🇫🇷🇩🇪 Side note on propaganda

👉🏻 During World War 1, French newspapers (with the government's blessing) published fake stories of German atrocities. Among those most frequently depicted were the severed hands of French children.

🎭 There is obviously a logic to this: the emotional charge is all the stronger as the suffering is inflicted on poor little innocent victims. Moreover, this type of violence is graphically easy to represent in the viewer's mind.

🗣 "I saw yesterday, in Verdun, a poor woman coming from an invaded village of the Meuse and carrying in her arms two young children. The two poor little ones each had their right wrists cut. What brutes" — Testimony of a soldier as reported in a French newspaper, 1914

📱 In our day and age, propaganda has taken new shapes. But its target is still the very same: emotions. Your emotions. Stories like these made the French of 1914 hate the Germans, and gave way to 4 years of subsequent hell. We would thus simply like to remind you of being wary of your own feelings, and of were they might lead you.

👉🏻 Thinkerview is a French Youtube channel who has gradually become the best way to meet and learn about the different personalities of the French intelligentsia: economists, politicians, journalists, industrialists and others.

🎙 The concept of the channel is quite simple: bring a interesting guest, and let him expand on his field of expertise. Each interview is live-streamed, which allow for the public to interact and ask questions to the guest.

🕶 The channel is said to have been created by a group of hackers. The interviewer, "Sky", is a well-connected man who value his privacy and always remains behind the cameras.

🕯 From its early days to now, the picture drawn by its guest is bleak: the country has been in a headlong rush for a long time, and all of the upper class knows this.

The LRU MLRS has arrived in Ukraine from France, the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Reznikov said. This MLRS is an upgraded version of the M270

🇫🇷⚡️ Alone in the dark: cell network antennas will stop working during load shedding and power blackouts

👉🏻 As announcements of load shedding and power cuts for January are growing in number, French newspaper Europe 1 has revealed that nothing has been made to spare the mobile network antennas from those restrictions.

🔎 Over the 60,000 relay antennas spread over the territory, only a small portion is equipped with back-up batteries, of which the autonomy does not exceed half an hour, whereas a load shedding could last two hours.

🗣 "In some cases, there may be communication breakdowns in certain geographical areas", concedes the head of one of Enedis' regional control agency. Even worse, the antennas do not automatically reconnect. In at least one case out of two, their restart also require a human intervention.

🗒 There is of course a list of priority sites to keep powered, which was made by a decree dating back to July 5, 1990. It includes hospitals, prisons, public lighting and military sites. The mobile network, although the primary mean to contact emergency services, was never added to the list.

🔗 Source

It would be vain to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your [French] revolution, and especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect.

The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." But in the life of society, liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts.

Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained?

Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True fraternity is achieved by means not social, but spiritual.

📖 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1993

https://www.france24.com/en/rss
Macron slams US subsidies as 'super aggressive' towards French companies

Visiting French President Emmanuel Macron delivered blunt criticism to American lawmakers and business leaders Wednesday when he called out US industrial subsidies as being extremely harmful to his nation's companies.

AFP News Agency (Twitter)

France's Emmanuel Macron is set to be hosted by President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday for a state visit mixing sumptuous ceremonies with hard-edged talks on transatlantic trade and how to manage a rising China

http://u.afp.com/iGuC

✍🏻 Erratum: there does not seem to be a source to the claim of France running out of weapons to send to Ukraine

👉🏻 We shared earlier today a post regarding this subject, which mention Politico as a source. There is no mention of such a story on both Politico's website and twitter feed. The best we managed to find was a screenshot, which was in all likelihood forged.

🔎 After more digging, the story also only seems to have been relayed by pro-Russians outlets like Russia Today (all using the same source, without any links). This story is thus probably a Russian fake news.

🔫 It is true that the French military inventory must be getting thinner. The famous Caesar cannons for example were taken away from active military regiments, without any replacement.

😰 We want to make clear again that we are trying our best to bring you REAL news, without taking any sides in this conflict. Sorry for this mishap 🙏🏻

“The comet Donati over Paris 4th October 1858” by Amédée Guillemin, 1877.

https://www.france24.com/en/rss
Macron to end US trip by meeting French speakers in Louisiana

French President Emmanuel Macron will end his trip to the US with a visit Louisiana on Friday where he is set to announce the creation of a fund to finance the teaching of French in the state. FRANCE 24 reports.

Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that will be traded tomorrow for more than gold. On an overpopulated, overheated and noisy Earth, a forest cabin is the Eldorado.

📖 The Consolations of the Forest — Sylvain Tesson, 2011

France given green light to abolish internal flights

The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.

The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country’s 2021 Climate Law.

“It’s going in the right direction, but the initial measure is one that’s (not very) ambitious. We must go even further,” said Sarah Fayolle, Greenpeace France transport campaign manager.

Source

Handkerchief detail of the marble statue made by French sculptor Louis Philippe Mouchy, 1781

Louvre Museum, Paris/France

🇫🇷🕵️‍♂️ Former head of DGSE: "If we persist in our blindness, we are heading towards a country where life will no longer be worth living"

👉🏻 On November 15, the former head of the French foreign intelligence agency Pierre Brochand gave a speech on immigration, in which he summarized all issues raised by uncontrolled immigration, and their eventual outcome.

🗣 If everything going wrong in France is not the fault of immigration, far from it, it contributes to an extent that is, in my opinion, very underestimated.

Let's start by twisting the claim according to which France has always been a country of immigration. For a thousand years, from the Carolingians to Napoleon III, nothing of that sort happened.

[...] The secessionist scenario is the most natural slope of a "multi" society.

[...] We are told simultaneously that immigration does not exist, exists and is a blessing, has always existed and is an inevitability, that welcoming it is a moral duty, and that it is going to pay for our pensions and fulfill jobs that the French do not want.

[...] I have just presented you with a diagnosis. Namely that if we persist in our blindness, we are heading towards a country where at a minimum and by slow implosion, life will no longer be worth living, or, at a maximum, towards a country where by dint of explosions, we will not be able to live at all.

🔎 Earlier this year, another former head of the same agency had given similar warnings in his book "Seven steps to Hell".

🔗 Source

During the long walk back, among the flow of rebels coming and going, the electrician tried to to get the horror out of his mind. He thought about the world before. The barbecues with friends, the evenings, the parties, the hobbies, the fights, the series, the beach, the hikes in mountains, the nights with Alice. Life.

He dreamed of running again, with an empty mind, in the calm of the dawn. Receiving, remembering, laughing and cooking. To let himself be grasped and amazed. To dip his croissants in his coffee, to drink his beer while admiring the sunset. A simple Sunday in the family torpor.

He would now appreciate life down to its bitterness, its little dramas, its pettiness and its overrated pleasures. Even to the driving fear of a distant and fictitious death. He would never again complain seriously about anything. He would even love his troublesome clients to bits.

Cedric only hoped for one thing: the return of his routine. From this world of abundance and comfort, without purpose. To see his little one grow up. Hoping only for the respite of fate.

Pushed to the limit, forced and coerced, he had defended his freedom, his way of life, his right to tranquillity. Without thinking, following the movement. A literally superhuman effort, which he hoped never to have to face again.

All the glances he met here, on this highway, all the conversations overheard, said this same will. It had taken to wake up this crowd a spectacular rupture, rather than the usual gradual rotting that everyone preferred to ignore.

Each hoped never to live again such a convulsion, even if it meant become a little cowardly and indifferent again. Just a little, to enjoy life. Just enough to postpone problems, to pass them on to those we elect, and to vegetate. To forget that in the shadow these problems will accumulate, again, and will end up bursting anew.

📖 Guérilla vol.3: The Last Fight — Laurent Obertone, 2022

🇫🇷🇲🇦 Video reportedly from Nice, France showing a Moroccan fan shooting on top of a car with a pistol after Morocco's win against Spain in the World Cup.

🌍 @European_Insider | 🕊 Retweet

🇫🇷🔌❗️ — 🇫🇷 French Channel, Geopo on Telegram:
— "In Paris (capital of French Republic), 125,000 homes were left without electricity during a 10-minute cut"

https://t.me/canalgeopo/3545