French weekly magazines review 4 June 2017

Two philosophers dominate this week's front covers - one says the recent election of Emmanuel Macron to the French presidency was orchestrated by something called globalised finance; the other wants us all to put on skirts.

DR

The French presidency plot is the brainchild of Michel Onfray; the skirt challenge comes from the feminist writer Elizabeth Badinter.

Onfray assures us that he is no believer in conspiracy theories. Fine. But that doesn't stop him from asserting, in black and white in this week's Le Nouvel Observateur, that the whole presidential scramble - the primaries, Juppé, Fillon, the left squashed flat, the leader of the far right acting like a Disney witch in the last television debate, the whole works - was all hokum to distract the voters from the determination of the "Maastricht Masters" to place their man at the head of the French political pyramid. The voters were duped by a careful scheme put in place by big money, helped by a servile press.

Going out to vote, says Onfray, was a complete waste of time, since the result had been decided beforehand.

Coming from someone who doesn't believe in conspiracies, that's a lot of theory!

Who are the mysterious Maastricht Masterminds?

So who are the Maastricht Masterminds at the root of it all?

As far as I can follow Onfray's argument, these are the mysterious bureaucrats who assure the smooth running of the European business. They get their name from the 1992 treaty, which led to the creation of a single European currency. Their only interest is to promote a liberal economic agenda, according to Onfray. And, for that, they need leaders like Macron.

To that end, a system was put in place to ensure that Marine Le Pen was the second round survivor who went head-to-head against Macron, this ensuring the election of the golden boy.

And the system was us, the journalists, who spoke about Macron far more than we spoke about, say, Jean Lassalle. Who remembers him?

The political parties also played their part, Onfray argues, with Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon providing distraction at the extremes, while the left elected a guaranteed loser and the right overlooked Alain Juppé to give the ticket to the fiddling Fillon. His fate was sealed, once again, by us beduped journalists.

Onfray describes himself as the voice of popular despair. The only answer, he says, is to give the power back to the people. But he doesn't explain how we get rid of the invisible enemy that goes on deciding in the name of the people. Maybe that'll be in his next book?

Does my bum look big in this?

Elizabeth Badinter calls for us all to wear skirts in this week's Le Point.

The feminist writer's central worry is that there are now parts of several French cities where women are reportedly being forced from the public space. There are cafés in France which are effectively reserved for men and entire city zones where women make an appearance only to go the the market, do the shopping or collect the children.

And while Badinter accepts that there is a danger of falling into racist stereotyping in discussing this kind of problem, she also warns that there has been a fundamental change for the worse in the position of women in general in a French society which is becoming ever more sexist.

The fact is that all women living in France are not in a position to choose how they live, that some are forced to submit to imperatives that are completely contrary to the principle of sexual equality, she says.

Badinter is scathing of political moves to ensure sexual equality in high places. She says basic competence is always going to count more than gender in the public space. Parity won't be achieved overnight. But she'd like to see more progress in the sharing of household chores. French men, on average, still take care of less than 30 percent of the daily domestic drudgery. That's not a government problem, she points out, it's an interpersonal one.

Noting that five oil-importing European nations voted to give Saudi Arabia a seat on the UN's Women's Commission, Badinter says she is pessimistic about the future of women's rights but determined to keep on fighting.