The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  At first, as is often the case in the event of an emotional shock, the general reaction in France was denial. I kept hearing words like ‘incredible’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘inconceivable’. Over the next forty-eight hours French Twitter would be awash with conspiracy theories.* DSK’s socialist colleagues leapt to his defence. Former prime minister Laurent Fabius said that he was ‘in shock’ and spared a thought not for the supposed victim but for Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair. Even DSK’s political opponents alluded to a possible set-up by Sarkozy’s entourage to undermine his rival’s candidacy for the presidential race.

  But it was a woman, former minister for housing Christine Boutin, who voiced the prevailing view. ‘To me the whole business seems highly implausible. We know that he’s rather vigorous, if you know what I mean, but that he should get himself caught like this seems unbelievable, so I hope he’s just fallen into a trap.’ The general state of shock in France seemed not so much that a crime should have taken place but that DSK should have allowed himself to get caught.

  I phoned a journalist friend in Paris called Michèle Fitoussi, a columnist for Elle magazine, who would, I knew, offer a more considered view.

  ‘We had all heard about him,’ she said. ‘Some made jokes and some knew what he was capable of. For years during our Parisian dinners we’d sit around slyly alluding to DSK’s dubious behaviour with women. We made jokes about the fact that a sexily dressed woman shouldn’t be left alone with him. There were rumours that it went further than the occasional visit to Les Chandelles (Paris’s most exclusive swingers’ club). There’s a climate of maximum tolerance towards our male politicians that we’re just waking up from. It feels like a real collective trauma.’

  But would this trauma cause a change in behaviour? Not at first. To my delight, the priceless Bernard-Henri Lévy could be heard on France Inter the next morning. He sounded angry, very angry: ‘Do you think, for one second, that we would be friends if I thought that DSK was a compulsive rapist (I do love the use of the word ‘compulsive’ here), a Neanderthal man, a guy who behaves towards the women he meets like a sexual predator? All this is utterly grotesque!’

  BHL ended the interview with the assertion, rather a dangerous one for a French philosopher, that not everybody is the same: ‘Everybody is not everybody,’ he declared. ‘The President of the IMF, the man who was about to be a candidate for the presidency of the French Republic, handcuffed! It’s obvious that he’s not some commoner (le quidam) … This American justice is an outrageous hypocrisy (Tartufferie), something I already knew but which today is blindingly obvious to me!’

  I was particularly chuffed by this last rant. In that moment BHL with his humanitarian posturing and his patrician lecturing was the living embodiment of the endless struggle that lies at the heart of French culture between the myth of republican equality and the hierarchical values of the Ancien Régime.

  Another intellectual, the essayist and magazine editor Jean-François Kahn, interviewed on France Culture the same morning to promote his latest book, The Philosophy of Reality: A Critique of Realism, was also asked to comment on DSK’s arrest. His response was even more revealing of the patrician values that live on in the heart of the republic:

  ‘I’m certain, at least practically certain, that there was no violent attempt at rape. I don’t believe that, I don’t, I mean I know the man and I don’t think so. That there was an imprudence, we can’t … (laughs), I don’t know how to put it, a troussage … a troussage de domestique, I mean, that’s not good, but there we are. It’s an impression.’ The offending phrase – troussage de domestique – is almost impossible to translate into contemporary English. The closest might be ‘to tumble a chambermaid’.

  Listening to France Inter four mornings later, the tone seemed to be getting more, not less macho. Arriving home with the shopping I sat in the car and listened. I could hardly believe my ears. There, in the recording studio, a female journalist called Pascale Clark sat tittering at male comedian Sami Ameziane who was impersonating DSK in his hotel room in New York trying to talk some sense into his penis: ‘Listen, I don’t like the look of this chick, she’s going to get you into trouble, put away the merguez, buddy …’ But it’s the other voice that wins: ‘Come on, Dom. Have you forgotten who you are, Dominique-nique-nique-nique (as in nique meaning to screw)? Whip out the tools, mate …’

  Then followed a festival of inanity the subtext of which was, either Nafissatou Diallo was asking for it and changed her mind halfway through, or it was a set-up. In both scenarios DSK is the ‘vigorous’ male, a Samson figure being brought low by a woman. Listening to the appreciative chuckles of Pascale Clark brought it home once again: wilfully unreconstructed, France is a society in which women collude in a continued phallocracy.

  At the time Joe and I were watching Madmen, a TV series set in an advertising agency in 1960s New York. This, I thought, is how to explain to Brits and Americans what the climate is like for most French women. All they had to do was watch Joan Holloway, the curvaceous redhead in Madmen. She is clever, sexy, witty and ultimately submissive. As a result she’s admired, pampered, worshipped and dominated. This, I realised, was the unspoken pact most French women were still willing to accept.

  Pascale Clark did try to address some of the issues that were being raised by the DSK case. Has the French press been negligent, she asked a male colleague, by not reporting on DSK’s widely known habit of ‘pressing’ women for sex?

  ‘I’m still thinking about that,’ he replied. ‘But there is a difference between being a ladies man (homme à femmes) and being lourdingue (heavy-handed).’

  He went on to talk about a colleague of his, a woman, who recently felt the need to discreetly change jobs because she was being ‘repeatedly hassled by a high-ranking member of the UMP’ (Sarkozy’s party).

  No one on the programme suggested that this kind of behaviour might be illegal.

  A few months later I found myself in the UK, where I quickly began to feel equally disgusted by some of the coverage there. A column by Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph entitled ‘When forgiveness goes a step too far’ was particularly repulsive:

  ‘Forgiveness is good,’ wrote Pearson. ‘Even so, the nauseating sight of French heiress and journalist Anne Sinclair standing by her man, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, sets a new low. The former IMF chief may have been acquitted of attempted rape against a hotel maid, but is there anyone who can look at that swaggering silverback primate without a shudder? Ugh … Shame on his indulgent wife.’

  Why, I asked myself, did this woman feel she had the right publicly to condemn the couple in this way? What was it about our culture that made us so quick to judge, and so quick to blame? Here, once again, was sheer puritanism disguised as feminism.

  *

  The DSK case did not end there. When he returned to France after New York prosecutors dropped criminal charges against him it was to face a new accusation of sexual assault: this time from a friend of his daughter’s, the young writer and journalist Tristane Banon. On the internet for all to see was Banon’s account of the episode and further evidence of DSK’s long-standing impunity. Filmed in 2007 for a weekly chat show† hosted by Thierry Ardisson at his sumptuous flat on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and designed to look like a smart Parisian dinner party, complete with silver, candlelight and, to add to the iconography, servants to pour the wine, the young woman tells fellow ‘guests’ (seven men and one woman) how her ‘interview’ with DSK ended in violence. ‘It ended very badly … I was kicking him … He undid my bra, he tried to open my jeans …’

  ‘He’s obsessed,’ Ardisson observes with amusement.

  At the time, Banon’s entourage, including her mother, discouraged her from pressing charges. ‘I didn’t want to be remembered,’ Banon tells her fellow guests, ‘simply as the young woman who’d had a problem with a politician.’

  But when DSK returned from New York Banon decided to try to bring him to justice. Her attempt failed. She co
uld not prove attempted rape and she’d overshot the statute of limitations for sexual assault, so the charges were dropped.

  In 2012 DSK managed to elude two further criminal charges. In March – along with three executives of the Hotel Carlton in Lille, a police official and a lawyer – he was investigated for ‘aggravated procurement in an organised gang’, otherwise known as pimping. Then in May a Belgian prostitute accused him of anally raping her during a sex party in the W Hotel in Washington. The prostitute later withdrew her statement but the damage had been done. I doubt there will be any more dreams of a political comeback for Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

  There is no doubt that France has changed as a result of the DSK case. What became embarrassingly clear in its aftermath was that this apparently civilised nation did not offer a proper legal framework with which to punish sexual harassment, the concept of which to all intents and purposes didn’t exist here. Indeed the law described it as the business of ‘obtaining favours of a sexual nature’. No wonder so many women kept silent.

  Out of the thousand or so cases of this type that were being registered each year, only about eighty were resulting in a sentence.‡ It was important, for France’s image in Europe and the rest of the world, to get a new law passed as quickly as possible.

  Then on 4 May 2012 the constitutional council that was examining the case for a new law decided to repeal the existing one for being ‘too vague’. Many of the cases that were pending had to be put on ice or dismissed. Despite this setback I couldn’t help noticing that the concept of sexual harassment was being taken seriously for the first time since I had moved here in the eighties. I remembered the general outrage that was expressed at Parisian dinner parties when the first cases of sexual harassment were coming to light on American campuses. France would never allow political correctness to inhibit the cult of pleasure, people said. But in June 2012 a Paris hospital (Saint Antoine et Tenon) opened a unit within its psychiatric department to help patients claiming to have suffered sexual harassment.

  ‘Sexual harassment creates a particular kind of trauma,’ explained chief consultant Professor Charles Peretti. ‘It can lead to insomnia, loss of self-esteem, anxiety symptoms and depressive tendencies that can occasionally lead to attempts at suicide.’§

  Reading his words, I couldn’t help picturing Peter Sellers impersonating Dr Zempf, the German-accented high-school psychologist in Kubrick’s Lolita. It all seemed so … old-world.

  Then at last in July 2012 the National Assembly voted unanimously in favour of a new law making sexual harassment – that is, the act of ‘imposing upon someone sexually connoted words or actions’ – a criminal offence. Henceforth it would be on a par with moral harassment, punishable by up to three years in prison.

  Thank you, Nafissatou Diallo.

  * Le Parisien, ‘Affaire DSK: Jonathan Pinet, l’étudiant qui a mis le feu au Web’, 17 May 2011.

  † 93, faubourg Saint-Honoré was a television show broadcast on the cable channel Paris Première between October 2003 and June 2007.

  ‡ ‘Les victimes de harcèlement sexuel prises en charge’, Agnès Leclair, Le Figaro, 13 June 2012.

  § Le Figaro, 7 June 2012.

  19

  Hating the Rich

  In November 2012, The Economist took another swipe at France. On the cover were seven baguettes held together by the tricolore with a lit fuse protruding from the centre. The headline was ‘France and the euro: the time-bomb at the heart of Europe’.* The wording of the piece itself sounded very like a warning: ‘Unless Mr Hollande shows that he is genuinely committed to changing the path his country has been on for the past thirty years, France will lose the faith of investors …’

  It was not the first time that the French government had been preached to by The Economist, which has been referred to by French commentators as the ‘Pravda of finance’ and the ‘little Taliban of liberalism’. This time, though, Hollande’s ministers responded with barbed disdain. ‘Honestly,’ said industry minister Arnaud Montebourg on Europe 1, French national radio, ‘The Economist has never distinguished itself by its sense of moderation.’ In an interview with French internet TV channel i-tele Hollande’s prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said, ‘You’re talking about a newspaper that is resorting to excess to sell papers. I can tell you that France is not at all impressed.’

  Used to defending his paper from accusations of being anti-French, John Peet, the Europe editor, took the opportunity to throw in another warning: ‘The point of this cover and the article is to encourage France. Other countries … have conducted many reforms. This is not yet the case in France.’†

  I can’t help sensing an embedded Schadenfreude in these regular reprimands, and of course the stifled cry that goes with it: It’s not fair!

  Why should France continue to enjoy a lavish health service, an impressive infrastructure and a high-quality, free education system when everyone else is hacking away at their welfare states in order to stay afloat in the global market? Why is she, with all her debt, still the world’s fifth-biggest economy, the sixth-biggest exporter and the fourth-biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world?

  Despite this, two days later, as if in answer to The Economist’s prayers, the credit-rating agency Moody’s stripped France of her triple A rating. Already downgraded to AA+ under Sarkozy by Standard and Poor’s, France sucked it up: it was neither a big surprise, nor a big catastrophe.

  Perhaps not, but something has to give. The French system is not kind to the spirit of enterprise and many of those young people who have managed to come through their education with any entrepreneurial ambitions at all are leaving the country in droves. Ella is gearing up to go back and work in London next year in order to kick-start her chosen career in film production. Her boyfriend, who has no ties to the UK apart from her, is thinking of going too. He works for a smallish finance company specialising in mergers and acquisitions, and since Hollande’s tax reforms, which included a rise in marginal capital gains rates to as high as 60 per cent, he says the market is frozen. The last to be hired, he expects to be the first they let go, and if that happens London is where he will look for a job.

  A conservative estimate puts the number of French people living in London at 300,000 (the population of Corsica) but it’s probably closer to 400,000 and when Hollande introduced his ‘exceptional solidarity contribution’, a tax of 75 per cent to be applied for two years on all income in excess of one million euros, more would certainly have crossed the Channel. Indeed, the Brits welcome them with open arms and, of course, irrepressible gloating.

  ‘When France sets a 75 per cent top income tax rate we will roll out the red carpet,’ David Cameron announced at the G20 summit in Mexico in June 2012. ‘And we will welcome more French businesses which will pay their taxes in Britain … That will pay for our public services and our schools.’

  European Affairs Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responded somewhat tersely on Canal+: ‘What I can answer to this statement from the British prime minister is that there are French bosses who are patriots …’

  Speaking at the Tory party conference a few months later, Boris Johnson offered a similar welcome, but in his own provocative style: ‘I am very keen to welcome talented French people. We say to the people, not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France.’

  I called Laurent when I read about the tax increases and asked him what he was going to do.

  ‘I’m on the train to Geneva.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m deciding between Belgium and Switzerland.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t leave?’

  He laughed.

  ‘I know you’ve been trying to get me to move to England for about twenty years but no. I wouldn’t leave.’

  Laurent is not concerned about the income-tax rise, or the downgrading of his country’s credit rating or indeed its gaping debt. I’ve never liked the liberal use that the Br
itish media makes of the expression ‘the Gallic shrug’, but I have to admit that Laurent is a master of it.

  ‘The figures for the British economy are worse than ours,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the markets are reassured by the UK having its own currency. If France fails, the whole of Europe fails with her.’

  Laurent, who had voted Sarkozy in 2007, was one of the many centrists who were disappointed by his presidency. His right-wing posturing became increasingly repulsive to liberals like Laurent and it was not difficult for them to transfer their loyalties to a centre-left figure like Hollande. For one, François Hollande was one of the few politicians of his profile to have gone to Hautes études commercial de Paris (HEC), one of France’s top business schools. He would have been quite incapable of graduating from such a place without a good understanding of economics. In order to get elected he certainly had to reassure his rank and file with a veneer of socialist discourse but soon he set about reassuring the markets, and that was when the real shift came.

  In July 2012, shortly after his election to the presidency, Hollande, as part of what he called a ‘competitiveness pact’, commissioned a report from Louis Gallois, former head of EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company). Gallois came back in November, pinpointing France’s astronomical labour costs as the first obstacle to competitiveness. It’s worth reminding the British reader that for a salary of one hundred euros, say, the French employee will take home eighty euros but the employer will have paid out one hundred and forty euros to cover social charges. Hollande took Gallois’s suggestions on board, as well as his recommendation that it might be time to have another go at tackling the taboo subject of job flexibility. Such attempts have always ended in disaster and mayhem but Hollande, with his air of austerity and his spotless left-wing credentials, has turned out to be the man for the job. Immediately following the Gallois report discussions began between management and unions on the subject of more flexible labour laws. At last, on 9 April 2013, after a six-day debate in the National Assembly, the said law – renamed ‘the law on job security’ (as opposed to job flexibility) – was voted in by an overwhelming majority (250 votes to 26) while outside trade unions took to the streets and violently decried a law that they described in a communiqué as ‘criminal’.