Latest news with #GabrielAttal
Local France
3 days ago
- Business
- Local France
What's in France's new 'simplification' law?
The simplification bill was finally passed in the Assemblée nationale on Tuesday. The headline-grabber in the bill was an amendment to scrap the Low Emissions Zones in French cities - although that might still be open to challenge. READ ALSO Is this the end of France's Crit'Air zones for drivers? But there's a lot more in this bill, which has had a complicated life - introduced by Gabriel Attal's government last year and halted first by last summer's snap election, then the collapse of Michel Barnier government, it has had hundreds of amendments added and subtracted during its lengthy parliamentary journey. The bill contains 26 main measures intended to cut bureaucracy, and simplify administration, mostly aimed at businesses. It is based on a parliamentary report from February 2024 and was presented with an action plan that includes 26 other regulatory measures. Administration and and business life Governments can use decrees and ordinances to simplify administrative procedures and cut down the number of forms and procedures that businesses have to follow. More operations will be digitised, while the bill provides several policies to improve information sharing between government departments to reduce unnecessary duplication for businesses. Advertisement The government will also have to examine how future legislation might impact small and medium-sized businesses when bills are drafted. This should avoid brouhahas similar to the proposal to introduce lower VAT limits on micro-entrepreneurs . Under the terms of the bill, by 2028 all public procurement contracts – including those from hospitals and social security organisations – will be handled through a single online platform to give businesses better access to necessary public procurement information. To make it easier to sell companies with fewer than 50 employees, the legal period for employers to inform employees has been reduced to one month and the fine for failure to provide information has been reduced. And professional bank account services will also be improved, including the ability to close an account without charge. In terms of insurance, with regard to property damage, the draft law sets limits on the timeframes for compensating individual and professional policyholders at six months maximum from the date of the claim in cases where an expert is appointed, and two months in almost all other cases. In addition, it extends the obligation for insurers to justify their decision to unilaterally terminate business insurance contracts, and gives very small businesses and SMEs the right to terminate property insurance at any time after the first anniversary of the contract. Industrial and infrastructure projects To encourage the establishment of factories or energy transition projects, exemptions from common law are provided for in various areas, such as the installation of wind turbines or relay antennas, and compensation for damage to biodiversity caused by development projects, particularly industrial projects. Advertisement An amendment by the government will make it possible to recognise the imperative reason of major public interest much earlier in the development of projects, and supplemented to allow the recognition of the public interest status for projects that have already been declared – including the controversial A69 autoroute in south-west France. The bill provides, under certain conditions, for industrial-scale data centres to be classified as projects of major national interest, to speed up planning processes. The mandate of the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties is also amended to take into account innovation issues in all areas of its work. Payslips Future payslips will be simplified under the remit of the bill to contain just 15 lines of information. Details about restaurant tickets and travel expenses will be available separately, but precise details have yet to be confirmed. READ ALSO : How to understand your French payslip✎ Advertisement Rural cafés The bill includes measures to make it easier to open cafés and bars in rural areas by making it simpler to get a type four alcohol licence, known as a Licence IV, which covers spirits and liquor. READ ALSO France moves to bring back village bars in bid to boost rural social lives Government mediation The bill includes measures to make complaints against the French administration system easier, with a 'generalisation' of mediation, while current deadlines in place on taking legal action against the government will be put on hold. Small businesses, micro-entrepreneurs and employees will certainly cheer several measures intended to make their daily lives easier, and the 'tell us once' policy that cuts out the duplication of required information will speed up certain processes, but at this stage it is difficult to judge how much simply life might become.
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
We have learnt nothing from the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus
On a winter morning in 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was brought to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to deportation and life imprisonment; his epaulettes were torn off, his sword broken, and he was paraded before a jeering mob of onlookers. Dreyfus was Jewish, and virulent anti-Semitism within the army and wider society was central to his conviction on flimsy evidence. Despite a campaign by his supporters, including the novelist Emile Zola, Dreyfus was convicted a second time. He was not fully exonerated until 1906. At the end of An Officer and a Spy, his 2013 novel about the Dreyfus Affair, Robert Harris added an epilogue in which the newly exonerated Major Dreyfus meets General Picquart, the minister of war, to ask for promotion to lieutenant-colonel – the rank he should have achieved had it not been for his wrongful conviction. Picquart refuses: 'It is politically impossible.' Last week, the lower house of the French parliament unanimously approved a bill put forward by the former prime minister Gabriel Attal to grant Dreyfus retrospective promotion to the rank of brigadier general. Attal made it clear that the gesture was symbolic. 'The anti-Semitism that targeted Alfred Dreyfus is not in the distant past,' the legislation noted. 'Today's acts of hatred remind us that the fight is still ongoing.' But over this belated promotion there hovers the question that attends all symbolic gestures of political regret. Public acts of contrition are not a new phenomenon. In 1174, King Henry II did penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, entering Canterbury barefoot, where he was beaten by the attendant bishops and monks, and spent the night in prayer at Becket's tomb. Such acts might seem theatrical, but they do at least acknowledge that contrition needs to take some tangible form. Words are not enough. This is something that modern politicians struggle to grasp. Their enthusiasm for making grand, frictionless expressions of regret for historical wrongs (the slave trade; the Amritsar massacre) seems to have grown as their appetite for taking responsibility for injustices that have occurred on their own watch (the Post Office and infected-blood scandals, to name just two) has dwindled. Lord Carrington's resignation as foreign secretary in 1982, over Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands, may have been the last recorded example of a politician resigning from a sense of noblesse oblige. Since then, we have become more accustomed to the spectacle of our legislators clinging like bindweed to office, until the glyphosate of public opinion finally withers them. In 2009, the then foreign-office minister Lord Malloch-Brown artlessly admitted that 'British politicians don't know how to say sorry'. But they've upped their game since then, perfecting a virtuoso repertoire of blame-shifting, quasi-apologies ('I'm sorry you feel that way') and rhetorical flourishes that imply change, while retreating into impenetrable thickets of administrative complexity when it comes to reparation. Back in Paris, perhaps Dreyfus's promotion, long after it might have done him any good, may bring some comfort to his descendants. Beyond that, will this gesture deter a single act of anti-Semitic aggression? Or advance in the slightest degree the universal proposition that the systematic tormenting of a particular group of people – in whatever guise it may occur – is profoundly reprehensible. And if not, what on earth is the point? Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
We have learnt nothing from the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus
On a winter morning in 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was brought to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to deportation and life imprisonment; his epaulettes were torn off, his sword broken, and he was paraded before a jeering mob of onlookers. Dreyfus was Jewish, and virulent anti-Semitism within the army and wider society was central to his conviction on flimsy evidence. Despite a campaign by his supporters, including the novelist Emile Zola, Dreyfus was convicted a second time. He was not fully exonerated until 1906. At the end of An Officer and a Spy, his 2013 novel about the Dreyfus Affair, Robert Harris added an epilogue in which the newly exonerated Major Dreyfus meets General Picquart, the minister of war, to ask for promotion to lieutenant-colonel – the rank he should have achieved had it not been for his wrongful conviction. Picquart refuses: 'It is politically impossible.' Last week, the lower house of the French parliament unanimously approved a bill put forward by the former prime minister Gabriel Attal to grant Dreyfus retrospective promotion to the rank of brigadier general. Attal made it clear that the gesture was symbolic. 'The anti-Semitism that targeted Alfred Dreyfus is not in the distant past,' the legislation noted. 'Today's acts of hatred remind us that the fight is still ongoing.' But over this belated promotion there hovers the question that attends all symbolic gestures of political regret. Public acts of contrition are not a new phenomenon. In 1174, King Henry II did penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, entering Canterbury barefoot, where he was beaten by the attendant bishops and monks, and spent the night in prayer at Becket's tomb. Such acts might seem theatrical, but they do at least acknowledge that contrition needs to take some tangible form. Words are not enough. This is something that modern politicians struggle to grasp. Their enthusiasm for making grand, frictionless expressions of regret for historical wrongs (the slave trade; the Amritsar massacre) seems to have grown as their appetite for taking responsibility for injustices that have occurred on their own watch (the Post Office and infected-blood scandals, to name just two) has dwindled. Lord Carrington's resignation as foreign secretary in 1982, over Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands, may have been the last recorded example of a politician resigning from a sense of noblesse oblige. Since then, we have become more accustomed to the spectacle of our legislators clinging like bindweed to office, until the glyphosate of public opinion finally withers them. In 2009, the then foreign-office minister Lord Malloch-Brown artlessly admitted that 'British politicians don't know how to say sorry'. But they've upped their game since then, perfecting a virtuoso repertoire of blame-shifting, quasi-apologies ('I'm sorry you feel that way') and rhetorical flourishes that imply change, while retreating into impenetrable thickets of administrative complexity when it comes to reparation. Back in Paris, perhaps Dreyfus's promotion, long after it might have done him any good, may bring some comfort to his descendants. Beyond that, will this gesture deter a single act of anti-Semitic aggression? Or advance in the slightest degree the universal proposition that the systematic tormenting of a particular group of people – in whatever guise it may occur – is profoundly reprehensible. And if not, what on earth is the point?
Reuters
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
French rabbi tells of two attacks in one week as hate crimes rise
PARIS, June 6 (Reuters) - A French rabbi was attacked on Friday for the second time in a week, he told Reuters, reflecting a broad rise in hate crimes across France that has included high-profile anti-Semitic assaults. Elie Lemmel said he was sitting at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Friday when he was hit in the head by a chair. "I found myself on the ground, I immediately felt blood flowing," he said. He was stunned and unsure what exactly had happened, he said, initially thinking something must have fallen from a window or roof, before it occurred to him he had been attacked. "Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it's such a shame," he said. Friday's incident follows another in the town of Deauville in Normandy last week, when Lemmel said he was punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant. Lemmel said he was used to "not-so-friendly looks, some unpleasant words, people passing by, spitting on the ground," but had never been physically assaulted before the two attacks. The prosecutor's office in Nanterre said it had opened an investigation into the Neuilly attack for aggravated violence and that a person was being held for questioning. It said it could not provide further details. "This act sickens us," former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on X regarding Friday's incident involving Lemmel. "Antisemitism, like all forms of hatred, is a deadly poison for our society." Last week, five Jewish institutions were sprayed with green paint in Paris. "I condemn in the strongest possible terms the anti-Semitic attack that targeted a rabbi in Neuilly today. Attacking a person because of their faith is a shame. The increase in anti-religious acts requires the mobilization of everyone," Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said in a post on X. France has seen a rise in hate crimes. Last year, police recorded an 11% rise in racist, xenophobic or antireligious crimes, according to official data published in March. The figures did not include a breakdown by attacks on different religions.
New York Times
03-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
France Moves to Atone by Elevating Alfred Dreyfus as Antisemitism Spreads
For Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain arrested in 1894 on false espionage charges that were a reflection of virulent antisemitism in the French military, reparations have been a long time coming. The French National Assembly, or lower house of Parliament, took a big step in that direction on Monday when it voted unanimously to promote Dreyfus, who was publicly stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment, to the rank of brigadier general. It was an apparent acknowledgment that, after more than 130 years and at a time of repeated desecrations of Jewish sites in France, the Republic's atonement had been incomplete. The Senate must still vote for the bill to become law, but it is expected to pass with a large majority. 'We are very happy and moved,' Michel Dreyfus, the great-grandson of the officer, told RTL radio. 'He was rehabilitated judicially but never militarily, a wound that led him to leave the army.' Gabriel Attal, the centrist former prime minister who authored the bill, wrote last month, 'Accused, humiliated and condemned because he was Jewish, Alfred Dreyfus was dismissed from the army, imprisoned and exiled to Devil's Island,' a reference to a penal colony in French Guiana. Mr. Attal said the promotion would be 'a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the Republic.' The Dreyfus case split France down the middle, exposing divisions that had been festering since the Revolution a century earlier. A traditional Roman Catholic France strongly represented in the armed forces clashed with the ardent, secular believers in a Republic that had emancipated the Jews and that was constituted not by God but by the will of its equal citizens. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
