French press review 15 May 2013

Cannes and Paris football are this morning's big stories.

Sadly, PSG's sporting exploit in winning the French championship last Sunday has been completely overshadowed by the riot which prematurely ended Monday's celebrations in the French capital.

"The Shock Wave" is right wing Le Figaro's headline to a story that says the future of the Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, and the Paris police commissioner, Bernard Boucault, must be out into question.

The right wing daily laments the fact that similar celebrations passed off peacefully in Munich, Manchester and Barcelona on the very same evening, blaming the Paris violence on "gangs from the suburbs" who come "motivated by hatred" to take on the police, destroy the capital and terrorise the peaceful people of Paris.

Where is the logic, wonders Le Figaro, in sending thousands of riot police to harrass those protesting against the law allowing homosexual marriage, and not sending enough to control a bunch of hooligans who have no respect for anything?

Popular Aujourd'hui en France says the whole fiasco should have been foreseen, and was badly organised, both by the club and the police. The number of those in custody has risen to 47, as the police study video evidence and track down those suspected of breaking into shops and cars during Monday's violence.

Sports paper L'Equipe says the disturbances once again raise doubts about the image of a club that has been haunted for years by the violence of some of its supporters. Since 2010, two rival groups of fans – the Ultras from Boulogne, and the other Ultras from Auteuil – have been disbanded, and the club issues tickets on a random seating basis to avoid concentrations of troublesome supporters inside the Parc des Princes. But they can hardly be held responsible for the activities of opportunistic thieves who are happy to use any big public event to perpetrate a spot of smash and grab.

The Cannes Film Festival is this morning's other big story, with Le Monde enthusiastically announcing that French actors, producers and films are going to dominate the festival.

Left-leaning Libération and communist L'Humanité are less chirpy.

"French cinema is sick, but in good health," is Libé's contradictory main headline. The point of the story is that the local film industry is in good economic shape, thanks to the success of a few blockbusters, but this success has been achieved at the expense of the small-budget masterpieces that used to be the pride of the French producers.

Some people are being paid too much, it is becoming ever more difficult to make movies in France and the major distribution companies still have a stranglehold on what we get to see.Libération's editorial specifically blames the deal that regulates the rate at which cinema technicians are paid, saying it was struck between one trade union and a handful of industry millionaires, and effectively signed the death warrant for a raft of small production companies who simply can afford to pay the necessary staff.

Cinema audiences are in slight decline, down about six percent if you compare 2012 and 2011 figures. But paradoxically, given Libé's general argument, more films are being made in France – nearly half of the 2012 crop were homegrown, versus 40 percent a year earlier.

There's an urgent need, says the left-leaning paper, to make those who watch films on computers pay a fair price for that usage. France, in other words, needs a coherent cultural policy.