French property for £100m anybody? Article Published: 23:05 25/02/2007 Article Classification: Villa in Flayosc Provence
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It is the most beautiful home in the most beautiful capital in the world - and it is on the market. If you have £100m or so to spare, you might want to bid for the Hotel Lambert, a stunning mansion constructed and decorated by the finest artists of the 17th century on an island in the middle of the Seine. If, after your purchase, you feel the need to liven up one of the dozens of exquisitely decorated rooms, you could buy - for a mere £10m - The Flight into Egypt, a late masterpiece by Nicholas Poussin, also from the period when the French kings were the most powerful in Europe, which is on sale as well.

But don't expect to enjoy particularly good relations with your neighbours. The Hotel Lambert, currently owned by the French branch of the Rothschild banking family, and the Poussin painting are just two of a long list of prized elements of France's heritage whose sale is causing a very Gallic outburst of arm-waving and exasperation.

The plight of the painting has caused uproar. A campaign has been launched to raise the funds to allow a French museum to buy it. 'It would be utterly disastrous if the Poussin leaves France', said Didier Rykner, an art historian. But even with an unprecedented and radical mixing of public and private funds, the French are still far from the market price. The case is far from rare. Hervé Poulain, president of the national art market committee, says at least 80 per cent of auctioned top-quality art objects leave the country. 'France is an attic which is in the process of being emptied,' stormed the weekly magazine l'Express

Added to massive raids by US- and British-based investment funds and China or Gulf-based conglomerates on sectors of the French economy, the anger provoked by such sales is reaching far beyond the rarefied world of fine art. The question of France's role in the world has so far barely been mentioned in the heated campaigning for presidential elections in April. However, questions of 'globalisation' and foreign competition underpin many major issues in the campaign such as social and economic protection, the reform of 'the French model' and tax. Many, particularly on the left, talk of raising higher France's economic barriers to hold back the onslaught.

'Protectionism merits serious examination rather than just being caricatured by a few obtuse economists fixated on free market economics as a sacrosanct principle,' historian and author Emmanuel Todd said last week.

After years of domination of the debate by the declinologues - those who claim that France's welfarist and centralising social and economic model does not work in a globalised world - there is now a reaction. 'Some days you just have enough of moaning ... above all when France holds so many trump cards', said Michel Schifres, a writer of leading articles at Le Figaro.

'France has everything it needs to get back to the premier position it ought never to have lost in Europe,' said conservative politician and businessman Olivier Dassault in a recent book. Others joke about the country's apparent plight. 'According to the good old theory of global commerce, each country must export what it makes best - and in France that's revolutionary ideas,' said Todd.

Those fearful of the negative effects of international liberal capitalism - a familiar theme in French politics - point to the acquisition last year by a Chinese luxury hotel chain of a huge palace built by a relative of one of France's most famous rulers in the centre of Paris. The £60m purchase by the Shangri-La group of the Palais de Roland Bonaparte is just the latest in a series of buyouts that has left almost all the biggest Paris luxury hotels in foreign hands.