161
Are they being held? Yes.
The Telegraph article you quote has the key facts. This article in Le Monde (Google Translate) has more details.
Are they children? Technically yes.
The Le Monde article says they were students at the Lycée Jean-Rostand. In France a lycée is for students aged from 15 to 18. So yes they are likely to be mostly minors, but still ...
144
TL;DR: Those regions are poor areas considered as priority for public help by the French government to reduce inequalities. It has nothing to do with Islamic law or police patrols.
I'm a French citizen.
So what are the ZUS (Zone Urbaine Sensible)?
They are sensitive urban areas where the French government wants the local politics to put in effort. Those ...
118
To summarise up front, he used the word imbécile which is more or less like "idiot", but he used it as an element of an idiomatic figurative phrase which means "you can play-act someone who doesn't care or doesn't know better" or "in a remarkably (and in this case inappropriately) juvenile way" -- not saying that "you 'are' an idiot", saying "you can 'play' ...
106
According to this article (French), there has never been such a law in French codes, but the rumor is persistent over time.
It seems that it all come from the censorship of George Orwell's Animal Farm, censored for its first publication in France in 1947; the pig originally named Napoléon was finally renamed Cesar.
In 1945, an Englishman, George Orwell, ...
85
The 1930 measurement was taken incorrectly.
The claim was also made in domestic newspapers at the time, including L'Express du Midi:
50° AU SOLEIL A SAINT-ETIENNE
Saint-Etienne, 27 août. Le thermomètre a marqué aujourd'hui 50° au soleil. Mme Guilly, 40 ans, est morte frappée d'insolation.
A rough translation of this is
50° IN THE SUN IN SAINT-...
68
It's impossible to definitively prove: GDP is calculated annually, and compared based on purchasing power, rather than currency fluctuations - countries can't officially change position like this overnight. But the UK's status as 5th largest economy is certainly in doubt.
At least one estimate, detailed below, based on applying currency fluctuations to ...
46
The image is true in the sense that it was not manipulated in its pixels, and it is true that it depicts mainly Roma people who set camp on the railway line in Paris. But the date of "meanwhile" is manipulative as it indicates present day 2018 Paris. Taken together, that is a "No. That picture with its caption is not 'true'."
The picture shows a shanty town ...
38
The French word Macron used to address the teenager was "imbecile", although in an advisory form: "You can act like an imbecile, but..."
Video here: Emmanuel Macron tells teenager: 'Call me Mr. President'
The rest is a matter of translation, I suppose. CNN (in the above link) translated it as "fool", or more precisely "you can play the fool". I'm not a ...
37
No.
Here's a news article from April 2014,
African Monetary Union Stirs Criticism of France
A hoard of cash sits in the Bank of France: $20 billion in African money held in trust by the French government and earning just 0.75 percent interest. Now economists and politicians from 14 Central and West African countries say they want their funds ...
37
No-one connected to the attacks has yet turned out to be from Syria - they were almost all (around 12 so far) EU citizens from France and/or Belgium. There appears to have been at least one Algerian and possibly one or more Moroccans involved indirectly, but no evidence of any Syrians. Many of them grew up in urban Brussels. Many had travelled to Syria for ...
33
Although, as LangLangC stated, the image you provided doesn't show an actual migrant camp (the Roma people didn't come to France during the migrant crisis of 2015 but rather since 2008 when Romania and Bulgaria entered the EU, and keep coming here since then), there were until recently two big migrant settlements in Paris at Porte de la Chapelle and Canal ...
26
From the link posted by @SVilcans:
Fewer than 300 churches had been demolished between 1905 and 2014, the Catholic newspaper La Croix reported, out of more than 42,000 in total.
From the La Croix article, translated via Google:
According to Benoît de Sagazan, author of Patrimoine en blog, 28 churches have been demolished since 2000 - mostly in former ...
26
This appears to be a folk tale with little contemporary evidence of the event actually happening, but the tale itself does seem to date to the 15th century.
According to Volume 17 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the tale is told in a few ways:
MACAIRE, a French chanson de geste. Macaire (12th century) and La reine Sibille (14th century) are two ...
23
Tongue-in-cheek but true, this Cracked article pretty much sums it up
They've won 109, lost 49 and drawn (or as close as you can "draw" a war) 10 times.
And for references, there is this page on French military action
And some examples still unquoted here
The battle of Maregnano, and its legendary swiss-kickings
The French revolutionary wars, where ...
20
This article of "Le Monde" dated November 14th updated 14:29 reports on some rumors that followed the terrorist attacks. (Le Monde is a French daily newspaper and one of the most important and widely respected newspapers in Europe)
Même chose avec la tour Eiffel, supposément « éteinte pour les
victimes ». En réalité, l’édifice, illuminé tous les soirs ...
16
Helric Fredou was the second-in-command of the Limoges SRPJ (regional branch of the judicial police) . I can't find his nomination but here is a 2014 administrative decision that cites him in this role.
The national police superintendent's union published a short note which only mentions Helric Fredou's death, without stating any cause.
Highlighting ...
16
Post stamps bearing the image of Prabhakaran and other LTTE symbols were issued in France, not by the French government but by private users using the ability to create personalized post stamps from an image uploaded by a user. The French government has issued an apology for this, as they consider LTTE to be a terrorist organization.
Images of the stamps (...
16
I'm pretty sure there's no law (but the habit is genuine). I cannot find a definitive answer, but since it's difficult to prove a negative, I'm going to offer some fairly strong evidence.
None of the search hits for site:legifrance.gouv.fr croissant beurre on Google (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14) mention such a law¹. Légifrance is a French government ...
15
I would also add to France's victories the American Revolutionary War. France did not fight on its own for this war, but without the help of France, America would not be independent.
Indeed, France officially directly supported the war (Simms American Revolutionary war history book):
The Franco-American alliance refers to the 1778 alliance between Louis ...
14
I looked down the list
Atlas des Zones urbaines sensibles (Zus)
A lot of those places you could walk around if you wanted to. Fire crews would probably need to be accompanied by the police in some of them if they were to attend a fire. In a number, such as the quartiers nord of Marseille only reinforced police units would be safe entering but they are not ...
14
The French news magazine L'Express reported on this poll. They give information about the poll that complements the Newsweek article. In particular, the poll question was (my translation): ”According to your knowledge, tell us whether you have a very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative or very negative opinion of the Islamic State in Iraq and the ...
13
The claim isn't accurate - you won't be prosecuted for wearing a headscarf in public. However, it might be a misinterpretation or conflation of one or two things that do exist.
There is the French ban on face covering. This prohibits the wearing of clothing that entirely covers the face, unless there is a specific reason for it. The stated rationale is not ...
13
Yes.
German Tagesschau from May 29th (Verdun remembrance starting at 04:53, live footage of the performance at 07:24)
Euronews on YouTube with some more live footage
The production was conducted by Volker Schlöndorff. According to Tagesschau (in their 13:15 airing of the same day), on personal request by President François Hollande, so much for "the ...
13
Here's a very straightforward reference: The French penal law. Specifically, Article 113-2 makes this law applicable to the full territory of the French republic.
And of course it does not employ that thieves get their hands cut off etc. (cf. Article 131).
As a consequence the French state must act against any attempts to install islamic law.
13
To answer more precisely on the where part of the question, the shantytown is on BD Ney, 75018 Paris (48°53'53.1"N 2°21'05.6"E):
Google Maps screenshot
12
Well the OP Cited 700 AD as the starting point so that bring Charlemagne (The name given by later generations to Charles, King of the Franks), into contention.
Returning to his capital at Aachen, he began a series of fifty-three
campaigns- nearly all led in person- designed to round out his empire
by conquering and Christianizing Bavaria and Saxony, ...
10
French Wikipedia has some things to say about this.
Orthographe française
En 1718, avec sa seconde édition, le Dictionnaire introduit de façon systématique les lettres j et v en remplacement des lettres muettes qui permettaient jusqu'alors de distinguer les mots homonymes écrits respectivement avec les lettres i et u (ainsi « apuril » devient « avril »). ...
10
It has been stated as false by Snopes for United States, France, and Britain.
Steven Emerson, who spread such a rumour about Birmingham, have apologized for it.BBC
The French embassy stated that
"Of course it is not true to say that there are no-go areas in France. To give you an idea of how wide of the mark those comments are, we could compare them to ...
10
I asked a very similar question yesterday on History and after reading more about it, I believe the answer is not absolutely clear. In any case, this article from New Scientist seems to provide the clearest answer I've found so far. Rather than because of being left-handed, Napoleon seems to have been keen on changing centuries-long traditions for the sake ...
9
This was exhaustively answered on History.SE question "Was Napoleon as short as “common knowledge” states?".
I won't provide the complete answer here - you should just read it on History SE - but as we can't close questions as duplicates cross-SE-site, I will offer just one cite from that excellent answer by @coleopterist:
According to the French ...
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