En février dernier, François Jolivet a déposé une proposition de loi, visant à interdire l’usage de l’écriture inclusive dans les documents administratifs, signée par plus de soixante députés. Aurore Bergé, Agnès Thill, Bertrand Sorre… Ils sont aujourd’hui 115, du Parti communiste jusqu’au Rassemblement national, à le soutenir. Le député LREM explique au Figaro les raisons de son combat contre cette graphie militante, qui est, selon lui, loin d’être «inclusive».

LE FIGARO.- Comment est né votre combat contre l’écriture inclusive?

François JOLIVET. - J’ai toujours été lié dans mon mandat municipal au monde du handicap. Ainsi, je possède des relations avec des associations qui ont en charge des personnes dyslexiques, dyspraxiques, dysorthographiques, dites «dys». Un jour, des parents sont venus me dire que leurs enfants avaient des difficultés à lire certains documents, du fait de l’écriture dite «inclusive», et plus précisément les graphies comme le «point médian». Je le rappelle, quand on est «dys», et qu’on lit un point, on revient à la phrase du début. Cela empêche la lecture. Je me suis donc intéressé à ce sujet. Je me suis aperçu que l’université aujourd’hui fait parfois ses fiches de formation en écriture inclusive (exemple récent avec l’ONISEP sur Parcours Sup). Or, un certain nombre de personne n’arrivent pas à lire cette écriture et ne peuvent donc pas répondre. Quand on sait les effort fournis par certains pour obtenir un baccalauréat, c’est insupportable. Puis, j’ai vu que l’OMS, l’ONU, l’Union européenne publiaient en écriture inclusive. Je me suis aussi rendu compte que des collectivités communiquaient et délibéraient de cette façon. Quand on n’est pas capable de lire un document, on ne peut ni faire valoir ses droits ni contester une mesure administrative… Lorsque ma proposition de loi a été médiatisée, j’ai été très étonné du tohu-bohu qu’elle avait engendrée. Avant, je recevais 200 mails par jour, aujourd’hui, c’est 400. On m’envoie des cours, des sujets corrigés en écriture inclusive. J’ai été contacté par des étudiants de l’IEP de Grenoble, de Sciences po Paris qui m’ont expliqué que certains élèves avaient été privilégiés parce qu’ils utilisaient cette écriture. Le Figaro l’a d’ailleurs révélé. Je me suis dit que c’était intolérable.

« À l’origine, l’écriture inclusive était élitiste, mais je pense qu’elle est devenue une espèce de mode »

L’écriture inclusive comporte diverses règles: point médian, double pronom, mots épicènes… Contre quelle écriture inclusive vous opposez-vous?

Je ne m’élève pas contre la féminisation des noms, mais contre le point médian qui est selon moi un point bloquant. J’aimerais une écriture pour tous, ce que cette écriture dite «inclusive», n’est pas. Des enseignants qui enseignent le français dans d’autres pays m’ont contacté pour dire leur stupéfaction. À mon sens, le combat de l’opinion est gagné, mais le combat de quelques autoentrepreneurs de l’écriture n’est pas facile à remporter. Lorsqu’on est un homme contre l’écriture inclusive, on est catalogué de terrible machiste et de vieux réactionnaire…

Est-elle une écriture élitiste?

Elle est contre-intuitive, illisible, excluante et donc, elle désunie. À l’origine, l’écriture inclusive était élitiste, mais je pense qu’elle est devenue une espèce de mode. Elle est un indice de la déconstruction de notre pays et de notre culture ; tout cela, sous-couvert d’une minorité agissante qui a su faire prospérer ses idées un peu partout. Nous sommes aujourd’hui dans une dictature des minorités.

« Pour obtenir l’égalité femme-homme, il est préférable de voter la loi PACTE qui impose autant d’hommes que de femmes dans les conseils d’administration, plutôt que défendre l’écriture inclusive »

Comment expliquez-vous alors que son usage s’étende?

Certaines personnes ont l’impression de satisfaire un combat, peut-être de bonne foi. Ils font cela sans se poser de question. Aujourd’hui, le militantisme fait que l’on mélange parfois sa fonction et les causes qu’on peut défendre à titre personnel. Parfois, certains cèdent à une mode pour plaire à un supérieur hiérarchique. Et c’est ainsi que l’on se retrouve, dans des entreprises, avec une communication en écriture inclusive. Or, pour obtenir l’égalité femme-homme, il est préférable de voter la loi PACTE qui impose autant d’hommes que de femmes dans les conseils d’administration, qui exige des rattrapages salariaux, plutôt que défendre l’écriture inclusive.

Votre proposition réunit des personnalités de différents bords politiques. Comment expliquer cette «convergence des luttes»?

Nous sommes aujourd’hui 115 signataires, venant du PC jusqu’au RN, mais pas le PS. Valérie Pécresse et Xavier Bertrand ont apporté leur soutien à cette proposition de loi, même s’ils ne sont plus parlementaires. Normalement les bords politiques ne signent pas en-dehors de leur propre groupe. Mais il y a des gens qui ont pensé que j’avais raison. Cette question de l’écriture inclusive va au-delà de divergences politiques. La parole publique, plutôt que de désunir, doit unir. C’est mon ambition. Je crois que le débat pour l’égalité femme-homme est juste, mais je trouve que le chemin qu’il emprunte et les moyens qu’il utilise met à l’écart les enfants dys. Il faut conserver une écriture compréhensible. À une époque où les gens ne se comprennent plus, il ne s’agit pas de leur enlever l’écriture, mais de la préserver. C’est elle qui unit.

« Les moments que nous vivons, et que nous avons vécu montrent combien l’attente d’égalité et de liberté sont devenues une priorité des Français »

Où en est-on de cette proposition de loi?

Nous nous sommes fixé un objectif de 200. Je pense que l’on va prendre l’initiative de faire une pétition dite à caractère institutionnel pour obtenir 100 000 signatures, d’ici à septembre. À la rentrée, le président de l’Assemblée nationale recevra la procédure constitutionnelle. La Commission l’examinera et la discutera. J’espère qu’ainsi, cette proposition de loi sera inscrite à l’ordre du jour. On verra si le gouvernement s’en saisira. On sera dans un calendrier qui permettra beaucoup de débats. Si la présidentielle ne se fera évidemment pas sur l’écriture inclusive, elle portera entre autres sur la culture française, sur les marqueurs culturels et sur l’égalité de tous pour accéder à ses droits et à l’usage de sa liberté. Les moments que nous vivons, et que nous avons vécu (gilets jaunes, crise sanitaire) montrent combien l’attente d’égalité et de liberté sont devenues une priorité des Français.

Quand on voit l’échec de la loi Toubon dans les publicités, où l’anglais est roi, peut-on penser qu’une loi puisse faire respecter l’interdiction d’utiliser l’écriture inclusive?

L’article de la proposition de loi modifie un code qui historiquement s’appelait le Code des procédures administratives contentieuses et qui s’appelle désormais le Code des relations entre le public et l’administration. À partir du moment où l’administration écrit et que l’usager ne peut lire, cela signifie qu’il ne peut plus faire valoir ses droits. C’est ce que modifie la proposition, l’écriture appartient donc bien au domaine de la loi. Si, dans l’entreprise, le dirigeant ne veut pas être compris de ses collaborateurs ou de ses clients, c’est son droit. Cela étant, s’il veut les exclure de promotions parce qu’ils ne parviennent pas à lire certains documents, cela relève du ressort des organisations syndicales.

Si cette proposition de loi aboutit, où sera-t-elle interdite?

La proposition de loi a pour objectif de l’interdire dans les documents administratifs et documents destinés aux usagers (rapports, études, procès verbaux, circulaires, notes et réponses ministérielles, avis, décisions, courriers électroniques envoyés aux usagers, publications officielles sur internet…). Tout document produit et diffusé par une personne qu’elle soit publique ou privée en charge d’une mission de service public.

« Du 27 au 31 août se tiendra le huitième congrès international des recherches féministes dans la francophonie, à Paris-Nanterre. Un événement majeur, réunissant artistes, chercheuses, militantes du monde entier, avec des financements publics français et européens considérables. Un des thèmes sera : Dés-effacer les féministes racisées. Pourtant, maghrébine donc racisée, féministe, j'ai été effacée de ce colloque.

Racisé est le terme qui permet de réhabiliter la distinction raciale dans les recherches en sciences sociales. La race obsède les nouveaux sociologues et les militantes, y compris celles qui se réclament du féminisme. Les 14 et 15 juin derniers, un colloque avait déjà pour thème Approches phénoménologiques du genre et de la race. Avec toujours un seul courant de pensée représenté et homologué : celui des indigénistes.

Ceux-là mêmes qui ont vu dans la victoire de l'équipe de France de foot celle de l'Afrique, refusant de considérer les joueurs comme des Français, et qui prétendent que les petits-enfants d'immigrés sont traités comme des sous-citoyens par un État structurellement raciste. Nous étions deux féministes dites universalistes, invitées dans ces réunions, Christine Le Doaré et moi. Nous allions défendre une autre vision, tout aussi légitime. Nous n'étions que deux, mais c'était déjà deux de trop.

Il nous a été expliqué d'abord que notre présence, actée officiellement dans le programme dès mai, était un malentendu. Puis que nous n'étions pas en capacité de lancer et d'entretenir un débat dans des conditions sereines. Nous avons enfin pu lire que c'est la menace d'actions violentes de la part de militantes indigénistes qui avait contraint les organisatrices à nous déprogrammer.

Notre discours pose problème et nos opposants fuient le débat. Nous critiquons l'intersectionnalité -concept utile quand il est étudié par des spécialistes-, qui a dévoré le féminisme et l'a détourné de ses objectifs : l'émancipation individuelle et collective des femmes. De toutes les femmes. Nous combattons le culturalisme, qui consiste à défendre des droits différents en fonction de la couleur et de la culture des femmes, en fait leur ethnie et leur religion.

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L'intersectionnalité, qui prétend faire reconnaître le cumul de discriminations (femme et noire par exemple), fonctionne comme une intersection routière : il y a toujours une priorité et un cédez le passage. Avec l'intersectionnalité, ce sont toujours les femmes qui cèdent le passage aux intérêts du groupe ethnique et religieux auquel on les assigne. Houria Bouteldja, digne représentante de ce courant de pensée, explique qu'une femme noire violée par un Noir ne devrait pas porter plainte contre cet homme pour ne pas nuire à sa communauté, des féministes s'opposent à la pénalisation du harcèlement de rue parce qu'elle aurait visé les hommes d'une certaine origine ethnique!

Je considère que ma couleur de peau, mes origines, mes croyances ne me rendent pas différente de mes compatriotes blanches. Que ces nouvelles féministes me contestent le droit à la parole parce que je ne reste pas à la place qu'elles me destinent, voilà le racisme. Celui des bons sentiments qui livrent les femmes au patriarcat oriental. Voilement, excision, mariages précoces et/ou forcés, triptyque imposé aux femmes de la virginité, de la pudeur et de l'humilité.

Que l'État et ses institutions financent sans mesure ces colloques qui ne prêchent que la haine de la République, réhabilitent le racisme, nient tous les progrès qui font de nous une communauté nationale, accrochent les femmes non blanches à de nouvelles laisses, est une faute et un scandale. Si vous refusez aux femmes qui ne sont pas blanches ce que vous exigez pour vous, ce n'est pas de la tolérance, c'est du racisme, celui qui protège vos privilèges de classe. »

Byzance tomba aux mains des Turcs tout en discutant du sexe des anges.
Le français achèvera de se décomposer dans l’illettrisme pendant que nous discuterons du sexe des mots.
La querelle actuelle découle de ce fait très simple qu’il n’existe pas en français de genre neutre comme en possèdent le grec, le latin et l’allemand. D’où ce résultat que, chez nous, quantité de noms, de fonctions, métiers et titres, sémantiquement neutres, sont grammaticalement féminins ou masculins. Leur genre n’a rien à voir avec le sexe de la personne qu’ils concernent, laquelle peut être un homme.
Homme, d’ailleurs, s’emploie tantôt en valeur neutre, quand il signifie l’espèce humaine, tantôt en valeur masculine quand il désigne le mâle. Confondre les deux relève d’une incompétence qui condamne à l’embrouillamini sur la féminisation du vocabulaire. Un humain de sexe masculin peut fort bien être une recrue, une vedette, une canaille, une fripouille ou une andouille.
De sexe féminin, il lui arrive d’être un mannequin, un tyran ou un génie. Le respect de la personne humaine est-il réservé aux femmes, et celui des droits de l’homme aux hommes ?
Absurde!
Ces féminins et masculins sont purement grammaticaux, nullement sexuels.
Certains mots sont précédés d’articles féminins ou masculins sans que ces genres impliquent que les qualités, charges ou talents correspondants appartiennent à un sexe plutôt qu’à l’autre. On dit: «Madame de Sévigné est un grand écrivain» et «Rémy de Goumont est une plume brillante». On dit le garde des Sceaux, même quand c’est une femme, et la sentinelle, qui est presque toujours un homme.
Tous ces termes sont, je le répète, sémantiquement neutres. Accoler à un substantif un article d’un genre opposé au sien ne le fait pas changer de sexe. Ce n’est qu’une banale faute d’accord.
Certains substantifs se féminisent tout naturellement: une pianiste, avocate, chanteuse, directrice, actrice, papesse, doctoresse. Mais une dame ministresse, proviseuse, médecine, gardienne des Sceaux, officière ou commandeuse de la Légion d’Honneur contrevient soit à la clarté, soit à l’esthétique, sans que remarquer cet inconvénient puisse être imputé à l’antiféminisme. Un ambassadeur est un ambassadeur, même quand c’est une femme. Il est aussi une excellence, même quand c’est un homme. L’usage est le maître suprême.

Une langue bouge de par le mariage de la logique et du tâtonnement, qu’accompagne en sourdine une mélodie originale. Le tout est fruit de la lenteur des siècles, non de l’opportunisme des politiques. L’Etat n’a aucune légitimité pour décider du vocabulaire et de la grammaire. Il tombe en outre dans l’abus de pouvoir quand il utilise l’école publique pour imposer ses oukases langagiers à toute une jeunesse.
J’ai entendu objecter: «Vaugelas, au XVIIe siècle, n’a-t-il pas édicté des normes dans ses remarques sur la langue française ?». Certes. Mais Vaugelas n’était pas ministre. Ce n’était qu’un auteur, dont chacun était libre de suivre ou non les avis. Il n’avait pas les moyens d’imposer ses lubies aux enfants. Il n’était pas Richelieu, lequel n’a jamais tranché personnellement de questions de langues.
Si notre gouvernement veut servir le français, il ferait mieux de veiller d’abord à ce qu’on l’enseigne en classe, ensuite à ce que l’audiovisuel public, placé sous sa coupe, n’accumule pas à longueur de soirées les faux sens, solécismes, impropriétés, barbarismes et cuirs qui, pénétrant dans le crâne des gosses, achèvent de rendre impossible la tâche des enseignants. La société française a progressé vers l’égalité des sexes dans tous les métiers, sauf le métier politique. Les coupables de cette honte croient s’amnistier (ils en ont l’habitude) en torturant la grammaire.
Ils ont trouvé le sésame démagogique de cette opération magique: faire avancer le féminin faute d’avoir fait avancer les femmes.

Ledger produces some of the most popular cold wallets on the market.

The summer of 2020 saw news spread of phishing attacks against Ledger users, with the firm ultimately disclosing that it suffered a data breach that June during which customer contact and order information was compromised. In December, a database containing the personal information for more than a quarter-million Ledger customers was posted online. 

Ledger and Shopify eventually identified a rogue Shopify employee as responsible for the leak, but not before some users reported threats of home invasion and other scareware tactics. At the time, Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier took to Twitter to reassure users that their hardware wallets had not been compromised and that their funds were safe. Nonetheless, talk of starting a class-action case began soon after.

The lawsuit, the first to be filed in response to the information leak, comes from law firm Roche Freedman, which filed the complaint in a San Francisco court on April 6. The firm is known for its class actions against crypto firms such as Binance, Tron and iFinex, the parent company of Tether and Bitfinex. Last week, Roche Freedman filed a lawsuit on behalf of a customer of Nexo, as reported by Law360. 

Regarding the Ledger breach, law firm partner Kyle Roche told The Block, "We've been investigating this since the day it became public. This investigation included speaking with experts in the data security and cryptocurrency fields."

In a statement, Ledger general counsel Antoine Thibault said: "Ledger does not comment on ongoing legal issues. Ledger would however like to take this moment to remind our customers, yet again, never to divulge their 24 words and validate the identity of the recipient of your transactions. You are in sole and total control of access to your funds."

The case will hinge on the question of who is responsible for what. Ledger's wallets themselves were not compromised, but the complaint includes the security of Shopify's service as part of Ledger's duty to clients. As noted in the complaint: "[b]y operating in the crypto-asset security space, Ledger places itself between user’s funds and would-be hackers. The anonymity of its customer list is a key and obvious element of the security that Ledger offers." 

Central to delegating responsibility will be the question of what Ledger and Shopify knew and how quickly they communicated that information to users. As Roche told The Block: "The case is noteworthy because two very large and sophisticated companies handling sensitive information will need to explain why it took them so long to warn their customers about such an awful and highly damaging incident."

The current complaint does not specify the amount of relief that it seeks for the class, but it does identify the "[m]atter in controversy" as worth over $5 million. Currently, the complaint references only two Ledger users directly, who together lost 4.2 BTC, 11 ETH and 150,000 XLM to phishing attacks. At today's prices, those holdings add up to $340,000, but were worth significantly less as of the time of the attacks. 

A copy of the complaint can be found below:

Ledger Shopify Complaint by MichaelPatrickMcSweeney on Scribd

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

But, he added, it has tried to use the Euro the same way.

Speaking at a virtual event hosted by conservative non-profit, the Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel was commenting on whether China’s central bank-issued digital currency, or CBDC, could threaten the U.S. dollar’s status as a global reserve currency.

While Thiel, who is known to be pro-Bitcoin, suggested an “internal stablecoin in China” will amount to little more than “some sort of totalitarian measuring device,” he added that China may view Bitcoin as a tool to erode the dollar’s hegemony:

“From China’s point of view, they don’t like the U.S. having this reserve currency, because it gives a lot of leverage over oil supply chains and all sorts of things like that,” he said, adding:

“Even though I'm a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether if at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. where it threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar.”

Thiel alluded to Chinese efforts to denominate oil trades in Euros during recent years in a bid to undermine the global standing of the dollar, stating: “I think the Euro, you can think of as part of a Chinese weapon against the dollar — the last decade didn’t really work that way, but China would have liked to see two reserve currencies, like the Euro.”

The venture capitalist speculated China does not actually want its renminbi to become the global reserve currency, noting the government would have to “open their capital accounts” among other measures “they really don’t want to do.”

As such, Thiel concludes that supporting Bitcoin offers China an elegant means to weaken the dollar’s standing internationally:

“China wants to do things to weaken [the dollar] — China’s long Bitcoin, and perhaps, from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works.”

Second memory: the less epic surroundings of Mote Park, Kent, three decades later. The Scorpions, this time for real, with bedazzling lightshow and backdrop of peace signs on a holograph of the Berlin Wall; Klaus Meine – born 1948, year of the Berlin blockade – singing Wind of Change through a chilly night. “The world is closing in/ Did you ever think/That we could be so close, like brothers … ?”

Now, it turns out, that sparkler-swaying anthem may have been contrived by US intelligence as cultural subversion of communism. An upcoming podcast series, Wind of Change, by the New Yorker’s Pat Radden Keefe, investigates whether it was – as the journalist was told a decade ago – actually a CIA-crafted confection.

The producers can be sure of an audience for Keefe’s exploration of “the dark byways of cold war history and … nearly a hundred interviews in four countries with rockers and spies”. But if the song was created by the agency, this was nothing new – indeed, it would have been a late arrival to a policy and practice almost as long-established as the Berlin Wall itself.

The CIA had built a facade of front structures, in pursuit of American cultural hegemony

As the United States and Soviet Union amassed sufficient nuclear arsenals to blow the world up several times over, and – respectively – installed murderous dictatorships across Latin America and colonised Eastern Europe, each also stirred riptides of cultural subversion, one of the other. It wasn’t until 1990 that a book by Joseph Nye gave all this a name: Soft Power, exerted “when one country gets other countries to do want what it wants”.

From 1947, Voice of America radio diverted its attentions from wartime to cold war, broadcasting to the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries. But the CIA had also built a facade of front structures in pursuit of American cultural hegemony, beginning with the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which claimed indirect influence over 800 publications, and in 1950 the International Organisations Division under a former secretary general of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Braden.

Appalled at the appeal of communism in Europe, these agencies waged cultural cold war against serial Soviet “peace initiatives”. A CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom was coordinated by Russian composer and writer Nicolas Nabokov, exiled in the US, with offices in 35 countries, funded and tasked to mount exhibitions, stage concerts and sponsor anti-communist activity, in intellectual disguise.

Among its apparently benign charges was the vibrant, impeccably liberal, Encounter magazine, based in London and edited by Stephen Spender.

Music, even before the Scorpions, was always central. Modernist orchestral music was anathema to the Soviets, and the imposition of classical forms a pillar of domestic cultural orthodoxy. At the centre of the tussle was the 20th century’s greatest composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, who worked on a knife-edge dais between innovation and censorship for what the communist cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov called “formalism” from the decadent west. The CIA was among many trying to secure his defection when Josef Stalin released Shostakovich to address the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York in 1949.

But Shostakovich frustrated and confounded his western supporters. He returned to Russia and enabled the USSR to present him as a loyal comrade, a claim as outrageous as attempts in the west, from the mid-1970s until the present, to ventriloquise Shostakovich as a political dissident.

Soviet contempt for western modernism was an invitation to US intelligence to promote such music. Accordingly, in 1952, the CCF coordinated the Festival of Twentieth-Century Masterpieces of Modern Arts, in Paris. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was flown at State Department expense to perform Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring; Braden remarked that the performance “brought more acclaim for the US than Dwight Eisenhower could in a hundred speeches”.

Russia was equally canny: the Leningrad Philharmonic toured the BBC Proms and other venues in 1971 (I was among those who gratefully benefited) and even kept its “touring conductor”, Arvid Jansons, on hand as principal guest conductor at the Hallé orchestra in Manchester.

The visual arts scene was also fertile terrain. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine a world divided between socialist realism in the Soviet Union and abstract expressionism as a tool of the CIA in defence of the west. But that is how the agency saw innovations pioneered by Jackson Pollock and others.

Abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock in his studio in 1953. Photograph: Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images

Joseph McCarthy’s acolytes in purging the American left found abstract expressionism “unAmerican”. But the CIA begged to differ, finding in the new art an assertive individualism – in stark contrast to the collectivist confinements of socialist realism.

The centre of gravity in fine art shifted from Paris to New York. In her book on the cultural cold war, Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders says the CIA deported itself “in the manner of a Renaissance prince, except that it acted secretly”.

The artists – Pollock especially, but also Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning – benefited from CIA-backed international promotion, despite their political views.

The same irony applied to jazz, still largely black music in the US, where artists’ tours, like everything else, were segregated. But the racial origins of jazz had been used in propaganda against Nazi Germany, so why not red Russia?

The genius of Louis Armstrong was pounced upon, and the trumpeter appointed a “goodwill jazz ambassador”, dispatched on government-funded tours of Europe and Africa, while Jim Crow laws applied at home.

Jazz “ambassadors”, however, proved less manageable than the painters. Armstrong withdrew from the post – reneging on what was intended to be a showcase tour of the USSR – after President Eisenhower refused deployment of troops to enforce desegregation laws of 1957. “Satchmo” resumed tours when the policy was reversed and a division mobilised in Arkansas.

Louis Armstrong playing at Lucerna Hall, Prague, in 1965. Photograph: Vaclav Chocola/All Out Productions

Dizzy Gillespie joined the first State Department-organised tour in 1956, but wouldn’t attend official briefings, saying he “wasn’t going to apologise for the racist policies of America”. The white jazz pianist Dave Brubeck was another “ambassador” for US cultural policy, dispatched much later, on a 13-concert tour of the USSR in 1985.

The CIA’s most infamous meddling with literature concerned Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. Copies of the former – deemed anti-communist commentary - were carried across the Iron Curtain by air balloon, while the French Communist Party ordered its members to mass-purchase, then destroy, copies.

Everyone knows that Orwell held dictatorships of all political colours in equal contempt, and that the closing scene in Animal Farm featuring humans and pigs can refer to both systems.

But Stonor Saunders’ book uncovered a scheme by the CIA to secure film rights to Animal Farm in order to doctor its ending, and show a revolt against the pigs, with the other tyrants – humans – omitted.

The CIA also changed the ending of the movie version of 1984, in defiance of Orwell’s instructions. In the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is cowered by the generic totalitarian regime; its last line is: “He loved Big Brother.” But in the film Winston and his lover, Julia, are shot down after the former declaims: “Down with Big Brother!”

Significantly, though, whatever impact the CIA’s efforts may or may not have had, they were overtaken by the avant-garde’s own potency. By the late 1960s, cultural foment was off the leash worldwide, and the new music – integrated into protest and peace movements antagonistic towards both capitalism and communism – cut both ways in terms of the cold war. And where rock ’n’ roll culture was eroding the latter, it needed little help from US intelligence.

Although the Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed, a band called Plastic People of the Universe chipped away at the edifice of Czech communism, only because, as keyboard player Joseph Janiček told me: “In Prague in 1968, if you wanted to play your own music you became political whether you intended it or not, because the authorities deemed that you were a threat to their ‘official’ culture.” The eventual “Velvet” revolution was so-called not because of any CIA shenanigans, but in part the influence of the Velvet Underground on the Plastics and their champion, Václav Havel.

By the time Bruce Springsteen played Chimes of Freedom in East Berlin in 1988 – one of the most politically charged performances ever – no one was in any doubt what was happening: the CIA was irrelevant.

But then, after that festival in Moscow in August 1989, the Scorpions released Wind of Change, with its references to the Moskva river and Gorky Park. This lyrical celebration of the proclaimed new world order sits oddly in the band’s other material from that time, markedly Crazy World, with its disillusionment: “Spend your dollars and roubles / Buy a piece of the wall … I’m so sick of it all”.

So we’ll see what Keefe’s podcast turns up. Meanwhile, the British writer Robert Winder is about to publish a book about soft power in a post-Scorpions world, and he wonders: “It is hard in these Trump-damaged times even to recall the cultural moment when a pianist, Dave Brubeck, could be told, on a 1958 tour of Poland: ‘What you brought wasn’t just jazz. It was the Grand Canyon. It was America’.”

The first of eight episodes of Pat Radden Keefe’s podcast, Wind of Change, will be broadcast on Spotify on 11 May.

Thriller présenté dans un format court inédit où aucun épisode ne dépasse les seize minutes, "Caïd"plonge dans le quotidien de trafiquants de drogue d'une cité de Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône). Cette série de Netflix réalisée par Nicolas Lopez et Ange Basterga envoie un réalisateur et son caméraman tourner le clip d'un rappeur qui est surtout à la tête d'un réseau de cannabis au coeur d'une "cité sensible", où ils se retrouvent embarqués malgré eux dans une guerre de gangs.

Adaptée dʹun long-métrage des mêmes créateurs sorti en 2017, ce produit dérivé relate sur le mode de l'immersion nerveuse en (fausse) caméra embarquée (le procédé de found foutage utilisé par le fameux film "Le Projet Blair Witch") règlements de compte et trafics de drogue. Soutenu sur le scénario par Nicolas Peufaillit ("Un Prophète" entre autres), "Caïd" reprend les mêmes comédiens que le film et a bénéficié de vingt-quatre jours tournage, contre quatre pour le film récompensé il y a quatre ans du prix du meilleur long-métrage au Festival Polar de Cognac.

>> A voir, la bande-annonce de la série:

[embedded content]Une série proche du docu-fiction

"L'idée était de se démarquer en recourant au found foutage. Il s'agissait d'adapter les codes du film d'horreur aux caïds des cités, ce qui n'avait jamais été fait. On a aussi voulu tester avec Netflix un nouveau format court, qui s'adresse et s'adapte aux nouveaux modes de consommation de la jeunesse. En termes de narration, cela nous a permis davantage de rythme et de dynamisme", expliquent Nicolas Lopez et Ange Basterga à la RTS.

La série, proche du docu-fiction et qui évoque souvent l'esprit de sa cousine italienne "Gomorra", maintient ainsi une tension constante et s'avère très réaliste. Une authenticité obtenue notamment grâce à un recrutement en forme de casting sauvage de comédiens dans les environs de Marseille.

Cette réalisation aussi incisive que fougueuse n'évite hélas pas à cette fiction une série de clichés où s'entremêlent rap, violence, drogue, destin déterminé sans points de vue nuancés. Et de finalement séduire davantage sur la forme que le fond.

Propos recueillis par Anne-Laure Gannac

Texte et adaptation web: Olivier Horner

From saying the Chinese capital was horrible to unusual outbursts the public deemed racist - the Queen's husband is often mired in controversy. 

1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.

2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.

3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.

5. "You managed not to get eaten then?" To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

6. "You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist during a tour of Budapest in Hungary. 1993.

Fears for Royal's health: Buckingham Palace staff called to emergency meeting.

Fears for Royal's health: Buckingham Palace staff called to emergency meeting.

7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.

9. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's verdict of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999. He later clarified his comment: "I meant to say cowboys. "I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up."

10. "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle." To survivors of the Lockerbie bombings in 1993.

11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.

12. "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want." A man of the people shares insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981.

13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.

14. "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!" On the issue of stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995.

15. "What do you gargle with - pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

17. "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple.

18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

19. "You ARE a woman, aren't you?" To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift.

20. "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

21. "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" On being offered the finest Italian wines by PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.

22. "I would like to go to Russia very much - although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.

23. "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" In a Radio 4 interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996. He said to the interviewer off-air afterwards: "That will really set the cat among the pigeons, won't it?"

24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.

25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.

26. "A pissometer?" The Prince sees the renames the piezometer water gauge demonstrated by Australian farmer Steve Filelti in 2000.

27. "Don't feed your rabbits pawpaw fruit - it acts as a contraceptive. Then again, it might not work on rabbits." Giving advice to a Caribbean rabbit breeder in Anguilla in 1994.

28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

32. "You bloody silly fool!" To an elderly car park attendant who made the mistake of not recognising him at Cambridge University in 1997.

33. "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment." To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999.

34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort - provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

35. "The French don't know how to cook breakfast." After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat - from Gallic chef Regis Crépy - in 2002.

36. "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

37. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." On a visit to Australia in 1992, when asked if he wanted to stroke a koala bear.

38. "It doesn't look like much work goes on at this University." Overheard at Bristol University's engineering facility. It had been closed so that he and the Queen could officially open it in 2005.

39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.

40. "Do you still throw spears at each other?" Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

41. "Where's the Southern Comfort?" On being presented with a hamper of southern goods by the American ambassador in London in 1999.

42. "Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had suffered poor academic reputation.

43. "Ah you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? Ha, ha! Well done." Meeting 14-year old George Barlow, whose invited to the Queen to visit Romford, Essex, in 2003.

44. "So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

45. "You could do with losing a little bit of weight." To hopeful astronaut, 13-year-old Andrew Adams.

46. "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

47. "The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined." While hosts made effort to greet a state visit to Brazil, 1968.

48. "During the Blitz a lot of shops had their windows blown in and sometimes they put up notices saying, 'More open than usual.' I now declare this place more open than usual." Unveiling a plaque at the University of Hertfordshire's new Hatfield campus in November 2003.

49 . Philip: "Who are you?"

Simon Kelner: "I'm the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Sir."

Philip: "What are you doing here?"

Kelner: "You invited me."

Philip: "Well, you didn't have to come!"

An exchange at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002.

50. "No, I would probably end up spitting it out over everybody." Prince Philip declines the offer of some fish from Rick Stein's seafood deli in 2000.

51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.

53. "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans." In 2000.

54. "Can you tell the difference between them?" On being told by President Obama that he'd had breakfast with the leaders of the UK, China and Russia.

55. "I don't know how they are going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield." After meeting students from Brunei coming to Britain to study in 1998.

56. "Do people trip over you?" Meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

57. "That's a nice tie... Do you have any knickers in that material?" Discussing the tartan designed for the Papal visit with then-Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie last year.

58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.

59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.

60. "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard." To a young fashion designer at a Buckingham Palace in 2009.

61. "So you're responsible for the kind of crap Channel Four produces!" Speaking to then chairman of the channel, Michael Bishop, in 1962.

62. "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years." Address to the General Dental Council, quoted in Time in 1960.

63. "Tolerance is the one essential ingredient ... You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance." Advice for a successful marriage in 1997.

64. "I never see any home cooking - all I get is fancy stuff." Commiserating about the standard of Buckingham Palace cuisine in 1962.

65. "I suppose I would get in a lot of trouble if I were to melt them down." On being shown Nottingham Forest FC's trophy collection in 1999.

66. "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters!" To pupils at Queen Anne's School in Reading, who wear blood-red uniforms, in 1998.

67. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

68. "Ah, so this is feminist corner then." Joining a group of female Labour MPs, who were wearing name badges reading "Ms", at a Buckingham Palace drinks party in 2000.

69. "Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

70. "All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury." Bemoaning the rate of British tax in 1963.

71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.

72. "Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" Asked of a penniless student.

73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.

74. "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." Of his daughter, Princess Anne.

75. "They're not mating are they?" Spotting two robots bumping in to one another at the Science Museum in 2000.

76. "I must be in the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane." Philip did not approve of the noise Concorde made while flying over the Buckingham Palace.

77. "The only active sport, which I follow, is polo - and most of the work's done by the pony!" 1965

78. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." On seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

79. "Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

80. "We go into the red next year... I shall probably have to give up polo." Comment on US television in 1969 about the Royal Family's finances.

81. "Bugger the table plan, give me my dinner!" Showing his impatience to be fed at a dinner party in 2004.

82. "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit." Said to a woman solicitor.

83. "You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you." Said to Sir Rennie Maudslay, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in the 1970s.

84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.

85. "This could only happen in a technical college." On getting stuck in a lift between two floors at the Heriot Watt University, 1958.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

87. "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons" On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965.

88. "You're not wearing mink knickers, are you?" Philip charms fashion writer Serena French at a World Wildlife Fund gathering in 1993.

89. "My son...er...owns them." On being asked on a Canadian tour whether he knew the Scilly Isles.

90. "Well, that's more than you know about anything else then." Speaking, a touch condescendingly, to Michael Buerk, after being told by the BBC newsreader that he did know about the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Awards in 2004.

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La stratégie actuelle 2020-2023 de la promotion économique met un accent particulier sur les technologies d’avenir et s’adresse aux entreprises innovantes. (Photo d’illustration)

KEYSTONE/Christian Beutler

Deux cent vingt entreprises étrangères ont choisi de s’implanter en Suisse en 2020, créant 1168 emplois lors de leur première année d’activité. Au total, ces sociétés ont prévu de créer environ 3600 emplois d’ici trois ans, un chiffre en hausse de 21% par rapport à 2019.

Cette évolution positive est intervenue malgré les conditions difficiles du marché, souligne vendredi la Conférence des chefs des départements cantonaux de l’économie publique (CDEP). Celle-ci recense chaque année les implantations qui ont pu se concrétiser grâce au travail des organismes cantonaux, régionaux et nationaux de promotion économique.

Même si les 220 entreprises qui se sont implantées en Suisse en 2020 sont 23 (-9%) de moins que l’année précédente, le total de 1168 nouveaux emplois au cours de la première année d’activité dépasse de 119 (+11%) le résultat des implantations en 2019.

Avec un total de 3583 nouveaux emplois prévus pour les trois prochaines années, le niveau de l’année précédente (2970) a également été dépassé (+21%).

Technologies d’avenir

À l’image de 2019, la plupart des entreprises venues s’implanter en Suisse sont actives dans les secteurs des technologies de l’information et de la communication ou des sciences du vivant. La majeure partie des sociétés concernées proviennent de France, des États-Unis et de Chine.

La stratégie actuelle 2020-2023 de la promotion économique met un accent particulier sur les technologies d’avenir et s’adresse aux entreprises innovantes et à forte valeur ajoutée. L’objectif est de contribuer à la prospérité du pays en attirant de telles entreprises. Grâce à leur savoir-faire innovant, ces entreprises contribuent à une valeur ajoutée locale pour l’économie et la société, estime la CDEP.

ATS

Publié aujourd’hui à 10h49

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