HOW did that theory go again?

The one that said that the beat of an insect’s wing in the Amazon could cause a tornado at the other end of the world or, in other words, that far-reaching chaos can result from apparently insignificant incidents? The butterfly effect, it was called, if memory serves.

Anyway, this teacher in a small country town in northern France had little idea that he was just seconds from providing a literally striking example of it when he walked into his Year 7 technology class at 8 o’clock one bleary Monday morning last January.

He asked the lad in the front row to clear his desktop because he needed it for a demonstration. The boy refused point-blank and the teacher ended up sweeping his things off on to the floor in exasperation. The pupil called him a connard, which roughly translates as, well, ‘bad star’ is an anagram for one English equivalent. The professeur saw an even deeper shade of red and clipped him round the ear.

Now the sound of that slap reverberated all round France, and not just because corporal punishment has been banned in French schools since 1834. Although the teacher immediately pulled himself together and told the class that the incident was now closed, the boy’s father rejected the head’s subsequent attempts at reconciliation – faults on both sides, won’t happen again, I assure you -– and pressed charges for violence aggravée sur un mineur.

The teacher was arrested at his home and taken in handcuffs to the police station, where he was detained for 24 hours. Then the media picked up on the story, which immediately became the subject of fierce national debate, most of it commiserating with the teacher and questioning a society in which the Child King seems to have only rights and privileges, and no duties.

Even the Prime Minister weighed in, saying that while he couldn’t condone the clip, he did understand it. And Luc Ferry, a distinguished philosopher and former Minister of Education himself, said that he would have given the kid another one for good measure. It was a fair cop, though. The teacher pleaded guilty as charged and the matter could have been settled simply and quietly with a negotiated sentence in the prosecutor’s chambers that would only have had to be rubber-stamped later in court.

But realising that he had got the nation’s attention, he finally opted for a public hearing, not to try to justify his behaviour in any way, but to cry Haro! on the denigration, the physical and verbal violence and lack of respect that more and more teachers are having to put up with on a daily basis – and not just from pupils but also, increasingly, from their parents.

In the end he was fined 800 euros and was warned about his future conduct. But one strange aspect of the affair is that the boy’s father is a gendarme – and they can be more than a little touchy when their own authority is not respected.

Last year there were 31,000 cases of outrages à agents dépositaires de l’autorité – insulting a police officer. This figure has doubled in ten years. But one Paris publisher who was done for that is now campaigning to get the offence removed from the Code Pénal.

Not that he wants to encourage disrespectful behaviour, but he claims that the charge is all too often trumped up to cover policing methods that do tend, alas, to range from discourteous heavy-handedness to downright violence because the French boys in blue don’t believe in all your friendly bobby business.

No, la peur (fear) du gendarme is the official line, and rébellion – resisting the authority of the law – is another handy charge just in case the judge wants to know why the chap in the box has got a black eye. And the cracked ribs, officer? Fell down the stairs, Monsieur le Juge. Where? The Eiffel Tower?

One gendarme once told me ruefully that they would have had no trouble getting this Englishman to confess if only I hadn’t been in the room as the obligatory official interpreter. It seemed that the presence of an impartial and potentially awkward witness – in this case, me – had forced them to adopt a, well, less hands-on method of questioning the suspect who, he claimed, had now got away with it.

AFTER a four-year legal battle, a lady motorist has just got away with the 30 11-euro fines she had been given for failing to display pre-paid parking receipt tickets in her car in her local multi-storey.

She just happens to be an advocate, and argued that while failure to pay was an infraction, failure to display did not appear in the Code Pénal, the Code de la Route, or anywhere else for that matter, and the law does state quite clearly that you can’t be punished for an offence that doesn’t exist. The court finally had to agree with her, so the government is now wondering how many more motorists might be thinking of contesting the 3.5 million parking tickets that were shoved under the nation’s windscreen-wipers last year.

Actually, a few years ago I lent my car to some American friends, and after a stroll around the ramparts at St Malo they discovered that they had been booked, too. But they didn’t want me to pay the ticket, so they set off to the commissariat (police station) to do the necessary.

Unfortunately, the desk sergeant’s English was even more limited than their French, and they couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just take their money and, even more strangely, why he seemed to be going on about stamps and tobacconists. That couldn’t be right, could it?

So they eventually decided to implement Plan B and go to the gendarmerie instead, only to get the same cockamamy impression there too.

The sun was starting to dip towards Dinard by now, so they retired to the pavement café over the road and were just wondering what on earth Plan C might be when the waitress noticed the ticket. Ah! Pas de chance! That’s, ’ow you say, bad luck! And she explained that all they needed to do was buy a fiscal stamp to pay the fine, then pop everything in an envelope and send it off to the address on the back.

Well, that solved half the mystery, but where on earth could they buy the stamps, fiscal and postal, and this late in the day? Eh bien, anywhere that sells tobacco and cigarettes, she chirruped, like right here in this bar, for instance, and the eurocent finally dropped.

It did seem a funny old set-up for an Anglo-Saxon visitor, but then it would never occur to any French person to go to a supermarket for a bottle of aspirin, either, or to a chemist’s for anything photographic, or to Trinity post office for a bunch of flowers, come to that.

Jackie Laisné-Brillet (60) lives just over the water from you in Normandy, and his problem with the law is slightly more ticklish. Any time he’s had to sign anything, he’s always drawn a sort of Smiley, you see, but the Tribunal Adminstratif in Caen ruled last week that a drawing is not a signature. He has decided to appeal, but in the meantime he has just bought a motorbike and sent off the registration papers – yup, signed with a Smiley. Watch this space.
Kenavo!