The Secret Life of France (25 page)

This, according to the American uncle who was
responsible
for nurturing my writing dreams, is the cowboy’s first rule of survival. He’d sometimes say it to me as a sign-off: ‘Remember, buddy: ride a fast horse and stay ahead of the news.’ I now suspect that he made the expression up because I can’t find it anywhere, but it still stands as a reminder of his extraordinary ability to live in the sticks – in his case a hippy outpost in Northern California – and still give the impression that he had his finger on the pulse.

I have, on occasion, felt uneasy about calling myself a journalist when I’m writing, most of the time, from the middle of nowhere. As one comment on my blog so rightly put it, ‘How would you know anyway?’

With regular power cuts and an average of one person for every fourteen square kilometres, my corner of the Lozère can feel very cut off. But then I remind myself of the fact that most journalists I know strongly dislike interviewing people and rarely leave their desks except to go out to lunch.

I mostly track news of France on the radio as I drive
back and forth along the narrow, winding road that hosts the famous rally, Le Critérium des Cévennes, and leads down to our local village.

The stations that come through clearly here are France Bleu Gard Lozère, a very bland local radio station to which listeners phone in saying that they lost a shoe in a field, or that they found a bag of kittens by a stream; then there’s the uniformly and unapologetically leftist France Inter, and the shamelessly dull and pretentious France Culture. All three, with their endless talk shows and phone-in programmes, can offer a pretty good idea of the mood of the nation.

When Sarkozy came in promising
rupture
with the past, the West watched and waited for France to throw off at last her Keynesian corset and join the modern world. In July 2008 the President boasted at a UMP rally on Europe, ‘France has changed a lot more quickly and profoundly than we know. From now on when there’s a strike in France, no one will notice!’

By then Sarkozy’s track record was already impressive. His reforms to the civil service at home and his handling of the euro crisis during his term as President of the European Council, his intercession in the Russia–Georgia conflict and his decisive action against Libya had made a statesman of him – albeit one in stacked heels. By the following year even
The Economist
, which always has France in its sights, had to concede that the French had come out of the global financial crisis better than most. In an article
entitled ‘France: the badboy of the free market bites back’,
*
the author, a devotee, as you would expect, of US and UK-style free-market capitalism, could not help but acknowledge that France’s bizarre economic model, with its record of shameless dirigisme, conservative banking and lavish public spending, had left her better equipped to deal with the crash of 2008 than her more obedient partners in the global economy. Sarkozy was riding high.

By May of the following year, however, a shift was discernible. A poll
†
claiming to take the temperature of the nation after two years of the hyperactive, tick-riddled Super-Sarko revealed that a large majority (75 per cent) admired the man for his ‘courage’ and ‘dynamism’, but condemned him (73 per cent) for his inability to ‘listen’ and ‘to solve the problems of the French people’.

A year and a half later, in October 2010, this mild condemnation had turned to mass aversion. For the sixth time since Joshua and Gabriel’s return to school – after their interminable, nine-week summer holiday – there was a general strike, a day of ‘interprofessional mobilisation’. Once again millions took to the streets, truck drivers blockaded the roads, railway workers occupied the tracks, workers barricaded the refineries and blocked the airports; in short, the kind of tsunami of protest that makes France the envy or outrage of the world.

‘What’s it about this time?’ my sister asked me irritably
on the phone from London. My answer sent her into a spiral of indignation. ‘Retirement at sixty? Are they tripping!?’

Even for her, a left-wing,
Guardian
-reading feminist, the French were being spoilt and petulant.

What was clear, even through the euphoria of mass demonstration, was that this particular battle had already been lost. There was a sense that these marches were not so much about the retirement age but about the future of politics in this country, for politics was still being defined, for better or worse, through the interaction, or rather the collision between authority and rebellion.

Even my daughter, Ella, who was finishing a Masters in business and finance at Paris Dauphine, one of France’s few academic outlets for economic liberalism, felt caught up in the excitement.

‘It’s true that you can’t help admiring the British model, with its super-reasonable parliamentary democracy and all that,’ she said. ‘But I do love a strike, don’t you?’

The support for the strikes was massive and I pictured Ella along with all those French men and women sitting in their offices, behind their spreadsheets, watching the marching hoards on their iPhones and feeling, possibly in spite of themselves, the thrill that goes with disobedience. Chapters like Robespierre’s Reign of Terror notwithstanding, revolution is still the stuff that French dreams are made on.

France seemed to be holding up reasonably well to the constant pressure to mend her ways. After years of being urged to toe the line economically, she emerged from the global financial crisis clinging more steadfastly than ever to her status as lone wolf. Then, out of the blue, came a disastrous blow to her self-belief. On 14 May 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and France’s presidential hopeful, was arrested in New York on attempted rape charges. In the weeks following the news, cracks in the myth of France as the most civilised, epicurean nation in the world began to appear.

It was Sunday morning and I was driving to the market in our local village when I heard the news on France Culture. A woman of Guinean origin called Nafissatou Diallo working as a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in New York had accused Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her. I remember pulling over into a layby, turning up the volume and sitting there open-mouthed while the boys fought in the back. The news was shocking in itself – attempted rape, unlawful imprisonment – but my alarm went deeper. It felt
like a moment of reckoning, a death knell to a certain idea of France. Suddenly DSK, the
grand séducteur
, the infamous lover of women, was revealed as nothing more than a dirty old man unable to control himself.

All of a sudden people started questioning some of the myths that are woven into this culture around sex – particularly of the extra-marital kind – as a private, elegant and decorous game. Perhaps all those
hommes à femmes
, those
grands séducteurs
and those
chauds lapins
were part of a big lie designed to serve as a rampart for the patriarchy. How tragic it was that the nemesis of both the man and the myth should be played out in America, the home of the witch-hunt and the cradle of political correctness. And how predictable that so much of the reaction to the story was centred upon a visceral clash between two world views.

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 could 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.