Frenchmen from both sides of the political aisle are united in support of a day of rest, as President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to open French shops on Sundays faces fierce opposition in the French parliament.

Parliament is due to pass a Bill tomorrow to ease France’s strict trading laws, but hostility to it is so widespread that some MPs in Mr Sarkozy’s own centre-right camp predict that it could unravel before becoming law.

The President’s plan to abolir le dimanche is being resisted by an unlikely coalition of interests, including the centre and left-wing Opposition, the Roman Catholic Church, the trade unions and small shopkeepers who fear losing their existing Sunday business to supermarkets. Up to 60 per cent of the public, according to polls, are also against a scheme that will reverse the century-old right to a day of rest.

The President has made Sunday shopping a personal crusade since he promised it in his 2007 election campaign under his slogan of “work more to earn more”. He pillories France as a backward exception to the rest of Europe and has said that he was ashamed when Michelle Obama wanted to take her daughters shopping in Paris on a Sunday last month — he had to arrange a special opening for her at a Left Bank boutique.

Interestingly, while Sarkozy claims France's laws to be backwards, Sunday shopping is still nonexistant or a novelty in many other European countries:

Although most shopping centres and non-food shops are closed, the French already work more on Sundays than most Europeans. Limited Sunday trading has been allowed in big French cities and tourist areas since 1993. Many other EU countries restrict Sunday shopping more or as much as France. Germany and Austria are only just getting used to the novelty of Saturday afternoon shopping. Belgium, which Mr Sarkozy has cited as a model, allows Sunday trading in only limited areas.

The only EU countries that allow unlimited Sunday opening are the Czech Republic, Sweden and Romania."

The Times of London could not resist adding, "Britain has restrictions but its citizens still manage to put in more work than in any other EU state." Thanks for letting everyone know. 

BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images

Nicolas Sarkozy may want to keep his opinions to himself next time Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Paris -- that is, if he ever wants to come back.

Israel's foreign ministry has accused France of unacceptable meddling in its internal affairs over a reported comment by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

He was quoted by Israeli TV calling for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who leads a far-right party, to be sacked.

The plea, which has not been confirmed nor denied by officials, was allegedly made during a meeting with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu last week.

Israeli Arab leaders have accused the foreign minister of anti-Arab racism[...]

Israeli Channel Two reported that President Sarkozy advised Mr Netanyahu to "get rid" of Mr Lieberman during their meeting in Paris.

He also suggested that his predecessor Tzipi Livni be restored to the post, according to the report.

"You need to get rid of this man... You need to remove him from this position," Mr Sarkozy reportedly said, to which Mr Netanyahu replied that "in private [Mr Lieberman] is pragmatic".

Sarkozy also compared Lieberman's private pleasantness to French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has often been attacked for anti-Semitic comments. Regardless, given that the meeting was private, it would be interesting to learn who leaked the details to Israeli TV. 

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There were probably quite a few places Nicolas Sarkozy would have rather been than at Omar Bongo's funeral today. Not only did the late Gabonese dictator have an astonishing 40-year record of human right abuses and corruption, but at the time of his death, a French court was investigating him for embezzlement, which always makes things awkward, not to mention the fact that the French government had been accused for years of protecting Bongo from prosecution. 

 

But then, he had to listen to the crowd cheer his predecessor Jacques Chirac (who allegedly received illegal campaign contributions from Bongo) receive cheers from the crowd while he got booed:

"Go home we don't want you, leave," chanted the protesters. "Timber, petrol, manganese, we've given you everything. If France is what it is, it's thanks to Gabon. We don't want this anymore. We want the Americans and Chinese," said one.

Chirac was a close friend of Bongo (and, if you believe Valérie Giscard d'Estaing, received money from him to fund his 1981 presidential campaign); Sarkozy paid him lip service but Bongo was outraged that the French leader had failed to crush a legal complaint about where his family got the money to pay for 39 luxury properties in France and various flash racing cars. A court order to block some of his France-based bank accounts further irked him.

All of this raises the question of why Sarkozy allowed himself to be humiliated like this. Chirac got a lot of flack for not attending the funeral of former Senegalese President Leopold Senghor in 2001, but Senghor was a genuine democrat, anticolonialist icon, and major Francaphone literary figure to boot. Bongo: not so much.

I know France has economic interests to protect in Gabon, but given that the French president Bongo actually liked was going anyway, I'm sure Sarkozy could have gotten away with a sympathy card. 

AFP/Getty Images 

Our long international nightmare is over. The U.S. and EU have reached an agreement to end the world's most entertaining trade dispute, which began with George W. Bush's lame-duck decision to raise import duties on Roquefort cheese:

The new US administration has now agreed to drop the import duty threat, due to come into force this week, and which would have affected to a lesser degree a range of EU products, from truffles and mineral water to chewing gum.

Under the provisional deal, the EU will keep the hormone-treated beef ban, which it claims poses a health threat, but will quadruple imports of non-hormone treated American beef in four years.

Cheese farmer and lefty icon Jose Bove (above) described the deal as evidence that the U.S. has "accepted that health is more important than trade," even though this is actually an expansion of trade and between all this beef and cheese, I'm not sure who's getting healthy. 

But in any event, kudos to negotiators for ensuring that neither American populism nor European ludditism will bring down the transatlantic alliance. Time for a celebratory cheeseburger.

JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty Images

An epidemic of "bossnapping" is sweeping France as employees at French subsidiaries of Sony, Caterpillar, 3M and a Hewlett-Packard have in recent weeks taken their bosses hostage to protest cutbacks. The AP's Greg Keller writes:

So far none of the boss-nappers has been prosecuted and none of the bosses hurt. Workers sometimes even make efforts to make their boss' night at the office more comfortable.

During his boss-napping in March, 3M manager Luc Rousselet told reporters "everything's fine," and workers brought him a meal of mussels and French fries for dinner. [That's him enjoying his meal in the photo above.]

Seizing bosses is not a new tactic in France, with examples of boss-napping dating back decades in a country famous for its strikes and known as a place where workers aren't afraid to put up a fight.

But the phenomenon has jumped to the front pages of French newspapers in recent weeks as the Europe-wide recession has sparked a fresh wave of boss-napping episodes.

Average Frenchmen and women seem to take a forgiving view of the practice. A poll earlier this month showed 55 percent of them judged "justified" boss-nappings, factory and road blockades and other "radical and violent social acts."

French bosses aren't going to take this lying down though:

The phenomenon has sparked a cottage industry in advice for executives worried they could be locked up. One Paris management consultant has begun promoting a "survival kit" for potential boss-napping victims, including a cell phone pre-programmed with the numbers of family, police and a psychologist, and a change of clothes.

Niel is giving his clients a list of "10 anti-boss-napping tips," which include gauging your staff's mutinous instincts beforehand and choosing a neutral observer to calm things down if and when a boss-napping does break out.

I imagine a good number of our readers are sitting at work right now. If your boss is looking at you funny, it's possible he or she might just be "gauging your mutinous instincts." 

ALAIN JOCARD/AFP/Getty Images

Today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a frankly horrific set of numbers. The unemployment rate hit 8.5%, the highest in more than 25 years; 663,000 workers lost their jobs in March alone; 25 million are underemployed; and over the course of the recession, the U.S. has bled more than 5 million jobs.

Certainly, the U.S. has fewer social safeguards against the disruptions of unemployment than many other high-income economies, meaning fewer protections against lay-offs and less-generous unemployment benefits. (FP looked at the best places to lose your job last month.) This generally means more volatility in the unemployment rate.

But is the U.S. really doing worse than, say, France and the United Kingdom, countries with historically high unemployment? 

The short answer is yes; the U.S. recession has gone on for longer and is deeper than in Europe, and therefore has sapped three times as many jobs.  The unemployment rate in the U.S. is higher than in the U.K., and close to France's. (The U.K. and French numbers above are estimates.) And the job-losses are accelerating faster in the U.S. than in other countries.

Here's hoping for it to bottom-out soon. 

Unless left-wing parliamentarians can pull off some last-minute procedural wrangling, French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen will chair a European Parliament session in July. As the oldest member, Le Pen is entitled to chair the body between June parliamentary elections and the election of a new president.

Le Pen is notorious for, among other things, calling the Holocaust a "detail of History" and was once suspended from the parliament for assaulting a political rival. All the same, the Green Party's explanation for the rule-change they're trying to enact is a little weak:

The Greens co-president, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, said "we would like to see the youngest deputy open the session, not because of Le Pen, but because it's a sign of the future".

Yes. Nothing to do with Le Pen, I'm sure.

To be fair to the Europarl, a similar custom is how the United States wound up with an 92-year-old ex-klansmen, albeit a reformed one, as president pro tempore of the senate and third in the line of succession for the presidency.

FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP/Getty Images

Via Matthew Yglesias, it seems that there's at least one U.S. politician brave enough to fight for Americans' God-given right to enjoy fancy French cheese. Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar has written a letter to the president protesting the United States's relatiatory tariffs on Roquefort cheese:

“Freedom fries and “freedom toast” did serious damage to U.S.-French relaions. We both want to reestablish America’s moral authority in the world under your presidency; a very noble gesture toward that goal would be to remove or reduce this mean-spirited and unproductive punitive duty on Roquefort cheese.

Though I am a supporter of “buy American”, it is for unfairly subsidized foreign products when they are identical or comparable to ours. Roquefort cheese is not in this category. I know from my own experience that if such retaliatory action were taken on products produced in small communities in my district, as Roquefort cheese is in a small French town, it would have a serious adverse local economic impact.

Even here at Passport, we realize that the Roquefort controvery is not one of the more pressing issues Obama faces. But all the same, it's impressive when a congressman from an agricultural state is willing to come out against counterproductive protectionism, and for something French. Though a quick Getty Images search reveals that Oberstar is a longtime French sympathizer.

According to the New York Times's Marc Santora and Alan Cowell, yesterday's meeting between Nouri al-Maliki and French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a sign that the Iraqi leader is looking to "gradually diminish American power over Iraqi politics and increase ties to other Western powers."

This was reinforced by a swipe at U.S. Vice President Joe Biden:

“The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over,” Mr. Maliki said in answer to a reporter’s question about Mr. Biden’s remarks. “The Iraqi government knows what its responsibilities are. We are carrying out reform, and we are in the last step of reconciliation.”

If Maliki thinks his country would be better off with France, he clearly hasn't been reading my blogging colleague David Rothkopf or he would know that they're not always the most dependable friends. Then again, Iraq's on Rothkopf's list of America's worst allies too.

Speaking of Rothkopf, this is just about the best thing I read today:

Why is it that people treat foreign policy like it is semi-theological when the bullshit factor in making policy about hugely complex issues is so high and duplicity, deception and grotesquely self-serving behavior are so prevalent? Why do they practically write about it in an English accent? I literally do not know of a single respectable intellectual pursuit that is founded more on generalization, speculation, and guessing than even the most "serious" practice of foreign policy professionals.

Then he smacks down an uppity commenter and starts talking about Rihanna for some reason.

Photo: Iraqi Prime Minister Office via Getty Images

Those cheese-eating French are already giving Barack Obama a hard time. No...really.

Apparently one of George W. Bush's last acts as president was to triple tariffs on French roquefort cheese. This was meant as retaliation for the longstanding French ban on U.S. beef imports. But as Charles Bremner notes, many French were quick to see it as Bush's final shot at the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" who had so aggravated him during the run-up to the Iraq war.

French roquefort producers, including anti-globalization icon and dairy farmer Jose Bove, are protesting the move to "hold roquefort hostage" and are demanding that Obama reverse Bush's decision. The French parliament is debating a measure to slap tariffs on Coca-Cola in "symbol against symbol" retaliation. As a not-so-subtle hint, the governor of the roquefort-producing Mid-Pyrenees region even sent Obama a deluxe box of roquefort (shown above) as a welcoming gift. Repealing the beef ban is out of the question for health reasons, say officials.

The last thing Obama wants right now is to get into a trade war with France over a last-minute decision by his predecessor, particularly when he's looking for French cooperation on far more pressing issues. But even the farmers seem to realize that the "cheese wars" are not particularly high on Obama's list right now. "The boy must have a lot of priorities," acknowledged the head of one agricultural union.

Umm...yeah. I would say so. And you probably shouldn't be calling him "boy" either.

Photo: PASCAL PAVANI/AFP/Getty Images

I doubt this is true, but it is funny:

The subdued Ms Merkel, who loathes Mr Sarkozy's bravura, has been watching videos of the late Louis de Funès, a manic comic actor and Gallic institution, for clues to understanding the ever-agitated President. 

Here's a representative sample of M. De Funès's work:

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers sends in the following photo from Paris:

It looks like Rwandan school children will soon be trading their copies of Le Petit Prince for Paddington Bear. Rwandan education officials announced this week that French will no longer be the first language of education -- all lessons will be in English by 2011.

It would seem that this latest shedding of French culture by Rwandan officials comes too close on the heels of last summer's controversial accusations to be taken as anything but an insult by France. It was just last August that an independent commission set up by the Rwandan government implicated 33 French military and political leaders in the 1994 genocide and called for them to stand trial. Rwanda's current government, moreover, is led by former rebels who fought and ousted what they saw as French proxies.

Rwandan officials, however, were quick to add that this latest move is not a spiteful jab at France. Vincent Karega, Rwanda's trade and industry minister, said the motive was purely economic: "English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe." In addition to the English-speaking investors now coming to Rwanda, the country also relies on trade with places where deals are made in English, like East Africa.

Rwanda may be onto something here: The country's state minister for education has already noted that English textbooks are much, much cheaper than the French alternative.

Photo: JOSE CENDON/AFP/Getty Images

Cairo's zabaleen form the backbone of the city's garbage disposal system. They collect about a third of Cairo's trash and traditionally haul it by donkey cart, as seen in this Oct. 20 photo. Largely scorned by Egyptian society, the trash scavengers recently lost one woman who had worked tirelessly for their well-being -- Sister Emmanuelle, a Belgium-born French nun who died Oct. 20 at age 99.

See more photos of zabaleen at work and read more about them in this week's photo essay, "Cairo's Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps."

Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images