Eve Gilles' win at this year's Miss France is cause for celebration – it is a continuation of a longstanding French tradition of championing unique b… - Agnès Poirier

I was called Agnès after a character in a Molière play. When I looked at names for my daughter, I wasn't sure until Garance was uttered, and that was it.

Booing the Marseillaise is a very symbolic gesture, especially when it comes from French nationals. France was built on an unwritten national contract, that of a community sharing not only the same geography but also a sense of a common destiny. The Republican model is that of integration and togetherness, not of peaceful cohabitation between separate communities, as with multiculturalism. Integration supposes a will to integrate and a desire to live together. Since the 1960s, the French left has shied away from any debates brushing on anything linked with, in its eyes, the awful word of "nationalism", forgetting that the political concept born in the 1840s was a progressive one.

I was 12 when I first saw Les Enfants du Paradis, at the Ranelagh theatre in Paris, a stone's throw from Balzac's house. The neo-Renaissance theatre screened this story of mimes, actors, impresarios and swindlers every week-end for more than 20 years until the 35mm print became too fragile. Two generations of cinephiles did as we did, going up the little street like pilgrims on a quest. If God was a film director, he would have made this film, thought the child that I was. Later in my teens, I would go back to the Ranelagh, dragging school friends along. If they didn't get it, I'd never speak to them again.