France Government

During her first two months in office, no one has accused French Prime Minister Edith Cresson of pulling her punches. After three years of general anesthesia under careful predecessor Michel Rocard, Cresson has taken her scalpel to the Japanese (causing her to be burned in effigy in Tokyo), French male sexism and, by defending her remarks in a resurrected four-year-old interview, the sexual proclivities of Anglo-Saxon males.

Victims of anti-Semitic persecution whose bank assets were confiscated in France during World War II may file claims with a commission established to review such compensation, French officials in Los Angeles said Monday. Those invited to file claims are any individuals and families, including heirs and successors, who are Jewish or were considered Jewish by the German and French Vichy governments and who had any kind of bank account in France between September 1939, and May 1945.

The Los Angeles riots and aftermath have had a ripple effect even in distant France, inspiring government ministers to create new programs aimed at preventing similar outbreaks of urban violence here. In some cases, such as the decision to assign 4,000 military draftees to blighted urban areas to help with crime prevention and community services, the French programs exceed in scope many of the remedies under discussion in the United States.

In another blow to Europe's farm industry, France banned exports of animals at risk for foot-and-mouth disease as the Continent went on high alert to try to stop the virus from spreading from Britain. After a series of false alarms, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and France said they had no confirmed cases of the disease.

Taking the biggest political gamble of his term, President Jacques Chirac on Monday night dissolved the National Assembly and asked the French to elect a new Parliament willing to impose more belt-tightening measures on an already restive nation. "Our economy, our enterprises, employment cannot wait," Chirac proclaimed. "France needs a new elan. This . . . can only be given by clearly expressed approval from the French people."

She is university-educated, well-spoken and exquisitely polite, but citizens such as Beatrice, an auburn-haired Parisian who finds herself without steady work as she faces middle age, are making the French government tremble these days. On Tuesday, the unemployed Frenchwoman and thousands like her were in the streets, demanding a less precarious present and a more secure future.

"Get a lunchtime appointment in Paris in January with the people I need to see?" said the reporter from Time magazine. "Forget it." This is a very peculiar French season, known as the exchange of vows. For French President Jacques Chirac, it has meant eight receptions in one week at his official residence, plus a trip to his longtime power base, the farming area of Correze, about 250 miles south of Paris.

New French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin unveiled his government Wednesday, breaking spectacularly with the stubborn misogyny of French politics by entrusting more than a third of its 16 ministerial portfolios to women.

Rimless spectacles, white curls, dull-hued suits, professorial air and talk of ethics in politics: In style as well as substance, Lionel Jospin, the new prime minister of France, is the very opposite of the monarchical Francois Mitterrand, his onetime Socialist mentor. "Between the principles of morality that I used to see written on the blackboard of my classroom, and the principles that must impose themselves on the state, there must be a close relationship," Jospin has said.

They have almost faded away, those young Americans who crouched once upon a time in the muddy trenches of France, braving machine-gun fire, artillery salvos and poison gas for what they were told would be the last war ever fought. More than 2.1 million U.S. servicemen--doughboys, they were nicknamed--served in France and helped deliver the coup de grace to Germany and its allies in 1917 and 1918.

France and Belgium reported their first suspected cases of foot-and-mouth disease Saturday, stoking fears that the contagion that broke out in Britain last month might have spread to continental Europe. As Britain shut down much of its countryside for the weekend in an effort to contain the spread of the infection, officials in Europe said the chances that their own livestock would be spared were slim. "If we do nothing, it will spread across our country fast.

"Get a lunchtime appointment in Paris in January with the people I need to see?" said the reporter from Time magazine. "Forget it." This is a very peculiar French season, known as the exchange of vows. For French President Jacques Chirac, it has meant eight receptions in one week at his official residence, plus a trip to his longtime power base, the farming area of Correze, about 250 miles south of Paris.

Jacques Chirac, France's president since 1995, is nicknamed "The Bulldozer" for his willful, impetuous style of living and politicking. But as the whiff of scandal strengthens here, the ground under this proven survivor has never seemed more unstable. The 68-year-old neo-Gaullist is playing host this week to fellow leaders at the European Union summit in Nice and, pleading the press of diplomatic duties, has kept mum.

In a landmark ruling affecting legally uncharted Internet territory, a French judge Monday ordered the U.S. portal Yahoo to block Web surfers in France from an auction site selling Nazi memorabilia. Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez gave Yahoo three months to find a way to prevent users based in France from accessing pages that feature nearly 2,000 Nazi-related objects, such as swastika-emblazoned flags and daggers. After the deadline, Yahoo would be fined $13,000 for each day it does not comply.

Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said Saturday that the French government has taken steps to ensure the safety of Jewish institutions, which have been targeted in attacks apparently motivated by violence in the Middle East. Jospin said that the Justice Ministry has advised French prosecutors to deal severely with anyone suspected of taking part in such attacks and that police will act aggressively to prevent "all acts and all attempted acts that are racist in character or anti-Semitic."

Few people, it seems, are more intimately acquainted with taxes than the French. More than 45% of the wealth generated nationwide is grabbed by the revenue man, one of the world's biggest tax bites. The average adult works seven months of the year to pay taxes, direct and indirect. On Thursday, the government decided enough was enough. It announced an ambitious package of tax reductions worth nearly $16.5 billion over three years, beginning in 2001.

In an attempt to put an end to the swirling political controversy surrounding Palestinian guerrilla leader George Habash's entry into France last week for medical treatment, President Francois Mitterrand on Tuesday dismissed the matter as "not serious" but only "an error of judgment" on the part of senior French bureaucrats.

The Klaus Barbie trial, now in its fourth week, has turned its attention to the killing of the 44 Jewish children of Izieu, a case that reveals a good deal about the kind of impact the trial is having on France. Barbie, who was the Nazi Gestapo chief in Lyon when the killings occurred, is charged with ordering the roundup of the children from a home in the village of Izieu on April 6, 1944, and deporting them to Auschwitz in Poland, where all were killed in gas chambers.

Vivendi's agreement to acquire Seagram Co. and part of Canal Plus was approved by a French regulator after concessions by Vivendi. But analysts suggested the changes could jeopardize the terms of the $46-billion accord. The French media and utility company agreed to modify the acquisition, giving control of Canal Plus' French pay-TV subscriber base back to Canal Plus Programmes, a unit that will be 49% owned by Vivendi, the regulator said.

An official French commission Monday put a price tag on the ruthless and highly organized campaign of looting and expropriation that French and foreign-born Jews fell victim to in France during World War II--the contemporary equivalent of more than $1.2 billion. "Two things struck us in particular. One was the scale of the despoilment, which was much greater than we originally thought," said commission member Claire Andrieu, a Paris-based historian.