Hush, hush, whisper who dares...

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A New York Grand Jury has decided that Dominique Strauss-Kahn will stand trial....but the jury of French opinion has already decided on his overall innocence.

Let us ignore for the moment the fact that that the jury is composed of...as '1066 and All That' would have it, 'other barons who would understand'...... journalists, self proclaimed philosophers, politicians and financiers....as nobody else in France can get their views heard, but just listen to what it is saying.

Yes, he is strongly attracted to women...this is part of the French culture after all...but what goes on in his private life has no bearing on his capacity in public employment.

He has been accused by a number of women of seriously aggressive 'attraction'? How come they have stayed quiet so long? They must be seeking to boost their failing careers.

He was the 'white knight' who was going to beat Sarkozy and put the Socialist Party in power....so his problems in New York must be down to a plot.

His actions at the IMF which kept the Euro from risk of collapse displeased the Americans....it must all be a plot.

Photographs of him in handcuffs are humiliating and degrading for a person of his importance. Doesn't the American justice system see the difference between him and some ordinary person?

And what's all the fuss about anyway? All he did - if he did anything - was to roll an employee in the hay.

And who is this woman? Who is a cleaner, an immigrant moreover, to complain about a man as important as Monsieur Strauss-Kahn?

I think that about sums up the position of the self appointed French jury.

I think the real problem is that revelations as to the nature of Monsieur Strauss-Kahn's attraction to women have given rise to the risk of an 'Emperor's clothes' situation.....where the hoi polloi begin to question the basis of authority of their masters.

And questioning authority in France is the ultimate crime.

As anyone who has done it is aware.

It's not just on the national scale, either.

A few years ago a drunken gendarme ran over and killed two kids who were riding their scooters back from a local fete.
Had it not been for the fact that he had damaged someone's car as he left the car park, and that that someone had pursued him, it is likely that the deaths of those two boys would have remained a mystery as the gendarme's colleagues did all in their power to help him...not even breathalysing him until mid morning on the day after the crime when he was still stratospherically over the limit.

Once again, the jury spoke...the local notables.

It was the fault of the organisers of the fete......but the bar served only pink wine, beer and water; the gendarme had brought his own bottle of whisky which he had downed in the course of the evening.

It was the fault of the parents of the two boys....both sets of parents were divorced...there was no stability in the home. Both boys were doing well at school and had a settled social life.

The gendarme wasn't on duty at the time. I should hope not!

He would lose not only his job but his pension. I didn't feel that factor weighed for much in the balance with the loss of two children to their parents.

But all these factors weighed with the court, which gave him the lightest possible sentence.....

In both examples it is clear that the authority figure cannot be seen to be at fault and I think a factor in the general supine acceptance of this by the French generally is the philosophy of the state, in which the state - and thus its representatives - embodies the will of the people.

So it's quite important that the people don't decide that their will doesn't coincide with that of the elite and their enforcers.

So the elite and their enforcers discourage questions.

As the women who have come forward with revelations about Dominique Strauss-Kahn relate, they did not proceed with complaints because there would be no future in so doing...no future for them, that is.

The whistleblower on the local council who revealed the maire's juggling with tenders for public works was sacked...six years later, the maire was given a token fine.

That's how it is.

The French elite gets away with a great deal by its self confidence...its elan.
They feel themselves to be unbeatable.....but so did the young French officers of 1914 running forward, sabres held in their white gloved hands, only to be mown down...and their men with them...by the steady, organised and resourceful Germans.

Its attitude might be expressed in the words of another Dominique...Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister at the time, I believe.

France is like a woman...she wants to be taken (by implication) by force....

Well, that's all right then.

You, a French politician, embodying the will of the people, decide what they want and give it to them.

You, a French man, decide what women want...and give it to them.

They don't like it?

Tough. What can they do about it?

The real tragedy of this unfortunate affair is that while the elite deploy their white gloved hands in defence of one of their own, an increasing number of people...the non-elite, the ones traditionally led to the slaughter...might decide that they can do something about it by reposing the embodiment of their will elsewhere.

With Marine Le Pen and her Front National.

Seeing his way clear...stream

Image by Franck Prevel via Flickr

Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister of France, former Foreign Minister best known to the world for his speech of opposition to the war in Iraq at the United Nations General Assembly, is to appear in court on Monday, accused of complicity in a plot to blacken the reputation of President Sarkozy, then just a presidential candidate, by making it appear that he had been laundering money from bribes arising from the sale of frigates to Taiwan.

Complicated? You just bet.

President Sarkozy has let it be known that he wants politics cleaned up...no more of these plots and manoevres which have, he says, been typical of the Vth French Republic. He has also let it be known, rather more colourfully, that he wants the perpetrators of this particular plot 'hung from meathooks'. I have always said that he has so sense of historical resonance.
However, history seems to be what all this is about.

Sarkozy was once a protege of Chirac, famous for his Spanish practices while Maire of Paris and then President of France. As any good protege should, Sarkozy made himself agreeable to his patron's daughter but then, somewhat tactlessly, dumped her for something less dumpy. In for a penny, in for a pound, Sarkozy compounded his error by supporting Balladur, Chirac's unsuccessful rival, which left Sarkozy out in the cold for some considerable time, until his growing support in the party forced him back into government.

De Villepin has always been Chirac's man.... a graduate from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, one of the 'enarques' who appear to think that the government of France should only be confided to one of their number. Sarkozy is not an enarque. Never elected to any office, de Villepin was Chirac's chief of staff before being appointed Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister, and, in the run up to the last Presidential elections, was Chirac's choice of candidate, though Sarkozy, by then Finance Minister, was making all the running.

While the preparations for that election were hotting up, de Villepin happened to meet his old friend Jean-Louis Gergorin, another enarque, and, at the time, vice president of the aerospace company EADS, just before the latter approached an investigating magistrate with a list purportedly showing the names of those involved in the kickbacks from the frigate deal with accounts with a Luxembourg company called Clearstream. Although it quickly became apparent that the documents were forged, de Villepin mounted an enquiry, an enquiry which, according to the then head of intelligence in France, was ordered by Chirac himself. Chirac refuses to answer any questions, claiming the immunity which covers any actions of a President of the French Republic while in office.
Inevitably, news of the enquiry leaked, and Sarkozy confronted de Villepin, accusing him of making it appear as though the allegations had weight by ordering an enquiry after it was clear that the evidence was a forgery. He then brought a civil action to clear his name.


In the meantime, Sarkozy has become President, de Villepin is an isolated figure in his own party, but, more importantly, the investigating magistrates have been busy confiscating all sorts of interesting documents, including the notebook of France's chief spy, cataloguing the little foibles of the country's political elite. Rumours abound of the dirty tricks played against Sarkozy in the run up to the election, including, apparently, alerting his then wife to his infidelities, which might be one explanation of her refusal to be at his side during the campaign.


De Villepin might have trouble wriggling off this particular meathook - I think a lot depends on how much can be put down to Chirac who of course will not testify - but he is mounting an interesting defence. Despite the fact that a court has already ruled that a President can bring actions while in office, de Villepin's lawyers will be arguing that it is impossible for the court to hear Sarkozy's charges as the inequality between the parties is so great....Sarkozy can attack as an individual, while being immune from attack in his turn, as President. It's a bit like being armed with a machine gun while wearing Ned Kelly's protective armour.

Why does this case have any importance for the general public, apart from the wafts of sleaze in the wings? It is important because Sarkozy has announced that he wants no more of these insalubrious plottings and if that is the case it can be nothing but a good thing for the political climate in France. However, as he is also proposing to abolish the role of the investigating magistrate, it is hard to see how we should ever know about any future government shennanigans, since the French press is supine and the future investigators will be the government run prosecution service.