Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Recently, France24 asked me (along with, no doubt, thousands of others) to contribute to a blog portraying the upcoming French presidential election as seen from the eyes of commentators overseas and I contributed my piece on Royal which they subsequently published. My article on Chirac even managed to hold its place as lead story on the site throughout March 12th and was picked up on their broadcasts too thus giving me my 2 seconds of fame.

What most impresses me about all this is that, seemingly for the first time, France is asking the rest of the world what they think of the events in France.

Obviously the presidential election is very much an internal matter for France. However, who the French president is matters outside France: how France reacts on the international stage will be very different depending on whether it’s Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou as president. So it’s important that this election receives the exposure that it deserves worldwide and not just in France.

France24 itself seems symbolic of this new spirit of outreach through its decision to have a large proportion of its output in English and hopefully it will continue to reach out and pull us anglophones into its circle.   

The T list contains your favourite travel and tourism blogs. It’s a way of using links to boost smaller blogs and getting more readers. Let me know if you enjoyed any of the blogs listed below.
Instructions
– Write a post.
– Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
– Make sure the links are active and correct.
– If your blog is on the list, remove it’s not a self-promotion post. As Tim Fehlman (Z-List) said : Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread.’
– Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it.
– Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
– Publish the post.
– People will notice the T-List and continue it.
Here is the list

France This Way
Hotel Blogs
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel Blog
Travel Rants
Travolution Blog
BootBlog
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
Radaron
The Travel PR Blog
Europe A La Carte
Normandy Gite
Frenchless in France
French Journal
The Paris Blog
L’Oiseau
Maldives Live

France is massive and so is the variety of houses that you can get with everything from small apartments to large castles on the market and locations varying from the city centre of Paris to rural areas with just the odd passing cow for traffic.The first things that you need to decide for yourself when looking for a place in France are what type of property you want and what kind of area you would like that property to be in. These two aspects are closely inter-related in that you won’t be able to buy a chateau in the centre of Paris nor buy a chic apartment in rural Roussillon.The days of run-down barns available for a few thousand pounds are long since gone and prices these days start at around 50,000‚€ which will buy you anything from a reasonable townhouse in the country to an apartment on the outskirts of a town. What that price won’t buy you is a chic apartment in the centre of Paris nor will it buy you a massive farmhouse ready to move into.

On the other hand, there are still bargains around. As we write this, there are a number of quite charming chateaux for sale at around the 600,000‚€ (£400,000) mark although at that price level you should expect to have some work to do to them. Similarly, if you are prepared to move outside the brit-enclaves and into the real France you will find quite substantial properties for perhaps 300,000‚€ (£200,000) although again you should expect to do some work at this level.

Where are these brit-enclaves though? Well, one easy to find them is to pick your favourite B&B listing site (which must be, of course, Chambre-d’Hote) and look at areas with large numbers of listings. At the moment, you’ll find these mainly around Brittany/Normandy, Poitou-Charentes, Dordogne and Cote d’Azur. Prices in these ares are, generally, that little bit higher than in the surrounding areas for comparable properties.

If you haven’t got your heart set on a particular region in France, the best thing to do is to make up a list of the characteristics of the type of area that you are looking for. For example, we wanted a place that was within 10km of water that we could swim in which meant that we looked at properties near the coast and near lakes etc. We also wanted somewhere broadly in the southern half of France which narrowed down the search a little. Finally, we wanted somewhere with views of the mountains which reduced the areas somewhat more.

Doing this will bring up a number of regions that you may not have thought about before and give you a much wider selection of properties. Note too that it’s best to think about why you want a particular feature eg we didn’t say that we wanted to be on the coast but rather that we wanted to be near water that we could swim in. Likewise we said that we wanted somewhere scenic rather than with views of the mountains.

Chirac has presided over a range of fairly high profile controversies since beginning with his authorisation of the nuclear tests in the Pacific just after his election in 1995. Just two years later he tried to manipulate the electoral process by dissolving the parliament and forcing an election at an opportune time for his own party though, such was the opposition to this action, he ended up weakening his powerbase.

Unexpectedly facing Le Pen in the second round of elections in 2002, he naturally had a landslide victory. The defeat of the European constitution in 2005 was quite a blow both to him and other nations in Europe. As with the nuclear tests in 1995, he typically followed solely the interests of France in opposing the war with Iraq. Also seemingly typical of French politicians, he withdrew the proposed First Employment Contract (Contrat Première Embauche or CPE) in the face of widespread student protests against this move to make it easier to both hire and fire young people.

On the whole, I think he will be remembered as one of the most typically French politicians. He seemed to consider only the interests of France abroad and followed (on the whole) the desires (if not always the needs) of the French people within the country.

Although it seemed likely that he would lose the election had he stood this time around, he seemed to recognise in his speech that France needs a different type of leadership in the future, one that begins to consider more completely France’s place in Europe and that takes a firmer stand on necessary policy changes.

This section very briefly covers the variety of circumstances that may apply and how you might go about moving to France if they apply to you. There are just too many combinations and special circumstances to adequately cover all of the possibilities so hopefully this will give you a feel for how you might ease your transition to France.

If you are a visa national (ie a citizen of a country requiring a visa to enter France), then your first hurdle is the French embassy in your country of residence. There are many visa categories but the simplest lie in the areas of family reunification or if you already have a job offer in France.

I imagine that for most people the “job offer” option is most likely to apply. Obviously if you already have a job lined up there’s no problem but if you’d like to organise one, see our section on employment coming soon.

Finally, don’t forget that if you have parents or grandparents who are Irish or were born in Ireland pre-1922 or in the Republic of Ireland after that then you are Irish and can simply apply for an Irish passport and thereby come under the very simplest case which we covered at the start of this segment.