, who pointed out that “Not to hold, not to see, does not mean not to use it”
💰French MPs are in the top 3% of earners
And to cap off the week, a nice public interest story.
Despite regular complaints that French deputies are “suffering” from a degradation of their remunerations as representatives of the French people, two researchers have published a study regarding the earnings of French deputies.
Crunching the numbers, they found that French deputies are among the country's top 3% of earners, with a gross annual income of €72,175, with the median French salary being €19,849.
Studying the figures since the early 1900s, their findings on the development of the earnings of deputies has been very helpfully represented in the below infographic by Le Monde, alongside an incredibly helpful history on the development behind how deputies are paid.
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