France Brand-New Promotional Website France.fr Crashes

(July 15) -- Just when things seemed as if they couldn't get much worse for France's image, already tarnished by its disgraced soccer team, a messy financial scandal involving the country's richest woman and a president with his lowest approval ratings ever, the government just launched a brand-new $2 million promotional website to great fanfare and then watched as it promptly crashed.

It's been down ever since.

Visitors to the much-ballyhooed France.fr, which was to serve "as a major promotional tool for France's image abroad," found only an apology today and an explanation that the site was a "victim of its own success" because the high numbers of people going to the site caused it to crash. It launched Wednesday to coincide with Bastille Day.

France.fr

France is temporarily unavailable! This was the welcome screen of France.fr, a website to promote everything French, on Thursday after the site crashed because of a problem with the configuration of its servers.

That phrase was replaced later by a statement saying the site had a problem with the configuration of its servers. France was one of the last European nations not to have its own official website despite being one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.

Not all French TV pundits and journalists were impressed with the government's positive spin on the crash, with Europe 1 complaining that it was yet "another symbol of France breaking down." "The Shame!," French TV journalist Jean-Marc Morandini wrote in his blog today.

The website crash came as Paris Match published a new poll saying that if the French presidential election were held now, President Nicolas Sarkozy would suffer landslide defeats by the two most likely Socialist Party candidates.

"France always comes off worse than other countries when things go wrong because they're so proud and perfectionistic," said Philip Dermargosian, who runs the Paris-based leadership development company, Show Up Big, and teaches leadership at Sciences Po. "The French are so much about looking good that when they slip, they can easily look like buffoons."

Sarkozy has been having one of the worst weeks of his presidency because of the messy financial scandal involving L'Oreal's billionaire heiress Liliane Bettencourt, including allegations that Bettencourt and her late husband gave illegal cash contributions to right-wing politicians.

French police detained four people implicated in the scandal today, including Bettencourt's longtime friend, photographer Francois-Marie Banier, who is facing trial on charges he may have taken advantage of Bettencourt, who gave him millions of dollars.