Let them eat on fancy plates
PARIS: The French president’s fondness for the gilt-edged aspects of his job — the fancy backdrops in chateaus, his big makeup bills, the proximity to the wealthy — is no longer a secret to his countrymen.
Emmanuel Macron dislikes being called “president of the rich”, but of all the labels affixed to him, it is the one he can’t shake.
A dust-up over the cost of the new presidential dinner service is unlikely to help.
Like presidents before him, Mr Macron is ordering his 1,200 plates from a porcelain factory in Sevres that is heavily subsidised by the state and has supplied France’s rulers since the 18th century.
At a moment when Mr Macron was seen complaining in a government video that French welfare spending costs “a truckload of cash”, those fancy new plates from the Manufacture de Sevres have caused a small ruckus.
This will not be not the plain white china to be found at Ikea. Each plate requires “at least five hours of work — it’s all made by hand” by state-paid artisans, Romane Sarfati, the factory’s director-general, said in an interview on Thursday. The design is based on drawings of the Elysee Palace, the seat of the French presidency, and every Elysee dinner guest will sit down to an individualised plate.
The ministry of culture is paying US$58,000 (1.8 million baht) to the winning artists. But that doesn’t cover the cost of the plates themselves.
“There’s no number because you can’t calculate it as though it were a business,” Mr Serfaty said.
That hasn’t stopped some of the French press from gleefully speculating, led by Le Canard Enchaine, the ever-impertinent satirical weekly. It came up with a total of nearly $600,000.
“Faux controversy”, said the Elysee. It said that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the expenditure, and that it would not inflate state budgets — a sensitive point for Mr Macron, with Brussels looking over his shoulder all the time.
For Sevres, “the subsidy remains the same: 4 million euros,” a spokesman for the president said on Thursday. “The order doesn’t represent any additional cost,” he said.
Mr Serfaty was somewhat less dismissive. “One can understand why the French might be a little astonished, at a moment of budgetary constraints, that the president would make such an order from Sevres,” she said. “But you’ve got to understand what’s at stake. He represents France and the French. At dinners of state he must be in a position to represent France, and the French tradition of art de vivre.