Paul Webster

The man who launched Jean-Marie Le Pen on to France's national political scene said yesterday that his early support for the racist demagogue was 'the worst thing' he had done in his life.

Flying into a literary storm

Twenty years after his death, Jean-Paul Sartre has been raised to the status of "man of the century" by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher-showman who led the revolt against leftwing thinkers in the 1970s.

More than 50 relatives of the wartime French general Charles de Gaulle yesterday attacked the decision by the late president's oldest grandson, also named Charles, to stand for the racist National Front in next month's European elections.

The French doctors’ charity, Medecins sans frontières, yesterday published an independent report on atrocities in Kosovo which it said ‘amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity’.

Luckily there was neither rain nor gale when an inquiry team visited the four skyscraper towers of France’s new national library to draw up a scathing report on a billion-pound institution, known as Francois’s folly after the late President Mitterrand.

In the second scandal to shake top-flight football in France in recent years, officials from Girondins Bordeaux football club have been standing trial amid allegations that prostitutes and lavish presents were offered to referees.

Even in the safety of her austere flat in Paris’s dull 13th arrondissement, Malika Oufkir finds it difficult to talk about her terrifying 24 years as a prisoner of Morocco’s King Hassan II.

An appeal court in Grenoble yesterday overturned a lifetime ban on a British snowboarder who was blamed for causing an avalanche in the Alps when surfing off-piste in January 1998.

It is one of France's most puzzling unsolved crimes: on Halloween in 1988, a young couple vanished while walking their dog in a popular stretch of forest near Fontainebleau, south of Paris.