Data Recovered From Air France Flight Recorders

Investigators at the French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses spent a full day painstakingly removing, drying and testing the circuits of the flash memory chips inside the flight recorders, which arrived Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Le Bourget, near Paris. The data and the voice recordings were then successfully downloaded over the weekend and transferred onto a secure computer server. Copies were made and provided to the French judicial police, who are conducting a separate criminal inquiry into the crash.

The plane’s flight data recorder tracks roughly 1,300 different statistics, including the plane’s position, speed, altitude and direction when it began to experience difficulties. Investigators plan to synchronize the data with the voice recorder, which includes the final two hours of the pilots’ conversations and other cockpit sounds, including any alarms that would have sounded as its flight systems failed.

In a statement, investigators said they would spend the next several weeks conducting a detailed analysis of the black box recordings in order to assemble a fuller narrative of what happened in the flight’s final moments. An interim report on their findings was expected to be published during the summer, the agency said.

All 228 passengers and crew members were killed when Flight 447 went down on June 1, 2009, in a heavy high-altitude thunderstorm en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.

Decrypting the data on the recorders of the plane, an Airbus A330-200, gained new urgency after the decision in March by a French judge to place both Airbus and Air France under formal investigation on accusations of involuntary manslaughter in the case. Under French law, being placed under formal investigation is one step short of criminal charges but could lead to a trial.

So far, the main source of information about what happened has been messages sent automatically from the plane, which indicated a malfunction of its airspeed sensors.

At a briefing last week, Jean-Paul Troadec, the head of the investigations bureau, said a salvage boat had successfully raised dozens of pieces of the plane, including its engines, most of the cockpit and several onboard computers.

“We have all of the pieces that we wanted,” Mr. Troadec said.

Still missing so far from the trove of debris, however, are the three airspeed sensors — known as Pitot tubes — that are believed to have failed. But Mr. Troadec said he did not believe physical inspection of the sensors would yield critical new information.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a French government minister who oversees transportation issues, expressed her “great satisfaction” Monday that investigators would be able to read and analyze the black box recordings. “This proves we were right to devote such an effort to shed light on this accident.”

Air France, Airbus and the French government spent more than $30 million in four attempts to locate and retrieve the wreckage of Flight 447.

In an effort to demonstrate the transparency of the investigation, investigators said Monday that the extraction of the data from the recorders was filmed and recorded in its entirety and conducted in the presence of investigators from four other countries — Germany, the United States, Britain and Brazil.

The French police were expected to determine later this week whether traces of DNA could be recovered from the bodies of two crash victims found this month in the wreckage two and a half miles below the surface.

Underwater cameras have located the remains of about 50 people amid the debris. Jean Quintard, a deputy prosecutor, said last week that it was unlikely that all of those bodies could be raised. Based on the condition and position of each body, police specialists would be forced to determine the possibility of recovering each corpse on a case-by-case basis, he said.

It remains unclear whether a definitive identification of all the recovered remains will be possible. Forensics experts said that, after being immersed in salt water for two years, most traces of DNA would have been leached away. The best hope for identification would come from the marrow of larger bones from a victim’s leg or pelvis.

“What remains of any DNA would be in the center of the bone,” said Fran?ois Daoust, head of the forensic institute of the French national police agency. “But this is the first time sampling has been attempted under such conditions.”

View the original article here

As Case Unfolds, France Speculates and Steams

 

PARIS — France’s shock at the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault charges has turned among some to suspicion and anger, with his defenders questioning the initial New York police account and speculating about entrapment, and many others characterizing the photos of the handcuffed suspect as insulting and unfair.

Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, of the Socialist Party, questioned the police account of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's activities.

  Dominique Strauss-Kahn waited to be arraigned on Monday.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, was arrested on charges of attempted rape and illegal imprisonment of a chambermaid in a French-owned hotel in midtown Manhattan, the Sofitel, and was arraigned on Monday in New York.

The charges against a man thought to have had the best chance of becoming France’s next president in elections only a year away, and who is the prominent managing director of the International Monetary Fund, have exploded most political assumptions here.

On Tuesday, the opposition Socialists, who had been widely expected to choose Mr. Strauss-Kahn as their presidential candidate against President Nicolas Sarkozy, planned to debate their plans for the future. But the party leader, Martine Aubry, declined to say whether she would contest the presidential primary when the deadline for nominations expires in July. “We have a timetable and today is not the moment,” she told France Info radio. “We are not changing anything in our timetable.” She also said Mr. Strauss-Kahn must be seen as innocent unless proven not to be.

Apart from the political turmoil, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest has caused some soul-searching, especially among the French press, about whether it had failed to dig deeply into Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s sexual history. But some of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s supporters raised questions about the American handling of the case and hinted at a role by his political opponents.

The blogosphere and news outlets, especially on the Internet, were busy trying to dissect Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s day before he boarded the Air France flight to Paris. Citing unnamed allies of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, they suggested that he had lunch with his daughter before boarding the plane to make a flight that had been reserved in advance, that he may have checked out of his hotel before lunch with his daughter, and that he may have had lunch after the alleged attack took place. In other words, they suggested, he did not flee in haste, as the police had said in their comments on the case.

The Socialist politician Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a close ally of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said: “In the file, there are a lot of contradictions beginning with the escape, which was acknowledged today didn’t happen.”

On the Web site of RMC.fr radio, for example, claiming to cite information from Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers, the writers laid out the shape of an alibi — that he checked out of the hotel around 12:30 p.m., returning his keys to reception, and met his daughter for lunch before going to the airport, where he realized he had lost one of his cellphones, and called the hotel to ask that it be returned to him at the airport. The New York police originally estimated the time of the alleged attack on the maid at about 1 p.m., but have since revised it to around noon.

Another question raised was about the timing of the flood of Twitter posts around the scandal, with the first one reportedly sent by a French student who is a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party.

It was at 4:59 p.m. New York time that J_Pinet posted this message on Twitter: “A friend in the United States just told me that DSK was arrested by police in a hotel an hour ago.”

Twenty-four minutes later, a post by Arnaud Dassier, who ran Mr. Sarkozy’s online election campaign in 2007, spread the news further, apparently before any New York newspaper. Mr. Dassier is a shareholder in the Web site Atlantico.fr, which Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s allies accused this month of disseminating photographs of him and his wife getting into a Porsche in a bid to tarnish his reputation with common voters.

On Monday, Atlantico published what it said were reports from the police and the French Consulate in New York about the case, asserting that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had scratches on his back and left traces of DNA behind.

Ma?a de la Baume and Scott Sayare contributed reporting.

 

Memo From France: Questions Raised About a Code of Silence

When, for example, Fran?ois Mitterrand was asked by a journalist during his presidency whether it was true that he had a daughter outside his marriage, he replied: “Yes, it’s true. And so what? It’s none of the public’s business.”

The French have been complicit in accepting this sort of secret-keeping: they do not enjoy ugly revelations that could tear apart the social fabric. What shocked them more than the existence of Mr. Mitterrand’s mistress and their daughter was the revelation after his death that the French state had financially supported them and even provided police protection.

Now, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is once again challenging the assumption that the private lives of the rich, famous and powerful are off limits to public scrutiny. That the most serious accusation against Mr. Strauss-Kahn is attempted rape, and not just an indiscretion involving a consensual sexual relationship, only adds to a sense on the part of some people in France that the curtain of privacy needs to be lifted.

“We felt that we were superior to the Americans and the British by upholding the principle of protecting private life,” Pierre Haski, one of France’s leading political commentators and co-founder of the political Web site Rue89, said in an interview. “But we journalists haven’t done our job properly. We were used and abused in keeping secrets. We need to define our role in a more aggressive way — and say that not everything private is private.”

Mr. Haski said he had been wrong to withhold information in the past about French political figures that could have compromised their ability to carry out their duties.

“I knew that when Roland Dumas was foreign minister, he was romantically involved with the daughter of Syria’s defense minister,” he said. “I didn’t write it because it was a matter of his ‘private life.’ I was wrong. It had an impact on France’s foreign policy.”

He also chided himself and the French media for keeping secret that the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal and Fran?ois Hollande, her longtime partner, father of her four children and head of the Socialist Party, were no longer a couple while she was running for president in 2007.

The Strauss-Kahn scandal coincides with shifts in French public life in which the codes had already begun to crack and secrets were being revealed. The personality-driven nature of the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy has created a hunger for personality-driven, tell-all tales. Technology has made it easy to record and film private meetings and embarrassing public encounters on cellphones, contributing to a transparency that had never before existed.

But historically, the French have traded in rumors and secrets, and there are several reasons why they can be passed around in private circles but not put into public discussion.

First, the French have long been accustomed to unconfirmed stories about powerful figures and politicians. This dates from the era of the royal court — when information was power, yet had to be handled carefully. Salacious stories, whether true or not, made for good entertainment.

That makes the French tolerant of other people’s private behavior, especially sexual behavior. Private lives must not be invaded by outsiders. “To live happy, live hidden,” goes the saying by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, the 18th-century poet.

There was no public outcry or journalistic investigation, for example, when Mr. Sarkozy named Frédéric Mitterrand, the nephew of Fran?ois Mitterrand, as minister of culture, even though he had written a memoir describing in graphic detail how he had paid for sex with “boys” in Thailand.

Marine Le Pen, now the leader of the ultra-right National Front, later pushed the matter into public view and called for his resignation, but Mr. Sarkozy supported him and he has kept his job.

Second, politicians in France are not hounded out of office for sexual indiscretions (although violence against women is another matter). Traditionally, a political man who reveals his sexual prowess is proving his vigor: he is showing his constituents that he is fully and physically capable of running the country.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year in which Cécilia Sarkozy became the first lady of France. She became the first lady in 2007, not 2005.

 

Germany and France Bolster the European Economy

 

As a result, the European Commission said in its spring forecast that prospects for 2011 looked “slightly better” than six months ago.

But it also raised some caveats, noting that the pace of recovery would be uneven across the 17-nation bloc for some time to come, that inflation remained a worry and “moreover, despite some improvement in labor markets, the prospect is for a rather jobless recovery.”

The powerhouse in Europe in recent months has been Germany, but the latest data showed that France was catching up. The two countries together account for nearly half the euro zone’s economic output.

The German Federal Statistics Office reported that gross domestic product grew 1.5 percent over the previous quarter, when harsh weather held growth to just 0.4 percent.

The figure was well above analysts’ estimates and showed that Germany’s economy had recovered fully from its worst recession since World War II. “The precrisis level of early 2008 has been exceeded,” the office said.

France, too, surpassed expectations with growth of 1 percent, the steepest increase since spring 2006, according to the statistics office Insee. That compared with an increase of just 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2010, and a median forecast of economists surveyed by Reuters and Bloomberg News of 0.6 percent.

Over all, G.D.P. grew 0.8 percent in the euro area compared with the pace in the previous quarter, according to the European Union statistics office, Eurostat, somewhat better than economists had expected.

But the strains of austerity measures to rein in gaping deficits were evident as well.

Spain’s economy grew only 0.3 percent from the previous quarter, according to the National Statistics Institute in Madrid. Although that was slightly better than expected, it was largely attributed to exports amid weak domestic demand and high unemployment.

Portugal posted its second quarter of contraction, with its G.D.P. dropping 0.7 percent, according to Eurostat. The country is bracing for continued economic struggles as it awaits a 78 billion euro ($112 billion) bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. With the Finnish Parliament approving the bailout on Friday, European finance ministers are expected to sign off on the package early next week.

That approval had been threatened by the True Finn Party, which opposes bailouts.

Another struggling country, Greece, registered its first quarter of growth since 2008. Output grew 0.8 percent in the first quarter, according to Eurostat, compared with a decline of 2.8 percent in the final quarter of last year.

European stock markets and the euro both slipped lower. While economists called the reports encouraging, especially for Germany and France, they warned that keeping up the momentum would be difficult.

“Looking forward, we expect growth to slow down to more moderate rates, as world trade growth loses some momentum and fiscal policy tightening and higher oil prices kick in,” Aline Schuiling, senior economist at ABN Amro Bank in Amsterdam, wrote in a note. “Nevertheless, the German economy should continue to outperform the euro zone average by a wide margin.”

Oscar Bernal, an economist at ING Bank in Brussels, said that the pickup in industrial activity in France in particular “might just be a catch-up” after the year-end lull.

“All in all, we believe that the first-quarter G.D.P. growth acceleration will only be temporary,” he said, adding that the French government will still face difficulties meeting its budget-deficit reduction targets.

Strong demand for exports like automobiles has fueled the recovery in Germany, as in past recoveries. Domestic demand has typically trailed, leading to criticism from Germany’s trading partners. However, German consumers seem to be gaining confidence this time as unemployment falls sharply.

The German statistics office noted that compared with the last quarter of 2010, domestic consumption was up “markedly,” along with investment by businesses in machinery and equipment and construction.

“The growth of exports and imports continued, too,” it said. “However, the balance of exports and imports had a smaller share in the strong G.D.P. growth than domestic uses.”

The French statistics office noted that manufacturing production soared 3.7 percent in the first quarter, the strongest growth for at least 30 years. Household consumption was also up, but only slightly. Imports grew more rapidly than exports, weighing on the overall growth figure.

 

What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

  The Alucia and a Remus 6000, an unmanned reconnaissance submarine, at the last-known position of Flight 447. The sub can navigate rugged terrain miles beneath the ocean's surface and bring back thousands of photographs of underwater wrecks.

Late on the morning of April 3, the expedition ship Alucia rocked violently on the South Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a squall. On the aft deck, the crew huddled together in rain slickers and gazed across the heaving seas to a yellow blur on the horizon. This was an unmanned reconnaissance submarine carrying 15,000 photographs that they were nearly desperate to see. But it had buoyed to the surface just as the squall sprang up, and with 30-knot winds and four-foot swells that splashed over the stern, it was too dangerous to retrieve the sub. So they watched and waited.

A sonar image of the wreckage area of Air France Flight 447 that was released by French air-crash investigators on April 4.

For eight days, the Alucia had been trolling the ocean near a spot known as the L.K.P., or the Last Known Position of Flight 447, the Air France jet that vanished in June 2009, about halfway between South America and Africa. In the nearly two years since, three other search teams went looking for the wreckage, but this was the Alucia’s first try. The ship carried three Remus 6000 submarines, some of the most advanced underwater search vehicles on earth, which swept the seafloor in 20-hour runs, then surfaced to deliver sonar imagery to the Alucia’s scientific team, who pored over the data in 12-hour shifts around the clock. So far, they had not found the plane, but the day before, one scientist pointed at something unusual on the monitor and said, “What about this?” And ever since, the air on the Alucia was charged.

Everyone knew the stakes. This wasn’t a scan of the Sargasso Sea or a study of salinity samples. The families of 228 passengers were restless for results. The search had already taken two years and cost more than $25 million. Another $12 million was committed to the Alucia this year, but French investigators had quietly decided that this year would be the last. If the Alucia did not find the plane, no one ever would.

As expedition leader, Michael Purcell was equal parts colleague and boss, with a raspy voice and a sonic laugh and a playful sarcasm, but he knew the Remus subs as well as anyone. Looking at the fuzzy mark on the monitor, he knew they had found something unnatural. It was too long and straight to be geologic. It was unlike anything else on the seafloor. On the other hand, if it wasn’t Flight 447, Purcell knew the disappointment would be palpable. As he prepared the photographic sub to return to the bottom for an 18-hour mission, Purcell whispered to another scientist, “I’m 95 percent sure that’s it, but man, if it’s not, it’s going to be a long two and a half months.” The sub went down at 9:45 p.m. At 2 a.m., Purcell was still awake in his cabin. He picked up his journal. “Tired but not sleepy,” he wrote. “May have found the plane today. Everyone is on edge.”

Four hours later, Purcell was up with the sun, and by late morning he was on deck with the crew, watching the Remus bob in the distance. A little after 1 p.m., they pulled the sub onboard and attached two thick cables to upload its data into the computers in the mission-control room. They drew the curtains around the room, so nonscientific crew members could not see in, and yanked the satellite uplink offline, so no one could leak the news. Then they crowded around the computer monitor as the first images of Flight 447 came onscreen: engines, landing gear and sections of fuselage, all unmistakably vivid on the ocean floor. But as they turned the satellite back on and began sending the first photos to air-crash investigators in France, the deeper implications of their discovery were just beginning to surface.

The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.

Wil S. Hylton (wilshylton@gmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

The cover article this weekend, on Page 38, about the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, makes several references to unrecovered data cylinders from the plane’s black boxes. On May 1, after the article went to press, the cylinders were found on the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean and are expected to be analyzed in the coming week.

View the original article here

What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

  The Alucia and a Remus 6000, an unmanned reconnaissance submarine, at the last-known position of Flight 447. The sub can navigate rugged terrain miles beneath the ocean's surface and bring back thousands of photographs of underwater wrecks.

Late on the morning of April 3, the expedition ship Alucia rocked violently on the South Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a squall. On the aft deck, the crew huddled together in rain slickers and gazed across the heaving seas to a yellow blur on the horizon. This was an unmanned reconnaissance submarine carrying 15,000 photographs that they were nearly desperate to see. But it had buoyed to the surface just as the squall sprang up, and with 30-knot winds and four-foot swells that splashed over the stern, it was too dangerous to retrieve the sub. So they watched and waited.

A sonar image of the wreckage area of Air France Flight 447 that was released by French air-crash investigators on April 4.

For eight days, the Alucia had been trolling the ocean near a spot known as the L.K.P., or the Last Known Position of Flight 447, the Air France jet that vanished in June 2009, about halfway between South America and Africa. In the nearly two years since, three other search teams went looking for the wreckage, but this was the Alucia’s first try. The ship carried three Remus 6000 submarines, some of the most advanced underwater search vehicles on earth, which swept the seafloor in 20-hour runs, then surfaced to deliver sonar imagery to the Alucia’s scientific team, who pored over the data in 12-hour shifts around the clock. So far, they had not found the plane, but the day before, one scientist pointed at something unusual on the monitor and said, “What about this?” And ever since, the air on the Alucia was charged.

Everyone knew the stakes. This wasn’t a scan of the Sargasso Sea or a study of salinity samples. The families of 228 passengers were restless for results. The search had already taken two years and cost more than $25 million. Another $12 million was committed to the Alucia this year, but French investigators had quietly decided that this year would be the last. If the Alucia did not find the plane, no one ever would.

As expedition leader, Michael Purcell was equal parts colleague and boss, with a raspy voice and a sonic laugh and a playful sarcasm, but he knew the Remus subs as well as anyone. Looking at the fuzzy mark on the monitor, he knew they had found something unnatural. It was too long and straight to be geologic. It was unlike anything else on the seafloor. On the other hand, if it wasn’t Flight 447, Purcell knew the disappointment would be palpable. As he prepared the photographic sub to return to the bottom for an 18-hour mission, Purcell whispered to another scientist, “I’m 95 percent sure that’s it, but man, if it’s not, it’s going to be a long two and a half months.” The sub went down at 9:45 p.m. At 2 a.m., Purcell was still awake in his cabin. He picked up his journal. “Tired but not sleepy,” he wrote. “May have found the plane today. Everyone is on edge.”

Four hours later, Purcell was up with the sun, and by late morning he was on deck with the crew, watching the Remus bob in the distance. A little after 1 p.m., they pulled the sub onboard and attached two thick cables to upload its data into the computers in the mission-control room. They drew the curtains around the room, so nonscientific crew members could not see in, and yanked the satellite uplink offline, so no one could leak the news. Then they crowded around the computer monitor as the first images of Flight 447 came onscreen: engines, landing gear and sections of fuselage, all unmistakably vivid on the ocean floor. But as they turned the satellite back on and began sending the first photos to air-crash investigators in France, the deeper implications of their discovery were just beginning to surface.

The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.

Wil S. Hylton (wilshylton@gmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2011

The cover article this weekend, on Page 38, about the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, makes several references to unrecovered data cylinders from the plane’s black boxes. On May 1, after the article went to press, the cylinders were found on the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean and are expected to be analyzed in the coming week.

View the original article here

Much Ado Over Royal Wedding in Secular Republic of France

 

Despite the fact that the major royal events are rare — the wedding Friday between Prince William and Kate Middleton will be the first big British royal celebration since the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 — the ceremony and the surrounding hoopla this week serve to remind the French of their own tempestuous associations with royalty, which retains associations in this secular country.

Since the engagement was announced in November, media coverage has been building. Point de Vue, a popular weekly magazine, has been focusing on little else. It normally sells 200,000 copies a week but its chief editor, Colombe Pringle, expects the wedding special this week to sell 750,000. Other rivals like Paris Match have also been publishing commemorative editions. Le Figaro, one of the most popular dailies, offered a 79-page special entitled: “So British.”

On French television, three major channels — TF1, France 2 and M6 — will show the ceremony live.

Olivier Debeugny, 37, who lives in the Paris region and works in insurance, said that his mother and aunt would be glued to their set at home in Lille on Friday. “I have no idea why,” he said, “and I’m not sure that they could tell you why, either.”

As in many other countries, sales of royal memorabilia have been brisk in France. Ruth Thibaudière, assistant manager of the WH Smith store in central Paris, which sells British books, newspapers, food and other products, said recent sales had been three times higher than last year’s levels, mostly due to wedding-themed items like mugs, plates, key rings and bookmarks.

Many of her French clients, she said, have been “amazed at what it incurs, at how big it is.”

Even if they cannot always explain why, among many French, there remains a certain fascination with their cross-Channel neighbors.

“We’ve always had a very specific relationship with the British,” said Bruno Jeanbart, director of OpinionWay, a Paris-based research and polling firm. “In the 20th century, the enemy was Germany. Or was the real enemy the British? There’s always been a kind of competition between the two countries.”

While many Frenchmen enjoy chiding their cross-Channel cousins about their culinary shortcomings, poor weather and generally quirky ways, the fact that an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 French people live in London alone tells a different story (the number of British living in all of France is estimated at about 200,000). A poll in Le Figaro last weekend found 95 percent of the French expatriates were happy in the British capital.

But beyond the love-hate relationship with Britain, the French have conflicting feelings about monarchy, secularism and the intersection with politics.

“There’s always been a significant interest in royalty in France,” Mr. Jeanbart said.

Indeed, late last year, the discovery by scientists that an embalmed head apparently belonged to King Henri IV, the first of the Bourbon line, appeared to stir real public interest, with follow-up news articles and Internet buzz.

To some, the apparent interest stems from a nostalgia for lost traditions, perhaps even a sense of guilt that the French rejected royalty and chopped off Louis XVI’s head in 1793.

And there still is a fringe royalist movement in France, which is steeped in a yearning for a strong, conservative and pure France, rooted in the land and propped up by the pillars of the Catholic Church and the army.

Disparate groups keep alive the idea of restoring the monarchy, which was partially restored after the French Revolution and later abandoned. The last Bourbon monarch, Louis-Philippe I, who was referred to as the “citizen King,” abdicated in 1848. (He was the last king to rule France, although Emperor Napoleon III would serve as its last monarch.)

The current monarchists include the political party Alliance Royale and the right-wing pressure group Action Fran?aise, with its radical youth arm, the Camelots du Roi. Other groups include the Manants du Roi and Nouvelle Action Royaliste.

In the highly unlikely event of a restoration, the throne could pass to Jean d'Orléans, the duke of de Vend?me and son of the Count of Paris. He is the main descendant of the House of Orléans and was himself married in 2009 at Notre-Dame de Senlis Cathedral in a service attended by 900 people including politicians, business and social figures and representatives of European royal families. He runs a charitable foundation.

Another potential claimant would be the Spanish-born Prince Louis Alphonse of Bourbon, the duke of Anjou.

Apart from the French royal line, there is the House of Grimaldi, which serves as something of a surrogate royal family in France. In July, Monaco will celebrate the wedding of Prince Albert II to the South African former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock, though the impending nuptials have been overshadowed by the grander preparations in London.

Even though France’s royalty may be long gone, its vestiges remain. In many ways, French society remains hierarchical, for example with senior positions in government and industry often earmarked for those who attended the most prestigious schools. And politics here has retained a monarchical style.

“We look for a true leader, someone who rules from the center. Before it was the king, then we had the emperor, now it’s the president,” Mr. Jeanbart said. “Since the 5th Republic, we’ve had a kind of elected king,” he added, referring to the constitutional changes introduced under Charles de Gaulle in 1958.

That sense of a regal presidency was personified by leaders like Fran?ois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac. But the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been criticized for jettisoning tradition and is seen more as a “king of bling,” with arriviste tastes and media ubiquity. Perhaps wounded by the barbs, Mr. Sarkozy has himself compared his predecessors to the “rois fainéants,” or “lazy kings,” who ruled France without energy in times past.

Still, there is another, competing narrative, one that suggests that the recent fascination of the French with monarchy is in fact a media creation.

Maurice Szafran, a writer and chief executive of the French publication Marianne, says the perception of a royal yearning might be more refrain than reality. “It could be that our press is more passionate about the story than the French people are,” he said on French radio last week. “In the coming weeks, we’ll find out.”

 

France Joins Britain in Sending Military Advisers to Libya Rebels, Reports Say

PARIS — The French government said Wednesday it would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support the ragtag rebel army in Libya, news reports said, offering a diplomatic boost for the insurgent leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil who planned to meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

The French and British decisions to send advisers marked the latest development in the international community’s search for a means to break a bloody battlefield deadlock that has killed hundreds in the contested cities of Misurata and Ajdabiya and left the rebels in tenuous control of a few major coastal cities in their campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

But the moves, likened by some critics to America’s decision to send military advisers to Vietnam, raised worries in both countries that their military establishments were being drawn closer into the conflict. The French government spokesman, Fran?ois Baroin, told reporters on Wednesday that the number of military liaison officers would be small, but did not give details. French government ministers stressed that they do not plan to send ground troops to support the rebels.

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said on Tuesday that the British advisers would help the makeshift rebel forces “improve their military organizational structures, communications and logistics.”

Britain and France — the European nations at the forefront of the diplomatic drive against Colonel Qaddafi — have strived to maintain a united front since they promoted a United Nations Security Council resolution almost five weeks ago authorizing NATO air strikes to protect civilians from loyalist forces.

France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters in Paris on Tuesday that he remained “absolutely opposed to a deployment of troops on the ground, “ words echoed on Wednesday by the defense minister, Gérard Longuet, who said the Security Council resolution permitting air strikes did not authorize the use of foreign ground forces.

On Wednesday, nonetheless, the satirical and investigative French weekly, Canard Encha?né, reported that, along with Britain and the United States, France dispatched covert special forces to Libya three weeks to assess the impact of allied airstrikes.

The Libyan government criticized the British decision to send advisers , saying the move would prolong conflict. Instead, Libya’s foreign minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, used a BBC interview broadcast on Wednesday to renew the Tripoli authorities’ frequent call for a cease-fire and a suspension of NATO bombing to permit a settlement negotiated by Libyans themselves without foreign interference.

“We think any military presence is a step backwards,” Mr. Obeidi said, “and we are sure that if this bombing stopped and there is a real cease-fire we could have a dialogue among all Libyans about what they want — democracy, political reform, constitution, election. This could not be done with what is going on now.”

President Sarkozy of France met Mr. Abdel-Jalil, formerly Colonel Qaddafi’s justice minister, to try to find a means to break the deadlock and, according to a statement from the French presidency, to debate “the process of democratic transition.

The French prime minister, Fran?ois Fillon, who also planned to meet Mr. Abdel-Jalil, was quoted in news reports as saying France would intensify air strikes “to prevent Qaddafi forces from pursuing their attacks on civilian populations.”

“But at the same time, we will need to find a political solution, that is, conditions for a dialogue so that the Libyan crisis can be resolved,” he said in Kiev, Ukraine, according to Agence France-Presse.

Libya’s state television reported on Wednesday that NATO warplanes had struck telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructure. But it did not say where or when the reported attacks took place.

The Libyan rebel leader held talks on Tuesday in Rome with Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, and urged NATO to increase its airstrikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. But, publicly at least, he appeared to have secured no firm commitment of increased military aid similar to Britain’s offer.

Italy, France and Qatar are the only countries to formally recognize the rebel administration in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Britain had previously been providing what Mr. Hague described as “nonlethal assistance,” in the form of telecommunications equipment and body armor. He maintained that the new deployment fell within the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the international community to protect Libyan civilians but ruling out an occupation force. The military team will work with British diplomats who are already in Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital, he said.

The officers will be deployed “quickly,” said Britain’s Defense Ministry, but it declined to provide further details on the timeline or the number of soldiers. The Associated Press reported that there could be as many as 20.

A government official, who did not want to be named as he was not authorized to discuss operational matters, said that though some of the soldiers had special forces backgrounds, they were not directly drawn from Britain’s elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service teams.

The move was cause for concern among some current and former politicians. Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, which is now part of a governing coalition with the Conservatives, said Tuesday that the advisers “must not be seen as a first installment of further military deployment.” He added, “Vietnam began with an American president sending military advisers.”

Current members of Parliament have also called for a fresh debate. “This is clear evidence of mission creep,” said John Baron, a Conservative member. “Now we are beginning to put military personnel on the ground, something that wasn’t even discussed when we debated this issue.”

Allied bombing sorties and Tomahawk missiles have failed to tip the balance decisively in favor of a rebel group with disjointed leadership, limited weapons and many inexperienced fighters. And civilian casualties have continued to mount. On Tuesday, the United Nations said that at least 20 children had been killed in the siege of Misurata.

Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Ravi Somaiya from London. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.