Why Depardieu, the rich and the poor flee France and Hollande

By Nicolas Popov

Is it a tempest in a glass of water, as would ask inspector Clouseau? I don't know, may be. French superstar Gerard Depardieu wants to give back his passport ; he is tired of paying so much taxes, up to 85% of his income, tired too of being insulted repeatedly in a country where public insulting  has become a full-time job, involving now even the PM, his cabinet and a bunch of petty manipulators of opinion. If you study the case, you will find that the partisans of tax-raising are the worst warmongers too. Nobody is perfect, yet someone has the ability to be totally imperfect!

Depardieu is facing a French "new wave" of insults and sarcasms. Since the government's official newspaper, Liberation, has insulted Bernard Arnault, the prestigious manager of LVMH and the richest man in Europe for having fled to Belgium ("scram, you rich jerk!"), nobody is spared by the French autocratic press, financed by public money and the unavoidable Rothschild heir, who enjoys wasting his money in crippled media. So the French star is being labelled a jerk, a lame-duck, a vile servant, even an asshole (in the front-page!) not to say worse... lately a French actor, a rather radical chic one, Philippe Torreton, used again the tribune of Liberation to insult our national Obelix! Yet our last national glory, Brigitte Bardot, has replied violently, as she is used to do: "The unknown Torreton, may keep his thrash, his vulgarity and his jealousy, his rage too to insult those who deserve better than him." Dear BB: she is finally defending the Gauls, after having spent so much time in defending less valuable mammals!

Since he has been elected, François Hollande has been perfect, having committed what we call a "sans-faute"; he is flawless, an almost perfect president, for being worse than Sarkozy, Chirac, Mitterrand, whoever has been here lately! He has increased the French war-effort in Syria; raised a lot of new taxes, discouraged private initiative, impoverished the poor and hunting down the rich with hounds of technocrats, clerks and reporters turned into insulting jokers. The number of unemployed is soaring every month, up to more than three millions, and no employer is willing to take risks in a country driven by a somewhat loony rhetoric of equality. The PM Ayrault had even the guts of asking -with a threatening tone- his victims to stay in their country in order to pay more taxes for the increasing number of poor, the always ill-treated immigrants and the victims of a system that has driven him to power! It is like if Hitler had asked Einstein to stay in Germany in order to help Heisenberg build the atomic bomb! Anyway the socialists are already losing all local elections, and the unpopularity of inexperienced and incompetent Hollande is at its high.

The French socialist everlasting melodrama is then taking a new course, after the sex-scandal involving DSK; a dimension made of hatred, aggressiveness, bitterness and thrash. Despite ten million articles we don't even know if Hollande's current girl-friend is actually divorced or not! Yet we had no choice indeed: voting again for Sarkozy? Oh, my God... Better fleeing France -or Holland, or the now infamous Euroland - before it is too late...

Gerard Depardieu is not alone in his fight against this "green-eyed monster" or bureaucratic machine. He has been helped by the fact that many rich people are leaving France; that many stars like Alain Delon (who even renounced his French nationality a few years ago) and sportsmen (rally ace Sebastian Loeb) already settled in Switzerland or in Belgium; that many showbiz people, including Brigitte Bardot, have advocated for more respect for the image of a man and actor who has incarnated with an inspiring power his decaying country so many times. Of course many little buzzards will still insult him and his supporters.

In France, said once French genius Cocteau, equality means beheading the heads that dominate. France is not Russia; unlike Russia she has not digested her failed revolution turned into a petit-bourgeois everlasting republic made of complex of inferiority, rabid humour, jealousy and addiction to civil jobs (80 000 candidates for each concourse of postmen!).

One may say that despite these evidences Depardieu is still too rich to be complained. But is the one thousand euros generation happier?

A commentator has recently written that France is insupportable, that she is unbearable. He has added an interesting point: many poor Frenchmen are leaving France or want to leave her. Why? If France is such a socialist paradise, why do the poor run away from her?

I'll tell why: because the French socialist ideal is made of strenuous mediocrity. Because it is uneasy to stand a lifetime on a dole of one thousand euros or less, especially in brave old Paris where you hardly rent eighteen squared meters for than sum! Young Frenchmen are voting with their feet too because it has become - thanks to Chirac and Sarkozy too - an "insupportable" country, an oasis of ugliness, a concentration camp of politically correct, a horror of cop-control and bureaucracy and a paradise of rising taxes, not to mention a pretension to glary cynicism and repentance! Here we don't either stand any mark of faith or religion, thanks to our lay bias and obsessive anticlericalism, not to mention patriotism, which explains French aggressiveness towards Russian one. There may be not such antipathetic country in the world, except maybe America, which at least spares her wealthy minions and keeps with Hollywood and the Fed printed dollars some of her fading charisma...

In March 68 a famous commentator wrote in Le Monde - a newspaper that is the shadow of what it used to be- that France is bored. Not now: thanks to Depardieu we know yet that France is poor but not bored. Her sleep is merely bad. We shall see if she can awake. For the mediocre message of Hollande, "raise the taxes and drop the flag", is rather frustrating.

Nicolas Popov