Neither her birth in a poor neighbourhood of Nanterre nor the serious accident that befell her as a child.

UNESCO: House | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Nanterre mayor Jacqueline Fraysse, who survived as council colleagues slumped over dead around her, was appalled that Durn had been able to slip away so easily.

CNN: French killer's 'bin Laden wish'

Now the contracts are coming up thick and fast, and Clear Channel has taken a number of important French cities, such as Montpellier, Nanterre and Annecy.

ECONOMIST: Advertising

In France, the last mass shooting comparable to the recent American random murders dates back to 2002, when a Richard Durn gunned down eight members of the city council of his home town of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris.

CNN: France: Where fear and taboo control guns more than laws

It will be left to Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the summit's host, to carry the banner for France's universities: he taught sociology at Nanterre in 1967-68 and, later, at other French universities (as well as holding posts at Stanford and Cambridge).

ECONOMIST: French lessons

Thousands of miles away, at a court in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, a lawyer for the duke and duchess had sought a privacy injunction against the publishers of Closer magazine - Mondadori - to prevent the photographs of Catherine being re-published or distributed in France.

BBC: UK

Many of his French colleagues found him too much: noisy, mischievous, attached to no school (though he had sat at the feet of both Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes in his feverish years at Nanterre, when teaching had been interrupted by clouds of tear-gas and cobblestone-throwing).

ECONOMIST: Jean Baudrillard