French press review 28 May 2014

UMP's Fillon and Copé, Shakespeare's Juliet and nuclear power prices are all in today's papers.

François Fillon had a good day yesterday, savouring a cold revenge against his brother conservative and detested rival, Jean-François Copé.

The pair clashed in 2012 over which of them got to lead the UMP. Copé won, narrowly, and Fillon went away to wait for yesterday. The party top brass met on Tuesday to discuss the scandal surrounding the communications company Bygmalion, suspected of siphoning money out of UMP coffers in order to illegally finance the 2012 presidential campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy.

The problem is that Bygmalion is owned by close Copé associates and Copé's right-hand man, Jérôme Lavrilleux, earlier this week admitted that, indeed, he had boosted presidential spending power during the 2012 campaign by getting Bygmalion to charge the party for events which never took place and then recycling the money really paid for fictitious happenings into the Sarkozy war chest. As much as 11 million euros may have been involved.

Copé says he had no idea that his principal private secretary was involved in a money-laundering operation. That claim of ignorance may turn out to be true; the French judicial system will decide. But, in the meantime, in order to protect "the honour of our political family", Fillon was yesterday obliged to ask Copé to get his ass out of the office. He touchingly called him "Jean-François" in his farewell speech, which is shorter and more polite than many of the things Fillon has called Copé over the past two years.

For the time being the UMP is working on the principle that three heads are better than one, and the conservative party will be directed by a triumvirate of former prime ministers, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Alain Juppé joining François Fillon at the helm.

Where all this leaves the political career of Jean-François in anyone's guess. Don't write him off.

Shakespeare's Juliet famously observed that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", meaning, roughly, that the names we give things do not affect their inherent qualities.

According to Le Monde's science pages, she was talking through her hat. Scientists at a hospital in Canada asked volunteers to smell a number of samples, in each case reading the name of the item out loud before smelling. Many of the samples were the same odour but with a different name. The researchers found that parmesan smells one way if you call it "cheese" and somewhat differently if you call it "dried vomit" or "sand".

And Juliet's rose ain't too rosey when presented as "well-worn military sock" or "horse urine" - my apologies to those having their breakfast, I'm quoting more or less directly from Le Monde - the victims of the experiment reacted differently, by perspiring more and breathing less deeply, when the label indicated a "bad" smell, even though the actual pong was still pure Romeo.

Shakespeare hasn't been around for the best part of four centuries and that's probably just as well.

On Le Monde's business pages, under the headline "Warning as nuclear power prices soar", we learn that the cost of producing electricity in French atomic stations has increased by 20 per cent over the past three years.

Most of the extra charges can be put down to increased investment in security, which leads one to wonder just how dangerous the bally places were before they decided to spend serious money on making them safe.

Just to make you feel more secure, two levels of nuclear disaster have been envisaged for France, one considered "serious", the other "major". A serious accident at a French nuclear reactor would cost the state an estimated 120 billion euros, with the major equivalent likely to cost 450 billion. The number of glow-in-the-dark, medium rare and charred human beings associated with each level is not mentioned.