Petite Anglaise

I first started reading Petite Anglaise at the beginning of the year. I can’t remember now how I came across her but I was captivated from the minute I started reading.

I could identify with her blog on so many levels. An English ex-pat living in Paris, she is currently living the life of a single girl, having left a long-term relationship in her early thirties – as I did. I too was a ‘petite anglaise’ many moons ago when I spent a year in Perpignan as part of my university course. She even has a little girl who sounds not unlike a slightly more grown-up version of the Minx.

The other thing that attracted me was the elegance, wit and intelligence of her prose (something I could never hope to emulate) and the way she cleverly uses allusions, cliffhangers and cryptic asides to build up the suspense. It’s as good as a novel and I read her entire blog in one weekend.

We emailed each other a couple of times and she invited me to place an ad on her site. Said ad has since delivered a small but consistent stream of traffic and a few orders – until today when this happened.

Petite was fired by her English employers, who thought that her blog was bringing their firm into disrepute – despite the fact that the blog was anonymous and the firm unrecognisable and scarcely mentioned. Petite is now taking the case to a French industrial tribunal in a test case which will have important ramifications for the relationship between bloggers and their employers (how grateful am I that I don’t have one of those). Her case has been taken up by the Daily Telegraph and she has been interviewed on Radio 5 Live. The story has now appeared in newspapers and on news websites around the world (editing to say that as of this morning there are stories in the Daily Mail, Independent and Times- check out Petite’s press page) and the blogosphere (how I hate that term) is aflame. It’s fascinating to watch a story go global like this, in a way that would never have happened even five years ago. (It’s also amusing to note that her employers, previously anonymous, were named in the Telegraph interview and are now being engulfed by a tidal wave of bad publicity).

I just hope things work out for Petite and that she’ll come out of this with the book or film deal (and the compensation) which she so richly deserves.

mirrormirror is currently running two blog ads. As well as the one on Petite Anglaise, we have an ad on Guido Fawkes’ Blog of Parliament. Mr Fawkes, too, has been all over the papers recently as the blogger on the case of John Prescott and Lord Levy. The message is clear. If you want unimaginable fame and notoriety as a blogger then sell adspace to ‘mirrormirror’. Do you dare?